TYH LV 12

From the staff

It’s almost summertime, when the readin’ is easy. Wherever you’ll be—at the beach, in a cubicle, on the Great effing Wall of China—soon it’ll finally be time to Read For Pleasure. Our job here at the Herald is usually to give you The Truth, but in honor of our spirit season, this week we’re presenting you with our third annual Literary Special, in which we celebrate our love and lust for fiction and poetry.

The pieces included in this issue run the literary gamut, from a work of drama on America’s abortion wars by Rachel Kauder Nalebuff, SM ’13, to short fiction on man, marriage, and Twitter, by Carlos Gomez, SY ’13, to an excerpted work of criticism on Joan Didion and objectivity in journalism,

by Emily Foxhall, SM ’13, to five student poems.

Joan herself noted that the writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream. We are willing victims of this trickery, suspenders of disbelief. We dedicate this issue to the dreamers and the listeners, and to outgoing editress-in-chief Emma Schindler, SM ’14, who has been both of those things for us and for the Herald.

Stendhal said, “A good book is an event in my life.”

The Yale Herald

Volume LV, Number 12 New Haven, Conn.

Friday, Apr. 26, 2013

Editorial Staff: Editor-in-chief: Emma Schindler Managing Editors: Colin Groundwater, Eli Mandel, Maude Tisch Executive Editor: Emily Rappaport Assistant Executive Editor: Olivia Rosenthal Online Editors: Marcus Moretti, John Stillman Assistant Online Editor: Micah Rodman Senior Editors: Sam Bendinelli, Ariel Doctoroff, Carlos Gomez, Lucas Iberico Lozada, Nicolás Medina Mora, Clare Sestanovich Culture Editor: Micah Rodman Features Editors: Margaret Neil, Katy Osborn, Olivia Rosenthal Opinion Editor: Andrew Wagner Reviews Editor: Elliah Heifetz Voices Editor: Sophie Grais Design Editors: Julia Kittle-Kamp, Christine Mi, Zachary Schiller Assistant Design Editor: Madeline Butler Photo Editor: Rebecca Wolenski Business Staff: Publishers: Shreya Ghei, Joe Giammittorio Executive Director of Business: Stephanie Kan Senior Business Adviser: Evan Walker-Wells Online Staff: Webmaster: Navy Encinias Bullblog Editor-in-chief: John Stillman Bullblog Associate Editors: Alisha Jarwala, Grace Lindsey, Cindy Ok, Micah Rodman, Jack Schlossberg, Maude Tisch The Yale Herald is a not-for-profit, non-partisan, incorporated student publication registered with the Yale College Dean’s Office.

We say, books are our partners in crime and for all time.

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 2012-2013 academic year for 65 dollars.

Happy summer! Get your lux on, beauties.

Word by word, Em & Cind Literary Issue Editors

Please address correspondence to The Yale Herald P.O. Box 201653 Yale Station New Haven, CT 06520-1653 Email: Emma.Schindler@yale.edu Web: 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 2011, The Yale Herald, Inc. Have a nice day.

Cover by Christine Mi YH Staff

The Yale Herald (Apr. 26, 2013)

IN THIS ISSUE

COVER 10 It’s the Herald’s third annual Literary

Special—we’ve got poetry, prose, fiction, and drama. Start your summer off right and celebrate the power of the written word with us, as we air our literary issues!

LITERARY ISSUE

VOICES 6

All aboard! Ava Kofman, TD ‘14, rides the party bus of self-negation.

11

PLAY: Excerpt from The Givers, by Rachel Kauder Nalebuff, SM ‘13.

8

Andrew Wagner, TD ‘15, sits down with Kenneth Reveiz, CC ‘12, to talk about the People’s Art Collective, the Free Skool, and living in New Haven after graduation.

12

FICTION: “The Real Jack Smith,” by Carlos Gomez, SY ‘13.

14

PROSE: “Establishing Reality,” by Emily Foxhall, SM ‘13.

16

POETRY: Eli Mandel, BR ‘14, Sarah Matthes, JE ‘13, Jake Orbison, BK ‘16, Jacob Osborne, DC ‘16, Max Saltarelli, PC ‘13.

9

OPINION: Matthew Breuer, BR ‘14, advocates for safe on-campus spaces for drinking, and Julia Calagiovanni, SM ‘15, argues against the death penalty for Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

REVIEWS

CULTURE 18

Marcus Moretti, BK ‘13, profiles Badfish, the world’s biggest Sublime cover band. Also: the Quinnipiac River Bottle public art exhibition and a new bike sharing program.

20

Aaron Gertler, TD ’15, on will.i.am’s new album, #willpower. Also: The Place Beyond the Pines, Snoop Dogg, Phoenix, and our weekly staff list.

The Yale Herald (Apr. 26, 2013)

THANk GOD IT’S FRIDAY The Herald’s week in review: what rocked, what sucked, and who took the lead in IM bowling.

CREDIT/D/FAIL Cr:

Marichal Gentry On Thursday, Marichal Gentry sent an email to the entire school. I opened said email alone in my room, not expecting anything much. Sure, Marichal is a cool guy—I’ve seen him sauntering around campus in all kinds of sweaters, but nothing prepared me for this new level of cool. Sandwiched between the usual pre-Spring Fling fun facts about safety, grain alcohol, and Port-a-Potties was a definition of partying that will shape an entire generation. Just like the 80s was shaped by Andy Warhol’s vision of dancing and glitter, the 90s by *NSYNC’s baggy pants and block parties, the 00s by Alec Finlkstine’s dazed Bar Mitzvah grinding (maybe that was just me), the 10s will be defined

by Marichal Gentry’s definition of all day, e’ry day partying (as long as you and a few other people don’t live in the exact place that you are standing).

“Parties,” Marichal writes, “in student rooms are not allowed during Spring Fling. (A party is any gathering that includes more that the residents in a given room).”

WHAT. Don’t hide that kind of groundbreaking, eradefining info inside some parentheses. Don’t act like we all knew that we were literally partying. All. The. Fucking. Time. Don’t be modest, Marichal. You’ve just defined a whole generation of young people. You’re a trailblazer.

Party on, friend.

D:

Excitement about Spring Fling I love “Thrift Shop” just as any fun loving college student, and am genuinely interested in your debate over whether you should take acid or Molly on the special day, but I can’t quite fully chime in on all the hype. Maybe it’s because the first outdoor concert I ever went to was of that guy who sang that song “Baby Beluga” and turned out to be a pedophile. I do love debating whether or not the headliner has misogynistic lyrics (this year is a happy break) and wearing those weirdly big tank tops that we will definitely look back on with shame. But last year I totally bought into the hype and was pretty dissapointed. I listened to a ton of Passion Pit to teach myself to differentiate their songs, bought a tank top, and talked up my excitement for day drinking like it was the new night drinking (it’s not).

But all of this led me to loosing my friends after looking for a bathroom and listening to T-Pain alone from my room in Lawrence.

I’m not tryna be a wet blanket on Yale’s dry blanket of excitement, but anybody can be a pedophile, you know? You get it.

The Yale Herald (Apr. 26, 2013)

F:

Cicadas In case you haven’t heard, the cicadas are coming. Cicadas are bugs that hang out underground for 17 years and then swarm the East Coast, poke people with their pointy proboscis, and block the sky with their billion-cicada swarm while meeting a 90decibel buzz for like six weeks at a time. University of Maryland entomologist Michael Raupp summed it up for nbcnews.com: “For entomophobes, this is the season of despair. For the entomophiles, this is the season of joy.”

Okay so that’s cool or whatever if you’re a fancy fucking “entomophile” on your fancy entomophile horse, but I’m a die-hard entomophobe. I’ll be building a fort before the cicadas decide to dig their “escape chimneys,” finding that body bubble that Jake Gyllenhaal wore in that movie, and buying all the milk I can get my hands on so I can eat cereal in my fort for the whole six weeks.

According to Raupp the “expert,” cicadas supposedly represent a “culinary bonanza” for birds and stuff. They’re said to taste like asparagus or shrimp. The entomophobe community is not impressed. What the fuck is a proboscis. Don’t poke me with it. And I’m highly allergic to shrimp. So.

—Ruby Spiegel —graphics by Zachary Schiller YH Staff

BOOM/BUST

BY THE

NUMBERS

TYNG CUP STANDINGS

INCOMING: The work storm The one thing that doesn’t help with the amount of work I have left is telling people that I have unfinished work. Even now, you know what I am doing?

I am writing this in order to tell you that I have work I am putting off for it. I was going to be all like, “Don’t tell me how much work you have—we all have work.” But that’s what I am doing, and it’s okay because you are reading this and didn’t ask me out of courtesy how I’ve been doing. I’ve been doing fine. I have some work, but I’m fine. And I really don’t mean to annoy or dodge the question: the real answer is I am bored. Boring, I neglect it, and I am bored.

OUTGOING: The sun What’s up, sun? Are you staying or not? Please stop standing in the doorway of April—you’re letting the cold air in. It has actually gotten back to the point where I were a sweater and jacket again just so I don’t jinx away the weather.

Of course, that strategy is not working out the way I drew it up. Do you notice how much happier the campus is when the sun is out? It’s like a weight that none of us even knows is there has been lifted. The campus mindset shifts: of course I’m publicly drinking—it’s 3 p.m. And is mine the only suite that hasn’t been storing an inflatable couch in their common room? The lingering wintry weather has even caused a new wave of sickness, the plague of the ambitious sunbather. I mean, it is still 40 degrees outside, but I still see people playing Frisbee in flip-flops, and they are either tearing from the cold or crying over the apparently perpetual winter. Please come back, sun. We love you, sun.

—Jake Dawe

TOP FIVE 5 4 3 2 1

#

1. Trumbull 2. Jonathan Edwards 3. Ezra Stiles 4. Pierson 5. Saybrook 6. Morse 7. Timothy Dwight 8. Branford 9. Davenport 10. Berkeley 11. Silliman 12. Calhoun

866.5 860.5 785.5 726 693 688 639 618.5 595 503 472 150

INDEX 328, 259 Number of books published in the United States in 2011.

235, 000 Number of self-published books in the United States in 2011.

Yale-centric senior theses

8

Number of books sold in a traditional bookstore for every book sold online.

ECON: “Inflationary Implications of Gourmet Heaven Prices”

23

Percentage of ebooks in US book publishers’ sales.

SOCY: “Finals Period Study Breaks: An Ethnography”

17

EVST: “Squirrelensis Yalesis: Population Growth of an Invasive Species”

Number of books read annually by the average American.

EP&E: “Legitimation Crisis? The 2013 Yale College Council Elections”

8,000

Number of new publishing companies established in a year.

WGSS: “Taken too Seriously: The SWUG Phenomenon” —Austin Bryniarski YH Staff

Sources: 1) bowker.com 2) paidcontent.org 3, 4) greenleafbookgroup.com 5) libraries.pewinternet.org 6) greenleafbookgroup.com

­—Alisha Jarwala YH Staff The Yale Herald (Apr. 26, 2013)

An I not for an I

by Ava Kofman YH Staff

T

here are a couple different ironies at play when writing about one’s disavowal of writing in the first person. I’m going to name some of them. I’m hoping, upon reflection, that some things will be made clearer to me, and others, less confusing.

Reflection: an important word here. “I” is both the speaking subject and the object of the speech act. This game of doubling produces that uncanny “me-not-me” moment, as when a baby looks at his own little baby hand.

