The Yale Herald YALE’S MOST DARING PUBLICATION SINCE 1986 | VOL. XIX ISSUE 9
See how adult day care provides balanced solutions for the end of life
4/6/18
FROM THE EDITORS Howdy partners,
That’s right. All of you are my partners, because we have so much in common: living in the Wild Wild East, we’re all just trying to get through the chaos and heartbreak of the fake spring that’s been thrust upon us. I’m currently sitting in the sunshine-filled courtyard of my residential college, desperately trying to pretend that it isn’t too cold for a tank top while my teeth clatter in tandem with the sound of my typing. But hey, I can’t afford to slack off. Our writers don’t either. In this week’s front, Jack Kyono, PC ’20, takes us to Partnerships Center for Adult Day Care in Hamden, Conn., to talk with its director, Valerie DellaRocco. At a time when there are more elderly people than ever, services in nursing homes are often lacking or imperfect; adult day care offers a unique alternative, which allows the elderly to live in their own homes but still retain access to everyday medical checkups. This work has its challenges, but the Center is definitely a valuable part of the Greater New Haven community.
There’s more. In Features, Marina Albanese, PC ’20, unveils the long and endlessly interesting history of vibrators in New Haven. Stereotypes about international students are passionately refuted by Joseph Peck, BF ’21, in Opinion. As for Reviews, Marc Shkurovich, BK ’19, critiques Wes Anderson’s new contribution to film, the Isle of Dogs. And in Voices, Zoe Ervolino, MC ’20, takes us to Colombia in a series of short stories.
So, I encourage you to get your sunglasses out, spread a blanket on Cross Campus, and dive in– no matter the weather, Harold will keep you warm.
THE HERALD MASTHEAD EDITORIAL STAFF EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Eve Sneider MANAGING EDITORS Margaret Grabar Sage, Jack Kyono, Nicole Mo EXECUTIVE EDITORS Emma Chanen, Tom Cusano, Emily Ge, Marc Shkurovich, Anna Sudderth, Oriana Tang, Rachel Strodel SENIOR EDITORS Luke Chang, Hannah Offer FEATURES EDITORS Fiona Drenttel, Brittany Menjivar CULTURE EDITORS Allison Chen, Nurit Chinn OPINION EDITORS Lydia Buonomano, Tereza Podhajska REVIEWS EDITORS Gabe Rojas, Tricia Viveros VOICES EDITOR Carly Gove INSERTS EDITOR Zoe Ervolino AUDIO EDITOR Will Reid BULLBLOG EDITOR Marc Shkurovich
DESIGN STAFF GRAPHICS EDITOR Julia Hedges DESIGN EDITORS Audrey Huang Rasmus Schlutter Lauren Quintela Nika Zarazvand 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 eve.sneider@yale.edu. Receive the Herald for one semester for 40 dollars, or for the 20172018 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.
With love, Tereza Podhajská Opinion Editor
VISIT THE YALE HERALD ONLINE AT YALEHERALD.COM 2 THE YALE HERALD
IN THIS ISSUE 8
OPINIONS
VOICES
Zoe Ervolino, MC ’20, tributes Gabriel García Márquez in three vignettes.
10,16 FEATURES
Confront stereotypes with Joseph Peck, BF ’21, who’s on a mission to set the record straight about the financial situation of international students. Drag is all about stereotype-smashing, but Yale’s drag scene out-smashes the rest. Lulu Klebanoff, GH ’20 tells us how.
18
Vibrators have a long and complex history. Join Marina Albanese, PC ’20, as she dives into the history of the vibrator and its wavering place in the current sexual climate.
CULTURE
Head over to Culture, where five writers crack open the egg.
Religious freedom has always been a hot topic in America. The Herald sits down to discuss it with Dr. Tisa Wenger, a professor at Yale Divinity School who has written books on the matter.
WEEK AHEAD FRIDAY, APRIL 6 @8:00PM
RHP & 5H SKETCH SHOW: MÉNAGE À TROIS HOPPER CABARET
MODERN LOVE: ARIES BIRTHDAY SPECIAL PARTNERS CAFE
SUNDAY, APRIL 8 @2:00PM STUDENT ART EXHIBITION YALE PEABODY MUSEUM
COVER
Ever wondered what it’s like to grow old? Jack Kyono, PC ’20, profiles an adult day care center in Hamden and investigates the conflicts between lifestyle and medical care that many seniors and their families are forced to confront.
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REVIEWS
Wes Anderson is back on the silver screen, but Marc Shkurovich, BK ’19 is here to let you know why it doesn’t live up to all the hype. Emma Keyes, PC ’19, considers the dark-comedy within Death of Stalin; Nicole Mo, BK ’19, commends Frankie Cosmos’s musical maturation in their newest album, Vessel; Henry Zatarain, BR ’18, reminds us that Jack White’s creativity is still alive and well with his latest release, Boarding House Reach.
50 MOST You’ll get it next time!
OUTGOING
SATURDAY, APRIL 7 @10:00PM
12
INCOMING
6
50 TOASTS That was one long Passover.
TUESDAY, APRIL 10 @6:00PM MELON FORUM: SENIOR ESSAYS IN FOOD SYSTEMS ST. ANTHONY HALL 3
I N S E R T S April.6.2018
The Divine Law that Created Puberty BEN KRONENGOLD ,TC ’18
Passed by a joint council of angels, saints, and God himself.
as an obvious yet vital allegory for race relations.
To push children into adulthood through a gauntlet of body odor and self-loathing.
Blemishes shall appear most when a human’s visual likeness is to be captured for perpetuity. This clause is in place to remind humans of their inferiority to their benevolent God, as well as for His shits and giggles.
This act may be cited as the “Human Onset Reproduction Notice and Instructions for Earlyage Ripening.” Or simply the HORNIER Act. Sec. 1. Body Hair An abundance of non-head hair shall grow during this time of transition. However, these follicles are meant only as a sign of bodily change and are to be removed as swiftly as possible. Braiding of any kind shall be considered a high offense. There shall be only two exceptions to this hair-removal mandate: Exception 1: A narrow strip of hair from the naval downward shall be preserved due to its undeniable aesthetic charm. Exception 2: A patch of hair ought to be grown out on the chin so that, when the face is upside down, this chin hair can serve as the “head hair” for a drawnon “second face.” This second face shall carry out all legal and business transactions.
A select group of humans shall have additional acne on their backs. These blemishes, when connected with a writing implement, shall uncover the coordinates of Saint Peter and the Heavenly Gates. Sec. 3. Sexual Urges Note: The joint council disapproves of any surge in the sexual desires of young men and women. However, the landmark case of God v. Satan ruled that the devil has full control in the following two domains: a) humans’ sexual desires and b) humans’ inability to resist line dances. Thus, an independent assembly in Hell has decided that the mere sight of the following things shall spur the sexual urges of pubescent humans: -Teachers -Blindfolds -Caramel
Sec. 2. Acne
-Tiger print
Whitehead and blackhead pimples shall punctuate the faces of ripening young adults, serving
-The word “lubricant”
4 THE YALE HERALD
-Everything else
Sec. 4. Fertility At the onset of this transition, human females shall officially become capable of carrying a child. However, they shall STILL BE ABLE TO URINATE (see: the Two-Hole Compromise of 4550 BC). Note: Human males were considered for the childbearing role, but a test case ultimately ruled out this option. Specifically, “It was reported that male seahorses ‘bitched for days’ when pregnant.” Despite this illuminating “Seahorse Folly,” millions of future human men are still expected to claim they “could handle it,” ignorant to the continued, voiceless bitching of their pregnant fish counterparts. Lastly, due to the delicacy and sensitivity of “menstruation,” this is the only name by which the process shall be called. Period. THIS ACT SHALL BE PUT IN PLACE EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY.
I Broke the Glass Ceiling and I’ve Never Been in More Pain AMANDA THOMAS, SY ’21 As we all know: there are good ideas, and there are bad ideas. You’d think that the distinction between the two would be obvious. You’d think that a good idea wouldn’t result in the collapse of colossal, razorsharp shards of glass on your womanly frame. You’d think that a good idea couldn’t possibly have the unintended consequence of you getting so physically injured that you need to use a catheter. You’d think. But, dear reader, you’d be sorely mistaken. And sore I certainly am. If we’re being totally honest, I’ve been working on this my whole life. I started collecting rocks when I was five and practicing my throwing when I was ten, and I perfected my hurling technique at the mere age of fifteen. I’m a freakin’ prodigy. There was no doubt
in my mind that that delicate little doily of a glass ceiling would be powerless to my incredible strength and accuracy. I just didn’t think about the basic physics of the situation. Exhibit A: When I threw the first stone up into the ceiling, I didn’t think that LITERAL glass shards would fall right on me. Exhibit B: There is no Exhibit B I just really didn’t think that LITERAL GLASS SHARDS WOULD PLUMMET DOWN ONTO MY HUMAN BODY. And I know what you’re thinking— how could you not anticipate that glass shards would fall down if you were throwing a stone at the glass ceiling above you? Because I thought the whole thing was just a big dumb metaphor! And I was so busy focusing on the glass ceiling metaphor, I forgot
all about the “don’t throw stones if you live in a glass house” thing. UGH. And I still can’t get over the fact that I was so confused. I mean who took the time to construct a literal glass ceiling? How did that even pass the building regulations?! Thanks for nothing second wave feminism. The worst part of it all is that I don’t even think anything has changed. I’m still severely underpaid and underappreciated. Steve from Marketing still thinks it’s hilarious to fart into To Go cups, write “Promotion” in Sharpie, and leave them on my desk. Now, not only am I confronting sexism on a daily basis, but also I’m suffering from several broken bones and a crippling fear of things falling from above. I almost lost my shit the other day when it rained.
Top 5 Contributions the Seventy-year-old Auditor in My Seminar Has Made this Semester ZOE ERVOLINO, MC ’20 YH STAFF
5.
An air of discomfort about the classroom
4.
An attempt to engage with the professor about “when we were kids”
3.
A forty-minute personal anecdote unrelated to the themes of the course
2. 1.
