Volume LXII Number 3

The Yale Herald Volume LXII, Number 3 New Haven, Conn.

Friday, Sept. 30, 2016

FROM THE STAFF Hola Amigos, Remember the presidential debate? Don’t remember the presidential debate, because you consumed so much alcohol that your hippocampus gave up on fixing memories? You missed a good time, including an entirely unprompted tangent about Rosie O’Donnell and an involved discussion of beauty pageants. The American Experiment is flourishing.

One of the more substantive parts of the debate was Donald Trump reminding us that apparently we’re still talking about stop and frisk as a policy option. But New York is far from alone in its history of racially discriminatory policing; the pattern is nationwide, and the Elm City is no exception. You should read Carmen Baskauf’s SY ’17 front about community policing and racial profiling in New Haven.

Then, the Trump train continues in this issue of the Herald, with Kate Cray, SM ’19, chronicling the Great Trump Schism of 2016 in the Yale conservative sphere. If you like your objectionable rich New Yorkers a little more vintage, Emma Chanen TD ’19 has what you need with some fine archival research about one of our venerable institution’s many Dwights. And if you’re looking to forget that these are truly the end times and we are living in Hell, Noah Silvestry BR ‘19 has a lot of feelings about Wilco’s latest outing, “Schmilco.”

The Yale Herald Volume LX, Issue 3 New Haven, Conn.

Friday, Sept. 30, 2016 EDITORIAL STAFF: Editors-in-Chief: Tom Cusano, Rachel Strodel Managing Editors: Victorio Cabrera, Oriana Tang Executive Editors: Sophie Haigney, Sarah Holder, David Rossler, Lily Sawyer-Kaplan, Charlotte Weiner Senior Editors: Libbie Katsev, Jake Stein Culture Editors: Emma Chanen, Emily Ge Features Editors: Frani O’Toole, Nick Stewart Opinion Editors: Luke Chang, Nolan Phillips Reviews Editors: Gabriel Rojas, Eve Sneider Voices Editor: Olivia Klevorn Insert Editor: Marc Shkurovich Audio Editors: Phoebe Petrovic, Korinayo Thompson Copy Editors: Dimitri Diagne, Drew Glaeser, Frances Lindemann ONLINE STAFF: Online Editor: Hannah Offer Bullblog Editors: Jeremy Hoffman, Caleb Moran DESIGN STAFF: Graphics & Design Editor: Haewon Ma Executive Graphics Editor: Claire Sheen BUSINESS STAFF: Publishers: Russell Heller, Jocelyn Lehman Director of Advertising: Matt Thekkethala The Yale Herald is a not-for-profit, non-partisan, incorporated student publication registered with the Yale College Dean’s Office.

Get to reading, pal! Who knows how much longer we’ll have books?

Bye, Victorio Cabrera Managing Editor

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 2014-2015 academic year for 65 dollars.

Please address correspondence to: The Yale Herald P.O. Box 201653 Yale Station New Haven, CT 06520-1653 thomas.cusano@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 2016, The Yale Herald, Inc. Have a nice day.

Cover by Haewon Ma YH Staff

2 – The Yale Herald

THIS WEEK In this issue

Incoming

More “Aleppo Moments”

Our favoite world leader is the other former president of Mexico, Frederic Iseman ‘74 of the Yale Center Study of Globalization Ernesto Zedillo

Outgoing

Hopes for a third-party candidate

Jill Stein, step it up.

Cover 12– Can New Haven solve its policing problem? In light of several clashesh between law enforcement and the community, Carmen Baskauf, SY ’17, investigates.

Voices 6 – Erica Wachs, JE ’18, writes the script to our wost nightmare.

7 – Julianna Simms, ES ’18, uses poetry to play with her food while.

Opinion

Saturday Men’s Football vs. Lehigh Yale Bowl 1:30 p.m.

Saturday YFS Presents: Il Deserto Rosso Whitney Humanties Center 7:00 p.m.

Tuesday Tim Lawrence – NYC Party Culture 19801983: Conjuncture, Queers, Women Loria Center for the History of Art 5:00 p.m.

Thursday An Evening with David Sedaris Shubert Theater 7:30 p.m.

8 – It’s personal: Nolan Phillips, TC ’18, does not find Trump funny.

9 – Marc Shkurovich, BK ’19, offers his two cents about Venmo.

Features 10 – Kate Cray, SM ’19, whether the Yale New Republicans can make conservatism great again, in New Haven and beyond.

16 – Emma Chanen, BK ’19, expected to love the East Coast, but the reality she encountered was far less romantic.

Culture 18 – The Brooklyn Museum is out of this world; it’s in Brooklyn. Sanoja Bhaumik, MC ’19, spills the tea.

19 – Janine Comrie, BK ’19, eats and networks with professional chef Wheeler del Torro a Hispanic Heritage Month celebration.

Reviews 20 – “Wilco superfan” Noah Silvestry, BR ‘19, explores the themes of past and present in their new album, Schmilco.

21 – Revisit Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank with Robert Newhouse, CC ‘19, in anticipation of her next release. And Graham Ambrose, JE ‘18, praises Danny Brown’s single, “Really Doe.” Sept. 30, 2016 – 3

THE NUMBERS

EMAIL FROM CS50 COURSE HEADS To: Undisclosed-Recipients From: CS50 Course-Heads Subject: Welcome

Index – Presidential Debate

September 28, 2016 at 2:37pm

1

number of times Trump brought up his beef with Rosie O’Donnell

Hey folks,

1 too many times Trump brought it up 51 times Trump interrupted Hillz

Congratulations on making it through the first weeks! We’re all so excited that so many of you have decided to join us despite the unfortunate reputation we seemed to pick up last year. (“Natural Causes” is such an all-

30.7K number of retweets Howard

encompassing term!) We’re so excited for Year 2, and we know you are too!

Dean got on his tweet: “Notice Trump sniffing all the time. Coke user?”

But we understand that, even this early in the term, a few of you are feeling hesitant about the workload. Here are a few testimonials from last year that we hope will clear up any lingering doubts:

472-46 phone number to text say-

“Everyone says this course was hard, but I don’t know what all the fuss is about. I just paid some MIT student to do it.” —prospective tech executive

ing I’m With Her

“I miss the sun.” —CS/Math/MCDB major

Aren’t those comforting? Anyway, the stuff we teach in this class is –Lora Kelley

undoubtedly, undeniably, irrefutably essential stuff to be learned by any selfrespecting millennial. I mean after all, can you really call yourself a member of the Internet generation if you don’t know what the difference between the Heap and the Stack is? Or how to do pointer arithmetic on the back of a napkin? Or how your computer connects to the local DNS server to acquire an address to which it sends a HTTPS request via TCP/IP, so you can look at

5–

“37 Occult Symbols You’ll Never See the Same Way Again?” (Understand

Top five ways to celebrate Rosh Hashanah at Yale Go to class just in case your professor makes any knowing references to Judaism

some of those words? Join my startup!!)

All this and more lies ahead. See you next week!

Best wishes, Your course heads P.S.: It’s been brought to our attention by campus security that late last night, a group of students were found painting 0’s and 1’s on the walls of our lecture hall with the blood

4–

Decide that this year is gonna be different

3–

Use Snapchat’s yarmulke filter (this will exist, I’m sure)

2–

Go home to Westchester

1–

Just say fuck it and do another Seder

of a newt. We would like to remind everyone at this time that these actions (or any other instances of occult worship) will by no means affect your standing in this course. What ultimately matters is not so much where you end up relative to your classmates, but where you, in Week 12, end up relative to yourself in Week 1. Lastly, to be totally clear, our course abbreviation is CPSC, not CULT.

– Will Reid 4 – The Yale Herald

– Elias Bartholomew

sarah.holder@yale.edu thomas.cusano@yale.edu

rachel.strodel@yale.edu

VOICES Jill is cleaning up the remains of the wine she and Mary had presumably just been drinking. As she goes to push her chair in, she hears a sudden shriek, followed by a terrific succession of knocking at her door. It is Mary, wrapped head to toe in various layers of paper: flyers, tissue paper, construction paper, all different colors, all consuming.

MARY (Muffled) Help! Jill!

Jill, startled, opens the door. Mary pours in.

JILL What happened to you?

(Running to a drawer.)

Okay, I need scissors, (She pulls out a pair of scissors.)

And for you to stand here.

(She gestures towards a chair. Mary shuffles to where she thinks Jill is directing her towards. Jill helps her climb up onto the chair. She stands eerily still.)

You’re going to be alright.

(She begins to cut and chop away at the layers of paper surrounding Mary. The construction paper should be removed in large chunks, with the bits of tissue paper tightly clinging to every last extremity. As she peels off the flyers, she starts to read them aloud, in tandem with Mary’s monologue.)

MARY When Henry was little he always made these catastrophic arts and crafts projects, and every project he started would involve glue and fake feathers. Feathers everywhere, great tufts of them littered in my kitchen.

And one day he superglued a blue feather to my back where he could see my spine sticking out when I bent over. Waited months and months for it to fall off. It was the conversation starter at every cocktail event.

I’d pick out certain dresses with plunging necklines and revealing backs just to parade the feather, just to showcase it. Sometimes I think it’s still there and it’ll tickle me at the most inconvenient times. I never told you that because I knew you’d make fun of me, and I always liked laughing with you.

JILL (Jill reads the fliers with a steady, almost monotone voice.)

Lost cat. If found, please return to 202 Righters Mill Road. Cash reward.

(The next one.) Mapes Toys everything must go sale! Overstock of tiara crowns!

Overstock of fake guns! Overstock of Chia pets and other things you nurture for a time before you realize nothing is going to grow. (Another one.) Needed: new member of women’s only book-club. Someone who can bring real experience. If you know what I mean. Winky face. (And another one.)

“IT TAKES A WHILE BEFORE YOU CAN STEP OVER INERT BODIES AND GO AHEAD WITH WHAT YOU WERE TRYING TO DO.” Jenny Holzer believes in you. (And a final one.) Needed: volunteer for Main Line’s first ever Pride Parade! Take to these oncecobbled streets with rainbows, motherfuckers. (Jill has finally succeeded in removing all the paper, only to reveal a sheet that covers all of Mary except her nose.) Ugh, hold on. (With her scissors, Jill makes a large cut in the fabric, tearing it. Mary spins out of the sheet. There are layers upon layers of children’s arts and crafts feathers glued onto Mary’s otherwise naked body. Jill starts to pluck at the feathers until Mary starts to bleed, her skin raw.)

