Herald Volume LXIII Issue 4

The Yale Herald Volume LXIII, Number 4 New Haven, CT Friday, Feb. 17, 2017

EDITORIAL STAFF Editor-in-Chief: Oriana Tang Managing Editors: Emma Chanen, Anna Sudderth Executive Editors: Tom Cusano, Sophie Haigney, Sarah Holder, Lily Sawyer-Kaplan, David Rossler, Rachel Strodel, Charlotte Weiner Senior Editors: Libbie Katsev, Jake Stein Culture Editors: Luke Chang, Marc Shkurovich Features Editors: Hannah Offer, Eve Sneider Opinion Editors: Emily Ge, Robert Newhouse Reviews Editors: Mariah Kreutter, Nicole Mo Voices Editor: Bix Archer Insert Editor: Eli Lininger Audio Editor: Will Reid Copy Editors: Jazzie Kennedy, Meghana Mysore

From the editors

ONLINE STAFF Bullblog Editor-in-Chief: Marc Shkurovich Bullblog Associate Editors: Lora Kelley, Lea Rice Online Editor: Megan McQueen

Volume LXIII, Number 4 New Haven, Conn.

Friday, Feb. 17, 2017

DESIGN STAFF Graphics Editor: Joseph Valdez Design Editor: Winter Willoughby-Spera Executive Graphics Editor: Haewon Ma

Dear Reader, Though February is the shortest of the months, it always feels like the longest. Apart from the clutch snow day last week, the weather’s slowed us all down as we slog further along into 2017—there’s nothing I like more than slipping on black ice en route to my midterm. Read this issue not for a Valentine’s Day postmortem, but to break the mid-month inertia and start moving towards March.

In this week’s front, Rachel Calnek-Sugin, SM ’19, profiles a New Haven clock fixer. Calnek-Sugin’s piece turns back the clock, describing the prosperous life of industry that once characterized the Elm City, but also hinting at why some look to the past as a model for the future. Setting the clock to present day, Emily Ge, BK ’19, covers the renaming of Calhoun—it’s about time—and the christening of Grace Hopper College. One name that won’t be changing soon, though, is Handsome Dan: Clara De Pablo, BK ’19, has penned a study on the dogs of Yale.

And if you’re just looking for ways to pass the time, peruse the Culture section: Steph Barker, JE ’19, lauds the YUAG’s Josef and Anni Albers exhibit, and Victorio Cabrera, TC ’18, digs (perhaps too) deeply into the physics and psychoactives encircling the igloo on Cross Campus.

I’ll meet you there, dreaming of Spring Break.

With frosted tips and hardened nips, Marc Shkurovich Culture Editor

2 – The Yale Herald

BUSINESS STAFF Publisher: Patrick Reed Advertising Team: Alex Gerszten, Garrett Gile, Tyler Morley, Bedel Saget, Jr., Harrison Tracy 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 send a check payable to The Yale Herald to the address below. Receive the Herald for one semester for 40 dollars, or for the 2016 - 2017 academic year for 65 dollars.

Please address correspondence to: The Yale Herald P.O. Box 201653 Yale Station New Haven, CT 06520-1653 oriana.tang@yale.edu www.yaleherald.com 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 2017 The Yale Herald.

Cover by Joseph Valdez YH Staff

THIS WEEK’S ISSUE 12 COVER

Incoming

Explore the history of American clockmaking—and the sinister nostalgia of “Make America Great Again”—through an heirloom clock store in North Haven with Rachel Calnek-Sugin, SM ’19.

John Kerry The former Secretary of State will return to New Haven next year to teach a seminar on how to lose a presidential election.

Outgoing

6 VOICES Considering the words of poet Li Bai, Catherine Yang, TC ’19, meditates on translation and memory.

Deborah Monti, JE ’19, writes a poem of water, snow, bones, and a woman.

John C. Calhoun The Yale Corporation finally voted to remove the seventh Vice President’s name from the residential college after just eighty-six years of overlooking his misdeeds.

8 OPINION Elena Conde, DC ’19, gives Yale’s grading policy an F as she considers the true purpose of education.

Stress culture and eating disorders at Yale: why it’s important to reach out.

SCHEDULE Saturday

Something Extra’s Birthday Jam 7:30 p.m.

Sudler Hall

10

Sunday

16

Berkeley College Orchestra: Sounds of Spain 4:30 p.m.

Battell Chapel

Sunday

Debate: Aesthetics are Morally Vacuous 7:15 a.m.

Sudler Hall

Thursday

Poetry Reading by Yusef Komunyakaa 4:00 p.m.

Beinecke Library

FEATURES Emily Ge, BK ’19, considers what led to the renaming of Calhoun College.

Grab a lint roller and take a walk around campus with Yale’s dogs and Clara de Pablo, BK ’19.

18 CULTURE

Ever wondered what the ideal dimensions are for an igloo? Victorio Cabrera, TC ’18, evaluates the dome of snow erected on Cross Campus.

Steph Barker, JE ’19, praises the YUAG’s innovative exhibition showcasing the lives and work of Josef and Anni Albers.

20 REVIEWS

Ivan Taylor-Kirwan, JE ’18, celebrates the cathartic intimacy of a man and his piano in Sampha’s Process.

Kehlani’s SweetSexySavage has Sarah Holder, SY ’17, listening on repeat. Revel in the beautiful monotony of Paterson with Carly Gove, BR ’19.

Feb. 3, 2017 – 3

LETTER THE NUMBERS From: The Most Illustrious Sovereign Duchy of Pierson College To: The Upstart Pretender-State That Styles Itself “Yale University” We, the free and sovereign people of Pierson College, hereby announce our secession, effective immediately, from the false kingdom of “Yale University.”

For too long have we endured taunts, insults, and ridicule from the denizens of Yale. For too long have we been derisively told we are “too far away to visit.” And, worst of all, for too long have we heard the hateful sentence: “Where even is Pierson College?”

No longer! We now know that it doesn’t have to be this way. We have watched, with growing hope and exultation, the independence struggles, and final triumphs, of our brothers and sisters in the Most Illuminated Margrave of Silliman and the Exalted Barony of Timothy Dwight. Now, our time has come.

We hold no illusions, of course, that the imperialistic tendencies of Yale will allow us to secede unhindered, and we are fully prepared to resist any invasion. Our mighty ramparts overflow with brawny Footballers wielding the fierce hockey sticks of justice, and within our walls are housed trebuchets built by our finest mathematicians (those few that have bravely resisted the depredations of the vile Barony of Science Hill).

And, dear denizens of Yale, we have quite the trump card. I regret to inform you that, as of this morning, the mythical beast, the rallying cry that unites all Yale, the symbol of all that you cherish, is in our power.

That’s right. We have Handsome Dan. Should we be allowed to peacefully secede, and suffer no further interference from Yale, all will be well, and your hound will be released into your custody forthwith. But should we get even an inkling of opposition to our demands—let me remind you of Sasha Pup’s mysterious departure from Yale. What we did once, we can do again.

The free people of Pierson College await your response.

Sic semper Yale main campus.

- Sahaj Sankaran YH Staff 4 – The Yale Herald

Famous intellectuals in your kitchen HeidegGerber Baby Food Galileo GaliLay’s Chips Martin Lutherbal tea Nietzcheetos (ofc they are flaming hot) Pythogorasberry pie!

René Decarton of milk B.F. SkinNerds Rope Henry David Thoreau-gaine (you are balding! and so you keep this in your kitchen!)

Francis Bacon (I didn’t have to change this one at all) – Gian-Paul Bergeron YH Staff

Top 5 Presidents to get drunk with 5 Obama - A president I could

get a beer with, ya know? Let’s take in a Bulls game, Barry.

4 JFK - Mmmmm: gimme a frothy Guinness and this Irishman and I’m set 3 Grover Cleveland - I’m looking for a beer belly like his 2 Ulysses S. Grant - Won the civil war, sits on the $50 bill, brandy lover 1 John Adams - Word on the street is homeboy was drinking beer for breakfast as a teen at Harvard. BAMF. – Emma Chanen YH Staff

sarah.holder@yale.edu oriana.tang@yale.edu

oriana.tang@yale.edu

VOICES

A grand return

by Deborah Monti water mosaics form of hills and dips, smoke and smog in a five by three cut of crystal. snow to glass like moss on rock clinging, or holding, or maybe stuck to the transparent north wall, a silent soldier against the cold. winter pretended to close the door behind her before kicking it open and blowing a mean swirl of cloud. when boot meets ice it snaps like cracked bones, or small and opaque paper firecrackers against the cement ground. she blows a high pitched moan through opened doors before the hinges shut her mouth and she sputters saying remember me, I was here.

Graphic by Joseph Valdez YH Staff 6 _ The Yale Herald

If you ask for the moon

by Catherine Yang

T

he strength of my memory is not in the things that I have seen or the places that I have been. In fact, the strength of my memory is not a thing at all, but in its place lies a feeble collection of fragmented songs and words and feelings. So when you asked me to give you a recollection of the moon, I closed my eyes and I saw darkness. No twinkling stars or midnight glow, just an emptiness beneath my eyelids. I searched my memory with the moon in mind, but the images of my past are mired in forgetting. Eyes squeezed shut, I saw nothing claw its way through the brambles.

When I stopped the search and returned to daylight, I remembered a poem of exile that I learned once in Chinese school, perhaps the most famous Chinese poem of all time. It begins with the line “ ,” which translates roughly to “Before the bed, moonlight.” The poem is titled “ ,” or “Peaceful Night Thoughts.” As I bestow these translations upon you, I can feel no joy. I sense that the language has died in my rough hands, as if I extinguished it in my fists on the journey to the other side. I could not remember a moon of my own, so I stole a poem that you could not understand. And yet, because I have given you the poem in translation, it is no longer the beautiful thing it once was in my mind. So you see now that my memory is an inconsolable sadness, a ramshackle resource whose limits are the insides of my skull. Outside, all I can provide is a dying parody.

Graphic by Shelby Redman YH Staff Feb. 17, 2017 – 7

OPINION

OPINION No new grades have been posted

by Elena Conde

F

or the most part, Yalies don’t talk about grades. But that doesn’t mean we don’t care about them. Though they don’t come up often, their true impact connects like a punch in the gut whenever someone casually makes a comment like, “Gotta get that GPA up for law school, am I right?” We see a letter on a page and can feel content, terrified, elated, exasperated, dizzy, nauseous, apathetic. More than we’d like to admit, grades have a huge influence on our experience of Yale. But as the intelligent, capable, deeply perceptive students that make up Yale’s student body, we shouldn’t let grades have the power over us that they do.

