WEEKEND

WEEKEND // FRIDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2013

where the time goes

By Lillian Childress see page 3

Why Do We Spend So Much Time on Facebook?

TOAD’S

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TUNES

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TURKEY

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AN UNUSUAL GUEST

LOST BIRDSONG

SUFI MUSIC COMES TO YALE

Ivan Kirwan-Taylor takes us on a stream-ofconsciousness tour of Yale’s famed nightclub.

Yale commemorates the extinction of the passenger pigeon, through a Peabody exhibit and a YSO performance of a piece unplayed for 150 years.

Patrice Bowman wonders whether music is or should be a universal language.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

KIRWAN-TAYLOR

WEEKEND VIEWS

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A FRESHMAN: JAMES JOYCE GOES TO TOADS // BY IVAN KIRWAN-TAYLOR

When does Yorkside close again How many drinks is What was her name the girl the Girl whose face was demure and innocent whose skirt was cheap? The bouncer’s felt marker cross on my hand the ash of my forehead Ash Wednesday, Toad’s Wednesday … Woad’s — Wash! The black of the marker on my hand is ash on my forehead is a crucifix. I am the resurrection and the life. I am become the Word I am become the Woad.

The horror of this strait and dark prison is increased by its awful stench. I’m so fancy, you already know, cries the siren, heard but not seen. As my heart once danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide, so my limbs now dance to the beat, dirtier than the DKE basement.

Trapped in trap music, I myself am hell, but the orgiastic riot is rapturous. On the floor the Yalies come and go, talking of “Directed Studies, bro.”

I grope in the darkness of my own state. Until the groper becomes the groped. Does it have a name, this thin creature with hands and a fecund, swaying waist, that moves ever closer to me? The neon of her bootyshorts sways me to kinesis. She goes by Mary. Virginal? Alas. Ascending to heaven on a greasy pole.

— Kiss me, she said.

Ravished over her I stood, full lips full open, kissed her mouth. Yum. Softly she gave me in my mouth the

pizza warm and chewed. Joy: I ate it: joy.

Joy jogging jogging up to East Rock Hill with you, Nora. Memory in the strobes and blackness took me to you, when the trees were in their Autumn beauty, the woodland paths were dry, when I was conscious of nothing in the world but the dark pressure of your yoga pants ass. I am unfaithful! Liberame domine!

An exile from boarding school, silent and cunning, I am broken by college, by Dick Pic Yik Yaks, by unfiltered Internet at ungodly hours.

Animus bends to corpus, as my prick bends towards her in the Woad’s heat, alighting my loins ... Phototropism! Chem 110 imbibed my pores with understanding. Now they leak sweat and sin. But I am stultified by desire.

Take me back to the pregame, safer than the womb of my mother, wet amniotic. IKEA cushions scatter a dorm clad with Bob Marley “Pulp Fiction” posters, ironic beyond irony? Naughty little gin sloshing in my gullet, spills on my shirt. EDM trickles out of the infant speaker — Is she coming tonight?

— I know her from Tinder!

He that swipes right sitteth at the right hand of the Father — She has a paper tomorrow, has to work — What about him?

— Already there

— Hey pass me a cup. Can we play pong?

The pain which will inflict my damned soul in hell is the pain of conscience. 18 years on this earth, yet I brandish a plastic rectangle claiming 21. Faithful to the one, yet lusting after the many. Damned by numbers! From my waist I can feel now I am harder than my math midterm.

Hurtle out of the cave, free of the noise. Stumbling now, drank those drinks. Drinked. Drunk? Bouncer, bumped. Excuse me. Breathless in the new air, the cold air. Sidewalk streetlight city traffic cone blare and din of sirens. Sickly feeling. Gin. Gut. Gulp. Hold it back, hold it back now.

This unholy baptism brought to you

by Budweiser riddled with Pabst Blue Ribbon spewed up on the sidewalk.

Static society, slimy sobriety. Snotgreen vomit chunks ooze down my shoes.

Woad’s is a nightmare from which I am trying to wake.

Mr Toad in top hat, ash cane imminent, croaks a goodbye. To bed, to Berkeley, to section on Thursday.

A holy communion of flies and bile.

On Wednesdays, we pervert the Sabbath. This is my body. Take, eat in remembrance of me. Will I rise and return in seven days? Yes I said yes I will Yes. Contact IVAN KIRWAN-TAYLOR at ivan.kirwan-taylor@yale.edu .

BARDEY

// THAO DO

Snapchat and The Real Me // BY CHARLIE BARDEY

// CHA

RLIE BA

R D EY

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We a l l understand the existential threats posed by social media: how its ubiquity is shortening our attention spans, making us anxious and depressed, eroding monogamy and family values, forcing us to see how much fun stupid Karen is having at her stupid parties — the list goes on.

Snapchat, however, stands apart.

Unlike Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, Snapchat foregrounds something we have always known about human selfhood: its nonexistence.

For most smartphone users, Snapchat is integral to the smartphone experience. It occupies a distinct space from the other principal photosharing app, Instagram, both because Snapchat content is deleted after viewing and because it can be selectively shared. Because ’Grams live forever, it is expected that they are aesthetically pleasing. The structure of the app reinforces this: The cornerstone of Instagram is the filter, designed to make photos as beautiful as possible. With Instagram, everyone is an artist: Snap a pic of a cloud, throw a filter on it (not Kelvin, obviously, because that looks #ridiculous) and pray that you cross the popularity threshold, past which Instagram lists your likes as a number rather than as a series of names.

Snaps, by contrast, are all about the content of the photos themselves. They are not saved, so aesthetics are unimportant. The main embellishments on Snapchat are captions; while there are filters, they are so meager and pathetic compared to Instagram’s wealth of photo-editing power as to be saddening. Snaps are often humorous, conveying your quirky, idiosyncratic life, which means that there’s a lot of “look at how much we’re drinking and how crazy we are” content (college, amirite?). As such, there’s very little overlap: A Snap is rarely a ’Gram, and vice versa.

The crucial difference between Snapchat and Instagram (as well as Facebook), however, is in the way photos are shared. On Instagram and Facebook, you share content with all of your Friends. On Snapchat, you select to whom you’re sending each picture. This grants you the freedom to take and share pictures that not everyone in your network would appreciate.

For example, when I came across a lone

TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE

Off Broadway Theater // 7:30 p.m.

cupcake sitting on the sidewalk of Elm Street last Wednesday, my first instinct, obviously, was to Snap it (caption: “sum1’s ready 2 party 2nite”). I then had to make a decision: Who of my 49 Snapchat friends (50 if you include Team Snapchat) should receive it? The Snap represented a distinct sense of humor that my friend Thomas (username: givememilkPLZ) certainly appreciates, but perhaps not Annie (username: thisisnottherealannie), to whom I show a goofier sensibility. Instead, I sent her a Snap of a bottle of Dubra (caption: new bestie [two men holding hands emoji]), which I would not send to Thomas, who doesn’t drink.

As in life, I never reveal my whole self in Snapchats.

In this way, Snapchat is customized exactly to my tastes. People only send me things that they think I would appreciate.

Snapchat allows me to present a different version of myself to everyone I know.

Sending Snaps is an act of self-creation: When I scroll through my list of Snapchat friends trying to decide who would appreciate a picture of a coffee cup I have drawn a face on, I am deciding which version of me — what sense of humor, what values, what worldview — I want to share. What consistently shocks me is how stark these variations are. While everyone knows that we act differently with our family, with authority figures and with our friends, we generally consider how we act with our friends to be our “true selves.” Our choice of Snapchat recipients shows that even among our closest friends, we make distinctions, constantly presenting alternate selves, tailoring ourselves to others’ expectations. Selfhood is illusory: I show a different “real me” with each Snap.

Snapchat is therefore the best imitator of real life that we have. None of the “one-personality-fits-all” nonsense of Instagram and Facebook, where you are pressured with presenting one coherent self/brand to the world: On those platforms, what your best friend sees is also what cute Josh from physics sees, which is also what your uncle sees. In real life, I do not present the same person to everyone, or anyone — I make minute alterations in what I say, how I say it, and my accompanying physicality. The types of Snaps I send and to whom I send them, show far more than my Instagram feed ever could. Who are we, then, but amalgamations of Snaps, each revealing one of many shifting components that make up our identities?

Contact CHARLIE BARDEY at charles.bardey@yale.edu .

WKND RECOMMENDS:

No relation to Tuesdays at Mory’s.

Honey-ginger tea at Jojo’s. An alternative to Yale Health.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND COVER

FACE TO FACEBOOK // BY LILLIAN CHILDRESS

News Feed Messages 16

Events Photos Browse

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t’s late Thursday night and I‘m probing Jackson Beck ’17, a classmate, about his Facebook habits over questionably cheap steak sandwiches.

“So how much time do you really spend on Facebook every day?” I ask.

“About an hour,” he answers, without pausing to consider.

“And when you log off Facebook, what percent of the time do you leave feeling satisfied?”

“About five percent of the time,” Jackson pauses, biting into his sandwich and looking up at the ceiling as he chews.

“Yeah, I’d probably say I leave Facebook feeling unsatisfied 95 percent of the time.”

“So you’re telling me you spend an hour a day doing something that 95 percent of the time leaves you unsatisfied?”

I ask.

“Well … Yeah.”

I’m writing this article because I’m curious. I’m curious as to why, when I walk around a lecture hall or a dining hall or a party or a seminar table, at least a few people are always scrolling through their newsfeeds. I want to investigate why I, like many of my friends and classmates at Yale, feel ultimately unsatisfied by the hours, days, weeks and collective years that we’ve spent staring at that familiar blue screen. Why do we spend so much time on Facebook? *** Yale was one of the first three universities to receive theFacebook.com in March 2004, along with Columbia and Stanford. Mark Zuckerberg birthed his brainchild just a month before in his Harvard dorm room at the beginning of February. It was a basic blue and white affair, with a male’s pixelated blue face staring down at users from the top left corner of every page.

Just a few months later, the News was already lauding and lamenting the far reach of theFacebook.com’s popularity: “Ahh, the joys of being able to massproclaim your popularity via the Internet. Although theFacebook.com is not the originator of social standing sites, it is undeniable that for the college student eager to find new and enlightening ways to procrastinate (those which don’t involve another being or a spare hand) theFacebook.com can easily become a means to fruitful Friday online frolics,” wrote Dana Schuster ’07.

Schuster’s guide to Facebook etiquette included (now scarily dated) warnings to the class of 2008 to resist the temptation to message new suitemates in lieu of calling them. TheFacebook.com’s capabilities, she half-joked, half-pleaded, were by no means a proxy for meeting real people.