MARY That was my wedding dress.

JILL It was an old sheet.

MARY Sure, now it is. (Suddenly grabs her hand in pain.) You’re making it worse.

(She starts to cover the parts of her body Jill has already exposed with the featherplucking.)

JILL What are you doing?

MARY It hurts.

JILL Where does it hurt?

MARY Everywhere.

JILL Where does it bleed?

6 – The Yale Herald

A Dream Sequence

by Erica Wachs MARY Everywhere everywhere. Gotta stop the bleeding.

JILL I’ll get you a bandaid.

MARY Bandaids won’t work. My wedding dress.

JILL The sheet.

MARY My wedding dress! Was to stop the bleeding.

JILL You could have killed yourself.

MARY Good.

(Beat.)

I’m pregnant.

JILL But the wine.

MARY Yes. JILL You drank wine tonight.

MARY I’m not pregnant with a child.

JILL Have you told Felipe?

MARY Who? JILL Your husband.

MARY Oh. No. He’d want me to get rid of it. So the wine. It drips, it’s sticky. Dark red stains. I’m unclean.

JILL It was an honest mistake, I’m sure.

MARY It was a mistake to keep it hidden.

JILL Do you feel sick at all?

MARY No. I’m just—I’m scared.

JILL About what?

MARY (In this next sequence of dialogue, Mary should treat every fragment like a complete sentence.)

I’m scared it won’t.

JILL It won’t what?

MARY I’m scared it won’t stay.

JILL (Frustrated.)

Stay where?

MARY I need my wedding dress back.

(She rips the sheet out of Jill’s stunned hands.)

JILL Mary. It’s late, you should rest. Especially in your condition.

(Mary lies down on the table, cocooning herself into the sheet.)

You could come to my house with layers of tar coated on you and I’d unwrap you just the same. If you want, you can have the baby here.

MARY I already told you. It’s not a child.

JILL I wouldn’t know what else to call it. Goodnight.

(Jill gets up on the kitchen table, and positions herself in a place where she can stroke Mary’s hair to calm her down.

Overly maternal. Just as she is about to put her hand onto Mary’s head, Mary abruptly sits up, a confessional.)

MARY Hidden.

Graphic by Jason Hu YH Staff

swallow

by Juliana Simms

I have a strange habit of punctuating my sentences with apologies.

Speaking for others; feeling obligated to present my opinions As hypotheses.

Free thinking is a luxury for me, A dish only to be enjoyed on special occasions.

Intellectual autonomy is a delicacy.

I’ve served it to others countless times, Chilled with cynicism, Flambéed with rage, but most often silently, With a generous side of concession, Implied agreement, Choking on miseducation and poisoned food for thought.

Of course, I’ve only ever gotten scraps: A theory seasoned with one-dimensional reason, Expired notions of freedom and equality.

Wilted bundles of legislative symbolism to last me until The next meal, Next movement, Next generation.

Maybe then we’ll have a seat at the banquet table.

Find ourselves in conversation with Them.

Not complicit Or passive victims of the Asphyxiation of Black imagination.

Perhaps we’ll be people there Not problems.

And speak our “selves” in complete sentences, Rather than a series Of questions.

Graphic by Haewon Ma YH Staff Sep. 30, 2016 – 7

OPINION Talking to my therapist about Trump

by Nolan Phillips YH Staff

M

y favorite site on which to follow the presidential race is FiveThirtyEight.com, which provides an array of colorful maps and statistical models based on every new update to presidential polls. Within the past few weeks, as Trump’s numbers have improved, I’ve been making a visit to FiveThirtyEight every day. It’s safe to say that I’ve spent much time obsessing over this election. Donald Trump’s meteoric ascent in American politics has made me uneasy for at least a year, but as Election Day draws tangibly closer, I’m feeling a more acute sense of dread. For many Americans, Donald Trump’s white nationalist remarks have been a cause for deep, unshakeable worry. I check the polls religiously—each bump for Hillary is a small personal victory, each gain for Trump a small defeat. I find myself thinking about Donald Trump all the time. In fact, I’m terrified. Many of my peers are, too. We need to talk about the psychological toll that Donald Trump’s candidacy has on so many of us.

“This election isn’t like other elections” has become a cliché—it’s true that everyone, regardless of political affiliation, has been astonished by Election 2016. The bizarreness of the primaries, the unconventionality of the candidates, and the brutishness of the discourse are universally acknowledged. But the genuine fear instilled by Trump’s candidacy is rarely addressed. It is not enough to characterize this election as merely unusual. Trump has proudly proposed major civil rights violations, he has suggested apartheid-style measures to segregate Muslims, and he has threatened millions with deportation. That’s not just unusual—it’s unprecedented. Trump showers us with a numbing barrage of anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-everyone hate speech.

And with Trump’s bombast on full display, it’s easy to ignore his quiet running mate, Mike Pence. But Pence’s famous Indiana anti-LBGT legislation is no less troublesome. For decades Pence has ±fought the gay rights movement, and he calls homosexuality “the types of behaviors that facilitate the spreading of the HIV virus.” For Muslim Americans, for Latinx Americans, for LGBT+ Americans, and for other groups singled out by the Trump machine, this election has the potential outcome of personal persecution. Deporta-

tion, stop-and-frisk, a Muslim ban—to many, Donald Trump poses an immediate risk. That’s why I’m so nervous all the time.

You don’t have to be a threatened minority to be uneasy about Donald Trump, though. Maybe you’re afraid of his ties with Putin, or perhaps you first recognized the threat he poses in his authoritarian speech at the RNC—the speech in which he bellowed “I alone can fix it,” as his name stood in letters thirty feet tall. I’m worried about Donald Trump for all of these reasons, too.

And I must confess that I find myself thinking about him too often. I try to imagine what it would be like if he were elected president. I try to tell myself that it would be okay, that he can’t mess up everything too terribly, that maybe he would be merely an embarrassment. It couldn’t be all that bad, could it?

But as the election nears, and the polls tighten, I’m worrying about him more than ever. Sometimes I feel ashamed for thinking about him so much—I know he’s an egomaniac, and I know he wants me to think about him. As my worries compound, I’ve realized that I can’t be alone in this. Lately, I’ve examined my peers for signs that I’m not the only one with 2016 Election Anxiety—and I’ve discovered plenty of others who have similarly deep concerns about the election.

When Donald Trump comes up in conversation, he elicits a wide variety of potential reactions. Some people ridicule him, attempting to appear unfazed by the prospect of a Trump presidency. Many people express exasperation not with Trump, but with the election.

And occasionally people expose feelings of genuine worry. Whatever the reaction, it’s often evident that a more serious anxiety about Donald Trump runs deep— but no one is willing to truly express it.

Usually we treat Trump with mockery and humor.

Given his wild appearance and over-the-top persona, this isn’t too hard to do. But our humor often disguises more serious concerns. I, too, am guilty of making jokes about this election. However, our collective tendency to treat Election 2016 with sardonic humor makes it difficult to detect whether others are as deeply bothered by the Trump campaign as I am. So I’ve recently ditched the jokes in an effort to become more honest when discussing 2016 Election Anxiety.

As I began to approach Trump conversations with a more serious bent, I soon noticed just how many of my peers shared my profound worries about Trump’s wild rise to the top. Some have family members with shaky immigration status, some feel threatened by his anti-Muslim rhetoric, and some, who are less directly targeted, are afraid of what he will do to others.

In the current political climate, it’s difficult to communicate this fear. Many people are equally disgusted with both Clinton and Trump, to the extent that any complaint about Trump is met with a reflexive dig at Clinton. And when I speak to Trump supporters, my fear of Trump is politely dismissed as a partisan opinion. This is why it’s challenging to properly convey the seriousness of my 2016 Election Anxiety. It’s hard to express that the unease I feel due to Donald Trump’s campaign is not just political disagreement; it’s personal. It’s a profound fear of his authoritarianism and bigoted statements, which really are neither liberal nor conservative.

It’s true, there are multitudes of Americans who are not particularly stressed out by the Trump campaign—many people intend to vote for him, and others see him merely as a nuisance or a buffoon. But it’s important for everyone to acknowledge that many people, like me, feel a deeper, personal anxiety about Donald Trump. This is rarely acknowledged. Sometimes I feel like I’m taking the election too seriously.

But just this morning, in lecture, I noticed a laptop screen in front of me refreshing FiveThirtyEight’s newest election map—and I was reminded that I’m not alone. If everyone acknowledged the unusually profound character of 2016 Election Anxiety, perhaps more safe spaces will open up in which people can speak honestly about the pervasive unease caused by Trump. With a bit more openness, many of us will be able to better express our sincere worries. If we can candidly talk about 2016 Election Anxiety, our compulsive joking about Donald Trump can turn into a more truthful and meaningful discourse.

Oh—and vote for Hillary Clinton.

Graphic by Haewon Ma YH Staff 8 – The Yale Herald

Venmo rich

by Marc Shkurovich YH Staff

T

wo people I know have thrown most of the pre-games for my friend group since freshman year. They open their suite to around two dozen friends on a near-weekly basis, setting up their common room and cleaning it each time. They buy the alcohol, and though they beg friends to bring cups and chasers, they usually buy those too. And they do it all gladly out of the goodness of their heart, and without significant personal cost, because at some point during the zenith of the pre-game, they cut the music, get on an elevated surface, and shout: “EVERYONE VENMO ME.” In the past, I took out my phone, opened Venmo, and complied. But slowly I realized that, first, I had no idea how Venmo works—how the click of a button sends my money to someone else remained a mystery—and second, how unquestioned this ubiquitous social phenomenon remained.We use Venmo partly as social vernacular (both a verb and a noun) and partly for sheer practicality, but there there seems to be a collective, tacit agreement to take Venmo’s functionality at face value, without probing into what it does with our money and our habits.

Venmo was founded in 2009 by two Penn roommates hoping to harness technology to split bills more efficiently. The company grew independently until 2012, when it was purchased by a payment software company for $26.2 million; that company, Braintree, was in turn bought by PayPal in 2014 for $800 billion. An important detail for understanding Venmo: it is not like a bank, nor is it like a credit card company.

