today's weekend

REALITY B2THE WEIRD INTERNETAre our lives just one big computer simulation? Susannah Shattuck mulls it over.

GENTRIFICATION B4THE DEATH OF PERIODICALS Jake Orbison meets a Harlem Globetrotter and expounds on the shuttering of News Haven.

UGLINESS B11“UGLY PEOPLE” TAKES THE STAGESex, coke and startups. All of the above in the newest play to premiere at the Whitney.

// FRIDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2012WEEKEND

ANYA GRENIER puts the search for Yale’s next president in perspective. PAGE 3.

WEEKEND VIEWS

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I recently read an article on Vice Maga-zine’s website that described the very real scientific theory that our reality is actually a computer simulation. Yeah, you understood me correctly: There is a scientist out there in the world — a real live scientist who has sci-ence-y credentials and an important science job — who really thinks that our entire uni-verse could just be an incredibly detailed and complex computer game. I practically did a spit take when I first read this article. “This is some crazy shit,” I thought, hunched over my glowing computer screen.

“There’s how many PlayStations world-wide? More than 100 million, certainly. So think of 100 million consoles, each one con-taining 10,000 humans,” said Rich Terrile, a big deal at NASA. “That means, by that time, conceptually, you could have more humans living in PlayStations than you have humans living on Earth today.”

My mind was blown again by the madness of everything around me when I stumbled across another online discovery — via Face-book, that great receptacle of bizarre Inter-net phenomena — from The Seattle Times, published in July, that described the story of a man being spotted in the Utah wilderness living in a goat suit amongst “realgoats” (it’s actually one word in the text). O!cials at the time were concerned that with the approach-ing hunting season, “goat man” would be in danger of getting shot because people would think he was a goat. This news piece raised a few questions: namely, who is this goat man,

and why does he live among the goats in a goat suit? Is he “an extreme wildlife enthusiast,” as the article suggested, or is he just batshit crazy?

As if these two supremely weird sto-ries weren’t enough to keep me on my toes, I just came across the other day with possi-bly the most frightening and strange Wiki-pedia entry that I have ever read, and believe you me, I’ve read a lot of Wikipedia entries. I absent-mindedly wandered across an entry for “Bloop,” one of six significant unexplained underwater sounds detected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Equatorial Pacific Ocean autonomous hydro-phone array. Basically, in 1997, Wikipedia tells me, the array picked up a strange signal that did not resemble that of any man-made noise or known seismic activity. The sound, nicknamed “Bloop,” was more like an animal burp or a fart, scientists thought, but here’s the catch: It was, and I quote, “several times louder than the loudest recorded animal, the blue whale.” Now if that doesn’t freak you out, then I don’t know what will. As far as scien-tists know, some enormous creature could be bellowing under the ice in Antarctica. This is CRAZY.

As much as I want to believe in the weird reality (or simulated reality or whatever) described by these articles, further Internet snooping tells me it would be foolish to do so. (I probably shouldn’t be getting my science news from Vice either.) A great number of scientists think “simulation theory” is com-plete bunkum. A news update reveals that the “goat man” of Utah was simply a Canadian hunter “preparing” for the upcoming season. The epic leviathan thought to be responsible for “Bloop” could just be an Antarctic ice floe crashing into the ocean.

Part of me doesn’t care, though. At least we live in a world where people can think weird things and publish them on the Internet. At least we still have that privilege.

Contact SUSANNAH SHATTUCK at [email protected] .

The Internet says the darndest things// BY SUSANNAH SHATTUCK

Excuse me while I rant about breakfast// BY KALLI ANGEL

On Tuesday, the News reported the closing of News Haven and the future opening of a Panera Bread in its place. Skimming the article as I avoided puddles on Elm Street, I wilted a little. In truth, I had been to the interna-tional periodical outlet just once during my freshman year, and even then only to buy pens. Con-fused by the “No Browsing” sign, I hadn’t stayed to peruse, and yet, as an aspiring writer or editor or “something involving books,” I felt this closure as another wound to my cherished industry. A moment of silence, please.

Walking briskly to get out of the rain, I probably would have forgotten all about the death of News Haven by the next block. But then I came to this line: “Two of [13 students interviewed] said they think Panera will provide students with a much-needed breakfast option around campus.”

“WHAT??!!,” I thought. There was an angry pressure behind my eyeballs. “A MUCH-NEEDED WHAT??”

Granted, I rarely eat break-fast. I usually prefer extra sleep to a banana and cold cereal (sorry, Mom), and I don’t really care where other people consume their Most Important Meal. But if even close to 15 percent of the undergraduate population thinks New Haven is lacking in delicious breakfast locales, I kindly suggest that they poke their befuddled heads out of Commons and tear an itty bitty hole in that Yale culi-nary cocoon.

An overreaction? Maybe. But here’s the thing:

You want pastries? I can’t think of a single Panera baked good that tastes better than a Blue State raspberry muf-fin, and JoJo’s, Willoughby’s and Ko"ee all have house-made treats. You want an egg sand-wich? Try the Gourmet Heav-ens on Broadway or Whitney for 24-hour breakfast-y goodness

or hit up Wall Street Pizza for a bacon, egg and cheese with per-fectly runny yolks and a 10-per-cent student discount. Craving a sit-down a"air? Chap’s, Claire’s or A1 Pizza is your place. Week-end brunch? Find it vegan-style at Red Lentil or in full force at, of all places, Rudy’s. Looking for the real deli feel? Stroll over to Oran-geside Luncheonette for pastrami

and eggs with pancakes. And of course there is always trusty Atti-cus for your book-browsing and quiche-eating needs.

So call me a locavore, call me a hipster, call me a trust-busting wannabe or some other laissez-faire-hating epithet. Fine. But my dollars will keep on voting for the Book Traders, the Woodlands and all the other superior, inti-mate New Haven establishments that have stories of origin instead of marketing copy, and that make this city feel like home.

In the same article about the end of News Haven, Abigail Raider of University Properties was quoted as saying, “national and regional merchants have the marketing and brand to draw people from the suburbs (who otherwise might never come) into the city to enjoy the city’s cosmo-politan look and feel.” And that may be true.

But this is also true: While traveling through northeastern Germany this past spring, a new friend, Nicole, took me to Ros-tock, a Hanseatic city about the size of New Haven. She had vis-ited the city often as a teenager,

and after more than two years away, she was eager to check in on fond memories. We wandered quietly together down Doberaner Strasse.

“It’s very di"erent,” she finally told me in German. “Now there are so many Ketten (chains).” Then she started pointing out storefronts. A pizza chain that used to be a gelato parlor. A

nationwide drugstore that used to be a trendy boutique. A ubiq-uitous media outlet that used to be a local university bookstore. A Starbucks.

Never having been to Ros-tock, I couldn’t exactly relate to Nicole’s loss. But during the three months I’d spent in Germany, the large signs of the popular Ketten — their colors, their typefaces, their slogans — had grown famil-iar to me. Despite its characteris-tic Brick Gothic churches and the copper plaques commemorating events from centuries past, Ros-tock felt a little too modern and a little too prefabricated.

We strolled through the Old Town for a few hours, I snap-ping photos and Nicole recon-ciling her childhood Rostock with the new one. We had a fine afternoon, but on the train out of Rostock I had the distinct sense that the marketing of Germany’s national merchants had ensured that Nicole would not be coming back any time soon.

Contact KALLI ANGEL at [email protected] or follow her at

@NewHavenNormal .

ANGEL

SHAT

TUCK

F R I D A YO C T O B E R 0 5

STAGE COMBAT WORKSHOP294 Elm St. // 2 p.m.

Learn the techniques needed to safely perform violence (on stage). Applicable for actors, directors, sophomore slump-ers.

PAGE B2 YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:Calling your relativesIt’s midterm season. It’s that time.

ONWARD!// BY WEEKEND

Passing through our attic offices each in turn this week, our former edi-tors — the lady Brenna, gallant Nikita, sir Chase and fair Erin — offered up wisdom and scraps of paper coded with the runes of InCopy and out-dated passwords to servers. They leave us now, with their blessings and warm beer, refusing to look at our cover page, insisting they have societies to attend, activities to partake in, libations and obligations. And we’ve still only got two key-cards to 202 York Street between us. It’s all too much.

We four — Jordi, Jack, Cora and Akbar (in reverse, alphabetically, to spite the one with initials AA) — are finding our way. We’re fluent, respec-tively, en Español, Applied Math, con-tinental philosophy and drama. Two of us took lost years. One of us, inexplica-bly, spells “what” “wot” in every Gchat. We more or less met three weeks ago — we still don’t know each other’s middle names or where everyone will sit.

Here’s where our heads are at:In its third year, WEEKEND will wind

its analog wristwatch and do its best to stay timely. We want to keep a finger on the pulse of the student body, its veins running Yale blue, and an ear to New Haven’s ground, knotted over with elm

roots. O u r s y m p a - thies, as

ever, remain with the marginalized, the uncanny — above all, the sleep-deprived. Our pages are for the gonzo, the satirist, the reporter with a honey or vinegar voice, a singular vision or acid-dipped pen.

We recognize that the News is steeped in certain institutionalized privilege. We recognize, staring out our gothic stone windows into the gar-den of Wolf’s Head, our complicit role in hierarchies and power structures on campus. We intend to work to keep this at the forefront of our minds, to chal-lenge that fact and undermine it. At least, we aim to entertain, and to throw a few parties in the boardroom, beneath Briton Hadden’s pug nose.

With the modest soap box of these twelve weekly pages, we seek to con-front the above — whether in features, reviews, or social critique. Not to men-tion the intoxicating prose of Chloe Drimal ’13.

There is a mind-meld that comes about in the process of putting out a publication. It comes with the neces-sity of coordinating sta"ers, deadlines and assignments, of proofing pages in time for that out-of-sight print-

ing (the means of production ever hidden — the owners of the presses with their early mornings, breakfasts, families).

At approximately 3 a.m. one night this week, a joke about our Franken-stein-esque crew — our weird fusion and eerie ESP, united via electronic mail and little else — led to a perhaps ill-judged message to one of our fear-less illustrators, whose inestimable talents were harnessed by our whims, resulting in a likeness part ghoulish, part comic.

With four hydra-heads and sixteen appendages, we move awkwardly, but hopefully with inadvertent majesty, through the deep that is Yale’s campus. We welcome you into our monstrous lair with open suctioned tentacles.

Here, among the ephemera and

y e l l o w -ing covers from decades past, there is a crystal(esque) decanter we hope to keep filled, a ribbon-less typewriter and an original Mac, with its spectrum of neon stripes and the still-visible bite-marks of the original chomp of knowledge. Once, in times of yore, the entire rag that is the News was processed through its now-dormant motherboard. Requi-escat in pace, outmoded machine, dusty technology.

But enough highfalutin talk for now. Doping for next week beckons. For the first time, as ever, we are your humble servants in journalism, arts and living. Get at us.

Contact WEEKEND at [email protected] .

AS FAR AS SCIENTISTS KNOW, SOME ENOR-

MOUS CREATURE COULD BE BELLOWING UNDER

THE ICE IN ANTARCTICA. THIS IS CRAZY.

BUT MY DOLLARS WILL KEEP ON VOT-ING FOR THE BOOK TRADERS, THE WOODLANDS AND ALL THE OTHER SUPERIOR, INTIMATE NEW HAVEN

ESTABLISHMENTS.

//KAREN TIAN

The WEEKEND editors get

Kraken.

WEEKEND COVERYALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2012 · yaledailynews.com PAGE B3

F R I DAYO C T O B E R 0 5

THE TALE OF THE JAPANESE FOLDING SCREENS

Beinecke Library // 3 p.m.

WEEKEND hears “Harimaze” folding screens are making a h-u-g-e come-back.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:Watching the presidential debatesEven if Romney has creepy, glossy, TV eyes.

It had been pouring for hours. As students filed into Battell Chapel this past gloomy Fri-

day afternoon, some looked as though they’d swum rather than walked there.

Three dozen Yalies had braved the weather to attend an “Open Forum” hosted by the Presidential Search Committee (PSC). That group, which consists of eight Corporation mem-bers and four faculty representatives, will be responsible for providing rec-ommendations to the Yale Corpora-tion, the larger body which will ulti-mately choose this University’s next President. Presidential Search Com-mittee Chair Charles Goodyear ’80 and Vice Chair Dr. Paul Joskow ’72 told students in an email that this forum was an opportunity for under-graduates to offer “observations, advice and feedback” they said would be “invaluable” for the PSC later on in its selection process.