As Yale students a decade later, we

I

JOHN ADAMS, GUEST CONDUCTOR

belong to the first generation of “digital natives” — a term which Sherry Turkle, director of the MIT Initiative oN Technology and Self, used in her aptly titled book “Alone Together.” When I entered Yale, my expectations for the place were almost entirely dictated by the Class of 2017 Facebook page.

WHEN I ENTERED YALE, MY EXPECTATIONS FOR THE PLACE WERE ALMOST ENTIRELY DICTATED

BY THE CLASS OF 2017 FACEBOOK PAGE.

By Bulldog Days there were already campus celebrities, certain names on everybody’s lips. Before I had even stepped foot on campus, I had seen pictures of my suitemates when they were toddlers, learned what kind of activities they had been involved with in high school and felt myself a partial witness to their awkward middle school phases.

Calling them on the phone probably would have been the most prominent display of social ineptitude I could ever conceive of. *** It’s a blustery Saturday afternoon when I sit down for coffee with Helder Toste ’16. If you don’t know who he is, you probably don’t have a Facebook.

I’ve always assumed that Facebook celebrities are introverts glued to their screens, but Helder is both more gregarious and socially adept than I expected.

He keeps his phone in his pocket throughout the duration of the interview, removing it only once to glance at a few messages that accumulated during our chat.

“I like to consider myself a very fun and sarcastic person,” he tells me. “I think coming into Yale, a lot of people from the Class of 2016 were like, ‘this guy is so intense!’”

Toste says that he uses Facebook for around an hour a day, but intermittently, like when he’s waiting for class to start or walking home from the library. He gets around 10 to 20 Facebook messages a day, and when he logs on, there are usually around five to 10 notifications waiting for him. He likes to post on the Class of 2018, 2017 and 2016 pages — mainly because he wants to help answer people’s questions — and on “Overheard at Yale” because it’s amusing.

Although students frequently disagree about how to pronounce his surname (It’s Tost-ee), the name is ubiquitous around campus.

“A lot of the time I meet people and it’s like, ‘You’re Helder, the guy on Facebook,’ and I’m like ‘That’s not totally who I am!’” He explains. While Helder stresses that his Facebook profile in no way represents who he is, he has made a fair number of friends through such interactions.

Bianca Li ’17 also feels like her twodimensional Facebook profile doesn’t fully capture the complexities of her three-dimensional self.

“I feel like in person I’m very much more of a listener than a talker. There’s a lot I won’t tell people unless they ask me,” she says.

Li spends five hours on Facebook every day. She is a frequent poster on the Class of 2017 and 2018 pages. Unlike Helder, she isn’t so positive about the recognition she gets for her Facebook activity but concedes that it’s part of the trade. She understands her online presence can be polarizing, because of the amount of comments that she posts.

Li says she’s amazed that people often recognize her from her Facebook profile. “Freshman year, people would visit my dorm room. Some people who didn’t even have swipe access to my entryway. It was kind of creepy, but at the same time, I kind of understand the fascination with people who are so visible online,” she says.

She describes her Facebook personality as “jokey” but also sometimes serious, when she advocates for things she thinks are important, like feminism and healthful living.

“It’s very much a representation of what I would like to be seen as,” she says. *** Ben Chen*, a junior who deactivated his profile for the entirety of last year, agrees that Facebook does give us a platform to present what we’d like to be seen as by other people, but often in a way that he finds “pathetic.” Ben chose to deactivate his Facebook because of what he calls an “old person’s obsession with privacy,” and for the same reason requested to use a pseudonym to retain Google anonymity.

“I think at Yale, the perfect profile picture is one where you look really good, but where it doesn’t look like you’re trying to look good,” he says. “At my high school the perfect profile picture was just a picture that looked really good.”

Ben says that perhaps this active nonchalance on Facebook is unique to the elite and highly educated — that we, as Yale students, think we need to be aware of the medium as a medium. We need to simultaneously wink at the idea of Facebook and try to look good on Facebook. Ben’s idea of a good profile is one that’s either over the top, campy and SEE FACEBOOK PAGE 8

WKND RECOMMENDS:

Woolsey Hall // 7:30 pm

No relation to the Founding Father.

Chicken soup — for the sore throat, for the soul.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND FEATURE

THE SOUND OF SILENCE // BY STEPHANIE ROGERS

// RICHARD KISSEL

She was 29 years old, with a coat of pale brown fur. Her name was Martha and she died on September 1, 1914 at one o’clock in the afternoon, found lying on her back in her cage. Her corpse was then frozen in a 300-pound block of ice and shipped across the country from Cincinnati to Washington, D.C., to be displayed in the Smithsonian. She was the last of her kind, the final passenger pigeon, named after the matriarch of the United States — Martha Washington.

Martha will go down in history not as the matriarch of her species, but as the end of her line — an icon of extinction.

Today, you can find three of Martha’s distant relatives on display at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. The museum marked the 100-year anniversary of the passenger pigeon’s extinction with an exhibit, which at once honored their memory and provided a sobering reminder of the power of human destruction.

From Sept. 1 to Oct. 12, museum visitors had the opportunity of viewing three pigeon specimens, along with an egg and a pigeon nest — a rare opportunity, since the exposure to light can bleach the plumage of the birds.

The exhibit curator Kristof Zyskowski said it was worth the risk to put the specimens on display, so as to teach the public about a pivotal moment in environmental history.

Richard Prum, a MacArthur Genius and William Robertson Coe professor of ornithology, ecology and evolutionary biology who helped curate the Peabody exhibit, believes the story of the passenger pigeon is important because of the bird’s devastating decline. Prum explained that in the mid-nineteenth century the population was estimated to be about five billion birds. But in under 50 years, the species went from billions to zero.

“The story of the extinction of the passenger pigeon ... is a very American story,” Prum said. “It was one of the most abundant birds on the planet and rivals that of the migration of the buffalo in spectacle.”

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Prum explained that the extinction of the passenger pigeon inspired people like Teddy Roosevelt to pioneer the conservationist movement with projects like the National Park Service and the Audubon Society.

In 1813, John James Audubon reported that “the light of noon-day was obscured by an eclipse” when a flock of passenger pigeons was seen overhead. Director of Public Programs at the Peabody Richard Kissel said that one flock was reported to be a mile wide and 300 miles long. The skies of North America back then are unimaginable to society today, he added.

Biologists still debate the causes of the bird’s extinction, but the consensus holds that a combination of overhunting, deforestation and pigeon social behaviors led to the bird’s demise.

On Oct. 11, Prum organized a daylong symposium about extinction inspired by the passenger pigeon anniversary. The event culminated with an evening performance by the Yale Symphony Orchestra with a piece that embodied the sounds and birdsong of the passenger pigeon.

Research Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science David Sepkoski spoke at the symposium. Before Darwin, he said, many scientists denied the concept of mass extinction. Even during the Darwinian era extinction was seen as a natural phase in the survival of the fittest. Only the weakest species went extinct.

This mentality changed with the passenger pigeon, said Sepkoski. For the first time, society could not deny human influence on nature.

The passenger pigeon revolutionized the way evolutionary biologists view extinction, yet the average Yale student is still unaware of the species’ existence even in this year of commemoration. Seven out of 10 students interviewed said they were unaware of what a passenger pigeon was and that it was in fact extinct.

Tom McCoy ’17, who took Professor Prum’s course on ornithology, said

that in class they learned that once the population of the passenger pigeon dipped below a critical mass, the pigeons could not muster the numbers they needed for their communal breeding.

“The most famous human-caused extinctions are of animals like the dodo or the elephant bird, which only had small populations confined to single islands,” McCoy lamented. “The passenger pigeon, though, was the most common bird in North America.”

ALTHOUGH THE SOUNDS OF HEINRICH’S LONG-LOST PIECE TOOK FLIGHT, THE PASSENGER PIGEON REMAINED STILL. Tali Perelman ’17 had never heard of the pigeon until she took Environmental History. Perelman said she was amazed by the abundance of these creatures and the way flocks darkened the skies.

“I think it’s really sad that I didn’t know of their existence, even less of their extinction, until my environmental history class,” Perelman said.

“It should be common knowledge. It’s impossible to separate environmental history from human history, and I think stories of our interactions with nature, not just our interactions with people, should be taught in schools.” *** What can the future hold for a species that is already dead?

Ben Novak, lead researcher of “The Great Passenger Pigeon Comeback” at The Long Now Foundation, is working to promote the de-extinction of the passenger pigeon and other species. By cloning the gene sequences of

THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY Morse/Stiles Crescent Theater // 8 p.m.

“A play about poetry, anarchy and god,” based on G.K. Chesterton’s eponymous novel. We’re in.

passenger pigeon specimens in museums and using other doves or pigeons as surrogate parents, Novak’s team hopes to bring the passenger pigeon back from the dead.

Novak, who spoke at the extinction symposium on Saturday, explained that the endeavor is not only possible with innovative science measures, but also worthwhile. Since the passenger pigeon extinction, no other species of pigeon has filled their role in the ecosystem of the Northeast.

Novak finds our hand in their demise so intriguing because passenger pigeons can be considered “our genetic mirror in bird form.” They had the same amount of genetic diversity as humans.

However, other scientists and researchers are unsure whether deextinction could actually work. “I think people should realize that these efforts of cloning are far from the real thing,” Zyskowski said. “These attempts at de-extinction through cloning are not the answers to the global biodiversity loss.”

Meanwhile, others, like UCLA professor of English Ursula Heise, question the current conversations about extinction. She explained that narratives of extinction are abundant, but often one-sided. “The problem is that a lot of these stories are stuck in a template of mourning and loss,” Heise said. “There may be other ways of talking about natural change. You have to be careful about only telling decline stories.”

Heise wonders whether we should continue doing what amounts to triage work with endangered species or focusing on those species we deem salvageable and necessary. Society cannot save all of the endangered species and maybe it is time that we learn which losses we can deem acceptable, Heise argued.

At the YSO’s performance, conductor Toshiyuki Shimada told the audience that the performance was their artistic attempt at resurrecting the beauty of the passenger pigeon.

They played the Columbiad, or The

Migration of the Passenger Pigeon,

by Anthony Philip Heinrich. Saturday’s show was the North American premiere of the piece, whose sole performance took place in Prague in 1857.

Heinrich was inspired to compose the piece after witnessing one of the bird’s immense migrations. The 12 movements of the music represent everything from the “thunder-like flapping of a passing phalanx of American wild pigeons” to the “cooing” of the pigeons and even a “conflict over Beech nuts.”

