The Yale Herald Volume LXII, Number 5 New Haven, Conn. Friday, Oct. 14, 2016
FROM THE STAFF Greetings, Friday, Sept. 9, the 45th anniversary of the Attica Prison riots, marked the beginning of the largest prison strike in U.S. history. Organizers protested poor living conditions caused by mass incarceration and exploitative prison jobs. Despite the scope of the strike, it garnered little coverage in mainstream media. While issues like amnesty for drug offenders and prison overcrowding are prominent in the political conversation, many attempts to reform the criminal justice system have received little public attention. In this week’s front, Victorio Cabrera, TC ’18, sheds light on one such initiative. He follows the preparations of Yale students to start the Connecticut Bail Fund, an organization that will post bail for low-level defendants at the New Haven and York Correctional Facilities, where female defendants wait in pretrial detention. Responding to a broken system in which over half of all those in pretrial detention have been there for over 52 days, the Fund seeks to combat the systemic racial and class-based biases at the root of the problem. The discussion of race and class continues with Travis DeShong’s, BR ’19, review of how The Birth of a Nation depicts a slave revolt. Charlie Bardey, SM ’17, shares a story of how not to go to prison for underage drinking in Culture’s spread about breaking into places. Plus: Yale students hit the roads around New Haven, why the film major needs reconsideration, and Architecture of Rain. With fall break coming up, what better way to decompress than sitting down with the Herald? Enjoy yourself. You deserve it. Yours, Luke Chang Opinions Editor
The Yale Herald Volume LXII, Issue 5 New Haven, Conn. Friday, Oct. 14, 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, Matt Thekkethala The Yale Herald is a not-for-profit, non-partisan, incorporated student publication registered with the Yale College Dean’s Office. If you wish to subscribe to the Herald, please send a check payable to The Yale Herald to the address below. Receive the Herald for one semester for 40 dollars, or for the 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 Fall Break Time to go sit on a pumpkin in the last bits of the year’s sun.
Outgoing Fall Break Fall Break is three days long because the weekend doesn’t really count, and I know that you know that you won’t do any work during break and you’ll be just as stressed when you get back as you are rn :’)
Cover 12– Justice isn’t so blind after all. Victorio Cabrera, TC ’18, investigates the racial and class disparities in Connecticut prisons, and what some people are doing about it. 6–
Voices Poems by Ashia Ajani, TD ’19, and Joey Lew, BK ’17.
Opinion
Friday Silliman Tea – The Art of Urban Foraging with Dr. David Craft Silliman College 4:00 p.m.
Saturday Tango Beginner Bootcamp GPSCY 2:00 p.m.
Saturday Women’s Ice Hockey vs. McGill Ingalls Rink 2:00 p.m.
Monday Mondays at Beinecke: “British Punk at Both Ends of the Dial Beinecke Library 4:00 p.m.
8 – Don’t tell Kat Lin, MC ’18, that she’ll be selling her soul to consulting. 9 – Andrew Schmidt, TC ’18, wants to level the playing field for film majors.
Features 16 – Yale students tend to run the road more travelled. Anna Lipin, ES ’18, considers why.
Culture 18 – Catch Adam Moftah BR ’19, Charlie Bardey, SM ’16, Eve Sneider, MC ’19, Jordan Cutler-Tietjen, JE ’20, and “Sunny Turner,” FKAC ’19 in the act as they stick parts of themselves into places they don’t belong.
Reviews 20 – Explore a house torn by grief and clinging to memory with Liana van Nostrand, TD ’20, in her review of Architecture of Rain. 21 – Read up on how Olivia Burton, MC ’18, deciphers the nuances in Bon Iver’s latest release, 22, a Million. Travis DeShong, BR ’19, expresses his disappointment with The Birth of a Nation’s mediocrity. And walk the line between depressing and beautiful as Mark Shkurovich, BK ’19, parses Moses Sumney’s Lamentations. Oct. 14, 2016 – 3
CREDIT D FAIL
THE NUMBERS
Staying Hot
Index 25 days until the American Presidential
Tea
Election
Like Saint Nick after a banquet, lower temperatures are as we speak waddling towards the Have. “I’m from California or an Island territory, how should I prepare?” Well, for us locals, the solution has been in our hands all along. Nope, not talking about wool (Who do I look like, your earnest, pastoral dad?). Tea is the name of the game here. Any kind will keep your innards warm, just know that if you drink it caffeinated, you might end up jonesing for some ‘feine like my roommate Lukas Cox. Seriously, email him about his addiction. Additional merits of tea? Black Coffee tastes like shit, even if you say it doesn’t. If you put milk in your joe, the combination tastes and smells great, but it hasn’t been hip ever since up-and-coming savage Paul Simon talked about “coffee and cigarettes” on his mixtape Bookends. Just like my grandmother who lives in Lincoln Park! Remember, if you decide to introduce yourself to the curly haired girl in your HU gut who wears what you inaccurately assume to be gardening shoes—do as follows: Nix bean, pour in the green. Just promise me you all won’t swarm the bag rack in the BK dining hall, since, you know, your boy needs to stay hot this winter too. Speaking of:
1 Billion
perceived length, in days, of this election cycle
102
runtime, in minutes, of the movie Election, which, unlike the presidential election, has inspired joy, laughter, and deep thought
45 Trump’s lead, in percentage points, according to all polls everywhere
7 times a day I shout to the heavens,
“Please, please make it stop! Having so much liberty shouldn’t feel this hard!”
Being Cool
Sources: 1) 270towin.com, 2) a giant hourglass in my mind, 3) IMDb, 4) N/A, 5) Me
This directive is required reading for my own demographic, the blanc bois. The best way to be hot has always been to be cool, and in today’s salty age, to be cool is to be ironic. For social reasons, make it known that you have frankincense in your bathroom, even though you’re an atheist. Put the picture in even sharper focus by referring to yourself as “your boy.” (Also accepted: ya boi, cha boy, chai boy). By ironically invoking the third person, you will dangle narcism in front of your bedazzled conversation partners, but only as an example trait that you totally disavow. (Good evening, I’d like the humble pie for one, please!!) Even if you managed to utterly compost my simple advice to drink tea instead of coffee, you can still impress others by pulling off the ironic public persona. To boot, the satisfaction from being indisputably cool will keep you warm until the ironic trip to Myrtle. Come to think of it, fuck it, consider this article my intro course on how go from loaded sadist to Yale famous. High Street, please give me good reviews in the Blue Book! Reach your boy at uncircumcizedfreeverse@hotmail.chai.
–Joe Kuperschmidt YH Staff
Top five universes worse than ours 5– 4–
– John Rosenbluth 4 – The Yale Herald
The one where your socks have tiny people living in them who charge you rent.
3–
The one where the only kinds of jokes are repeating what the person before you said in a baby voice and starting each word with schma.
2–
The one where people always think you are wearing a visor even though you aren’t and will make comments like “Nice visor!” and “Where can I get a cool visor like that?” and you have to let them down gently and tell them you aren’t wearing a visor at all.
1–
The one where our hearts look like heart emojis and are so dysfunctional that life expectancy is 35.
Forgetting Your Coat and Getting Sick Yea, my face naturally gets chapped between October and March, so fucking what? I get some Ceravé and fix it. Combat the cold with comparable vigor by not leaving outerwear in the Taft (unless you live in a former luxury hotel ironically). Otherwise, you’ll be the categorical opposite of hot once the cold sets in, and experience disappointment from your intellectual lapse. The good people at hotmail.chai will bring you soup (ironic, ik), but a crap flavor like cream of mushroom so you’ll put the kibosh on negligence in the future. In the meantime, get the frankincense and pray your cold isn’t of the superbug ilk. And of course, we can’t sleep on the issue of the coats themselves. If you replace the coat you lost with a fur one, no irony will save you, because you’ll look like a jagoff by default.
