This WEEKEND

WEEKEND // FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2013

EF ?8M<E A community’s fight to save the Q House and end youth violence.

CHANTEL SIMPSON reports.

PAGE 3

PRIMARY

B5

POPULAR

B6-7

PIZZA

B12

VYING FOR THE MAYOR’S SEAT

CHOOSE YOUR EXTRACURRICULARS

HERMAN CAIN DOES YALE

What do the outreach strategies of this year’s mayoral candidates say of their campaigns and their personalities?

Careful, freshmen: what you decide to do this year may very well define your entire college career!

The outspoken Republican talks taxes, Yorkside and how Syria “probably never would have happened” under his presidency.

PAGE B2

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

STILLMAN

WEEKEND VIEWS

MAGNA CARTA...HOLYYALE! // BY JOHN STILLMAN

projector and everyone would be like, “Oh I love this one — it’s sick.” That’s exactly what my art history major roommate and I say, in unison, when “Picasso Baby” comes on.

Have you ever listened to an album and been inspired to respond to it for publication in WEEKEND? Jay-Z’s most recent release, “Magna Carta …

Holy Grail,” did it for me.

I had a moment the other day, Jay-Z in my earbuds, walking across Cross Campus. I looked up at Sterling Memorial Library in all its grandeur, and “Picasso Baby” came on, and I felt thankful that Jay-Z had given us a pitch-perfect soundtrack for senior year at Yale. I might be late to the Jay-Z party, but I’m here, so Boola Boola.

“Magna Carta … Holy Grail,” Jay-Z is speaking not to the American dream, but to the Yale dream.

This album is a Yalie’s Swiss Army Knife — its 16 tracks have you covered in virtually any situation on campus or in the immediately surrounding area.

There are a lot of high points throughout the album’s 59 minutes, but Jay-Z is at his very best when he’s touting his art swag. This music brings you back to Nemerov’s Art History lecture, and to those precious moments in section when the TF would put up a painting on the

I MIGHT BE LATE TO THE JAY-Z PARTY, BUT I’M HERE, SO BOOLA BOOLA. In that song alone, Jay-Z manages to shout-out Pablo Picasso, Mark Rothko, Jeff Koons, Francis Bacon, JeanMichel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, and Leonardo DaVinci, as well as the MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre and the Tate Modern, where he is variously living or “throning” — and Art Basel (a contemporary art showcase), outside which he keeps two Bugattis.

This sounds like a baller fellowship.

In “F.U.T.W.” — Fuck Up This World — Jay-Z claims to do just that, in the manner of any good old Yale boy: he eats steak, he owns an estate, and he’s “got strip clubs feelin’ like Oxford,” which is to say, he gentrifies.

Elsewhere on the album, Jay-Z invites us to his housewarming party.

He officially makes #BookJacketRap a thing when he refers to himself as “the bestselling author of Decoded.” I bought that book for the spring 2012 DeVane Lecture. He gives us a reassuring picture of what it might be like to retire, when he boasts of playing “Frank Sinatra on my Sonos.” On “Tom Ford” Jay-Z spits the line, “fuck hashtags and retweets,” and it sounds like something you’d overhear at Mory’s during reunion season. In context, the turkey bacon aroma Jay-Z wakes up to in “Picasso Baby” smells like Sunday brunch in the Saybrook dining hall.

Or maybe nostalgia’s just got the best of me.

This is the anthem of courtyards and entryways and frocos. It has me excited for Parents’ Weekend.

As Yalies, we can take comfort in the fact that someone in the rap game is making music for us. As seniors, we enter the twilight of our college careers with this, the masterpiece of Mr. Carter. Our timing is impeccable.

Can anyone think of a better headliner for Spring Fling? Can anyone think of a better commencement speaker? Can you picture the op-eds that would run after that announcement?

The ivory tower would shine once more!

Contact JOHN STILLMAN at john.stillman@yale.edu .

ASCHER

Give Us Some Space // BY JORDAN ASCHER

There’s been a lot on our minds as summer turns to fall. Around the world, conflicts roil. A thousand geopolitical ties wear thin. At home, our political system is as gummy and depressing as usual. Economic ruin threatens again. Here in New Haven, we deal with our own quotidian dramas. It’s September: Another summer gone, just like that. Some of us have just arrived on campus for the first time, some of us for the last time.

Everyone must find a way to balance past, present and future in a way that quiets, at least for the moment, the nebulous uncertainty that whips up around us like autumn wind. Moreover, lots to think about.

But there is one issue that is especially important. It looms over us all, informing each and every one of our choices. I’m sure most of you will know instinctively what I’m talking about. But for those of you who don’t, I’m talking about the NASA’s plan to lasso an asteroid.

The elephant in the room, I know.

I’ll pause to let anyone who hasn’t gasped yet go ahead and do that.

Now, here’s how Project Asteroid Party 2K20, as it’s officially known, will work. In 2018, they’re going to send an unmanned spaceship into space. Then, once it’s in space, they’re going to move it around so it’s near an asteroid (which presumably is hurtling toward Earth or something).

Once the spaceship is near the asteroid, some magical thing will happen with physics and gravity and the asteroid will be pushed into orbit around the Earth-moon system.

At some point in the 2020s, human astronauts will go hang out on the asteroid to do some science, and also presumably to have some fun asteroid times.

To me, that sounds fun. And maybe there’s even a good scientific reason to do it! I don’t know — I was too lazy to look that up. (Ed. Note: Update — there is one.) But, my goodness, is it a cool idea. The ability to move objects slightly in space is very important to NASA’s mission of doing space things.

The skills NASA learns from jiggling this asteroid could be presumably used on everything from other gal-

F R I D AY SEPTEMBER 6

axies to elephants floating freely in space.

But as usual, the boo-birds over in Congress have different ideas. In July, the Science Committee in the House of Representatives voted along party lines to nix Project Funky Asteroid Dance, as it’s officially known.

Republicans, always the life of the party, controlled the committee and voted down the initiative. Rep. Steven Palazzo of Mississippi called the project “a costly and complex distraction.” Ouch. Don’t let space hear you say that, Rep. Palazzo.

Project Asteroid! Asteroid! Asteroid! Asteroid! Asteroid!, as it’s officially known, isn’t dead yet — it awaits a vote by the full House. But don’t get your hopes up.

The House’s gridlock is disheartening when it affects policies that don’t really matter to most people, e.g., food, taxes and the government’s ability to function. But when Congress blocks a project so relevant — central, even — to our daily lives, like slightly altering the orbit of an asteroid, it makes me mad. They’re ignoring all the amazing practical implications of asteroid-capture, and the bright future that awaits us if we follow through.

I, for one, can see a future in which we all live on asteroids and just look at Earth. A future where my kids can play in the backyard in their spacesuits and capture all the little asteroids they want. A future where there are two asteroids in every garage, and one in every pot. A future, moreover, where we feel, with great certainty, that asteroids are the most important objects in the universe.

That’s what the House of Representatives is giving up on — that beautiful dream. To think that we might not spend billions of dollars to slightly disturb the orbit of a large rock is as upsetting as it is outrageous.

What kind of large-space-rock-free future do we want to pass on to our children?

I feel very strongly about this.

Contact JORDAN ASCHER at jordan.ascher@yale.edu .

MANUCHA

//TAO TAO HOLMES

Ecstasy Zoo // BY RYAN MANUCHA

We were supposed to arrive at Randall’s Island in New York City for a final day of electronic music that never came. Throughout Sunday, engineers prepared to disassemble stages on which some of the world’s leading electronic artists should have been playing. Instead of identifying Armin van Buuren and Avicii, my ears detected machinists and forklift operators.

A collection of tablets believed to be ecstasy (known as MDMA), which might have otherwise fit into an empty pack of gum, brought about the deaths of two young adults, hospitalized several others and prematurely ended Electric Zoo. Tens of thousands of fans streaming to Labor Day’s electronic rave woke up to the unfortunate news on their Twitter feeds.

Despite electronic music’s automated and computerized nature, human emotion surged profusely in the aftermath.

Our crew of five congregated in the small rented apartment in Queens which we had used as a home base for the weekend’s event. Leading up to it, I was looking forward to expanding my musical horizons. I had done the background reading on the artists, and listened to the albums as well as the viewpoints of other fans. In a dimly lit and muggy room, sympathy, frustration and bewilderment fluctuated within us for several cycles until we finally arrived at lethargy. For many, the concert represented a significant chunk of summer wages put towards accommodation, transportation and food. The atmosphere resembled that which follows a destructive flood.

As a neophyte to the electronic concert scene, I took refuge in the expertise of my fellow concert chums. My friend James, a student music artist with an electronic-heavy reper-

toire often hired at Yale events, sagged on the futon. “People are looking to heighten their experience and find creative ways to get substances through security,” he explained to me. The lyrical lingo describing the use of ecstasy in popular culture misleads concertgoers about the destructive capacity of the drug.

With softened synonyms such as “Molly” or “disco biscuit,” it grants the possibility of a more invigorating musical experience. It is not uncommon to find a subversive chapter of dealers who roam concert venues offering questionable hallucinogens to attendees caught in the moment. Dr. Danielle Ompad, an epidemiologist at NYU, stressed to me that users often have no clue what they are ingesting: “It is not always clear that the pill that was purchased is always MDMA.”

THE ATMOSPHERE [AT ELECTRIC ZOO] RESEMBLED THAT WHICH FOLLOWS A DESTRUCTIVE FLOOD. Leading into the weekend, I had fully expected to see substances, and pockets of individuals who used them — to deny this would be to deny the reality of an electronic concert. But I thought there was safety in numbers. No concert that attracts over 100,000 visitors could ever be canceled. That version of affairs lay outside my realm of possibilities.