On Saturday, after 150 years, the notes of Heinrich’s music traveled from Europe to the ancestral land of the passenger pigeon, playing to over 1,000 audience members in Woolsey Hall. True to the American story Prum spoke of, the song ended with a rendition of “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

On stage with over 80 members of the Yale Symphony Orchestra stood an unusual soloist: a passenger pigeon specimen from the Peabody Museum.

Heinrich wanted the piece to embrace what he considered the undying glory and triumph of the species. Ironically, the audience knew the true ending of the passenger pigeon — one not of triumph, but of demise. As the notes of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” rang through the hall with the gusto of a patriotic anthem, the passenger pigeon stood silent on an artificial branch.

YSO celloist Robert Wharton ’17 said, “I thought it was pretty cool piece. I don’t know if it resurrected the pigeon though. Before we started, Conductor Shimada suggested the pigeon would take off and fly away.”

Although the sounds of Heinrich’s long-lost piece took flight, the passenger pigeon remained still. Meanwhile, at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., Martha the passenger pigeon sits on display, a 100-year-old symbol of extinction, the final member of a community that was once five billion in number, extinct before she even died.

Contact STEPHANIE ROGERS at stephanie.rogers@yale.edu .

WKND RECOMMENDS: Treating yoself. Double-strength Mucinex? Treat yoself. Triple-ply tissues? Treat yoself.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND ARTS

NORTHCOTE’S “FABLES” BLEND PAST WITH PRESENT // BY KELSI CAYWOOD

Although James Northcote is known as a historical painter, his work is not as antiquated as his subjects. In “Picture Talking: James Northcote and the Fables,” the Yale Center for British Art’s new exhibition running through Dec. 14, the viewer finds political and ethical statements that are strikingly relevant today. Northcote continues to resonate with us because he was an intrepid artist of his era while cognizant of enduring symbols and methodologies from artists of the past. Northcote’s relevance also endures because of the unconventional storytelling utilized in his work.

The stories in question are a series of fables Northcote wrote over the last 20 years of his life. Inspired by Aesop’s fables and other allegorical tales, Northcote wrote his own fables and then paired them with original illustrations, using anthropomorphic symbols to condense entire stories into single illustrations.

“The Bee and the Drones” is one of the first pieces presented from the

diverse collection of works selected to outline Northcote’s artistic career. The piece’s natural imagery, of bees collecting on rocks, gives a guise of simplicity.

The illustration is actually modeled on a literary fable of a similar name, Tomás de Iriarte’s “The Drones and The Bee.” The exhibition explains the fable’s cautionary tale: “[It] dwells on drones who, lacking sufficient invention to create their own honey, mine the resources of their dead predecessors, celebrating past brilliance by ostentatiously arranging the funeral of a highly productive ancestor.” Its placement is at the forefront intentional and the mark of a curator that knows how to guide the audience’s attention towards underlying themes of an exhibition. This fable, in particular, emblemizes many of Northcote’s central fears as an artist.

Understanding those fears informs the rest of the exhibition.

Northcote wanted to create his own honey but recognized the value of learning from the artists that preceded him. This aim gives rise to deep-seated

anxiety experienced by not only Northcote, but also by any other artist in pursuit of genuine authenticity. Likewise, the exhibition thoroughly establishes the influence of literary and artistic forefathers, like Shakespeare and Michelangelo, on Northcote. Identifying these influences underscores one of the unifying themes of the exhibition: art begetting art.

Tradition weighed heavily on Northcote, who spent his career trying to balance his own ideas with self-conscious allusions to the past. He painted fictional self-portraits with famous artists and writers, and his work displays an almost erotic and obsessive reverence for the past. This wasn’t derivative, though — Northcote wanted to elevate others’ symbols and achievements rather than reduce and misinterpret them.

But we are left to wonder whether Northcote was a real creative force or just a series of impersonations of prior artistic greats, borrowing their symbols and mimicking their ideals. Visi-

tors are primed to be critical of Northcote’s work, in order to distinguish what parts of the work are truly his own. What value does his work hold, if it relies so heavily on others? Each piece also provides the opportunity to assess whether it has stand-alone value without its accompanying labels and curator-provided explanations. Meanwhile, approaching each piece critically serves a dual purpose because the visitor is more likely to recognize the morals of Northcote’s fables.

“Picture Talking” is also unique because it encourages viewers to consider the end goals of art. What does it mean that Northcote did artwork for commission? There are drastic differences between the work Northcote undertook for pay and that which he undertook to fulfill his creative visions.

This complicates the judgments made about his integrity as an artist. Northcote’s work lacks cohesion, something apparent in “Picture Talking,” but this should not lead us to doubt his capabilities. Instead, it should inform our

understanding of his eccentricity and his preoccupations while encouraging us to avoid universal statements about his work. This is part of what is most exciting about the exhibition — it allows the discerning viewer to evaluate Northcote’s identity as an artist.

Northcote is indeed an enigma, but becomes less cryptic with curatorial guidance.

Northcote is not one of the uncreative drones that he disparages in “The Bee and the Drones,” because he is marked by self-awareness. His obsession with the past was neither selfserving nor the mark of a megalomaniac — it was an indictment of his desire to actualize his predecessors’ excellence.

It may be ambiguous where Northcote departs from his own “highly productive ancestors,” but there is no ambiguity about the abundance of meaning and contemporary relevance to be gleaned from the exhibition.

Contact KELSI CAYWOOD at kelsi.caywood@yale.edu .

Ancient Turkey, Modern Sentiments // BY PATRICE BOWMAN At the risk of sounding sappy, there’s no denying that music has an inexplicable influence over people. Often, when normally spoken words can’t reach us, a tune easily can. Music is an international language. These words may sound clichéd, but they still have truth to them.

Such thoughts must have been on the mind of Turkish musician Latif Bolat during “The Healing Sounds of Ancient Turkey,” his performance of Sufi music this Tuesday at a public event in the Whitney Humanities Center.

When I began listening to Bolat’s singing and strumming of the baglama — a commonly used Turkish folk instrument — I was uncertain whether the appeal of his music would be truly universal. Sufi music, about which I knew little before the concert, is the devotional music of Sufism.

Also known as Islamic mysticism, Sufism is characterized by asceticism and dhikr (a prayer

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containing the repetition of Allah’s names). Sufi lyrics often draw upon Sufi poetry inspired by the poets’ close relationships with Allah. So, I was puzzled to hear Bolat present these uplifting lyrics through subdued singing and the baglama’s melancholy sounds.

But what I assumed to be melancholy was actually pensiveness. I realized this when he first asked for audience participation; he wanted us to chant “There is no god, but God” in Turkish in order to provide a chorus for one of the devotionals he would perform. Traditionally, such chants can go on for ten hours, but Bolat played the piece for a little less that ten minutes. I prefer not to chant phrases from religions other than my own, so I just watched. Once he ended, though, the mellow strumming and singing placed me into an partial trance. While I was glad that the singer decided to move

to another, more varied song, the Turkish lyrics continued to echo through my mind. I didn’t think about anything religious, but I felt relaxed. The million things that I had to do after the concert melted away, at least for a moment. If the piece had been as energetic as other worship music, I’m not sure I would have felt so focused.

Bolat soon switched gears entirely, asking someone from the audience to read from “Quarelling with God,” a compilation of famous Turkish poetry that he had translated. This reading led to the concert-lecture’s most unorthodox part: Bolat played the baglama while a man read “Hiroshima,” by socialist Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet. This famous poem, translated into English and set to music by such artists as Pete Seeger, the Byrds and Paul Robeson, conveys a powerful anti-war message by speaking from the point of view

ROSE AND THE RIME

Yale Cabaret // 8 & 11 p.m.

A tale of two tropes: Ice Queen curses city with snow, budding virgin breaks through.

of a girl who perished when the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima.

Why would Bolat feature this poem? Bolat described “Hiroshima” as a “poem of all times” because of its potent plea for mankind to abandon war. And why wouldn’t a cry for peace fit into a book of poetry concerning the love from and for a higher being? Although initially surprising, Bolat’s use of “Hiroshima” made his concert more accessible by adding a secular element to a largely spiritual show.

For the final act, Bolat played and sang over a slideshow of pictures of modern Turkey: images of sunsets, flowers, city night lights, mosques and rundown houses. The final part of the performance provided an excellent closure for Bolat’s concert-lecture, connecting Turkey’s musical past to its history, its role in globalization, its problems with poverty and its natural beauty.

With that, Bolat finished his concert while lamenting that he couldn’t perform longer. Apparently, Sufi devotionals can last from sunrise until sunset. There was little hope for that happening here and now; before the concert-lecture ended, several people quietly packed their things and tiptoed out. But I found it a presentation worth sitting through.

Latif Bolat’s visit to Yale makes up part of his final concert tour, which also includes visits to the west coast, the United Kingdom and India. Despite acting as a musical ambassador, he sees his music as a force for national music genres and against globalism. His website reads, “Latif Bolat’s cultural mission can be summarized as ‘preserving the cultural traditions in this rampant wave of commercialism.’”

His performance resisted the idea of music as immediately universal; indeed, all foreign

music, especially that in a different language and with religious content, can be difficult to grasp. By challenging American listeners to expand their ideas of what music should be, Bolat’s performance aimed to preserve his unique musical culture rather than conform to globalized tastes.

Yet how does one reconcile the universality of music with the individuality of different kinds of music? When you move beyond the difference in language, culture and religion, there remains an emotional core that everyone can relate to. For Bolat, that core is the desire to reach a higher plane of understanding, some sort of transcendental realization as we go through our everyday life. And while Bolat’s music was strange and new, this sentiment resonated deeply with me.

Contact PATRICE BOWMAN at patrice.bowman@yale.edu .

WKND RECOMMENDS: Christmas carols. Cheer yoself.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND FB

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NIGHTMARES

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What were you thinking?

Chloe Tsang

Madeline Kaplan

If there’s one thing I’ve learned as an adolescent/person who has attended a lot of Bar Mitzvahs, it’s that no one should ever ask a 13-yearold what they think about anything. When I joined Facebook in the fall of 2008, I was just approaching the zenith of middle school awkwardness. I had a lot of emotions but hadn’t yet found the right way to share them. Then I joined Facebook. “I care about how you’re feeling,” Mark Zuckerberg said, to me and to every other teenager circa 2k8. “And so do all of your friends and acquaintances.”