The one where the door always closes on the person behind you no matter how long you hold it open.
– Gian-Paul Bergeron YH Staff
sarah.holder@yale.edu thomas.cusano@yale.edu
rachel.strodel@yale.edu
VOICES
Counter-intuitive by Ashia Ajani He sits you on the kitchen sink Counts the opals in your mouth with his tongue Kissing your calves and sucking your kneecaps Makes love poems with his trachea and lungs He’s grown familiar with your taste He compares you to dishes of a country tantamount to a penitentiary He remembers everything Relishes every memory Your skin is an analogy for the rubble and destruction The color of olive bark Maybe he could patch it back together with enough saliva His plea is hidden within every caustic remark He tries to kiss away the bruises of occupation Of military state Of marauders and betrayal Of a land without a face Your bodies do not fit together quite right The stubble on your legs like barbwire The sharpness of his collarbone between your thighs The scars on his hands remind you of the remnants of “cease-fire” His fingers glisten His lungs are thick with carbon monoxide and flat plains Grandfathers without skin And babies without names He’s fasting Enjoys the scents of days past Thyme and sugared lemons He stopped praying but his faith is steadfast
6 – The Yale Herald
The roman floor by Joey Lew A cold and plain stone sits at the center of a Roman floor; it reprimands the once-depiction of a then-saint with its asymmetry. There is a crack in the shape of an evergreen tree. A mosaic in place of a carpet. Ars Poetica in place of a later loss of idolatry;
Pure, Pure, There is love, Geometry in the ruptures and colors of the dedicatory slab— no salve will suture stone but a beautiful relic Has suffered the stampede of centuries, and won— In the requisitioning, Two shades of red were needed: The squashed beets scraped from marketplace sandals, to be carefully aged once on stone, and the blood of a soldier, who drew shapes as he slept alone.
Graphic by Haewon Ma YH Staff Sep. 16, 2016 – 7
REVIEWS OPINION Not everyone can be the next Kubrick by Andrew Schmidt
Y
ale’s film program was recently named the 25th best in the country, according to the Hollywood Reporter’s highly anticipated annual rankings. This was a major victory for Yale’s film community, which rarely garners such high-profile praise. As a Film and Media Studies major at Yale, I was glad to see my program get such positive recognition. But the ranking also made me acutely aware of the imperfections in Yale’s approach to film studies, and especially of the financial and extracurricular burden the department places on students who wish to pursue practical filmmaking skills. The Hollywood Reporter’s description of our program reads: “If classes like World Cinema—which explores the ‘coexistence of globalization and the persistence of national identities’—are your cup of tea, then Yale is the school for you.” There is no doubt that Yale’s theory-based courses, like World Cinema, are world-class. But the film studies major is designed to favor theory over practice in such a way that makes it difficult to combine the two. For students who want experience in actually making film, the extracurricular time required to make film prevents many from ever learning how to apply the concepts that they’ve learned in class. This preference for theory over practice excludes a sizeable chunk of students from the film production community on campus, since many must pursue film production while juggling evening and weekend jobs. In turn, these students are kept out of the film industry. As a matter of personal preference, I have never loved to write exclusively about the abstract theories and terms that get bandied around film studies classrooms. For me, a better alternative has always been to make pictures and videos, and to see how new academic ideas are reflected in them. As we learn in film classes, this process of combining theory and practice is called praxis. Translating a lesson into an object, a piece, is a crucial part of the filmmaking process—
the essential idea behind every film. When Brian de Palma made Carrie (1976), he was taking Hitchcock’s lessons and applying them in a new way. When Joss Whedon made Cabin in the Woods (2011), he carefully observed many effective approaches to horror film that came before him, and he synthesized these ideas into an original horror-comedy. The Film and Media Studies program at Yale College is very excited about theory, offering courses in niche areas of practically any subject you can imagine. But the Yale College film program is not very excited about practice. This trend is apparent in other undergraduate arts programs, too. The Theater Studies department is one example—if an aspiring set or sound designer wants to take a course that focuses on the technical skills to apply design theories, they must register with a class through the School of Drama, which is not an easy process. For Art majors, any course listed as ART has to be taken through the School of Art. In these cases, at least, there’s a graduate department to provide desired skills. But that option does not exist for Film and Media Studies majors. The department offers a few courses in praxis, requirements for any film major who wants to make a thesis film, but they are focused on screenwriting—definitely not the same thing as learning about filmmaking on a set. The only resource available to students who wish to gain hands-on experience in film is the Digital Media Center for the Arts (DMCA), which offers a marvelous series of workshops taught by a rotating series of visiting artists. These workshops are the closest thing to a skills-oriented class we have at Yale. Though the artists are inspiring, they never stay for long, so there’s no reliable artist to approach with problems or questions. To pursue practical film experience, all film students are directed to Lynda.com, a useful how-to video site. Any time I have a question, I turn to Lynda for help and guidance. Over the course of my time as a Film and Media Studies major, I’ve spent countless hours watching
tutorials, going to workshops, and asking friends how to do certain tricks. Therein lies the big issue—time. Learning practical filmmaking skills has to occur on your own time—there’s little opportunity to get academic credit for gaining necessary technical abilities, like how to light a scene. So making films becomes an extracurricular, one that can take up as many hours as you have available. For some students this is feasible. But perhaps you need to start working more shifts at your student job, and suddenly being a film studies major concentrating in production conflicts with earning enough money to get by. As a Film and Media Studies major at Yale, learning the basic skills you need in order to tell the stories you feel are important can cut into your livelihood. This burden silences many voices that ought to be heard. In an industry constantly under fire for being whitewashed, for lacking diversity on the screen and behind the camera, it’s important to enable as many aspiring filmmakers as possible. Yale offers a high-quality array of theoretical, intellectual classes. And for students with a flexible schedule, Yale has some good extracurricular opportunities—the DMCA and the School of Art can provide good equipment, and groups like Bulldog Productions have been working hard to train young filmmakers. But it shouldn’t be up to students to train each other, on their own time. With such high barriers to entry, learning film production is needlessly exclusive. The film department has been making some strides to account for this disparity—just this year they created a (roundabout) way to get credit for a summer production internship. This is a positive change, but it should be only the beginning of a more accessible path to practical filmmaking skills. Many potential filmmakers are still barred from making film just because there aren’t enough hours in the day.
Graphic by YH Staff 8 – The Yale Herald
Too much disdain for Bain by Kat Lin
W
ith the temperatures dropping into a crisp October chill, a new season is upon us: recruiting season. Friends dressed in business-casual rush from one consulting event to another. According to the Yale Office of Career Strategy’s First Destination survey, 31.4 percent of the Class of 2015 entered the finance and consulting industries after graduation, and this year will undoubtedly be similar. There they go, sinking deeper and deeper into corporate culture, the bane of true intellectualism and social justice. Rather than pursue the high salaries of the banks and firms, we should “follow our heart” and do work that we’re passionate about. That’s the entire point of a Yale education, anyway, isn’t it? Not exactly. Instead of shaming people who are trying to attain financial stability or assuming they are greedy, we should recognize the privilege that underlies such judgemental stances. We have this love-hate relationship with the recruitment process. We watch acquaintances and friends land interviews, then offers, half in disdain and half in awe. Where does this disdain come from? Let’s take a step back. Why did we come to Yale in the first place? Many of us came into Yale knowing that our degree would add dollars to our salaries. How many of us really came here purely to explore our academic passions or just to change the world? The way our system is set up is contradictory to the nominal main pillars of a liberal arts education. The pressure of GPAs incentivises us not to explore intellectually. And yet it seems that we have mild existential crises whenever something is chosen for the resume-builder rather than the ideals held by people who can afford to stay starry-eyed.