Venmo is simply a money services business (MSB), an amorphous grouping that leaves Venmo outside the jurisdiction of the federal institutions, like the FDIC, that traditionally protect consumers. Venmo’s only requisite registrations as an MSB are state licenses permitting Venmo to conduct money transfers; the majority of these licenses were secured by and belong to PayPal, meaning that Venmo technically operated illegally before securing them.

Also worth understanding is Venmo’s business model. Though it charges a 3% fee on credit card transactions—a standard practice among similar services—it swallows further losses from satellite charges around debit card and bank account transactions.

However, when your money is floating as Venmo balance, the company holds it in banks, earning interest as it sits. In the words of Teddy Shim, BR ’18— who started his own payment company and explained Venmo’s ins and outs to me—“think of Venmo as a giant bank account with tiny accounts for users.” As such, Venmo is incentivized to hold funds for as long as possible (in case you’ve ever wondered why your balance can take a few days to reflect transactions, that’s why—and also because Venmo has to wait for the Federal Reserve to move money, which it does in

batches). Despite this palliative, Venmo still bleeds money; its long-term strategy is to promote itself as a direct payment option to vendors––which it is unveiling next year––and charge the vendors a fee, as credit cards do. Venmo’s unique vulnerability to fraud through the practice of chargebacks is another reason the company is not currently profitable. Chargebacks–– when a customer reports a fraudulent transaction on their card––come at the vendor’s expense; credit card companies and banks value their customers, so they typically fulfill the chargebacks, and when the transaction is peer-to-peer, Venmo takes the brunt of the blow. The 3% credit card fee––the only visible fee Venmo extracts from users––is really chargeback insurance. This is not to say your money is jeopardized through Venmo, because apart from shady customer service dealing with past hacks, it’s not, though Venmo insures nothing; it would just be very simple to rip Venmo off.* This summer, PayPal’s CEO elucidated that “the secret sauce of Venmo is turning a transaction into an experience.” “Experience,” however, both overcomplicates and undersells the role of Venmo on a college campus. Venmo changes the way that we treat money, at least in small quantities, which is part of its unpalatability. I’ve heard Venmo balance referred to as “fake money” repeatedly, and this makes sense: other forms of intangible currency are valued less than cash as well. Florian Ederer, a professor of economics of the Yale School of Management, pointed me towards an MIT Sloan School of Management study from 1999 corroborating that spenders do tend to value tangible money over intangible currency. The experiment pitted Sloan students paying for an auction purchase through a credit card against those paying through cash; the credit card group bought more than twice as many tickets as the bidders paying cash. I would rather not be reckless with my money, yet the streamlined nature of the app engenders inattention, especially when used among like-minded peers.

Ederer believes that the Venmo user base––which is 80% millennials, an incentive for companies to dodge Venmo’s no-ad policy––skews young in part because of the traditional “stigma to not talk about money.” Matters involving analog money are typically kept private, and older folks are not keen to use an app that forces you to caption your transactions. However, using Venmo can be interpreted as a form of a proven consumer behavior: conspicuous consumption. Flippant Venmo payments with garish captions aren’t that different from “throwing dollars at the club,” Ederer says. Are we comfortable using Venmo because we’re already comfortable spending money and have gotten used to having people know that we are spending money? Relative privacy is assumed when it comes to other financial transactions, but Venmo users seem at peace forfeiting that expectation.

As Caroline Sydney, SM ’16, elegantly put it in her own Herald op-ed about Venmo, “it’s not enough to share the check for dinner—the fact that the check was shared must also be shared.” Though you can also make transactions private by default in the settings— which I and most people don’t––Venmo is a powerful form of social media. A friend of mine, who understandably wishes to remain anonymous, confessed to using Venmo to “stalk” her ex-boyfriend. By examining his transactions and captions, she could roughly tell what he had been doing and with whom. “On my ex’s profile I saw a string of transactions between him and another girl with whom I’d seen him out frequently in public. They stung when I saw them, for sure, but then I knew it was time to move on.” A user’s Venmo history (when public) seems to offer an incontestable digital paper trail, though this doesn’t stop minors from captioning transactions with beer emojis, drug references, or potential threats to national security; two developers with a sense of humor built Vicemo, a website that until five months ago compiled (and linked!) all transactions whose captions included a reference to drugs, alcohol, or sex.

Intra-Venmo etiquette also appears to be unique.

Captioning comes with the expectation of humor, turning Venmo feeds into a list of inside jokes and wordplay. Just as some people carefully curate their social media persona, so do people indicate their social strata through references to partying as well as through the spending itself.

Also, looking back at my last twenty Venmo transactions, only six were charges. We are clearly still not wholly comfortable demanding money from our friends, though I am a staunch advocate of embracing Venmo charges as the least awkward way of reminding friends to pay you back.

It is unsurprising that this app created by college students is so prominent in college life. Venmo exists in our lives as a unique combined tool of personal finance and social interaction, slipping through our critical consciousness even as more of our money moves through its network. Perhaps what is remarkable is not the blend of money and social media, but that we don’t think that is weird at all. Regardless, the way that we use the app merits further scrutiny, especially as Venmo makes its push towards a relevance beyond college pre-games. I have my hesitations about Venmo’s infrastructure, and about what our collective inattention says about our relationship to money and technology, but nothing I learned overcame the overwhelming practicality and ubiquity of the app; the next time my friend cuts the music and asks me to Venmo him, I know I will.

Graphic by Jason Hu YH Staff Sept. 30, 2016 – 9

FEATURES

With him, or with them?

Kate Cray, SM ‘19, considers whether the Yale New Republicans can make conservatism great again.

O

n Aug. 8, around 1:00 a.m., a screenshot from the Yale College Republicans’ Twitter account surfaced on the Facebook feed of Overheard at Yale: “NEWS: The Yale College Republicans will not be supporting Trump in the fall.

More information to come.”

Several days earlier, the Harvard Republican Club’s choice not to endorse Donald Trump instigated a media firestorm: Fortune and the Washington Post broadcast the story across the internet and in print. Many Yale undergraduates expected their school’s equivalent to follow suit; inevitably, then, comments on the Overheard at Yale post like “meaningless unless they vote for Hillary” from Isaac Kirk-Davidoff, JE ’18, demonstrated a lack of surprise at the announcement. As dawn broke, however, discord devolved into confusion.

That morning, Emmy Reinwald, TD ’17, Co-President of the Yale College Republicans, commented on the post to share that the Twitter account responsible for the renunciation of Trump—@YaleRepublicans— was impersonating the Yale College Republicans, whose real Twitter account is @YaleGOP. Shortly after 9:00 a.m., the Yale College Republicans released an official statement, which the organization affixed to the comments on the original Overheard at Yale Post.

This time, the Yale College Republicans were endorsing Donald Trump for president.

Commentators like Kristen Wright, TD ‘18, quickly demanded clarification: “Does this mean the Yale GOP supports Trump?” she asked online.

Within days, it became clear that the more appropriate question was not whether the “Yale GOP” had endorsed the Republican candidate, but instead if this organization existed at all. On Aug. 11, the Yale Free Press announced the formation of a new student group, Yale Conservatives Against Trump (YUCAT).

Just one day later, word spread about the creation of another conservative organization: the Yale New Republicans. Tables at the annual undergraduate Extracurricular Bazaar, held at Payne Whitney Gymnasium, would be especially crowded this fall—and with Republican student groups, nonetheless.

THE QUESTION OF WHETHER THE YALE COLLEGE Republicans should endorse its party’s presidential candidate had long been a source of contention among members. Mike Fitzgerald, SM ’19, former treasurer

10 – The Yale Herald

of the Yale College Republicans, said: “About a week before the Overheard Post, we had a debate among the board members about whether or not we were going to endorse Trump. The consensus was basically that we weren’t going to say anything, and if people asked we would just say that we were committed to supporting Republicans.” When the Overheard at Yale post surfaced, Ben Rasmussen, JE ’18, former vice president of the Yale College Republicans, messaged the organization’s members to discuss what to do. It was then that he heard the news: “The statement was already up.”

The presidents of the Yale College Republicans, Reinwald and Michaela Cloutier, CC ’18, had released the statement without the knowledge or support of the group’s members. This was a shock to Rasmussen: “I mean, I was the vice president, and I was just like, ‘What? The statement’s up?’ Nobody ran anything by me. So I felt stabbed in the back, betrayed, because we had the numbers: the majority of the group did not want to endorse Trump. That’s when ideologically and morally I just couldn’t stand by the group anymore.”

Both presidents refused all requests for an interview. Instead, Reinwald said in an email: “Our group’s constitution (which was unanimously approved by our board members in April) states we will support all Republican nominees up for election.”

Rasmussen’s initial response was shockto gather support from within the Yale College Republicans for the reversal of the presidents’ decision: “I thought we had the numbers to stop the group from supporting Trump. I thought that we had the majority and could keep the group silent, so I wasn’t thinking of leaving as that serious of a threat.”

But he may have been the only one—Fitzgerald, the treasurer, resigned immediately. He never secondguessed his decision: “The week before it happened, I told them that if they endorsed Trump I would resign,” he said. Soon, over half of the executive board of the Yale College Republicans had resigned.

FOR MANY, HOWEVER, RESIGNATION WAS JUST the beginning. Within hours of his own resignation, Rasmussen approached Fitzgerald about creating the Yale New Republicans. “We really didn’t want to be a part of [the Yale College Republicans], but we also really didn’t want to give it up altogether so that’s when

we began talking about creating a new club, and it spawned from that,” Fitzgerald said. Jay Mondal, CC ’19, and Grant Gabriel, TC ’17, also resigned from the Yale College Republicans to join the New Republicans.

Immediately, the group sought to establish itself as principled and forthright: “We emailed the co-presidents of the Yale College Republicans before we sent out our statement saying why we did what we did on the New Republicans’ Facebook page,” Ben Rasmussen said. “We didn’t really want them to feel like we were stabbing them in the back in any way. We wanted to be completely transparent.”

But relations between the Yale College Republicans and New College Republicans have remained strained: “I do not think they were expecting other board members to resign,” Fitzgerald says. “I think there’s definitely a level of frustration, especially because there aren’t many Republicans at Yale, so I know they went a few months last year with open board positions. Now they’re in a position where they have to fill four slots, and I don’t think that’s an easy process.”

Reinwald and Cloutier responded to the New College Republicans’ email over the summer. Their response, Rasmussen said, was “cordial on the surface but definitely tense—kind of like, ‘I don’t know what the need for another conservative party on campus really is, but I guess you have your reasons.’”

