WEEKEND

WEEKEND // FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2014

Between Yale Blue and Green

Following Yale’s “no” to divestment, Emma Platoff and Wesley Yiin examine the state of campus environmentalism. // page 3

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ADVICE FOR FRESHMEN

ON THE IMPACT OF 9/11

WEEKEND GETS LIKES

We’ve got an expert to consult on the challenges facing the class of 2018.

Aria Thaker reflects on patriotism and community.

We made a flowchart for all your social media needs.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND VIEWS

CUNNINGHAM

HERE NOW, LOOKING BACK: A MESSAGE FOR FRESH MEN // BY JAME CUNNINGHAM Every year, every one comes back to the school for what promises to be one of the true years of our lives. But, as this one comes back as my last one of all, I have started to think of the school as more than just what one does in a day, or even night. What did the school mean for me? Why did it? What did I do it if I did it? And what of all of the people? If we truly are to be what the school means us to be, like the books and words of yore, we must pass down the things and thoughts of today. Oh I do see these little bitties only just now coming to the school for the first time! I see them even as they are outside, walking and dancing in the moon, yelling to each other in this way and that. They chant and sing, they do, of the Light College Years, as they hold each other in their hands and discuss the issue of the day. Little do they know, these same little bitties are to be made into big men and girls, if only they knew. I remembered of my fresh man year. I arrived just from the train, when all of the sudden there it was: The School. I was so excited truly. To see of the people and place that I was to spend my years, I could never have thought that there it would be, and then soon to be gone again now. Then I saw it all: Old Camps, the Gate, Stairs, Woman Table, blue books, the Sterling Stack, Benickle. These truly would come to be the things of my

time at the school, from now, and from then. But these were just the things. What also were, is the people. They were all of them my friends, even if we touched just once, in the grass or by the tree. I knew of one, my Dougland, of my fresh man suite. Even at day one, we made fast friends with a wink or a smile. These were the nights, to even just sit and talk and eat of the Buttery, there with all of us: Danuel, Tob, Jessico, Kakika, and Mobe. And then there were the others, those times to sing and shout and dance around land! Once of these times, we took us to Frat, where Little Jame wiggled his arms and legs till they all past out. Then to end it all, even just a popped corn movie in my bed. Oh those things of time that happened once ago! But soon these for me are now not. But you, little bitties, with your hats and coats, this is still for you! Count it! Keep them in you as much as you can! Soon the very things you once looked around to see will only be gone, and you will stand like me at the Gate and only look back. It is only once, so be of it now. And as the old song says: “Light College years, with pleasure life, The short, glab year of life.” Contact JAME CUNNINGHAM at thisisa.fakename@yale.edu . // ANNELISA LEINBACH

FOGGATT

English as a Second Language

// EMILY XIAO

// BY TYLER FOGGATT

F R I D AY SEPTEMBER 12

I spent my summer in Brazil, learning how terrible I am at speaking Portuguese. When I returned to the U.S., I discovered that I might also be terrible at speaking English. As one of the least fluent speakers in my L3/L4 summer session class, my Brazil experience induced a decent amount of angst and self-loathing. I don’t know why I expected to get around the country with a vocabulary that basically just consisted of “futebol” and “cerveja” — soccer and beer, respectively — but my weak understanding of both the language and its nuances quickly became an issue. I was speaking the Portuguese of a preschooler, but I was trying to communicate with adults. One experience stands out to me quite vividly. Brazilian septic systems are generally incapable of handling paper waste, and most of the establishments we visited had signs in the bathroom to remind customers not to flush toilet paper down the toilet, but to instead dispose of it in a trash can. Our hotel in São Paulo was without one of these wonderfully informative signs, so we inevitably found ourselves faced with a clogged toilet and no knowledge of how to say exotic words such as “clogged,” “flush,” or “broken.” My desire to avoid speaking Portuguese was eclipsed by my unfortunate need to urinate, so I called the front desk and produced a sentence that was probably the most insightful Portuguese I uttered during my entire stay in Brazil: “The toilet needs help.” It worked. The front desk sent someone to help our toilet almost immediately, and I was astounded by the effectiveness of my infantile Portuguese. The rest of the trip continued like this — unable to voice things like “I’m really in the mood for a glass of iced water,” I resorted to: “Want water,” or the even more desperate, but slightly more accurate: “Need water. Now.” I hated myself for speaking like a caveman, for being so unquestionably terrible at Portuguese that I couldn’t even attempt to properly articulate what it was I wanted or how I was feeling. But I was properly articulating these things — “Need water” still resulted in a glass of water being placed in front of me. I was just annoyed that I couldn’t say it in a more eloquent way. My inability to speak eloquent Portuguese forced me to be direct. Because I was essentially unable to convey uncertainty or indecisiveness, gone were the days of me throwing questions back at the people who originally asked them, in order to avoid giving straightforward responses. When a Brazilian asked me what I wanted to eat, I actually had to give them the name of a specific food item. I couldn’t just say “whatever” because I didn’t know how to say “whatever.” I was wary of broad and polite answers such as “I like everything,” when in real-

