WEEKEND

WEEKEND // FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2014

PRESIDENTS AND

PRECEDENTS

What does history tell us about Yale’s future under Salovey? // BY SCOTT STERN PAGE 3

SALIVATING B6,7

SELFIE

TASTY TREATS

GONE TOO SOON

SWEET TRANSVESTITES

WKND will make your mouth water with reviews of New Haven eateries.

Consider the cancelled TV show: Jackson McHenry mourns the untimely demise of “Selfie,” “A to Z” and more.

“The Rocky Horror Show” titillates and captivates.

B10

SEX

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND VIEWS

BUCKLEY

DON’T SIGN ON THE DOTTED LINE // BY ELENA SAAVEDRA BUCKLEY

// ASHLYN OAKES

SIN

I remember kindergarten as a blurry collection of dotted lines. They sat between two solid ones on the soft, beige paper of handwriting worksheets, the kind that would disintegrate under too much pressure from an eraser. In class, we spent afternoons hanging letters on them as if on a clothesline. We wrote our names over and over, my papers reading “E-L-E-N-A” down the length of a page, shaky in dull graphite.

By age five, the letters flowed through my pencil with ease. My classmates and I had it down. After all that practice, we’d learned who we were, a lesson more urgent than arithmetic, reading or the differences between triangles and squares. It sat right there on the page. By age ten, I’d perfected my signature in pen — a fourth grader, ready to sign a check. Which, of course, quickly leads to having a job, living alone and owning a dog, right? To being the full, complete person I always wanted to be, without delay.

When practicing turns into doing.

Now, I rarely use pencils, and I certainly write those five letters less often. I add them to the bottom of an email or the top of a test.

But the dotted lines have stuck around, I think, especially for us Americans. We’ve been taught to be individuals since kindergarten, taught that learning to be ourselves is part of growing up. As we outgrow the handwriting worksheets, though, we outgrow their simplicity, too. The search for an identity can become rabid and consuming, more a practice of collecting activities and accolades than building a relationship with the world.

The dotted lines showed up in FroCo meetings at the beginning of the year. The question “What’s your spirit animal?” made its rounds, and we giddied up to claim our own, choosing rabbits, barn owls or emperor penguins. *That’s me!* The animals became our new handwriting worksheets, our names scrawled in steadier graphite than before.

The dotted lines edged the campus walkways at the beginning of the semester, as some ran to auditions and others to interviews. *That’s me!* We dug our pencils into classes and clubs, jokes and subcultures, friends and acquaintances. *That’s me!* In college, we have the time, space and

privilege to worry about our “me.” And, you know what? It’s exhausting. Useless, most of the time. We collage together preferences and accomplishments, hoping we’ll end up with a presentable picture. While eating dinner one night, my friend leaned back in a Berkeley rolling chair and sighed. “I don’t know what makes me happy,” she said. She furrowed her eyebrows, more annoyed than upset.

I looked at her and wondered if I had my own answer.

Later that week, I went to Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia” and sat in the balcony. My eyes latched onto the actors and their red tailcoats, and my ears heard the words so fully I could feel the spaces between them. It was me and the lit stage, the rest of the theater a cloud of negative space. When it broke for intermission, though — when every light in the house went black and the white noise of applause expanded to fill the space — I felt small and suddenly not myself. The moment reduced the entire audience into one pair of ears and eyes. Every person at the play heard the same roar and saw the same darkness. It

erased whatever lingered of “me.”

I would tell my friend in Berkeley that I call that feeling, the understanding of my own anonymity, happiness. It’s a kind we often don’t allow ourselves to know among the dotted lines, and it’s one I found only by accident. We rarely hear that being part of the crowd is something to practice as frequently as being an individual. We expect a clear, tangible solution to the question of happiness, one that will come with auditions and interviews. When we get the chance to blend in, though, it’s a release from the whirlpool in which we get stuck — our own obsession with who we are. Instead of worrying about creating the best picture, the perfect collage, we’re content to be a part of the one that surrounds us.

I think we missed out on that feeling while tracing our names over and over. So, while I won’t stop writing “E-L-E-N-A,” I’ll write other things, too.

Contact ELENA SAAVEDRA BUCKLEY at elena.saavedrabuckley@yale.edu .

Back to Everyone’s Favorite Worst Restaurant // BY LUCAS SIN This is how the kitchen boys’ nights out end: We stagger through double doors, sit at the same greasy linoleum table, order in invented Chinese dialects. This is how we punctuate our whisky-soaked nights on the town: curry beef stew noodle with chow fun, cha jung mein with hot oil and hock kian shrimp noodle with Cantonese noodle. All of them extra spicy. And finally, after all the steamy bowls: heads thrown back in croons of gustation, laughter with our bellies hoisted in the air, heads soaking in lingering fantasies of MSG-enriched noodle soup. We clap one another on the back and tell ourselves, again, that yes — we’ll make a habit of coming back.

And we did. For us, late-night slurps became a fixture. Sure, as we left the kitchen, sometimes I would get a text — one of us was bringing along some little shrimp from somewhere else. New waitstaff, valued customer, new girlfriend, new girlfriend of a visiting cousin (or something) and they would

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never understand. It’s not authentic. Dude.

The owners are mean. Dude. They only have two stars on Yelp. Duuude. Then we would drag them down Broadway, past the fancy Frenchy Belgium Maison de la Casa House, sit them down and order for them, without a glance at the menu. Curry beef stew noodle with chow fun, cha jung mein with hot oil, and hock kian shrimp noodle with Cantonese noodle. All of them spicy.

Sure, the establishment is easy to hate.

Their dumpling skin is thick as leather. Most of the food is bland. Service is a circus: It’s caught between the unresponsive mother and her eleven-year-old son, haughty, selfindulgent and gnawing at your heels like a hairless dog. The bathroom is always locked.

The walls are covered in stock photos, printed on budget printer paper. The gray floor tiles are always greased with spilled lo mein.

But, still, we always come back.

Because Aristotle said that excellence comes of habit. Because Kierkegaard wrote

JAZZ AT THE UNDERBROOK The Underbrook // 8:00 p.m.

Relax with Yale’s groovy new jazz ensemble, Newspeak!

that selfhood appears only through repetition. Because Aquinas’s virtues follow from habit. Because Hume’s model of mind is rooted in repetition. Because for Bourdieu, habit and regularity is the basis of our very social construct.

But also because there is something to be said for being a regular — for coming back again and again, even if you’re coming back to everyone’s favorite worst restaurant. To be a regular is to get in sync with a restaurant’s rhythm. Returning to face the same bowl of noodles, the same waitstaff and the same locked bathroom door isn’t unlike returning again and again to a painting. Repeated aesthetic experiences allow for the comfort necessary to see a certain beauty. A Mondrian canvas won’t yield to you in a single sitting.

Nor will hock kian shrimp noodle.

Regularity encourages thoughtful interaction with the noodles themselves — that is, spend a few moments tasting. Let that rich braised brisket melt away. Slurp, savor those

noodles anointed in sweet oils. Let loose your longing.

Nowadays we like to ride on trends. We hop from restaurant to restaurant, order the dish recommended by Yelp, snap a photo, then move on to somewhere and something else with someone else. But still, the kitchen boys come back to the restaurant on Elm Street. Maybe regularity does indeed breed a certain comfort. Comfort to hate, comfort to love. Comfort to sit at the same table, to mirror the obtrusive service with your own rambunctiousness, and of course, comfort to dig through the menu, make it past the bastardized Chinese staples and unlock its hidden delights: Curry beef stew noodle with chow fun, cha jung mein with hot oil and hock kian shrimp noodle with Cantonese noodle. All of them spicy.

Contact LUCAS SIN at lucas.sin@yale.edu .

WKND RECOMMENDS: Crying in the Sterling Stacks, particularly on the fifth floor.

Fifth floor is key.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND COVER

PERSONALITY OR CIRCUMSTANCE // BY SCOTT STERN

// ZISHI LI

n Feb. 10, 1950, A. Whitney Griswold ’29 GRD ’33 and his wife, Mary, headed to New York for an evening of theater and fine dining. After seeing “Caesar and Cleopatra,” Whitney — a young Yale history professor — and Mary decided to stay over in New York and have lunch the next day with Roswell Ham, then-President of Mount Holyoke College. After hearing all about Ham’s life as a college president, Whitney remarked to Mary, “Thank God we’re not in that racket.”

Griswold had no reason to worry. Though Yale’s president, Charles Seymour 1908 GRD 1911, had just announced his retirement, Griswold was a highly unlikely choice for the job. He had never been interviewed for the position. He was too young, just 43. He was something of a nonconformist, at least

by Yale standards: a solid Democrat on a faculty full of Republicans. And though Griswold had sterling credentials — a bachelors and doctorate from Yale (the country’s first ever PhD. in American Studies) and nearly two decades of celebrated teaching — he genuinely did not want the job.

Yet, when he returned to the Elm City later that evening, Griswold learned that the Yale Corporation, the University’s highest governing body, had chosen him to run the nation’s third-oldest university. “When the Corporation announced its choice,” Yale’s late, great historian Brooks Mather Kelley ’53 wrote in “Yale: A History,” “many observers could not have been more surprised if Yale had chosen God.” As president, Griswold remained intensely focused on Yale’s academics. He dismissed extracurriculars as “Bonesy bullshit” and “that Dink Stover crap,” as historian Jerome Karabel recounted in “The Chosen.” Practicing what he preached, Griswold spent much of his time engaged in scholarly pursuits.

“It was his nature. He was a scholar — he liked to think; he liked to write,” recalls Henry “Sam” Chauncey ’57, who became a Yale administrator during Griswold’s later years and eventually served as the University Secretary.

“Whit had, generally speaking, one appointment in the morning and one appointment in the afternoon — if he had to give a speech or go to a dinner or something at night, he didn’t usually have the afternoon appointment. And he generally spent a lot of his time talking to faculty members, and occasionally to students, but the rest of the time he sat at his desk with a yellow legal pad and wrote beautiful essays or statements.”

In the six decades that have passed since that winter day in 1950, six men have served as Yale’s president: Griswold (1951-1963), Kingman Brewster ’41 (1963-1977), A. Bartlett Giamatti ’60 GRD ’64 (1978-1986), Benno Schmidt ’63 LAW ’66 (1986-1992), Richard Levin GRD ’74 (1993-2013), and Peter Salovey GRD ’86 (2013-present). (I am not including in this count Hanna Holborn Gray or Howard Lamar, both of whom served only briefly as acting president.)

From Griswold’s day to Salovey’s, the job’s demands have exploded. The president has gone from a solitary, contemplative figure to a manager,

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speaker and fundraiser with an international profile. Keeping that in mind, the question I posed to Salovey and the two-dozen other individuals interviewed for this article was this: how has the changed nature of the presidency affected the president’s ability to effect change?

Salovey has only just begun his presidency, but his popularity seems virtually limitless. However, in our modern, international, highly corporatized, highly bureaucratized Yale, will he be able to make the changes that Yale demands?

Full disclosure: I’ve sometimes been pretty critical of Salovey in my staff column for the News.

I’ve been vocal about these changes, the ones (I feel) Yale demands. In writing this piece, I’ve tried to remain constantly aware of my own potential biases. This piece began as an effort to understand why the changes I’ve wanted are not coming to fruition. Surprising no one more than myself, I’ve come to believe that the answer is not a matter of personalities, but one of circumstances.

The constraints Salovey faces can seem, to an outsider, mind-numbing. He works around the clock, nearly every day of the year. He treks across the country and around the world on Yale business.

“There aren’t many breaks in the day,” Salovey told me. “And I wish there were more, because what I love is writing and speaking.”

“You know,” Salovey continued, “the idea of a president sitting alone, smoking a pipe, reading Jonathan Edwards, and slowly, with a quill, writing a speech — that is so far from how I spend my day, I can’t tell you. But at some point in Yale’s history that is what presidents did. Those days are over.” *** During the 1950s, Yale was all male and virtually all white. Private school students made up more than 60 percent of the Class of 1957 (a figure considered startlingly low), and most of these came from just a handful of elite prep schools. Almost 100 students came from Andover each year.

