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features

Media Saturation or Bust A chat with Debbie Stoller, Yale Ph.D recipient and outspoken founder offeminist zine Bust. BY D ARBY

SAXBE

Closing Time Students are troubkd by recent police crackdowns on parties serving alcohol but what seems like the new prohibition may just be a beginning-ofthe-year formality. BY

Eu KlNTtSCH

16 This Old House Why has the New Haven Preservation Society's agreement with Yale allowed an historical house to be torn down for a parking lot? BY

BEN SMITH

Family Portrait Photographs show how a debilitating disease casts a shadow over a family's relationship. BY

MICHAEL BRAUN

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Between the Vines: The Futures Market BY DANIEL BROOK

The Critical Angle: George Platt Lynes Returns to Yale.

Endnote: The Starr Chamber BY IAN BLECHER

DAN KELLUM

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Poster Child On the first really cold morning of the year, I walk into TYCO to get the story behind the boy whose enormous picture hangs on their wall. Despite the early hour, the machines are already humming, and some over-ambitious students are competing for space at the tiny counter. Ah, the familiar reek of ink and paper and ~PY machines worked past capacity. I take a quick glance up at the "TYCO kid," as I've silently dubbed him. Looking at this happy youth, with his knobby kid-elbows and tufted brown hair. who wouldn't be curious? The TYCO kid is possibly the second-biggest celebrity figure on campus. He is, at four feet by six feet, a little boy of preposterous proportions. It is time to put an end to the mystery. Michael Iannuzzi, Sr. is the owner of TYCO and the father of the TYCO kid. He takes me up to his spacious third Boor office overlooking Broadway to tell me about his son, who is now all grown up. Ellie Iannuzzi, the mother, ducks in for a few comments. "People come into the store, and they know it's my son," she says with just a hint of motherly pride. The explanation of the poster itself is rather mundane. "We needed something to show that we could make big prints with our machine," says Mr. Iannuzzi. "So you know, I went through the photos. That one has always been a favorite of mine." The poster is of Mike, Jr. at age ten or so, an up-and-coming player for a little league team with a fearsome name: Standard Oil. Iannuzzi has the same photo hanging in his garage at home, in a somewhat less gigantic size. It hangs alongside a print of the TYCO kid's sister, who used to have her picture hanging in the store, screen-printed on a

T-shirt. "It's the first thing I see when I corfle home," says Iannuzzi. Conversation switches over to the TYCO kid's erstwhile baseball career (which, incidentally, terminated during his freshman year of high school in favor of basketball). "Mike was a very good player as a little kid. He had a good arm. It was probably his strong suit as a young player, a very powerful arm," says Mr.

Iannuzzi. The TYCO kid mainly stuck to pitcher, catcher, and third baseman, but as a little leaguer, he naturally played every position. At this point, I am allowed, upon request, to actually hold the TYCO kid's glove-the same one as in the poster. Like any true kid's glove, it is creased over, sandwich style. I touch its surface, still finely gritted with dirt, graying and ready to fall apart. The lettering has all fallen off, no doubt the result of the graceless bobbles that characterize little league play. This trip down memory lane prompts other recollections of yesteryear. The TYCO kid was very quiet as a child, as one might guess from the shy Bambi eyes we're so accustomed to seeing in the poster. "In nursery school, Michael just would not talk," says Mrs. Iannuzzi. "He'd play with

all the kids and everything, but wouldn't talk to them." For a moment, I can't help but imagine little Mike sitting next to chattering kids, crushing trucks together with both hands, mouth sealed shut. Mr. Iannuzzi echoes this sentiment, a bit proudly. "I don't care how good of an interviewer you were, from 60 Minutes or something, that kid was just not going to talk to you. He'd speak to us of course, but there was no way he would talk to an outsider." "High school was his turning point," safS Mrs. Iannuzzi. As these parents launch into a description of Mike's high school career, it quickly becomes clear that Mr. and Mrs. Iannuzzi are indeed the TYCO kid's biggest fans. "He never gave us trouble, an honors student, always worked hard," says Mr. Iannuzzi. Mrs. Iannuzzi offers to list all of Mike's awards for me. "It seemed we were always going to award banquets." Indeed, Mike was something of an over-. achiever: captain of the varsity basketball team senior year, class president junior year, student council vice-president senior year. "What do you expect me to say? He was perfect," laughs Mrs. Iannuzzi. All of this is a far cry from the sweet little TYCO kid who we all know and love. Mike Iannuzzi is grown up, currently 20 years old and a junior at Boston College. A contemporary. He is training, it seems, to be a future oppressor of the masses. It is with great consternation that I learn of the TYCO kid's current enrollment in the Carroll School of Management. His class schedule this semester, aside from a philosophy course: finance, marketing, management information systems, and business systems. I find it somehow disheartening to think THE NEW JouRNAL

of the TYCO kid, out in the corporate world serving the Man and ·~rushing the proletariat. Perhaps this is an omen. If even the TYCO kid can join the Dark Side, what is the average Yalie destined for? Personally, along with other Yalies rooting from the sidelines, I'd like to see the TYCO kid take over the family business, one of the few mom-and-pop enterprises left on Broadway. This possibility is something that has been seriously discussed in the Iannuzzi household. "These past two summers I started to take TYCO very seriously," says Mike. Mr. Iannuzzi says that he just wants Mike to be happy. "He should have the option to involve himself with TYCO. If he's leaning in this direction, if he wants to come here, I don't want him to look at what I've done. I want him to do his own thing-he should have his vision of the future." The start of a dynasty? If Mike goes on to own TYCO and then has a child, perhaps he will tack up a gigantic photo of his kid right next to his own. Every generation thereafter could add huge pictures of their children on the wall of the stor~, passing the TYCO kid torch. Each picture would be a reminder of years past, a snapshot of youth frozen in time. A portrait of Peter Pan in Neverland.

-Andrtw Youn

Get On Your Feet Clap: "On your back!" Clap: "On your ftar Clap: "On your back!" Twenty Capoeira students spring up and f.ill to the hard wood Boor. Master Robert Thompson and his Timothy Dwight clan might print it on their shirts, but they are not the only ones in New Haven with ashl. Ashl is the force responsible for all movement in the universe, according to some African religions in Brazil. In the basement of a church on the corner of Olive and Chapel Streets Capoeira master Efriarn Silva and his class conjure the energy force ashl as well. · Capoeira is a dueling dance that emerged in sixteenth century Brazil with the arrival of African people during Portugese colonization. Though its precise origins and definition OCTOBER 9,

1998

seem as hard to pin down as the Buidity of capoeiristas, Efriam explains that it began as a martial art. "Because martial arts were banned among slaves, it was disguised as a dance," he says. In a match, a jogo, two capoeiristas meet each other in a roda, a closed circle of people playing music. The players seem to duel with kicks but dance as they anticipate and move with their partners, often without contact. When I come in, the class is practicing Capoeira music on the berimbau, the atabaque and the panderio. Music is an essential element of Capoeira, and a master must be proficient in the songs and rhythms as well as the physical motions. From a student's perspective music is intrinsic to developing a sense of timing and positioning. The berimbau, a curved wooden bow with a taut metal string which is beaten with a stick and rattle, is respected as a spiritual authority. Before entering the circle capoeiristas touch the berimbau as a reverent gesture to ensure protection during their match. Many of the more dedicated students have made their own; a capoeirista is encouraged to play it, care for it, and personalize it, infusing it with the energy needed for a good roda. Clap: "On yourfta!" Clap: "On your back!" Clap: "On yourfta!" Efriam challenges the students with repetition to make the motions instinctive. They repeat the basic step, the ginga, until all the students have their turn counting to ten in ~~~~~~~~~~-~·-Portugese. Clad in sweatpants lined with colors of Brazilian loyalty-green and yellow-students also wear a belt that denotes their level. A baptized novice gains a white cord and then one in green, yellow, blue, or any combination of the four until a master is crowned again with white. Two beginner students, Dennis Price and Toni Beluci, explain that Capoeira is a way of life. "I travel all over to participate in Capoeira events and because I share this interest with others, anywhere I go I have a place co stay," explains Dennis. "It's addictive-in a good sense," adds Toni. Its motions and rhythms permeate these students' daily routines, affecting everything from their physical movements to their mind- · set. "It's not just a game, it's a mind thing." says Dennis. Even from my bench view

Capoeira is transfixing. From my less lofty perspective in Trumbull, Timothy Dwight might seem invincible on the Intramural fields with the power of ashl. This class of capoeiristas has an ashl of a different son. Though Capoeira is performed with grace and Buidity and ideally without contact, it can be lethal. An article in Ebony magazine in 1947 declared that, "In a real attack, the aim of the Capoeira fighter is to throw an attacker so the softest part of his skull crashes upon the ground or pavement, either killing or kayoing." Ashl! -Gmevin~e Taft