Our reverence for them impedes true intellectual development, and they distract our focus from the most basic goal of higher education: to learn.

We care so much about grades not because they have any innate value, but rather because they symbolize achievement. Grades are a convenient checkpoint that can wrap up our complex motivations for wanting to succeed academically. For me, doing well in school was my way of thanking my family for their sacrifices. Some of my friends care about school so that after they graduate, they can secure a high-paying job to provide for their families. Others are motivated by a love of learning, which they hope to further pursue by attending graduate school. Some just want to make enough money to buy a yacht and sail off to Cabo. Though these examples may be oversimplified, they share a common thread: we care about our grades because we care about our futures. Yet while there’s no doubt that doing well in college can help one succeed afterwards—learning how to think critically, stretch our minds, and work hard definitely benefit any career—it’s time we question whether grades accurately measure academic success.

To do so, we first need to think about what academic success really means. Because most concerns about grades regard future employment, it makes sense to consider academic success from an economic perspective.

Economists refer to two main theories on the purpose of higher education. One is called the Signaling Model, which claims that academic success acts as a flashing light to employers saying, “Take me! I’m a capable, smart, and dedicated worker who will turn into a productive employee!”

In this framework, we aspire to get good grades so that we can prove we’re capable. These grades don’t necessarily mean that you’ve learned anything—just that you were capable, smart, and dedicated enough to do well in the class.

The problem with the Signaling Model is that grades are not accurate signals; in fact, they’re incredibly arbitrary. Their distribution differs per department, per class, and even per teaching fellow. An A can be nearly identical to an A-, yet the opportunities given to a student graduating with a GPA of 4.0 can differ drastically from those given to a student graduating with a GPA of 3.67. This disparity is especially true in classes with curves.

For instance, if an engineer gets a 70 percent on an exam about building bridges, she can still receive an A in the class. Does that mean that even though she’ll be deemed a capable engineer, she’ll only be able to build 70 percent of a bridge?

If the Signaling Model doesn’t provide a good basis for the purpose of grades, let’s turn to the alternative: the Human Capital Model. This model argues that the purpose of education is to guide students in deepening their intellectual capabilities, strengthening their work ethic, and developing more creative thought patterns. If grades were an accurate metric for the Human Capital Model, a student who truly challenged themselves would receive good grades.

But can grades accurately reflect personal growth? While they can certainly measure one’s understanding of a given subject at one point in time, they lack the specificity to reflect how much one is learning over the course of a semester. Too often, students focus solely on their final grade, rather than how much they’ve stepped outside of their comfort zone to complete it, or whether they have truly learned something new. I know many students who would rather write a paper on a topic they’re comfortable with and get an A instead of taking a risk. In this case, the A doesn’t represent how much the student’s knowledge or depth of understanding grew, but rather that they are able to articulate what they knew all along. The exception would be the student who genuinely pours herself into her work and gets an A. When this happens, however, the A is less important than the work it took to get it.

Nevertheless, grades can limit the development of our individual interests. How many times have you been told not to worry “for now” about a certain challenging topic, solely because it won’t be on a test? Sure, students who are deeply interested will do research outside of class, but the fast-paced nature of classes often means that if you pause to linger on a topic on your own, you’ll fall behind the rest of the class. It’s rare to find a student who rushes through an assignment, does fine, and later regrets it because she’s missing out on her intellectual development. Our reverence for grades as the authority on all things academic means we can overlook what the Human Capital Model mandates as truly important: intellectual growth.

The Signaling Model and the Human Capital Model may seem too extreme, or overly simplistic. However, these models capture two theoretical poles about the purpose of education. Still, students may be tempted to see grades as a motivator, given that employers care about them. Why not go along with a bad system for now if it’ll help you get a job later? But this type of thinking comes at immense costs. It means you’re never really able to engage in your work as an end in itself. You’re never able to take intellectual risks because you’re scared they might mess up your flashing light, your GPA. As future leaders in the labor market, we are clinging too closely to the status quo that the labor market dictates rather than setting new standards for what it means to think critically and creatively. We are all bright students with individual perspectives, and we shouldn’t be settling for such an inaccurate and insufficient standard.

Graphic by Joseph Valdez YH Staff 8 – The Yale Herald

Reaching out

U

*

nlimited food in the dining halls, free snacks at club meetings, and food-laden study breaks—when are college students not surrounded by food? Here at Yale, food is intimately intertwined with social life, yet while we often associate this abundance of food with weight gain and unhealthy eating habits, in doing so, we turn a blind eye to other types of detrimental relationships with food. For two years, in the transition from middle to high school, I had an eating disorder. I restricted heavily and frantically avoided social outings, isolating myself until my recovery began. Now, while trying to maintain the facade of serenity and efficiency that every other Yalie seems to effortlessly pull off, I have experienced a resurgence of feelings I once associated with my eating disorder: a simultaneous desire for control in a dynamic environment and pressure to conceal my anxieties. My own experience has taught me that in response to a campus culture characterized by maintaining the pretense of composure while internalizing stress, we should prioritize our own physical and emotional well-being and reach out for help in times of need.

College students face countless challenges and enormous transitions, both academically and socially. The process of becoming self-reliant and taking on difficult decisions is exciting but stressful, and yet despite this stress, Yalies often seem to glide effortlessly on the surface—going to the gym, working at the library, and getting more than eight hours of sleep each night, all while achieving the prestigious status of “Woads scholar.”

This illusion is popularly known as the “duck syndrome:” we seem fine on the exterior, floating peacefully on the surface, but are paddling feverishly underneath to stay afloat. This mass delusion manifests in a suppressed competitive attitude. Not only do we evaluate each other’s physical accomplishments, but also our physical and mental states. When is the last time you went to the gym? How tired do you look? When did you last do laundry?

This quickly becomes a game of not only sizing up everyone we meet, but also anticipating others’ criticism of ourselves. We become afraid to acknowledge our own insecurities and feelings of anxiety or depression, assuring ourselves that we are just as buoyant as those around us.

But the truth is, you don’t always have to stay afloat. At Yale, inundated with new faces, new grades, and new activities, I have been overwhelmed with the need to regain command over my life. As I contrast myself to others while trying to maintain a veneer of coolness, my sense of vulnerability peaks, and I find myself experiencing the yearning for security and longing for stability that once spurred my destructive eating disorder behavior.

Two years of my life were defined by a numbers game. Where others saw food, I saw numbers—calories, grams of fat, and grams of protein.

I had sold my soul to the number 1,200. My heart pounded with anxiety when friends invited me over for meals. How could I explain to them why my hair was falling out and my skin was shriveling, or that I simply did not want to go out to a restaurant, or that my life was dominated by eating, an action they took for granted? It is one kind of hell to live through an eating disorder, but it is another type of hell to even begin to talk about it. For two years, I felt isolated and lost—I was living a double

by Anonymous

life, not unlike that of the duck syndrome. To some, I was a thriving, vivid person, a girl who giggled at almost any joke and dedicated countless hours to extracurricular activities; elsewhere, I was defined by skipping meals, avoiding the friends who I knew would remark on my shrinking frame, and dedicating hours and hours each day to hammering nutritional facts into my memory. For two years, I lived this life of distress and anxiety. It’s not that I didn’t want to stop—I just couldn’t.

It’s been almost four years since I last went a day without eating, since I last typed in numbers on a calorie-counting website in a sharp panic. It is difficult to determine the point at which I embarked on the long, painful process known as “recovery,” just as it is difficult to pinpoint the time at which the eating disorder began, but one thing is certain: recovery is both physical and mental. Within six months of recovery, I had gained back 40 pounds and experienced my first menstrual cycle—the physical symptoms were gone, but the mental struggles took much longer to depart. This struggle, I could not handle alone, and as I relied on my family and close friends for a community of support, the voices in my head that once urged restriction and control soon waned to a soft murmur.

You don’t have to be alone. Learn to separate your own standards from those of others and detach your self-worth from your social advancement. In honor of National Eating Disorder Awareness Week in the upcoming week, take the time to reach out to those you love and practice self-care. The thing about eating disorders is that they never truly leave you, always creeping up on you when you stare into the mirror. You can never truly get rid of the faint whispers of criticism and doubt; you just learn to listen to the louder voices that encourage and empower. Amidst this campus stress culture, we must not forget to take care of ourselves, not only for the benefit of our own emotional and physical health, but also for the ones we love. We never know what battles they’re fighting, so be willing to lend an ear, and know that reaching out for help is never a sign of weakness; it’s an emblem of strength.

Yale Mental Health & Counseling for Students: 203-432-0290 Student Health: 203-432-0312 Yale Walden Peer Counseling: 203-432-TALK

SOURCE: Nedawareness.com

Feb. 17, 2017 – 9

FEATURE

Name games Emily Ge, BK ’19, talks to the activists behind the re-christening of Grace Hopper College

* F

or passers-by, Feb. 10, 2017 seemed like any other Friday in the year. A large group of protesters gathered in front of Calhoun College to rally against the name of a man alternately derided by people in the crowd as “racist,” “mud under the boots,” or, simply, “evil.” The rally moved to the corner of Elm and College, where chants such as “this is what democracy looks like” and “New Haven, united,

10 – The Yale Herald

we can never be defeated” echoed across the Green. Wendy Hamilton, a nurse and New Haven resident, read a written statement from Corey Menafee thanking the Change the Name Coalition for their continued and diligent support.

The coalition, an amalgam of 46 studentbased, faith-based, and community-based local organizations, had received word that the Yale Corporation would be meeting that Friday

to hold an official vote on the renaming of Calhoun College. They had planned accordingly, crunching through snow in order to stage one final act of civil disobedience, blocking Elm St. with their banners and their bodies. Police officers nonchalantly stood around the intersection while one man spoke slowly into the speaker of a patrol car: “You are being cited for disorderly conduct. Cease and desist. I will repeat: cease

and desist.” The four protesters who had previously volunteered to be arrested were politely packed into the back of a van and driven away. The organizers who remained carefully rolled up the iconic orange “Yale: # Change the Name” banner and carried it away for future use.