The atmosphere in the room was unsettled. The dripping wet students in attendance spread themselves thin over the pews, only moving up to the front when urged by organizers. Those who had put their names down on a list to speak muttered to their neigh-bors, rehearsing what they wanted to say. The forum’s moderator, the four Search Committee members pres-ent and the single student counselor asked to advise the PSC stood apart at the front of the nave, talking quietly.

After spending about 10 minutes glancing around for stragglers, mod-erator and Yale Corporation mem-ber Byron G. Auguste ’89 turned to face students and began explaining in calm, measured tones that this was going to be “a listening session”: a chance for the committee to hear stu-dents’ thoughts on Yale’s strengths and weaknesses — and, of course, the qualities they would like to see in its next leader.

That wasn’t exactly what they got. Fifteen minutes in, the first student got up to talk. She identified herself as a member of activist group Students Unite Now and launched into a read-ing of a manifesto written by her orga-nization’s members.

“Good afternoon,” she began. “We’re really excited to be here.”

Over the course of the next two hours, SUN activists and other con-cerned students would speak pas-sionately about everything from their love for Yale to their concerns about the new residential colleges, read aloud poetry by lesbian femi-nist group Fierce Pussy (the opening line: “I want a dyke for president”) and rail against Yale-NUS. But what they wanted to talk about most of all was not what they wanted to see in the next president of Yale. It was how he or she would be chosen — and whether they would have a say in that decision.

Over and over, students expressed their confusion and frustration about the search process: How had the search committee members been appointed? Why wasn’t there a stu-dent voice on the PSC? How could

students even know the Corporation was going to listen to what was being said that day?

Beyond concerns about the search’s mechanics, students spoke about against its overall lack of transpar-ency, as well as the “corporatization” of Yale as an institution.

“I see a trend of Yale becoming less of a community and more of a brand,” said Communication and Consent Educator Jess Belding ’13. “I don’t like forums like this because … I feel like I’m being an ungrateful consumer. In a truly democratic process, no one would be feeling that way.”

Belding was among many who pointed out what they saw as the pri-mary flaw in the forum’s design: the fact that it asked students to talk at, not with, the members of the com-mittee sitting silently in the front pew, while hearing nothing in response and having nothing more than the Corpo-ration’s word as a guarantee that their views would be taken into account.

By the end of the session, it was clear that at least some of the assem-bled students weren’t willing to dis-band without hearing something from the committee in a physical, rather than a virtual, space.

Eventually, Goodyear stood up and began to speak directly to them.

Asked whom the members of his search committee saw themselves as accountable to, he said he would turn the question back to students: “Why do you think we won’t be account-able?”

Several disgruntled student responses later, Goodyear conceded the point.

“I realize you don’t have any basis to trust us,” he said. “We need to earn your trust over time.”

---

Four weeks earlier, at 8:59 a.m. on Aug. 30, 2012, Yale students, fac-ulty and sta! received “a message to the Yale Community” announcing that, after 20 years in o"ce, President Richard C. Levin would be stepping down at the end of the 2012-13 aca-demic year.

At 9:10 a.m., they received another email from the Senior Fellow of the Yale Corporation, Edward P. Bass ’67 ARC ’72 . This was the first time most Yalies had ever heard the name, and many hit the delete button without a second thought.

Former Yale College Council Presi-dent Brandon Levin ’14 was sitting at his job in Betts House, where he works as special assistant to Vice President Linda Lorimer, when the message announcing President Levin’s retire-ment appeared. He processed the news together with the administra-tors sitting in the o"ces around him.

“I had no idea, no advance notice,” he said, “I was very surprised.”

Later that same day, Lorimer spoke to her special assistant about an opportunity for him to serve the Uni-versity in another capacity. Bass had asked her to invite Brandon Levin to fill the role of Student Counselor to

the new Presidential Search Commit-tee.

Before long, he found himself “communicating daily” with Bass, Goodyear and Joskow.

One day later, the community received another email from Bass with the subject line “Presidential Search.” It contained a rough outline of the structure to be set in place for communication with the PSC, with appointed “Trustee Liaisons to Cam-pus Constituencies” on the Corpo-ration side working with “Campus Counselors to the Search Committee” on the other.

The position to which Levin was appointed is a new one. It represents the first time in Yale’s history that a student has had a formal role in the process of finding a new president. The same goes for the new posts of faculty, sta! and alumni counselors to the search committee — all of whom are to serve as conduits between their various constituencies and the mem-bers of the Yale Corporation.

But certain members of both the student and faculty communities remain skeptical of what such over-tures might mean in practice.

“An elaborate structure has been put in place, featuring layer after layer of filters and ba#es … It all seems like a thin disguise over the Corporation’s undisputed prerogative to do exactly what it wants, no matter what anyone thinks,” French and African-Ameri-can Studies professor Christopher L. Miller GRD ’78 PHD ’83 wrote in an email to the News.

More visibly, members of Students Unite Now (SUN) took the Corpora-tion’s attempts at outreach as a call to arms.

SUN began a multi-pronged cam-paign to get fellow students orga-nized, sending multiple email blasts to the Yale community, circulating both paper and online petitions and canvassing residential college suites. SUN Leader Sarah Cox ’15 said nearly everyone she has talked to about the search process, from friends to the last freshman whose door she knocked on, “has a sense that this isn’t quite right.”

Her organization’s petition had 366 supporters online at change.org at the time this article was written and con-tains a template for a letter outlining the demands SUN is making “in order that the process better reflect the val-ues of democracy and transparency that are at the core of this institution’s mission.”

Members of the Yale Corporation and administration who were pres-ent in 1993 for Levin’s selection might find this appeal difficult to under-stand. After all, the current search process is doing more to solicit input from all the constituencies of the Yale community than any in Yale’s 311-year history.

President Levin told the News that “the outreach on this one has been much more extensive in terms of reaching out to the internal con-sistencies” compared to the search which selected him.

Up until Levin, Yale’s presidents were selected by a process so far from being either democratic or trans-parent it could become “farcical” at times, said Yale historian Gaddis Smith ’54 GRD ’61. Past presidents were selected — with more or less total impunity — by the Corporation, Yale’s board of trustees.

The most egregious excess came in 1986, just after President A. Bartlett Giamatti abruptly ended a presi-dency beset by strikes and tense labor relations in order to become the new Commissioner of Major League Base-ball. The search that followed resulted in the appointment of then-Dean of Columbia Law School Benno C. Schmidt — but it was really no search at all.

“Schmidt was the only candidate, and the search committee was basi-cally just one powerful member of the Corporation,” said Smith. “They just tapped him and said, ‘that’s it, you’re the president.’”

But Schmidt was no Levin when it came to longevity. His term lasted only six years, and he is best remem-bered for alienating much of cam-pus. Schmidt did not even live in New Haven, choosing instead to commute to Yale from New York City.

The search for his replacement, which would eventually bring Levin to o"ce, was significant in the Universi-ty’s history for its thoroughness, with numerous candidates from across the country interviewed in multi-ple rounds. Levin recalled having had around 24 interviews with members of the search committee.

For Smith, the enormous divide between these two presidential searches can be boiled down to one visual: the documentation produced by the search for President Levin is purported to take up the equivalent of a four-by-four foot shelf space in a downtown New Haven bank, he explained. With Schmidt’s selection, Smith laughed, “there was a rumor it was just one thin file.”

Though the ongoing presidential search, modeled after that of 1993, has inspired outrage in some, it is undoubtedly the most progressive in Yale’s history. Not only will it con-tinue the precedent of including fac-ulty as full members of the PSC, but it will be the first to include an extensive formal structure to reach out to stu-dents, sta! and alumni.

Given this, the overwhelming atti-tude among those on the Corporation both then and now is to ask, “Why fix what isn’t broken?”

For Vernon Loucks Jr. ’57, who was senior fellow of the Corporation when Levin became president, Levin’s leg-acy ought to be enough to vouch for the process that chose him.

“It seems to me that what you’re looking for more than anything else is an e!ective system,” he said. “And it seems to me that it was.”

But what was revolutionary in 1993 seems anachronistic to many in 2012, particularly those with an eye on what has been happening at Yale’s peer

institutions.Some weeks after Levin’s

announcement, Princeton Univer-sity President Shirley M. Tilghman declared that she too would be step-ping down. Not long afterwards, Princeton’s Undergraduate Student Government President Bruce A. Easop invited members of the university’s current senior class to apply to serve on the school’s Presidential Search Committee.’

“Two members of the Class of 2013 … will have the unique privilege of playing a part in shaping Princeton’s history,” Easop wrote in an email.

At Princeton, such an opportunity isn’t news. Two students were also on the committee that identified Tilgh-man, the University’s last presidential choice. The only new development is towards increased openness: last time, one of the two student seats was reserved for the president of Prince-ton’s student government. This time around, both will be filled through an open application.

“I think the president of a univer-sity needs to be able to work e!ec-tively with all of the constituencies of the university,” Princeton Vice Presi-dent and Secretary Robert K. Durkee, who will also be sta"ng the school’s search committee, told the News. “In our experience it’s helpful … to have representatives of all of those con-stituencies present during the search itself.”

The view looks similar up in Prov-idence. When then-President of Brown University Ruth J. Simmons announced her plans to step down on Sept. 15, 2011, a process comparable to Princeton’s was set in motion. The Presidential Selection Committee of the Brown Corporation was joined by a 13-member Campus Advisory Com-mittee, which comprised six profes-sors, two staff members, a medical student, a graduate student and three undergraduates, only one of whom was a member of student government.

For a shot at one of the other two undergraduate spots of the Advisory Committee, students could fill out an application which was sent out to the entire undergraduate student body.

Current Brown senior David Rat-tner, who filled the spot reserved for a student government representa-tive, said that, despite the formal split between the Selection and Advisory Committees, the two “essentially functioned as one big group.” Both he and the other students remained present in the room during meetings all the way up until the final candi-date’s presentation to the rest of the board of trustees, and remained, he said, “as much a part of the process as anyone else,” right up till March, when the search culminated in the naming of economist Christina Hull Paxson as Brown’s new president.

Princeton and Brown are not uniquely enlightened institutions. Stanford, Columbia and Duke Uni-versities have all included students as formal members of their most recent

YALE’S “MOST PROGRESSIVE SEARCH” FAILS TO SATISFY ALL

// BY ANYA GRENIER

SEE TRANSPARENCY PAGE 8

//HARRY SIMPERINGHAM

WEEKEND NEWS GRAVEYARDPAGE 4 YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2012 · yaledailynews.com


MANHATTAN SHORT FILM FESTIVAL

Whitney Humanities Center // 7 p.m.

“NOTE: MANHATTAN SHORT is NOT an ONLINE Film Festival.” Duly noted.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:Bustin’ out the turtlenecksIt’s getting ruhl cold, ruhl fast.

“People raise pigs on roofs,” offered Tony Kowalski, as just one example of the obscure knowledge one could glean from thumbing through the periodi-cals of News Haven. “Oh yeah, they do all kinds of stu! down there in the city.”

Kowalski has been the proces-sor of News Haven’s inventory for the past 15 years, a tenure that will end in a few short weeks with the neighborhood staple’s closing. A Panera Bread will replace it. To some Yalies, such as myself, News Haven seems, at first glance, to be a standard convenience store. But to most of its patrons, the shop is absolutely irreplaceable. This past Thursday, Kowalski showed me around and helped guide my observation of the unique estab-lishment.

The store is pleasantly plain: white walls, on which the only decorations are section signs, a few drink refrigerators, a con-venience counter, and stacks on stacks on stacks of magazines and newspapers. The front of the store acts as a quick pit stop for most — a place one can pick up Gatorade, snacks, single doses of Tylenol, Emergen-C and all other defenses against the fresh-man plague. The rest of the store, however, is unlike any for literally miles around.

“At one time, we had over four thousand titles,” Kolwalski told me. “Recently, we’ve got about 2500, maybe close to 3000. It depends on the supplier.” The shop’s inventory is so vast that few other news shops struggle to compete. After News Haven closes there will be virtually no place for magazine-lovers in the greater New Haven area to pur-chase their beloved publications. Among the wonderfully diverse scores of volumes displayed on News Haven’s shelves were such titles as “Edible Brooklyn,” the heading that prompted Kowals-ki’s tidbit on urban pig farming, “Kung fu,” “Homeopathy Today,” “Equestrian Quarterly,” “Women and Guns: The World’s First Fire-arms Publication for Women,” “Playgirl,” “Modern Drunkard” (“Standing up for your right to get

falling down drunk since 1996.”) and “Oggi,” which is something akin to the Italian version of “Us Weekly.”

