Herald Volume LXXXIV Issue 7

YALE’S MOST DARING PUBLICATION SINCE 1986 Oct. 26, 2018

ld

Th

e H l a e ra Y e

from the editors

THE HER AL

VISIT US ONLINE AT YALEHERALD.COM

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THEAD S A M EDITORIAL STAFF EDITOR-IN-CHIEF MANAGING EDITORS

Jack Kyono Nurit Chinn, Fiona Drenttel

EXECUTIVE EDITORS Emma Chanen, Emily Ge, Margaret

Grabar Sage, Nicole Mo, Marc

Shkurovich,Eve Sneider, Anna Sudderth, Oriana Tang FEATURES EDITORS Marina Albanese, Trish Viveros CULTURE EDITORS Sara Luzuriaga, Tereza Podhajská VOICES EDITORS Allison Chen, Julia Leatham OPINION EDITOR Eric Krebs REVIEWS EDITORS Kat Corfman, Everest Fang STYLE EDITOR Molly Ono INSERTS EDITORS

Sarah Force, Addee Kim

DESIGN STAFF Dear Fellow Gamers, This week, I joined the ranks. It’s Battle Royale, bitches, and I’m spiritually 13-years-old again. I just biked home from middle school and Mommy is upstairs, making tater tots. I’m in the basement. My Wii nunchuck is collecting dust underneath the couch, and peanut M&Ms roll across the carpet like tumbleweeds. I turn on the TV and plug in. It’s the Fortnite era.

Copy that, Bush Campers? Let’s play.

CREATIVE DIRECTORS Julia Hedges, Rasmus Schlutter DESIGN EDITORS Merritt Barnwell, Paige Davis, Audrey Huang

LEVEL 1: Ryan Gosling. He’s made a moon landing and Sahaj Sankaran, SM ’20, is right there with him. Put on your space suit and jump into his review of First Man. LEVEL 2: Speaking of moon landings, Cameo Thorne landed in the New Haven School District many moons ago; since then, she has worked tirelessly to improve restorative practices in public schools. Find an interview with her by Caramia Putman, BF ’22, in Features.

LEVEL 3: Power up! Anya Pertel, MC ’21, knows how to mix but never match. Check out some of her power clashing tips in the Style section.

Lick that Cheetos dust off your grubby little fingers. It’s go time, noobs.

Fiona Drenttel Managing Editor

The Yale Herald is a not-for-profit, non-partisan, incorporated student publication registered with the Yale College Dean’s Office.

If you wish to subscribe to the Herald, please contact the Editor-in-Chief at john.kyono@yale.edu. Receive the Herald for one semester for 40 dollars, or for the 2018-2019 academic year for 65 dollars.

The Yale Herald is published by Yale College students, and Yale University is not responsible for its contents. All opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the views of The Yale Herald, Inc. or Yale University. Copyright 2018 The Yale Herald.

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THE YALE HERALD

IN THIS ISSUE 6

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FEATURES Caramia Putnam, BF ’21, interviews Cameo Thorne, a New Haven English teacher running to be president of the Teachers’ Union.

VOICES Mara Hoplamazian, GH ’20, explores queerness through carabiners in a lyrical essay.

In an ethereal three-part poem, Sasha Carney, SM ’22, weaves between the mundane and the supernatural.

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In the final installment in the Herald’s series, “Stomping Grounds,” Local Stories that Will Define the Election, Armin Thomas, MC ’21, examines the duality of immigrant-American identity and how essential birthright citizenship is to preserving it.

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STYLE Anya Pertel, MC ’21, makes a stand for wearing “whatever the fuck you want.”

SATURDAY OCT. 27 @ 8:00 P.M. JE GALLERY

Caramia Putman, BF ’22, recounts the poet Eileen Myles’s candid poetry reading at the Beinecke.

Alma Bitran, GH ‘21, transports us to the Sunday Compline services in Christ Church.

REVIEWS Sahaj Sankaran, SM ’20, critiques Damien Chazelle’s latest film, First Man, the story of Neil Armstrong and the first moon landing.

Alan Presburger, SM ’21, brings up to speed those who missed this year’s YSO Halloween Show.

IN C

ING M O Swallowing gum

TGO U O

Gum (in seven years)

IN G

LINES OF ESCAPE: CLOSING RECEPTION

CULTURE

Nicole Mo, BK ’19, discusses confidence and vulnerability in pop artist Robyn’s latest release, Honey.

FRIDAY NOV. 2 @ 8:00 PM DAVENPORT-PIERSON THEATER

SAT NOV. 3 @ 10:00 PM 216 DWIGHT ST

XXXXXXX

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THE PURPLE CRAYON PRESENTS: GENUINE IMPROV! A SINCERE SHOW

JACK IS 21 AND JULIA IS ALMOST THERE !

COVER

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OPINIONS

WEEK AHEAD

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INSERTS

OUR COMMUNITY DANIEL YADIN, MC ’21

vey .yale.

Editor’s Note: This is satire.

President Peter Salovey <president@message.yale.edu> to me To the Yale Community,

But divisiveness has no place in a community of love. The mass imprisonment and hyper-exploitation of puppies presents us with an opportunity for robust campus dialogue here at Yale.

Our commitment to find better ways to invest our endowment, to uphold our high ethical values, is unwavering, and we have made progress towards that end. Just last month, we announced that we would donate to a charitable cause one cent out of every dollar we make off the genocide of the Rohingya. Don’t let the activists tell you we don’t care.

When I ponder what creates our community here, as I often do, gazing wistfully down Hillhouse Avenue, I think of you: members of our vibrant home of visionaries, thinkers, artists, researchers, lovers. Yale is a place of love and safety and mutual care, and we all recognize the key role our financial investments play in supporting our endeavors here. The Above all, my beloveds, this is our home. endowment is the pot from which you This is where you learn, where you love, flourish, my flowers. where you’re inducted into the global ruling class. Together, we can ensure Yale Recent reporting in campus publications remains that way. on the nature of our investments holds no water against the strength of what we’ve Sincerely, built. As our president, as a father, and as a husband, I see clearly the divisiveness Peter Salovey caused by the revelation of Yale’s President investments in labor camps for puppies. Chris Argyris Professor of Psychology

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THE YALE HERALD

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PERRY FALK, SM â&#x20AC;&#x2122;20 & SELENA MARTINEZ, DC â&#x20AC;&#x2122;22

1.

s nt

teps to S f o o r G p l e e d e M h o art tt o ock in L

ob at J t a Th veryo g E n t e n a i h W a T

Google Lockheed Martin, and find out exactly what they do. They make missiles.

Train for 10,000 hours and become an expert in something that Lockheed Martin needs. Like making missiles.

3.

Attend one of those Tony Robbins seminars to gain confidence in talking about your expertise. In making missiles.

Because Lockheed Martin only hires hotties, change your LinkedIn profile picture to a picture of a model. A model that is damn good looking, but has medium to low notoriety.

5.

2.

4.

For the interview, hire said model. Teach her how to make missiles.

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F

Not for Climbing

M

arisa jingles when she walks, and I pay attention. I’m starting college, becoming aware of beginnings, of the fragility of early friendship, of the distinct velocity of a queer crush. Also, mostly, of the fact that my Midwestern fashion sense doesn’t cut it here, on this monochrome coast. Marisa wears her keys on her belt loop, in a ring attached to a stainless-steel double-gated carabiner, sturdy and weather-worn and labelled “NOT FOR CLIMBING.” She unhooks them with a smooth flicker of fingers and wrist, rests them on the seminar table each Tuesday morning as she exhales into her chair— legs wide, chin tilted, poised. When she gets up to go, she snaps them back into place and smiles goodbye. My ears track her as she walks away.