At the head of this monochromatic student body, Griswold remained a traditionalist. He was largely unconcerned with the makeup of the student population, but rather wanted the University to return to its academic roots. So Griswold eliminated anything that smacked of vocational training or interdisciplinary focus: the teaching program, the transportation program, the alcohol studies program, even the renowned international relations institute (which hastily decamped for Princeton).

“From the day he got here,” recalled Chauncey, “Griswold started what he called ‘purifying’ the University … He said, ‘Yale is going to be departments: history, English, physics, and it’s going to be ‘pure.’’ And he cleaned everything out.”

This decision-making process was far from atypical. On April 4, 1959, the Yale Corporation gathered to decide the names of Yale’s 11th and 12th residential colleges, at that point still two years away. Eventually, of course, they settled on Morse and Ezra Stiles. But unlike today — when there is no shortage of debate over the new colleges’ names — Griswold named Morse and Stiles largely on his own, Sterling Professor Emeritus of English and former Stiles Master Traugott Lawler told me.

HOLD ’EM YALE

WHC // 7:00 p.m.

“A romantic comedy about an Argentine gaucho who comes to New Haven, falls in love with a professor’s daughter and fights for gridiron glory while staying one step ahead of the police.”

*** Times have changed. The makeup of the University has changed. And the presidential decisionmaking process has changed.

“Let me say something very clearly,” Salovey told me. “I don’t want to go back to those more homogeneous times, ever. But I think in a more homogeneous university, everybody sort of comes at it from the same point of view, so when the president says, ‘Here’s what we’re doing,’ people go, ‘Sounds like a pretty good idea.’”

On October 8, 2014, Salovey emailed the extended Yale community, soliciting suggestions for the names of Yale’s as-yet unbuilt 13th and 14th residential colleges. This came after years of intense speculation over the names, which the Corporation has yet to select.

For years, the News has seen scores of op-eds about the college names (including two of my own). As early as 2008, the Yale Alumni Magazine had created a “Name those colleges!” challenge for its readers. And after the October email went out, someone plastered campus with “Grace Hopper College” flyers. Students and alumni want to weigh in; the power to make big decisions, it would seem, is far more constrained by a world of instantaneous access to information and a multitude of demanding stakeholders.

“I can’t just announce something and expect it’s going to happen,” Salovey says. “I can champion it, I can put some resources behind it, I can go out and try to raise money to support it … But I can’t expect that by presidential fiat it will just happen.” *** When Griswold died in 1963, Kingman Brewster took over the job. This was, Chauncey told me, “the point where life [was] getting kind of exciting in universities.” The burgeoning Civil Rights and Women’s Rights Movements were underway.

Into this just-simmering cauldron of change came Brewster, a scion of the old, patrician elite.

Brewster had earned his bachelors at Yale in 1941, but then decamped for Harvard Law School, where he was a student and then a professor. Griswold brought him in as provost in 1960.

Too slowly for the radical students, but far too quickly for the disgruntled alumni, Brewster began to change Yale. In 1967, he announced new admissions standards, which opened the school up to less advantaged students. Two years later, Yale finally admitted women.

Brewster was not a radical. He frequently vacillated and evolved on the issues for which his stances are supposedly well known. Nonetheless, he was a decidedly and consciously political president. Over the years, he developed a well-known oeuvre of provocative statements. This came to define his persona, and his legacy. “[Brewster] was an unmistakable figure. He was not a great, charismatic public presence. But many revered him,” says Sterling Professor of English David Bromwich ’73 GRD ’77.

Whereas Griswold had occasionally spoken out (on, say, McCarthyism and free speech), Brews-

ter made headlines by denouncing the Vietnam War and even the president. On the front page of the News in 1972, for instance, in a statement demanding respect for free speech, he wrote, “I think it is terribly important to avoid playing into the [Nixon] Administration’s hands…” In perhaps his most famous moment as president, on one rainy night in 1970, Brewster told a crowd of thousands that he was “skeptical of the ability of black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the United States.” The speech set off a firestorm; United States Vice President Spiro Agnew personally called for Brewster’s resignation. *** Would a college president today speak out on a controversial national issue?

According to Joseph Zolner SOM ’84, senior director of the Harvard Institutes for Higher Education and an expert on university leadership, the changing role of the university president has constrained political activism.

“Because there are now so many stakeholders and interest group,” he says, “It’s becoming riskier to stick your neck out and take stands on issues of public import.”

Marvin Krislov ’82 LAW ’88, President of Oberlin College, brought up another factor: political activism depends to a large extent on the individual.

Vietnam was highly relevant to Brewster’s job, he says — there was a draft. Nonetheless, Krislov added, “Many of us would not feel that it is within our expertise and our purview to speak out on, let’s say, whether the United States should intervene militarily in some particular region of the world.

“Some of us might,” Krislov continued, “but some of us might feel that wouldn’t be” — he paused for a moment — “prudent.”

Salovey is not an apolitical figure. He has spoken out prominently on the issue of socioeconomic diversity in higher education, on federal funding for universities and on immigration reform for highly skilled workers. Still, there are certainly topics he just won’t touch. “I am most comfortable speaking about issues that concern higher education,” Salovey told the News in March 2014. And it’s true: He has not been vocal about national issues on the scale of those that Brewster famously addressed.

But why is that?

“I can’t think of a president since Kingman who has gotten as much publicity for speaking out on hot-button issues,” says former Deputy Provost Charles Long. “And I don’t think it has anything to do with changing circumstances. I think it has to do with Kingman as a man.”

Yet to some, circumstances are a factor that demand political nimbleness — circumstances like the president’s role as a fundraiser.

I asked Professor John Merriman whether the president today would speak out on an issue like Vietnam.

“I don’t know,” he responded, “but I would say probably not. They would say, ‘We’ve got big money down in Texas.’”

SEE PRESIDENT PAGE 8

WKND RECOMMENDS: Accidentally crying during that Virginia Woolf lecture. “Was there no safety? No learning by heart of the ways of the world?”

PAGE B4

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND COMMINGLES

A NEW HAVEN FOR THE ARTS // BY MADELINE KAPLAN

The summer before her sophomore year, Emily Hays ’16 went to India. And there, like so many literary and cinematic heroines, she had a revelation.

She was trying to learn Hindi, but found it difficult to practice in the new environment. So, she said, she had to speak to strangers. Though her conversations were often short and rudimentary, they helped her feel connected to her temporary home.

“Those tiny interactions,” she said, “made me feel more a part of that community than I ever did in New Haven.”

Back in Connecticut for the fall semester, Hays felt a “moral obligation” to extend that spirit of community. A lifelong arts enthusiast (music and art classes as a kid, a few art classes and various music ensembles in college), she wanted to foster a spirit of creativity and cooperation right here in New Haven.

And that’s how Blue Haven, a new student organization encouraging artistic and creative collaboration, was born. *** Yale students are ostensibly pretty good at talking to strangers. They ace college interviews, charm their friends’ parents and schmooze with professors during office hours. But casual conversations between Yalies and New Haven residents unaffiliated with the University are relatively rare.

Hays thinks that should change.

At the start of her sophomore year, inspired by her time abroad, she resolved to build a community in her adopted Connecticut home. She wanted to connect students with local New Haven artists. And after a semester of work, Hays put together a show in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. The collaborative performance, called a “commingling,” bridged the town-gown gap, combining a variety of artistic modes including song, dance and poetry. “It’s about getting performers and artists together in the same space,” Hays said.

Comminglings are informal and often improvised. Anyone who wants to participate is welcome, and Blue Haven members encourage attendees to perform in pairs, creating mixed media duets.

Sarah Lemieux, a New Havenbased musician and music teacher, performed at that first event in January. During the

s h o w, she took part in an impromptu collaboration with Dave Harris ’16, a Yale spoken word poet.

“He asked me to accompany him,” Lemieux said, “and we just came up with it on the spot.”

Alexander Dubovoy ’16, a seasoned jazz musician and Blue Haven’s publicity director, also performed at the original commingling. He said the show was a fun opportunity to branch out from usual on-campus creative circles. Plus, “We got a great response from the Yale community.”

Following that first show’s success, Hays realized she could do even more for the New Haven arts scene. She orchestrated a second event in the spring semester, an art exhibition. Still, it was a fledgling endeavor, and much of the organizational work fell to her.

Today, Hays works with a group of equally dedicated students — Blue Haven has grown into a full-blown, Yale-approved organization. (The name doesn’t have any particular meaning. “One of my friends just came up with a series of puns on New Haven,” Hays explained.)

The group’s membership has expanded in the last year, and so has its scope.

“Now it’s not just about being in the same space,” Hays said. “It’s about creating new art together, through combined inspiration.

Though Blue Haven remains in its first semester of official existence, Hays and her fellow arts enthusiasts are already planning several events. Their first collaborative project will involve Kingdom Café, a regular open mic for New Haven youth, on Nov. 21 at the Afro-American Cultural Center.

“Kingdom Cafe gathers upwards of 80 people a month, most of whom are high school aged,” said Kingdom Cafe leader George Black. The students are free to sing and

dance a n d s h a r e poetry or visual art, he explained.

Now, Yale students will also get to perform at their November event. Blue Haven and Kingdom Cafe members will be paired for their performances, said Black.

“It gives me great joy to see a partnership forming where New Haven peoples, including Yale students, can be exposed to the powerful expression of New Haven’s youth.”

In January, Blue Haven will form a similar partnership with The Future Project, a mentorship group for teens that encourages creativity and innovation. With these new affiliations, Hays aims to cement institutional relationships as well as personal ones.

She’d like to ensure that students and local artists continue collaborating in coming years, long after she graduates. *** Still, the 313-year relationship between Yale and New Haven is, in a word, complicated. It’s a well-known trope: disharmony between the University and the city beyond its glorious, swipeaccess-protected gates.

“A lot of the time, people talk about New Haven in terms of crime statistics,” said Hays. She thinks that some Yale students consider it a sinister place, a reputation reinforced by worried parents and out-dated college guidebooks.

As a result, many students feel like they exist in the “Yale Bubble,” rarely leaving central campus and almost never engaging with the community at large.

To Lucy Wang ’17, a student in Morse, the city does feel fractured. “It’s absurd that I don’t feel safe walking two blocks off campus,” she said. “I once talked to someone from New Haven who described Yale as a castle that no one else can access. It’s like two different worlds.”

But many on-campus groups are working to improve the relationship between city and university. Becca Steinberg ’15, president of the New Haven Urban Debate League, believes that students should expand the way they think about the Elm City.

“It’s not like we’re just at Yale for four years,” she said. “We’re in New Haven for four years.”

The Urban Debate League partners with New Haven high schools and middle schools to provide debate coaching and host monthly competitions. That way, local students can have more opportunities to

debate, and Yale students can build long-term relationships with their mentees.

Steinberg feels a sense of responsibility to the city. “We have an obligation to reach out and really interact with the broader community,” she said.

“It’s important to build that mutual back-and-forth.”

For Blue Haven, that mutual back-and-forth is a symbiosis among all kinds of artists. And Hays believes that this cooperation benefits artists and audiences alike. A student who sees friends collaborating with local performers might realize that community extends beyond the four corners of a residential college (37 corners if you’re in Morse or Stiles).

“There’s a common idea that New Haven is a security problem. This is a way of counteracting that conception,” Hays said.

“There is so much richness here.” *** While Yalies are perpetually inundated with Facebook invites to improv and YSO shows, they don’t always remember the larger arts community that surrounds them, said Dubovoy. “If you weren’t looking for it,” he said, “you wouldn’t necessarily find it.”

“I know of some local art spaces,” Wang said. “But other than that, I sort of assume that arts-related people would have something to do with Yale.”

In reality, outside the Gothicand-Sometimes-Georgian Bubble, local artists are thriving. “It’s a really vibrant and diverse community,” Lemieux said.

She named a variety of musical spaces, the majority of which are probably unknown to the average Yale student. “You have a fantastic symphony orchestra, a bunch of little hole-in-the-wall venues.

Then there are more established places like Café Nine and Firehouse 12,” she said.

That vibrant and diverse community is also larger than some might think. According to its website, the Arts Council of Greater New Haven serves around 130,000 artists, arts organizations and the general public each year.

Even if you missed Aaron Carter at Toad’s, you still have plenty of opportunities to sample New Haven’s arts scene.

