This WEEKEND by Yale Daily News

WEEKEND Let’s talk // FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 2013

CCE

Broug

ht to you by Yale

about rape //BY ELAINA PLOTT, PAGE 3

STALWART

STUNG

STELLA!

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ROSA DELAURO, UNPLUGGED

A NEW STATE OF BEE-ING

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS RETURNS

Congresswoman? Hipster? Dancer? WEEKEND demystifies and reveals some truths about the lady behind the legend.

Something’s abuzz at the Yale Bee Space. The fearless Jennifer Gersten goes there to poke the beehive.

“A Streetcar Named Desire” is opening the new Yale Rep season. Jackson McHenry digests the drama for our readers’ delight.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND

WEEKEND VIEWS

// BY ANDREW KOENIG

F R I D AY SEPTEMBER 27

@CLIPKA_ FOLLOW SPREE Internet // Forever

@diplo retweeted a picture of her ass!

any of it. It has no epochal sweep. This history depends on whether I decide to write my name in wet cement, or pull leaves off a hedge. *** In Granada Hills, you can sometimes smell a metallic odor. The collective trash of Los Angeles putrefies in the Sunshine Canyon Landfill and the odor wafts down to the people in the valley below. If it’s really bad, you can call a professional smeller who comes to your street to record the smell. “Smells like the dump all right,” he says. He takes down some notes and leaves. They say there’s going to be a class action suit and all those notes will matter to someone. The waste will never be put to good use. It won’t be buried underground or made into fertilizer. The people of the San Fernando Valley probably can’t even make money off a lawsuit. There is only an enormous landfill situated atop a hill and its passing odor. We have not built any burnt sienna churches or painted any grand frescos. Buildings crop up out of nowhere and get torn down again without explanation. The recurring wildfires lose their terrifying power to destroy a city’s history when there is no history to destroy. When you drive along the 118 at 80 miles per hour, you feel light as air. You’re the only person living, the only person driving this way. You are racing the other drivers to the edge of the freeway, to the ocean. You get out of your car and face away from the waves breaking against the shore. The water recedes, the foam dissolves. The sand drips away and only your feet remain, planted on the beach as long as you can hold them there. The sand yields to the shape of your feet, yours alone, and leaves an impression. The water washes over and it disappears. Contact ANDREW KOENIG at andrew.koenig@yale.edu .

MADISON & KAHOE

KOENIG

Burnt Siena

something like the Palio evolved to its present form. The Palio, a race held every year in the public square, dates back to the 1200s, when citizens raced their haltered cows across a grassy field. Now it’s horses that gallop around cobblestone streets matted with a layer of dirt. It took 800 years of citizens to make that change from cow to horse, grass to dirt. They counted for something. *** The 118 Freeway in Los Angeles is a rich historical monument, but not for the same reasons. An outsider will find nothing in it. To him it is just a freeway, wider than most, rutted in parts. But when I drive along the 118, I discover a collection of selves: There is me when I am five in a booster seat; when I am twelve; when I am eighteen and have my own car. My memories have turned the 118 into something more than just a freeway. When I take the curved overpass and see the San Fernando Valley sprawled out before me, I feel I matter in some way. Who else would be there at that moment to see the tract homes bathed in smog? Sometimes I think that without me the 118’s leaden gray layers would dissolve into the air, stripped of any purpose. In the absence of a historical narrative, you matter immensely. You carve out your own biographical space in a city where nothing happens. There are no military victories to celebrate or great churches to help bridge the gap between now and before. Instead, there are freeways and trees, parked cars and fences. They compose my history. I could tell you about the time I trespassed onto the Knollwood Country Club Golf Course by myself and ran in the sprinklers and felt more alone than I’ve ever felt since. I could show you the bend in Pineridge Street that leads you away from the setting sun and back to it. But I couldn’t tell you the history of my neighborhood of Granada Hills. There is only the history of myself. There is neither urgency nor inevitability to

// BY WEEKEND

At the start of every new year, the Romans carried out a ritual of sorts to honor Janus, the god of beginnings and transition. It was tradition to exchange good wishes and words of optimism. Figs and honey were given as gifts; cakes made of hulled wheat doubled as sacred offerings to the heavens. No animal sacrifices took place — only expressions of mirth and fondness. Janus is usually portrayed as having two faces, one looking to the past; the other, to the future. Here at WEEKEND, it is time for us — Caroline, Jack, Jordi and Akbar — to turn our four visages from the trail we have blazed to the bristly path ahead. The end of our reign will bring forth the next generation of propulsive WEEKEND warriors, who will carry the inextinguishable torch of Arts & Living into the future. Like the Romans before us, we can only sing the praises of our successors during this time of flux. WEEKEND has gone down a winding road this past year. We’ve rapidly shifted our focus to cover what matters to you: from fetishized almond pudenda to #SWUGNATION; from mental health to sexual climate; from tires floating across the Rio Grande to cow heads hanging in meat freezers; from GPA-saving study stimulants to

// TAO TAO HOLMES

Ambrogio Lorenzetti painted his fresco of “Good Government” in Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico 700 years ago. Workers run scythes over the hills outside the city walls. Orange shingles rise and fall like dust swirling in the wind. Burnt sienna roofs cut into green Tuscan hills that roll into farmland, vineyards and wineries. Lorenzetti’s landscape looks like the Siena of today. The same green hills swell into purple mountains in the distance. The cobblestone walls still snake around a city of convoluted alleyways. I never figured out the streets. One main thoroughfare leads you through the city but to get to the monuments takes extra effort. You can’t just see a building, decide you want to go there and walk towards it. You’ll get lost in serpentine trails of cobblestone that will break the soles of your shoes and you’ll wind up going back the way you came. The stones are immobile. Nothing grows or decays. The water flows from aqueducts built centuries ago. The feeling of your historical insignificance hovers over you when you look at Siena from a rooftop. Old palazzos, old belfries, old air. You imagine that a thousand years ago the air was just as dry, the mountains just as purple, the cobblestones just as unyielding. It’s not the kind of age I’m used to. It’s the weight of centuries, of ancient human bodies being buried under green hills and rotting and turning to soil raked by the scythes of their descendants. It’s the weight of a plague that killed half the city in the Middle Ages and a war that scarred its people seventy years ago. I couldn’t grasp this historical heaviness. I didn’t matter to Siena. Its streets could have swallowed me up and it wouldn’t have made a difference. But the people of Siena have made some difference. The city has headed somewhere since its founding, even if it’s unclear just where. When you talk to today’s locals, they will tell you how

AN ENDING, A BEGINNING Yale-saving icons like Linda Lorimer; from the academic study of parties to Yalies partying in Hollywood. We asked your burning questions to heartthrobs like Aaron Carter and Herman Cain. We gave you a glimpse into the hippest wardrobes of Yale. We answered your single friends’ calls for companionship by setting them up on blind dates, and we provided an outlet for your unrestrainable love for Queen B. When doomsday rolled around, we prepped you for the darkest of deaths, and when spring break finally arrived, we brought you tweets full of sun and tequila. Since its conception, WEEKEND has carried a message at its core, a sentiment that has fueled the long hours in our perch at 202 York: everyday is WEEKEND. And indeed, we have spent every waking moment thinking of the issues, thinking of the trends, thinking of you: the artsy and the living. Now it is time for the keepers of the lounge — that four-headed beast, that irrevocable mind meld — to walk our separate ways. We will dust off our fish lamp, reset our desktops and pass it all down to the next round of Weekenders. We can’t wait to read what they have in store for all of us.

The Five Most Unimpressive Students at Yale Right Now // BY CALEB MADISON AND CODY KAHOE

Yale is one of the best universities in the U.S. — if not the world. Each year, it attracts top high school applicants, with a record-low acceptance rate of 6.7% last year. As a result, Yale has some pretty remarkable students. Of course, Yale also harbors some pretty unremarkable students. We found five particularly unimpressive undergraduates here at Yale. They’re schmucks, lowlifes, nerds, junkies and loafers, and they’re making pretty much no difference in the world — or even on campus. 1. Angus Durden (Class of 2014) Founder of Yale Undergraduate Cheese Review A Wisconsin native, Angus hasn’t wasted any time in spreading the Gospel of Gouda all over the Melba Toast that is Yale. After occasionally sitting in on a couple of his high school newspaper meetings, Durden proposed and single-handedly spearheaded the first college cheese journal in the country. “We have almost no subscribers, and very little cheese,” said Durden to the News. He went on to remark, “Cheese is very expensive.” 2. Mikaela Bunbury (Class of 2015) Campus Grass Advocate Ever since childhood, Mikaela has been in touch with her advocacy ‘roots.’ “They put up those small posts around recently seeded lawns for a reason guys!” she can be heard chanting from Old Campus every Wednesday afternoon. Drawing on the philosophies of Thoreau and Gandhi, Mikaela believes that, “Like people, a lawn cannot reach its full potential if d-bags keep stepping on it.” But life at Yale isn’t easy, even for the likes of Mikaela. “A lot of people try to buy drugs from me when they hear about my advocacy work,” she said. “But I’m not about that life.” 3. Marcus Throndike (Class of 2014) Experimental Theater Guru Marcus P. Throndike, Jr., has always been enthralled by the theater. In his hometown of Duluth, Minnesota, he graced the stage of Abraham Morganstein Memorial High School with such coveted roles as “Dad” in “A Family” and the title role in “A Man’s Soul:

Live.” When Throndike arrived at Yale, he had even bigger plans for the theatre. “At this point, I see my whole life as a sort of play in which I myself am the main character. And all the supporting characters. And sometimes the audience.” Marcus can be seen monologuing and wildly gesticulating at G-Heav, Blue State and section. Those who have viewed Marcus’s performances say, “That guy is so loud,” and, “I hate him.” 4. Andrew Doobis (Class of 2017) President of the White Privilege Cultural Center “I come from a place where there’s a lot of white privilege, and I didn’t want to lose that culture when I came to Yale,” says Doobis. “Did you know that only 1% of white people are considered minorities?” Doobis wrote in his most recent White Culture pamphlet. “And yet, only one American President since the year 2000 has been white!” Since his freshman year, Doobis has devoted his life to getting Yalies back in touch with their Caucasian roots, founding and presiding over the Yale White Privilege Cultural Center, which meets weekly in the New Haven Meatball House. When asked if he considers Jews to share in his white heritage, Doobis refused to comment. 5. Lisa Schratsch (Class of 2016) Enrolled Student In her high school days, Lisa received adequate enough grades to be accepted into Yale. Upon arriving, Lisa had almost no aspirations beyond receiving a Yale diploma. Once, Lisa showed up to an audition for a play, but quickly realized she was just in the wrong room. “I really only wanted to study,” she recalled to the News on one of her customary walks from class in LC to her dorm in Berkeley. “By the way, it’s pronounced ‘scratch,’ like when you have an itch.” Lisa eats mainly in the dining hall and is relieved to have no work due tomorrow. Contact CALEB MADISON and CODY KAHOE at caleb.madison@yale.edu and f.kahoe@yale. edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Taking your parents to Friday morning section/class

Be the coolest kid in your class and let them soak up some learnin’.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND COVER