By now, we all know where we stand. Calhoun College is no more, and the most buzzworthy debate is which insect will be the new mascot for Hopper College, named for Grace Murray Hopper ’30 M.A., ’34 Ph.D., an almost unassailable choice. In a conference call with student and national news organizations, various administrative officials claimed that Yale’s decision was based on stringent moral and intellectual precepts. Vice President of Communications Eileen O’Connor persistently re-emphasized the “strong presumption” of the Witt Committee (originally called the Committee to Establish Principles on Renaming) against renaming. O’Connor was also sure to repeat several times that the administration sees this decision as one “made on principle,” unprovoked by “the actions of any specific individuals or groups.”

I wondered what those journalists from The New York Times or The Washington Post who were also listening in made of this decision; after all, they weren’t on campus last April, or even last Friday. As soon as Salovey joined the call, he told us, “I want to ensure that we don’t erase history, especially history that might embarrass us. Especially history that has university involvement. We need to confront that kind of history.” Salovey explained, “Last spring I couldn’t imagine a way to accomplish that, to protect that,” before going on to reiterate how “Renamings are going to be exceptional. These are exceptional circumstances.” Salovey noted, “Judging Calhoun’s principles, his legacy as an ardent supporter of slavery as a positive good, are at odds with the values of this university.” He did not explain why he had not mentioned these principles or this legacy when the decision not to rename was announced by the university last April.

When asked about the impact of the Change the Name Coalition on the decision to rename, President Salovey replied, “This is an issue for many years that reasonable, wise people have disagreed about. This continues to be the case. We received many emails, phone calls, letters from all sides of

this issue. We welcome that input, no matter the source.” He paused, before adding, “I wouldn’t say that any one group is privileged in providing information over another.”

Roughly ten minutes after he had joined the conference call (which lasted 60 minutes in total), President Salovey had to run to a board meeting. When asked if Salovey had ever met with the leaders of the Change the Name Coalition, his deputies replied that they “often invited community groups and activists to 43 Hillhouse” and sometimes hand out “New Haven Civic Medals.”

The Change the Name Coalition began with the collective efforts of New Haven citizens to fight on behalf of Corey Menafee in court. Kica Matos, one of the leaders of the coalition and Director of Immigrant Rights and Racial Justice at the Center for Community Change, commented, “First we fought for Corey—and succeeded in getting him reinstated at his job and having the felony charges dropped against him. The coalition that formed to fight on his behalf decided to pivot our efforts to eliminate the systemic racism that affected Corey and many others like him.”

Matos also rejected the idea that the administration was always willing to work with the coalition. Although Matos and other leaders such as John Lugo of Unidad Latina en Acción had the chance to speak with members of the Witt Committee, the letter they sent to Salovey last October received only a cursory response deflecting them back towards the Witt Committee. When Matos went with other leaders to a rally last year at Woodbridge Hall, they asked to meet with him. Matos said, “We were told that he was not there, though we later found out that he was in his office but did not want to meet with us. When we delivered our basket of goods [including books and other items] to him, we asked to meet with him and again, we were told that he was unavailable. I left my card and reiterated our request to meet with him. But we never heard back from him.”

Although the administration seems reluctant to attribute the renaming decision to any forces it perceives as outside of Yale, there is certainly a community in New Haven that recognizes the coalition’s impact. Janis Jin, GH ’20, said, “The renaming is certainly cause for celebration. It is certainly a victory, and a victory that we owe entirely to the labor of

student activists and organizers in New Haven for putting pressure on the university.”

Lindsey Hoggs, GH ’17, said, “The most important contributions from the New Haven coalition groups were their dedication, persistence and energy. They were the ones who rallied for Corey Menafee over the summer, they were the ones hosting protests outside of Hopper college every Friday.”

Of course, the coalition is primed to move on to bigger and more difficult issues. As Jin said, “Changing the name isn’t the end. The point is to change Yale.” Lugo had a similar take, noting that “Two blocks away from Calhoun is the courthouse of New Haven. It looks just like a plantation, and the majority of people judged in that courthouse are the descendants of slaves.” He went on to say, “There needs to be bigger changes besides just changing the name of a building.”

But regardless of what task the coalition chooses next, the ties it has forged between students and New Haven activists will prove vital. These connections are challenging to maintain due to the four-year turnover rate of the student population, but such maintenance is by no means impossible. When Jin wrote to me about the renaming debate in her college, she said, “We weren’t here last year so a lot of our memories of last fall are inherited rather than experienced.” It is these inherited experiences, these inherited struggles, that we as students need to keep in the forefront of campus debates. The renaming of Calhoun College was not an empty, purely symbolic act. Whether or not the administration is aware of it, the name change attempts to address problems of physical, material violence perpetrated by citizens of this country against other citizens of this country. Jin ended her email by saying, “Three years from now, I’ll graduate as an alum of Grace Hopper College, not Calhoun College.” And for the residents and students who have spent decades fighting, that matters.

Graphics by Natalie Schultz-Henry YH Staff Feb. 17, 2017 – 11

COVER

IN SEARCH OF A LOST TIME Rachel Calnek-Sugin, SM ’19, talks to the only certified master clockmaker in Connecticut about religion, apprenticeship, and the place of clocks in today’s fast-paced world.

Graphic by Joseph Valdez YH Staff 12 – The Yale Herald

I

think it’s absolutely worth taking care of.”

“It is beautiful. When do you think it’s from?”

Both men stare at the clock on the glass counter between them.

It’s three feet long, wooden, and banjo-shaped, with a pastoral scene painted on its case. Emblazoned on the bottom are the words “New Haven Clock Company.”

“Probably 1900. New Haven made a lot of clocks like this around then.”

Its grey-haired, flannel-clad owner is still sweating from carrying it in from his Jeep. “Why’d they go out of business?”

A shrug. “The economy.”

“New Haven had a lot of industry that, when it went, took New Haven with it.”

Raymond Pavkov, the only certified master clockmaker in the state of Connecticut, is all too aware, and he offers his customer a small smile.

Raymond has a thin, friendly mouth, wire glasses, and a round nose. He wears a knee-length denim apron that he uses for all sorts of things: to serve as a buffer between his skin and the metal when twisting off jagged parts, to protect his neat plaid button-downs from enamel spills, and to store the writing utensils that peep over the seam of his breast pocket.

He sports a modern Seiko watch with a thick-linked black plastic strap (“I like it,” he says, amused at my assumption that he would wear an oldfashioned wind-up) on his left wrist and a simple gold wedding band on his fourth finger. His palms are callused. Small tufts of pale hair sprout up at his knuckles, miniatures of the patches that protrude on either side of his otherwise bald head.

Raymond talks with his hands. When he is thinking, his fingers lace together like mechanical teeth. Or his pointer lands on his lower lip, falling into place the way a wire slips into its groove. Listening to his customer, he taps out the seconds on the glass case where he makes transactions and displays his first-ever clock—a wooden Gilbert he purchased as a teenager. The case is filled with assorted memorabilia, “stuff only I would care about,” he says: toy models of bulldozers, watch fobs, racecar patches, and dozens of pins with logos of fast food joints, cartoonish American flags, and one-liners like “200th Anniversary Bill of Rights.” In the 43 years since he opened Yankee Clock Peddler, Raymond’s hands have repaired thousands of clocks. When faced with pinions and wheels, they shift automatically into gear.

The store has a showroom in the front with hundreds of American timepieces crammed in the shelves and covering the walls: flat-faced dials, rosewood grandfathers, kitchen clocks shaped like mini cathedrals and city halls, vintage timers, long clocks with lazy pendulums, clocks with spring movements, clocks with quartz movements, early wind-up alarms, decorative clocks with elegant ironworks or elaborate carvings or oil paintings, boxy blonde shelf clocks, an original hickory-dickory-dock with a toy mouse that slides down with a ding when the catch is released at one o’clock. Every hour on the hour, the store explodes with music.

Many of the clocks are just slightly off, so it’s five minutes of chiming and ringing, a cacophony of cuckoos and doorbells—one sounds like a train coming into a station, another is programmed with bird calls.

Yankee Clock Peddler is sandwiched between Rae’s Driving School and Quinnipiac Gold and Diamond Exchange in a shopping plaza just off State St., North Haven’s main thoroughfare. Eight-wheelers barrel past the American flag and enormous CLOCKS banner Raymond has unfurled outside. In the storefront window, a prominent sign announces “Clock Sale Today,” no matter the season, and an omniscient dial-face declares it is three-o’clock, no matter the hour.

Raymond finishes the transaction: the repair will cost between $500 and $550; it’ll be ready around Christmastime. “I’ll miss it when it’s gone,” his customer says, and Raymond, who knows how clocks can start to feel like part of the family, promises to take good care of it.

SEVEN MILES DOWN STATE ST. FROM RAYMOND’S STORE—ALONG the railroad tracks that first connected New Haven to New York in the 1890s, solidifying the growing Connecticut city’s status as one of the nation’s export capitals—a complex of 14 red brick buildings sprawls four

square blocks in the old industrial heart of New Haven. The buildings’ huge, curved windows are boarded up with plywood painted in a messy approximation of burnished brick. The alleyways and courtyards, where workers once emerged for fresh air and a smoke, are littered with broken glass, uprooted stones, and accumulated trash. In the lower-right corner lurks the complex’s only tenant: Scores Gentleman’s Club, where disco lights and cheetah print carpets fail to completely conceal either the building’s former grandeur or its present state of decay.

This is the New Haven Clock Factory, once the largest clock manufacturer in the world. It employed 1500 workers at its peak and churned out over three million timepieces each year for export around the globe. In the early 19th century, a man named Chauncey Jerome—the sort of tinkering, upwardly mobile, white male patriot who embodied American opportunity—founded the clock company that brought New Haven’s name, engraved on enameled wood, to mantelpieces from London to Singapore.

Things have long since stopped ticking. At the start of World War II, the company turned its attention to the U.S. military. By 1942, it had stopped making clocks altogether in order to devote itself fully to “our Country’s service.” After 125 years of timepiece production, the New Haven Clock Company began building bomb fuses, automatic machine parts, radio instruments for the navy, and precision motors for the operating remotes in airplanes. In 1947, New Haven clocks returned to stores, but the company was in bad shape. Workers lost vital skills in the shift to wartime production. The factory’s equipment was decades old, competition was fierce, and electric models began to dominate the industry. In 1956, the company filed for bankruptcy, and in 1960, everything was liquidated.

