This WEEKEND

// FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2012WEEKEND

ACTION B5THE SYNDICATEA history of activism at the Beinecke Plaza and its present day.

COMPLAINTS B9SEECLICKFIXThe future of civic engagements in New Haven may or may not involve Yalies.

CABARET B11RISK//TRANSFORMATION//AND MORE...What’s to come in the wold and wondrous season of the Yale Cabaret.

THIS WEEK

THE BALANCING ACT // BY CAROLINE MCCULLOUGH, PAGE 3

WEEKEND VIEWSPAGE B2 YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

AGAINST APOLOGY// BY CINDY OK

The deal with punctuality at Yale (by which I mean the deal with the lack of punctuality at Yale) goes something like: 95 percent of us are 10 to 15 minutes late, 90 percent of the time. The delusional entitle-ment that leads to the lapse in the Yale clock is similar to the situation in L.A., except that here you can’t genuinely blame tra!c all the time.

You have a group lunch Friday in Pierson at 12:15, so at 12:22 you pack your bag for the day and head out. I get it; you were finishing up a reading response. You stop and chat a couple times on the walk there, okay, okay. That’s all fine. And this is coming from the person who gets to the college common room at noon sharp with that week’s copy of the Yale Herald (jokes!) (Cindy Ok making fun of the Herald, JOKES!).

I was even understanding when a friend arrived 37 minutes late to a one-on-one dinner in Berkeley last fall. It wasn’t the first time, and it wasn’t the last; my friends are busy people (soooooo busy). Still, 37 minutes late to a 20-min-ute dinner is not an awesome show of friendship. And you know what? I would happily forget about the tar-diness, except that she spent those 20 minutes apologizing.

Copiously.Repeatedly.Gratuitously.

Which led me to spend those 20 minutes exonerating her from the lateness and from her own guilt — basically, to my consoling her.

Apologies, it seems to me, are almost always more for and more about the apologizer than the apol-ogized-to. They are ultimately a defense, some more ridiculous than others. The finest I’ve ever heard was in high school from a girl who’d been slacking on a proj-ect we were working on together. When confronted about her sloth and her negligence (we were sec-ond-semester seniors, to be fair), she apologized for her only partially connected fron-tal lobe. Apparently her still-developing brain made the task of

paperwork simply UNbearable (all adolescent brains have partially connected frontal lobes, Katie). The late diner’s excuse has even less to do with physiology, but her apol-ogy was equally self-indulgent. Is there some kind of veritable relief to hearing so many times that “it’s okay, it’s really okay, honestly don’t worry about it”?

This year, I’m on a (solo) cam-p a i g n a g a i n s t a p o l - ogy. Well,

a g a i n s t m e a n -i n g l e s s

a n d / o r self-serv-

ing apology. D o n ’ t

b e

sorry that you were late, or mean, that you forgot a birthday or cheated on your girlfriend; just don’t do it next time. In the mean-time, take responsibility for your mistake. It was your decision to take a nap so close to dinner, to get drunk so close to the girl you have a crush on. You’re not sorry you did it, you’re sorry it had to hurt some-body, which are very di"erent sen-timents (the second completely unthinking to express).

You’re 18, or 20, or even 24 if you took a gap year and were old for your grade to begin with. Everyone runs into her freshman-year room-mate on the way to class, everyone has to take the long way to Edge-wood when there’s construction in the Pierson shortcut once in a while. If you’re making excuses, then everybody should get to, and that’s not the kind of world any of us are tryna build. Anyway, no one thinks it’s your fault that you spilled the co"ee, so chill out and just help clean it up.

Sometimes the circumstances

are outside your control (choosing to lose your mental faculties for the night does not count for this one, sorry). “My professor let us out of class 10 minutes late” will do per-fectly fine, and is not a situation that warrants 15 “I’m sorry”s in a row. Let’s let that phrase keep its meaning.

Contact CINDY OK at cindy.ok@yale.

edu .

Dear students,As you all know, our beloved

University president, Richard Levin, will be stepping down at the end of this year after 20 years of service to the Yale community. As the co-chairs of the Search Committee for Rick Levin’s Suc-cessor (SCFRLS), or scerfulls, as we a"ectionately call ourselves, we consider it our duty to keep the student body informed of our decision making process. With this in mind, below is the cur-rent lineup of possible successors to President Levin along with the statements submitted by each candidate. Please take this list seriously, as it represents both the months of hard work by the committee and the welfare and future of this University.

N. Ferguson and Co.Deans of Administrative Func-

tionality

Police Chief Ronnell Higgins:To the Yale Community:I write to let you know that

I officially announced my can-didacy for the office of Presi-dent of Yale University this eve-ning at Elm and Temple Streets at approximately 6:30 PM (Click here to view the incident’s loca-tion). My wife, who is not a mem-ber of the Yale community, was approached by two members of the search committee who carried briefcases and asked of my where-abouts. No injuries were reported.

If you wish to express any sup-port for my candidacy or should observe any suspicious activity on the part of other candidates, please call the Yale Police at 203-432-4400 or text your anony-mous tip to 67283.

As a general reminder, please be aware of who the President is at all times, talk about me to the com-mittee when possible, avoid dis-playing valuables, note the loca-tion of emergency Blue Phones, and make use of security services, including shuttle services and door-to-door rides after dark.

Sincerely,

Ronnell A. Higgins, Chief of Police

Andrzejek Kzrlsatkpjk, President of Yale University, Grudzi dz, Poland:

Greetings to America. I, Andrzejek Kzrlsatkpjk would like very much be President of Yale, you know? As President of Yale University at Poland, I make many good things happen at Yale University at Poland. We increase double size of Natural History Museum collection from 5 rocks to 8 rocks. Our hit cat with stick team come in second place every year (louses at Warsaw Univer-sity cheat. Hit very small cat with very big stick). We renovate many place at Yale University at Poland. We put ceiling on every dormi-tory (well, not every dormitory), and no more forced octuples (well, some forced octuples). If I am Yale President, every student make for only 3 homework classes per week! Thank you.

Shrick Shlevin:I would like to offer my ser-

vices in continuing the hard work and success of Yale’s greatest President, Rick Levin. Although you don’t know me (I’m a total stranger to the Yale community), I think I would best fill the admit-tedly gigantic shoes of soon-to-be-former-President Levin.

Shmick Shmevin: Wow, that Shrick Shlevin

character sounded pretty smart. We should listen to him.

A. Real Personson:

Boy, that Shmick Shmevin said some pretty cool stu". His ideas sounded pretty groovy to me!

Joseph Stalin:It has recently come to my

attention that there is a new Yale University regulation requiring all o"-campus parties for more than 50 people to register with the Dean’s o!ce. In the mother-land, 50 people is a get-together! Seriously! I had 5 million people at my birthday party, and we had a great time. I mean, like for real-politik. What is this? Soviet Rus-sia? Ha haha ha … but seriously, if more than 50 people have an o"-campus party, I will throw you in a gulag.

The Yale Pundits:Oh boy, do we have some

hilARIOUS ideas for being the President of Yale. Like, what if we changed all the silverware in the dining halls to PLASTIC! Wouldn’t that be RICH!? Can you imagine the looks on everyone’s faces when they grab a plastic fork instead of a metal one! Wait, or what if we sent out an email that announced that Fall Fest was actually happening in SPRING! Can you imagine the looks on everyone’s faces when they read that email! Priceless.

Fareed Zakaria:Fareed Rafiq Zakaria: born

January 20, 1964) is an Indian-American journalist and author. From 2000 to 2010, he was a col-umnist for Newsweek and editor of Newsweek International. In 2010 he became editor-at-large of Time. He is the host of CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS.” [1] He is also a frequent commentator and author about issues related to international relations, trade and American foreign policy.[2]

Contact CODY KAHOE at [email protected] and CALEB

MADISON at [email protected] .

The Search Committee for Rick Levin’s Successor (SCFRLS)// BY CODY KAHOE AND CALEB MADISON

The lamest semester ever spent was a Summer spent in New Haven// BY CAROLYN LIPKA

I spent my summer with Yale not because I didn’t get enough during the school year, but because I had had enough. I had sophomore slumped all over my classes and desperately needed to fulfill a language credit. As a result, I found myself in L1/L2 French over the sum-mer.

Five weeks in New Haven.Five weeks in Paris. I had heard rumors my freshman year of the

New Haven summer, with the campus trans-forming into something like summer camp: Yale-only Toad’s and parties galore! The real-ity was very, very di"erent. I made the first mistake of living on campus. As anyone who has ever lived in a residential college knows, the buildings have no air-conditioning and dining hall food isn’t exactly gourmet. Unfor-tunately, the fact that Yale Summer Session treats its students like children exasperated

my already fragile summer state of mind.Apparently, being a legal adult and living

on campus for the past two years without so much as an RA is very di"erent from living on campus in the summer (maybe it’s the heat?). I suddenly found myself with a counselor, another Yale student, only two years older than me. The campus is o!cially dry over the summer. As I was reminded many times, the first strike with alcohol means immediate expulsion from Summer Session.

Parts of the Pierson basement were acces-sible to students, like the buttery and the washing machine, but the gym was “strictly o"-limits,” and a flood of emails informed me that any use of the gym would result in a $50 fine for everyone.

We also weren’t allowed to prop our doors open. That was also a $50 fine for everyone in the suite.

This was not the summer of debauchery and frivolity I had expected.

Still, it was only five weeks, and suddenly I was lugging around two maximum-weight suitcases through Gare Du Nord and up the steps to my Parisian host family’s home.

Let me be clear: Paris was incredible. The

people in my class got very close (sometimes we still eat crepes together) and my teachers were awesome. However, these facts are in spite of the Yale marker on the program, not because of it.

While everyone in the class had virtu-ally the same command of the French lan-guage, that doesn’t automatically mean that everyone has even remotely the same inter-ests in after-class activities. Yale Summer Session ignores this, and mandated “excur-sions,” which occurred daily the first couple of weeks. These “excursions” took us on three-hour-long guided tours in the middle of the day through areas of the city that about half the class was interested in: a scavenger hunt in the Jardin du Luxembourg and an activity where we traced the steps of the characters in French In Action, a French language learn-ing series used in the class. On our week-end trip to Normandy, Brittany and Mont Saint-Michel (which are great in concept), our class was joined by the L3/L4 program to sit on a bus for 15 hours. We had two hours at the D-Day Museum and one hour at Omaha Beach and the American cemetery (5:1, not a great ratio).

My 10 weeks with Yale Summer Session weren’t like 10 weeks at Yale at all. Where on campus we’re used to being treated like adults, or at least young adults, I felt like a middle schooler who’s every minute needed to be planned by the school. When I signed up for a class with Yale, I didn’t realize that it meant I was also signing up for a whole sum-mer of Yale-mandated funtivities.