CCE: THE NEW INSIDERS // BY ELAINA PLOTT

t was a crisp Tuesday evening, and the Trumbull dining hall was filled nearly to capacity, a steady line of students flooding in and out of the faded mahogany doorframe. Amidst the noisy banter on extracurriculars, midterms and weekend recaps, however, were Andrea Villena ’15 and Ari Zimmet ’16, who chose to converse on a topic of slightly different gravity: sexual misconduct at Yale, and the most effective means of combatting it. For Villena, such conversations had quickly become routine. After penning an opinion piece in the News — a critical take on Yale’s Communication and Consent Educators (CCE) program — she had spent much of her weekend fielding requests from CCEs like Zimmet to meet and discuss her skepticism. Melanie Boyd ’90, assistant dean of student affairs, emailed Villena mere hours after the article’s publishing to request a meeting regarding the “various details [she] seemed to have missed” about the role of CCEs on campus. The CCEs’ immediate outreach, far from assuaging Villena’s concerns, unnerved her all the more. Her piece, “Rethinking CCEs,” was sharply critical of the program’s administrative ties, sketching these student employees as a part of a university public relations strategy. Given these insinuations, a CCE reaction was largely predictable. For Villena, however, the nearly “frantic” and concentrated outreach efforts served merely to affirm her article’s larger sentiment. “It’s pretty troubling that CCEs just seem completely incapable of taking criticism,” she said. “So many groups at Yale are criticized on a daily basis, but you don’t see them having a breakdown about it.” The idea of feedback would become a central factor behind Villena’s concerns — not only for the CCEs’ “inability to handle” criticism, but also for the student body’s general leeriness to offer it. It’s a trend, she says, that proved most troubling when she watched it plague the discourse within her own group of friends, many of whom are CCEs themselves. “I’ll be having normal conversations with my good friends who are CCEs, and if I casually ask how things are going with the program, they become completely different people, as if they have some kind of script they’ve rehearsed beforehand,” she said. “I think when stu-

dents see their CCE friends take on this robotic nature, it makes them afraid to offer up their actual feelings on the workshops or anything else.” But for all of her apprehension, Villena readily admits that her first dinner with Zimmet struck an encouraging note. She deems him an “unconventional” CCE, rooted in his willingness to acknowledge the “artificialness” the program may reflect. Armed with this shared line of reasoning, Villena left Trumbull that evening with a heightened sense of optimism. She’s quick to interject, however, that her original unease remains more palpable than ever. “I think it’s a natural concern when students are paid by the administration to promote its policies,” she said. “You can’t help but feel like a lot is going on there that we don’t know about.” *** The vision for the CCE program began to grow as early as 2008, when Boyd introduced a class assignment in her Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies seminar “Theorizing Sexual Violence.” The exercise — an intervention project — asked students to work in groups and closely observe the dynamics of sexual misconduct surrounding them on campus.

responsibilities involve leading workshops for freshmen and sophomores and education sessions for registered student organizations, all aimed at teaching students how to identify and prevent sexual misconduct. While Boyd encourages CCEs to stay true to themselves when carrying out the program’s aims, there remains “a handful of core precepts of CCE-dom,” she said, including: respecting individuals’ decisions, grounding opinions and programs in data, and strengthening positive ideals whenever possible. “In interviews, I look for students who value the ideas of their peers, students whose instincts are collaborative rather than denunciatory, students who come up with creative, often oblique approaches to the hypothetical problems I pose,” Boyd said. “While the patterns of sexual violence can appear to demand ferocious opposition, that’s not a good strategy for true community change.” Of the several reforms that occurred in the aftermath of the Title IX complaint, the CCE program is the one most directly linked to the student body, focusing on how peers can help each other promote a healthier campus culture. For Matt Breuer ’14, a communication and consent educator, the CCE’s role is to step in and direct

WHILE THE PATTERNS OF SEXUAL VIOLENCE CAN APPEAR TO DEMAND FEROCIOUS OPPOSITION, THAT’S NOT GOOD STRATEGY FOR TRUE COMMUNITY CHANGE. MELANIE BOYD ’90

The project gave Boyd a new perspective on how sexual violence prevention could be achieved through more creative and collaborative means. After beginning discussion of the CCE idea with Yale College Dean Mary Miller in 2009, Boyd saw the program’s official formation take place in the wake of a Title IX complaint filed in 2011 by 16 students and alumni to the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. The undergraduates who make up the CCE team are screened by Boyd herself through a written application and interviews. Their

the conversation on Yale’s sexual climate, a position most appropriate for “trained educators.” As students who commit their energy to understanding the nuances of University policy, Breuer says CCEs have a “duty” to respond swiftly to misguided criticisms of the administration’s sexual violence prevention efforts. Such is why, when Facebook newsfeeds exploded on July 31 with aggressive condemnations of Yale’s semi-annual sexual misconduct report — and, more specifically, the seemingly lenient punishments

given to assailants — Breuer and other CCEs were quick to post their own statuses defending and clarifying the report. Similarly, Breuer promptly responded to Villena’s op-ed, both commenting on the article itself on the News’ website

and not wanting “to be emailed by Dean Boyd like [Villena],” condemned the administration for coopting Yale’s “brightest minds” to promote its policies. In essence, he said, the critics have devolved into the cheerleaders.

I THINK IT’S A NATURAL CONCERN WHEN STUDENTS ARE PAID BY THE ADMINISTRATION TO PROMOTE ITS POLICIES. and addressing its shortcomings to his Facebook audience. (Boyd asks, but does not require, CCEs to “check with [her]” before making any formal public statements, in order to minimize “unintended consequences,” such as a quote being taken out of context.) “As students who have gone through training on these issues, and those with a deeper understanding of university policy, I think it’s important that we step in whenever we can to point out when people might be misinformed,” Breuer said. It’s a privileged knowledge for which Breuer, and other CCEs interviewed, have Boyd to thank. Given her initiatives that prioritize preventative over reactionary measures, Breuer counts Boyd’s leadership as a definitive marker of progress in Yale’s fight against sexual misconduct. “So far, I really do think [Boyd] has done things perfectly for the program,” Breuer said. “There are very few people who could do her job as well as she does.” Mitra Yazdi ’15, a CCE, echoed this sentiment wholeheartedly: “I trust her completely,” she said, noting that Boyd’s academic background on these subjects — including a B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. in women’s studies — gives her directives a necessary layer of thoughtfulness and foresightedness. But it’s precisely this level of unbounded trust that causes some students to view the program with reservations. A Yale College senior, who asked to remain anonymous given his close friendships with some CCEs,

“It worries me that we’re taking some of the best minds and just pushing them toward defense of the university, instead of having them think creatively about the ways the university is both good and bad,” he said. “I wouldn’t say that [CCEs] are brainwashed, but I don’t know if they realize that this administration is the same one that covered things up just a few years ago.” And while the Women’s Center’s Business Coordinator Elizabeth Villareal ’16 doesn’t align herself with these sentiments, repeatedly voicing her support for the CCE mission, she acknowledges how the sincerity behind the program’s efforts could easily become lost in translation. “I think there can be a disconnect between the calm, well-trained personas that Melanie [Boyd] and the CCEs give off,” she said. “There’s a disconnect between that and the actual level of anger surrounding issues of sexual climate… the fact that she seems so collected, not concerned and not angry — that worries people.” Even so, Breuer displays a remarkable sense of pride in the direction the CCE program is going, highlighting the productive dialogue he believes it has spurred across campus. From this praise, however, a concern similar to that of Villareal arises, that a perception gap between CCEs and the general student population is overshadowing the laudable work the program actually fosters. Unless CCEs commit to actively bridging this divide, he says, the program risks remainSEE CCE PAGE B8

CCE

F R I D AY SEPTEMBER 27

#STRUCTURE15

202 York Street // All day Understand the hell our babies have been through in their struggle to win the stewardship of this paper.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Drinks at lunch with your parents

They’re here for a reason — to buy you liquor to help you put up with each other’s roughness.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND ARTS

SUMMONING SOJOURNERS // BY THERESA STEINMEYER “Okay, but what do you want me to do about it?” I ask the woman in the pink dress. She stares tiredly at me, her head resting on her fist. There’s a man in a white and blue polo shirt leaning in behind her, his lips parted just a few inches from her ear as he sweeps her hair aside. I’ve trespassed — I’m embarrassed, and I apologize. And then I remind her (and myself) that her moment is suspended from a white wall by thumbtacks and binder clips. I’m grateful to be off the hook. It’s easy to forget that my feet are planted firmly on the scuffed gray floor of the Yale School of Art’s “Solstice” Undergraduate Art Show. The exhibit, on view until Oct. 4, features pieces from undergraduate art majors and summer session students. There are a few names, titles and project descriptions taped up around the gallery, but the theme is left undefined. “Solstice” is a celebration of individual journeys

brought together on crisp white walls beneath soft white lights. It is a successful quest for moments that harness everyday beauty. I’m not sure where to start, so when a young man passes through the gallery, his arms laden with papers, I ask him if he’s affiliated with the exhibit. He pauses for a long moment, and then smiles timidly and shakes his head. And so I set off unguided on my sojourn to meet the lady in the pink dress and all her friends. The upper part of the gallery is dedicated to work from undergraduate art majors and Norfolk summer session students. Their pieces are playful, nostalgic, awestruck, caught-inthe-act, corporal. Down the wall from the woman in pink, a comic page by Madeleine Witt ’15 narrates the tale of a successful local video store. There’s a floor-to-ceiling sketch of what appears to be a dinosaur, a photograph of a man with his fist stuffed into his mouth and

a series of paintings of a young woman wearing a tank top that bears the word, “Tender-Loin.” The Norfolk summer session pieces include an emphasis on found objects, as in Martina Crouch’s ’14 unnervingly extensive display of “Selected Photographs and Postcards of Marion Christ.” The lower level of the gallery features projects from the Auvillar summer session. Here, the focus is architectural — each student investigated a motif, such as a piece of wood, a brick wall or an arched entryway. I had the opportunity to speak with Auvillar session artist Mariah Xu ’16, who identified her pieces around the room and her contemplation of an art studio window and the journey toward it. “It’s the idea of wanting to go somewhere,” she explains as she points out the foreboding obstacles looming before the window in one of her pieces. I’m tempted to tread down those shadowed floorboards, past the

stacked cardboard sheets, toward the narrow white window in the distance of this moment she has brought back from Auvillar. When I walk back up the stairs into the upper floor of the gallery, a pair of beckoning black-and-white photographs calls me in. The first image captures two young men sitting in the urban shadows of a decaying building. One of them peers out at me from beneath the drooping hood of his white sweatshirt. Unlike the woman in the pink dress, he doesn’t seem to want anything from me; instead, he just watches me pass. To the right is an image of a third young man, sitting on a concrete bench beside the highway and staring into the darkness beneath. I’d like to think that he, too, is a sojourner, peering into the human and the architectural everyday to find the beautiful. He sees something in this moment of his own journey, and it has captured his

// ALEXANDRA SCHMELING

Wander into the minds of Yale’s art students.

imagination. This inquiry is what the “Solstice” artists have done so well. We, too, can be sojourners. Go visit the young men sitting in the shadows. Go marvel at those arches from Auvillar. Go support the undergraduate artists who stapled up their work and their travels for us to explore in the silence of those clean white lights. And when you meet the woman in the pink dress, please give her my best regards, and say, “Hey, you’re not alone. I see you.” Contact THERESA STEINMEYER at theresa.steinmeyer@yale.edu .