Just prior to Electric Zoo’s cancellation, a concert in Boston hosting a techno band saw three reported overdoses from

YALE ANIME SOCIETY PRESENTS “COWBOY BEBOP” William Harkness Hall, Room 119 // 7:30–10 p.m.

Bounty hunters, spaceships, sexual overdrive.

ecstasy, with one resulting in death. College campuses aren’t insulated from the growing prevalence of the drug either. As one acquaintance told me at the dining hall: “Let’s just say that Toad’s isn’t the only thing popping on a Wednesday night.” The illicit nature of ecstasy inhibits an accurate estimate of usage on campuses, but according to the Justice Department’s website, nearly 10 percent of incoming freshmen will have tried ecstasy at least once before even having stepped foot at their respective colleges.

The decision by the New York Mayor’s Office to cancel the final day of Electric Zoo highlighted the inextricable link between illicit substances and electronic music for me. The logic now flows: If there is an electronic concert, then there will be ecstasy. Vice versa, there cannot be an electronic concert without users of ecstasy. This is almost an inherent fact, not a personal belief.

The strong response to Electric Zoo will repel moderates like me who fluctuate between music styles. Prior to my descent upon New York, I was really excited to broaden my musical knowledge and investigate emerging artists.

Instead, the events have cognitively distorted my attraction to electronic music and made the genre less accessible. Sunday’s twist will nurture the intimidating image I have of rave culture and harm what was once a growing attraction to the scene.

It will take some time before I feel comfortable venturing off to an electronic music fest or fully investing in EDM artists. It is not a rational reaction, but the reinforced stigma of raves remains looming in the back of my head.

Contact RYAN MANUCHA at ryan.manucha@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Weekend trips to New York Aren’t you over Yale?

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B3

WEEKEND COVER

SAVING THE Q HOUSE // BY CHANTEL SIMPSON

ackie Bracey expected the Q House to look the same as it had eight years earlier in 2003 when the city of New Haven closed its doors — in good condition with just a touch of water damage.

But every door was broken. Glass from windows lay shattered on the floors. Vagrants had found their way in and inhabited portions of the property. According to Bracey, there was only a single padlock protecting the 31,000 sq. ft. building.

The city had purchased the foreclosed building in 2010, and Bracey, the president of the Concerned Citizens for the Greater New Haven Dixwell Community House, Inc., joined a group from the Dixwell Court for an independent examination of the building in 2011.

The Dixwell Community House, or Q House, was once the lifeblood of New Haven’s African-American community. Established in 1924 as a settlement house, it was the community’s town hall, a hub for discussion and protest, a place to congregate and resolve problems. But most importantly, it provided a recreational center and a place to hang out for the city’s working-class children.

But the loss of the Q House has left a crater in the city’s youth services, and with few job opportunities and little to do to pass the time, many young people have turned to the streets. As the building lay decaying since 2010, gang violence has spread in New Haven and many disadvantaged youths in the city have been killed. This past summer alone, three young lives were lost — Torrance Dawkins, 22, Devaante Jackson, 18, and Marquis Harris, 22 — continuing a trend of increased gun violence over the summer months.

Over the past decade, alumni of the Q House and members of current youth groups — some not even born when the Q House closed — have banded together to resurrect the center and save New Haven’s youth.

The struggle for the Q House highlights the determination of New Haven residents to solve the two major problems contributing to the rise of youth violence in the city: The lack of widespread youth services and the need for youth job opportunities. It also spotlights the indifference of city officials who, these residents claim, have been slow to fund the reopening of the House.

J

THE LEGACY OF THE Q HOUSE

From discussions with many New Haven children, it appears that almost all have a relative who attended the Q House at some point in its 79-year tenure on Dixwell Ave. They have heard the stories of the late Bruce “Soup” Campbell, a legendary Q House basketball player, and how the House’s rec basketball teams were some of the best in the city, beating out the high school teams. The Q House was also the site of many firsts in the African-American community: the first black Boy and Girl Scout troops in the city, the first gymnastics team.

Though it changed locations from 98 Dixwell Ave. to 197 Dixwell Ave. in 1971, its members moved with it. One such member was Frank E. Douglass Jr., Alderman of Ward 2.

He was brought up under what he calls the old Q House regime.

His great-uncle Bill Douglass was the athletic director when he attended the original building in the ’60s. The doors would open at roughly 2 p.m., when the schools let out, and every day Douglas would run downstairs in the Q House to get his seat at the pool table. Lined up against a wall across from the table were 10 to 15 chairs where boys would wait their turn to play. If he needed to get up from his chair to use the bathroom, he would say “Tap, Tap. I want my seat back,” and the other boys would politely heed his request.

“As youngsters, we learned respect for ourselves and a lot of respect for others back then,” said Douglass.

When Douglass was growing up, small gangs settled scores with their fists or on the basketball court. Enemies one day could be friends again the next. Hardly anyone brought a knife to fight and a kid wielding a gun was unheard of, he remembers.

Things are different now.

Capria Marks, 17, was friends with

F R I D AY SEPTEMBER 6

Melvin “Gully” Hayes, 20. On March 22, 2013, Gully shot himself in the head. The bullet entered the back of Gully’s head and came out the front.

Gully didn’t intend to kill himself, according to Marks, but instead was fooling around with the firearm and suffered a tragic accident. But Marks is struck by the fact that Gully was not alone. One of his friends was with him. “Even if he was playing with the gun,” said Marks, “You don’t let your friend sit there and play with no gun.”

Gully’s death may not have been a direct effect of gang violence but accidents like his could have been prevented if weapons weren’t a prevalent possession amongst New Haven’s youth.

According to Marks, true friends can be few and far between for many young men in gangs.

“When you don’t got nothing else to offer them, they not gonna care about you no more. And sometimes, your friends don’t really care about you until you get a car or something.

‘Til you get a house where they can come and smoke up all your weed or something. It’s like these boys, they living in darkness,” Marks said.

The daughter of Rev. Scott Marks, a community activist, Marks was raised in the church and never found it hard to keep away from street life. She is one of the founding members of the New Elm City Dream, a group that aims to tackle youth violence by pressuring the city to create jobs for young people.

Yet, she does not exclude those involved in the wrong crowd from her friend circle. While adults immediately write misfits off as thugs or gang-bangers, Marks befriends them. She understands that kids just don’t get up and join gangs. There are social, familial and economic factors that draw them to the streets — some impossible to avoid.

Most gangs in New Haven claim entire neighborhoods. Even if a kid is not a part of a gang, he or she can still be affiliated with one just by living on a particular street. The R gang splits Reed Street with the R2. The Ville claims Newhallville. KSI runs Kensington St. Fairside runs Fair Haven.

From the Hill, the Trey, the T Street boys, every gang is tied to a neighborhood.

Just as youths cannot choose what street they live on, it can be difficult to escape the violence between these street gangs.

In 2010, 2,559 New Haven seventh and eighth graders participated in a Student Health and Behavior Survey funded by the National Institutes of Health as part of a prevention program by the NHPS Social Development Department and the Yale Department of Pediatrics.

Thirty-four percent of these 12-15 year olds said they had seen someone get stabbed or shot, while 11 percent reported actually having carried a gun or a

weapon.

For Douglass, the petty reasons for conflicts between young people have not appeared to change, but the modes of retaliation clearly have. That would be bad enough, but those who pull the trigger often send their bullets flying into random bystanders.

The near fatal shooting of 18-month-old Tramire Miller as he sat on his porch with his mother, Sherrie Miller, on Oct. 10, 2012, was the final straw for Douglass. He was one of the first at the hospital with the family.

That same night, he got up in front of an audience of 100 at City Hall to urge the city’s General Assembly to secure state funding to reopen the Q House.

The suspects in the toddler’s shooting were Joseph Metteus, 18, and Tythrone Ford, 19.

CONCERNED CITIZENS FIGHT FOR THE Q HOUSE

Douglass’ sentiment is shared by members of the Concerned Citizens for the Greater New Haven Dixwell Community House, Inc. Mostly alumni of the Q House, the group has been fighting to reopen the center since the day it closed.

But the reason behind its closure is disputed.

According to a bankruptcy petition filed in Jan. 2006, the building was shut down because of outstanding debt.

Some community members blamed the debt on mismanagement of funds, pinning the fault on the last executive director, Willie Green.

However, according to Bracey, the Q House’s financial woes began over 30 years before it finally closed, when it changed locations and lost a major source of income from the United Way of Greater New Haven, a nonprofit organization that provides grants for agencies in the city.

Then in the early 2000s, another problem hit. A city-run adult education program located in the Q House and paying 40 percent of its rental fees was moved out of the building. The United Way, soon thereafter, dropped funding the center completely.

When the news of the Q House’s foreclosure spread in 2003, countless groups claimed they were going to save the center. Bracey, who considered the response all rhetoric, brought together a group of powerful black women that included a former state representative, the president of a community organization and the

owner of a bookstore. One night at Bracey’s home, they decided they needed to involve the entire community instead of leaving the center’s fate in the hands of disparate and disorganized factions.

A couple weeks later, Bracey and the women got a call from a member of Christ Chapel, which organized a meeting of groups interested in saving the Q House. Several meetings later, Concerned Citizens for the Greater New Haven Dixwell Community House was born, co-chaired by Bracey and former New Haven mayor, the city’s first and only black mayor, John C. Daniels.

Mayor John DeStefano Jr. created a task force to discuss the Q House, and at its first meeting in 2010, Bracey recalled DeStefano inquiring what the group thought about the Goffe Street

The violence that rattled New Haven in 2011 reinspired the city’s residents and youth together to fight for the Q House.