Kingdom Café holds open-mic nights once a month. From Nov. 19 to Jan. 2 the Arts Council will host an art exhibition called More Than a Face, featuring self-portraiture without depictions of the face. And each summer, a huge number of musicians and artistic visionaries attend the International Festival of Arts and Ideas.

Student groups and professional ones have always had resonant interests and aims. The problem, Dubovoy said, was that “no one had combined all of these goals into a forum for interplay between Yale and New Haven.”

That’s where Blue Haven comes in. But even with the group’s early successes, it’s still trying to gain a dedicated following at Yale and in the surrounding city. Hays and her companions are currently looking for interested Yalies with organizational and coordinating skills, as well as potential performers.

The foundation is in place.

Members will keep commingling.

And with each new partnership and performance, that Yale Bubble will get a little thinner.

“I want to make sure this group lasts,” said Hays. “We want to create spaces where New Haven and Yale people feel really comfortable together. Where they’re creating together all the time.”

Contact MADELINE KAPLAN at madeline.kaplan@yale.edu .

// JENNIFER DAVIES

FRI D AY NOVEMBER

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YALE DANCERS FALL SHOW ECA // 8:00 p.m.

Everything is beautiful at the ballet.

Graceful men lift lovely girls in white.

WKND RECOMMENDS: Kinda sniffling on the bench by the Grove Street Cemetery. Remember: The Dead Shall be Raised.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND ARTS

PHOTOGRAPHY OF YALE: AN EXPLORATION // BY SOFIA BRAUNSTEIN

I arrived 30 minutes before closing time, a guard gruffly informed me. I shuffled into the delicate lighting of the Yale University Art Gallery lobby from the gorgeous darkening day outside. Making my way to a map of the YUAG I located my destination: Photography, 4th floor. As I traipsed through gallery after gallery, a guard directed me each time as they learned about my destination via their headset. Each time, they puzzled as to why I would want to go to that exhibit in particular. Finally, I located the Yale photography gallery: a small, highceilinged, windowless room right in front of the elevator, containing nothing but a bench at its center with 20 to 30 photographs hanging on the walls; a sort of afterthought.

But “Photography at Yale” is anything but an afterthought. It’s the product of Margaret Neil ’14, whose senior thesis explored the history of the photography program at the School of Art. The exhibit serves as an account of Yale’s recent yet rich history in photography, one that is both national and international, gelatin silver and chromogenic. The photos span from 1929, before Yale even had a photography program, to 2013 and provide glimpses of different techniques and time periods.

A quick counterclockwise turn around the room reveals that the arrangement is neither chronological nor topical; rather, it’s explorational. Without hidden agenda or intended meaning, it invites the mind to wander. Although each photo forms part of the collection, the nontraditional arrangement allows for each to be considered within its own context, unadulterated by the significance of the neighboring works. Almost every photograph is shot by a different photographer, providing a small taste of the artists’ work and their particu-

lar view of the world.

Gracing the back wall, an untitled work

by Gregory Crewdson ART ‘88 is one of the gallery’s richest photos in both color and implication, graces the back wall. It’s the first photograph you see when you walk into the gallery, a stark dark rectangle softly lit from behind. Upon closer inspection, blues and greens emerge from the shadows, depcting a backwoods lot with a makeshift shelter, tucked among the branches, set between a misplaced suburban neighborhood and a misty river. A lone figure faces away from the camera, his naked back softly illuminated by the fading light. The photograph contains both a dreamlike essence and a noticeable tension. Its sheer window-like size invites the viewer to immerse herself in the scene.

A photograph to its right, the work of Laura Letinsky’s steady hand, depicts a more intimate scene: a couple sprawled on a bed, the man on his back with his arm bent behind his head, glancing casually at the woman before him, her shirt off and her back toward the camera. The photograph, drawn from a collection entitled “Venus Inferred,” lives up to the series’ name.

There’s an ease to the unspoken conversation within the photo, a love implied in a glance we cannot fully catch.

Each photograph is a burst, a moment in time, a collection of photons trapped with the click of a shutter; each is meant to fuel conversation and exploration. Tucked away on the top floor in the back corner of the art gallery, “Photography at Yale” gets little viewing. During the half-hour I spent wandering around that one room, several heads popped in to investigate only to quickly deduce that the exhibit simply wasn’t worth their time, even as entertainment during the five-minute wait for the elevator. But one short glance misses

entirely the value contained within that one windowless room, the possible discussions and wandering thoughts, the brief escape into a space where any idea is accepted and no perception is wrong.

As I was about to leave at the behest of a grumpy guard, I looked back at the lonely bench at the center of the room. Ignoring the guard’s complaints, I sat down, sinking into the comfy black leather and calmly glancing around the room. When I finally left, I knew I would be coming back to peer through these photographical windows, to find new insights and to further explore the hidden realities contained behind the clear, reflective glass. // ELENA MALLOY

Contact SOFIA BRAUNSTEIN at sofia. braunstein@yale.edu .

A Dead End into a Dark Place: Leon Botstein on the Humanities // BY NICHOLAS STEWART

An Uncovering

// ELENA MALLOY

// BY DALIA WOLFSON The last time I altered a book, the change was a tea stain and the move did not require much imagination. But after seeing “Odd Volumes: Book Art from the Allan Chasanoff Collection” at the Yale University Art Gallery, which runs until Feb. 1, I’ve been challenged to view material books as foundations for creativity. There are many dictionaries in this exhibit, but the Noah Websters here are the artists. The skeletal definition of a book is something with leaves — with their recto and verso sides — and a spine to gather the pages together. And then there is the other necessary, universal experience of the book for the reader — the mystery of the closed book, and the revelation of the book opened. The objects on display explore the space created by that experience: They stretch, alter and redefine what it means to “open” a book.

Many of the pieces here are entry points to other worlds through form rather than content. Megan Williams’s “Altered Book Landscapes” and Guy Laramee’s “Vulcan” and “Sinking” were both invitations to envision a paper-thin environment, topography made of paper. Pamela Paulsrud’s “Landscape Narratives II” was probably the most delicate act of alteration: a series of book-stones polished into sedimentary rocks, with colorful bindings deposited on top of white sandstone pages. James Elaine’s “Worm Hole Book” and Jana Kluge’s “Book written by the Sea” evoked some very hungry caterpillars and ocean underworlds, respectively. And one could even be transported to the Peabody Museum not too far away: Elaine’s “Triumph of Venice” contained a pressed bird (feathers and all), while his “Turtle Book” held a mediumsized flattened turtle. Don’t read this one at the dinner table, kids.

Whereas many objects in the exhibit were altered nearly beyond recognition, there were

SATURDAY NOVEMBER

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two types of printed matter that remained identifiable: bibliographical and Biblical works. Dictionaries and Deuteronomy, encyclopedias and Exodus — these are some of the pieces that claim to serve as reference material for the world. Yet in “Odd Volumes”, these texts that control and claim wisdom are exposed to natural and manmade manipulation. Linda Ekstrom’s “Work of the Bees” involved a rewriting of the Bible by bees, with chapter headings obscured by honeycomb.

Doug Beube’s “Books of Knowledge Standing Up Against the Elements” showed burnt, battered encyclopedias huddling close. Terri Garland’s “Square Bible,” a survivor of Hurricane Katrina, sat pained but intact and, perhaps, ultimately hopeful. Scott McCarney’s “New Age Encyclopedia Index” ecstatically unraveled its entries all over the place. We are left to judge whether this artistic exploration of books of knowledge is chaos or creativity.

I finally reached a table and found objects that I could interact with — “You can touch these!” — so I promptly put away my laminated gallery guide. I peeped through a keyhole in a dictionary at a dictionary smaller still. I crinkled my eyes and played stopmotion with flipbooks for grown-ups. Finally I reached a large purple box with a profusion of flaps. In it were a series of purple books, spines with a fragmented letter apiece.

“Suripesi!” they said, botching the spelling. I could see a lonely serif on one end, waiting to be reunited with an erstwhile “E.” It was reassuring to see how human hands had opened these books and very humanly re-shelved them the wrong way. I did not rearrange them.

A slim, closed volume is always a surprise.

Contact DALIA WOLFSON at dalia.wolfson@yale.edu .

YALE-PRINCETON JOINT GLEE CLUB CONCERT

Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College and the conductor and artistic director of the American Symphony Orchestra, began his talk on Wednesday night at the Yale Center for British Art by warning the audience that he intended to “infuriate you as much as I can.” Between the title of the night’s talk, “Beyond Fashion and Fear: The Future of the Humanities in the American University” and his opening promise, Botstein provided a humorous opening for what is hardly a funny concern for many humanities students: that their degrees are irrelevant and their prospects poor for finding paid work in a depressed economy.

Botstein’s opening remark in some sense typifies the man himself, who is well known for his outspoken disregard for CollegeBoard, the SAT and college rankings publications. Botstein was ironic throughout his talk, moving effortlessly between jokes satirizing the response of parents to their children’s choice of major and deeply serious suggestions about the state of art and culture in the United States and society at large.

According to him, many parents now dread their children’s turn to English literature, seriously believing that the major is a “dead end into a dark place.”

He delighted in recounting his recent visit to Stanford, when he dined with humanities faculty who fret about their increasingly slighted role in the intellectual emphases of the university, quipping that the Stanford arts faculty have “always been marginal” there.

Botstein did take a more serious tone about contemporary society’s real disinterest and detachment from the arts.

According to him, our educational system has failed to cultivate an understanding of the

relevance and importance of the arts and humanities in the American student. Most Americans, Botstein says, lack a personal attachment to music, art or literature.

To use his example, unlike crazed soccer fans, who literally kill each other over the results of games, such passion does not exist around arts because many people lack even an amateur association with them — most Americans cannot draw or paint or play an instrument. It’s debatable whether even the most hardcore violinists ever think about beating each other up after concerts gone wrong, but this is beside the point to Botstein.

Yale itself, Botstein continues, plays a role in perpetuating some of the “fear” surrounding involvement with the arts and humanities. Strict departmental structure and archaic, technical language of academia prevent scholars from considering important questions that span across disciplines. Students who choose to specialize in tech or natural sciences graduate with degrees that lack a background in the humanities and thus find themselves unprepared to tackle moral and ethical questions that the humanities investigate in depth.

Botstein’s charisma and good humor gave his talk a levity that saved it from falling into a rant about the lack of public interest in the arts and the failings of institutions like Yale to help correct society’s apathy. And according to him there is hope for the future; he sees technology as a positive force for bringing the arts back to the people.

But he doesn’t offer much of a vision for how technology can be effectively used to bring classical music and literature back to everyday people.

Nor does Botstein offer an alternative to organizing depart-

ments by major, but he is sure that the status quo presents structural impediments to practical application of the arts and humanities. He refused to acknowledge the simple fact that any expansion of music or art programs in schools will require funding that is scarce.

Maybe individual science and math teachers can do more in their classrooms to embrace history and literature in order to instill an ethical and moral education in their students. But for schools to emphasize the arts on an institutional level, they will have to spend.

Botstein hints at this conclusion when he acknowledges that struggling orchestras and operations like the Met will potentially have to be subsidized in order to survive. He is clearly wary of the sensitive subject of money, though, and doesn’t press the issue. He explains how at Bard the precarious financial situation drives them to innovate, but the school is practically dedicated to creative study, and public schools have to emphasize the core curriculum over anything else. Most schools simply don’t have the same flexibility that Bard does to throw what little money they have into strengthening their arts programs.

Ultimately, Botstein argues for vast structural changes to public and higher education in order to include the arts and humanities as central pillars of their core curriculums. This is a noble ideal, but in order to cultivate an appreciation of the arts among American students in college, that education will have to start at an elementary school level.

And this is a question of funding that Botstein is not ready to address.

Contact NICHOLAS STEWART at nicholas.t.stewart@yale.edu .

WKND RECOMMENDS:

Woolsey // 7:30 p.m.

Possibly the toffishest, toniest meetings of minds and voices this side of paradise.

Taking long, steaming showers. They will silence your tears.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND DINES

Soul de Cuba Doesn’t Disappoint

Not Constantinople, But Still Delicious // BY CAROLINE HART // KEN YANAGISAWA

Although my grandfather likes to remind me at restaurants that you “can’t eat atmosphere,” Istanbul has a pretty good one.