Shades of Gray "See? Here it says the dish is 10 feet and two inches long. But that's wrong!" Ken Grimes flips through some carefully annotated photocopies which he pulled from several carefully labelled envelopes. "Here, it says it's 30. That's right. I have it in ten other books. Three are in my library. This is more important than the Cheshire coincidences that got me started. There are 200 or 300 of these mistakes, I think. If we can find enough, we can statistically prove this." "What's yow explanation for these mistakes?" "There's a conBict with reality. Astronomers start writing about what they know without realizing that there's an alien metaphysically and psychically there causing Freudian slips." Ken's face is reminiscent of Stadler or Waldorf, the old Muppets who used to sit in the opera box on The Muppa ShtnJJ, but he's younger, wears older, dirtier clothing, and has less of a sense of dramatic timing. But that's all right-his art speaks for itsel£ Quite often, there's someone to speak for him- The New l'Ork Times, The WaJJ Strta journal, and glossy catalogs from art exhibitions around the world offer their voices. In the words of the commentary-rich anthology &If Taught Artists oftht Twmtirth Century, "His oeuvre is a huge, continuously growing book about visitors from outer space; each individual work is a self-contained 'page' that can be understood on its own, yet in style, look, and subject matter relates to every other 'page.'" Ken hangs out at Fellowship Place, on Flm Street. Fellowship Place is a job training facility, an art school, a food provider, a psy-

chiatric treatment facility, and a welfare-towork program; it combines all of these services into a one-of-a-kind psychiatric outpatient resource center. Of course, that includes providing art supplies, art education, and help in finding agents and navigating the art world for anyone who should happen to need it. Ken is just one of many fellowship workers who display their work in the friendly complex of barns. But Ken's art goes beyond the aesthetic. "I don't know how I could get the word out except by painting. I enjoy coming up with the ideas, and the recognition, but not the work involved with putting paint on large canvases." By restricting his palette to black and white, Ken evokes the usual colors of printed materials, and the idiom about having something in "black and white" as a claim to fact and truth. However, he turns the process inside out by making the words and objects white against a black background, like photographic negatives. Ken abruptly decides the conversation is over, gathering up his folders and opening the door. "Do you think people understand the messages behind your work?" "No," he tosses over his shoulder. "They don't." This is the first time he's broken through a monotone that resulted from a mental breakdown during his sophomore year of college. "Grimes' nuanced grays not only provide a delicate gamut between dark and light, but also hint at 'gray areas' in our understanding and communication," according to Self

Taught Artists. Ken couldn't have achieved his fame without Kate Walton, a mental health professional and the Executive Director of Fellowship

tric." Still, she realizes that the problems Ken faces in working with his agent, keeping his finances in order, and doing public relations are greater than many artists' challenges. "The art people don't necessarily believe in his ideas either. There's just this harmonic convergence between popular ideas and striking art," says Walton. Perhaps because she's tired (her head is sagging), a note of annoyance at Ken's fame creeps into her voice. Walton prefers the brightly-colored work of another Fellowship artist, Maurice Hansen, whose enthusiastic painting of Fellowship's "Street of Dreams" festival adorns her office wall. "I mean, Ken's art looks great in New York City apartments with lots of stainless steel and black formica and...and whatever they have," she says. "In this chromatic synthesis, the stark demands of black and white are tremulously linked by the subdeties of gray," explains SelfTaught Artists. Ken reaches out to the people in the murky realm between skepticism and a desire to believe. "There's room for a lot of different voices in this," Ken says. "You could even help."

-]m Champagne Place. While she is proud of Fellowship's support for artists, she sees a greater force at work in creating these artists. "Schizophrenics' minds are just liberated to new levels. A normal mind shuts off before they get to experience those things. I don't know that many talented artists who aren't, well, rather eccen-

A Place at the Table Last year, as a prefrosh on my official college tour, I saw the Women's Table for the first time. The simplicity of the sculpture in con-

THE NEW jOURNAL

trast with the Gothic architecture of Sterling Memorial Library w~ striking. What attracted me to it, however, was not so much its aesthetic strength as the sigruficance of the outwardly spiraling numbers, marking the entrance of women into Yale. This year, when I arrived on campus and saw Maya Lin's sculpture again, I realized that 1993 was the last year the number of women enrolled at Yale was inscribed; after that year the spiral ends. I was somewhat disappointed by this, because I still fostered my wish to be a part of the spiral. I went to the Manuscripts and Archives department at the library to find out why numbers were no longer being added. I soon learned that Lin designed the Table so that the spiral would end at 1993, the year the sculpture was installed. The chief research archivist, Judith Schiff, informed me that she had worked on the project to research the enrollment of women at Yale in earlier years, which was far from a routine taSk. Women's names first appeared in Yale's records in 1873, four years after the founding of the coeducational School of the Fine Arts. The n~es of those who enrolled during its first years are lost. For a long time after 1873, only the names of students were recorded. Schiff and her colleagues had to research students with ambiguous names such as "Stacey" or "Lee" to determine their genders. One woman, likely the first to study at Yale, did not appear in the records as female because she applied and was accepted to the law school under her initials. Although the administration did not prevent her from enrolling when her gender became apparent, it soon created a policy explicitly prohibiting the enrollment of women at Yale. The Women's Table is an understated reminder of a time when the inclusion of women at Yale was something first nonexistent, then tenuous and extraordinary. The presence of women is now integral to the life of the university and ordinary in the best sense of the word. Yet inequalities still exist, as we see from a tenured faculty that is 89 percent male. Lin wrote, "The choice of a spiral was to mark a beginning but to leave the future open." Now that the matriculation of women and men iS equal, Yale's strides toward equality can no longer be contained by numbers on a table. -julia Kardon

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Media

Saturation or

BUST Darby Saxbe hen I spoke to Debbie Stoller (GRD '87) on a weekday afternoon, she spent the first ten minutes of our conversation poking around under her bed for a favorite shirt and trying to keep her dog away from the UPS man. Not the standard workday for a rising young magazine editor, but then Stoller, who co-founded and co-edits Bust, has always been a bit different. After getting a Ph.D in Psychology of Women, she headed to New York to create websites for Nickdodeon and to work in feministfriendly media. Bust is more likely to run ads from independent record labels than from cosmetics companies. Its tone-frank. funny, and bigsister hip-recalls old-school.s4ury Since 1993, Stoller and her partners, Marcelle Karp and designer Laurie Henzel, have turned Bust from a xeroxed zine to a glossy magazine that gets distributed in Borders, prints rants by Courtney Love, and featured Missy Elliot on its last cover. Bust was given several inches of column space in this summer's Time cover story, "Is Feminism Dead?" Although the story's writers concluded that yes, feminism is dead, and that image-oriented pop culture magazines like Bust are part of the problem, Stoller herself contends that the women's movement is alive and well.

lm going to put you on sp~aku phone now. Yay! I'm on speaker phone. Why am I on speaker phone? You don't have one of those little phone tape recorder thingies where you can plug it into the phone? Linda Tripp-like, you know. Where is my damn shirt? What's it like in New Haven today?

It's nic~. J(jnJ ofone ofthose New Englmul autumns. Yeah ... the sky there was always so beautiful. I lived on Chapel Street, across the street from the art school. I lived upstairs from a Chinese restaurant, across from Jong's. I loved watching the people go back 8

and forth. That was my best apartment.

So how did you end up at Yak? I put myself through college. I went to a really crappy state school because I had to pay for it myself, and I was bardy able to swing that, washing dishes at the cafeteria. I wanted out of there so bad that I graduated in two and a half years, and then I applied to all these grad schools. I was interested in going into psychobiology, brain and behavior, and when you go into a fidd like that, they pay you to be a student, because they c:xpect you to teach and do research. So I knew I wasn't going to have to pay, which is how I could manage to do it. Then Yale called me and I was off in Holland doing research, and I said, of course, of course, I'll come to Yale, that's so exciting-what I wanted for my whole life was to go to a fancy school like that for free. My parents were so overwhelmed-no one in my family had ever gone to an Ivy school. They were so floored and excited, that in the middle of the night after I told them they got worried and thought maybe someone was pulling my leg. In the morning they called Yale to make sure it was true.

