WEEKEND

WEEKEND // FRIDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2014

// PAGE 3

LOVE

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PEACE

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WAR

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LOST AND FOUND

SHORT AND TRAGIC

ON STAGE

The first part of a short story by Jackson McHenry.

Scott Stern reviews “The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace.”

Matthew Stone checks out the Yale Rep’s newest production.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

SIN

WEEKEND VIEWS

SUCH IS THE STATE OF AMERICAN PASTRY // BY LUCAS SIN

XIAO

Such is the state of American pastry: cookie dough shaped into a shot glass and filled with milk, a croissant with its legs crossed into a pretzel, and soft-serve made out of strained cereal milk. Oh, and of course, there’s the Cronut™ and its mutant cousins: the bronut (a brownie doughnut), the brodding (a brownie pudding), the brookie (a brownie cookie), the crookie (croissants with Oreo cookies), the S’monut (doughnut pastry with marshmallow filling and graham crackers), the S’mookies (s’mores between cookies), the townie (a brownie tartlet), the broissant (a Cronut™ made by chocolatier Peterbrooke), the baissant (a bagelcroissant) and the cragel (a croissantbagel).

It would not be going too far, therefore, to point out that the race for the next pastry portmanteau might have gotten out of hand.

But then again, you might find yourself in line outside the Dominique Ansel Bakery in chilly SoHo at 6:30 a.m., in line for a Cronut™ — arguably the original pastry mutant that started this candied ruckus in the first place. After an hour and a half of waiting (during which Dr. Fran-

kenpastry Dominique Ansel himself tenderly handed you a freshly-baked madeleine), you took your first bite into the Cronut™ and it discharged a sudden squirt of pastry cream that dribbled all over your chin and onto your shirt. And you might have then thought to yourself: This here — right here — yes, really, truly, is worth it.

Over in France, pastry chefs compete for the Meilleurs Ouvriers de France. The competition was started in 1929 during a time of ideas to remind the public of the importance of craftsmanship, expertise and labor. The MOF pâtissier competition happens every four years.

Sixteen chefs, from an intial pool of 100, are selected to participate in the

final round, during which they must make, among other things, 60 miniature pâte à choux, one three-tiered wedding cake, 60 chocolate candies, 1,500 grams of jam made with a summer fruit associated with a flower, 36 miniature afternoon tea accroutrements, a full-length chocolate sculpture, a body-length sugar showpiece adher-

ing to the theme of the year, and a bijou, or jewel, to be presented in a Plexiglass case. Of the 16 competitors, any, and certainly all, have a shot at receiving the MOF distinction. The honor does not come with a finacial award or compensation for the cost of ingredients, equipment and travel.

Such is the state of French pastry, as it has been since the beginning:

sacrifice, tradition, “Le Technique,” maniacal attention to detail, fanatical dedication to craft, fraternité, years of disappointment, blood, sweat and tears.

As Americans, reading this — perhaps in line at a bakery — we pity and we envy the French. What is this slavish devotion to craft for? What about the American Dream? Don’t they have Cronuts™ in France yet?

Flaky Cronut™ in hand, we remember that the modern American pastry temperament owes its roots, indeed, to France. Of the acclaimed pastry chefs in the United States, Dominique Ansel, of cookie dough shot and Cronut™ fame, is French. Maury Rubin of pretzel croissant fame began his pastry apprenticeship in Paris. Christina Tosi, creator of cereal milk ice cream, is a French Culinary Institute graduate. American pastry is built almost entirely around a pastry technique imported from France.

It is as if all these pastry chefs arrived to the American sweet scene and saw the lay of the land: cheddar apple pies, colored sprinkles and PopTarts. They thought to themselves: Here there is work to be done. So they

came up with Crack pie®, kitchen sink kookies and b’day cake pops.

They made no éclairs unless they were pumpkin-spiced.

Is American pastry’s identity crisis just that then? French recipes, fervor and craftsmanship lost in translation during their transatlantic migration?

The American melting pot does not allow for French pastry excellence; there really is nothing French about a deep-fried croissant or people who are paid $100 to line up for Cronuts™ and deliver them. There is something brutal about this severe commodification of food. Popularist chefs trade craftsmanship for the sake of five-star Yelp reviews, tapping into our short attention spans and our basic cravings for excessive amounts of sugar.

Seen from afar, the state of American pastry looks bleak: We’re stuck in brand-driven creativity. Kraft over craft. Too often, we’re often much closer. Too close, with our faces buried in supremely flaky croissantdonut chimerae, wiping November special salted dulce de leche off our chins.

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

Cutting My Teeth // BY EMILY XIAO

My mother’s given name is Fang.

Friends and teachers here have always said it like it’s a sharp tooth. But in Chinese, it’s got a brief but harmonic “ahh” sound, the kind the dentist asks you to make. I like to think that my mother and her name toughened up for America. It makes for a good story, you know? It gives you something meaty to chew on.

In the spring of my junior year of high school, I took an English class called “Stars and Dust,” in which my classmates and I learned how to write creative nonfiction. “It’s about truth.

Write what you know,” my teacher admonished after our daily warmups. So I wrote about hurricanes. I wrote about ants and ghosts behind bedroom doors,

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about silence and surgery and scabs.

Bluebonnets in desperate bloom along the gray highway. I wrote about roots and my mother.

In a way, I almost felt like I had to.

I mistook writing what you know for writing everything you know, and I confused confessional angst with honesty. I saw aspects of my life as little doors to be unlocked one by one and thrown wide open to the foreign eyes of my classmates: One week I wrote disability (so brave!), the next week I wrote ethnicity (so edgy!). An advent calendar of life experiences.

Ethnicity especially — actually, race, ethnicity, nationality, the distinctions were muddy to me at the time (“as muddy as the polluted banks of the Yangtze River,” I probably would have written back then). All I knew was that it sounded really poetic to talk about accents and foreign rivers and the nicotine

MINGUS BIG BAND

Sprague Memorial Hall // 7:30 p.m.

Charles is dead, but his music lives on.

staining my grandfather’s tongue, and the way my mom checked locks three times and called out to me from downstairs, “Mimi, ahh!” These things added texture. They added truth!

Junot Díaz pulls this kind of thing off. So do Amy Tan, Jhumpa Lahiri, Julia Alvarez. I couldn’t. I recently reread the story I wrote about my mother, and the words sound nice, and I make a semi-vulnerable mention of my bacne at one point, but it doesn’t feel honest or full. At the end of the story, I tell my mother I’d rather have her homemade dumplings over French fries any day.

Where did that come from? When did my mother’s messy story — displacement and money-tightness and homesickness and unemployment — get distilled into a sappy winter-night bonding scene at a McDonald’s drivethrough?

Part of the problem was likely my lack of self-discipline. I was an imma-

ture 17 and allergic to self-discipline and trying to hit upon the right chord of truth. I’m almost 19 now, which isn’t much better.

Beyond that, I tried to write my mother’s story in a way that it was never lived. I thought her foreign struggles would be more “authentic,” not only because of the suffering-equals-art trope, but also, at least a little bit, in the way Gauguin painted native girls like fruit and called it art.

He liked their rawness, having escaped all the artificiality of society back home. But when my mother counted tips as a waitress in an oily Americanized-Chinese-food restaurant, she had no comforting sense of “keeping it real,” and she never thought, at least consciously, that her circumstances were somehow more authentic or morally resonant. They were simply harder.

There was something else, too. I relished the thought of having some-

thing that most of my classmates didn’t, as if experiences were possessions. We were forever disciples of that mantra, “Write what you know,” and we exploited life material for literary material. Equating singularity with creativity, I grabbed onto this thing with slick, greedy fingers and rearranged it onto an Microsoft Word document. I made myself, I made my mother as different and as novel as possible because I wanted to say something original. But all this time, my mother’s been trying to rope in the stubborn runaway vowels that still tell people she’s from someplace else.

I remember stuttering when my teacher asked me to read my story aloud to the class, my own words dragging their feet on their way out of my mouth. My mom, on the other hand? Well, she’s a fang.

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

WEEKEND GIFTS: For the parent: a signed copy of a book written by your professor, with the inscription, “Your child is more academically successful than you think.”

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND COVER

WHAT DOES FERGUSON MEAN? //BY AMAKA OCHEGBU AND KELSI CAYWOOD here was silence.

Dignified, mournful, resolved silence. Yale community members, from freshmen to faculty, stood up from their seats in seminars, lectures and meals across campus at 12:01 p.m. on Monday. They walked out in tens, and then hundreds, onto Cross Campus. The attendees, who gathered before Sterling Memorial Library, were from many demographic groups.

There was no yelling, there were no screams. A powerful resonance rang in the air, punctuated only by exclamations of hope.

“It is our duty to fight for our freedom … we have nothing to lose but our chains,” said Alexandra Barlow ’17 to a crowd of roughly 300.

Barlowe quoted Assata Shakur, a freedom fighter in the 60s and 70s. After the rally on Cross Campus, students marched to City Hall to demand justice.

The Black Student Alliance at Yale with support from members of the Afro-American Cultural House organized the event — Hands Up Walk Out — in response to a recent grand jury decision that shook the black community at Yale and across the world.

T

THE DECISION On Aug. 9, 2014, Michael Brown, an 18-year-old teenager, was shot dead by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. Brown was black. Wilson was white.

On Aug. 20, 12 grand jurors assembled to adjudicate whether to indict Wilson for a crime. In the American judicial system, a grand jury has the power to indict defenders by evaluating the “probable cause” behind a crime.

To indict Wilson, nine of the 12

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jurors would have had to agree that enough evidence existed to bring him to trial. They did not.

On Nov. 24, it was announced that the grand jury elected not to indict Wilson on any charges.

