Herald Volume LXXXVI Issue 8

THE YALE HERALD YALE’S MOST DARING PUBLICATION SINCE 1986 | VOL LXXXV ISSUE 8 | 28 Oct. 2019

FROM THE EDITORS Dearest Herald Readers, It’s been one week since fall break came to a close. One week since the AirBnBs with friends, the trips to the stormy New England coast, to the mountains, Florida, home, or even just naked trips to the bathroom because all of your hallmates were gone.

This week has been tough. Midterms are pelting down like fat rain-drops, final project proposals are frantically typing themselves, and suddenly, it’s dark before dinnertime. The semester is waning with the daylight hours, and with the onset of winter, we must come inside to get warm.

This week, the Herald bundles up by the fire: Will Wegner, MY ’22, celebrates the hot and crunchy Yale chicken tender.

Jordan Cutler-Tietjen, JE ’20, shares the perfume of his family hot pad, and the memories it evokes. Michelle Lim, GH ’20, reframes the fiery passion of a sweaty SoulCycle room. And, Camden Smithtro, ES ’22, describes the warmth of reading computer generated poetry with a group of strangers.

The Yale Herald is a not-for-profit, non-partisan, incorporated student publication registered with the Yale College Dean’s Office.

If you wish to subscribe to the Herald, please contact the Editors-in-Chief at laurie.roark@yale.edu and marina.albanese@yale.edu. Receive the Herald for one semester for 40 dollars, or for the 2020 academic year for 65 dollars.

The Yale Herald is published by Yale College students, and Yale University is not responsible for its contents.

All opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the views of The Yale Herald, Inc. or Yale University. Copyright 2019 The Yale Herald.

VISIT US ONLINE AT YALEHERALD.COM

So shut your laptop and let this Herald issue insulate you like a woolen sweater. Pour yourself a cup of tea and read it pressed up against the radiator, rain tattering on the window. Smell the crinkled black and white pages. Go on, smell them. And once you read it front to back, set it ablaze and soak up its lovely heat.

Warmest regards, Marc Boudreaux Reviews Editor

EDITORIAL STAFF EDITORS-IN-CHIEF MANAGING EDITORS

Marina Albanese, Laurie Roark Kat Corfman, Eric Krebs

EXECUTIVE EDITORS Chalay Chalermkraivuth, Nurit

Chinn, Fiona Drenttel, Jack Kyono FEATURES EDITORS Rachel Calcott, Elliot Lewis CULTURE EDITORS Ryan Benson, Bri Wu VOICES EDITORS Hamzah Jhaveri, Silver Liftin OPINION EDITOR Spencer Hagaman REVIEWS EDITOR Marc Boudreaux ARTS EDITORS Matt Reiner, Harrison Smith INSERTS EDITORS Sarah Force, Will Wegner

DESIGN STAFF CREATIVE DIRECTORS Paige Davis, Rebecca Goldberg ILLUSTRATOR Annie Yan

BUSINESS STAFF BUSINESS MANAGERS George Hua, Michelle Tong

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THE YALE HERALD

IN THIS ISSUE 6

Voices

In an introspective essay about his mother, Jordan Cutler-Tietjen, JE ’20, grapples with empathy, pain, sensitivity, and his relationship to a medicinal talisman.

12

Arts

In an artist’s statement on her most recent body of work, Molly Ono, ES ’20, subverts consumer accumulation of commodities.

8

13,16,18

Candles. Meditation. Cycling? Michelle Lim, GH ’20, reflects on her summer of SoulCycle in Silicon Valley.

Can computers write poetry? More importantly, can that poetry be beautiful? Camden Smithtro, ES ’22, offers an answer.

Opinions

10,14

Features

In response to the recent price hike of Durfee’s chicken tenders, Will Wegner, MY ’22, investigates the culture around tenders at Yale and exposes information about the future of Durfee’s.

Isaac Pross, BK ’23, explores the creation of the genre-defying extravaganza “Red Line to Union Station.”

Culture

INCOMING Celestial Seasonings Sleepytime Tea Bear

OUTGOING Holly, the fattest brown bear in Katmai National Park, Alaska

Addee Kim, JE ’21, draws a snail shell fifty times, meditating on the impact of School of Art professor Robert Reed.

Contemplate the state of museums, art and conservation in the technology age, with Melanie Heller, SM ’23.

20

Reviews At the artistic director’s encouraging, Claire Fang, ES ’23, answers her own questions about Girls, the most recent show at the Yale Rep. Jake Kalodner, JE ’21, provides an antidote to Yale’s a capella hegemony: Window Seat, an alternative student band.

Week Ahead UTOPIA: A CABARET SUNDAY, OCT. 27 - TUESDAY, OCT. 29, 9 PM SAYBROOK UNDERBROOK THREE BY KUBRICK: THE SHINING THURSDAY, OCT. 31, 7 PM WHITNEY HUMANITIES CENTER THE SPHINCTER TROUPE: THE SPOOKY SHOW FRIDAY, NOV. 1, 7 PM NICK CHAPEL

INSERTS

I

just listened to the new music album by the famous rapper Kanye West. It is named Jesus is King. This was a surprise to me because I thought rap music was about “ganstas” and “thugs.” I never thought of Jesus as one of those “ganstas.” I always thought of him as more of a “lord” or a “savior.”

Jesus is King 4

THE YALE HERALD

My favorite song on Jesus is King was the one called “George Bush is Cool Now.” I especially liked the part of it when Kanye said that George Bush is a cool man.

It really sounded good when he said it with a cool beat in the background. My least favorite song was the one called “Yubba.” I didn’t really like it because I don’t know what a “yubba” is. Maybe it is like a Yubster?

Like how “gansta” is rap talk for gangster? I think this just goes to show how thought provoking music can be, even the rap.

I think it is also important that Kanye talked about Jesus a lot. For example, in the song “Jesus Jesus Jesus,” Kanye said he loves Jesus so much that he has to say it three times. I think this is just like a poem, both because it rhymes and because he leaves it to the reader to figure out whether Jesus is good or Jesus is bad. I think I will recommend all my friends to listen to this music album!

5 5.

LYDIA HILL, BK ’21

Cuck’d

Top 5 Alternate Names for Sig Ep Spook’d

4.

Suck’d

3.

2.

Fuck’d

Chuck’d

1.

Ask’d to Leave

Girl in Sexy Devil Costume Checking IDs at Pierson Inferno is Actually Satan REBECCA SALZHAUER, SY ’22

I

don’t know how you missed the signs, mortals. I am not a poor, overworked, underappreciated college aide. I am Satan. Beelzebub. El Diablo. Sure, I appear to you as the girl who talks just a bit too slowly in section and wreaks havoc with her off-topic questions, but I take many forms. That’s who I became for you.

For that lanky, carrot-topped first-year who stepped on your toes and did not acknowledge you, I was broadway icon Terrence Mann. Chief Ronnell Higgins sees me as Tina Cohen-Chang from Glee. The heralds of the apocalypse are those people standing on Cross Campus with flyers about Life’s True Meaning.

You told them you were in a rush. I know you sat on that stone slab “shooting the shit” with someone from your FroCo group whom it is “so good to run into” because you feel like you “never see them.” You were doing nothing but waiting for the dining hall to open at five. I digress.

Is it disturbing to see the verve with which new souls essentially push themselves into my clutches? Of course. Is there an undying, eternal pit of flame in the so called “basement” of “Pierson College?” There is literally no other reason for it to have been so hot.

Do I feel proud of what I’ve done? In one sense, my mom tells me I should feel good after all that hard work. In another sense, I have a very complicated relationship with pride in my work and mistake satisfaction with complacency and laziness. Have I seen the Amazon Prime series Modern Love? Yes, and it has only amplified my desire to fall in love NOW. Wait, you didn’t like it? We’re gonna have some prob—oh, you liked it, but you were just disappointed by the Tina Fey episode? Same, queen.

“Pop off,” as they say.

VOICES Hot Pad

JORDAN CUTLER-TIETJEN, JE ’20

A

fter rotating for two and a half minutes in the microwave, the hot pad perfumes our kitchen and living room. I scrunch up my nose at the smell: like a sweaty tree. It reminds my mom more of horse feed, maybe, or wet soil. We suspect that it’s filled with beads of rye, but whatever its composition, the hot pad’s unmistakable umami has become as close to a panacea as I know. One whiff and my shoulder blades loosen and descend in anticipation. I begin to breathe from my belly. I soak it up.

When the microwave beeps, we take out the yellow rectangle, about the size of a child’s pillow, and hear quiet maracas in our hands. The quarter-inch kernels jostle together and apart, following gravity between our fingers. The hot pad is too hot to hold for long, so we wrap it inside a towel and carry it to the couch.

I lie on my back and my mom rests it over my chest.