How did you ga into doing psychology ofUJ01'1Inl? After about two years of doing psychobiology, I realized that it wasn't for me-l was good at it, but when I started at Yale I was 20, and I was kind of a big fuck-up. Fmally, finally I had made it to the cool school and I was so happy and so excited. My college had been full of frat boys and sorority girls and I was like the outcast freak, and at Yale I was meeting all these great people and it Was like an embarrassment of riches, just overwhdming. I spent more time hanging out at the cafes and the bars and running around enjoying myself than I did at the lab. I realized pretty early on that I wasn't going to be able to cut the lifestyle that science required of me-l wasn't going to be able to spend all my

THE NEW JouRNAL

time in these little darkened laboratories. Because there were so many cool things to do at Yale, I started taking other classes outside my department and I took classes in videomaking. I started to take film theory classes. I was interested in all that stuff, and then I just felt like I didn't really fit in with the psychobiology people. I had this girlfriend in the grad school, too, in Developmental Psychology, and we were both feminists and spent a lot of time thinking about that stuff and taking classes outside our department. At that time, there was all this work going on about feminist film theory-people were always talking about images of sex objects, what harm it does to women. Feminists were writing about pornography, and it was a very hot topic. Some film theorists said, when you show women as a sex object on the screen, it gives the man who's watching it power, it gives him a chance to feel like he's getting to consume that image and the woman is powerless. But other theorists were writing and saying, no, when you have images like that the woman is really powerful and the men fed really scared. As someone with a research background, I thought, well, this is something I could really research and find an answer to. So my best friend and I sort of created a make-believe Psychology of Women department together and had a bunch of people come speak at Yale. I actually wrote my dissertation in a month. I'd done my research, but I just kept putting off the writing-up part. I finally decided that I really wanted to graduate with a cap and gown, and if I was going to do that I would actually have to adhere to the due date. So I locked myself up in a room in the psychology department that had a computer and I just wrote and wrote and wrote until four in the morning and then I would go to sleep on the couch in that room because I knew that the cleaning lady would come at five, so that I would only be able to sleep for an hour and she would wake me up and I would keep writing and OcroBER 9, 1998

writing and writing. That was before the days when everyone had a computer-I actually wrote all my papers on a typewriter.

I wanted to ask you about computers. I saw a Shift. com column whm you wrote that you we-e programming BASIC with k~unch cards while today} computer whizus wm still playing with blocks. " Youw always ken comfortable with that technology yourse/fi what do you think about the cyberspace revolution and its implications for women? I know that there's a myth out there that technology _ is for boys and girls are scared of it, but I think that that i myth is really dying. When I talk to really little girls about ~ computers they have no idea that they're supposed to be ~ afraid of them. And I think that the basic skills that the Internet ~co requires-typing, communicating-all this is stuff that women are !a supposedly better at than men. Really, according to stereotype, women i should be the computer users. I think that, while older women might still have some trepidation about computers, the younger girls are going to even that out.

Speaking ofyounger girls, how didyou get started at Nickelodeon? I graduated from Yale and went to New York with a Ph.D and started working as a secretary, trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I had been studying the media, and when I graduated I Wanted to actually start creating new media that would be good for women, rather than just teach people about the negative effects the media could have on them. But there wasn't any place to go. Sassy hadn't been born yet. So I figured I would start out at the ground Boor of a new media company and get involved with it. I started at Nickelodeon in the typing pool and rose through the ranks. I ended up doing online work because I

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was always interested in computers. When I was there Geraldine Laybourne was president and she was interested in girls and so she wanted to target materials to them.

a bunch of designers at Nickelodeon, and they helped to lay it out on the computer and we printed it and xeroxed it... so we did that, we xeroxed and stapled 500 copies, and hence the first issue of Bustwas born in 1993.

At what point in aU this did Bust get started?

How did you gtt the magazine's readership to grow so quickly?

Like I said, I was looking for a way to be involved in making good media for women,. but there wasn't any place to go. Pretty early on at Nickelodeon, I was thinking, "What am I going to do with my life? I've spent six years getting a Ph.D and now I'm working as a secretary." I'd been reading Sar.s)l and that magazine was so cool, I just thought it was brilliant-all my girlfriends were reading it, and we were all in our late 20s ... and all the media for women was like Madnnoiselk and Glamour, and then all of a sudden riot grrls started getting talked about, foxcore music started getting talked about, and I thought, you know, there are a whole bunch of other chicks like me who are not necessarily fulfilling the Madnnoiselk modd of female behavior, who would sooner have a bottle of tequila to relax than have a long bath and a cup of General Foods International Coffee. We need a magazine too. It's great that teenagers have ~ but what about us older girls? We need to have something cool. So I had the idea to launch a new magazine and right away I thought it should be called Btm-something that would be funny and sexy and aggressive-and I mentioned it to a girl I worked with at Nickelodeon. A year later she called me and said, "Did you ever do anything about that magazine idea that you had?" and I said no, and she said, "Why don't we get together and talk about trying to do it?" But being the slacker that I was, that we both were, there was no way we were going to say, okay, let's make a business proposal, and go and get investors... between sips of coffee and smoking cigarettes and going out all night every night, there wasn't too much in the way of starting a new business that we were going to take on. But we did decide that there might be a way for us to just do it ourselves, something that wouldn't cost us anything, to just sort of see what we could do with the idea. We both asked friends of ours to start writing stories about things in their lives that they weren't seeing reflected anywhere in the media, the real lives of women. I worked with

With that first issue, we went around to stores, and said, "Would you sdl our magazine?" and brought around 500 copies ... but we really didn't think too much of it, it had been fun to make, we didn't know what would happen with it. And all of a sudden we started to get fan mail and orders for the magazine and we had to xerox and staple an additional 500 copies-this was all done furtively in the officeS ofViacom. It wasn't a magazine then, it was totally a zine. lt:still is, but it could now enter a party of magazines, it could pass-it could get past the red rope, baby. A bunch of people we'd sent it off to, to see if they'd be interested in distributing it, said, this is kind of a cool idea, but we really can't sell this stupid thing that's xeroxed and stapled ... if you want us to distribute it, you have to get it printed. So Marcelle and I both reached into our pockets and took out $500 each, and so for $1000 we printed 3000 copies of the second issue. Also, I knew a girl from Nickelodeon who had a really cool artistic sensibility and always had pictures ofYoko Ono and Nico hanging over her desk, and we asked her if she would take on the project of getting Bust designed, and she said yes. So the second issue started to look more like Bust as you know it today, although it was really small and it was on newsprint. With every issue we got some monies coming in from subscribers, and we also started selling ads. We learned as we were going on. I had never edited before, Laurie had never designed a magazine, so we all learned about those things.

Whm did the tÂŤbsite become part of the project? [http://www.bust.com] As soon as I started to learn how to make websites I started .trying to make a Bust website-it's been there since very early on in the web, even back when you could only have grey backgrounds. We used to have text from the first issue available on a gopher, in f.tct. We were always trying to distribute it dec-

THE NEW JouRNAL

I'm going to get some phone calls ... there's really no such thing as bad publicity. Because of that magazine thousands and thousands more people heard about Bust. There was a

HAY~S

buzz.

tronically. I even got a Hypercard version of Bust in AOL. Because I did computer stuff I was always trying to use that to get the word of Bust out. Now the website is still one of our last priorites--here I am, a website designer, and our website really suffers from a lack of content. It's hard because Bust still doesn't pay us any money, now we distribute 30,000 copies of the magazine, and we get written up, and I get e-mail from people saying, I want to work for Bust, here's my resume, and it's like, "Honey, as soon as we can hire ourselves we'll start thinking about hiring other people." Nobody makes one thin dime-Bus~ like crime, doesn't pay. All the money that comes in goes back to printing the next issue of the magazine, and each issue that we've done has been better and more expensive than the last one. We're working on the twelfth issue now. We worked our way up to a four-color cover, and then we worked our way up ro a shiny cover, then we worked our way up to shiny inside pages, and then having color on the inside pages--we're always pumping it in and making the magazine better.

What was tk impact of th~ Tune story for

Everyone expected Tim~ to bash feminism; they've been doing it for years. Any time that feminism has a chance to get up on the podium and speak, even if only in response to a negative article, that's great. The real story of the '90s is the revamping of feminism, the makeover of feminism, how it's popular again. The Spice Girls are calling themselves feminists, eight year old girls are jumping around in their big sneakers and calling themselves feminists. When Bust was first started there was a smaller percentage of people who were willing to call themselves feminist. Now the girl power thing that was just starting to build when we started Bust is really widespread. The Tim~ story was totally clueless. It was like, "Hello, postmodernism, hello, irony" .. .I was really upset that all these feminists I know and respect were responding to the article, saying, "You're wrong, we are still doing grassroots work''-I'm sorry, but popular culture is really important, have we not realized that yet? What's in the popular culture is a really important reflection of where our value system is, and putting feminist products out into the popular culture is a way of making change. I don't think that putting out Bust is not as important as standing at abortion clinics and protesting against Operation Rescue.. .! think that Sassy was one of the most important feminist things to happen in the last 15 years. So was Madonna and so was Courtney Love. One of the first things the women's movement did in the '70s was to go and protest the Miss America pageant, and to hold a sit-in in the Lad~s Hom~ journaL offices. They realized back then the importance of pop culture. It was just weird that n~ was saying that feminism now is just a bunch of vapid pop culture stuff... and all these feminists who should know better are responding on their terms. A political strategy through popular culture is a valid way of dealing with things. It doesn't have to be apologized for.