The winterless New Haven was not the city I had grown to know and love during the tra-ditional school year. The buzz of the school year is gone, but the stress isn’t. I figured that some time alone with the buildings couldn’t be too bad (I mean, look at them), but instead of the liberation that usually comes with the season, I felt cornered. Harkness turned into a looming, oppressive presence, a constant reminder that I was a liability. Indeed, we are coddled and told from our first week at Yale that we are special. We have money and opportunities thrown at us to the point where we are overwhelmed with privilege. The sum-mer program, by contrast, felt harsh and abra-sive. I felt more bound by rules as an incom-ing junior than I did as an incoming freshman.

For me, the Yale of summer is a very di"er-ent creature than the one of our school year, and not in a good way.

Contact CAROLYN LIPKA at [email protected] .

FREE WINE TASTINGS AT THE WINE THIEF

181 Crown St. // 5-8 p.m.

Free wine? Need we say more?

F R I D A YS E P T E M B E R 7

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:“Wuthering Heights” by Kate BushThis perennial British classic never got the play it deserved in American, but that’s okay because now we’re bringing you back to 1978/1848. Just try to get it out of your head after you’ve heard it once.

KA

HO

E &

MA

DIS

ON

THE WINTERLESS NEW HAVEN WAS NOT THE

CITY I HAD GROWN TO KNOW AND LOVE DUR-ING THE TRADITIONAL

SCHOOL YEAR

OK

LIP

KA

I THINK I WOULD BEST FILL THE ADMITTEDLY

GIGANTIC SHOES OF SOON-TO-BE-FORMER-PRESI-

DENT LEVIN

Y http://www.yale.edu/sis/ yale academic calendar

Apple Yahoo! Google Maps YouTube Wikipedia

Inbox (3,954) - University - CalendarClasses*v2: GatewayStudent Informati (27) Facebook Bluebook - Search Daily News - The YaleStation, the Y

“CARIS PEACE” AT ISEMAN THEATER

1156 Chapel St. // 5 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.

This documentary about an actress with a brain tumor might make you cry.


WEEKEND COVERYALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2012 · yaledailynews.com PAGE B3

s shopping period over yet? Nine classes are still hanging around on your OCS sched-

ule worksheet. Hitting the refresh button on your Gmail isn’t revealing anything about that wait-listed seminar. And on top of all this, someone may need to call a search and rescue unit to track down an advisor to sign your schedule, however hazy the final product may be.

Shopping period is about scheduling more than classes. There’s the attempt to get ahead on the reading — maybe — after you finally “get the meal” that never happened last semester. There are those tempting flyers advertising THIS COOL EVENT NOW, with pizza, and THAT THING LATER, free Ashley’s. All the world seems to be buzzing around the hot and hectic, aren’t-we-the-chummiest-group-of-them-all, battle royale of panlist sign-ups called the Extracurric-ular Bazaar. There, the count-less activities Yale boasted about during the admissions tour come back to haunt us, and hunt us out.

A new semester offers the chance to figure it out again. To

decide how much time you can devote to section, a

job, Bass, the treadmill, or analyzing your suit-emate’s new love inter-est. As Yale students try

to move the golden scales towards a healthy “work-

life” balance, we find ourselves in one of the most overloaded and tense times of the year.

Although each Yale stu-dent makes an individual choice when it comes to balancing life’s demands and desires, each choice is taking place within this prac-tice round for adulthood. What we learn here about work-life balance will be influential when the work portion comes, hope-fully, with a paycheck.

“WASTING TIME EVERY ONCE AND A

WHILE”In order to

talk about “work-

life”

balance, we must define it. The very term “work-life balance” implies that there is an inher-ent separation between what is “work” and what is “life.” An interpretation of the term “work-life” could be stretched to imply that when one is “working,” one is not quite “living.” Of course, in many cases, the same kind of pleasure experienced in the “life” end of the bargain can be drawn from activities categorized under “work.”

Issa Saunders ’15 wrote in an email, “I feel like at the moment my work and my life are inter-twined. I don’t think they oppose each in a way that would consti-tute a “balance.” I think Yalies do what they love and love what they do. At any given time, any one aspect of what we do can feel like “work” but I think overall we just enjoy our lives.”

In the same way that work can be fun, fun can become work. Jessica Lopez ’15 gave important advice that should be obvious, but often isn’t.

“You should pick extracur-riculars that are fun, because that’s the point,” she said. “At the same time, I wish I had more time hanging out and doing the social thing. But, I don’t want to just be sitting in my suite doing noth-ing.”

Lopez explained that when she became more involved in extra-curriculars the second semester of her freshman year, she became anxious that she would become stressed. Like many other stu-dents interviewed, she discov-ered that being busier made her more productive.

“I did better in my classes, and hung out more with my friends. When you need to get stu! done, you do it faster,” she said.

On the other hand, Lucia Huang ’14, President of the Women’s Leadership Initia-tive and Chief Marketing Offi-cer of Smart Woman Securities, explained that she has to allow herself to “waste time every once and a while.”

“For example, just last night I ended up having a two-hour conversation with my suitemates about life. Even though we all knew that we had readings and emails and problem sets to do, I think it was healthy for us to ‘waste’ time and just enjoy each other’s company.”

Students suggested that scheduling got easier as

they got older. Sath-ian said that she

has modified her priori-

ties as s h e

approached her senior year. “I think the biggest thing that I started doing is trying to just have unstructured time with friends. It is easy to schedule meal or cof-fee and it is harder when you don’t have an end time.”

WORKING HARD, PLAYING HARD

In a survey of over 500 under-graduates conducted for this arti-cle, an anonymous participant commented, “Shopping period is not a good time to ask people how anxious they feel about their schedules. It will not accurately reflect the normal stress levels of the student body.”

Jane Fisher ’14, a member of YaleDancers, a student employee at the Film Studies Center and a program assistant at the McDou-gal Center, spoke to this point. She said that planning rehears-als alongside class time and work shifts makes for one of the most di"cult parts of the semester.

Yet the survey results sug-gested a di!erent story. Only six percent of respondents said they felt “very anxious” about their daily schedules. About fifty per-cent responded that they were either “somewhat anxious,” with the rest feeling “neither anxious nor relaxed” to “very relaxed.” It seems like most students are somewhere in the middle of the road — certainly not lounging around, but also not terrified of the coming semester.

These responses make sense, given that participants’ evalu-ations of their own success in finding a work-life balance were generally positive. Additionally, most students indicated that they observed other Yalies in general to be “somewhat” to “very suc-cessful” in managing a work-life balance. Everyone’s got it figured out, almost.

These were the results from an anonymous survey. Many stu-dents interviewed expressed the opinion that they managed to set a healthy schedule, while they

felt the general population was overbooked.

“We certainly have a lot of over-

a c h i e v e r s here,” said

T e s s a

Berenson ’14, “I think I try to do a good job balancing fun and work. I know I need some time to relax and I think I do that better than the general campus. I still work like anyone else.”

Perhaps the discrepancy can be attributed to a knee-jerk reaction to the question of comparison. When asked in person, people immediately compared them-selves against the extreme cases, pointing to those who have prac-tically sold their souls to this very publication, or adversely a frat-star neighbor who only seems to leave FIFA for the occasional trip to Viva’s.

The survey suggests that stu-dents are aware that even in extreme cases everyone is navi-gating through what Bryan Epps ’14, events director for the Yale College Council, called Yale’s “work-hard play-hard environ-ment.”

“It’s easy to say, ‘Wow, that person really has it together.’ But,

you don’t know the methods people have for doing the things they do. My guess would be that everyone has an attempt at bal-ance and everyone does their own thing,” said Sanjena Sathian ‘13, former editor of the Yale Global-ist, “There is a huge chunk of time that you don’t see the people that go out every weekend. You don’t see the hours they spend study-ing at lunch, maybe at odd times during the week. We do not see this because it occurs in their pri-vate spaces.”

HIGHER STAKESWhen considering the culture

of “work-life” balance for Yale students, it is important to take into account the influence of the faculty’s example and Yale’s pol-icies on an administrative level. This is especially true when con-sidering questions of work-fam-ily.

Yale’s residential college sys-tem is unique in that some of our administrators, our masters and deans, live among us. Stu-dents become familiar with the sight of faculty’s children and grandchildren riding their tricy-cles in the courtyard or skipping through the dining hall. A master or dean’s professional and fam-ily lives are often fundamentally mixed given their living situation.

Many college websites proudly display photographs of the

deans’ and masters’ children. In most cases, children

are included in the long list of a mas-

ter or dean’s accolades.

BALANCING ACT// BY CAROLINE MCCULLOUGH

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:Michelle Obama’s ArmsShe’s smart and educated, a great mom, wife and advocate, and Monday’s speech proved she could be a politician herself. But let’s be honest: those bu! biceps are the real reason we tuned into the DNC.

I

EVERYONE’S GOT IT FIGURED OUT, ALMOST.

SEE BALANCING ACT PAGE B8

PAGE B4 YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND ARTS

Even after the Rep. Todd Akins debacle, I wasn’t too embarrassed to call myself a pro-lifer. A safe pro-lifer; “I don’t believe in abortion except if it’ll harm the mother.” Okay, that may not be accurate. What about rape, illegitimate or not legitimate? How trustworthy were adoptions and foster care? And what about mothers who, if they did have the child, would make Joan Crawford look like June Cleaver?

Last Sunday, Choose Life at Yale, a pro-life undergradu-ate organization, held a screen-ing of “Bella,” a film that fol-lows a young pregnant woman’s blooming friendship with a brooding young man. The freshmen and their lanyards didn’t pour in as I thought they would. Oh well. Perhaps the digital images would solidify my pro-life stance, I thought. Or not.

The CLAY members stayed close together in that semi-nar room, chatting enthusi-astically about the new school year and the new “converts” it would bring. It’s a shame that the safety buttons, kettle pop-corn and polite conversation had to bookend “Bella.” The food and talk were more con-vincing recruitment tools than the film.

The film opens with a brood-ing Jose (Eduardo Veráste-gui) surveying a little girl play-ing on a beach. His heavy beard announces that he is a man with a dark secret. A single accident has halted his soccer career. Now he works as a chef at his brother Manny’s (Manny Perez) restaurant. Nina (Tammy Blanchard), a nervous wait-

ress at the same restaurant, has an unplanned pregnancy and no support network. The film explores a single day in both of their lives as their paths inter-sect.

In a little over 24 hours, Manny fires Nina after her morning sickness makes her late one too many times, Jose gets himself fired by chasing after her for an unexplained rea-son, they ride around, they’re accepted into another job but don’t work there, Nina breaks down in an abortion clinic, they visit Jose’s family, Jose con-fesses his past tragedy, and Nina decides that she should give her unborn child to Jose. Mel-low guitars and wispy vocals accompany this drama. Hap-pily ever after, ignore the mess. With such an over-stu!ng of events for two main characters who barely know each other, the film should move quickly.

But Jose and Nina are the protagonists.

Jose’s tragic beard and reck-less kindness complement Nina’s lonely dilemma and ultimate transformation only to relay the thin message and nothing more. The support-ing cast comforts, yells or jokes when required.