Of course, News Haven carries every standard publication a New Havenite could ever want, but it is these special issues, the ones that News Haven sta! would describe as “shockingly popular,” that will be missed most dearly from the long-standing institution. Kow-alski added, “I tell our customers that if you want any of this any-more you have to get on the train. Out of Town News up in Boston, in Cambridge Square. There used to be a place in Stratford, but now you have to go to New York.” Of course, the increasing scarcity of newsstands and stores like News Haven may not be troubling to some. Personally, I had never felt shortchanged for my lack of access to Russian gossip media

or a professional cartography digest. I thought I had access to every piece of information I could want through my smart phone. I didn’t quite understand what it was about these magazines that was causing people to feel such loss. Then again, no spontane-ous Googling would necessar-ily uncover the titles I saw while browsing the aisles.

Why, then, can’t these news lovers turn to the Internet, as more and more people seem to be doing? I asked Kowalski if he would feel withdrawal from any print publications in the way he believed most might. “Of course,” he replied, “There’s tons of them. The Spectator, The Nation, The Guardian, I like the political pub-lications. The Economist, New York, The New Yorker. You know, Vanity Fair has some great arti-cles. It’s just good reading. When you go online you can get part of a story or a highlight or some-thing. But to hold it in your hand and to have 30 pages there to soak up is just a whole di!erent expe-rience.” For Kowalski and his customers, magazine reading is a ritual. The loss of News Haven

means for some the loss of bass fishing tips over lunch or a dog lover’s weekly on the Monday commute to work.

Unfortunately, the story of what’s happening to News Haven is an all too familiar nar-rative: corporate chains driving the well-loved local stores out of business. It’s the plot of “You’ve Got Mail,” “Dodgeball,” “Empire Records,” “Barbershop,” “Barber-shop 2” and even “Good Burger.” News Haven has been around for 30 years, and unlike in the mov-ies, it will close its doors in two weeks. Despite the recent pop-ups of Shake Shack, Chipotle and now Panera Bread, many New Havenites insist there is a healthy advocacy for local businesses. Even those at News Haven would agree that the Elm City still has large support for the little guy.

Kowalski, a resident of New

Haven since 1967, commented that his city was still “surpris-ingly parochial. People here have allegiance to small business. Some people just take umbrage at places like that ruining the local flavor.” The owner of News Haven, Navin Jani, reported such customer loyalty when he told the News that his store has about 100 regular customers everyday. When I visited the shop, alle-giance to News Haven was con-stantly evident.

Even during my short time at the store, I could see the wide range of dedicated patronage that News Haven receives. The first to come in after I arrived was a father and his daughter who lin-gered and finally landed on the right coloring and puzzle books. Next, a power-walking Yale stu-dent buying an energy drink. The next slate of items purchased ran: Marlboro Reds, Pretzel M&Ms, Twizzlers, vitamin water, post-cards, and, of course, the maga-zines. One customer looking for the latest “duPont Registry” was wearing a Harlem Globetrotters hat.

Alex Howard or “Vator,” as he

was known on the Globetrot-ters (a basketball team with their own animated series) serendipi-tously illustrated just how widely appealing News Haven is to a cer-tain section of the community. Kowalski, who incidentally knew a player on the Washington Gen-erals, the team the Globetrotters pay to humiliate on the court, approached this man. The two had a brief, amiable exchange, but it was the final patron of News Haven I encountered that demonstrated just how impor-tant the store was to the neigh-borhood at large.

This final customer of my saga had not yet heard of his news shop’s closing. He was looking for the latest issue of Classic Cars, his favorite British monthly. He couldn’t find the magazine in its usual spot in the back left corner of the store, top shelf.

“I’ll look for it, but we might be out.” Kowalski replied to the man’s inquiry.

“Well how frequently do you restock your inventory?”

“I’m sorry to say but the shop’s actually closing down in two weeks.”

Kowalski said that the shock and disappointment visible on the man’s face was not an uncom-mon response to the news. “Lots of people are very upset.”

“This was an important place” the customer replied softly.

“Sure, in the last couple of weeks we’ve had a lot of people crying in here. You know, you get used to certain publications, and you cannot get them any-where else, and I know that, and our customers tell us that.” Kow-alski and his coworker behind the register tried to convey to me how engrained in the lives of their customers these publications could become. Most of News Haven’s business is New Haven area regulars, including some Yale faculty and sta!. Kowalski explained that for the regulars that request it, there is a reserve service. For them, these articles, the acclaimed and the unknown, become a routine part of life — brushing your teeth, your morn-ing co!ee. “That’s what’s going to be missed,” Kowalski said.

Contact JAKE ORBISON at [email protected] .

News Haven to Close: Panera to replace the Old Media Temple// BY JAKE ORBISON

// DIANA LI

News Haven is the latest victim of the fast-food invasion hitting the city.

// ANNELISA LEINBACH

THE STORY OF NEWS HAVEN IS A FAMILIAR NARRATIVE: CORPORATE CHAINS DRIVING THE WELL-LOVED LOCAL STORES OUT OF BUSINESS.

WEEKEND REFLECTIONSYALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2012 · yaledailynews.com PAGE 5

Questioning the system// BY CATHERINE SHAW

In the summer of 2009, I visited Burma with my family. I have never been to a place so devout. Stupas and temples dot the countryside, and the red and saf-fron robes of Buddhist monks and nuns are rarely out of sight. The Burmese peo-ple display their devotion in their every action, and their religion has, in many ways, become their only method of peace and security during this di!cult political time. So when I heard Daw Aung San Suu Kyi tell a story at her address last week about the police dressing as monks in order to attack her convoy, I was furious. I think my mouth must have been hanging open for a good minute in a combination of shock and outrage.

While I contemplated the shocking yet expected horror of her story, Daw Suu was smiling and even managed to elicit laughter from the crowd. Although at first I was as o"ended by the laughter as I was by the story, I realized later that this is Daw Suu’s supreme gift. She has seen and experienced so much, but her expe-riences do not hold her back. Rather, they propel her forward. From an early age she says she “knew what kind of person [she] wanted to be,” and she has never allowed anything to come in the way of being that person. Her strength and persever-ance have already done immense good for Burma and for the world. After hearing her speak, I know that her positive influ-ence will continue on for the rest of her

life and beyond.I could use many words to describe this

incredible woman who has done so much for her country and for humanity. She is elegant, graceful, highly intelligent and an incredibly gifted speaker. But her nature is so magical that I describe her most accurately only by borrowing a buzzword from Tyra Banks. Daw Aung Sun Suu Kyi is fierce. There is a reason that the people of Burma call her the Lady: her grace of bearing, especially considering the hor-rors she has experienced throughout her life, is absolutely astounding. The mili-tary junta declared her a “destructive ele-ment” because of her involvement in pol-itics and kept under house arrest without a trial for a total of 15 years. Being locked up without contact with the outside world for 15 years is enough to turn even the kindest person bitter. Daw Suu is, how-ever, one of the least bitter people I have ever seen. She was able to speak about the breakdown of rule of law in Burma with-out hesitation or anger. She simply spoke of the terror the government’s complete disregard for rule of law inflicted on the people of Burma and said, “without rule of law, our people would never be free from fear.”

I come from a family of five generations of lawyers; we, the Shaw family, may as well have been the cheerleading squad for the American legal system. Although I’ve always been a staunch believer in due

process, Daw Suu’s speech made me real-ize that I never truly appreciated our legal system until I heard, from the mouth of a survivor, what can happen without it.

Sitting there, listening to this remark-able woman — a true victim of the break-down of law and order in Burma — and hearing her stories forced me to think about the possibility of something like that happening here. I no longer felt iso-lated from these instances of injustice. They became something real, something tangible, something that could occur not only in Burma but also anywhere under the wrong set of circumstances. I left the auditorium with a newer, deeper appre-ciation for the American legal system because, although I can’t say our legal system is perfect, it is certainly better than the alternative that Daw Suu experi-enced. We must guard our system against abuse. and we must protect the great gift that our founding fathers have estab-lished for us.

Contact CATHERINE SHAW at [email protected] .


TROLLEY NIGHTCalhoun College // 10 p.m.

It’s no Safety Dance, but whatever floats your trolley. Long Live Safety!

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:The Little Book of Economics, by Greg Ip. All you need to know about the economy, stupid.

The Good, the Bad and the SWUGly// BY JULIA CALAGIOVANNI

Two days before “SWUGLIFE: A Colloquium,” a commenter on the Facebook event page asked, “IS THIS REAL LIFE.” It was. (For those I’ve lost already, the vaguely unfortunate acronym stands for “Senior Washed-Up Girl.”) Wednesday evening, a few dozen seniors and a handful of Com-munication and Consent Educators gathered at Viva’s. Over mediocre nachos and truly questionable quesa-dillas, they hashed out the realities of SWUG life: the good, the bad and the SWUGly. I watched from a safe dis-tance — as a sophomore, I’m at least two years away from potential SWUG-dom myself.

The colloquium was more than a chance to eat fried food on Yale’s dime. The tell-tale signs of being a SWUG were bantered about: they hang out at Viva’s and Box; they’re equally likely to drink a bottle of wine or a bottle of gin; they’re big fans of Yorkside’s mozza-rella sticks and S’wings’ “sassy wings.” They “dontgiveashit,” in the words of one attendee. The event was a chance to talk about some very real, very com-mon feelings and experiences that are a natural consequence of spending

three years at Yale under constant aca-demic and social pressure. This sus-tained state of frantic self-discovery is — let’s be honest — exhausting. We learn the unwritten rules, established by no one in particular — where to party, what to wear, whom to hook up with — and spend three years trying to follow them. SWUGs break them.

The event Wednesday had a few men in attendance and two on the panel, but the majority of the audi-ence was female. It’s worth asking why there’s no such thing as a “SWUD:” a Senior Washed Up Dude. After all, plenty of senior guys “dontgiveashit” either, but there’s no trendy acro-nym for them. It’s because the rules of acceptable behavior are, in many ways, stricter for women. Pressure from our peers, the media and soci-ety at large can be relentless. Men def-initely face their own set of expecta-tions, but, in many ways, women are taught to be more aware of — and more ashamed of — our transgressions.

In the back room of Viva’s, it became clear that SWUGs are a diverse group. But they all share a certain “no apol-ogies” attitude. They’re making their

own social, personal and sexual deci-sions: to go all-out at Toad’s or stay in with Netflix; to hook up with a fresh-man or finally give up on the twelve college challenge. They might forgo going out to, instead, work on their senior essays. Faced with the prospect of leaving their friends after gradua-tion, they spend more time having real conversations, although not neces-sarily sober ones. They articulate their sexual desires and boundaries and don’t worry that it seems less sexy. They chill out.

There’s nothing wrong with this; it’s actually a pretty healthy way to live. But we seem to know, although we don’t quite know why, that there’s something wrong with it. It threatens the status quo; it doesn’t fit with the way we think we “should” behave. So we turn it into a pejorative. We pathol-ogize it. Girls call themselves SWUGs with a shrug and a laugh, with more than a hint of self-deprecation. Are you supposed to be ashamed of being a SWUG? It’s unclear. The Urban Dic-tionary entry is tagged with both “desperate” and “badass.”

“Washed-up” seems to suggest

failure, that someone has peaked and then fallen — hard. That she has, in this case, lived that caricatured college lifestyle and then failed to keep it up. There are younger girls or hotter girls to take her place, and she’s resigned to her fate. But most self-identified SWUGs seem to know that’s not the whole story.

“It’s so fucking refreshing,” declared Chloe Drimal ’13, author of the Monday opinion column in the News that ignited the campus debate around SWUG. Other panelists agreed, and heads nodded throughout the room. “We love SWUG.” “We made it up, so we can define it.” And, so, what sounds like a Mean Girls-style insult actually becomes an oppor-tunity for empowerment. It’s also a semi-humorous way to deal with a semi-scary thing; SWUG is, in a way, shorthand for all of the angst, anx-iety and burnout that comes along with being a senior. One attendee said it helped her to know that other girls felt this way; she’d experienced the SWUG phenomenon, but she hadn’t told anyone, she said, because she felt bad about it.