Why don’t we value this kind of practicality more? To answer this question, we have to think about Yale as an institution. Historically, only the richest and financially stable of families had the chance to go to Yale. Although the inequities have been reduced to some extent, our culture and mindset still echo the time when only the most affluent could afford to send their kids to explore their academic passions. Outside of our disdain for consulting and finance, this perspective has now manifested in areas like the student contribution of financial aid and even the way we think about the objectives of our education as a luxury to be enjoyed rather than a stepping stone for better-paying jobs. We forget that Yale has been built by privileged people for privileged people. The negative stigma against consulting is really just another way in which the privilege of Yale has distorted our perception. Consulting and finance might not be the most fulfilling of jobs; allegedly, the first few years is getting cozy with Excel and Powerpoint. Still, we can’t ignore the fact that a core reason for the prevalence of consulting and finance careers is because it’s a pretty safe choice. In the end, the truth is that not everyone can afford to follow their passions and work at nonprofits. To those whose families never had the opportunities to land to high-paying jobs before Yale, it genuinely is a very smart option. Nothing gets done without capital. We can’t always ignore the fact that money is an important decision-making factor. Even nonprofits must follow the mantra “no margins, no mission,” meaning without enough money to sustain yourself any altruism or goals you have won’t be able to come to fruition. There’s another reason the financial stability of these jobs might seem appealing. We have been so swept
away by the romance of America’s individualistic values that we forget that sometimes, some of us may have families depending on us for financial support in the future. For example, children of immigrants are sometimes expected to help fund younger siblings’ college tuition and to support the family in their parents’ old age. Not everyone has the freedom to plan their lives so independently of others. Careers in consulting and finance certainly aren’t easy. One might argue that playing into the system is just as hard as doing more emotionally fulfilling work. The mental strength and stamina needed to dealing with the 80+ hour work weeks and corporate culture in all its misogyny, cutthroat competitiveness, and intense hoop-jumping. All of it comes with its own set of difficulties. To provide for yourself, your current family, or future one, you do what you have to do, and that’s an entirely reasonable move to make. Could we, perhaps, not blame people for doing something that is a relatively smart decision? Just as we wouldn’t judge people for working minimum wage jobs, we shouldn’t judge people for wanting to work high-paying jobs. So yes, perhaps the world would be a better place if more Yale alums spent their time in non-consulting, non-finance industries—but also maybe there’s something wrong with the system, if the most lucrative jobs are ones that play into “corporate greed.” Where are these world-changing and fulfilling jobs that can help us sustain families? Maybe we ought to stop blaming the individuals and instead acknowledge the core of the problem: the setup of our society incentivises financial and job security over personal fulfillment.
Graphic by YH Staff Oct. 14, 2016 – 9
Paying for freedom By Victorio Cabrera YH Staff
12 – The Yale Herald
W
ednesday, Oct. 12. Another morning at the office in Courtroom B of the Elm Street Courthouse: to the left of the white marble-walled room, the court lawyers and their support staff mingle and laugh. Their side of the room is dominated by stacks of paperwork, manila folders, and a few computers. In the center, the judge’s bench sits vacant between the flags of the United States and Connecticut. To the right, rows of chairs sit empty, waiting. Above them, an ornate plaster of Paris clock with Roman numerals ticks away the minutes. Finally, at around 11:40 a.m., accompanied by guards, the prisoners start to trickle in. Some are defiant, others sullen, others nervous. The youngest is 18; the oldest is over 60. Most of them are puffy-eyed and exhausted. All of them are or will be in the care of the public defender. They are all men—11 of them, mostly Black and Hispanic—and, technically, they are innocent. You wouldn’t know it, looking at them. These innocent people are all bound hand and foot, their shoulders tugged behind them by handcuffs at their backs. The more broad-shouldered among them have one set of handcuffs attached to each hand and linked together, forming a crude, metallic infinity in the small of their backs. Invariably, these linked-together handcuffs are taut, digging into their wrists. If it were a weekend, these men would be in lockup in the basement of the New Haven Police Department, awaiting their arraignment. But it is a business day, and each has been accused of a crime, so they are here in Courtroom B, where the bail commissioner, the assistant state’s attorney, and the public defender will haggle over how much each will have to pay to get out of jail. This sequence plays out every weekday in 20 local courthouses that feed into 22 pretrial detention facilities across the State of Connecticut; together, these institutions modify and ultimately sustain a pretrial population of around 3,000 innocent people. Soon, there will be another person in Courtroom B: a representative from the non-profit Connecticut Bail Fund, which plans to begin posting bond for New Haven detainees held on low bail. They will try to snatch at least a few defendants out of the clanking apparatus of pretrial detention. HERE’S WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU GET ARRESTED IN Connecticut: first, you’re taken to pre-arraignment lockup. In New Haven, that means facilities in the basement of the New Haven Police Department. There, the desk sergeant will set your overnight bond. The next morning—or on Monday, if you’re arrested over the weekend—you go to court for an arraignment hearing, where generally you will receive a lower bond. If you want to get out of jail
before your trial, you, someone you know, or a bond agent will have to cough up the funds. Otherwise, you’re in jail. Maybe for a long time, your Constitutional right to a speedy trial notwithstanding. This is where the fund comes in. “Really, we’re fighting this two-tiered system of justice that is set up by money being a part of our justice system,” said Patrick Sullivan, JE ’18, one of the Connecticut Bail Fund’s co-founders. At Wednesday morning’s arraignment, five of the men get released on a PTA: a “promise to appear” at their next court date. The remaining six will be held on bond, with the lowest bond at $5,000 and the highest at $100,000. For its supporters, bond is just a risk-management mechanism. Joseph Lamotta, the assistant state’s attorney for this arraignment, said that “the purpose of bond is not necessarily to punish those who post it. It’s twofold: to assure their appearance in court, and to protect the public.” He recalls one of the defendants present at the hearing, who had been arrested with a loaded and chambered .32 caliber pistol. Surely I don’t want him out and about. Probably not, when it’s put that way, but does that mean he should sit in jail? Would his being able to afford a five-digit bond make his freedom any safer? Connecticut licenses two sorts of bondsmen to assist defendants in making bail: professional bondsmen and surety bond agents. The former pay for the entire bond up front, while the latter pay only 10 percent and have the rest insured by a third party. Their business cards are wedged into nooks and crannies around the New Haven Police Department, and they are generally found wherever people are going to be incarcerated. If you are poor and awaiting trial, they might be your only option. “It’s presumed innocent until proven guilty, but not really,” says Beatrice Codianni, a formerly incarcerated person and now the managing editor of Reentry Central, a publication focusing on issues of prisoner reentry into society after incarceration. Codianni is a member of the community advisory board of the Connecticut Bail Fund. “You get arrested and you get a bond put on you and if you’re poor, you stay in jail.” THE CONNECTICUT BAIL FUND BEGAN IN THE FALL OF 2015 with Brett Davidson ’16, who spent a summer working with a civil rights lawyer in Los Angeles. He spoke to many people who were in jail because they couldn’t afford bail and was shocked by the scope of the problem. “I was very surprised, I think, because I had some faith in the fairness of the justice system. That there was some element of due process… that you’re innocent until proven guilty.” The experience got him thinking about the possibility of a non-profit bail fund in New Haven, and the thoughts got closer to
Oct. 14, 2016– 13
action when he met another of the eventual co-founders, Simone Seiver, PC ’17, at an October meeting of the Yale Undergraduate Prison Project. Davidson self-deprecatingly notes that she has a “can-do attitude” that he lacks. They soon met with Scott Greenberg, a researcher at the Yale School of Medicine, who had independently come up with the idea for a bail fund in the course of his work with the Transitions Clinic at the Whalley Avenue Correctional Facility. While there, Greenberg saw inmates on bond as low as a $100 and saw the need for something like the bail fund. Sullivan, whom Davidson knew through improv and Seiver through the Prison Project, joined soon after. With a Yale Entrepreneurial Institute fellowship of $15,000 for the organization and a $28,000 Gordon Grand