I borrow my first carabiner from a friend’s desk.

Smaller than Marisa’s, inconspicuous, silver. Two months later the hook that holds the lever in place breaks, and I graduate to a graphite-colored mid-gauge S-Biner that I pick out from REI. The heavy carabiner on my right hip becomes a comfort. I wear it to class. I wear it to rugby practice, where the older players also wear theirs, and a chorus of metal on steel clinks in the grass as we tie our cleats. I wear it to a party, then I wear it to sleep, then I wear it the next morning to breakfast with a girl I met at the party, who is wearing hers too.

I use my keys to start a conversation with an acquaintance who owns the purple bike that’s locked to the gate of the city farm where Marisa works. Her carabiner is bright green, and hooked to the back of her pants, because it flops less when she rides, helmetless, down the hill to class. The cool girl with a crop cut in my history section laughs with me at how much noise we make, climbing the stairs together. I go to see Moonlight with new friends, and it takes a few extra moments in the theater to quiet down the twinkling of our keys.

MARA HOPLAMAZIAN, GH ’20

Suddenly it seems everybody is wearing a carabiner. We wear them like Claddagh rings, facing outward—an offering of friendship, a sign of loneliness. Some people wear theirs casually, thoughtlessly utilitarian. But I wear mine like a text-printed t-shirt; like the green and fuchsia one I carefully picked and ordered in the sixth grade, from the Delia’s catalogue, and waited on my front stoop for, in the back-to-school chill, ready to make a statement: Don’t Be Trashy, Recycle. I’m not quite sure what the carabiner silkscreen says. I’ve Watched Every Season of The L Word, maybe. Or, I Ride a Funky Bike. A simple, I’m Queer, Be My Friend.

Alison Bechdel says key rings are a phallic symbol, one that conveys potency, agency, capability.

I learn who Alison Bechdel is around the time I start wearing my graphite S-Biner. Then I learn that butch isn’t a bad word, and that maybe, sometimes, I want to be called it, as long as there’s no bite in the crackle of the “ch.” By the time I learn the hearty lesbian legacy of carabiner key rings, “gay” has started to feel like an endorsement rather than a taunt. I learn that it is harder to say what I mean than it is to mean what I say. But I’m more sure each day that whatever I’m saying when I clip my carabiner to my belt loop, I mean.

I think closets were built to hold two things: the stories we tell about ourselves, and the parts of us we avoid mentioning. Pairs of socks that once matched, until we used one to store the lighter we didn’t want our parents to find. Lingering space for the pink dress we threw out at twelve, in a rage against lace and too-tight waistbands and tripping while running after brothers. A scarf or two from an ex who thought we looked good in purple. The closet I carry with me in the schlep from the Midwest to the coast has shed and regenerated over three falls. Like wind chimes, the clink of keys across campus has become a faint joy. My carabiner stays snug on my hip—a remnant of a story I’ve told about myself enough times to stick.

VOICES The Fae Folk Are Particularly Unhelpful at Pit Stops SASHA CARNEY, SM ‘22 06.06.18. I’m writing this in a roadside Subway in Squamish where, legend has it, if you tip just right they’ll let you into the aether through the STAFF-ONLY back door. They say the door spills transcendence like moonlight from the fourth dimension, which pools on the cracked concrete of the parking lot. Legend has it, it’ll fill the furrows of your knuckles like rubber cement, seal the scabs that still haven’t healed from last week, when you socked your own subconscious in the jaw. But I don’t have exact change, and the cashier’s eyelashes are growing into fangs, lengthening & sharpening & crusting over like lichen on rock. It feels like a threat of sorts. So I’m keeping my head down, eyes fixed on the open face of my sandwich. Tomato on white. The tomato slices bleed into the barely toasted bread, staining it the faintest shade of orange-pink, pornstar martini with vodka overpoured, diluted sunset, faded remnants of a wish made at a crossroad decades ago. I don’t know why I got tomato on white. The gaps in the soggy red slices yawn and yawn and threaten to swallow me whole, and their edges are run ragged like my heart’s chambers, thick with knotted & over-oxygenated veins, but four times smaller and twice as bloody.

06.09.18. I’m sitting by a riverbank in Red Deer and the stream is trying to hide her laughter lines. Her furrowed forehead ripples over a handful of pebbles and blurs the reflected leaves ever-so-slightly, perfect passive subject, wistful mirror-muse. The man at my elbow mutters Sublime and clacks his paintbrushes like fingernails, like talons, like beetles’ beaks, so much menacing keratin. I can’t dissolve him or wash him away, not least because it wouldn’t be fair to tip my toxicity into the river’s mouth. The man at my elbow died a hundred and nineteen years ago and, still, he clings to my skin like ketchup on a souvenir t-shirt, scrubbed at again and again with sweat and steel wool, refusing to budge.

06.12.18. The ancient Egyptian gods superimposed the afterlife on reality, pinned it parallel to the Nile, and when you died, if you died, if you had the exact change, you flipped into the metaphysical with a snap of Ra’s cosmic fingers, like night shift on an iPhone X. I am explaining this excitedly to a sprite as he fills his minivan at a gas station in Mistinikon. He grunts, chugs moonlight from a plastic milk jug, turns away. We both know I will drive until the highway hits the horizon and trickles, diluted, into the stratosphere, but I will never leave this body, never pump myself from this too-tight heart, never scour my too-human skin with steel wool until it ruptures and bloodies and I drip into the Duat.

OPINION

ARMIN THOMAS MC ’21 THIS IS THE FINAL INSTALLMENT IN THE HERALD’S SERIES, “STOMPING GROUNDS,” LOCAL STORIES THAT WILL DEFINE THE ELECTION.

I

am an American. I believe that my birth in Boston, almost two decades ago, guarantees that. I grew up both Indian and American, able to explore the intricacies of multicultural duality. The two identities are inseparable and cannot exist independent of the other.

Donald Trump has thrown these long-established axioms of my life into jeopardy. A few days ago, he tweeted his “understanding” of the Constitution— one that allows him to unilaterally repeal the 14th Amendment by executive order. The amendment among other things, safeguards for equal protection under the laws and of birthright citizenship. Given that my parents were not American citizens when I was born, my citizenship in the United States is solely contingent on the fact that I was born on U.S. soil. Provided that the Republican Congress and Supreme Court have thus far failed to protect basic constitutional rights for so many people, how long would it be until they start assenting to outright unconstitutional acts? How long would it be until they retroactively revoke people’s citizenship for the sake of preserving “real America”? These questions tear at the very heart of my existence, threatening to unseam the tenuous connection between my identity’s inherent duality. In effect, Trump’s intentions are asking people like myself to accept that, unless we are derived from “real American” stock, we are not Americans at all. And that proposition is one by which I cannot abide. Were I to dissociate my American life and upbringing from my Indian cultural background, I would be denying the fundamental truths of my world, repudiating everything I know myself to be—too Indian to be purely “American,” and certainly too American to fully Indian.

I am from Lexington, Massachusetts, where thousands of children have similar stories to mine. We are a diverse community of native-born Americans and immigrants—legal and undocumented alike.