TELLTALE STORYTELLING SHOW

Contact TYLER FOGGATT at tyler.foggatt@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Davenport College Courtyard // 7 p.m. BYOPB (Bring Your Own Picnic Blankets).

ity I hate most things and am allergic to almost everything else. Asking the Brazilian what he or she would like to eat would result in a back-andforth conversation, which was the one thing I wanted to avoid. So, I just had to answer. The same sort of directness was required when answering yes or no questions to which your intended answer was “no,” albeit a polite “no.” When asked a question in Portuguese that would usually elicit a polite rejection in English, I was forced to be blunt. Responses like: “I’m actually pretty busy today but maybe I’ll be able to marry you in the distant future” turned into “Can’t,” and “Thank you so much for the opportunity but I’d rather not bear your children” turned into “Nope.” Although being direct in this way had its obvious merits, I was still bothered by my inability to elaborate. I felt such a need to qualify things that didn’t even need to be qualified. Maybe it’s because I was in Brazil after a year of humanities classes — a year of writing ten page papers when I only had five pages of ideas, of rambling on in section just for the sake of participating. As an English major, I love that I’ll spend the rest of my time at Yale studying how great authors manipulate words and weave them into resonant sentences. And as someone who likes to write, I’ve always hoped that one day, I’ll be able to accomplish something similar. The goal has always been to create something beautiful. But there comes a point when the beauty of a sentence begins to cloud its meaning — when verbosity and high diction result in confusion, instead of clarity. How good is an idea that can’t be properly explained? How eloquent is someone who can use their words to impress, but not to actually communicate? When I began taking L1 Portuguese during the fall of my freshman year, my goal wasn’t to impress Brazilians with my wide-ranging vocabulary. It was to learn a new language that would allow me to communicate with a new group of people, and experience another culture. Also, soccer. Soccer was part of the goal. If you do a quick Google search of the word “eloquence,” the synonyms associated with it include “expressiveness,” “forcefulness,” “potency” and “effectiveness.” Based on those synonyms, I would have to argue that I may be one of the most eloquent Portuguese speakers of all time. The broken Portuguese I spoke while in Brazil was probably twice as informative as anything I’ve ever said in English. Maybe next summer I’ll stay home and work on that.

Hamburgers

The cornerstone of any nutritious breakfast.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND COVER

“NO” TO DIVESTMENT, “YES” TO WHAT? // BY EMMA PLATOFF AND WESLEY YIIN

n order to understand how and why Mitch Barrows ’16 became invested in environmental issues, you have to go back to where he grew up. “The closest town had 300 people,” Barrows said of his home in Michigan. “And I lived outside of it.” He spent most of his childhood outside, entertaining himself with “trees and dirt and grass and all that good stuff.” It never occurred to him that people who lived elsewhere might have different relationships with the environment. His own world was a bubble, where humankind and nature were inextricably linked. In high school, he began to travel more often, and his visits to different places exposed him to people who felt no real connection to nature. This is when Barrows first began identifying as an environmentalist, an identity he once thought applied to everyone. At Yale, Barrows’s commitment to the environment has only sharpened. Although he was not a founding member of Fossil Free Yale — a student organization that leads the campaign to convince the University’s Corporation Council on Investor Responsibility to divest from fossil fuel companies — Barrows joined on as the group’s project manager, and has been an unsilenceable voice in the movement ever since.