Raymond was once inside the factory. He’d repaired a clock for an employee of the development company that owned the buildings, and the customer invited Raymond to poke around and take whatever he could find. Raymond, who knew so much about the factory at its peak, was disappointed. “It wasn’t a fun place,” he says. What remained mostly wasn’t worth fixing. He preferred the company as Chauncey Jerome had envisioned it in his autobiography, and the factory as it was in old photos: a frenzy of activity, invention, and industry.

Those buildings stand quietly as obstinate reminders of an old America. They tell a story of extreme wealth, eventual abandonment, and the relentlessness of time. Most people have forgotten the New Haven Clock Company and its age of greatness—but not Raymond. Nearly 200 years after the company was founded and over 50 since the factory closed, its clocks still run in Raymond’s shop.

THE BACK ROOM OF YANKEE CLOCK PEDDLER IS RAYMOND’S WORKshop. It smells like sour lubricant from the “supposedly non-toxic” solution he plunges the gears in to clean them. The workbench has every manner of tool: drills, hooks, plates, torches, grapnels, grinnels, pieces of wood to burnish, bits of leather to prevent dents, glues, weights, springs, screwdrivers, pliers, and clamps, some of which he refashions from “old junk” in his friend’s machine shop. “I make tools you’ll never find in the catalog,” he says. His perch at the bench allows him to work on a clock, preside over the showroom, and watch the TV—always FOX News on mute—that is nestled in a nearby shelf. There are clocks back here too, but these hang silently on the walls or sit gutted on the shelves, each waiting its turn for the clockmaker to restore them to their former glory.

Today, he turns his attention to a Smith eight-day dial: he takes it off the wall and sets it on his workbench. It’s a relatively simple clock—a much easier fix than the New Haven banjo. This is how it’s supposed to work: winding it up with a key, one is really tightening the coil inside, storing enough energy there to last eight days if it is released at the correct rate. A part called the escapement regulates that: like a nozzle on a hose, it controls the speed of the uncoiling by allowing the wire to slide out over only one tooth at a time. There are three main wheels inside the clock that are responsible for pretty much all the action. One corresponds to the second hand, one to the minute, and one to the hour. When everything is running properly, one wheel spins 12 times faster than the

Feb. 17, 2017 – 13

next, so that the second hand makes one full rotation each minute, the minute hand makes one full rotation each hour, and the hour hand makes one full rotation every 12 hours. This clock, however, isn’t working—the owner said he’d felt something slip when he wound it. Raymond guesses it’s a problem with the main spring, but he won’t really be able to tell until he takes it all apart.

First, he removes the bronze hands, untwisting the tapered pins that hold them there with a pair of pliers. The flat face looks eerie without them, like it’s missing its nose. He expertly removes the screws, lifting off the whole front plate as if opening a can. He grabs a pair of goggles from a shelf above the bench, the kind a dentist wears, with tiny magnifying glasses that protrude out on each lens. Raymond bends over the clock’s teeth. The balance platform—comprised of the escapement and the balance wheel, a weight that ticks with each oscillation—is the most vulnerable part of the machine.

Even a tap could break it, so he removes it with the utmost care. A sequence of numbers is etched into the metal underneath. He looks mildly surprised as he notices his own registered number. Decoding it, he sees he repaired this clock in 2003.

Raymond is getting close to the mainspring now. He undoes the four post pins that hold in the front wheel, then takes off the clutch, a flat bronze leaf that’s the culprit for a clock that’s losing time. He removes the coil from the barrel and it expands like a slinky in his palm. The end is jagged and broken at the hole where it screws into the rest of the apparatus. Having identified the problem, he wipes the piece on a towel where it leaves splotches of greenish gunk. Then he chops off the end, and prepares to punch a new hole by heating the metal with a blue propane flame until the steel changes color and becomes soft. Then the hole punch with a swift bang. The shrill file to round the edges, the silicone lubricant so that it slips right in. Now all there is to do is put it back together the same way.

“WHEN I CLOSE THE DOOR, I KNOW WHAT I DID, I KNOW WHAT I’VE DONE, I CAN GO TO SLEEP AT NIGHT.” Raymond Pavkov, master clockmaker

YANKEE CLOCK PEDDLER TAKES ITS NAME FROM THE 19TH CENTURY New England men who once touted Connecticut clocks throughout the country, generating a whole lot of resentment as they cut local middlemen out of the equation. A newspaper from that time notes that the success of the Yankee peddlers was such that “a yankee clock now graces every cabin throughout the west; and the backwoodsmen… when boasting of their exploits, always add, ‘I can stand anything but a clock pedlar.’”

With Raymond as a tour guide, a walk through the shop is a walk through the history of clocks in America. Here are the foreign clocks, imported around 1810, the name of the jeweler in cursive on onyx or marble. These were exorbitantly expensive—about $35 (or $650, with inflation) as opposed to the models the Yankees soon developed for just $4.50 (about 80 in today’s dollars). All the most important innovations happened in Connecticut. In Thomaston, Seth Thomas developed Formica coating to make cheap pine look like rosewood. In East Windsor, Eli Terry invented interchangeable parts, paving the way for assembly production. In Plymouth, Chauncey Jerome designed the one-day brass clock, a tremendous improvement from the wooden clocks that came earlier. Clocks became ubiquitous in every American household, and export began in earnest: Ingraham’s mahogany carriage clocks, Gilbert’s cherry shelf models, Waterbury’s gingerbreads with their elaborate oak headboards. Eventually, quartz movements replaced springs.

Wristwatches took the place of pocket watches; digital displays displaced

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analogs. Yankee Clock Peddler has it all, from a $35 kitchen timer to a $3998 Emperor grandfather clock that stands serenely in the corner, its polished brass interior reflecting the rest of the store.

Many of the clocks are New Haven Clock Company models, some of the millions churned out over the 19th and 20th centuries. In 1793, Chauncey Jerome, who would one day found the company, was born in Litchfield, CT. He worked on his family’s farm as a child and enlisted in the military as a teenager. Jerome made dials for the old-fashioned long clock under the supervision of Eli Terry, inventor of interchangeable parts. Jerome took spare parts from Terry’s workshop and refashioned them into his own designs. Soon, he invented the one-day brass clock, which was more effective and less expensive than its predecessors. In 1817, he founded the Jerome Clock Company in Plymouth, CT. Twenty-seven years, one fire, a couple of bad business deals, and the corporation’s first bankruptcy later, the factory moved to Hamilton St. and was rechristened the New Haven Clock Company.

Chauncey Jerome transformed himself from a penniless farm boy to the world’s biggest manufacturer of timepieces. This was 19th century America, where a life like that was possible, though not for everyone. Jerome and his Connecticut Clockmaking compatriots were all white, male, and Christian.

Women, African Americans, and immigrants entered into the frame only as smock-clad workers lined up at the hundreds of identical workbenches in old photos of the New Haven Clock Factory. Over the course of the 1800s, New Haven’s population exploded, mostly due to an influx of immigrants looking for work, and the clock factory was the biggest employer. The workers made the city tick, but Jerome is the one in the history books. He had successfully transplanted the clock from the craftsman’s workshop to the assembly line.

Now everybody had to have one. They were so useful and only four dollars! Suddenly, you were expected to arrive on time to work or dinner. You could check the schedule, consult your mantle-clock, and hop on a railroad.

You could wake up when you actually intended. The Yankee Peddlers, with their cocked hats and bad reputations, spread Connecticut clocks all over the country. From the harbors of New Haven and New York, workers loaded them into ships and sent them all over the world.

RAYMOND PAVKOV WAS BORN IN 1947 IN RURAL OHIO, AND GREW UP— like Chauncey Jerome—on a small farm. He traces his love of mechanical parts to his family’s garage, where he was obsessed with greasing the axles on the equipment. When there was time—and there often wasn’t, since he had to help sow the fields, clean the barn, and drive the bulldozer—he’d start to fiddle, fascinated by how the machines worked. He bought his first clock (the Gilbert that he keeps atop Yankee Clock Peddler’s transaction counter) when he was still in Ohio; his mother thought he was crazy. Fortyfive dollars was a lot of money then, and to drop it on an antique clock shaped like a bell-curve or camel hump or—as is their nickname in the business—a Napoleon hat seemed like poor judgment on the part of a foolish teenager. As it turned out, the purchase was an uncanny foreshadowing of Yankee Clock Peddler: Gilbert was a 19th century Connecticut man and a business partner of New Haven’s Jerome. The site of Gilbert Clock Company is less than an hour’s drive from Raymond’s store.

In the summer of 1966, a friend went out of town, leaving to Raymond the care of his gleaming new Corvette. Raymond did what any bored 19-year old would have: he took the car out to an empty strip of highway and decided to floor it. The whole point, as any teenager could tell you, was excitement, but as he got up to 100 miles per hour, he started having fleeting visions of deer, turkeys, shattering fiberglass. He “was making a lot of bad choices” then, and his father’s voice sounded in his head: If you die, you’re going to hell. As he decelerated, he accepted Jesus into his life. Religion offered an alternative to the fear of death, and Raymond accepted it gratefully. “I was 19 years old and I gave my life to God and Christ,” he says. “It makes this life a whole lot easier.”

Raymond helped found a church in Hamden and was pastor there for 33 years. His Christianity is one of faith and one of kindness. He believes it is his responsibility to share his testimony with others, and on Fridays he swaps his denim apron for his purple windbreaker and heads for the Water-

ford Speedbowl, where he preaches with the Racing for Jesus Ministry. He’s done weddings, baby dedications, and funerals. Recently, he officiated a full military funeral—it was the whole shebang, he says, with three gunshots, the folded flag, and taps.

“Taps always does something to you if you’ve been in the service,” Raymond tells me. He enlisted in 1967. He expected to go to Vietnam, but by chance (or, he believes, divine providence), was sent to Germany, where he served as the battalion commander’s driver. He once asked why he was selected for the position. When the time came to clean the latrines, the Sargent Major told him, the other guys slunk off into the woods; Raymond did the job alone, without complaint.

When he returned, Raymond married Sandi, a middle school teacher whom he’d met at church camp in West Virginia, and soon started his apprenticeship, an 8000 hour ordeal, for a seventh generation Hungarian clockmaker about whom he speaks with nostalgic reverence. Exacting and patient, Steve bestowed unto Raymond the knowledge that had passed through so many men in his family.