A forty-minute personal anecdote related to the themes of the course
An unmistakable snore at around minute 45 5
V O I C E S
Tributes to Gabo
ZOE ERVOLINO, MC ’20, YH STAFF
The Colombian Andes are categorically uninhabitable for humans. If jaguars, anacondas, poison dart frogs, or guerilla soldiers don’t kill you, cholera surely will. The thick and breathing tangle of green has claimed many naïve lives— some in search of gold, others looking for Eden. And yet, perched high in the thorny jungle of Leticia lies the town of Commando. The town name was an unfortunate mistake. Confusing Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s fictional One Hundred Years of Solitude for fact, three men—all Colombian patriots—had set off on an expedition to search for the lost land of Macondo. Their names were Jorge Andres Trespalacios, Juan Carlos Valdez, and Estefan Cortez Cortos and, as was to be expected (and as their wives continued to remind them for the rest of their lives), they failed. Refusing the possibility of failure, they chose to make their own Macondo, settling instead on a strip of land where the jungle was not too oppressive and the jaguars and snakes and frogs and guerillas were disinterested in them. The settlers built sturdy homes with clay walls and palm roofs. When they finished, they retrieved their wives from their old homes and carried them piggy-back style to their new lives of rain and green. They survived off of bananas alone. By this point, they had forgotten their initial quest, forgotten their once beloved Gabo, forgotten Macondo and its utopic allure. They called the city Commando. This was a story Ana María Trespalacios, great granddaughter of Jorge Andres Trespalacios, had heard thousands, maybe millions, of times. Her mother would recite it as she prepared the huevos for breakfast, repeat it as she carefully wrapped the tamales for lunch, and once more over dinner’s arroz con frijoles. Sometimes, if she was particularly nostalgic, she’d sing the tale over an afternoon cafecito. In each iteration, the story was the same. The valiant explorers, the crushing blows, their ultimate triumph. “You should be proud of su familia,” her mother would say. But Ana María wasn’t. And who could blame her? They were stuck in a jungle town whose name was also the word for free-balling. All she wanted was for something—anything—to happen. She daydreamed of guerillas raiding their homes and displacing them, of enormous boulders crushing their clay homes, of sinkholes, of floods, of earthquakes, of mudslides, of jaguar attacks, of drought. Anything, and she would finally be free of this godforsaken, suffocating place. But nothing happened. Instead, every day was more of the same. Ana María woke up to the familiar warmth of sunlight tinged with jungle green and
6 THE YALE HERALD
the soft suggestion of her mother’s humming. She washed her face, hands, and feet in the basin of water at the foot of her bed, pouring the rest over the wildflowers that grew just below the base of the window. She pulled a yellow dress over her head and tightly fastened her black chancletas around her feet. Finally, she braided her black hair into two neat braids that swished around her hips. When she walked into the kitchen, she saw her mother was sitting at the dining table, sipping her cafecito as she read the last page of One Hundred Years of Solitude for the thousandth time. She had already prepared the huevos, which sat in a piling heap at the center of the table. It was a scene so familiar Ana María could see it perfectly with her eyes closed. “Buenos dias, mija.” “Buenos, mamá.” She joined her mother at the wooden table, filled a teacup with lukewarm café, and served herself some breakfast. While Ana María enjoyed her coffee and huevos, her mother—right on cue—began to recount their origin story. Pues, el papá de su visabuelo y dos otros hombres decidieron… When the story was finished, Ana María washed her mug in the sink. It was right then that they started to hear the rumbling. It began as a faint pitter-patter, like the sound of rain beating against the roof. Then it grew, transforming into an emphatic drum roll. And then, suddenly, it swelled into loud thunderous clapping. With every moment, the thumping grew louder. Despite her mother’s warnings, Ana María ran outside towards the rumbling, and felt her knees shaking as the earth trembled beneath her. She looked up, following the trunks of the banana trees all the way up. Then, she saw it: an enormous, spherical mound of rock plunging down the mountainside, flattening any and everything in its path. She watched as the boulder squashed the banana trees against the jungle floor. She watched as the great jungle was flattened in an instant. And then, in one swift rotation, she watched as the boulder rolled over her home. She watched the windows explode, the walls crumble, the roof collapse. She heard the muffled shriek, and then the penetrating silence as the rock continued on its way. She cried softly, her gaze fixed on the pathetic parcel of ruins, for it was hard to learn to be careful what you wish for.
***
It wasn’t easy living with Ernesto Sanchez Flores. It was even harder being married to him, or at least that’s what his wife, Sofía Uribe Flores, thought. The pair had met more than twenty years ago when they were undergraduates at the National University of Colombia. Trying to complete their quantitative reasoning requirement early, they had wound up in the same freshman Economics class, and every lecture, without fail, Ernesto sat behind Sofía. Each class period was the same deal: Sofía took detailed notes, Ernesto did not. Instead of paying attention, the curly-headed boy would fool around with static electricity, methodically rubbing his jeans against the polyester seat to generate friction. As if the repetitive thumping in the row behind her wasn’t annoying enough, Ernesto would use the friction to shock the neighboring students, giggling with maniac delight as his unsuspecting prey were met with the sting of energy. He was, in all senses of the word, a nuisance, and Sofía avoided interacting with him at all costs. One day, however, Ernesto decided to shock Sofía. In that day’s class, the professor began to introduce the topic of behavioral economics. “He decided to buy a bicycle,” he declared, restating the results of the problem he had just solved on the board, “but why?” Sofía didn’t know why, and she certainly didn’t know why, and for that reason she was engrossed, frantically scribbling down the professor’s every word. “Because he thinks he needs it,” he explained emphatically. Meanwhile, Ernesto was not listening. Instead, he was leaning forward into Sofía’s row, plotting his next attack. Slowly, so as not to make a sound, he extended his electrically charged pinky finger and, in one swift motion, tapped the top of her right ear. The pain rushed down the side of her head like an avalanche. And then, it vanished. She knew exactly what had happened. Bursting with anger, Sofía stood up. She snapped her head around, ready to shame him in front of the entire lecture hall. But, when she laid her eyes on his lanky frame and huge brown eyes, the words flew out of her mouth like an exhale: “Te amo.” They didn’t talk for a few months after that because what she had done was weird. But sure enough, within a year they were dating. And after eight years, the pair had gotten married, and the wedding had been beautiful, and they had five beautiful children named Úrsula and Immanuel and María José and José María and Contracepción, and they had a wonderful marriage filled with love and joy and fulfillment and who the hell was Sofía kidding she couldn’t take it anymore. Ernesto was still the same idiotic pendejo tan bobo she had met in Economics lecture and whatever flicker of promise she had seen in him had extinguished long ago. Now, as she smoked a cigarette out the window of their Bogotá apartment, she contemplated her decisions, agonizing over the long and painful years of dissatisfaction. In the master bedroom, her crazed husband rubbed balloons together. What had she done? Why had she done it? And was it the very same reason for buying a bicycle that their professor had explained all those years ago in Economics lecture?
***
“Habitación 301,” Sara repeated to herself as she walked down the hallway of ‘El Hotel Mejor’ and towards her room. Drenched with rainwater and clenching a rusted key in one palm, she tried to ignore her discomfort. She reached the room at the end of the hall and let herself in. The room was simple, but clean. Sara noticed a bowl of fruit next to an old TV. No matter how ‘Mejor’ the hotel claimed to be, Sara did not want to be there. She had been driving home from Bolombolo, a small town perched in the Colombian Andes, when she got caught in the rainstorm. Her family had warned her of the rain, had told her it could get rough, that she should leave the next morning, but she had ignored their advice. She was tired of being a guest. The rain had been light at first, dusting the dashboard of the car with a mist that was more annoying than anything else. But as Sara continued to drive down the winding road, the rain picked up. The first specks of water floated down and pattered lightly against the roof of the car. Then, the droplets began to get heavier, thumping loudly overhead. As Sara tried desperately to focus her attention on the road, the globs of moisture continued to grow, pounding against the car like cannonballs. Suddenly, Sara realized that the giant raindrops were not amorphous—they resembled fruits. She was witness to a tempest of translucent grapes, oranges, guavas, and bananas, which fell and, upon collision with the car, vanished into thin air. Unsure if her eyes were fooling her, Sara rolled the window down and extended her arm. Within seconds, a transparent pineapple fell into her palm, shattering against her skin. Awestruck, Sara turned her eyes back to the road, but her vision was blurred by a tentacle-like stream of water that rested on the windshield. Shifting her weight forward, Sara peered up. She saw the clear and glistening roots, the trunk, the branches, and the leaves of an enormous oak tree, composed entirely of water. She shrieked and slammed on the brakes. For a moment, all was still—the water tree suspended in air like an apparition. Then, the tree fell, crashing down against the hood of the car, water rushing over the top of the car, and spilling in through the open window. Sara thrashed against the force of the water, struggling to keep her head above the flood. Now, safe in ‘El Hotel Mejor,’ Sara walked towards the fruit bowl next to the TV. She peered into the bowl and discovered that—besides a small sign that read Disfrútelo—it was empty. With that, Sara felt the tears well up in her eyes. She fell to her knees, pulled the bowl to her face, and sobbed hard. When she lifted her head, she looked down: at the base of the bowl lay hundreds of perfect, glistening apple seeds.