My lunchmate, Kellen, likened the decorations to those in his Russian grandmother’s apartment, a remarkably high compliment (although perhaps not the one Istanbul was going for given that it’s a Turkish restaurant.) Antique lamps and tapestries furnished the cozy space, and a warm greeting from the wait-staff made me feel like I was in someone else’s very welcoming home.

A small loaf of bread lightly brushed with oil and sprinkled with sesame seeds started our series of plates. It was so warm and delicious that about half of it was gone before we received the accompanying dips. The Patllcan salata, otherwise known as babaganoush, was substantial enough to eat alone with a fork, which we did. It was creamy, and heavy on the garlic. The Nohut Ezme, otherwise dubbed hummus, boasted a lighter flavor and thinner consistency, which necessitated the bread as its vehicle. These two spreads were a nice introduction to the Turkish feast to follow, and also nice to keep at the table — their milder flavors provided

// BY LILLIAN CHILDRESS

a respite from the strong spices later in the meal.

If you go to Istanbul, you have to order a limonata, or you risk losing the restaurant’s full, eccentric experience. I probably would never have ordered what the menu called “a Turkish style home made lemonade, made fresh by kneading a mixture of whole lemons and sugar until a sweet zesty paste is created, then thinning with cold water.” Fortunately, though, my lunchmate did. The drink tasted like tart, somewhat bitter lemonade, a perfect accompaniment to the richness of the appetizers.

The sigara borek, up next, was bound to be good: a wonderful fried bread with cheese inside.

The “layers of thin dough and stuffed with feta cheese, parsley and egg” delivered indeed.

Although the feta rendered the appetizer a tad too salty, the limonata balanced out the almost briny aftertaste.

The main event was the chicken kebab — these are the move. We received a plate of four different kebabs, called the Karisik Izgara Kebab, but the chicken kebabs were by far the best. Simply grilled, served with rice, they were light and filling. In fact, I wish that I had eaten a few less of

these to save room for more baklava. But we’ll get to that.

The other meats were wellspiced, and complimented by the raw vegetables alongside which they were served. The lamb kebab had the consistency of a meatball and was a bit too strong for my liking. But the variety of the plate would serve a group well, and made the kebabs perfect for sharing.

And now to the baklava, which boasted layers upon layers of greatness. Not overly sweet, with a pleasant combination of textures from the nuts, syrup and phyllo, this was a winning way to round out the meal.

Istanbul is definitely a great place to dine with a group. The small plates, meant to be shared, could even provide topics of conversation if you’re eating with people you don’t know! Trying not to butcher the pronunciation of menu items is a fun game, as is guessing what a “Künefe” is. Also, the owner, Murat Firidin, asked that I mention the live belly dancing shows that he hosts weekly.

So, if the kebabs weren’t a good enough reason to go...

// MIICHAEL IAMEL

The first time I went to Soul de Cuba was last year, for an end of semester dinner with a seminar I had been taking on Haiti. My professor ordered seemingly everything the menu had to offer, and the feast presented to us was both impressive and borderline excessive. I left feeling as if I were about to burst. My restaurant week prix fixe lunch last Friday was a much different affair — satisfying, but not so much that I felt liable to burst at the seams at any second. When eating at Soul de Cuba, take all things in moderation — except flavor.

Heading to Soul De Cuba without making a lunchtime reservation was a mistake. We had to wait 15 minutes for a table, standing cramped between the bar and the refrigerator and awkwardly shuffling out of the way every time a waiter passed. Soul De Cuba is small, but if you have a seat it’s not so small that it feels confined — the tables are spaced just far enough apart to encourage intimate conversation. Lining the brightly painted walls are colorful, vivid Caribbean paintings and the interesting decorative choice of a flat-screen TV endlessly repeating a slideshow of old photos from Cuba.

It’s a lively atmosphere.

For a first course, try the yucca fries with chili and cheese, as I did.

Contact CAROLINE HART at caroline.hart@yale.edu .

Yucca, a starchy root common in South America, has the satisfying softness of potato fries, but is richer and creamier. Topped with a thick chili and a bit of cheese, the dish is simply divine. Despite the symphony of flavors, I’m not sure how I feel about the plastic bowl it was served in. If one is paying that much for a lunch, there’s a certain expectation that everything will be served in washable, ceramic dishes.

For the main course, I cannot recommend more highly the bistec uruguayo. It’s slightly unconventional, and I’ve never quite had a mélange of meats quite like it before: a flat steak covered with slices of baked ham and Swiss cheese, rolled into a log of meat that is subsequently breaded and fried. The meat was tender, juicy and very flavorful. My only qualm was that it was difficult to properly cut with a knife because of its highly elaborate structure, with rolls of beef that spiral around the ham and cheese. The cheese used had obviously been carefully selected — in dishes where melted cheese is only a garnish, restaurants sometimes skimp on quality, but Soul de Cuba does not. And as if the two large rolls of steak weren’t enough, the dish came with the traditional Cuban staples of rice and beans. Added to garnish were two slices of plantain,

soft and cooked to sweet perfection.

For dessert, try the flan Soul de Cuba. While some flans are light and airy, as though they’ve been made with skim milk, this flan tasted as though it had been made with heavy cream. The square of rich, thick cream was one of those desserts that you must stop talking, take a large spoonful, and close your eyes to really appreciate. Drizzled on top was a sweet caramel sauce — though not too sweet, it had a body and complexity that many caramel sauces lack.

While I am not yet old enough to order alcohol, I spied a few people sitting at the bar sipping on what looked to be some delicious and carefully crafted cocktails. The beer fridge that we stood next to while waiting for a table also featured some quality imported beers — much more variety than you might find at your typical American joint.

While I won’t say that Soul de Cuba wins the prize for my favorite New Haven eatery, I would definitely go there again with a friend.

Fried rolls of steak interspersed with baked ham and melted Swiss cheese aren’t for everyone — but if you’re asking me? I say give it a try.

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

Cask Republic: Great Food, No Joke // BY SCOTT STERN

A Formal Vacation to Roìa // BY JACKSON MCHENRY According to Roìa’s website, the College St. restaurant takes its name from a river which crisscrosses the border between Southern France and Northern Italy. Roìa’s menu pays homage to cuisines of both regions, as the restaurant features everything from pasta to confit. All in all, there’s a little too much purple prose spent on the French Riveria, all of which ignores the fact that you will actually be eating in the gray Connecticut coast. Nevertheless, the food makes the affectations well worth it.

While occasionally frustrating, Roìa’s fastidiousness serves a larger fantasy. The restaurant aims to offer a specific kind of food, but also in a specific style. In this case, that means food from the South of France, and specifically old-fashioned food from that region. The menu has no foams, fusions or gastronomic flights of fancy. Instead, there are hearty soups, buttery entrees, and (if you want some, which you do) sides of pomme frites.

Housed in the hundred-yearold former Taft Hotel, Roia’s whitepainted and wood-finished dinning room serves that goal as it evokes a restrained, mannered decadence.

This isn’t the South of France of racecars and Gucci bags; it’s the South of France of an earlier era, of the lost generation and Tender is the Night. I don’t know if any era is significantly less realistic and/or problematic to fantasize over, but Roìa makes its stake clear: Here, we want you to feel

// MARISA LOWE

D AY SATURDAY NOVEMBER MO NTH ##

15

SOME LIKE IT HOT WHC // 7:00 p.m.

Nobody’s perfect. I, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe gotta work it.

like Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief, not Selena Gomez in Monte Carlo.

Last Friday, my friend and I tried out Roìa’s restaurant week lunch menu, which featured a choice of appetizer, entrée and desert for $18.

Fair warning: on a typical lunch day, that $18 is only enough for one of the non-fancy meat entrées (you could get a burger, but no steak frites).

The appetizers, vinaigrette of leeks with sieved egg and cream of mushroom soup, split the difference between experimentation and tradition respectively. Sieving an egg produces a collection of white and yellow granules, which the chef dusted across a leek poached to buttery translucence . My friend described the taste as “a bit different, but good,” which covers about all the adjectives you need.

The soup, on the other hand, was both exactly as expected and entirely satisfying. It retained a satisfying mushroom flavor — the ingredients must have been fresh — while embracing a warm creaminess. Perfect for a cold day on the Monaco coast, or any day in Connecticut.

Roìa offered up a sandwich of duck confit and gnocchi a la bolognese for main courses. The duck confit was where I expected the restaurant to swerve — confit is seen as a stodgy menu item today and restaurants typically “update” the French classic if they serve it — but the meal leaned old-fashioned yet again. The shredded duck came with tarragon mayo,

surprisingly light for a dish that requires cooking with an immense amount of fat, but nonetheless successful. The only fault lay in the bread — toasted ciabatta — which was cut too thickly, and gave the sandwich a ratio of about three times as much bread as duck.

Our other choice was gnocchi a la bolognese, or gnocchi in beef ragù.

The gnocchi were cooked to perfection — slightly al dente, gummy when you bit into them, but never so much so that you had to exert effort as you chewed. And the ragù, creamier than your typical meat sauce, equaled the richness of the gnocchi without making the dish overly decadent.

The restaurant week menu left us with the rather unexciting prospect of pear sorbet for dessert. The sorbet was light and sweet, an ephemeral endnote after a meal of heavy, creamy dishes, but I do wish that some of Roìa’s other dessert options (which include panna cotta and rice pudding) were on the literal and metaphorical table. I wanted to eat the desserts, yes, but I also wanted an excuse to stay in the restaurant, ignoring the time as I idly chatted with a good friend, before we had to go our separate ways in the gloomy November afternoon.

Fitzgerald was right: If you spend too much time in the South of France, most other things, inevitably, disappoint.

Cask Republic, with its gleaming wood, polished countertops, and fashionable gloom, feels like a bar. It is a bar. I had known it was a bar. Until last Friday, though, I hadn’t fully grasped that it was also a restaurant.

Most bars serve food, but it seems to me that some do it with noticeably less enthusiasm than others. (Toad’s, I’ve heard, serves soup.) Cask, though, in spite of its definite bar-ness, doles out food with surprising good cheer and efficiency. All in all, my three-course lunch was tasty, timely and even a little trendy.

For the appetizer, I chose the “Curried Chic Pea Fritters.” I was fairly certain these were going to be some pretty chic peas, but my waitress informed me that they were chickpeas — you know, like garbanzo beans.

Still unsure whether the menu was putting on airs or just bad at spelling, I awaited my fritters apprehensively. When they came, though, they were three satisfying orbs of fried chickpea, topped with dollops of lemon dill aioli, resting primly on triangles of pita. The whole thing was festooned with a cucumber and onion salad. On the whole, it was a perfect appetizer — filling enough to pique one’s interest, insubstantial enough to leave one awaiting the main course.

Pretty soon thereafter, the main course arrived! I had ordered the “Kale Salad with

Grilled Chicken.” To me, this was the ideal entrée — the chicken was a conventional, respectable option, while the kale added a crunchy soupcon of New Age daring.

I’ve never been the world’s biggest kale fan (though I’d love to meet the “world’s biggest kale fan”), but this kale salad was awesome. It was like a fluffy green cloud of awesomeness. This might have been because the salad was lathered with the creamy ginger vinaigrette, or perhaps it was because of the sizable sprinkling of cranberries, walnuts and radicchio (a purplish chicory). Either way, it was probably not too good for me — but it was very good.

The chicken was, well, good chicken.

Chicken is tough to mess up. But it was cooked just right, spiced to perfection, and served in abundance. I would estimate six solid slices, balanced up against the quivering, green forest of awesome kale.

My roommate Gordon, who had come along for the gastronomic adventure, got the restaurant’s iconic burger — a hefty slab of cow topped with bacon and a few other goodies. The fries that came with the burger were excellent. But, then again, it’s hard to screw up fries.

Gordon and I ate our main courses slowly, savoring every bite. Cask started to fill with people. It never got full, exactly, and most of the lunch crowd gravitated toward the bar. Nonetheless, a cheerful sound filled the

restaurant.

For dessert, I had the “Dark Chocolate Almond Brownie,” a cute little arrangement of two triangular brownies, one overlapping the other. In the negative space between them, almost like an afterthought, sat a slowly melting sphere of vanilla ice cream.