Mimesis asks for recognition and recognition asks for subsequent disindentification to produce itself. This is why mirrors are freakish and daguerrotypes steal souls.

But I said I was writing this to make things less confusing and this is abstract. I haven’t explained why I thought and still think commitments to the first person leave a bad aftertaste. I was writing this essay, I said to myself, to escape the recursive abyss. And yet, any reflection upon the “I” articulates and creates its own difficulties, like a neo-noir detective searching for the clue to his own existence. What does it mean to say anything to myself? As Nicolas Cage might say, I am my own mystery.

The first person questions how I identity my “self” as myself. This use of the word “person” is intended to refer to composite characteristics that identify the shapes of my body, my mouth, my lips, my ears, as different, under ordinary circumstances, from yours. In spite (and perhaps because) of the first person, I am no more than my own body, and that is a shaky proposition, at best. With or without the invocation of the fluted “I,” we are still skin sheeted over bone.

Who is this first person anyhow? If I listened to the words of my mouth, I might say that someone else was speaking out of my mouth. To listen to my own words is to make them an object. I’m me and it’s not me. I’m reified:

6

The Yale Herald (Apr. 26, 2013)

the stout insolubility of the Roman “I,” a simple Tuscan shaft with two capitals, full of stoic composure and decadent and depressed.

Often, due to time, disinterest, distance, or some combination of all three, I cannot identify with this “I” anymore than I can identify with “you.” Which one of us is writing this page? Borges once asked himself. I don’t know, he answered. You answer. I answer. We answer. The critic Mikhail Bakhtin answers.

He answers that the alienated quality of language—its pulsing alterity—lets me express myself without expressing myself at all. When I read this, I imagine language as a blood coursing through the fiction that is my body.

Forms of fiction like the novel can, for Bakhtin, “open up the possibility of never having to define oneself in language, the possibility of translating one’s own intentions from one linguistic system to another, of fusing ‘the language of truth’ with ‘the language of the everyday’ of saying ‘I am me’ in someone else’s language, and in my own language, ‘I am other.’” Rimbaud (it must have been Rimbaud because he said lots of things) said “the ‘I’ is somebody else.”

To say “I” is to say “not-you.” To say “I” depends on difference. “I” legislates a bo(un)d(ar)y. But it is also, sometimes, to say “and you, too.” You and me both, hypothetically, are located in “we.” But maybe we don’t know each other well enough yet. And if we did, maybe we would not want to be so intimately linked by two little letters. I depends on we. I will not exist if you do not imagine me.

I is sneaky. I slides around. The thing I’m after with I-as-an-object is its regulation of a certain mode of being one’s self. The concept of being one’s self and its implicit essentialism will be interrogated momentarily.

What makes me anxious, for now, is the way the first

person forecloses on ways of acting in the future. The “I” affixed here to this page acts as though it defines a stable self, and in this way, limits other possibilities of being.

“I” lets us believe the ignoble fantasy that we control the means of our own production. The printed page, as semidurable matter, legitimates this feeling of permanence. In life we are improving. On dead trees we are stuck. Seconds after that first moment of instantiation, “I” lets our bad faith run on auto-pilot, though whether by courtesy or conspiracy I am not sure. I is its own best cheerleader; it is constantly rallying itself to rally itself.

This is because “I” is contractually obligated to line up with all the other “I”s in a given piece of writing. I is supposed to function as some sort of repository of meaning for the self. And yet, it constantly locates itself elsewhere (for instance, all over this page) like poison daggers in an arcade game. I prosecutes its own alibi like a dog biting its own tail. The fact that we need to constantly reassert our identity at all, according to Judith Butler, demonstrates that “identity is not self-identical.” “I” can never cite itself identically because it is not the same “I”: the I is an imitation of itself, of the self, that always fails.

It goes without saying (as I am writing this essay) that there are many practical reasons for making myself legible under the sign of the first person. [The implications of the ontological and political claims of the impersonal I (“I will argue…”), as opposed to the personal I, (“I love” “I am” “I want”), as opposed to the lyric I (“Shall I compare thee…”), not to mention the question of voice and of Voices, are more complex than the space this evisceration allows.] Still, I weakly believe (right now at 11:13 a.m.) that the spatial and temporal instability of all acts of iterability—and truly they are theatrical acts—make coherency impossible. Who is to say—that is to say, “Who

am I or who are you to say?” which is also to always say, “Who am I, anyhow?”—that the instant even exists. The instant is infinitely composed of instants infinitely composed of…and so on.

That this interval of time is always subject to further revision doesn’t bear directly on the point I’m about to make. But the structure of this ad infinitum division is useful to think about in relation to the space, rather than the time, occupied by the utterance. Is the utterance a unit that only includes the “I”? Or should the rest of the sentence be considered seperately, like sections of a cafeteria tray? Here is the string bean “I,” served next to fragments of porkchop and peas.

It’s 5:46 a.m. and the itching squawks of birds make me want to pluck out my own eyes. Instead of making “I” the subject, we might make “4/23 8:48 p.m.” or “insert irony” the subject, but this would give too much priority to that moment––as though something happening now was always different from the something happening now.

Which it is and isn’t.

MAYBE THIS UNSPOKEN IMPERATIVE TO SECURE A position for the wandering and provisional self is not unrelated the impulse that makes us build towers tall enough to scrape at air and sky.

I spend more time agonizing about how to avoid writing about my person than writing at all. And trying too hard to avoid whatever mode of first person turns out terribly.

Sometimes, when I would erase the “I” from my writing so that it no longer existed, I would end up, paradoxically, overdetermining its presence. My least favorite construction as a result of this to date is: “Later, from a plane, the skyscrapers...” I was clearly in that plane but couldn’t clearly say so. I was giving this concept of the clandestine self—of myself—too much credit. The inexplicably omniscient viewpoint throughout that piece about the passenger-less plane is, like physicalist accounts of transubstantiation, a pretty painful act of contortion.

Until this moment (2:35 a.m. on Tuesday), I thought I was writing to silence myself so that language might

speak for me. At time of publication, this thought seems misguided and a bit precious. Because what we think the self to be is, in reality, fundamentally unreal. The “I” is just the convenient party bus that consolidates the dizzying vertigo that accompanies this realization of unreality.

Freaks me out. The stability of “I” is the result of equal pressure from all angles, like the keystone at the top of Roman arches when they made aqueducts and et cetera.

But there is nothing beneath it. And that other voice resounds: “Nothing will come of nothing: speak again.”

Suddenly it is evening. I may not be writing any of this.

I, me, Ava, am certainly not speaking aloud, certainly not saying anything. This sentence says nothing. Neither does this one. Nothing at all, except nothing itself. And to say that is to say nothing of me, or the category of my person, or the shape of my lips, which are only letters and nausea.

“I” becomes a something the way a nothing does: by saying I do not exist on this page, I must exist on this page.

This is one of the reasons (and there are many) that I love reading YouTube comments. They thrive in unbearable anonymity. Their uprbringing was one of orphanhood. Despite all odds, these comments beam feelings that may never be seen or felt or heard by anybody else. The songs they address never listen to them. And so intensified by this solitude, marked at an early age to carry the sign of the wanderer, they feel their way along the web’s expanse, guided only by the lights of fiber optic cables. External noise is made internal. The YouTube comment, like Mayakovsky, has mastered the art of the “intimate yell.”The voltage of these comments comes from real life. They are full of wildness and tension, like a stork crashing into a window. The usernames often have no bearing, no default clue that positions subjects outside of these lonely glaciers of floating text:

Am I located inside the letter “I” which makes existence a fantasy of flat planes streaking across space, like thin rain, and falling away? I disintegrates into daggers.

I I I I I I I I never existed in the first place. The “I” is the cause, not the effect, of our notions of consciousness and subjectivity. The self presupposes the self. Especially given the condition of the temporary nothing in which life goes on.

Since this essay is only myself as I was today and yesterday and the day before, I find it boring and old. This boredom is part of my discomfort with the first person and its need to assert radical commitment, or at the least, enough self-interest in what one is saying to keep on saying it. But what’s exciting about having already spoken?

The words spark a dull brightness.

What do I share with this “I”? What do I share with this “I” besides hysterical boredom, creative paranoia and a goldfish attention span that makes me unable to ever share anything with this “I” for more than a minute at a time before moving on to the next thing? And then onto the next thing until I shrink and die.

I is that day the ice-field melted up north, a boy wishing he was a young girl living in pre-Haussmann Paris. I is a silent fire, a green, twitching lung, and several volumes of Poe. What’s left? More words. I am going after my own reality with language. Hungry, shaking and sleepless, to consummate existence in this letter, in this distillation of the clarity of consciousness.

I’ve been working on having something to say for a while now. Tomorrow, maybe. What can talking about it do. I don’t know.

—graphics by Julia Kittle-Kamp YH Staff The Yale Herald (Apr. 26, 2013)

7

SITTING DOWN WITH KENNETH REVEIZ

by Andrew Wagner YH Staff

While most Yale students bid farewell to New Haven after graduation, poet Kenneth Reveiz, CC ’12, stayed in the Elm City to help found the People’s Arts Collective (PAC). PAC is an inclusive public space and workspace for artists and activists that leads a variety of social change programs for the New Haven community, including the Free Skool. The Herald met up with Reveiz in the Barnes & Noble Café to talk about PAC’s new LGBTQ Kickback Space for high school students, the town-gown relationship and what it’s like to stick around New Haven.

YH: What were your experiences with organization and activism in New Haven before founding the People’s Arts Collective?

KR: I got into student activism through the financial aid reform campaign, through the Undergraduate Organizing Committee.

Right now they’re revamping a similar thing. They’re Students Unite Now, which I was part of the transition for, which is really exciting and cool. We fought for financial aid reform, we fought for responsible investments: Yale had something like $120 million invested in this hotel company that was known to make its housekeepers do 14 rooms a day as opposed to seven, which is the industry standard. I got more into local politics, I was the field director for Sarah Eidelson’s campaign.

She’s the Yale Ward 1 alderwoman.

YH: How did those experiences influence the PAC and the foundation of it?

KR: For me a super important part is [that it’s] the People’s Arts Collective of New Haven. I felt like we couldn’t really start it responsibly without understanding the context of the city and making a real push for it to be not just Yale students and not just downtown-focused, but actually trying to get people from the Hill, and Fair Haven. People who needed this space more than we did, and who needed representation downtown, and who should be getting the means of production, so to speak, for their culture.

YH: Can you tell us a bit more about the founding of PAC? KR: Originally, it was going to be the People’s Theater. We were working really excitedly on a play called Osama Play, that I wrote and Gabe DeLeon [JE ’14] directed. We decided that we love working together, that there’s really no space for art that engages political and social things that we were really concerned about. There was a vast underrepresentation of people of color making art and in my experience organizing in New Haven, there just really needed to be a space for people to make art or have meetings.

YH: So how successful has the PAC been in bringing people in from the greater New Haven area?

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The Yale Herald (Apr. 26, 2012)

People’s Art Collective KR: We’ve done a pretty good job, I’d say. [At] the New Haven Free Skool, we have, maybe, 70 percent people who are not in any way Yale-affiliated. That includes people on the Hill, people from all over, but also Seymour, Connecticut, and Bethany.

allegedly super progressive, and Yale has a huge queer population. But I felt like there was really a need. [There are] kids who are physically assaulted or verbally assaulted on the regular. And especially in communities of color, which is something that nobody has really been addressing.