Thus began a yearlong stretch during which I publicly posted my innermost thoughts and feelings, often two or more times a day. At turns mysterious (“is feeling conflicted…”) and specific (“my frosted mini wheats smell like fish food… o.0”), my statuses were universally un-liked and un-commented. I used exclamation points

with shameful frequency, perhaps to give my thoughts a sense of urgency (“is watching titanic and is going to have nightmares tonight!!!”). On three separate occasions I posted what must have been the world’s most clever Jason Mraz reference (“is the geek in the pink”). But none of these soul-baring revelations received any feedback.

Sometimes I ventured into incisive political commentary (“thinks McCain is a weenie-head.”) or cultural musings (“they’re not doing project runway on lifetime??? what will happen???”).

At my emotional nadir, I posted a desperate plea for everyone to vote for Anoop Desai on American Idol.

I was the worst. But that blank status box loved me anyway. It wanted to know my feelings — about school, about friends, about art (“is listening to Demi Lovato’s new album and is surprised!”). Facebook made me feel like I mattered.

It’s 2010. Enter 15-year-old Chloe, a high school freshman who spends all her time on Facebook and YouTube. One day, Chloe stumbles upon Sam Tsui’s medley of Michael Jackson songs. She’s hooked (and smitten). Eight months later, she visits Yale, sees Sam’s cameo in the welcome video and nearly faints in the admissions office. Panic ensues: She knows she absolutely must get in to Yale. When she hears that a senior at her high school knows Sam, she creepily Facebook stalks said senior, looking through his friend list until she finds someone listed as Sam Tsui.

Everything looks legit: His profile photos are casual, his relatives are linked to his “About Me” page, and most of his friends are Yale students.

Chloe proceeds to send him a Facebook message with the subject line “Huge Fan.” In the message, she mentions her newfound aspirations to come to Yale, gushes about her Sam Tsui fandomness and tells him to “keep up the amazing work.”

Sam (or someone pretending to be him) actually responded to the message and, at the time, 15-year-old Chloe felt like nothing would ever be the same. When 19-year-old Chloe stumbled across this blast from the past a few days ago, however, she only felt embarrassed by her overeagerness and creepy Facebook stalking skills.

But hey, at least it made for a great story, right? #Yalewasfatefromdayone #creepy #sorrynotsorry

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Why I Chose Yale

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Statuses Universally Unliked and Uncommented

WKND

Rachel Paul

Do we really want to know what other people think of us? Before the series of tubes that is the internet came into being, our answer to that question didn’t matter — you were as likely to get a straight answer from someone in person as you were to, well, um, have something really unlikely happen to you. Suffice to say that people bit their tongues more in the pre-internet age, before Facebook’s veil of ignorance descended on our communications.

It’s now all too tempting to ask for and receive a frank appraisal of your character. But the flip side of this is that people sometimes ask you to appraise them. WKND found ourselves in just such a situation a few years back, when we undertook the questionable mission of offering our friends our honest opinions of them. All they had to do was send us a three-digit number, and we would post a status with that number and our Real Feelings about that person, in a sort of weird, public FormSpring (remember when that was a thing?). Now, if you know anything about WKND, you know that our Real

Feelings are extra real. The realest feelings, if you will. So pity the poor soul who asked for our opinion, only to learn that we disapproved of their music taste and posture and general aura.

WKND broke a few hearts. But none so badly as Anastasia’s.* We wanted to like her, we really did. But it was difficult when her Eastern European accent was so thick that we couldn’t really understand anything she said. She certainly seemed like a nice girl … but that was as much of a read as we could get. So when she sent us a three-digit number and asked for the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, we gave it to her: “389: You seem really nice. We just can’t ever understand anything you say.”

We were young, we were cruel, we were apparently bad at aural comprehension. But Anastasia never forgave us. At least we don’t think so. We still aren’t entirely sure what she said.

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What Was That You Said?

OCTOBER

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ROSEMARY’S BABY WHC // 7 pm

Laughs and heebie-jeebies galore (also Mia Farrow’s pixie cut).

thought, “How will this play out? What is my next, hilarious move?” There was only one thing to do. I decided to raise the stakes on HIM and accepted the request. “Ha ha!” I thought, “I outsmarted him! I’ll have the last laugh” But I was wrong. No one had the last laugh. It was a big mistake and a Facebook faux pas. As a result, it has now been FOREVER, and we are STILL in a relationship on Facebook. The joke was funny, sure, but now we’re left with this residual relationship. Who will end it?

And how? Help! I’m stuck in a virtual relationship.

*Name changed for the sake of all involved.

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SATURDAY

It all started when I clicked the “Ask” button on his Facebook relationship status section. I love making jokes and being thought of as funny, so I HAD to do it. I pressed the button, thinking we’d laugh about it in the dining hall later that day. But, no, that’s NOT at ALL what happened. Instead, I didn’t hear back for a day, which in Facebook time is LITERALLY YEARS. After a nervous 24 hours, he finally responded. His response created a Facebook nightmare, to say the least. He requested TO BE IN A RELATIONSHIP with me. Oh geez.

I had NOT anticipated that answer. I

Stuck in a Virtual Relationship

WKND RECOMMENDS:

SATURDAY OCTOBER

Neti Pots. Hint: use distilled water; tap can cause infection and/or death.

18

A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC IN CONCERT

WKND RECOMMENDS:

Harkness Auditorium // 2 & 8 pm “Send in the Clowns” makes WKND weep.

Long hot showers. Then: guilt over taking long hot showers.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND COVER

f

Time’s A-Wasting FACEBOOK FROM PAGE 3 ironic, or one that’s tasteful, effortless and fun.

“How tasteful are their photographs? If they’re trying too hard to come off a certain way, then that seems kind of desperate and pathetic.”

And thus we enter a zone where we’re judging and being judged on every detail of what we’ve chosen to present. We’re carefully packaging mass amounts of information about ourselves because being seen as pathetic sounds really scary.

Before Facebook, if I met an interesting guy at a party, I’d have to ask my friends if anyone knew his telephone number, and then muster up the guts to call his landline, all the while fearing he wouldn’t pick up — or even worse: that the conversation would be awkward. Now I can go on Facebook and see what his “deal” is and also pictures of his cats and his parents and what he looked like when he was a baby and what type of people he hung out with in high school and what bands and movies and books he likes and doesn’t like and he likes country music? Hah, no way. Like he ever stood a chance.

“I think the biggest problem with Facebook is making assumptions about someone before they actually meet them,” laments Maggie Morse ’17. “It’s hard — for example if your friend says they’re dating someone new, it’s hard not to make an assumption in your head. You get some sort of impression of them. I’ve definitely done that. But I wish I didn’t.”

“That sounds awful, oh gosh,” she adds.

“I’m pretty sure we’ve all done that. It’s inevitable. Human nature,” I quickly reply.

Who am I making justifications for? *** I call Nicholas Christakis ’84 on a Friday evening just before he drives out of cell phone range into rural Vermont. Christakis, director of the Human Nature Lab, does not discount the dayto-day utility of Facebook, but he does maintain that Facebook has the ability to perpetuate feelings of negative self-worth. Christakis attended a Yale where every room had landlines (with no answering machines!) and people scribbled messages to friends on the chalkboards outside each suite.

“On any given day, a few of your friends might be having a truly exceptional experience,” he explains. With Facebook, he goes on, you can see everyone’s exceptional experiences and suddenly start to feel that you’re the only one stuck behind a screen. This can lead to feeling very envious very quickly, even though Christakis points out, “most days are just a normal day.”

Hall Rockefeller ’16, who deleted her Facebook after her freshman year, has a similar take.

“I found that Facebook represented an alternate reality that I didn’t really want to partake in,” she says. “I think that the self that exists on Facebook is definitely not the one that exists in, well, I’d like to say reality, but Facebook becomes some sort of weird, twisted reality.”

Rockefeller found that Facebook created a standard against which she didn’t want to measure herself. “I just wasn’t interested in seeing people live in the ways that people wanted to present

FRI D AY OCTOBER

18

them, because it made me assess my life in a way that I didn’t want to or need to assess.”

In fact, in an oft-cited study published in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking, researchers ran an analysis of Facebook usage among college students and found a correlation between low self-esteem and high levels of Facebook activity. And while scientific studies only describe reality up to a point — especially when we’re talking about something as subjective as self-esteem — when I told the students I interviewed about the study, they all seemed to nod their heads in agreement.

To them, the correlation made sense.

To Chris Paolini ’17, you can look at someone’s Facebook profile and understand how exactly they want to be seen by their peers — especially when being critiqued by other Yale students.

“Yale’s not particularly [academically] competitive, but what a lot of people are worried about is the way they seem to other people,” he says. “Especially when it comes down to intelligence and impressiveness.”

IF THEY’RE TRYING TOO HARD TO COME OFF A CERTAIN WAY, THEN THAT SEEMS KIND OF DESPERATE AND PATHETIC. ANON

The image that Yalies strive for, Paolini thinks, is not necessarily one of perfection, but an image that we think is the best encapsulation of ourselves. That’s the image we want on Facebook.

“You have a certain degree of control over your virtual identity.

And in that sense, it’s not a true perception that people are having of you,” he says.

Facebook gives us time to perfect a virtual version of ourselves.

On the internet, you have both time and Google on your side when you’re engaged in a comment war. In the “real world,” however, you only have a few seconds to prove your intellectual prowess.

“Facebook is the one place where people don’t really make mistakes easily. It’s a lot more conscientious, how an identity is created,” Paolini observes.

Creating that external self takes time. I no longer have a Facebook account, but when I did, I probably spent as much time stalking myself as I did other people. Deleting pictures in which I looked uncool, hiding things on my timeline that my grandma had posted (the horror!) and strategically refraining from “liking” things people had posted on my profile so it looked like I didn’t spend that much time on Facebook. I did.

But the desire for cool internet-impassivity doesn’t seem to be anything new among Yale students. In Schuster’s article — now more than 10 years old — she advised her peers: “I recommend updating your Facebook photo every three to four months … Or you may opt to leave your original Facebook photo up indefinitely — instantly

ZELENKA: MISSA DEI PATRIS St. Mary’s Church // 7:30 p.m

Yale Schola Cantorum performs the music of Zelenka, a Czech Baroque composer. WKND didn’t even know that was a thing.

emanating an ‘I haven’t been on theFacebook.com in ages’ aura despite the fact that you surreptitiously lavished in your summer internship’s ability to provide you with countless hours of anonymous Facebook-browsing.”