Travis Washington Jr., 17, was assassinated on June 25, 2011. At approximately 10 p.m., he was approached by a man near the intersection of Carmel and Percival streets in the Beaver Hills neighborhood. The man asked for his name. He replied, “Travis.” He never had a chance to inquire “Why?” Washington was the 18th out of 34 homicides in the city that year and one of seven casualties under the age of 21, according to the New Haven Homicide Report. Thirty-four was the highest number of homicides in a decade.

Out of fear for the futures of young people in the city, two new youth groups were born.

JUST AS YOUTHS CANNOT CHOOSE WHAT STREET THEY LIVE ON, IT CAN BE DIFFICULT TO ESCAPE THE VIOLENCE BETWEEN THESE STREET GANGS. Armory, a large building adjacent to the New Haven Correctional Center.

“We didn’t want our kids next door to a jail,” Bracey said. “We did a survey of the community, and almost 99 percent said they wanted that building in Dixwell, on the site it was [on]. ” After DeStefano and the city’s Board of Aldermen voted unanimously to use public funds to purchase the property in 2010, Concerned Citizens received $5,000 and 6 months to develop a strategic plan addressing the rehabilitation of the building, the programs the new Q House would offer and a long-term sustainability strategy.

In their 15-page prospectus, the group demanded the city pay $3.5 million in improvement costs for the House. With such a large sum, the mayor turned down their plan because he said, in a signed letter to Bracey, the sustainability component was inadequate.

Sheeva Williams-Nelson, Washington’s aunt, had dreams of starting her own youth organization. The death of her nephew forced her vision to come to fruition.

In July 2012, she started Breakthru!

Inc. “It was how I went through my grieving process,” said Williams-Nelson.

Her son, Joshua Williams, 18, who helped start the program, had taken his cousin’s death particularly hard.

The trauma of losing a loved one, suffered by many children in New Haven, was an issue Williams-Nelson noticed was not being addressed in schools.

She knew she had to make healing the central focus of her program.

Through her group, she has met countless students involved in gangs and who have been to jail. Unable to escape the violence, even in school, many of these kids exhibit symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

“Before 2011, if they heard gunshots they really didn’t pay attention,” Williams-Nelson said. “But now, when they hear it, they’re scared for their parents. When [they] see a car drive slowly down the street, now they start to run.”

Children with PTSD are more aggressive, acting on impulse, and more prone to cause trouble in school.

According to Williams-Nelson, instead of arranging an assessment of those who exhibit repetitive behavioral problems, teachers place students on in-house suspension, punishing them for lashing out.

SEE Q HOUSE PAGE B8

“SEA OF YOUTH”

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Whitney Humanities Center // 7:30 p.m.

Radical documentary maker Shinsuke Ogawa hits Yale’s big screen with this 1966 Japanese film.

YOUTH GROUPS TAKE ACTION

Similes

“In the sudden darkness, so like a womb, Antosh seemed an embryo waiting to be born from her character’s despair.” — Jennifer Gersten ’16

PAGE B4

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND TRANSPORTS

MOVING ON // BY JACOB GEIGER

“Cars,” once said New York City-based photographer Jill Freedman, “are sort of like our country.” From Henry Ford to American Graffiti, the car has long embodied America’s dual spirit of industry and freedom. And just as America has undergone drastic transformation, so has the automobile —Detroit struggles; the growl of the American muscle car has been supplanted by the whir of tinny engines run by computerized fuel injection systems. The changing spirit of the American car echoed the changing spirit of America itself as the Industrial Age drew to a close.

New Haven is no stranger to these changes, which seem to have infected it with the particular malaise of being an industrial city in a post-industrial world. New Haven was built from steel and oil. At its heart was its harbor, which supported a thriving shipping industry. During the Civil War, the United States contracted its weapons from New Haven Arms (later renamed Winchester Arms), and the arms manufacturing industry became an economic cornerstone of the city. Today, the harbor rarely seems busy; its massive cranes tower unused as a single ship unloads. The enormous, sprawling Winchester Arms factory (pictured left) sits abandoned, hollowed out, as plans to repurpose it as premium loft apartments are discussed. It’s a story repeated again and again, and one especially visible from the Yale campus as the university attempts to plant the seeds of gentrification in formerly industrial neighborhoods like Science Park.

I hope to convey this narrative through the microcosm of New Haven’s transportation: the growl and rumble of dirty diesel engines still heard and felt in city buses; the tires that sink into the sand on an underused harbor; the clicks of a bicycle freewheel driven by a system of spinning gears, cranks, and roller chain; the dozens of tons of steel sheets that plate railway cars. And — as discarded automobile frames return to the earth as dirt and rust — I hope these photographs will capture something of an age in passing.

F R I D AY SEPTEMBER 6

YALE VOLLEYBALL VS. MIZZOU

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Payne Whitney Gymnasium // 7 p.m.

Where is Missouri again?

Olive oil

Good for your hair and your skin. Good lube, too.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B5

WEEKEND CAMPAIGNS

MAYORAL RACE: PICKING BETWEEN PERSONALITIES // BY YUVAL BEN-DAVID

A meet-and-greet. A master’s tea. A roundtable. A casual Cross Campus chat.

These events share a goal: They seek to engage Yalies politically.

But beyond variations in the cookies served and questions asked, they seem like nothing more than slightly different shades of schmooze.

Elicker. Fernandez. Harp. Carolina. In the all-Democratic New Haven mayoral race, the differences among the four candidates have less to do with policy than personality, so distinct campaigning styles count for a lot. And with a relatively small electorate at play in next Tuesday’s Democratic primary, the hundreds of votes candidates could win from Yale’s campus are nothing to sneeze at.

On Yale’s campus — where few students follow New Haven politics, let alone have strong opinions on local issues, simply because they don’t see the city as crucial for their everyday services — the candidates often find themselves expounding upon abstract “visions” for the city rather than the details of constituents’ concerns.

But those visions are not so different. Each campaign stresses the holy trinity of jobs, education and public safety, and all hope to unify a city divided by race and class.

Jason Bartlett, campaign manager for Toni Harp ARC ’78: “Toni Harp’s message to bring the city together is universal. Her emphasis on education, jobs and the economy is universal.”

Emma Janger ’15, a Henry Fernandez LAW ’94 supporter who runs her candidate’s campaign on campus: “I think from the conversations I’ve seen Henry have with students, his vision still centers on jobs and education and public safety.”

Rafi Bildner ’16, fundraising consultant for the Justin Elicker FES ’10 SOM ’10 campaign: “The issues are education, safety and developing New Haven as a 21st century city.”

Kristin Horneffer ’14, volunteer for Kermit Carolina: “It’s all about ending the cycle of poverty, which by extension ends crime.”

Each campaign rep said they think their candidate can best tackle those issues.

So with the campaigns stressing skills over substance, whether a candidate chooses to talk to students at a meet-and-greet, a master’s tea, a roundtable or while hanging around on Cross Campus can tell us something about the personalities in this race — and what really separates them. *** Drew Morrison ’14, president of “Yale for Elicker,” thinks wordof-mouth is the best way to sell his candidate around campus. “We have a pretty good contingent of about 20 people in the operation.

Having them ask their friends — that’s the most effective conversations.” Morrison sees the ground zero of the campaign as the few Yale students who’ve made some intimate acquaintance with the city, whether through volunteering or because they are local. Their enthusiasm infects others.

“People who have friends who are involved and who see the passion in their friends: that’s the basis of our campaign,” Morrison said.

To the skeptic, Morrison’s analysis might seem to betray a handsoff complacency in Elicker’s campaign strategy. While three of the four mayoral candidates are Yale alumni, Elicker is the most recent graduate. His five-year career as a Foreign Service Officer in the State Department is the kind of experience many Yalies would love to boast at 37. He is the only white candidate in the race. And because Elicker is the alderman for East Rock — a relatively affluent ward home to many Yale graduate students and professors — some suspect that he assumes implicit backing from the privileged institution in the center of, but in sharp contrast to, this poverty-plagued city.

Bildner puts a different spin on

his candidate’s natural connection to Yalies. Like them, Bilder said, Elicker is a bit of a nerd.

“I think Yale students respond well to Justin not because of what he looks like, but because when they ask him a question, he gives them a real policy-based response based in facts and figures,” Bildner said. And responding to questions about how Elicker’s privilege may endear him to Yalies, Morrison said he thinks Yale students are the voters most willing to confront Elicker about issues of race and class. “Yale students are willing to ask him, ‘Hey, you’re a middle class white person from a wealthy neighborhood,” he said.

Elicker has the most visible undergraduate campaign operation of all the candidates. Even a likely Fernandez voter like Zunaira Arshad ’17 conceded that the people who signed her up to vote were associated with the Elicker campaign.

IT LOOKS LIKE THERE IS AN INVERSE FORMULA IN THIS RACE BETWEEN POLITICAL EXPERIENCE IN THE CITY AND GRASSROOTS CAMPAIGNING. That’s something the campaign likes to tout. Bildner said that both at last Saturday’s meet-and-greet in Dwight Hall, and at Elicker’s appearance at Bagel Brunch at the Slifka Center, many students told him Elicker was the first candidate they had seen.

Elicker’s campus campaign strategy is a one-two punch of visibility and chatter that embodies what Bildner pegs as the alderman’s central promise: “a transparent and open style of government” epitomized by the responsiveness Elicker claims to have demonstrated as alderman and the way he delegates responsibilities on the campaign trail. Bildner, who has worked on previous Democratic campaigns including President Obama’s, said the Elicker campaign was the first time he found himself in a room of volunteers where “each one is working almost as a senior campaign staffer.”

But it looks like there is an inverse formula in this race between political experience in the city and grassroots campaigning. Elicker is young compared to his chief rivals; he has spent fewer years as an elected official. So folksy as it might seem, his being accessible to students exposes Elicker’s limited political currency on the New Haven scene. *** But if Elicker is the new kid on the block and acts that way, his tactics are very different from those of the establishment candidate: Harp. Experience is her catchword — and campus engagement far from a priority.