We are taught that we are Americans as well as keepers of our ancestral cultures existing in multi-

8 THE YALE HERALD

Divide and Conquer cultural duality. Such an executive order is eerily reminiscent of another demagogue many decades ago who used the stripping of citizenship to justify oppression and state-sponsored terrorism against those deemed to be outside the nation’s populace. People say that the situation won’t get that bad, that we have systems in place that will keep such heinous acts from being repeated. But I always ask myself, do we really? We are one 5-4 Supreme Court decision away from such breaches of basic constitutional rights—denying citizenship as a pathway to even greater inhumanity.

Considering that partisan hack and “originalist” “justice” Brett Kavanaugh has been seated to ensure the rubber-stamping of the Trumpist agenda, I fear that my world and the worlds of innumerable others are under threat. It is clear that the president sees immigrants, particularly from non white-majority countries, as a threat to the whiteness of his imagined America. The accentuation of the word “caravan” within his speech at any of his unhinged rallies makes this clear. To his followers who share the same repulsive worl-

dview, hordes of swarthy immigrants are streaming towards America, ready to stain and sully the purity of its long-guarded whiteness. Trump’s acolytes in government have agreed. Iowa congressman and white supremacist, Steve King, went as far to declare that “Culture and demographics are destiny.

We can’t restore our civilization with someone else’s babies.”

Do I count as someone else’s baby?

If the majority of America agrees with Trump’s view on immigration and birthright citizenship, then I somehow do. If that is true, then is my entire existence, predicated on the duality of my two cultural backgrounds, a lie? And if my identity is a lie, how am I supposed to navigate the white power structure determined to erase it? I am sure countless other people of multicultural backgrounds are asking themselves similar questions. But for now, the only remedy available to us is to reassert our heritages’ place in American society at the ballot box. Vote.

Were I to dissociate my American life and upbringing from my Indian cultural background, I would be denying the fundamental truths of my world, repudiating everything I know myself to be— too Indian to be purely “American,” and certainly too American to fully Indian.”

STYLE

-Cla r e w s o

Y

our alarm goes off. It’s a Thursday morning. You hop off your scarily lofted bed and open your closet. Yesterday, you exhausted all your clothes that go together. Now what? Oh, but behold! Say hello to power-clashing.

According to that unholiest of sages that is Urban Dictionary, power-clashing can be defined as “combining clothing items that according to style etiquette do not go together.” Let’s unpack that.

First of all, who is “style etiquette” and how did she get my number? Secondly, what does “go together” even mean?

t

s an

h

h e t T f i o

ANYA PERTEL, MC ’21

But the real issue with the 10 Item Wardrobe is the implication that there are certain pieces that do or do not go together, that an outfit is only the whole and not the individual parts. But if you truly love every individual piece in your closet, is there ever anything that doesn’t go together? As Evidently, it means that the world is in need of long as you wear it with confidence, no one’s goanother personal style mantra. There’s this whole ing to say a thing. Intentionality is the heart of all new minimalist trend that’s whirring around clout, didn’t you know? speedy metropolitan hubs: “The 10 Item Wardrobe.” The premise is that you only have ten items In the end, power-clashing gets to the heart of of clothing in your wardrobe that all “go togeth- fashion: wearing something and making it yours er,” so whatever you throw on in that morning and yours alone. Some days I get out of bed, look rush looks crisp and put together. And while I, at my closet, and decide to grab whatever the two too, am sometimes tempted by the idea of sucking craziest items in there are. I just slap ‘em on my all the sartorial joy out of my life and sinking into body and go. And, truly, the secret is not giving the warm ease of not having to give any thought a single fuck. Like, seriously, who cares? Life is to what I wear every day, I’m just not willing to confusing and so are patterns and color theory, so give up on some things so easily. just live your life. But then make it fashion.

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FEATURE

A More Perfect Union C

ameo Thorne has been an English teacher in the New Haven School District for 15 years, though her impact on the district extends beyond the classroom as the Project Director for the AFT Innovation Fund Grant for Restorative Practices. Restorative practice is generally a social science that studies how to alter systems like schools, prisons, etc so they more positively contribute to and strengthen a community. Through the Grant, Cameo has been replacing punitive practices (i.e. suspension) with mediation that builds community and understanding for students in conflict. However, Cameo believes the school district itself needs restoration as well. She is running to be president of the Teacher’s Union (one of the largest unions in New Haven) in an upcoming election this month.

Yale Herald: Tell me about yourself and your career and how you’ve been involved with the school system.

Cameo Thorne: I’ve worked in New Haven for about 20 years. I started out as a high school English teacher at High School in the Community, [and] at the beginning of the 2015-2016 school year, I moved into the restorative practices position. I have a Master’s in Educational Leadership, a graduate certificate in restorative practices, and a training license with the International Institute for Restorative Practices. During the summers, for the last couple of years, I’ve been training Boston teachers at Suffolk’s restorative justice center as a contract trainer. As I became more and more involved with restorative practices, I had an opportunity to visit [many of ] the schools, to sit with teachers, to sit with students in a variety of settings and locations, to work with students who were struggling in relationship to being a member of the communities. And so, I got a pretty good sense of the stories that need to be told. To solve a problem, you have to understand the problem. And that means you have to know enough about it to ask the right questions. Once you have the right questions, you can [then] start working on the solution. And I began to see that we were not being proactive in relationship to meeting the needs of students and teachers. I do believe that students and teachers are like a marriage: it has to work together. There’s no such thing as what’s good for a teacher not being good for a student, or what’s good for a student not being good for a teacher—because they are inherently joined. Both of their needs are important and [must] be advocated for. When Governor Malloy [first] took office, I remember him making a statement that he wanted teachers to work eight-hour days. When he made the statement, I laughed, and I actually told our current union president we need a couple of billboards that say “I agree, teachers should work eight-hour days.” Last night, [I had] a teacher text me [saying], “Just ending another 14 hour day.” Most teachers are working nights [and] weekends. They’re taking homework every weekend. They work really long hours to meet the demand.

[Then] they’ve got to come in cheerful and chipper and meet the needs of the students everyday despite the fact that there’s a mountain of [work to

10 THE YALE HERALD

do]. [But] what would motivate a legislature to fund a situation when they think, as Governor Malloy [thinks], that we don’t even work a 40-hour week. There’s a lack of being proactive and educating the public about any of these issues. [There is] a really fundamental lack of understanding because of [the] lack of communication. So here we sit in a fiscal crisis [and] funding gets cut, but people don’t know how much more was needed to begin with. [Educating] the public about the real issues doesn’t happen. That’s [supposed to be] the job of the union. Their job [is] to advocate for teachers and the needs of students. But [the union’s] very reactive: they’ll [show] up [after] somebody’s in trouble, defending the contract. But it [should be] way more than that. In my vision, it’s not about being reactive, it’s about being proactive in order to actually solve the problems that teachers face daily.

And that is inherently is restorative, because the community can function [once] everybody’s needs are getting met.

YH: How exactly do you intend on meeting those needs?

CT: There may be somebody out there who could do a better job than I do, but they’re not running, and they don’t hold office right now. I do have a plan. In my position I was able to [conduct] a workplace wellness survey, and about a little over a quarter of the teachers [responded]. I [took] some of those answers from that survey, which I then shared with my union, [but] they did not use that information. I want to perform a larger [survey] to collect a little more information. The next step is to work with the people.