I have bronchitis. In this memory and all others like it, I am cared for. In between coughs, as the heat drains my lungs and the towel slips to uncover a corner of the pad, I appreciate the fabric’s diagonal grid of abstract icons, which to my sick eyes look like little hearts surrounded by corn husks. She asks if it’s heating what needs it, and I nod. Only after twenty minutes of stillness have passed and I lift up the pad do I notice an oblong sweat stain mapped below my collarbone.

I am still coughing, but I take this dampness as proof that I am healing.

My mom taught me to make my pain known. In our home, cheeks soaked in tears are proof of a cure-in-

6 THE YALE HERALD

progress: we never bottle, we always share. During the year before I left for college, not a week would pass without one of us sniffling at the dinner table, then the other muffling sobs with a paper napkin.

When I go home for the holidays, rarely do 48 hours pass before we’re crying together. The causes—a bad grade, something hidden, a fight—are relevant until they aren’t. What matters is the reciprocal sharing of vulnerability, the ritual of it, reiterating this special form of intimacy. I’m here with you. Crying means there is something worth crying about, some part of the other worth understanding. I’m hearing you.

When I was four and we lived in Berlin, my mom took a train by herself to the Johannesbad Fachklinik, a health center near the German border. She had never spent this much time apart from her only child, so before she left, she wrote me 21 postcards, one for every day of her absence.

She conscripted my dad to hide one in his chest pocket every chilly morning, walk to our mailbox, and pretend to discover it inside, newly delivered. I don’t remember any particular card, but I know that together, they would teach me one new word and one new feeling: fibromyalgia, and her vindication.

At college, I do almost all of my crying alone.

Which sounds pathetic—but I like to think of my weekly bawl-fests as useful, reverse-engineered introspection. If something is bothering me but I can’t figure out what it is, I ignore its cause and coax out its effect with YouTube videos of wedding vows. It’s almost an art, divining the perfect series of stimulating media to arrive at the type of tears that feel right in the moment. This act of crying is just that—an act, a performance—but, in this case, content follows form. I come to realize, eventually, from where my initial sadness sprung, the waterworks carrying me into otherwise inaccessible canyons of the mind. I share these with my mom later, and as her voice cracks alongside mine, I am struck by the ways in which her sensitivity has become my own.

She returned, and I learned how to pronounce the five syllables of her diagnosis—emphasis on “myALL,” as in all of her. As in the aching muscles, the upset stomachs, and the tides of pain that had made her body an inhospitable island for 25 years. She had not expected a label this encompassing, one that spoke to so many of her discomforts. She also had not expected one this empty. Doctors don’t know what causes fibro nor how to cure it, as true now as when she was diagnosed. Soon after, she bought two hand-sewn hot pads from a craftswoman at a Weihnachtsmarkt, an open-air Christmas market.

Those pads have shared our bodies ever since.

*

“Ah, not right now,” she says, nudging my arm off of

* She winces and leans forward.

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her right shoulder. “I’m sorry,” I say, drawing it away and into my lap.

exaggerated barely stuffy noses into influenza and turned lymph nodes into tumors.

I often move to hug my mom this way: right elbow around neck, bicep against back, coaxing us together on the couch. It never works. There are too many pressure points, and I always forget to give enough warning. I know her fibromyalgia is chronic and incurable, but I stretch out my arm again and again, wondering if, this time, something will have changed.

I can’t be sure where this mild hypochondria came from, but it’s no accident. I have been sensitized by a woman who is never all-the-way well, who deserves to be as sensitive as she is. I am well, but sometimes I wish I were not. I pity myself. I melodramatize.

I reflect her like the water’s surface, an unsteady mirror. How much of my empathy is made up of myself ?

My mom tries to describe what it’s like to feel what she feels. “It’s like a shell of armor—the pain is this encasement around me,” she says. She feels wounded all over. The wounds feel like a defense, a self-defense in which she has no say. They are sore to the touch, and so is she.

I gave her a present, a book by Elaine Scarry called The Body in Pain, which says that “to have great pain is to have certainty; to hear that another person has pain is to have doubt.” That second phrase scares me because I know how much it has hurt her to have doctors, therapists, and an ex-husband play the role of non-believer. But I’ve played it too. Instead of being her closest confidant, I’ve become, at times, my mom’s biggest skeptic. On one level, I know she is hurting, but thoughts wallow in my mind: Could she be faking it? Has the shell of armor trapped her or protected her, an excuse for not doing as much as she and others want her to do? How heavy is her pain, really? Prove yourself, Mom, I want to say. Let me feel it.

The hot pad—heavier, not so bony—is my proxy.

It embraces her neck when I can’t. But it can only soothe for so long. After its heat is lost in her, I am again reminded that I will never know what it means to be of her body. * Facing the unbridgeable gap between her hurt and my health, I have adopted an embarrassing habit. I want to smell and feel our hot pads even when I’m not sick. I’ll check my body for heat discrepancies: my hands are cold, my ears are burning. I’ve

* I wish all bodies were hollow. No organs to fail, no nerves to pinch. Human processes performed by skin surrounding inflated air.

I tell this to my mom and she laughs. “You’re being silly,” she says, bending down. “Help me load the dishwasher.”

I am quick to define her by her pain, but she is not.

She believes in her limbs, and she’s fought to find professionals who believe in her. Her new physical therapist has almost unkinked her scoliosis; not genetic, as she had always been told, but caused by years of asymmetric muscle firing. She attends an aerobic water yoga class three times a week to stave off malaise. And last summer, we hiked a steep six miles up the Garden-to-Sky trail to a peak on Catalina Island. When she started to slow, she asked me to take her pack, and I did. When she said she wanted to turn back, I dashed around the next bend, saw the summit, and asked her if she had anything left in her. She did. The coasts on both sides of the island gleamed. At home, hot pad resting over thighs, she told me how strong she felt.

I can’t feel my mom’s twinges, emotional or physical.

Nor can she fully communicate them to me, nor I to you. But I can trust her when she tells me that bodies are what we make of them and, when I fly home for Christmas, tend to her armor when she asks me.

The hot pad is itself two oceans—a hidden stitch divides it into dual pouches. That way, its little grains don’t all shift to one side. That way, when it has done what it needs, we can fold it and neatly store it in the cupboard, by the tea, for when we need it next.

OPINION Paying for Soul MICHELLE LIM, GH ’20

E

ach worship session, two large, cylindrical candles on the podium light up the dark room. We close our eyes and sink into a trance while our leader espouses his message. At the end of the session, we place our palms together and meditate. Finally, the lights turn on, abruptly reminding us that we are sweating on stationary bicycles in a group spin class called SoulCycle (or Soul, as the instructors called it).

It was the start of what would be my last summer internship in Silicon Valley. My company had offered use-it-or-lose-it “wellness benefits” (more like “productivity stipends”) that we could use to pay for exercise classes. I chose Soul, thinking it was just another group cycling class with great music. Indeed, an instructor on a stationary bike leads students—also on bikes—through a program of different resistance levels and weight training. Basically, it’s a generic gym “interval training” program. But, at Soul, you’re surrounded by people who will judge you. The front wall is a mirror, designed to allow riders to surveil their classmates. Group surveillance was perfect for me—I’m that kid at gym class who would walk most of the track and only start running when people were watching. It didn’t hurt that every other rider in the mirror had perfectly toned bodies; the mirror was a mural depicting everything I could be. I just had to keep cycling.

SoulCycle affirmed my need for the group. On a sign titled “Soul Etiquette,” it was inscribed that we ride as a pack—that “we ride close together so that we can feel each other’s energy.” Luckily, the studio gave us lavender-scented face towels so we wouldn’t have to smell each other’s energy.

Another line stood out: “Talking during class is a major distraction for the spiritual folks around you.” Spiritual folks?

8 THE YALE HERALD

At the peak of my first class, all the lights were dimmed. The chorus of David Guetta’s hit song “Titanium” blared, “You shoot me down, but I won’t fall. I am titanium.” My mirror self was the only one awake. Behind her were riders with their eyes shut, teeth clenched, smiles stretched from ear to ear, bodies moving to the beat. When the sprint was over, many of them sang a cheer, almost as if they were speaking in tongues. The instructor ended the sprint by telling us to live our lives with intentionality. It felt like a platitude out of a Disney movie. Either way, my first time was a success. Whereas normally I could only cycle for fifteen minutes, the group made me cycle for 45.

Two weeks later, I was putting on my spin shoes when a tall, muscular man walked in, high-fiving people on his way to his seat on the podium bike.

He introduced himself as Shane, our instructor.

He started with an anecdote: “There were no fires today, so my team spent the day training at the gym.” In the mirror, Shane “the firefighter who saves lives” stood out amongst the crowd of women, freshly changed out of their office attire. “Someone complimented me on my arms and I told him he was exaggerating,” Shane said.