THIS QUESTION—OF WHETHER THERE EXISTS room for a group like the New College Republicans— has guided Rasmussen and Fitzgerald as they look to define themselves in relation to other conservative groups on campus.

Fitzgerald explained: “Our focus is creating a more inclusive, conservative Republican message that can draw people into the party. Our vision definitely does not end in November. We are looking to be a long-term organization and to fill the spot that the Yale College Republicans never filled.” Rasmussen reiterated Fitzgerald’s sentiments, emphasizing in particular his desire for an active on-campus presence: “[The Yale College Republicans] doesn’t really do too much. Last year I think we me met one or two times in the entire year. Attendance is dropping. It’s really just seen as laughable. So I think that my motivation was to create a conservative political action organization on Yale’s campus.”

It is this emphasis on long-term community building that distinguishes the Yale New Republicans from other anti-Trump conservative organizations. YUCAT, for one, focuses its efforts exclusively on preventing Trump from entering the White House. Alexander Michaud, DC ’17, the founder and president of YUCAT, told the Yale Free Press earlier this year: “Our work will be done when Trump is defeated in November.”

But Karl Notturno, SM ’17, a Trump supporter, has another theory: “Yale Conservatives against Trump— I’m not sure about this, but just from looking at what it is, I have a feeling that it’s a front group for the Party of the Right. So I think that it’s probably a tool.” Notturn highlighted Michaud’s central role in the Yale Political Union’s Party of the Right. The Herald reached out to Michaud for a comment, but received no response.

Regardless of whether there is space for the Yale New Republicans within Yale’s political community, other on-campus groups are making room for those who have rejected the Republican presidential nominee.

Josh Hochman, BK ‘18, who serves as the Yale College Democrats’ campus and community coordinator, said: “We would love to engage with more people who don’t consider themselves Democrats but share a goal with us. Our organization is about winning elections and passing bills. We’re not about maintaining a level of ideological purity.”

THAT THE YALE COLLEGE DEMOCRATS ARE MORE eager to work with disenchanted conservatives than are the Yale College Republicans attests to a broader reorganization of the political spectrum, both here at Yale and beyond. Of this phenomenon, Rasmussen said: “If we take a step back on those sorts of issues and focus on issues that have always been very beneficial to our party such as strong national defense, strong conservative economics, and take it back to the party of Lincoln, Reagan—the great Republican presidents that have come and gone through our party—then I think we can get more voters.”

While Rasmussen and the Yale New Republicans believe that the future of conservatism at Yale lies in rejecting Trump, Notturno sees things differently: “Republicans have everything to lose if they don’t vote for Trump. What those people are banking on is that Trump will lose, the Republican party will just snap back to what it was, and that they’ll be viewed as the heroes who never left. However, I think that if Trump loses, then the Republican Party self-implodes, because almost everyone who was for Trump—which is now about 90 to 95 percent of the party—will look at those neverTrumpers as whiny jerks who cost them the election.”

Then again, some of this friction is unique to Yale’s limited conservative scene—where the rejection of Republican candidates is often a personal affront. “You’re talking about relatively small groups whose dynamics are largely defined by individual people,” Notturno explained. Rasmussen and Fitzgerald, too, admitted that the founding of the Yale New Republicans was in great part a response to their feeling disrespected by the choice of the Yale College Republicans’ presidents to endorse Trump without consulting them.

Beyond Republican circles, students also identify conservatism here at Yale in terms of its most vocal advocates. John Chirikjian, TD ’17, described Notturno and Reinwald as “famously vocal about their support of Trump”—and, as a consequence, well-known around campus. A sophomore in Silliman, who asked to remain anonymous, shared that some members of the residential college’s community differentiate between Fitzgerald and another student with the same first name by calling him “Republican Mike.”

Over the summer, approximately 20 people emailed the New College Republicans to express interest in the organization. Another 30-35 students registered with the group at this year’s Extracurricular Bazaar.

Outside Yale’s gates, too, conservatives have grappled with the very same question: whether to embrace the changing face of the Republican party or to reject it—to stand with Reinwald and Cloutier, or to defect with Rasmus-

sen and Fitzgerald. In July, notorious Republican billionaire Charles Koch told Fortune of the presidential race: “If I had to vote for cancer or a heart attack, why would I vote for either?” Earlier this week, the Arizona Republic endorsed a Democratic candidate for the first time in its 126-year history. Even President George H.W. Bush is said to support Clinton over Trump.

Rasmussen sees this shift within the Republican party not as a rift, but instead as an opportunity to affect much-needed change. “We are certainly a bit more moderate, because the only way that we’re going to achieve our goal of getting a, more support and followers, is to modernize,” Rasmussen said. “This isn’t just our problem; this is the Republican Party’s problem.”

Graphic by Jason Hu YH Staff Sep. 30, 2016 – 11

New Haven blues

By Carmen Baskauf

12 – The Yale Herald

B

arbara Fair was holding it together. It was past six, and Mayor Toni Harp, ARC ’78, still hadn’t appeared. Fair and a group of 20 or so New Haven activist regulars filled the reception room of the mayor’s office, arms crossed, shifting weight from foot to foot. Harp’s office staff looked on uncomfortably. Fair stood in the center of the room with her daughter, Holly Tucker, who wore a shirt that said “I’m black. I read. I know sh**.” A small but vocal crowd, many of them representatives of New Haven activism groups like Unidad Latina en Acción and Answers Coalition, stood with them.

A protester squeezed Tucker’s shoulder supportively. They had been waiting for twenty minutes. Would they be willing to speak with someone else, maybe Mayor Harp’s chief of staff? “No,” Fair said. “We need to talk to the mayor, because that’s who we voted into office. They didn’t vote for the staff, they voted for Toni.” Minutes ticked by. The office staff continued to insist Harp was in a meeting and could not see the protesters. But Fair was holding it together. Could they set up an appointment with Harp for a later date? “No! We’ve done that already,” Fair said, for at least the third time. “We set up something, we waited three weeks, and the day of the meeting, she canceled. We’ve been calling, and calling, and calling, leaving messages, talking to people, and for what?”

“She has just as much as a right to see her as I do, as you do,” chimed in an older white woman holding a cane, pointing to Tucker. “And if she were my child…I’m not violent, but God help me if she were my child…”

Fair exhaled and shook her head. “Let me stay calm. Don’t even talk. I don’t need to hear what someone else would have did for their child, because I might lose it.”

Barbara Fair is one of New Haven’s most well-known activists, and has been confronting city officials in New Haven for almost thirty years to protest police brutality. In this protest, though, the grievances Fair wanted to bring to Mayor Harp were deeply personal. This time, Fair came to Harp with allegations of brutality by New Haven police officers against her own daughter, Holly Tucker.

Tucker’s allegations fit with a larger pattern of police violence affecting people of color across the country, and this is by no means the first incident of reported police brutality in New Haven. But New Haven’s police department has also been held up as a model for community policing, with President Obama even meeting with the former NHPD chief for a discussion about healing police-community tensions. As leaders across the country look for solutions, it is worth considering New Haven’s fluctuating relationship to the community policing program.

“THIS WAS HERE. WHERE THE CLOTS WERE.” HOLLY TUCKER SHOWED me a photo on her phone of a forearm with deep purple-black bruises. “Oh, this was from pressing up against the window. I think he had to do something to my muscles, from squeezing it so tight, because my skin was kind of hanging, you know?” We were sitting on the couch in her house in a quiet neighborhood of Quinnipiac Meadows, and Tucker was talking me through the night a police officer threw her to the ground. Tucker is black. Both the officers involved in her arrest are white.

Around 11 p.m. on Sat., Sept. 10, Tucker was driving home with a male passenger when, at the McDonalds on Foxon Boulevard, she noticed two police cars parked on either side of the street. Officers were directing traffic

out of the parking lot after a drag race. Tucker stopped and waited. Once all the cars had exited, and the officer directing traffic had crossed the street to talk to an officer in one of the squad cars, Tucker started driving again, but she soon noticed that the two police cars were following her about 20 feet back. They did not flash their lights to flag her down. She pulled into a gas station and got out of the car. When she noticed the female officer, Jennifer McDermott, taking photos of her license plate, Tucker decided to start videotaping the officers on her phone.

Tucker confronted McDermott about what she was doing. McDermott gave her a verbal warning for disobeying an officer’s traffic direction, and asked for her license and registration. Tucker argued at first, but eventually got in her car to get the documents, passing them to the officer through her cracked window. McDermott took the documents back to her squad car, and returned with the other officer, Robert Stratton, hanging behind.

Things began to escalate quickly after that. McDermott told Tucker to get out of the car, and Tucker refused. Stratton began to pry the driver’s-side window down. “Stratton and McDermott get my window halfway down, and that’s when they grab my arms, twist my arms, pulling my arms and yelling at the same time ‘Open the window,’” Tucker told me. “And I’m like, ‘how am I gonna open the window when you have my arms?’”

Tucker showed me the fading bruises on her arm where the officers grabbed her through the window. “[Stratton] used his other hand to open my car door, take my seatbelt off, he pulls me out of the car, pushes me against the car, and footswipes me to the ground. And I had a dress on. You know, at this moment I’m like ‘what are you doing?!’ You know, I’m screaming ‘what are you doing??’”

Tucker believes that the incident began to escalate after McDermott had a chance to speak with Stratton in the other patrol car. Tucker had taken Stratton to court two months earlier to fight a traffic ticket, and Tucker believes Stratton had a vendetta against her. While she was riding back to the police station cuffed in the back of the patrol car, Tucker said McDermott referenced the court case. “She showed me a half inch little cut, and said ‘you hurt my finger when you rolled up the window. And I have four kids and this is my job, and I know you like to take people to court.’” Tucker told me she had never met McDermott before that night. “I’m like, ‘wow, so you got that from Stratton, because you don’t know me.’”

The officers took her to the downtown police station. At this point, Tucker said she was having a severe anxiety attack, and asked the officers to take her to the hospital. “Instead of [McDermott] calling medical attention, she called the paddy wagon.” Tucker spent the night in jail, with a $25,000 bond. She had never been arrested before.