For example, New Haven public school advocates have been standing up at Board of Education meetings, yelling about 37 layoffs. [Was] our union president standing with them? No, he wasn’t. [There’s] that lack of ability to be proactive—I’ve got that. I think like that all the time: Where’s my agency, what do I do next to accomplish what I have to do? If I stay in reaction all the time, I’m never going to get to proaction.

YH: What are some possible challenges you might face during your campaign?

CT: I do have some challenges that are frustrating. One of them is that a lot of the electorate doesn’t know we’re having an election. Ballots are going to be sent home at the end of next week to their home addresses. If they don’t know they’re coming and they don’t get them, they won’t know to call for another ballot. [Many] don’t know who the candidates are, because in addition to the union not effectively communicating that there is an election, there’s no place where they’ve actually said “These are the candidates.” And right now, by the rules of engagement set up by the elections committee, I can’t go in the school parking lot at the end of the school day and hand out flyers. So [as for] making myself known, I’ve done so mostly [through]

11 CARAMIA PUTNAM, BF ’22

social media and through teachers I know. [P]eople need to know that there is an election, [and] what that process is. [I]f you don’t know any of this, you can’t make an informed decision.

YH: What role do you think the union should be playing in the New Haven public school system?

make sound decisions unless the unions are informing them. I have a different vision. It’s to be proactive, and to get ahead of this. However, I am completely stunted by the way union has failed to inform its own electorate about the candidates, about the fact that we’re having an election. About what the process is.

YH: And who are you running against?

CT: There should be [some method] of informing the public about the reality of education. What does a four year graduation rate mean? The question isn’t, “Did the school get it done in four years?”

It’s, “How many kids did they actually graduate?”

And we must [help] them understand those differences. When we publish test scores, what do they actually mean? I was in a meeting where they told me there were 70 languages spoken in New Haven public schools. A third of the class are English language learners, and two thirds of the class aren’t.

How much does that impact the teacher’s ability to bring everybody to some level of proficiency? As a high school English teacher, every single year over the last 10 I got more and more kids who read at a lower and lower reading level. At one point we had to put in a Wilson Reading Program, which meant that kids weren’t knowing phonics.

YH: You mentioned that there have been a lot of layoffs in the school system. Do you think that these problems with education are related to that, or that both of those things are caused by something else in the New Haven community?

CT: So if I’m a legislator, and I don’t know what the issues are, and I have to decide what to do with the dollar that I can send to cities and towns, I’m gonna look at it and say, “Well, teachers don’t even work 40 hours a week.” That was Malloy’s idea when he said that in public. [A legislator] is gonna make assumptions on what funding is needed based on their experience. How many legislators do you think have actually sat in a class, in a school system that might have had 70 different languages being spoken? Probably almost none of them. So, they can’t

CT: Tom Burns, who’s also running for the presidency.

He’s the current vice president. And David Figueroa, who has been the president since they originally took the post.

YH: And were either of these two people teachers at all?

CT: They both were at one time. I don’t think David’s been in the classroom since 2008. And Tom hasn’t been in the classroom since 2008 or 2009. And I can tell you a lot has changed since then.

YH: So do you think that affects the amount of insight they have in terms of what they should be doing with their power?

CT: I think it does. You can’t know what you don’t know, right? And when I suggested we do the workplace stress survey, and they weren’t interested. [The survey] to me was a way to collect information about what you don’t know. I don’t want to be that person who disparages others. I just want to say that I believe it needs to be done differently. And I think in this fiscal environment that it’s not likely to get better. There’s less money for us to do things with, and that means people have to make really hard decisions, but they can’t make them well if they don’t have the [right] information. It’s the job of the union to inform [our political leaders]. Rosa DeLauro came to our convocation and she said, “It is the teacher’s job to stand up for the needs of children.” Absolutely, that’s our job. And in particular our union’s.

YH: What that is the goal of restorative practices, and how have you implemented it into the school system?

CT: One part is community building in and of itself. So when I walk into a [classroom] full of people, we all have similar values: loyalty, family, integrity, honesty, respect. But because we come from different places and spaces—over 70 languages for example— we may have different ways of applying those values.

Or expectations of others in relationship to those values. We [must] agree to do things for each other so our community functions. With conflict, [we] switch the model from: “What rule was broken, who broke the rule, and how should we punish them?” to “What happened, who was harmed, what are the needs of the person who was harmed, and who is obligated to meet that need?” Then we come to an agreement about what would repair that relationship. And the agreement is solely between the person who did the harm and the person who was harmed. They create a contract together, and the relationship then starts to move on to a different place. That’s the nutshell. Implementation started with the community building circles. The political proactive side of being a union president is to make the public understand the needs of students and teachers. That’s what calms down conflict. When people understand and they go into an agreement about how they’re gonna support those needs, they don’t have to fight about getting their needs met. The perfect articulation of that purpose is to actually move the community to a space where all of the people are getting their needs met as possible.That should be the point of politics, the point of people serving other people as a representative, to get the [people’s] needs met.

RERIGGING HISTORY RASMUS SCHLUTTER MC ’21 YH STAFF

I

n 1839, reports of a mysterious ship with tattered sails zig zagging along the Eastern seaboard were spreading among New England towns. Later that year, this ship, a Spanish slavetrading vessel named La Amistad, was intercepted off of the coast of Long Island by the USS Washington, captained by Lieutenant Thomas R. Gedney. Gedney found a revolt aboard: 40-some enslaved Africans had overthrown their Spanish captors, killing all but two of the crew members and taken control of the ship. During the day, the freed captives directed the two remaining Spaniards to navigate back towards Sierra Leone; but at night, the Spaniards steered towards shore, hoping to get aid from the Americans. Gedney, seeing an opportunity to claim salvage rights on the ship and its valuable cargo, towed the Amistad away from New York, where captured slaves were considered free, to slave-condoning New London, Connecticut.

Unwittingly, Gedney towed this ship into history, sparking the impetus for what would be the most important Supreme Court decision on slavery up until Dred Scott.

The legal disputes that were to follow have elevated the Amistad to a sort of mythic status, particularly in the New England area. As the court case and testimony from the captives would reveal, the ship had been carrying slaves from Sierra Leone, brought in illegally to the Spanish South American slave trade. The captives were from the Mende people,

one of the two largest ethnic groups in Sierra Leone. Back in America, conversations that the Amistad Many did not speak the same language, and many had galvanized were fueling a wave of abolitionism across the North. The legal case became evidence that had never been on the ocean before. change was possible, and it continued to influence When Gedney brought them to shore, he quickly public opinion up until the outbreak of the Civil War. cast the Amistad Africans as rebelling slaves, void of any legal protections. Sengbe Pieh, the leader of the After the case, the Amistad was auctioned off in slave revolt, voiced his own defense even before the October of 1840 to Captain George Hawford, who actual trial began, retelling the story of his capture renamed it the Ion. He sailed it for four years, using and vouching for the freedom of his fellow captives, it to trade goods down to Bermuda, until he sold as well as giving justification for their actions. To it again in 1844. From then on, the history of the settle the legal dispute, the Africans were moved to original vessel sinks into obscurity. No record of the prison cells in New Haven, the location of the US ship exists past 1844.

District Court for the District of Connecticut. After both the District and the Circuit Court ruled in favor In 1998, a Connecticut non-profit, Amistad America, of the Africans, Gedney finally appealed the case to decided to construct a working replica of the ship. the Supreme Court.