The whole concoction was sprinkled — well, bathed, really — in a rich amaretto caramel. The ice cream, especially dunked as it was in the caramel sauce, was excellent. The twin brownies, Gordon and I agreed, left a little to be desired. Brownies can’t really be bad (unless you talk to Maureen Dowd), but these were just the wrong amount of flaky, not quite the right proportion of sugar to flour, or something.

All in all, my meal — appetizer, entrée and dessert — ran me $18. Pretty reasonable, but probably not an everyday outing for a college student on the meal plan. When you can, though, head on over to Cask!

And now for a joke: A horse walks into a bar. He says, “Can I have some food?” The bartender responds, “We don’t serve horses here.” The horse replies, “Oh, that’s ok. I was more in the mood for beef.”

At Cask, the bartender would say, “Great!

We serve burgers!” And the fries are excellent, too.

// KEN YANAGISAWA

Contact SCOTT STERN at scott.stern@yale.edu .

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

WKND RECOMMENDS:

SATURDAY NOVEMBER

Burying your face in a pillow and muffling your sobs, preferably in front of your roommate. Surefire way to keep the place to yourself.

15

YSO

Woolsey // 8:00 p.m.

YSO plays “unfinished works” — Shubert’s unfinished symphony (such a tease) and the Adagio of Mahler’s Tenth (sublime).

WKND RECOMMENDS: Bursting into tears on the swing by the Yale Farm.

You’re almost far enough away from campus to have some privacy.

PAGE B8

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND COVER

LEAVING A LEGACY // BY SCOTT STERN

PRESIDENT FROM PAGE 3 The president’s fundraising responsibilities have changed enormously. Griswold and Brewster simply did not spend as much time flying around the country, raising money; Salovey, on the other hand, told the News in a November 2013 interview that he spends as much as a third of his time away from campus, usually at meetings set up by the Association of Yale Alumni, the Office of Alumni Affairs or the Development Office.

This is hardly unusual for a college president.

According to Krislov, “I definitely think the norm now is that fundraising is probably the single most important thing for most presidents.”

According to Bromwich, “That means you’re dealing with all the dreams and hopes of potential donors.” These dreams and hopes fall across the political spectrum. As a News article pointed out last fall, Charles Johnson ’54, whose $250 million gift was the largest in Yale’s history, is one of the country’s top Republican donors. On the other hand, many deep-pocketed donors are Democrats.

The increasing focus on fundraising, and the varied ideologies of donors, serves as a check against controversial political statements.

The easiest thing for presidents to do, Zolner told me, “is to stay very bland.” *** Brewster truly was a political figure, and in 1977 Jimmy Carter nominated him to serve as U.S. Ambassador to England. After Hanna Holborn Gray served as acting president for a year, the job fell to A. Bartlett Giamatti.

Giamatti, like Griswold, had spent virtually his entire adult life at Yale, first as an undergraduate, then as a graduate student, then as a professor of comparative literature, then as master of Ezra Stiles, and finally as president.

For most of his presidency, Giamatti was a popular figure on campus, in spite of his unpopular positions regarding divestment from South Africa and a ten-week strike by clerical and technical workers “But none of that seemed to impact the generally benevolent image Bart Giamatti seemed to project,” says Marc Bousquet ’85, who was an undergraduate during the Giamatti years and is now an associate professor of English at Emory.

Even though Giamatti spent more time away from Yale fundraising than any president before him, “the impression you had of Bart was he was always here,” says Long. “He was always walking around.”

In 1986, Giamatti — an avid baseball fan — left Yale to serve as the president of the National League. In his place, the Corporation appointed Benno Schmidt, Jr., former dean of Columbia Law School.

As president, Schmidt faced an era of tight finances. So he undertook many controversial and unpopular moves, such as attempting to reduce the size of the faculty. But some of his unpopularity wasn’t due to his positions. It was his persona, especially contrasted with that of his predecessor.

Schmidt wasn’t visible in the same way Giamatti had been. He wasn’t as warm.

Perhaps the greatest personal controversy of them all was Schmidt’s residence. As president of a university in Connecticut, he still lived in New York.

Even though Giamatti probably spent more time away fundraising, Long told me, Schmidt was just never as visible when he was in town.

A. Whitney Griswold is inaugurated. He declares that “The times are not auspicious for learning. They are times of war, and war imposes a terrible burden of proof on everything that does not directly serve its ends. Just and noble as we believe those ends to be in our case, war and preparation for war are not conducive to the reflective life that produces great teaching and great scholarship.”

SATURDAY NOVEMBER

15

“The whole campus was displeased by this,” Long says. Students and faculty alike expected their president to be a public persona.

“Where’s Benno?” started appearing on t-shirts across campus.

1992 was a tough year for Schmidt. Faculty members were increasingly vocal in their criticism of him and his austerity measures. Several senior members of his administration resigned. So, on the morning of Yale’s Commencement, Schmidt announced that he too would leave, in order to run a for-profit education start-up. The departure was sudden.

According to a 1992 New York Times article, several members of the Corporation literally sat there with their mouths wide open as Schmidt made his announcement.

A year passed under another temporary president, after which Richard Levin — a young economics professor and dean of the Graduate School — took Yale’s helm, and the rest, as they say, is history.

It is, perhaps, ironic that Levin is now so often painted as an aloof administrator, since, when he started the job — right after the “Where’s Benno?” controversy — people saw him as refreshingly present. Levin actually lived in New Haven, and students occasionally glimpsed him walking around.

“I think Rick Levin, in the beginning, was more like Brewster,” Chauncey told me. “I don’t mean personality, but I think he saw more people, he was able to reach out more, and so on. I think the job got much more complex because of bureaucracy and also because, the longer you stay in, the more complex it gets. So, by the end, he became a much more removed man from the day-to-day things that were going on at Yale.”

When the News asked upperclassmen, in a poll of 57 Yale undergraduates, how Salovey differed from Levin, the responses were notably similar.

“He seems more accessible,” wrote one, referring to Salovey; “he’s nicer,” wrote another. “Much more involved and present in student life,” wrote a third. *** “The biggest change” that has occurred in college presidencies, according to Bousquet, who has written widely on university governance, “is that the president has gone from an avuncular sort of handson figure to a hands-off, largely fundraising figure.”

In other words, college presidents have gone from people you see around campus, to people you don’t.

Even though Griswold was a very reserved man, he certainly had time to meet with students, and did so from time to time. Brewster and Giamatti were constant campus presences, and well-liked for it.

Yet Schmidt’s decision to live out of state isolated him from students, who had been used to big personalities and frequent sightings. Then came Richard Levin, Yale’s smooth, distant, busy, endlessly competent administrator.

Peter Salovey, the noted social psychologist, wants to connect with people. He too tries to walk around campus. And to a large extent, he is successful. Salovey belies Bousquet’s label. “I want to be at plays and concerts and sporting events,” he told me. “I want to eat in dining halls when I can. But I also want to be right here in this office, meeting with people who have ideas that they want to share with the president.”

And every single person I talked to — whether they knew Salovey well or hardly at all — said that he is a genuinely wonderful person. “Peter is a good guy,” says Merriman. “I wish I knew him better.”

In the aforementioned poll, only three of 57 stu-

*** There are few people living who are more knowledgeable about the history of Yale administrations than Chauncey. When I asked him if it was too early to assess the Salovey presidency, he told me, “In Griswold through Levin, in my view, the time in which you identified the uniqueness of the man — I’m sorry there have never been any women, but the man — is when he disagrees with his predecessor and takes the University in a new direction.”

Each of Yale’s last five presidents has made an institutional change that clearly distinguishes him from his predecessor: Griswold started “purifying” from day one; Brewster returned to an interdisciplinary focus within two years, creating new programs while largely neglecting fundraising; Giamatti quickly cut funding for many of Brewster’s new programs, instead focusing on fundraising so as to achieve what he called “financial equilibrium”; Schmidt tried to drastically reduce the size of the faculty; and though earlier presidents had been skeptical about international ventures, Levin announced that he wanted to go abroad as early as his inaugural address.

This has become a pattern, Chauncey says.

“The president says, ‘Respectfully, my predecessors were wrong about this, and we must chart a new path.’ So that’s a way in which I’m trying to indirectly say, we won’t know anything about Peter Salovey until he does something that is unique and, quite probably, contrary to what his predecessor, or predecessors, thought was right.”

When I brought this idea up to Salovey, he

The Yale Corporation deliberates on the naming of the university's eleventh and twelfth residential colleges.

Eventually, in large part because of Griswold's direction, they settle on Morse and Ezra Stiles.

The New York Times runs an article entitled, "'Where's Benno?' New Refrain at Yale Belies Record." The article quotes Beatrice Sibblies '90: "As students we felt warmer to Giamatti.

Giamatti was a man of the people."

April 23

May 26

1970

1989

October 6

1950

dents surveyed expressed dissatisfaction with Salovey’s presidency.

Still, some wonder how much being well-liked matters anymore.

“The presidency is not a position of particular power to reform,” Bousquet told me. “The president’s freedoms are within a very narrow range.” In other words, no matter how beloved he is, the president couldn’t just name the new residential colleges whatever he chooses anymore. There are too many other factors to consider. On top of new responsibilities such as alumni relations, fundraising and constant international travel, Yale’s president must deal with the day-to-day reality of an ever-expanding bureaucracy.

The administration has grown enormously. “The best example” of this growth, says Chauncey, “is the Yale College Dean’s office, which, in 1963, had the dean, the dean of students, and three assistant deans. And today, the last time I counted, there were 52 people in that office who had the title of dean, assistant dean, associate dean, etc.”

“I think this has made it very difficult for the president to act,” he added.

This is not a phenomenon unique to Yale. “Most administrators report feeling powerless in their jobs,” Bousquet says. “It’s because they all feel limits. Once they move out of line, someone else begins to exert pressure on them.”

Bousquet points to the memoir of Annette Kolodny, former dean of humanities at the University of Arizona. Of dealing with Arizona’s huge bureaucracy, Kolodny wrote, “If logic and hard data failed me and I thought it would help me, I teased, I cajoled, I flirted, I pouted. I bought small gifts for one provost and always remembered the birthday of another.” But no matter how personable or even flirtatious she made herself, in the end, Kolodny felt “isolated” and “trapped.”

October 14

September 10

1959

1978

2010

A. Bartlett Giamatti is inaugurated. He begins his speech: “We at Yale have never been stronger. In the last 25 years, under three presidents, the University has steadily grown in the depth of its faculty, the diversity of its students, and its commitment to equity in its daily processes."

MUZEUM

Yale Cabaret // 8:00 & 11:00 p.m.

This is a “Bollywood masala ride through modern Indian society.” WKND thinks there may be some confusion about the meaning of the word “masala,” but we are still intrigued.

*** For my part, I’ve been fairly critical of Salovey in my column. Writing this piece, I realize I’ve been, perhaps, a little unfair. There are just so, so many reasons his job is really tough: a metastasizing administration, the demands of fundraising and alumni relations, travel obligations, and on and on.

After meeting Salovey, I find myself agreeing with everyone else: He’s nice, charming and well intentioned.

I also find myself agreeing with Kraus, Merriman, and others — it’s too early to really assess the Salovey presidency. As Chauncey suggested, until Salovey departs from Levin-era policies, until he says, “Respectfully, my predecessors were wrong about this, and we must chart a new path,” we just can’t know what the future holds.

I guess my only real insight is this: with all of the constraints on his job, it’s only going to get harder and harder to depart from the past. And, since there are so many ways for Yale to improve, that’s pretty scary. I don’t envy President Salovey.

“Personalities do matter in this business,” Merriman told me at the end of our interview, “but presidents are now prisoners of, as Bruce would sing, ‘the New World Order.’”

August 24

April 4

In a speech before thousands, Kingman Brewster declares, "I am appalled and ashamed that things should have come to such a pass in this country that I am skeptical of the ability of black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the United States.”

expressed some skepticism. If universities are in a good place, he says, presidents are chosen with a sense of “continuity.”

“I think universities are not very well served if, from president to president, you’re just kind of jerking the institution from right to left, forwards and center,” he told me.

In so many ways, the Levin-to-Salovey transition has indeed been characterized by continuity.

Some point to this year’s creation of the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences as a distinctly Salovey initiative, but other, arguably more recognizable undertakings — such as expansion abroad, the new residential colleges, and the push for more STEM students — are decidedly Levin-era projects.