A 20-year veteran of the Connecticut state legislature who spent 10 years as chairman of the state senate appropriations committee, Harp has won powerful endorsements (like that of Democratic Senator Chris Murphy) and leads the pack in fundraising.

Arguing that her work at the state level has qualified her to manage the crumbling city budget, Harp presents herself to Democratic voters as a major-league player.

But coupled with her unmatched union support, that state-level experience has painted Harp as a classic machine politician.

At Yale, that’s how Harp is understood. Her marginal contact with university students — largely limited to work with Students Unite Now, an undergraduate ally of the Unite Here unions — is defined by a high-priestly manner students may not find relatable.

Though Harp leads Elicker and

Fernandez in almost every other institutional aspect, her campaign has no official student presence.

David Steiner ’16, who attended a Labor Day lunch at Timothy Dwight college with Harp and aldermanic candidates Ella Wood ’15, Jeannette Morrison and Sarah Eidelson ’12, said Harp’s appearance with those three aldermanic candidates — along with their four-way endorsement at the event — underscored her SUN and union associations. Steiner said he found Harp detached.

“While her lengthy resume is worth highlighting, she didn’t relate that experience to the audience members’ interests,” he said.

Steiner, an undecided voter, said that instead of discussing Yalerelated matters, Harp focused on youth issues, including the closure of the Q House in Dixwell.

Just as the candidate did at the Timothy Dwight luncheon, Harp’s campaign tries to win Yalies over by linking her to aldermanic candidates who do — or seek to — represent Yalies. That tactic reeks of chummy establishment politics — something the other three candidates say Harp is guilty of.

Renita Heng ’16, a Silliman resident, recalled canvassers coming to her room to first talk up alderwoman Morrison and then Harp.

“Experience kept on coming up,” Heng said.

It may be that Harp simply finds Yale’s institutional hulk less intimidating than the other candidates do. She is not as worried about causing offense. While Steiner recalled Harp talking about working with Yale’s president to secure funds for the city, her campaign manager, Bartlett, does not mince his words when speaking about the University. On balancing union concerns with Yale’s, a key issue given Harp’s union backing and what she could gain from Yale votes, Bartlett said, “I don’t know what kind of balancing act Yale expects. Harp’s been pretty clear that Yale has to do more, that we support New Haven Works and we expect Yale to participate in that program. We think that more New Haven residents should get jobs at Yale, both at the university and the hospital.”

dez event, which he estimated to be $70. This raises questions about whether that financial cost was an implicit endorsement of Fernandez and then whether Yale and its administrators must remain impartial in New Haven elections.

When Elicker hosted his meetand-greet in Dwight Hall, his supporters distributed flyers noting that the campaign had rented out the space. But in an email to the News, Pitti argued that “as one of the strong candidates for mayor, [Fernandez] deserves the attention of students and others.”

Fernandez has said that the master’s tea was Pitti’s initiative. Regardless of whose plan it was, Fernandez gained a chance to address scores of students.

Fernandez is also rumored to draw support from his alma mater: the law school.

Perhaps those institutional ties explain why Fernandez’s effort on campus has less to do with student-led grassroots organizing than Elicker’s. Instead, Fernandez has made a number of formal appearances on campus, including the two master’s teas and an event last week with actor Danny Glover at the Afro-American Cultural House.

Fernandez’s decision to host that event is a testament to what Danielle Filson, a senior at the University of Connecticut who serves as Fernandez’s communications director, sees as her candidate’s greatest strength: his diversity. The son of an African-American father and white mother, husband to a Puerto Rican woman and father to a Spanishspeaker, Fernandez is a mosaic of the city’s many communities, his supporters believe. “He embodies New Haven,” Filson said.

While Elicker has gone to some lengths to emphasize his independence from Yale — he recently opposed the sale of portions of High and Wall streets to the University — Fernandez and his staff are more secure in balancing their candidate’s University links with his New Haven identity. One proposal Filson was quick to tout was a plan to open a school principal training program at the Yale School of Management.

***

***

Henry Fernandez has some good friends at Yale. The former economic development administrator for the city and Law School grad was once an associate fellow at Ezra Stiles college. As of Wednesday, he has been hosted at two Master’s teas there. Janger, who founded “Yale for Fernandez” earlier this semester, explained that Ezra Stiles master Stephen Pitti ’91 and his wife, American studies and ethnicity, race and migration professor Alicia Camacho, are good friends with Fernandez and his wife, Kica Matos.

Janger said the two couples have worked together at Junta for Progressive Action, a New Haven organization that focuses on immigrant rights where Matos was formerly the executive director.

Pitti said that Ezra Stiles footed the bill for the most recent Fernan-

There is one more candidate.

Kermit Carolina will not win this election. But Kristin Horneffer ’14, who works for his campaign and said she is the only Yalie she knows to be doing so, does not think victory is the point. Carolina is the champion of those who do not vote, she said. “He’s trying,” Horneffer explained, “to mobilize a group that’s known not to have a voice in New Haven politics — the poorer residents of the city, residents of the inner city, including the blocks surrounding Yale.”

That group, Horneffer admitted, “is socially, economically and emotionally really separate from Yale students.”

Yale students are the inverse: New Haven residents who could have a voice but often choose not to. Each campaign must be innovative to win Yale voters who could

be valuable to them come Tuesday. “Getting any college student interested in politics on a local level is a challenge,” Harp’s Bartlett said. “I think they’re focused on national politics. To transition to local politics — unless they’re New Haven residents — that takes some work.”

And while Bartlett conceded that some issues, like gun violence, lay at the intersection of national and local politics, the challenge in attracting student voters lies primarily in the fact that this election is circumscribed to Democrats in a very specific geographic area. The national range of opinions does not translate well to city politics.

The extreme partisan rhetoric that dominates national politics will have no bearing on this election. If something national will affect the race, Janger said, it will be immigration reform, an issue where Fernandez stands far to the left of other candidates.

And while Janger noted that

presidential politics do play a role in one way — many students are already registered to vote from last year’s presidential election — there were many during that season of disillusion who did not register for a party, or who do not remember if they registered as Democrats or independents. That means many student will be ineligible to vote in the decisive Democratic primary.

But Bildner remains optimistic.

“Yes,” he admitted, “there’s a small group of students who are really knowledgeable about the issues and are involved in the campaigns, but it’s a very easy pitch in this election because of how important it is … everyone seems to be willing to listen — everyone to whom we say, ‘Listen, this election is huge,’ is willing to at least register.”

The hard part comes next.

Contact YUVAL BEN-DAVID at yuval.ben-david@yale.edu .

// ISAAC STANLEY-BECKER, KATHRYN CRANDALL

F R I D AY SEPTEMBER 6

“ZABRISKIE POINT”

Whitney Humanities Center // 4 p.m.

Approaching Death Valley.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Tomato and avocado sandwiches on whole-grain bread with bacon Are you hungry, bitches?

PAGE B6

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B7

WEEKEND PREDICTS

FLASH FORWARD

I

t’s shopping period, but not just for classes — extracurriculars too. With the Extracurricular Bazaar, auditions, rushing and general meetings all happening all at once, you need to be aware that what you do will change your life. In four years, you might be someone different. Someone you hate. Someone you love. Someone you’re ashamed of.

Someone you’re proud of. They say your major doesn’t mean anything, but no one said anything about your activities. WEEKEND is here to show you what you might become.

YALE UNDERGRADUATE MATH SOCIETY

FRESHMAN

Freshmen, are you taking MATH112? Think twice — it could be a slippery slope. You might succeed at derivatives, then find yourself dominating integrals. Then differential equations, then abstract algebra. Before you know it, you’ll be onto complex analysis, and the Putnam Prize will be yours.

But will your friends still be yours?

GREEK LIFE Were you that goody goody girl in high school that thought alcohol only existed in your chemistry textbook? Did you think that the only meaning of pot was a metal object that one

SENIOR

cooks something in? Three years down the line you might find yourself a lot less innocent. But a lot more hot.

FRESHMAN

SENIOR

FRESHMAN

SENIOR

SENIOR

WYBC YALE RADIO Do you wear gym shoes when you’re not working out? It’s ok, it hap-

ASPIRANT PHI BETA KAPPA MEMBER

pens. But if you’re looking for a complete style, attitude and lifestyle

Did you get all A’s in high school? Do you refuse to settle for anything less at Yale? Well, get ready to settle for a lot less in every other aspect of your life, because the only 3.99 you’ll be seeing is at Walgreens. You may have a higher GPA than friend count, but who cares?

S AT U R D AY SEPTEMBER 7

YALE ANIME SOCIETY PRESENTS “SPIRITED AWAY” William Harkness Hall, Room 119 // 7 p.m.

Do you want to be spirited away? WKND does.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Follow your imaginary well-dressed toddler Quinoa, we love you!

FRESHMAN S AT U R D AY SEPTEMBER 7

WORD PERFORMANCE POETRY

Jonathan Edwards Theater // 7:30 p.m.

Release your back-to-school feelings in verse.

makeover, look no further than Yale Radio. You will be indoctrinated into the hippest of the hip. Goodbye Eastpak, hello JanSport.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Tooting and booting

Sustainability is for the environment.

PAGE B6

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B7

WEEKEND PREDICTS

FLASH FORWARD

I

t’s shopping period, but not just for classes — extracurriculars too. With the Extracurricular Bazaar, auditions, rushing and general meetings all happening all at once, you need to be aware that what you do will change your life. In four years, you might be someone different. Someone you hate. Someone you love. Someone you’re ashamed of.

Someone you’re proud of. They say your major doesn’t mean anything, but no one said anything about your activities. WEEKEND is here to show you what you might become.