Empty Mothers

Engaging with Olympia sur l’herbe

// BY EZRIEL GELBFISH

// BY LEAH MOTZKIN

Anne Fontaine’s Adore used to be called Two Mothers because it concerns a set of best friends, Lil (Naomi Watts) and Roz (Robin Wright Penn), who have affairs with each other’s grown sons. This is indeed the premise of the Lonely Island and Justin Timberlake’s video “Mother Lover,” but instead of going for a comedic angle on this strange setup, Miss Fontaine attempts to make an edgy drama, though it never comes off as anything more than absurd. Based on Doris Lessing’s novel The Grandmothers, Adore is set in New South Wales, Australia, in an idyllic beachtown where Lil and Roz live in neighboring sun-kissed houses bordering the blue. Lil is widowed and lives alone with her son Ian (Xavier Samuel), while Roz conducts a similarly unassuming and pleasurable life with her husband Harold (Ben Mendelsohn) and son Tom (James Frecheville), both theater directors. The movie sets up the exposition nicely by framing the two central women as lifelong besties (people in town even speculate that they’re in a lesbian relationship), but when Zeke goes off to Sydney for a job at a university, the loneliness and the boozed up fine dining allow each single mother to sneak into the house of the other and conduct illicit couplings with their nubile sons. Much of the drama’s potential, the premise and implied discomfort notwithstanding, doesn’t track out after the romances heat up and the cameras continue rolling. The script by Christopher Hampton (Oscar-winner for Dangerous Liaisons) is so overtly melodramatic as to make the movie not only exceedingly unlikely but laughable, an overdose of soap opera enthusiasm that even includes a perfunctory slap-each-other’s-faces scene (when Roz gets upset at Ian). Ms. Wright and Ms. Penn are both fine actresses, and Messrs. Samuel and Frecheville, the oft-shirtless Aussie newcomers playing their sons, are stolid additions, but none of the character interactions muster enough realism to go beyond the level of sickly TV drama. Miss Fontaine, a former actress and

F R I D AY SEPTEMBER 27

model, means for Adore to transcend the tawdry and popular by casting a distaff veneer on the absurdity. This she does by forming her two main characters as Mothers instead of Fathers and hence continuing the line of her vaguely feminist oeuvre. Adore comes right after the lush Coco Before Chanel, which Fontaine both wrote and directed, and its focus on the influential fashion designer (played by Audrey Tatou) reflects Miss Fontaine’s proclivity for strong and beautiful female leads. Adore is no exception, and its ubiquitous bleached blonde vacation scenes prove that Ms. Wright and Ms. Watts can indeed straddle the line between mother, a traditionally unglamorous screen role, and diva, a persona of charisma and allure. (Despite their middle age, the two show no signs of diminishing sex appeal.) Without a believable script, however, I never got the feeling that Roz and Ian were actually mother and son, or that there were any familial relationships at all going beyond the skin deep, however tanned. Flanked by their Hollister-esque sons and floating on a large dock in the sea, Ms. Wright and Ms. Watts leave the viewers with images of visually pleasing seaside excursions, and nothing else of note. Movies with risque premises — Louis Malle’s Murmur of the Heart, a portrait of an incestuous relationship comes to mind — have succeeded at shocking audiences by finding the pain, awkwardness and emotion that can arise out of ‘extreme’ relationships. But such efforts are derailed by a flippant attitude towards realism; like a hyped bar with ultimately disappointing service, they entice the customer and then deliver vacuity. In this case, that emptiness is of hedonistic melodrama, captured in the movie’s final image of an illustratively vacant crane shot — a spiral down onto the languorous leads on a sea deck — and proving with radical absurdity that Adore had said nothing radical. Contact EZRIEL GELBFISH at ezriel.gelbfish@yale.edu .

THREAD CUTTING CEREMONY

Rosenfeld Hall Rm. 109 // 2:30 a.m. Allie Krause ’15 begins free falling — soon, at terminal velocity.

// ALEXANDRA SCHMELING

If you squint your eyes at most of the pieces in the exhibit “Lunch with Olympia,” you will be able to discern one of two compositions. In half of the works, you can see a reclining figure watched over by a looming presence. In the other, you’ll detect three bodies in the foreground with the suggestion of another emerging from behind. The exhibition, which honors the 150th anniversary of Édouard Manet’s paintings “Olympia” and “Déjeuner sur l’herbe,” is remarkable in its presentation of the conversation that has been occurring since the paintings first hailed the advent of modernism. For those who are not familiar with the pieces, “Olympia” presents a naked, adorned, recumbent prostitute who is being attended by a black servant. “Déjeuner sur l’herbe” features a naked woman sitting in the grass and eating lunch with two fully clothed men in front of a semi-clothed nymph-like creature behind. As a modern viewer, I at first struggled to understand why these two pieces that are no longer shocking to our modern sensibilities could have made such a monumental impact on the art world. But I thought back to a memorable conversation I had with my SAT tutor in front of the piece in the Musée d’Orsay when I was saw it for the first time at 14. “Leah,” he said, “what if that was you naked and me sitting the grass?” OK,

Manet’s “Déjeuner” was truly shocking, and he was a visionary when he completed the two paintings. Though they were originally regarded with scandal, and even disdain, the watershed works sparked a conversation that is ongoing. The exhibition, organized by curators art history professor Carol Armstrong and Dean of Yale School of Art Robert Storr, successfully chronicles this revolutionary discourse. In the beautiful space of 32 Edgewood, there are about 30 pieces that allow the viewer a glimpse into the artistic achievements that have resulted. The art that has been produced out of this conversation is extremely varied, and it is fascinating to see connections and interpretations in such a clear way. Closest to the entrance, the viewer comes face to face with Manet’s own sketches of “Olympia.” These are real Manet sketches, which were especially powerful for a gallery space that can sometimes be overlooked. The piece stood in place for the original, acting as a base or foundation for the multiplicity of works that followed. The following works start to experiment with subversions of the original. Most typically, gender, race and perspective are subverted. For example Manon Elder’s “Olympio” depicts a similar rendering of the standard with an effeminate male in the place of the prostitute. While a modern audi-

ence finds very little discomfort with the naked female form, artists who depict the naked male body do so in a way that reinstills the shock value that the first view of “Olympia” felt. Another work displayed, Mickalene Thomas’s “Le déjeuner sur l’herbe: Les Trois Femmes Noires,” scandalously plays with the now-archetypal form of the the original “Déjeuner.” Three black women sit together among flowers wearing heavy makeup and overdone hair. The artificiality of the background is a clear departure from the natural location of Manet’s version. The women’s expressions are foreboding to anyone who would dare challenge their right to comment in this discussion. This piece is one of many that successfully continue to push the viewer to consider more modern interpretations of Manet’s works. Overall, I found it extremely enthralling to view an entire conversation unfold in the art placed before me. Many of the pieces show viewers observing either of the works, and I found myself reflecting on the next work which might include me observing this exhibit. In this way, I would highly recommend that you become an implied part of the exhibition before it closes on Nov. 21. Contact LEAH MOTZKIN at leah.motzkin@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Inviting your roommate’s hookup to dinner with your family

Because why not make them suffer the way you do in your sad singlehood?

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND ICON

NEW HAVEN’S ULTIMATE POLITICAL SURVIVOR: ROSA DELAURO // BY YANAN WANG, ISAAC STANLEY-BECKER AND MICHELLE HACKMAN On Sept. 24, at a Wooster Square emptied of market-goers and cherry blossoms, a small crowd stood against the early autumn chill. Some people were holding Toni Harp ARC ’78 campaign signs. Others wore the uniforms of public service workers associated with powerful unions, themselves a declaration of allegiance to Harp. Volunteers in Harp T-shirts walked around with clipboards and pamphlets. Gathered around the DeLauro Family Table—a four-piece granite sculpture meant to mirror the arrangement of a kitchen table— the Harp supporters were waiting for a native daughter, U.S. Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (D), to take the microphone and declare that she too supported their candidate. If any place in the city could adequately represent the power of the woman now endorsing Harp, it would be that monument. At the unveiling of the DeLauro Family Table in 2011, Mayor John DeStefano, the man Harp hopes to replace, talked up the sculpture as a tribute to the DeLauros’ generations of service to New Haven, citing both Luisa DeLauro’s 34 years as alderwoman and the political rise of her daughter. That daughter is no longer a political rookie. She is an important force in her own right. Since she joined the House of Representatives in 1991 to represent Connecticut’s third disrict, Rosa DeLauro has been re-elected ten times, consistently garnering at least 63% of the vote since her initial victory over Republican State Senator Thomas Scott. She represents her district in many ways. DeLauro often speaks of her Italian heritage, her working-class upbringing and her attachment to Wooster Square. For Harp, who will face a strong rival—Justin Elicker FES ’10 SOM ’10—in the mayoral election in November, Rosa’s blessing means a great deal. DeLauro stood behind the podium wrapped in a colorful scarf, her thin frame inside a purple leather jacket. She told the crowd that she and Harp were “cut from the same mold.” DeLauro said of their respective family upbringings, “We have similarities.” She pointed out Harp is, like her, a female, progressive politician concerned about New Haven and familiar with the struggles of its less fortunate. As the crowd learned that day, both Harp and DeLauro are also dancers. After the two concluded speaking, Alicia Keys’ “Girl is on Fire” blared from the stereos. Instead of allowing the crowd to thin out, DeLauro began to sway her hips. Clapping her hands and nodding her head to the tunes of “And she’s not backing down,” DeLauro motioned for the onlookers to join her around the DeLauro table, turning the monument into a dance platform. What wasn’t mentioned was another, unspoken parallel: spouses whose actions and asso-

cations have cast their wives’ political philosophies into question. DeLauro’s energy is one that New Haven understands and likes. But as the city prepares for its most serious change in political governance since 1993, how has DeLauro been able to maintain her steadfast, decades-long relationship with the city? What is the shape of her political footprint?

BLUE BLOOD

Strong and visible ties to the national Democratic party have a lot to do with DeLauro’s career. Gary Rose, the chairman of the department of gGovernment and plitics at Sacred Heart University, said DeLauro’s district is very strongly Democratic and appreciates her influence with other top Democrats. “[Rosa} has worked her way up in Congress—she’s very much a part of the Democratic establishment, [and] that’s admired by third district voters,” Rose said. “People feel that Rosa can deliver the goods when it’s needed. Rose likened congressmen to “social workers,” adding that DeLauro is “one of the good ones.” “There’s no end to what the congresspersons are doing for their districts... people who live in the third district, let’s say they have problems with Social Security. People perhaps have Medicaid issues, can’t get access to veteran services. Who do you call when you have these problems? You call your congressperson,” Rose said. “[DeLauro] knows how to run a good staff because she was a former staffer herself.” Much as DeLauro is a child of New Haven and does, as Rose said, maintain her “local connections,” she is also a product of widely recognized political structures. Soon after receiving her master’s degree from Columbia University, DeLauro helped found EMILY’s List, a political action committee that seeks to help elect pro-choice Democratic female candidates to political office, and served as the organization’s first executive director. She is, not unjustifiably, proud of what she was able to accomplish early on. “The organization is an overwhelming success,” DeLauro said. “It changed the face of the House— with more women, and more women of color.” EMILY’s List has elected hundreds of women to state and local office, as well as 101 pro-choice Democratic women to Congress, since its founding. DeLauro moved from working for female representation to more mainstream Democratic political work with her first job ater EMILY’s List, as the administrative assistant and chief of staff for former Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd. DeLauro served as Dodd’s chief of staff in the 80s, and would ultimately back the 30-year senator in his bid for president in 2008. Rose said DeLauro’s work for Dodd gave her “immediate gravitas,” as she was associated with the senator during the peak of

S AT U R D AY SEPTEMBER 28

his popularity in the state. Many of Dodd’s accomplishments became principal talking-points in DeLauro’s campaign, he added. The role with Dodd brought DeLauro into contact with top Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi— and the inner workings of D.C. Both women would ultimately be elected to the House, Pelosi in 1986 and DeLauro in 1990. “We’ve been friends for a very, very long time,” DeLauro said. “She was deeply encouraging for me to run for office. When the opportunity arose, she picked up the phone and said, ‘you’ve got to do it.’” Gubernatorial ambitions caused four-term incumbent Democratic U.S. Congressman Bruce Morrison to retire from Connecticut’s 3rd district in 1990. DeLauro stepped up, running for the open seat and winning 52% of the vote to Republican State Sen. Thomas Scott’s 48%. Ronald Schurin, associate professor of government and politics at the University of Connecticut, said those margins of victory are atypical, even for a strongly Democratic district. Schurin attributed DeLauro’s popularity to her ability to “bridge the gap between the working-class parts of the community” and “Yale and the more academically oriented parts of the community.” A founding member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, DeLauro is considered one of the most liberal members of the House, Rose said. Leading in the Democratic state of Connecticut, DeLauro has rallied the state’s left—but at what cost? In response to a question about DeLauro’s relationship with the Connecticut Republican Party, spokesperson Zak Sanders retorted, “Well, she doesn’t really have one with us.” “We’ve never heard from her: she’s has made no signs of working with the Republican Party.” Sanders remarked. “Rosa DeLauro is a big fan of the partisan politics going on in Washington, D.C. that has plagued Congress—they’d rather face gridlock than try to work together on our problems.”