Events like the SWUGLIFE collo-quium and columns like Drimal’s are part satire, part consciousness-rais-ing. Why do we still feel bad about doing the things we want to do, pro-viding they’re safe and don’t harm other people? We don’t need to wait for the SWUG title to give us permis-sion. It’s okay to admit that we’re not the same people we were a year or two ago. SWUG is not an excuse to do truly reckless or hurtful things, but it is a license to listen to yourself a little more and other people a little less, to define yourself rather than waiting to be defined. I wish we didn’t need this “permission,” but if SWUG starts the conversation, so be it. SWUGs are over things that don’t matter, and we’d all do well to follow their example.

After the panel ended, attend-ees finished up the nachos — why, I still don’t understand — and headed out. Maybe some of them ended up at Toad’s later. Maybe they didn’t. And that’s okay.

Contact JULIA CALAGIOVANNI at [email protected] .

MOTHER SUU// BY HAN MYO OO

I was born after Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was first placed under house arrest in 1989. For many Burmese youth of my generation, Daw Suu was just an idea.

We glimpsed her in banned copies of her collected writings, Freedom from Fear and Letters from Burma. We saw images of her on the Internet. And we heard about her through foreign media. Every time I drove past University Avenue Road on my way home in Yangon and saw soldiers and metal-wire barricades in front of Daw Suu’s home, I wondered whether I’d ever meet her, or whether she’d ever be free. I won-dered whether she would one day be more than the subject of whis-pered conversations in the coun-try.

But in November 2010, Myan-mar held its first general elec-tion in 20 years, and, a week later, Daw Suu was released from house arrest. Thousands gath-ered outside her home, where she appeared on a platform behind the gate of her compound.

“We haven’t seen each other for so long,” she said. “So we have many things to talk about.”

Her words affected me, even though we had not met before. Strangely, for me and for a lot of other Burmese people, it didn’t feel like that was the first time she spoke to us.

Eventually, I did see Daw Suu one day, when I visited the office of her National League for Democracy party. She had a horde of supporters surround-ing her, so I was unable to speak to her personally. But this past summer, a second chance and a special opportunity arose: While working at a Thai news agency that covers issues in Myanmar, I learned that Daw Suu was visit-ing the U.S. in September. Imme-diately, my friend and I emailed Master Jeffrey Brenzel to pro-pose Daw Suu as a candidate for Timothy Dwight College’s Chubb Fellowship. On the day Master Brenzel told me that her visit was confirmed, I was overjoyed: My mother was coming to Yale.

Tickets to her public address in Sprague Hall ran out in a mat-ter of minutes. I was happy to see

the support of the Yale commu-nity for Mother Suu, but I was also worried that in celebrating her visit, Yalies would overlook the very issues that she stands for: Myanmar’s political and eco-nomic changes are just start-ing, and there is still much to do back home. At the Chubb Fellow dinner, the evening before her address in Sprague Hall, Mother Suu told the 100 or so students in attendance about the lack of edu-cational opportunities to chal-lenge and prepare young people in Myanmar as we rebuild our nation.

“We would like your help, as citizens of this world, as fel-low human beings, to help us to achieve what we are trying to achieve,” she declared.

The next morning, at her pub-lic address, she emphasized the fact that until we in Myanmar achieve the rule of law and estab-lish an independent judiciary, we cannot say that our country is truly on the road to democracy. She called on the Yale commu-nity for help to train lawyers and judges in Myanmar. The Univer-sity responded: in his introduc-tion for Mother Suu, President Levin announced that plans were being discussed to bring Burmese high school principals and teach-ers to Yale for training.

And sitting there, in my sec-ond row seat of the crowded Sprague Hall, I had never felt prouder to be Burmese and a Yalie.

But I cannot help but reiterate the point that Burmese people must build up our own country — after all, Mother Suu herself had said, “we must take responsibil-ity for the future of our nation.”

I didn’t see her after the pub-lic address, and I admit that I was saddened by the fact that I didn’t get to talk to her more. But I real-ized that perhaps I was expect-ing too much. She had already achieved more than enough for my country.

She brought and contin-ues to bring hope to the peo-ple of Myanmar, to the hundreds of thousands of Burmese refu-gees outside the country and to many of the young Burmese stu-dents abroad who have the priv-ilege of receiving a good edu-cation. She connects us, across ethnic boundaries, with a com-mon national goal. For many of us Burmese studying in the U.S., her 18-day tour across the U.S. rein-vigorated our purpose. The idea of Mother Suu will always speak to me — and I hope our mother knows that we are ready to take responsibility.

Contact HAN MYO OO [email protected] .

// CREATIVE COMMONS

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi visited Yale last week as a special guest hosted by the Chubb Fellowship.

ON THE DAY MASTER BRENZEL

TOLD ME THAT HER VISIT WAS CONFIRMED, I

WAS OVERJOYED: MY MOTHER WAS COMING TO YALE.

WEEKEND DOUBLETRUCKYALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2012 · yaledailynews.com PAGE 7PAGE 6

The former owner of Sally’s Pizza, Flo Consiglio, who passed away on Monday, Sept. 24, is remembered as one of New Haven’s most beloved residents. Described as a little tough on strangers, but warm toward Sally’s regulars, she made delicious thin-crust, brick-oven pizza for patrons from all over, including politicians and celebrities.

For decades, Flo sat behind the cash register and talked to members of her New Haven community, making many of them feel like family, they say. She opened her doors to the Cottos, the first Puerto Rican family in Wooster Square, and to many of the city’s children, several of whom worked for Flo and her husband, Sal.

In an interview with the New Haven Independent, President of St. Andrew Ladies Society Theresa Argento said, “You’ve lost a legend.”

S A T U R D A YO C T O B E R 0 6

THE SOUND OF ARCHITECTURELoria Center // 9 a.m.

One word: Acoustics.

DRAWING AND PAINTING AUTUMN LEAVES AND BERRIES

Peabody Museum of Natural History // 10 a.m.

We fucking love natural science illus-trations.


WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:Barrio Latino Lounge in West Haven. It all happens HERE, actually.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:Tutoring. Break out of the ivory-tower rut.Doing a problem set with your housemate doesn’t count.

I walked into Yorkside Pizza in search of the smiling face we see every Saturday night, the one the belongs to the man who hands out free Yorkside T-shirts to the most frequent goers: Anthony Koutrou-manis, ever happy to see me.

Anthony has spent 42 of his 72 years of life at Yorkside, putting calories, grease, and — more than anything — love, into the food he has served to Yalies for many a time more than our lifespans.

Shy of the limelight, Anthony co-owns Yorkside Pizza with his brother George Koutroumanis. He doesn’t like to take credit for his hard work, but upon getting him to sit with me, he revealed many historical Yorkside secrets. (For instance, who knew they’re not actually splitting their profits with Toad’s?)

The diner we see today sprung up in 1977 — but it wasn’t always situ-ated where it is now. Anthony’s first place was around the corner from a popular pizza joint that stood where Urban Outfitters stands today. Imagine: it was that far from Toad’s. Only there was no Toad’s in New Haven then. (Which is how we know, o!cially, the two aren’t actu-ally working in cahoots.) In place of Toad’s, there stood a club set up by four Ivy Leaguers, one of whom was Johnny Carson. The former York-side was called Broadway Pizza Pal-ace and started in 1970, with only about 15 to 20 items on the menu.

Anthony recalls that Toad’s came around in about 1973 — so after he was on the block. While he admits that Toad’s gives the business an extra boost, he said they “wouldn’t shut down if Toad’s did. You know?” We see Anthony so often

on Toad’s nights because his major shifts are on Saturday and Sunday. You’d wonder why he would pick the busiest nights to work, when rowdy, obnoxious and rather dis-oriented Yalies and Qpac-ers hit the diner, hard. Even he asked, “Why would I come here, at this age, on those nights?” His answer to him-self: “It’s the people. I love them.” So Yalies can take some consolation in knowing that Anthony loves us in all shapes and forms — at all times.

Speaking of forms and shapes, Yorkside has contributed to the alteration of many body forms. This might be because its menu has evolved from the modest 20 or so items to over 100. Back in the day, they specialized in meatballs, sauces and pizzas, but today they sell seafood, scallops and pasta as well. When asked what his most popular item is, Anthony proudly said, “The Greek Salad.” The reason for the move in popularity from piz-zas to salads is clear: When York-side set up there were only about 500 girls on campus. “Now? There are more girls then boys!” said Anthony. This is not to say all us women are healthy eaters, because someone has to eat the yummy gyros and the irresistible mouse track milkshake (me). Yorkside has grown notoriously famous for its scrumptious milkshake, which is lined with Reese’s at the bottom and mixed with all else that is unhealthy and delicious in the world.

Koutroumanis: We apologize for our late-night belligerence, and thank you for your kindness. Here’s to many more generations of York-side!

Yorkside’s Anthony Koutroumanis// BY AAMINAH QADIR

G-Heav’s Adam Juarez// BY LEAH MOTZKIN

“Adam! What’s up, buddy?” “Adam, how’s it going, brother?” “Sup, Adam? I hate studying.” “Interview? You’re gonna be famous, Adam!” Every person who walks into G-Heav has something to say to the store’s legendary front man. As it seems most Yale students end up in G-Heav at least once during the day and once after midnight, manager Adam Juarez comments, “I know most of the students at Yale, and I like them.” Adam has dealt with Yalies in all sorts of situa-tions — at their best (“They treat me very well during the weekdays”) and low-est points (“On weekends, after drinks, there’s sometimes trouble”).

Students can be very demanding of Adam. They introduce themselves and expect him to remember their names. Adam loves, however, whenever he is able to remember a name, because the students are always so glad about it.

While Adam considers many Yale stu-dents to be his friends, he recalls one of the weirdest nights he’s spent at G-Heav, when some students crossed the line. On a slow night about three years ago, a

group of students dressed up as burglars — replete with bandanas over their faces — and filmed his reaction to their “rob-bing” him. Adam comments, “I thought it was real until they said, ‘Adam, we got you!’” While he was freaked out in the moment, Adam is a pretty chill guy. He said he understands that it was a prank that happened around Halloween time — though the students claimed it was for a class. After many apologies and hugs, Adam forgave them.

You may always end up at G-Heav with the late-night munchies, but Adam Juarez is always already there. Therefore, it’s only natural that the sandwiches he makes are clearly better than yours. They’re bigger, too. Adam says that the sandwiches he makes himself often look so big and good that he ends up giving bites to students who ask. “So what’s on the typical ‘Adam’ sandwich?” the inquisitive reader wonders. He reveals all: “Though it’s di"erent every night, typically I like egg whites, chicken, Brie, onions and avocado.”

Sally’s Pizza’s Flora “Flo” Consiglio// BY MAYA AVERBUCH

Branford’s “Ms. Michelle”// BY LEAH MOTZKIN

Looking good from her frosted tips to her revolution-ary acrylics, Michelle is the first person you want to see when you walk in the Branford Dining Hall. Michelle never fails to make you smile as she swipes your ID card. Sometimes cracking jokes, always asking after students’ well-being, Michelle genuinely cares for the students in Branford. She has become a “mother away from home,” she says, for the students who pass through her hall’s doors.

A New Haven native, Michelle began working at Yale 13 years ago and has worked in Branford for the past four. She has four children of her own — though 400 more claim her. You may have seen her adorable grand-children visiting her in the dining hall.

Julius Mitchell BR ’13 says of this maternal figure, “Any time I walk in the dining hall, I can always expect a warm welcome and good conversation from Ms. Michelle. In my four years here, she’s never let me pass by her without telling her how I’m doing.” When fresh-man timidly hand her their ID cards for the first time in August, she immediately steadies them and makes them feel at home. [Ed.’s note: The author of this piece is one such freshman … ]

Making such close connections with students is sometimes hard on Michelle, who has witnessed four years of seniors graduate and leave campus. She does say, however, that many come back to visit. They know where to find her. If you intend to become a Branford regular, look forward to seeing her smile every morn-ing — probably in a di"erent shade of lipstick each day.

Give this dog a break — put him on a wall// BY YUVAL BEN-DAVID

Game over. Handsome Dan, 17. Dalai Lama, 14.

Dan — who, according to his pro-file on the athletic department web-site, “retrieves with vigor” — has been reincarnated three more times than the great monk.

That’s 17 Yale mascots since 1889, when a British student, Andrew Graves, bought the original from a New Haven blacksmith for $5. Nowadays he sits, stuffed, above the trophies in Payne Whitney. The dog, that is — not Graves.

And as for Dan, it’s been a dog’s life lately, with few trophies in sight.