THE CONNECTICUT BAIL FUND WILL BE UP AGAINST AN INTIMIDATING system. Since July 1, 2016, the government of Connecticut has released a (for the most part) daily snapshot of demographic and offense-related data for every inmate in pretrial detention in a Connecticut correctional facility. A preliminary analysis of this data reveals a disheartening picture: by most measures, pretrial detention in Connecticut perpetuates the racial disparities that are rampant elsewhere in the American criminal justice system. Worse, even without parsing the data for race, the average length of stay in pretrial detention is high across the board. Defendants await trial in 22 facilities across the state. From July 1 to Oct. 13, 2016,* 7,580 people were in this system. On any given day, there were approximately 3,346 inmates in pretrial detention in Connecticut. The average bond was $124,012, though this measure is probably significantly skewed by a small amount of extremely high bonds in the $1 - 3 million dollar range for very serious offenses. Eight hundred twenty inmates, or approximately 10 percent of the population, were in pretrial detention on bonds lower than $5,000. Men were 86.73 percent of the pretrial detainee population and women 13.27 percent (the demographic data does not count nonbinary identities). These numbers are disturbingly racialized. Of all pretrial detainees, 36.13 percent were Black and 25.66 percent were Hispanic. This is in a state where 11.6 percent of the population is Black and 15.4 percent is Hispanic, which means that these two groups represented, in pretrial detention, 300 and 150 percent of their demographic proportions, respectively. White people comprise 68.2 percent of the state’s population but only 37 percent of its pretrial detainee population. American Indians form 0.3 percent of the state population and 0.3 percent of the pretrial detainee population; Asians are 4.6 percent of the state and 0.61 percent of pretrial detainees. The trend persists with bond amounts: on average, Black detainees had their bonds set at $163,902, and Hispanic detainees at $134,686. This is compared to an average of $124,012, with the average bond amounts for other races ranging from $79,001 (White) to $86,692 (Asian). Similar racial dynamics are present in the length of stay statistics.** The average stay was 171 days across the board, which is alarming in itself. In general, only 25 percent of people spent fewer than 17 days in pretrial detention, and only 5 percent spent fewer than two days; exactly half of the pretrial population spent more than 52 days awaiting trial. On average, Black people spent 220 days in pretrial detention, and half of them spent over 63 days awaiting trial. Think about what can happen in 63 days, or 17, or even two: you can lose a job, lose custody of a child, get behind in school, fail to pay your rent, get evicted. Codianni, who spent 17 years in prison on racketeering charges, knows the feeling well. People awaiting trial, she said, will often “take a plea bargain even if they’re innocent just to get the hell out.” According to fellow board-member Barbara Fair, who has long worked on criminal justice issues, 90 percent of criminal cases in New Haven are
“You get arrested and you get a bond put on you and if you’re poor you stay in jail.” —Beatrice Codianni, managing editor of Reentry Central Fellowship to support Davidson as he worked on the fund full-time after graduation, they were off the ground. The group spent the summer working at the offices of the Entrepreneurial Institute. There was some semantic incongruity between the two organizations—when I spoke to Kassie Tucker, the YEI’s director, and Brita Belli, its communications officer, about the Bail Fund, they preferred the term “social impact venture” to “non-profit”—but ultimately it was a fruitful partnership. The YEI provided working space, mentorship, and access to counsel. Over the course of the summer, they worked through a sometimes arcane set of regulations to arrive at their final legal and institutional form: they are a federally registered 501(c)(3) non-profit, and, in Connecticut, a non-stock corporation. Seiver and Davidson will serve as the Fund’s licensed professional bond agents. They will be professional bondsmen, as opposed to surety bond agents. Licensing might not be necessary, as the law only requires registration by individuals who post bail more than five times a year. “So we thought: if that’s the case, is any one of us going to post bail more than five times in a year? And the answer might be ‘no’ if I post bail five times, Brett posts bail five times, Scott posts bail five times, Pat posts bail five times, you go post bail for us five times—if we diffused posting bail across an army of volunteers, no one person should post bail more than five times,” Seiver explained. But incorporating meant that the bail bonds would be funded by only one pool of money, the corporation’s. That, together with a desire not to “skirt” the law, led Seiver and Davidson to decide to undergo the licensing process. As of publication, their final interviews were set for the coming week. If those go well, Seiver said, they should be able to start posting bail soon—maybe within the next month.
14 – The Yale Herald
settled with plea bargains, which is roughly in line with the national average of 94 percent in state courts. Lamotta, as an assistant state’s attorney, understands the incentive to plea, but thinks that it is less common than some say. “When we interview individuals for this job,” he tells me, “we send them through various hypotheticals. And one of them is if you have this first-time offender who’s accused of a felony, and he didn’t do it, but he wants to plead guilty just so he can go home to Kansas or wherever. And the most common answer—well, the best answer—is that you drop the charges.” When faced with first-time offenders, Lamotta tries to be “somewhat solicitous” of their rights, because they are new to the system. He thinks it’s different with repeat offenders, that they know what they’re doing. Being in the system, “you get a feeling of the ebb and flow. You know who’s savvy and who’s not.” I don’t doubt that Lamotta is telling the truth, or that he’s trying to do a good job. I don’t doubt that the preponderance of people in the system are trying their best to get outcomes that are as just as possible. Or even that some of the men I saw were indeed dangerous. But I can’t stop thinking about what the system, working as it now does, produces: 11 men, just before noon, walking handcuffed into a courtroom and standing before the panel that would rattle off their past transgressions and judge how likely they were to transgress again. It gives us poor people, disproportionately Black and Hispanic, spending weeks and months in jail, all while presumed innocent. THIS SUMMER, GOVERNOR MALLOY TRIED AND FAILED TO PASS a bail reform bill that would have largely eliminated bail for low-level offenses and would have encouraged judges to allow defendants to pay 10 percent of the bond, much like they would with a surety bond agent, but to a state-administered fund instead of a private company. The bill failed. As the Connecticut Mirror reported, Speaker of the House Sharkey refused to bring it to a vote, saying that though there was “unanimous support for the concept” of the bill, it was outside the caucus’s comfort zone; the Minority Leader, Themis Klarides, wanted a risk assessment-based approach instead of a blanket abolition of bond for low-level crimes. All, however, agreed that reform was necessary. It is, among other things, expensive to keep people in jail. That might explain why the Connecticut Bail Fund has had what Seiver called an “overwhelmingly positive” response from government officials. One analyst, the Mirror reported, projected that the bill would have reduced pretrial detention by 1,000 inmates, a tremendous number relative to the total. Right now, the Connecticut Bail Fund has about $60,000 available for posting bail. Bail money is returned after the defendant shows up to court, so, aside from any losses, the money will be perpetually useful, but is certainly not enough to tackle the totality of unpaid bonds all across Connecticut, which are worth, as of Oct. 13, about $650 million.They are planning to start small, posting low bail (the exact cut-off is to be determined) for defendants in the Elm Street Courthouse and for detainees
held on low bail at the Whalley Avenue Correctional Center, which houses pretrial detainee men from New Haven, and the York Correctional Center, which houses women. It was Whalley, after all, which spurred the creation of the fund: Greenberg was working there when he began to think about the bail fund after seeing detainees spending prolonged periods in jail on bonds as low as $100. At the time of publication, 150 detainees in Connecticut were being held on bond at or below $3,000. Approximately 60 of them, said Sullivan, were detained at Whalley. According to Seiver, the short-term focus of the fund will be on the Whalley Avenue jail. In the medium term, they will work on fundraising in order to bail more people out, assist other bail funds that are starting out, and eventually bring clients who have been bailed out and left the system back as volunteers for the fund. Seiver and every other person affiliated with the bail fund I spoke to were unanimous in their long-term goal: to no longer exist. Everyone involved agrees that bail, in some way or another, has to be reformed. Fair’s extensive experience working on criminal justice reform has led her to believe that, to be meaningfully successful, any reform will have to be “deep system work” that fundamentally restructures the institutions of punishment from the ground up. “You’ve got to start decriminalizing people… It would mean a change in the way people see other people in the first place,” she said. We know how the criminal justice system sees people now: risks to be mitigated, potential crimes that are better off being thwarted behind bars, even if that means they’ll spend months before trial. Here is one more thing I saw in court: a woman shaking feverishly next to her child as her partner stood before the judge. Would he get released? The attorneys, the bail commissioner, and the judge deliberated. Eventually, he was, with an admonition that one more argument, any drug use, any step out of line, and he was back in jail. She kept shaking. Charlotte Lawrence, ES ’18, contributed data analysis. * The data has several gaps, which might distort this average. ** The length of stay is skewed high by several very lengthy stays, but is also artificially low because (a) we adopted the state’s recommendation that stays in excess of a year be treated as incorrect data points and not included in the data, even though several data points appeared to correctly display stays in excess of a year, (b) the gaps in the data mean that several stays drop out of the count prematurely, which leads to undercounting, and (c) since the data is daily, many of the stays that were ongoing as of Oct. 13 will continue into the future, but are counted as if they ended on the last day used in the data.