YH: What inspired the idea for the Free Skool?

KR: I, personally, had done a lot of education stuff. I was at a school in Fair Haven doing environmental science and theater, which was awesome. There are so many reasons why [the Free Skool] should exist.

Class is something that we don’t talk about at all in schools.

At least on Yale’s campus, they’re now doing it a lot more, which is great. It’s about who has access to knowledge, who produces the knowledge, and who feels like they’re able to produce knowledge. That’s all a class thing. And I feel like the Free Skool can make it so anyone can learn anything, anyone can teach anything.

YH: What sort of workshops do you do with the students?

KR: Last week we did one on verbal self-defense. Like when someone says something stupid like, “Why don’t bisexuals just pick one?” People are ready with a response. And then the second part of that was queer families. We had special guests, people who live in New Haven, one of them was the alderwoman of the East Rock neighborhood, and they were just talking about what it’s like to raise a family in New Haven, what it was like for them growing up.

YH: What exactly does the Free Skool offer?

KR: It’s free classes open to anyone, everything from yoga to queer art thought & action, which I co-teach. Black history films, there was a disposable camera workshop, backyard poultry raising.

YH: So who teaches those classes?

KR: Anyone. It’s a combination of us. A lot of people I’ve met through organizing and activism, and people who have just come to us. One thing that I really loved was how much this group People Against Police Brutality has been using our space, and they taught this class “Every 36 hours,” which is about police brutality in New Haven. Every 36 hours a black man is incarcerated in the United States. That was exactly what I had personally envisioned: they need a space, we have the resources and can help them.

YH: On the whole, do you feel like it’s been successful so far?

KR: In a number of ways. It’s just that we have a tremendous privilege of having a space. That, number one, is ridiculous.

That makes a huge difference. If you throw resources at anything, it’s going to make it do better.

YH: One of PAC’s recent programs is the LGBTQ kickback space. What made you feel like this was something that New Haven needs?

KR: Again, it’s based on experience. For one, the New Haven Pride Center, which does great work, is in West Haven, which is kind of ridiculous. In my experience, in high schools and middle schools, people are really afraid to be allies and advocates. There are a few out people here and there, but it seemed like a real struggle. And this is New Haven, which is

YH: So now, as a New Haven resident yourself, how has your relationship with the city changed from your time as a student at Yale to now?

KR: I really love it. There’s so much cool shit going on. The punk scene is amazing. There’s some real brilliance. The more I meet people, the more I wish there was more interaction between all kinds of communities, not just Yale and New Haven people, but downtown and Fair Haven, or the Hill and Fair Haven, the elderly and the young.

YH: What do you think of the Yale-New Haven relationship more generally?

KR: Number one important thing is that the rumors you have heard are not true. If you walk past Dwight Street, you’re not going to get mugged. If you walk past the Green or even in the Green, you’re not going to get shot. That’s all lies. That’s all myth. That’s all fabrication. And, what it actually does, is it enforces a very racist, classist, elitist notion that enables gentrification and the destruction of neighborhoods, and that’s ongoing.

In the 60s, there was this project called the Ring Road that literally would have built a highway around Yale’s downtown campus. And [it] was partially built, right where we have Downtown Crossing. That was the Oak Neighborhood. People lived there. For years afterward, and still today, people who grew up there have vigils. They go to the highway with candles.

YH: Would you like to see Yale students become more involved with the New Haven community?

KR: There’s so much that it could give to them as well as they could give to it. I feel like the discourse is framed so that it’s a one-way relationship, like a philanthropic one, but actually it’s quite the opposite. There’s mutual learning possible.

—This interview has been condensed by the author

opinion dealing with drink Facing ourselves

by Matthew Breuer As the school year ends, Yale University’s policies surrounding alcohol look remarkably similar to how they did at the end of the year prior. Despite a yearlong conversation on campus about the administration’s grip tightening around drinking, policies have remained the same. Students have been invited into the discussion on this issue, and several Yale committees, many of which include current students, have worked tirelessly to find solutions that the entire campus can embrace. However, if I were not one of those students myself, I would hardly know any of this.

The fact that the legal drinking age is 21 has created Yale’s drinking culture. The same students spending nights out at bars abroad return to campus to drink vodka out of water bottles or shotgun beers inside the tailgate Porta Potties. It is annoying, unnecessary, and—at a university where we are frequently challenged to solve some of the world’s greatest problems—entirely out of character. For the vast majority of students who show up at Camp Yale having no experience with alcohol, there is no venue to have any sort of intelligent introduction to drinking. Instead, it is likely to come in your Old Campus common room, a circle of people just as inexperienced as yourself, centered around the perpetually unsatisfying Dubra. Maybe you will have one drink, maybe eight—after all, you are probably not going to be able to drink later, and if you are going to make it Toad’s, you are not looking to do it sober.

This dynamic is central to so many of the problems around alcohol at Yale: the lack of any supervision, the exaggerated rate and amount of consumption, the fear around helping a friend. To say that students believe Yale should push to lower the drinking age sells short the real message—students, particularly those under 21, are not in love with how alcohol is consumed at Yale either.

However, the complex ways that Yalies feel about alcohol remains unknown to the administration. By now, everyone should have filled out at least one of Yale’s alcohol surveys the administration has sent out. Yet how useful is the data collected if we are not having a real conversation about what we want to see in our drinking

scene? Asking us if we have done something we regret while drinking might net a percentage point answer, but it says absolutely nothing in terms of how people feel about that experience, and if it was truly problematic, or what dynamics caused it.

In truth, it is not Yale’s alcohol policy that is to blame for Yale’s drinking culture. The policy, as it is conceived today, is a pretty reasonable one given the administrative and legal gymnastics that are required to maintain it. However, no one, students and administrators alike, can succinctly describe it, and the failure of communication has created a culture of fear around Executive Committee that is shutting down spaces that were once safe areas to drink and where anyone was welcome. Instead, this failure of communication is pushing people to take that extra shot (or three) before they leave for the night.

We need to get those spaces back. If fraternities simply cannot keep their doors as open as they used to, and if the University would rather see fewer college party suites than more, then new spaces need to be opened up. If the current trajectory is continued, “All roads lead to Toad’s” is going to start sounding a lot more like “The only road leads to Toads,” which is likely the exact opposite of what the administration is attempting to accomplish.

—graphic by Christine Mi YH Staff

by Julia Calagiovanni YH Staff Mon., Apr. 15, 2:49 P.M.: a bomb detonated at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Thirteen seconds later, another. At an event—a moment—meant to celebrate the strength and ability of the human body, we were reminded what flesh cannot do—resist nails and shrapnel and fire. During a moment in which we should have been celebrating the triumph of the mind and will over fatigue and pain, we became terribly aware of just how fragile the world is.

And the pain will not end soon for those who lost family members and friends; the people who loved Krystle Campbell and Lü Lingzi and Martin Richard and Sean Collier will not soon forget them. The 300 people who were wounded will face physical and emotional pain unimaginable to most of us. Our friends at Harvard and MIT will remember the days when their sense of safety, too, was shaken; we will remember the frantic phone calls or texts or emails we sent to loved ones in Boston.

But I’m also thinking about how Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is exactly six months younger than me. To call him young is also to call myself young, of course; we are both impressionable, naïve, insistent on the truth of our convictions, hungry.

But while I spent my 20th birthday reading Milton and eating vegan cupcakes, he will, of course, spend his 20th birthday, and many more after that, in prison.

I have no faith in the so-called “criminal justice” system to deliver justice.

Prisons are a site of horrific racial and sexual violence; a prison industrial complex profiting off of the caging and torturing of people stripped of their dignity; an arena for sadistic displays of control over other human beings; a place to dehumanize and forget those people we wish didn’t exist. While people who have committed acts like the Boston bombing obviously pose a threat to the public, placing them out of sight and out of mind cannot heal the emotional wounds they caused.

We can only recover by facing them, and ourselves.

These things are easy for me to write; for those who lost loved ones or had their

bodies and lives forever changed by the bombings, they are surely unfathomably difficult to consider. It would be easy— too easy—to force the weight of fear and grief onto the body—the life—of one teenaged boy.

The death penalty is illegal in Massachusetts. But if Tsarnaev is tried in federal court, he could face capital punishment. Executing him would say this: some lives are precious and mournable; some are not. Some human beings are unworthy—undeserving—of life. Others have called for Tsarnaev to be named an “enemy combatant,” effectively obliterating his status as a human being, detaining him indefinitely without a trial or a lawyer. He is not one of us, we say, he should not live.

I want to find compassion in the midst of tragedy. But when I think too much, I think about fear and the meaning of justice. I’m addicted to news, my voyeuristic curiosity and my anxiety fed by the 24-hour news cycle, the incessant updates on my Twitter feeds at two and three and four in the morning, the news alerts that come up on my phone between texts and emails. I don’t think that it would soothe me to know that this man was dead. It would be a macabre game of whack-a-mole, my sense of ease in the world dependent on the obliteration of whatever happened to threaten my sense of safety.

Maybe it would provide some measure of relief for someone to wake up and remember that this young man is dead. It might be satisfying or make the world feel safer. But it also limits our moral and emotional vocabulary to reach for such easy solutions. There is an easy response, and there is a humane one.

We reach for punishment and death as an answer. But what we really need are questions: how am I complicit in creating a prejudiced world? How do I simplify, categorize, or reduce other human beings? How do I allow my fear to cloud my belief in the goodness of others? If I met Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, what would I say to him? Could I look him in the eye?

The 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero (Alexander Shaheen/YH) The Yale Herald (Apr. 26, 2013)

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10

(Zachary Schiller/YH Staff) The Yale Herald (Apr. 26, 2013)

The Givers

by Rachel Kauder Nalebuff I spent a day shadowing an abortion provider last spring. She would be indistinguishable from any other successful professional if it weren’t for the wig in her purse and the gun in her glove compartment. The number of providers has decreased by 30 percent over the past two decades, and even in liberal New Haven such doctors can be—and are—this afraid for their lives, sometimes to the point of wearing bulletproof vests to work.

With the support of a summer fellowship and an artistic residency from Planned Parenthood, I spent last summer interviewing abortion providers around the country. Doctors are not alone in the following of their beliefs; I also interviewed many pro-life activists and attended the National Right to Life Convention and found those same levels of conviction on the other side of the issue.

The resultant play, The Givers, is about an abortion provider and her devoutly pro-life hairdresser. The respectful dialogue about abortion that it aims to open up feels particularly important this year which marks the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade and the passage of our country’s most conservative anti-choice legislation.

In the following excerpted scene, Ellen, an abortion provider, attempts to convince Hannah, her 22-year-old daughter, that the two women are safe despite the threats Ellen has just received after testifying against a pro-life court case.

Excerpted from Act II, Scene 3 of The Givers

afraid or you can choose to laugh.

ELLEN: I have something that I think will cheer you up. Hold on, hold, on.

HANNAH: Can I see that? Shit, it looks really real.

HANNAH: You don’t need to try to cheer me up.

ELLEN collapses on the couch.

ELLEN: Close your eyes, sweet pea.

ELLEN: I had to squeeze in FIVE patients today.

ELLEN rifles through her bag from work.

HANNAH: Why?

HANNAH: What are you doing?

ELLEN: Close ‘em!

HANNAH closes her eyes. ELLEN pulls a wig out of her purse. It should be natural-looking, although not ELLEN’s natural hair color.