7
O P I N I O N Apr.6.2018
The Gender Binary’s a Drag LULU KLEBANOFF, GH ’20
Last Saturday, I put on a $20 suit, strapped a gift-wrapped cardboard box to my waist, and sang about genitals to a cheering crowd. That is to say, I did drag for the first time. This semester, I’d been engaging more actively with queer communities on campus and joining up with the Bad Romantics—Yale’s undergraduate drag troupe—seemed like a natural next step. Plus, it sounded fun. Nevertheless, as tech week approached, I had some doubts. My previous exposure to drag comprised a single live show in Toronto, and a few scattered episodes of RuPaul’s Drag Race. As I understood it, drag typically consisted of cis gay men dressing as women. It was fun and subversive, I thought, but also potentially problematic. When a cis man performs as a woman, his misogyny can pass undetected. He can call women “bitches,” mock femininity, and play into stereotypes about women for his own comic gain. So, when I walked into the first day of Bad Romantics tech rehearsal, my excitement was tempered by an eye towards potential misogyny and trans-misogyny within the art form. What I found when I arrived, however, shattered my worries. The members of the Bad Romantics took me in with kindness and enthusiasm, and changed my conception of the format and impact of a drag show.. The first thing they taught me was that drag is not only cis gay men performing as women. It can also be non-binary people performing as women, men, and everything in between. They/them pronouns abound in the Bad Romantics rehearsal room, with the trans* nearly outnumbering the cis. And drag can be women performing as men—my stage persona, for instance, was drag king “Justin Timberdick”—or even women performing as women. Nataly Moreno-Martinez, TC ’21, does femme drag, because she enjoys it as a form of artistic expression, and feels it’s “like putting on a mask or a shield [that] lets you be really free in front of people.” Drag even has room for the straight and cis. Elijah Gunther, BR ’18, who performed “Marry the Night” by Lady Gaga, says that he “likes how [his] doing drag being cis and straight really breaks out of the boundaries of what’s considered normal” and that he has a lot of fun “doing something really non-normative.” The Bad Romantics not only welcome people of all genders and sexualities, but also empower them to engage in any type of performance they find meaningful. Performers sang original songs and covers, lip-synced, danced, recited spoken word poetry, and even monologued about philosophy. During every act, members of the group cheered each other on enthusiastically. And my decision to wear no makeup or wigs, in defiance of the typical drag emphasis on aesthetics, went unquestioned. Whatever made each of us feel powerful and subversive was whole-heartedly supported by the rest of the group. The Bad Romantics also taught me how freeing and exhilarating a drag performance can be. As an improviser in Lux Improvitas, I often find myself playing confident
8 THE YALE HERALD
male buffoons. Inhabiting masculinity on stage allows me to take up space physically and vocally, something I feel selfconscious about doing in real life. It allows me to poke fun at gender and toxic masculinity. And it allows me access to a greater range of comic characters than if I limited myself to only playing women. Drag seemed like a good way to take this fun to the next level, and engage more with Yale’s queer scene. And I had the perfect performance idea, the act which would make me feel the most cartoonishly masculine, and which was sure to make the heteropatriarchy cower in fear: Andy Samberg and Justin Timberlake’s Dick in a Box. So I found an Andy (the incomparable Paige Davis, MC ’21), bought a suit from a queer thrift shop, choreographed a dance, and rigged a box to hang from my crotch. Then there was tech week, a whirlwind of lighting, props, sweat, and new friends. And then we performed. We strutted in, serenaded, and seduced the audience, suggestively gyrating our boxes. It was a parody of gender performativity and aggressive male heterosexuality, and it slayed. We walked offstage to raucous cheering. When the adrenaline rush faded, I was left with a feeling of satisfaction and power. I had stolen a piece of male swagger and sexuality, and I had gotten away with it. Performing with The Bad Romantics didn’t completely abate my worries about misogyny and transmisogyny in drag. After all, Yale’s drag scene doesn’t exactly conform to the standards of more mainstream drag. In spaces where drag is only open to cis gay men (of which there are still many, despite the efforts of drag kings and non-binary performers), there is definitely a risk that performers will end up mocking womanhood instead of celebrating it, or degrading trans* people rather than uplifting them. But when and where this happens, performers are failing to honor the true spirit of drag, which involves pushing back against gender roles, playing with performativity, and mopping the floor with the gender binary. Drag is meant to steal power from the oppressor, not from women and trans* people. This can be done by cis gay men—most of whom use drag to celebrate their own femininity, or to poke fun at strict gender standards, or just to slay in a way that only a femme queen can slay. But it cannot be done by them alone. And it shouldn’t be. Limiting drag to cis gay men leaves other people out of its benefits. The non-binary members of The Bad Romantics with whom I spoke find drag to be a freeing space, within which they can radically be themselves. One member, Brian Matusovsky, PC ’19, told me that for them “gender always feels like performing,” and since they usually present as more masculine, “getting to perform something feminine and opposite of that is really satisfying.” For another member, Xuan, DC ’18, drag has been “an irreplaceable part of discovering, inhabiting, and displaying [their] trans identity.” The stage can be a safe place for trans* performers to explore and express their gender, and be cheered on while they do. And in the process, they can make
funny, subversive, affecting art. The nonbinary performers alone at this weekend’s show put forth a stirring original song, a dance routine to a twisted and evocative mix of pop music, a genderqueer reinterpretation of Monty Python’s “The Lumberjack Song,” a spoken-word poem about body dysmorphic disorder, and more. Inclusion of women and trans and nonbinary people in drag not only opens up for us a world of power, creativity, and fun; It is also the ultimate realization of drag’s revolutionary spirit.
“BUT WHEN AND WHERE THIS HAPPENS, PERFORMERS ARE FAILING TO HONOR THE TRUE SPIRIT OF DRAG, WHICH INVOLVES PUSHING BACK AGAINST GENDER ROLES, PLAYING WITH PERFORMATIVITY, AND MOPPING THE FLOOR WITH THE GENDER BINARY.”
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International Students’ Starter Pack JOSEPH PECK, BF ’21
“I ADMIT IT, BACK HOME I’M WELL OFF, BUT IF I TRANSLATE THE INCOME MY PARENTS MAKE BACK HERE, I WOULD BE A LOW-INCOME CITIZEN.” - FRED MAKOLLE, BF ’21 Imagine a rich person. More likely than not, what comes to mind resembles classic caricatures of the uber-elite, of exploitative businessmen like the Koch Brothers or Stephen Schwarzman, who live in their ivory towers far above the rest of us. It is a clear-cut conception of economic inequality that remains largely unchanged from our younger days, when we watched The Muppets’ tense battle with supervillain Tex Richman and could easily differentiate poor from rich and good from evil. In reality, there are not only two, but such a vast number of socio-economic groups that many go unrecognized and are wrongly branded as wealthy or poor. International students at Yale, in particular, are consistently subjected to stereotypes and innuendos that can be hurtful to those who are misunderstood. As an English student from a lower income background, this is a story I am all too familiar with and am determined to put to rest. If you’ve been on the Yale meme page, I’m sure you’ve seen at least one of the numerous posts about international students. The most popular of these contains classic identifiers of wealth, including, of course, a Canada Goose, with the caption “International Students Starter Pack.” The implicit suggestion of the meme, that being wealthy is a prerequisite to international study, is one that Liverpool native Lucy McEwan, BR ’21, has had to deal with repeatedly. “From the very start of the year,” she told me, “People suspected that I went to a well-known London private school just because I was an English international student at a prestigious university.” For students like Lucy, it is particularly hurtful when people assume she is privileged, as the reality is so painfully different. “I actually have three jobs and work a total of 19 hours per week; obviously this makes balancing studies, work, sleep, friends and family really difficult.” By being put into the box of the elite, low-income international students do not receive the same levels of compassion and understanding as their American counterparts do. At many American universities, particularly public ones, the majority of international students do come from wealthier backgrounds. At better resourced schools like Yale, however,
the disparity between American and foreign-born students is nowhere near as stark. I asked Ozan Say, the adviser for undergraduates at the Office of International Students and Scholars, if the impression of international students here at Yale is an accurate one. “No, of course not,” he responded. “International students, very much like other Yale students, come from very diverse backgrounds.” Say went on to point out that the increasingly progressive makeup of the cohort is in part because Yale is need-blind to international students and, therefore, “many are here on financial aid.” Unlike the majority of universities in the country with need-aware admissions, including Columbia and Stanford, Yale’s needblind policy means that financial insecurity doesn’t hurt the applicant in the eyes of the admissions office. Wealth, for Yale, does not feature in their self-designed “starter pack.” While the International Office does not usually deal with financial aid, Say told me that in helping “students in their transition to life at Yale and in the U.S., we indeed interact with students who, at times, may face some financial challenges.” In particular, the strength of the U.S. currency means that “life in the US is much more expensive than back at home,” an added dimension to the struggle for low-income international students. Fred Makolle, BF ’21, the first Yalie to hail from Cameroon in 15 years, knows this struggle first hand. “I admit it, back home I’m well off, but if I translate the income my parents make back here, I would be a low-income citizen.” The stark difference in the price of living does not translate well across currencies. “With the equivalent of a dollar back home I can get a good meal, but I can’t do that here.” Laura Koech, SY ’21, from Nairobi, Kenya, also struggles with the increased financial burden of being an international student, as well as being from a lower-income background. “I guess break is exactly the difference,” she said of the added difficulty of studying so far away from home. “I can’t go anywhere, because going costs money that I can’t spare and I can’t go home either.” Say says that the increased cost of international study, including the need for expensive flights, is likely a source of the stereotype. But for most of us
so far away from home, the added cost is not a characteristic of our privilege, but of our greater adversity. International students come from all walks of life. To brand them as categorically wealthy does a disservice to those who struggle to work through the week. Given that around 35 percent of Yale College students come from families who make over $250,000 a year (while the percentage of American households that earn as much stands at only 5 percent), wrongly stereotyping one specific group only serves to distract us from the larger issue of economic inequality. We cannot allow ourselves to ignore the blindingly obvious fact that that this university is dripping in gold, and the huge number of wealthy students on campus don’t only come from abroad, but from the most elite sects of American society. If you want a more accurate image of the international student population, Say suggests looking through the Office of International Students and Scholars Instagram page, which recently started showing profiles of international students. These students come from very diverse backgrounds and are more representative of international students at Yale than the rich kid stereotype. Persistently, the assumption of wealth is a hurtful stereotype that goes beyond the humorous expectation of the Facebook page, and frequently rears its head in everyday conversation. That might be a good thing to keep in mind if you find yourself making your next international student meme.