The characters talk, but the camera wants to watch people frowning on a train, or cement trucks churning, or skyscrapers rising. Director Alejandro Mon-teverde isn’t discovering any-thing new about New York City here. But when he and writers Patrick Million and Leo Sever-ino capture snippets from His-panic life in the City, the film obtains an additional dimen-sion — only to flatten it. Manny takes advantage of undocu-mented Hispanic immigrants. Jose, a man from a close-knit Mexican family who still knows the language, doesn’t want

Nina, who is far removed from her roots, to get an abortion. So, would a closer cultural connec-tion curtail the high abortion rate among Hispanic women? I don’t know if the film has dived that deeply.

The film did elicit good dis-cussion from CLAY. One fresh-man relayed her own account of her experience as an adopted child. With a tale involving real parents taking financial advan-tage of good, adoptive parents, it was clear that “Bella” had simplified a tricky matter. Mov-ies are streamlined and stylized versions of our lives, but they don’t have to turn into fairy tales.

As I watched the film and talked to members of CLAY, I couldn’t help but wonder: where did God go in a discussion that — like some other issues in America (the death penalty, gay and lesbian rights, gender equality, etc.) — has some foot-ing in religion? CLAY is irreli-gious in order to avoid internal conflict and, as CLAY president Travis Heine ‘14 said, to better “spread pro-life ideologies to convert others.” The organiza-tion provides emotional support to pregnant women and main-tains a network with a variety of pregnancy centers (such as Sisters of Life) while being sure, as Heine clarified, “to avoid the moral high ground.”

Kelly Schumann ‘15, a mem-ber of CLAY, placed “Bella” within the tradition of its genre like this: “Some of these mes-sage films are hokey. But this one was nice.” Yes, nice. As if to say, something bland yet inof-fensive.

Contact PATRICE BOWMAN at [email protected] .

// CREATIVE COMMONS

‘Bella,’ shown by CLAY.

There’s a lot to love about “Robot & Frank.” Maybe a little bit too much to love.

The new indie flick takes place sometime in the near future, in a time when robot butlers abound, to much reverie by the younger generation. Unfortunately, the protagonist is an aged, forgetful, lonely man named Frank (Frank Langella). He’s gifted a robot — programmed to maintain the old man’s health — by his son Hunter (James Marsden), who is tired of the responsibility of looking after Pop.

The premise of the movie makes the plot seem deceptively simple. Robot and Frank get o" to a rocky start, but slowly warm up to each other, their relation-ship lending itself to questions of where humans can find unlikely friendships and what it means to be emotional versus mechanical.

Frank’s daughter Madison (Liv Tyler) takes a stance against the use of robots as slaves, bring-ing politics into the mix. On top of that, Frank is a divorced ex-convict and has tense relation-ships with both of his children, calling for some exploration of familial bond and obligation. As Frank and Robot begin planning robberies, justified as mecha-nisms of mental stimulation, the film touches upon treatment for dementia in the elderly and the often blurry line between delu-sion and reality for patients suf-fering memory loss.

To some, such interwoven complexities might seem appeal-ing. After all, the storyline o"ers something for everyone, whether it be futurism, controversial technologies, the emotional

strife of estranged family mem-bers or the ethics associated with dementia. For me, the e"ect was more disappointing. I felt over-loaded by overlapping themes. I walked out of the theater con-fused as to the film’s intent and what I should have taken from it.

There’s undoubtedly plenty of thought-provoking material to indulge in, but it’s almost too much.

“Robot & Frank” su"ers from being stretched too thin. It tries too hard to be interesting and complicated, instead coming across as overwhelming for the casual movie-goer.

Still, I can’t call it a bad movie, because it’s far from unentertain-ing or tedious. I meant it when I said there’s a lot about this film to really love.

It showcases some brilliant first-time film writing by Chris-topher D. Ford, who has paired the emotional themes of family, identity and aging with an unex-pected flair for dry humor in the characters’ dialogue. The robots respond to questions like “How are you doing?” with answers like “I’m functioning normally,” and these moments are reason enough to sit through 90 minutes of winding plot.

The movie also boasts a stellar performance by Frank Langella, who plays his role with a subtlety that cannot go unappreciated. He curses with masterful comedic timing, displays the rugged exte-rior of a man obdurate in preserv-

ing dignity and independence and assumes the nuanced expres-sions of a confused elderly man. He does this all in proper balance to make his character incredibly likeable and sympathetic.

I could go on naming the vari-ous merits of this indie flick. For one, it’s an indie flick. It presents a certain enjoyable whimsicality. It has James Marsden. It’s rela-tively fast-paced, avoiding the overly drawn-out, cheesy ending scenes. It features some adorable old-age flirting between Frank and local librarian Jennifer (Susan Sarandon).

It is with good reason that “Robot & Frank” is a Sundance prizewinner. It truly is a beau-tifully executed movie with remarkable cast performances — a worthy watch for anyone nor-mally excited by the genre.

Of course I could have done without quite so many clashing themes. Madison is a particularly futile character, and less of her political mumbo-jumbo would have probably improved the film as a whole, if only by eradicating one confusing, unnecessary side story. But I’ll still maintain that on the whole, Robot, Frank and “Robot & Frank” are all pretty lovable.

Contact PAYAL MARATHE at [email protected] .

// CREATIVE COMMONS

Robot & Frank is playing at the Criterion.

F R I DAYS E P T E M B E R 7

UNDERBROOK COFFEEHOUSE PRESENTS: PLUME GIANT ALBUM

RELEASE SHOWSaybrook Underbrook Theater // 7 p.m.

Yale’s folky favorites come back to rock the Underbrook with a few new tunes.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:Not taking “Introduction to Congress” at HarvardWhen 50 percent of a class is caught cheating, you know someone has some REAL problems to sort out.

CHOOSING LIFE, BUT WITHOUT THE SPARK// BY PATRICE BOWMAN

‘Robot,’ endearing, frankly a bit much// BY PAYAL MARATHE

WEEKEND UNITES

WOMEN’S CENTER GAME NIGHTThe Women’s Center // 8 p.m.

Go play games with our favorite femi-nists!


YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2012 · yaledailynews.com PAGE B5

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:The library’s new Scan and Deliver serviceIt’s too soon to tell if this will actually be useful, but it’s so fun to sing to the tune of “Signed, Sealed, Delivered.” Scan and Deliver, we’re yours.

In the declining light of this past Monday evening, standing in a semi-circle in front of the war memorial at Beinecke Plaza, approximately 50 students were — they recited each in turn — pissed o!.

“At Yale, in America, in society in general, social concerns are increas-ingly subordinate to economic con-cerns … The way the University treats its workers and its city … The Global Left’s inability to mobilize around concrete and tangible goals … The CEO of Pepsi will choose [Yale’s] next president … I ran out of bread this morning.”

The grievances voiced ran the gamut: international, local, domes-tic; psychological, linguistic, desire-based. “I’m pissed o! that I find it so hard to talk about why I’m pissed o!,” one person present self-critiqued. “I’m pissed o!, and I’d like to change that,” another said.

The improvised meeting, called by a non-hierarchical, consensus-based progressive working group calling itself “The Y Syndicate,” had begun with contradictions.

“Everyone go around and say your name.” “No, everyone, say your names all at once.” “Say your name, and one reason you’re pissed o!,” the conclusion was reached, sparking the above litany, as well as other claims. (“Ninety percent of campus pub-lications are fascist,” was followed by both laughter and nods of agree-

ment.)The Syndicate has yet to hold an

official organizational meeting (it will today, Friday, September 7th, at 4 p.m. at the war memorial), and so a"liated individuals have so far declined to speak to the press on the record.

But this relatively anonymous col-lective is only one example of activ-ist efforts currently taking place at Yale and within the city of New Haven, and these somewhat frag-mented groups are increasingly com-ing together to form a more organized and inclusive network.

This coming Monday, an “Activ-ist Bazaar” will be held on Cross Campus, attended by organiza-tions including Students Unite Now, the People’s Arts Collective of New Haven, People Against Police Bru-tality, the Yale Student Environ-mental Coalition and Broad Recog-nition. Organizing material for the event calls attention to a distinc-tion between activism and commu-nity service, in that activism seeks to change the current “social or politi-cal state of a!airs” in a way that com-munity service, while important and valuable in its own right, may not.

Though the Syndicate hasn’t explicitly laid out an agenda for the near future, people present at the event have independently described interests in a set of progressive causes that range in urgency. Among these are multiple concerns with the cur-rent methodology of choosing the next president of Yale and versions of disquiet about the university’s pres-ence in Singapore. Individuals pres-ent also spoke of a general dissatis-faction with existing platforms for students (such as the Political Union, the Class Council, community ser-vice opportunities and involvement in national political parties), because, in their views, these institutions do not themselves challenge or disrupt existing hierarchies and structural problems currently in place.

ON JARGONThis article quotes no one individ-

ually by name. In doing so, it seeks to respect certain qualities of the still-amorphous, nascent organization it describes.

I attended the first Syndicate meeting primarily as a sympathetic and curious participant, so this arti-cle necessarily contains value judg-ments and a subjective viewpoint. Also a fair amount of jargon. Sorry about that.

ON THE PLACEIn June of 1989, a Yale alumnus,

visiting campus for an alumni week-end, set fire to a makeshift shanty-town, which had been enacted in front of the war memorial in protest of Yale’s refusal to divest from com-panies in apartheid South Africa.

According to an AP article about the event, the man, a doctor from West Palm Beach, “was apprehended blocks away by another alumnus who said he was jogging when he saw [the man,] dressed in a suit and tie, fleeing the burning shanties.”

The arsonist, a Vietnam veteran, said he started the blaze because of the shanties’ proximity to the war memorial. An intrinsically charged location, the site was also once the locus of draft-card burnings during the Vietnam War. The Syndicate used one photograph from another rally in its first email to potentially interested students.

On Tuesday, when former Repub-lican Pennsylvania senator and 2012 presidential candidate Rick Santo-rum spoke in Woolsey Hall, a group of twenty to forty students handed out flyers and staged a walkout, an act partially conceived at the Syndicate’s first assembly this past Monday.

And just a couple of weeks ago, Yale welcomed 21 students who will be participating in the newly-returned

ROTC program with an instantly-iconic photograph in Woolsey Hall, adjacent to the memorial.

The space immediately invites students into an existing historical narrative of participation in and pro-test against military and other insti-tutions. The stone itself is dedicated to the memory of men who “gave their lives that freedom might not perish from the earth,” but the events that have taken place surrounding the cenotaph complicate its physical message.

ON THE (YALE) PRESIDENCYIn the past thirty-odd years, Yale

students have also staged protests against for-profit prisons, employers that violate workers’ rights, changes in financial aid structure, police bru-tality in New Haven, Yale’s refusal to recognize a graduate student union and a culture, both on campus and more broadly, that leads roughly 25 percent of students who graduate with jobs to join the ranks of consult-ing and I-banking firms.

Some present at the Syndicate’s first meeting stated that they see the search for Yale’s next president as a particular energizing moment, an event that can help focus some of the organizing e!orts of various activist groups and call attention the Univer-sity’s priorities.

ONE PRESIDENT PASTIn the spring of 1970, then-Univer-

sity President Kingman Brewster ’41 oversaw a faculty meeting concerning student protests related to the trials of members of the Black Panthers. For the rest of the semester, class atten-dance was voluntary.