As Yale students, we often face a familiar dilemma: work/sleep/ friends. Pick two. Yet with The Facebook, that has changed. We can suddenly multitask: socialize and work, or socialize and sleep simultaneously. Because even when we’re in bed at night, people can browse through our photos or “poke” us. And how many lecture rooms are filled with screens opened to a page of notes, with a Facebook tab right behind it? Or sometimes, just the Facebook tab? *** Every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday night from 10 to 12, a group of students congregate in the Branford Trumbull room over home-baked cookies and tea. They talk about life, dreams, hopes, other Important Matters that have always plagued college students. At the front door of the tea room is a basket filled with iPhones and Androids. “Technology Free Zone — Please place your phones in the Basket.” The sign reads. It’s held in Branford, but anyone is welcome to join — as long as they drop their phone in the basket before entering.

Branford College Master Elizabeth Bradley helped create the space last spring when a group of students came to her with the idea.

“They were talking … about how hard it is to have an authentic conversation,” she remembers. “In the dining hall, people will pass by each other and say, ‘hey, how are your midterms?

What’s going on? What are your plans for the summer?’ Just these sort of facts, rather than — ‘how do you feel about these courses you’re taking? Who do you feel like you’re becoming as a person?’”

“They just felt like there was no space to do that. It was almost socially weird to do it.”

I’ve been thinking about Master Bradley’s words a lot lately.

When I deactivated my Facebook a month ago, the first terror that popped into my head was that no one would remember my birthday. After a five-minute process of finally finding the “deactivate your Facebook” portion of the website, I was confronted with the profile pictures of my closest friends with pleas to stay written under them. (How did they know who my closest friends were?)

“Theo will miss you.” “Fiona will miss you.” As if I were moving to Beijing. I clicked the necessary bubbles and boxes, closed my eyes, and in a moment of inexplicable panic re-entered my password and pressed the deactivate button. “To reactivate your account, log in using your old login email address and password. You will then be able to use the site as before. We hope you can come back soon.” The reply was smooth.

My birthday came and went and I had a party that I invited people to by text and word of mouth. My grandma emailed me, and my parents and my two closest friends from high school called. Life carried on.

I’m not trying to sound alarmist, nor am I caught in some Luddite vision of a past Yale in which we only spoke face-to-face and

All Was Good, but I feel the fact that we needed to create a special room to put down our phones just to have a conversation says something. It says a lot.

Branford Residential Fellow Steve Blum ’74 seems to agree with my assessment. Steve is at the tea room almost every night chatting with students. His was a Yale where friends would meet nightly for pizza and games of bridge, and where the closest thing to campus celebrities were the football players you read about in the News.

“The very fact that we (a) had to invent the tea room, (b) had to have rules attached to it and (c) that people actually end up talking about it in a meaningful way, is in fact testament to something we’ve lost,” says Blum.

Of course it’s easy to feel nostalgic about a time you’ve never lived in. You can imagine the good parts without the bad parts.

Yet, as Master Bradley described the times spent out on the quad and Christakis talked about the little notes slipped under doors and Blum waxed lyrical about the daily games of frisbee in the courtyard, I can’t help feeling that, in gaining Facebook, we’re losing something else.

On Monday night, I walked through Bass Library looking at how many computers were open to Facebook. (I suppose you could call it stalking in the real world sense.) Fingers clicked at lightning speeds as photos whizzed by screens in nanosecond intervals. In my surreptitious (and maybe a bit invasive) study, I counted six out of 40 laptops on the top floor of Bass open to Facebook, besides the guy watching Spiderman.

Around 13 percent. Numbers are only helpful to a point, but I rode home on my bike through the rain that night wondering why Yale students spend so much collective time on a blueand-white webpage that more often than not, seems to leave us unsatisfied.

Out of all the Yale students I spoke to, the average time spent on Facebook was about 45 minutes (I suspect it’s higher, but maybe people just want to present the best versions of themselves. Especially to reporters.)

Human error aside, it’s still a lot of time. 45 minutes a day. That’s five and a quarter hours a week.

21 hours a month. 252 hours a year. And if the average Yale student is a sophomore (like me) who has had a Facebook profile since ninth grade, that’s 52 and a half full days spent on Facebook. Fifty-two and a half days we could have spent reading books or learning how to play an instrument or getting up the courage to speak to our crush in person. Maybe I’m just optimistic about how we would have been spending our time. I don’t know.

But I fear that as we spend our hours in the library half-studying and half-looking through the prom photos of that girl who sits across from us in section, as we decide not to contact the boy whose profile indicates a taste for country music, as we lie in bed mindlessly scrolling in the minutes before drifting off to sleep, that we’re losing something more than time in the process.

Contact LILLIAN CHILDRESS at lillian.g.childress@yale.edu .

WKND RECOMMENDS: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. And, you know, the kind that protect you from the rain.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND FEATURE

RECLAIMING THE CONCRETE CANYON // BY YI-LING LIU

There is something desolate and industrial about the walk up State Street to Interstate 91.

Fallen leaves — thin, auburn, curled like fists — are left unraked and scattered messily on the pavement. The park by the intersection of Humphrey and State is empty but for a small playground with a tired pair of swings and accompanying metal slide. The same sunlight that caresses the collegiate Gothic structures and throngs of college students on Old Campus feels harsher and starker here. I can see the top of the underpass and just make out its rusting surface, burnt umber scars on the ash grey concrete.

Pulled out of the warm, Disneyland-esque cocoon of Silliman College, I find the area run-down barren and impersonal. As I turn right on Humphrey Street to face the underpass, however, everything changes.

An explosion of color: The underpass is lit up by ecstatic strokes of azure, bright cerulean, magenta and chartreuse. Two large murals cover every inch of the inner walls.

This is the Under 91 Project, a quest to transform the grim concrete canyon of the underpass that divides East Rock and Upper State Street from Fair Haven. According to Aicha Woods ARC ’97, one of the lead organizers of the Under 91 Project, “the differences are pretty stark between the more economically diverse East Rock side and the Fair Haven side, which has anecdotally always been a pretty rough area.”

The statistics tell the same story: violent crime rates in the Wooster Square, Mill River and Fair Haven area are higher than the citywide average.

On a map of income distribution in New Haven, presented by the Data Haven Community Index, the left area of Interstate 91 is shown to have sig-

nificantly lower income levels and a higher concentration of public housing than the right.

Walking into the passageway, I first see Alberto Colon, one of the commissioned artists, atop a tall ladder, putting the finishing touches on his masterpiece adorning the passage’s right wall. He’s going over with a spray can what seems to be a series of purple, bubble-like, hexagonal shapes, which he later explains to me are human cells. They are supposed to correspond to the large colorful gummy worm strings on the far end of the wall, which he says are DNA strands.

The cells and strands flow from one end of the wall to the next without any border or breakage, fluid and continuous. This feeling of continuity is precisely what Colon was trying to communicate.

“I like organic shapes, I try to avoid having any straight squares or rectangles in my artwork,” he says, pointing out the smoothness of each stroke, a drastic contrast to the stiff lines of the actual architecture of the underpass.

The diverse, vibrant colors of the DNA strands, coupled with their fluid, borderless presentation, fit neatly into the mission of the Under 91 Project, as explained by the project’s website: to reclaim the passageway as a connector rather than a rigid concrete divider.

In doing so, the project aims to bring together the vibrant and diverse Jocelyn Square and East Rock communities.

The very process of putting together this mural was centered on the idea of bringing together a community. Not only was the selection process for the artists based on a door-to-door survey of the Jocelyn Square neighborhood, but the final murals were decided upon through community vote.

When the artists were at the tail end of finishing their pieces, people from all corners of New Haven — inhabitants of the immediate area, college students, little children, their grand parents — were invited to leave their own physical mark on the walls of the underpass. Paintbrushes were handed out, and participants were asked to do whatever they wanted.

“We didn’t do a lot of advertising but turnout was much larger than we anticipated,” says Woods. “People were told to write initially within the set boundaries, but it totally exploded all over the walls.”

The evidence of that explosion sprawls before me. Underneath Alberto’s DNA strands, I find a chaotic medley of names (Romeo Yoniel, Shanda, Jay Vory), song lyrics (“Birds flying highhhh, you know how I feel”) love declarations (“Theo Loves Us,” “Xander Loves Bacon”) and thoughts (“I think Yale business students should have to do people’s taxes for free”).

The words are anarchic and spontaneous, sentences and phrases snaking over and underneath each other.

Illustrations are crammed into small spaces and scattered across the wall: bunny heads, flowers, Arabic characters, phrases in Spanish. I instantly recognize a collection of self-portraits as the work of a first grade artist, thanks to the two-dimensional, blocky style: opaque circle eyes, upright vertical lines as strands of hair, and wide, u-shaped mouths.

Stepping back to take everything in, I find a certain rhythm and harmony in the disarray and discord. I feel a sense of comfort knowing that so many people once stood where I now stand and baptized the wall with their exuberant, uninhibited self-expression.

“The public kind of went overboard last Saturday,” Colon says, laughing.

“But that’s OK.” I imagine that before the project, this was a place through which pedestrians would quickly shuffle, anxious to reach the other side. The underpass of Interstate 91 now seems to produce the opposite effect.

It makes us amble, pause and appreciate. A car slows down as it drives through, the driver whipping out his phone to snap a picture. A man in sagging jeans and a bright red hoodie and his girlfriend in a rosepatterned skirt stop to admire the expansive mural on the left wall. As I follow their gaze from one end of the wall to the other, I realize that the mural contains an entire storybook narrative.

It begins with a depiction of outer space — three spheres that appear to be Earth, Mercury and Jupiter, orbiting each other. The dominant color of this mural is the electric crimson that one finds in Manga comics, Yugio cards and East Asian computer games.

Then this outer-space world seamlessly morphs into an underwater one: Neil Armstrong, a motif transposed from the earlier mural, clutches his American flag as he stands next to a miniature space rover atop the rim of a large bathtub, as if about to dive in.

In the center of the bathtub, sitting next to the chubby hand of a child, is a canary yellow rubber duck, imposing in its brightness.

To the right, the powder blue bath water suddenly swirls into a violent, onyx tide that has caught a container ship in its stormy wrath. Towards the far right of the mural, we enter the depths of the bath water sea, a rich, azure, Jules Verne-esque world of caverns, stalagmites and a large reclining octopus.

At the final section of the wall, the sea transitions into a grass field of

strong, vermilion stalks and a large butterfly, drawn with the meticulous, anatomical detail of an entomology textbook or a diagram at a natural history museum.

A week ago, Woods tells me, a woman stood in front of this section of the wall, in tears. Her grandmother had told her before passing away that she would come back as a butterfly.