F E A T U R E S April.6.2018
Talking Down Intolerance Dr. Tisa Wenger, a professor at the Yale Divinity School, has been interested in the concept of religious freedom for years. Much of her research is explained in the book “Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal,” which she recently discussed at a conference at Hofstra University. The Herald speaks to her about the role religious freedom and its surrounding discourse have played in American history. THE YALE HERALD Yale Herald: I was reading that one of the main themes of your book is “religious freedom talk” or the discourse around the concept of religious freedom in America. What did religious freedom talk look like at the time of the country’s founding? Tisa Wenger: That’s actually not a period I really focus on in the book, but I would say in general terms, throughout U.S. history, the concept of religious freedom is contested and so religious freedom talk is going to be different and varied depending on who is doing the talking. The point of the concept of religious freedom talk is that there’s not really a single or essential meaning of what religious freedom means that can be abstracted from how people talk about it. That it’s not only a legal or constitutional concept, but it’s an idea that gets deployed in various ways by different groups of people. For example, in the Revolutionary period, some British colonists who were not members of the Church of England were not happy with the Anglican establishment and so used religious freedom to argue against the establishment and were particularly worried about the proposal to have an Anglican bishop in the colonies. And so they used the idea of religious freedom to argue against that. YH: How would you say that religious freedom talk has changed shape over the years, especially now, considering that the election of Trump has changed the political climate? TW: That’s a really good question. Again, this is a very contested concept, but you can see in the past few years—and I actually think that this is not new with the election of trump, but it has maybe been even heightened and intensified with his campaign and the election—that the concept of religious freedom is used by conservatives as a kind of rallying cry, and they have focused it around
10 THE YALE HERALD
issues of gender and sexual morality interpreted in a very particular way. So [for example], the right of conservative Christians not to participate in abortion or provide funding for abortion or contraception or issues of same-sex marriage. And it’s striking to me that so much of the public attention and public discourse over religious freedom now has to do with those issues. I find that to be in a sense troubling, [and] narrowing of what religious freedom means. I also think it’s worth pointing out that thinking specifically about the issue of abortion, in earlier decades, even in the 1970s, in the decade or two right after the Roe v. Wade decision, the concept of religious freedom was associated far more with a pro-choice position than it was with a pro-life position, which is surprising for a lot of people to hear now because it’s so different now. So that’s an example of a kind of shift in religious freedom talk and the way that the concept generally gets invoked because at that time, the focus was much more on the right of the individual woman to follow her own conscience in whether or not to have an abortion. And so that is a way of understanding and talking and invoking the idea of religious freedoms. There’s an organization called Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice that still is around, but maybe had more prominence at that time, and they had big banners saying “Religious Freedom” that they would carry in marches. YH: We’ve touched on this a little, but could you elaborate some more on the way that the concept of religious freedom has been used by both majority groups and minority groups, and how those visions contrast or interact with each other? TW: Yeah, absolutely. I want to bring it back to the material that I actually talk about in the book because the book focuses on the period from the 1890s through World War II, and doesn’t bring
that history up to present, although I do think it’s an interesting history for reflecting on the present; but when you talk about majority groups, one of the main arguments that I make in the book is that religious freedom talk historically was used to defend white privilege and also Christian majority privilege. I think that is still often the case. White Protestants in the period that I’m talking about certainly associated themselves with the idea of religious freedom. They argued that the whole concept of religious freedom came out of Protestant Christianity. And they linked this also to race. Scholars of race and religion talk about a kind of co-constitution of race and religion. Oftentimes racial and religious identities are defined in relation to each other. And we can also put national identities in that mix, right? So what it meant to be an American—they placed themselves as White Protestants, or Anglo Saxon Protestants [and] talked about religious freedom as a value that they particularly exemplified and kind of racialized it, that white people were more inclined or able... they had a kind of racial aptitude for freedom, and religious freedom in particular, oftentimes. And so Catholicism was racialized. Other racial groups were seen as not fully capable of exercising these freedoms or sort of having to be tutored and taught to exercise those freedoms. I’m also thinking about racism in American history. And I’m thinking now about the history of slavery and segregation. White southerners and the defenders of the slave society used religious freedom among other things to defend slavery and to argue against abolitionists. They argued that slavery was a Christian system, was in the Bible, it was the southern way of life—and not only the southern way of life, but that it was a religious, Christian way; that it was the true Christian system, and that abolitionists, by trying to legislate against slavery, were not only infringing on states’ rights and these other kinds of constitutional defenses for slavery, but were infringing on religious freedom
“I THINK RELIGIOUS FREEDOM IS THE IDEAL WORTH PRESERVING AND THAT THIS STILL HAS VALUE FOR US, BUT THAT IT NEEDS TO BE BALANCED WITH OTHER VALUES AND IDEALS.” - DR. TISA WENGER for the South. Similar kinds of arguments were made in defense of segregation. Now, the other side of your question was on how minority groups have used religious freedom. So to continue with the same example, Black abolitionists and African-American activists for civil rights also used religious freedoms for their cause. So you do see minority groups of all kinds defending their interests in the language of religious freedom in American history, and we can think about this because of the constitutional status of this idea and the way that it has a kind of cultural and political salience in American life that makes it an idea that lots of people are going to appeal to. And so one of the things I’m interested in looking at in the book is how that appeal, that kind of stature that the idea has when people appeal to it, also has a way of shifting traditions and shifting the way people think about what religion is. There are some pros and cons to that. So for Native Americans... I have a chapter on Native American history in the book, and there are a lot of examples of this in Native American history. Native appeals to religious freedom... There’s a kind of catch-22 for them. The dominant society understands what religion is according to a kind of white, Christian mold. And so for native leaders and native communities to make an argument for religious freedom was in some cases a useful strategy for them to resist suppression by the government of their practices, traditions, ceremonies, but in order to make that argument, they also had to represent their traditions in a way that authorities and the larger society would recognize as being legitimately religious, and that often made them look like more like Christianity. YH: In addition to writing books about religion, you teach several classes at Yale Divinity School. What aspects of religion have you found that today’s students are most interested in discussing? TW: Well, I’m not sure that the divinity school students are necessarily representative of the larger student population because they are a kind of selfselecting group that comes to the Divinity School because they’re interested in religion already. Many
of the Divinity School students are in training for some form of ministry, but not all of them. Others are planning other kinds of professional careers or planning to go on into further graduate study in the study of religion or in history or social studies or theology or lots of different kinds of disciplines. But... oh gosh, the kinds of things that current students were interested in varies immensely. Thinking about the larger student body, some people are not that interested in looking at religion, but certainly, I see students very much interested in thinking about how religion intersects with racial politics, gender politics. But also understanding religious traditions as a source of meaning and meaning-making, looking at questions of religious practice, religious materiality, religious history... There’s so many different avenues into the study of religion. I’ve been particularly interested, as of late, in thinking about the relationship of religion in American history to settler colonialism. I taught a class last semester called Religion and the U.S. Empire. That ended up being a pretty good size for a seminar and attracted several undergraduates as well as a good mix of people from across the university. So I think religion and religious history intersects with other topics that students are interested in. Politics, imperialism, race, class, gender, sexuality, all of those things are important topics.
Africa because they were anti-apartheid activists. And so, these questions of missions, religion, race, colonialism... for them it was a question of “How can we be responsible as missionaries, as American missionaries, who are relatively wealthy in this context?” Even though they didn’t feel wealthy, there, they seemed very wealthy, right? So, you know, how they struggled with how to act responsibly as missionaries without further perpetuating this legacy of racism and colonialism and knowing the kind of complexity of missionary. So, I think hearing them wrestle with that and thinking about these questions of race, religion, colonialism absolutely brought got me to where I am and the kinds of things I work on. The religious freedom topic may seem distant from that. But for me, the issue of religious freedom was a kind of lens into these questions about race, religion, and empire in American history.
YH: And how did you first become interested in religious studies?
YH: Finally, in your opinion, what should people keep in mind when engaging in discussions about religious freedom?
TW: Well, here’s an autobiographical answer to that, which is that my parents were missionaries, and I spent the first half of my childhood in Swaziland in Southern Africa while [my] parents were missionaries in about six different African countries with the Mennonite church. And they were very much conscious of... I would say, the way that Christian missionaries were often complicit with colonialism. And they talked about that at home. We were also in Swaziland, which is almost entirely surrounded by South Africa, during the years of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa and had in our home sometimes refugees from the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. My parents were not able to get visas into South
YH: Do you have any ideas that you’ve already begun to consider for future books or future research? TW: Yes, I do. It’s very early to talk about, but I am thinking about how the dynamics of settler colonialism in early America, early in the National period, intersect with American religious history and shape American religion.
TW: Well, that religious freedom can mean lots of different things depending on who’s involved. I don’t have a sort of final definition of religious freedom, but I do think that exploring the history of how this idea has been used and invoked for so many different purposes by different people has given me as a real sense of caution with it. This idea can’t be a trump card over everything else. I think religious freedom is the ideal worth preserving and that this still has value for us, but that it needs to be balanced with other values and ideals.
11
KEEPS YOU HOME
A HOME THAT
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Before Herbert “Bud” Barker died in 2011, at the age of 89, he was many things. He was a motorcycle scout in the Second World War, where he earned three Purple Hearts and served as a personal driver to George S. Patton; he was the Chief of Police for the northeast division of Conrail, where he was a leader in integrating women and minorities into the department; he was a guest on The Ed Sullivan Show after earning the American Red Cross National Hero’s award for pulling a woman from a burning car moments before it exploded; but at the very end of his life, Barker was a patient at Partnerships Center for Adult Day Care in Hamden, Conn., suffering from frontal lobe dementia. Every weekday morning of the final years of his life, Barker stepped aboard a bus that stopped just outside his bright yellow house. When his dementia started to progress rapidly, Barker moved into this house at the request of his daughter, on the sole condition that she would paint it this color: he needed
JACK KYONO, PC ’20, YH STAFF to be sure that if he went for a walk in the neighborhood, he would remember which house was his. On the bus, Barker would sit among other men and women his age, some with Parkinson’s, some with Alzheimer’s, and many, like him, dealing with dementia. The bus would turn off of Dixwell Avenue and continue through a yellow arch reading “Hamden Business Park” before stopping in front of a squat, boxy building, where for the next eight hours Barker and the other patients would be fed, administered medication, bathed, entertained, and cared for. As Barker and the other patients approached the entrance to Partnerships, Valerie “Val” DellaRocco, the Director, would turn her eye toward the mirror strategically placed to let her see the entrance from her office. She would watch as one of her assistants held the door open for the caravan of canes and walkers. When she saw Barker, she’d smile: he was her favorite.
*** It’s now been seven years since Barker died, and DellaRocco is still in that office, still watching the mirror each morning as her patients step off the bus. DellaRocco is a compact woman, small but energetic, like a stack of tightly wound electrical coils. A row of neat, auburn bangs covers her forehead. When she’s telling a story, she leans in at the moment of highest drama and speaks softly, as though she is sharing gossip in the back of a high school classroom. On the wall of her office hangs a framed quote, attributed to herself, which reads, “I once thought I was wrong...but...I was mistaken.” DellaRocco has been working at Partnerships for the past 27 years and serving as Director for the past 19, but she has always cared for those most in
need. By the time she was 19 years old, she was a Registered Nurse (RN) with an Associate’s Degree from Quinnipiac. She began working at Gaylord Hospital soon after graduation, where she conducted rehab for paraplegics, quadriplegics, and amputees. After eight years at Gaylord, DellaRocco left only to take care on another monumental task as the mother of three daughters born in the space of four years. Once her daughters were school-aged, DellaRocco wanted to go back to work. She scanned through local newspapers, and stopped at a small ad seeking a part-time RN. The job seemed perfect, and she could start her workday right after dropping the girls off at school and finish right before she had to pick them up. She only had one question: “What the hell is adult day care?” It’s a question that few who work outside of elderly care, or are elderly themselves, would be able to answer. Adult day care, as a service, lies somewhere between a senior community center and an assisted living facility. It’s a solution for seniors who want to stay in their homes, but need a certain level of medical attention each day—someone to count their pills correctly, or check them for signs of worsening conditions. The patients at Partnerships might not need constant supervision, but at this stage of life, daily check-ins can be crucial. DellaRocco remembers one instance when a patient who lived alone “came off the bus, and she had had a stroke during the night, and no one knew. She got on the bus, but her face was drooping.” DellaRocco immediately recognized the signs and sprang into action. Most of DellaRocco’s patients, however, have someone to take care of them when they’re not at day care, often children or spouses. For these primary caregivers, adult day care helps them just as much as it helps the patients themselves. Dr. Paul Kirwin, Associate Professor of Geriatric Psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, emphasizes the stress placed on families. “These needs are enormous and challenging,” he stresses. “What do you do with an aging parent
who’s starting to develop either physical or mental health or cognitive functions, and you are running your own life with a spouse and children, and you’re then having to take care of this older person as well?” DellaRocco’s answer? Bring them to Partnerships. Adult day care allows families to work full-time without feeling guilty about neglecting their sick parent or spouse. And in terms of cost, there is simply no comparison. Partnerships charges $71 a day, a price that DellaRocco says is cheaper than comparable day care centers, and much cheaper than alternatives. “When you think about $71 a day—it costs twice that for an RN to go into your home for 20 minutes.” The other options, nursing homes and assisted living facilities, run upwards of $300, and patients only receive a fraction of the attention, typically running on a schedule of 20 minute bed-checks. During a day at Partnerships, patients are constantly engaged, and never out of sight of DellaRocco or her nursing assistants. Adult day care programs also allow patients to stay in their homes. Growing old and sick means losing one form of independence after another. As conditions worsen, the elderly might lose their ability to drive a car, make their own legal and financial decisions, or cook for themselves. Often, staying in their own homes is the last vestige of their independence; moving into a nursing home means a final painful goodbye to autonomy. DellaRocco illustrates this by talking about another of her former favorite patients, who died in 2008. Gaston Schmir, GRD ’58, had been a researcher at the National Institutes of Health and a Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at Yale before coming to Partnerships as a Parkinson’s patient. He was also a Holocaust survivor: when he was 11 years old, Schmir fled to Switzerland from Nazi-occupied France with his sister by climbing over a barbed wire fence. In the hours when Schmir wasn’t at Partnerships, his wife served as his caretaker. Once, when she was recover-
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Valerie “Val” DellaRocco
14 ing from surgery and unable to take care of him, Schmir had to be moved into Cheshire House, a nursing home in Waterbury. DellaRocco remembers that Schmir’s wife called her after he had spent two weeks in Cheshire House. “She said ‘Val, it’s horrible there. He needs to get out of there. He misses you so much.’” DellaRocco arranged for a livery car to bring Schmir to Partnerships during the day. When he returned to Partnerships, Schmir could only explain his feelings by drawing a comparison to his flight into Switzerland, decades earlier. “That first day he came in, he told me—and it made me cry—he said he felt like he was going over the barbed wire... and he said, ‘I climbed over the barbed wire again. And I got out.’ Because to him, that nursing home was like prison.” Geriatric care is a field that recognizes its own limitations; more often than not, the end goal is to ensure that things don’t get worse. “From a clinical perspective,” says Dr. Richard Marottolli, the Medical Director of the Dorothy Adler Geriatric Assessment Center at Yale–New Haven Hospital, “you have to be able to accept the fact that you can’t cure things often. Usually it’s dealing with chronic illness or issues that tend to be persistent. But you can still make improvements in a variety of different things. You can still help people, and it’s still quite rewarding.” From DellaRocco’s perspective, these considerations leave her with one concrete answer. “Our goal is to keep people out of a nursing home.” And that means as long as possible, to the very end. “If someone dies during the time that they are with us, that’s a success: we’ve kept them at home.” *** At 10:30 a.m., the patients are in the main room, evenly scattered among the tables. A nursing assistant turns on the TV and puts on a karaoke program, an activity they do every morning at this time for half an hour. A man in a green sweater named Tom accepts the microphone and begins
Herbert “Bud” Barker
14 THE YALE HERALD
crooning “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You” by Frankie Valli. DellaRocco leans over and whispers to me that Tom was formerly the Sports Writer for the Record Journal in Meriden, Conn. Jodie, the woman sitting next to him, is picking at a donut served on a small plastic plate when she starts to hum along under Tom’s booming baritone voice. She was a professional singer and music teacher before coming to Partnerships. Both Jodie and Tom suffer from advanced stage frontal lobe dementia. The song ends, and “Blueberry Hill” starts playing from the speakers as DellaRocco leads me into another room. “Someone with advanced dementia,” she says, “might not know their spouse’s name, they might not know their children’s names, but they know the lyrics to an old song.”