Brewster served as president from 1963 to 1977, and in May of 1972, when Richard Nixon’s Secretary of State William Rogers was invited to speak at the YPU, Brewster published a statement on the front page of the News saying that he would under-stand and “expect” demonstration and picketing. He urged students who opposed the government’s policy to wear black armbands.

Among his other quotations, both obtuse and pithy, are, “Universities should be safe havens where ruth-less examination of realities will not be distorted by the aim to please or inhibited by the risk of displeasure,” and “incomprehensible jargon is the hallmark of a profession.” Make of these what you will.

Contact CORA LEWIS at [email protected] .

STUDENT ACTIVIST GROUPS PLAN BAZAAR// BY CORA LEWIS

// SYN

The war memorial in Beinecke Plaza has previously been the site of a variety of protests.

‘WE ALL LIVE IN A TELEVISED GOLD-

FISH BOWL’

KINGMAN BREWSTER, JR. FORMER PRESIDENT OF YALE

// TIME

“BACK TO THE FUTURE” SCREENING

Whitney Humanities Center // 7 p.m.

The Yale Film Society brings this 1985 classic into the future via playing it in the future.

S A T U R D A YS E P T E M B E R 8

CONNECTICUT FOLK FESTIVAL AND GREEN EXPO

Edgerton Park // 11 a.m. to 11 p.m.

Free food, lots of art and a venture to a park far away from campus? Count us in.


WEEKEND SAFEPLACEYALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2012 · yaledailynews.com PAGE B7PAGE B6 YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEM BER 7, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

My favorite place at Yale can now only be accessed through memory, so pardon me if I romanticize it. If only I were a peer liaison or a froco, I could go back and see how it has changed. But alas, the swipe-access doors of Durfee are closed to me forever.

My freshman-year double in Durfee was overwhelmingly purple and teal. Purple because I had decided in second grade that that was slightly girlier than blue and slightly less girly than pink and so should be my choice for favorite color. Teal because everything at Pottery Barn is teal. The yellow Target poster of Dwight Schrute’s life-size head and his top seven best quotes on “The O!ce” clashed with those colors but it was too important to me to not put up.

That purple and teal bed shoved into the corner between my wall and my desk supported my ever-so-slight heartache at realizing that life as I had known it ended when my parents left me to my own devices the Sunday of Move-In Week-

end. The first fact I knew concretely was that the goodbyes to home — those done in person, over the phone, and over Skype on my padded mattress — would only get more frequent from here on out. Life was changing from a staid, square existence as a “student” and “daughter” into a turbu-lent rollercoaster ride as a “more special-ized student,” “confidante,” “roommate” and other new identities. In that room, my world turned into a mess of sticky floors, diminished privacy, and ear-shattering bass radiating at an impressively constant rate through the ceiling from the suite above.

But it also turned into much, much more. On my roommate’s side was a win-dowsill big enough for one person to sit on. The window had no screens, so on particularly warm fall days, I would sit on that sill, open the window and breathe in the fresh air. It felt so much more precious all the way up on the fourth floor. Below me a scene straight out of Yale’s viewbook would be playing out: happy gaggles of

freshmen playing Frisbee, sitting under trees, reading on picnic blankets, talking on benches — all as the New Haven sun cast a brilliant autumn glow on the var-iegated leaves speckling the still (mirac-ulously) green grass. It sounds Arcadian, but anyone who has experienced fresh-man fall on Old Campus knows that this description is not too romanticized. The scene inspired me with hope — hope that, although my four-cornered world was changing in new ways, it would someday settle as a mature entity I could be pleased with. In other words, it struck me that it might all work out just fine.

My dad liked to call my side of the room my “little corner of the world.” That’s what it was, but, two years later, I under-stand that it was also my little entrance into a new world, a world at times daunt-ing and at times exhilarating but always, always something worthwhile.

Contact ARIELLE STAMBLER at [email protected] .

My little corner of the world// BY ARIELLE STAMBLER

It was a night in late spring, just at the end of exam period, when my friend Car-oline and I bought takeout from Gheav and ate it on the Women’s Table. We sat on the small ledge where the sphere of the fountain meets the dry hardness of the black platform. We had ventured to East Rock earlier that day, gotten lost, and found a small cabin in the woods where an old woman kept a vegetable garden and three large dogs. As we ate, we com-mented on how nice the crisp evening air felt against our sunned skin, how strange it was that freshman year was over, how beautiful the reflection of Sterling Library looked on the table.

When architect Maya Lin arrived at Yale as an undergraduate in 1977, she was a part of the University’s ninth class of women. And while the ethnic and sex-ual makeup of the faculty was changing by the 1980s, I can only imagine the fears and uncertainties Lin su"ered alongside her female classmates, whose presence at the institution had been unwelcome a mere decade earlier. The women I’ve

met here are equal parts intelligent and audacious, and it chills me to think that there was a time when the administration believed otherwise. That’s why Lin later designed the Women’s Table, I guess — to remind us that injustices linger not too far behind.

I don’t remember everything that Car-oline and I talked about that night, but I do remember feeling content. There were no more final exams and papers to worry about, and the summer loomed joyously: four months seemed to me then an end-less span of time. Time to read all of the books I hadn’t touched during the school year, time to reacquaint myself with childhood friends, and time to think.

The act of thinking wasn’t what the women before me were denied from, but rather everything that it should entail. They didn’t have a forum in which to share their thoughts, and what are thoughts if they are not heard and enriched by others? My English profes-sor, Margaret Homans, told the News that she recalls being one of three women in a

seminar filled with “ferocious” boys. “It was still the era of the ‘1,000 male lead-ers,’” she said, “and at that time I did not have a feminine vocabulary to express my unease.”

Now Professor Homans teaches “Fem-inist and Queer Theory,” a testament to just how far we have come and how far we have yet to go.

One of the first nights of this semester, my friends and I wandered our way to the Women’s Table. We had come from one of those joint-suite birthday parties where there is little room to breathe, let alone to dance. Cross Campus seemed a far better alternative, with its couples too engrossed in one another to notice that there were three sophomores blasting Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” from their iPhones. We danced, and while we danced, we stepped on all the zeroes that circled the edge of the table, on all the severe, old men who had once told us “no.”

Contact YANAN WANG at [email protected] .

Dancing at the Women’s Table// BY YANAN WANG

In the thick of exams to take and papers to write and friends to see and emails to send, a spe-cial place to go and unwind can be a valuable thing. When my friends and I talk about the places we go to find peace on campus, I hear of mystical places. Of hid-den libraries that require lock picks to access, of candlelit med-itation sessions in Battell Chapel and of rooftops with nighttime views of New Haven. When it is my turn to share my place to seek calm, I falter. Sadly, mine is about as unglamorous as it gets — the family bathroom in the basement of Calhoun College.

Do not get me wrong — the beauty of Yale’s campus has not been wasted on me. I recognize the architectural beauty around me as well as anyone else, but this bathroom still has a spe-cial place in my heart. During my very first midterm season as a college freshman, this bath-

room was where I sought solace during my very first midterm-induced stroke of panic. It is pri-vate, it is roomy. There is a mir-ror that you can stare into as you chant words of encouragement to yourself (or as you scold your-self for not dropping that math class). There is a sink with a fau-cet, perfect if you are one of those people who finds the sound of running water comforting. The temporary lack of phone recep-tion will block the temptation to check your ever-growing amount of new text messages and emails. The fact that it is a family bath-room means you don’t have to worry about people coming in to wash their hands and then won-dering what you are doing. Yes, the wallpaper in the basement is orange, but the lighting is pleas-ant and there is plenty of room to pace. Best of all, the tra!c to use this bathroom is pretty light, so it is usually available in my hours

of need (here is where some-one could make a joke out of the saying “When you gotta go, you gotta go,” but I’ll refrain). Hope-fully this state is not jeopardized by my disclosing of this informa-tion.

But chances are, the bathroom will remain vacant. The beauty of these Quiet Zones is that they are individualized to the user. Be it a particular desk in the Sterling stacks or the family bathroom in a college basement, the place’s familiarity is what is comfort-ing. Arriving at a new place and experiencing its new set of sights, sounds, and stimulations, a rou-tine or just something constant can be a reminder that not all will be swept up in turbulence. And it just so happened that, for me, this is a 7’ x 4’ room with a toilet and a sink.

Contact JOY SHAN at [email protected] .

Solace in a bathroom // BY JOY SHAN

When I tell my friends about the hedge maze behind the School of Management, they imagine an English garden trimmed by a fastidious maintenance crew year round. Instead, they find a short, scraggy arrangement of shrubs. The hedge maze attached to Skinner House (now the International Center for Finance) is not even a proper hedge maze. It is a “knot garden,” a diminutive cousin. The shrub-bery, no more than two feet tall, form two squares one inside another. A circu-lar patch of grass forms the knot garden’s center. Not exactly the most impressive hedge display.

But to me, just a summer ago, the knot garden seemed perfect. After work-ing five-hour shifts scanning books in a dingy corner of Rosenkranz Hall, I would nap in the knot garden. The grass beneath me felt like a wool blanket, warm and scratchy. As I watched the clouds above, I imagined that’s what Tom Saw-yer or Alice’s imaginary universe are like: a time and place outside of adult respon-sibilities and concerns. Or I imagined it was like Rupert Brooke’s Grantchester

Meadow, where one, “flower-lulled in sleepy grass,” can “Hear the cool lapse of housrs pass, / Until the centuries blend and blur.” In the knot garden, I felt a con-tentment I had never enjoyed at Yale before.

Then school began. Although I tried to nap or read in the knot garden between classes, the place lost its appeal. (Maybe it was the quizzical stares from SOM students who passed by.) When sum-mer turned into autumn, the grass, shrubbery, and flowers yellowed. I put on a jacket and hurried back to my dorm room immediately after each class. Fall-ing leaves buried the knot garden; home-work buried me. Spring brought a scat-tering of wildflowers to the knot garden. For a while, I continued my summer-time ritual of napping there on after-noons. Blowing on dandelions, I’d day-dream about the short stories I planned to write. Then one week in late April, three full days of rain turned the knot garden into a trench. Bits of dead dande-lions protrudes from the mud and grass like skeleton fingers. I turned away in

disgust. Nothing seems perfect at Yale, even

my favorite place on campus. Over the summer, while studying abroad at Cam-bridge University, I read the poetry of the WWI poets for my history class. While I wanted to enjoy Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sasson, again and again, I returned to Brooke. Brooke’s England was “Washed by rivers, blest by suns of home” — a paradise worthy of young men spilling their blood in foreign fields. But he died of an infection in 1915 on his way to the Gallipoli Campaign, without witnessing the horrors of Anzac Cove. I envy Brooke for his unwavering love for a place because I never can. Because we, our generation — cynical and lost and anxious — can never say “For Country, For Country, For Yale” with full convic-tion nor enjoy our bright college years without thinking about the uncertain future ahead.

Contact BAOBAO ZHANG at [email protected] .