YALE UNDERGRADUATE MATH SOCIETY

FRESHMAN

Freshmen, are you taking MATH112? Think twice — it could be a slippery slope. You might succeed at derivatives, then find yourself dominating integrals. Then differential equations, then abstract algebra. Before you know it, you’ll be onto complex analysis, and the Putnam Prize will be yours.

But will your friends still be yours?

GREEK LIFE Were you that goody goody girl in high school that thought alcohol only existed in your chemistry textbook? Did you think that the only meaning of pot was a metal object that one

SENIOR

cooks something in? Three years down the line you might find yourself a lot less innocent. But a lot more hot.

FRESHMAN

SENIOR

FRESHMAN

SENIOR

SENIOR

WYBC YALE RADIO Do you wear gym shoes when you’re not working out? It’s ok, it hap-

ASPIRANT PHI BETA KAPPA MEMBER

pens. But if you’re looking for a complete style, attitude and lifestyle

Did you get all A’s in high school? Do you refuse to settle for anything less at Yale? Well, get ready to settle for a lot less in every other aspect of your life, because the only 3.99 you’ll be seeing is at Walgreens. You may have a higher GPA than friend count, but who cares?

S AT U R D AY SEPTEMBER 7

YALE ANIME SOCIETY PRESENTS “SPIRITED AWAY” William Harkness Hall, Room 119 // 7 p.m.

Do you want to be spirited away? WKND does.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Follow your imaginary well-dressed toddler Quinoa, we love you!

FRESHMAN S AT U R D AY SEPTEMBER 7

WORD PERFORMANCE POETRY

Jonathan Edwards Theater // 7:30 p.m.

Release your back-to-school feelings in verse.

makeover, look no further than Yale Radio. You will be indoctrinated into the hippest of the hip. Goodbye Eastpak, hello JanSport.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Tooting and booting

Sustainability is for the environment.

PAGE B8

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND COVER

FIGHT THE VIOLENCE Q HOUSE FROM PAGE B3 Members of Breakthru! expressed that they wanted a community center like the Q House with mentors to talk to about their troubles. The only obstacle is pressuring the city to get on board.

“It’s not a money [problem],” Williams said. “[The city] can definitely afford it. It’s not on the top of their priority list.”

According to Jeanette L. Morrison, Alderman of Ward 22, no child was ignored at the Q House.

“Kids that are doing the unfortunate incidents, they don’t have anywhere to go where it could be a safe place to talk about their problems,” Morrision said. She has been working with youth groups like the New Elm City Dream to push the city government to reopen the Q House.

A self-proclaimed Q House kid, Morrison started going there when she was 7 years old.

She recalls Carlton White, a man who many kids went to talk to when they were considering committing violent acts. He would counsel these young people at any hour of the day, many deciding afterwards not to do what they had contemplated.

“When you have a place like the Q house, where people know it’s a safe haven they can turn to, you will decrease the violence,” said Morrison.

In 2011, Breakthru! conducted a phone campaign, mobilizing thousands of youth in New Haven to call City Hall and demand the Q House be reopened. And with the support of city officials like Morrison and DeStefano, on Jan. 10, 2012 the group facilitated a Q House Community Forum that filled the auditorium at Wexler Grant High School. Youth and community members demanded what they wanted to see in a new Q House. Williams-Nelson, also an alumnus of the House, handed a report to the mayor.

While Breakthru! Inc is focused on counseling kids, the New Elm City Dream, also formed in 2011, was determined to pressure the city to create youth jobs as a solution to youth violence.

The city’s Youth@Work program provides employment opportunities year round for young people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. However, due to budget cuts in 2011, the program can fund job opportunities for only 600 kids for the next fiscal year, almost half the number they were able to serve in 2010. There are still thousands of youth between the ages 14-21 that need jobs. Money is an anchor for many who stay in gangs, according to Marks.

Co-founders Lisa Bergman and David White met at the New Haven People’s Center, while members of the Young Community League of New Haven. The devastating number of young people lost to violence in 2011 prompted the two to switch their attention from adult workers to unemployed youth.

The YCL had their first Youth Jobs Roundtable on Sept. 24, 2011, marking the birth of the NECD. At the request of the group’s youth, they held their first Youth Jobs March on Nov. 2, 2011.

Over 200 people attended. They held up the names and photographs of the 34 people who had lost their lives that year on placards as they marched. They collected 650 petition signatures for Obama’s American Jobs Act. In Feb. 2012, the group wrote their own youth survey to find out what young people in the city thought about the youth violence and jobs issue. They found that 50 percent of 10th graders, the largest group surveyed, had been exposed to gun violence and shootings.

The group’s second Youth Jobs March on June 17, 2012 inspired the state to open their ears.

It was this march that Morrison believed convinced Connecticut’s state government to provide $40,000 to the Board of Aldermen to fund a feasibility study of the Q House in Sept. 2012.

“The state and other elected officials saw the New Elm City Dream and other youth groups marching,” said Bergman. “[We were saying] we don’t want to be involved in the violence … we need something to do, something positive. Otherwise, how could you except us to have better lives?”

Although the Q House will not directly solve the problem of youth joblessness, it would provide kids with positive social interactions and the support they need to make good decisions for their lives.

In Feb. 2013, the group organized a Valentines-themed march, urging the community to love each other in order to decrease violence in the city. They marched on Kensington Street to the home of Tremire Miller, now 2 years old.

There, members gave s p e e c h e s u rg i n g peace and unity in the face of senseless v i o -

lence.

THE ALDERMEN PRIORITIZE YOUTH

Sarah Eidelson ’12, Ward 1 Alderman, chairman of the aldermanic youth committee, was at this February’s march and promised that the Board of Alderman would look into the reopening of the Q House as part of its youth agenda.

“A big part of why I wanted to get involved in the youth agenda in the first place was from getting to know some of [the youth groups] and being at their rallies and their marches and being so inspired by the fact that there were young people my age or older and also who were 6 or 7 or 10 who were really taking control of their neighborhoods and leading in the fight to build their own youth agenda,” said Eidelson.

After the new board came into term last January, they created a legislative vision statement, which they passed unanimously, the first time that had ever happened for a board. Their top priority in that statement was to develop a comprehensive youth agenda to address youth violence and the lack of opportunities for youth in the city.

There are three components to the agenda, one of them being youth spaces. Under that umbrella, the board will reassess the Q House, the Goffe Street Armory and carry out a citywide youth space project. In the latter project, the city will map out spaces that already exist and evaluate what can be done to enhance them.

In Sept. 2012, the BOA received $200,000 from the city’s Engineering Dept.— $160,000 for the citywide project and $40,000 to conduct a feasibility study to determine the cost of renovating the Q House.

After the receipt of these funds, the board created an informal co m mit-

tee that put out two requests for quotation (RFQ); one for a contractor to assess the Q House and discern how much the dilapidated building would cost to renovate or breakdown and rebuild, and another for a facilitator to hold community meetings for citizens to voice what they want to see at the new House, who they want to manage the building and how they plan to keep it sustainable.

The contractor, Regina Winters ARC ’94 of Zared Architecture, and the facilitator, Dr. Robert Tucker, a retired consultant, were chosen in April and the feasibility study began in July.

However, as of the end of this summer, the BOA has yet to secure the funding for renovations. That process will go under way once Winters determines the final cost.

The future of the Q House appears bright. If it were not for the efforts of groups like the Concerned Citizens and the unwavering activism of New Haven’s youth groups, the resurrection of the Q House may have remained on the bottom of the city’s priorities. It’s a promising step in getting youth off the streets and providing a safe place for them to be kids, a place for them to find community. But for Bracey, the promise of the center’s return has a more significant meaning.

“A win for the Q House is a win for the African-American community.”

Contact CHANTEL SIMPSON at chantel.simpson@yale. edu .

// KEN YANAGISAWA

S AT U R D AY SEPTEMBER 7

IMPROV RECRUITMENT SHOWS Everywhere // All day

For the weird blend of theatrical, hip, intellectual and funny.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Using the phrase “slipping away”

A poetic, dramatic and poignant way to express losing control of your life.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B9

WEEKEND ARTS

REAL STATES // BY AVA KOFMAN

My first motive in writing this review of “Still life: 1970s Photorealism” — to say “Go, go see this” — is accomplished in few words.

The second motive — to say, “This is what I saw” — takes a couple hundred more. Today I recorded the things I saw speaking into my iPhone. This review is the direct transcription of that Voice Memo, with some edits made for clarity and brevity.

The walls are orange. And there is a man sitting in the corner with newspapers and a beer.

He is hanging out after a long day of work. Or maybe this is his work. Next to him the headline of the sports magazine reads: “More Bad Luck.” It’s a copy of the New Haven Register. One wonders if an actual New Haven newspaper was part of Duane Hanson’s original sculpture installation.

“It’s Open” reads the poster above the Louisiana Superdome and immediately, from the effects of lights shining on other lights, I think, “This is real.” It really does look like a photograph until

I see the Kentucky Fried Chicken scene, whose outlined letters are too sketched and nervous to be real, although that blurring sketchy quality was probably a real property of the original light that just appears fake here.

This painting, Noel Mahaffey’s “Louisiana Superdome — Times Square” (1977), makes for a different greeting than the seated man but an equally strong opening impression. And it also immediately raises what seems to be one of the tacit questions of the show (besides the unanswerable question, “What is realism?”) which is: When pursuing this fidelity to the photographic style, why does the artist choose to break from it?

The opening hallway’s drawings and paintings announce some of the problems staged by photorealism. There’s something mechanical, Teutonic and draftman-like in some of the paintings collected from the Documenta 5 exhibition of 1972. These works appear more as exercises than as

finished pieces and as I say this, I see that that guy sitting in the chair with his beer is still watching me.