Tucker is 33, a student at Gateway Community College studying early childhood development. She hopes to transfer to Albertus Magnus next year, and eventually open her own daycare. She’s a single mom with a thirteenyear-old daughter. And, of course, she is an activist. She always has been— how could she not be, as the daughter of Barbara Fair? She’s black, and she’s seen and spoken out about incidences of police brutality against black citizens in New Haven and across the country. When she was on the ground with an officer cuffing her hands, Tucker couldn’t keep herself from thinking of the incidents that ended with an officer taking a black life. In the next weeks, Tucker followed with the rest of the country the news of the shooting of Terrence Crutcher in Tulsa by a police officer, an unarmed black man shot

Sept. 16, 2016– 13

standing next to his car in the middle of the street, and thought back to her own violent confrontation. “I thought, wow, that could have been me. I could have died.”

“YOU DON’T HAVE A MEETING WITH THE MAYOR, SORRY.” THE SECRETARY crossed her arms, unflinching and unmoved. The activists erupted.

“We are the people, and we put her in office!”

“We the people!”

“She serves the community. She doesn’t serve herself.”

“If someone in this administration’s children got brutalized by police, (“That’s right!”) how long would it take them to set up a meeting to deal with police brutality (“Right!”)? When it’s someone from the community, when it’s someone they can just push to the side, meetings get canceled, people’s schedules fill up.”

“New Haven prides itself on community policing, but we’re the community.”

“Well, I see a community of police outside. That’s what I see.”

Although the frustration of the activists in Mayor Harp’s office mostly focused on Harp’s absence and what they felt was a betrayal of the mayor’s promised

in Guilford. “They’re getting off Exit 61 on Route 95,” Manship said, “And the East Haven PD, back in the day, would just sit there and take people off— basically profiling Latinos coming off the highway from Fair Haven.”

The harassment Latinos experienced from the East Haven police was sometimes physically violent. Manship noted the case of Moises Marin, who was attacked by then-officer Dennis Spaulding for videotaping police harassment in front of his restaurant. Spaulding pushed Marin to the ground and kicked and stomped Marin, ultimately fracturing his vertebrae. “I really believe that the escalation and the violence towards members of the Latino community in East Haven was moving towards some sort of serious injury or fatality.”

Initially, many parishioners Manship talked to didn’t want to take action against the police—some were scared; others just wanted to move on with their lives. But in February 2009, “four Ecuadorians were stopped and then beaten and abused by the East Haven PD,” Manship said. “The Ecuadorian community is a close-knit community in the parish, and they said ‘no, we don’t want anyone to suffer what we just suffered.’” So Manship and his congregation began to document police activity. Their work gained public attention in mid-February when the priest was arrested for filming an incident of racial profiling by the police in East Haven. Manship worked with Yale Law School students to collect affidavits from victims in the parish, and was instrumental in putting together a complaint that led to a federal investigation of the EHPD by the Department of Justice.

The investigation’s conclusion was damning: “We found that EHPD engages in a pattern or practice of discriminatory policing against Latinos in violation of the Constitution and federal law,” the findings letter said.

The report highlighted discriminatory traffic enforcement and treatment following traffic stops, as well as a failure to “design and implement internal systems that would identify and prevent” such conduct.

A settlement that followed required the town of East Haven to overhaul its police department under federal monitoring. Top administrative officers were replaced, and the department remodeled its training program with specific attention to anti-discrimination instruction. The settlement also required cameras in every patrol car and called for an increase in bilingual English- and Spanish- speaking officers.

For many, the East Haven case serves as an example of what can happen when a department commits—or is forced to commit—to major structural changes. Manship emphasized the importance of the DOJ’s external oversight in turning the EHPD around: “Police can’t police police. It’s a conflict of interest.

You can’t have the fox guarding the henhouse.”

Manship thinks that community-police relations are better in New Haven; instances of discrimination are certainly less flagrant and frequent than they were in East Haven a few years ago. Still, some believe that the situation in New Haven requires radical solutions. Barbara Fair hopes to take a lesson from East Haven and involve the DOJ: “I can see now we’re not getting anywhere trying to work with the police here so that’s my bottom line: seeking out the DOJ to try and take a look at what’s going on in the city.”

“At least you can create some noise and force them to sit with you. And we have been doing that.”

—John Jairo Lugo, co-founder of ULA open-door policy, there was also a clear sense of disillusionment in the room with the police department, and in particular the promise of community policing.

Because New Haven is a city that prides itself on community policing.

Starting in the 1990s, under Chief Nicholas Pastore, New Haven’s police department became a pioneer nationwide in developing and instituting a model of community policing. Commitment to this model waned in subsequent decades, but this momentum reversed in 2011, when Mayor John DeStefano appointed Dean Esserman as police chief. Esserman had helped Pastore design the original community policing model back when he served as assistant chief, from 1991 to 1993. As chief, Esserman put theory to practice, assigning more officers to walk the beat, starting community conversation programs, and focusing on recruiting from the community. But even as Esserman was lauded nationally as a visionary in community-police relations during the turbulent years of Ferguson and beyond, his temperamental personality—and a few widely publicized gaffes, one involving Michelle Obama’s Secret Service—led many in New Haven to call for his dismissal. In July, Mayor Harp placed Esserman on leave, and he resigned in September. Esserman’s deputy, former Assistant Chief Anthony Campbell, is now serving as interim chief. With new leadership to arrive soon, New Haven residents inside and outside of the department are thinking critically about the current status of community policing in the city and how it might improve in the future.

TO UNDERSTAND WHAT “GOOD” COMMUNITY POLICING COULD LOOK LIKE in New Haven, it’s perhaps instructive to look at an example of what community policing is not. And you only need to look a few years back and one town over— in East Haven—to see a textbook example of police-community relations gone wrong.

Reverend James Manship is the pastor of St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church in Fair Haven, a white guy who preaches in second-language Spanish to predominantly Latino parishioners. In 2008, Manship began to hear an increasing number of accounts of discriminatory abuse that his Latino parishioners suffered at the hands of East Haven police. Although Manship’s parish church is in the Fair Haven neighborhood, in New Haven, a few of his parishioners are from East Haven, and many of his Fair Haven parishioners work and shop in the town, or pass through on their way to housecleaning jobs

14 – The Yale Herald

WHAT IS GOING ON IN THE CITY? THE JURY IS STILL OUT ON HOW WELL community policing is working in New Haven. John Jairo Lugo, one of the founders of the grassroots immigrants’ and workers’ rights group Unidad Latina en Acción (ULA), believes that the NHPD is more receptive than departments in surrounding cities: “At least you can create some noise and force them to sit with you. And we have been doing that.” As a community organizer, Lugo said he has received support from the police department’s high administration. But, he said, that support doesn’t necessarily translate into a change of behavior by officers on the ground.

Luiz Casanova, assistant chief of the NHPD in charge of the Professional Standards and Trainings Bureau, agreed that this inconsistency—“where the top’s talking about it, but the cops are not doing it”—has plagued the department in the past: “you can’t just assume that because you’re teaching it, you’re training it, that they’re doing it.”

The discrepancy between administrative cooperation and on-the-ground recalcitrance has consequences that Lugo has suffered personally. This summer,

because of a family illness in Colombia, he missed a court date for an incident in which he was ticketed for protesting without a permit. He tried to reschedule the trial, but at another protest in New Haven, officers confronted him, saying they had a rearrest warrant. After Lugo argued with them, the officers tried to grab him. “They threw me on the floor. I got arrested, and I spent the entire night in jail. So that’s my experience with community policing.”

Lugo and other members of ULA joined Fair and Tucker at City Hall on Wednesday. In a written list of demands for Mayor Harp, the protesters asked that—in addition to removing the officers involved in Tucker’s arrest—Harp ensure that “officers involved in continuing to harass and arrest our friend, John Lugo, be disciplined.” The letter also advocated for a civilian review board with subpoena power.

The importance of feedback from the community is paramount to Casanova.

Although he manages the Internal Affairs Division, he believes that “the best check of all is not the internal check, [but] the external check, when the community is feeling that we’re doing community-based policing.” He hoped that Mayor Harp would take that notion to heart and bring in, as the next chief, “someone who believes that the community must, must, be on the police agenda.”

As New Haven looks forward to a new chief, many residents—activists and officers alike—look back on an old one as a model: Pastore. Casanova said that he was “masterful” when it came to the community-based model. Even Barbara Fair agreed, remarking, “Under former Chief Pastore there was true community policing.”

People speak of Pastore with a sense of awe and appreciation that he would not have predicted when he first began to implement his policies. I met him at his family business, an auto repair shop called The Car E.R. He stressed the opposition he faced from a department he depicted as militaristic: “There was no thinking to better socialize the industry of policing. What they were concerned about was buying tanks, helicopters, and more guns too. And that’s a sign of being a coward.” Pastore believes that a Mafia-like system of “inherent corruption” dominated the department at the time, and that officers felt “threatened” by his plans to upset that system.

But the political upheaval that Pastore remembers is not what he is remembered for. Instead, it is his smaller acts of kindness and outreach. As Fair put it, “he’s the kind of chief who would have been standing on the corner talking to the guys. Somebody might be hungry, they’ll buy him a slice of pizza.

All that kind of stuff. And then he might have officers who’d be playing ball with the kids or something.”

“He believed in helping folks,” said Casanova. “And so do we.”

But Fair, and those who joined her on the steps of City Hall, do not see that belief put into practice. Fair noted that many officers do not even live within the city limits, and as a result, the city’s claims to community policing are false.

“There’s no community policing here,” she said. “It’s just been on paper and in words.”

incident. Harp listened quietly, asking questions from time to time: “You were out of the car here?” “Did she say why they wanted you to—I mean, when it escalated, why?”

After watching the video, Harp promised to meet with the interim chief to follow up on Tucker’s case, and pledged to use executive order to start a civilian review board. She listened to John Jairo Lugo’s arrest situation. “Andrea has all your information? Okay, I will look into that. I’ll talk to the state’s attorneys.”

The next day, I asked Tucker what she thought of the mayor’s response. “I don’t know. I’m trying to put faith in her,” she said. “You know, they get a slap on the wrist, the police officers. So, I just—I don’t know until she does something.”

“HELLO, WE HAVE A LETTER TO DELIVER TO YOU,” SAID FAIR. After half an hour of waiting outside of the mayor’s office, a door had swung open, and Mayor Harp had emerged.

“Okay,” said Harp, taking the envelopes.