“What I should have said is ‘Thank you.’” I leaned forward. As we proceeded with push-ups on the bars, Shane shouted, “When I say ‘You look great!’ you say ‘Thank you!’” I lowered my torso.

“You look great!” I pushed up and mouthed the words, “Thank you.” The inspirational firefighter walked in front of me. I spoke the words louder, cringing. In the mirror I saw my Soul mates smiling and screaming in unison.

Somehow, I never brushed off compliments again. It occurred to me that though I hear platitudes every day, I had never been in an environment where I focused on one of them at length.

I thought about how Yale’s most popular class was a class on happiness that taught students how to enjoy life. With all the pressure to be independent young adults, maybe we all just want to surrender control and let a grownup (and especially an inspiring firefighter) tell us what to do.

At the second session with Shane, his story of the day involved him resigning from his previous job, only to get a new job offer immediately after. The moral was that we had to close one door entirely in order for the next door to open.

My heart warmed, and I smiled at him. Coincidentally, I had come to that session during my annual mid-internship identity crisis; I was questioning whether or not I should remain an engineer. At the peak of the ride, he preached, “Think of that one door you’ve been struggling to close. Muster all that strength. Close it!” My mirror self exerted herself harder than she’d ever done. When all was over, the noise in my mind faded away. The next day, I told my manager I wanted to transition away from engineering and into some engineering-adjacent business roles.

Perhaps letting out some existential tension in SoulCycle let me focus on my needs. Perhaps associating bodily motion with my will made it easier for it to manifest as action. Perhaps my body finally got to communicate its exhaustion at work to my mind—matter over mind. Or maybe it was the induced sweating and suffering during the sprint. The last time my mind was truly clear was when I was hunched over on the toilet bowl with food poisoning. When your body is in pain, you can better experience the difference between your aching meat and your shapeless mind. I thought about religious

9

fasting and hair shirts, and I wondered if Soul fulfilled my subconscious desire to access my mind, without the diarrhea. I also thought about how rarely I associate my body with my mind. I live my days trapped in my head. I joke that with Soul, my body and mind became one.

One day, just before the final sprint, Shane blew out the candles. The smell of incense drifted below my nose. My tense eyebrows relaxed. As I accelerated, I lost control of my legs and they just kept pedaling. My mind floated above. The athletes call this ecstatic space “the zone.” After the class, I was surprised when a classmate told me she felt the exact same thing. She said we were probably light-headed due to the weak air-conditioning. Regardless, I found myself understanding why talking during class could be distracting to spiritual folks.

The next day, at my company’s lunch table, I joked about how ridiculous Soul was and invited friends to try it out. At the same time, a Buddhist coworker of mine was giving out handwritten postcard invitations to join him at his Buddhist meetings. While I instantly got two coworkers on board with Soul, I learned that only I had agreed to go to his meeting. It was much easier to invite people to my “place of worship.” I could distance myself from the radical “spiritual folks” and say that I only went to Soul for the exercise. I held the Buddhist postcard invitation in my mind. It was a copy of a hand-drawn cartoon of three animal friends holding hands together. I saw its juxtaposition with Soul’s sleek yellow and black billboards and targeted ads.

My friends and I would choose bikes right next to each other. Shane would ask that we

It didn’t hurt that every other rider in the mirror had perfectly toned bodies; the mirror was a mural depicting everything I could be. gave cheers to our “neighbors” after each interval. Though these friends were acquaintances whom I had just met, after our first ride, we felt comfortable enough to start talking about how we want to improve ourselves. These friends in turn invited more friends and our post-“worship” small group grew to six. Sweating profusely in unison is a fast way of peeling away all pretenses and becoming closer together.

One day, I attended a different male instructor’s class. A classmate told him that she was moving and that this was her last lesson in the Silicon Valley studio. At the end of the ride, he told her, “Soul people are the best people!”

The lights turned on, and in the mirror I saw a

room of young white women—most of whom were wearing Soul’s Lululemon gear. Lululemon means $100 yoga pants and $60 sports bras. Amongst the SoulCyclers was a college student wearing a knock-off Under Armour T-shirt. Remember: she could only afford the $35 entrance fee because her Silicon Valley tech company paid for it.

The next time I went to Soul was my final session. My internship was ending. I walked in to the gym’s front desk which I now realize was a retail shop. I had known all along that it was “pay to play,” but I only now considered that it was also “pay to pray.” You purchase your Lululemon gear at the front and buy your religion in the back. Marx says religion is the opiate of the masses, and capitalism says, “Great. Let’s sell it.”

Inside the studio, my mirror self stared blankly at Shane. Underneath the smoke screen of candles, incense, and inspirational speeches, his concern for me, I realized, was conditional on the entrance fee. I momentarily thought of Shane as a pop star and myself as a monetized fan, but somehow our relationship felt more personal than that. Maybe Shane was the pastor, and I was a churchgoer who funded the church.

Now back at college, I had to quit Soul, and I tried going to a Buddhist temple. I felt spiritually fulfilled, but couldn’t motivate myself to go there regularly. I tried spin classes at Payne Whitney. Though the gym was constructed to look like a Gothic cathedral, the instructor’s words were void of Shane’s magic. My mirror self looked at me. We knew where we would much rather be, but also where we couldn’t.

FEATURE

, Love, and Care WILL WEGNER, MY ’22, YH STAFF

T

he page is mostly white space. At the bottom is a text box into which you can enter your phone number, purportedly for purposes of future notification. In the upper right-hand corner sits a little plugin allowing you to provide a Facebook like. And smack dab in the center are two cerulean letters in the prototypical Yale font, broadcasting a simple message: “No.” Beneath it, a sympathetic addendum: “But you’ve still got options.” The last word conveniently links to the Google Maps location of the Popeyes on Whalley Ave. I’m looking at isitchickentendersday.com, a website with a narrow but abundantly clear function. Its only page boasts a humble “No” today because it is not Chicken Tenders Day. But every two weeks, the “No” is replaced with a “Yes” because—you guessed it—on those momentous occasions, it is Chicken Tenders Day. The necessity of the site, however, isn’t apparent. The same information can be found in the Yale Dining App, Yale Menus—its cooler older cousin— or deeply embedded in the internal clocks of almost every Yale student. An Overheard at Yale post from 2017 quotes a Saybrook alumnus as having said, “I may be [more than] 2500 miles away but I still know when it’s [Chicken Tenders Day].”

Chicken Tenders Day—also known as Chicken Tenders Thursday, Tenders Thursday, or, affectionately, Tendies Day—is a ubiquitous element of Yale culture. But tenders can also be found outside of the dining halls and on days other than Thursday. They’re among the most iconic offerings at another Yale fixture: Durfee’s.

Almost every student understands the combinatorial optimization necessary to construct the perfect $9 swipe. Consequently, the recent price hike of their tenders from $5.95 to $6.95 has resulted in considerable hubbub. I contacted Melissa Roberts, Communications and Marketing Manager for Yale Hospitality, to determine the motivation behind this unexpected change. She wrote in an email, “This year’s $1.00 increase is the first in over three years, even though

10 THE YALE HERALD

labor and food costs rise annually. Durfee’s tenders, as opposed to Student Dining’s tenders, are a convenience item. They continue to be available as a swipe exchange and as a value pack which includes chips, fruit and water.”

“The new cilantro sauce in Berkeley for chicken tender day pops off,” another student told me, “and that’s all I’ll say.” Another insisted that “there’s something magic in the [barbecue] sauce” offered at Trumbull’s late lunch.

For many students, the convenience of Durfee’s tenders cannot be replicated elsewhere. “My experience with Durfee’s has always been more positive, by a factor of at least three or four. I’m always way more satisfied,” one student told me. “I think that the fundamental difference is that when I get Durfee’s tenders, it’s like 4 p.m. [and] I haven’t had lunch—whatever I’m gonna eat is amazing.” But they were perplexed by the habits of typical Durfee’s patrons. “A lot of people eat Durfee’s at the regular lunch time, which is mind-boggling to me. Like, why would you do that when you could just get regular lunch?”

A few Thursdays back I sat down with Sammy Grob, MC ’21, in the Trumbull dining hall. It was Chicken Tenders Day, and he was partaking with enthusiasm.

Between bites of breading, he expounded upon their appeal. “They’re one of those things that I like subjectively and can also appreciate why they’re so great objectively,” he told me. “Every chicken tender is unique. It’s just like a snowflake. It looks different, it tastes a tiny bit different. It’s got these kind of crusty things on the side that jut out from the main tender.”