Bust?

We got a lot of work out of that. As soon as I saw that in the magazine, I said, oh God,

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STUDENTS ARE TROUBLED BY RECENT POLICE CRACKDOWNS ON PARTIES SERVING ALCOHOL, BUT WHAT SEEMS LIKE THE NEW PROHIBITION MAY JUST BE A BEGINNING-OF-THE-YEAR FORMALITY.

THE NEW JouRNAL

t was the second weekend of the school year. Camp Yale was going strong, and rumors of the crackdown were flying. People were whispering. With Old Campus still crawling with parents, Yale police officers had arrived at a party in Vandetbilt Hall. "This year it's going to be different," a cop told T101 O'Meara (DC '00) as he ushered people out of the room. A few days later, when police appeared at McClellan Hall, a cop said, "We don't want to have to do this, but we were told to crack down real hard the first month," according to Nathan Vasquez (TC '00). Students were getting carded at Viva's. Rudy's was turning people away. Naples and Gecko's were tightening their collars. Students were getting called on their f.tke IDs. There was talk of a party in the Boyd Swing Space where the underaged host was wasted on plastic-bottled Smirnoff and orange juice. He vomited repeatedly on his bed, mumbling about DUH and doctors. His friends called an ambulance. A cop arrived with the ambulance. "First thing be asked was, 'How is he?"' said Quinny Tan (DC '01). "The next second, he asked if the host was 21, and who had bought the drinks." The officer went on to explain that the police were now "taking action" against those who purchased alcohol for minors. "He told us there was a new policy and then interrogated us, one by one," said Kyle Jarrow (SM '0 1). The pattern of the crackdown seemed to continue the next weekend at Davenport's Cottage, a traditional party suite. Police arrived to break up a massive crowd that had gathered to hear the Sextones, a srudent band, perform. Rumors swirled around the campus quickly, suggesting that the police were overreacting to a party that, while huge in attendance, had a very relaxed atmosphere. When the cops told the

band to stop playing, and announced that the party was over, the crowd yelled obscenities. Marc Hoffman (ES '00) stepped up to the microphone to protest the forced ending of the party. "He said, 'Why's the party over, ask them why!'" recalled Roberto Boneta (DC '00), a bystander. Then the situation got ugly. Boneta and others maintain that the officer told Hoffman to "get the fuck off the mic." Hoffman stepped away from the microphone and tried to discuss the situation with the officer, and, according to Boneta, the officer "pushed him hard." "The cop came towards me and I was between [Hoffman] and the cop. I said, 'Officer, there's no need for violence,' and asked for his badge number," Boneta said. The crowd, which had been watching the scene in shock, began shouting "Give us your badge number!" which furthet infuriated the officer. "He ripped my shirt and grabbed my arm. I raised my hands in the air and said, 'I'm not doing anything.'" T he officer then dragged Bonera, forcefully at first, to Davenport Dean Larry Lyke, who Boneta claims saw the entire incident. "The dean told me, 'Don't harass the officers.'" "The cop was definitdy out of line,'' said Peter Eleey (TC '00). Adam Seidman (ES '00) claims that a police officer shoved him as well. Yale Police Chief James Perrorti says no formal comp~ts have been filed with the Yale Police, and according to his official report of the incident, there was no misconduct. While most fdt the majority of the officers were courteous and restrained in a tense situation, the incident left a sour taste in the mouths of those srudents who had witnessed the behavior of the officers. Many saw Seidrnan~d Hoffinan, who now face the prospect of _}

0croBEJl

9, 1998

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an arrest warrant, as scapegoats for a raucous event. Executive Committee hearings are pending for the pair as well as several members of the band and the .hosts of the party.

he origin of the perceived crackdown had its roots last fall, when a drunken crew recruit was taken to Yale-New Haven Hospital. He told the police he had been served at Alpha Delta Phi's FunnelFest, a celebration of gravity and beer. A few days later, Yale Police arrested the fraternity's president. Next to experience the pinch was Delta Kappa Epsilon's (DKE) Feb Club-a month of nightly parties aimed at relieving winter malaise. Though officials denied that they had used the widely distributed list of events to target locations, fraternity brothers questioned whether the administration and police were playing by unwritten rules. "They weren't just shutting down parties, but shutting down the parties before the fact," said Chris Ryan (BR '99), vice-president of DKE. "Residential college masters were calling people into their offices and saying, 'Do not have this party.'" Then the administration came down hard on DKE sophomores Matt Manewal (BK '00) and Anthony Coyne (BK '00), who were caught with a keg by police responding to noise complaints. The pair faced Ex.Comm for serving to minors. "They told us it was by their own good graces that they didn't kick us out of school," said Manewal. With the newly applied pressure, DKE, Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE) and many other fraternities were having fewer large parties, carding at the door, issuing armbands, and using phrases like "risk management" along with keg and tap in their party planning. University officials deny that there have been any changes in policy. But this fall, it seemed that parties were under fire wherever one looked~n-cunpus, off-campus, in frats, in apartments, in courtyards. "Since I was a

freshman, there's been a step up in police activities," said Blake Sando (BK '99), presi: dent of SAE. "There's much more liability." The increased pressure seemed to make sense in light of recent national events. In the last two years, alcohol-related fatalities have hit more than a dozen schools across the nation, from MIT to Clarkson. But as the "H~ RI PPED MY SH I RT AND GRABBED MY ARM. I RAISED MY ARMS IN T H E AIR AND SAID, ' I'M NOT DOING ANYTHING:"' THE OFF I CER THEN DRAGGED BON ETA, FORCEFULLY AT FIRST, TO DAVENPORT DEAN LARRY LYKE, WHO BON ETA CLAIMS SAW THE WHOLE. INCIDENT. "THE DEAN TOLD ME, 'DON'T HARASS THE OFFICERS."'

death toll rises, students aren't getting the message. Researchers at Harvard's School of Public Health report that more and more college students are drinking in excess. College campuses are reacting with unprecedented regulations. Fraternities and campus houses have tightened measures at MIT, for example, and at state schools around the country, where police actually patrol the parties. During Dean of Student Affairs Betty Trachtenberg's tenure, Yale has escaped tragedy, but the dose calls make her uneasy. "We've had several cases this year where students were as dose to death as they can be0.3 [blood] alcohol level and over." t's a common counter-argument to the idea of a crackdown: the cops are more active at the beginning of the year, and as the parrying dies down, their activity lessens. More likely than nor, there has been no official change, but individual police officers are taking it upon themselves to send messages. With classes started and parties slowing down,

perhaps university officials felt there was no need for further warning. But three weeks after the dosing of the Davenport Cottage party, the breakup of an off-campus party suggested this assumption might not be correct. The patty was called Crime and Punishment, held at 15 Edgewood Avenue. The cops arrived a litde after one. The atmosphere was relaxed; the band was too loud. By 1: 15 everyone had filed out to be greeted by 12 New Haven ~d Yale police cars. Ga.ty and ÂˇMark were among the first to leave the party. "I saw this cop get up from his car, and he dropped his shoulder and checked Gary-he laid into him," Mark said. "I said, 'What are you shoving me for?"' said Gary. "The cop replied, 'Because I want you to get the fuck out of here."' Gary moved on with the rest of the crowd, which was still exiting the party. Moments later, Gary. Mark and Andrew Fisher (SM '00) approached the officer. Mark asked politely for his name and badge number. "We were not confronrational," said Fisher, "but [the officer] grabbed Mark's arm, and waved the flashlight at us threateningly. He was swearing, real pissed. He yelled, 'You wanna file a complaint? I'll take you to my supervisor,' sarcastically." "If my friend hadn't been there to insist that he tell us, I was intimidated enough that I wouldn't have persisted," said Mark. "I intend to file a report." Judy Mongillo, representative of the New Haven Police Department, said she has no information about the incident. "A lot of students are complaining about being mistreated," said Yale College Council President Zachary Kaufinan (SY '00). "I understand that the police have a job to do, but it seems their conduct should be investigated to make swe that they are operating within official police procedure." This sentiment is echoed by Julio Gonzalez (CC '99), Alderman of New Haven's Ward Tm NEW JouRNAL