The replica, built using period woodworking techniques and the images of the original Amistad In 1842, the question was finally settled by the as reference, began sailing out of the New Haven highest court in the land, which ruled 7-1 in favor of Harbor in 2000. After facing charges of tax fraud in the freedom of the Amistad Africans, requiring them 2015, Amistad America closed down and sold the ship to be returned to Africa. The Court ruled that, having to a new organization, Discovering Amistad. It’s now been illegally enslaved, the former captives were an educational vessel, traveling around New England indeed free and entitled to return to their homelands. ports as a moving classroom, educating students about By this time, however, only 35 of the original 53 the history of the Amistad.

Africans who began the voyage survived. Many had died on the journey to the United States, others after the ship had landed in Connecticut. In 1843, they returned to Africa with a group of American pastors, at last, free. What happened to rest of them after this, after their return home to Sierra Leone, is unknown.

SENGBE’S FAC

*** Being on that deck carries this weight of history to those who know it, even though the Amistad story itself has been cast rather lightly. It still mostly exists as an emblem of abolitionist success in American collective memory, cemented by the eponymous Steven Spielberg film in 1997. It is a win for good, an abolitionist checkmark. The ship became the symbol for a great alliance between the wrongfully enslaved and the publically righteous. But when on it, it becomes something very different. Both literally and symbolically, the ship has been remade. Today, this new nautical classroom has become a place where students learn a different story and a different memory, and question this type of historical glazing.

There are educational stations where crew members lead exercises about dehumanization and Northern complicity in the slave trade; the whole experience aboard becomes a hands-on history lesson. The ship is an intensely critical memorial, engaging students with an intensely important question: how do we remember the Transatlantic Slave Trade, and how might we remember it better?

“One of the things we try talking about is putting the role of the Amistad into a bigger context. In

trying to erase the misconception that the North somehow equals good, and understand that it’s more nuanced and complex than that” Jaclyn Levesque says, the current Director of the Discovery Amistad Organization. She explains how the economies of the South and the North were inextricably linked; much of the food and raw materials that fueled everyday plantation life came from the North. “Even though there were abolitionists in Connecticut, Connecticut also made a lot of money off of slavery.”

Sengbe’s story of loss and pain, by no means unique among the captives, is difficult to carve in stone or cast in steel. He has become an legendary emblem of bravery and abolitionism, a status carved out of the harsh reality of his life. Known as Joseph Cinqué to his Spaniard captors, Sengbe was a rice farmer from central Sierra Leone. He had a wife and three kids at the time the slave traders captured him and took him to the slave fortress of Lomboko on the coast of Sierra Leone. He would never see his family again. Sengbe is on almost every memorial of the event. Even on the Levesque and the Organization are unusual in this replica Amistad ship there is a small portrait of him, sense. They explore intimately the specific human hanging from the wall below deck—he cannot even costs of slavery in a way that few other educational escape the ship he was brought here on. institutions in the state do, putting aside the court cases and the history book dates to talk about the Sengbe finds himself on other memorials in the area actual experience of the people involved in the as well. Visit the sculptural memorial by City Hall in Amistad Affair. One of her focuses is retelling the New Haven, and he is there again, albeit in a context story of Senghe Pieh, who led the revolt on the ship. very different from the Amistad ship. The sculptor, Ed Hamilton, completed the piece in 1992. It’s a large “Who was Sengbe Pieh, who were the kids? After piece of steel, a rough inverted pyramid standing 12 he’s kidnapped, we know more about what happened feet tall with Sengbe at the front and the faces of the to him than his wife and kids ever did. To them, other Amistad Africans at the sides. From above, there Dad’s kidnapped and he’s gone. When you tell that is another face, looking directly up, seemingly drowning to a group of young kids you can see them grappling into the sculpture itself. The site is rarely filled with more than one or two people. There are no benches, only a with it,” Levesque said. railing where people sometimes lean or eat a quick lunch.

CE IS EVERYWHERE, BUT NOT HIS STORY.

IT’S ABOUT REBELLION AND ORGANIZING, IN WAY THAT THREATENS A WORLDVIEW THAT WOULD RATHER VALORIZE SENGBE PIEH’S HEROISM THAN DISCUSS HOW HIS CAPTURE PERMANENTLY SEPARATED HIM FROM HIS FAMILY. “In New Haven, the name Amistad is everywhere.

But that does not mean that people have a full understanding of the history. More support and outreach is desperately needed, especially to connect the local story to Cuba and Sierra Leone. ” Joseph Yannielli, a historian of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and a former Lecturer of History at Yale University, explains. “I have taken several Yale classes on field trips to the memorial, and almost none of the students were aware it existed, despite its location directly across the Green from Old Campus.” *** Sengbe’s face is everywhere, but not his story. Not only was the memorial a long time coming, being erected over a 130 years after the event, people simply don’t know enough about the event itself to make meaning of the memory this monument communicates. What is frustrating then, is how close potentially elucidating information is.

The Beinecke holds hundreds of documents directly and tangentially related to the events of the Amistad, but Yale has few accessible public resources to learn about the Amistad.

“The story is especially pertinent for Yale, an institution named after a slave trader and founded on the profits of slavery and racism,” Yannielli says. “There are many things that need to be done to atone for and repair the damage done by Yale. A fuller engagement with the Amistad, and all of its transnational connections, would be a step in the right direction.”

While there is no dearth of historical documents relating to the affair, the most popular narratives about Sengbe lack depth and historical scrutiny.

The history of the Amistad needs this kind of monument to find place for its memory, but it also needs better public understanding to become meaningful. Here, Yale has an opportunity to use its authority and resources to promote new, critical understandings of the Amistad affair, understandings similar in nature to the ones taught by the Discovering Amistad organization. The alternative to actively supporting this approach is to leave this history victim to inaccuracy and amnesia.

Levesque recounts how a few years ago, misinformation was spread about Sengbe, with a report claiming that when he returned to Sierra Leone he became a slave trader. Until a group of historians checked the sourcing and proved the claims to be false, the report gained some public traction. The truth can be so easily broken when it stands on such shaky foundation. The literal hundreds of documents the Beinecke has, some of which are occasionally on display at the New Haven Museum, are for the most part buried. The few names that do emerge become tokens that get twisted and misremembered.

And while the Levesque and the Discovering Amistad Organization have begun to bring some of that historical detail and complexity forward, the effort is challenging, particularly because at a very basic level, what they are doing is confronting commonly held notions about Connecticut’s innocence, and about slavery in America more generally.

Yale’s absence is particularly felt on board the Amistad replica. Yannielli was the first professor

to bring a full class of students aboard the Amistad last year, and this was one of the few major outreaches between the organization and the university. The university was closely involved with the original case itself–many of the abolitionists advocating for the captives were educated at Yale, as were many of the supporters of slavery advocating for the return of the captives to the Spanish.

In many ways, the history taught by Discovering Amistad is precisely the kind Yale shys away from.

It is much easier to have the Amistad be text on a page, drawings in a vault, even a memorial from a well-over past, than a ship you can travel on.

It is much easier to avoid complicity that way as well.

“Connecticut was the South’s friend in the North. You have to know, the big plantation owners had children who would attend Yale, and advocate for their father, and their father’s friends,” Adwoa Bandele-Astante, an educator and researcher with the Discovering Amistad Organization, said.