My favorite painting in the show is probably of the tangerines, called “Tangerine Sugar” by Ben Schonzeit. You can see the luscious flesh of the tangerine almost bursting into Rorschach abstraction yet still remaining a most real, chaotic, juicy, membranous offering. It is dripping with some solidity, but it also seems as though it could float away into ephemeral dots of its own pastel at any moment.

In contrast to the lively colors of that tangerine, there are the fruits of John Clem Clarke. He paints a quince (which I’ve been told is a type of pear), a melon and a cucumber. And his weirdly dark arrangement recalls those Spanish still-life paintings by Zurbaran or kitchen life paintings from the 16th and 17th century.

The Chuck Close portrait is also amazing because it is sad. In its attempt to capture everything

perfectly, there is something tragic about the fact that the attempt might always be a failure.

There’s a cool Richter at the show as well — “Portrait of Holger Friedrich” — where Richter’s characteristic blur shows the photograph as a process, as a moment in time, as a shake of the hand over a negative in the studio.

It reminds me of when a painter chooses to show his brushstrokes, or paint his own hand, painting.

And the exactitude of his blurring seems even harder to “get right” than simple clarity would be.

Why a show about photorealism? How can we think through Los Angeles, urbanism, New York, automobile culture, with these paintings?

In one nook, there’s a grouping of cityscape paintings of cars and diners and old homes and streets and small businesses and country Chevrolets that are coming and going and the dust is California, and Sacramento, if you keeping driving, is just around the bend. If you walk around the

whole room, it’s like you’re driving up to Sacramento getting all of these sights and snapshots of all the things you see from the car for a second and then remember and then forget soon thereafter.

This car-ride effect is the most successful curatorial choice in the show.

On the flipside, Duane Hanson’s “Drug Addict” is the worstplaced object in the show. It used to be placed downstairs on the first floor of the YUAG around a corner, and you used to just turn around and walk into it and that was very surprising. Here he seems denied the agency of surprise. Still, the pain and the shock and the reality of his pain are probably somehow better amplified by the white walls of this museum space than on the street, as just another object.

The last painting I want to talk about is the gigantic face of “Giummo” by Ben Schonzeit, who also painted the tangerines. Giummo is a guy who looks like an aging rock star with black

// ALEX SCHMELING

Photorealism versus photography. Which do you prefer?

curly hair and big aviator glasses for reading. You can see the black stubble on his beard, and half his face is cast into shadow — it’s a profile perdu and it’s so sad because he’s looking at us but he’s not looking at us. And his nose is red and burned from too much sun, and his skin feels oily and aged and he’s like plastic or cellophane.

You want to reach out and touch him, but when you do, you don’t get anything back. And that darkness is obviously enhanced or lost by his mass of hair and he’s looming like the blurry Richter painting of the photo of Holger Friedrich but he isn’t because isn’t he real?

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

A Brave Landing // BY THERESA STEINMEYER When I first entered the Yale School of Architecture’s newest exhibit, “Everything Loose Will Land,” I was confronted by a triangular fortress, 20 feet wide on each leg with rectangular portals, towering up to the ceiling amidst dangling neon shapes.

The structure, created by Bruce Nauman in 1980, is aptly named “Untitled (Equilateral Triangle).” I can’t help but wonder if it’s a peace offering from a delegation of geometry-happy alien invaders. Regardless, it’s landed bravely in this 1970s Los Angeles architecture exhibit, inviting us futuristic trespassers to step inside.

“Everything Loose Will Land,” originally displayed by the MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House in Los Angeles, is inspired

by Frank Lloyd Wright’s declaration, “Tip the world on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.” The exhibit explores the relationship between postmodern art and architecture as a function of changing cultural drama, a relationship somewhat as centerless as Wright’s interpretation of the city. Still, the exhibit attempts to ground itself with four themed sections clustered around the “Untitled” structure: “Procedures,” “Users,” “Environment” and “Lumens.”

Don’t attempt to tour the pieces without doing some background reading — curator and UCLA professor Sylvia Lavin provides a thorough and necessary explanation of the exhibit’s themes. “Procedures” showcases the new methods of producing architecture developed in the 1970s through the simplification of building tools, allowing for an increased unity

S AT U R D AY SEPTEMBER 7

“BRIGHTON ROCK”

Whitney Humanities Center // 6:30 p.m.

Down for British film noir?

between architecture and art.

“Users” transforms the nature of architecture by actively participating in architecture, often using buildings as tools. “Environments” incorporates a study of factors such as limited space, pollution and noise. Finally, “Lumens” deals with the influx of contemporary lighting and its effect on how the surrounding environment, art and architecture were perceived.

This is less an architecture exhibit than a contemplation of the ideas that built 1970s Los Angeles. Sometimes, the relevancy of the pieces to architecture was more obvious, as in the model of an Ajax Car Rental station built by Peter de Bretteville and Keith Godard, and a 2–4–6–8 House Kit, instructions tucked neatly into a small box on how to assemble a simple home. In these pieces, the simplification of tools and procedures, and the desire of users to be more active in the production and manipulation of architecture, manifest clearly as contributors to 1970s Los Angeles design culture.

Other pieces struggled to fit so cleanly within the confines of the exhibition’s thematic limits. In the “Users” section, I found myself face to face with Robert Mangurian’s “Portable Person,” an amalgamation of a human skeleton X-ray with various wires, chips and technological gizmos. Fascinating, yes — Mangurian incorporates everything from an antenna to improve communication to life-support features. A computer chip appears to rest where the skeleton’s heart ought to be.

But the relationship between the “Portable Person” and architecture is a stretch, even with the

bridge of the “Users” theme.

In the “Environments” section, uncomfortable images of “17 Beautiful Men Taking a Shower” leapt away from otherwise obviously architecturally relevant pieces. The influence of cultural growth on art and the Los Angeles population was clearly portrayed, but the connection between these developments and architecture sometimes left me grasping.

“Everything Loose Will Land” takes a leap of faith between its thematic content and Los Angeles architecture itself.

Just before I entered “Lumens,” the final section of the exhibit, I noticed a slideshow of projected images against the back wall. The West Coast seized me, a Midwestern girl who had never seen the Pacific Ocean. I let 1970s Los Angeles wash over me in snapshots: highway congestion, skyscrapers, a man sleeping, smog, birds above the ocean, tunnels, palm trees, more traffic, natives surfing, an advertisement for a McDonalds’ Quarter Pounder. At last, I felt at ease in the exhibit. I had fallen loose

// AMRA SARIC

Where is your center of gravity?

from New Haven, tumbling past blueprints and posters and cardboard chairs, and landed in this strange town called Los Angeles, where perhaps, for a few moments, I could belong.

“Everything Loose Will Land” is daring and selfassured. The thematic premise is initially perplexing, but the cultural awareness in the gallery is gripping. I came away from the exhibit less with a sense of 1970s Los Angeles architecture than with a sense of 1970s Los Angeles entrepreneurship in a fiercely energetic, technological age. The exhibit never promised clarity, or cohesion — only landing. To find peace in this strange world of yesteryear is quite the destination.

Contact THERESA STEINMEYER at theresa.steinmeyer@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Dating your best friend

You don’t have much time left.

PAGE B10

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND COLUMNS

TITLE: TK // BY SOPHIA NGUYEN AND GRAYSON CLARY

SN: As Yale undergrads spend shopping period swarming and settling into various classes, some in the outside world also fret over schedules. I’m talking, of course, about network executives, whose freshly green-lit shows debut this fall. In the spirit of the season, we’re revisiting that old warhorse, the thirty-minute family sitcom.

A few days ago, ABC became the first of the big networks to release pilots from its new line-up: “The Goldbergs,” “Back in the Game” and “Trophy Wife.”

Here we have three different cocktails of dysfunction and

SOPHIA & GRAYSON SPLIT/SCREEN cohesion, warmth and profanity. The question is not whether these shows accomplish anything new. They don’t. “The Goldbergs” is self-consciously retro, setting itself in the ’80s and introducing us to a comfortably nuclear, loud-mouthed family who bicker over whether Junior (not his real name) will get a car. “Back in the Game” presents the saga of a single mom drafted into coaching her son’s underdog Little League team.

“Trophy Wife” — to my mind, the freshest and most likeable of the three — stars a former party girl who has married into a surprisingly amiable blended family.

But why does default television look like this? And why do we continue to revisit this genre?

GC: Of last season’s new shows, exactly one stuck with me (the superlative “Hannibal,” longevity happily ensured by an atypical financing deal). The rest rose, fell or didn’t as the case might have been, and the world kept turning.

A wiser man once suggested that the reason television struggles to hit high art status is inherent in the medium: even the finest television takes place over the course of a programming block that absolutely had to be filled by something, and had to be filled by dint of the fact that that programming block already exists.

Creativity happens in a space afforded under the constraints of a 24-hour network — or it doesn’t, and still the network

rolls on.

“The Goldbergs” and “Back in the Game” read like pretty shameless for-lack-of-anything-better programming. You don’t want to find yourself five minutes into a sitcom pilot wondering if it’s supposed to be — really supposed to be — a comedy. “The Goldbergs” is egregious on this front.

I thought the culture had gotten mature enough to drop the idea of naked reference as humor, familiar as funny because there’s no other reaction to have to it. No one is surprised that Star Wars was a thing once, that the Karate Kid painted a fence and that jeans didn’t used to fit as well as they do today. “Back in the Game” landed with a thud for me too: The humor has been welltrodden out of the jokes that the show is brave enough to make.