Tenders are also unique in their culinary construction, he told me. “It’s a lovely package because it’s protein packaged in a carb. A delicious carb. It’s got a nice golden feel to it.” He also speculated on the appeal of tenders as opposed to nuggets. While nuggets are composed of unknown mush, he explained, tenders have a seemingly healthier quality. “With a tender you can see the stringy bits of sinew and muscle of the chicken. It makes you think that it came from a more naturally occurring place.”

I put out a poll in each of the Yale College class Facebook groups to get a feel for the relative popularity of the three on-campus offerings: Student Dining, Durfee’s, and Slifka, which also offers tenders on a weekly basis. There were a surprising 369 responses, though the numbers are undoubtedly inflated, as at least a few people voted in several polls—my sincerest apologies to any die-hard statisticians. Nevertheless, the results were overwhelmingly clear—68 percent of the respondents thought the dining hall tenders were best, with 23 percent preferring Durfee’s, and only eight percent choosing Slifka. A number of people reached out to voice their more nuanced opinions.

Matthew Schneider, MY ’22, wrote that “nothing beats the southern tender flavor of Bojangles’ Chicken Supremes,” but conceded that the dining halls were the best option “up north.” Oliver Orr, PC ’19, didn’t think the off-campus options could compare. “Every time I miss [Chicken Tenders Thursday] for class, I go to a retail chicken tendery to compensate,” he wrote.

“Every time, I tell myself that the store-bought tenders are just as good as the dining hall tenders. Every time, I’m lying.” Others professed loyalties to specific dining halls. “We always have a selection of a minimum of four sauces,” boasted one student in TD.

I spoke with an anonymous student who advocated on behalf of the Slifka contingent. They explained that none of the other tenders available to Yale students are kosher. Slifka also deserves style points, they argued, because their tenders are hand-breaded and baked in-house. Melissa Roberts expanded slightly on the preparation process, explaining that Slifka tenders, in adherence to kashrut law, don’t contain the typical buttermilk.

Other dietary restrictions also warrant discussion.

Several anonymous students reached out to voice their frustration with the apparent lack of gluten-free alternatives. “Chicken tender Thursday makes me sad because I can’t have gluten, and I have to look at everyone enjoying something I wish to eat,” wrote one student.

But there is one fried chicken option that works for

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them. “Garden Catering helps fill the nugget-shaped hole in my heart.” According to the student, they offer batches of gluten-free nuggets, cooked separately from those containing gluten. “I love that their gluten-free nugs and their vegetarian nugs are different,” wrote another student about Garden Catering. “They didn’t just put all the ‘not regular’ things in one.” The vegetarian alternative to chicken comes with the highest recommendation from Phoebe Cardenas, BF ’21. “I am not a vegetarian, but I think that the cauliflower nuggets at Garden Catering are amazing and need to be commended,” she wrote. There are also vegetarian options offered on-campus: Durfee’s offers samosas, which Melissa Roberts described as “a different flavor profile and vegetarian alternative” to their tenders.

After catching wind of my tenders investigation, Sam Gallen, SY ’22, invited me to his buttery shift. I arrived to find an environment which sounded and smelled like home—friends conversed, music played, and the pleasant aura of boiling oil was thick in the air. I spoke to him across the counter as he took orders and prepared food. “The Saybrook buttery, also known as the Squiche, has the best chicken tenders on campus,” he stated with pride. Throughout our conversation, he dished out their many other offerings, including something called the “manliestwich,” piled high with just about everything you can fit between two slices of bread. “That’s probably the most intense sandwich we offer,” he said. One of his coworkers, Lucy Wilkins, SY ’22, spoke to the tendency of some Yalies toward such foods. “We’re adding healthy items to the menu,” she said, “because Yale’s kinda boujee, and people either come for the really healthy stuff, or they don’t care, and they just want shit.” She also mentioned that they’d once attempted to replace their oil fryer with a healthier air fryer, but received immediate backlash.

“With the chicken tenders, you may as well just go full on in, because if people are trying to be healthy they’re probably not even going to have chicken tenders, they’re gonna have a smoothie, or eggs, or avocado toast.”

During our discussion, I learned that Lucy, in addition to her job at the Squiche, works at Durfee’s. “I feel like I’m surrounded by the chicken tenders of Yale,” she confessed. When I asked her to speak to the popularity of Durfee’s tenders, she was visibly eager to respond. “Okay, it’s fucking insane—sorry,” she said, backing off from her initial intensity. But she reiterated her point, speaking to the experience of her and her coworkers. “It’s all women—everyone who works at Durfee’s,” she noted. (I suppose I’d been unconsciously aware of this, but I’d never heard it stated outright.) She explained that of the five workers on a given day, the burden of tenders usually falls to one of them. “One person’s job is literally just to stand at the tender oven and cook tenders. Which is, like, a lot.

They just stand there all day, putting tenders in the oven and out.” The lines for tenders can often reach as long as 18 people, she explained. Though demand fluctuates throughout the day, their popularity is generally unwavering, and their oven is consequently pushed to its limits. “I feel like the oven has probably broken, in the last six months, maybe four times, and we’ve just had to bring a new one in,” she told me.

“The other day it broke in the morning, and they literally replaced it in two hours.”

Tenders are a phenomenon—one which has gripped Yale for at least the last 10 years, according to Melissa Roberts. They’ve spawned dozens of Overheard posts, innumerable debates, a Pundits prank, and their own dedicated website. Aside from their obvious merits— their taste, their texture, their convenience—what is it that makes them so special? “For me, the chicken tender represents family and friends and a time before the complexities of adulthood,” wrote Alexander Rosas,

“But Thursday is the moment before the kiss, you know?”

Dean of Pauli Murray College, in an email. “Chicken-tender Thursdays are a refuge from the stresses of everyday life.” Melissa Roberts concurred, writing that tenders are a “comfort food, reminding us of a childhood past.” Sammy Grob seemed to think that their significance lies in their placement within our calendar. “Every other Thursday? Thursday becomes an event,” he told me as our lunch was drawing to a close. He didn’t think they’d have the same cult status if they were offered on Friday. “When I think about the Friday, I think about the end of the weekend,” he continued. “But Thursday is the moment before the kiss, you know? Thursday is the anticipation of release.

The anticipation of the anticipation.” He smiled between bites, an artist’s palette of sauces splayed across his plate. “Chicken tenders represent that anticipation for me, of the release of the weekend. And I love that.”

The status of tenders at Yale, however, may soon be undergoing a drastic shift. According to a staff member, Durfee’s is set to close upon the opening of the Schwarzman Center. “This is the last year of Durfee’s,” they said. Dumbfounded, I contacted Melissa Roberts for a definitive answer about the status of Durfee’s.

Her response was nebulous. “At this point, I’m unaware of any definitive plans for Durfee’s with the opening of Schwarzman next year,” she wrote in her response. The anonymous source mentioned the possibility of a new Grab N’ Go location opening within the Schwarzman Center. However, they “don’t think there’ll be tenders.”

With the future of Durfee’s up in the air, those of us lucky enough to consume their tenders should savor every bite—even if it means substituting a humble water for a Hubert’s lemonade or sacrificing an Awake bar. We shouldn’t take our tenders for granted. We also shouldn’t forget about those who make them for us. As her shift was winding down, I asked Wilkins for any remaining, pressing thoughts about Durfee’s.

She had a clear message to share. “The women who work there every day literally spend their weeks making tenders for Yale students,” she said. “Be nice to the women at Durfee’s when you go in, because they hate making tenders, and they make so many.”

ARTS

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MOLLY ONO, ES ’20 YH STAFF

This week, the Yale Herald asked Molly Ono, ES ’20, to share an artist statement explaining her most recent body of textile work.

T

he basis of these pieces is a process of consumer-based accumulation within a capitalist system. This is not unique to these objects, and, in fact, most pieces of artwork originate from bought materials, except for art derived from found materials—a radical yet perhaps unsung act.

Here, I decided to take this idea to a blunt and potentially ugly extreme, purchasing textile material and presenting the results in an “art” context with varying degrees of intervention. What does it mean for a skimpy halter top from Urban Outfitters to hang on the wall like a sculpture, tags still skewered into the stitches emblazoned with “SALE: $9.99?” The viewer is torn between treating it like a $9.99 piece of clothing and a piece of art. The context shifts the meaning, but not fully nor permanently; to accept the pieces as one or the other is defeating the purpose.

Instead, the pieces are in a suspension of viscose-cotton-silk-muslin-rhinestone limbo, firmly pressed (sometimes stretched, and certainly impaled to) the wall like dissected specimen waiting to be probed or undergo surgery.

And in this way, there is hope: just as there is a narrative of clinical, apathetic experimentation, there also exists a chance of recovery and convalescence—the sale voided, the Urban Outfitters obliterated.