Imperfection in a knot garden// BY BAOBAO ZHANG

“What house is this?” he asked me.

“What do you mean?”“What group lives here? An

improv troupe? Crew team?”I am confused. Why should a

place have a name, an identity? Why not just an address? 37 Lyn-wood Place. 37 for short.

Six housemates, six bedrooms, four floors, two kitchens, one living room, one basement. A dwelling of happenings. A veri-table mice problem. A decoration project in progress. A landlord from hell (lookin’ at you, Pike International). All in all, a home. My home. Our home.

Located on the first floor, my room enjoys its own bathroom and gargantuan closet. I moved in this semester after return-ing from a gap year, and I still need to buy my posters, put up the usual tchotchkes, paint the room “Sparrow” — that’s lingo for light grey. The place is chaos, for now. Two di"erent colors of fitted sheets currently cover the queen size bed. I need to Swi"er at some point. Despite its ragtag state, the space is perfect. It is my

own, it belongs to me. My library weenie bin, my bunker, my haven in New Haven.

Then I can step outside, out to partake in our Wednesday night traditions, or to talk about the origin of language with Max, or to dice the potatoes for fam-ily dinner. We chew the fat, we dance, we mix cocktails, we joke about poop. We make plans that are carried out — trips to Trader Joe’s! — or that never come to fruition — still waiting for that Aaliyah shrine. No worries though: at least for this month, our patron saint is Kate Bush.

Perhaps we do have a shared singularity, a common denom-inator. For starters, the same roof. A fondness for Wine, Wen-zels and Words. An aversion to tufthunters. A fascination with “Hoarders.” A love of porch stooping. 37 is a metonym, and the answer to the original ques-tion.

“Oh. Um, it’s 37 Lynwood. It’s the friends’ house!”

Contact JORDI GASSÓ at [email protected] .

Thirty-seven// BY JORDI GASSÓ

The importance of pathways// BY AMANDA SHADIACK

I always leave my room exactly two minutes later than I should, no matter where I’m going. It’s fine, I reason, since I really do walk quite quickly. I can finish this episode of Modern Fam-ily. I can skim the last six pages of my reading.

They used to be the objects of my loathing, the pathways here. The uneven flagstone alleys and the stained sidewalks tripped me up and kept me from getting from one monumentally important place to another. I’m a busy lady. (Kind of.) I have things to do. (Kind of.)

You might have tried to convince me that the scenery made those rushed, tedious walks worth it, or maybe you would have argued that what matters is the journey, not the destination. I would have sco"ed discourteously.

But last week, I reevaluated why I despised these pathways so much.

For the first time in a long time, I gave myself adequate time to get from the fifth floor of Dav-enport to the second floor of WLH: I set out at 8:45 a.m. for a 9 a.m. seminar. Maybe the set-ting of my epiphany could have been more pic-turesque than trying to dodge a courier van as I jaywalked across Elm Street and skirting a group of tourists outside of Sterling. Mornings in New Haven are busy, I thought absently, dipping my fingers past the water’s surface on the Women’s Table. But my sleep-addled brain didn’t have much of a place to go from there.

Awkwardly, I lunged down the lengths of the dreadfully spaced steps to Cross Campus, and that was when the doubts crept in.

Because I had left ten minutes early, because I wasn’t rushing somewhere, because the too-long or too-short steps (I can never figure out which it is) forced me to slow down, the normal frantic thoughts assessing where I’d just been and antic-ipating where I was going were absent. Without those clogging up the works, I was at the mercy of my masochistic subconscious, which took the opportunity to remind me of my every insecurity and confusion. I took a shallow breath and tried to keep the questions nagging at my every word and deed at bay.

In that moment I was finally aware of why I spent so much time running on and away from the paths and sidewalks of Yale. Being in transit and being without consuming thoughts of what happened back there and how late I’m going to be getting here allow me the chance to second-guess myself, and I’m terrified of those moments and terrified of maybe, possibly coming to the conclusion that I’ve been wrong about this, that, everything.

But when I felt myself breathing easier a moment later, having dispelled all of the vague and the specific doubts, I think I knew the impor-tance of that chance for introspection. We all work really hard around here to make it seem like we know what we’re doing and where we’re going.

Maybe I need those pathways and those min-utes of just being in transit to embrace and decode those doubts, and really make sure I’m going the right way. (I’ll still probably leave two minutes too late, anyway.)

Contact AMANDA SHADIACK at [email protected] .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:Weed’s Cafe on Dixwell Ave.We swear this is a real place.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:Knowing that you ain’t too proud to begIt’s the second week of shopping period, and you’re getting desperate. Dispense of whatever self-respect you once had and get into that class, whatever means necessary.

MY FAVORITE PLACE AT YALE IS...

// ANNELISA LEINBACH

The Lipstick. Cross Campus. Branford Courtyard. Bass (JK). Some are obvious, others less so. The fol-lowing WKNDers reveal the places at Yale that have

challenged them, comforted them and made them feel at home.

http://yaledailynews.com

http://yaledailynews.com

mailto:[email protected]






PUB NIGHT AT GPSCY204 York St. // 8 p.m. to 2 a.m.

Who cares that you’re not a grad stu-dent? GPSCY is poppin’ this year.


WEEKEND COVERPAGE B8 YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:Trying out for improv, even if you’re not funnyWe’d like to bet that the awful auditions are wayyy more memorable than the good ones.

BALANCING ACT FROM PAGE B3

WORKING, LIVING, ETC.“Things work best when [work

and life] are as seamless as possi-ble. For instance, we love to share the joy of our grandchildren with the Silliman community,” Master Judith Krauss wrote in an email. “Many students know the chil-dren by name and will stop by to play with them in the courtyard. Some students know that I’ve been struggling to help my aging mother adjust to a new living sit-uation. I think students appreci-ate seeing me and my husband as real people, embedded in multi-ple communities, and working to balance it all.”

Facilitating the families of its employees is a Yale administra-tive priority. In both 2010 and 2011, Working Mother magazine named Yale as one of the “100 Best Companies” in the nation. Working Mother praised Yale for its employee benefits and aspects of Yale’s Worklife Pro-gram. Worklife, a program run by the Department of Human Resources, exists to “help fac-ulty and sta! to balance the mul-tiple responsibilities associated with work, academic, and per-sonal life,” according to the pro-gram’s website. Worklife offers classes ranging from Yoga classes to parents’ reviews of New Haven schools.

“As a professor in public health, I have found Yale’s poli-cies to be supportive of work-life balance,” Branford’s Master Eliz-abeth Bradley wrote in an email. “I have had wonderful depart-ment heads and deans, who have allowed flexibility in my face-time hours and in total hours at di!erent times of my career.”

“When I had small chil-dren, I remember that reduc-ing the number of days I worked was completely acceptable, and when I wanted to leave at 3 p.m. to pick up the kids at school, no one blinked an eye. The registrar even rescheduled my teaching, so it would occur all on a couple of days when I had family to watch the kids.”

Crystal Feimster, the mother of two sons and director of under-graduate studies for the Afri-can American Studies Depart-ment, has also had a positive experience as a working mother on the Yale faculty. She said that although balancing her fam-ily and her career can be a chal-lenge, she is lucky that her hus-band is committed to equal care. Her husband, Daniel Botsman, is a professor in the Department of History and chair of the Council of East Asian Studies.

She explained that as a team, the two are committed to at least one parent being home by mid-afternoon to pick their son up from school. Therefore, they try to schedule classes, meet-ings with students, and faculty meetings in the mornings. They

also make sure that they teach on alternating days.

“That way, one of us is not going to have to cancel class to take to our son to the doctors. You can’t really do that with other professions. A doctor or a lawyer can’t just be on call Tuesdays and Thursdays. Our situation is really ideal in some ways, [for] a two career family.”

Professors Feimster and Bots-man once taught in the same department at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. There, faculty meetings were held in the afternoons and conse-quently, she and her husband had to make clear to the department chair that they would take turns missing meetings. Professor Feimster pointed out that faculty meetings in the African American Studies Department and the Pro-gram in American Studies at Yale are around noon or lunchtime to accommodate for family life.

“Every week we look at the schedule and if there are more than two days in the week that the nanny has to stay until five, then we make di!erent choices. Sometimes I miss dinners with my colleagues. But, sometimes it’s nice to just be home with my kids. I like to be able to give my kids a bath and put them to bed,” Feimster said.

Feimster said that over the past

decade, universities in general have become better about paren-tal leave, especially the inclusion of paternity leave. For example, Professor Tamar Szabo Gendler, chair of the Philosophy Depart-ment, said that when her now 15-year-old son was born, she did not get parental leave from her job at Syracuse University. She said that she has observed relatively flexible parental leave policies at Yale. She attributed the di!erence not to the schools policies per se, but to a change in attitudes over time.

Like Professor Feimster, Pro-fessor Gendler’s husband is also a professor at Yale. The two work hard to coordinate schedules for their children. Now that her chil-dren are older, Professor Gendler says they spend time on Yale’s campus. She said she has tried to create an atmosphere within the Department of Philosophy that simultaneously remains pro-fessional and allows for gradu-ate students or professors to feel comfortable bringing their chil-dren if it makes them more able to participate.

Both Feimster and Gendler pointed out that professors don’t just have to juggle their work and family life. Many fac-ulty members have dif-ferent demands, such as caring for aging parents o r

other commitments within the community.

“Academics can be worka-holics,” Feimster said. “For me, work-life balance is about fam-ily. Not everyone has a family, but that doesn’t mean that one should be working 24 hours a day. Work-life balance is not just family-centered but can center around creating a healthy life.”

Students interviewed generally said they were not having conver-sations about work-life balance with their professors, but had positive responses to professors who opened up the “life” side to their students.

Liana Epstein ’14, on the var-sity women’s cross country team, wrote in an email, “I think the best professors I’ve had are not those that just talk about their research and are excited about their “work” in isolation … The strict academics who one might assume spend little time with their families, pursuing hobbies, or relaxing, are undoubtedly bril-liant, but less successful at invig-orating their pupils.”

“The most important lesson is probably that things are rarely “in balance” and we all need to learn to set priorities and make adjust-ments,” Master Krauss wrote. “We also need to take time for ourselves doing whatever brings pleasure and stress reduction… The hope is that students see us living our lives and take some-thing from that.”

LOOKING TO THE FUTUREThis summer, Anne-Marie

Slaughter, a professor at Prince-ton and a former Obama admin-istration official, wrote “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” an essay in The Atlantic that saw much buzz across the Internet. Drawing much controversy, she argued that society’s structure makes it impossible to be doting mothers and top professionals simultaneously.

Raising children is an unthinkable responsibility com-pared to the varied commitments of the average Yale student. Yet Slaughter’s article brings up interesting questions about how much one can handle, even with smaller stakes.

“I think Yale is preparing me really well to deal with the stresses of the real world,” Beren-son said, “Here we get to try it out and try out own organizational habits, and with relatively little pressure.”

“I think college is where we learn a lot of the extremes of our personality because we are in extreme conditions,” Sathian said, “If I’m ever in a career that is really high paced, it is good to know that I can still have friends and be mentally and physically healthy in as an intense environ-ment as school.”