Graphic by Haewon Ma YH Staff
Oct. 14, 2016 – 15
FEATURES
An alternative route Anna Lipin, ES ’18, explores what familiar exercise routes mean for students in the long run
T
he first thing you hit as a jogger in New Haven is pavement. To run in the city is to embark on an obstacle course filled with honking cars, inefficient stoplights, curious dogs, bicyclists with saddlebags, tour groups with selfie sticks, and your peers. For those students who choose to run outside as their preferred form of exercise, New Haven is not just the home of Yale’s campus—it is a multi-layered metropolis that visually unfolds the farther away from Cross Campus you get. A few weeks of interviewing Yale runners yielded one firm conclusion: to run in New Haven is to gain, as one student told me, “a richer feel” for the city as it truly is. “You see a lot of things you wouldn’t see otherwise.” However, this interaction mainly stops at “seeing.” Truly interacting with New Haven involves more than solely running through familiar territory. THE MOST CLOGGED ROUTE FOR RUNNERS IS invariably through the East Rock neighborhood, just northeast of campus. Anyone who’s walked up Orange Street at dusk has dodged students logging some mileage after class. As a captain of Club Running, Alexandra Small, SM ’14, told younger students who wanted to run on their own to head to East Rock. Joe Battles,
16 – The Yale Herald
DC ’18, the co-president of Yale Club Running, confirms the spot is still a favorite among students. But four years running on the same streets can wear on you like cement on the soles of your shoes. Club Running diversifies its workouts, heading northwest from campus to Southern Connecticut State University or to Yale’s athletic fields. Small—who had previously only run alone, in the East Rock neighborhood—cultivated a cohort of male friends with whom she would run to SCSU or Lighthouse Point Park. Varsity runners, who practice six days a week, mostly run in the areas around the university’s athletic complex like Edgewood Park, the golf course, or the Maltby Nature Preserve west of the Yale Bowl. Julia Borowski, DC ’18, a member of the cross country and track and field teams, prefers those runs in Westville. “It’s a little quieter,” she says. “You can run in the road and not have to worry about getting run over.” BALANCING SAFETY WITH THE CONSTANT interruption of crosswalks is a predicament for New Haven joggers. Russi agreed that “the physical danger when running in New Haven is much more related to traffic than to getting assaulted or mugged.” However, he noted that as a “big guy” who also runs sans head-
phones or valuables, his experience is not necessarily that of a typical runner. Although Yale Police advises in every crime-report email to “avoid walking or running alone, especially at night” and to eschew headphones, that directive is not well heeded. I personally violate those two rules almost daily. Tuning out honking, screeching, the wail of sirens—these are part of the appeal, part of my escape. It’s intuitively unwise to run with headphones. You rob yourself of the warning sounds of oncoming traffic—the approaching car’s engine, the rustle of another pedestrian, the clatter of bicycles. You flaunt the ownership of pricey technology (an iDevice, perhaps). You generally project the image of a college student living in her own world. And if you’ve been at Yale long enough, you know someone (or a friend of a friend of a friend) who has been mugged or assaulted—maybe because of that iDevice. Small had a friend who got punched; Russi knows someone who was robbed. There are stories about cars that slow down beside you, drivers that start talking to you. Officer David Hartman of the New Haven Police Department offered some frank commentary on the consequences of Yale students using the city as their running track. “Yale is not Dartmouth. This is not Ha-
nover, where it’s evident that the community is the campus and the campus is the community.” New Haven, he said, is a city home to the “richest of the rich and the poorest of the poor—and poverty breeds crime.” NHPD’s crime log does not distinguish between the victim’s activity at the time of the crime: Officer Hartman couldn’t tell me whether a victim was walking, biking, running, or standing at a bus stop. Anecdotally, though, he thinks having earbuds in makes you more likely to be a target. A more common and unreported experience is being catcalled: “There were plenty of times when I was running around and had somewhat uncomfortable experiences with passerby,” Small told me. “But there also were times when I would be out running in a part of town where I didn’t normally go to and someone would say: ‘yeah, go get em girl’—something really complimentary and lovely.” Catcalling, despite the unequal and outdated gender power dynamics it represents, is not a stand-in for crime. Contrary to popular opinion, crimes involving Yale students are statistically rare. Lieutenant Von Narcisse of the Yale Police Department told me via email that “we have had a few—and only a few—robberies of runners over the past few years, just as we’ve had a few robberies of people walking.” Violent crime has been on a downward trend in New Haven (as in the rest of the country, despite the proclamations of a certain presidential candidate). For Yale students, who tend to have an outsize view of the dangers of our city, this is an important clarification. EAST ROCK HAS A NUMBER OF CHARACTERISTICS THAT MAKE IT ATTRACTIVE for student runners. It’s within the Yale-shuttle bubble, a net that encompasses enough of New Haven to get a decent run in, but that keeps you pretty much within Yale’s orbit. The shuttle, after all, runs to East Rock because enough Yale affiliates live there to make it worth it; ergo, enough Yale affiliates live in the neighborhood for students to feel “safe” running through it. The population, demographics-wise, reflects the environment students are used to. The neighborhood’s nickname is “Grad Haven” for the preponderance of Yale graduate students in addition to faculty and staff. The houses are large and wellkempt, with trimmed lawns and hedges. The biggest obstacles are strollers. Yale-owned buildings extend northward on Whitney Avenue, tendrils of safety marked by the neon jackets of Yale Police. Both the East Rock and Dwight (east of campus) neighborhoods, for example, are buffeted by a park on one side and Yale on the other. Both, actually, have similar reported crime rates. But one neighborhood is mostly populated by working-class people of color, and the other by more affluent and more white Yale affiliates. There’s only a few degrees of separation between you, a student, and the majority of passersby on Orange street. There’s a wider gulf, it seems, between perception and reality. Broadening your running route beyond East Rock, of course, does not imply greater interaction with those communities. By and large, students who run