kitchen table served as a public forum for local residents around Wooster Square. People from all around visited, Carbone remembered, often just to have a few words with the most recognizable political figures in the neighborhood. Comparing the DeLauros’ dedication to the attitudes of politicians complaining about the “stress and strain of it all,” Carbone said their family “marked in [his mind] an example of what public service is really about.” “Their home was a mecca for Italian immigrants — their home was their office,” he said. “They worked 24/7, and the door was to open everybody. People felt comfortable and free to walk in.” Four personal and political acquaintances interviewed pointed to Rosa DeLauro’s working-class upbringing as having had a large influence on her current political values and work ethic. Congressman John Larson, who serves alongside DeLauro in the Connecticut delegation to the U.S., credited much of DeLauro’s passion and energy with her Italian roots and her politically active alderwoman mother. Her family’s deep roots to their ancestral home of Italy is reflected in DeLauro’s personality, Larson said, describing DeLauro as a mother at heart, one who is concerned with feeding people, caring for people and entertaining people. He remembered sitting at the dinner table with DeLauro and Greenberg. DeLauro had made an Italian meal of eggs, onions and mushrooms with grated cheese, produced from scratch and in front of them. Larson described the vibrancy of DeLauro’s hostess style. “If you ever walk into the house, you just get a welcoming

color from every single spectrum of the rainbow,” he said. “There’s always something that’s avantgarde and at the same time very homey.” Carbone, who was as ensconced with the Italian community as DeLauro was as a kid, remembers two things from their childhood: that above all DeLauro was a young activist, and that their “classic blue-collar” neighborhood was home to dozens of small dress shops and storefronts where men and women sat at their sewing machines all day, making clothing. They worked hard, DeLauro remembered, often under the worst of conditions. Like Carbone, DeLauro had parents who encouraged her to “see all sides of life,” to note the immigrants who were working in near-slave labor conditions around Wooster Square. “You walked through those factories in Wooster Square, the noise alone would make your ears kind of shatter. You had to watch every step you took or you could fall into a hole in the floor,” Carbone said. “I think it was the sight of all that — the sound of all that — that has shaped her experience. She has emerged as the embodiment of the shepherd of our community to get beyond.” Carbone pointed to initiatives to expand paid sick leave and to promote the Fair Pay Act as instances where DeLauro has striven to improve working conditions for the Americans she used to see on her walks home.

FROM WILLIAMSBURG TO D.C.

Today, DeLauro has a whole new crop of fans who like her entirely different, entirely nonWooster Square reasons. Comedy writers Travis Helwig and Kirk Larsen were liv-

ing in Williamsburg when they watched the State of the Union of 2010. Seeing DeLauro appear on the television screen wearing a large scarf and a beautiful, green “thrift store” jacket, Helwig said a thought suddenly occurred to him: “A lightbulb lit up above me. I thought, I know what you look like — you look like my neighbor!” When they established the Tumblr page, “Rosa DeLauro is a Fucking Hipster,” Helwig said the conception of DeLauro as an alternative culture icon “resonated with people.” Writing captions of exaggerated hipster slang, the duo have received submissions from both distant fans and members of DeLauro’s inner circle. Helwig said at one occasion, one of the DeLauro relatives sent them a photo from a private family event. In her interview with the News, DeLauro characterized her fashion choices as less than calculating. “I wear what I like: I don’t put a lot of thought into what others think, of what they like or what they dislike,” DeLauro remarked. “Someone once asked me why I wear boots. I like boots! I like them, so I buy them and I wear them.” Those boots are here to stay. Retirement remains a distant future for DeLauro. “At the moment, I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing,” she said. “I’ll continue to do my job until I decide that I’d like to do something else, Contact YANAN WANG, ISAAC STANLEYBECKER and MICHELLE HACKMAN at yanan.wang@yale.edu, isaac.stanley-becker@yale.edu and michelle.hackman@yale.edu.

FROM FACTORIES TO FEDERAL LEGISLATURE

Joseph Carbone of Fair Haven has known the DeLauro family since the day he was born. Their fathers knew each other from their work for New Haven Public Works, and Carbone noted that DeLauro still recounts the moment she heard, as a ten-yearold, about his birth. “She said her father came home all excited and told them that my mom had had twin boys,” Carbone chuckled. Calling Luisa DeLauro and Ted DeLauro “model public servants,” Carbone recalled the way their // TASNIM ELBOUTE

Rosa DeLauro: New Haven’s most powerful hipster.

MEET YOUR CHILD’S HOOKUPS

All Dining Halls // Breakfast, lunch and dinner Did your child suddenly turn red?

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Field trip to Quinnipiac

Just so your parents are prepared for Saturday night.

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WEEKEND POSTGRAD

TIME TO GO! L

ast May, the class of 2013 donned their gowns and funny hats, gathered on Old Campus and said au revoir to their bright college years. They dispersed to myriad adventures and identities in a place called “the real world.” Or did they? WEEKEND profiles the stragglers that never quite got the message: 2013, time to go.

Woodbridge Fellows // BY DAVID WHIPPLE

Grad students

No, they’re not TFs. Just because their title includes “fellow” doesn’t mean you should expect to see a Woodbridge Fellow collecting problem sets or begging you to donate your thoughts on Aristotle (as if anyone actually did the reading). Handling snotty undergrads with presidential aspirations is so far below a Woodbridge Fellow. They have much more important things to do. Like… you know, stuff. Yale’s nine Woodbridge Fellows are recent grads who stick around for a year to pitch in with various projects and initiatives on campus, like designing websites, doing research on Yale’s past or orchestrating tours and press releases. According to the University, being a Woodbridge fellow means the opportunity for a “behind the scenes” look at Yale. Which begs the ques-

// BY JACKSON MCHENRY Who is the only person more exhausted during section than you are? No, not the girl who’s recovering from Woad’s, not the guy clutching his Blue State cappuccino as if holds the elixir of life. Turn your eyes toward the front of classroom and find that pitiful creature, struggling to get you to reference the reading. Yes, Yale’s grad students have just as many struggles as you. Some of them graduated last year. They marched through Old Campus, diplomas in hand, beaming as their classmates talked about how excited they were to enter the real world. But these kids weren’t about to leave New Haven behind. They were going back to college, and this time they wouldn’t even get dining hall swipe access. As Liz Lemon says, “Grad Students are the worst,” but maybe they just have it the worst. They’re doomed to years in academia and stints under unforgiving thesis advisors. Once they get their degrees, they’ll trawl across America, searching in vain for that one associate professor job. They dream of getting tenure, but right now, they just want this section to end.

tion, what “scenes” are we talking about? Is this all an elaborate ruse? Are we all being “punk’d?” Are the Woodbridge fellows the only ones who know the truth? Probably not. “Behind the scenes” is probably just another way to say, “doing boring administrative stuff that someone needs to do and it certainly isn’t going to be an actual faculty member.” But that’s why we have Woodbridge fellows. What’s in it for them? The fellowship offers a soft landing from cushy college living. Many aren’t sure what they want to do after graduation, and took the fellowship hoping for something that would bridge the gap between Yale and the world at large. Pun very, very intended. Contact DAVID WHIPPLE at david.whipple@yale.edu .

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

Unemployed // BY WESLEY YIIN

When you spot them on Cross Campus, you might wave, but they’ll avert their eyes. Pull up their hoods. Walk quickly away from you. If this happens, don’t despair. No, you haven’t gotten fatter or forgotten to put on deodorant (although there’s no harm in double checking)! It’s them. These 2013ers are ashamed because their greatest nightmare — unemployment — has become reality. Maybe they wasted away every night at Toads, majored in East Bosnian Underwater Basket Weaving, and credit/D/ fail’ed “Women, Food, and Culture” only to, well, fail. In that case, we hate to say it, but the struggle is deserved. What’s more likely is that the world out there is just too damn competitive. They tried and they applied, but by the end of senior year, all they had in their inboxes were rejection emails and unopened Yale e-bill reminders. The Yale bubble abruptly popped, plunging them into the darkness and uncertainty of “real life.” These guys had no choice but to go home. Of course, the home they chose just happens to be a college campus. If they’re smart, they’ll use this time to rest, reapply, audit some classes and network. But if you find yourself bumping into them again and again at Woads, do them a favor and ignore them. No matter how you view it, unemployment isn’t sexy. Contact WESLEY YIIN at wesley.yiin@yale.edu .

Yale 4ever

Hooking up with an undergrad

// BY AARON GERTLER

// BY LEAH MOTZKIN

Predatory is not the right word. You saw them all the time last year: sharing a table with their main squeeze at Blue State York, or draping their arm over a shoulder while lounging on cross campus, or buying drinks at Rudy’s. But when you see them walking around campus now, these class of 2013ers make you do a double take. What are they even doing here? Isn’t he working for that investment bank in New York and living in Murray Hill? Didn’t she move home to Westchester, which is a definite 40-minute drive from here? I will tell you why they are here. They are hooking up with undergrads. I’ve heard it said that college-age students are at their physical peaks, so wouldn’t you want to keep liv-

ing the dream and keep the flame going with your young sweetheart, even if they haven’t exactly entered the real world? It’s kind of like when you go to college and stay with your high school girlfriend even though she’s not exactly legal. Except that it’s different, in that maybe they’ll spend the rest of their lives together. We can’t blame them — undergrads are hot! When you see these 2013ers on campus, smile at them and be nice. Yale hook up culture is a lot more liberal than that of the real world, we’ll all learn soon enough. Contact LEAH MOTZKIN at leah.motzkin@yale.edu .

S AT U R D AY

EMPTY NEST HELP GROUP

MONTH 29

Give your weak, your poor, your lonely parents.

LC 101 // 10 a.m.

Graduation is a myth. No one ever leaves Yale. People talk about places like “Boston” and “Hollywood”, and I’m willing to accept that those places exist. But Yale students actually working there for the rest of their lives? I don’t buy it. Where’s the evidence? Sure, you visit your 2013 friends at their “new apartments”, and they take you to restaurants where they seem to know the waiters. But do you follow them to work? Read their mail? Open their paychecks from “Goldman Sachs”? Slink around the schools where they “Teach For America”? I doubt it. And even if your parents claim to be Yale graduates who settled in California, what makes you think they aren’t part of the conspiracy? Yale has plenty to gain by keeping us around. It spends four years molding us into ideal citizens of the world, by which I mean citizens of a small kingdom that is almost nothing like the world. We’ve been working Yale jobs and learning from Yale profes-

sors. Yale is the only employer fully prepared to make use of our talents, and only Yale can protect us from the dangers of foreign environments like “West Haven” and “Australia”. It follows that the places hiring “Yale grads” are simply tentacles of our Krakenlike institution. Lots of us go into finance? What a coincidence! It’s not like Yale has piles of spare money to found shell companies like “Bridgewater” and “J.P. Morgan”. And President Salovey — if you’re reading this, and I’m sure you are — don’t think I haven’t recognized a few of the new grad students from “Oxford”. Carmen Estrada’s new British accent isn’t fooling anyone. I’m not wrong about this, but if I am, let Yale speak now or forever hold her tongue. Does anyone else have any explanation for the horde of 2013ers in our midst?

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Using your parents’ IDs

Just wear business formal to box.

// KAREN TIAN

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

S AT U R D AY SEPTEMBER 29

OEDPIPAL ARRANGEMENTS Dwight Chapel // 4 p.m.

Send a care package to your mother.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Doing co*e with your parents A new level of family bonding.