THE FURY THAT FOLLOWED “It was one of those situations where you will always remember where you were when you heard the news,” said Dara Huggins ’17, a black psychology major concentrating on law and social justice.

Huggins said that she had been following the case since day one, like many in the black community. That night, she was at the movies watching “The Hunger Games.”

“I knew it would be coming out at 9 p.m., so as soon as I came out of the film, I was constantly refreshing the feed,” she said.

When she saw the verdict, Huggins stopped in her tracks, in the middle of the street. Her heart dropped.

Travis Reginal ’16 was having dinner with his girlfriend’s family when the announcement came on the television. The complex case became one of the first discussions he had with her family.

Following the Ferguson decision, many Yale students came together in their concern for the grand jury’s verdict. A majority of students interviewed said that they were upset but not surprised.

David Rico ’16, who goes by Campfire David and who is of Native American descent, noted that he has experienced many negative interactions with the police, possibly due to his ethnicity.

“I do not know the AfricanAmerican experience, or what it is like to be an African-American in this country, I just know how it SEE FERGUSON PAGE B8

AN ILIAD

Morse Crescent Theater // 2:00 p.m.

Tim Kane returns in his critically acclaimed role as the Poet of all poets.

//ANNELISA LEINBACH

WEEKEND GIFTS: For the grandparent: a signed copy of a book written by your professor, with the inscription, “Your grandchild is less academically successful than you think.”

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND FICTION

THANKS: PART I // BY JACKSON MCHENRY

//THAO DO

Before dinner, Todd had placed a pair of white candles on the table, each held up by a kitschy ceramic pilgrim. The man had big buckle shoes, the gold on which had faded to sickly yellow after decades of use.

The woman wore a white apron that tightened around her waist in a little groove that you were supposed to tie with ribbon. Todd sat at one end of the table, and I sat at the other. His two children, Amy and Cam, flanked his right and left. The three of them talked about the way the beach had changed in the three years since they had last been to this house. I had no knowledge of the details — the new restaurants, the changing cost of firewood on the shore — so I listened and watched the candles flicker and the wax melt. I knew the big changes anyway, the ones that Todd, Amy and Cam, did not mention. Three years ago, Stephanie, Todd’s wife, had died. Two years after that, he had somehow found me.

Dinner finished. Amy and Cam got up to clean the table. The candles’ flames had sunk deep into the wax. Through the window, the sun floated inches above the ocean. Todd reached his thick fingers around each candle and blew it out. The thought that he and I had “somehow” found each other, I had to admit to myself, was one of those little lies we allow ourselves. We had met online — a fact that did not bother me, but which, I later discovered, bothered Todd. He believed in serendipity. He had pretended that I was the first woman he had dated after his wife had died. That set up our first fight, when I had discovered in him a native desire for purity, a virginlike impulse to be faithful and true.

And when we fought, I realized that for 20 years, and maybe longer, I had given up on such things. All I want is companionship, I had told Todd — no myths, no lies, no fantasies. Now, sitting at the table, I wondered when I had somehow changed my mind.

Todd walked over to me, placing his hands on my shoulders. “Do we have to?” I asked. “Of course,” he whispered. “Things are going perfectly.” He took the ring from his pocket and slipped it onto my finger.

As if on cue, Amy and Cam walked

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back into the dining room. Todd held my hand in his. “It’s been long enough,” he said. “I love Anne, and I’ve asked her to marry me.”

“After a year!” Amy said. Cam said nothing, joining the group hug, but not making eye contact.

“Now,” Todd said. “That’s done.

Let’s go down to the beach.” *** “Why now?” Amy asked. It was the morning of Thanksgiving. She sat on a chair by the marble-top island in Todd’s kitchen. She wore a canvas jacket and blocky black glasses, which did little to hide the fact that she always seemed to squint.

“That’s what the recipe says,” I said. “‘After crisping the skin, turn down the heat in the oven.’ I’m not sure. I don’t really cook much.”

Amy had driven in from Silver Lake, where she volunteered at a Montessori school. After Todd and I admitted to each other that we were dating — as high school as it sounded — he finally introduced me to his daughter. She had just graduated from Occidental and took us to a movie in an old Eagle Rock theater that smelled of pot and cheap beer. Afterwards, she needled Todd and me with questions: where we had met, how we had met. Amy had managed to get at everything I was anxious about — to pick at all the scabs I’d ignored. After the movie, when we were alone, she had told me she liked me and that I was nicer than the other women he had dated.

That night, Todd and I had our first fight.

“Thanksgiving was a very big deal for the Brennan household,” Amy said in her deadpan drone. “I just want to make sure it’s good.”

As we worked, Amy started to recite the history of the house. She spoke without conviction but with the same certainty of fact I had seen in her father. He, she pointed out, always had a special love for the beach, growing up in Orange County, surfing and swimming along the shore. He earned his money in the real estate boom of the ’90s, fitting people into subdivisions that iter-

ated like river deltas. To his buyers, he promised happily ever afters that, as Amy pointed out, were 40 years out of date. But that money had been enough to buy a beach house the year she was born. They had lived there full-time until Cam, the younger sibling, had moved away to college.

Amy asked why I had moved to California. I told her what I had told Todd on our first date: I had moved for work when I was 28. I had just finished law school, and I realized there were more openings in California. The more complicated answer, which I had told Todd only weeks into dating, was that I had discovered that my boyfriend was cheating

NOW, SITTING AT THE TABLE, I WONDERED WHEN I HAD SOMEHOW CHANGED MY MIND. on me and I had needed to escape.

Amy was still talking about Orange County — a bland, white, conservative paradise, she called it.

Some of her high school classmates, she said with disgust, still lived in Huntington Beach. They’d moved back after college, or hadn’t gone to college at all, choosing instead to nibble at their trust funds. I guessed these weren’t her close friends, but the bigger demons of high school — cheerleaders, football players (from what I can imagine — I was sent to boarding school.) Todd once mentioned that in high school, Amy had stopped eating — he was not clear on the details, her mother had dealt with that.

I stacked a set of smeared glass bowls in the sink and turned on the faucet. I told Amy how my older sister had married at 25. She laughed at the idea of marrying at her own age, and for once, she seemed to admit me into the kinship of the oppressed.

Or as I hoped, maybe we had found some deeper recognition, a bond

BOOK FAIR, ODDS AND ENDS YUAG // 1:30 p.m.

Independent publishers, rare and special-edition books, obsolete zines: a book junkie’s paradise.

between women who had both practiced the art of turning yourself off.

“I read that all the big mansions in Orange County are sinking into the ocean anyway,” she said, flicking a butter knife with her index finger and sending it spinning in circles across the marble. “Global warming. Comeuppance, I guess. Better us than Bangladesh.” *** When Cam came into the kitchen, I was alone, picking plates out of the dishwasher and trying to find their respective drawers. Cam had promised to make pumpkin pie, as he had done every year — excepting that three-year gap which they all seemed to ignore — since he was 10.

He had blonde hair and delicate, but definite, features, which looked like they’d been drawn with a sharpened number 2 pencil.

Cam was polite, but didn’t want me to say anything, really. If I struck up a conversation — asking about his drive or his graduate research in physics — he answered in one or two syllables. But if I made a move to leave, he would pause, and ask me a simple question: “How is your work?” “Hasn’t it been dry this year?” So I sat at the countertop, skimming through my phone, nodding as Cam made his own sort of conversation, full of fastidious insights. “This is a how to beat the eggs, you see?” “Most people use too much nutmeg, but really, the secret is in the allspice.”

It must have been in a protected environment that Cam had time to perfect this rhythm, speaking and pausing for reassurance on the reality of his thoughts. Stephanie — mom, I guess — had been the one he talked to before. He never spoke about her, Todd told me that Cam had taken her death the worst of all the family, but I could feel the space that he was working around. Where there must have once been a partner in these little thoughts — someone who knew what to say besides “uh huh,” who could comment on spices and maybe even astrophysics — Cam had a hole in his life.

Stephanie had been the kind of

mother who dedicated everything to her children. My sister had done that too. She had given up her job to live at home in Connecticut just after I moved to California. I used to find excuses to ignore her on holidays — work, travel for work, whatever I could muster. I did not want see her. I did not want to spend my time watching her bend over backwards for her children or making excuses for her husband — Terrible Harry, I called him. When I visited, he always used to disappear. My sister would tell me he was stuck at work or in traffic or something oddly generic.

And then I’d have to spend my time helping out, as she asked, “Anne, could you possibly…?” “Anne, could please…?”

When I was 28, I had learned that my sister’s life was never going to be mine anyway. I can’t have kids.

I hadn’t been planning on having them either — not for several years, at least — but the discovery somehow shocked me. I fell into a depression that was punctured only when I came home to our second-floor walk-up early one August afternoon and discovered that Jason was cheating on me.

Cam was still talking. I wasn’t paying much attention, cleaning utensils with an old rag and saying “uh-huh” every few phrases or so. It was comfortable, I had always known, to play mom. There are moments when this — just sitting here, listening — seems like all it takes. And there are other moments, too — when you hold your sister’s months-old son, for instance, his hand grasping the air as if testing whether the whole world is made of something as soft as he is. But if this is all so easy, those moments remind you, why haven’t you made them on your own? Why do you only witness them as a substitute?

Cam held a pie in front of me.

The pumpkin mixture in the center sloshed back in forth inside the shell. “It will congeal in the baking,” he said. “It’s mom’s recipe. She used to say that this way the texture is unbeatable.”