“Trophy Wife,” though — that was fun. If you can overlook Malin Akerman’s too obvious struggle to perform at the level of the rest of the cast, you’ll get to the sincere enjoyment of, well, a great cast. It’s always nice to see Bradley Whitford polishing off his acting chops. He was top-notch in “The Cabin in the Woods,” but showed much too much of his age in a 2012 “West Wing” reunion short. The rest of the cast is charmingly askew after the same spirit, in a winking if broadly sketched portrayal of something that feels — for all its foibles — not unlike a family.

SN: Oh, give Malin Akerman a break. I think you’re confusing the actress trying too hard with the character trying too hard. The episode is premised on Kate’s desperate desire to inhabit the role of step-mom, now that she’s been unexpectedly pulled into this family and its issues. Maggie Lawson is the one I really feel for. She has to emotionally anchor “Back in the Game,” which seems to be the kind

of comedy that relies on its feelgood plot points to soften certain offensive jokes. As for “The Goldbergs,” I find its pseudo-Neil Simon overtones incredibly grating, but at least it’s a labor of love. By the end, I was charmed by how shots of the characters were paired with footage of the showrunner’s family members on whom they were based. But I don’t think that one guy’s nostalgia is enough to garner wider interest.

To me, the general insistence on remaking the family sitcom seems like a feeble attempt to yank us back into the era when watching television was a family activity — a time when, at the appointed hour, everyone would gather around the hearth, the glowing cathode tubes of the household’s one TV set.

Maybe the logic goes something like this: different things frighten, shock, intrigue and excite us, but surely comfort is universal.

Let’s be honest: it’s only because of the demands of this column (and those infamous taskmasters, the editors of WEEKEND) that we watched these shows in the first place. The fact is that while you were pursuing your (unhealthy! deeply unhealthy!) love/hate relationship with “The Newsroom,” I was bolstering my feminist cred by queuing up “Orange is the New Black.” In our column, we keep returning to this theme: today’s television audience is fragmented. We’ve made ourselves difficult to count. We’ve fled to cable, and fallen down the rabbit holes of Hulu, Netflix and YouTube. Each of us has our own little screen.

Whether it’s a network show, or a review of a network show: this is what filling space looks like.

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

// CREATIVE COMMONS

A Questionable Friend // BY DAVID WHIPPLE

On some cavern wall in France, there’s a painting of cavemen sitting around a fire, roasting wooly mammoth and banging on drums.

We’ve always loved music. We might even have sung before we talked. People have been gathering to make music since there were people, so I’m sure the campfire sing-a-long dates to pre-history.

And I’m also sure that in the corner of that picture, you can see a few especially scruffy cavemen passing around a primitive joint.

Music and Drugs are old friends, having now spent decades together terrifying parents and authority figures with the help of their accomplice, Sex. For whatever reason, the way drugs stimulate the brain complements music particularly well. And live music is even more appealing for our inner potheads; you can’t go to a concert without meeting a whiff — or a haze — of weed. Nobody seems to care too much, and as any weed-smoker will tell you, it’s all fairly harmless, maaan.

S U N D AY SEPTEMBER 8

DAVID WHIPPLE MUZAK Unless you happened to be at the Electric Zoo festival in New York this past weekend. With a strong nudge from the New York City mayor’s office, organizers ended the festival a day early, after overdoses of bad Molly left two attendees dead and four more in critical condition at the hospital. A week earlier, three attendees at a Zedd concert at the storied House of Blues in Boston overdosed on the same drug.

One died and the club management appeared before city officials to discuss what had happened. In July, over 100 attendees of the Paradiso festival in Seattle were hospitalized and one died after taking Molly tainted with cocaine, meth and LSD. MDMA overdoses and the harm done by tainted strains of the drug are nothing new—people have been dying while taking Ecstasy for years. But the size and

publicity of the Zoo shutdown pushed the issue into the public eye, if only for a brief moment.

The deaths at Electric Zoo were indicative of how the old musicand-drugs trope has evolved.

The ever-increasing demand for stimulation that’s won hordes of fans for live dance music is also behind the new enthusiasm for Molly, which pairs well with the overwhelming stimulus of a dubstep set blasted through a weapons-grade speaker system. A new kind of music has found its new kind of drug. And like the concert drugs of yore, it seems fairly harmless—a good time in powdered form with a peppy name.

Only, it can kill you.

It makes sense that a more intense experience would demand a more intense drug, and that a more intense drug would come with more intense risks.

What’s different about Molly is that the good feelings it activates aren’t created by the drug itself, the way THC in weed creates a high. Instead, Molly causes your brain to release a flood of

natural pleasure-inducing neurotransmitters. Also unlike weed, Molly carries with it the potential for an overdose, blamed for the two deaths at Electric Zoo. Then there’s the the risks associated with taking a tainted version of the drug. As an artificial freebase drug, Molly is easily and frequently tampered with. So the danger is twofold: you could overdose on MDMA itself or unknowingly take an impure dose, something you simply have to cross your fingers against. Unless you make it yourself, the purity is entirely out of your control.

A NEW KIND OF MUSIC HAS FOUND ITS NEW KIND OF DRUG. This new and more deadly concert drug has become a fashion statement in a way that other

drugs never were. People wander through festival campgrounds “looking for their friend Molly” but clearly enjoying the winks and laughs they get in response.

Madonna (I guess she’s still alive?) created some controversy (yeah, it’s still her) when she asked the crowd at Ultra 2012, “How many people have seen Molly?” This status makes some sense. The chemicals Molly releases in the brain promote feelings of empathy and unity; take Molly with a group of friends, and it becomes a sort of semi-natural lovefest, without the inebriating effects that foreign substances like THC or alcohol can have. One can see then how Molly became associated with communal use, and through that, a drug with cultural currency. Now, flaunting the use of Molly isn’t reserved for “druggy” kids — it’s a mainstay of live EDM. I really don’t mean to play Mom here, but it bears pointing out that we’ve attached cultural booster rockets to the ascent of a concert drug that’s significantly

BAD ROMANTICS AUDITION

Contact DAVID WHIPPLE at david.whipple@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

TBD // 6 p.m.

Do you have what it takes to be a drag queen? Go find out.

scarier than those we’ve used in the past. We take some recreational risks without batting an eye; it doesn’t seem to bother us that drinking is an order of magnitude more dangerous than MDMA. But the drugs coupled with music never presented the kind of hazard Molly does.

This is what makes the response to the cancellation of Electric Zoo’s final day so interesting. The Internet did register some modicum of sadness, with artists tweeting their condolences. At the same time, plenty of people were simply angry, unable to see why the festival had to be cancelled for a few overdoses on a drug that most wouldn’t consider “heavy.” “If people take drugs,” one would-be concertgoer told the New York Post, “that’s their own fault.” Maybe so. They should have known the risk and maybe we should all get used to this happening. But do we want to?

Deleting your Facebook Get Google Plus.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B11

WEEKEND RUNS

LOSING TRACK // BY JENNIFER GERSTEN

It turns out that the mnemonically pachydermic Interweb still has its trunk wrapped tightly around records of a self I have long since discarded. I know this to be so because I Googled myself — the celebration and singing of oneself retooled for the modern age, no? In all likelihood you are now going to want to Google me too, so I’ll save you the trouble and simply confess: I was a runner. A trackie, the captain of my high school team, too XC for my shirt, seven miles in the snow.

The girls who sweated together, stretched together; who barfed together, belched together. This was literally no walk in the park and anyway, suffering builds character.

My senior year, I wrote my experience into a Real College Essay That Worked.

Track was a big deal. As a runner, whether for better or for worse, I was not a big deal. There were three captaining positions my senior year, and a bizarre slew of defections in 2009 had left just three rising seniors, so in a way my appointment was by default. I like to think that I deserved it for all my painful diligence, but on the talent front I was only ever reliably mediocre. I still maintain that it was the most physically harrowing thing I have ever done or ever will do. And occasionally I didn’t even do it at all, incapacitated by both no sleep and my coach’s stern, paternal insistence that I please go home so my parents wouldn’t sue. In retrospect, it was a sound strategy: work so hard that people feel uncomfortable pointing out how little you’ve actually achieved. And if I never made my times, I at least reaped the physical benefits in full: toned gams, a preternatural ability to hold my breath for ages, the flexibility, finally, to touch my toes. I thought I was in love.

If I really had been in love, I had a funny way of showing it. Postgraduation, suddenly the thought of running made me want to hurl almost as much as actual running.

The day I entered the purgatory between twelfth grade and college, I severed all ties to the sport and spent the summer on the couch. I had the misfortune of living near the park where my former teammates worked out, so I hid from them in the velveteen folds of our upholstery. I dreaded Olympics broadcasts. I spent many a guilty day carb-loading at the future home of the cronut. It was summertime, and the livin’ was finally easy. Through my sugarcoated haze, I realized in shame that the pain to which I had willfully, obsequiously subjected myself for the past three years was

no longer something I wanted to feel. It occurred to me that running, perhaps, was something I actually hated.

That summer I didn’t quit running, because running quit me instead. When you stop or stall in your pursuit of an athletic goal, your sense of self inevitably changes after a while because you are physically not the same person capable of doing the same things.

Worst of all is that you feel and look different, but the only person who can see what’s changed is you. One day you wake up and find your abs, though never prominent, are officially a thing of the past. What once was firm, now is fat — not that you were ever fat, but you were definitely once fit. The squishiness you disdained in your peers has introduced itself to your thighs with great aplomb. How is it that now you do one hundred crunches, but take breaks in between? No sense in talking about it, since you alone understand what it’s like to watch your times climb into what are the rafters for you, what is the ground floor for the untrained. You forget how you used to be good. You are trying to be done with your sport, but your body refuses to let you forget that you were once an athlete. You are softening. When Lucille Roberts commercials come on, the grating announcer is now talki n g t o y o u w h e n they mention $ummer $ av i n g $ !