To start with, the boys of Sigma Phi Epsilon violated the fall rush guide-lines by taking in Sir Jackson Margari-

taville Wasserman — a golden retriever with the self-promotional skills of cer-tain Yale undergraduate publications. Dan’s pretty smug about the rumors that Jackson isn’t yet potty-trained, but that’s just because he’s bitter about being elbowed out of Rumpus’s “50 Most Beautiful” Issue. Again.

But Dan’s biggest beef is with the undergraduate admissions o!ce, which he says is “exploiting” his brand.

While the first Handsome Dan was treated to a world tour with its keeper, #17 got a rougher deal. When the inter-national admissions officers recently set out on their international jaunt, they substituted the latest Dan with a stu"ed animal.

Jeffrey Lassen, the owner of Louis’ Lunch, has been working behind the counter at one of New Haven’s most historic eateries for the last 33 years. A serious, no-nonsense guy, he keeps the luncheonette his great-grandfather opened in 1895 up and running, producing the same five-meat hamburger sandwiches in the original stoves.

“I do everything — and I do mean every-thing, from cleaning the restrooms to locking the door, and anywhere in between,” he said while chopping onions. “My father always told me that if we were going to hire some-body, you had to do all the chores you had them do, because then you would know what [the work] entailed. They could say, ‘Well, you never did that,’ and I could say, ‘Oh yes, I did.’”

The eatery has come a long way since its opening days, when Louis served steak din-ners, but it maintains the same decor, with small wooden booths and brick walls. Por-traits of its previous owners hang on the walls, but Jeffrey says his portrait is not going up until he is “up there.” He hopes Louis’ Lunch will keep on running, though he cannot pre-dict whether his son, who is now three years old, will want to work there.

Jeffrey once hoped to be a baseball player, but he likes the work in his family business. “It’s not an easy thing to do. It’s very time-consuming, but you get your rewards: meet-ing people every year, forming friendships, maintaining family ties.”

And he gets to eat a hamburger sandwich — every single day.

Louis’ Lunch’s Jeffrey Lassen// BY AAMINAH QADIR

New Haven’s Lesser Known Notables// BY WEEKEND

Meryl Streep’s face adorns the exposed brick of Miya’s exterior. Paul Giamatti smirks between

Chapel and York. Dr. Benjamin Spock holds up a baby on one out-of-the-way wall, and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. stares down New Haven’s citizens from a height on Howe. Chapel West Services recently launched a campaign of “New Haven Notables” — stylized portraits of accom-plished locals from throughout city his-tory, immortalized (though perhaps not weather-proofed) on the sides of vari-ous businesses and municipal structures. WEEKEND put out a call for those lesser-known figures — your unsung New Haven heroes. You responded... in growls and gurgles, from the digestive tract. Yale’s stomachs have spoken. Here, then, are pri-marily the gate-keepers to eating well — the good men and women between you and your next hot meal. Also a celebrity canine.

// LEAH MOTZKIN

// LEAH MOTZKIN

// AAMINAH QUADIR

// YALE DAILY NEWS

// MARIA ZEPEDA

// CREATIVE COMMONS

http://yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND COVERPAGE B8 YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

presidential search committees.In fact, however little we may

want to believe it, the institu-tion Yale most closely resembles in this respect is none other than Harvard.

Harvard’s most recent presi-dential search took place in 2006 and selected the school’s first female President, Drew Gilpin Faust. Like Yale’s current process, it was the first in that school’s history to consider input from a series of student and faculty advi-sory committees. In Cambridge, though, neither student nor fac-ulty representatives had a for-mal seat on the Search Commit-tee itself.

News stories published in the Harvard Crimson over the course

of that year described Harvard’s process as “unique in many ways, not the least of which is its insular and secretive nature,” and (per-haps not without a note of pride) “historically as secretive as final-club punch.”

Overall, however, the marked di!erence between Yale and many of its peers has served to further some students’ outrage at the absence of a single student voice at the table at Yale today.

According to Cox, being aware of opportunities other schools provide for student representation “really highlights how unneces-sary this is for this to be so closed [and] how far behind we are in our governing structure.”

The numbers of those who agree are greater than the 30-some students who came to the meeting in Battell or even the 369 who have signed SUN’s online

petition. 82 percent of more than 600 students surveyed by the News agreed with the statement that students should have a say in the decision-making process to find Yale’s next president, while 77 percent agreed that at least one student should be present at all Presidential Search Committee meetings.

Adding Levin to the process is not, Cox emphasized, a replace-ment for a student voice.

“A liaison is just a liaison,” she said.

As she and others have pointed out, the only formal duty that has been outlined for Levin thus far is to act as an intermediary between students and members of the Yale Corporation and Search Com-mittee. As far as Levin knows, he said, his role will only diminish as

the search moves beyond its initial “listening phase.” He will not, for instance, be present during meet-ings at which the PSC will evaluate candidates.

The Corporation’s official statement on the subject of stu-dent representation on the search committee is that “no one or two students can represent the full diversity of the Yale student body. The Corporation believes that the best way to get input is through the designed process that allows the committee to directly or indi-rectly hear from all the student constituencies, through the Stu-dent Counselor or direct contact from any and all students or stu-dent organizations.”

But that argument seemed to hold little merit for the students at Battell, as became clear through the increasingly hostile exchanges between Goodyear and those bar-

raging him with questions from both those linked to SUN and there to represent themselves. When Goodyear got up to speak in response to students’ repeated requests, he reiterated the Corpo-ration’s logic.

“Think about the diversity of the students on this campus,” Goodyear said, listing examples of specific student constituen-cies present on Yale’s campus before being interrupted by stu-dents arguing that similar divi-sions could be present within the faculty or the Corporation.

“I don’t understand the dis-tinction between students, fac-ulty and the Yale Corporation,” said Katherine Aragon ’14, the political action chair of MEChA de Yale. “I feel, if anything, students should have a larger voice in this process because we live here, and we go to these classes, and this is our home for four years, so I really don’t understand the distinction, but maybe you could explain it a little more.”

Goodyear had an answer ready: “Well, you just said it. You live here for four years. Faculty may live here for their career.”

Aragon was not satisfied with this distinction.

“We should be taken seriously,” she argued in an email to the News two days after the meeting. “For us, Yale is an everyday reality, not just a dollar figure, public image or brand to be maintained. We can bring this perspective to the search committee’s deliberations.”

But on that gray Friday, Good-year cut the dialogue short.

“Listen, I’m not going to be able to answer all of your questions today,” he said.

Within a few minutes, the meeting was dissolved.

---

While SUN’s demands for a student voice ask Yale to do noth-ing but meet the standards of its peers, its requests for transpar-ency demand action that some said would be unimaginable for a university like Yale.

SUN is asking the Search Com-mittee to enact two new policies with regards to transparency: to release the minutes of each meet-ing and publish a shortlist of can-

didates at least three weeks before a final recommendation is made to the Corporation.

The organization listed the University of New Mexico, Mis-souri State University and the University of Wisconsin-Madi-son as schools at which releasing a shortlist of candidates before a final selection is common prac-tice.

The Presidential Search Com-mittee’s emailed response to these concerns explained that many candidates for Yale’s presi-dency might not want to publicly announce their candidacy.

“Many candidates will not want to publicly ‘throw their hat in the ring’ as they do not want to be seen to have come in 2nd or 3rd (or worse) if they are not success-ful. It may also impact the oppor-tunities in their current role if they are not successful. The same can be said of Yale; Yale does not want to be seen having to settle for her 2nd or 3rd choice. As a result, in order to maintain the widest pool of outstanding candidates, the PSC believes confidentiality must be maintained.”

While SUN’s statement at Bat-tell played up the pettiness of try-ing to save face during such an important decision, it did not address the more serious underly-ing argument the PSC was trying to make: that failing to guarantee confidentiality to potential can-didates could dramatically limit Yale’s options.

Those on the other side of the process both here and at other universities sympathize with the PSC. Princeton Vice President Durkee said that the work of his university’s presidential search committee, which will be work-ing parallel to Yale’s over the com-ing months, will be carried out in complete confidence.

“Our experience is that there are many potential candidates who would be willing to talk with the search committee … But who would not be willing to do so if we were not willing to have that con-versation confidentially,” Durkee said.

Speaking over the phone from Brown, Rattner said that the same level of secrecy was expected from all those working on the his uni-versity’s presidential search.

SUN wants Yale to keep stu-dents informed about candidates the PSC being brought under consideration and the progress the PSC is making. But accord-ing to Rattner, once the Brown search committees moved into their deliberation phase, “there was absolutely no updating [the community at large] at all” up until the final selection was made and announced in an email to the entire university.

The reason for this level of secrecy, Rattner argued, is simple: “Anyone who wants to become president of Brown, of Yale, of Princeton, already has an incred-ible job … If their name got out, they would almost certainly drop out of consideration.”

In fact, this exact situation happened at Yale in 1978, said historian Smith. Giamatti was appointed at the last minute, after the name of Yale’s top choice, a top Harvard administrator, was leaked to the press and he subse-quently withdrew his name from consideration.

Yale and its peer institutions may be different from the pub-lic schools SUN has cited simply in attracting a pool of higher pro-file candidates with more to lose should their names be released.

“This is not … some open beauty contest,” Vice President Lorimer said. “[It is] rather a seri-ous review of outstanding candi-dates to ascertain who would be the best leader for Yale.”

For some members of the Yale community, a level of secrecy seems inherent when it comes to Corporation dealings at this level.

“I’ve been a student, I’ve been a faculty member, I’ve been a par-ent. but I don’t know what goes on inside the Corporation room, I can only guess,” said history lecturer Jay Gitlin ’71 MUS ’74 GRD ’02. He wasn’t, however, complaining.

“Transparent would be a fan-tasy, it can’t be that transparent,” he added.

---

Gitlin is one of many who aren’t complaining. Many on this cam-pus are expressing either opti-mism that student voices are being heard or simply indiffer-ence.

Seventy percent of respondents to the News’ survey said they have not been involved in the presiden-tial search in any way.

“I think that the [lack of response from] the student body is a good thing,” said Amalia Hali-kias ’15. “It shows we have a lot of faith that a good decision will be made.”

Meanwhile, students coming out of the smaller private sessions with members of the PSC and the Corporation held the week-end after the Friday open forum said they were satisfied with their opportunity to have the kind of dialogue with members of the PSC that was lacking at Battell.

Jamey Silveira ’13, president of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity and a vocal representative of the Greek life community recently hit by more stringent administra-tive policies, described the atmo-sphere and general tone of his meeting with the PSC as “fantas-tic.”

“It was very open and seemed very promising, especially in terms of the likelihood that these people will take into consideration the concerns that we brought up,” Silveira said.

Even SUN leader Alejandro Gutierrez ’13 said the PSC mem-bers at the meeting he attended seemed receptive to having a dia-logue with undergraduates.

“The best thing [for students] to do is to demonstrate that there would be benefit added from hav-ing a student on this search,” said Brandon Levin, perhaps the best example of a Yalie working within the system currently in place.

Indeed, some students feel that in attempting to “change the con-versation” at Battell Chapel, SUN was doing exactly the opposite — and e!ectively harming its own cause.

Yishai Schwartz ’13, a col-umnist for the News and for-mer speaker of the Yale Politi-cal Union, expressed this view in an op-ed published yesterday. He criticized SUN for using the forum “as a platform to prove how activ-ist they are” instead of provid-ing constructive feedback to the Search Committee in keeping with “the point of the forum.”

Entering the fray with a less serious blow at SUN, the Yale Herald placed the organization’s emails to the undergraduate pop-ulation in its Bullblog Blacklist on September 28.

“I promise you,” read the text, “I have nothing valuable to con-tribute to the presidential search committee. Now leave my inbox alone.”

On the presidential search front, maybe all Yale needs is a bit more time to update its search process and fall in step with its peers. But the dissatisfaction expressed by some undergradu-ates may point to a more prob-lematic institutional difference between this University and oth-ers.

Both the presidential searches at Brown and Princeton have

something Yale lacks: a precedent for involving students in major decisions made by the University.

The body responsible for the presidential search is not the only important committee at Princ-eton to incorporate student rep-resentatives. In the email student body president Bruce Easop wrote to Princeton’s senior class, he noted that “this commitment to transparency in committee selec-tion comes as part of a [Princeton University Student Government] effort to open up applications across campus, including those for the Priorities Committee.”

The Priorities Committee at Princeton, which has existed since 1970, annually advises that university’s president on how to spend the operating budget, making recommendations about tuition levels, salary increases, and new programs to support.