CULTURE David (Jhave) Johnston’s Machine Poetry

CAMDEN SMITHTRO, ES ’22 YH STAFF

I

’d never been to a reading in the Beinecke before, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that the four ambitiously long, semi-circular lines of chairs on the mezzanine were mostly full by the time I arrived at 4:55 p.m. Perhaps I walked into Jhave Johnston’s reading on Oct. 17 overly expecting to have the words to describe what I would see, knowing as I did that the reading/performance was part of the current Beinecke exhibition, Beyond Words: Experimental Poetry & the Avant-Garde. I sat in the second row, far enough away from the microphone but still in easy sight of the projection. Before the reading began, plain text words scrolled vertically on the white screen: visually prose but with the line breaks of poetry, coming at random and without titles. It was hard to follow without paying complete attention; turn away to talk to the person on your left and the text you had been reading was gone, replaced by something wildly different. Sometimes it came in paragraphs, other times spaced out wildly. I couldn’t decide whether to pay attention or to save it until the reading started, in fear of spoiling dinner by eating dessert first.

The introduction was short, given by Kevin Repp, Curator of Modern European Books & Manuscripts, but written by Johnston himself. He was introduced as a renowned digital net-artist-poet concentrating on integrating advanced computational techniques (neural nets, VR, and fluid dynamics) into the creation of art installations and spoken word performances that expose and question human-machine symbiosis (a mouthful, I know). After Repp stepped aside, Johnston approached the podium, a computer open in front of him. A slight man, tall and balding, he was wearing a dark sweater and thin scarf. He looked like a poet, which is why it was surprising for him to then say that he had received his Bachelors in Computer Science, followed by a maybe more expected Masters in Interactive Digital Media and finally a PhD. The first half of his reading was devoted to his older works, which began with “the Big Book”: an accountant’s ledger filled with tangled and spiralling typographic visual poetry called “plough-ems.” As the capabilities of Flash developed, he began to ex-

periment with interactive poetry. One idea he toyed with was verse as a flock, clicking one word on his program and then a poem emerges, constrained by the window and by rules, but following its own path. Poems, and words of poems, could move and disappear and reappear in ways that words on a page could not. So many other examples followed: working with adding text to videos, creating pathway systems where verse structure breaks down, subtitling a film that was in a language he did not speak. While he showed us his poetry, one thing he did not dip into was the code that was behind it. Perhaps if we were a different audience (a performance in the CCAM may have looked significantly different in terms of content) that would not have been the case; his website does show links to code on github in ways that makes me feel he was not being secretive, merely respectful of his audience’s interests.

After perhaps half an hour of these projects he moved to his most recent work: ReRites, poems written by a neural network and edited by a human (himself ). While I had been taking notes before this point, when he reached the neural network poetry, I found myself too rapt to interrupt my focus to write anything down. Using a machine learning process beyond me, for one year, he had run a neural network program that wrote poetry. Each month he fed his program a different library, described as the size of all the books visible on a wall of the Beinecke, which it read 60 times over the course of three days.

It would analyze these words for patterns and create new patterns of words and letters and spaces from the library it had read. This text was massive and dense, creating patterns but with no knowledge of the meaning behind it. Then, each morning for one year, from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m., he would “carve” poems from the brick of words and possible meanings the machine learning machine had given him. Those poems now exist in a 12-book anthology (available soon in the Yale Library), as well as on his website.

It was fascinating and troubling to think of computers writing poetry, but when he talked about the

carving process, it was clear that the computers have no idea what they are creating. They are looking to make the best patterns possible, but have no idea if what they are writing is beautiful or painful or hungry or lonely. Only the carver can look for that.

Johnston ended the reading by pulling up the same moving text that had been on screen before the reading began. But now we knew that this text was being generated in real time by a computer working with machine learning technology. He gestured to the microphones and asked us, the audience, to read. To read whatever spoke to us on the screen.

We were welcome to read together or interrupt each other or interact however we chose. There was a long moment of silence and I worried that nobody would read. Kevin Repp stood first and began to read. Knowing that Repp had not written the poem and that the poem came from the computer, it was astonishingly beautiful. On my side of the room two men stood and went to the microphone together and began to take turns stealing words.

After them a woman with a beautiful voice took the microphone and read to make me believe she had written and loved the words she was reading. After another woman on our side, my playwright friend and I stood up together. A girl who was our age read a stanza on her side, and then we read, trading lines, until a computer-generated stanza break. She took over after us and read until the line “thank you.” She sat, and it felt complete.

There was something truly special about sharing that moment with strangers. Listening to everyone who read, I believed that the words meant something to them, and that it was their poetry they were reading. In a way, having chosen the words from the screen, it was. In many other ways it was not. I left wondering what was more important: words or meaning. What happens when they begin to separate?

One answer: beauty.

FEATURE

Lost in Communication: ISAAC PROSS, BK ’23

“I

want a cognitive dissonance in people’s take of my piece,” Michael Gancz, PM ’21, announced while gracefully sipping coffee between bites of his toasted mini sesame seed bagel. Poised in the dining hall in a cozy hoodie, he explained the process behind his newest, and deeply intimate, musical work and multimedia art piece. Not only is this his most technically adventurous performance, with choreography and projected animations, but it’s his most personal composition yet, exploring the complications of long distance romance. We sat down for an interview the morning after the world premiere of “Red Line to Union Station.” After months of writing and an impressively short amount of rehearsal time, the show premiered last Thursday, Oct. 24. Opening night featured premieres by students Sam Christopher, TD ’22, and Harry Castle, MUS ’21, as well as by Yale Department of Music Professors Kathryn Alexander and Konrad Kaczmarek.

On a recent afternoon, I dropped by a dress rehearsal.

Unsure where to find the entrance to the Off-Broadway Theatre, I lingered around the Shops at Yale, struggling to locate any space conducive to experimental performance. At last, nestled behind a bike rack, I stumbled upon the black box theatre. I loitered like the graduate students chain smoking in front of Loria, unsure what kind of musical experience I was about to encounter. Professor of composition and electroacoustic genius Konrad Kaczmarek finally let me in. Immediately upon seeing the flautist’s t-shirt that proudly declared “$cumbag,” I realized this was no sanctified nor stodgy performance hall, but rather a shrine to experimentation and novelty.

During the rehearsal, Gancz worked like an octopus, diplomatically sorting logistics with a group of professors, giving performance notes to the instrumentalists, and even directing a tech operator who controlled prepared musical samples and the projected video. The

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piece, “Red Line to Union Station,” includes an ensemble of alto flute, voice, and prepared recordings: an assortment of ambient sounds in a train station, distorted recordings of the instruments we see on stage, and electronic sounds that Gancz synthesized. While the piece consists of eight movements, the 25-minute trip flows nonstop, initially making me think it was all one movement). In the black box theater, the two performers stood on either side of a thinly drawn line, their separation already dividing the narrative, creating a tension that lasted throughout the entire production. Behind the performers, a video by visual artist Alice Tirard, TC ’20, played on loop 75 times over the course of the piece. Its meandering red line reminded me of Harold’s purple crayon as it wandered through a hypnotizing soiree.

Growing up in a family of chemists, Gancz always dreamt of composing. Although none of his relatives played music, he learned trombone throughout grade school, performing in high school orchestras and jazz ensembles. Slyly, he shared than he even played in an emo and ska band. He cited the versatility of the regal brass instrument for allowing him to play in a range of ensembles. Over time, he grew more interested in composition as a means of expression. As an ambitious high schooler, he taught himself music theory by grabbing an AP Music Theory textbook from the library, which he now maintains is all wrong and problematic in music education. Gancz remarks on the support and “endless encouragement” of the Department of Music faculty. He noted that Yale has encouraged him to “explore shit for [him]self.” Gancz loves the open-endedness of the department’s requirements, which allow him to study a range of musical styles and heritages while developing as an artist. Having almost majored in math, he smiled with glee when asked about his favorite music classes, which include a history of Western art music with Professor James Hebokosky and a first-year seminar called “Loops and

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Drones in American Music.” He revealed that the seminar introduced him to the rich world of American minimalism and post-minimalism, and completely transformed how he thinks. He took private lessons with Professor Kaczmarek which he claimed were “the main reason this piece worked, especially with technology.” As a third-year Music major, he’s already taken multiple graduate seminars. He explained in a celebratory tone that he just finished his midterm for an orchestration class with internationally renowned and award-winning composer, Professor Christopher Theofanidas. Since taking this graduate course, he can’t stop listening to 20th century symphonic composer Jacob Druckman.

He’s currently listening to John Luther Adams’ new composition “Become Desert,” although he prefers 2013’s “Become Ocean.” He obsesses over legendary prog-rock band King Crimson, whom he swears sounded ages ahead of their time. Throughout breakfast, Gancz seemed to be tapping his feet unconsciously, playing through ideas in his head.