One. "When you have vague standards, you have a selective enfor~ment," he said. "Students have grown to believe that if it's a private affair, signs [indicating the law] posted, and no disturbances, they are entitled to be left alone." It's what Gonzalez calls a "different culture of enforcement" that leads to the confusion, and the so-called mixed messages such as: the JE master's house serves champagne to the public, yet sophomores are put on probation for getting caught with a keg. The reality is that both act with an implicit understanding of responsibility. Students may protest when the sophomores are punished, but this seems a petty price for a generous freedom. Yale is neither a boarding school nor Chico State. En wco parm~ the doctrine of the university as protector-is alive and well, if sometimes misunderstood. While the university usually looks away from students drinking alcohol in their rooms, it must periodically make an example of people. By choosing to serve underage students, hosts must accept that they may get caught, may be made responsible, and may face litigation. The parents of Scott Krueger, who died at M IT, are suing his fraternity. Sometimes, ExComm is the least of your worries.

t's hard to reconcile a university crackdown with Yale's alcohol-soaked history. In the 19th century, afTer all, rich Yalies were served beer by their butlers at breakfast. In the 1970s and '80s students drank beer almost exclusively-available at college-funded keg parties in the dining halls, no lesswith little adult supervision. In the mid '80s, Connecticut's drinking age increased, and the law was changed to ban serving alcohol to minors. The University adopted massive regulations to protect against lawsuits, and the results were an end to dining hall bashes, a resurgence of fraterllities, an increase in police attention, and a more active Executive Committee. However, those measures certainly didn't eliminate traditions like Mory's, Tap Night, and TANG. "Another effect was that the drinking was

OCTOBER

9, 1998

driven underground," said Associate Provost Uoyd Suttle, who was Dean of Student Affairs in the '80s. "People started drinking the hard stuff." Yale saw binge drinking become a lethal reality. Similar patterns followed around the country. When Wtlliam Bennett was Master of Silliman College in the mid '80s, he saw the rise of binge drinking. "They had these whiskey bars, where students would chug-a-lug 9, 10, 11 shots." Bennett also witnessed Yale's most recent alcohol tragedy, the death of Silliman student Ted McGuire in 1987. McGuire began the evening at a SAC party in Saybrook. "Then he polished off a bottle of tequila," said Bennett. "His friends carried him up five floors and lefr him on the floor to sleep it off." At 6:30 in the morning, someone noticed he had stopped breathing. Several hours later he was pronounced dead. It's frightening to discover how often such a tragedy is narrowly avoided. During this year's Tap Night, on September 23, a crowd of drunken singing group members were partying in Branford. It was a splash of fun in an otherwise dreary evening, with Madonna pumping from inside and singers trading Tap Night war stories in the Branford courtyard. In the middle of the parry, a woman began complaining that she felt ill. Friends huddled around her, offering advice. She was blue, shivering, and periodically vomiting. "She was very sick, but I felt it wasn't a good idea to call DUH- it would have turned into a disciplinary problem," the host said. "Since it was my room, it would have gone into our files in the dean's office." Here, it seems, students finally bad the privacy they wanted, and none of the intrusion from the law that so many others had protested. 1m]

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WHY HAS THE NEW HAYEN PRESERVATION TRUST'S AGREEMENT WITH YALE ALLOWED A HISTORICAL HOUSE TO BE TORN DOWN FOR A PARKING LOT?

' ' M aple Cottage," located on Trumbull Street between HillBE N house and Temple, is a remnant of another New Haven. The great American architect Alexander Jackson Davis designed the house in 1836 as part of the plan for an elaborate city envisioned by his patron, James Hillhouse. Maple Cottage was intended to be among the formal mansions looked down upon by the lavish Hillhouse Estate (now Science Hill). While study elms lined Hillhouse, the "cottages" on side streets like Trumbull bad to settle for respectable maples. Two maple trees still stand outside Maple Cottage. But by the time Yale acquired the house in 1976, previous owners had buried much of the exterior detail under a drab layer of stucco. A notice on the door of the abandoned building announces Yale's intention to demolish it before winter, and to lay down a parking lot in its place. Yale has found an unlikely ally for its plans in the New Haven Preservation Trust. Yale administracors have considered Maple Cottage a liability since 1995, when the Center for International and Area Studies left the building for Luce Hall. They kept this sentiment to themselves until February 26 of this year, when Yale President Richard Levin (GRD '74) and the President of the Preservation Trust Edward Bottomley (CC '81) signed an unprecedented agreement in a public ceremony in Battell Chapel. Yale promised to renovate four decaying local landmarks,

OcrosER 9, 1998

including the derelict Davies Mansion on Prospect Street; the Trust promised to stand aside while Yale sold the Kingsley-Blake House on Trumbull Street and demolished neighboring Maple Cottage. Signed more than two years after the creation of Yale's Office of New Haven and State Affairs, the February 26 agreement was one of the notable accomplishments of Yale's new policy of community engagement. In the following months, however, consensus within the Trust and the local preservation community evaporated, and those opposed to the Trust's vision ofcooperation with Yale coalesced into the Friends of Hillhouse Avenue. Members of this new group suggest that the February agreement merely rubber-stamped Yale's pre-existing plans, and that the Trust's directors were railroaded into its approval. Much to the chagrin of the Friends of Hillhouse, the Preservation Trust signed off on a landscaped parking lot as the temporary replacement for Maple Cottage. However, according to recendy released planning documents, Yale has higher hopes for Trumbull Str~. In a letter to the Connnecticut Historic Commission, the Office of Facilities cited a planning consultant, writing, "One of their recommendations is that this become the primary entrance to Yale, a major gateway to the University and New Haven." In the long term, Yale promises a new building of similar size and placement. "A more substantial building, housing academic or student administrative offices, if properly scaled, would

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be a more suitable announcement of the University on Trumbull Street," according to Yale planning documents.Âˇ

thought she could convince them to go back to Yale for a new round of. negotiations. "The Board was completely pciralyzed," she says. Although the Trust had agreed not to pose o the untrained eye, Maple Cottage any legal obstacles to Maple Cottage's demolidoesn't look like much to fight for. tion, nothing prevented Farwell, an indepenHowever, architectural historian dent consultant, from filing the papers that Anstress Farwell insists that the cracked stucco would force Yale to bring its case for demolicould be peeled back to reveal original 19th tion before the State Historical Commission century detail. Farwell is an old hand at New in Hartford this September. Haven preservation activism. Eighteen years By this summer, Farwell's initiative had ago, as a graduate stuevolved into Thursday dent in architectural hisnight meetings of the Friends of Hillhouse. tory, she led a group that "A . MORE SUBSTANTIAL forced Yale to preserve This ad hoc organizaBUILDING , HOUSING the Davies Mansion. tion reflects the two ACADEMIC OR STUDENT Still technically a Yale types of people who ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICES , Ph.D candidate, she make up the preservaIF PROPERLY SCALED, now works as a freelance tionist community: WOULD BE A MORE preservation consultant those who own fabulous SUITABLE ANNOUNCEMENT and is the driving force old houses, and those OF THE UNIVERSITY ON behind the Friends of who make a Uving from TRUMBULL STREET, " Hillhouse. Citing the them. Held in the ACCORDING TO YALE dirty stucco and the Whitney Avenue office PLANNING DOCUMENTS . metal fire escape slapped of a real estate broker, onto one side of the the group includes Yale building, Farwell blames employees and memMaple Cottage's current state on 20 years of bers of an older New Haven eUte, as well as Yale ownership. "This is demolition by professional historians and preservationists. neglect," she says. The discussion sometimes digresses into talk The world of New Haven preservationists of leaky slate roofs, decrepit chimneys, and is a small one, and Farwell first learned about excessive property taxes, but centers on the the Trust's agreement with Yale through Trust members' shared sense that the Preservation President Bottomley, her friend, former Trust betrayed its mission by signing the Febneighbor, and current nemesis. The Trust's ruary agreement with Yale. Many of the Board of Directors had already passed the Friends of Hillhouse are members of the agreement by a vote of 22-0, but Farwell Preservation Trust, among them four Direc-