This continuous series of imaginary, child-like realms seem to suggest that the world around us — its grandeur, terror and danger — are simply projections of our own mind and consciousness. Just as a bathtub can be transformed into a mythological underwater world, a cold and dingy underpass can be wholly reinvented by sheer force of the imagination. Perhaps, as Woods believes, the stark division between the neighborhoods was “as much in our heads, as in the data of disparity or the barriers of urban infrastructure.”

However, despite its seemingly idealistic, Wordsworthian message, the art of Under 91 remains grounded and realist in its aims. As I turn around to leave, I notice, for the first time, the small patch of wall space at the entrance of the passageway. There are no underwater kingdoms or DNA strands here, but a painted portrayal of Interstate 91 itself: pale blue sky, wisps of cirrus clouds, the rusting grey asphalt of the underpass and two iron poles holding up an industrial metal sign, bearing the words “New Haven” in plain white letters.

The artists of Under 91 do not overstate the transformative power of their artwork: I-91 is still an interstate.

But take a stroll through the underpass of Interstate 91 — maybe you’ll start to see it a little differently.

Contact YI-LING LIU at yi-ling.liu@yale.edu .

// YI-LING LIU

SATURDAY D AY OCTOBER MO NTH ##

18

PATRICK OLIPHANT YUAG // 3 p.m.

The famed political cartoonist caricatures in real time as David McCullough provides historical commentary. What the what?

WKND RECOMMENDS: Amanda Palmer. Sad music for sad weather.

PAGE B10

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND COLUMNS

IS THE OP-ED FUNDAMENTALLY SEXIST? // BY LEAF ARBUTHNOT When the Women’s Media Center released this year’s Women in U.S. Media report, few were surprised to hear that the average newspaper columnist was in fact a 60-year-old dude. The publishers surveyed included the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and had on staff some 105 male columnists, versus just 38 female ones.

It’s not a shocking statistic. If women are more present in the media now than they were, say, 30 years ago, it’s been roundly shown by various studies that gender equity in journalism is still a far-off dream, and not one shared by all in the newsroom.

Still, 105 guys versus 38 chicks?

Really?

Of all the causes for the imbalance, ingrained societal conservatism seems the most responsible, something visible even outside newspaper columns. As Slate has reported, male sources are quoted three times as frequently as female ones in front-

page stories in the New York Times; when a voice of authority is sought, the gut reaction of the average hack (whether a she or a he) is to mic up a bloke. This tendency is reflected in the types of protagonists that dominate Hollywood movies. A study by the University of Southern California examined the 500 most popular movies released between 2007 and 2012, and found that of the 4,475 speaking characters on screen, only 28.4 percent were female. 2012 was in fact the worst year they analyzed, revealing the lowest percentage of onscreen females. So it’s a certified thing: Women just don’t get the airtime and pen-time that guys do. The situation is even worse for queer writers, writers of color and writers from low-income backgrounds. Clearly, gender bias permeates both popular and intellectual culture, even if, as I suspect is often the case, that bias is unintentional.

When it comes to female representation in the media, it’s

important to pick one’s battles.

Concerned though I am about the skewed Hollywood gender dynamic, I’d be a terrible filmmaker and can’t act at all, so I will leave that issue for others to sort out. But I can write, and like to do so on a fairly regular basis for print and online media outlets. My new thing, manifestly, is op-eds. Previously, I’d specialized in food and culture journalism, but this year, with my first semester at Yale underway, I thought I’d try and head in a new direction.

The trouble is, the op-ed is a difficult beast to master. Editors look for a staunchly uncompromising viewpoint — the clue is in the name, “Opinion”, singular.

You’re meant to have a stance on something, preferably controversial, and defend that stance with your teeth gritted, enduring if need be the reams of antagonistic comments in the space below your piece.

Unfortunately, there are relatively few things that I have

fixed or overtly polemical views about. For instance, as a Brit, I have a volatile position on the UK’s policy regarding the Islamic State. Sometimes I think we should bomb them; at others I question the validity of the West’s decision to get involved at all. Another example: the current Hong Kong protests. One morning, I’ll gush, “I’m so with you on this one, you go guys.” On another, I’ll find myself musing, “But y’know, the Chinese government’s not going to offer you any concessions, so I’d just call it a day.”

This being the case, I’m not naturally the world’s best op-ed composer. But this raises the question — is it just me who finds it a difficult journalistic form to fill? Or is the op-ed itself slightly, well, sexist? At this point, the waters get choppy. Clearly, there should be a space in newspapers for people to state their opinion (singular) and explain why they are sticking to it. Readers don’t necessarily want to read a piece

written by someone unconvinced as to the best course of action. Now, the last thing I want to do is say that women think like X and men like Y, and that opeds are for Y-thinkers. Absolutely not. I wholly accept that women can be brilliant opinion writers — take the Guardian’s Barbara Ellen, or the New York Times’ Vanessa Barbara. You can read an op-ed and not know that it’s been written by a woman; female journalists frequently show themselves to be entirely capable of using print to defend one particular viewpoint, however controversial.

But I have noticed that amongst my peer group, my female friends tend to hold much more flexible opinions on current affairs than those held by many of my male friends. The reason for that difference is incredibly complex — but it seems possibly related to the fact that we less regularly look to women as sources of factual authority. It’s not that the op-ed itself is nec-

essarily fundamentally sexist, but rather that it favors a certain confidence of thought, that some women, including me, have been less rigorously trained to adopt. The greater flexibility of some of my girlfriends’ views doesn’t mean that their analysis of what’s going on is lacking in insight — quite the opposite.

Having a more fluid approach, one that eschews black-andwhite binaries, is a healthy intellectual stance. But such openness and fluidity means that the op-ed, for a thinker of that sort, can be especially tricky. It seems that few editors want an op-ed wearing its indecision on its sleeve. They don’t want writers who admit from the get-go that either a) They are somewhere in between the two (or more) sides of a debate, or b) They haven’t even decided where they stand.

Or at least that’s what I think I think.

accomplishes by repeating the same phrase over and over again.

On “You Don’t Pull No Punches,” he repeats the title phrase endlessly near the end of the song, using everything from fuzzy snarl to clear falsetto. On Astral Weeks’ “Madame George,” Van Morrison’s best song, the coda features the line: “The one’s to love the love the love’s to love the love’s to love to love to love…” On “Tupelo Honey,” the sweetest love song ever written on the album of the same name, the singer delivers the line “She’s alright to me” in every way possible. The effect in all three songs is to render the words meaningless; all that matters is his interpretation of them.

We transcend the mediated meaning of words and enter the higher understanding brought through sound itself. This is not a new concept for Van Morrison, but only on “Veedon Fleece” does it reach its fullest and most lasting realization.

“Astral Weeks,” the paragon of sadness in music, was Van Morrison’s greatest achievement.

It resembles no other album extant today, and only four records can claim to better it. But “Veedon Fleece” was a more important album for Van Morrison—the entirety of his work for the last forty years derives from its rejection

of aspirations to grandeur and from its quiet, contemplative focus. Music critics have largely seen Van Morrison’s work since Veedon Fleece as mediocre, the creation of a worn-out, grumpy man. Greil Marcus described the sixteen records from 1980 to 1996 as “an endless stream of dull and tired albums.” Robert Christgau gave them all B- and C+ grades. But these diagnoses are too pessimistic and their analyses too unfair to the artist. “Astral Weeks” was a lyrical and musical masterwork, and while Van Morrison’s albums since “Veedon Fleece” are strong in lyrics and in instrumentation, their brilliance lies in his singular focus on vocal sound. Listen to the harsh roughness on the self-analytical, self-critical “The Healing Game,” or the high clarity on the spiritual “Into the Music,” or the sweet tenderness on “Poetic Champions Compose.” The lyrics are often repetitive and simple; the music of little interest.

Van Morrison’s voice captivates us, reigns over all. That is the surviving legacy of “Veedon Fleece”: its improvisational spontaneity provides us with the insight that words, ultimately, mean rather little. And only with that understanding can we begin to interpret Van Morrison’s career.

Contact LEAF ARBUTHNOT at eleanor.arbuthnot@yale.edu

Van Morrison’s Vocal Ventures // BY NOAH DAPONTE-SMITH

Nobody quite understands Van Morrison. If Bob Dylan’s long stretches of patent bizarreness in the 1980s seem incomprehensible to most, then Van Morrison’s entire career surely must remain an enigma. His music has encompassed nearly all of rock and roll in the past fifty years, from the frantic youthful energy of “Gloria” in 1964, to the Christian hymn “Full Force Gale” in 1979, to the contemplative introspection of “Celtic New Year” in 2005. Meanwhile, his 1974 album “Veedon Fleece,” celebrating its 40th anniversary this month, is a quietly overlooked masterpiece. It is integral to our attempt at understanding the Irishman, and without it our portrait of Van Morrison would be woefully lacking.

On “Veedon Fleece,” what seems particularly evident is that Van Morrison, born in Belfast after the Second World War, draws from two vastly different sources of inspiration, feeding on the muses of Blake and Yeats as much as Fats Domino and Muddy Waters. The songs on the album compose a delightful array of melodies and instrumentation deriving from the mystical foggy landscape of Connemara in western Ireland, and from the bluesy grooves of the Mississippi Delta: We hear an inflected Gaelic fiddle, alongside a hopping piano.

Indeed, this symbiosis appears all over Van Morrison’s oeuvre, especially on the soul-inflected “Moondance” and the religiously minded “Into the Music.”

The centerpiece of “Veedon Fleece” is “You Don’t Pull No Punches, but You Don’t Push the River,” a nine-minute song composed of so many lyrical ditties and wordless riffs that it feels like Van Morrison is making the whole thing up as the music carries him along. The song is replete with asides and references, largely to the Veedon Fleece, which might harken to the Greek myth of Jason and the Argonauts, but nobody’s really sure; we do know that William Blake and the Eternals are apparently searching for it all over the west coast of Ireland. A concern with authenticity comes to the fore as the song progresses — “We’re going

down to the west coast/Lookin’ for the real soul, for the real soul people,” Van Morrison sings in a gruff drawl. At other points, his voice soars ever higher, trying to pierce its way into our souls.

He can twist and modulate his voice like no one else, something wholly evident on the track.

“Bulbs,” coming later on the album, shows Van Morrison for the bluesman he really is, and though structurally and musically it differs from “You Don’t Pull No Punches,” it exhibits the same qualities of vocal improvisation and experimentation that make the former song so memorable. After an acoustic introduction, “Bulbs” quickly becomes a lively bluesy piano-and-guitar shuffle, and the singer’s sharp voice seems to encompass every tone all at once. Near the middle of the track, he stops singing and begins a wordless growl, quickly undulating in volume. This vocal shift renders all instrumentation, as catchy as it is, secondary, and as on “You Don’t Pull No Punches,” forces us to consider the voice above all else.