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

WEEKEND GIFTS: For the beloved sister: a soft Yale sweatshirt.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND ARTS

CAPTURING THE SELF // BY ERIC LIN

To think that the face is the proper way to visually represent the self seems silly, but that’s how self-portraiture has conventionally been defined. “More Than a Face,” an Arts Council of Greater New Haven exhibition, is curated

by Marissa Rozanski. Located on the second floor office space of 70 Audubon St., the exhibition consists of 23 self-portraits by nine

artists that do not show the artists’ face. By excluding the face, the artworks have to justify their place as self-portraits. These works might “speak to the nature of the artist just as much as, if not more than, the face of the artist,” as Rozanski writes in her statement.

The artists represent themselves in highly varied ways, and

the quality of the work varies accordingly. The most compelling ones are more than intellectual exercises.

The first pieces are smaller works that feel at home in their office environment. An early highlight is Irene K. Miller’s “Unleashed,” a small, brightly colored print whose swirling red lines evoke blood or bacteria, on

top of which is a purple rectangle and a black circle.

After the sixth work, just before the exhibition spills into the office conference room, the works become more ambitious.

Here, the office setting does not suit the work.

Barbara Hocker wins the award for the funniest work. “The Book About My Back” is a sculpture

of stacked pages in the shape of a spine, complete with messy wires coming out of it and a subluxation.

Thuan Vu’s three works, entitled “The New World (Still)”, “The New World (autumn II)”, “The New World (Lush)” are the most literal. Depicting her parents’ escape from Vietnam, the perspective and the circular shape of the painting effectively mimic disorientation and sharpened senses.

Jessica Cuni and Anne DorisEisner’s works stand out above the rest.

Cuni’s works, “Natura Immorta III” and “Natura Immorta V,” made with spray paint, convey idiosyncratic spirituality based on nature. “Natura Immorta III” shows evergreen leaf prints in a grayish-purple color, with red in the middle and a bird facing upwards. White outlines of the bird are repeated, creating a dark and uplifting effect overall. “Natura Immorta V,” which focuses on a wasp against a white background, is “Natura Immorta III”’s heavenly counterpart.

The two pieces, which measure

approximately 2.5 x 2.5 feet, are the largest works in the exhibit.

Doris-Eisner’s pen-and-ink drawings, by contrast, are some of the smallest works. Her swirling lines are both sensual and primal. Contained within the flow are suggestions of legs, a cocoon, peacock leaves, and bugs. The work’s density and visual rapidity is mesmerizing.

Corina S. Alvarezdelgo’s thicky painted “Chrysalis,” set against a red background and plastered with diet recommendations, is strangely appealing, but it ultimately seems too vulgar and pop to be a satisfying self-portrait.

The exhibit separates the artists’ individual works. At first, this is a mildly interesting intellectual and emotional exercise, like meeting very different people back to back. As the exhibit progresses, however, the separation blunts the power of the works, some of which are part of a series.

That is not to say the exhibit is not worth seeing. The best works deserve your attention.

Contact ERIC LIN at eric.v.lin@yale.edu .

//PRESS RELEASE

The Extraordinary History of Ordinary People

Bearing Witness to Hunger

// BY NOAH KIM

// BY SOFIA BRAUNSTEIN

//DEVYANI AGGARWAL

It’s a casual display. About a dozen picture frames containing photos with thick white borders hang on the walls to the side of the dining room and line the stairs. It’s understated. Like the actual hunger crisis, it’s there, but in the background. It’s there, but we don’t talk about it.

“Witness Hunger,” a photo exhibition right outside Pierson dining hall, is an attempt to start an important conversation.

Through the lens and the voice of those who actually experience the daily struggle of feeding themselves, a new image of the life of low-income American families emerges. The exhibition is part of a nationwide project run by Mariana Chilton, a professor at Drexel University who heads the Center for Hunger-free Communities.

Each photo on its own is nothing special. It’s obvious that there is no professional photographer clicking the shutter. However, it is in this ordinariness that the key message of this exhibit is found.

These are no skilled shots with expert lighting — they are a reality many of us fail to notice. By looking at the photos, the audience is perceiving the world of one who is hungry, not only for food but also for notice.

The exhibit features three photographers: Jo-Ann Ndi-

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aye, Kimberly Hart and Miracle Brown. They are the voice of the 30% of New Haven residents who lack food security and who were affected by Congress’s food stamp cutbacks in February. Each woman’s photos tell of her individual struggle and her attempts to combat the many hurdles in her journey toward a full stomach for herself and her family.

Ndiaye’s photos depict her particular solution: a garden plot in her backyard. One of my favorite photos is of her standing proud with a yellow squash in each hand and a verdant garden box behind her. The quotations accompanying each photo detail her daughter’s dislike for vegetables and Ndiaye’s attempts to make them appetizing by mixing them into Rice-a-Roni.

Kimberly Hart’s photos line the wall by the stairs, telling a slightly different story. The photographs depict a life dependent on food stamps — which simply aren’t enough —and the inefficiencies of the national system. One of the photos, which features her local food pantry, is captioned: “I waited for two and a half hours to get one bag of food.” Another photo is of an emergency food pantry, which, according to Hart, has now become her day-to-day pantry since her food stamps no longer cover her necessities. Per-

haps one of the most heartbreaking photos of the exhibit is that of Hart’s son staring directly into the camera as he picks at his disheartening meal asking, as noted in the caption, “Really, Mom, no meat?”

In a way, it is the captions that make this exhibit so powerful. Never have I had to grow my own vegetables to supplement my meals, or wait for two and a half hours just for a bag of food. All my life, the main hurdle in having a good meal was my reluctance to make myself dinner with readily available ingredients in the pantry. Here at Yale, it’s so easy to walk into the dining hall, swipe in, grab a plate, heap on piles of food and dump the halfeaten leftovers into the nearest trashcan. However, only a few miles away in New Haven’s lowincome neighborhoods, people are struggling to find even one decent meal.

As small as “Witness Hunger” is, its message is an important one that should be shared and internalized. I wouldn’t necessarily make a long trek in the rain to see the exhibit, but if you’re waiting in the tedious five-minute line to enter Pierson dining hall, it’s certainly worth a look.

In a whimsical sermon to his extended family, the Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke of Thomas Pynchon’s “Mason & Dixon” states that “History is not … [Remembrance], for Remembrance belongs to the People.”

The past is typically observed from the macro level, taught and discussed in terms of nations, empires and governments. General history charts the clashing of armies, the rise and fall of states and the sweeping effects of natural events. Most individuals discussed in textbooks are Great Men and Women whose actions have altered in dramatic ways the path of the human species. Rarely are the stories of the so-called ordinary people remembered, let alone recounted.

“No One Remembers Alone: Memory, Migration and the Making of an American Family,” currently on display at the Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale, highlights the courtship of two young lovers, Abram Spiwak and Sophie Schochelman, and their experience as Russian Jewish immigrants at the beginning of the 20th century. Curated by Patricia Klindienst, “No One Remembers Alone” is a love story told through the couple’s postcards, a batch of which were rediscovered by their family in 2008, and many of which still have their original one-cent stamps.

Between 1882 and 1924, 2.6 million Eastern European Jews came to America, among whom were Sophie and Abram. In Russia in 1905, the Jewish people were blamed for a failed coup to overthrow the Romanov dynasty. A horrific pogrom ensued, and refugees poured across the border into Europe, where they were likewise unwelcome. Sophie and Abram, who had met just months before in the Russian city of Odessa, were separated in the chaos, as Sophie and her family made the 1,000-mile journey across the Atlantic. After Abram himself arrived in New York, he found her living in an apartment in the Lower East Side and immediately set about wooing her a second time.

The exhibit begins with a postcard sent

August 8, 1907 and covers their relationship over the course of the next several years. Sophie and Abram’s story is a universal one — that of two young people caught in the sweep of history, bolstered by each other’s love. The postcards illustrate their relatively difficult financial situation. They squeeze in as much writing as possible to capitalize on paper, writing in tight, compressed font and scribbling messages in the margins.

The exhibit’s chief accomplishment is in illustrating Abram and Sophie’s humanity while illuminating and commenting on their time. It treats them as they are — human beings — rather than turning them into historical monuments. Over the course of their correspondence, the pervasive anti-Semitism of the 20th century remains in the background (on one occasion Abram reveals that he has been passing as a Christian to circumvent his landlord’s policy of barring Jews). Major historical events are rarely discussed. It is easy for one to envision oneself in either Sophie or Abram’s shoes.

The exhibit also does an admirable job of highlighting their love for each other — the love that sustained them through a difficult time in a strange land and that eventually spawned a family. The poignancy of the exhibit comes chiefly from one’s awareness of the trials that they faced in setting foot on American soil.

Their correspondence is a typical one. They arrange dates, passionately express their affection for each other and pester each other to write more frequently. One can always sense the emotion and feeling in every one of the words they write, even when they discuss trivial matters.

On many of the postcards, Abram and Sophie sign off “I am always yours.” Thanks to “No One Remembers Alone,” their mutual promise holds true, 100 years later.

Contact NOAH KIM at noah.kim@yale.edu .

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

THE VIOLA QUESTION PRESENTS: “READING WEEK”

//BRENDAN HELLWEG

WEEKEND GIFTS: WKND RECOMMENDS:

LC 101 // 9:00 p.m.

Let the procrastination begin.

For the estranged brother: a Yale sweatshirt with sweat stains.

PAGE B6

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND NAUGHTY

PAGE B7

OR NICE?

WHAT DO YOU DESERVE FOR CHRISMAHANUKWANZAKAH? 1

It’s Sunday evening. You’ve just spent the weekend in Brooklyn, hanging with friends and hitting up bars and going to gallery openings. Unfortunately, you also have a paper due in 12 hours.

(The essay prompt includes the words “dialectic” and “materiality.”) What do you do?

A B C 2

Delete your Facebook. Or consider deleting your Facebook. Put on your residential college sweatpants and head to Bass. So college!