The open door policy at Partnerships keeps a lot of patients out of nursing homes, the only places that would accept them if turned away elsewhere; but in recent years, it’s also kept the Center’s finances trending toward the red. When the economy crashed in the 2008, adult day care centers in Connecticut began losing patients. “We had a lot of people getting laid off from their jobs, so they would stay home and take care of their parent, instead of sending them to day care, because they weren’t working.” DellaRocco further explains that of the patients who stayed, many started requesting to reduce their service plans down to half-days: “We also saw a lot of people say, ‘We can’t afford a whole day. But we can afford four hours,’ which would give them four hours to do their errands, maybe to just get some sleep! Do their own apDellaRocco prides herself on never turning any- pointments, whatever.” one away, either for their inability to pay, or the severity of their condition. She listed off the names During the recession, most other adult day care of her current patients as they sang karaoke. Al- centers ended their half-day packages because too most every other name was followed by, “No one many clients were switching down, while the cost else would take them.” That included Dennis, a of overhead remained roughly the same. Partformer architect whose frontal lobe dementia has nerships has kept their policy. DellaRocco, with a progressed to the point where during karaoke, he solemn voice, says, “The past couple of years, we sits apart in a designated quiet room to avoid ir- have really begun to struggle. We are struggling ritation, or Mark, who has autism and is the only now to the point where our future is really in quesone who still drives himself to the Center. Schmir tion, because of the fact that we continue to take ended up at Partnerships because the fall risk asso- people for a half-day.” ciated with his Parkinson’s made every other adult day care turn him away. On top of the economic woes of the center, DellaRocco, who has seen hundreds walk through her DellaRocco says some of her patients had been doors seeking a refuge for the end of life, has made treated at other centers before, but were thrown the heart-wrenching decision to retire. She turned out as their conditions worsened. “They discharge 65 this year, making her older than some of her because they need two people to assist to the toi- patients and old enough to qualify for Medicare. let in the bathroom. Are you kidding me?” There’s But so far her decision is only formal; the search a particular cruelty in professionals refusing to lift for a replacement has thus far been fruitless. The part of the burden of care from the shoulders of demands of the position are boundless—the pathe amateurs. “These families are doing it at home, tience and empathy required alone eliminates okay? Most of the time if it’s an older person, their most contenders—and each day that the threat of spouse is in their 80s; they’re transferring them closing the center lurches closer to reality, the more to the toilet, they’re getting them out of bed, and impossible the hunt becomes. DellaRocco leans in you’re going to say we can’t admit you because and lowers her voice, forming each word in quiet you’re too much care? That pisses me off.” distress, “What nurse is going to take a position,
Gaston Schmir and his wife
SHE LISTED OFF THE NAMES OF HER CURRENT PATIENTS AS THEY SANG KARAOKE. ALMOST EVERY OTHER NAME WAS FOLLOWED BY, “NO ONE ELSE WOULD TAKE THEM.”
where I hope we’re open for a few more months? other trend,” DellaRocco says, “which probably I hope we stay open!” started around 10 years ago, is the increasing diagnoses of early onset Alzheimer’s and frontal lobe *** dementia, Parkinson’s type dementia. So we are getting younger and younger people. My youngest Partnerships is not alone in its struggle. In the right now is in his 50s.” DellaRocco has a coupast decade, the number of adult day care cen- ple possible explanations for the trend. The oldest ters in Connecticut has shrunk from 67 down to generation, when they were younger, had “better 50. Failing assisted living facilities have routinely foods, a less toxic environment. The stuff that we been swallowed up by massive corporations and are experiencing now, not only environmental polrebranded, only to see their doors close months lution, but also in the foods that we’re eating—It’s later. And this period of financial turmoil comes different. It’s very different.” She also cites recent at a time when it has never been more important studies that have linked emotional trauma with for places like Partnerships to stay open. early onset dementia, a connection she’s seen in her own experience. Regardless of the cause, the For one thing, the elderly population is growing, trend has serious ramifications for families: they and fast. Joanne McGloin is the Associate Direc- get no help from the state, as most benefits for tor of the Yale Program on Aging, a research ini- the elderly start at age 65. And while most of the tiative based in the School of Medicine. She says primary caregivers for DellaRocco’s patients used the demographic shift we’re experiencing now is to be their adult children or retired spouses, now unprecedented. “I mean, we’re looking at a time some of her patients have spouses working full when 20 percent of the population will be consid- time to pay for children just starting college. ered elderly, and that’s never happened before.” On top of the huge advances in medical technolo*** gy that allow for longer lifespans, the Baby Boomer generation is celebrating birthdays beyond 65 In her 27 years at Partnerships, DellaRocco has in droves. “On the one hand, it’s a wonderful ac- known hundreds of patients. She’s attended complishment that many people are able to live countless funerals, and provided peace of mind that long, but it brings a lot of challenges.” for families seeking quality care for their loved ones. “These families are my family,” she says. First among those challenges is money, and how Earlier this year, when DellaRocco called a meetthere isn’t nearly enough of it. For one thing, there ing to discuss the Center’s dire financial situation, has been a complete plateau in governmental as- every family showed up. Every face read concern sistance for the elderly. “Our public funding and for the future. public policy initiatives haven’t kept pace with an aging demographic,” Dr. Kirwin remarks. For She’s been in their position, too. A few years ago, most populations in need of significant aid, when DellaRocco watched her most difficult patient government money comes up short, non-profits walk through the entrance of Partnerships: her usually step in to try to make up the difference. own father. At first, she struggled to see herself This isn’t the case for the elderly. Most charities in the role of both caretaker and daughter. “Afnaturally tend towards the issues related to the ter dealing with this for so many years, and then beginning of life, not the end of it. DellaRocco having it hit home...was tough.” But after two says, “The focus of a lot of grants and potential weeks, a change came over her. “Then it hit me— funding really has to do with youth and educa- how lucky am I to have my dad coming with me, tion—the elderly population seems to get lost in spending the day with me,” she recounts, “and he that.” In an age fascinated with making altruism made it to 91. I had him here for two years that I as effective as possible, the elderly constantly end got to spend with him.” DellaRocco felt the comup on the losing side of a calculation that mea- fort of knowing her father was in the best place sures impact in terms of years of human life. And he could be. He wasn’t in a nursing home or an those raising objections to this disparity seem to be assisted living facility—he was with his daughter only those who work directly with the elderly. McG- and living at home. It was a comfort that DellaRoloin shares Kirwin and DellaRocco’s views: “I think cco has given to every family who has trusted her when we try to work toward a just society there are with the care of their mother, father, husband, or a lot of needs that need to be balanced—you know, wife. And for as long as Partnerships stays open— the needs of children, the needs of working fami- whether a month, a year, or a century—anyone, lies—but we can’t forget older people as well, we just regardless of their condition or ability to pay, will have to find ways to make life better for everybody.” feel this same comfort. And so there are more elderly people, fewer places to treat them, and an overall stagnation in the rise of governmental and charitable aid. But another massive shift in the state of elderly populations forces the comparison to a perfect storm: “The
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F E A T U R E S April.6.2018
Good Vibrations MARINA ALBANESE, PC ’20 YH STAFF When I pick up the “Premier Vibrator” in the Yale Medical Historical Library, I am surprised by how heavy it is. It seems less like a massage tool and more like a power drill. Its nameplate reads: “Premier Vibrator/110 Volts DC...Patent Applied For.” Thought to be made in 1896, it was probably one of the United States’ earliest vibrator patents. Accompanying it in its purple-velvet lined box is an oil dropper, as well as various rubber attachments—or vibratodes—that are equal parts menacing and confusing. It is a far cry from the hot pink “rabbits” we know today. New Haven itself was once home to large-scale vibrator production. The Eli Whitney Museum owns and exhibits the collection of Yale Medical School alumnus A.C. Gilbert and his company. The A. C. Gilbert Company was the largest toy company in America and the largest employer in New Haven from the 1920s to the 1950s. Gilbert went out of business in 1967 and is little known today, remembered mostly for his toy construction—or “Erector”—sets, while not much historical attention has focused on his patent No. 1,668,364: “The Vibrator.” Gilbert’s vibrator was not a device intended solely for tired feet. An unsigned document from the 1920s in the Gilbert Catalog Archive, housed at the Eli Whitney Museum, describes the Gilbert Vibrator. The documents proclaims that “one object of the invention is to provide a means by which married people can enhance sexual excitement with each other so as to enjoy completion of normal sexual intercourse with the least expenditure of time and energy.” It continues: “without proper stimulation...sex can become a chore and every excuse is used to avoid this obligation...the vibrator is the quick and simple solution.” According to Bruce Watson, author of The Man Who Changed Boys and Toys, Gilbert tested the gadget amongst New Haven friends and reported that “all couples have admitted that their sexual relationships have immeasurably improved. Husbands feel proud of their new ability to satisfy their wives...The Wife is now extremely happy and content with marital life. The Husband is proud of his new prowess.” Bill Brown, Director of the Eli Whitney Museum, says that while the specifics of the production of Gilbert’s vibrators are unknown, the large number remaining in the archive suggests they were produced in large quantities. Vibrators were part of Gilbert’s Polar Club line—the brand used to market his electromechanical household appliances—and according to Brown, they generated just as much revenue as his toys. Under the Polar Club and “Vitalator” Brands, the A.C. Gilbert Company marketed vibrators ostensibly for “beautifying” purposes. However, one magazine advertisement from 1922