“You people lie so much,” one of the protesters muttered, about claims the staff had made that Harp was not in the building. “Don’t even,” said Fair before pressing on to announce to Harp their first demand, the removal of the officers who pulled her daughter from the car.

“Well, why don’t you tell me your side?” said Harp, to Tucker. “I’ve heard the other side.” (New Haven police have not commented publicly on the incident, since it is still under investigation.)

“I’ve told so many times—I know they told you,” said Tucker. The other activists encouraged her: “Come on, Holly, just the basic story.” Tucker sighed, fighting back tears. “My heart is racing, and I haven’t even told the story. I’m tired of telling the story.” The other activists jumped in to fill Tucker’s silence.

But after some time, Tucker said “let me show you,” and pulled out the video she taped of the officer interaction on her phone. She walked Harp through the

Graphic by Haewon Ma YH Staff

Sept. 30, 2016 – 15

FEATURES

Wrong side of paradise

Emma Chanen, BK ’19, reflects on last year and thinks about “tomorrow”

I

n the musical Annie, the eponymous curly-haired ginger protagonist walks into a rich man’s mansion and begins to sing “I Think I’m Gonna Like It Here.”

Walking into the Timothy Dwight courtyard on the first day of my freshman year at Yale, I resisted the urge to break out into Annie’s song. I did, however, in all my own curly-haired gingerhood, think I was going to like it there. The courtyard—lit by the sun and the many friendly faces of TD—perfectly embodied the manicured idealism of the East Coast I had envisioned.

With the white pillared dining hall and tall white clock tower, TD represented a culture that I only vaguely understood but had longed to be a part of. The tall gingko tree in the center of the lower courtyard mirrored the green of the shuttered windows, which remain forever open—a relic of colonial architecture, there for show rather than function.

16 – The Yale Herald

Joining the TD community meant leaving my crunchy, clog-wearing, Reconstructionist Jews of Evanston, Illinois, the Portland of the Midwest where even parents love indie rock and the plentiful coffee is always fair trade. But, as an American history nerd, sweater vest enthusiast, and avid to-do list keeper, the East—buzzy and busy, steeped in history with endless American intrigue woven into its social fabric— appealed to me. I wanted a peek into the Warbucks mansion, the Old Boys’ Ivy League club that somehow still manages to maintain its smoothly paved inroads into American society.

THERE WERE MANY TIMOTHY DWIGHTS. THE TWO FOR whom the residential college was named were Timothy Dwights IV and V, both presidents of Yale College.

The Dwight family tree includes a Jonathan Edwards

branch, a Woolsey branch, and Kevin Bacon (a hilarious validation of the “Six degrees of Kevin Bacon” theory). The Dwight family papers include letters from “Your friend etc.” E. Whitney and “Your most obedient & humble servant” G. Washington.

When I ordered the boxes for my assigned archival research essay, I had no sense of what would be in them. Frederick Dwight, one of many Yale men buried within the folds of the Dwight family, left behind several thick leather-bound journals that I was lucky enough to stumble upon. “Anecdotes of F. Dwight 1930”is embossed in gold along the spine. Frederick’s anecdotes for me, an outsider, were thrilling. I read through hundreds of neatly typed, dandelion colored pages, hoping to find something about his connection to the university; instead, I found the far more interesting chronicle of his life as a wealthy well-connected man in New York in the 1920s

and 30s. To Frederick, if you weren’t a “Yale Man” or a “Harvard Man” then you were a “Princeton Man” or a maybe “Williams Man,” and if you weren’t any of those then you weren’t anyone at all.

Fred casually interacted with wealth and power. His friend Evelyn Fox owned a string of beads that she later discovered had been a gift from Napoleon to Josephine.

Evelyn, Frederick nonchalantly notes, sold the beads to Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan for sixty thousand dollars. His mother’s friends foolishly passed on the opportunity to buy for ten dollars a painting that later sold to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for three thousand. Frederick’s anecdotes frequently begin at the University Club or Union League Club or with his friend Jack Mather. In the quiet of the Manuscripts and Archives library, I found giggle-inducing entries like: “Last week I was a delegate to the Tenth General Congress of the Society of Mayflower Descendants, held at Plymouth, Massachusetts.” Frederick opposed Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency, “considering him to be the emptiest and most inadequate candidate ever put forward for so high an office by one of the major parties during my lifetime.” In this, Freddy revealed the invisible C in WASP that so directly opposes my own upbringing: conservative. His rotating cast of characters included colorful names—Miss Ethel Du Bois, Miss Evelyn Fox, Eleanor Taylor, Rufus Cowing, and George Bartholomew—that still managed to highlight how blindingly vanilla his existence was. On December 16, 1923, he wrote, “The other day, when I dropped in to see Mother, Antoinette, at Mother’s suggestion, narrated an amusing anecdote of Miss Irene Bigelow which illustrates in a striking manner the kind of people one is likely at any time to encounter in this vast and heterogeneous city”—going on to describe her wild experiences paying little “street urchins” to find taxis for her. Frederick somehow managed to live a vastly homogeneous life within his vast and heterogeneous city.

Making friends with Frederick Dwight allowed me some insight into the high society of the East Coast that had long fascinated me. I had always thought that I had an East Coast personality. My type ‘A,’ go getter attitude, I thought, suited me well to the East Coast culture I imagined—its pace, its values, its rich, dramatic history and aggressive intellectualism—the one represented by Gilmore Girls and Fitzgerald’s stories. Between Fred’s obsession with antiques and the historic plaques on the walls of TD suites, though, I realized that more than anything, what often characterizes the East Coast ethos is a reverence for the old, an obsession with an America frozen within the clutches of wealthy white families. It’s the reason almost every sweatshirt, coffee mug, and golf ball that blares “Yale” in the school’s custom typeface also boasts “1701” like a badge of honor. You’re never fully dressed without a smile or the year your school was established, apparently. This wouldn’t be a problem if the cult of antique Americana didn’t directly oppose an environment of innovation and evolution, of change.

ferent from the Yale of 1935 as it should be.

I thought I would like the traditionalism of the Ivy League. I thought I would appreciate its reverence for the past and connection to history. I thought I would enjoy the legacy of the powerful families and acute Americana that surrounds the institution.

And I suppose I enjoyed my peek into the life of Frederick Dwight and the culture of East Coasters the way I enjoyed watching Gilmore Girls. Walking into the dining hall, though, I’m grateful that it doesn’t look like the photo I found—that I’m not standing in a maid’s uniform serving the food—because it means, though it may be hard, change is possible. In the year since I considered singing the soundtrack of Annie, the concept of the East has been de-romanticized for me. I do like it here. But not in the same way I thought I would. I like it because I have the chance to change it, to improve it.

Frederick Dwight’s papers amused me, and the alien world he so vividly establishes—one where his friends share the names of Yale’s buildings—still captivates me.

I still sit under Timothy Dwight’s bright yellow gingko tree, which predates the college itself and appears in all of the old archival photos in shades of gray rather than green and yellow. It would be nice if Yale were more like the gingko, shedding its leaves entirely and committing to growing new ones.

WHEN I HEAD BACK TO THE DINING HALL IN TD, AT YALE, IN CONNECTICUT, ON the East Coast of the United States, I feel more Midwestern than I ever did at home, not just because the plate in front of me is flooded with Ranch dressing or my chilled feet sit snugly in my clogs. I feel proudly Midwestern because more than I’m type A or driven or fast-talking, I’m committed to change and inspired by the students working to radically change an institution that has, since its founding in good ole 1701, evolved at a glacial pace. Looking at Frederick’s cozy life in the arms of his elite privilege, I’d rather pledge allegiance to the hard knock life.

OVER THE COURSE OF LAST YEAR, MY FIRST ON CAMPUS, AN EMAIL FROM AN Associate Master (the dated and confusing title for the spouse of a head of house) condoned cultural appropriation and a fraternity member manning the door at a Halloween party declared “white girls only.” The fire that was sparked still burns across campus, but it is challenging to change an institution so warped by tradition. Everything must be sent to the Yale Corporation, wrapped tightly in sticky red tape, and stacked on top of other ignored requests for change.

In the wake of the reminder that Yale may not be so inclusive a place as it would like to believe, Timothy Dwight’s female Head of College and female dean started a reading group devoted to authors of color and other marginalized perspectives. The discussions were held in the dining hall.

Many of the photos I came across in my research were of the dining hall. It looks exactly the same, with the dark wood beams and high windows. The one notable difference are the diners themselves. In the dated photographs, young, white men in sport coats and dinner jackets line the wooden tables. The only women in the room wear black and white serving uniforms. This is not surprising. It is, though, fascinating to peek into the Yale of old as I get to know the Yale of today. In the photo, the old boys, the company of scholars, society of friends—the Yale men—sit with white cloth napkins and toast the new Timothy Dwight College on October 25, 1935. Though last August I sat with women and men in shorts and t-shirts and toasted the Timothy Dwight Class of 2019, I couldn’t help but believe that the Yale I see now isn’t as dif-

Graphic by Rachel An YH Staff Sep. 30, 2016 – 17

Museum of the present

CULTURE Chewing the fat

by Sanoja Bhaumik

by Phoebe Chatfield A Stiles Tea this Tuesday given by journalist Richard Marosi was the first in an annual fall series called Chewing the Fat. Unlike in past years, however, this year’s series is hosted not only by the Yale Sustainable Food Program, but also by the newly created Yale Center for Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration (RITM). The series will focus on “the intersection of Racial Justice and Food” and will highlight those who are working at the nexus of these two interconnected issues.

Stiles Head Stephen Pitti, who also serves as the Founder Director for RITM, hosted nearly sixty students and community members in the Stiles House on Tuesday afternoon for the tea with Marosi. He opened the conversation with Marosi, and thoughtfully moderated throughout.

Marosi was an interesting pick to launch this fall’s series. Long-time journalist for the LA Times, he’s best known for his work on government corruption and US-Mexico border issues. The way he tells it, Marosi fell into investigative journalism almost unintentionally when he was drawn in by outrage of various stories in LA County, and then sent down to Mexico to report on the drug war of the early 2000s. Marosi seems to be a natural storyteller, and throughout the tea launched into many tales of his adventures on the border.

While all border issues are tied up with agriculture, Marosi’s work that is most tied to food issues is his 2014 series on Mexican farm laborers, which made him a Pulitzer Prize finalist. In four stories, Marosi depicts the dangerous and degrading conditions faced by laborers in the farm industry in Mexico, and traces their produce to the United States. At Yale, he explained that the tie to US consumers was what made the story so compelling to print, because it meant that his audience was physically connected, through the act of eating, to his subject matter.