Pop an Adderall and lock yourself in your room. This is why you chose Yale: for the stressful, fruitful moments. You grow stronger as the deadline approaches. Ah, yes!

I cannot answer this question because I have never been to Brooklyn and I have never written an essay the night before the deadline.

D E

4

Ask the professor for an extension! She likes you because you make a lot of jokes in class and clearly have a funky, fresh creative streak.

A B C

Freeze. Play dead. Call your mom. Hang up on your mom.

Pull an all-nighter drinking black coffee and listening to sad, crooning music.

It’s Monday afternoon and you’re recovering from that crazy all-nighter! You’re a star! You’ve also just received the following text message from your ex: “Dear [Name], I’m thinking about the time we spent together last semester. I miss you: your presence in my life, your hands on my body.

Can we meet?” You respond:

A B C 3

“Sorry, but I can only meet with you as a friend. Trust me. I know you’re going through a rough patch, and I would love to help, but you know we can’t be together.”

“Ours was a beautiful relationship, fresh and tender as a flower. However, I cannot stand by as you trample the past, deliberately flouting a decision we came to out of mutual respect and careful consideration! Your histrionics exasperate me.” And then—“Meet in 20 mins?”

D E

C

“Unfortunately, you have made the exact argument Michel Foucault proposed in his seminal work The Order of Things.

This is a textbook case of plagiarism. Come talk to me after class. Best, Judith.”

D E

Bellow a few profanities in your most commanding tone of voice. Then squish the spider between your index finger and your thumb. Leave the corpse by the sink.

Eat the spider.

Turn off the shower! Immediately! Cup the spider in your hand and let it out into the frosty December air. Post a status about the incident.

Scream, but then spend the next few minutes entranced by the arachnid. Hum crooning music and wonder, “Are spiders sad creatures? What is sadness?”

don’t want to hit up the sexy, sweaty New Haven nightclub. They’re all doing “homework.” How do you end the night?

You actually forget to respond because you’re busy integrating the text message into your newest play. The material is just so fresh!

A

You actually draft seven different responses, but then fall asleep holding your phone and listening to crooning music.

The next morning you delete the message.

B C

You’re in class Monday evening, sipping tea and Snapchatting your friends from under the table. Suddenly, your TA says: “I’m handing back your papers!” When she gives you your essay, she screws up her face in polite discomfort. You immediately look at the comments:

A B

Freak out (!) and take a few deep breaths. Swat at the spider with your shampoo bottle and then tell your friends about the whole thing over froyo. So college!

It’s Wednesday night, and you’re ready for Woad’s. You’ve already been enjoying “subtle tan5 nins and a heady bouquet” — you’ve been drinking wine from a box. Unfortunately, your cronies

“You have the incorrect telephone number. I am [Name]. I am a human being.”

“Unfortunately, you have made the exact argument Professor Adams proposed in lecture last week. While this isn’t a textbook case of plagiarism, come talk to me after class. Best, Esther.”

It’s Tuesday morning, and you’re ready to take on the day. You get up, drink some coffee and hop in the shower. While you’re lathering up, you discover a huge, hairy spider hanging from the showerhead. The spider has one million eyes. What do you do?

You stumble back to your room, put on your favorite jammies, and watch your favorite “New Girl” episode. Then you fantasize, picturing the Whiffenpoofs in quick succession until they become one single, glowing face: The Whiffenpoof.

When your roommate’s in the bathroom, you take a sledgehammer to his computer. He returns, and you say: “Are you still going to do homework tonight?”

You scrounge around the WLH basement looking for spiders. You consume them.

D E

No big deal! You have a Google spreadsheet called “people” — you open it up, pick a name at random (“girl from fractals?!”) and ask “girl from fractals?” if she’s DTF. (Down to Frolick.)

You stumble back to your room and cry yourself to sleep.

During the night, however, you fuse with your bed. Congratulations — you are no longer human.

Mostly Ds:

D E

You deserve an artsy, cool, impractical

“Unfortunately, you have made no argument. This essay, ‘some thoughts on meaning in the bell jar by sylvia plath,’ is a bewildering, sickening work of free association. Come see me after class. Best, Delilah.”

gift! (You probably asked for a weird animal-print sweatshirt or a plane ticket to Berlin.) You’re hip and hilarious, but also

“Unfortunately, I found your essay illegible due to tear stains. I would be happy to read a clean version. Come see me after class. Best, Jezebel.”

quick to help a friend in need. WKND recommends: the new Lena Dunham mem-

“Unfortunately, you have made an argument that is not relevant to this class. You have argued that all literature is obsolete and that books encourage irrational thinking. Come talk to me after class. Best, Hagar.”

oir or studded leggings or blue hair dye.

Stocking stuffers: parti-colored condoms and Sailor Moon stickers. //THAO DO

Mostly Bs:

Mostly As:

Mostly Es:

Mostly Cs:

You deserve love. (You probably didn’t

You don’t believe in surprises. You also

You really don’t deserve anything.

don’t believe in celebration or human

You deserve an exciting but practical gift! (You

This is self-explanatory. Look at

emotion. You are possibly a robot, a

also asked for a practical gift, so this is great

your answers. (Who even knows

character from “Atlas Shrugged,” or a

news!) You’re grounded, kind and mature, so you

what you asked for?) WKND recom-

dead rat hiding under some trenchcoats.

don’t need baubles or accessories. WKND rec-

mends: coal. Stocking stuffers: coal.

WKND recommends: Seven meaningful

ommends: a nice pair of jeans, new snow boots,

touches a day. Stocking stuffers: Soylent

a new copy of Microsoft Office. Stocking stuffers:

packets.

ask for anything.) You’re actually way sadder than that spider in the shower, in case you’re still wondering, because that spider doesn’t even have a brain. Just a small knot of neurons. WKND recommends: A copy of “To the Lighthouse,” probably?

Stocking stuffers: none, because stocking stuffers would trivialize your despair.

Mechanical pencils and candy canes and A Life.

SATURDAY DECEMBER

6

BEES ’N’ CHEER

SSS 114 // 7:00 p.m.

TUIB’s annual end-of-semester concert. Come for the cheer. Stay for the bees?

WEEKEND GIFTS:

SATURDAY DECEMBER

For the kooky aunt: a bottle of champagne. Valium.

6

ANGELIQUE KIDJO

Sprague Memorial Hall // 3 p.m.

The famed singer and activist from Benin heads a lineup that features Shades and the Yale Percussion Group.

WEEKEND GIFTS: For the “fun”-cle: a bottle of Pine-Sol. Valium.

PAGE B8

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND COVER FERGUSON FROM PAGE B3 feels to be discriminated against from the police,” he said.

Rico gave the example of the disrespect he was shown when policemen approached him while he stood outside, phoning his parents. The police did not believe he was a Yale student.

Yale student groups have taken to social media to raise awareness about the issue. On Wednesday, the Yale College Black Men’s Union released “To My Unborn Son,” showcasing black-andwhite photos of members holding whiteboard signs with messages to their future sons.

“To my unborn son, the world is not yet ready for you, so I will hold you close and make it ready to love you,” reads one. Another simply says, “To my unborn son, I love you.”

The Afro-American Cultural Center has also played a crucial role in shaping the campus response, providing an open space for grieving and reflection.

“All it takes when something like this happens is an email to someone as opposed to reaching out and having to start a relationship. You have hung out with them, had study breaks and also had conversations about police brutality before it happens,” said Micah Jones ’16, president of the Black Student Alliance at Yale.

“I am impressed with Yale’s

response … It sends a good positive message about unity,” said President of the Greater New Haven Branch of the NAACP Dori Dumas.

Dumas said that she was impressed with Yalies’ eagerness to work with the New Haven community to protest and emphasized that she did not think that Yale voices would drown out the experience of black New Haven residents. “[I like] the idea that people are really wanting to engage these really complicated issues and are trying to do it in a public forum — that’s what a university should be about,” said Yale College Dean Jonathan Holloway.

Still, Yale students are not of one mind. Some aren’t sure that the grand jury’s decision was unreasonable, or that the shooting was necessarily a matter of race.

Adelaide Goodyear ’17, a white student, agreed that racism plagues relations between the police and the black community, but said that the decision “is not about getting away with murder — it’s that it’s hard to find evidence in cases like this.”

Goodyear explained that the grand jury’s verdict was not an assessment of guilt, but an evaluation of the available evidence.

She added that although Michael Brown’s death was a clear case of police misconduct, murder

charges require large amounts of evidence to go to trial.

Christopher Taylor ’18, who is also white, agreed with Goodyear, saying, “This is definitely a problem with legal procedure.” He noted that police brutality against blacks is a large problem but that police officers are rarely indicted by grand juries.

Other students went further, noting that Brown’s death may not have been motivated by race.

“I think that people overreach and think that it’s an act of ‘the system yet again’ … A lot of people, especially at Yale, don’t even consider that there might not have been probable cause,” said a right-leaning independent student who wished to remain anonymous. “They think they know more than they do.”

Beckett Lee ’18, who is white and identifies as conservative, called for students to remember Wilson’s humanity. He added that police officers are killed on duty more than people realize and that Wilson could have been in survival mode.

“It is almost impossible for a human being to weigh all of the potential ramifications of what they are going to do,” he said of the shooting.

Still, students holding views sympathetic to Wilson appear to be in the minority.

Goodyear suggested that policemen wear cameras to pro-

vide evidence in ambiguous cases. Goodyear’s suggestion echoes that of Brown’s family.

However, the Eric Garner decision — in which a grand jury declined to indict a white police officer who, in a videotaped encounter, killed a black man in a chokehold — on Wednesday prompted many students to question why no action was taken, even with what they described as clear evidence.