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tors who regret voting for the February deal. Nancy Baquie, a Wooster Square resident and member of the Trust's Executive Committee, complains of her exclusion from Bottomley's discussions with the Trust's chief negotiator, Robert Gnywacz. "Even I am not invited to the secret meetings," says Baquie. Although they are dissatisfied with Yale's behavior, the Friends of Hillhouse save their strongest words for their fellow preservationists at the Trust. "There was absolute secrecy with no community involvement," com-

with Grzywacz. Yale came to the table with plans to demolish two of six properties, and ready to discuss the terms by which the other four would be restored, according to Grzywacz. Months of negotiations produced an agreement that committed Yale to the restoration of the badly damaged Davies Mansion, two decrepit houses on Hillhouse . Avenue, and the 18th cenrury John Pierpont House on Elm Street. Grzywacz and Bottomley both pointed out that while they were unable to save Maple Cottage, they did conplains Jack Gold, a CITING THE DIRTY STUCCO vince Yale to grant a one-year grace period member of the Friends AND THE METAL FIRE for the Kingsley-Blake of Hillhouse who once ESCAPE SLAPPED ONTO House across the street. worked as a preservaONE SIDE OF THE (It currently houses the tionist for the city of BUILDING , FARWELL Ethics, Politics, and New Haven. The parties BLAMES MAPLE COTTAGE'S Economics Program.) to the negotiations give CURRENT STATE ON Yale has agreed to give differing accounts. Yale TWENTY YEARS OF YALE the structure to anyone Associate Vice President OWNERSHIP. " THIS IS will take it, and has who for Facilities Kemd DEMOLITION BY even offered $75,000 Dawkins says, "It's not NEGLECT," SHE SAYS. toward the immense clear to me that there cost of physically movwas this secrecy," while ing an antique house. the Trust's Bottomley The trust also won significant concessions on says that the planning was confidential. "Yale the details of the restoration of the other four wanted it that way," he claims. properties, according to trust officials. Trust officials like to focus on the Februale first made contact with the Trust in ary agreement's preamble, which recognizes October 1996, according to Trust that Yale's academic mission comes first and negotiator Gnywacz, an architect who asserts, "Change is part of a continuously livalso chairs the Trust's Preservation Action ing community." However, the agreement Committee. In November 1997, two reprerecognizes that "conscientious stewardship sentatives of Yale's Office of Facilities and requires ... a careful balancing of preservation Office of New Haven and State Affairs met

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and change." The preamble also promises "continued consultation" on the six properties, but Grzywacz called the Friends of Hillhouse's claim that this clause permitted a new round of negotiations a misunderstanding. Members of the Friends of Hillhouse argue that the agreement lacks schedules and procedures, and that its legal status is questionable. Many of the Friends of Hillhouse's complaints center on the role of the Trust's President. "The plan was sprung on us," says one Trust Director, bookseller Nolan Smith. Another Director, Jack Gold, notes that Bottomley's firm has done design work for the University and for Yale-New Haven Hospital. "I think that there are some clear confiias of interests on the board," he says. "I don't harbor any bitterness," says Bottomley. "It's wonderful that there is so much interest in this issue." He denies having pressured anyone into the agreement. "There was a three-hour meeting," he says, adding that copies of the agreement were mailed in advance to all board members. As foe the charge of a conflict of interest, Bottomley says his professional involvements were never a secret. "It's hard to be in this town and not have anything to do with Yale," says Bottomley, a former Whiffenpoof. In the agreement he sees a chance to bring new clout to an organization that has lost more than half of its nearly 1,000 members in the last decade, and which has not had a full-time director in

years.

he tensions within the preservation community carne to the surf.l.ce at the State Historical Commission meeting in September. The Commission had to decide whether Yale's proposal to demolish Maple Cottage was "unreasonable" and then forward its recommendation to the State Attorney General for action. Both sides made long presentations; Grzywacz joined Yale representatives and lawyers in vaunting Yale's record in preserving buildings like Linsly-Chittenden on Old Campus, while members of the Friends of Hillhouse defended Maple Cottage and suggested that Yale had acted in bad faith. Yale Assistant Vice President Michael Morand, who Âˇworks at the Office of New Haven and State Affairs, characterized the Friends of Hillhouse as paranoid. "There aren't any great conspiracies at work on this one," he says. Nonetheless, the Friends of

THE NEW JouRNAL

Hillhouse argued suCCC!)Sfully that Yale and the Trust had not done enough research to determine the house's true value. The Commission and Yale agreed that Yale will have until November 4 to assemble an independent evaluation of the house and a more thorough set of plans for the site. As President of the Trust, Bottomley is visibly proud of an agreement that produced a congratulatory letter from the President of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. It was a step into the limelight for an organization best known for the oval plaques on scores of buildings around the city. And Grzywacz, who also chairs the Trust's Preservation Action Committee, enjoys the new, more personal relationship he has with Yale administrators after years of being ignored. Gnywacz now meets with Yale officials on a monthly basis. "Very frequently I'll be called [by Yale] once a week, just an informal telephone call," he says. Committed to the agreement in writing and in spirit, the New Haven Preservation Trust finds itself standing in for Yale in the battle against an activist wing of the preservation movement. Divide and conquer. It's worked for leaders cannier than Richard Levin, and against opponents more fearsome than the New Haven Preservation Trust. But as the preservation community remains divided, Yale finds itself with allies and enemies in New Haven. Associate Vice President Dawkins winces at the mention of the many hours that Yale's new policy of community engagement has cost him. Nevertheless, he continues to meet with members of the Friends of Hillhouse, while his office maintains a close relationship with the Trust. Dawkins is frustrated by the delay in demolition, but he still supports the University's new direction. "What it demonstrates is Yale's good intention," says Dawkins. And it is to the credit ofYale's new community relations strategy that each preservationist &ction speaks of Dawkins with respect. As Yale and New Haven begin to move beyond their cautious overtures, the moment may have finally arrived when New Haven will abandon Yale as an all-purpose enemy, and accept the university as a powerful, if calculating, ally. Ill)

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FAMILY PoRTRAIT photographs by Michael Braun

ichael Braun's father was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis when Michael was six years old. These pictures were taken 13 years later, in the win.ter of 1997, when the. lifestyle dictated by illness had been adopted by the family and had long since become second nature. It's a fairly simple task to photograph one's family. It is far more difficult to make a picture that extends beyond- pervasive familial cliches. Michael manages to capture intimate, heartbreaking moments, as well as convey their everyday nature. This is, as he puts it, "what has settled under the air in my house." He succeeds in touching upon the complex and weighty relationship that exists between husband and wife-but not forcefully. I am struck by the love with which these photographs are so apparently made, drawn as they are by the touch that only a son could havean interpretation only he could provide.

-Hrishikesh Hirway

Michael Braun is a junior in Trumbull Colkge. Hrishiltesh Hirway, a junior in Morse Co/.kge, is designn of TN].

THE NEW JouRNAL

Ocrona 9, 1998

THE NEW joURNAL

0croBER

9, 1998

The Futures Market Daniel Brook Dimes, quarters, lunatic change... -James Merrill, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and son of Merrill Lynch founder Charles Merrill t was not the first time I had attended a mid-September meeting hold their receptions at XandO. I wonder if the firms who go there preat Yale where the "facilitator," hoping to attract new blood, had tend they're "indie" like XandO does-none of those long lists of cities bragged about his organization's "open, non-hierarchical struc- . with branch offices in their ads. "Wow, those firms must really hate cure." But this wasn't YHHAP and it wasn't SLAC and it hierarchy," I thought, but Merrill Lynch's anarchical tendencies will would have taken a lot more than my gin and tonic to have to suffice tonight. help me imagine this guy in anything other than a~~ ~--alii:-~ It would make my interviewing easier, at least. gray suit and wing-tips. If he was fighting the ~ il'·~'ii~···- ~ There wouldn't be all that pressure to barge up to power, he was doing it wearing a power tie. ~~ ~,.-..,. . .~···"f~ the front of the room and take up Mr. KenBut if he was trying to stick it to the Man, he ~~ 1r ~ ~ ney's-I mean, Jerry's-precious time. I'm came to the right place. Rumor has it that w~~ '"~~~ ,~ sure Jerry is like those ex-hippie teachers I whenever the Man comes to New Haven, 11. 'Iff, ~~ ~'~"W ~' used to have who let you call them by he stops in for an after-dinner drink at 1J -·~ 'fll~~.; ,.-~\ their first names just to be non-hierarchithe Graduate Club. P~~g the Man ~~~i cal. I wonder who hares hierarchy was not new to our facilitator; he had ~ ··~IJ more-Jerry Kenney, Jerry of Ben and been doing it all his life. ~4 I Jerry's, or Jerry Garcia? But why should I This was Jerry Kenney (SY '63), Yale ~~-·' ~,.__-__,/ even need to ask? I could talk to the little Man and Senior Vice President at Merrill ·~ ~J!f.1J people, since Merrill Lynch grants them Lynch, whose official title and salary are ~Z ~ 1 a... ~ Z'....Jti/J so much autonomy. And they won't l>e matched only by his unofficial position as ~~ ~hard to find either. The company brought head of Yale-Merrill Lynch relations. In 1963 ~ up loads of them from New York, recent Yale he got his "senior haircut," bopped a train to ~--·-~il- V/ grads all. Grand Central, and never looked back. He was a ~8...:: ··~,~~ But they were a tight-lipped bunch. I tried to king-maker (and queen-maker-Merrill Lynch loves ~-~~ interview two women from the class of '98, but they diversity as much as it hates hierarchy) and his audience was suggested I talk to more senior people. I tried another but he filled with many a handsome young prince(ss). But these young royals had strict orders from his non-hierarchical supervisors ("Comrades," I may have more in common with Czarevich Alexei, the Russian heir think they're called). "We were told we can't say anything about this who ended his brief life riddled with Bolshevik bullets at the bottom of [to] newspapers," he said. Finally, I found someone who was more than a mineshafts, than with a young Louis XIY. No, the revolution is not happy to talk. He claimed that the global economic downturn was havcoming, but on Wall Street the sky may be falling. ing no effect on recruiting and that there was no noticeable change in I wanted to find out how the Asian flu (not to mention the Russian mood at the office. But Friday's Nnu York Times reported that Citicorp flu or the Latin American flu) was affecting investment bank recruitwould lay off scores of its financial services workers, and last week's ment. I thought this would be easier than it turned out to be. First of Time featured an article from a hedge fund manager entitled "Fear all, I wouldn't have to travd. Why go to Wall Street when Wall Street Reigns On The Floor?" (they even put "Reigns" in red). As I worked comes to you? And I wouldn't have any trouble finding a recepcion-I the room, I realized that the article described the atmosphere on the just picked up the YDN and read only the full-page ads. Merrill Lynch Boor of the Graduate Club as well as it did the New York Stock was coming to town, specifically to the Graduate Club, the usual place Exchange. for good old-fashioned good old boy networking. I've beard some firms Claudine Rippa works full-time as a recruiter for the firm's debt