Raymond would have liked to teach his son the trade, but Adam, now 35, does “something with computers” in Kansas. “He can’t even fix the chain on a bicycle,” Raymond says. On some days, he laments that Adam will not take over his store; on others, he declares that his children (he also has a daughter named Meredith who works for AAA) are successful and happy and that he wouldn’t want them to do anything else.

Raymond has never taken on an apprentice of his own, though he would have liked to. He even asks me, half seriously, half poking fun at just how many questions I have for him: “Do you want to quit that fancy school and become my apprentice?” Fifteen years ago, he placed ads in papers throughout the Nagatuck Valley, the old center of Connecticut clockmaking. He was looking to train someone who could keep Yankee Clock Peddler open after he retires. But nobody was interested. It’s a craft that takes dedication to learn, and it isn’t particularly sexy. Clock repair doesn’t seem so useful in a world where clocks are becoming obsolete. Besides, Raymond couldn’t pay an apprentice much—there’s always been money at the end of the week for shoes, but never much more than that. At least, he says, “When I close the door, I know what I did, I know what I’ve done, I can go to sleep at night.”

THE HISTORY BOOKS ON CONNECTICUT CLOCKMAKING ARE FILLED with faces of clocks and faces of men. They all look more or less alike: confident, unblinking, and some shade of white. The fathers of Connecticut Clockmaking—Terry, Ingraham, Thomas, Gilbert, Jerome—mostly came from humble beginnings. A tinkering spirit, a patriotic industriousness, and a knack for entrepreneurship earned them their successes. “The early clockmakers were truly rugged individualists—traits which have never become extinct in this industry,” Ingraham’s grandson told the Connecticut Society of Civil Engineers in 1940. Three quarters of a century later, Raymond keeps that spirit alive.

He has one American flag outside his store and another outside his home. He listened to the biography of Harry Truman on tape on a crosscountry road trip. He cried during the nighttime ceremony at Mount Rushmore when the spotlight illuminated George Washington. Like the fathers of Connecticut Clockmaking, he is a true patriot, a staunch individualist, a devout evangelical, and an unambiguous white man.

There was a time when men like Raymond Pavkov and Chauncey Jerome defined the American spirit. Those were the years when the New Haven Clock Factory was producing three million timepieces, and the railroad that rumbles down State St. was a novelty.

As America becomes increasingly digitized and diverse, the place of both the clocks and their peddler is uncertain. Raymond speaks matter-of-factly about how there will never be another manufacturing boom like that of the early 1900s. He’s under no delusions that anybody’s father is still winding up the family alarm in the evenings.

He owns an iPhone, Bose speakers, and a Mac desktop.

“There’s IKEA, and there’s iPhones, and there’s whatever my son does, which has something to do with those annoying ads that pop up—and

somewhere in there, clocks don’t fit,” he says. Somewhere in there, neither do men like him.

OR SO IT SEEMED TO ME. THEN, THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL election made the question inescapable: did people like Raymond still call the shots? It didn’t surprise me to learn that he was voting for Trump: his every demographic suggested it, and every so often he would lament the rise of unions, regulations, and political correctness for stymying the creativity that had once made America great.

As I got to know Raymond, Trump’s slogan, which I had once laughed off, seemed suddenly genius. “America” was the word that originally stuck out to me in “Make America Great Again,” but thinking about Raymond, it was “again” that struck me as brilliant. What if those abandoned buildings could be vibrant again? What if the inventor down the street could manufacture a product—made with New England timber and Nagatuck Valley mill power—that was 10 times better and 10 times cheaper than what was being produced overseas again? What if you had once been the VIP guest, the first in line, the employee of the month, and the sole preferred flyer in the airport lounge, and you could be, again?

Whenever I visited Raymond, I rode my bike between two deeply divided parts of this country. Yale University and Yankee Clock Peddler are separated by East Rock State Park, Lake Whitney, and an especially steep hill on Davis St. They are also separated by an ideological expanse that is much more difficult to cross.

My classmates and I peer out across this distance from the towers of our Ivy League institution—that bastion of liberalism in which I am so comfortable—and see one homogenized mass. The mass is white and angry and racist. It’s poor and rural and uneducated. The mass doesn’t want to talk. And how could it?—a mass can’t talk. We, also, are angry. I know I am very angry.

I think of what I know about Raymond. I know that he takes the Christian doctrine of kindness seriously. I know he is creative and hardworking and disciplined. I know he cares deeply about his family. I know he loves barbecue, and dreams of taking the weeklong train ride through the Canadian Rockies on the Rocky Mountaineer, and that when he first met his wife, he knew she was inevitable.

I know that when a clock stops working, Raymond removes its face, inspects its insides, figures out what’s wrong, and fixes it. He has spent over four decades learning how to do this, stocking his workshop with the necessary equipment. He is good at his job, but no matter how many timepieces he repairs, the Yankee Peddlers will never be pioneers venturing out onto the Western frontier again. The New Haven Clock Factory isn’t going start business again. So when Trump came along with his brash promise to open up America and restore what he says has been broken, Raymond was willing to believe that the candidate had the tools he lacked.

I never want our country to return to Raymond’s “again.” That age of innovation, adventure, and opportunity was reserved for a select few to the exclusion of everybody else. Luckily, Raymond, unlike that undifferentiated mass of voters, loves to talk; the challenge is to get him to stop once he’s started. It’s easy to understand why nostalgia resonates with him. One only has to look to his clocks: hundreds of collectibles he’ll have to auction off on eBay when he retires. His work is quite literally a fight against time. He has spent the past 43 years meticulously, lovingly, making clocks run again.

BACK AT THE WORKBENCH, RAYMOND SLIPS THE SPRING BACK INTO the barrel. He fits the pivots into the pivot holes, greasing the gears with just a drop of oil. He fastens the last screw, turns the key, and holds his breath. The key winds the coil of the main spring so that it oscillates.

The spring releases energy to the first wheel pinion, which is attached to the first wheel gear, which powers the center pinion, which activates the next wheel, which operates the second hand. The clock starts ticking. The bronze strip glides ceaselessly around. We are both mesmerized. For now, it’s impossible to tell if it’s a testament to unending circularity or to the forward march of time.

Feb. 17, 2017 – 15

FEATURE

Dog days aren’t over An in-depth investigation of who the dogs of Yale are and why we love them so much

I

n early March of my freshman year, my suitemate (down on her luck after suffering a self-induced concussion) joked that she wanted a dog for her birthday. For some reason, we decided to take her up on this request—there would be a dog at this birthday party. We had several options: the Berkeley fellows’ two black labs (too shy), the dean’s pekingese (too entitled), my suitemate’s dog (too far away). Eventually, the choice became clear: Sasha Pup. It’s near impossible for a Yalie to open Facebook without being inundated with images of the beloved Samoyed—even if you’re not friends with her, she constantly gets more likes on Overheard than you ever will. Never having met her in person, we reached out via Facebook message, “Hey Sasha!

It’s our suitemate’s birthday next Wednesday, March 2nd. Would you be willing to come play with her that day for a little while? She loves dogs and misses playing with her puppy back home.” Within minutes, we received a response: “Woof! What about a visit after dinner?” I was in love.

Our fascination with these dog celebrities begs an interesting question: why do we love them so much? Laurie Santos, director of Yale’s Canine Cognition Center—better known as the “dog lab” —offers her expert scientific opinion: “Over the course of dogs’ domestication, humans have developed an incredible bond with dogs, one that research has shown taps into the very neural mechanisms we have for parenting and bonding with our own offspring. So it’s no wonder we come to love the Yale dogs so much. I think it comes down to the fact that we’re just really wired to fall for dogs.”

The legacy of puppy love at Yale dates back to 1889, when Yale tackle Andrew Graves bought a bulldog from a local blacksmith. The dog took to following Graves everywhere around campus, including sporting events, and students quickly adopted him as the Yale mascot. Dan was peculiar in that he would associate with no one but students, working his way “more firmly into the hearts of Yalies than any mascot had ever done before,” according to the Yale archives. When he died, Graves had him stuffed and returned for display in the Yale gymnasium; to

10 – The Yale Herald

* this day, he rests in a sealed glass case in one of the Payne Whitney trophy rooms. The next Handsome Dan would not surface until thirty-five years later, in 1933. From there, a tradition was born, and a new Handsome Dan has been selected each time the previous one passes away or retires. (Interestingly, in the mascot’s nearly 130-year history, there has only been one female Handsome Dan. Bingo, owned by Yale history professor Rollin Osterweis, served from 1975-1984). Maurice, Bingo’s successor, marked the beginning of New Haven resident Chris Getman’s, ’64, reign as Handsome Dan’s most prolific handler. Getman has owned four out of the five past Handsome Dans, including Sherman, the most recent, who passed away last August.

After the loss of Sherman, it was time for something new. Last November, Kevin Discepolo, ’09, a former Yale lacrosse player who is now the Assistant Athletic Director of Facilities, Operations and Events, took on the job. Two days before the Harvard-Yale game, students opened their inboxes to a wonderful surprise: the new Handsome Dan’s first official press release, which showed a picture of a bulldog puppy resting solemnly in front of a football helmet. This was the first time in recent memory that Yale had gone with a puppy, and Discepolo was involved in the search process from the outset—it was always predetermined that he would adopt the dog. He chose the puppy, whose real name is Walter, for his colors and markings, “and speaking with the breeder, it looked like his temperament was right for the role.” Walter’s namesake is Walter Camp, the Yale alum credited with the founding of the modern American game of football.

Handsome Dan’s day is split between performing official duties and relaxing in his handler’s office.

“He comes in to work with me daily, so a lot of his routine depends on what I’m doing that day,” says Discepolo, “He comes to a lot of meetings.” Walter can also expect three to five new appearance requests per day—he’s gone to study breaks, Christmas parties, meetings with deans, sports practices… “Whatever fits [his] schedule.” In his official capacity as the mascot, Walter also attends most

by Clara de Pablo varsity athletic contests and events like Commencement and Bulldog Days. Discepolo’s own routines have changed with Walter’s role—“It’s been more administrative work as far as wrapping in appearances and his schedule around my current responsibilities.” Though for now it’s a “volunteer thing,” he has hopes to make it part of his official position.

Still, Discepolo has no regrets about accepting the role. “It’s a lot of fun having him, he’s really my sidekick. He’s just a great dog.”