Apart from administrators, the committee includes undergrad-uates, graduate students, faculty and sta! members.

“It’s a way for people from all campus constituencies to think together about the decisions that have to be made each year,” Princ-eton Vice President Durkee said.

Hearing students out is a part of the institutional culture at Brown as well, according to Rattner, one of the undergraduate representa-tives involved in that university’s presidential selection process last year.

He spoke of opportunities for students to be heard on commit-tees that determine everything from the University’s budget to dining options. In a report pub-lished two weeks ago on the for-mation of new committees to work on future university strategy at Brown, the Brown Herald noted that most of these bodies would contain undergraduates.

While Yale includes under-graduates on a range of commit-tees, mostly those concerned with specific majors and academic pro-grams, both students and faculty have complained about the Uni-versity’s closed off approach to making larger strategic choices.

These include the controver-sial creation of the Yale-NUS Col-lege, which faculty argue did not include adequate opportunities for their input, and about which students were not consulted at all.

Gutierrez said that the mes-sages from Bass and Levin desig-nating how the search process will work are merely part of a pattern he has seen in which policy deci-sions are made “in a boardroom somewhere and emailed out.”

Sometimes, as in the case of Yale College’s 2010 decision to increase the student income con-tribution for undergraduates on financial aid by $400, these deci-sions are not emailed out at all, Gutierrez added.

Measures such as the SUN peti-tion and the speeches made at Battell Chapel are, then, aiming to do more than just change the presidential search process.

“What we should be thinking of is how, at the end of this year and beyond, we can have a di!erent relationship with the administra-tion and Corporation,” Cox said.

And that means, she added, “not just in the presidential search process, but in everything that goes on at this University.”

Contact ANYA GRENIER at [email protected] .

82%

10%7%

AGREE

NEITHER AGREE

NOR DISAGREE

DISAGREE

1%DON’T KNOW

70%34%

77%…at least one student should be present at all

Presidential Search Com-mittee meetings.

…they haven’t been involved in the Presidential

Search.

…they believe that the Presidential Search

Committee will incor-porate student opinion

in its decision making process.


YALE VS. DARTMOUTH FOOTBALLYale Bowl // 12 p.m.

School spirit > restrictive tailgating poli-cies.

STUDENTS SAY...

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:presidential-search.yale.eduGet informed.

GITLIN: “TRANSPARENCY WOULD BE A FANTASY.”TRANSPARENCY FROM PAGE 3

“STUDENTS SHOULD HAVE A SAY IN THE DECISION-MAKING PROCESS TO FIND

YALE’S NEXT PRESIDENT”

“YOU LIVE HERE FOR FOUR YEARS. FAC-ULTY MAY LIVE HERE FOR THEIR CAREER,” MR. GOODYEAR SAID.

WEEKEND THIS BE ARTYALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2012 · yaledailynews.com PAGE 9

// ANNALISA LEINBACH

Green Hall is where it’s at.

SAT URDAYO C T O B E R 0 6

ELI YALE’S BAR MITZVAHSaybrook Dining Hall // 10 p.m.

L’chaim, Eli! Go and party as if this event doesn’t happen every year.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:People’s Arts Collective of New HavenSocial justice, meet art. Keep them company at the corner of College and Crown.

Undergraduate show: meta, real// BY CATHERINE SHAW

When I first walked into the UGx3 Auvillar, Norfolk and Art Majors Exhibi-tion in Green Hall, I felt as though I was in the room of a 12-year-old girl.

Two large posters of Harry Styles and Niall Horan from One Direction, pulled from the pages of the fan maga-zine Tiger Beat, hung on the walls before me. Between two of the most iconic emblems of boy bands, a photograph of a third, unfamiliar face was placed in the piece, smiling at the camera like he, too, is a member of a band. Although I didn’t realize it, this piece by Max Saltarelli ’13, with its vivid, memorable and self-referential twist on familiar symbols, reflected a theme present throughout the entire exhibit.

The works on display at the exhibit are the works of art majors as well as the Yale Summer Session at the Institute for Studio Studies in Auvillar, France and Yale Summer School of Art and Music in Norfolk, Conn. These Summer Ses-sion pieces, varying in size and design, are all done on what appears to be slabs of white cardboard. There were abstract designs, pencil sketches of cathedral arches and hazy lakes, and one partic-ularly colorful piece that almost looked like camouflage. I was particularly drawn to a pencil sketch of a lighted lantern in front of a misty lake. The background

was so dark the details were mostly obscured. The lantern, however, was left untouched, so the white cardboard shone through, brilliantly capturing the blazing forth of light.

Walking through the gallery space, I realized the sheer variety of the utilized media, from photographs to sculptures to installations to various multime-dia presentations. One particular mul-timedia piece projected a series of col-ors onto a large plastic doughnut with shapes carved in it, peppering the wall behind it with interesting shadows. There was a beautiful series of water-colors in the second room; they skill-fully evoked the contemplative spirit of the pensive girls using only swooping lines of various thicknesses. Yet another impressive installation was that of Alex Terrell ’14, who has several photographs in the show from her first photography class. Her representations of everyday objects in New York, such as an empty Coke can and co!ee cup sitting next to the exposed rebar of a construction site, gave new life to these typically mundane scenes.

“[The photos I chose] are scenes of New York where object gains charac-ter from shadows and light,” Terrell explained.

Floor-mounted pieces — such as braided rope so long it might have been plucked from Rapunzel herself — had unorthodox placements and broke up the gallery’s physical space. Each strand of the beautiful 10-foot-long rope was laced with immense skill. The rope left me in awe, its sheer size and technicality emanating a sense of royalty — I didn’t want to go near it. However, as I paced through the gallery, I observed someone stepping directly over it, intruding on what seemed to be the piece’s invisible, regal bubble.

Walking from the first gallery space to the second, I nearly decapitated myself on a carefully constructed clothesline hanging from the doorway, a work con-spicuously and confusingly blocking the entryway. In this same room, I was par-ticularly drawn to the everyday objects melting onto the floor like Dalí clcoks. A rubber slipcover was laid over the

seat, making the chair appear to be gen-tly fading away. As I watched, the cover fittingly and unexpectedly cascaded from the seat, revealing the intact fab-ric underneath. The chair’s “nip slip” not only gave a glimpse into the process behind the making of the piece, but also expanded the piece’s meaning on a meta level — the seemingly splintered chair melted, more or less, before my eyes.

As with any art exhibition, the Under-graduate Art Show features works that seek to illuminate and make sense of disturbing ideas. The first gallery space featured a large print of a man devouring his own foot by Hannah Shimabukuro ’13, which brought to my mind Francisco Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Son” that similarly and masterfully depicted a bar-baric scene of cannibalism. Also present was a series of pen and ink drawings of a living room with several severed body parts sitting on a side table, perhaps begging for the viewer to understand the parts before the whole. One of the mul-timedia presentations playing on a tele-vision screen even featured a stomach grotesquely devouring food while music played in the background. These scenes are, however, more thought provoking than downright gruesome, juxtaposing alarming repulsiveness with ordinary life.

Overall, the Undergraduate Art Show is outstanding and worth a visit. Each piece, even if it was created for an assign-ment, shows a unique and intriguing point of view matched with an incredible level of technical ability. The great diver-sity of pieces on display also ensures that there is something for everyone — from One Direction-ers to horror story fanat-ics. As a person who participates in art mostly on an academic level, I was espe-cially impressed by the intellectual rigor behind the creative abilities of these art-ists.

The UGx3 Exhibit will be on display in Green Hall at 1156 Chapel St. until Octo-ber 9.

Contact CATHERINE SHAW at [email protected] .

WEEKEND COLUMNSPAGE 10 YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

HOW TO CURE YOUR “SUNDAY WEIRDS”// BY CHLOE DRIMAL

I wasn’t able to truly comprehend the idea of the “Sunday Weirds” until I woke up after Marathon Weekend (toga, tailgate, RAD1) with cornrows in my hair. Yes, these corn-rows did have colorful star beads dangling from them, and no, I didn’t fly to Jamaica to get them. I walked into a dorm room in Pierson and got my hair pulled by a skinny white girl.

The “Sunday Weirds” n . [suhn-dey weerds]

You know, the “Who am I?” “What am I going to do next year?” “Should I be applying to banking jobs too — I mean, everyone else is.” These ubiquitous amounts of anxi-eties that creep through our stom-achs are only made worse by Retro Cringe, which is bound to follow soon after.

Retro Cringe n. [re-troh krinj]We’ve all had it. That moment

when you are gaily skipping down Broadway only to be interrupted by some memory of your night: maybe it was begging your best friend to date you. Maybe it was attempting to walk on your hands outside of Box 63 — you are male and weigh 200 pounds, you aren’t Gabby Douglas.

But, whatever it was, you remem-ber it, and cringe. Your skip turns into a saunter and you decide to find your way to a small cubby in the basement of Sterling and avoid Face-book at all costs. You know the tags will come.

***

This weekend was indeed a mar-athon. One arm has an unexplained bruise. The other has three patches of arm hair missing, as a result of ripping o! my “Calhoun Loves Our Bulldogs” stickers, which I wore proudly despite our defeat.

We seniors made the last togas of our lives. (Well, actually, my friend’s parents still attend an annual toga party. I’m crossing my fingers to be on next year’s guest list.)

But still, with fear of never, ever again fastening a sheet around myself with safety pins or be called a toga-guru, I became extremely attached to my toga. I was so attached, in fact, that I felt the need to incorporate it into every out-fit of the weekend. It functioned as a shawl at Tailgate2, an armband at RAD and now as a blanket for my blue stuffed giraffe named Mor-phine.

But now, a few days later, I realize the time has come to clean my room and throw away the dirty piece of fabric. I mean, come on, I’m not Ste-ven Tyler.

We can all get so consumed by our memories, our pasts, that we begin to believe that if we let go of even the smallest strand of the memory, the entire memory, good or bad, will

be lost forever. But maybe it’s these exact memories that hold us back, anchor us down, and catalyze our “Sunday Weirds.”

Maybe, if you throw away your toga, you’ll let go of the fact you have no job lined up for next year, you won’t mind that you have never attended a naked party, and you may finally stop being scared of walking alone down Crown St. It’s a scary thing to let go of what you know, to let go of the consistencies in your life, but sometimes, that’s just what you need to get rid of those “Sunday Weirds.”

My friend once told me that I live my life like a rock star. He then coldly and bluntly reminded me that I’m not one, and that I will most likely be eating oatmeal for breakfast, lunch and dinner once I’m off the meal plan. I told him to fuck o! and con-tinued to eat my eggs, reminding him that oatmeal isn’t even gluten-free.

But maybe we can all learn from rock stars. Their lives get plastered on the cover of US Weekly and some of it is fact, but a lot of it is fiction. They roll their eyes and continue to produce music, letting go of last week’s cover story. That’s all you can really do: roll your eyes and carry on. If we all just keep living, if we for-get about our old togas, and learn from our cringes, Sundays will just be Sundays. We can’t relive the past — it’s gone forever. But today, we can

be whomever we want, and I don’t know about you, but I want to be a rock star.

1. For those of you who haven’t ven-tured past the Shell gas station, it’s the ’80s party at the frat that thinks it’s badass.

2. Yes, it deserves a capital letter. Tailgates are more important to me than who wins the game.

Contact CHLOE DRIMAL at [email protected] .

A Long Stay in a Strange “Hotel”// BY DAVID WHIPPLE

It always confused me when Rolling Stone talked about music as if it were a math test. “Difficult,” “challenging,” “rewarding”: I struggled to see how listening to my iPod could have so much in common with manual labor. Music was music. It didn’t fight back or require hours of study, and if I didn’t like something at first, it probably just wasn’t any good.

I went on like this for a while. Every new CD I bought, I half-expected to jump out of its jewel case and “challenge” me to a duel, as seemed to happen so regularly at the Rolling Stone o"ces. I imagined David Fricke parry-ing blows from the latest Radiohead album, then subduing it with a final jab.

“‘Kid A’ is even harder to decode … exqui-sitely camouflaged in taut, arch distemper,” he would write. On the floor, the defeated CD would whimper as Fricke spilled its secret “arch distemper” to the world. What the hell, I wondered, does that even mean?