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WEEKEND POSTGRAD

TIME TO GO! L

Woodbridge Fellows // BY DAVID WHIPPLE

Grad students

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

Unemployed // BY WESLEY YIIN

Yale 4ever

Hooking up with an undergrad

// BY AARON GERTLER

// BY LEAH MOTZKIN

S AT U R D AY

EMPTY NEST HELP GROUP

MONTH 29

Give your weak, your poor, your lonely parents.

LC 101 // 10 a.m.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Using your parents’ IDs

Just wear business formal to box.

// KAREN TIAN

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

S AT U R D AY SEPTEMBER 29

OEDPIPAL ARRANGEMENTS Dwight Chapel // 4 p.m.

Send a care package to your mother.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Doing co*e with your parents A new level of family bonding.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND COVER

THE PERCEPTION GAP CCE FROM PAGE B3 ing cloaked by an ether of distrust. *** “Are those the people that gave the presentation — the froyo skit?” “No, I haven’t heard of them.” “I know there are CCEs and CHEs… I’m trying to think of which does which.” “I have heard of CCE, but I don’t know anything else about them.” For over 15 students interviewed, these musings represent the predominant perception of CCEs at Yale. Their responses lend credence to Breuer’s earlier contention, that a lack of concentrated communication between CCEs and the student body is perhaps diminishing the program’s overall contributions. According to Boyd, however, a quieter presence has become a central feature of the CCE program.

and Pi Beta Phi to offer advice on planning upcoming parties. For her, such collaborations represent one of the most exciting and progressive facets of the CCE program, but she admits that it’s one very few people know even exists. “I don’t know, maybe that’s a bad thing,” she said. “We’re doing all these really great things for campus, but at the end of the day, it’s frustrating that nobody seems to know.” *** As CCEs attempted to allay objections to this summer’s sexual misconduct report, a separate group of students sought to mobilize. Instead of the quieter approach that the CCEs were endorsing, these Yalies wanted action. Fifteen students, energized by a petition begun by Emma Gold-

CCE TALKS ABOUT FROYO. SASVY TALKS ABOUT RAPE. “Always, though, the bulk of the CCEs’ work has been low key, often behind the scenes,” she said, but then added that the CCEs are “thinking more about when and how it is helpful to make that work visible.” These “low-key” duties, Boyd noted, working with groups who want to revamp a problematic tradition; connecting people with the resources they need; and consulting with party throwers on how to create the safest and most positive environment for attendees. Yazdi points to her own experiences, recalling times in which she met with leaders of Greek organizations such as Sigma Alpha Epsilon

berg ’16 on change.org, submitted an open letter to President Salovey, its contents including a comprehensive list of policy demands. The students detailed their vision for a disciplinary standard in which expulsion would be the primary sanction for perpetrators of sexual misconduct. These students would ultimately organize under the umbrella of a brand new student group — Students Against Sexual Violence at Yale, better known as SASVY. Since returning to campus, SASVY members have experienced an administrative readiness to discuss policy changes, and, at the very

l e a s t , acknowledge the legitimacy of the group’s aims. As a purely student-led effort, SASVY lacks the institutional ties afforded to the CCE program, but SASVY member Hannah Slater ’13 MPH ’14 remains confident that her group’s collective voice will carve out a lasting space at Yale. “At the end of the day, CCEs are employed by Yale and may not want to compromise that relationship by being too angry or pushing too far,” she said. “So we have an advantage now of being outside activists — we have distance, and that enables us to be a little bit more critical.” Despite SASVY’s positioning as a more critical counter to CCEs, Slater acknowledges that the scenarios published in August represent a good starting point toward a more transparent student and administrative relationship. The scenarios, issued in response to the backlash against the semi-annual report and its lack of case specificity, serve to outline certain imaginary incidences of sexual assault and the form of punishment that would accompany them. But while Slater concedes that such a rapid administrative response was heartening, she’s careful to note that the scenarios would never have existed were it not for the palpable outrage coursing throughout campus. Yet Breuer, along with Villareal and Suzanna Fritzberg ’14, a former Women’s Center board member, remain unconvinced that SASVY’s “ill-channeled anger” is a positive step toward promoting productive conversations on campus. “I don’t really know what [SASVY’s] goals are,” Villareal said. “I do think that their grievances are legitimate, but I think people who direct anger in this way… you know, you forget that there’s only so much the administration can do. You can be angry, but at some point you should recognize that the administration can’t give you all the answers.” The perceived divide between SASVY and CCE reflects a failed attempt at collaboration, Fritzberg said. Ultimately, she noted, the two groups both hope to curb the incidence of sexual assault at

C CE

S AT U R D AY

BASS BASEMENT STUDY PARTY

SEPTEMBER 28

A quiet place for your parents do to their tax returns.

Bass Library // 3 p.m. until close

Yale, fostering a culture that is both preventative and appropriately reactive. Unless SASVY and CCE attempt to understand the other’s preferred methods, this larger goal could potentially be lost altogether. “Anger is good,” she said. “But I wonder if with SASVY, it’s not being expressed in a way most conducive to real progress.” Overall though, most SASVY and CCE members view both groups as necessary foils to one another. But in the eyes of Alexandra Brodsky ’12 LAW ’16, one of the 16 Title IX complainants in 2011, who also assisted SASVY in drafting its open letter, the two camps reflect irreconcilably different attitudes toward Yale’s sexual climate. While the two groups champion the role of education in their respective missions, she underscores that SASVY is unafraid to explicitly address questions of violence and discipline. “CCE talks about froyo,” she concluded. “SASVY talks about rape.” *** Earlier this semester, Zhuohan Li ’17 and the rest of the freshman class joined their respective freshman counselor groups for their first consent and communication workshop. The workshop’s aim was to facilitate constructive discourse on the many faces of sexual assault, but rather than tackle the issue head on, Li and others were presented with the task of “role-playing” with frozen yogurt. In groups of two, freshmen took turns acting out various scenarios organized by the CCEs. Freshmen were instructed to consider their interactions within a range of constructed contexts — one student takes on the role of a club leader; the other, of a new member. The group leader invites the new member to grab froyo, and then a slew of prescribed situations begins to take place. For instance, the group leader is very casual about the request, and the new member would love to go, but really can’t tonight; the group leader needs to get the new member to the froyo shop for a surprise party, and while the member doesn’t want to go, he doesn’t want to damage his new relationship with the group; the group leader is enthusiastic about going, with the new member responding in kind. Mary Kate Dilworth ‘16 remembers vividly her frustration with the workshop. “It was frankly kind of ridiculous,” she said. “It was trying to teach people their own boundaries, like how to say no [to unwanted sex]. But it wasn’t something that would ever come up... Someone was just pressuring you to get froyo. It was stupid.”

Other students commented that the workshop, rather than leaving them with a more informed understanding of the nature of consent, merely fueled feelings of apathy and humor. Patrick George ’16 recalled that the workshop was “more the butt of jokes than anything else,” something he deemed strange given the gravity of the topic at hand. For Villena, this cognitive dissonance underscores a more fundamental problem with the CCE program: the glaring perception gap between the CCEs themselves and the students they are attempting to educate. In her eyes, the program’s work is undeniably positive, a “necessary” institution to a sexual climate as scrutinized as Yale’s. But with a subject as urgent as sexual assault, she concluded, euphemistic tones only serve to confuse and alienate a student body otherwise willing for a true education on the issue. “I think the CCE program is great — the education they’re doing is not being done anywhere else,” the anonymous senior echoed. “But I’ve watched my friends go from the administration’s most vocal critics to suddenly becoming employees of the administration, and then defenders of the administration. That’s my biggest concern. At the end of the day, the administration consistently, consistently, consistently neglected to prosecute rape, and I just wonder if the CCEs have forgotten that.” But Boyd stresses how individual CCEs are urged to draw from their own convictions when it comes to addressing any student concerns or high-profile episodes on campus: “The CCEs think for themselves and are all the more powerful for it,” she said. Further, she notes that the CCEs are likely to see the administration as a group of people they know and work with closely, not an “anonymous mass.” While Boyd characterizes this notion as “obvious,” some students don’t see it that way. Ultimately, for Yalies, confusion with the program is rooted in an inability to separate the seemingly dual identities of CCEs. On the one hand, CCEs are viewed as well-educated students, their perspective offering a sense of relatability to the general student body. On the other, CCEs’ position as paid employees leaves many students feeling suspect, as they’re unable to determine which advice is genuine, and which directives are merely a scripted subset of University policy. And most troubling of all, according to Villena, is that CCEs do not seem able to determine which is either. “It just baffles me that I can’t have an honest conversation about the program with my closest friends,” she said. “Are they our educators or our peers? Because you can’t be friends with your teachers. You just can’t do both.” Contact ELAINA PLOTT at elaina.plott@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Tagging along with your friends’ parents In case yours didn’t visit you.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND HONEY

HIVE HAVEN // BY JENNIFER GERSTEN

It is the third meeting of the Yale Bee Space at the Center for Engineering, Innovation and Design (CEID), and hive coordinator Fred Rincon ’16 is at the whiteboard with a marker, drawing a beehive. “So, there’s basically two types of standard hives, two types of templates: there’s the Langstroth hive, that’s mostly used for industrial honey harvesting, and there’s topbar hives, or Warré hives,” Rincon says, continuing to diagram for the six other members in attendance. The floor is otherwise empty, and Fred’s voice carries through the quiet.

BUT RINCON IS CONTINUING TO BEEKEEP AT YALE BECAUSE “BEES ARE PRETTY BADASS”. Rincon explains that the Warré hive, unlike the Langstroth hive, only needs to be opened once for honey harvesting during the springtime, a feature that largely preserves the moisture within the hive to which the bees are naturally accustomed. The Langstroth, however, is potentially more useful for research because it relies on frames, or structures composed of honeycomb, that are removable and allow for easier bee management. Club president Glen Meyerowitz ’14, who founded the group this year, sits up in his office chair. “I think the important thing to remember here is that, with the stuff that we have at the CEID, we could pretty much do whatever we want,” he says, his right leg bouncing up and down like it has since Rincon began his presentation. The members smile, and a few of them laugh; in the back, colorful pliers and wrenches, hanging like fruit, shine in the industrial lighting. “We could pretty much go to Home Depot, get a giant thing of plywood, and make a hive in a few hours with a laser cutter.” Everyo n e

pipes their assent: cool, okay, sounds good. Rincon sits down to soft applause. Of the members present this evening, including Meyerowitz, Rincon is one of the few with prior beekeeping experience, and unintentional at that: his brother flew to New York over the summer, leaving his newly acquired hive and its 30,000 bees for Fred to figure out how to tend. And only Meyerowitz and secretary Sam Faucher ’16 among them plan to major in the sciences or engineering. Meyerowitz hopes to give tutorials for those unfamiliar with the tools they will be using in hive construction, like laser cutters. The group continues their discussion of plans for the year: an iPhone app for following hive humidity and temperature, dabbing bees for tracking with fluorescent paint, experimenting with bee pheromones, and, for those of age, perhaps experimenting with honey fermentation to make mead. Students at Yale might not know much about beekeeping, but they will find the Bee Space’s approach to the venture old hat: have problem, will solve. Here, on the members’ minds is not a problem to solve so much as a dearth of knowledge; according to Meyerowitz, most scholarship on bees is largely speculative. “I’m not hoping to answer any questions,” he says. “But any data that could shed light could be a cool way to participate in the discussion.” *** There are two Langstroth hives at the Yale Farm, separated by a few, cautious feet, to be found behind a hill that leads away from the main grounds. The Langstroth hive is visually unimpressive, like a minimalist totem pole — two white wooden drawers are bookended and secured by a large rock, lying on top of a fitted wooden cover, and a board on bottom. This structure sits solidly on top of a stout wooden stake. To look at the hives is to instantly see more than the hives themselves. From a small vent at the base of each, a persistent trickle of bees broadly loopde-loops like a self-knotting skein. The patterns of this emergence are variable, and change with the wind, though the bees keep to their course and return, always, to the hive. Nearby cars and airplanes above are noisy in their passage, but in their absence it is possible to discern the bees’ low,