ELLEN: Everyone’s trying to get the operation scheduled before the law gets enacted.

All of them were over 20 weeks. Literally, the moment the court released the decision the phone didn’t stop ringing.

personal crisis in the middle of an operation, and you worry about worrying the patient, who’s already terrified, and it’s just awful.

HANNAH: No, never mind.

HANNAH: Shit, I—

HANNAH: How can I possibly go out if…if there are posters everywhere…of your face? If we can’t go to restaurants…

ELLEN: Like there was this one girl today.

Seventeen, I think. And she waited this long because her mother wouldn’t sign the darn consent form. I think she had to visit her dad in prison to get his signature or something?

But she was a wreck. I had to hold her for about five minutes before she stopped crying about her mother. (Pause) But it’s like either, have the consent mandate or the twenty-week bill, but you can’t do both, you know?

HANNAH: Mom.

ELLEN: That’s why you gotta go out.

ELLEN: That shouldn’t stop you from hanging out with your friends!

HANNAH: What friends? Where are my friends? Please tell me.

ELLEN: Cindy?

HANNAH: She moved to New York! Like everyone else!

HANNAH: That kinda backfired, huh.

ELLEN: It’s gonna make you laugh, I swear. K, you can look now.

ELLEN: Laurel actually had to start turning people away.

ELLEN: Don’t punish them for waiting when you made them wait, Jesus, it makes no sense.

HANNAH opens her eyes.

HANNAH: Wow.

HANNAH: You were right.

ELLEN: Ta-da!

ELLEN: We’re just not equipped…

ELLEN: About what?

HANNAH: Really. What people, Mom? I’ve literally met one person since I’ve been here.

HANNAH: Wow.

HANNAH: Eric and what’s-his-name…

HANNAH: I honestly don’t know if I’m more mad at you or me right now, though.

ELLEN: I see young people in my office every day.

ELLEN: You think I could be a redhead?

ELLEN: None of them want to do it. I asked Eric and he goes…he doesn’t mind if I do it, he just doesn’t want to have to do my dirty work.

ELLEN: Sweet pea, you gotta learn to let go of stuff.

HANNAH: How do I MEET those people, Mom!

HANNAH: It’s just, you’ve been really shitty… but like it’s impossible for me to be mad at you right now. Like, I would be such a dick if I resented you when you’re literally doing the hardest thing.

ELLEN: I mean, a job would be helpful.

ELLEN: Oh Han. It’s gonna get better.

HANNAH: I have!

HANNAH: Right.

ELLEN: I still don’t really understand why you didn’t tell the folks at the library you knew Spanish, but…

HANNAH: Meh. ELLEN: Oh come on. There’s that smile.

HANNAH: Why do you even have that?

ELLEN: Laurel gave it to me today.

HANNAH: What a dick. How can you work with him?

ELLEN: He’s a sweet man, his heart’s just in the—

HANNAH: Laurel? Why?

ELLEN: I don’t know! Make some new ones!

Meet people you know indirectly! There are a ton of people your age just waiting to be your friend.

HANNAH: You don’t think I’ve been trying?

ELLEN: I know you have.

HANNAH: How many did you do today?

ELLEN: So that I could walk into the hospital (exotically) incognito.

ELLEN: Five. And I have six tomorrow.

HANNAH: Jesus, you think that’s funny?

HANNAH: So he’s a dick.

ELLEN: I haven’t been checked out in over twenty years so I’m happy to take advantage of the situation.

ELLEN: Well, you know…you become desensitized to the operation. It’s remarkable actually. Like when you pull a foot out of someone by the fifth time…it just kinda stops being a foot, you know? Like by the end of today it seemed just like a slippery rubbery thing…and I mean thank god because how else could you do it…but then you launch yourself into this

HANNAH: Okay, one: that’s not true. Two: that’s not what this is about.

ELLEN: You can choose to be stressed and

ELLEN: No, it is! And aren’t you grateful that we can at least handle this as adults?

HANNAH: Whoa, no. I’d so much rather be an oblivious six-year-old. Literally all I do is psych myself out! Every day when you’re at work it’s like I’m living out The Shining. Like today…uch.

ELLEN: What?

HANNAH: You honestly think that’s why I didn’t get it? You HONESTLY still think that’s why.

ELLEN: It’s such an asset, I don’t understand why you never want to talk about it!

continued on page 15 The Yale Herald (Apr. 26, 2013)

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by Carlos Gomez YH Staff

J

ack Smith learned he was a cheater when he read it on his Google alerts. “JACK SMITH: CHEATER,” it read. It was the first Jack Smith had heard of his alleged affair, but Jack Smith was certainly not the first to hear it.

He had four missed calls on his phone, another incoming, and it was barely six.

“Did you see—” “Yeah.”

“Is it true?”

“No.” A grainy photo and a grainer close-up accompanied a full testimonial from the lady in question. Her face was blurred. She had asked to remain anonymous.

“Call me in a couple hours and we’ll figure out what to do.”

Jack promised to call, hung up, and scrolled down. Apparently he had slept with her two weeks ago. June 12. He had met her in a bar. B&W. He had been very drunk.

“Slurring,” even. He had been very forward and did not mention his wife. “I don’t remember a ring.”

Hannah. Her name was Hannah. And she hated being referred to as his wife. Hannah, who wore men’s clothes and refused to switch to DSL for over a year, who didn’t even want a television in the house. Hannah wouldn’t read this. Hannah was above this. Hannah had a fucking tomato garden for God’s sake. Hannah was calling.

“Jack, tell me this isn’t true.”

“Honey, you can’t be—” “—don’t patronize me. I’m just asking— ” “—I’m not. And it’s not. I—” “—because Megan called this morning and—” “—what the hell would your sister know?”

There was heavy breathing on the other side. Jack could see her there, biting the skin off her pinkie nail, wearing her glasses, his slippers.

“Look, I’m sorry about this. But it’s not— don’t even read the—” “Of course I’m going to—after last time—how…”

Her voice was weak, warbled, about

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The Yale Herald (Apr. 26, 2013)

to rupture. “…how did she know all of that, that stuff about you?”

“The Internet. Honey, I—” She sighed. He stopped.

“Sam’s up. One second, sweetie, I’m on the phone with—yes, I’ll be in there in a second, I—Jack? Jack, I have to go. Our son is hungry. You’re back on Monday?”

“Yeah. There might be reshoots, but I’m definitely, please don’t­—” “—I’m coming. Okay. I have to go.”

“I love y—” She hung up.

It was true. She was smart, this woman— the “other woman”—or whoever had commissioned the story. They had fact-checked.

Most of the hard details could be confirmed and thus found online: “He ordered whiskey-cokes all night, his favorite…and I said I liked his shirt—blue, striped—and he said he liked mine too but would like it better if…his hotel was right around the corner, though we took the…” And everything else, the “personal details” she didn’t want “to go into” but rather dove into headfirst, would require him to discuss his sexual predilections or at least drop his pants to contest.

Jack felt uneasy but Hannah would get over it. She had rage wound into every one of her brown curls but it never lasted long.

After not getting into grad school Hannah smashed her camera on their tiled floor and then spent the next three hours cradling the pieces, sobbing. Jack bought her a new one for their second anniversary.

The front desk called. His car was here.

Did he want to go out the back?

JACK TRIED TO REMEMBER JUNE 12 AS the crew fixed a harness to the X-suit.

He had been at the bar, sure, but he must have called home. Maybe it had been too late. They pulled tighter, pinching his cupped-crotch.

“Do we want to sue?”

“Huh?” “Do. We. Want. To sue?” Mark Branson, ‘publicist-to-Jack Smith-yes-that-Jack Smith,’ wanted to know. He was spinning something furious on his phone, all mouth

and thumbs.

“Do we—” “Want to sue. Libel.”

“I don’t—” “In any case you need to release a statement. Post on the site. Tweet something.

You’re trending, you know. So is Agent X.” “I—” “Nevermind. I’ll do it.”

Yellow goggles and a scarred skin cap were pulled over Jack’s head. His cheeks were stretched and hair tugged and harness drawn tighter as the crew put on his face.

He was halfway Agent X when his phone vibrated. Another email from Hannah.

They had talked two more times the day before and she had reluctantly agreed to believe him “for the time being” but she was making use of her once-begrudged fast connection to forward him select new headlines. “Jack Smith’s Other Woman.”

“Jack Smith’s Wife, ‘Furious.’” There was an online poll: “Did Jack Smith Do It?” (45 percent thought he did; 39 percent thought he didn’t; 16 percent couldn’t decide.) Another read: “Jack Smith Sleeps with Hooker,” though that was before they identified the woman as Leslie Ackerly, USC senior, communications major. Jack had never seen her before, but that hardly mattered.

Hannah’s newest email contained a condensed profile.

Jack pressed delete as a brown-haired production assistant buckled his boots and adjusted his pants. His phone buzzed again.

He didn’t check it but it buzzed again, and again. Hannah was calling.

“I checked our statement. You were there. At that—” “—for work. Have you been talking to Megan? Honestly, I—” “Jack. There was a photographer here this morning. In Thetford. In our backyard.”

Jack wedged the phone between his shoulder pad and capped head as the girl put on his gloves and the director yelled for him.

“I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. But I thought we—hold on!—Hannah, I have to—” “—Jack, you said work would never— “—Give me one minute! Hannah—”

“And after last time…” She exhaled.

“I’ll be home in four days.” He ignored her. “Give Sam a kiss for me.”

Three years earlier, when Hannah was almost due and Jack had just gotten home from his last movie, she found a napkin with a number in his coat pocket. Hannah had been unpacking his bags. She liked putting his things back next to hers. Jack was in the shower, and she waddled down to the kitchen phone and dialed and listened to a woman’s voicemail recording as she smoothed the napkin’s warped corners on the table. Jack had not done it. He had not even seen the napkin. (“People just do things like that. To me. It doesn’t mean I do anything to them.”)

And, practically speaking, he argued, if he had called the number it would not still be in his pocket. Sam kicked and Hannah relented. (“You never were that good at acting, I suppose.”) Jack, as he’d promised at every interview and press conference during that last year, stayed in Vermont once Sam was born. “Family comes first.”

They pulled him up and he hung there, limp, suspended, waiting to be called into action.

“Mark. Mark!” Mark came over and looked up at his dangling client, hollering for him.

“We’re not suing. Hannah and Sam—” “Ok-ay.” Mark said in the sing-song way that meant he disagreed. “Makes you look guil-ty. Are you sure?”

A camera swung on Jack’s right and they pulled his wires even higher.

“I’m sure. There was a photographer, Mark. In Thetford. In my backyard.”

The director called action and Jack began speaking to the green wall behind him.

They would add in the details later.

TWO DAYS PASSED AND HE—“JACK Smith”—Mark Branson—had still had not released anything. Jack checked his phone frequently. It never left his hand unless he was in front of the camera. Hannah had not answered any of his calls. They had not talked all day. No emails, either. But 2,012 people had tweeted @TheREALJackSmith.

The newest one was from LucyFur666, who had a Saint Bernard in a red-horned

headband as her picture and wrote: “You deserve to die @theREALJackSmith!” Seventeen people marked this as a “favorite.”

“I cant believe you @TheREALJackSmith,” said the person below, who apparently could not spell but added the hashtags #cheater #scum in case her tone was unclear.