Caroline Smith ’14, Junior Class Council President, said she believes that the kind of blend between work and play that hap-pens on campus is also happen-ing within careers. “We seem to be moving into a culture where what we do with our careers is funda-mentally in line with what we believe in a n d

what we love,” she wrote in an email

Alex Ratner ’14, who sings in the Duke’s Men, wrote of a sim-ilar hope. “I think that for the immediate future, as well as in my 20s, the ‘life’ that I’m experi-encing at Yale in terms of theater/music will (hopefully) become my ‘work,’ and so ideally I won’t feel too much of a separation between ‘work’ and ‘life’ down the road. I don’t anticipate having to choose between a career and a family — I want both.”

Although a vast majority of students surveyed demonstrated that “work-life” balance would be very important to future pro-fessional lives, the survey shows that most students “somewhat anticipate” having a job that will make it di"cult to fulfill personal and familial commitments.

However, when asked directly in interviews about the possi-bility of managing a family and professional life, students often responded that they had not con-sidered these questions yet.

“I haven’t thought much about a family life. Part of being college age is being very selfish, so it’s not something I have started to con-sider,” Epps said.

“It is hard to picture because I can’t see myself with a fam-ily because I am so young. It is so hard to choose a hypotheti-cal family over all the things you want to do,” Lopez said.

The fact that both males and females are not extremely wor-ried about the work-family bal-ance indicates a fairly recent change. In 2006, a controver-sial story ran in the New York Times, largely based on the author’s assertion that many young women in the Ivy League anticipated leaving a career to become mothers. In response, Christine Slaughter and Tina Wu wrote a piece for the YDN titled “Kids, career trade-o! remains a hot topic.” They wrote that the Yale Undergraduate Work-Life Balance Survey had found that “no difference was found in the degree to which male ver-sus female undergraduates value both family and career.”

Today, the recent survey leads to similar conclusions. How-ever, the topic of family-work life balance has seemed to cool o!, a problem looming in a far o! future.

Daryl Hok ’14 said that when he starts a family depends on the demands of his career. “If I don’t have time for the family, then I wouldn’t start a family.”

“I do foresee that choice in the very distant future. Even though women have made great strides in the workforce, I think the career versus family struggle still exists,” Lucia Huang wrote in an email. “I tell myself that if I work hard enough now and make the right

career choices, that when the time comes for a family, I’ll be in a career where I’m in the position to have some flexibility with my schedule for my family and that I’m in a work environment that supports that.”

Many students said that their ideas about their future options are often based on the examples of their own parents.

“I definitely anticipate choices. The biggest example I have is from my own life. My mom put her career as a professor on hold when she had me. Now she is up for tenure. If she had stayed full-time, she would have already gone through the process a long time ago,” Fisher said. “Having babies is obviously always a huge time commitment when it comes time to have a family. It’s going to have to come at a certain cost to my career.”

Berenson sees it differently. Although her mother became a stay at home mom, she believes that she will be able to find a compromise within her career.

“My mom has always been a stay at home mom. I’ve always assumed I would be because that’s what she is. It wasn’t a hard decision for her. I really value having my mom at home,” Beren-son said. “It is not something I’m worried about. It is balancing two good things. A career I love, and a family.”

So we put down this paper or our laptops and choose between something a little less lofty, beginning the first problem set or another Youtube video. The Blue Book does not offer Time Management 101. We learn that from example, from our own trial and sleepy error. But maybe the ways in which we learn to fill the shortest, gladdest years of life will help us to fill in the rest of them.

“Balancing the commitments and obligations of being a Yale student is a unique challenge,” Fisher said. “Classes are not one monolithic thing. Each class is its own beast. I hope this is the busi-est I’ll ever be. Who knows if it is sustainable?”

Contact CAROLINE MCCULLOUGH at [email protected] .

FOR THE IMMEDI-ATE FUTURE, THE LIFE THAT I’M EXPE-RIENCING AT YALE WILL HOPEFULLY BECOME MY “WORK” DOWN THE ROAD.

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S UNDAYS E P T E M B E R 9

WEEKEND CITYYALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2012 · yaledailynews.com PAGE B9

It all started with graffiti on a wall.

Ben Berkowitz, a New Haven native, noticed it on the side of his neighbor’s building. He called City Hall to file his complaint.

“At some point in the phone call, I realized there was no way to con-nect,” he said.

As a new way to cut through this red tape, SeeClickFix.com was born. Co-founded by Berkowitz in March 2008, the site allows citizens from any city to report non-emer-gency issues in their communities to their city o!cials. The process is self-explanatory: residents SEE a problem, CLICK and upload it to the website (dialogue ensues) and, ideally, the city FIXES it.

While its original purpose was to shine a spotlight on basic

infrastructure

problems, and to eventu-

ally get them resolved, SeeClickFix’s goals have

expanded in the past four years to include a question-and-answer service through which users can ask local authorities about public information, such as library hours or how to obtain a marriage license.

SeeClickFix has helped to open up the relationships between citi-zens and their local governments, making communications and griev-ance processes much more trans-parent in various cities around the globe. The site’s success derives in part from its New Haven origins and t h e city’s civic

framework, an accomplish-ment that has little to do with the prominent presence of Yale University (excepting the handful of Yalie interns SeeClickFix has enlisted in past years).

While residents in and outside the Elm City have embraced the SeeClickFix phe-nomenon as a novel method of civic engagement, the most transient of New Haven d e n i z e n s — Yale students — have yet to make the most of the website.

“I think Yalies unde-rutilize [the site],” said Hans Schoenburg ’10, a SeeClickFix.com user and one of its mobile app developers. “More importantly,

they underestimate its power.”***

In the beginning, SeeClick-Fix focused on forward-

ing users’ non-emergency requests to the appropriate

municipal department. If you saw a run-down play-ground, the parks and rec-

reation division would be notified of your complaint;

if there was a need for a new cross-walk, it fell under the Department of Transportation’s purview.

At present in New Haven, City Hall is not only receiving emails about these grievances, but SeeClickFix entries are now inte-grated into the city’s complaint records and work order system, Cityworks.

This assimilation, said New Hav-en’s chief administrative o!cer Rob Smuts ’01, arose from SeeClickFix’s popularity among residents, which outpaced usage of the original 3-1-1 program, a telephone number used to access non-emergency munici-pal services. While Cityworks still serves its purpose as an archive of complaints, Smuts added, SeeClickFix has come forth as an alternative report-ing mechanism. Essen-tially, a two-way street has been unlocked: both c o m p l a i n t s l o d g e d

directly to City

Hall and t o the web-site are i m p o r te d into SeeClickFix. com.

As a result, the volume of issues reported to the New Haven govern-ment has significantly increased, Smuts explained, prompting city o!cials to take a closer look at how the grievance system can function more e!ciently.

“That’s really been an ongoing process. I don’t think we’re there yet,” he said. “I don’t think we’ll ever get there; it’ll be an ongoing process we’ll be working on.”

The process of integration includes a new smartphone appli-cation, through which users can locate and record an issue via photo or video, report it in real time and incorporate it into the city’s work-flow. Once the issue has been fixed, the original complainant can be notified of its resolution.

***“Can you draw me a map of the

city?,” asked Brandon Jackson ’13, who formed part of the team that developed the mobile application.

I choked — it was one of those questions I thought I

knew how to answer.This reaction, Jackson said, is

symptomatic of a larger a"ic-tion many Yale students tend

to share: lack of involvement in New Haven and a reputation for

being disconnected from their urban setting. SeeClickFix aims

to curb this trend, but it’s unclear how much it has influenced campus behavior thus far.

Yale counts as its own “watch area” on the site, a geographically distinct region monitored by its citizens. Some complaints in this “watch area” have been funneled to University departments, namely Yale Police and Yale Transit. After protests on the website about the fast speed of Yale shuttles, Berkow-itz told me, the problem was addressed and settled, resulting in slower buses.

Over 100 Yale email addresses are registered on SeeClickFix.com, Berkowitz said, though it is near impossible to quantify the actual number of Elis who use the website.

One of these Yale users has been Brian Tang ’12. In Tang’s view, the site has grabbed a mighty brass ring — it cuts the middleman, stream-lining and enabling a new kind of city involvement that was other- w i s e u n f e a s i b l e before.

“While I don’t think SeeClick-Fix is the singular answer that will make t h e p u b l i c process work so m u c h better, I d o feel our e x i s t -

i n g assump-t i o n s

about how t h e p u b -

lic reaches out to governments

is pretty lacking, and it could be a

lot more meaningful,” Tang said.

Yet the possibili-ties allowed through

SeeClickFix are not only lim-

ited to civic i n t e r a c -

t i o n s ,

and the site’s potential could be harnessed and scaled down to meet more specific Yale interests. For instance, Schoenburg suggests applying the SeeClickFix interface in residential colleges so students can self-report issues affecting their own facilities. And although Yalies can be their own watchdogs inside their dorms and o# campus, they often become the source of grief on SeeClickFix.com.

Issue #225390.“Lux et Trash,” regarding 36 Lyn-

wood Place: “The sidewalk is over-flowing with household trash dis-carded by students,” reported by Schoenburg himself on August 27, whose user profile labels him as a “municipal avenger.” “It covers both sides of the street and much of the sidewalk. Talk about bringing down the neighborhood.”

***In the 1950s and 60s, New Haven

became a laboratory for pioneer-ing urban renewal strategies, which included the construction of con-nectors and parking garages, the launch of new cooperative hous-ing projects, and the renovation of neighborhoods such as Wooster Square.

The city’s adaptive attitude toward public policy suits the nature of SeeClickFix, Jackson said, even if the start-up scene here is not as vibrant as those in Silicon Valley or New York City.

“SeeClickFix is a very rare excep-tion,” he told me. “It’s ability to launch in other places was very dependent on New Haven because the city had a lot of faith in the web-site. That’s a powerful endorse-ment.”

Now, municipal administra-tions in San Francisco and Wash-ington, D.C. are implementing the site’s platform. Tens of thousands of communities use it to docu-ment their infrastructure issues, and additionally, the company has about 80 clients who pay for enhanced features tailored to their needs, including collegiate costum-ers such as Southern Connecticut University.

For Berkowitz, New Haven is both a home and a sandbox, a fitting breeding ground for a new genera-tion of empowering civic initiatives.

“It’s a small enough city that you can test something and actu-ally make an impact,” he said. “But it’s also big enough that the impact is treated with credibility by others looking in.”

The website has enhanced New Haven’s ability to address the work order system, Smuts explained, dra-matically improving the city’s abil-ity to get back in touch with citizens and close the loop. On a di#erent note, police o!cers in New Haven also receive direct alerts on their cellphones from citizens reporting crime issues within their “watch areas,” allowing for quick arrests.

As for the bond between Yale and SeeClickFix, it’s a matter of mental-ity. Students see New Haven as an extension of Yale, and not the other way around, Tang noted. If Yalies are to truly engage with the city in any capacity, be it online or not, they must first begin to consider New Haven as something more than just a college town.