And then I got the album that made me understand. Wilco’s “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” is widely regarded as one of the best records of the 2000s (“But I haven’t even heard of it!,” you might say. Shame on you.) I bought the album determined to love it. Wilco’s more recent stu! had me hooked, so when I cued up the album and bumped the volume, I was expecting the first song, “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart,” to be a twangy, o!-center burst of killer country rock. Instead, my room filled with a smooth, oscillating synthesizer and a lightly strummed guitar repeating the same three chords over and over. The drums, instead of hanging out in the back, snapped along with Je! Tweedy’s half-spoken vocals: “I am an American aquarium drinker / I assassin down the Avenue … ” I found myself with the same question I had when reading David Fricke’s review of “Kid A:” What the hell does that even mean?

“Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” was a disappoint-ment. Where were the slide guitar solos, the howling broken-heart epics, the shimmer-ing acoustic laments of “A.M.” or “Sky Blue Sky”? The rest of the album limped along just like the first song, formless and stubbornly un-catchy. Was this really Wilco’s opus, their defining work? I was skeptical that music so unorthodox could really be as compelling as everyone claimed. But I kept listening. In his review, Fricke compared “Yankee Hotel” to the “exquisitely camouflaged” “Kid A.” Maybe this would be the duel I had been waiting for.

But then a funny thing happened. The album came to me. As I listened over and over, the shapeless cacophony of that first song became a symphony, an intricate puzzle

of optimistic chimes and half-drunk pianos, liquid electronic harmonies and acoustic gui-tars all swelling together with Tweedy’s mur-mured fears and confessions. The curtain over the rest of the album had been lifted. “Ashes of American Flags” featured my missing slide guitar, layered in reverb and mourning some unnamed loss; the sailors of “Poor Places” floated on waves of feedback and radio static, and that mysterious rhythm that had frus-trated me suddenly slid into place. Far from disappointed, I was captivated.

I never had to duel “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.” It never brandished a rapier and challenged me to like it. All it took was time. Time for the music to unfold like an old roadmap, time for me to master the album’s twists and turns, time to relearn the rules that Wilco had shat-tered. Like switching to black co!ee, it was unfamiliar and maybe unsatisfying at first, but with time I began to wonder how I ever settled for anything else.

Music as far outside the box as “Yan-kee Hotel” is always a risk. To almost com-pletely disregard convention and practice, to stray onto the thinner limbs, carries the pos-sibility of total failure. The old guidelines — base, guitar and drums, or verse, chorus and bridge — are there for a reason. But breaking the rules so brazenly can also lead to the cre-ation of something entirely new and breath-taking, as it did for Wilco 12 years ago and as it does every so often. This is the stu! that causes David Fricke to string together those long chains of adjectives. And it is, in some sense of the word, a challenge to learn to love something unknown and alien. The reward is in hearing noise shape itself into music before your ears.

Contact DAVID WHIPPLE at [email protected] .

GC: We wanted to kick things o! with the high-concept drama that’s brought J.J. Abrams back to a small screen near you: “Revolu-tion.” (NB: he’s only the executive producer, but his fingerprints are all over it.) The premise ought to be compelling — the lights have gone out, and they’ll never come back on.

The show opens 15 years post-electricity to introduce the Matheson family, residents of an idyllic American commune. Enter Giancarlo Esposito as Captain Neville in the swaggering militia of the reigning Monroe Repub-lic, the death of the family patri-arch (who knows more than he’s telling about the show’s elec-trical mystery) and the abduc-tion of his son Danny quickly fol-low. That leaves behind Central Blond Teenage Daughter, now with a pair of objectives: rescue her brother and seek out itiner-ant uncle Miles Matheson for aid and information about what hap-pened 15 years ago.

SN: From there, “Revolution” walks right into the cliché that genre stories are high on set-ting, low on character develop-ment. Bow-wielding Central Blond Teenage Daughter (whose name is Charlie, I had to look it up) is a Katniss Everdeen knock-o!, and her love interest Nate is your store-brand Taylor Lautner: hunky, expressionless, of dubious intentions.

The stale dialogue quashes any hope that these characters will grow and subvert expecta-tions. What’s great is that there’s no such thing as subtext. Charac-ters constantly, hilariously, over-explain themselves to each other:

“I can’t believe you’re sleeping with this hussy and betraying the memory of our mother, who — as you know — died soon after the blackout!”

“You think you’re grown up enough to hunt for food, but — as you know — it’s dangerous out there, and you have asthma, for which there is no longer medica-tion!”

GC: That being said, Billy Burke as Miles Matheson is by far the brightest spot in the pilot for me. His resigned, “Yep, same shit as always” attitude hits just the right note, and I’d probably keep watching just to see him have another few reluctant but beauti-fully choreographed sword fights with the goons. It’s a Han Solo ri!, sure, but it’s a good one.

I’m more worried about the nagging structural problems. One: the show’s weirdly disinter-ested attitude towards the con-sequences of its premise. Though the setting deserves a radical reinvention in light of the fact that, well, there’s no electricity, it’s weakly sketched, which is a shame when there’s such enor-mous potential for world-build-ing.

I’m not talking about the aes-thetics — the shots of overgrown Chicago are appropriately pretty — but about the epistemic stin-giness. I can accept that there are no iPhones, but where have the combustion engines gone? Esposito’s spiel on the “Bal-timore Act” banning firearms doesn’t really cut it either; show us why that makes sense in (or how it makes sense of) the post-blackout context, don’t just lay it out like an un-motivated law of physics.

Maybe I’m being unreasonably impatient, but after the incred-ibly fun pilot for “Last Resort,” I think the execution of the set-ting just wasn’t great. I know that Abrams would like to get at our anxieties about overconnected-ness, I know he wants a Revo-lutionary Era vibe, but my feel-ings on this new way of life were weakly cued.

SN: If anything, the second episode screamed right-wing nightmare to me. People are exe-

cuted for owning hunting rifles; the militia burns the (outlawed!?) American flag. It wasn’t so much the end of the world as we know it, as it is the end of Amurrica.

I’m usually a sucker for post-apocalyptic scenarios. Give me marauding gangs and a long road, even this stu! was borrowed from elsewhere. But Charlie’s road is 15 minutes long and the gangs don’t scare me.

GC: What makes all of these smaller failures so frustrating is that the commercial stakes for genre television are such a del-icate negotiation — when your space opera tanks, the networks make more police procedurals and medical dramas. It’s not that I don’t like J.J. Abrams’ shows; I’m a “Fringe” watcher, albeit a begrudging one by now. It’s that he’s studiously squandering whatever cultural capital is avail-able to science fiction.

SN: I actually gave up on watching “Fringe,” and watching “Revolution” has made me won-der if J.J. Abrams is really suited for television. He did a good job with the Star Trek reboot, but he seems to have problems starting from scratch and playing an idea out to its conclusion. Any given episode of “Fringe” has sev-eral ideas running full-throttle, each of which could totally shift the show’s essential paradigms: an evil corporation, an alter-nate universe attacking us, oth-erworldly agents who engineer fate. You end up with a jumble of plot twists totally evacuated of tension.

That weakness makes me wonder how future audiences will look back on “Lost.” At the time, I was pretty forgiving of the pseudo-spiritual finale. But maybe it wasn’t brilliant, atmo-spheric incoherence. Maybe J.J. Abrams just doesn’t finish what he starts.

Contact GRAYSON CLARY and SOPHIA NGUYEN at

[email protected] and [email protected] .

The loose ends of J.J. Abrams// BY GRAYSON CLARY AND SOPHIA NGUYEN

GRAYSON CLARY & SOPHIA NGUYEN

SPLIT/SCREEN

// CHLOE DRIMAL

Chloe passed the Marathon Weekend with flying colors!

CHLOE DRIMALTHE UNICORN FILES

S U N D A YO C T O B E R 0 7

BIG FOOD: HEALTH, CULTURE AND EVOLUTION OF EATING

Peabody Museum of Natural History // 12 p.m.

Come and learn all of the reasons why you’re fat.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:Following new EIC @TapStephenson on TwitterBecause @idtapleythat is no longer!

DAVID WHIPPLETUNE-UP

I NEVER HAD TO DUEL “YANKEE HOTEL

FOXTROT.” IT NEVER BRANDISHED A RAPIER AND CHALLENGED ME

TO LIKE IT.

WEEKEND THEATREYALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2012 · yaledailynews.com PAGE 11

AMERICANA, PAINFULLY// BY LIZ RODRIGUEZ-FLORIDO

Flannel, rifles and other assorted Amer-icana (a flag as a cape, a mounted deer’s head) appear throughout the Yale Dramatic Association’s fall 2012 production of Sam Shepard’s tale of woe and psychologi-cal trauma in the late twentieth-century United States. The man loves his country, the way we love our families, even when that love takes us in tragic directions.

“A Lie of the Mind,” the second of the Dramat’s Fall Exes, tells the story of two Western families coping with the after-math of domestic abuse. After years of marital disputes, husband Jake (James Dieffenbach ’13) leaves his wife Beth (Bonnie Antosh ’13), who he believes was unfaithful, for dead, and tries to cope with life without her. Beth’s family collects her from the hospital and must deal with their own personal demons while attempting to help their daughter recover.

The script doesn’t lend itself to easy adaptation — it’s basically a play that tries to communicate how hard it is for two families to communicate with them-selves — but the sensitive direction of Kate Heaney ’14 made such serious issues easier to digest. At times, the scenes drag and feel overly depressing, but the prem-ise isn’t one that would easily lead to rain-bows or happy endings.

Antosh’s performance is scary. Not scary as in horrible — scary as in awfully, breathtakingly good. Antosh takes the role of a brain-damaged and beaten woman — a role that could easily be over- or under-played to disaster — and made it both

physically believable and emotionally convincing. She screams, mumbles, and su!ers on stage. And whenever she’s on, everything else on the set seems irrele-vant.

The rest of the cast held their own, with Jacob Osborne ’16 as a convincing patri-arch and the welcome comic relief in a show with scene after scene of dysfunc-tional family history, disappointment, and old memories.

The cast collectively put on southern accents, which at times were a bit dis-tracting from the scene due to their large variety. The story is very dialogue based; the biggest event — Jake’s beating of Beth — takes place before the play begins, but inventive light direction and an interac-tive set help make up for this lack of direct action.

All in all, the lighting design of Shan-non Csorny ’15 is ambitious but coher-ent: lights alternately guide the audience’s attention, set the mood and give cast and crew time to transition between scenes.

The lighting introduces layers to the set, literally breaking down the stage into two sections. Stage left, we have Jake’s family and, stage right, Beth’s home.

The set consists of two walls con-structed from large, hanging photographs of snowy cabins, trucks, and family por-traits – which feature the actual cast – and which are enhanced by frequent lighting changes. Whenever a cast member begins discussing something from the past, the photograph dealing with that particular

set of circumstances lights up. This adds to the production’s portrayal of the e!ects memories and family identity have on us. The lives these characters had before we meet them are literally illustrated with these images, extending the play into an imagined past.

In addition to the expert lighting, two cellists play throughout the show’s tran-sitions. I’m mixed on their contribution. Though they added to the atmosphere, the musicians did not seem to contribute to the story’s arch. To my mind, I associated their theatricality with Hollywood block-busters like Black Swan and Harry Potter.

Within the Dramat’s fall lineup, “A Lie of the Mind” is a break from the more light-hearted and cheery fare on o!er this season. In less than three hours, it pres-ents a rugged look into the degeneration of the American home and country.

Contact LIZ RODRIGUEZ-FLORIDO at [email protected] .

Lost in Yonkers, Found in New Haven// BY YUVAL BEN-DAVID

A few years back, when I hit puberty, my dad put a copy of “Portnoy’s Complaint” in my hands. That’s the Philip Roth book, you’ll remember, that “put the id back in yid.”

Neil Simon took that project seriously, and “Lost in Yonkers” — his 1991 Pulitzer Prize winning play — takes a circumcision-scalpel to the pathologies of a Jewish-Amer-ican family.

Set in Yonkers, New York, during World War II, the fast-talkin’ domestic play hur-tles forward as its agonies accrete, under-statedly—until, at the point of oversatura-tion, they collapse under the dead weight of schmaltz. Director Molly Houlahan ’14 bril-liantly cushions the fall, leavening her pro-duction with just so much realism as to war-rant a genuine emotional response. In other words, yours truly—a notorious schmuck of a skeptic—teared up.