Bandele-Astante leads one of the onboard education stations on the slave trade and on African culture and society. She shows, in full color, how deeply tied Connecticut, and Yale, were to the slave trade, but also speaks to who exactly the enslaved people were. While accurately imagining the past is critical to an understanding of slavery today, and Yale can play a larger part in this, it is exploring the human story, the kinds of cultures and histories enslaved people were coming from, that gives the story a more significant moral meaning.

“For example, in West Africa you have storytellers who are very organized and undergo rigorous training to be linguistic storytellers.

And why is that important? When the dust clears after the war, who tells your story? That’s why it’s important to your legacy.”

That is the same legacy of memory that BandeleAstante carries on today in her teaching and

research. The students react well to it, excited and energized by this way of learning that runs against the usual grain of textbook memorization.

“I talk specifically about the Triangular Trade and Africa. I let them know that millionaires were made in Connecticut participating in the Triangular Trade. They made ships, they made sails, they made textiles–having cheap cotton was valuable to them–they grew food,” BandeleAstante says. “They participated full heartedly in the trade. It grew from this industry into the insurance capital of the world.” *** This retold story of the Amistad is about fighting that system, at the most basic human level. It’s about rebellion and organizing, in way that threatens a worldview that would rather valorize Sengbe Pieh’s heroism than discuss how his capture permanently separated him from his family. Creating this story, from the original boat to the replica, has brought a new vein of rebellion back into the Amistad story. Perhaps that’s where it’s true importance lies. Not only is it about teaching a past, but also imagining the future.

The Amistad memorials around New Haven and Connecticut are for the most part commemorative. They are conservative holders of memory, presenting a limited view of the past in a charged setting. The replica boat is much more diffuse, much more flexible in its interpretation of its memory. It’s history brought alive, brought forward as something to be reconciled with.

“It’s kind of scary. You see it in the movies and you hear about it and read about it in your textbooks, it’s another fact to memorize. When you actually come out on it, it’s the same type of feeling in a way, there were actually people on a ship like this, there were actually people being carried over miles of open ocean, just like this, just how we are right now,” Jon Katz, a senior at Notre Dame High School in West Haven said.

“It really happened.”

Even though the ship is not an exact replica, and doesn’t pretend to be, many students shared this sentiment. Somehow, they were closer to history on this ship. The memory of slavery is so abstracted that it when it finally finds an actual space to be grounded in, it latches on.

The breadth of the material taught on the ship activates the other memorials in new ways, and draws students back to central questions about memories of slavery.

“This was one story of one ship, [but considering]

the size of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, it was this times thousand and thousands of other ships. When I feel like you can come out here and experience it, that has a deeper impact,” Katz says. “I definitely think that the monument brings that history to life, makes it a physical manifestation instead of just words. Actual monuments can change your perspective.”

That change of perspective is what Levesque sees as the true mission of the Discovering Amistad Organization. With an imperfect replica and a crew of five or so, it’s not easy to weave a story like the Amistad for the consumption of teengaers, but when it is done right the results are tangible.

That sound of a mental click, from seeing this ship as an educational tool to a historical bridge, can be heard even above the howling wind around the ship. Seeing the students interact with the ship, hearing them talk to each other, reveals a degree of respect for the space. Not all, of course, share the sentiment, but change still feels possible.

“They want to talk about race, even the young kids, they don’t shy away from it, they want to get into it, and that’s been an eye opener,” Jason Hine, second mate of the Amistad and a classroom educator for the Organization said. “3rd and 4th graders– they get really into the story, their imaginations bring them into it and then they start speaking as if it was the original. They’ll say, ‘Oh where was Cinque when...’ and I’ll say ‘Remember, this is a recreation.’ They’ll get into the story and they think of this as if it was the original.”

Bridging the past and the present is more than an exercise in producing new forms of memory; it presents a radical prescription for understanding contemporary injustices. “I think today, you have the powers that be that don’t seem to value humanity, just like the times in slavery.” BandeleAstante says. “Keeping life valuable, keeping the young people humane. There are challenges to that. You have to share your perspective. I tell the youth, violence without cause is brutality. People who fight for their freedom aren’t brutes. It’s people who brutalize people for no cause: that’s different.”

CULTURE The Casual Poetry of Eileen Myles CARAMIA PUTMAN, BF ’22 W

hen I heard Eileen Myles was coming to read at Yale, my expectations could be summarized by the vague phrases that popped in my mind as I climbed the Beinecke steps this last Thursday: lesbians, Allen Ginsberg, Transparent, and that one poem in The New Yorker; but primarily the word cunt, which they only said a disappointing four times at the event.

This semester, the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library hosted two readings as part of The Yale Collection of American Literature Reading Series. Organizer Nancy Kuhl explained to me in an email, “the series aims to celebrate American poetry in all its variety and richness, featuring both younger poets of great promise and well established writers of high achievement.”

Myles is currently on tour for their new book, Evolution. They opened the reading with older pieces before progressing to the new ones in the collection. The event was an opportunity for them to promote their new work, while also being an opportunity for the library to announce its acquisition of Myles’ papers. These papers, Myles told me after the reading, includes scraps of their journals and original drafts of novels, poems, and other works.

Before starting the reading, Myles noted that they have always been criticized for reading

too fast. Yet as they read, the speed seemed suitable, making their poetry, which is jarring and enjambed on paper, flow in speech. Each lengthy poem became one singular statement.

Myles was loud and surprisingly comfortable compared to the Nicole Sealy reading (part of the same series) that I went to a few weeks earlier. Then the upper level of the library felt dark and heavy, paralleling Sealy’s quiet and slow voice. Now, against the quartzy glow of the space, Myles sparked welcoming synergy.

They were unhesitant to interrupt their own reading to interject an anecdote or refill their wine glass of Diet Coke, jokingly likening themselves to President Trump.

Before reading their poem “Joan,” Myles started with a prelude about writing a play with a group of women on Joan of Arc. I couldn’t tell when it ended and the piece began. However I knew once they were in the thick of reading the dark piece with the hitting line, “a white dove leaped out of her mouth as she died.

Four-hundred and thirty-one years ago today a dove leaped right out of her mouth.” They ended with a tidbit about how the real Joan of Arc was killed for wearing men’s clothes.

The subject of this and many other pieces were dark, yet Myles’ blunt delivery made them feel just as regular as those about their dog.

“IT’S WHAT KEEPS ME FROM CROSSING OVER INTO INSANITY.”

18 THE YALE HERALD

Myles is a queer, free-form poet from an impoverished alcoholic family in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They’re a recent winner of the Shelly Prize from the Poetry Society of America and a 2012 recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, among dozens of accolades. “When I started out I knew I was better than any of the boys getting more attention than me” they told me after the show. I asked if they felt satisfied career-wise. They didn’t hesitate to point out, “It’s rare for a poet to be able to live off of their writing.” After hearing Myles tell me all about why they were successful, I wondered if they would still be writing without that feeling.

They immediately said yes. “It’s what keeps me from crossing over into insanity.”

When I talked to Myles after the reading, we first discussed their success and career more than who they were as a person. However, as we continued Myles told me about their past unabashedly. When they were younger they felt there was nothing to inherit from their mother but alcoholism, but later realized they were wrong.

“I found I could inherit storytelling…it’s what makes me so natural at events like this.” Coming from a similar background, their comment shifted my perspective. People like Myles dig out the strength in their roots.