During the rehearsal in the Off-Broadway Theater, Gancz sat silently in the audience, watching his vision come to fruition. “Red Line to Union Station” began with the solo alto flute drifting around, slowly spelling out pitch centers: Bb, A, E, C. Immediately, we’re pulled in, transfixed by the dramatic lighting and mesmerizing video.

Distorted electronics enter, sounding like a gargantuan beast, then evolving into the whispers of a flock of seagulls. Finally, the human voice joins. Between movements, pauses pave the way for spoken dialogue. Over the course of the piece, the electronics grow into a rich orchestral texture. Sometimes the recorded and processed sounds of reverberated grand piano take over, providing a space for the vulnerabilities of a sincere vocal line. At other times, the electronics sound like a gnarly heavy metal banger. The reverb of high-pitched electronics reminds me of ice. Towards the end, recordings of dissonant tremolo strings and jazzy percussion overtake the live instrumentalists, reminiscent of a New Orleans big band marching through a town square. This melting pot of timbres sounds more sumptuous than any gumbo.

Gancz called his song cycle a “profoundly upsetting piece about distance—physical and emotional.” He mentioned that he was in a long distance relationship for three years. Travel played a crucial role in the creation of the piece, as did the ritual of riding the train from DC to New York.

“The programmatic frame of the piece is stopby-stop,” he explained. He wanted to depict the mental state of character: “in part me and in part some abstract thing.” Over the course of the piece, sequences of narrations by the singer transform into gibberish and blur into a “sound collage.” The last movement primarily features primarily recordings of train sounds, which Gancz called “a return to physical environment.” Through the choreography and pacing of the work, Gancz strives to create “continuity and therefore separation between immediacy and distance.”

There’s rarely a moment not saturated with textures—let alone a dull one. As the end grows more distorted, blurred samples envelop the audience. The sound of the vocalist comforts and reassures the audience like a lullaby. After the chaos, the lulling flute returns along with an audio sample of a train station. Following a slow withdrawal to silence, the two performers locked eyes and parted ways, until the stage bared only music stands and the projection.

This is the first piece that Gancz composed on his own, outside of an academic class. Over the summer at Ostrava New Music Fest, he wrote it living away from the Yale “academic bubble.”

Without the restrictions and self-conscious thoughts of grades or professor’s critiques, he felt more inspired approach a more serious piece.

In this intimate and vulnerable sog cycle, he explores ego. He wanted to portray “how it imposes fundamental difficulty on being a person in a relationship.” Gancz reveals that he channeled the “‘sad-boy’ and [previously] irrelevant aspect of [his] life.” However, instead of gloating in self-pity, he transformed the whirlwind of emotions into an accurate portrayal of the “illogic of the mind.” Gancz enjoys toying with the expectations of his audience as well. He desires the audience to feel “bored, upset, sad, or maybe feel

numb.” Well aware that the audience might have no immediately salient idea to grab onto, he values questioning the art over applause. He wants the flexibility of music to allow open interpretation to all audiences.

On a technical level, this piece achieves something new. The score contains a written part for “computer,” filled with samples that are programmed and triggered by a live performer sitting offstage. The ‘“laptop part” contains 13 tracks, which can be mixed and matched using Ableton Live, a digital music creation software.

Some tracks are raw voice memos from Gancz’s phone, while other tracks are synthetic electronic instruments and “patches” he built. The prepared tracks also incorporate highly processed recordings with synthetic-reverb of the flute to create a “flute choir.” Often this rests atop electronic bass. Most impressively, the entire piece is performed with no click tracks, which would otherwise help anchor the live performers to the electronic track.

Gancz gloated that the animation loop took Tirard less than an hour to create. Instead of using a 25-minute animation to match the music, he wanted to play with concepts of repetition. The more an abstract idea is repeated, the more powerful—and meaningless—it becomes.

Over breakfast Gancz compared repetition to linguistics and, more critical to this piece, miscommunication.

Already looking to the future, Gancz is developing a multidisciplinary night of music in January called “The All-Nighter.” He has secured a CPA Grant and plans to replace the chairs of a theater with blankets. He also promises to serve hot chocolate. Last January, he hosted a smaller version, which he found more successful than expected. This year Gancz plans to invite visual artists and tap into Yale’s “printmaking scene” and “typography artwork” from the JE Printing Press. He’s currently searching for musicians, artists, actors, and dancers: “Present your most unpresentable stuff !”

CULTURE

Out with the Classical, in with the Digital MELANIE HELLER, SM ’23 YH STAFF

W

hen was the last time you visited an art museum just for fun? Probably not as recently as you might have liked. I, too, a self-proclaimed art lover, haven’t been as recently or as often as I thought I would have. In the two months that I’ve been a student at Yale, I’ve only visited our world-class art galleries for research purposes.

The attendance at art museums across the country is dropping. According to the National Endowment of the Arts, fewer American adults are visiting art museums (21 percent in 2015 down from 26.5 percent in 2002), and those who do visit do so less often (3.5 times per year in 2002 versus 2.7 times per year in 2015). Museums across the country have been taking measures to get more traffic, such as eliminating entrance fees.

check-ups and fixing up as needed. Fairbanks-Harris goes on to explain that these artifacts are part of our history and culture and that the process “is similar to preventative health care to minimize and slow down the deterioration of an artifact.” Even though art conservation is concerned with preserving the physical, digital images of pieces and their conditions are also recorded to see how they change over time, much like how medical records are kept for humans.

Perhaps the prevalence of finding, sharing, and consuming images of artwork online is the cause of the decline of the art museum. Why go all the way to a museum when the same images can be Googled?

Some art history professors refuse to give lectures on pieces they have never seen in person. Why? Many elements of a piece are missing on a webpage. Visitors at the Louvre are often surprised by the small scale of Why prioritize taking care of art when fewer and Leonardo’s Mona Lisa or Van Gogh’s The Starry Night. fewer people are encountering pieces in person? To For other pieces, its placement is just as important as Theresa Fairbanks-Harris, Senior Conservator at the the work itself. For example, Rodin’s The Burghers of Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) and the Yale Calais is meant to be placed directly on the ground.

University Art Gallery (YUAG), this is far from A pedestal would make it harder for the viewer to the case: “Art conservation is important because it is see the expressions of the statues. The placement of one of the methods of preserving art for the future each statue to each other makes it impossible to see which is part of the cultural and artistic heritage.” Art all six men at the same time. This forces the viewer conservation is just as much a science as it is an art. to circumambulate the statue. A static image of the “Art conservation is the preservation and treatment statue would only show five of the six men, making of art work. Preservation includes stabilizing the it impossible for the viewer to fully experience work so it doesn’t deteriorate,” says Fairbanks-Harris. the piece.

Conservation can span from structural treatments like mending and reinforcement to cleaning the Has the internet taken out the excitement of art? work. Though these artifacts aren’t alive, conservators For me, wandering through the galleries of an art care for them as if they were patients, with routine museum is like a treasure hunt. I could be searching

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went on to explain that she even receives “more respect for [her] physical work as it is seen as being more labor-intensive.”

for a specific piece and find other works I take to on the way. When I turn the corner to find the work in full display, I am always overcome with a sense of awe. There’s no element of surprise when searching for images of art online. When looking online at art, one must also remember that this is not the real piece, but a digital reproduction.

There is an interesting exception to the overall decline in art museum attendance. Modern art museums and exhibitions have seen more traffic than before. The modern art museum creates an almost Instagram-ready psychedelic display for its viewers to capture and post. These digital exhibits work as free advertisement, drawing the attention of those scrolling through social media, creating even more traffic to the museum. In this way, the internet helps us get out of the house and into a house of culture.

If museums displaying modern art mediums gain more traffic, why don’t classical museums follow suit? The explosion of technology and the internet in the 21st century precipitated a rise in new media art, mediums like computer animation, 3D printing, and digital art. Art museums seem to be mostly concerned with painting and sculpture, not so much with new media art. Wondering why that was, I sat down with artist Alex Taranto, DC ‘23, to discuss digital art. She explained that although it looks like digital art will be a large feature of the future in art, classical mediums won’t be overtaken. “There’s something so important about the tactile feeling of making art in the physical world. It’s a different sensation,” says Taranto. She

To Taranto, “every [digital] piece needs to be ‘perfect’ because technology can create that. But sometimes in drawing and painting, the best pieces are the ones that have been molded by mistakes that you couldn’t hit an ‘undo’ button on.” What is lacking, however, is that physical art, sometimes molded by mistakes, creates humanity in the work.

Viewers can relate more easily to a work when it mirrors their own flaws and imperfections.