But at least there were the 274 people who retweeted HardyBoy69: “@TheREALJackSmith, P.I.M.P.” It was late, but Jack could not sleep. The night before, Hannah called at three in the morning. They hadn’t talked for long and about nothing in particular, but the point was that he answered and had been in bed, asleep, alone.

Jack slid his finger back and forth over his phone, locking and unlocking it from the edge of his bed. “How could you @theREALJackSmith?? Y not me?? #jealous.”

When Hannah was happy she liked saying Jack only asked her out because he knew she’d say no. And that he fell in love with her because she was the only one who didn’t already return the sentiment. But she would say all this with her winking grin, the same one she sported when she took Jack’s first headshots and said, “You’re better when you don’t speak.”

Another one popped up: “UR still my hero @TheREALJackSmith! Cant w8 4 Agent X. RT me please!” RT meant re-tweet, but Jack did not. He rarely used the account.

TheREALJackSmith’s last message was from a week before. “New pics of Agent X suit… dont think im ever gonna take this off. #AgentX #Spring2013.” Mark had sent this.

Over six hundred people had re-tweeted it.

Jack had taken off his suit.

He walked to the window and dialed again. At home Jack could see the entire night sky. He had Hannah and Sam and a clear shot at the heavens. Here he had neon clouds and the twinkling of the US Bank Tower and counted among the only stars people wanted to look at.

“Hello?” Jack thought he heard someone pick up.

“Stop calling. She’s hysterical, naturally, and rightfully so, I should—” “Megan? Can you please put—” “You’re not suing? You might as well have just confessed. Didn’t even talk to her about it, I mean, this is, you are—” She gave Jack a few names (#scum, #clichedbastard) before he cut her off.

“Megan, I need you to put Hannah on the phone.”

There was clattering on the other end.

“No, hannah. We agreed—you said—i’m not—fine.”

There was more clattering and then silence as Hannah picked up.

“Do you remember when Sam was born?”

She was stuffed-up, but, still, her voice was different. Softer, more removed.

“Of course.” Jack’s voice went in and out the way men’s do when they try to whisper with emotion. “Happiest day of—” “You said I looked ‘beautiful’—” “You di—” “I looked like a cow but that’s not the point.” She took a deep breath. “And you

said, ‘This is what it’s all about.’ Do you remember?”

In truth, Jack did not remember. But he also remembered that day being warm and glowing with sunlight when all the pictures showed it overcast and gray.

“I do, and—” “—and you and me. We just watched him. Remember?”

“I know. You two—” “I need you to stay there.”

She said this quickly and then went silent.

“What? You can’t—Can I at least see your face? Can I talk to Sam?” She sniffed slowly, considered it, and then said she couldn’t as her voice shattered. Jack sat down and raked his fingers across his scalp.

“How long?”

Weeks, she said. Longer, maybe. As much time as it took, really. There was a long pause.

“He’s playing with your action figure, Jack,” she said, and laughed. “He thinks you’re a superhero.”

“That’s not—” “Thank god he can’t read yet.”

JACK GRABBED ANOTHER DRINK AND walked around the room, ignoring shouts for “Agent X!” and pretending to look for someone. No one really wanted to talk to him anyway. He was there to talk around and about and to pull in for pictures. Jack was not even sure quite where he was. Some restaurant with leather booths and dim lighting. Near palm trees and pavement and green hills staked with signposts.

Mark’s arm shot out from a booth and dragged Jack down beside him.

“Jack, look at me—how are you, Arnie.

Sit here with us, I know, I know, we’re feeling pretty good about this one, hold on can you give me a sec? And another whiskeycoke here, please. For Jack. Jack? Jack, I’m talking to you.”

Jack turned back around reluctantly.

“Are you drunk? Good. Anyway, look, this is horrible. Terrible. No way of getting around that—thank you, dear—your wife, family, awful, I can imagine. But. But—hear me out. Listen, do you want some good news or do you want to pout?”

“I don’t—” “You were most searched name this week. Online. The third, at least. For people.

The Agent X site got over twenty thousand new hits.”

Jack took a drink to busy his fist. There were cameras around. Mark answered a call.

“I’m just saying, when life—hi, hi, yes I’m here. Give me a second, Jack, will you?”

Jack said to take several or at least he meant to as he sank into the cushioning. He had stayed an extra week. They had finally finished that day—at least they hoped. (It still had to go through editing.)

It had been a week and Hannah still would not talk to him. Or let Sam even.

She had stopped picking up her phone and sent only one email that said she had checked their statement again and saw he had bought a plane ticket back but could

he “please, not.” She wasn’t interested in grand gestures. Like coming home.

“Hannah” she had signed it. Just “Hannah.”

“I believe you @theREALJackSmith,” a new tweet read. Angela88. “Your wife is beautiful.”

Jack wiped his sweaty thumb over the message, leaving a translucent film on the screen.

“You should retweet that. The last one.”

Mark had his phone against his shoulder and his head over Jack’s. He called over a waitress and ordered two more drinks.

Jack pressed retweet and locked his phone. Below the date and time was a picture of Sam on his second birthday, five months earlier. He was on Jack’s lap, redfaced and crying and clutching his shirt.

Jack was laughing. He and Hannah had put trick candles on the cake and it had not gone over well.

“Cute kid.”

The production assistant who put on his shoes every day had come up beside him.

She had curled her brown hair and wore a silver dress and seemed much taller now that she was in heels and not bent over his feet.

“Thanks. My son. Sam.” She said Sam looked like Jack and Jack said Sam looked like his mother and she said, smiling, that he’d done a good job that day. Jack thanked her again and she said something else about the shoot, or something the director had said about the shoot.

About reshoots, maybe.

“It’s loud in here.”

“Wha?” He was slurring a bit. She leaned into his ear.

“I said, ‘It’s loud in here.’”

It was pretty loud. And everything was always clearer from the outside.

JACK WENT TO THE BATHROOM AS THE girl—“Laura,” she told him in the cab—took her coat off and sat on his bed. He didn’t know quite what to do with her in his room, what he should or wanted to do with her, why he had done what he did already. He tried calling Hannah.

“Jesus Christ, pick up.”

He and Laura hadn’t been outside for more than a minute before they were driving back to the hotel, taking the back entrance then up in the elevator where they had one swift and drunken kiss before reaching his floor. Jack felt like he was being pulled along rather than doing any of it, like any action of he did or would undertake being swept into some larger momentum. The kiss itself had felt like some considered maneuver she aped from TV. Hannah didn’t answer, and Jack walked back in the room and directly to complimentary basket he’d never opened. “Want some?” he said, not looking at her as he twisted the cork off with a suctioned pop.

Jack poured champagne into plastic cups without listening for her answer.

“Is this what you do for all your girls?” she said, smirking as she sipped her room temperature froth. It was a stupid line Jack found irritating. “Is this what you did with that girl,” she pressed. “Leslie?”

“No,” Jack said blandly, not bothering to deny it. He really hadn’t slept with her— Leslie—but he knew it didn’t matter. There were too many words out there to make his worth much now. He sat next to Laura and they drank in silence for a second before she leaned in.

“Wait, wait,” Jack said, taking her cup as if he was scared of spilling. He walked to the desk and downed the last swallow before picking up his phone. “I have to take this,” Jack said, walking out the door and into the hall. No one was calling him but he had two new text messages.

[Mark: “Where r u??”]

And two minutes after that: [Mark: Srsly where r u we have to take pictures.”]

Jack checked his email and refreshed his inbox three times before calling Hannah again. It had been two weeks but it was as if the anxiety of waiting for her response had only grown as he came to know the response was never coming. It was ringing. Jack figured it must have been worse with snail mail—still ringing—before text and Twitter and cell phones. Or better, maybe, Jack couldn’t decide. “This voicemail service has not been set up yet.”

Jack hung up and walked back in the room, where Laura had taken off her dress but not her heels and was kneeling in the center of the bed with her hair pushed to one shoulder. Jack couldn’t imagine she normally acted this way, but he’d been around long enough to know there was something about the presence of a “movie-star” that made everyone an exhibitionist, gave them the confidence—or the affectation of confidence, if there’s a difference—to perform.

So they fucked, loudly and clumsily, changing positions every few minutes like they were playing musical chairs.

Jack used to hate calling it that. Fucking.

Hannah had used it the first time they’d had sex, which was the first night they’d met. As she was buttoning up her shirt afterward she said, “Well, now that we’ve fucked I doubt I’ll see you again. Okay, bye.” She left before he could respond, so he just opened his mouth and left it there. When he tracked down her dorm room the next day she opened the door with a grin, pleased more with herself than his arrival, but he asked her out anyway.

“Zip me?” Laura said as she fingercombed her hair into place.

“Okay. I, uh, don’t mean to, uh—” Jack fumbled over the zipper.

“Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone.”

After dessert and a bottle of wine the next night Hannah sort of apologized for that first night, her dramatic departure, and Jack remarked, half-joking, that “girls don’t talk that way.” She slapped him. After that she’d called it “fucking” exclusively, imbuing the term with a sharp sentimentality so that when she said it on their wedding night it meant something more than the physical act—it was a winking tribute to the frank and unfussy honesty of their love.

—typography by Zachary Schiller YH Staff

The Yale Herald (Apr. 26, 2013)

13

by Emily Foxhall

W

riters begin with the 26 letters of the alphabet. From there, arises infinite possibility. As an aspiring journalist, I am concerned with the compositional choices writers make in an effort to tell the truth. By “tell the truth,” I mean dictate an honest and accurate portrayal of some aspect of our world. This, to me, is the ideal purpose of journalism.

Daily reporting, with its explicit mission to inform readers objectively, sets forth the most immediate claim to this task. Reporters present their information as if reflective of a neutral reality, removing themselves from the situations described and writing in the third person. I used to believe wholeheartedly in this method. As I began to enter the field myself, I took to heart the strict standards for how to interview, how to structure stories, and even how to regulate the voice of written sentences. But the more I worked both for campus and professional news outlets, the more I began to see hints of the form’s limitations. With such parameters, journalism aims to narrow the opportunity for artistic choice, or subjectivity. In actuality, writing can never be as rigorously empirical as math or science.

Because any text is a result of an author’s choices, any piece of writing, be it fiction or nonfiction, is thus intrinsically slanted and given to distortion and drift. Precisely this process of selecting among the 26 letters— this process of writing—renders complete objectivity impossible.

I have described this discovery in a matter-of-fact tone, but as it happened I became quite distressed. I felt duped. Take the

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The Yale Herald (Apr. 26, 2013)

sentiment as scrawled in a journal entry last year: I AM PLAGUED BY THIS QUESTION OF JOURNALISM AS NOT OBJECTIVE. A resulting question then arose and consumed my thoughts: if not through journalism, how then should writers aim to tell the truth?

In a world erupting with new uses of written language—tweets, blog posts and text messages, to name a few—the standards by which readers grant consent to a work as true have grown increasingly blurred. In my career, I want to be sure my words convey something real to a reader. I worry that journalism may not allow my sentences to do so most effectively because of the rigidity that the form of writing requires, but I worry also that something will be lost if we abandon the pursuit of objectivity altogether.

I turned to Joan Didion, an author who walks a blurry line between fiction and nonfiction regardless of the genre in which she is writing. Didion has produced a variety of works—be they novels, essays or screenplays—that offer a means for analysis of how differing relationships between a text and reality, as mediated by the author, might affect a reader’s understanding of some truth.

I worked through them as part of my senior essay, from which this introduction and the thoughts to follow have been redacted.