When I asked Merriman about Salovey’s initiatives, he responded that it’s just “too early” to name any. Professor Christina Kraus responded to the same question in an email: “So far, he’s just continuing Levin’s [initiatives] … I imagine those will change and become his own as he goes along.”

Salovey, for his part, talked at great length and with enthusiasm about his initiatives, including the Yale Center for Teaching and Learning, the Center for Preservation of Cultural Heritage, his efforts toward a “more unified Yale,” and, of course, his aggressive efforts toward expanding Yale’s outreach and services for underprivileged kids.

“My style isn’t to stand up and say” — Salovey adopted a booming voice — “‘Initiative number one,’ but it is to—” He paused. “If you connect the dots, you can see what I’m doing.”

Students, in spite of almost universal good will toward Salovey, appear not to be connecting the dots. Answers to a question about Salovey’s most important initiatives to date include: “no clue,” “Nothing comes to mind,” “no idea,” “unknown,” “I don’t know,” and “not sure,” as well as a smattering of slightly more substantive responses, such as “college expansion,” “positive climate towards sexual assault,” and “I guess expansion into Africa? I remember reading about that, but I haven’t heard about it since. Also Singapore.”

Representatives of Yale and the National University of Singapore meet in New Haven and sign an agreement to move forward in planning a joint liberal arts college in Singapore.

2013

Contact SCOTT STERN at scott.stern@yale.edu .

Peter Salovey, Yale's new president, says in his first Freshman Address, "I believe that talking about socioeconomic status is one of the last taboos among Yale students...

The uncomfortable conversations that you will certainly have — in Commons or in your common room — represent opportunities for true understanding and true friendship with classmates whose families are far different from your own."

WKND RECOMMENDS: Keening in front of your DS History & Politics professor. She will shake her head in disgust, hand you a tissue.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B9

WEEKEND LAUGHS

FUNNY GIRLS // BY EMILY XIAO

// HUFFINGTON POST

In a basement classroom of William Harkness Hall, a tangle of beta decay equations and Chinese characters and Spanish phrases occupy the chalkboard. Stray potato chips lie scattered on the seminar table. Six students are settled in around the table, their laptops open and their voices lively — but this is not your usual discussion session. Rather, it’s a meeting of the Fifth Humour, Yale’s oldest sketch comedy group. And this isn’t your usual Fifth Humour meeting, either. The male members of the group have disappeared into the night, and the six students sitting here, belly-laughing their way through sketch read-throughs, are all women.

These women are preparing for a show to take place in Sudler Recital Hall, located just upstairs. On Saturday night, the room will play host to no student recitals or chamber music performances; instead, it’ll be occupied by students-turned-spectators, who have come with enough laughs prepared for two hours of back-to-back comedy performances, all by women.

Billed as a “leading lady-driven version of Saturday Night Live” on its Facebook event page, “That’s What She Said” is organized

by Sabrina Bleich ’16, who works as a staffer at the Yale Women’s Center. The showcase serves as Bleich’s individual staffer project for this semester will feature women from almost every comedy group on campus in a lineup of approximately 20-minute-long sets. Bleich is surprised by the enthusiasm that the event, originally intended to be low-key, has received so far. “I underestimated how many women are involved in comedy on this campus,” she tells me.

group Red Hot Poker had the opportunity to meet and work two years ago at a comedy festival. While Bleich believes that changes still need to be made, there has already been significant progress. “In 2007, that idea that girls aren’t funny was still part of the dialogue.

I think that’s sort of been turned on its head a little bit and is being used to the advantage of female comics who are saying, ‘Oh, girls aren’t funny? Okay, let’s prove otherwise.’”

Elizabeth Villarreal ’16, head coordinator of the Women’s Center, who helped Bleich organize the event, nonetheless makes a qualification; while she would like to believe that much progress has been made, the fact that such a stereotype still remains recognizable only indicates that it continues to exist in the discourse. And that’s a problem. *** But in the comedy scene at Yale, women are standing up and standing out.

The Fifth Humour is equally divided between males and females. In the experience of co-director Brooke Eastman ’16, Yale offers a range of opportunities for comedians of all gender identifications: “I’ve never once felt that, as a female comedian, there were things that I couldn’t say that my fellow male comedians could say. In some ways, I think that Yale is a far more progressive place than the world of mainstream comedy.”

Sophie Dillon ’17, assistant director of Red Hot Poker as well as a member of improv group The Viola Question, notes a similar experience, telling me that her group currently has more women than men.

*** “That’s What She Said” isn’t the first event of its kind to happen at Yale. In fact, the Women’s Center has sponsored two other all-female comedy showcases in recent memory, one in 2007 and the other in 2009.

As Bleich explains, she’s aimed for a similar structure in this Saturday’s showcase by tapping into the existing establishment of sketch and improv groups, which are already accustomed to collaborations and joint shows.

Bleich hopes to provide an opportunity for women to break off from their respective groups for a night and come together as a larger community.

Yet the structural similarities between this Saturday’s event and the previous ones belie some of the shifts that Bleich has observed in the wider comedy landscape in the past several years. “It’s definitely become more of a discussion recently with all these movies coming out, like ‘Bridesmaids’ — what is women’s place in comedy?” She goes on to cite other examples such as the leading ladies of “Broad City,” with whom, according to Brooke Levin ’16, her sketch comedy

SATURDAY D AY MNOVEMBER ONTH ##

15

WOMEN GET A REP FOR NOT BEING FUNNY BECAUSE EVERYONE IS BROUGHT UP TO RECOGNIZE THE MALE PERSPECTIVE. SOPHIE DILLON ’17

Of particular interest is one group that consists purely of women: the all-female, feminist sketch comedy group, the Sphincter Troupe, of which both Bleich and Villarreal are members. According to Bleich, not many college campuses can boast such a group.

All of this stands in stark contrast to what Henry Connelly reports in the Oct. 10, 2007 issue of the News: “The vast majority of sketch and improvisational comedy groups on campus are directed by men. Both the win-

YALE-PRINCETON GAME Yale Bowl // 12:30 p.m.

WKND’s only really going for the tailgate, but football! Yeah!

ners of the January 2007 Last Comic Standing competition were male. There can be little doubt, some say, that comedy today — at least at Yale — is dominated by men.”

Thus it would seem that Claire Gordon ’10, who organized the Female Comedy Showcase in 2007, was addressing a context decidedly distinct from the one that Bleich is working within now. In light of how female comedians seem to be thriving on campus, justifying the existence of such a showcase at Yale becomes less straightforward — it goes deeper than gender ratios alone. There is enthusiasm here for the showcase, lots of it, and there is still the sense among the women that I speak to that something like this continues to be relevant — even necessary. *** Dillon and Eliana Kwartler ’16, a member of the Yale Ex!t Players, were the only two female performers in this October’s Last Comic Standing event, although both advanced to the final round. Neither was able to attribute the low representation of women in the event to a specific cause, particularly without knowing how many women had auditioned.

Reluctant to point to any active bias on campus, Dillon nevertheless perceives a continuing struggle for women in the stand-up world at large.

“Women get a rep for not being funny,” Dillon explains, “because everyone is brought up to recognize the male perspective, so that [perspective] makes sense to a much larger group of people.” The very fact that she finds Louis CK’s jokes about fatherhood and male masturbation humorous, she says, is a testament to the predominance of the male worldview. For Dillon, comedy provides a vehicle for experiencing other worldviews. Thus, events like “That’s What She Said” have value because they bring us closer toward parity in the realm of comedy — and beyond.

While these women all praise the progressive environments of their respective groups, they clarify that none of them are actively feminist in the way that the Sphincter Troupe is. Although Bleich herself is a proud member of Sphincter, she emphasizes that the showcase itself is not designed to be explicitly political, but participants can go in that direction if they choose.

Many of the women in the showcase have drawn inspiration not only from successful female figures in mainstream comedy, but also from the work of their female peers. Eastman has nothing but admiration for Sphincter, especially their gender-bending performances. Whereas the act of playing the opposite gender often serves as a punch line in the world of comedy, she says, such a focus is absent from Sphincter’s performances.

Rather, their humor comes more from the characters they create and the structures of

their sketches; in a group composed exclusively of women, gender becomes incidental.

Eastman and her co-director, Allison Kolberg ’16, have enjoyed that same freedom from gender considerations when putting together the script for their group’s performance on Saturday.

Villarreal remarks that a women-only space can be politically significant in itself, pointing to the existence of her own group, Sphincter. “Even if the other groups don’t have this sort of explicitly feminist content, it’s a cool political statement just that this [showcase] is happening. And that sends a message that women are funny, women are funny at Yale, and women are doing funny things right now.”

Kwartler finds something uniquely constructive in the comedic medium itself.

“Improv is an incredibly supportive march — you need to be helping the people around you, so at its most basic level, it’s kind of feminist in that we’re all equals,” she observes. In both form and content, in the empowering characters and the novel worlds that her group pulls out of thin air, Kwartler believes in the inherent ability of improv to open up a wider range of perceptions, even if the word “feminism” is never directly uttered. On a more fundamental level, humor in itself is an accessible medium, connecting performers to audience members and making otherwise difficult content approachable.

In his 2007 article, Connelly takes note of some students who had been uninterested in that year’s showcase, perceiving it as focused less on comedy and more on agenda. Yet, given the nature of comedy as a particularly conducive platform for provoking dialogue through dialogue, it seems indeed a waste for comedy never to have an agenda. *** “That’s What She Said” has Annemarie McDaniel ’16, board member of the Women’s Center and graphic designer for the event, to thank for its title. It’s particularly apt, an acknowledgement and celebration of these women’s voices that runs counter to its usual usage. Villarreal agrees: “That’s what good comedy does, right? Especially female comedy. It takes something that already exists and subverts it and gets the female perspective out there.”

And in the vein of getting things “out there,” the showcase seeks to draw Yale’s female comics out as well, into the spotlight. This is what Kwartler is talking about, when she says: “I don’t know what’s going to happen in our set, but I know that we’ll be up there saying, ‘Hey, we’re here.’ And that’s really cool.”

Contact EMILY XIAO at emily.xiao@yale.edu .

WKND RECOMMENDS: Listening to My Bloody Valentine on your way to WLH and blinking back tears. You’re surrounded by people, sure, but you’re still so alone.

PAGE B10

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND COLUMNS

CUTTING INTO COLOR This fall, “Henri Matisse: Cut-Outs” traveled across the pond from the Tate Modern in London to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where it will remain until Feb. 8. I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to see the exhibit in both locations; though the exhibit was the same in both places, the architecture and permanent collections of each museum made the experiences unique.

The MoMA owns 284 of Matisse’s works, including major masterpieces from his earlier and perhaps better-known fauvist phase, such as “The Dance,” “The Piano Lesson” and “The Red Studio.” The Tate owns only 20, none of which are particularly well known. While the MoMA’s extensive Matisse collection informs visitors’ understanding of the artist throughout his career, the Tate’s exhibit proved more powerful in fulfilling the exhibition’s goal of exploring this final era in its own right. It is the most extensive exhibition of the cut-out period ever mounted.

At the MoMA, examining Matisse’s darker fauvist works before climbing up a flight of stairs to see the “Cut-Outs” exhibit colored my perception of it. The origins of this exhibition’s brightly colored compositions, ranging from floral to anthropomorphic to abstract, can certainly be traced back to the colorblocked, nonrepresentational and assemblage-style composition he was doing in his fauvist period. Matisse began his deconstruction of spatial illusion in these earlier 1910s pieces, which he pushed further in his cut-outs.

“Henri Mattise: Cut-Outs” contains 100 cut-outs from private and public collections displayed alongside related drawings, prints, textiles and stained glass. In the final 14 years of his life, from 1941 to 1954, after being diagnosed with cancer that confined him to a wheelchair and limited his sight, Matisse turned to cut-outs to continue his creative expression. This new art form did not require the same vigor of movement that his paintings had demanded and he hired the young Lydia Delectorskaya as his assistant. Matisse referred to his new process as “drawing with scissors,” the opportunity for “une seconde vie.” It also became Matisse’s favorite art form as he said only what he created after his illness was his “real self: free and liberated.”