insistent buzzing. On Monday, New Havenbased beekeeper Ben Gardener gave the first workshop on introductory beekeeping at the Yale Farm hives to members and prospective members of the Bee Space. Educational coordinator Eleanor Dunbar ’16, who beekept while working on a produce farm last summer, said that beekeepers actually play a minimal role in managing the incredibly complex activity inside the hives. At the farm, she said that beekeeping was primarily opening up the hives, cleaning up excess sticky material and making sure you could find the queen — the only bee who can lay eggs, and without whom the hive will die. For Dunbar, beekeeping was a largely uninvolved process. Rincon, however, is less optimistic about the practice. “It’s like raising a really incapable baby,” he says. Over email, he wrote that beekeeping could be both heartbreaking and frustrating when colonies collapsed, or when the bees wouldn’t settle into the hive. But Rincon is continuing to beekeep at Yale because “bees are pretty badass.” Dunbar has continued to find beekeeping exciting as well. “Every time I see [the hive], it’s awesome,” she says, “because it’s always sort of unexpected. The average hive has 50,000 bees, and it looks like synchronized swimming, the way they will fly and land. Some of the honey cells are still sort of uncapped, and you can see the bees up to their abdomens, eating the honey. It’s a whole world going on inside of this boring white box.” To Meyerowitz’s surprise, 24 people attended the first meeting of the Yale Bee Space. He developed the group over the summer with the Yale Sustainability Project, and expected to be working with a small, concentrated group. Instead, he found himself dealing with unanticipated interest — their panlist has about 60 subscribers. “I have had to answer questions about ‘why are you doing beekeeping?’ a lot,” says social chair Ben Healy ’16. “Last year I did basically everything that I did in high school. This year I’m trying to figure out things that I can do that are interesting to me, and that I have not had the chance to try ever, and may never be able to try again.” Faucher agreed, saying that beekeeping appealed to him because of its separation from other, more typical activities at Yale. Students from both rural and urban areas have expressed interest in the Bee Space. Though students from the latter might be intrigued by the possibility of exploring an activity that seems out of their environmental comfort zone, Meyerowitz says that there is nothing necessarily rural about beekeeping. “Central Park doesn’t pollinate itself,” he points out. “There are lots of urban hives, even in New York. It’s something that people may associate more with rural areas, but it’s definitely something that can appeal to anyone, anywhere.” *** In the next few weeks, the Yale Bee Space will take control of hives currently located in West Campus, left by a lab that was studying the pollen composition of honey before it moved to Texas. The Bee Space will move the hives to the West Campus Farm, where their work will officially begin. What they actually plan to do with the hives, other than beekeep, remains up for discussion. Meyerowitz, a physics major, is particularly enthusiastic about developing an iPhone app that would render 3D temperature and humidity maps of the beehives, but the general attitude of the Bee Space suggests that no idea is a bad idea. “Glen is great — he’s our queen bee,” Healy said. “He’s really been prepared for every step of the way. When I first came into the club, my thought was that this was a group of people who looked at a beehive every week, but it’s turned into a really interesting

project.” Meyerowitz’s vision for the Bee Space is more extensive than a training ground for Yale beekeepers. He wants the Space to use elements of design and engineering to improve upon beekeeping and hive structure, the latter of which they have already begun to address. According to Meyerowitz, there has been little extensive research on beehive designs or technology since the 19th century, when both the Langstroth and Warré hives were invented. Although people have continued to hold beekeeping as a casual interest — Faucher brings up a website called “Beehacker.com” that bills itself as a “cross-pollination of beekeeping and technology” — few, if any ventures in the field have resulted in real impact for bees and beekeeping since the 1850s. The Langstroth and Warré hives were designed before the development of tracking and sensing technologies, both of which the Bee Space plans to implement when they begin work. Modern hives have undergone scant changes that would allow them to accommodate more advanced research on bees; whether the Bee Space chooses to use Langstroth hives or Warré hives, they will only be as a baseline on which to make modifications.

THE AVERAGE HIVE HAS 50,000 BEES, AND IT LOOKS LIKE SYNCHRONIZED SWIMMING, THE WAY THEY WILL FLY AND LAND. “It’s an interesting challenge from an ecological engineering standpoint,” Meyerowitz says, adding that their work is complicated by the relatively little scientists understand about bees. Among the mysteries is colony collapse disorder, a phenomenon resulting in sudden death among worker bees that gained widespread attention in 2006. Pesticides have been proposed as a potential culprit, but its cause remains a source of speculation. With additions like heat and humidity trackers to Bee Space hives, the group hopes to gain new findings that, unlike more recreational beekeeping, will be useful and relevant to protecting the welfare of the species. Though equally excited to begin the upcoming projects, Faucher has a solidly pragmatic view of the Bee Space’s aims. “It’s a whole new area of scientific research, so we’re sort of choosing the low-hanging fruit — things that are more portable and relatively simple that can be done by undergraduates. We [have to take into account] the practicality of the research.” Meyerowitz adds that he himself is unsure whether any of their ventures will yield

results. But earlier, after Rincon had finished, he had swiveled around and pointed at a sleek, white Yaledesigned racecar on display in a corner of the CEID. “One day, soon, they’re going to take out that racecar and [replace it] with one of our beehives instead,” he said. There was a pause in which nobody spoke — perhaps they were considering if and how that day might actually be a possibility. *** The Reverend Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth coined the term “bee space” in 1851 over the course of designing his namesake hive. Considered the “Father of American Beekeeping,” Langstroth, who graduated from Yale in 1831, revolutionized beekeeping with the idea, which is Goldilocks in nature: a space between two slits of wood less than one centimeter apart will be just the right size for a bee to crawl through — not too small so that the bee takes it for a crack and seals it, and not too large so that the bee fills it with unnecessary wax comb. The concept of bee space has endured. Respecting it results in more efficient beekeeping and a more manageable hive, and now it has lent itself to the name of a student beekeeping team at Langstroth’s alma mater. But it is a lonely concept, one of few notable advancements in a practice that has been around for hundreds of years. At the Yale Bee Space, there is enough curiosity and enthusiasm to convince their skeptics that the idea of bee space may very well be in good company in the next few years. “At a certain point of learning about honeybees, it becomes difficult not to spiral into fascination,” wrote Jeremy Oldfield, Field Academic Coordinator at the Yale Sustainable Food Project, in an email. “I love the idea that [Glen’s] work … may help inform the next generation of data-gathering honeybee hives. There’s a lot of excitement around the [Farm] about this effort.” Meyerowitz will graduate this year, but he believes the club will continue in his absence. Watching the members, abuzz with activity about their plans, you are inclined to agree with him. Contact JENNIFER GERSTEN at jennifer.gersten@yale.edu .

// MICHAEL MCHUGH

S AT U R D AY SEPTEMBER 28

PARENT DAY CARE

Kline Biology Tower // All day Time out your parents.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Parent Trap your parents

Condoms are available in every freshman entryway.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND COLUMNS

AND IT IS SURELY TO THEIR CREDIT SN: Aaron Sorkin, Mama always warned me about men like you — those sweet-talkers with chips on their shoulders, the arrogant, the fatally undependable. And oh, you’ve done me wrong this time. Like many, I fell hard for “The West Wing’s” combination of heart and screwball banter, and in 2012, eagerly awaited Sorkin’s next workplace romance, created under the auspices of HBO’s prestige brand. “The Newsroom” would go behind the scenes of a fictional cable news show, Atlantic Cable News, and follow the personal and professional travails of its ensemble cast. I was promised idealism about journalism, an extended, modernized “His Girl Friday.” But the debut of the “The Newsroom” left me first broken-hearted, then embittered. Everything everyone had ever said about Aaron Sorkin — that he was smug, self-righteous and not a little bit sexist — turned out to be true. The chemistry between the characters was virtually zero. No feminist could root for the budding relationships between anchorman Will and producer MacKenzie, or those Jim-and-Pam rip-offs, Jim and Maggie. This was a land where the men were brash and the women adorably incompetent, where romance was a lecture and a starry-eyed girl to deliver it to. Season one yanked viewers two years into the past, so that they could be walked through Sorkin’s version of how events should

SOPHIA NGUYEN & GRAYSON CLARY SPLIT/SCREEN have been covered. Sorkin, unlike actual newscasters in 2010, had the benefit of hindsight, so the moral wins racked up by his fictional producers and anchors rang hollow. Sorkin’s antipathy towards the Internet, towards the ignorant masses, towards youth itself, worked up to a fever pitch, even as it became glaringly obvious that he didn’t know the first thing about journalism. Why was this old man yelling at me to get off the grass? It wasn’t even his lawn! The second season begged me to give “The Newsroom” another chance, and so I did. The show’s universe diverged from the real one; Sorkin’s dream team began to take a few hits. The characters struggled. The stakes were upped. I was in again. That is, until the finale two weeks ago, an episode so bewilderingly and unforgivably terrible that it cut me off at the knees. GC: The reader will understand that Sophia took this one pretty personally. The backstory on that: For reasons that will never be entirely clear, I followed “The Newsroom” loyally. Don’t take that to mean that I liked it (or did I?); I didn’t (and yet I did). Still, I watched every episode. And read every installment of “Tolerating the Newsroom” at “Slate,” and

“The News vs. ‘The Newsroom’” at “The Atlantic,” and (it really goes without saying) the coverage at “The A.V. Club.” Facts is facts. Sophia’s a good friend; terrible as she knew the show to be, she blazed through the second season to catch up with me in time for the two-part finale. And first it was good, and then it was oh so bad. The second season’s greatest virtue was its openness to criticisms of the first. Admittedly, Sorkin showed little understanding of how to connect means to ends (his woman problem is particularly intractable; where’s the ghost of Amy Gardner fled to?). But damn if he didn’t try to fix things. The credits are reformed, and it’s for the best that Murrow’s Olympian Heights were swapped out for the staccato rhythms of modern Manhattan. The staff’s infallibility is viciously sabotaged in an update of CNN’s Operation Tailwind debacle — rechristened Operation Genoa — a season-long conceit that peaks in a gorgeous collapse. The terrible, terrible, really terrible relationships hung around, but they were marginalized in favor of the tasty sausage-making story of ACN’s institutional failure. And then, the finale. Holy shit, the finale. Let yourself hope. Think back to the grandest sequences of “The West Wing.” Remember President Bartlet resolving to run for reelection to the strains of Dire Straits’ “Brothers in Arms,” or orating over Tori Amos’ haunting

“I Don’t Like Mondays.” Think about the way Sorkin made you feel, the way he made you dream. Start to see, as the second season builds, the gauzy outlines of the show “The Newsroom” could be: flawed, inevitably, but human, idealism without sanctimony and wit without disdain. But wait, no! Sorkin’s snuck up behind you, a dangerous look in his eyes and a shovel in hand. SN: The Genoa plotline was a brilliant move. Season One was accused of giving characters too easy of a time, so Season Two’s main arc was an epic screw-up in which the ACN team accuses the U.S. military of using sarin gas, only to have their story, and biggest break ever, fall apart. The punishment seemed appropriate to the crime: of course their hubris, all that self-aggrandizing idealism, would lead them into this kind of trouble. Their fall from grace also presented them with a novel and genuinely

A Forgotten Father Found: “The Black Count,” a review It started with one of those reallife-being-more-poignant-thanfiction openings, which, ironically, is the death of the main character. When told that his father has died, a 4-year-old boy asks where the father has gone. When the grownups respond that God has taken the father up to heaven, the son squares his shoulders and marches off toward his father’s gun closet. The boy grabs a rifle as tall as he is and walks down the stairs. As he heads out the door, he is intercepted by his mother. Asked where he is going, the boy responds that he is going to heaven to kill God so that he can get his father back. It’s a moving opening, enough to guarantee a compelling biography. But what’s more, this particular boy grew up to be one of the most famous and influential novelists of all time. Oh, and his father was a brilliant four-star general of Olympic proportions, who rose up from slavery to face down Napoleon. Yeah. For the rest of his life, the boy would search for his father’s legacy, compiling a massive if flawed collection of documents. “The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo,” by journalist Tom Reiss, finally completes the son’s mission. It is the true tale of Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, who, awesomely, went by the casual Alex. He is the father of the novelist Alexandre Dumas pére and grandfather of the playwright Alexandre Dumas fils. Alex (I could call him Dumas, but I think I’m going to stick with Alex) was the son of a disgraced French nobleman and his black slave, born on the French sugar colony of Saint Domingue (now Haiti) in 1762. Conceived while his father was in exile, Alex was sold into slavery when he was fourteen so that his father could raise funds to return to France. Eventually, Alex was bought back by his father and sent to school in Paris (though his siblings remained in slavery).