Yale students will continue to question the Brown and Garner decisions. Three separate events are scheduled for today — a die-in at the law school, an artistic demonstration on Beinecke Plaza and a #ThisEndsToday event on the New Haven Green.

“My brother is turning 20 next month, which means that he is solidifying his presence in a demographic of young black men between the ages of 19-25 in the United States who are disproportionately targeted by police brutality,” Karleh Wilson ’16 explained. “I worry about [my brother’s] safety under the hands of the law. My brother should feel safe among the presence of policemen, but he does not, and this is the same for all men of color his age in America.”

Contact AMAKA OCHEGBU and KELSI CAYWOOD at amaka.ochegbu@yale.edu and kelsi.caywood@yale.edu .

ACCORDING TO A 2008 BUREAU OF JUSTICE STUDY,

3 TIMES

BLACK PEOPLE WERE ALMOST MORE LIKELY THAN WHITE PEOPLE TO BE SUBJECTED TO FORCE OR THREATENED WITH IT BY POLICE.

~ ACCORDING TO A PEW STUDY,

79% 44% ~

OF BLACKS THINK “A LOT” MUST BE DONE TO REACH RACIAL EQUALITY,

COMPARED TO

OF WHITES.

ACCORDING TO A PEW STUDY,

76% 52%

OF BLACKS HAVE NOT MUCH OR NO CONFIDENCE IN THE MICHAEL BROWN INVESTIGATION,

WHEREAS OF WHITE DO HAVE CONFIDENCE IN THE INVESTIGATION.

~ ACCORDING TO THE NAACP, AFRICAN AMERICANS NOW CONSTITUTE NEARLY

1 MILLION OF THE TOTAL

2.3 MILLION INCARCERATED POPULATION.

~ ACCORDING TO THE NAACP,

1 6

IN BLACK MEN HAD BEEN INCARCERATED AS OF 2001.

//JULIA HENRY

//ANNELISA LEINBACH

SATURDAY DECEMBER

6

NOW NOW OH NOW

University Theater // 7:00 p.m. & 9:00 p.m.

The experimental theater troupe Rude Mechs comes to New Haven and ask attendees to “leave big purses and bags at home.”

WEEKEND GIFTS: For the best frenemy: a gingerbread house that you secretly licked.

PAGE B9

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND FEATURE

THE ROAD TO RHODES // BY CORYNA OGUNSEITAN What does it take to be a Rhodes Scholar?

I asked this of some Yalies selected for this year’s fellowship — Jane Darby Menton ’14, Matt Townsend ’14, Jordan Konell ’14 and Gabriel Zucker ’12.

My curiosity may have stemmed from my confusion regarding college admission decisions. I’ve never understood the cloak-and-dagger proceedings of highly prestigious institutions, whose prestige surely comes in part from the competitive nature of their selection processes.

6.3 percent of applicants to Yale are accepted, but the Rhodes Scholarship only took 32 out of 877 applicants this year — a 3.6 percent admission rate.

This is especially notable given that most applicants are highly successful college students.

In addition to the four Rhodes winners aforementioned, there were six Marshall Scholars selected from Yale this year: Rahul Singh ’15, Miranda Rizzolo ’15, Sarah Norvell ’15, Benjamin Daus-Haberle ’12, Ned Downie ’14 and Katherine McDaniel ’14. Unlike recipients of the Rhodes Scholarship, winners of the Marshall Scholarship can choose from among all universities in the United Kingdom.

This year there were 979 applicants to the Marshall Scholarship, and 34 were accepted — an almost identical admissions statistic.

When I asked what it really takes to be a Rhodes Scholar, two of the Yale winners from this year responded: “Passion,” said Jordan Konell.

“Vision,” said Matt Townsend.

Confession: I usually don’t believe it when people say things like this. But these two seniors really, really convinced me that they meant — and, more importantly, understood — what they were saying.

“I thought I bombed my first interview,” Konell said. “I called my mom and told her to come early. I left and I felt like I hadn’t done my best, but I also felt like everything I said, I meant from my heart … I don’t think the Rhodes Foundation is just looking for impressive individuals. I think they’re looking for people who want to change the world.”

Konell talked extensively about his field of study: race relations in civic policy. Although I kept trying to steer the conversation away from urban Philadelphia (his hometown, of which he hopes, one day, to be mayor), he tied everything back to race.

“What’s your favorite book?” I ask. “‘Song of Solomon’ by Toni Morrison,” he says.

Besides being a passionate advocate for racial equality, Konell was a Community Health Educators CoCo (CoCoordinator) and seems to be a par-

ticularly dedicated Pierson FroCo this year — he refers to his freshmen as his children. Konell tells me he grew up in a working-class area in Philadelphia with a single mom. Because of that, he says, his family is very close-knit. (The night he found out about winning the fellowship, he ate a Philly cheesesteak and hung out with his mom.)

He talked about his background: an ethnically diverse neighborhood that made him aware of his privilege as a white male, which has had a great influence on his field of study now.

Townsend grew up in Chappaqua, New York. He plays basketball, which he describes as the activity he’s most devoted to — he was recruited for athletics his junior year of high school, and basketball is the main reason he came to Yale. He leads the varsity team here, and has maintained a perfect academic record across the sciences, economics and Latin. Maybe most importantly, he works for Student Rented Fridges. He proudly says that, yes, if anyone I knew had ordered a fridge for delivery, he was the one who made that happen.

Said Townsend: “I don’t think it’s [so] important what change you want to make in the world, because there are so many ways to make a big difference. I think what’s important is having a clear vision of what exactly you want to do.”

In the long term, Townsend’s vision is to go into academic medicine. He wants to explore socio-cultural determinants of health, particularly the causes of obesity. And, of course, he wants to continue playing basketball; he’s on the Yale varsity team now and has been shooting hoops since he was eight. He might even play at Oxford, though he tells me that someone compared the Oxford team to “like, third-and-a-half division.”

The professors who recommended Townsend and Konell have their own explanations for the students’ success.

Professor Crystal Feimster, who has known Konell since he was in a freshman seminar she taught, says, “Jordan was a real firecracker as a freshman. And such a joy to teach — his enthusiasm was contagious.”

“I think Jordan is interesting,” says his advisor Cynthia Horan, who wrote him a letter of recommendation for the Rhodes and has also taught two of his classes. “That’s not to say other students aren’t interesting.” But she still highlights Konell’s unique qualities: “Jordan has a good sense of himself …

He can make a good case without getting nervous, because he actually believes what he’s saying. There’s a lot of networking at Yale, but Jordan doesn’t do that in the same way. He does what he cares about.”

Townsend is the first student pro-

// ZISHI LI

fessor Peter Aronson has ever recommended for a Rhodes scholarship.

Townsend took a class and did rounds in the hospital with him, and the professor is a great admirer of Yale athletics. Despite Aronson’s inexperience recommending students for the fellowship, he says, “It did strike me that Matt would be a good candidate because of his well-rounded array of activities and his excellence in all spheres … I was particularly impressed by his well-defined interest — he’s already done work in the area of obesity. He wanted to continue work he’d already started, not have the Rhodes be an honor for its own sake.”

He too goes on to qualify his praise with recognition of other students. He cites the many impressive students he has, and says he wonders whether too

much attention is given to those students who win prestigious awards.

Despite the glowing recommendations from their professors, Konell and Townsend remain humble.

What it really comes down to, they both say in conclusion, is luck.

It’s doubtful that this is the only factor. For the past decade, Yale students have won between two and eight Rhodes scholarships per year on average. Only 32 students are selected from the entire country; a disproportionate number of Yalies snag the prize.

A Yale education certainly fosters success: There is an average endowment of $1,700,000 per student, 75 percent of classes have 20 students or fewer and Yale coordinates hundreds of summer internship programs.

YALE SCHOLARSHIP WINNERS RHODES MARSHALL

!"#$ !"#% !"#" !"##

!"#!

## SUNDAY !"#! !"#$ !"#% “MESSIAH” AUDIENCE SINGALONG

DECEMBER

7

Battell Chapel // 1:30 p.m.

Do you have a handel on the best piece of choral music of all time? WKND hopes so.

!"#$ !"#%

Elliot Gerson LAW ’79, who is in charge of appointing members of the scholarship competition’s committees, cannot pinpoint the reason why Yale has so many winners as opposed to other universities — other than the obvious fact that as a selective institution, Yale admits individuals who are high-achieving and ambitious.

Instead, Gerson lays emphasis on the individual above the institution. “Most years, even after 111 years, we have one or more winners from institutions that have never before had a winner. We give no weight on the scale to such applicants, but we promote them specially to help assure that remarkable students apply from everywhere and anywhere.”

Gerson is quite fixed on the idea that the Rhodes Foundation selects individuals with particular qualities that cannot be gleaned from studying at elite schools.

Gerson says it’s not Yale — so does this bring us back to luck? He does acknowledge that the majority of finalists, even candidates, are highly qualified and deserving. Gerson comments that finalists and other applicants who didn’t win the scholarship go on to be successful people who greatly impact the world and their fields of study.

This is in keeping with Konell and Townsend’s observations that they felt all of the students in their applicant pools were incredibly qualified and that they met some of the most interesting people they knew during the application process.

Horan acknowledges the influence of luck, saying, “The Rhodes process really seems to depend on the interaction you have with the committee that interviews you. I definitely think at the very end of this long and difficult process, that committee is the one that decides.

And that’s pretty unpredictable.”

Still, Gerson isn’t too keen on considering luck as a major factor. He admits that the selection process is rigorous, but that’s for a good reason: The process, he thinks, is ultimately fair. Still, he says, it would be naïve to say luck is not, at least, a small factor.