The exhibition artfully breaks down these final years into 14 rooms that explain the development of the cut-out

STEPHANIE TOMASSON PUSHING THE PALETTE KNIFE technique from his earliest small-scale collages to his larger pieces. In the final room hangs a glorious stained glass window commissioned for the Time-Life Building in New York. Some highlights of the exhibition include “The Snail,” a massive and colorful abstract reinterpretation of the shelled molusc. Though the colors and shapes appear hastily selected at random, they are a deliberate choice of complementary colors and shapes whose angles could unite in composition but consciously do not. The spiral-like movement that guides the eye through the piece mirrors what one would experience tracing the whorl of a snail’s shell.

Matisse’s famous “Oceania, The Sky” — another large work presenting an ocean of white objects including doves, coral and abstract shapes on a gold background — highlights a different facet of Matisse’s cut-outs. The piece began because Matisse had cut out a swallow from a sheet of writing paper; not wanting it to go to waste, he pinned it onto his studio wall to cover up a stain that had bothered him. Over the following weeks he pinned more shapes onto the same wall without knowing what the final composition would contain. He was inspired by a visit to Tahiti 16 years before, and he wanted to transfer the dynamism of the natural world he had seen there into the Paris studio to which he was now confined.

Matisse’s cut-outs are both a culmination of and departure from his earlier body of work. He turned to this fresh form of creativity out of necessity but these works proved ultimately to be the ones he prized most. Matisse evolved in these final years to drawing not the outlines of his figures and filling them in with loud colors as he had in the fauvist years, but instead cutting directly into color. We find in his cut-outs a return to simplicity of decoration, but also a purity in technique that his earlier works strive for but do not attain.

Contact STEPHANIE TOMASSON at stephanie.tomasson@yale.edu .

WIKI COMMONS

Requiem for a Selfie No TV show enters the world fully formed, and this is especially true of sitcoms. It takes time, often an entire season, for a show to right itself, for a cast to gel and for audiences to develop. “30 Rock” had to realize Jack Donaghy was funnier as a mentor than a villain. “Arrested Development” needed room to spin its web of callbacks and self-references. The American “The Office” found its heart with Jim and Pam’s romance.

In part, this discrepancy is a product of the way that networks develop television shows (cable channels now use other strategies).

In the spring, networks buy pilots, which are typically written by one or two people. In the fall, they greenlight a slate of shows, which have a larger staff and a stricter deadline.

Never judge a TV show by its pilot.

“30 Rock” ’s involved a trip to a strip club; “Friends” put Rachel in hysterics; “Seinfeld” ’s established a tone of aimlessness, but was otherwise truly aimless.

But it’s not just about the writing.

Unlike other art forms, in television you can see the marks of practical concerns — budget changes, contract negotiations and many other factors. “New Girl,” for instance, replaced Damon Wayans Jr. with Lamorne Morris (each playing a different black friend) in its second episode when Wayans dropped out to stay on the (surprisingly) renewed “Happy Endings.” Some critics argue, therefore, that you can only really judge a show by its third or fourth episode, when the noise gives way to a clearer pattern — “New Girl,” it turns out, was less about Zooey Deschanel being annoying and more about a group of twentysomethings all learning to grow up.

Of course, time is money, and in today’s TV climate, there isn’t much of either. Most pilots aren’t picked up, and networks start can-

// ASHLYN OAKES

SUND AY NOVEMBER

16

BACK TO THE FUTURE

Yale Collection of Musical Instruments // 3:00 p.m.

Contrary to what the title might suggest, the program consists of German and Italian music from the 17th century.

JACKSON MCHENRY celling shows just weeks after new episodes begin to air. This year, the ax fell slower than usual, but by Oct. 4, ABC made the fist move, calling it quits to the truly terrible “Manhattan Love Story” after four episodes.

Other networks were quick to follow: Fox gave up on “Utopia” and cut its order for “Mulaney”; NBC announced it would cut its orders of “Bad Judge” and “A to Z” to 13 episodes.

In order to get a show — and especially a comedy — on the air, most writers adopt a gimmick, something that will get people hooked for a season, or at least a few episodes. As Andy Greenwald wrote for Grantland, the TV development process “forces people to squeeze their best square-peg ideas into the frictionless, round maw of corporate desire.”

So most network comedies tend to be built around concepts that might make you pause during an ad or an elevator pitch, but which almost immediately fall apart. “Manhattan Love Story” promised insight into the minds of its main characters and then decided that those minds were only thinking about boobs and purses. “A to Z” seemed destined to last 26 episodes, if only to tell Andy and Zelda’s love story — you guessed it — from A to Z. The easy answer, from a viewer’s perspective, is not to get caught up in this process. Wait until half the crop fails, and until then, catch up with old stuff on Netflix, or watch the shows that you already know are good. That ignores the fun of watching shows develop. You get a sense of ownership. You become less a viewer

and more like a sports fan, shouting, “Yes, give that character more time on the screen!” “No, don’t go for that ratty old trope!”

This year, I chose “Selfie.” It had a terrible, if predictable, conceit — a jury-rigged imitation of “Pygmalion” that featured Karen Gillan as Eliza, a social media–obsessed narcissist, and John Cho as Henry, her self-serious boss — and an even more tone-deaf pilot. But I like John Cho and Emily Kapnek, the voice behind “As Told By Ginger” and “Suburgatory,” so I figured I’d stick with it.

A few episodes in, “Selfie” started to bloom. As Cho and Gillan found their chemistry, the writers realized they could make Henry Higgs just as damaged as Eliza Dooley. He might claim to “improve” her by dislodging her from the Internet, but she has just as much to teach him about how to have fun without feeling guilty. Pygmalion hinges on class and misogyny, drawing a clear distinction between high and low society. In “Selfie,” there is no high or low society (this is a TV show, after all), merely each character’s entrenched judgments. “Selfie” didn’t just grow out the toxic premise governing its predecessor, it took aim at it. It was more a subtweet than a retweet.

Last Friday, “Selfie” was cancelled. ABC announced that it wouldn’t extend the show’s 13-episode order, and that many of those episodes might not air. The time slot’s likely going to holiday programming. The show averaged a tiny 1.5 million in key demographics, and it’s not likely that many will miss it.

I know I’ll miss it, though. I’ll watch the next six episodes, if ABC airs them. Maybe, as is more likely, “Selfie” will be sold to Netflix or Hulu or Amazon, and I’ll spend an afternoon months from now catching up.

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

WKND RECOMMENDS: Making out with someone in their cool off-campus apartment and then having a hysterical fit. WKND may or may not have done this.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND THEATER

STUFF AS DREAMS ARE MADE ON // BY IRINA GAVRILOVA The Whitney Theater, whose layout transforms with every performance, never ceases to impress me. In this year’s production of The Tempest, the black-box becomes the home of Prospero, (Eric Sirakian, ’15), his daughter Miranda (Ashley Greaves, ’16) and his servants Ariel (Jamila Tyler, ’15) and Caliban (Lucy Fleming, ’16). The former Duke of Milan, Prospero plots to exact revenge upon his brother

Antonio (Kyra Riley, ’16), who has stolen the title from him. In order to do so, he conjures up a devastating storm that throws Antonio’s ship against the island’s coast. With an image of a Somali shore projected onto the back wall, the audience becomes an extension of the beach.

Tom Delgado DRA ’09 creates a visually stunning lighting design: branch-shaped silhouettes

Breathing New Life into “Rocky”

spill across the floor, a whimsical green light illuminates the back wall where the show’s poster image is projected. Jagged root-like lines and sunrays appear throughout the show in pools of azure and gold light, creating a truly magical atmosphere inside the Whitney.

Unlike many other directors whose projects go up in the space, theater studies professor Toni Dorfman focuses on depth rather than linearity: A large portable dance floor occupies most of the set and two wooden decks stand upstage framed by black muslin curtains. Throughout the performance, actors storm, dance and tumble onto the stage from all directions, accompanied by deafening sounds of thunder and crashing waves. These visual and auditory effects establish the tone of the play right from the opening and also provide important plot clues for the audience. Ariel, for instance, appears onstage with specific sound and light cues that represent her ethereal nature.

This immersive experience, however, doesn’t last as the actors transition into monologues which are, essentially, one-dimensional. Though the ensemble’s study of the text is evident and praise-worthy, the characters’ relationships are lackluster. They seem uncomfortably distant from each other, too involved in their own lines and too hesitant to fully engage with scene partners.

A notable exception is Fleming, who brings the necessary urgency to the story. She enlivens Caliban with her astonishing physical and vocal variation. I found myself yearning for her to crawl back on stage in another angry fit.

By deciding to set this work in Somalia, Professor Dorfman adds a sense of relevancy to The Tempest.

However, the reasoning behind this choice isn’t entirely clear: While the costume design and the projection slideshow anchor the production’s concept, the concept itself doesn’t quite connect with

// TRESA JOSEPH

the original text. Even though those design choices distract more than they inform, they certainly add freshness to this fairly familiar work.

Despite its flaws, this performance presented the theater community with a myriad of opportunities.

Not only was the casting race-blind and genderblind, the production also gave many theater artists who usually remain offstage an opportunity to be in the spotlight.

Contact IRINA GAVRILOVA at irina.gavrilova@yale.edu .

In Perfect Unison // BY BRENDAN HELLWEG

// BY ALEX WALKER “It was a night out they were to remember for a very long time,” says a Greek chorus of leather-clad phantoms. They’re referencing an unsuspecting couple’s venture into the hyper-sexual world of Dr. Frank N. Furter, yet the same could be said for the audience’s experience of Richard O’Brien’s cult classic, “The Rocky Horror Show.

Since its debut in 1973, the story of the “sweet transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania” has been told and retold on countless stages. And because of this ubiquity, Travis Greisler faces the following challenge in the Dramat’s fall mainstage production: to personalize the experience, and engage a Yale audience. After all, the plot of “The Rocky Horror Show” is more or less an afterthought.

Instead, this distinctly Yale production gains its unique energy from the stage seating, the audience participants (nicknamed “Meatcurtains” and “Pussywillow”) and the calls of “Harvard Girl” to describe an especially prudish Janet.

Even before the lights dimmed, I could tell there would be an emphasis on immersive experience as opposed to plain performance.

The pulsating music and moving lights gave the theater a Toad’s-like feel as phantoms ran down the aisles, calling up audience members on stage to perform pre-show rituals. As the bridge between the viewers and the actors, these phantoms played an especially crucial role, drawing in the audience with their dramatic narration and spontaneous performances. In particular, the frightening group’s red-headed ringleader, played by Thomas Stilwell ’16, elicited plenty of guffaws from the crowd with his quick-witted banter.

In an homage to B horror movies, the production follows the misadventures of a recently engaged couple, Brad and Janet, played by Christian Probst ’16 and Sarah Chapin ’17, who seek help at a nearby castle when their car gets a flat tire. What ensues is a mix of terror and sexual awakening for the two, as they find themselves in the home of Dr. Frank N. Furter, played by Tim Creavin ’15 with an easy confidence.

Splitting his time between entrapping guests and creating Rocky (Bobby Dresser ’15), a handsome sex slave, Furter commands the stage in costumes that range from skin-tight to form-fitting.

At one point, once the doctor has split his old lover’s brain in two, he wonders if he has made a mistake in only giving half to Rocky.

Before he can utter the words “a mistake,” an audience member shouts out “What does your mother call you?” These “talk back” lines are a staple of all “Rocky Horror” productions, and the audience must have impeccable timing to achieve the desired effect.

Though initially somewhat shaky, this interactive dialogue (a mixture of classic Rocky lines and some Yale-inspired calls) grew stronger as the play progressed.

I think the sex and sexuality at the heart of the play resonates well with a Yale audience.

“Rocky” was especially daring at the time of its debut, but today, the sexual undercurrents find a receptive audience on such a progressive campus. Perhaps the most well-executed scenes of the night were the parallel sexual encounters between the doctor and his two guests — both the gay and straight scenes play out in an identical fashion behind an illuminated curtain.

Most of the issues that detracted from the performance could be attributed to the opening-night learning curve: Singing was a little pitchy in the first act and there appeared to be some difficulties with microphones. Parts of the play itself have been called sloppy and unclear, but I think such criticisms miss the point of a “Rocky” production. Ultimately, the success of the play lies in audience enjoyment instead of the quality of execution, and on that count, this Dramat’s “Rocky” certainly succeeds. Just as Frank N. Furter breathes new life into his sexual playmate creation, so too do this cast and crew in their quirky take on an old favorite.