UNLIKE TRADITIONAL JOURNALISTS, Didion readily admits that her nonfiction work inevitably conveys her own perception.

“Since I am neither a camera eye nor much given to writing pieces which do not interest me, whatever I do write reflects, sometimes gratuitously, how I feel,” Didion indicates in

the preface of her best-selling essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem. But this subjectivity does not necessarily preclude one from accessing some sort of truth. In fact, developing an interpretation is the purpose of reporting for Didion. “How it felt to me,” she writes in her essay “On Keeping a Notebook,” is the underlying point of recording any notes from day-to-day life.

As such, in her nonfiction essays, Didion does not hide herself like a traditional journalist might be trained to do. Instead, she employs the “I” without pause. Be it through a profile of musician Joan Baez or an essay exploring shotgun weddings in Las Vegas, Didion fuses general narratives with personal anecdotes. She allows us to engage not only with the story presented but also with the methodology behind creating it. Consider, for example, moments in several of the stories included in her second published collection of essays entitled The White Album. Readers can travel alongside Didion as she works through each piece.

She provides detail on what is happening with her while she narrates, be it by adding descriptions of where she is physically or of what she is thinking about. The details are neither random nor needlessly self-indulgent. They work to further some larger point. In the title essay, “The White Album,” Didion interrupts a dialogue between two members of the rock group The Doors to tell us that her leg has fallen asleep while she has been taking notes on the scene That Didion’s leg falls asleep while listening to The Doors is important insofar as she uses the moment to tell readers she is afraid of

standing up for fear of disrupting the tense mood of the room. Similarly, while interviewing Huey Newton under bright, fluorescent lights, she tells us her eyes hurt. That her eyes hurt while interviewing him sets the tone for the entire conversation by clueing us into the harsh atmosphere and intimidation of the scene, in addition perhaps to her own biases against him.

Didion’s nonfiction essays, in large part, are not autobiographical. Rather, they use her as a character to further an overall storyline, opening storytelling possibilities not seen in daily journalism by acknowledging her involvement in the plot’s development.

This use of self, regardless of how objective it may seem, would never be included in a daily newspaper, unless on an op-ed page or in a magazine supplement. When reporting for the main section of the Yale Daily News, I never used the first person.

Instead, if I had a personal relationship to a subject, this would be dubbed not an opportunity for a revelatory move, as Didion executes, but a “conflict of interest.” This categorization, according to procedure, would preclude me from writing the story, whereas Didion can admit to any relationships with her subject matter. “I recall once interviewing Nancy Reagan, at a time when her husband was governor and the construction on this house had not yet begun,” she writes in “Many Mansions,” explaining the details of the interview and then adding, “I mention this because it was on my mind as I walked through the empty house on the American river outside Sacramento.” Her use of the narrative “I” inevitably reminds the reader

that the author is in fact mediating an experience for us as readers. The account loses its veneer as objective and instead turns its focus to a subjective perspective. The author is persistently human.

WRITING ABOUT ONESELF IN ANY CAPACity requires certain vulnerability. At the New York Observer, where I held my first journalism internship, any stories that involve the first person replace what would have been “I” with the term the Observer. For example, rather than write, “I ran into President Obama,” I would write, “The Observer ran into President Obama.” This serves as an odd form of protection, implying that anyone at the newspaper would have returned with the same reporting. This protects the individual identified in the byline, placing the responsibility on the newspaper as a whole.

Yet this judgment of character that the use of the first person would inevitably invite is exactly what journalists do to their subjects. Reporting in the third-person thus involves a double standard. Journalists demand their sources’ stories but use them for their own benefit, opening their sources to public scrutiny rather than themselves.

Any beginning reporter is taught the art of manipulating interviewees. Begin with the easy questions, work up to the hard ones.

Some reporters I have met swear explicitly by the “art of seduction,” that is, making the subjects feel as if they can trust the interviewer when really they should not. A common mantra in any newsroom, after all, is that it’s not the journalist’s job to “save people from themselves”—sources are to be portrayed in a truthful light, which is not necessarily in the light with which they understand themselves. I still find some difficulty in the discrepancy of protection.

By removing ourselves from our writing, as

journalists we are allowing for a layer of defense not given to those that provide us the material about which we write in the first place. “That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out,” Didion warns. Authors have the one-way

Internet, whether or not it is grounded in thorough reporting. The issue of how we, as readers, grant authority to that which we read needs to be put under higher pressure.

The competition for attention is high, and the most reliable writing does not always win.

power of interpretation of their subjects. But Didion, by including the first person, shares the scrutiny. Didion steps off the journalistic pedestal and allows the reader to identify with her—and to judge accordingly.

Many of these articles, or posts, or tweets, or what have you, are not being guided by constraints of tension and drama, or even of voice, but rather take any form the author so desires. A number of recent nonfiction texts, such as Bob Woodward’s 2010 work Obama’s Wars or Andrew Ross Sorkin’s 2009 text Too Big To Fail, rely on detailed reporting and provide readers an author’s note explaining from where they have drawn their information.

SUBJECTIVE, OBJECTIVE, NONFICTION, journalism—these terms are no longer enough to provide firm understandings for how any individual work ought to be judged.

Today, anything can be published on the

“This book is the product of more than five hundred hours of interviews with more than two hundred individuals who participated directly in the events surrounding the financial crisis,” Sorkin writes in a note preceding the text of Too Big To Fail, which chronicles the 2008 economic crash from the perspectives of those running the Wall Street banks. As seen in this example, or in Didion’s solution to explain her methods within the piece, frameworks for understanding can be set. Our generation requires this, done carefully. The honesty an author such as Didion gives to his or her reader with regard to the intention and process of his or her writing is important only in that she describes something larger than herself. As Emily Gould, one of the first bloggers to gain a significant online following, reflected in a New York Times Magazine piece about her blog, “I would always be allowed to write, without supervision, about how I felt.” Writing needs some purpose, some method of oversight. The point is not to create a world of all subjectivity, and no subjects.

Journalism today is refreshing to me in its openness to experimentation with how to recreate a story for a reader, to engage him or her in a scene, to allow for the discovery of a truth about human nature. But interpreting truth from a text demands an understanding of the forum from which it is being drawn. My crisis regarding the seeming impossibility of achieving truth via daily journalism stemmed not so much from the growing concern over whether an objective reality exists at all—this I leave to philosophers—but from a growing realization that language can only ever capture slices of it.

—typography and graphics

by Zachary Schiller YH Staff

The Givers, cont’d continued from page 11 ELLEN: It’s such an asset, I don’t understand why you never want to talk about it!

HANNAH: It was a library shelving job! I don’t have to speak ANY language at all in the first place!

HANNAH: She knew we had the same last name, Mom! That’s literally all there is to it!

HANNAH: Wow you really just don’t get it, do you?

sweetie.

HANNAH: No, Mom, no it’s not.

ELLEN: What? (Pause.)

ELLEN: It’s also just a tough time to get a job.

HANNAH: I think I should move.

HANNAH: She asked if we were related.

ELLEN: What?

ELLEN: But anything that gives your C.V. an advantage matters today it’s that competitive. You know that.

ELLEN: No.

HANNAH: I don’t want to be here anymore.

HANNAH: I was the only person that applied with a college degree. I called her back yesterday to confirm…

HANNAH: When I called, she goes, “Hannah Thomas…as in…wait …there’s only one Thomas family in town, isn’t that right?”

And I said, “Fuck you, you small-minded, discriminatory right-wing cunt.”

ELLEN: Want to? Since when is it a matter of—

ELLEN: (meekly) Maybe that’s why you didn’t get the job. (Pause.) Oh Han, I’m sorry. There’s gonna be so many more opportunities though.

ELLEN: But right now?

ELLEN: 99 percent of your anxiety comes from you, that’s what the hospital social worker told me, okay?

HANNAH: No, no, mom. Like the fact that you’ve been seeing a social worker!

ELLEN: I just told you that…

HANNAH: They killed Louis.

HANNAH: It’s clear no one’s going to hire me…

ELLEN: What do you mean, they…

ELLEN: Makes no sense.

HANNAH: Oh no, it does.

ELLEN: Why do you think?

HANNAH: Somebody came into our yard and murdered him.

HANNAH: Because I’m terrified!

ELLEN: Why would someone murder a cat?

ELLEN: I know, but that’s all in your head, The Yale Herald (Apr. 26, 2013)

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On Joseph Wright’s “Cottage on Fire at Night” Sometimes, in the hills of Derbyshire, cottages burn.

Sestina of Southern California A young female talk show host in a cold room says we are all in for a spell of hot, dry air so out come the new sunglasses while the Santa Ana winds snap the trees outside our homes and I drive around with a group of friends called The Club, stopping by a Starbucks for iced coffee and comfort.

Our customizable pools are built for privacy and comfort, a brochure at my father’s office says.

His client Jim recently joined the golf club, and so is in the market for a house with that Mediterranean air.

For thirty-five years, my father has sold homes to nervous couples who yell at him indoors in their sunglasses.

Four or five girls named McKenna, all in sunglasses, stand in the quad offering one McKenna words of comfort in preparation for her commute between two homes.

Getting divorced was good for my parents, a McKenna says, but McKenna desperately needs some fresh air.

She scratches dried tears off her phone and walks to drama club.

Blocks away the freeways buzz with the activities of a nameless club.

Its commuter-members wear the identifying sunglasses and fill the spaces of their cars with cool, stale air.

We coast beneath a billboard for temporary shade and comfort and fast food burritos is what it always says.

Via hands-free devices, we call our homes.

The fires begin at night, from dinner embers neglected or unseen, and sometimes continue for generations.

Smoke rakes the inside of a mother’s nostrils, and she wakes.

Bits of the thatched roof fall as the woman and her daughter step outside.

Father and the boys are already on horses.

They wear stained bedclothes and do not look down as they pass.

She watches them ride towards the farms to the east.

There will be nothing left when they return.

All about her, the blaze paints itself onto the forest.

She grips a cuff of her daughter’s dress and leads the girl down the grassy bank behind the cottage.

They pause when they reach the stream at the base of the hill.

The moon is reflected there, with them, on the surface, its own fire burning slow and strong into the sky around it.

At an opening for a tract of model homes, my mother talks to a woman named Kelly about her book club.

Great gals, great wine, no husbands! Kelly says.

Kelly compliments my mother’s sunglasses.

We three sit on our model couch in something like comfort inhaling the metallic notes of the room’s potpourried air.

In the aromatic din of mall food court air, two mothers rest after shopping for their homes at interior decorating boutiques offering both style and comfort.

One woman orders a half turkey club and her charm bracelet jangles against her sunglasses.

I’m fed up with this shit, her friend says.

Temperature-controlled air circulates through our homes.

In its comfort we remove our sunglasses, like the rituals of some sad club, someone says.

—Max Saltarelli

—Jacob Osborne

Pillar (after a sculpture by Louise Bourgeois) Found, strewn on the beach: Odysseus the object, the thing wanderer.

A slit, a slot with a button; crooked and pockmarked bone— stop. Making this meant no words.

Each time I walk by the water I see this mile-marker that counts out the sea.

Maybe if I talked more easily I would love it less.

I should accept that my daily life may be unarticulable as long as I keep longing; but lately I have eaten beach stones: each one went down like an obverse word.

No longer will I apologize: I will be the names of things.