Townsend thinks a big part is his likability. And he is likable. (“My favorite book is ‘Pride and Prejudice.’ I know, it’s really girly, but I identify with Mr. Darcy. Not because I want to be, like, the main love interest with all the ladies, but because I’m quiet, and some people think I’m aloof.”) But he’s also a superstar varsity basketball player, premed student and volunteer — a host of qualifications he’s too modest to list and, at this point, are probably available on the Internet. Point is, it’s not luck. It’s not Yale. It’s some sort of golden ratio.

Contact CORYNA OGUNSEITAN at coryna.ogunseitan@yale.edu .

WEEKEND GIFTS: WKND RECOMMENDS: For the forgotten friend from high school: a miniature license plate with a name that’s almost theirs on it.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B5

WEEKEND COLUMNS

THE SHORT AND POWERFUL BIOGRAPHY OF ROBERT PEACE A lot of books declare themselves to be “the [insert adjective] life of [insert name].” “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.”

“The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” “The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry” (which I reviewed a few weeks ago). Now, there is one more: “The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace,” by Jeff Hobbs ’02.

These titles are simultaneously great and awful. They are so neat, so concise. They enthrall us, suggesting that we will quickly learn the totality of a life. They also imply that the story will touch on death. Yet for these same reasons, such titles are overly simplistic, even reductive. They boil a life down to a bumper sticker. They rob the books’ subjects of their glorious human inconsistencies.

Such a characterization fits “Robert Peace” very well. It is, in some ways, a profound and meaningful book, an easy read, a memorable story. It is also, in subtler ways, a problematic book. But we’ll get to that later.

“The Short and Tragic Life” tells the story of Robert DeShaun Peace ’02. Rob, as he was known

SCOTT STERN READING BETWEEN THE LINES (he also went by Shawn), was born in Newark to Jackie, a nurse, and Skeet, a hustler and drug-dealer.

Jackie is hard working; Skeet is brilliant. Jackie buys her son encyclopedias and takes classes at night so she can send him to private school; Skeet teaches his son to fight and is convicted of a brutal double-murder before Rob turns ten.

So, the single child of a single mother, Rob grows up in East Orange, a neighborhood near Newark that Hobbs depicts as a crime-riddled, drug-ridden, gang-infested ghetto. As author Anand Girharadas described East Orange in a New York Times book review, “There are places in America where life is so cheap and fate so brutal that, if they belonged to another country, America might bomb that country to ‘liberate’ them.”

Even coming from such a household in such a community, Rob shone bright. He was at least as brilliant as his father. He thrived in a difficult prep school and scored in the 99th percentile on his SATs, even as he held down a part-time job, became a varsity water polo player, tutored his friends, supported his mother, worked (unsuccessfully) to free his father, and casually dealt drugs.

Rob got into Yale and Johns Hopkins, but was set on attending Montclair State University until he obtained the unlikely financial support of a wealthy backer, an alumnus of his prep school. Jackie, overworked as always, missed the deadline to mail Rob’s security deposit for Johns Hopkins by a single day. Reluctantly, then, Rob set his sights on Yale.

As a Pierson freshman living in L-Dub (“Lanman-Wright Hall,” Hobbs always calls it in the book), Peace met Hobbs, a wealthy white kid from the ’burbs. At this point in the story, Hobbs becomes a character. Because of the author’s firsthand knowledge of Rob’s time at college, the Yale years are the most complete in the book. Rob

continues to shine academically, majoring in molecular biophysics and biochemistry, achieving excellent grades, and working in a cancer research lab.

Yet Rob also realizes that he could make easy money by dealing weed to hapless, wealthy Yalies.

Soon, he is bringing pounds of the stuff from Newark to Yale every year. Eventually, he is caught by the Pierson authorities, yet he gets off with a warning. Rob graduates with honors, with hundreds of thousands of dollars in drug money, and with no concrete plan for the future.

After Yale, Rob fulfills a longheld dream of spending several months in Brazil, walking the beautiful beaches and meeting the beautiful people, practicing his Portuguese far from the streets of East Orange. When he returns, however, Rob remains directionless. An untrustworthy family friend has stolen Rob’s drug money. Rob takes a job teaching science at his old prep school, and every year he talks about applying to do graduate work in biology.

Yet Rob returns to drug dealing, as well. He starts carrying a gun,

sleeping in his car or in friends’ homes, wearing a Kevlar vest.

Eventually he trusts the wrong person. The book’s title implies what happens next, on a cold basement floor one night in 2011.

Hobbs is a sometimes-gifted writer, telling Rob’s story with verve and a wealth of descriptive detail. His book is a powerful one.

For the most part, he describes a community about which he knows nothing with sensitivity and tact.

Yet Hobbs also, inevitably, misses a lot. Many readers will notice, for instance, that there are virtually no female characters in this book beyond Rob’s mother and a variety of interchangeable girlfriends and hook-up partners.

More troublingly, we must remember Hobbs’s self-interest in telling this story. He is, in a sense, capitalizing on his friend’s death. Though Hobbs’s first novel, “The Tourists,” was a bestseller, he reveals in “The Short and Tragic Life” that it did not make him fabulously wealthy, that his second novel failed to find a publisher, that his third novel stalled, and that he was forced to take a job copy-editing self-published books to keep

his young family financially afloat.

Then “The Short and Tragic Life” shot to the top of the best-seller lists; Hobbs is a star.

Still, even as these concerns remain relevant, they do not detract from the stark power of “The Short and Tragic Life.” It is a book without an ultimate message of uplift or one of cynicism.

It’s actually striking—this could have been a book about race and the Ivy League, or poverty and the Ivy League, or our messed up drug laws, or any number of major issues. But it isn’t. Hobbs wrote a biography of his friend. The simplicity is almost noble. And this means that Rob’s life is compelling enough, in and of itself, to attract the wide audience that this book has garnered.

In the end, “The Short and Tragic Life” is a solid biography of Robert Peace, a product of and outlier from his community, a gifted, kind-hearted, complicated man who led an extraordinary and all-too ordinary life.

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

Rap vs. Feminism? // BY LEAF ARBUTHNOT The first album I listened to properly, and I mean from cover to cover, was Eminem’s “Marshall Mathers” LP. It was released in 2001; I was nine and my older brother had been given a copy by his best friend. The album had a canaryyellow sticker on it, warning young buyers that they needed parental permission to purchase it. Nothing could have made it more appealing; I took the album, put the disk into my Walkman and listened to Eminem for three days straight.

From that moment on, rap became my favorite genre, an obsession I was vaguely ashamed of but needed in my life. Initially, its attraction lay in the cursing I could discern amongst the rapid-fire rhymes – words I’d hear my mother hiss when she smashed a plate, words a kid called Evan at my school used bountifully, usually before being sent out of the classroom.

But as I went through high school and college, rap came to mean way more than just alluring obscenity. I became picky, developing on the one hand an interest in the worlds being rapped about and on the other a keener ear for poetic and witty lyrics — even if they were sometimes sexist. Jay-Z’s “99 Problems” came out in 2004, when I was midway through my second year of boarding school in England. Once the lights went out in our nine-girl dormitory, I would listen to the album under my duvet, reflecting sagely

that however huge my homework pile, I at least was not being afflicted by “bitch problems.” And now I’m a feminist. You probably know the deal – I believe that women should be treated equally to men, that they should be able to climb career ladders despite their ovaries and retain jobs in TV when they get wrinkles. I’d like girls not to feel outsexed by Barbie; I’d like to live in a time when ladies who, to use today’s parlance, “sleep around” aren’t condescended or shunned but are treated as normally functioning people whose sexual appetites are as by-the-by as their tastes in upholstery.

These views didn’t suddenly walk into my head on my 18th birthday; they were there all along. But the older I get, the crankier gender inequality makes me feel.

Recognizing that I’m a feminist has not provoked some astronomical life change. Feminism is, after all, a cartoonishly broad church; I still wear makeup and I still like rom-coms. But it has made me examine my music tastes with a shrewder eye. Is my rap habit – which has only increased in intensity since “Marshall Mathers” – incompatible with my views on gender?

Listening to the past month’s biggest hits, it’s hard to deny that misogyny is still alive and well in the rap industry. In Meek Mill’s latest track, he says to a female addressee, “It’s two words,

‘bitch fuck,’” and then, more charitably to a male adversary, “You can have my old bitch cause I don’t do the same hoes.”

In Big Sean’s single “I Don’t Fuck With You,” he says as much to his ex, calling her “you lil stupid ass bitch” before adding for good measure, “fuck how you feel.”

This stuff is pretty inarguably misogynistic. Not all rap and hip hop is as bad, obviously—in “Dear Mama,” Tupac thanks his mom for being “always committed.” But derogatory images of women remain dominant in rap music.

Women are rarely presented as smart or superior; they “ain’t shit,” as Dr. Dre observes, “but hoes and tricks [to] lick on these nuts and suck the dick.” Some artists even underline that they specifically enjoy having sex with independent women so as to put them in their place – B.I.G. likes his ladies “educated” so that he can “bust off on they glasses,” a lyric which, as a spectacle-wearer myself, has always made me chuckle.

Of course, I’m not the only white, privileged female to enjoy this sort of music. But instead of squirming at my ability to stomach the woman-hating I hear, it seems useful to examine why rap is sexist. The misogyny didn’t pop up ex nihilo: As rap became increasingly produced by major record labels, artists had to offer more hardcore content. Research has shown a direct correlation between a

rap album’s explicitness and its success.

Too $hort addresses this connection head on, replying in “Thangs Change” to the charge that rappers are “always disrepectin’ ladies.” He basically shrugs it off, saying, “I get paid to talk bad about a bitch.” Rappers shouldn’t be let off the hook entirely – denigrating women is, after all, a cowardly way of squandering poetic talent. But the issue of misogyny in rap is not quite the black and white ethical field it is often framed as.