The media starts t h ro w ing you a housewarmi n g party f o r your

move-in to the American body, and all you want to do is sit and eat the consolation cake they have baked in your dubious honor.

During the fall break of my first college semester, I visited my borough championship cross-country meet, where the sight of my uniformed team made me irrepressibly sad. Track had become more meaningful to them than it had ever been to me; they actually did love running, whereas I was just an ambitious masochist. Watching them tear across the finish line, though, I recalled some droplet of what it had been like to be drenched in the glory of personal victory, whether first place or last.

But I did not want to run, nor did I think I had to any longer. I had run to be impres-

sive, and finally I had impressed.

Now, being neither coached nor captained, nor captain of anyone but myself, meant I was free. I could do what I wanted, and what I really wanted was to get my high school body back.

HUMANS ARE REALLY NOTHING LIKE BUTTERFLIES ... BECAUSE CHRYSALISES SHED THEIR SKINS AND HUMANS HAVE TO LIVE WITH WHAT THEY’VE GOT. I tried Pilates. A woman by the name of Cassey Ho runs a YouTube series called Blogilates, and what she lacks in intelligible conversation she makes up for in workout difficulty. I watched her bend her legs over her head, extend her hands in airplane position like a conductor cueing an orchestra. I fumed at the loss of my ability to touch my toes. Soon enough it became clear that Pilates was not a safe alternative to running, but an aching reminder of how unfit I’d become. Through it all, she never ceased to exclaim that I really could do whatever move she was doing, even as I lay there exhausted, incapable and shamefully still, or that there were only fifteen more repetitions to go — or did she say fifty? — or that all my hard work

would pay off if I just followed her workout calendar to the last, sweaty T. On especially lonesome days I positioned my laptop on a chair beside my bed, curled up under my covers, and just watched her contort in self-loathing awe.

Yoga was next. Unaware that yoga is something you work at, not a skill with which you are born, I became immediately frustrated when I realized I lacked the patience and skill to put my feet behind my ears.

These experiments, alas, were short-lived, all too reminiscent of the mindless pain I had experienced in my former sport. Whatever had once motivated me had completely dissipated, and I was beginning to feel unconscionably lazy. To boot, it seemed like all my classes were confirming that I had also become a blockhead overnight. In public I felt I had vanished before I had even materialized, but in my dorm room mirror I saw every stretch of my skin in ugly, unflattering clarity.

Humans are really nothing like butterflies, no matter what the Hallmark poets say, because chrysalises shed their skin and humans have to live with what they’ve got.

I didn’t want to be an athlete anymore. But with an athlete’s body, maybe I’d fool myself, which is what I craved — proof that I hadn’t changed (for the worse, I was sure) as much as I’d thought. Becoming a person you like is difficult enough the first time around, and now I was confronting the possibility of having to do it all over again.

It’s been a process, but explainable thusly: I am trying to figure what I like. Speaking of which, late this August, on a friend’s bequest, I missed the finale of Chopped AllStars for a run, but a slow one, more of a jog. For once I hadn’t wanted to keel over when I finished. My body had done just what I’d asked of it, and for the meantime that was enough.

Running and I, we’re going to take a break. I need my soul for other things, and this lapse in my athletic career has as of late been nothing short of thrilling.

Last weekend I was crossing the street in the drizzle when I came across some people warming up for a road race. I beamed at them, genuinely happy to see their devotion to running persist despite the inclement weather. And then I walked on, rejoicing that I was not, and genuinely had no desire to be, among them.

Contact JENNIFER GERSTEN at jennifer.gersten@yale.edu .

// KAREN TIAN

S U N D AY SEPTEMBER 7

BALLET FOLKLORICO OPEN PRACTICE

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Broadway Rehearsal Lofts // 1 p.m.

They even teach you how to Chihuahua dance.

Taking classes without finals Let’s be real.

PAGE B12

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND BACKSTAGE

HERMAN CAIN

CANDIDATE, CELEBRITY, EDUCATOR? // BY JANE DARBY MENTON

Q. How did you enjoy your time at Yale?

A. I thought it was awesome. It was a packed house. What I found most interesting was the old-time British parliament format, the stompin’ and the hissin’. I thoroughly enjoyed it and I enjoyed the feedback I got from students — the stompers and the hissers.

Q. Before becoming a presidential candidate, you were a pizza man. Some say that New Haven has the best pizza in the country, so do you have a favorite New Haven pizza place?

A. No, because I didn’t get a chance to eat any pizza in New Haven. We went to the place next to Mory’s, York …

York … something? [WKND: Yorkside?] Yorkside! They have a picture of me hanging on the wall from the late 1980s, and the students I was with told me about it, and I said “Get out of here!” So I walked over there. I don’t have a favorite pizza place because I didn’t get a chance to eat it, but let’s just say Yorkside would have to be one of the first places I would try.

Q. The Pew Research Center reported that of all the Republican candidates in the 2012 presidential primary race, you received the most media coverage. What was it like to be in the limelight like that?

A. It was bittersweet. The sweet was it gave me the opportunity to get my message out, in terms of the solutions that this country ought to be working on making happen. The bitter was when some in the mainstream media turned viciously against me because of some accusations that were never proven. They insisted on pursuing it when there was no evidence. Overall, I got more out of it than having to go through that. It’s been all sweet since then (the primary). There has been no focus on the bitter part because there

was nothing to it to begin with. How many times can you write the same story over and over, saying nothing about it but accusations?

Q. What part of the message have you been focusing on getting out since the primary?

A. Solving America’s biggest problem: replacing the tax code. Not reform, replace. Capitalize the word replace.

Reform will not fix the problem. If we replace the tax code, we will create a much more robust economy in terms of growth. We can solve a whole lot of problems in terms of growth.

Our tax code is our biggest barrier to success. At my website, hermancain. com, there are 3 options. We’re having a national poll as we speak. [There’s the] fair tax, flat tax, and 9-9-9 plan that I developed. I’m going to take a vote of everyone that decides to vote to pick that best plan and try to rally people around one plan that we would demand at the U.S. Congress. I would be happy with either one, even though it’s the 9-9-9 plan that I developed.

Whatever the people prefer, that’s what I’m going to get behind, that’s what I’m going to get others behind, so we can move forward.

Q. What do you think are the biggest challenges facing the country right now? What concerns you the most about the world?

A. The economy. Domestically, the economy concerns me the most, because we do not have a policy that is growing the economy. That’s why I’m focusing on the movement. Internationally, the biggest thing that concerns me is that we do not have a very clear foreign policy. All you have to do is look at the mess related to Syria.

Q. If you were president, how would you

be handling the crisis in Syria right now?

A. If I had been president, the situation in Syria probably never would have happened, because I would have done something to pre-empt those kinds of things going on. I would not have waited for 100,000 people to be killed. I would have rallied with international partners, trying to get them to put whatever pressures we could not to get to this point. When it first started, something should have been done, [though] not necessarily a military strike. But instead this administration sat back and waited till it got to the point of outcry around the world before this administration was thinking about doing something. We still don’t have clarity on what it is they expect to achieve. I don’t think it ever would have gotten to this point had I been president.

Q. So what do you think are the most important qualities for a president to have?

A. Leadership. Leadership is the ability to Work on the right problem — W — and Ask the right questions — A — and Remove barriers — R. [WKND, at a later date: WAR??????] What that will lead you to is prioritization, prioritizing the right things. This administration … we cannot spend our way to prosperity. Energy independence could be moving along much faster than it is, in spite of the federal government and its regulations, energy is moving forward. If the government got out of the way it could be moving much faster, [and we would] not [be] subject to the whims of energy-producing countries like we are today. The economy, energy independence and of course, national security. Our military is weak right now. We need to restrengthen it. It’s not just how much money. It’s been drained by the war in

Iraq, been drained by what’s going on in Afghanistan, been drained by other smaller conflicts in other parts of the world.

Q. How do you think the state of the military will affect any American action in Syria?

A. In Syria, it’s dependent on what they decide to do. The military will rise to the occasion, but you can only strain your military so much before it reaches a breaking point where it will not be as effective as it will normally be. We still don’t know what the outcome would be if we used military force. That’s going to open up an entire Pandora’s box.

Q. Going back to you now: what have you been up to since election season ended?

A. I have a syndicated radio talk show.

People can find out more about it at my website, hermancain.com. The radio show is basically what’s consuming all my time.

Q. How do you like being a radio man?

A. I love it, love it, love it. It gives me an opportunity to continue trying to help people become better educated about what’s going on in this country. Too many people are clueless. When people have the right information, they’ll make the right decision. This is something Thomas Jefferson said years ago, and he’s right. I want to raise the political IQ of a lot of people who have a very low political IQ. Q. Is a 2016 run on the horizon for you?

A. Nope! Not at this part point in time.

But last time around I didn’t know that was something on the horizon. I have no plans right now, but I didn’t have any plans in 2012. Because of circumstances, considerations and frustrations I decided to run. A lot can happen between now and 2016.

Contact JANE DARBY MENTON at jane.menton@yale.edu .

“

IF I HAD BEEN PRESIDENT, THE SITUATION IN SYRIA PROBABLY NEVER WOULD HAVE HAPPENED.

“

Y

ou may know him as the pizza mogul honored on the walls of Yorkside, the star of a “Daily Show” segment (see “Herman Cain: An American Presidency”) or simply as a 2012 Republican presidential hopeful. With his Southern drawl and quotable debate performances, Herman Cain became a national celebrity last year. Though he failed to obtain the Republican candidacy, Cain’s still working for America, pushing hard to get his message out with trips across the country and his radio show. Following Cain’s eventful Yale Political Union debut this week, WEEKEND sat down with him to discuss taxes (9–9–9!), Syria and his plans to elevate America’s political IQ.