Like much of Van Morrison’s work, “Veedon Fleece” is largely concerned with nostalgia. Van Morrison wrote the album after visiting Ireland in 1973 following a seven-year self-imposed exile in the United States.

That might explain the free-flowing, loose Celtic sounds on the record, sounds that Van Morrison draws from the character of the land itself. No wonder, then, that so many of the songs concern themselves directly with the land — “Streets of Arklow,” about an ambulatory stroll through an Irish seaside tow n ,

sounds like a mournful reliving of the carefree joy of youth, and “Cul de Sac” impresses on us the enormous sadness of returning to a changed boyhood home. This record is firmly, insistently about Ireland, a topic always present in Van Morrison’s work but never quite properly addressed until this point.

But in 1974, Ireland found itself in the throes of civil war, with Republicans, Unionists and the British Army all fighting for the fate of Ulster in the North.

It is remarkable that Van Morrison never once mentions this consuming struggle of which his hometown, Belfast, was the heart. Indeed, in his entire career, I know of only one reference to the Troubles, and that an oblique remark about orange boxes, typically associated with the Unionist Orange Order, in the song “Saint Dominic’s Preview” in 1972. Perhaps we might glean f r o m this

that Van Morrison believes in a nostalgic, romanticized conception of Ireland — a Celtic Ireland, the Ireland of Yeats and St. Brendan and Padraig Pearse. The past dominates all other substantive themes in Van Morrison’s work, and humans cannot escape the burden of the years that have come before. But we can hope for a shining future rejuvenation, and that hope permeates “Veedon Fleece.”

Like most music, the album is fundamentally about the search for some sort of meaning. But Van Morrison thinks differently about the origin of that meaning. For him, it is neither the words nor the melodies that render a song impactful, but rather the sounds that come from the singer’s mouth. Van Morrison’s career, in fact, seems like one long attempt to make words meaningless and sounds supreme, which he

Contact NOAH DAPONTE-SMITH at noah.daponte-smith@yale.edu .

// WIKIMEDIA

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TRANSPORTED WEEKEND

All across New Haven // 12-6 p.m.

Grab a map and guide from Artspace and see art across the Elm City.

WKND RECOMMENDS: Decompressing. School’s (basically) out.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND THEATER

A PLAY OF MANORS: “ARCADIA”AT THE REP // BY IVAN KIRWAN-TAYLOR As with most writers, Tom Stoppard sets out to prove that man does not live on bread alone. We need a little more, a little metaphysics, or it’s back to cattle grazing. “Arcadia” is a testament to that claim, and you’ll struggle to find a finer production of it than at the Yale Repertory Theater.

I was baffled, seduced and enchanted enough to go twice, once on a Friday, and the result was ultimately disheartening: After the show, I knew the rest of the weekend, whatever lay in store, would be a dull, meaningless and post-coital affair.

“Arcadia,” as with many of Stoppard’s works, is about subjunctive history: the what-ifs and the might-have-beens.

The play flicks between two time periods in the Coverley family’s countryside manor: 1809 and the present day. The current residents delve into the ambiguities of the manor’s predecessors, who themselves appear, whilst they muse on mathematics, literature and entropy.

Septimus (played by Thomas Pecinka DRA ‘15) shows spectacular disdain for his rival, Chater, and his capacity for condescension is astounding. The spit can be seen flying out of his mouth as he flawlessly enunciates every word with a mammoth breadth of intonation and intensity. Not only Septimus but the whole cast moves with exceptional style as they posture, sit and emote. In the 1809 setting, the stage resembles the many Gainsborough family portraits at the YCBA. However, director James Bundy doesn’t limit himself to the classical canon. As the scenes change, gentle minimalistic interludes coo to the audience, ambient musical numbers that could’ve come straight from Arcade Fire’s soundtrack to “Her.” Max Gordon Moore DRA ‘11 turns Valentine, the sardonic and impatient mathematician, into the most lovable arsehole possible. The callousness of his

lines is given an unprecedented warmth in their delivery — “of course she bloody couldn’t” is no longer rude, but somehow charming. He states (to an attentive Hannah) the beauty and wonder of both chaos theory and fractal geometry as the most miraculous phenomenon: “It’s how nature creates itself, on every scale, the snowflake and the snowstorm. It makes me so happy.”

Bundy opts to fill this speech with intermittent and unsuccessful attempts on Valentine’s part to kiss Hannah. The pathos and intensity of the speech are somewhat compromised, but the audience howls with laughter. Bundy is ruthlessly attentive throughout: When two characters from the different eras are reading onstage together, the books’ pages are turned in unison. Little details are spiced up: In the text, there is “Give Lightning [the tortoise] a kick on your way out.” In the play, “lightning” is replaced with “Gus,” the recalcitrant boy. Cruder joke, bigger laugh. Bernard (Stephen Barker Turner) fistbumps Chloe. The play is a little racier, and for something three hours long, these attention-seizing gestures are valuable.

The production’s energy doesn’t just come from gimmicks, but also from passion of character. When Bernard delivers a panegyric to literature and the individual talent, prompted by Valentine’s claim that “personalities” are “trivial,” “Arcadia” stops simmering and it starts to burn. Behind Turner’s razor-sharp articulation, one can feel the voice of a writer telling all the moderns who worship data and information to just fuck off: “A great poet is always timely. A great philosopher is an urgent need.

There’s no rush for Isaac Newton. We were quite happy with Aristotle’s cosmos. Personally, I preferred it.”

Hannah (René Augesen), the worldweary writer who is profoundly unable to love anyone, closes the math-versus-lit-

erature debate with exquisite mediation: “It’s all trivial — your grouse, my hermit, Bernard’s Byron. Comparing what we’re looking for misses the point. It’s wanting to know that makes us matter.”

This is Stoppard’s catechism. It’s the curiosity and the meaning we find, that is nourishing, not the object or art form to which it corresponds. Augusen, who plays Hannah, utters this speech with complete and perfect sincerity. There’s no one who won’t buy it.

“Arcadia” has the odd hitch. Some of the British accents aren’t quite there, but perhaps I’m only saying this as a Brit myself: to American ears unaccustomed to our eccentric breed of sharpened consonants and flattered vowels, they’ll go undetected. Every innovation of Bundy’s pays off, and we’re left with an original production of “Arcadia,” a rare feat indeed.

When Stoppard came to speak here last month and was asked what he looked for in performances of his plays, the reply was simply “clarity of speech.”

Stoppard would be delighted with what the Yale Rep has done with “Arcadia”: Despite the breathtaking speed at which the one-liners and aphorisms come, nothing is missed or blunted. The old world moves fluidly into the new and back again; Pecinka is debonaire, winning Septimus is counterbalanced by the wild pairing of Turner and Moore.

As the characters from both eras dance together, oblivious of each other, in the play’s impossibly magnificent finale, a pseudo-Santana guitar riff from a garden party slips into a Chopin waltz from the dining room. The lights fade to an indigo glimmer, and every working mechanism in the play is visually resolved: New and old are one, disorder and order are one — there is harmony.

Contact IVAN KIRWAN-TAYLOR at ivan. kirwan-taylor@yale.edu . // JOAN MARCUS

Talk of Our Town

Benefit of the “Doubt”

// BY JACOB POTASH

// BY LEAF ARBUTHNOT

// WA LIU

“Wherever you come near the human race, there’s layers and layers of nonsense,” says the character of Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.”

These words resonate with many of our day-to-day frustrations. It is the role of theater, though, to cut through that nonsense. The best art takes the human mess of experiences, beliefs and commitments and finds in it something intelligible and beautiful.

One leaves “Our Town” with a swelling sense of the preciousness of life: a feeling that is sentimental but also undeniable, like the play itself.

Set in Grover’s Corner, New Hampshire, it is really about every town, and every human community. It follows two next-door-neighbor families, who could stand in for any family.

The play’s strength is its universality.

Long Wharf Theatre’s production, which opened last week, tries to pull the play into the 21st century. About half the cast are people of color, for one thing; this diversity seems to be the result of choosing the best actors around rather than a political statement.

But there’s a fine line between universality and being generic, and other choices are less successful. The actors wear modern middle-class clothes — jeans, flannels, t-shirts — and in

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doing so take away the play’s specificity. In a work already in danger of feeling generic by attempting to represent everyone, the highly specific setting — small-town, turn-of-the-century New Hampshire — grounds “Our Town” and shouldn’t be forsaken so quickly.

The two lead actors’ approach suffers from the same miscalculation as the costume design: in trying to be every couple, they fail to register as convincingly unique people. They are appealing and charismatic but feel too much like caricatures.

What this production has in abundance is polish — from the sleek online ads that appeared on my computer last week (with a laudatory review by the New Haven Register, which also happens to be the show’s “Media Sponsor”), to the changeable backdrop and smooth lighting. The cast is strong, and the iconic role of Stage Manager, who acts as narrator and tour guide, is played with warmth and authority by Myra Lucretia Taylor.

The venue is an expansive room with seating on three sides of the stage. “Our Town” kicks off Long Wharf’s 50th season, and most of Wednesday’s audience came straight from a party marking the occasion, held for season-ticket holders. Illustrious guests included former New

Haven mayor John DeStefano Jr. and a nephew of Thornton Wilder himself. The audience’s ritzy evening wear made for a peculiar contrast with the working-class life celebrated in the play, but the intermission schmoozing revealed that these people made up their own kind of community. The woman I was seated next to told me many of the audience members had sent their kids to the same schools.

When originally staged, the play’s unconventional form was too progressive for many. Its risks still feel bold and fresh: the thoroughly broken fourth wall, the actors planted in the audience, the surreal cemetery scene, its division into acts called “Daily Life,” “Love and Marriage” and “Death and Dying.”

Yet “Our Town” is avant-garde without being cold. The third act builds to an intense emotional pitch and eventually had my whole row in tears. How many shows can you say are imaginative, warm, beautiful, heartbreaking? Those are adjectives I am reluctant to throw around, but “Our Town” demands that you give in to its all-embracing humanity, brought alive and writ large in this big-hearted production.

LIUWE TAMMINGA, ORGANIST Marquand Chapel // 5 p.m.

There’s a certain time of day, Sunday afternoons, that impresses, with the Heft of cathedral tunes.

Contact JACOB POTASH at jacob.potash@yale.edu .