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ronmental initiatives taps into a larger feeling amongst the student body. Of 119 respondents, 78 (66 percent) said they personally believe climate change to be “important” or “very important.” Not everyone participates with the same fervor as Barrows — only 28 (24 percent) said they had taken a course concerning environmentalism, and only 18 (15 percent) said they had participated in environmentally oriented extracurriculars — but the prominence of these issues has become clear. So when Salovey announced a new set of sustainability initiatives in the same email as the divestment decision, activists found themselves torn. The University had stepped away from the chance to make a significant gesture on green issues, but proposed other steps forward. Some were pleased with a pivot away from a unitary focus on divestment, while others promised to push back against the CCIR. For Barrows — who has come to view climate change as the “most important justice issue of our time” to which most other global issues are linked — the administration’s efforts weren’t nearly enough. Sustainability is all well and good, but a university with more than 12,000 students, a $20 billion endowment and a name recognized around the world could, in Barrows’s view, do much, much more. Other activists echoed that notion—the university has the means,

DIVESTMENT IS STILL THE MOST EFFECTIVE ACTION YALE COULD TAKE, BUT THERE’S NO NEED TO CHOOSE ONLY ONE. Barrows, like most involved in FFY, was disheartened to hear the Yale Corporation’s decision not to divest from fossil fuel companies, announced in an email to students on Aug. 27. After a couple of years of hard work within the guidelines of the administration, Barrows and his collaborators hit a wall. In the same email announcing the CCIR’s decision against divestment — sent as FFY met with the Corporation and the University President Peter Salovey in Woodbridge Hall — Salovey laid out a series of six new sustainability initiatives for the University to follow. Salovey acknowledged the importance of Yale’s investment decisions, but argued that the University’s role in environmental activism lay in other areas. “I believe that Yale’s most important contributions come from its teaching and research, its internal practices and its leadership by example and encouragement among peer institutions,” Salovey’s email read. Many students and faculty members interviewed expressed disappointment with the divestment decision, and in a survey sent to a random sample of undergraduate students by the News, 64 percent (75 people) of 119 respondents said they opposed the Corporation’s decision. And that general support of envi-

and the student support, to go beyond the status quo. Gabe Rissman ’16, the former policy coordinator for Fossil Free Yale, said divestment is still the most effective action Yale could take, but there’s no need to choose only one. “It’s not an either or, it’s an all of the above,” he said. “We should do everything we can be doing.” *** On the concourse level wall of Kline Biology Tower, nine adjacent LCD panels spanning a total of 50 square feet display a constantly changing slide show detailing Yale’s environmental initiatives. Curators Lori Bronars and Gwyneth Crowley worked on this digital media exhibit for nearly 6 months before it went on display, and with good reason: Yale’s sustainability efforts are numerous, highly varied and incredibly farreaching. The exhibit’s 73 slides covered everything from the number of LEED-certified spaces on campus (three platinum, 16 gold, two silver) to environmentally sound waste management practices, to efforts to make campus transportation more green. Yale has a bike-sharing service, a “green roof” atop the Yale Health building to mitigate storm water runoff. A new radio show from the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental

Studies promises to spread climate change awareness in just 90-second blurbs. The fledgling Yale Climate & Energy Institute, which took off about five years ago, provides an interdisciplinary, interdepartmental course of studies for students of all backgrounds interested in combating climate change in various ways. The six new initiatives President Salovey recently announced will only broaden these efforts. The University will invest $21 million over the next three years to improve energy conservation and reduce greenhouse gas emissions in buildings on central, medical and west campuses. A new task force chaired by Sterling Professor of economics William Nordhaus will investigate the potential for implementing a new internal carbon charge. The University will install a 1.25 megawatt array of solar panels, to cover over 350,000 square feet of roof and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by approximately 500 metric tons per year. At least two new Green Innovation Fellowships will be established to fund innovative student, faculty or staff ventures in emerging green businesses. Yale will join the Climate Registry in an effort to ensure transparent greenhouse gas monitoring and disclosure methods. The Sustainability Advisory Council will examine whether University-wide goals are ambitious enough. According to the administration, these initiatives reinforce Yale’s preexisting commitment to green issues. “I am excited about the innovative sustainability initiatives,” Virginia Chapman, the director of Yale’s Office of Sustainability, wrote in an email, highlighting the third-party verification of Yale’s greenhouse gas emissions and the task force investigating internal carbon pricing as particularly important. Other supporters noted that these programs will have an impact far beyond New Haven. According to professor Michael Oristaglio, the executive director of the Yale Climate and Energy Institute, the energy future of the Earth lies in the developing world. These nations have more than three times the population of the developed world, and the choices they make will have by far the larger long term impact on climate change. The best contribution Yale could make, then, would be a scientific innovation to help developing countries grow sustainably. In that sense, Oristaglio considers the new initiatives’ focus on research and education promising. Most student environmental leaders, however, were less enthusiastic about the scope of these programs. Tess Maggio ’16, the president of Project Bright — a student organization whose mission is to increase the presence of solar energy sources on campus and in New Haven — says the new solar installations on West Campus, which have been in the works for a long time, are especially exciting. The carbon tax is also a big step, she said. But she’s less optimistic about the initiatives as a whole. SEE GREEN PAGE 8

Do you support the University's decision not to divest from fossil fuels?

No 64%

F R I D AY SEPTEMBER 12

WAKE UP!: PEOPLE OF CONSCIOUSNESS PARTY & ART GALLERY

Afro-American Cultural Center // 9:30 p.m. Go to raise awareness of police brutality; stay to celebrate life.

Yes

36%

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Jojo’s banana walnut oatmeal

You get extra banana if you speak Mandarin with the manager.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND REMEMBERS