—Eli Mandel YH Staff

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The Yale Herald (Apr. 26, 2013)

Portrait of a Man Who Looks Like My Father Aside the river running and the real rocks abounding where we’d hit balls onto the freeway like skipping stones there is a man my age always taking pictures.

He thinks his black hair is brown and bright like his youth baseball card, the picture he has framed behind his eyes—all of his colors were fading, or he’d put a shade on them. But regardless of the light he still took pictures: (not of the games, they’d be uncomfortable, they’d forget quick hands, quick hands, no) the pictures are of the birds.

He tells me that he wants to find a cardinal: his son would want the picture to be of a cardinal and he isn’t finding any. Only hawks.

My father used to draw—he drew his dad’s dogs and his wife, his heroes and his characters and his dad would smile. I love them. He loved them, and took care of the menageries.

He tried one of you, but they never looked good like the framed one: Now, I’ll make it paint since paint is thicker: he paints his face, he paints the mirrors: What is this fucking mess? and I don’t love them the mirror mumbles, wipes him clean, and paints his face right back.

There, Black Hawk. Now let’s go home.

—Jake Orbison

I tell him I’ve never seen a cardinal near the freeway, and he hasn’t either but the picture is what hangs in their rooms; still, he needs to go home so he draws them.

Dmoney’s Sad Attempts at Astral Projection once again last night I had a strange dream it’s weird when I woke up I remembered all of it but now I only remember some of it I remember this one part of it there was this girl from sixth grade and I was feeling her thighs and she was being tested for her virginity so somebody told me to help and I put my finger inside and then I started rubbing on her thingy if you know what I mean

haha I woke up and tried for an out of body experience and I got vibrations so hard they hurt through my

entire body but mostly in my reproductive organ it was weird because I never feel vibrations there had it been lighter it would have felt good after a while the vibrations went away and

nothing happened.

I’m starting to think I have no soul because I can’t leave my body no matter how hard I try.

—Sarah Matthes

The Yale Herald (Apr. 26, 2013)

17

CULTURE Badfish: a tribute

by Marcus Moretti YH Staff

S

ometime before noon on May 25, 1996, Brad Nowell ingested a quantity of heroin that his body could not survive. The band he sang and played guitar for, Sublime, was two months away from releasing its third LP. Nowell’s surviving bandmates decided to call it Sublime, and it would go on to sell over five million copies in the U.S. alone. Several of its songs, including “What I Got” and “Santeria,” would receive heavy radio play for the next 17 years and counting. Sublime the band, however, was dead with its frontman.

Today, Scott Begin plays drums for a Sublime cover band. He’s a handsome, short-haired white guy who looks eight years younger than he is (35).

The muscles in his arms reveal which instrument he plays. He told me to meet him outside Blue State before the show; he wanted an Americano.

His band is called Badfish, and it’s the biggest Sublime cover band in the U.S., according to him and Google. The bassist, Joel Hanks, and Scott conceived Badfish in 2001, while they were juniors at the University of Rhode Island. They met in a computer science class.

“The name was the one thing Joel and I agreed on in the beginning,” said Scott as he paid for his Americano. “That song defines Sublime.” After the barista handed Scott his change, he dumped the whole handful into the tip cup. It looked like at least $1.75. I couldn’t tell whether it was an over-the-top performance of charitableness in front of a journalist or a quirky habit. We went next door to Au Bon Pain to talk because all the seats in Blue State were occupied at 10:30 p.m. on this Friday night.

“I don’t know how much it was a calculated decision,” Scott said, regarding his band’s decision to “go pro” and play Sublime songs full time. That was back in 2003. “It was a big risk at the time. But with hindsight, it was a good call.”

Scott, Joel, and Pat Downes, Badfish’s lead singer and guitarist, live in Rhode Island, where they grew up.

Dorian Duffy, who plays keyboards and rhythm guitar, is the outlier: he’s still in his 20s, lives in New York City, and is unmarried. “Our old singer, Dave, left in 2007 to start a family,” said Scott. Joel and Scott are married with kids, and Pat is recently married.

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They support their families by participating in national tours that can be grueling. When the band arrived at Toad’s last Friday, it was coming off three packed weeks of shows. In one week, the four traveled from Anaheim to Cambridge, taking turns driving, and playing shows six out of the seven nights.

The band makes it to Toad’s something like five times a year, according to Scott.

One thing that makes their lives a bit easier, as opposed to those in bands that cover, say, KISS or Guns ’N Roses, is that there’s no costuming or making-up involved whatever. The original three, from Long Beach, Calif., never tried to cultivate a signature look, dance style, etc., which means Badfish’s job is to play the original songs as accurately as possible. But copying the sound sometimes means appropriating the gestures. “One thing Bud [Gaugh, Sublime’s drummer] does, if you watch footage of them live,” said Scott, “is he raises his left arm way up before hitting the snare, and I find myself replicating that motion. When I do that, the rhythm is closer to the original, because the mechanical part of it is the same as his.”

During the show, it becomes evident that this, and whatever else the band does to practice, works dramatically well. You can see it in YouTube videos of them too. They play everything in the originals down to the grace notes in the bass part. Two minutes into their performance of “Wrong Way,” a trombone comes out of nowhere for a perfect reproduction of the solo. That’s not to say they don’t add their own touch. Toward the end of “Doin’ Time,” the hip-hopsounding song based around a vibraphone (or glockenspiel?) sample, the band breaks into double time.

They also like to morph the slow, melancholy “Pawn Shop” into an extended jam.

What’s as interesting as the band’s performance is the crowd it draws. Before Badfish comes on, my friend and I are in the middle toward the back.

The band emerges and takes up their instru-ments.

They open with the lesser-known “Garden Grove,” the first song on Sublime. Almost right away, the guys surrounding my friend and me start moshing wildly. We manage to dodge their aimless arm-heaving, but soon a wide circle in the crowd is pushed

open around us, and for a moment we are the most vulnerable targets in the club.

We duck, dive, and dodge, and manage to avoid harm. We hurry out to the where the bar and tables are and get a better look at the audience. The people in this tamer section seem all to be searching for other people. The music is too loud for me to hear if any of them say “excuse me” before they spill my drink. One guy’s wearing a Tribe Called Quest T-shirt—right era, wrong genre, guy. “Garden Grove” is still playing, and everyone seems to know all the lyrics. When the singer hits the line, “Finding roaches in the pot,” you can’t hear him over the fans’ sing-along.

The rest of the show, I’m amazed by the amount of Sublime lyrics this crowd of 300-400 knows by heart. On the verses of even the most obscure tracks Badfish play there’s an audible backing chorus. Sublime is a popular band, for sure, but it was a surprise to see this many fans this devoted. This is part of the point of going to a concert, I guess: to commune with the fellow fans who you know exist based on reports of the band’s popularity, but who exist only anonymously. Here, at Toad’s, we’re acting out our community by doing the one thing that links us: loving Sublime.

Except it’s not Sublime we’re all loving. And it’s not quite Badfish either; it’s a bit more complicated. Beyond the offer that every cover band implicitly makes to its audience—you can pretend we’re the real thing, if you like—Badfish is performing as Sublime in a particular sense. Sublime broke up just before they became really popular, before their big album came out, and before they could perform Sublime all over the world. Badfish are filling the space left after the premature end of Sublime and its leader; they are creating the stage life of Sublime themselves.

Heads, shoulders, and outstretched arms that fan along with the beat obstruct my view of the stage.

Scott is keeping rhythm off to the right, the farthest from where I stand. He and the kit he’s seated at are almost entirely invisible to me. The only part of him I see is his left hand, which he occasionally thrusts upward before a swiftly striking the snare.

New Haven, bottled Yale’s ‘Celebrate Sustainability’ week began with a splash on Monday, Earth Day, in Beinecke Plaza. There, the Peabody Museum hired local artist Fritz Horstman—an art instructor at Albertus Magnus college—to come up with an interactive and public art project. Horstman decided to trace an outline of the nearby Quinnipiac River on the ground outside Commons; calling the piece “The Quinnipiac River Bottled,” he, with help from the Peabody and Yale’s Office of Sustainability, invited passerbys to take a plastic water bottle, fill it with water brought from the river itself, and place it in the outline.

“A lot of people in New Haven don’t even know where the [Quinnipiac River] is,” Horstman said as we stood in the Beinecke Plaza. “It’s only about ten blocks from here.” According to a handout from the Peabody’s Sustainability Committee, the 100-foot model of the river with bottles “reminds us of the natural water cycle, the nearby—but oft-neglected— river, and the ubiquity of disposable plastic products in our lives.” By allowing students and community members themselves to build the artwork, they hope to promote even more serious conversation about our natural environment.

According to the committee, they chose Horstman some months ago because of his reputation for incorporating issues of sustainability, nature and public interaction in his past exhibits. His prior work includes a series of ‘Falling Leaf Diagrams,’ maps of various falling leaves created by tracing each frame of a video taken of their descent; Horstman has also used other Connecticut rivers as subjects for his art.

According to Horstman, the purpose of the piece in Beinecke is twofold.

On one hand, he wants to raise awareness about the excessive use of plastic water bottles, though his work is not necessarily a polemic against them.

“This is not a call for the end of bottles,” he said, “but for more engagement with the issue.” In the end, however, the project is more than the distribution of pamphlets or flyers about the impact of plastic on the environment—it is a work of art. “I want also to call attention to the beauty of water and light,” he said.

“The Quinnipiac River Bottled” captured both of these on Monday. But the beauty was obviously muted when contained in the plastic bottles. As the Peabody’s Sustainability Committee said, this is part of Horstman’s attempt to “focus on the seam where humans separate themselves from nature.” ­—William Theiss YH Staff ­— graphic by Zachary Schiller YH Staff

Getting in gear While Chicago and New York aren’t quite ready to roll out their versions of a bike sharing program, Yale is. As a result, fifty brand new bicycles have popped up around Yale’s campus, allowing students, faculty, and staff to commute about the campus on borrowed wheels.

“My real hope is just that we’re able to make it easier for people to choose biking as a way of getting around,” said Holly Parker, Yale’s sustainable transportation director.

Zagster, the company contracted to run Yale’s bike sharing program, aims to mimic Zipcar, the popular car sharing service. Bike sharers pay an annual $20 membership fee, which Yale will reimburse if registrants agree to take a seminar on bike safety, and during the first six months of membership, Zagster waves its usage fee.

Yet biking around campus is less common for Yale students than it is for students at some other universities and colleges. On Stanford’s website, for example, bicycling is instead “one of the most popular modes of transportation” on its campus.

“New Haven isn’t the most bike friendly city,” said Jacob Sandry, BC ’15, a Yale bike enthusiast. Sandry is a coordinator for Yale’s Sustainability Education Peers (STEP) program and said, “a very essential part of my day is using my bike.” He cited the lack of bike lanes around Yale’s campus and the generally high curbs as possible stumbling blocks for the program, but ultimately maintained that if the program gains enough traction it could change the university’s biking habits. “There might be some logistical issues, but bike share programs develop a biking culture,” he argued. “People who haven’t biked before start biking and drivers start to evolve to respond to the bikers.”