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boasts that their vibrator is “recommended for nervous disorders,” bringing “instant relief to…general ‘nerviness.’” “General nerviness” appears to be the 1920s’ version of hysteria. Since Ancient Greece, women had been diagnosed with hysteria, a condition in which the uterus supposedly disconnected and began to wander the body. The cure to hysteria was the coaxing of the organ back into its original position in the pelvis. In his 1653 medical compendium, Pieter van Foreest advised that when symptoms of hysteria presented themselves, it was “necessary to ask a midwife to assist, so that she can massage the genitalia with one finger inside.” By the Victorian era, when most midwives had been pushed out of the medical profession, women would have repeat hysteria therapies at doctors’ offices and spas. In the words of historian Rachel P. Maines, “doctors inherited the task of producing orgasm in women because it was a job nobody else wanted.” Maines also asserts that hysteria was so common in women because female masturbation was seen as unchaste and potentially detrimental to health. Furthermore, the androcentric definition of sex—which sees sex as three essential steps of preparation for penetration (foreplay), penetration, and male orgasm—fails to produce an orgasm in most women. Indeed, the reason that the physician’s massage of the clitoris could be seen as a clinical, non-sexual treatment was because clitoral stimulation was not at all considered a part of sexual intercourse. Through hysteria treatment, the female orgasm was enabled precisely because it was denied. Physicians thus viewed clitoral stimulation not as an act of sexual pleasure, but as a routine chore—and a difficult one. In 1660, a notable British surgeon lamented the difficulty of performing clitoral massage, comparing it to “the game of boys in which they try to rub their stomachs with one hand and pat their heads with the other.” In general, physicians hated performing hysteria therapy, but enjoyed its profitability. With the advent of electromechanical technology, the dilemma of physicians was solved. Thus originated the vibrator. The predecessor to the first American vibrator was a steampowered massage and vibratory apparatus, patented in 1869 by physician George Taylor, which was in part designed for treating female disorders. Taylor made sure to warn physicians and spas—his main market—to supervise treatment with the “Manipulator” to prevent “overindulgence.” Taylor’s patent was a giant apparatus, consisting of a table and wheels. By the turn of the 20th century, however, handheld vibrators were readily available. For the next two decades, the vibrator was increasingly marketed as a household appliance to aid in health, relaxation, and beautification, appearing in periodicals
“THROUGH HYSTERIA TREATMENT, THE FEMALE ORGASM WAS ENABLED PRECISELY BECAUSE IT WAS DENIED.”
such as Home Needlework Journal, and Woman’s Home Companion. Advertisements often contained ambiguous phrases such as the promise that “all the pleasures of youth…will throb within you.” At the end of the 1920s, this ambiguity—or what Maines calls the vibrator’s “social camouflage”—disintegrated as the medical community learned more about women’s sexuality, and as vibrators began to feature in pre-pornographic stag films. The advertisements disappeared from magazine pages and the mention of vibrators disappeared from common discourse. Vibrators did not resurface in the popular media until the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s—and this time as a sexual device, rather than a medical one. It was an acknowledgment and embrace—finally—of the female orgasm. But state regulation quickly kicked in. By 1973, Texas introduced its Obscene Device Law, a statute prohibiting the promotion and sale of sexual devices. The law is, in fact, still on the books today, though declared by a judge as unconstitutional and unenforceable since 2008. Alabama, Colorado, Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Virginia also had laws banning the sale of sexual devices at different points. Alabama remains the only state where the purchase of vibrators is still illegal, its anti-vibrator law upheld in 2009 by the Alabama Supreme Court. The de-medicalization of vibrators did not just bring on legal implications for their sale and possession, but also stripped them of the social respectability they once had. Their association with sexuality has resulted in an inextricable association with shame. As a result, even today, most sex shops or online distributors of vibrators operate policies of discretion in order to ease the customer’s embarrassment. At a sex shop in Orange, Conn., the manager informed me that the shopping bags are black, with no labels, and that the shop attendants take extra care to take items out of packaging and DVDs out of cases, and don’t give out receipts. Some customers using credit cards ask how the transaction will appear on their bill and the shop attendants assure them that the name of the sex shop is omitted. The manager told me that their biggest rush is on the weekends, with large crowds of women coming in after the bars close. The store intentionally stays open till midnight on weekdays and till 2 a.m. on weekends. “You’ll find that most of [the customers] are intoxicated,” she said, and suggested that people like to come in when they’re inebriated because they are more “open.” Since the 1960s, popular acceptance of vibrators has grown. A stunning breakthrough in public perception came in 2012, when in the months following the launch of the Fifty Shades of Grey book trilogy, sex toys underwent a 400 percent growth in sales in the US market. In 1976, there were only a half dozen pleasure product companies in the world. Today, the sex toy industry is a $15 billion market. However, it’s worth noting that the male-dominated pornography industry currently stands at about $97 billion. Furthermore, the boom in the sex toy market doesn’t mean that vibrators have shed the shame attached to them since their de-medicalization. Even sex toys companies embed a sense of indecency in the advertising of their products. In 2012, sex toy manufacturer Adam & Eve published a publicity infographic with a heading that read, “If she doesn’t admit it, there’s a pretty good chance she’s lying [about using a vibrator].” Meanwhile, the fourth link to come up when you google “buying a vibrator” is a HuffPost article titled “The Shame-free Guide To Buying a Sex Toy.”
At Yale, the embarrassment surrounding the vibrator is alive and well. One female Yale student who asked to remain anonymous refers to herself as a “vibrator dealer” and has bought around 30 vibrators for other Yale students on her Amazon account. She said, “People don’t want to order [a vibrator] on their own Amazon account because their parents might see it or [they] don’t really want to go a store because they’re hard to find, they’re usually kind of sketchy, and it just feels kinda weird.” She remarked that perhaps women feel so uncomfortable buying vibrators because “by placing an Amazon order, even walking into a sex shop, you’re articulating the sexuality that’s always been societally suppressed.” Even in a liberal space like Yale, many female students feel discomforted by vibrators—and this feeling can be even more extreme for students from Southern conservative backgrounds. “After I got mine, I mentioned it to some friends from home. I’m from the South and most of my friends were like, ‘oh my god a vibrator uhh,’” she added, acting out revulsion. Another female Yale student, who lives in an apartment, said that sometimes she feels uncomfortable using her vibrator in case her roommates hear her. Both students affirm that talking about vibrators openly has made other women they know more comfortable with the idea of having one. They agree that the positive encouragement from each other to take their sexual pleasure into their own hands, instead of depending on Yale hook-up culture, functions as a “reclamation” and a type of “Fuck Yale Men” initiative. But as open as both students are with each other, they admit that they keep their vibrators in their sock drawer or in their nightstand. As much as we like to think that at Yale we’ve reached a point where female sexual pleasure is fully celebrated, vibrators remain something concealed. A 1920 A.C. Gilbert advertisement for the Polar Club vibrator exclaimed that “a vibrator is an indispensable requisite of every woman’s dressing table.” Today, it’s just as much a requisite as ever, but you won’t find it sitting proudly atop anyone’s nightstand.
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C U L T U R E April.6.2018
How Do You Like Your Eggs? What do Easter and Pesach have in common, besides monotheism? What comes in soft, hard, wet, and squidgy forms? What began it all? The answer to all these questions is egg. Egg—a delicious meal, a reproductive vessel, the beginning of babies, the beginning of the universe (fuck the chicken)—is a real topic to crack. Here, a few of us gave it a shot.
a treatise on eggs.txt JOSH FENG, TD ’18
About two years ago, I started eating breakfast every day. Because of this, my life slowly improved. This morning ritual began with two eggs over-easy, which soon evolved into sunny side-ups, and then again morphed into what I’ve been making for the past nine months—two poached eggs every morning. The pot of water I put on the stove warms up by the time I’ve finished showering. Throwing in a splash of white vinegar also wakes my nose up. An egg slips into the bath. The whites spread out like milky tendrils, careful not to stray too far from the host mass, the egg-UFO. Yes, these eggs are linked to grander cosmic histories. A nourishing capsule, a sacred key—the egg is the yoke of life. The Sanwu Liji details universe creation via egg, explaining that “the chaos of heavens and earth is like a chicken egg. Pangu was born within it. 80,000,000 years later. Pangu opened up the heavens and earth.” This primordial egg is a bubble in the bathtub of multiverses; it houses the
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creation of everything. My housemate’s Dragon Ball Z video game quotes someone named Elder Kai who explains, “Tokitoki is a divine bird that manipulates time. His eggs hold the time for a brand new universe.” I stopped using a timer to poach eggs a couple months back. Sometimes I forget them on the stove; sometimes I take them out too early. Though I’ve poached eggs hundreds and hundreds of times, I never know how they will turn out. All of this in pursuit of an egg of perfect viscosity, so delicate a slight puncture causes the yolk to ooze (not run) out. “Poach” can be a violent word. But for these morning eggs, it is a fragile process, and a daily reminder to be more tender. To handle things with care, even those things we do daily as routine—a coordinated unpredictability.
EGGS: Should I Freeze Mine?
MARINA ALBANESE, PC ’20 YH STAFF
If you’re asking yourself this question, you’re already one step ahead. As we chain-smoke Marlboro Golds; load our bodies with Dubra, caffeine, and pesticides; and accidentally contract chlamydia for a short period, not many of us Yale females are thinking about the havoc we’re wreaking on our poor ovaries. But believe it or not, we are in our prime reproductive phase right now and with every year that passes, the likelihood of our children developing chromosomal abnormalities climbs higher and higher. If you think that none of this applies to you because you have an acai bowl from Juice Box every day and think cigarettes are gross, think again, because even if you have perfectly healthy eggs, you may have no choice but to squeeze ’em and freeze ’em. As per usual, it won’t be your fault, but a man’s. A study from none other than Yale showed that women with Master’s degrees and doctorates are “desperately” freezing their eggs because “there are not enough educated men in the world.” That’s right. Yale researchers have suggested that an “oversupply” of graduate women have been confronted with a “dearth of educated men to marry,” causing them to freeze their eggs while they continue to look for a suitable husband sperm donor. So even if you make yourself chamomile tea on a Wednesday night instead of finishing off your roommate’s Sauvignon Blanc in the fridge, your perfectly healthy eggs resting in your ovaries may not be able to wait long enough for their ideal sperm candy. So, with the memory of that questionable rash you got freshman year and with the knowledge that (statistically!) there aren’t enough men around who are worth your time, the question remains: when it comes to freezing your eggs, should you get crackin’? With the egg retrieval procedure costing $10,000, the hormonal drugs costing $5,000 and the cold storage costing up to $1,000 per year, you’re looking at a $25,000 fee for freezing your eggs for the next ten years. But hey—it’s still less than a semester at Yale!