GEOGRAPHY LESSONS // BY ARIA THAKER

It wasn’t until Sep. 11, 2001 that I realized my hometown was only 12 miles from New York City. They were 12 very long miles though, clogged with traffic and striated with densely packed layers of the American cake. Crowded ethnic neighborhoods squatted near buttoned-up suburbs, which butted against gated mansions. Every day, my parents commuted to Manhattan from our home in Tenafly, New Jersey. It sometimes took them ninety minutes to crawl their way across the George Washington Bridge. But we were still only 12 miles away, so in the weeks after 9/11 we could see smoke rising into our suburban sky. While my mother drove me between piano lessons, the library and Stop & Shop, I’d see plumes gliding like wraiths above us — cresting between treetops, appearing around corners, waiting for us at the tops of hills. Once, my mother pulled over near the golf course on Knickerbocker Road and we just sat there, gaping at the gray wisps that we might have otherwise mistaken for cirrus clouds. My mom already got a prime view of Ground Zero on her daily commute, but it must have been even more stomach-turning to see the smoke from our quiet town, where housewives tended their petunias with fierce precision and the rowdiest residents were Canada geese. Two of my classmates even swore they could smell the charred rubble. I had never been a good smeller, so I just nodded along. I did a lot of nodding during those weeks. I nodded when adults talked about “our big family,” and “lifting our neighbors.” As a nine-year-old with reserved Indian parents, I didn’t have firsthand experience of that hyper-American, vaguely Judeo-Christian lexicon of “community.” At first it felt strange to see grown-ups replacing tight handshakes with white-knuckled hugs, treating one another with what I assumed was a very sucralose brand of sweetness. It felt strange watching our disinterested school principal give a speech that actually brimmed with feeling. I don’t quite remember what he said, but he definitely tried to stitch together a flaccid metaphor about our school being like a beehive or an ant colony. Soon, though, even my principal’s clichés began to make sense. I had never before felt part of a community outside of my family. Now, it was strange how little events accreted to produce a pull of pleasure in my gut: a “hello” from my cooler, blonder neighbor; a snug goodbye hug from my friend’s mother; a watery smile from a typically gruff teacher. It was like my town and school had extended long woven webs, and I suddenly found myself at home in their tangles. These local webs all fed into the big star-spangled one. Until 9/11, I hadn’t thought much about what it meant to call myself “American.” Now, in Ms. B’s fourth grade class, we were coloring pictures of the flag and discussing national security policy — neither of which, I suppose, was a particularly age-appropriate activity. In our discussions, we learned to use phrases like “liberty versus security,” which we had learned before but had never corresponded to such tangible, kill-those-mennow stakes. For the first time, I found myself thinking about America enough to realize I might love it. We also learned a few patches of world geography. Ms. B showed us Saudi Arabia on the map, explaining that 1. We got a lot of our oil from there, and 2. That was where Osama bin Laden was from. We talked about Afghanistan as well, but our focus lingered longer on Saudi Arabia, the country we saw as Bin Laden’s true progenitor. We didn’t learn other world geography that year, so I suppose that lesson had served the purpose of demonstrating the vast, reassuring distance between us and the people who lived “over there.” But far more potent than knowledge of the 6,528mile distance between Manhattan and Riyadh was the image of Bin Laden’s haggard face, which now stared at us from every television and newspaper. My classmates relished the opportunity to describe how scary he looked, with his grizzled beard, his wild eyes and dark skin. He was a perfect Disney villain. It was easy to imagine his long brown fingers folded together as he hatched diabolical plans. I didn’t talk about Bin Laden’s face. My skin was his color. My father’s beard was dark and thick. Still, I also didn’t challenge the thought that Bin Laden’s features were naturally threatening, that something about their combination had formed evil incarnate. Later, it would scare me to think how little I ques-

F R I D AY SEPTEMBER 12

tioned the nature of that feeling, the fear of my own skin that had come to rest in even my own bones. So when my teacher led us in a discussion about racial profiling, I raised my hand with everyone else to agree that sure, yeah, of course it made sense. A popular classmate had shared a story about how her father had recently taken a flight alongside a bearded, turbaned man. My classmate’s dad had ducked into the bathroom and broken federal law by using his cell phone, calling his wife and daughters to say that there was a terrorist on his plane and that he might not make it home. I said that my father had a short beard and no turban. Indians with turbans were generally Sikhs, I said. They were people from an entirely different region than my parents who practiced an entirely different religion than we did. And when my friend and I were swinging in the playground after school and she sang out “no offense, but your dad kind of looks like Osama bin Laden,” I didn’t know how to tell her I was hurt. Instead, I told her my family was Hindu, not Muslim. That wasn’t true. My father had been a cardcarrying atheist for a long time, but “Hindu” now seemed a more credible alibi. When the only other brown kid in the fourth grade got called “terrorist,” I sat silent. He was a recent immigrant with a strong Indian accent. I didn’t defend him from the name-calling because I was confident, and mostly correct, that my pigtails and lack of an accent would keep me safe from the word. I even savored a bit of schadenfreude when it happened, remembering the time he had chased me around the playground while spitting a Hindi slur that I didn’t understand. I was called “terrorist” a few times, too, but the group of my detractors (a few third-grade boys with stringy hair) was much smaller than the group that taunted the other boy. I was more than a match for my bullies, shooting back with retorts like “I was born here, ass-wipe,” or “I speak better English than you, turd.” My voice seethed with the coarse, deliberate insults of the American-English vernacular. Try and deny me my nationality now, you cornholes. In the years to come, as the U.S. dropped bombs and the brown bodies piled higher, I kept pointing, like Ms. B had, to the world map. I traced the distance between India, Iraq and Afghanistan with an insistent, angry finger, railing against American ignorance in my school, in the news, on the playground. Didn’t they know the different shades of brown? Why couldn’t they tell that mine was the harmless kind? In later years I lamented the poor geography lessons that made Miss Teen South Carolina refer to “the Iraq and the Asian countries.” What I was also saying was, “Go ahead. Just leave me out of it.” Sep. 11 jumpstarted a years-long process of reforging my identity, of scrubbing myself a little whiter, and redder and bluer. I played down my inconvenient attributes and played up my convenient ones. I responded to every racial taunt like a bargain-ready shopkeeper. “Go ahead, you can take this skin, take this heritage, take this bearded father — I don’t need them, anyway.” Just give me my home back, even if you have to cut it with a hyphen. In the weeks after 9/11, people planted flags like flowers — big ones on lawns, small ones in windows, mini ones on jacket lapels. I came home from school one day demanding to know where our flag was. How on earth, I snapped, had Ba and Bapu lived here for fifteen years without buying at least one? My father, in what might be called a very “American” move, did not drag me over his knee and spank the respect into me. Instead, he promised he’d buy us a flag on his next trip to Stop & Shop. When he came home a few days later, he told me the flags were sold out. Instead, he’d bought an eight-inch vinyl decal. I complained that it wasn’t enough but I took it from his hand anyway, carefully peeling the sticker from its plastic skin. I claimed for it the most prominent territory in our white colonial house: the exact center of our front window. When passersby looked into our living room, they might see our brown faces, but they’d see the red-white-and-blue decal first. It would be a compass, one that never pointed east. Contact ARIA THAKER at aria.thaker@yale.edu .