SCOTT STERN READING BETWEEN THE LINES In France, Alex received a classical education and entered the French military, adopting his mother’s surname so that he could enlist at a lower rank than that guaranteed by his father’s title, and thus prove his worth on his own. Alex was quickly renowned throughout the army for his supposedly superhuman strength and physique. In a tale that just has to be apocryphal, Alex was riding a horse indoors when he grabbed onto the rafters and lifted himself and the steed up bodily. Alex soon joined an interracial group of swordsmen, called the Free Legion of the Americans. An American, of black and white blood mixed in the Caribbean, Alex won praise for his verve in the French Revolution. In one operation, he led a group of men up cliffs of ice to conquer a supposedly impregnable Austrian fort. At the age of 32, Alex was promoted to General-in-Chief of the Army of the Alps, commanding more than 50,000 men. This would be the highest rank achieved by a black soldier until Colin Powell came around in 1989. From there, Alex’s career was the mirror image of that of another rising French star, Napoleon Bonaparte. As Napoleon gained power, he set his sights on an ill-planned mission to scorching Egypt, and Alex went with him. Alex made the mistake of publicly confronting Napoleon about the viability of the mission, and his career spiraled downward. Leaving for France in shame, Alex was captured by rogue allies and held in prison for two years. When he finally returned to France, he quickly died a broken man. Alex is a figure so remarkable he seems almost supernatural. He is literally unbeatable in hand-to-hand

S U N D AY

ROBERT SHILLER’S MASTER CLASS: ‘HOW TO DONATE’

SEPTEMBER 29

Law Auditorium // 1:00 p.m. The Yale Division of Finance could always use more parent gifts.

combat, triumphing over multiple opponents at once and killing scores of enemies on the battlefield. He is principled, forbidding his men the traditional prize of raping and pillaging. And he is lucky, being spared execution at the hands of the corrupt Committee of Public Safety only because Robespierre is conveniently toppled. But, inexplicably, Alex is forgotten. Reiss accounts for Alex’s omission from popular history by explaining that Napoleon systematically purged Alex’s legacy after his rival’s death, taking personal credit for many of Alex’s accomplishments. But I suspect the reason is more complicated than that. Alex, once a slave, came of age at just the right time, when Europe’s earliest Civil Rights battles were being waged in French courts. Alex certainly faced discrimination, but he was able to receive a first-rate education and rise in the ranks of the army based on the content of his character, not the color of his skin. By the time of Alex’s death, and certainly afterward, life was not the same for blacks in France. A black insurrection had humiliated Napoleon’s forces in Haiti, and many past legal civil rights victories were forgotten. Alex has been neglected because history has been intentionally whitewashed. This makes Reiss’s biography all the more remarkable. Drawing on the literature of Dumas pére (Alex was the inspiration for the Count of Monte Cristo, among other famous characters) and never-before-seen archival documents, Reiss has traced this epic story across three continents over ten years. He shows how a national hero and international celebrity has been lost. He traces a son’s attempts to find and resurrect his father through literature. He indicts a country that has forgotten one of its true heroes. Contact SCOTT STERN at scott.stern@yale.edu .

compelling problem, and, moreover, one with real stakes in the real journalism world: How could these guys salvage any sense of legitimacy? How would they win back the trust of the public? And did they deserve it? That’s why the finale feels like a betrayal, as well as a cop out. Everyone gets to keep their jobs. That spectacular mess gets swept under the rug as the team celebrates their smooth, bland coverage of Election Night 2012. A marriage proposal is made and accepted. Champagne is uncorked. Even that old, awful theme music returns. Though the cast claims that there will be a third season, HBO has been tight-lipped on the show’s renewal prospects. I’m never allowing Sorkin to darken my doorstep again, of course, but I can’t help but wonder where “The Newsroom” can go from here, now that it took one step forward and two steps back.

// HBO

Deadline is approaching.

GC: There’d be a comi-tragic justice to ending it here. News Night 2.0 was an experiment; it failed, brought down in more ways than one by the enormous vanity of all involved. It makes more than a little sense that they (read cast or characters here as you please) would smile and sing their ways off the cliff. At least Jeff Daniels has an Emmy to keep him company on the way down. Contact SOPHIA NGUYEN and GRAYSON CLARY at sophia.nguyen@yale.edu and grayson.clary@yale.edu.

Being “that guy” You’ve met me before. If you’ve ever been to a concert or listened to a live recording, you know who I am, and you have some opinion of me. I’m that guy who yells stuff at the band between songs. I admit it, I embrace it. I go to concerts to be unencumbered and hang loose, and if I want to yell that “you guys are the freakin’ best, man!” to the band, with my voice cracking on “best” to hilarious effect, then I’m going to yell it. And I think that’s OK. I had my conviction on this matter challenged last week at a Deerhunter show in New York. They’re one of my favorite bands, and I figured they needed to know. So in between “Don’t Cry” and “Revival,” I shrieked something to the effect of: “You guys rule! Hell yeah! Rock and rooooll!” Despite my mellifluous tones, a woman standing in front of me took issue. Sensing (correctly) that my one-way conversation with Deerhunter might continue at a few more junctures during the show, she turned to me and said: “Do you have to be ‘that guy?’” Being “that guy” at a concert is a delicate role. It doesn’t mean singing along to every song. It doesn’t mean shouting “Free Bird.” It doesn’t even mean shouting anything at every single break. It means being a little too enthusiastic and letting people know. Normally, this is not acceptable behavior. But at a concert, even if the woman in front of me apparently finds it obnoxious, I apologize, but I think it’s OK. We don’t go to concerts to be alone. What I love about a concert is being part of the mass, the semi-stoned hive mind of the crowd. We’re there to experience music, which has always been a communal ritual, together. But part of being in that throng is that we lose our personhood a little bit; the guys onstage can’t make out our faces or hear our individual voices when we cheer. We also go to shows to interact, in some way, with our favorite bands. But although this big blob of crowd can emote, it can’t really communicate. So people like me, lacking inhibition, step in. We don’t really speak for the crowd, but as the crowd, filling what might otherwise be dead air between songs with some attempt to reach out directly to the performers onstage. It would be awkward if it was silent as the band switched guitars or whatever, like we were just watch-

DAVID WHIPPLE TUNE-UP ing them from behind glass instead of being taken along for the ride with them. It’s all manners of self-important and pretentious and generally absurd to call myself a prophet of the crowd or something like that. I don’t mean to say that I speak for everyone when I shout, “yaaahhh I love that song man!” at the lead singer. I don’t. But connection with the band is vital to a live show, and part of that is communication. Bands themselves seem to entertain “that guy” when he inevitably makes himself heard. On Wilco’s “Kicking Television” live album, “that guy” yells out, “KANSAS CITY!!!” in between songs. Jeff Tweedy doesn’t ignore him or shush him, but instead thanks him for coming, adding, “How dignified is it to drive from Kansas City all the way to Chicago to see Wilco?” The crowd responds with a tidal wave of approval. In essence, Tweedy asked the crowd, “Do you all love us as much as someone who drove from Kansas City to see us?” (In the interest of full disclosure, later on in the set, Tweedy thanks the fan again for another shouted endorsement before adding, “Now be quiet.”) If everyone else in the theater’s reaction was, “That guy needs to stop wasting the band’s time,” then maybe being “that guy” wouldn’t be a great thing. But at the end of the show, I think the crowd remembers those moments and adopts them as their own interactions with the band. We all hear it together, and usually, whatever “that guy” says is pretty universal (unless it’s “KANSAS CITY!!!”). When the band responds, they aren’t responding just to the one guy, but to everyone. I’m sure everyone at that Wilco show remembers “that guy” from Kansas City. I’m sure they remember what he said and that, in a way, he yelled on their behalf. And I bet they’re OK with that. I doubt anyone heard, much less remembers, what I yelled at the concert last week. I hardly do. But to the lady who was standing in front of me: Someone has to be “that guy.” And it might as well be me. Contact DAVID WHIPPLE at david.whipple@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Taking your parents on a run to East Rock Just kidding, WKND doesn’t exercise.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND THEATER

A MODERN LOVE STORY AT THE CABARET // BY YUVAL BEN-DAVID

I wonder what they’d make of “Dutchman” in Brooklyn. Playing this weekend at the Yale Cabaret, Amiri Baraka’s play makes mincemeat of the ironies we coyly use to talk about race. And fierce direction by Katherine McGerr DRA ’14 touches a modern nerve. It’s hard to imagine the 1964 script wasn’t intended to shatter the false securities of our ambivalently postracial era, when it’s cool to subvert the last few decades’ political correctness so gingerly through our hipster ironies. But “Dutchman” is also far from PC—it rails precisely against mealy-mouthed racial niceties of any kind. On a sparely set metro that the play never leaves, a black man sits reading a book. Smartly dressed, with khakis, a white dress shirt and tie, he looks up at a white Lolita in a skimpy summer dress and bug-eyed sunglasses strutting into view. She cuts a flirty figure, clearly, and in due time she’ll cast herself as the fast-talking-stripper-smartass to his baby fat and twinkle. Double bookkeeping the evening, always narrating her near future, the woman leads the man to wonder: Is she a television actress? “I told you no,” she says, “but I also

told you I always lie.” Primadonna seductress, Lula—“say it twice,” she orders, “Lula Lula”— will play the race card like kabuki, manically mixing the stranger’s chocolate to her vanilla, but with enough sprinklings of racial epithet to eventually make him crack. She rubs against him, setting her supersize imagination loose: “You ain’t no nigger… You just a dirty white man.” And that’s when he erupts. In that way, this otherwise compelling play hews close to a stale theatrical formula about racial tension: it simmers until it explodes. It really does. And that, too, is extraordinary in this play where all is role-play until—snap—it isn’t. Lula had wondered if is his name is Lloyd, Norman or Leroy—“one of those hopeless Black names coming out of New Jersey.” But it’s Clay, he says, and he playfully let her guess if his last name if Jackson, Johnson or Williams. (It’s Williams.) During the first half of the play, Clay cooperates with the irreverent racial scrimmage. Lula whispers enough sweet words to deceive him that she sees past the color line. Like a puppy, he answers to her barks of “boy.” Later on she’ll call him an Uncle Tom and, ever the actress, hobble

around the stage like one. Keywords of racism clutter the script, but the actors don’t let them pile up into a laundry list. Cornelius Davidson DRA ’15, as Clay, and Carly Zien DRA ’14, as Lula, act with the surgical precision of cruise missile strikes. Not a single cheap emotion crosses their faces. As composed as rocks struck by lightning, Zien and Davidson—especially Davidson—convey the gravity of the situation. Their deep focus belies the fact that “Dutchman” can come across as a morality play. Sparks fly — there’s too much romantic chemistry for the two to just plain hate. Davidson plays the part too adorably, too earnestly, to ever be mistaken for the stereotypic Angry Black Man. And Zien’s too complicated, troubled maybe, to just be a Frigid White Bitch. At times it feels like “Dutchman” served as an echo chamber for Amiri Baraka’s righteous anger, and the script divides the play into two parts: her rant and his. She taunts him for the first half; he strikes back in the second. It’s a call and response effect. And at the rare moment when wit rears its head, it’s ugly. Lula asks Clay if the other white passengers on

the train scare him, “because you’re an escaped nigger, you crawled through the wire.” “You must be Jewish,” he responds. “All you talk about is wire.” That’s a queasy line to take from Baraka, the poet-playwright who would achieve near-universal infamy with his 9/11 conspiracy theories in the poem “Somebody Blew Up America”: “Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed. / Who told 4,000 Israeli workers at the twin towers/ To stay at home that day.” In a way, “Dutchman” was the watershed in Amiri Baraka’s career that pushed him to write like that. Ultimately, the play’s an argument against the pretense of politesse in a climate of anger. “If Betsy Smith had killed some white people she wouldn’t have made her music,” Clay says. Charlie Parker “would have played not a note of music if he killed some white people.” Here, Baraka argued that Black art muffled Black politics. Art compromised politics. And yet, the Yale Cabaret didn’t let politics compromise their art. Contact YUVAL BEN-DAVID at yuval.ben-david@yale.edu .