No musicians create in a vacuum; rap lyrics reflect the realities their writers deal with on the day-to-day. That’s not to say that the songs’ extravagant tales of pussies and gangbangs are legit – they’re often exaggerated, intent on gratifying demands for stereotypical representations of ghetto life. But the need these young, usually black, usually male artists feel to trumpet their own virility via the denigration of the female reflects a sociocultural situation that is absolutely real and, on the whole, horrific. For some of these artists, the opportunities for proving their masculinity in more palatable fields – professional frameworks, for instance – have been sparse, denied by a society that incarcerates over 12 percent of its African-American population.

Yet even if rappers are exhorted to churn out misogynistic content by industry fat-cats, and even if rap-

pers’ creativity can only unfurl within the boundaries of a warped sociocultural context, misogyny in rap remains problematic for feminist listeners. How can someone who wants women to be respected listen to, much less pay for, content that perpetuates harmful gender norms?

It’s an issue that I’ve struggled with a lot – I’ll feel outraged by a lyric that I feel goes “too far”, before forgiving a song that is just as offensive, but which I like for its solid boardwork.

At this point, I’m reminded of Sarah Koenig in the “Serial” podcast, who also swings from one point of view to another.

I don’t have the answer, essentially – all I know is that I believe in gender equality, and yet I like rap music, including songs that are insulting to my sex. I also like Flaubert, the 19th century French novelist whose female characters were also almost all one-dimensional. The reasons why we respond positively to certain art forms over others are complex, and while I would like my political stances to dovetail with my tastes in art, music and literature, they just don’t. Figuring that out is one of the hardest tasks of being a modern feminist, because it involves a constant evaluation of where lines can be drawn and where they cannot.

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

// ZISHI LI

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A LIGHT IN THE DARK

Off Broadway Theater // 2, 6 & 9 p.m.

Yale Danceworks’ fall show provides a light in the December dark.

WEEKEND GIFTS: WKND RECOMMENDS: For your significant other: a slice of pizza. (Later, your body.)

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND THEATER

Steve Martin Paints His Own “Picasso” // BY JACOB POTASH

// CHARLES ERICKSON

“Picasso at the Lapin Agile” feels like a Steve Martin standup routine grafted onto a fun, if flimsy, plot: a pair of twentysomething no-names — a painter and a physicist — meet at a Paris bar in 1903. One is called Picasso and the other is named Einstein, and they spend the night exchanging jokes, competing for women’s attention and announcing their plans to revolutionize the 20th century. The play was Martin’s first, written in 1993.

Each role in this delightful farce is a Martin alter ego embodied — a comic conceit come to life — and the actors in Long Wharf Theatre’s excellent new production have obviously studied Martin’s mannerisms: More than a few lines are inflected with the comedian’s trademark loopy delivery.

The subject matter is uneven.

Bathroom humor is unceremoni-

ously thrown together with overwrought soliloquies about the nature of genius, but the powerhouse cast is able to take an already-charming script and wring out a moving and uproariously funny play.

A married couple — Freddy (Tom Riis Farrell) and Germaine (Penny Balfour) — run the Lapin Agile. Among their guests are Gaston, an old man whose perversion is rivaled only by his incontinence; Suzanne, a beautiful young woman eager for a tryst with Picasso; and Sagot, an art dealer whose money-mindedness serves as a foil to Picasso’s romantic idealism.

Freddy and Germaine are ordinary compared to their largerthan-life guests, but they too have their outré moments: a shouting match over whether Germaine is a post- or neoromantic is inter-

rupted by Gaston, who reminds them, “This is not some sleazy dive!”

The show’s greatest comic pleasure is Jonathan Spivey in the tremendously idiotic role of Charles Dabernow Schmendiman, an inventor who is confident that his building material — a mixture of asbestos, kitty paws and radium — will guarantee him a prominent place in the 20thcentury pantheon. Onstage for 10 captivating minutes, he is the play’s strongest invention — even if the joke can only be sustained for a short burst.

Einstein, in the hands of Robbie Tann, is also delightfully weird, prancing and cackling his way through the 85-minute show.

Picasso (Grayson DeJesus) is a caricature of the appallingly selfobsessed artist: picture James Franco or Kanye West at their

most cringe-inducingly pretentious.

The rapport between the two men is the backbone of the play: Already convinced of his own genius, each man gradually becomes convinced of the other’s, too, until they are awash in a sea of self-congratulation, shouting lines like “My only regret is that we’ll be in different volumes in the encyclopedia!”

Perhaps here it is appropriate to note that the play’s armchair philosophizing is on a par with Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar”: Orations on the subjectivity of the universe are either rousing or woefully out of place, depending on your mood.

Over and over, it is pointed out that the 20th-century revolutions in physics and art both involved a radical relativism — which is an idea, sure, just not a remotely

original one. Granted, no one expects Steve Martin to be Tom Stoppard, and his effort to dramatize an historical moment is perfectly admirable.

Thankfully, there is an endless stream of goofy, meta-referential moments and absurd tangents: When Suzanne coyly asks Picasso when he will return to his room, he answers, “When the play is over.”

Einstein seeks to explain why “e” is the funniest letter, individually assessing every other letter in the alphabet to prove his point.

The audience’s knowledge of history provides another rich vein of humor, as when Germaine offhandedly predicts the advent of air travel, television, the atomic bomb, computers and lawn flamingos — before being dismissed by her husband as foolish.

The futuristic bell that chimes whenever anyone enters or exits

the bar is a subtle clue that the bar exists in a special realm unto itself.

But any subtlety on this front is left in the dust in the play’s final sequence, when the bar’s magical qualities are brought to the fore in a preposterous finale that only Steve Martin would dare to include. No spoilers here!

Suffice it to say that the play is an idiosyncratic love letter to the 20th century. It darkly hints at the impending world wars, but also seems to hold up Picasso and Einstein as secular saints — individual minds whose elegance might be capable of redeeming the century’s legacy. Steve Martin might not belong in their rarefied air, but even as a rookie playwright, he has created an enduring work of his own.

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

“Return Journey” Does Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night // BY NATE BRESNICK

Most is Fair in Love and “War”

//JOAN MARCUS

// BY MATTHEW STONE “War,” written by Branden JacobsJenkins and directed by Lileana BlainCruz DRA ’12, is characterized by its tensions: between present and past, brother and sister, family members; across racial divides and language barriers; and between two different shows playing on one stage.

At the beginning, the lights go up on the show’s minimalist stage to reveal two armchairs, two siblings, one comatose mother in one hospital bed and a strange woman by her side who claims in a mixture of heavy German and broken English to be the mother’s sister. Tate and Joanne, the two siblings, have never heard of the woman, who calls herself Elfriede. Further complicating this is the fact that Elfriede is white and German, while Tate, Joanne and their mother Roberta are African-American. What brings them all together is that Roberta has had a stroke.

As Tate and Joanne sit waiting for Roberta to wake up, they are left to confront and reconcile their longsimmering tensions.

Over the course of each act, the two ridicule each other’s decisions and words, from the minor and recent to the lifelong and festering. Gradually, we learn about the family of four that the siblings share even as they divide it. The two decorate the stage with bitter words about loyalty, hypocrisy, Joanne’s decision to drop out of law school and marry a white spouse, and Tate’s career burnout.

As the show delves into the complexities of familial relations, it also experiments with complex narrative forms. From time to time throughout the play, the lighting changes without a moment’s notice, the stage physi-

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cally rises and the characters — doctors and family alike — drop to all fours and begin to act not as people but apes. Dressed in a ghostly, white hospital gown, Roberta — dazed, amnesiac, lost, confused — wanders among the apes, trying to recover her memory and understand where and who she is. As Roberta stands next to the hospital bed her body occupies, one gets the impression of a purgatory, of an out-of-body experience. A show about family is interlaced with a onewoman act (save, of course, for some apes).

Tonya Perkins, who plays Roberta, delivers a stellar performance, leaving the audience entranced as she weaves in and out of her own consciousness and memory.

Just as chilling are her direct addresses to the audience. She speaks directly to us, asks us who we are, what we are doing here and why we won’t speak back to her.

A common motif of the play is the characters’ breaking of the fourth wall. They often not only interact with the audience, but observe it and make a spectacle of it. The very opening of the play features all of the characters (except Roberta) walking on-stage and slowly breaking into laughter at the audience, as if slowly catching on to some inside joke that only they understand. This image is paralleled at the play’s end, when a group of the characters go to a zoo to look at the ape house and end up looking through a window at the audience itself.

While this adds a surreal element to the play’s many complicated themes and questions, it seemed tangential — if not distracting — to the play’s pathos.

As Tate and Joanne try to grapple with the story (often lost in translation) of this strange German woman and her temperamental son, Tobias, they discover that Elfriede and Roberta share a father.

“I wanted to write a play about black Germans for a very long time,” Jacobs-Jenkins said in an interview published in the playbill. “Specifically something that dealt with the mischlingkinder (children born to white Germans and African-American soldiers during the American occupation of post-WWII Germany).”

Jacobs-Jenkins has constructed a play focused on a unique and unknown component of WWII history, but perhaps the most appealing aspect of “War” is its unique use of the stage. The elevation of the stage to create the rainforest purgatory is enticing. A space in the middle of the stage creates a wall between the characters, a threshold for the apes and a window for the characters to look at the audience. One of the characters exits the stage by walking right off of the downstage steps, joining the audience in the front row. In the physical and the visual, “War” is superb.

However, in its emotional appeal, “War” had its moments of brilliance, but it fell short in its ending.

The catharsis it had promised was never fully realized. When the lights dimmed for the final time, I sat at the edge of my seat expecting one more scene. After all, the emotional release had only just begun. But then the audience began to clap, and the players took their finals bows.