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Corporate officm at M~rrill Lynch, as pictur~d in

markets department. She seemed like just the person to talk to. But she wasn't; she was downright hostile. Ifeveryone's character was so perfect~ ly summed up by their last name, life would be a lot easier. She had been duough the recession of the early '90s and the Clinton~era boom and maintained that recruiting was never affected. "There are no pro~ lems here," she snipped. When pressed, she admitted they were now "assessing" because there was "concern," but she didn't anticipate any cuts. Again I changed my strategy. I decided not to look for a person from any particular age group or department. Rather, I decided to talk to someone who looked nice. I found a middle~aged man who told me the new bankers in his department were scared and confused by the market fluctuations. "They're asking, 'What does this all mean?' and 'What's going to happen to us?"' He, however, was completely at ease. It seemed he had even skipped yesterday's round of mandatory haircuts that had been inflicted on all the other gendemen in the room. Proba~ bly out playing with his kids. For the younger employees, a job at Merrill Lynch would preclude having a dog, let alone kids or anything else that might require care. I overheard a young man nun down a date because it conflicted with his "sell dinner." I must admit that I was unfamiliar with the term and thought at first it might be "cell dinner." They both seemed equally fit~ ting. In many ways, in fact, the lifestyle of an !~banker is like that of a prison inmate, minus all the play. Maybe it was a reference to a monk cdl, which would explain the celibacy and the boring haircuts, too. Ironically, the firm's official materials did not attempt to hide how its employees lived. In the recruiting film, a young man bragged about working from ten am to six am. Another admitted that "you can't plan anything" in your social life. The glossy companion brochure contained a close~up of a few Boors of the World Trade Center at dawn. A num~ ber of offices still had the lights on, framing silhouetted !~bankers hard at work. y hunch that fewer and fewer of these covered offices would be available this year had still not been confirmed. By this rime the reception was breaking up and I was resigned to going against the grain and embracing hierarchy-! had to interview

Ocrosu 9, 1998

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the big cheese. Before I knew it, I was face to face with Jerry Kenney. I had no journalistic tricks up my sleeve; I was going to put it to him straight. Besides, Jerry had already acknowledged the problems in the global economy. When he reached the part of his presentation about Merrill Lynch's $1.4 trillion in assets, he joked that it was "lower this month than before summer vacation." Talk about the wrong joke for this crowd-he didn't receive a single laugh. Sometimes the best way to break some bad news is with a joke, and for Jerry there was no covering up the bad news. He believed in the Five Values of Merrill Lynch, and number five was Integrity. "Do market fluctuations affect recruiting?" I asked. "They do," he replied, not realizing how many of his underlings had denied this basic fact. Like the all~American father explaining the ~ ins and outs of a carburetor to his son, he gave me a man~t~man on ~ the global economy. During growth you need more people, but in "ter~ ,; rible" markets you may have to lay people off. "I guess it will be a year ~ of reduced recruiting all over Wall Street," he concluded, estimating ~ that Merrill Lynch would have about 150 spaces in its 1999 "class." I 1 remembered that earlier in the evening I had spoken with a member of ~ the class of '97 who told me he'd trained with 400 recruits. This year ~ 250 are out with the Asian Bu. ~ I considered going back to Ms. Rippa and informing her that the Bossman had contradicted her, but frankly, I was scared of her. Besides, the night was winding down. The seniors were going back to their econ homework, the young bankers were packing up for New York, and the Man was going back to his house in the suburbs. Before leaving I went back up to Jerry and thanked him for being so forduight. "The clients know, so you gotta be honest," he told me. At least one man still believed in Value Number Five. As I walked back up Elm Street toward Yale, I tooko~t the recruit~ ment materials I had picked up at the beginning of the night. I looked at the glossy red portfolio, e:xpect:ing to see it emblazoned with the Mer~ rill Lynch slogan, "We're bullish on the future." There was no text; that slogan went down with the stock market. The slogan was gone, the brash, youthful confidence was gone, only the bull remained. IIIJ

Dani~l Brook is a junior in

Davmport Co/kg~. 27

THE CRITICAL ANGLE

Great Expectations LYN ES' PROVOCATI VE PH OTOGRAPH S REVEAL A TIMELESS DRIVE.

by Dan Kellum G eorge Platt Lynes Returns To Yale, exhibit at Beinecke Rare

Book & Manuscript Library and jonathan Edwards College. Through October)oth.

"This place is infuriating," George Platt Lynes wrote of Yale to Gertrude Stein in 1926. "The conventions begin nowhere in particular and are perfectly endless. This afternoon I had expounded to me the only way that one might be eccentric and live. By insinuating oneself quietly into 'the group,' by writing and publishing a few 'charming' lines in the Lit, {a supposedly-literary monthly which avowedly refuses to be alive), by submitting so thoroughly to the custom and convention that the student has created to protect himself from all but a little harmless comments that one has experienced it all, one may depart a little (very little) from the accustomed ways...And. I CANNOT DO IT. And there is no other way...so MUCH FOR YALE!"

Lynes had met Miss Stein, as he addressed her in his early .letters, the previous summer in Paris. He had been at Yale for a little over two months. From school, he envisioned Stein as his mentor in bohemianism, enamored as he was of her talent and connections. This was before the publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and before Stein had become a household name. He solicited her opinions of his work, including in his letters poems that Stein seems to have thought little of. In the '20s, Lynes fancied himself a budding writer, a furure member of a vanguard community, and his letters from this period are insistent in their literary pretensions (single-word sentences punctuate his letters, an arch dismissal of middle-class expectations

circulates throughout). Judging from his epistolary style it would seem he had already assumed be would be the doquenc voice of an insillgent generation. Uorevered and utterly miserable, he lefr the university just before the end of his first term. Lynes' career seems predicated on this shirking of his Northeastern upper-middle class roots-his father, too, was a Yalie-for the more progressive lifestyle lived out in Paris and New York by such avant-garde luminaries as Stein, Paul Cadmus, and Jean Cocteau. In fact, he gave up his literary ambitions, possibly at Stein's suggestion, for photographic ones, an interest sparked by the gifr of a Dearborn camera in 1927 and the publication of his first formal portrait of Stein in 1931.