“As citizens, we have rights and responsibilities,” Tang stated. “This is where I live; this is home now. I am a New Havener.”

Contact JORDI GASSÓ at [email protected] .

SEE-CLICK-FIX: For citizens, for New Haven, for Yalies? // BY JORDI GASSÓ

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S U N D A YS E P T E M B E R 9

WEEKEND COLUMNSPAGE B10 YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

The night noises this fall haven’t changed much from pre-vious years. Falling asleep with the window open, I still drift o! to Dopplered police sirens, snip-pets of late-night drunk talk, motorcycles drag-racing down empty streets and ’90s pop bal-lads murmuring from a party nearby.

But this year I wake up to gar-bage trucks rather than lawn-mowers or jackhammers. Coming home after class, I’m more likely to hear the whining of the col-icky baby a few doors down than the muted rant of another Berke-leyite through the fire door. And in the evenings when I’m getting ready to go out, the smell that wafts in underneath my door is one of strong curry from a neigh-bor’s dinner instead of the cheap marijuana of the football players downstairs.

These new sensations aren’t better or worse — just di!erent. But what is better is that this year, finally, I am living o! campus.

Before classes started, one of my oldest Yale friends came over for dinner. It’s a short walk from his house on Park to my apart-ment on Howe. Over improvised spaghetti and a little too much wine, we congratulated our-selves on eschewing the dorms in

exchange for the semi-adult high life and commiserated over the epic journey required of a grocery store run. “I was looking at places on Dwight,” I told him, “but that was a little too far from Yale for me.”

He laughed and said, “You’re brave. I thought Park was almost too far.”

I laughed too and didn’t think much of it until Ronnell Higgins informed the Yale community about an “incident” just a long block from my apartment out-side Pierson and I realized that I feel safer in New York’s East Vil-lage at three in the morning than I do on Edgewood at nine o’clock at night.

I’ve joked to my boyfriend about learning Krav Maga.

But it’s not all bad. In Cha-pel West, my new neighbor-hood, there are five discrete cof-fee shops that are all closer than Starbucks. There’s a jewelry and home goods boutique on Chapel that’s far better for buying birth-day presents than Laila Rowe or Urban Outfitters on Broadway. There are two bars with decent

happy hours and great craft beers on tap, and in less than one block I can find falafel, sushi and Indian food.

And, to be honest, it’s not as if I moved across town. Here’s a little perspective:

According to Google Maps, it’s a 10-minute walk from my apart-ment to Sterling. Cross Campus to Science Hill is about 12 min-utes, depending on where you’re going. And on a half-hour jog round trip, I made it all the way up to Prospect and Canner before turning back to go home.

For contrast, I commuted 35 minutes this summer in morning tra"c to get to my job in down-town Charleston, and the sum-mer before I spent 40 minutes (if I was lucky) on the New York sub-way to arrive at my Upper West Side internship.

So to me, 10 minutes is noth-ing. Ten minutes is a Metallica song. It’s the average amount of time you have for a problem on a MATH 220 midterm. It’s about how long you wait for your drink during reading period at Star-bucks.

The truth is that we Yalies rarely wander off campus. Admittedly, we have little need to, what with the dining halls and the dorm parties, the a cappella

concerts and the shows. In fact, there is so much to do on campus that each year seniors find them-selves composing long bucket lists of Yale traditions to check o! before they graduate.

But I’m starting my own kind of bucket list because, less than 10 minutes away from Yale’s bor-ders, there is an entire city to explore and in just nine months, I’ll be leaving that behind too.

Shortly after Camp Yale as a freshman, I had a lightbulb moment that I still remember vis-cerally. I was walking up College Street to an early German class on one of those crisp fall mornings before the leaves start turning. It was beautiful and breezy and I must have passed a sign some-where that put the words in my head because I started thinking about what “New Haven” really meant. Not the proper noun, but the words themselves.

New Haven, I promised myself, was going to be my new safe place, my refuge, my home.

After three years, with pepper spray in hand and Yale Security on speed dial, I’m finally making good on that promise.

Contact KALLI ANGEL at [email protected] .

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KALLI ANGELNEW HAVEN NORMAL

Perhaps you’ve heard of the “computer.” A sort of magi-cal electro-abacus, the com-puter is capable of performing dozens of calculations per sec-ond and may one day fit inside a modestly-sized living room. Indeed, computers are used for everything from statistical cal-culations and word processing to playing text-based games or sending electronic mail to col-leagues. But what about super-computers?

So-called supercomput-ers are, at heart, simply very, very, exceedingly, mind-melt-ingly, brain-bendingly, noggin-tobogganingly fast computers. We’re talking quadrillions of arithmetic operations each sec-ond, here — more than enough power to get a decent Dia-blo III frame rate. But what are supercomputers used for? Well, back in the ’90s, IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer was built with the noble goal of putting humans in their place by beat-ing the world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, in a six-game match. Deep Blue lost, so IBM’s team worked on it some more, and the next year Kasparov was finally defeated (though he claimed IBM secretly had humans help the machine). Playing chess may sound unim-portant, but IBM’s website assures the public, “Behind the contest, however, was impor-tant computer science,” going on to list a handful of noble applications like financial mod-eling and medical drug devel-opment that Deep Blue prob-ably should have been doing instead of trouncing Kasparov. (After the chess matches, Deep Blue was dismantled, lest it be put to any legitimately benefi-cial use.)

Fortunately, other super-computers have worked for humans instead of against them. Supercomputers crack cryptographic codes, model complex molecular and nuclear physics, detect overlooked oil and natural gas deposits in old sonar readings and ana-lyze stock markets. A super-computer was used for much of the special e!ects in the “Lord of the Rings” movies, and (in case you thought they were always good) a supercomputer is responsible for the weather

forecasts you see on the news. Proctor & Gamble even used a supercomputer’s airflow sim-ulation to make their Pringles potato chips more aerodynamic so they’d stop blowing o! the assembly line.

But although supercomput-ers are much cheaper and more widespread than they used to be, not everyone can afford one. Some groups have instead turned to a di!erent solution: instead of having one enor-mous computer do all the work, why not split the task up into little jobs that many comput-ers can do? This is the theory behind distributed computing projects; interested citizens can download programs that con-tribute to these projects when their computers aren’t in use.

One example is SETI@home, a SETI (Search for Extrater-restrial Intelligence) proj-ect where average home com-puters are used to search radio telescope data for narrow-bandwidth signals from space, which would be evidence of technologically advanced alien life. The Folding@home project models protein folding for dis-ease research when you’re not using your computer. DistrRT-gen does the same for studying password security, eOn models theoretical chemistry on long time scales, the Quake-Catcher Network detects earthquakes and Electric Sheep mathemati-cally evolves trippy animations that double as screensavers.

Afraid you’re being made obsolete? Fear not! Some sim-ilar projects actually require human interaction! NASA’s Clickworkers project, for exam-ple, relies on humans to iden-tify specific geological features in photos of Mars. When data from many “clickworkers” are combined, NASA gets an accu-rate mapping of the locations and sizes of craters. Similarly, Duolingo combines many nov-ice human language transla-tions of text to produce high-quality translations for articles and websites.

It’s always nice to see how humans are still relevant in our age of machines. There are some things humans will always be better at, like playing soccer and learning languages, right? (This list used to include driving cars and playing chess, too. And remember John Henry?) So go out and take part in one of these awesome projects that put you or your computer to use for the public good. Just don’t be sur-prised when you’re no longer needed. This is probably around when your vacuum cleaner will finally beat you at chess.

Contact JACOB EVELYN at [email protected] .

From Aliens to Pringles

No one reads “Fifty Shades of Grey” for its superior writing style. The same can be said for most of the books on The New York Times’ Best Seller List. Peo-ple read these books simply for story. When one wants to truly sink her teeth into literature, she turns to pieces with not only a good plot, but with the addi-tional element of style. She turns to Twain’s twang and satire, Hemingway’s terse descriptions or Kafka’s surrealism.

The same can be said for films, both classic and modern. Although the studios continue to put their money into big-bud-get, plot-driven narratives such as “Moneyball,” “The Help” or “Inception,” smaller studios, with their stylistically creative ventures, continue to win the Oscars. The Weinstein Compa-ny’s “The Artist” (2011) won not for its narrative, which featured the humdrum boy-meets-girl structure and the classic eternally loyal canine. Instead, what won the day was its ability to tell its story and elicit emotion through black-and-white, silent struc-ture, proof that we don’t need the flashy extras of the modern movie age to properly enjoy a film. Sum-mit’s “The Hurt Locker” (2008) could have been just another war movie, but its harsh cinema-tography and editing pushed its audience out of the theatre and into the battlefields of Baghdad.

My favorite films have always been those that rely more heav-ily on style than the twists and turns of narrative. While I enjoy and understand the appeal of “The Godfather,” I prefer the added voiceovers and editing quirks of “Goodfellas.” Although many of my friends walked out of Sophia Coppola’s “Marie Antoi-nette,” complaining that its lan-guid plotline lacked structure or intrigue, I could watch the cos-tumes and listen to the music, which combine and compare the excesses of Marie Antoinette’s France and America of the 1980s, over and over again.

Although “The Dark Knight Rises” and “The Avengers” took summer box offices by storm, two other films caught my eye. Not surprisingly, both struck me for stylistic reasons.

The first of the two films was “Moonrise Kingdom.” Sitting in the back of a packed theater,

I was enthralled by the idealis-tic story of young love, with chil-dren’s earnest whims overcoming the real-life woes and demands of the older generation. Like many film lovers, I would gladly rank Wes Anderson as one my favorite young directors of the 21st cen-tury. His canon is small but cohe-sive, maintaining, except for his first film, “Bottle Rocket” (1996), a general stylistic unity. Ander-son masks adult plotlines within storybook worlds. His colors are often muted and his costumes often conservative, reminiscent of illustrated schoolbooks like “Fun with Dick and Jane.” The films sometimes feature narra-tors or chapter titles, blatant, metatextual reminders of their literary quality. Anderson’s sty-listic choices compliment his self-written plots, which often feature basic realism inter-rupted by moments that seem more incredible. In Anderson’s first film, “Bottle Rocket,” he neglected to compensate his fan-tastical plot with the style typi-cal of his later films. In these later films, unrealistic moments don’t seem like plot flaws, for Wes Anderson’s style creates a fairy

tale — a world in which realism is a luxury rather than a necessity.

In “Moonrise Kingdom,” Anderson seems to have finally reached the apex toward which his past films have been aspiring. By inserting children as the pro-tagonists within his storybook, Anderson has found the ideal romanticism. The adults, each struggling and mildly pathetic, must give in to the whims of their children. In doing so, the adults do not quite reclaim the film, but they certainly begin to come to terms with Anderson’s fantasy.

My other summer favorite, “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” came not as an episode in a film-maker’s series, but rather as a starburst of new energy and fla-vor. The film was created by new filmmakers, drew from actors with no former training or expe-rience, and explored a part of America few had seen before. Beasts dives into the nits and grits of The Bathtub, a New Orleans slum a far cry away from the green pastures and neat Boy Scout camps of “Moonrise King-dom.”