Doubt can be a powerful force, capable of generating both curiosity and great cruelty. John Patrick Shanley’s play, “Doubt: A Parable,” which taps into the rich dramatic potentials of the emotion, and met with critical and popular success when the first production opened on Broadway in 2004. Set in 1964 at a Catholic school in the Bronx, “Doubt” exposes the ways in which suspicion can infect even the most sterile of environments, corrupting the purest of minds. Now the play comes to Yale through a production staged at the Jonathan Edwards Theater, with Michaela Johnson ’17 directing the four-person cast.

The cloistered setting of a rigidly traditional Catholic school in the Bronx offers the ideal playground for Shanley’s probing inquiry. As the play unfolds, we learn that doubts have been gnawing for some time upon the mind of the school’s staunchly moral principal, the bespectacled Sister Aloysius, played by Isabella Giovannini ’18. She fears that Father Flynn (Miles Walter ’18), the school’s charismatic priest and basketball coach, has behaved “inappropriately” with a boy: Donald Muller, the first black student to attend St. Nicholas.

These doubts crystallize into what seems like grim certainty as the play goes on. Our knee-jerk reaction, when presented with seemingly solid proof of Father Flynn’s perversion, is to feel revolted. Walter captures his character’s reluctance to reveal the true reason for the tête-à-tête, dithering by the desk of the principal’s study like a naughty pupil trying to escape punishment. This apparent manifestation of guilt plays off staunch certainty of Sister Aloysius.

In many ways, “Doubt” is a gift of a play. The cast is small, the staging simple — it largely unfolds in one sparsely furnished study with just four actors. The sound effects of schoolchildren playing outside among the birds, designed in this adaptation

by Sunnie Kim ’18, make up for the absence of real pupils. Aesthetically, the Yale Drama Coalition production punches above its weight, with perfectly judged costumes and on-point set design. When Muller’s mother

is hauled in for questioning by Sister Aloysius, for instance, her white gloves, lemony dress and tight grip on her showy handbag perfectly capture the quiet tragedy of the character.

The quality of the acting, too, is good, if variable. Walter plays the silken-voiced Father Flynn with zest and humor, for which audience members sitting at the back of the small auditorium are grateful, especially given that some of the lines delivered by the actresses are hard to hear.

Giovannini plays Sister Aloysius with believable sternness, which nonetheless thaws at crucial moments, allowing her more amusing lines to remain funny. She shows some unevenness in the role, however, as becomes painfully clear when she first confronts the suspected priest and adopts such a polite tone that her accusations later on in the conversation sound a little hollow.

Susannah Krapf ’17 plays Sister James with greater consistency. If at times her show of eagerness to be the teacher’s pet seems over-egged — and her tears, in the first scene, difficult to trace to an emotional source — she is still infused with all the gooey warmth and lip-biting humility that the part demands.

The hardest role of the play, perhaps, is that of Donald’s mother, Mrs. Muller, who must convincingly bat off the news that her son — the firstever black pupil at St. Nicholas Church School — has been (possibly) molested by his basketball coach. Mrs Muller faces a hellish dilemma: whether to let her boy carry on being — maybe — physically mistreated by an otherwise benign mentor, or whether to let the “secret” come out, and risk the child being beaten to death by his own father. Jamila Tyler ’15 convincingly communicates the difficulties of her predicament.

This production is a respectable, if imperfect, take on Shanley’s piece, that fulfills the crucial requirement that we remain, like the play’s characters, in a state of intolerable doubt from start to finish.

Contact LEAF ARBUTHNOT at leaf. arbuthnot@yale.edu .

WKND RECOMMENDS: Sleep. (Temporary, not eternal.)

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 12, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND BACKSTAGE

AMERICAN HISTORICAL MYTHOLOGIES: OLIVER STONE AND PETER KUZNICK // BY CAROLINE WRAY

O

liver Stone is a three-time Academy Award-winning filmmaker, the mind behind films such as Platoon, Born

on the Fourth of July and JFK. Peter Kuznick is a professor of American 20th century and nuclear history at American University, where he teaches the popular course “Oliver Stone’s America.”

When Stone visited Kuznick’s course in 2007, the seeds for a new project were planted. They spent the next five years producing The Untold History of the United States, a 10-hour, 10-part documentary series, as well as a 750-page book that examines American aggression and interventionism in the 20th century. WKND sat down with the duo in the lobby of the Study to chat about the art of documentary making, the importance of history education and contemporary American politics.

// WIKIMEDIA

Q: Untold Histories is both a documentary series and a book. Do you think these two media fulfill different functions in getting your story out?

PK: I think it’s two ways of conveying the same message. There’s actually another way, too, if you listen to the audiotapes. When I listen to the audio book, even after having written it, it’s still very powerful to me. But film has a different emotional resonance than reading a book, and when you put together the history with the skills of a brilliant filmmaker, each documentary episode feels like a feature film. Oliver did a great job of taking his words and my words, getting the visuals, and putting that together with the narration.

Q: Can you talk a little bit about your time at Yale, Mr. Stone? I know you started out here, and then finished at NYU. OS: I was over in the freshman dorm, McClellan? George Bush was in my class. I’ve been back a couple of times — my son almost came here but he went to Princeton instead …

I was here for the 2000 celebration, which was disgusting. I was literally turned off. The President [Levin] had

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turned into a money-grubber. It was the richest turnout I’d ever seen.

Bush the father gave a speech, and they were loving him, cheering him … It was a celebration of capitalism, the turn of the century, and I just felt so sick that week, just felt like it was such a surfeit of self-love.

Q: When you guys are presenting a documentary with an angle, or an interpretation, how do you interweave objective facts and their interpretations?

OS: He’s a history professor. He should answer that. It’s tricky.

PK: Even facts themselves are interpretation. When you get down to it, there are certain hardcore things, and those are uninteresting for the most part. History is all about interpretation, which is why it’s so silly when people call us revisionists, because historians are all, by definition, ‘revisionists.’ When people label us ‘revisionist,’ they mean ‘leftwing revisionist.’ At the University level, [Yale Professor of History and Cold War expert] John Gaddis is just as much of a revisionist as we are, but he’s revising from a different perspective. So I think that you’ve got to present the facts honestly, and then you’ve got to give your interpretation of what it means. We’re trying to show patterns across history. We start in the 1890s, we a c c e l e ra te with World Wa r I I and the

aftermath. We have an interpretation that says that the world could have turned out very differently and we would have been much better off had it turned out differently, and that the Cold War was effectively avoidable.

OS: There’s this very important issue of who did what, when.

When you say ‘facts’: The American settlers arrived here in ‘date, fact.’ The Indians massacred them in ‘date, fact.’ If you omit everything in between, about what the settlers did to the Indians, then of course it’s a massacre; of course it’s a simple act of revenge. So you have to be very careful when you say things, because omitting facts is a lot of what historians do.

PK: You have to be selective. All historians select facts that can reinforce their argument. It doesn’t mean we don’t see the other side; we know what Stalin did, we know how horrifically he treated people within his own country. But we can look at that and say, still, he was not imposing dictatorial regimes in the beginning.

There was a window there of about two years, when the United States and the Soviets could have worked out a different relationship.

Q: What are the differences in creating a feature documentary and creating a fictionalized feature film like JFK? Do you think one is more effective at getting a message across?

OS: Two different mediums, enormous differences. Drama films require condensation: You have actors, you have makeup, you have sets, you have to recreate reality.

With a documentary, presumably you already have a reality that you are interpreting, and realities exist in our archive footage. In order to do [curate archival footage in a compelling way], you’ve got to take a bigpicture-look at what really matters; we omitted certain things, absolutely, but I think we got the right picture and the right spirit. For me it was very exciting — not dealing with actors was great. We are dealing with a script, we are writing a narra-

tive line, and choice of words is crucial, as is fact-checking. In a feature film, nobody fact checks you. I enjoy [making both feature films and documentaries] enormously, because one requires an enormous amount of theatrical vantage and imagination and storytelling. Frankly, a documentary does too, but with a documentary I had the chance to be rigorous.

I basically went back and got a postgraduate degree in history with Mr. Kuznick.

PK: He got a B. OS: I learned a lot about American history, which I hadn’t known, even though I’d lived through it. it.

PK: Okay, he got an A. I just raised

Q: So, how do you think your experiences as a Vietnam War veteran influence how you look at things, like history and American politics?

OS: You have to realize I grew up Republican. I might have been George Bush in 2000 had I not lived my life and [concluded] that a large part of what I learned in American history was mythology, and not true.

Vietnam felt patriotic at the time, but everyone who actually went there saw something else. I think that’s true of every war we’ve fought so far.

And it’s not just war; it’s also domestic policies, our actions and covert intelligence to overthrow regimes.

The way we teach American history is part of that cover-up. So I reached this place where I was very uncomfortable with what was being done.

I feel that our greatness has been wholly compromised.

Q: It’s interesting that you use that word, ‘mythology’ in the context of war education. How else do you think that our history education today is a ‘mythology’?

PK: A lot of the project was inspired

by Oliver looking at his daughter’s high school history textbook, and being disappointed by what she was learning and what she wasn’t learning … You run into two problems:

One, that people know almost no history, and secondly, that the little bit they do know is usually wrong.

Q: You guys have called Obama a “wolf in sheep’s clothing.” Do you stand by that, and what would you like to see in the 2016 election?

PK: I’d like to see “ABC,” Anybody But Clinton, on the Democratic side.

She is just much too hawkish for my taste. Obama is a colossal disappointment. Maybe we should have known better. There was something so compelling, so attractive, after those years of Bush … just Obama’s intelligence, the fact that he was so articulate, that he had a vision, and he seemed to be a man of peace, and that he’s African American. That combination was very attractive to us. The only thing I like about Hillary is her gender. I think it’s time to have a woman President, but someone else, like Elizabeth Warren. Obama wasn’t as bad as he might have been, given the pressures he was under, but he wasn’t as strong. If Obama had been President in 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he would have listened to the generals, we would have invaded Cuba.

OS: I want to make one addendum, because I don’t want to seem wholly negative: I’m not saying ‘anybody but Hillary.’ I accept that it seems inevitable that it will be her.

So how do you live with her? Obviously you hope for amelioration, you hope that her foreign policy might be more nuanced than it’s been in the past. The problem is [that there’s] a pattern in American history, starting in 1894 [that accelerated us into] a national security state and then a global security state. It’s not [Clinton’s] fault, it’s almost like she’s been brainwashed; she just has to go along with that line. You can’t get along on either party without increasing military superiority. The problem’s not Hillary — how does anyone come up against what this country has become?

Contact CAROLINE WRAY at caroline.wray@yale.edu .

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