through the city’s more far-flung neighborhoods don’t return to them in civilian clothes. Russi highlighted some locations in West Rock and East Rock parks to which he’s returned to go rock climbing, or to eat dinner with friends. The varsity team occasionally goes to Nica’s in East Rock, a grocery and deli popular with graduate students and East Rock residents. As Small explained: “I did explore more of the city because I was running, but I also explored areas of the city and neighboring townships that I would not return to. I would not go back to just hang out.” RUNNING CHANGES HOW YOU SEE NEW HAVEN. WHEN YOU TURN DOWN a new street, you peek into the daily routine of just a few more people. You notice how the leaves on one block are turning autumn gold just a little bit more deliberately than the next. You see which neighborhoods come alive at dusk and which tuck in for the night. You get to know other students exploring the urban jungle. For Battles and other club runners, running brings to life the stark wealth divides in New Haven existent to students in theory but not always in practice. “Out towards the athletic fields,” Battles related, “you’ll be running through an area near Yale-New Haven Hospital that seems somewhat working class and you’ll see more people of color, and then you get across [Edgewood Park] and suddenly feel like you’re in a suburb. You suddenly get bigger houses, the streets are quieter, and that’s very startling.” Colin Jemez, ES ’18, who thinks students tend to mistakingly equate New Haven with Yale, credits running with rectifying that perception. Russi thinks most students will graduate having only interacted with a small slice of the city. “Running,” he said, “is one of many ways to end up with a much broader perspective. Lieutenant Narcisse of Yale Police stressed that as long as students are “aware of their surroundings at all times,” running and walking around New Haven is a “great way to explore the city.” There are other ways to become a part of the wider community of New Haven. Simply padding away from Yale’s campus on foot does not make you a more informed urban citizen. Simply discerning the sharp contrast between wealth and poverty—one extreme of which Yale epitomizes—does not mean you are making it better. Simply running through a neighborhood does not mean you understand its people. Yet, maybe, running affords you a place to start.
Graphic by Haewon Ma YH Staff Oct. 14, 2016 – 17
CULTURE Shooz! by Adam Moftah
I
broke into the criminal scene at the tender age of 10, when I first encountered Shooz! 128. For those of you lucky enough not to know what Shooz! 128 is, it’s (or rather, to my satisfaction, it was) a stupidly named shoe store on 7th Avenue in Chelsea, six blocks from the hospital where I was born. The purple doorframe displayed a button with the label “Push me if you’re ready for shit.” My sixth-grade self didn’t know how to process this. But my friends marveled at the idea that we could witness something clearly intended for a more mature audience by simply pushing a button. Since I was the tallest one and therefore the most intellectually developed, my friends figured that I should be the one to ring the bell and propel us into middle school maturity. As soon as I’d pressed the malformed doorbell, I regretted succumbing to peer pressure. A crusty-looking man came out and barked at me, “Are you ready for shit?!” I’d never been spoken to so explicitly by an adult, and by the looks on my friends’ faces, they hadn’t either. I mustered a quiet, “No thank you, sir,” and departed with my cohort. After we left, my friends and I pretended to think the encounter was anticlimactic and so we decided to try it again the next day. So there I was ringing the bell once more, but to a much grander surprise: our old “Shooz!” salesman was nowhere to be found. Shocked, my other friend rang the bell with added gusto. Shoozman torpedoed out of the storefront and chased us down a crowded sidewalk with a fury I’ve never since seen from a man of his age. Fortunately for us, he was old and raggedy, so we escaped. Unfortunately for me, my pretensions of moral superiority crumbled before this act of delinquency. My mother would never again be able to truthfully call me “her good little boy.” I had broken bad.
18 – The Yale Herald
Midnight tea at the Lizzy by “Sunny Turner”
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olks lucky enough to be invited to tea at The Elizabethan Club, one of Yale’s oldest literary societies, generally sign the guest book upon entry. This, however, was not the case for me and three friends when, against all odds, we found the Club’s back door left heroically ajar. One by one, the four of us—Forest, Samson, Rick, and your humble correspondent—tapped down those worn stepping stones toward a sitting area cushioned by a row of hedges and a hood of winding ferns. And there, nestled in the half-dark yard of that sanctuary of inked page, Forest (or maybe it was Rick?) produced the first of our pre-rolled wands of worldly wisdom. A spark, a cough, an exhaled exaltation, and here we were, delighting in the wild environs while greedily breathing that perfumed, alternative air the enlightened keep so strategically for themselves. “In sooth, I durst not recall an eve more gay than this,” Samson proclaimed, the combination of proximity to first-folios and herbal influence already beginning to take effect. “Indeed—our three-pronged God doth look down smilingly on us presently,” I remember responding with a chuckle. Spirits were high, to say the very least. Too high, perhaps, because soon after we had finished ceremoniously burning the third of our joints, a light flashed on from the library. Then came a call, far off, yet undeniable—a melancholy sort of plea to “please vacate the premises.” The owner of the voice, emerging from the gloom, wore an unnaturally yellow jumper and menacingly brandished a flashlight. Off we scampered, dizzied by the fumes and the sudden disruption, though not without the sweet memory of our midnight tea at the Lizzy.
Learning to look back by Jordan Cutler-Tietjen
T
he first words I saw and the only ones I remember were on the cover: Sacred and Chaotic Fields, 1991. As I repeated the words in my head, memorizing their rhythm, I felt proud of my mother in a way I hadn’t before. I was 11 years old. When friends asked me what my parents did, I would always say, “My Dad’s a physicist,” and pause; then, faltering, “And my Mom used to be a writer.” Now, in the midst of moving books from Grandpa’s shelf to our cardboard boxes, I was holding real proof of her past in my hands. She walked into the room five minutes later, as I flipped through the pages of poetry. Jordan, please, you shouldn’t read that, she said, and I heard something in her voice that I hadn’t before, something that made me feel like a trespasser. Her eyes jerked to find mine, as if to ask what I had stolen, or maybe what I had understood. I put the book down, disappointed and confused, and stretched out some tape to close a box. I think my mother’s fear of what I might have found clouded her judgment of my ability to understand. She knew what was buried in the stanzas—her lost brothers, a childhood rabbit, the lust of a marriage now dry. But that’s not what I saw. I was looking for myself in the lines, some word or phrase that could have been mine. But I could not make her poetry a mirror. Now, I can only hear her voice reading the title in my head. I feel the same pride I first felt, hear her quiet shame, and remember that although growing up makes the people around you seem to shrink, you finally get to see their shadows.