Parker echoed this sentiment. “If you build the environment in a way that makes it intuitive and easy to do something like biking, people will do it,” she said. For Parker, the first and most important step in building that environment has already begun. ­—Kohler Bruno YH Staff ­— graphic by Zachary Schiller YH Staff

The Yale Herald (Apr. 26, 2013)

19

REVIEWS #powerhungry

by Aaron Gertler YH Staff

youtube.com: williamVEVO

#willpower is a curious name for hip-hop mogul will.i.am’s latest album. What exactly might it mean? I’m reluctant to call most of it the result of “will,” implying freedom of choice, because so much of the album is automatic: relentless Autotune, infallible drum machines, and an overstuffed guest list that checks all the right “crossover” boxes.

But “will” is also the name of a man, will.i.am, whom I’ll call Will. Thus, #willpower can also be read as “will power”—that is, the power of Will—who, as frontman of the Black Eyed Peas and guest on a dozen other bestselling tracks, has enough clout to do whatever the hell he wants, even in these troubled pop-musical times. This doesn’t mean he is responsible for everything on #willpower: few albums are the result of one man’s vision, and this isn’t one of them. However, because Will has acquired sufficient power in the pop world to have absolute control over what gets released under his name, it only makes sense to hold him responsible for everything on the record—some of which is so singularly unpleasant that without Will’s power I can’t imagine any other musician being allowed to release it on a major label.

Will’s musical talent rarely shines through on this album, but his marketing prowess is on clear display. In an iTunes world, he knows, two good singles are all he needs, and he can safely release a lot of terrible music so long as it comes with a guest star, a video, and a catchy bit for DJs to sample. #willpower embodies this principle. You probably know the singles: “This Is Love,” produced by Swedish House Mafia and fronted by electronic dance music darling Eva Simons, appears third on #willpower, followed by Britney Spears’ “Scream & Shout.” The former is an anthem, big and classic and comforting as oatmeal. The latter actually makes good use of a Will/Britney duet, though the best moment comes when Britney samples her 2007 self: “You are now, now rocking with/will.i.am and Britney, bitch.”

I think “bitch” might be a Freudian slip here—Will’s accidental way of letting us know how he really feels about us. It’s an offensive thing to say, but no more offensive than much of the music that follows. Chris Brown (were there no non-felonious

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The Yale Herald (Apr. 26, 2013)

R&B singers available?) comes in after Britney, and at first I think his track, “Let’s Go,” is just a joke on him: the needlessly complex vocal lines that leave Brown treading water, the way Will cuts him off, the fact that “Let’s Go” was the title of a much better Calvin Harris song on his album 18 Months.

And then I hear “Gettin Dumb”—whose title, when I type it, activates Autocorrect so many times that I myself start to feel dumb—and I realize the joke was on us. The track, a representative stew of musical styles, features a loopy semi-dubstep verse for Peas afterthought Apl.De.Ap and begins with vocals from Bom, a member of K-pop sensation 2NE1. The K-pop looks promising on paper, but Bom’s backing lacks her genre’s explosive joy, and she struggles, devoid of emotion, through nonsense lyrics like “let’s paint the town/bring fire, and burn it all down.”

Why paint something you’re about to destroy? Ask Will: after a promising start with the record’s singles, he pounds us into submission with a succession of awful songs. By the end of the 18th track (most of which are 90 seconds too long), only ashes remain of our respect for a man who wrote listenable rap ten years ago, who put a Cybotron reference in “Boom Boom Pow,” and who is much too old to be giving us lyrics like “Hot wheels be hot/May what? Maybach” or “My chick got body/it shakes like jelly/big tit, big booty, no belly [repeated].” He brings to mind Benjamin Button: as he ages, his music degrades into the basest elements of songwriting, if you can even call it that.

Don’t buy this album, but if you happen to hear it in some inescapable public place, take respite in Justin Bieber’s soothing chorus to bland banger “#thatPOWER” or Miley Cyrus’ whistle-backed verse in “Fall Down.” Ponder the metaphysical implications of the fact that “Reach for the Stars (Mars Edition)” became, upon the landing of the Curiosity rover, the first song in human history to be broadcast from another planet. (Now that’s #willpower.) And when “Smile Mona Lisa” comes in, backed only by guitar and some sampled humming and what might be a mandolin, think of it as a possible future for Will, in which he gives away all his money, moves to Italy, and becomes a busker in Venice, days before it sinks into the ocean forever.

This might be the only fitting follow-up to #willpower.

Music: Phoenix There’s something odd surrounding the release of Phoenix’s new album, Bankrupt!. The band hasn’t strayed from its indie-pop roots, its meticulous riffing, or even from its playful Franco-American lyricism. Phoenix’s songs are still rife with tempo alternations and slow-builds. So why did the band state that it would be taking an “experimental” turn in the months leading up to the new album’s release?

Most likely, it was to frame Bankrupt! as somehow significantly different from Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, the band’s 2009 smash success album that skyrocketed them into the American consciousness. But it’s simply impossible not to compare the two back-to-back records—because both of the albums sound so distinctly and similarly like the Phoenix we know and love.

In this light, Bankrupt! sadly falls short of Wolfgang in almost every regard. It lacks the catchy intonations of “Lisztomania” and “1901”—songs that demand to be played on repeat. And, on the flip side, noticeably absent are any instrumental tracks, like the ballads “Love Like A Sunset Pt. 1” on Wolfgang, and It’s Never Been Like That’s “North,” which attract with their simplicity, then build with dissonant layering.

The album is certainly not without merit: the nostalgic guitar strums on the eponymous track “Bankrupt!” and the incongruities between the lyrics and vibe of the chorus on “Bourgeois” are delightfully shocking. However, something always feels amiss. As Mars sings on the second track: “Almost, almost, almost the real thing / How could I have missed that one?” Bankrupt! is an album comprised of well-crafted numbers that are lamentably forgettable when placed in the context of Phoenix’s illustrious catalogue. Many of the tracks deserve to be heard—but don’t count on remembering the hook when it’s over.

—Erica Leh

Movie: The Place Beyond the Pines Director Derek Cianfrance, one of the most prominent indie filmmakers of the last few years, seems to dislike gimmicky plotlines, opting instead for simple stories that are smartly refreshing. His best-known film, 2010’s Blue Valentine, deals with everyday themes—love, family, etc.—despite its dramatic title.

However, while Valentine follows a single decaying marriage with a honed focus, Cianfrance’s latest film, The Place Beyond the Pines, is a crime drama that runs in three acts. The film follows two well-meaning fathers, portrayed wonderfully by Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper, who differ vastly in upbringing and lifestyle; however, both men find themselves in difficult, life-threatening situations for the sake of their children, and struggle to maintain their morals. Their mostly disparate stories converge briefly at the end of the first act, when the film shifts focus from Gosling’s character to Cooper’s, and again in the third.

Other than this unconventional structure, the film’s inexplicably lengthy run-time (nearly two and a half hours), and bizarre dialogue, however, the film is truly excellent. Cianfrance is an expert at conveying ideas through passivity and pathos, as we last experienced in Valentine. Thus, it is through our discomfort and sympathy for the characters that we can identify, if not fully comprehend, the film’s still-familiar themes concerning fatherhood, obligation, and guilt.

Those interested in seeing Pines should prepare to endure whatever boredom you may feel during its first half hour. Once the film picks up its pace, it becomes an enjoyable and thought-provoking commentary on the frailty of suburban family life—even in the midst of its frenzied plot and structure.

—Wesley Yiin YH Staff

Music: Snoop Lion Snoop Dogg, formerly of D-O-double-jizzle fame, announced his rechristening as Bob Marley’s reincarnation, Snoop Lion, last summer. Nearly a year later, after much ballyhoo (and speculation about his sincerity), he has released Reincarnated—a patchy album of reggae fusion featuring only enough music to keep you wondering what’s going on.

Certainly, Reincarnated features enough guest stars to warrant at least one listen-through: Chris Brown, Drake, Akon, Miley Cyrus, Busta Rhymes, Rita Ora, and Angela Hunte, among others, make an appearance. While almost all of them decide to put on half-baked Jamaican accents, there are some highlights. Angela Hunte sings a snappy chorus to Here Comes the King; Drake brings in an unapologetically honest rap to No Guns Allowed; Rita Ora gives us hope that pop-reggae isn’t an all illegitimate genre.

The line-up is impressive, for one, but it certainly signals that Reincarnated is no roots reggae record. This is new. Diplo and Major Lazer, as head curators of Snoop’s Caribbean tunes, are stellar. Tracks like “Smoke the Weed” are laced with perky pop-riffs, making the messages of ecological preservation, unity, and non-violence a little more bearable than straight PSA announcements. Notably they do push the envelope with “Get Away,” a thumping dance track with just enough patois-infused reggae. Honestly, it seems a little out of place, but attempts have been made.

Reincarnated lacks the ferocity, righteousness, and slow-eyed groove characteristic of reggae. In fact, the album is unconvincing and pretty insulting to Bob Marley’s legacy. He has some way to go as an advocate of Rastafarianism. That said, there is some promise: the production crew is solid, and there remains enough of Snoop’s erstwhile gin and juice goofiness to make us smile. So if this Rasta Snoop Dogg doppelgänger is here to stay, I wouldn’t necessarily be one to complain.

—Lucas Sin YH Staff

Staff list:

Here’s what we’ve been up to this past school year Where we’ve been eating: Watermelon Sourpatch Kids. What’s so sweet it makes InDesign almost not suck? What’s so perfectly green, red, and sugary white that 4 a.m. becomes 6 a.m. becomes 9 a.m. in no time? What’s more special to us at the Herald than life itself? These little guys. Give ‘em a try.

What we’ve been dreaming about: Peter Salovey’s mustache. Remember that time when the Herald staff made all of our profile pictures a black and white image of Salovey with a cut-out mustache? We sure do. Just try looking at it some time and really try not to fall under its spell. It may not be there now, at least in the material sense, but it will always be in our hearts, and in the dreams we have of the once-hairy face of our future President.

What we’ve been listening to: Taylor Swift. The Herald office just wouldn’t be the Herald office without T-Swizzle’s heavenly twang: as soon as Red dropped, we never looked back. You can hear her saccharine belting all the way down Crown Street—she wrote each and every one of our anthems, and you can be absolutely sure that she is almost always playing. We don’t know about you, but we are FEELING 22, and we KNEW you were trouble when you walked in. Okay?? So get out and stop hating. Team Taylor 4ever.

Who we’re looking for: Zachary Schiller YH Staff. Why’d you leave so early, man? We miss you.

—YH Staff

The Yale Herald (Apr. 26, 2013)

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BULLBLOG BLACKLIST Baz, how dare you taint Beyoncé with this hyper-indulgent bullshit?

We don’t know how to say it, so we never say it aloud.

We really hope we’re missing something here. But we’re pretty sure we aren’t. In fact, we’re positive.

That art is everything and is therefore nothing.

Also, that we worry about this.

Every band that has contributed to the Great Gatsby soundtrack

SOMESOM Ibid

Also, that when you think about the word “indeed” it just starts to sound really really stupid which makes us wish even more that there was another word for it.

That there isn’t a synonym for “indeed”

The cover for the YDN Wallace Prize Issue

Bad dreams

People who feel self-righteous about the amount of sleep they get

Doesn’t matter if you get a little, doesn’t matter if you get a lot: we just don’t give a shit.

TA

FellFe

People who have deleted their Facebooks

Please stop ruining our days.

That finals eating comes right before Myrtle bathing suits We’ve blacklisted you, but we’ve also forgotten who you are.

Also, study breaks. We didn’t plan for the extra calories.

The Yale Herald (Apr. 26, 2013)

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Have a fucking awesome summer.

Love, The Herald.