Discepolo thinks that Handsome Dan’s social media presence has helped him gain more recognition and popularity on campus, and sees Instagram as a great resource to update Walter’s fans on his progress. “It’s part of cashing in while he’s a puppy, building that brand equity.” Indeed, many Yalies (as well as fans outside of the university) expressed delight with the account, helping it grow to nearly 8,000 followers in just a few months. Students I spoke to echoed Discepolo’s sentiment about capitalizing on Dan’s puppyhood—“That’s the thing about bulldogs. They’re really cute as puppies but then they get exponentially less cute as they get older,” recounts one fan, who requested to remain anonymous. Discepolo agrees on the cuteness front.

He maintains that he’s no social media expert, but guesses that the account has gained followers because he “put up a lot of cute pictures.” He credits the official Yale Instagram post of Handsome Dan’s first photo shoot as the perfect introduction to the wider Yale community.

Handsome Dan’s presence on social media draws parallels to Timothy Dwight’s Sasha Pup, arguably Yale’s biggest social media star. Sasha came to reside at Yale four years ago with TD fellows David and Lanch McCormick. With just under 900 followers, Sasha’s Instagram following pales in comparison to Handsome Dan’s. However, where she really shines is on Facebook. Sasha has put up some of the mostliked posts in popular Facebook group Overheard at Yale and regularly accrues hundreds of likes on her photos. She posts in character, often signing off with “Woof!” David McCormick confirms that Sasha runs all of her own social media accounts: “Sasha

has a large paw-friendly pad to type with.” But not to worry, she hasn’t let the fame go to her head.

“Sasha doesn’t know what all the fuss is about.

She just likes to walk around looking for something to eat and a squirrel or two to chase.”

A typical day in the life of Yale’s fluffiest dog celebrity starts early. Most days, Sasha wakes up at 6am. After breakfast, she walks across campus. Her typical route is up Wall Street, to Cross Campus, to Old Campus, down College Street, to the Medical School and back. Her favorite spots at Yale are Old Campus and Hillhouse Avenue because “both have lots and lots of squirrels.” Sasha is crazy for squirrels, says McCormick. “Once she even had a squirrel calendar by her bed.” But her favorite thing is meeting and greeting all the friendly people on campus who take the time to say “hello” to her.

Sasha’s friends have blessed her with lots of “likes” for many of her posts, making her feel very loved and welcomed, says McCormick. Her favorite posts are the ones in which she brought a smile to someone’s face. But perhaps Sasha’s proudest moment was when she won Rumpus’ “50 Most” contest, “which is, obviously, the highest compliment Rumpus could give her,” though she was eventually disqualified because she is a dog.

In the time that Sasha has been living in TD, she has even helped change the college’s reputation on campus. “It used to be that whenever you asked a non-TD student about what they knew about TD, they just called it the ‘far away’ college,” says Greg Suralik, TD ’17, “But now, whenever Professor McCormick takes Sasha for a walk, people will often go up to him and ask if they can pet her. The kindness that Professor McCormick shows when this happens, along with Sasha’s sweet and lovable personality, help show the rest of Yale that TD is a welcoming, closely-knit community that is unlike any other space here on campus.”

Sasha also enjoys paying visits to her non-human friends. Her best canine friend is Phil, who lives on Old Campus with Sharon Kugler, the University Chaplain. Pig, who lives nearby in TD, “runs like a bullet” and Sasha loves to chase her. Sasha also loves to play with Bianca, another Samoyed.

On occasion, Sasha bumps into fellow dog celebrities Benjamin Westerbrook of Hopper College and Peter Salovey’s Portia and “has a good sniffing and wagging of the tail.” And every year, Sasha gets to march with Handsome Dan and TD for graduation.

As anyone who follows Sasha on social media now knows, she and the McCormicks will be leaving Yale at the end of the year for the University of Oregon. David McCormick will serve as Director of the Institute of Neuroscience, Lanch McCormick will become Director of Student Engagement, and Sasha will serve as “Director of Fluffiness,” according to an email sent out to the TD community.

Sasha’s friends and followers have reacted with dismay. In a move that ended up on Overheard at Yale, placards in napkin holders in a dining hall were replaced with the quote: “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if Sasha Pup is not here.”

The perfect Yale dog celebrity seems to have a combination of two things: social media fame and physical accessibility. This is why Sasha is so beloved, according to students I spoke with. David McCormick cites one of these in-person encounters as his favorite Sasha moment—“a person, who appeared to be down on her luck, hugged Sasha tight, buried her face in Sasha’s fur, and said, with heartfelt emotion ‘OMG this is what I need. Where have you been all my life?’ Sasha gave her a nose kiss, as if to say ‘It’s ok. I need you too.’” These interactions are what have truly cemented Sasha’s fame—without them, she’s just another white girl on Instagram.

While Handsome Dan boasts an impressive social media following, he’s much more elusive, lacking Sasha’s girl-next-door appeal. Sightings are few and far between. Most students report never having met him in person, and many expressed concern that they had not yet seen him in the flesh given that as he ages he is getting less cute by the day.

Handsome Dan and Sasha are only the most visible canines on campus. For the more adventurous dogspotter, there are plenty of other Yale pups out there. Take Sasha’s Samoyed friend Bianca. Bianca is often mistaken for her more famous friend, according to her owner, philosophy professor Daniel Greco. He describes an informal “Samoyed network” that has formed in New Haven, which counts Bianca, Sasha, and two other Yale dogs among its ranks. Like Handsome Dan, Bianca comes to

work with her human most days. “Students used to come to my office to play with her. They’re certainly welcome to,” says Greco. (His office hours are Thursday mornings in Connecticut Hall 106.)

He keeps a spare lint roller on his desk at all times, just in case a visitor comes in wearing black.

Greco thinks that Bianca has what it takes to be Yale’s next big dog on campus. “Bianca is maybe more personable, more likely to lick your face. Sasha is more aloof. Sasha used to be a show dog.

Bianca could never be a show dog,” he gestures to Bianca lying on floor licking her legs. This sentiment is echoed by several Yalies who have interacted with Sasha—“She’s beautiful, but she’s a diva,” says Cristina Teems, BK ’19. Greco recently created a new Facebook account: Bianca Greco.

Her profession is listed as “Director of Fluffiness,” perhaps an homage to Sasha’s new position at the University of Oregon. She posts photos and videos and is already friends with several members of the New Haven Samoyed circle, as well as a growing number of Yale students, myself among them.

Dogs have been central to the Yale community and image since the 1800s—there’s a taxidermied pup in the Payne Whitney trophy room to prove it.

From the streets of New Haven to Instagram feeds, Yalies adore and cherish campus dogs more than ever before. Not even Laurie Santos can explain the love I felt when Sasha Pup sat with us in our L-Dub common room last March. Dogs represent community and warmth, something we can never have too much of.

Graphics by Jason Hu YH Staff Feb. 17, 2017 – 11

CULTURE

by Victorio Cabrera YH Staff

The curious case of the snow structure in the nighttime

L

ast Sun., Feb. 12, everyone keeping score of imOn Friday night, the crew team was able to place three spots: he frequents ski slopes which have similar snow promptu, temporary constructions on Yale’s campus layers of bricks, though they didn’t cohere firmly. Risberg caves built into the side of the mountain. got to mark down something new and exciting in felt some doubt at this point, but these doubts were disThe hotbox crew hung out on a Cross Campus that was their notebooks: the arrival of the Cross Campus Ig- pelled when their return to the construction site Satur- bustling with more activity than usual. It was half past loo. Some might have speculated about the provenance of day after brunch revealed a sturdy, continuous structure. midnight, but there were many spectators—some of whom this Igloo. Was it related to the Igloo that popped up on Though the rings weren’t ideal—a little bit of a “spiral”— “were like, ‘aww, shit, that’s awesome.’” The Igloo, it Old Campus during the 2013 - 2014 school year? Who they were close enough. At this point, things got compli- seems, was acting as a bona fide cultural hub. “I feel like built it? Would it be totally dope to smoke a J in there, cated. A team of two to three stood in the center of the ig- the quads become much more social spaces in two situadude? It turns out the answers are (1) yes, (2) I’m about loo, receiving the bricks prepared by the separate recycling tions,” P.B. says. “The first one being when it’s spring for to tell you, and (3) duh (according to some intrepid snow bin assembly line. They held each new brick in place while the first time and it’s warm and you there’s this nice grass explorers I talked to)! Read on to discover more about the the Snow Packers and Water Throwers made sure it stuck. to hang out at, and when it’s snow. So it was very much newest addition to Yale’s winter wonderland.

Finally, two bricks were joined together as a keystone for people gathering because of the snow.”

To understand this igloo, we must understand the Origi- the arch. A little more packing and the job was done.

In an e-mail, J. described the hot box as a “stupefying nal Igloo, situated for a brief stint three years ago on Old There remained only turning it over to the public for success” and heartily encouraged me to do the same. (I Campus. And to understand either, we must go all the way whom they had built the Igloo. It was a great success. “You did not, in fact, hot box the igloo.) The Igloo, he wrote, was back to their mastermind: heavyweight crew team Social go in there and you see a box of Franzia, cans of beer… for everyone, ranging from “once-a-week vaper[s]” to “caCaptain John Risberg, TC ’17. Risberg, who is from Long and you figure people are enjoying it at all times of the sual toker[s]” and all the way up to “dedicated stoner[s].”

Island presently but Latvia distantly, is no stranger to snow. day,” Risberg says.

But what about those of us who are none of these (Latvia, where it snows “six-seven months of the year,” acthings, but rather are concerned with contemplating the cording to Risberg, can certainly give New Haven’s snow- A MISSION, IN THE DARK OF NIGHT deeper mysteries of the Cross Campus Igloo? Who can fall a run for its money.) Risberg first encountered igloo “It was a mission. It was definitely a mission,” P.B. tells deny the risk and thus the thrill, for example, of the hot constructions in his childhood trips to Latvia. “It was a me in a hushed, isolated cranny of the Pierson College box getting too hot and not boxy enough? In short: were place where you could just dig into the snowfall and you’d Common Room. He’s talking about his nighttime excursion our nighttime heroes risking melting the Igloo and causing have an igloo there,” he recalls. Many years later, as he sat last Saturday to the Cross Campus Igloo. He was on that a structural collapse? Just what is going on at the atomic cooped up in his Old Campus suite during the snowstorm, most predictable of pilgrimages: hotboxing the igloo. level, anyway? Some of you STEM people might find this Risberg decided to make an Igloo with some of his friends Dramatis Personae: The remnants of a party in the suite pretty basic, but I study Political Science and I think real and teammates. It was a hit, as anyone who remembers of J., P.B.’s friend. Approximately 12 attend the party; four science is just terrific. Let’s dive in! the time of that first Igloo can attest. This time around, make it to the igloo.