As the tea progressed we continued to explore this question of what makes a compelling story, and Marosi’s journalistic process. Stories must expose “something new,” Marosi repeated, and also must humanize an issue while portraying it accurately. Often researching contentions issues, and doing his own investigative work has brought Marosi in contact with an enormous range of people, from smugglers in Tihuana to ICE officials, whose trust he must win over in order to hear their stories.

A journalistic culture of story-seeking and impartiality pervaded Marosi’s language. When asked about his opinion on the Syrian refugee crisis, and the parallels it has to the migration he’s witnessed, he

quipped that he “shies away from opinions,” and commented on the complexity of the situation rather than offering any particular analysis. When writing about border issues, which have become so partisan and politicised this election - as Marosi mentioned despairingly with a number of allusions to Trump - nearly any statement that one could make about the border could be deemed a political statement. I wonder if the need for a semblance of journalistic impartiality has been limiting for Marosi; certainly his commentary tended towards individual narratives rather than systematic analysis.

Those gathered for the tea seemed to range in their reactions to Marosi. Many asked inquisitive questions about his process and experiences, some of which were not fully answered. One student asked about the examples of resistance or attempts to unionize he had encountered among laborers, and another asked how Marosi avoided voyeurism when writing about people with much less social and economic privilege than himself, neither of which Marosi responded substantially. Marosi was also quick to generalize about Mexico, recounting a tale of a dangerous city he had visited, overrun with drug cartels, and then generalizing by saying that “large swaths of Mexico” are completely lawless. Stephen Pitti interjected during the talk to say that the United States also struggles to enforce worker laws, perhaps gesturing to recurring problems of wage theft right here in New Haven. His interjection responded to a general sense among some that I spoke with at the talk that Marosi’s detached and absolute cynicism about Mexico was reductive, and did not adequately encompass the culpability of the United States in these complex issues.

More than that, he repeatedly referred to drug cartels as savages, a word whose loaded racial history made it an uncomfortable choice for some who listened.

Despite the sometimes jarring language of Marosi’s talk, his work to expose labor and border issues has been groundbreaking, and it would have been hard not to come away with a new perspective on investigative journalism. As the Chewing the Fat Series continues, we will continue to hear from impressive speakers, many of whom will be addressing their work without the need to be “opinion-less.” Later this week, writer Michael Twitty spoke about culinary justice and the many intersecting histories of food and race in the United States.

“Museums can connect the radical past with the radical present.” Anne Pasternak, director of the Brooklyn Museum, believes that museums can play a crucial role in current conversations of social justice. By showcasing historic collections in new settings, they serve as the meeting point of different times, cultures, and beliefs.

On Wed., Sept. 28, Pasternak spoke at the Yale Law School in a talk organized by the Schell Center for Human Rights’ JUNCTURE Initiative, which explores the intersection of art and human rights. Held in a small YLS lecture room, the event consisted of a short presentation by Pasternak followed by a conversation led by David Kim, JUNCTURE’s deputy director. The talk attracted a diverse crowd: law students, undergraduates, and Connecticut residents, as well as representatives from the Yale Center for British Art and the Yale University Art Gallery.

During the presentation, Pasternak drew from her experience as former director of Creative Time, an arts nonprofit based in New York, where she worked closely with artists to create public works that “disrupted the everyday experience.” Prominent commissions included Tribute in Light, by Julian Laverdiere and Paul Myoda, in which two beams of light shine upwards on the anniversary of 9/11 to commemorate lives lost. Pasternak placed the piece in the broader context of activist art by comparing it to the work of Laurie Jo Reynolds, whose “legislative art” works towards policy goals.

In her current role, Pasternak manages a 1.5 million-object collection drawing from of a range of time periods and civilizations. Located in Crown Heights, New York’s second-largest museum stands out from its peers because of its distance from 5th Avenue. Pasternak has faced challenges running an encyclopedic museum within a low-income, rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. “I be-

lieve that the Brooklyn Museum’s location is an opportunity,” said Pasternak.

The museum actively partners with community organizations, surrounding public schools that lack art programs, and other public institutions in Brooklyn.

She also suggested that visitors at the Brooklyn Museum search for a bolder experience to reflect the atypical setting.

Visitors encounter Egyptian relics and a Center for Feminist Art within the same building; recent exhibits include Who Shot Sports: A Photographic History, Agitprop, and Isreal & The West Bank.

Pasternak has encouraged the museum to rethink its collection and find new ways to tell stories. A revamped American Gallery begins with a focus on indigenous artwork and considers “who an American really is.” Rather than portray American exceptionalism, the new permanent exhibit considers both tragedies and triumphs within American history and depicts a more diverse array of Americans with portraits of women, people of color, and indigenous peoples throughout.

The changes, while not particularly radical in Pasternak’s view, mark a large shift in the institutional display of American history. They have not come without controversy; a recent article in the Wall Street Journal criticized the exhibit for being “sabotaged by political polemics” and seeming “perversely fixated on what’s wrong with our country’s past.”

In her presentation, Pasternak explained that museums, while temples of artifact, have a public responsibility to serve as a forum for debate about the representation of history, art, and people. By mediating conversation through objects, museums can embrace their roles as civic spaces for a diverse assembly of voices.

As Pasternak herself put it: “If museums can’t tell truthful stories, what good are they?”

Graphic by Julia Hedges YH Staff Graphic by Jason Hu YH Staff 18 – The Yale Herald

Mmmmingling

by Janine Comrie

Y

ale students are no strangers to networking. We love adding people to panlists, emailing alumni, and LinkedIn (god help us)—but professional chef Wheeler del Toro has a much simpler model for networking: meeting people.

There’s no better way to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month than by connecting with new people over the bright, tasty flavors of Latin-American dishes. That must have been the thought of renowned Cuban-born Chef Wheeler del Torro, anyway, as he joined Yale to celebrate Hispanic heritage this week by bringing his Latin-American-themed popup restaurant, El Barrio, to the Soul de Cuba Café in New Haven on September 26.

The event offered Yale students the opportunity to interact with professors, faculty and alumni in a more personal way than the typical Yale email exchange would allow and is one of a few stops on del Torro’s tour of East Coast universities.

Chef del Torro is not only a chef, but also considers himself a food and nutrition anthropologist. He is especially interested in the role food plays as people build interpersonal relationships. Throughout his studies, he has noted how food has become, among many minority communities, a means of retaining one’s culture and maintaining its vitality across generations even while many families live far from their countries of origin. Chef del Torro believes that food, as an expression of culture, allows people to feed their loved ones not only in a physical sense, but with emotional support and comfort.

“Preservation of culture through food was vital in the face of extreme hardships from slavery onward,” Chef del Torro notes on his website. “Gathering family and communities around the kitchen table was a way of coalescing

strength and lending support, often pairing the sharing of literal nourishment with that of stories and advice.”

Chef del Torro has extended the application of his research on food and relationships to the realm of business networking, which was how his tour of university mixers came about. He explained at the Yale event how people often perceive business networking opportunities to be beneficial but exclusionary, especially with regards to the underrepresentation of people of color at these events.

“Traditionally, people of color don’t find a lot of diversity at business networking events. They know it is a valuable resource, but they feel as if they do not belong and as if this resource is not accessible to them,” del Torro explained.

By featuring soul foods that evoke the character of different cultures and personal experiences, Chef del Torro’s mixers offer an environment in which people (especially people of color) can feel comfortable and emboldened to participate in business networking.

In keeping with his commitment to personal connections, Chef del Torro believes modern modes of communication and social media further deter people from connecting on a more personal level. His popup restaurants provide intimate contexts in which people can free themselves from the robotic burden of digital networking and indulge in face to face connection.

Those present at the Yale mixer said they were at first attracted to the event by the sound of the delicious foods that would be served. As the evening went on, people talked and mingled—carrying out del Torro’s dream of how the night would be.

The owner of the Soul de Cuba Café, Jesus Puerto, is a busy man himself in the food world. “[Lately] I have been working with the Peace Corps in Hawaii to build an

international relationship between Hawaii and Cuba. We are trying to get the islands to collaborate on the issues of island conservation and sustainability,” Puerto explained.

Puerto also came to the event to share with others the story of his restaurant, inspired by the traditions of his family and their influence in advancing the Cuban revolution for independence. “My manager called me and told me, ‘Hey, you’ve got to come here for this event we’re having!’ And so here I am.”

Puerto’s restaurant proved the perfect setting for Chef del Torro’s networking event celebrating Hispanic heritage.

Chef del Torro served versions of Cuban classics, such as tostones and Cuban sandwiches, along with dishes from other cuisines that incorporated Cuban flavors, such as a flavorful meatball dish. He is constantly redefining classic comfort foods, including those of the American South and Asia, to offer new, more nutritional versions for people to share.

Though Chef del Torro will continue onto other universities in the area, he hopes to return to Yale in the future to celebrate Black History Month and to continue supporting university students in their endeavors to build more enriching professional relationships. For him, cooking up strong relationships is a worthy endeavor.

Graphic by Jason Hu YH Staff

Sep. 30, 2016 – 19

REVIEWS Schmilco’s wide, unsettling smiles

by Noah Silvestry

L

et’s talk about Harry Nilsson. The American Beatle.

The pop-rock star of an era when pop and rock were all but synonymous. That Midnight Cowboy voice echoing ever westward on the only version of Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin’” you’ve ever heard. The figure who stands dazed and unshaven, slouched lazily in a bathrobe and grasping a pipe, on the cover of the 1971 LP that would define his career, Nilsson Schmilsson. Schmilsson’s 10 tracks are jovial, temporal, and hooky as all hell, earning their author four Grammy nominations and holding fast to their prime Billboard spots even after Schmilsson’s successor, Son of Schmilsson was released a year later.

Which brings us to Wilco. The American Radiohead. Altrock stars of an era when rock is dead and alt garners neither fame nor fortune. And, most pertinently, progenitors of Schmilco, the lulziest tip-of-the-hat to the late, great Nilsson the music world may ever see. But irreverent titling is just about where the tribute ends. Schmilco comes at a different point in Wilco’s career than Schmilsson did in Nilsson’s: Schmilsson was a breakthrough, whereas Wilco, with nine avant-Schmilco full-lengths, six of which Grammy-nominated, are a band already broken-in. Schmilco won’t define Wilco’s career.