The lifespan for technology seems to be shorter than most celebrity marriages. Will digital art stand the test of time? Taranto concedes that “physical art has a longer secured value because the artist physically interacted with the materials. It feels more legitimate.” She remains hopeful, believing “digital art will last through the ages.” She elaborates, “It won’t submit to the decay of material, just changes in technology and interest.” Conservators have their own way of preserving non-classical art mediums: “There are conservators who specialize in the preservation and conservation of new media of digital art just as there are conservators that specialize in the treatment of paintings, sculpture, books, and paper.” Conservators specializing in new media use processes like keeping “lightsensitive materials... protected from physical agents and stored in the dark, in climate-controlled and sometimes cold storage to slow down the aging process.” Conservators also have to be cognizant of the speed of updating technology, and the ensuing obsolescence of older forms. According to Fairbanks-Harris, because some digital files require a specific machine for their creation and viewing, those machines must be continually “kept and maintained since such hardware and equipment is often discontinued.”

Art is constantly evolving, and museums must keep up with the changing times. Something something the internet and social media transform the way we interact with and consume art. Perhaps classical art museums will become obsolete like old technology.

CULTURE

Fifty Shells for Bob Reed A

“quiet but dramatic coincidence”—that’s how the painter Robert Reed, ART ’62, characterized the invitation he received in 1987 to exhibit at the Second Street Gallery in Charlottesville, Va., the city where he was born and raised. For a painter who used geometric design and abstract expression to represent childhood memories, Reed’s return to Charlottesville—after 35 years of self-imposed exile—was a moment of great serendipity.

I never met Robert Reed, but his image loomed over me. Installed right outside of the basement studio where I took my first college art class was a placard dedicated to Reed, Yale School of Art’s former Director of Undergraduate Studies and professor of painting and printmaking for almost 50 years. His smiling, bearded face and the dedication Robert Reed, (19382014) ushered me, chronically late, into Basic Drawing every other day. My dad, a painter and teacher at the School of Art, mentioned his mentor “Bob Reed” a few times. At this point, I made a mental diagram: the placard, the mentor, and a little further away—me.

ADDEE KIM, JE ’21 YH STAFF

ronne and burned their summer creations. It was a fantastic imagined scene—a Viking funeral for thousands of beautiful art pieces—and one that inspired reactions from all of my peers: “Burned?!” “Why?!”

ject from observation. I wasn’t going to half-ass them.

I wasn’t even going to quarter-ass them. Not even the gastro-intestinal issues I woke up to were going to hold me back.

I began my task. I wrote a lot about family, childhood memories, and, to the best of my ability, the village that I was inhabiting. Towards the end of my time in Auvillar, I started to feel Reed’s shadow encroach upon me. Gaining clarity on who the man was and what he saw in this place felt necessary to reconcile what this experience ultimately meant to me. But learning more about him required a 30-minute infraction of my internet sabbatical, a policy inspired

by Reed, whose students were cut off completely from laptops, cell phones, and headphones.

At this point, I made a mental diagram: the placard, the mentor, and a little further away—me.

According to Amra Saric, TC ’17, who wrote about her experience in the studio practice program, each student dedicated themselves to one object and would make up to 100 pieces a day, ranging in size and medium, from their object of choice. At the end of the day, the fruits of their labor would be subjected to a Three months ago, I sat amongst a group of 13 oth- group critique, which Reed called an “observation.” er students on the veranda of our new home, a gîte in Southwest France. We were attending orienta- Reed’s hallmark first assignment is what most of his tion for English S247: Travel Writing, and his name former students mention. 50 drawings from obsercame up again. Robert Reed, the explanation for vation in the timespan between two class meetings why Yale’s travel writing course is in Auvillar, France. (one and a half days). The story behind the infaReed founded Yale’s “Studio Practice in Painting and mous 50 drawings is less known. According to my Drawing” program in Auvillar, which he directed until dad, in Reed’s first class, the professor assigned his he died of cancer in 2014. In the same room that I sat students 15 drawings each. After class, one student in daily, learning how to write with a village as my approached him and asked whether he said 15 or 50. muse, is where Reed and his 13 students painted and “In that moment, he realized that overachieving Yale “investigated” objects of their choosing. It couldn’t be. students would do the work, no matter what,” my dad explained. So from then on, it was 50 instead of 15.

A quiet and dramatic coincidence.

My object of choice was an abandoned snail shell I found in the brush. It was small enough to carry around with me wherever I went. I discovered that there are many ways to draw a shell. If you’re like me, you’ll start off by drawing the object from different I was informed by my instructor, who didn’t know I decided that on one of my last days in Auvillar, I was angles. Once you’ve covered every angle, you’ll move much about Reed, that at the end of the program, going to commit to doing the accidental assignment: on to using various materials: colored pencils, pens, Reed and his students went down to the River Ga- in one day, I was going to do 50 drawings of one ob- etc… If you are me, in a fit of repetition-induced in18 THE YALE HERALD

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sanity, you’ll use the dirt from inside the shell, a stapler to construct a punk representation of the shell, and a bunch of little eyes in the form of the shell that would concern most people who love you.

At some point, I took a break from drawing and went outside, where the shell was out of sight, out of mind. I ate a few ripe grapes that hung from the rafters. I thought about Robert Reed, and how sick he was during his last summer in Auvillar. He was in the hospital for most of the time, and had his teaching fellow pick up his slack. He must have known that he was going to die.

Did he savor his last moments in Auvillar? Did he wake up early to buy fresh croissants when he could stomach them? Did he let conversations with his students linger, despite his reputation for being a recluse? Did he watch the breeze spill through a field of sunflowers, was he brought back to his childhood in Virginia? From what others have told me about him, I’m guessing that he focused on his student’s work up to the last point. On teaching.

I thought more about mortality in my month in Auvillar than I had since a close family friend died.

I came in strong with my first assignment, which I less-than-tactfully ended with the line “I feel death.” Maybe it was inspired by the horrifying images of tar-black lungs and gray, bloated cadavers that decorate the cigarette packets in Europe. If so, touché, France.

I think, though, it was brought on by the fact that I’ve been reflecting a lot on life in Auvillar—on bits of my narrative that I want to capture, and, because of the pleasure I’ve taken in writing, how I want to be spending my time on earth. It’s like I’ve been drafting a satisfying, premature obituary for myself.

I’m drawn to Reed because of what baffles me about him. He had such important things to say—about the black experience, about growing up in Charlottesville—and had such a compelling language to tell that story. But he chose instead to teach, and in doing so forfeited a lot of his own legacy as a painter.

One particularly stressful night during my first year at Yale, hunchbacked in a Bass cell, hopped up on Awake chocolates, I called my dad in a panic. I was taking all the wrong classes, I told him, and I had no direction. He waited for my crying to subside and then told me about how, when he was in college, he had no idea what he was doing. He majored in English and was scared to pursue art seriously because he had such a traumatic time in his first art class, his class with Reed. The point is, he didn’t know what he was doing, let alone the fact that he was going to be an artist. Then, years later, to my dad’s surprise, Reed told him that he was one of his favorite students. It was probably enough to vindicate my father’s devotion to painting.

I don’t know what I’m doing yet. How I’m going to make a living. If it will conveniently be “my passion.”

If I’ll have a family, or at least in the nuclear sense.

But I’m hitting the age when people refrain from telling me, “Oh honey, it’s too early to be thinking about that!” So here I am, thinking about it.

If I am lucky to leave any legacy, I want it to be the Bob Reed brand of legacies. I want people to remember me in absurd assignments. I want 21-yearolds to loosely attribute their existence to me. I want a lot of people to be happier because of me, whether it’s because I put them through a series of torturous drawings, or told them that they could do it.

REVIEWS

P-sets and Coronets: Profile of a Yale Band

JAKE KALODNER, JE ’21

F

rom the outside, Yale’s music scene looks much like what you would expect: the flashy orchestras, a cappella groups, and marching bands capture the classy, sophisticated, and preppy milieu that once characterized the now-bygone days of the Yale Man. This is a zeitgeist that Yale’s administration advertises to the world, but it fails to capture the ever-changing reality of what campus actually looks—and sounds— like today. For example, when has the atmosphere that Yale attempts to convey ever pointed to the emergence of an undergraduate alternative rock band?

Noah Gershenson, DC ’21, looks just like what you might expect from the lead guitarist of garage band— his long brown hair, thick-framed glasses, and scruffy beard disguise a surprising charm as he talks to me passionately about the “underground” music scene at Yale. He sits alongside vocalist and bassist Delia McConnell, TC ’22, and drummer Jack Berry, MY ’22, in the living room of AEPi, currently repurposed as a rehearsal space for their thriving ensemble. Together, the trio makes up the band known as Window Seat.

The three describe their union almost as a given.