Though “Beasts” has received much critical acclaim, reviewers barely mention the film’s plot-line. Instead, they focus on the delight and despair of The Bath-tub’s world. It boasts the mixed qualities of an idyllic indepen-

dent community and a poverty-stricken hellhole. The film uses magical realism, incorporat-ing the beasts of The Bathtub’s communal folklore as actual fig-ures that arrive just as the town reaches disaster. Although some criticized “Beasts” for lacking a straight-forward plot, the film’s style matches the world of The Bathtub, a place that can only be understood as beautiful if one believes in its magic.

The success of “Moonrise Kingdom” and “Beasts of the Southern Wild” with summer art house audiences had little to do with dramatic plot twists or sur-prise endings. It was their style that captivated, bringing audi-ences into new worlds of romance and magic. Although the success of these two films at awards sea-son remains to be seen, I firmly predict, and even more aggres-sively hope, that films with such definitive styles will win the day.

Contact BECCA EDELMAN at [email protected] .

A Case for Cinematic Style

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“Moonrise Kingdom” directed by Wes Anderson.

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S U N D A YS E P T E M B E R 9

WEEKEND THEATERYALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2012 · yaledailynews.com PAGE B11

This year the Yale Cabaret will take you straight from 1928 Russia to 2012 New Haven, and then ask how you feel about dying. And after that? “All the shows are being created from the ground up,” said Yale Cabaret managing director Jona-than Wemette DRA ’13. “I couldn’t really tell you what the rest of the season has in store.”

Wemette can, however, guarantee that it will be full of theater “wildly unlike anything you’ll see anywhere else.” Each play is submitted and created in its entirety by Drama School students, and each week of the season will hold some-thing di!erent, with anything from pup-pets and mime one week to one man talk-ing alone on stage the next, according to the Cabaret’s artistic director Ethan Heard DRA ’13.

This complete change of both physi-cal and emotional scenery is emblematic of the Cabaret’s risktaking spirit. Heard said the theater itself is “a laboratory for drama students,” adding that those involved “strive to transform the space completely every week.”

The Cabaret prides itself on doing shows that are extremely interactive, and which utilize the Cabaret’s immer-sive and intimate space to the fullest pos-sible extent. The small dinner theater in the basement of 217 Park St. is a place for experimentation, said Dustin Wills DRA ’14, where students of the Yale Drama School can let go of their classroom train-ing and curricular assignments and put on their “passion projects.”

The Yale Cabaret values its accessibil-ity and inclusivity for audience members as much as it does artistic experimenta-

tion, according to Heard. With this spirit of inclusivity in mind, the Yale Cab-aret is launching a “University Ambassa-dors” program this season. The Theater will have a representative in each of Yale’s graduate schools and in the College to promote its shows and recruit new audi-ence members.

The season’s opening show, “The Fatal Eggs,” is adapted from a novella written by Mikhail Bulgakov in the 1920s, which was adapted for the stage by Wills and Ilya Khodosh DRA ’14, who also translated the text from the original Russian. It is also narrated by an ostrich.

The story begins with a scientist who discovers a ray of red light capable of reproducing organisms at a fantastically rapid rate, only to have his discovery fall into the hands of the Soviet government. What follows is equal parts absurd sat-ire and horrifying commentary on both Soviet Russia and today’s world (no spoil-ers, but there will be gigantic exotic ani-mal puppets featured in this production).

“The Fatal Eggs” also has seven actors playing 62 roles. The production’s incredibly rapid turnover of actors cre-ates a feeling of “anxious movement,” said Wills, which conveys “a time in Russia when it really felt like the world could col-lapse from under you.” While Wills said that the show has not been “updated,” and remains loyal to its time and setting, its message about a society in the grips of media-fueled hysteria still contains many complex themes that remain relevant,

“especially in an election year.”The next production, “This,” is an

ensemble piece based on interviews and emailed stories submitted by members of the Yale and New Haven community. “What’s really vulnerable and exciting and dangerous about the show is that someone next to you in the audience could have submitted one of the stories you’re hearing on stage,” said Heard. The pro-duction, said Wemette, is a perfect meta-phor for the Cabaret’s constant attempts to “break down the wall between audi-ence and actor, and [to] make the stage a more porous place.” The show is a way of making people feel that they matter, because their stories are being told, said associate artistic director Benjamin Fain-stein DRA ’13, adding, “It’s a true o!ering to our audiences.”

The third show that has been announced thus far, “Ain’t Gonna Make It,” is still very much in the midst of its creation process, according to Wemette. It is a look at dying, but one that is going to be “very rockabilly, musical, vibrant and celebratory,” in Wemette’s words. He also said that there are two designers at the helm of this particular show, mean-ing one can expect it to be both “visually spectacular” and to tell the story “through images in a way shows don’t always do.”

Going to the Cabaret, said Fainstein, “is a risk not only for the artists on stage but also for the individual audience mem-bers.” There is something uniquely com-munal about both the logistics and the purpose of the Cabaret’s space, he added. By being a dinner theater, he said, it allows audience members to first “engage in the ancient ritual of sharing food and drink and talking to one another,” before the play even begins. “It’s an event and not just entertainment.”

Contact ANYA GRENIER at [email protected] .

Risk//Presence//Transformation//Inclusivity//Purpose: Announcing the 45th Season at the Yale Cabaret// BY ANYA GRENIER

// ZOE GORMAN

The Yale Cabaret’s newest season will include mimes, Russia and death.

THE YALE CABARET VAL-UES ITS ACCESSIBILITY AND INCLUSIVITY FOR AUDIENCE MEMBERS AS MUCH AS IT DOES ARTIS-TIC EXPERIMENTATION.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:The lunch bu!et at ZarokaFor just 8.95, you can have all the Indian you can eat. The lighting’s a little strange, but you’ll be so stu!ed you won’t care.

WEEKEND BACKSTAGE

Q. How did you develop your focus on nature?

AA. Clearly we’re kind of con-scious of the environmental con-dition of the world today and are interested in projecting possi-bilities for the future. So rather than simply focusing on the built or architectural environ-ment, which is more typical, we are more interested in expanding beyond. We want to really look at architecture in relation to the city, and the city to the agricul-tural and natural, trying to find new relationships. DW. We’ve always been inspired by the idea of having a country life and a city life of the old aris-tocracy, and how we can actually bring that to the city and coun-tryside in a way that the two poles don’t necessarily need to be so totally separated.

Q. You talked a lot in your lecture about how living environments need to both be more dense and contain more open space — a paradoxical idea at first. How do those concepts go hand in hand?

AA. I think that’s an unfortunate result of the current suburban settlement. It really was a dream of living close to nature, but actu-ally you have to connect all these houses with roads and infra-structure, and this sprawl actu-ally ends up reducing the amount of green space due to private yards. Instead if you densify and compress the housing together, you’ll start to liberate many more collective green fields. DW. And also, by bleeding out any form of diversity from the suburbs — and I don’t just mean racial diversity or income diver-sity which there isn’t as well — but by outlawing any retail activ-ity, any possibility to work or any public space from parts of the city, from the suburb, you really create a very strange social con-dition. I think if you look at the most dangerous places in the country, they’re much more sub-urban-looking than urban-look-ing. And the one thing everyone complains about when they move to the suburbs from the city is that they miss seeing people, and being able to walk places and go out.

AA. And part of our interest is to show that not all densities have to be Manhattan densities. We want to explore densities that can afford an incredible amount of green space without being as low as a suburban density.

Q. Then are the areas you’d redevelop in an ideal world more suburban than what we traditionally think of as urban?

DW. Places like Keizer [Sta-tion, Ore.] are very interesting in that there is this idea of den-sity through the [government-mandated] urban growth bound-ary. It was very interesting for us to look at the suburbs. There was an earlier life where we said, “It should be cities or it should be rural,” but to look at the suburbs is to see why people really want to live in those conditions. If you look at density like Nature-City, it’s quite sustainable. It espe-cially works in edge conditions, like the exurbs and places where going any further is really unten-able. Even now, with people driv-ing an hour and a half to get to an urban center, we’re trying to pull

that boundary back and create a new edge of density with relation to the downtown. Q. You spoke about the importance of working within restrained budgets and design using pre-

existing spaces, especially in today’s economic conditions, yet many of your proposals seem radical in terms of how much you would need to build. Where do those two concepts meet in the middle? What do you hope to design that can actually be executed?

AA. I think it’s about always try-ing to be strategic. It’s not just bigness for bigness’s sake — the bigness of infrastructure is an investment in the future, whereas bigness in other ways is not and can be more wasteful. For exam-ple for our new Holland Island project, the last winner of that competition was Foster and Part-ners, which had designed a very large-scale intervention. Instead we were trying to be very stra-tegic in combining intervention with infrastructure to minimize the impact on these structures. DW. And even when we ran the numbers on the Nature-City project, we actually saved money

in infrastructure because to lay pipes out to every single sub-urban house outside the city is much more expensive. And then the sustainable infrastructure like large composting facilities that can create power are at the edge of what’s doable right now, but once that becomes viable, invest-ment in that would repay itself over time — let’s say the inter-est is in a 40-year investment, or even a 20-year investment. So we actually took out those num-bers because we assumed some-one would invest. Where do you see yourselves going next?AA. Our next big project is in Gabon, in West Africa.DW. We’re literally going to Gabon. AA. But after that, I think, though we live and work in New York and feel very much a part of it, we’re interested in exploring more global possibilities.

Contact NATASHA THONDAVADI at [email protected] .

PAGE B12 YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

Amale Andraos and Dan Wood are the principal architects at WORKac, a New York-based architecture firm known for its cutting-edge urban designs incorporating nature into the life of cities. On Thursday, Andraos and Wood spoke at the School of Architecture about

their architectural philosophy, discussing both their academic contributions and their building projects. Entitled “Nature-City,” the talk culminated in a walk-through of their firm’s design by the same name for a recent Museum of Modern Art competition tackling the urban landscape in the wake of the housing crisis. Their winning design reinvents a 225-acre portion of Keizer Sta-tion, Ore. in an attempt to create a sustainable community. In attempt to redefine the suburban landscape, the project o!ers a possible solution to the lack of resources and massive energy con-sumption of many American communities today. Andraos and Wood have also been involved in other conceptual urban projects such as a reimagination of the Bushwick neighborhood in Brook-lyn. To combat the food deserts still prevalent in the area, the two architects mapped potential bodegas and urban farms. For instance, they suggested that fish — which are capable of survival without exposure to light — could swim underneath the city streets in a series of pipes, enabling patrons at neighborhood stores to catch live food. Andraos and Wood have also worked extensively with chef Alice Waters on urban food projects, even designing an edible playground at a public school in Brooklyn.

THERE HAS TO BE A RHYTHM TO THE SEN-TENCE AND YOU MUST ALSO PAY ATTENTION TO THE VELOCITY IN WHICH IT READS.

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Spunky, Fast-Talking, Lovers of Nature// BY NATASHA THONDAVADI

AMALE ANDRAOS & DAN WOOD

// WORK ARCHITECTURE COMPANY

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