// JACOB GEIGER

Looking like a true Lolita

At Rep, a dangerous desire drives ‘Streetcar’ // BY JACKSON MCHENRY

Blanche DuBois arrives on stage in a white jacket, with a matching purse and gloves. Within seconds of his entrance half a scene later, Stanley Kowalsky takes his shirt off. Blanche and Stanley stand side-by-side, eying each other and measuring each other’s strengths. Blanche carries all the paraphernalia of desire. Stanley, a hulking ton of flesh, is the seeming thing itself. “A Streetcar Named Desire” first premiered at the Schubert Theater in 1947 and the Yale Rep’s current staging highlights many of the play’s New Haven connections. Blanche and her sister Stella are both played by School of Drama graduates, René Augesen DRA ’96 and Sarah Sokolovic DRA ’11. According to director Mark Rucker DRA ’92, Van Gogh’s “The Night Café,” which hangs in the Yale University Art Gallery, inspired the play’s third scene. Rucker and the set designers revisited the piece as they

S U N D AY SEPTEMBER 29

designed their set, which is built on a moving platform. The lighting creates a claustrophobic yellow fog that traps the characters within their tiny apartment. “Streetcar” begins with Blanche’s arrival at her sister Stella’s flat in the French quarter. She’s taking a leave of absence from her job as a high school teacher, she says. She’s had a fit of nerves. Compared to her demanding, compulsive sister, Stella is a pushover. She gives in to Blanche’s need for flattery and puts up no resistance to her husband’s violence. Joe Manganiello, no stranger to the South from his role as a vampire in “True Blood,” takes on the role of Stanley. His best contribution is his matinée idol good looks. Yes, Manganiello’s body ripples out from under his mechanic’s tank top and his very presence is threatening. But his speeches as Stanley fail to deliver on the prom-

YALE ANTI-GRAVITY SOCIETY OUTDOOR HANGOUT Old Campus // 1 p.m.

To infinity and beyond.

ise of his posture. Stanley’s anger is meant to be powerful, but Maganeillo blurs his words in rage. He tends to ignore the fine distinctions within Tennessee Williams’s language. And this wouldn’t be a problem if the poetry that makes up the dialogue in “Streetcar” weren’t so fundamental to the play. Williams fills each scene with unforgettable lines — Blanche’s meditation on the length of New Orleans afternoons, for instance. “When an hour isn’t just an hour,” she says, “but a little piece of eternity dropped into your hands.” These lines are especially important for Blanche, because they make up her armor—or what’s left of it. Blanche imagines herself in a more beautiful world than she can have. In her portrayal, Augesen brilliantly draws out that desire and Blanche’s accompanying delusion. She moves with a self-defeating, self-conscious

poise. She flings her wrists limply. When she recalls her past, you can see real fear in her eyes. This production of “Streetcar” also attempts to emphasize the goings on of the rest of New Orleans: the blind woman selling flowers along the street, the couple bickering in the upstairs apartment. While these encounters do provide some color, they distract from the main action. The director’s decision to follow several dramatic moments with a pumped-in recording of a passing train, for instance, only takes the audience away from the rich characters we’re watching. It’s sad that the portrayals of the minor characters — Stella, for instance — also fall by the wayside in this staging. Stella holds the second to last lines of the play, and is as near to a moral compass as Williams allows, but Sokolovic never really earns our sympathy. She alternates between fussy,

half-serious anger against Blanche and Stanley, and total submission to their whims. Once the drama escalates in the last act of the play, I had almost forgotten her, despite the addition of her newborn baby. Still, these are minor distractions. The Rep recognizes that “Streetcar” is ultimately a play about the fragility of lies, of the rose-tinted fantasies that Blanche invents for herself. As Williams argues, and as you can see in this production, there is something dangerous under these lies. It’s a human instinct, a gnawing impulse that consumes lives, throws men and women together and then propels them apart. Blanche believes there is poetry in love, but sometimes it is only a spectacle of the flesh. Contact JACKSON MCHENRY at jackson.mchenry@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Tell your parents ‘time to go’

Fish and guests stink after three days.

PAGE B12

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND BACKSTAGE

CHERRÍE MORAGA CHICANA WRITER, ACTIVIST, PIONEER

// CHERRÍE MORAGA

// BY ALEKSANDRA GJORGIEVSKA

Q. You identify yourself as a feminist activist, poet, essayist and playwright. You are now also a theatre, performance studies, race and ethnicity professor at Stanford. Is there a particular profession that you identify with the most, or do you weigh all of your pursuits equally? A. I don’t know if I weigh them equally — I would say they are all shifting positions. I see myself as a writer first and foremost. My writing has always had a political intention, and so has my teaching, but my writing is fundamentally the thing that shapes my purpose. So yes, I would primarily call myself a writer. Q. In your 1979 essay “La Guerra,” you write extensively about your mother and her skills as a storyteller. How has your relationship with her influenced your writing? A. I came from a working class family, and I was a first-generation college student. When people ask me “what is your literary tradition?” I always say I trace it through my mother’s and my auntie’s stories. My mother was a powerful storyteller, and the fact is that the way I understood language was through the oral tradition, not books — my tradition has that spoken quality to it. My mother’s capacity to speak with dramatic tension and descriptions was amazing. I refer to her as my “literary foremother,” even though she was not an educated person.

Q. Some of your earlier writing touches on the way you often used to be identified as white, when in fact you felt very much connected to the nonwhite part of your identity. In an age where the concept of “identity” is a lot more fluid than it used to be, do you think it is easier for members of minorities and mixed families to assert their identities? A. Yes, there is more fluidity, but that fluidity is still shaped through a very white lens. You can be biracial or mixed but it is usually shaped through whiteness. Particularly if you are mixed but have the capacity to blend, I don’t think it is necessarily any easier. It may seem that we are more liberal, like we are postrace, but if you are mixed with white there is always a push to identify as white, especially if you can pass ostensibly as white. I see it in my mixed students, and it’s still very problematic … because people have deep loyalties to their identities even when the shade of their skin indicates otherwise. Q. Together with the late Gloria Anzaldua, you edited the anthology of feminist thought “This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color,” a seminal work of feminist discourse published in 1981. What was collaborating with Anzaldua like? How did she influence your views?

A. Gloria was a very good friend and I think she influenced me the most by opening up to me certain questions I hadn’t really thought about before, like questions of real spirituality and metaphysics. She was a practitioner of metaphysics as a Chicana. She also made me think about the relationship between spirituality and politics — back then, I was a more serious materialist than I am now. And she did all of this through the lens of being Chicana. As Chicanas, much of our study of understanding our indigenous philosophy that’s not Western traditionally focuses on Mesoamerican and Mayan mythologies and religions. She was more versed in those than I was. She was an enormous resource with regards to that. It was a really pivotal time for both of us and it changed our lives forever. Q. Do you have a favorite writer? A. My favorite writers shift depending on what my needs are. There is currently one writer I often turn to — Linda Hogan, a native writer. She is a mixed-blood woman as well. She is a fierce feminist and has written a lot about eco-feminism and environmentalism. Q. You have experimented with several literary genres. In addition to publishing books, anthologies, poems and essays, you write and direct plays — your latest one, “New Fire: To Put Things Right Again,” premiered last year. How would

you characterize the relationship between the literary and the performative? A. What usually happens is that the genre tells me what it wants to be. All of these genres have a thematic relation and respond to each other. Plays for the most part are fiction — I make up characters to tell, to show things and issues. In plays you can kind of show conflicts and you don’t have to resolve them — you present them as an embodied tale, and my characters can instruct by showing. Writing characters for plays is pleasurable to me because characters don’t need to be right. There is a tendency when you write an essay, for example, that you need to be right. Q. Has teaching at Stanford given you a fresh perspective on some of the issues you have been tackling in your writing? A. The great thing about teaching is that students are teaching you all the time. I always feel like I get older and they keep staying the same age. I look at my peers who don’t teach, and there is a way in which I feel like it makes me feel much more plugged in with trends and people’s ideas and technologies and popular culture, but also with a sense of what “citizenship” means and how people identify themselves and their relationships to their communities. Every 10 years you can sense the change of how each new generation is identifying itself. But they are hungry to know what they missed. In the late 60s and 70s, for example, political movement was on the streets, and it wasn’t abstracted into the university system. I feel like I am grateful for teaching because those kinds of intergenerational links can happen. I mean, my son is 20 years old, I have grandchildren coming in, I am always relating to young people. Teaching is enormously useful for me as a writer, I always have them in mind as I am writing. As I go out, they are coming in.

Q. In 1977, you moved to San Francisco where you worked as a waitress. Soon after that, you became politically active as a feminist, and eventually became engaged with women of color feminism. How do you think feminist activism has evolved over the past 30 years? A. One of the critiques I have of how things work nowadays is that people think if movements happen on the Internet, they have happened. The Internet is important in terms of providing access to information transnationally and locally, and in the speed with which ideas can pass from one group to another. But you cannot have a movement without bodies, without people interacting physically, without them meeting in groups and working ideas out face-to-face — and taking these ideas to the White House, city hall, schools, wherever they need to be. There has to be embodied action. We need the Internet but there has to be a countermovement to it. We need to stay abreast of the technology but movements need to actually be enacted, with real strategies, real people, in real places.

on a book titled “Once Upon a Mexican America,” in which you tackle cultural amnesia through the lens of a Chicana lesbian. Could you tell us a little more about your work in progress? A. I started with the intimate story of my mother’s Alzheimer’s, and realizing what her generation left. My strategy is really to make known that the so-called America is just one monoculture of mostly the white upper-middle class. When I talk about cultural amnesia, I talk about all that is lost. We should not forget who we are, the languages we speak, our spirituality, our relationship to land — all the ways in which we have knowledge that we are forgetting. The book is a memento on that, on how to negotiate white patriarchy. It is a very intimate story of what I perceive are very serious and grand motions that have to do with oppression of women of color in the U.S. and transnationally. Contact ALEKSANDRA GJORGIEVSKA at aleksandra.gjorgievska@last@ yale.edu .

Q. You are currently working

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WE SHOULD NOT FORGET WHO WE ARE, THE LANGUAGES WE SPEAK, OUR SPIRITUALITY, OUR RELATIONSHIP TO LAND

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herrie L. Moraga is a woman of many professions. Earlier this month, the Chicana writer, feminist, poet, activist, essayist, playwright and professor received the Brudner Prize — a prize Yale awards annually to a scholar or activist whose accomplishments have significantly contributed to the understanding of LGBTQ issues. The Prize Lecture she delivered last Thursday in Sudler Hall was titled “‘Man Up’ — Queer Feminism After All These Years.” In addition to pursuing her career as a writer, Moraga is now an Artist in Residence in Stanford’s theatre and performance studies department as well as in its program on comparative studies in race and ethnicity. In an interview with WEEKEND, she spoke of her writing, her identity and the future of activism.