As with any band with a catalogue so hallowed as Wilco’s, critics have greeted their latest with a reflexive but ultimately apathetic reverence; Schmilco is good (what else is new?), but not genre-bending or politically uplifting enough to slap on more than the usual adjectives—introspective, understated, warm, personal. But since when does every release from our favorite bands have to gaze nobly toward the future for it to matter? In fact, it is Schmilco’s retrospection that, to my ear, earns it a spot among Wilco’s finest and most sensitive works.

Before I move on, let’s be clear about one thing: I am a Wilco superfan. Every time I write about Wilco, I pose the following question about critical journalistic integrity: “How do you write about your favorite band?” It’s tough when the following things are true: I have seen more Wilco concerts

(it’s a figure upwards of 50 at this point) than I have any other band; I own somewhere between 20 and 30 Wilco t-shirts and their entire discography on vinyl (an accolade Wilco shares with Radiohead alone); I have made a mixtape entirely of Wilco love songs (which you should do if, and only if, your significant other is as maniacal a Wilco fan as you); my parents attended a Wilco concert on Valentine’s Day, 1997, just two months before I was born. If frontman Jeff Tweedy “was tamed by rock and roll,” as he sings on “Sunken Treasure” (Being There), then I was tamed by Wilco.

My favorite Wilco record? A Ghost Is Born. It’s not my favorite because it won the Grammy, nor am I fetishistically intrigued by its focus, period of Tweedy’s life marred by anxiety, drug addiction, and, eventually, rehab. I love A Ghost Is Born because it represents Tweedy at his most honest—he takes all of the album’s guitar solos, one of which he described as a “musical transcription” of a panic attack—and a band that had begun to find its sound (the tour following its release was the first to feature Wilco’s current lineup).

Schmilco too owes its identity more to Tweedy (the man) than it does to Wilco (the band); in this way, it recalls the intimacy of A Ghost Is Born. Gone are drummer Glen Kotche’s bold beats and Nels Cline’s cochlea-melting guitar solos, and in their place is a half-wry uneasiness sculpted, no doubt,

by Wilco as an ensemble, but born of Tweedy’s mind alone.

“Normal American Kids” kicks off the record with the sound of a weathered acoustic guitar played in a bedroom, small and far away, soon joined by the trembling voice of a Tweedy steeped deep in his thoughts. He recalls a childhood of isolation and languor, and a hatred of “normal,” while an electric guitar meanders nervously through the changes. Schmilco brims with these sorts of musings on youth. On “If I Ever Was A Child,” Tweedy laments, “I hunt for the kind of pain I can take / I never was alone / Long enough to know / If I ever was a child.” The music itself reminds me of the quaint buoyancy of Wilco’s Be-

ing There and Summerteeth days, but the Tweedy who was then an alt-country up-and-comer sings now from the perspective of an artist once agonized, now revered.

That melancholy is directed at Tweedy’s late mother, JoAnn, on songs like “Happiness”: “I know the dead still listen / She sings a part of every refrain,” and later, “So sad it’s nothing / Happiness depends on who you blame.”

The next track, “Quarters,” is even more of an elegy. “The tavern where you worked / Was cold and dark as a cavern,” Tweedy sings, “They’d ask you, ‘Who’s he?’ / Behind a glass without a glance / ‘My daughter’s boy,’ you would say.”

But not all of Schmilco is reminiscent. “Locator” is a song distinctly of the 21st century: satellites! internet privacy! synthesizers! Its soundscape—coupled with “Common Sense,” on which dissonant lead guitar tones rub up against each other like broken bones on rough metal — recalls the same nagging anxiety heard on Tweedy’s A Ghost Is Born guitar solos. Other tracks are downright referential; no Wilco album would be complete without a nod to the assertive guitar lines of Big Star, as heard on “Someone to Lose,” or to the bubbly strut of George Harrison’s solo work that informs Schmilco’s cheekiest tune, “Nope.”

Schmilco feels spontaneous. On most tracks, Tweedy’s distant guitar and timid vocals are joined, hesitantly at first, by the rest of the band, as if playing the music for the first time, recorded hastily to tape, the sound of the room left untouched. Tweedy & co. are playing sad songs indeed, but with tongues in cheeks and thumbs on noses.

Schmilco’s essence is encapsulated by its cover art, designed by celebrated Spanish cartoonist Joan Cornellà. It’s a comic strip depicting a man in a suit and tie using his body to conduct electricity to a turntable as a young girl dances. Both wear wide, unsettling smiles as smoke gushes from the man’s hair, blood from his nose. Schmilco is like those uncanny grins: merry, even dance-worthy, at first encounter, but underscored by a dark, burning anguish.

Image courtesy of dBpm

20 – The Yale Herald

Film: Fish Tank

U

Music: “Really Doe”

D

anny Brown was just seven when N.W.A. dropped their landmark “Straight Outta Compton.” Outfitted with lyrics too profane for radio, a sound sharper than a switchblade, and a gangster image now so iconic as to seem banal, the West Coast rap septet readily gained a devoted following. At first, no one sounded quite like them; soon, no one could afford not to.

In “Really Doe,” Danny Brown’s just-released single from his upcoming album Atrocity Exhibition, Brown harkens back to the early days of hip-hop. What results is neither original nor trite. Instead, Brown has created a mix of moving parts that, assembled by an unlikely quartet, succeeds as a season-defining single.

“Really Doe” assembles an N.W.A.-style crew for a good ol’ posse track. Its star-spangled cast—Kendrick Lamar, Ab-Soul, Earl Sweatshirt, and producer Black Milk—nostalgically revives the gangster rap launched way back in suburban 1980s L.A. The track kicks off with a drum sample lifted from N.W.A., a stomp-your-feet and bat-yourhead rhythm haunted from above by the unsettling lilt of wind chimes. The effect is ghostly, like a midnight adventure through a graveyard. A repeating snare-kickdrum combo carries the song, echoing with the angry beatings of a human heart.

The track succeeds on sparse production—a less-is-more counterweight to the chart-topping maximalism of Kanye West and K-Dot. It’s dark, almost sinister, without being heavy. Like Pusha T, the Kanye protégée whose 2013 My Name is My Name collected the ingredients of his mentor’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy to concoct something distinct, Brown borrows from the unpretentious archives of Nas and Ghostface Killah to create something uniquely his own.

The product is a mesmerizing whirlwind of braggadocio checkered with self-doubt. “They say I got the city on fire,” Kendrick blasts on the hook, which he wrote. Brown, meanwhile, wonders about the onset of fame. “I done made it out the hood / Think I’m goin’ back?” He replies: “I wish a motherfucker would.”

Like any posse cut, “Really Doe” banks on the quality of the featured company. Each rapper delivers: Ab-Soul stuffs uptempo bars on gang relations and drug use into a verse bursting with contented quasi-aggrandizement; Kendrick deploys his renowned knack for wordsmithery on restless meters sure to please fans old and new; Earl Sweatshirt closes the record with a joke (“I’m at your house like, ‘Why you got your couch on my Chucks?’”) masked by his steely cadence.

The gang on “Really Doe” isn’t N.W.A., despite an earnest effort. Brown does, however, succeed in summoning something old and storied: a classic form making a twenty-first century comeback.

-Graham Ambrose

ncompromising from the start, seventeen-year-old Katie Jarvis refused to believe that the woman asking her for her phone number at Tilbury Town railway station was a casting agent for British filmmaker Andrea Arnold’s 2009 drama, Fish Tank. Jarvis had never been in a movie, never been on a film set, never even acted in a school play. So when she was interrupted during the middle of an argument with her then-boyfriend to be asked to audition, we can imagine her response. While we don’t know exactly what Jarvis told the casting agent, if she is at all like the character she portrays, Mia, the response probably consisted of an “Essex Good Morning”: fuck off.

Unfurling over an undetermined amount of time, Fish Tank tracks the exploits of Mia Williams, the pugnacious fifteen-year old daughter of a single mother. The first half of the film lacks any kind of obvious plot. Instead, people and events filter through, their inconsistency and transience reflecting the unpredictability of Mia’s life. But then Connor (Michael Fassbender) shows up. For at least a little while, Connor affects the qualities of the ideal father figure, bringing to the Williams’s home a greater sense of structure and a masculine presence.

Though not quite a dad, Connor manages to demonstrate all the superficial aspects of fatherhood without conveying any kind of basic love for Mia or her sister. He feigns reluctance when giving her extra lunch money. He takes her out on joy rides. He cleans her cuts and tells her to be more careful. And in an extremely ominous scene, he even undresses and puts her to bed after she’s come home drunk. Connor’s performance of the role of adopted father is, finally, just that: a performance.

This much becomes clear in a climactic scene in the darkness of the Williams’s living room. Lit only by the headlights of nearby parked car, Connor and Mia shed the roles of father and daughter to engage in a painfully foreseeable tryst. In a moment so full of repulsiveness, it’s a combination of Arnold’s careful direction and the nuanced performances from her lead actors that the scene transcends being a predictable twist. On one level, Arnold demonstrates the horrendous implications of an older man preying on a younger woman. But on another, more wrenching level, Arnold depicts Mia’s conflation of the love of a father with that of a lecher—an example not so much of Mia’s ignorance, but of Connor’s perverse villainy.

Free from the frills that may have come from a larger budget film, Arnold’s art relies instead on seductive writing and a career-defining performance to convey its harrowing portrait of poverty, femininity, and youth in contemporary Essex. Arnold’s work is as sparse as it is beautiful, a testament to the artistic worth of a simple story told simply. This Friday, her latest film—and what some critics are already calling her magnum opus—will be released. American Honey promises to be, if only because of the remarkable strength of Fish Tank, a must-watch this Fall.

-Robert Newhouse

Upper left image courtesy of Warp Bottom right image courtesy of BBC Films Sept. 30, 2016 – 21

BULLBLOG BLACKLIST the word “daddy” used by the professor in lecture

What we hate this week

five times in one class SOS

abandonment

it means I’m crazy

cry till you laugh

when you think you’re ENFJ but exhibit P tendencies the game not the place

limbo print journalism

losengers smug af show me one person a losenger really helped

I am in no mood

having a big storm coming

a bit of string

not enough to have fun with

Sep. 30, 2016 – 23