I Know Why the Cage-Free Field Notes: Yale Students Egg Sings and Hard Soft Middle Boiled Eggs BLEU WELLS, ES ’21
Age: Egg
I once was an egg, I now am a person. Age: 3 Approximately the age at which I first ingested a standard chicken egg. With certainty, I hated it, and continued to until...
She yelled at my entire class for it. I never came forward and confessed, an act that still haunts me to this day. Mrs. Banks, if you’re reading this, it was me and I’m sorry.
NURIT CHINN, DC ’20
LAURIE ROARK, ES ’21
One glass of milk. One plate of hot sauce. Seven eggs.
Age: 15
Good morning. A to-go egg, carried confidently across the dining hall and into the open air.
I encountered my first Sausage and Egg McGriddle at the Highway 81 McDonald’s in Loganville, Georgia. Curious and afraid, I bit into the squared-off egg patty and experienced sheer euphoria.
At this point most of our chickens had either died (the foxes were vicious) or had been given away. It was the year I convinced myself that eggs were good because my best friend at the time really loved them. It was also the year I dyed my hair red and decided I wanted to be a sequential artist (another bad idea).
Age: 10
Age: 17
My family decided that it was in our best interest to invest in live chickens. We lived in rural Georgia at the time. I brought a few of the fertilized eggs into my 5th grade class and we hatched them with an incubator. One of the chicks didn’t make it, but my teacher still peeled the shell off and had us examine the dead fetus. Also, at this age, I was fiercely jealous that my brother could cook eggs when I could not.
Eggs were inescapable online. Cats with eggs, golden retrievers with eggs in their mouths, egg log (a.k.a. long egg), eggs with tiny, mocking faces—their ubiquity tortured me. At night, I prayed god would take these apparitions away from me and ease me into slumber. Coincidentally, this was the same age at which I really leaned into my southern identity and started putting hot sauce and eggs in my grits, a life-changing innovation.
If you make a hole in the shell on the top and a hole in the shell on the bottom and then blow really hard, the egg comes right out.
Age: 8
Age: 12 Our chickens were so popular that our neighbors also bought some. Though I had learned how to cook eggs by this point, I began refusing to eat the eggs our chickens laid because they were often covered in shit. Age: 13 I cooked eggs in my math teacher’s Presto and forgot to clean it out.
Age: 19 (current) I cannot remember exactly when I last ate an egg, but it has been some time. I consider the egg to be a slimy relic of my past, like gauchos or My Chemical Romance, things I am improved for having lived through but better without.
“Do you know why they smell like that?” She takes four eggs from the bowl, gingerly placing each one at the bottom of her tote bag in silence. “They’re organic.”
“I mean, I guess the shell is kind of like a Tupperware container.” Naked and resting in a nest of multigrain bread and cottage cheese. “I guess it must be bulking season?” I watch the two eggs roll around and around the empty plate. They kiss the edge but never seem to fall.
YH STAFF
I used to eat two soft boiled eggs every Sunday morning. I lived in London, at the bottom of a bumpy hill made intermittently of grass and green and brownish cobblestone. I would walk up to a small cafe where, even in the midst of English winter, I would sit outside at one of the shiny black tables which were naked but for an empty soup-can filled with brown sugar. The waiter knew what I wanted, but still performed the formality of handing me a menu. The meal would arrive shortly thereafter: two eggs, each housed in a little egg cup, one wearing a red fluffy hat (that you could buy for an extra £3.50). Spread out like fingertips were strips of sourdough toast wet with butter. In England, we call them soldiers. As I cracked the egg’s head, yellow would ooze out like a yolky volcano, often soaking the little hat in the process (I always felt guilty for getting its clothes wet). When I finished dipping the soldiers into the eggy lava, I would passionately spoon the whites out of the shell, the silky bits I had missed in the dipping process. Full and satisfied, I would head back down my hill. But first, I would get toasted banana bread to go, because I like to push the limits of my digestive system. My first morning in New York, having moved to America the night before, I wandered into my hotel’s ground floor restaurant for breakfast. Coincidentally, it was a Sunday, and considering my family and I were about to drive our rental stuffed with luggage
(which was also stuffed with confused cross-seasonal outfits) up to New Haven, I decided to treat myself to some good old familiarity. “Soft boiled eggs, please,” I said to the waiter dressed in a clinical and expensive grey. He looked at me confused, and returned with a plate of two eggs, circling and spinning around as they failed to balance on the china. I looked down confused, and asked for an egg cup. “An egg cup?” he questioned. He was a lot more confused when I then asked for soldiers. Eventually my dad helped me create a DIY egg stand made of a spoon, a coffee cup, and four paper tissues. We got some toast and sliced it into thin, buttered soldiers. I finally cracked at the shell of the egg, desperately peeling off its shards of skin. I pushed my spoon into the egg, ready for the yellow eruption. But nothing happened. It was just a slightly undercooked hard-boiled egg, stoic apart from its very center, which was slightly more orange and responded to my spoon’s pokes like frozen jelly. I wanted to go home. These days, I grab a few eggs from the dining hall to eat throughout the day. They’re never wet and oozy, but they have other advantages. They’re good for an on-the-go snack. They peel a lot more smoothly since the centre is rock hard. And they’re hot in my pocket, like little hand warmers. I hold them tight in the New England cold, and imagine my palm is a little red hat.
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R E V I E W S April.6.2018
I WISH HE SPOKE OUR LANGUAGE MARC SHKUROVICH, BK ’19 YH STAFF image from thetimes.co.uk.jpgProject Wes Anderson’s new movie, Isle of Dogs, is uplifting though occasionally sobering, visually riveting, and undeniably charming. I had the chance to see it at a screening last Thursday presented by the Yale Film Society (and you can catch it at the Criterion beginning Friday, Apr. 6), where the audience gave the movie a warm welcome. Yet the most interesting part about it is a byproduct of a narrative conceit explained after the opening credits: “All barks have been rendered into English.” Isle of Dogs creates an epiphenomenon of unanswered questions that is more stimulating than the plot. Anderson brings up, but ultimately fails to investigate, issues of intelligibility and interspecies communication, content to fall back on another couple hours of whimsical fun. The film’s first half takes place on Trash Island—where the fictitious Megasaki City’s leader-cum-industrial overlord, Mayor Kobayashi, banishes the metropolitan canine population after an outbreak of “Snout Fever.” The first exile is Spots, a highly trained dog who was once assigned to protect Atari, Mayor Kobayashi’s precocious ward. Though the denizens of Megasaki forsake their ever-loyal companions, Atari rigs a prop airplane and crash-lands on Trash Island. A ragtag pack of dogs, from stray mutts to purebreds (most of whose voices belong to actors you’ll recognize), accompany Atari on a—you guessed it—quest across the island in search of Spots. Plot twists and character growth lurk along the way, and their progress is punctuated by composer Alexandre Desplat’s confident percussion (he recently won a second Oscar for his work on The Shape of Water, after winning for Grand Budapest Hotel back in 2015). Trash Island is made of what it sounds like. Accordingly, the early colors that dominate Isle of Dogs’ palette are dirty grays, browns, and whites. This makes the splashes of vivid color later on all the more pleasing to the eye—look out for the incarnadine of a kidney transplant, in particular. The stop-motion is so graceful you forget you’re watching puppets and not CGI, and it lends the film a texture as unique to Wes Anderson as his frame symmetry and obsession with detail—the most touching examples of which are the omitted stitches representing a childhood scar in Atari’s left eyebrow. Anderson pulls off frenetic action sequences by mixing in nimble cuts and seamless hand-drawn animation (the New York Times’ Anatomy of a Scene is well worth a watch). Fights are stylized as little cotton clouds juddering around the characters. This movie is unmistakably Anderson’s. Rather it’s another of Anderson’s idiosyncrasies that stands out in this film: information provided through dialogue is also represented visually. He insists on labeling everything. Often the results are playful: Yoko Ono makes an appropriately bizarre cameo as the assistant to a dissident scientist; her braids are adorned with a Y and an O. Other times it reinforces the dynamics of Megasaki City society: the clasps on dog cages are made by Kobayashi Lock & Bolt Japan. Despite the profusion of text, Anderson’s creative team decided to
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largely forgo subtitles, leaving almost all Japanese speech untranslated, and shielding English-speaking audiences from the drudgery of watching “foreign film.” Anderson and his co-writers, Roman Coppola, Jason Schwartzman, and, Kunichi Nomura—a multitalented Japanese actor, brought onboard as a cultural fact-checker—had to work within these confines to bring the story to life. So, we get only information that is key to Atari’s mission (through a disembodied narrator), or diegetically newsworthy (Frances McDormand plays a literal translator who relays events to spectators). Anderson also misses a ripe opportunity to explore how the media can impact events on the ground— in this film, it doesn’t. Even though Atari possesses a special headset that allows him to communicate with Spots, we only understand the dog’s responses to his master. What compelled Atari to embark on his mission? Why was this technology not used to help combat the Snout Fever? None of the dogs asked, so nobody knows. These linguistic limitations are perfectly suited to Andersonian humor. The jokes that drew the loudest laughs were literalizations and observations of the obvious: “stop licking your wounds,” one dog tells another, who looks up from lapping at an injured paw with chagrin. There’s something marvellous about hearing a dog say the words “sluice channel.” But the same limitations make it so the plot cannot fully unravel until Greta Gerwig’s character—a fast-talking bilingual foreign-exchange student-journalist named Tracy— appears. Tracy can also be understood as an interpretive device, but, unfortunately, this doesn’t make her character any less insufferable, or quell our discomfort as the only white character in the film (McDormand’s never leaves the press box) emerges as Megasaki City’s savior. In the film’s opening scene, Atari is billed to be the reincarnation of a folkloric Boy Samurai, and it’s easy to accept him as a stoic, confident hero when he speaks in Japanese; but when he switches to his broken English, we can only fawn over how cute he is. The film’s climax makes it clear that Anderson abdicates the responsibility to dig into language and translation, when Tracy makes a last-ditch appeal to the morality of Japanese citizens assembled at a Kobayashi rally… in English. But if there are no subtitles, how else could she do it? Herein lies the fatal flaw of Isle of Dogs: by pledging allegiance to a story about dogs in Japan, Anderson fails to consider what exactly his audience might understand. The debate over cultural appropriation in Wes Anderson’s work is officially on. And it’s a pressing debate, as this is the second time he has drawn heavily from an Asian culture (after The Darjeeling Limited, which is set in India). But Isle of Dogs manages to avoid what would be most damning and dangerous: dehumanizing Japanese people in favor of dogs. Before Atari arrives on Trash Island, two pack of desperate
dogs battle over a rotten bag of garbage—their best option for food. Amid the fracas, Anderson splices in a close-up of one dog tearing another’s ear off. Instead of recoiling, the audience waits to laugh; the cue comes when another dog points out the missing ear with surprise. A few minutes later, though, everyone in the theater flinches when a “broken propellor clutch” (the technically precise phrase the dogs repeat over and over again) is wrenched from Atari’s helmet after his crash. Despite the language barrier, human empathy prevails. And the reason Isle of Dogs’ Japan looks like the version of Tokyo you might find in a snowglobe is because it’s meant to. Wes Anderson’s art direction has always flirted with kitsch, and if any Japanese imagery appears overly caricatured, it’s due to his insistence on paying homage. In interviews, Anderson has cited Akira Kurosawa and Hayao Miyazaki’s filmscapes as inspiration for his own; Isle of Dogs’ set designers claim to have modeled Megasaki City’s buildings after Japanese metabolist architecture and Frank Lloyd Wright’s work in Tokyo. The result is resplendent: the wide shots of the cityscape are almost as awe-inspiring as the World of the Dead in Coco. But subtle, cinephilic references aren’t enough. Anderson couldn’t resist including every Japanese cultural form imaginable that American moviegoers might recognize: he devotes screentime to haiku, kabuki theater, and sushi preparation. I lost track of how many times variations on the iconic woodblock print The Great Wave off Kanagawa appears. Mayor Kobayashi shares his name with Japan’s most famous competitive eater; Atari shares his with the iconic video-game company, which, it might surprise both you and Anderson to learn, was actually founded in Silicon Valley. With time—the film is set in an unspecified future imagined from the perspective of the past—Anderson and his team land on a darker aesthetic than Back to the Future II did. Whereas that movie’s 1989 vision of 2015 is amusing in its inaccuracy, Isle of Dogs’ future seems only to contain ominous hints about our present—the authoritarian overtones are impossible to ignore. And still, the film fails to teach us anything new. At the plot’s core are misinformation and deception, a government deliberately suppressing science in order to defer to corporate interests. Anderson’s solution? The loyalty of dogs, and the pluck and morality of tweens. Agreeable, but hardly profound. Any deeper revelation about how a society should treat outsiders is again undermined by the film’s premise: how much of an outsider can a mascot named Boss, who is voiced by Bill Murray, really be? Yes, the charismatic canine puppets are endlessly endearing, the careful compositions a delight to watch. But for an auteur revered for his skillful manipulation of surface, it’s truly lamentable that Wes Anderson’s latest movie is just not that deep.