Barred by Charlie Bardey YH Staff
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spent the summer of 2015 deeply and passionately trying to understand what it would mean to be a New Yorker in their twenties. I’d lived in the Big Apple all my life, but spent 100 percent of my time chilling on couches in the homes of my friends’ moms, all of whom were named Sharyn. If I were to live the hip, urbane life that I felt was my birthright, I had to make some changes, and get into what I’d heard was a thriving New York bar scene. I was 20 at the time, so I knew I had to do it (if you’re a law enforcement officer stop reading now) illegally, and armed with my (again if you’re a law enforcement officer I’m really going to have to insist you stop reading right away) Ohio fake ID, I had my ticket in. Not content to work my way up, I shot for the moon. The first sceney bar was Kinfolk 94 in Williamsburg, which was hosting a wellknown (I guess) dancehall DJ. I was out of my league, both racially and hipness-wise. I had come with a friend who left after fifteen minutes, so I spent the next thirty minutes awkwardly nodding my way around the bar, accompanied only by my empty Five Points Ale can. I had promised myself I wouldn’t leave until I’d spoken to one person (…………..why?), so I tried to talk to a woman who I thought might be like “hi” but was instead like “wait no.” Fair enough. I left the bar in shame. While I didn’t know it then, though, this would be a story of triumph. The next summer I returned to the bar for a magazine release party, this time with the law on my side and a cute shirt and some hip shoes. I finally felt, if not actively embraced, that I could drink my Five Point Ale in comfort and peace. I had left Sharyn’s couch.
Nara Dreamland by Eve Sneider
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n a muggy afternoon last June, I went on a four-hour expedition with my mother and sister that involved (among other things) a dairy farm, a fully operational prison, a hot spring brimming with geriatric women, and a defunct amusement park. Allow me to explain. A few days prior, my sister had stumbled across Nara Dreamland—an abandoned amusement park on the periphery of one of Japan’s more temple- and tourist-ridden cities—in a cobwebby corner of the Internet. We were planning a short trip, and a spooky theme park seemed like a perfect break from shrines and gardens and heritage sites. It was several kilometers away from the city center and promised a pleasant walk. It also just seemed really fucking cool. We always do this, my family. We like long walks to far-out destinations. Over the years, we have trekked to Jewish cemeteries, steamy bathhouses, and even once to a local museum with a taxidermied two-headed goat on display (I kid you not). In the case of Dreamland, we imagined ourselves admiring the peeling paint and traipsing down sweeping, lonely boulevards. I’m not usually one for breaking and entering, but I like the idea of places that are left as they are, to be filled in by brush or chipped away at by time. As it happens, we never made it inside Nara Dreamland. Japanese summers are hazy and humid, and on the day in question the sky was just the right pre-storm gray out. A chance encounter with some friendly locals led us to the local prison. My mother, an architect, inquired about interesting buildings, and they suggested a Meiji-era panopticon on a street lined with townhouses. Then came the dairy with fresh soft serve and cheese (!!!). We stopped at a local temple with flowers blooming all around it and what remains the largest oak tree I have ever seen. Nara is a small city and, situated at its outskirts, Dreamland is surrounded by farmland. By the time we caught our first glimpse of rusty roller coasters peeking out from behind dense summer shrubs, the air was thick and heavy, and there wasn’t a person in sight. We walked past old rides and their empty tracks. We marveled at the clock tower frozen in time. But we didn’t go inside. We didn’t have to. It was about to storm. And anyway, the walk was the best part.
Graphic by Haewon Ma YH Staff
Oct. 14, 2016 – 19
REVIEWS
Windows into grief by Liana Van Nostrand
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rchitecture of Rain, the Dramat’s first Fall Ex, is a masterfully crafted story of an Asian family’s grief. Written by Stefani Kuo, PC ’17, and directed by Gregory Ng, MC ’18, the show tells the story of mother Sol, Arya Sundaram, DC ’20, and her three daughters: Scy, played by Allison Du, TD ’20; Silina, played by Emily Locke, SM ’19; and All-Grown-Up, played by Evan Billups, MC ’20. While the entire cast, and much of the creative team, is composed of Asian women, only a few details details, like talk of showering before getting into the bath and wearing slippers in the house, hint at the family’s background. The play’s universality is important to Ng. In his director’s note he says that Kuo’s writing “insists upon our right to represent ourselves with richness, depth, and humanity: to finally be the tellers of our own stories and to embrace our Asianness without being limited by it.” The relatability of grief makes the play particularly poignant. As All-Grown-Up informs the audience in the beginning of the show, “At least if they feel sad they still feel human.” If that’s true, then not only are the characters human, but so are the audience members, who likely left the theater both in awe and in pain. Part of this reaction stems from the juxtaposition of Billups’s All-Grown-Up, who is childlike and innocent without being gimmicky, with the deep emotional distress of her mother and sisters, who are distraught without being melodramatic. Losing a family member is always painful, but the loss of the youngest child seems especially difficult for the family. AllGrown-Up’s costume, a denim dress and striped leotard designed by Taylor Jackson, BK ’18, evokes both a worker and a child. It is the perfect combination for a daughter whose death shatters the family, but whose legacy helps put it back together. The first time All-Grown-Up enters the house is as a maintenance worker, called to fix the plumbing. The house, which constantly needs repairs, mirrors the family’s distress. The raw emotional pain of All-Grown-Up’s sisters and mother contrasts with the show’s airy design elements. Ar-
chitecture of Rain is visually gorgeous. The set, designed by Hannah Kazis-Taylor, CC ’19, consists of a light wooden house frame with some Plexiglas panels. The family’s home is decorated mostly in white—the porcelain bathtub, chipping painted chairs, fluffy comforter, and thick candles—with touches of natural colors in the sage pillows, beige baskets, and evergreen side table. The costumes also contribute to the refinement of the show. The two older sisters and mother are dressed in dance attire—adorned leotards and long romantic tutus. Adding to the balletic aura of the costumes, all of the actors wear their hair in buns, designed by Garima Singh, PC ’20, except for All-Grown-Up, who wears hers, for the most part, in a ponytail. The lighting design, by Ngan Vu, ES ’19, is artfully done. During a scene on the beach, jade and sand colored lights fade and alternate. The beams of light make the Plexiglas panels appear to change color, which makes the light effects even more stunning. The elegance of the design elements ultimately mirrors the family’s grace in navigating the bereavement process. Much as the audience must look through the Plexiglas panels in order to see the show, the story is told through a series of discrete windows, non-chronological scenes, into the family life. Even the family remembers All-Grown-Up in vignettes. Sometime after her death, they watch tapes on their small black television in which she dances, demonstrates Kung Fu moves, and talks about Lady Gaga. The videos, however, prove to be an imperfect method of commemorating the dead. When a power outage causes the video to disappear, Sol bangs on the television begging for it to come back. But the sisters can’t find a way to retrieve it. The incident with the video tapes isn’t the only time Sol is concerned with documenting the family. Even before All-Grown-Up’s death, Sol shows off one of AllGrown-Up’s drawings of the family to Scy and Silina. Later, All-Grown-Up hangs translucent pictures that look like they were drawn by a child on the Plexiglas windows.
The presence of many frames—the windows of the house, edges of the TV screen, or borders of the drawings—emphasizes an attempt to capture the family. But since the very nature of encapsulation is to make it so the object cannot leave, the family’s attempts to capture All-GrownUp are futile because she is already gone. This theme is reflected in Scy and Silina’s career aspirations. Scy wants to be a writer and Silina wants to be an architect; both of these professions involve trying to turn nothing into something by piecing together parts to create a coherent whole. But Kuo’s text and Ng’s direction beautifully complicate how we both remember the dead and tell their stories. I thought the show was going to end at many points before it did—specifically, in moments of striking departure from form and reality. At one point a waterfall of glitter engulfs the three sisters. At another, All-Grown-Up brings on three red balloons one by one. I also sometimes thought the show was ending because of repetition of an earlier piece of the text. Towards the end, a lullaby from the first half of the show returns. Scy, who has a monologue at the start of the show, had another heartwrenching one near the close. The very structure makes the audience commiserate with the family, whose grief is ongoing. Though time has passed since All-Grown-Up’s death, she does not appear to age until the very last scene, perhaps indicating that the family has allowed her to grow up so that her absence is not as painful. In the final scene, All-Grown-Up enters the house again as a maintenance worker in a lace yellow dress with her hair down, looking much more mature than she did in her previous costume. After climbing through a window, she calls to the family in a friendly voice, “Somebody called about construction… a paid job.” Once again, she holds the house together.