19 SPIRITUAL BUT (NOT) RELIGIOUS:

ALMA BITRAN GH ’21 slow down and take a break from the frenzy of exams, rehearsals, and scheduled meals.

SUNDAY NIGHTS AT CHRIST CHURCH

O

n Sundays nights, New Haven’s Christ Church is dim and silent—but not empty. The air is heavy with the haze of woody incense, the darkness punctured only by the glimmering pinpricks of candles that line the chancel.

Echoes of footsteps rise up towards the lofty wooden ceiling as people file in and take their seats. Not a word is spoken among them. Breaking this silence would feel almost transgressive; there is an otherworldly stillness here that begs to be preserved. Suddenly, a strain of song emerges, a pure and ringing soprano. In the echoing space, words are impossible to make out.I crane my neck in search of the music’s source, but it’s invisible in the darkness. The song, bursting from one voice into a soaring polyphony, seems like an instrument of the atmosphere itself.

This is the weekly Compline service, which takes place every Sunday at 9 p.m. and lasts only 20 minutes. Practiced in several denominations of Christianity, Compline is meant to be a sort of bedtime ritual marking the close of the holy day. At Christ Church’s service, there is no sermon, nor any form of speech at all—only the singing of hymns. Every week, the Compline is frequented by a small but consistent group of Yale undergraduates who find themselves drawn to it. Contrary to what one might expect,, the students in attendance are largely atheistic. It appears there’s something about the Compline service that allows it to transcend the bounds of Christian liturgy.

“The Compline is often where I figure out the things that are bothering me and trace out the history of the foregoing week,” says Claire Saint-Amour, GH ’21, a regular attendee. The ritual creates a sense of meditative closure on a Sunday night, encouraging you to

Saint-Amour, who grew up atheist, appreciates how the Compline service is open to those unfamiliar with Christianity. “I was very allergic to religion as a kid, just felt incredibly alienated by it. You turn up as an eight-year-old and you don’t know what to do with, like, the wafer and the grape juice, and you’re just like, oh shit, when do I talk and when does the priest talk?” Whereas traditional church services are governed by codified rituals, the Compline service is simple, requiring no audience participation.

Saint-Amour likens it to an “osmotic membrane that you pass in and out of.”

Perhaps this quality is what gives the Compline service its transcendent quality. Saint-Amour explains, “I think it’s the anonymity… That’s what makes it possible to go there and feel like you’re having an experience that has something to do with the transcendent but not necessarily with a particular God.” I definitely understand what she is getting at. When I first arrived at the service, I instinctively scanned the faces around me, but the utter darkness kept me from recognizing anybody. This anonymity renders the Compline un-performative, divorced from the social dynamics that are nearly inescapable in other facets of life. To be anonymous is to escape yourself and become a part of something greater, whether that be God or an unnamed form of higher power.

Through this quality of transcendence, the Compline represents something that’s common among young atheistic people: the separation of the spiritual and the religious. The term “spiritual” is common currency, ascribed to any moving secular experience and often referring to bodily pleasure. Things that I’ve commonly heard described as “spiritual” include: a beautiful concert, a vigorous workout, a much-needed Sunday brunch after a long night out.

I discussed students’ connection to spirituality with Dr. Christiana Purdy Moudarres, GRD ’10, DIV ’12, the DUS of the Italian department, who organizes a semesterly trip to the Compline service for her class, “Dante in Translation.”

“I was a little wary of incorporating Compline because I wondered whether students would mistake it for some stealth form of proselytizing on my part.

But I’ve found that when they do go, they don’t take it that way. They don’t see it necessarily as a reli-

gious ritual—they see it as spiritual. ‘Soothing’ is another word that’s often come up to describe it…”

This quality of “soothingness” likens the Compline to the more everyday experiences of pleasure that could be described by young people as “spiritual.”

But perhaps that aspect of simple pleasure elevates, rather than trivializes, the ritual. “I think that’s part of the beauty of the compline service to this particular generation,” says Purdy Moudarres. “I don’t want to generalize, but many of my Dante students volunteer that they weren’t raised with any particular religious affiliation, and I can’t help wondering if that’s why they’re so open to the poem’s Christian matrix, which extends to Compline—they’re coming at it with fresh eyes…appreciating it as a beautiful sensory experience.”

A “beautiful sensory experience”—this is what Purdy Moudarres offers as an alternative to the quality of religiousness. The service’s combination of incense, darkness, and song creates an immersive experience for the body as a whole. Lily Weisberg, MC ’21, another undergraduate who attended the service with me, says that the Compline feels “more like going to an expensive spa than going to church.” The service’s unapologetic catering to the body makes Compline feel like the underground, slightly edgy after-party of the traditional Sunday morning liturgy.

“One of the things I like about Compline is that it calls into question this idea that Christianity is inherently dualistic, that it casts the body in a negative light,” says Purdy Moudarres. “That’s not what it’s about at all. My understanding of Christianity is just the opposite—it’s very much a glorification of the body.” When I think of Christianity’s disposition towards the body, I see El Greco’s gaunt, emaciated depictions of Christ, and the asceticism of monks. The Compline offers a different perspective: a celebration of, rather than a reprimand against, the power of the senses.

The Compline service offers something different for everybody, whether it be a soothing Sunday night ritual, a weekly auto-psychoanalysis session, or a chance to get in touch with some higher power.

Either way, the service makes the case that the best way to access something greater than the body— something transcendent—is through the body itself.

IT APPEARS THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT THE COMPLINE SERVICE THAT ALLOWS IT TO TRANSCEND THE BOUNDS OF CHRISTIAN LITURGY.

REVIEWS

First Man

The movie portrays an abbreviated version of Neil Armstrong’s transition from test pilot to astronaut, his entry into the Apollo Program, and finally his climactic landing on the moon in 1969 with the Apollo 11 mission. It sheds light on his emotional struggles around the death of his daughter, and the toll his frequent brushes with danger take on his family.

The premise of the movie might have doomed it from the beginning. One thing the movie—which is based on James R. Hansen’s eponymous biography of Neil Armstrong—makes painfully clear is that Armstrong himself is the least interesting thing about the Apollo Program. Ryan Gosling’s performance as Armstrong, which is understated to the point of absurdity, does nothing to make him more likeable. Yes, Armstrong is supposed to be depicted as a quiet, yet soulful man with hidden depths, but those depths are very well hidden indeed; the inane repetition of the motif of Gosling staring wistfully at the moon erases not only any veneer of true nuance but also the audience’s desire to understand the personality within the man. Claire Foy’s performance as Armstrong’s wife, Janet, brings a little energy into the frequent scenes of domesticity chez Armstrong, but her irrepressible passion only underscores Gosling’s passivity at every moment they interact. Frankly, watching them talk at home, I found myself much more interested in her than in him, which in an Armstrong biopic might be a problem.

Aside from some truly interesting sequences—for example, the opening, which is set in Armstrong’s cockpit on a dangerous test flight—the movie is disappointingly predictable. Chazelle’s framing isn’t bad, but the shots he chooses to return to in nearly every scene in the movie—the shaky movement, the conversations, the wistful staring—are uninspiring.

Shots of people framed against windows with rain pattering against them were interesting when Kurosawa first did them in the 1950s, but, by now they’ve risen to the level of cliche. If the movie were catastrophically terrible—if it showed the signs of a vision that failed to execute, like an unwieldy structure or an excessive visual style—that at least would have implied that a singular, unique vision existed, even if it failed to translate to the screen. First Man lacks that sort of ambition. It’s bland. And from a director 20 THE YALE HERALD

who built his reputation on unpredictability— whose first two major features are as different from Hollywood standards as they are from each other— that mediocrity is heartbreaking.