Recounting their origins, Gershenson recalled, “We jammed, and it was a lot of fun, and we just… kept doing it. And here we are.” Gershenson facilitated the union of the group, having met Berry and McConnell independently through a linguistics class and WYBCx Radio, respectively. After several jam sessions, the trio officially formed the band—then known as Vape Naesh—in the spring of 2019, and debuted at the

20 THE YALE HERALD

YCC’s Battle of the Bands last April. They changed of unmatched achievement that they cannot find their name to Window Seat over the summer when anywhere else on campus—and their dedication to the craft is getting them more attention on campus they realized how serious they were about the band. every day. “People know our words—and we don’t Each member of Window Seat has a long history with even know our words!” Berry exclaimed. music that seems to both parallel and complement that of their bandmates. They have all played music Gershenson, McConnell, and Berry make up just since they were young, and each had been involved in one of many student-formed groups and performers several bands prior to the formation of Window Seat. on campus. They’ve played with Yale bands Toil!, While they had each known that they were interested TRØPIC, Sargasso, and the solo artist Hero Magnus. in joining a band at Yale, they had not expected to McConnell described the band scene at Yale as fall in with each other so quickly, or so easily. “This is having been difficult to break into, but once breached, my favorite band I’ve ever been in,” McConnell said, it quickly became a very welcoming environment. followed by the quick agreement of her bandmates. The bands see each other on campus, and have the “Usually, it’s either [that] you like the people and you opportunity to discuss recent gigs and their projects. don’t take it seriously, or it’s just for music but you “It is kind of separate [from the rest of Yale], but once don’t really like the people, but this is like—we like you’re part of it, it’s more connected.” Regardless, much of the rehearsal and planning time of the bands each other and we take the music seriously.” occurs independently, and separately from the rest of For them, the band goes beyond a hobby—it is an Yale. There is no form of overarching coherence, and activity that each places as much importance on as the members of Window Seat seem to like it that way. any other activity. “This is my primary extracurricular.”

Berry said. The band rehearses once a week, but they Window Seat has already played four gigs this year, at also write all of their own music from scratch, with the O61 Conglomerate in Saybrook, 216 Dwight St., each member constructing their own part of the song Benjamin Franklin Four Courts, and at the Autumn as they go along. They gather inspiration from various Music Fest at Toad’s Lily Pad. They’ve also recently sources—from bands they look up to, like Green Day been in touch with a recording studio and hope to and Modern Baseball, as well as from real life events. record some of their songs this semester. And, as “Noah’s songs are mostly about ex-girlfriends,” Berry always, they’re working on new songs to present to chirped, to Gershenson’s quick protests. Regardless, their ever-growing audience. Window Seat is here to the three assert that the development of a song from show us that the era of the Yale orchestra is over, and an idea to its physical manifestation creates a sense the day of the Yale band has just begun.

21 It’s October break. It’s a Friday. What better way to exercise my freedom from the restrictions of academic life than to see an adaptation of a play about madness; the destruction of social order; and the blurring of lines between human and animal, female and male, strength and weakness?

CLAIRE FANG, ES ’23

From Maenads to Girls: Renaming and Adapting The Bacchae

Girls is a modern adaptation of Euripides’s The Bacchae, in which Dionysus (the Greek god of wine and madness, born of the union between mortal Semele and divine Zeus) takes revenge on the family of Cadmus for not recognizing him as a god by turning the women mad and bringing Pentheus, Cadmus’ grandson, to his death at the hands of his own mother. In Girls, Dionysus is rebranded as Deon, a not-DJ, not-influencer generally referred to as “the curator” who is hellbent on turning his small hometown upside down. Deon’s role is essentially exactly the same as his role in the original: a force of nature and madness who upends the social order. But the focus really isn’t on Deon so much as on the eponymous Girls, women from the town who are game for a good time.

Unlike the original play, the entirety of Girls focuses on one central location: a wild party Deon sets up in the woods. The eponymous Girls are not called maenads, a term referencing worship and devotion to Dionysus; instead of acting as a single chorus constantly praising the god, they are characters in their own right with their own personalities and motivations for joining the party, which they name “the Clurb.” From seat O-5, it looks incredibly fun. From my seat in the audience, I want to get up and join them, sympathizing strongly with the Girls’ general motivation to escape everyday frustration and stress.

I emailed James Bundy, the artistic director, a set of questions about the adaptation, but he told me that it would be more interesting if I came up with my own answers. I decided that doing so is only appropriate for a play that questions traditional authority. So, without further ado: 1) What informed the choice to rename Pentheus as Theo, aside from the similarity between “theus” and “theo”?

Deon and Theo have a brief discussion on the meanings of their names (God v.s. Gift of God)—where did that name-versus-name discussion come from?

Theo is a Christian—the fundamentalist homophobic kind.

By contrast, Pentheus, on whom Theo was based, seems, if not nonreligious, not devout either. Both versions refuse to accept Deon/Dionysus as divine and express violent intolerance of Dionysus’s cult.

Befitting Theo’s traditionalist outlook, the name “Theo” is Greek for “Gift of God.” Theo thus retains a strong national connection with his predecessor. By contrast, the etymology of “Deon” lies in both “God” and “Dionysus.”

Obviously, there’s a connection to the original Greek name, but as Dionysus was also a god of dualities, it’s appropriate that Deon’s name does not only have one definition.

As for their confrontation, it certainly serves to highlight Deon’s reversal of the initial power dynamics between him and Theo: “My name means ‘God.’” “Oh? Well, my name means ‘Gift of God’!” “So, you’re my gift.” (Cue Theo’s confusion.) It also emphasizes how much more powerful Deon is, whether or not Theo realizes it.

2) On that note, what was the thinking behind the name adaptations as a whole? Agave to Gaga, Cadmus to Dada, and so on? Simplicity? Universality?

Since the setting has been radically relocated from Greece to Americana, it makes sense that the names change as well. “Deon” and “Theo” are relatively common names, while “Gaga”—colloquially meaning “crazy”—seems to further amplify the production’s insanity theme. “Dada” is a pretty easy way to establish that modernized Cadmus is Gaga’s father, which is his main role in Girls anyway.

3) What was the point of the purported hyena ancestry?

Just to set up the Girls as hunters? Or to comment on narratives surrounding gender?

One of the things this adaptation added was the story of how Gaga and her sisters have a hyena somewhere in their family tree. This story is made up by Dada to control his daughters (“animals get put in cages, and hunted”).

Although it’s not true, the story really does fit in well with Girls’ (and The Bacchae’s) deliberate blurring of the boundary between “man” and “beast.” Theo is mistaken for a lion, Deon sprouts a bull’s horns—the concept of Gaga as having the blood of a hunting animal fits in just fine.

And it becomes very relevant after the climax where Gaga kills her son with a submachine gun, just as with Deon and Theo’s animal selves’ reveals.

4) Semele’s ghost had a direct link back to the original play, but the escaped circus animals and ghost clowns definitely seem like very new additions. I know the point of an adaptation isn’t to hew exactly to the original script, and they fit very well into the theme of madness, but what inspired you to add them?

You know what, they’re cool.

5) Why is Gaga the principal Girl, instead of Semele, Deon’s mom, who had significantly more “screentime” in the original?

Since Girls does put women front-and-center, the principal Girl should have agency and the ability to speak for herself.

Semele, as a dead character, cannot have either. The title of the play is Girls, not Mom, after all. Agave, as Gaga, naturally gets to take center stage. Furthermore, she’s the one who completes Dionysus’s revenge against the family that slighted him by killing her own son—she’s the one who brings about the climax.

Overall, I really enjoyed this adaptation. However, I do think Girls would have potential as a heavily Bacchaeinspired story, rather than a straight adaptation. Sometimes adherence to the original script felt forced, especially the ending, which required a somewhat contrived setup so that Gaga could pick up the submachine gun to kill her son. The departures from The Bacchae were often just as interesting, if not more so. A story about a small town going insane, erupting in music and violence, is already compelling on its own. Maddeningly so.

Gold Contributor Abra Metz Dworkin Molly Ball Christopher Burke Silver Contributor Dan Feder Brian Bowen David Applegate Fabian Rosado Donors C. Morales Ervolino Sam Lee Joshua Benton George E. Harris Laura Yao Ted Lee Michael Gerber Brendan Cottington Marisol Ryu Natasha Sarin Emily Barasch Marci McCoy Julia Dahl Maureen Miller

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things we hate this week Clif Bars.

If I wanted to eat sediment, I would’ve gone to the river.

Drunk Texts

Hav u red trick mirro by jua tolentine?

Tall People

The average height of the Herald managing board is 5’4”and three-quarters.

Dusty bones.

Peabody Ball got litttt!

Housewifery

The Western Canon.

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George Bush’s oil paintings.

Stop horsing around.

Stop horsing around!!

Boutta’ dance on his corpus!

Nope, still not forgiven.

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