Contact MATTHEW STONE at matthew.stone@yale.edu .

SERVICE OF LESSONS AND CAROLS Battell Chapel // 5:30 p.m.

The Episcopal Church at Yale Choir and the University Church Choir sing carols, light candles and conclude with “Silent Night.”

I first heard Dylan Thomas’s famed villanelle, “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” just a couple weeks ago in the new Christopher Nolan blockbuster Interstellar. Michael Caine, each time the topic of mortality comes up (which is often) beats us over the head with it — “rage, rage, against the dying of the light” — and proceeds to build a giant spaceship. I can’t say I was particularly enthralled with Thomas after that. The grand conclusion of his poetry — don’t die? Try really hard not to die? I was unimpressed.

But pretentiously waxing poetic about immortality and actually achieving it are two different things. Thomas — his poetry and humanity brought to life by Welsh actor Ben Kingdom for an hour — achieves the latter in “Dylan Thomas: Return Journey,” a one-man-show that played at the Yale Center for British Art on Thursday.

This frustratingly simple production is not a play or a monologue; it is something much closer to a resurrection.

Although performed by Kingdom, the play is a seamless stringing together of Thomas’s prose and poetry, and feels driven by Thomas himself. Without much reason (but a good amount of rhyme) “Return Journey” shows Thomas ambling into the past, deep into his childhood. His destinations are trivial: The stories he tells of old men pub-hopping and Christmas Eve fires are amusing and laden with nostalgia, but of little apparent significance.

Along the way, however, Thomas runs into poem after poem. At first, they seem random, out of place, but we begin to see that these memories may be the underground springs from which his poetry surges forth.

With whimsy and subtle melancholy, Thomas tells us of throwing snowballs at the neighbor’s burning house until the fire engine came. He gets a look in his eyes, the lights dim, and the poetry commences.

More uncanny than Kingdom’s embodiment of Thomas’s ghost, however, was how this famous poem felt as natural as the story that launched it. Yes, obviously this was a poem: The shadowy intensity of the moment commanded a little bit more of our attention, the language was a little bit denser. Yet it was an organic outpouring.

That this piece captures the end of Thomas’s life seems rather fitting: It can be seen as a meditation on death in form and content. It has a certain movement to it — the audience laughs much more at the

//NATE BRESNICK

beginning. Though it remains amusing the whole time, the dry humor is supplanted by a gentle darkness as the piece orbits death at an ever-decreasing distance. And by confronting us with the reality of death, only to contradict itself by placing an immortal Thomas in front of us, the piece succeeds in a way that few performances can: It gives profundity to its source material. Thomas’s poetry about death is what brings him back to life. While I’d thought Thomas to be a shallow poet ruminating in a mildly interesting way on the oldest idea in the book, “Return Journey” showcases the nuances of his approach in a beautiful and unexpected way.

All this being said, I was not as spellbound by the show as many reviewers have claimed to be. At times, Thomas’s tale seemed a little too self-indulgent, his accent a little too impenetrable. In these fleeting moments, the magic was interrupted, the narrative thread lost and I had a vague sense of annoyance at the whole ordeal. Though it’s possible I just needed more coffee, I think that this excessive theatricality was a trait of Thomas himself.

Just listen to a recording of him reading one of his famous poems. Though haunting and passionate, Thomas savors his words just a little too much, as if to say “I know this is good.” While that same pomp sometimes bogs down “Return Journey,” it is, on the whole, a successful resurrection of Thomas in all of his spirit. “Return Journey” was only at Yale for one night, but with a volume of Thomas’s poetry and a bit patience, you can resurrect him yourself.

Contact NATE BRESNICK at nathaniel. bresnick@yale.edu .

WKND RECOMMENDS: For Peter Salovey: a fake mustache.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND BACKSTAGE

THE NECESSITY OF INDEPENDENT VOICES: JOHN SAYLES // BY PATRICE BOWMAN

M

ention John Sayles to any film buff and they’ll tell you that he’s one of the few American independent filmmakers still making unique, challenging movies. His films “Passion Fish” and “Lone Star” both earned him nominations for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. When he’s not busy making dramas or historical movies, he also writes novels and short stories. His most recent book,“A Moment in the Sun,” is an epic which begins with the Gold Rush and ends with the PhilippineAmerican War. He visited campus in October, sponsored by the Schlesinger Visiting Writers Series, and stopped over once more this week. WKND sat down with Sayles to discuss his career, his thoughts on contemporary cinema and his creative process.

Q: If someone were to watch all of your films from start to finish what sort of recurring themes would they notice?

A: They would see an interest in complex situations and in complex communities. That means that my movies aren’t usually heroic. They’re not about someone saving the day. They’re often about people who are put into situations where they have some choices, but none of them are that good.

Q: When you started working in the film industry in the 1970s, did you think that you’d become a politically and socially aware filmmaker?

A: I don’t think I thought in those terms. I thought that if I ever got to make a movie, why would I just do something that a thousand other people were doing? For instance, we made this movie “Amigo” (2011), which is set during the Philippine-American War. There are only three movies about the Philippine-American War made in America, and ours is one of them. And the other two didn’t have any Filipinos in them!

Q: You depict a lot of underrepresented characters.

Since you’re not a part of a marginalized group, how do you approach those stories?

A: Some of what you do is listen. You talk to people, you read things people have written, you have your own experiences. I lived in a mixed community and went to a mixed high school, so, people who weren’t white weren’t totally alien to me. When I think about these movies and do my research and talk to certain kinds of people, I’ll only go as far in as I feel comfortable going. Sometimes, it’s not me initially thinking that I’m going to deal with marginalized characters. As I was writing the last movie that I made, “Go for Sisters” (2013), I realized — there are actresses who want to play these roles. And they happen to be African-American. And the sad fact is that African-American women — even if they’re incredible actors — don’t get much work. Since I’ve started making movies, though, there are a lot more African-Americans, Latinos and gay people making movies. So, we’re getting their stories much more than we used to. Not as many as there should be.

Q: Some people believe that American cinema has become more commercialized since the 1970s. Have you experienced such a transition?

A: In the ‘70s, we had a lot of filmmakers — like

“

Martin Scorsese — who were influenced by European films. And European films got into politics and sex in ways that American movies just had not done. They got into what was going on, what younger people cared about. But after “Star Wars” (1977) and “Jaws” (1975), the studios realized that they didn’t have to [fund those European-style films] anymore in order to attract a big audience. I first noticed the change when I was working for Roger Corman (a famous director of low-budget sci-fi and horror movies). They used to make B movies. They had very low budgets. I wrote a movie called “Battle Beyond the Stars” (1980), which was basically “Seven Samurai” (1954) in space, and I think he made it for less than $3 million. By the beginning of the 1980s, those movies were being made for $100 million.

They were A movies and the big money-makers.

As far as becoming more corporate, I feel like that’s something that always happens. One thing that has changed is that advertising is so much more expensive. The studios think: “Why would we make a risky $3 million movie when we know we have to spend $10 million to advertise it?” That’s a lot of money to make back.

Q: With today’s cinematic franchises and expensive advertising, the current environment doesn’t seem like the brightest place for aspiring filmmakers.

A: It’s a relatively expensive form of storytelling. I don’t see people being able to sustain themselves making those “off-Hollywood movies.” It’s harder than it used to be. It’s easier to get a movie made and harder to get it distributed. That’s kind of the reality of a lot of filmmakers. Everyone knows now how late you have to stay up and how hard it is.

Q: But you’ve been able to sustain yourself within the industry and get money for your projects. What do you think about that?

A: First of all, we haven’t gotten anyone to invest in any of our films in over ten years. We haven’t gotten a company to distribute one of our films, so we’ve paid to have them distributed. I’ve financed my last three or four films by being a screenwriter for hire. I’ve probably written 100 screenplays by now. I eventually amass enough money so that I can be either the sole investor or the main investor in my own movies. Second of all, while I think [that getting into filmmaking] is difficult, I don’t think it’s unimportant. Movies are a part of a cultural conversation. I think if you leave a part of the conversation just to the marketplace, a lot

of things don’t get said. As far as what’s going to happen with the movie industry, it’s still unclear whether people are going to monetize all the new delivery forms. You know: streaming, video on demand. But I don’t think being an independent filmmaker is going to be profitable; you have to have another job.

Q: Would you consider working for streaming services?

I THINK IF YOU LEAVE A PART OF THE CONVERSATION JUST TO THE MARKETPLACE, A LOT OF THINGS DON’T GET SAID.

A: I don’t have a problem with any of them. But with Amazon, it’s kind of a Trojan horse — and not necessarily in a negative way — because it enters a lot of homes and learns things about our shopping habits. They want us to buy from them. These places have a way of getting their money back, an agenda for why they’re making shows. But I’m just trying to make a good show. For instance, I was just out in Los Angeles and I thought it would be great to have a six-to eight-hour show about Louis Armstrong. It’s a great story! But each of these companies would have to ask, “How can we show this and what commercials should we run?”

Q: Besides being a filmmaker, you’ve written several

novels. When you sit down and write a novel, how is that creative process different from that of writing a screenplay?

A: I can do anything that I want. If I want the sun to shine, I can write that the sun is shining. You don’t have to worry about how to afford all this stuff. Second of all, it’s just me. Occasionally there’ll be an editor assigned, but that’s a very late conversation. When you’re making a movie, it really is collaborative. There are people I hire who can do things that I can’t do. In movies I tend to work on four or five things at the same time. When I’m working on fiction, that’s all I’m working on.

Q: Is that why you primarily pursue film? Because film gives you the opportunity to work on multiple projects at once?

A: Yeah. And it’s also just — when it looks like you’ve got the money, you better make the movie, because it may go away!

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

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