Richard Brody, in the New Yorker, has called First Man a “Right-Wing Fetish Object,” claiming that, in its obsession with the valor of the Space Race, it takes a “regressive emotional perspective” that glorifies white men and their achievements. This may be true, but I don’t believe that the movie takes sides as strongly as Brody suggests; the film simply lacks the ambition to be a true ideological work. Depressingly enough, its dullness is its salvation.

Much like a Tide Pod lunch, First Man looks much better than it tastes and feels. I’ve become increasingly worried about the Hollywood obsession with biopics, docudramas, remakes, and sequels, and with Damien Chazelle joining the bandwagon, my hopes of a recovery of the spec market sink even lower than the Maldives. What does it take for someone to make an original idea? Why are people funding unoriginal ideas? Where did all my Tide Pods go? Among all these questions without answers, one thing is clear: First Man is the herald of a Dark Age of Hollywood filmmaking, and it is dreadful in my sight. Fallen, fallen is Babylon.

Seriously, I hear Scandi-noir is taking off. They have good healthcare in Norway, right?

those depths are very well hidden indeed.

Armstrong is supposed to be depicted as a quiet, yet soulful man with hidden depths, but

“I

I’ve spent many hours and more than a few cans of La Croix trying to understand First Man, and I remain befuddled. Whiplash, another film by director Damien Chazelle, was a masterpiece of framing, lighting, sound, and motion. La La Land was a spectacle that more than made up for in ambition what it lost in subtlety. And then we have Chazelle’s latest feature, written by Josh Singer, YC ’94, which, like a burrito from Taco Bell, fails to impress.

SAHAJ SANKARAN, SM ’20

Honey

NICOLE MO BK ’19 YH STAFF

I

’m a little too young to grasp the scope of Robyn’s influence on today’s happy-but-sad pop scene.

The Swedish artist’s last album came out in 2010, when I wasn’t having cathartic mid-club breakdowns as much as I was attending well-lit, emotionally-stunted bar mitzvahs. There’s definitely been an evolution in dance music since then: the Max Martin sound once had a monopoly over club playlists, but today’s dance floor soundtracks are both weirder and sadder, so often affecting an upbeat melancholia that Camila Cabello literally has a song called “Crying In The Club.” Robyn is a torchbearer of this genre, having set the stage for the Icona Pops and Carly Rae Jepsens of today—Lorde even performed on Saturday Night Live with a picture of Robyn propped on the piano. On Honey, Robyn returns to the forefront of euphoric, devastating pop with a softness that only makes it more powerful.

There’s a method to Robyn’s sadness—her manifold illustrations of mourning, heartbreak, and resilience celebrate tears as a necessary part of recovery. The album opener, “Missing U,” is steely and glittery, a

pulsing dance track about the tragedy of loss. (Robyn has said it’s about the death of her longtime friend and collaborator, Christian Falk.) It’s a colorful blur of grief and reckoning, perhaps the most classically “Robyn” song on Honey. The rest of the album is a little more hopeful. “Because It’s In The Music” cushions romantic pining in disco uplift, finding empowerment in the inevitable wallowing that occurs when we hear that song we shared with that ex. Even as Robyn sings “I’m right back in that moment / And it makes me want to cry,” her falsetto is prominently airy in contrast with the bare-bones instrumentals, her voice soaring above the shimmery synths and low bass. The minimalist production on Honey also gives Robyn room to carve eccentricities into the sonic whitespace. “Beach2k20” is a dryly funny spoken-word track that sounds like Cabo meets Japanese lounge funk meets a videogame soundtrack. “Human Being” features an eclectic synth beat peppered with outbursts of whirs, hums, and whispers. But ultimately, the production lets Robyn center herself throughout Honey, to locate herself after the storm and start anew—“I’m a human being / Baby

don’t give up on me now / I’m a human being,” she sings on “Human Being,” presenting a starkly human contrast to the sparse, sci-fi instrumentals.

Honey is so catchy from start to finish that you might not notice the dramatic emotional arc that takes place. By the last track, Robyn has reconciled with her heartbreak and moved on—“Never gonna be brokenhearted / Ever again / That shit’s out the door / I’m only gonna sing about love / Ever again,” she pledges. “Ever Again” is liberating, a blissfully weightless song that promises to work through a relationship instead of running from it, and Robyn ends the album with a casual confidence that may be more vulnerable than the moving articulations of sadness she’s perfected throughout her career. Honey is Robyn at her most optimistic, and maybe it’s not going to last—but it is a welcome phase in her sad, happy, weird, and beautiful career.

Original Image from broadwayworld.com

ALAN PRESBURGER, SM ‘21

S

pectacular cast, high quality video production and editing, beautifully performed and enjoyable music, an impressive degree of wit—this year’s Yale Symphony Orchestra Halloween Show, attended by 2000 inebriated Yalies, should have been a knockout.

YSO Halloween Show

That—at least, I think—is the plot.

sharper jabs that truly soared. Well-executed Cornell roasts will always score a laugh, and a copy of the Yale The audience would be as surprised to hear that there Daily News scaring away the Yale College Council was a fully-planned plot within all of the fourth- cult was hilarious. wall breaks and La Croix roasts as they were when the “missing” fourth suitemate showed up in the last Overall, despite its convoluted plot, this year’s YSO act, and, through the magic of plot-twists, became Halloween show still struck a chord. As I sat near the The story, loosely based on the Netflix hit show another protagonist. Unfortunately, a heroic Laurie front rows of a packed Woolsey Hall with a couple Stranger Things, follows the story of three suitemates’ Santos cameo was not enough to give this “plot” any thousand of my fellow intoxicated, costumed peers, I first week at Yale. Over the course of the first act, they follow-able coherence. felt a sense of unity. For one spooky Halloween night, discover that an evil group, the self-proclaimed Cult of we were all distracted from national politics, personal the Elder Snake, is invading the school. The film’s heroes The one upside of the audience not following the identity crises, and academic and social anxieties to then go to a staged “Harvard” (where they believe the plot—since we all gave up trying eventually—is that come together and laugh at ourselves a bit. Even with cult originated) to stop it before it completely takes they became free to enjoy the humor in the film. And a tangled plot, the YSO Halloween show more than over Yale, only to learn that they are too late. The that’s something that the show did right, because, did its job: it made us come together, share some story climaxes when we learn that the person secretly more than anything, it was definitely fun. We, the laughs, and remember that college is supposed to be behind this evil organization is none other than their audience, could tell that the director, Sahaj Sankaran, fun. It gave us an excuse to be late to our morning (apparently) missing fourth suitemate, whose existence SM ’20, had as much fun writing the film as the actors classes the next day. For that, at least, I am thankful. is only vaguely mentioned earlier. had performing it. Although many of the jokes about Yale and Ivy culture fell flat, there were a few subtler,

Patron T. Spielberg

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nds

Silver Contributor Dan Feder David Applegate Gold Contributor Abra Metz Dworkin Donors C. Morales Ervolino Sam Lee Joshua Benton George E. Harris Laura Yao Ted Lee Michael Gerber Brendan Cottington Marisol Ryu Natasha Sarin Emily Barasch Marci McCoy

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Don’t be cunt nugget!

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