The plot seems, at best, archetypal, at worst a Hollywood stock-reel. In any case, it’s an obscenely overstated litany of sor-rows (try saying the following in one breath): two brothers left to their curmudgeonly grandma and absentminded aunt as their hemorrhoidal father goes South to make the money he needs to pay back the shy-

lock he borrowed from to care for his wife who died of cancer: a meek, sickly aunt and wastrel uncle also make appearances. It’s a preachy lot, among whom the word “obli-gation” folds and refolds like amateur ori-gami. Grandma thinks her grandsons have an obligation to be healthy, even though she’s a hypochondriac. Papa thinks he has an obligation to his family but not to himself. The sons aren’t quite sure to whom they’re obligated. It’s debatable whether the ra"sh uncle has even heard the word obligation.

But the control room of the play is in Hit-ler’s bunker; the family’s local anxieties all refer to historical tragedies. Anti-Semitism is Simon’s chief device, rationalizing every statement — at once the cause of and excuse for the play’s sentimentality.

When Arty (played by a compelling, baby-voiced Connor Lounsbury ’14) refuses his grandmother’s soup, she falls back on the usual rhetoric:

“If you were a boy growing up in Ger-many, you’d be dead by now.”

“But if I ate this soup, I’d be just as dead,” Arty returns.

If on our one side we have a mountain of wit and on the other a mountain of high the-atrics, we find that Simon’s script lies in the

valley between them. Sara Hendel ’14 plays the grandma, herself a mountain, or mon-ster — “Don’t pay me for being born” is her response to a birthday present — but the actress’s acute sense of stage rhythm allows her to round out the disapproving matriarch, complicating her otherwise overcooked and predictable moral dilemmas.

Christine Shaw ’14, as Bella — the forget-ful, ambiguously childlike aunt — employs a suite of tics and mannerisms as expressively controlled as a face fighting back tears; her performance is ravishing.

In fact, what is consistent about the qual-ity of the acting is how the cast nimbly manipulates its oversized parts into psycho-logical creatures and not — as lesser actors would have done with the script — into gro-tesques.

When the play ends — and it does so in the most predictable way — the boys’ father (played by Gabe Greenspan ’14) kisses his mother, whether she likes it or not. “Thank you for not putting up a fight,” he says. All I could think was: Thank you, production members, for putting up a fight.

Contact YUVAL BEN-DAVID at [email protected] .

Fugly drugged-out people lose it// BY ROBERT PECK

Copious cocaine usage. Eat-ing talking birds raw. Sketchy sex. Destroying your close friends’ possessions.

If you enjoy the thought of any, or all, of those things, then you can get your sick thrills at “Ugly People,” by Cory Finley ’11, which premiered yester-day at the Whitney Humani-ties Center. But you’ll especially love it if you like the parts about drugs, intercourse and insanity, items that receive big billing in a show that displays more despair in one two-hour stretch than Dostoevsky fit into his entire career.

“Ugly People”’s foremost ugly person is Janna (Willa Fitzgerald ’13), a coke abusing San Fran-ciscan who has recently lost her lover, Brian, to heart fail-ure. Before his death, Brian was the pioneering mind behind a startup business backed by his parents and staffed by Janna, Brian’s brother Dan (Raphael Shapiro ’13), and his close friend Toby (Paul Hinkes ’15). Both Dan and Toby join Janna in her grief, Toby shares her drug habit and all three spend the play shout-ing at one another in a lake-side cabin to which they, along with Dan’s longtime girlfriend Megan (Calista Small ’14), have retreated for Brian’s funeral ser-vice.

The show opens with Megan sitting in the cabin with Janna as the two engage in barbed conversation. Megan tries to comfort Janna by touching her face a lot (a technique that she will favor throughout the play), but the only real com-fort Janna seems to find comes from the alcohol that Toby and Dan show up with a few minutes into the action. After having a bit too much to drink, Janna experiences a dream/flashback sequence that incorporates a hyper, narcotics-induced rant, a frenzied make-out session and a midnight lighthouse sail in the course of maybe ten minutes.

Though the show asks its audience to accept a lot in the first two scenes, the skills of its performers make this suspen-sion of disbelief seem not only possible, but reasonable. This holds true for no one more so than Fitzgerald: given the con-tinuous emotional fluctua-tion that being a crackhead demands of her character, she plays Janna with commendable maturity, displaying subtlety in some places and hysteria in oth-ers. Especially impressive is her ability to emote on command,

an ability that the show calls on frequently whenever it asks her to take a hit. Hinkes, too, plays his role with confidence and volume befitting a much older actor, adding a layer of fear just as powerful as on-stage violence whenever he raises his voice.

Finley’s ambitious writing is tackled with poise by direc-tor Charlie Polinger ’13, whose orchestration of the produc-tion’s numerous sound cues, from beach waves to revving engines, brings gusto to scenes that might otherwise feel mis-placed. Great care has also been put into prop usage: Fitzgerald was heard backstage more than once calling for “her blood,” a reference to the fake liquid that finds its way onto the hands and faces of several characters in later scenes, every time without a hint of camp.

Janna’s first bloodletting takes place after Toby and Dan have a screaming argument over who will take over as CEO of Brian’s startup after his death. Dan tells Toby that the board of directors have named him CEO, in reaction to which Toby pro-ceeds to smash Dan and Megan’s fine china all over the cabin floor while a drug-addled Janna jeers from the sidelines. After Dan and Megan go to bed, Toby threatens to leave, but Janna convinces him to stay by cutting open her hand on the edge of a broken plate. Toby responds by forcing her onto the couch as the theater goes black.

The final scenes, to leave room for intrigue, are equally in line with the above grim hap-penings. And all in all, though its characters often act in crimi-nally insane ways, “Ugly People” leaves its viewers with a creep-ing sense of self-awareness. By throwing the negative aspects of its characters into sharp relief, the show calls attention to the ugliness in all people, ugliness that audience members will have little di"culty pinpointing in themselves due to the sym-pathy produced by the show’s excellent acting and skilled direction. Though the material often seems to exist simply for shock value, Ugly People’s pos-itive aspects nonetheless make it sure to be o!ensively enjoy-able for even the most critical theatergoer. Give it a go, unless you’re overly attached to your own sanity.

Contact ROBERT PECK at [email protected] .

// HARRY SIMPERINGHAM

Lost, but together.

// BRIANNE BOWEN

Pain isn’t just an emotion in this Dramat production — it’s expressed physically, violently, as well.

S UNDAYO C T O B E R 0 7

ARTIST TALK WITH PHOTOGRAPHER AN-MY LÊ

Yale University Art Gallery // 2 p.m.

She just won a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship. That’s a huge deal!

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:It’s 4 a. m. — bedtime! Sleep is for the Blessed.

WEEKEND BACKSTAGE

Q. How did it feel interviewing people about such personal themes, and how did you get them to open up?

ML. We started with basic questions, but sometimes these warm-up ques-tions would open up things that were very personal to people. We found that people were excited to share sto-ries even though they knew they were going to be on stage. Part of that was because we kept all the interviews anonymous. An audience member who had a story in the show said it was exciting to see something articulated on stage that they maybe weren’t free to share themselves.MB. It was really amazing for us. We talked to 40 people for an hour each, and you can learn a lot about a person in an hour. We asked warm-up ques-tions like — where are you from and what were you like as a kid — because we wanted them to trust us and know we weren’t trying to exploit them.

Q. And how did you go about the process of finding people to interview?

MB. We sent out emails to all the grad-uate schools, and the Cabaret sent out emails to its subscribers. We set up a [public] anonymous email account so people could email us [their details to set up an interview], and we posted flyers in the city with both email addresses.ML. There was never a night with less than two or three audience mem-bers who had stories in the show. That made it feel very live in the room because the person sitting next to you could be the person that was “on stage”.

Q. You had a lot of material to work with. How did you go about transforming that into a play?

ML. A lot of co!ee and very little sleep. I was sent away with [the transcribed interviews] for two weeks to sift through everything. At the end, the draft had di!erent kinds of stories —

some life-changing and some smaller. We wanted to say that because you’ve held on to these memories, no matter large or small, we think they’re impor-tant because they’re a part of how you define yourself.MB. Logistically, we made lists of all the connecting themes – stories about people who lost their cats, jewelry, loved ones.ML. It was amazing how much cross-over there was and how much you have in common with another person with-out even realizing it.

Q. What has it felt like living and studying in New Haven?

MB. It has been challenging, and I miss living in the big city of Chicago. But I’m sure I’ll look back on this time and romanticize it as a quiet oasis. I wish I had more time to really understand New Haven rather than it feeling like a transitory place, and that was part of how this project grew.

Q. How did the project start?

MB. Even after spending two years at the School of Drama, I felt intensely isolated, like I didn’t know people as well I’d like to and people didn’t know me. You can work with people on a show every day for two months and think you know them. And then you realize you don’t know some basic things about them, like what their parents do, stories from their child-hood or events in their life that have shaped them. For me, it really started from that and getting to know people beyond conversations about theatre and who they are as artists. We talked about how film and TV are so fantas-tic to reach a broader audience, but the power of theatre is that you can cre-ate a show in dialogue with audience. That was a lot of the work I was doing in Chicago and in part, what made me fall in love with the city. So I guess this was also an attempt to fall in love with New Haven more.ML. Definitely. Once you know some-

one’s story, it’s easy to fall in love with them. And when you know a lot of people’s stories, it’s easy to fall in love with the place.

Q. Looking back to the beginning, what drew you to the Yale School of Drama in the first place?

ML. Professor Paula Vogel — she’s a genius. I love the way she teaches playwriting, but they only accept three playwrights a year, so I had to apply to Yale three times in a row until they were so annoyed that they had to let me in. I also love the way students collaborate here. Margot’s a student director, and I’m a student playwright, and we were able to work together and foster a relationship. When we leave, hopefully Margot and I will do every project together!MB. I’m going to hold you to that! I wanted to come here and work with Paula Vogel, which I’m doing now! It’s the one drama school in the coun-try that has students in all disciplines, including designers, who are work-ing really hard here, like they’re going through designer boot camp.ML. They’re badasses! Can you say that in the Yale Daily News?

Q. Because you were dealing with the stories of real people, were you ever scared of being insensitive?

MB. We tried to be really sensitive. Over 90 percent of the script is ver-batim. It was important to us that we never change the intention of the sto-ries.[The interviewees] gave us a gift, and we wanted to give them a gift back, not saying something that would make them regret giving us their sto-ries.

Q. Christopher Arnott, a reviewer from the New Haven Theatre Jerk, wrote “[‘This.’] is not a show for egos, for folks who feel they have deeper problems than others.” What are your thoughts on that?

MB. I think that quote is apt, in so far as there was no interviewee that was the star of the show. The reviewer [who was also interviewed for ‘This.’] had some great stories, which were whit-tled down to a few words. That’s the heartbreak of a piece like this — you end up getting so many good stories and you think, I could make five shows out of this. It’s hard to not be precious about that stuff, but you have the logistics.

Q. What about the presentational style?

MB. I’d call it a collage piece, if I had to put a label on it.ML. We wanted to create a sense of a universe of people instead of one or two primary characters that you follow all the way. We had a group of beauti-ful, talented actors in the ensemble that transformed into dozens of char-acters each.

Q. How did you prevent the show from becoming too dark given your themes of loss, fracture and regret?

ML. I tried to select some stories that were humorous. I think the joy was in

the shared experience and in under-standing that the things you lost were a part of your life for a reason. You can celebrate that as opposed to mourn-ing it.MB. Also, the way Mary structured the play was that some stories had their first parts in the first half and their conclusions in the second. So in the first half, we got to see people’s rela-tionships with [what they loved], like a wonderful stu!ed elephant they made in kindergarten and the happiness and joy of loving them. And that is where the humorous tone comes from.

Q. Did either of you include your own experiences in the play?

ML. At the very end of the play, we had a wall of projections to try and include as many people as possible in the play. And I included one of my stories in the projections.MB. Should we claim the Fifth Amend-ment? We’ll never tell!

Contact NITIKA KHAITAN at [email protected] .

PAGE B12 YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

MARGOT BORDELON DRA ’13 AND MARY LAWS DRA ’14

Margot Bordelon DRA ’13, Mary Laws DRA ’14 and Alex Ripp DRA ’13 created ‘This.’, a show that premiered at the Cabaret last week and is based on interviews with New Haven residents. The question they

asked was simple: “Can you tell me about a moment in your life when every-thing changed?” WEEKEND was able to catch up with two of the three play’s creators — Bordelon and Laws — to discuss this (or ‘This.’).

ONCE YOU KNOW SOMEONE’S STORY, IT’S EASY TO FALL

IN LOVE WITH THEM.

Playwrights, observers, visionaries// BY NITIKA KHAITAN

“

“

// JAMES LU