Risberg decided to go bigger, and so construction began Motivation: Obvious—it’s totally cool to hotbox an igloo. HAVE SOME SCIENCE on the Cross Campus Igloo. The operation was profession- Also, the same crew passed a J around and had a snowball First, let’s consider the question above: were our hotalized: 12 to 13 members of the team worked on the igloo fight last time, and they wanted something more low-key. boxers in danger of causing a collapse? It looks like they for seven hours total from Friday night to Saturday evening, “J. was like, all right, everybody, mandatory: we’ve got to probably weren’t. According to Chris Wang, a PhD student and the work was split into specialized roles. go [hotbox this igloo].” in Physics, “it’s all about the rates: the rate of melting, In their research for the Igloo, the team discovered Modus Operandi: One joint of cannabis, mixed (and, as and the rate of freezing.” Looking at an igloo, you might that igloos are traditionally built by stacking bricks ice far as anyone remembers, unnamed) strains. Originally think that not much is happening with the ice if it’s frozen. of cut from the earth. Yale was a little short on the large two, but someone bailed and kept a J to smoke by herself Wrong! See, the bulk of the igloo consists of ice, which ice formations, so they improvised: they packed normal, in a perplexing “side sesh.” is the colloquial term for water molecules in a “mechanipowdery snow into one blue recycling bin, put another reThe Scene: Surprisingly charming! P.B. was “expect- cally stable” “crystal configuration.” But there’s a “very cycling bin on top of it, and applied pressure, usually by ing a shitty little ice cave,” but in the end the Igloo was thin layer” on the surface of the ice where the material jumping on it. This wasn’t a flawless process: according “pretty legit.” The crumpled Budweiser cans, which P.B. is constantly melting and refreezing. In order to weaken to Risberg, “the first brick that [they] built fell completely described as part “chandelier” and part “shards of glass” the Igloo structurally, our heterodox demolition crew would apart.” Eventually, Angus Morrison, TD ’19, was installed stuck into the walls, made the space kind of “grimy,” but have had to cause the rate of melting at this very thin layer as the “Brick Quality Control Officer,” and approximately his impression was overall positive. And that means some- to exceed the rate of freezing and do so for many further 150-200 bricks were produced without incident. thing: P.B. is something of a connoisseur of icey smoke layers. In the dead of night, this was unlikely—“a human Graphic by Joseph Valdez YH Staff

18 _ The Yale Herald

body is not a huge source of heat,” Wang explained.

Even during the day, they probably would have been in the clear, since the inner surface layer would be mostly insulated from the warming effects of the sun’s rays.

But there’s a limit: an Igloo party is just like a normal party in that if it gets too crowded, the party will be too hot for comfort. (The difference is that most parties, unlike Igloo parties, don’t cause a ceiling collapse as a result.)

Also, it turns out that this Igloo was structurally pretty much perfect. See the graph prepared by Dr. Larry Wilen, Senior Research Scientist and Lecturer in Mechanical Engineering at the right.

Contrary to popular belief, the perfect Igloo isn’t a half-sphere: it’s a catenoid, which—as you can see—is a near-perfect match with the shape of the Cross Campus Igloo. “If you have a hemispherical sort of cap, then you have... this tendency to push the walls out [at the bottom],” Wilen explained. The preferred height to diameter ratio for catenoid structure starts at around 0.4, and the Cross Campus Igloo clocks in at a respectable 0.45. This structural robustness means that even as the ice “creeps”—acts, over long time-frames, analogously to a viscous liquid—the Igloo should be in good shape for a while. Wilen can’t predict how long it will last, but barring an increase in temperature, structural shocks (like someone jumping on the Igloo) or very thin walls, he thinks that the Igloo should remain relatively stable.

“I was actually kind of amazed,” Wilen said of the Igloo’s structural robustness.

Unfortunately, this structural perfection meant a “It was very mellow,” P.B. told me. Which is good, taller Igloo—otherwise, it would be too shallow and but… was it maybe too mellow? The outing, which was collapse—and it was the Igloo’s height which P.B. designed as a stepping-stone to another party, was a disliked the most. “It was like... okay, here’s this big “night ending event” for much of the crew. Undaunted, dome that we can all stand under and happen to not P.B. and one friend stumbled out of the smoky haze of be seen, but it didn’t feel like an igloo space,” he the Igloo and made their way to Soggy Cigs. said. He would have liked it cozier. Still, they had a good time.

Kat Lin, MC ’18, contributed reporting.

SOURCE: Larry Wilen, PhD, senior research scientist & lecturer in Mechanical Engineering

Small-Great Objects, small-great artists

by Steph Barker

T

ake the west elevator to the fourth floor of the Yale University Art Gallery and you will find yourself amongst a curious collection of miniature figures, intricate tapestries, and colorblock paintings. The museum’s newest special exhibition, which will be on show until June 18, is not your typical showcase.

In collaboration with the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and the Yale Peabody Museum, the YUAG has opened its doors to Small-Great Objects: Anni and Josef Albers in the Americas, an exhibition that foregrounds the interplay between the Albers’ art-making and art-collecting practices. The display not only presents paintings, weavings, and photographs that the couple produced throughout their lives, but also highlights the experiences that influenced their work as artists, educators, and collectors.

Between 1935 and 1967, Anni and Josef made more than a dozen trips to Latin America, namely Mexico and Peru. On their visits, the couple collected over 1,400 ancient objects and more than 100 textiles. Many of these works can now be seen amongst Josef’s photo collages and Anni’s journal entries, documenting the immense influence Latin America had on the couple’s creative vision.

The exhibition captures the time the couple spent in different areas of Latin America by dividing the gallery space into five sections. In each, short podcasts describe snippets of the couple’s life—from their first 2,000-mile drive from North Carolina to Mexico City in June of 1936 to their visits to archaeological digs at Monte Albán in Oaxaca. The audio-addition to the museum experience reveals that this exhibition is not

primarily about the artistic achievement of two of the most influential figures in 20th century modernism, but rather about the lives of two exceptional individuals. By centering the exhibition on the artists rather than on the art, curator Jennifer Reynolds-Kaye has provided a new window through which to view Josef and Anni’s changing creative process. Reynolds-Kaye suggests that we need context in order to understand and appreciate the Albers’ art, and provides it through snapshots of Anni’s journal entries and conversations the couple had with friends while staying in Mexico.

In a journal entry, Anni wrote: “It is strange that sculpture and pottery give me ideas for weaving.” In doing so, she acknowledged how great an influence the time she spent in Latin America had on her creative thought. While seemingly eclectic in its pairings of maps and podcasts, prints and decorative art, photographs and ancient figures, the exhibition forces the viewer not only to reimagine the lives Anni and Josef led, but to rethink the museum experience and consider what we miss out on when we see only the end result of an artist’s thought. In Small-Great Objects, we see the artists before the art, the influences before the final product, and most notably, the small taking precedence over the large.

While the Albers’ artwork looms in the gallery space, the objects in their collection are rather small in contrast. Many of the ancient figures, borrowed from the Yale Peabody Museum, could fit in the palm of one’s hand. The collages of Josef’s photographs that dot the exhibition space are similarly small scale, requiring the viewer to lean in closely to make out the shapes and landscapes Josef brought together.

Aptly titled, Small-Great Objects aims to emphasize that, as one of the podcasts says, “art didn’t need to be big, that the monumental and the meaningful could lie in the handheld. The small can be great.”

More than that, this exhibition shows that the life of the artist is just as fascinating as the art we are accustomed to seeing hanging on the walls of museums.

Blue Meander (Anni Albers, 1970) SOURCE: Yale University Art Gallery

Feb. 17, 2017 _ 19

REVIEWS

REVIEWS A cathartic Process Reflections on Sampha’s debut album

SOURCE: Spin.com

T

he piano on which Sampha plays “Plastic 100°C” in his video, on the roof of his label, Young Turks, in North-East London, is a perfect metaphor for his new record, Process. The video is a simple live performance, without the ethereal twangs of the taut strings that begin the album version, or the throbbing synths that sway between bass and treble. It was the first footage we saw of the new Sampha, and it was Sampha as any long-term fan had known him: a man at a piano. Having followed the London-based musician’s whole career, I was desperate for this video to work.

I knew the song would be beautiful when I realized it was to be five minutes of Sampha and his piano, but—as we do with all our favorites—I was watching the video in desperate search of some sign or symbol that his next project (his first project, his first studio album) was going to be successful. Of course, this was one of those moments in which the unquestioning hope of the fanatic is rewarded But back to the piano. It’s walnut. No one plays walnut pianos anymore. It’s an old upright with an archaic folding music stand, and nobbled in the way that only old wooden objects can be. During my internship, I saw it become a monstrously alive thing: it would groan begrudgingly as it was moved around. It would snap its key cover shut with a grumpy bark, paying no mind to nearby fingers. It would change hues as the rings it collected from hot mugs of tea and coffee gave it new skins, some impermanent, but some buried into the wood forever. It would smell: sometimes of Korean prawn crackertype snacks, sometimes of ginger tea, sometimes of chicken and peas and rice left to linger on it for far too long. But in the video, on the roof, how faithful it still was. How lovingly it still acknowledged its other half, its player. How willingly, how easily did the notes come out. It was a being which, regardless of previous history and prior actions, asked no questions and loved unconditionally. It was family.

In the third video to come from the album, “(No One Knows Me) Like The Piano,” he sits and plays on another walnut piano—not in fact the same piano, this time a clunky English Challen, but still walnut—while model Adwoa Aboah dances into dust around him. Aboah is a clear analogy for the memory of Sampha’s mother, who died of cancer in 2015, around the same time his brother was hospitalized with a stroke. He lost his father to the same disease when he was ten, and had a scare himself in 2012. At the end of the video, Aboah comes to sit next to him on the piano stool, and it’s as if the whole record is manifested in this moment: Sampha, the piano player, the singer, and his memories, embodied both in Aboah and the physical object before him. The piano that “knows” him as Aboah does, when she gazes at him, arms folded over the other side of the piano, with an astounding warmth and intimacy. Exactly as a mother would, watching her son practice piano at home, watching him fail, improve, grow.