Contact ALEX WALKER at ALEX.E.WALKER@YALE.EDU .

//JANE KIM

The Yaledancers performers’ precise yet grand movements strike a note of awe as they leap and spin to the music, shaking the ground as they land in perfect unison. The bass shakes the ground, too, right after giving the impression that the music and the dancers have become one. And then they breathe out all as one, giving a percussive quality to their movements that further blends the visual, the physical and the musical.

The Yaledancers put on an exciting and haunting show running from Nov. 14–Nov. 16, in the Educational Center for the Arts Theater at 55 Audubon St. The performance combines the traditional and the audacious, the classical and the modern, and the somber and the exuberant to create something memorable. The soundtrack complements the physicality and grace of the dancers in sometimes unexpected ways — who knew that Rihanna was made for ballet? — but the pairings are consistently effective and enjoyable.

An early highlight is Marissa Galizia FES ’15 and Karlanna Lewis LAW ’15 dancing to “Good Day”

by Nappy Roots in whimsical boxer shorts and socks. The duo demonstrates terrific athleticism and unity in the performance, a show of exultant friendship and love. On many occasions throughout, they link hands and support each other, staying perfectly still for just a moment before returning to their powerful movements.

With songs by artists as big as Adele and Rihanna, a student-written song might not be expected, but Karlanna Lewis’s piece, set to a rap song she wrote and produced, was extremely strong. The intensity of the song — telling the story of a past relationship turned emotionally abusive — reinforced the beauty of the dance. Since Lewis was behind both the dance and the song, she was able to tell a unified story; this connection was strongest in the donning and removal of sweatpants. There was something visceral about the way the dancers would wrap the pants around their necks all together, or tear them off as Lewis would drive her anger through the speakers.

The most memorable dance of the night was “Cerceau” by Gracie White ’15, a visually stunning acrobatic performance on an aerial lyra, a metal hoop suspended from the ceiling by a single rope.

With the twist of a limb, White would spin the lyra around or shift the weight, so all of a sudden she was upside down and hanging from her feet. And then, to the swelling echoes of “Over the Love” by Florence + the Machine, she would pull her body up through the hoop and the whole apparatus would twirl, propelled by her tremendous energy.

Florence Welch’s voice has that incredible ability to seem so powerful and so vulnerable at once, and White managed to channel that spirit in her movements. At times she would hang, limp on the lyra like a dying angel in a pristine white dress.

Then she would be a blur of movement, coiling around the hoop with complete control. The room was completely motionless save for the hanging, spinning metal disc, which White controlled with precision and intensity as the music pounded and the lights behind her glowed.

Intermission came next, which felt right. A moment to breathe is needed after a piece like that.

“Mein Herr,” an eight-person schmaltzy Broadway-style dance was a good way to get back into the spirit of the performance. The dancers did traditional moves with a modern flair and delivered a simply fun experience. Not every dance has to — or should — be deep. Sometimes it’s just good to see people kick the air to a song from “Cabaret.”

The performance proved that Rihanna has a perfect complement: ballet. Michaela Vitigliano ’18 improvised to the singer’s “Roc Me Out,” gracefully leaping as the bass of the song made the earth shake. For a voice so filled with power, the quieter strength of ballet formed an invigorating combination.

The performance came to an end with the Broadway classic, “One” from “A Chorus Line,” complete with the glimmering gold bow ties and the top hats. Even schmaltzier than in “Mein Herr,” the dancers grinned with the Broadway toothy smile that was unstoppably contagious. It was a truly satisfying way to end, and let the audience leave feeling totally exuberant.

The Fall Show was not meant to have a unifying theme, but rather to follow the inspiration of the company’s members. The pieces shared, however, a constant passion for that balance of intentionality and power that makes dance so beautiful. These dancers had tremendous chemistry, seen in the ensemble pieces where they would leap in perfect unison and land inches away from one another with grace and style. They shared a common energy in their actions, and became a mesmerizing unity in pieces like “Takatada,” in which the dancers would take tiny, speedy steps to the beat of experimental music.

Yaledancers forms an incredible body in this show, one that makes the trek past Koffee? and TDHeav to the theater well worth it.

Contact BRENDAN HELLWEG at brendan.hellweg@yale.edu .

// ELIZABETH MILES

MONDAY NOVEMBER

17

TUIB

Shake Shack // 8:00 p.m.

WKND’s two favorite things: fries dipped in frozen custard (don’t knock it till you try it) and American folk music (don’t knock it, period).

WKND RECOMMENDS: Shedding a single tear while sitting in the dining hall, alone, on Family Night.

PAGE B12

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND BACKSTAGE

A GREAT SOURCE OF MUSICAL KNOWLEDGE: JON PARELES // BY NOAH DAPONTE-SMITH

J

ohn Pareles graduated from Yale in 1974, and in the last four decades has established himself as one of the country’s premier music critics.

In his time at Yale, he was a musical person, DJing for WYBC, play-

ing the Harkness Tower carillon and writing the occasional music article for the News. After graduating, he started his career at the Village Voice, then moved on Rolling Stone, where he wrote the reviews for such albums as U2’s “October” and Rush’s “Exit ... Stage Left.” He joined the New York Times as the chief pop music critic in 1982, and this September reviewed U2’s newest album, “Songs of Innocence.”

Pareles returned to New Haven on Tuesday for a Master’s Tea at Jonathan Edwards College, where he spoke about his four years at Yale, his career and his routines as a music critic and his concerns about the state of modern music writing. He writes three to four reviews a week for the New York Times, of live shows and records alike, and his name has been a mainstay in the Arts section for over thirty years.

With a slight figure and an unassuming presence, Pareles might not come across as an authority on modern pop. But as he began to speak, names of contemporary artists rolled of his tongue — the Flaming Lips, Flying Lotus, Regina Spektor. His mind contains a great wealth of musical knowledge, and his Tea gave Yale students a chance to glimpse the life of the music critic behind the bylines.

A: Panic — because I have to write it fast. It’s due the next day; we’re a daily newspaper. I’m there standing at a show scrawling in a spiral-bound notebook writing down everything that occurs to me as I’m listening, hoping that a lightbulb will pop over my head saying “This is the lede!”

Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t. Maybe I’ll have to think about it overnight. But at this point I just do it. It’s kind of like a reflex.

I know it has to be done by a certain hour, and it will be done.

Q: What about for records, like your review of “The New Basement Tapes” in the paper today?

A: I listen, I think. I always ask for lyrics and credits though I usually don’t look at them until I’ve decided that I like the music, and then I go back and figure out who’s doing what and what they’re saying. Music hits you in so many ways and so many different angles that I’ll take whatever angle appeals to me for that record.

If I’m listening to a singer-songwriter, I’ll probably pay more attention to lyrics. If I’m listening to African music, where I can’t understand the lyrics, then the sound of it and the rhythm of it is probably going to get to me. It really depends, and it probably depends on my mood that day, and on how much sleep I got. It’s being human — there are so many ways to respond to music, and I’ve probably tried them all.

Q: You spoke in your Master’s Tea about modern pop culture as a “celebrity sideshow.” What do you make of the whole Taylor Swift phenomenon right now?

A: I was being a little polemical, because music still reaches a lot of people. People care a lot more about branding themselves now than they used to. There’s a lot more science of branding; there’s a lot more advertising and fashion. Taylor Swift is a really smart woman. I admire her wordplay, particularly on her earlier albums. I think she’s actually in a transitional phase at the moment, because for a

while she was that non-urban girl speaking to the teenage experience of falling in love and breaking up and feeling resentful and pulling yourself back together and being an outsider — she was really talking directly to teenage girls. And now she’s trying to be a grownup in New York, and to me it’s not quite as interesting, because for one thing she’s collaborating with the same people that everyone else is collaborating with, and it’s all just more clichéd. But she’s so smart, and she might come out the other end.

Q: Do you think the focus on branding crowds out the focus on music itself?

A: Short answer: Probably yes, but the music has to be there for the brand to work. In the end you’re listening to a song, and you can love Taylor Swift’s celebrity and her persona and the way she looks and her videos, but are you going to come back to that song? It’s the longevity of the music that governs the longevity of the career. You can have a novelty hit, but you can wear out your welcome with a novelty hit.

Q: You’ve listened to a lot of music over the years — do you find that there are certain constants, certain artists or albums, that you come back to?

A: (Laughs) I don’t really have time to go back, usually. I’m dealing with so much new stuff. There are people with long careers I’ve heard a lot of — Bono, U2, Radiohead, Springsteen.

I don’t really look back that much, because I’d rather hear what the new thing is, even the new thing of someone I’m familiar with. It might not be that good, and they might have worn out their welcome too, but as a journalist I’m looking for news and as a music fan, I’m looking for new thrills.

Q: Have there been certain albums that have really changed your perception of what pop music can do?

A: Oh, yeah — sure. How far back do you want to go?

Q: As far back as you want.

A: Well, there’s “Highway 61 Revisited.” There’s Stevie Wonder’s early

albums. There’s Prince’s albums — both examples of how you can have the entire song in your head and you can make it piece by piece and have it be astonishing. There’s Public Enemy’s first couple of albums, which are all about noise and rhythm and deep thinking and politics and passion. Those are the ones that come to mind, but there have also been bits and pieces where you think “Oh, that fits together” — Talking Heads albums, “Speaking in Tongues,” “Fear of Music,” which is really funky, really smart, really cerebral, doing everything at once. And I’d have a different list for you tomorrow. I’m always looking for that thing that knocks me off my perch and makes me dance.

Q: Something I’ve heard pretty often is that rock is dead now. Do you think there’s any merit to that?

A: People love “is dead.” The headline “is dead” is clickbait: Music is dead, fashion is dead, theater is dead. It depends on where you’re holding the funeral — rock does not appear to be doing as well as Top 40 radio music, but Top 40 radio music may not be interested in the audience that listens to rock. I still think that people love playing guitars and hearing guitars, and I still think that people love 4/4. So I would not declare rock dead.

“

Q: Do you think the ’60s and early ’70s are still relevant today?

A: People are still sampling them! But the ’50s are still relevant today. Bach is still relevant today. I don’t think that music today will or should sound like music made in the 1960s or 1970s.

Then again, I go to CMJ [a music festival] and hear these psychedelic bands, and they’re trying to sound like 1968 — a certain date in late 1968. So it’s relevant to somebody. There’s a lot of revivalism, particularly in rock, as people are trying to look back and figure out what part of it we can resurrect and carry forward. That’s what’s going on a lot in rock — excavating the past, looking for that magic elixir.

Whether they’ll find it, I don’t know.

Q: Do you think the presence of people who have been around forever — Dylan, Springsteen, U2 — is holding rock back a bit?

A: No, I don’t think so, because Dylan and Springsteen are reaching their loyal audience. I don’t think they’re crowding out anybody, because I don’t think that young people are that interested in Dylan and Springsteen. I don’t think they’re holding rock back.

They’re showing that you can persist in it, but younger rock fans are probably listening to the Foo Fighters, or My Morning Jacket. There’s room

for a lot. On the concert circuit, geezers are still raking in the major concert grosses, but there’s more vitality in a little band you can see at a club.

It may have always been that way — I don’t know.

Q: Do you think that modern trends point us toward the future of music?

More electronic, maybe?

A: It’s always tempting to think that the future is an extension of the present, but then a disruption arrives. So it’s always hard to say. What is it that the stock market says — past performance does not predict future returns? That’s what I like about music. Someone’s going to surprise you. Someone’s going to knock you off your complacency, send you on a detour. And that’s what makes it interesting. If I thought everything was going to sound like it does now, why would I go on? I want to be surprised. And I think we want to be surprised; I think we as a species want to be surprised by music. I think the science of pop says we like some familiarity but some unfamiliarity. I may like more unfamiliarity than most people, but we still want something that can fire up the neurons.

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

IF I THOUGHT EVERYTHING WAS GOING TO SOUND LIKE IT DOES NOW, WHY WOULD I GO ON? I WANT TO BE SURPRISED.

“

Q: When you write a review of a show, how do you start, what’s your process?