THE NEW joURNAL

It was an auspicious career move. Lynes' poetry, or what remains of it in manuscript, is

derivative and boring. His photographs are original-he invented the backlighting so artfully used by Richard Avedon-and shocking for his time in their display of frank homoeroticism. To contemporary viewers, when the male body is more ubiquitously sexualized, it may be difficult to gauge how controversial these images were. Set in the context of the '30s and '40s, it is easy to see his photographs not as dreamy dements in a surreal tableau, but as intimate portraits of idealized figures depicting ineyplicable and closeted desires. Looking at the photographs, admiring their candor, it is no wonder that Dr. Alfred Kinsey (the author of the ever-cited Kinsey Rrpo~ acquired many of Lynes' nudes in the early '50s for his institute in Indiana. The exhibition "George Platt Lynes Returns to Yale" uses funds from Jonathan Edwards College and photographs from Beinccke Library, and is housed in both locations. This splitting of Lynes' work makes both exhibits somewhat small, with the sad consequence that the viewer is never able to confront all the images at once. Comprehending Lynes' work becomes something less public than intimate, a personal exploration of the materials at hand. The exhibition demonstrates Lynes' virtuousity. There are sumptuous and seamless fashion shots where perfection seems to be met in the shimmer of light f.illing off fur and tropical wool, where men and women of ideal proportions confront a world of flawless interiors. Then, too, there are images of Lynes' literary friends, ranging from an austere, bibliophilic Evelyn Waugh, to a shon-trousered, domestic Christopher Isherwood, to a manDe!M, abject Dorothy Parker. Lynes wanted to be a writer for most of his young life. As a consequence, in the years after Yale he

Ocrosu 9, 1998

befriended budding and established talents, using them later as photographic subjects. Encapsulating the likes of Andre Gide and W. H. Auden, Lynes presented his admiration for the writing life, and the individuals talented enough to live it. According to friend and subject Donald Wmdham, Lynes made little distinction between the work he did for fashion magazines and his largely unexhibited male nudes. During his lifetime, Lynes published his nudes only abroad, in the German homoerotic magazine Der Kries, and there only under the pseudonyms Roberto Rolf and Roben Orville. The nudes are some of the most compelling works in the show. In a moment of self-conscious dejection, a naked man tucks himself into a ball on a diving board. ln another, a pair of barely pubescent boys build an acrobatic bridge, backbending off one another in front of a timeless gray screen. The pictures are strange and beautiful because we are unaccustomed to seeing men in such positions. Vulnerable and vanquished, two men lie naked over one another in a hospital bed, a mess ofinterlocking muscles, appendages covered in bandages. Contemplative and quiet, one man stands, back to the camera, staring out at a manipulated image of the sea. In the freeness with which Lynes explores the male form, his works invoke classical motifs, yet there is something particularly anti-classical about the presentation of men in Lynes' photographs. In Greek sculpture hair was removed, lest it prevent a proper presentation of the musculature; here the models remain unshaven, a fact that creates provocative, discomfiting images. The naked man staring off at the ocean has a smattering of thick black hair on his upper thighs. In the gymnastic photograph, a faint suggestion of pubic hair crowns the top of the bodily configuration, reminding the viewer that these

bodies are not merely beautiful, but sexual. Their subjects are not meant to be adored, not merely admired. In the authorial portraits and the nudes, the viewer is confronted by the artist's longings--to be a writer, and to express what was inexpressible at the time: Lynes' homosexual desires. In his Mythology Project-a series of surrealized figures from Greek myths-it is as if Lynes were pushing the boundaries of artificiality in his work, exposing the makeup he used on his models and studio-set environments in which he took all his pictures. He attempts to set his work free from temporal constraint, invoking the timelessness of myth. In so doing he creates photographs that seem more time-specific (think Edwardian melodrama) than any of his other work. Desire tranScends time; Lynes' veneration for old stories does not. In this exhibit, George Platt Lynes returns to Yale as the artist he aspired to be during his brief academic tenure here. His work rebuts the controlled society his classmates endured, moving as they did through the ranks of Yale society, quiedy accepting the norms and rules that older students had lain out before them-the rules of conduct Lynes dismissed as "so dull and stupid you could not imagine," in his first letter to Stein from Yale on October 5, 1926. Perhaps there is something related in the matrix of homoerotic desire, selfconciousness, and Lynes' need to rebel against the life his parents planned for him. Perhaps it is the hallmark of his art that Lynes focused on his desires, the desires that must have seemed so at odds with what others ex~ed ofhim. 181

Dan &/Jum, a smwr in SiUiman man4ging ~ditlJr ofTNJ.

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The Starr Chamber TALKSHOW HO ST GLEN N BE CK S PIN S THE STARR REPORT AS DAILY DIATRIBE A ND ONGOING RADIO DRAMA.

by lan Blecher

While most of the country finds the president not guilty by reason of inanity, an unregenerate few remain resolute unto resignation: the men of talk radio. Here in New Haven, WELl AM-960 has pre-empted its mind-numbing News at Noon with "The Impeachment of Character," a program dedicated entirely to hemming . and hawing the president out of office. Glenn Bc;ck, who narrates the ride to work for WELl's FM affiliate, KC-101, has given up his lunch hour to host the show. Maybe host isn't the right word. Beck doesn't take callers, interview experts, or prattle with his usual KC 10 1Âˇ buds about traffic-girl Heather Scott's new outfit. He hardy even analyzes the news. Moscly, he just reads the Starr Report, uncut, in order. . The show is not as boring as it sounds. As he has plumbed deeper into Clinton's sewage, Beck has cleaned up his impersonations. The president now sounds like a perverted cracker, Vernon Jordan an idiotic Uncle Tom, and Monica Lewinsky a Jewish American Princess who fell off the short bus on the way to the special school. Complete with stock characters and improvised dialogue, "The Impeachment of Character" is like a radio play out of the 1930s. However, back then when you turned on the radio, you did not hear obscenities like pmis and vagina and cigar. The show is certainly offensive, but no one seems more offended by it than Beck himself, who calls the report "vile," and even refused to mention the cigar story when it first broke. So why does Beck spread the poison? I drove to WELl's studios in Hamden to find out. Beck looks as intimidating as he sounds, 6'4" with icy eyes and a paunch that will probably keep him off television. When I met him, he was wearing a baggy gray sweatsuit and an old-fashioned Yale jacket. I asked him what he thought of the president's grand jury testimony. "The tape shouldn't have come out," he said, taking a strange position for a guy who's made it his job to publicize the scandal. But for Beck, Clinton's legal maneuverings hurt the country as badly as his sexual indiscretions. "We're involved with a president who's a lawyer, not a leader," he said. "It is high time we start searching for a stronger leader." You'd think so, wouldn't you? But what about that pesky 69 percent of Americans who don't want the lawyer-in-chief impeached? "It's like the debate on whether parents matter. It's an excuse for parents who aren't spending the time. We impose those same standards on the presidency. We're looking for absolution." Beck may be looking for absolution himself Last year he hosted an

amorphous call-in program on WELl that pre-empted the first hour of the immensely popular Dr. Laura. To make matters worse, his opinions were so abrasive and he was so nasty to dissenting callers that, after aÂˇfew weeks, his was almost the only voice. Augustinian arias on ethical discordances in Beck's own past swelled into choruses of moral indignation. He once asked a caller to read the ten commandments over the air as Beck tallied the ones he'd broken. He had broken most of them, as it turned out-at least as many as Clinton has. As the callers dropped off, he filled the air more and more with random selfdeprecating/self-righteous revelations. The show was short-liyed. "The Impeachment of Character" is more titillating t!tan Beck's earlier attempt, a sort of public confessional for America. Unlike the president's defenders, Beck isn't going to make it easy for us: the viler the report, the dumber his Lewinsky, the more unctuous his Jordan, and the slimier his Clinton. Beck lingers over every lie like a fine meal before a guilt-emptying purge. So what prevents the show from becoming as lascivious as the president? In the end, the scandal Beck dramatizes is a play within a larger play about its narrator. Beck's trudge from moral ambiguity to moral superiority culminates in judgement of the president, the country, ansi himself. And not for sexual dysfunction-Beck takes that sort of sin for granted. "Personal life," he said, "is one thing. The problem is perjury." The moral question here isn't about sin but whether we talk honestly and openly about it. The inner comedy about Monica and Bill may be bawdy and repugnant, but the outer tragedy about Glenn is cathartic and edifying. Its dialectical structure finally saves "The Impeachment of Character" from the obvious hypocrisy of teaching morality by publicizing a salacious scandal. The show isn't about a scandal so much as a scandal's negation. Beck's rendition of the Starr Report could only be a farce. To take the Report on its own, as a dry legal document, would be to cave in to the president's miasma of half-truths and jargon. As a comedy, the Report comes on the scene already unravelled by morality. By tum, the outer drama of Beck's own struggle depends on some kind of inner guilt to lament. For him, it seems, the real problem with the unmoved 69 percent of us is not that we lack a sense of what's right, but that we lack a sense of what's wrong. We may agree that lying is bad, but we don't think the scandal ought to have happened in the first place. For IIIJ Beck, however, there is no first place without a scandal.

/an Blecher, a junior in Davenport College, is on the staff ofTNj. OCTOBER 9,

1998

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