By now we know this is what Sampha does. He seduced Drake with just a zip file of music—incidentally, Drake was more interested at first by his production than his voice—and worked with Kanye on The Life of Pablo to make “Saint Pablo”, a track that stood out for its poised composition and softer beat on a sprawling and maximalist record. Like Joan Armatrading or Tracy Chapman, Sampha belongs to the coterie of musicians whose intimacy feels most real when it’s just them and their instrument: we hope they don’t get any more famous so we can achieve our romantic dream of seeing them live on a barstool in a small venue.

20 _ The Yale Herald

by Ivan Kirwan-Taylor I still can’t get that piano out of my head. In the video with Aboah, the piano is clean. It reflects some light, which the office piano certainly did not under its dust. And I wonder about Aboah herself. I wonder if it’s just me who thinks she was a serendipitous choice to play the ghost of a mother, since her shaved head gravely but touchingly may connect to the hair loss that cancer induces, and therein Sampha’s mother. But she of course does not look sickly; she wears scarcely any makeup, but she glows. Everything, then, has been healed.

The piano that “knows” Sampha, that his father bought for the house when Sampha was three, now cooperates—it sings with him. And the memory of his mother comes back, this time without pain but elegance and calm. Here, I feel the record in its entirety once more: pain, memory and the sheer time that mourning always requires are made real and made bearable by music. So many of the tracks feel expressionistic: desperate communications of personal feelings that hope to be heard and felt lovingly by the listeners. The racy, tormented anxiety of “Blood On Me”; the torture of letting a lover go in “Take Me Inside”; the doubt and guilt of the closer, “What Shouldn’t I Be,” whose lyrics on the page look like Frank O’Hara to me: “I should visit my brother / But I haven’t been there in months / I’ve lost connection, signal / To how we were.”

The lyrics on Process are so strong that I could just quote them, and that would be a rhapsodic review in itself. It was a relief to find that “No One Knows Me…” was one of the singles, because it is so immediately gorgeous and excellent that I don’t feel the need to qualify or explain the song to friends, I just let them hear the lyrics. Just the chorus: “You know I left, I flew the nest / And you know I won’t be long / And in my chest you know me best / And you know I’ll be back home”. But such lyrics, sincere and vulnerable as flesh without skin, can only reach their height on the wings of a voice like Sampha Sisay’s. On Process, his voice is the best it’s ever been, not only apparent in the time-stopping falsetto that begins “Take Me Inside,” but apparent in the confident steady force with which he sings the lyrics quoted above. For a few seconds he’s the Otis Redding that England never had.

It’s almost an embarrassing sentiment to express, because it sounds like an awful platitude, but Process is what catharsis means to me. It’s a record that took seven years of loss, of anxiety, of the artist wondering whether his path was worth walking.

And it truly took all those things; it used them, and it made them into music. The stakes of expression are high: Alisha Acquaye wrote in OkayAfrica about Sampha and the importance of voices dealing with anxiety and vulnerability in black music, and his voice, though impeccably gentle, rings so clear and loud in such a significant musical discussion. The record feels in conversation with A Seat at the Table—Sampha of course features on “Don’t Touch My Hair”—and even Blonde. Could there be a better trinity of records in recent memory? I would struggle to find one. To put it simply, I haven’t been this happy to have a record in so long. I owe Sampha so much. One trivial example: Valentine’s Day was earlier this week, a categorically miserable day to spend by oneself, which I did. Yes, I would have got through it whatever the circumstances, but I am so, so happy I had Process, and real songs about real feelings, to help me along.

Paterson

E

veryday life has a rhythm—the melodic pace of walking, the beat of conversations with friends, the constant background meter of breathing. In general, movies have to crank this rhythm well past its natural tempo in order to cram everything in and to keep the attention of the audience directed where it needs to be directed. Even intentionally meandering films do this. Still, I never realized how much they do until I was sitting in the Criterion, 30 minutes into Jim Jarmusch’s film Paterson, set in the New Jersey city of the same name. The film does something I’ve never seen done in a movie before, or at least never seen done so completely. Paterson allows the viewer to follow not just the life of it’s title character (a bus driver and poet played by Adam Driver who is also named Paterson), but the slow rhythm of his careful attentions.

The film is divided into seven parts, each beginning with the weekday scrawled across the screen in a font intended to mimic handwriting. With every new day, we’re given an overhead view of Paterson and his partner, Laura (played by Golshifteh Farahani) as he wakes up, checks the time, and turns to her still sleeping form. These morning scenes offer us the most tender moments of the entire film, maybe of any film I’ve

ever seen. Each one is slightly different, but they all provide a complete, quiet moment of devotion. Usually, Paterson will give her a small kiss as he checks his watch and musters the energy to rise. In the moment between waking and getting up, we witness an everyday intimacy heartbreaking in its fullness.

The sun is shining, the lovers are sleeping, and the scene is so personal it makes the viewer feel almost intrusive. We’re given the space to appreciate this moment not just once, but seven times, the full week—Jarmusch isn’t concerned that we’ve seen this before. It’s monotonous, yes, but Paterson faces monotony boldly and with intention rather than artistic laziness.

The film’s acceptance of monotony is what allows for its particular beauty. Because Jarmusch establishes his main character’s rhythms so thoroughly, we’re able to notice microchanges in his routine. A shot that lingers on the golden color of light beer; the strange coincidence of twins constantly riding Paterson’s bus; the small interactions with residents of the city, be they aspiring rappers or appreciators of French bulldogs.

There’s an attempt to dramatize these moments of attention.

Each one is positioned as a treasure to be collected, a valuable find in Paterson’s ongoing project of poetry composition. It is,

in essence, the only plot. A man drives a bus; he notices his city and the people he loves; he writes poems about them.

While we’re occasionally distracted by a humorous power struggle with his dog, Marvin, and his garden-variety love story with his partner, it’s clear that the creation of poems is what drives the film. It’s an interesting goal—to tell the story of literary creation through a purely visual medium. I’m not sure if it succeeds. The film is beautiful, and it’s littered with delightful moments, but I’d be lying if I said it’s never boring. Some of the acting is a little wooden, and Laura’s character is often frustratingly infantilized—she doesn’t seem to have a job, and instead pursues a couple different “dreams” from home, such as becoming a famous country star and/or owning a bakery.

She’s very childlike, a trope that is too-frequently deployed by male filmmakers to make their female characters more loveable. Even so, Farahani’s portrayal is enchanting.

Paterson is not a perfect movie, and it won’t be the one that radically changes your life this year. But still, if you care about poetry, or just need a reminder about the beauty of everyday life, it’s worth seeing.

before I eventually went with the second choice of Maya Angelou’s poetry instead, but only after intense deliberation. Yeah, I just compared Kehlani to Maya Angelou.

Kehlani is the human embodiment of the shrug-emojiexclamation-point combo. She’s with who she wants, when she wants, how. “They don’t want to see it happen...but we say fuck it!” she peals in “Undercover,” flaunting her unlikely crush in the haters’ faces (after whipping out a genius, oldschool Akon sample). In “CRZY” and “Distraction,” respectively, she reclaims the crazy-girl trope (“Everything I do, I do it with a passion / If I gotta be a bitch, I’ma be a bad one”), and promotes pursuing casual romance on your own terms, not a dude’s (“Are you down to be a distraction baby / But don’t distract me”). And in “Too Much,” she pretty much sums it up, singing “I’m too much of a woman / Too much of a woman / Too much of a bad ass bitch.” Word.

A Pitchfork review describes Kehlani’s take on R&B as slipping on “the musical equivalent of a belly shirt.”And while most of the album follows that midriff- and soul-baring style (I kind of think of Kehlani as ANTI meets Destiny’s Child meets

TLC but then also meets Blonde), Kehlani’s versatile: she pivots straight from the thudding synths of “In My Feelings” (and most of the first three-quarters of the album) into the slower “Hold Me By The Heart,” punctuating deft vocals with a driving acoustic guitar beat and finger-picking combo, in a surprising departure from the rest of the slickly produced album. Both songs also end up complicating the defiant, nofucks approach to romance that makes SweetSexySavage so appealing—the first an exuberant admission of liking someone even when you’re like “nooooooo whyyyyy,” the second a more standard love ballad with a “Somehow you came and like a prince / And picked me up for good,” fix-me-I’m-broken vibe that I ultimately found disappointing.

But then the album ends, and if, like me, you have it on endless loop, soon you’re back at “Keep On.” In it, Kehlani wonders why this guy keeps taking her back, after all the kind of shady stuff she’s done. We all know why, Kehlani: it’s cause you’re so freaking good. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ !

by Carly Gove

SweetSexySavage

I

n her new album, SweetSexySavage, Kehlani slays both men and the game in equal measure: delivering power vocals, silky-smooth ambients, and killer hooks in songs about being an unapologetic, triple-S, capital-W Woman.

I’m realizing, perhaps too late, that I know very little about music criticism. So I might have to start by conveying my visceral, complete, unadulterated love for Kehlani in somewhat unsophisticated terms. Here goes: to write this review, I didn’t have to turn off some other band so I could re-immerse myself in Kehlani; I had already been listening to SweetSexySavage for two hours straight (not on shuffle—it’s about the *progression*). “I Wanna Be” is my shower, study, and cross-campus strutting soundtrack; “Everything is Yours” and “Personal” made me want to take a candle-lit Valentine’s Day solo bath (but I couldn’t find the thing to plug up the tub so failed); I was so into “Do You Dirty” I sliced my finger chopping onions but didn’t care because, as Kehlani demonstrates, pain is Art; “Gangsta” inspired me to rent Suicide Squad for $3.99 on Amazon (it was very bad). I almost choreographed a dance about intersectional feminism to a mash-up of Kehlani songs IMAGE SOURCES: Floridfilmcritics.com (top); Wikipedia.org (bottom)

by Sarah Holder YH Staff Feb. 17, 2017 _ 21

OR IA

NA .TA NG C @ ON YA TA LE CT .ED : U

a

BULLBLOG BLACKLIST Henry VIII

why so many wives?

WHAT WE HATE THIS WEEK

InDesign two kinds of cursors is too many

chapped lips

wind

don’t rub your healthy lifestyle in my face

morning people neck cricks

Taylor Swift because I love Kanye

why won’t they crack? :/

that’s so Christian

table of contents holidays that are on the same day of the week every year

just read the whole damn paper

Feb.17, 2017 _ 23