Image courtesy of The Yale Dramat
20 – The Yale Herald
Film: The Birth of a Nation
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he Birth of a Nation struggled at the box office, making only $7.1 million on opening weekend. Its financial challenges are not, however, an indictment of the film’s quality. Nate Parker’s directorial debut is a good film, albeit one that is disappointingly mainstream. The plot follows Nat Turner’s (Nate Parker) radicalization from Christian preacherto organizer of the notorious Southampton Insurrection. Parker executes a solid performance as Turner, comfortably inhabiting the role and exhibiting Turner’s development into a faction leader. The writing is decent, save for some contrived dialogue in early scenes between Turner and his later wife, Cherry (Aja Naomi King). The Birth of a Nation is clearly Parker’s directorial debut. The visuals are artful and potent at times, whether it be blood drops staining cotton bales, a rope leash around a young black girl’s neck, or the Christ symbolism of Turner’s flogging against a whipping post. Parker cobbles together various tones and images to create a more or less cohesive whole that fails to establish an innovative style. Yet with all my applause, here lies the problem with the film: its ordinariness. No technical aspect of the film stands out; no nuanced theme sheds new light on contemporary racial issues. Furthermore, the presentation of women in the film is rather regressive. Female characters, such as Cherry and Gabrielle Union’s Esther, fail to either progress the plot or further support male characters’ developments. Others, like Turner’s mother, Nancy (Aunjanue Ellis), are significant only because of their relationship to a man. Parker’s film reiterates the antiquated thesis of black, masculine heroism galvanizing social movements while marginalizing black women. Turner decides to fight back in part to protect Cherry, because the film portrays her as being unable to protect herself. Their hierarchical relationship is evident from the moment Cherry is introduced. Turner convinces Sam (Armie Hammer) to purchase her: simultaneously “saving” and claiming ownership of her. If anything, this recycled male hero trope parallels the issue facing the Black Lives Matter movement regarding the treatment of black female and LGBT individuals. Black women support the men whose names hit headlines but are shut out from the national discourse, prompting responses like the #SayHerName movement. The Birth of a Nation is not groundbreaking. It relies only on the raw power of its subject matter to carry it home, and its presentation of righteous rage, violence, and revolt is unflinching. Nevertheless, it fails to transcend its self-imposed limitations and unfortunately proves to be a mediocre film under the weight of its hype and controversial director. -Travis DeShong
Music: Lamentations
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n an introductory letter posted on his website, Moses Sumney, the twenty-six-year-old purveyor of electro-soul, calls the songs on his latest EP “dirges in the face of a relentless sun.” The themes of Lamentations, which consists of tracks that didn’t make it onto his forthcoming album, are accordingly bleak. But fortunately for us, Sumney isn’t all Cormac McCarthy; his morose lyrics are tempered by the pure grace of his voice. My best bud from back home introduced me to Moses Sumney a few years ago. He, a saxophonist, heard of Sumney through jazz circles, back when the singer’s shtick was limited to live vocal looping and effects pedals. To hear Sumney now is to hear the latest trends in electro-R&B––just as Justin Vernon, James Blake, and Frank Ocean have recently done, Sumney adopts the Vocoder in the studio to separate the singer from his distorted voice. The effect elevates Sumney’s svelte falsetto from a luxuriant, yet tried sound, to a sui generis reverberation––more crystalline than that of the aforementioned singers––that floats alone, often indecipherable, towards the depths of the listener’s body. My favorite song off of Lamentations is “Worth It.” It’s three transient minutes of sparse, syncopated snaps and drums framing Sumney’s modulated voice. Voice and beat are all Sumney needs to create music that bleeds sorrow. In the opening lines, he recognizes his “heart as black and blue,” and in the chorus he wonders, in aching crescendos, if he is deserving of his lover’s unwavering devotion: “I don’t know if I am worth it.” The song’s video, released in late August, is one of the best I’ve ever seen, translating the power of Sumney’s voice into jolting muscles and deep shadows. The EP’s closing track, “Incantation,” is a prayer chanted in Hebrew; deviation clearly doesn’t bother Sumney, and neither does melodrama. In that same letter on his site, he asks, “Is there implied hope encapsulated in the mere expression of hopelessness?” Sumney concludes, “That isn’t for me to determine. I’m just here to lament.” I don’t have the answer to his depressive musings either, but I do find joy in their expression. Sumney’s bared soul translates into beautiful music, and I’m thrilled he is putting more of it out.
Music: 22, A Million
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was prepared to loathe Bon Iver’s new album, 22, A Million, as soon as I read the song titles. How do you say “______45_____” out loud? And when you talk about “00000 Million,” do you say “zero zero zero zero zero million” or just “zero million?” Once I suspended my aversion to the song titles with infinity signs and Greek letters, I began to appreciate Justin Vernon’s innovative combination of natural images and mathematical references. While 22, A Million deviates from Bon Iver’s earlier, more organic works, it also allows Vernon to ex-
-Marc Shkurovich YH Staff
plore his anxieties in greater depth. In “715, CR KS,” for example, Vernon sings about longing and loss in a coarse, autotuned voice, much like that in “Woods,” from his previous work Blood Bank. The electronic modulation creates a dissonance with the natural scene of the “low moon don the yellow road” that is exacerbated by the strange, almost glitchy title. Anxiety about the disorientation of the digital age permeates the album. Only a few songs, particularly those whose titles contain Christian allusions, have easily decipherable titles. For example, the title track,“22, A Million,” may reference David’s cry to God for help in Psalm 22: “It might be over soon,” sings Vernon, as if to answer his call. Two other songs whose titles allude to religion, “666 ” and “33 GOD,” reference the album’s pseudo-religious process of synthesizing memories, physical spaces, and virtual or imagined reality into a coherent sense of self. “I find God, and religions too,” Vernon’s voice seems to buzz in the lull before the climax of “33 GOD.” Once you start to think of 22, A Million’s metaphysical questions, it’s easy to get sucked into one of Vernon’s most complicated works yet. But for the casual listener, apart from a few stand-out songs such as “22,” and “33 ‘GOD,’” the album is nearly inaccessible. Vernon’s stylistic evolution is comparable to Kanye West’s sonic shift from the radio-ready “Watch the Throne” in 2011 to “Yeezus” in 2013. Perhaps not coincidentally, West has said in interviews that Vernon is one of his favorite living artists. In dealing with more complicated and personal themes, their tones become darker and more difficult to listen to, though perhaps more worthy of your time. -Olivia Burton
Upper left image courtesy of Fox Searchlight Productions Upper right image courtesy of Moses Sumney Bottom left image courtesy of Jagjaguwar Sep. 16, 2016 – 21
BULLBLOG BLACKLIST not having a Canada Goose
sometimes i draw the logo with a sharpie
What we hate this week
My Chemical Romance
i coughed it back up
when you’re watching Brokeback Mountain all alone and choke on an M&M
still waiting 4 a reunion XD!!
idk i feel like they can’t be good
nuclear weapons emails
being haunted
another email, another tiny panic attack
by the ghost of a colonial seaman who was buried under my suite in 1736
in which he nibbles my face with his toothless maw
my recurring nightmare about Mitch McConnell
Blac Chyna
please check your voicemails
Oct. 14, 2016 – 23