JACK WHITE, BOARDING HOUSE REACH HENRY J. ZATARAIN, BR ’18 Listening to Jack White’s Boarding House Reach (BHR) is a surreal, engrossing experience; it feels like exploring a dark cathedral into which light filters through blue stained-glass windows. Tucked into the walls are 13 pieces of modern art, each in its own small alcove. Such is the rawness and mystery of White’s latest album. In BHR, he explores how his own sensibilities, which tend toward the stripped-down and old-fashioned, interact with contemporary music-making technology. His work with the electric guitar is, as usual, spectacular, its richness and depth a testament to his mastery of the instrument. If there is one thing that sets BHR apart from White’s previous albums, it is his extensive use of synthesizers, drum samplers, and other digital devices. These modernist elements complement White’s more traditional accompanying acoustic instruments, which include organs, fiddles, live drums, and piano.
The digital components are foregrounded from the album’s first moment. A pulsating electronic buzz, which sounds like a scanner attached to a sinister robot from an old science fiction film, launches the leadoff song, “Connected By Love.” The song continues as White, sounding exasperated, calls out to an anonymous lover. Wistful, yet fiery, organ and guitar solos provide this excellent opener with additional texture and emotional weight.
pleads with the listener, asking, “Do you wanna learn? Then, shut up and learn!” Our fast-paced media landscape encourages people to form, express, and defend opinions quickly and relentlessly — in other words, the opposite of shutting up and learning. White knows that some of his fans, and others, will be bothered by this eclectic, meandering album. But this music is not designed to be immediately accessible; like most art, it needs to be digested slowly and deliberately.
In “Ice Station Zebra,” White comes as close to rapping as he ever has. With spunk and oral dexterity reminiscent of the Beastie Boys, he busts out lines about the fact that “Everything in the world gets labeled and named,” but that this creates a “prison” to which only “truth” has the keys. With laidback drums, funky keyboards, and driving guitar, this song reinvigorates BHR as the latter approaches its halfway mark.
In the 1960s and ’70s, Bob Dylan gave us poetry-as-lyrics, Led Zeppelin created their own brand of rock, and Johnny Cash exuded a devil-may-care attitude. These are just some of Jack White’s idols, and he channeled all of them while developing his own distinctive voice and sound. As he asserts in “Ice Station Zebra,” after all, “Everyone creating is a member of the family, Passing down genes and ideas in harmony.” What White has created in Boarding House Reach is certainly worth passing down.
“Everything You’ve Ever Learned,” the eighth track, hints at what White’s goal may have been in creating this album. He
THE DEATH OF STALIN EMMA KEYES, PC ’19 YH STAFF How you feel about pitch-black gallows humor will deeply affect how you feel about The Death of Stalin, directed by Armando Iannucci (best known in the United States as the creator of the television show Veep). The movie is, after all, about the power struggle following Josef Stalin’s death in 1954 and all of the ensuing chaos. Cheery stuff all around. In fact, the film’s depiction of these events is so controversial in the former Soviet Union that it has been banned by Russia, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan. Take from that what you will. Many political players, all members of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, fight for dominance and influence in the film, but the tense battle of wills between Moscow Party Head
Nikita Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi) and the head of the NKVD (one of the precursors to the KGB) Lavrentiy Beria (Simon Russell Beale), comprises the core conflict in the film. These two pull the strings on everyone else, especially Deputy General Secretary Georgy Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor), like pawns. Since this is at least nominally a historical movie, we already know how it ends, in some sense. I had never heard of Beria, but even though I would be hard-pressed to tell you a fact about Khrushchev (was he the one that banged the shoe at the UN? Just looked it up, and yes!), I can at least confidently say that he was, at some point, the head of the USSR. But the details of how that came to pass, sharply depicted in The Death of Stalin, are hilariously absurd in a horrifying kind of way. Seeing as I am not a Cold War historian, I cannot speak directly to the historical accuracies or inaccuracies that Iannucci depicts in the film; I don’t know how true it is to life. John Gaddis
might feel very differently about The Death of Stalin than I do, but nonetheless, the film makes the strikingly grim reality of its event explicit. The jokes garner laughs, but much of the time that laughter forces discomfort and reflection—there’s only so much levity that can be squeezed out of the NKVD’s reign of terror over citizens of the USSR. The Death of Stalin is funny in much the same way, unsurprisingly, as Veep: you laugh at the horrifying behavior unfolding in front of you because what else can you do? It’s not hard to see how Iannucci went from skewering the modern American political system to skewering the historical legacy of Soviet politics, especially given the obvious parallels between the Central Committee’s internal struggle for power and the power struggles playing out in our current administration. Only time will tell what The Death of Stalin’s equivalent will be in 50 years.
FRANKIE COSMOS, VESSEL NICOLE MO, BK ’19 YH STAFF Greta Kline has, probably to her dismay, become something of an icon. Held up like a DIY Madonna, the 24-year-old musician behind Frankie Cosmos is considered an exemplar of contemporary underground pop. Since 2012, her solo project has become a full-fledged band, amassed critical and popular acclaim, and signed to indie giant Sub Pop Records. Frankie Cosmos’ new album seems like an acknowledgement that Kline’s bedroom pop is no longer recorded in anybody’s bedroom. But Vessel’s studio production doesn’t drown out Kline’s softness, instead spotlighting her resonating vulnerability on what is perhaps her most introspective work yet. On their third studio album, Frankie Cosmos retains much of the same clever airiness that first endeared them to twee-indie fans. In “Cafeteria,” Kline confronts youthful self-loathing with sunny vocals and energetic instrumentals, finding reasons for
optimism (or at least humor) in her angst. “I wasn’t built for this world / I had sex once now I’m dead,” she sings dryly in one moment, “I never look back / It only hurts my head,” she croons heartbreakingly the next. The infectious “Ballad of R & J” constructs a story around Ricky and Julia, two lovers in a long-distance relationship. Both whimsical and tragic, beachy guitar riffs backtrack bittersweet heartache—“Julie had his flowers / Taped up to his wall / ‘It’s better to love Ricky / From afar than not at all.’” Vessel is also proof that Kline and the band aren’t complacent in their brand of tongue-in-cheek poetry. “Being Alive” flirts with indie punk, juxtaposing crashing percussions and uptempo verses with a slow, mournful chorus, as Kline and her bandmates declare, “Being alive matters quite a bit / even when you feel like shit.” Longtime fans may be thrown off by this fuller sound, more aggressive than the delicate ethereality that Frankie Cosmos is known for. On the other hand, “Ur Up” and “My Phone,” two beautiful tracks both clocking in under 45 seconds, have Kline singing alone, backed by minimal instrumentals, as
if she just sat down and recorded them on Garageband. This is the version of Frankie Cosmos fondly exalted as a trailblazer for lo-fi bedroom pop, and Kline hasn’t left it behind—in fact, many of the songs on the album are repurposed from past years and releases. But in insisting on variation, Vessel refuses the claim that indie-pop singer-songwriter always sounds the same. The album’s cover, awash in cool pale blue, centers on a taxidermied dog (presumably her beloved Joe Joe) poking out of bubbles in a ceramic bathtub. Perhaps this tub is the vessel that the album is named after, carrying a reminder of home, of youth, of loved ones, of change. Or perhaps Kline herself is the vessel, containing in her the pressures that comes with being a torchbearer for a genre. In “Accomodate,” she sings, “My body is a burden / I’m always yearning to be less accommodating / to say how I’m feeling.” Then maybe Vessel, in all its self-expression and intimacy, is just about trying to lighten the load.
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Write for The Herald!
22 THE YALE HERALD
THE BLACK LIST
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THINGS WE HATE
MID-SEMINAR STROKING
DORIC COLUMNS
not as good as mid-exam orgasms
What kind of doric invented those??
YOLKS
THE DEAD SEA, THE LOWEST POINT ON EARTH
Also yokes DIY SHAMPOO “I’m going no-poo” GOING “NO-POO” #nopoopoochallenge2k18
I need to get high PUBLISHING STUDENTS’ ADDRESSES But come visit Harold at 305 Crown! THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION “Slow down, I’m getting dizzy!”
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POYNT E R F E L L O W S H I P
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