STUDENT DEVELOPER ICE CREAM SOCIAL 143 Elm St. // 2 p.m.

Aptly taking place in a basement “HackSpace” equipped with wifi and whiteboards.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Calhoun loaded oatmeal

What it’s “loaded” with, we don’t want to know.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND ARTS

WHAT’S COOLER THAN BEING KOOL?

A Victorious Effort // BY ANDREW KOENIG

// BY CAROLINE HART The Marlboro Man, everyone’s favorite cigarette-selling American cowboy, appears to have fallen off of his high horse. He’s just not as hip as he used to be: His image shifts from iconic bad boy to ironic object of ridicule in “Selling Smoke: Tobacco Advertising and Antismoking Campaigns” at the Harvey Cushing library. The Medical School exhibit chronicles the sociocultural phenomenon of cigarette smoking through advertisements, photographs, articles and public service announcements from the William Van Duyn collection. Upon entrance into the exhibit, visitors are greeted by pictures of two cowboys atop their steed — a scene reminiscent of the American West and its fictional inhabitant, “The Marlboro Man.” The sun sets behind thin clouds in each landscape, rendering the background sky a blood redorange. In stark white lettering, somber remarks for such peaceful scenes cut across the center of each image. “Bob, j’ai le cancer;” “I miss my lung, Bob,” a cowboy laments. Both pictures are from the Califor-

nia Department of Health services, and are presented in a series of anti-smoking advertisements from around the world. The style of the other PSAs varied widely, and depicted the evils of tobacco threatening everything from motherhood to athletic success. The broad range of people and activities shown in the service announcements illustrates the popularity of smoking in the past, and also the efficacy of the effort to “stamp out smoking.” At least around Yale, cigarette smoking is no longer kosher — “designated smoking areas” are fewer and farther between. You can no longer smoke on airplanes or in restaurants, and health concerns now seem to trump the “coolness” factor once associated with cigarettes. But the question of how, when and why something is deemed fashionable often lies in the hands of two groups with whom I feel sufficiently acquainted — the “advertisers” and the “youth”. “What are the cool kids up to these days? How can we manufacture cool?” I imagine the for-

mer group pondering. At the same time, young people and their consumer habits largely dictate the question of when something “normal”, or deeply ingrained in everyday life, is no longer trendy or healthy. So, as I stood looking at the then-common advertisements of the 1960s and 70s, I wondered what modes of advertising our society churns out today that will be taboo in the future. I thought of my run to Durfee’s earlier that day, and of an image on the side of a “Chia Star” beverage that stuck with me — “60 Skinny Calories.” And thank goodness for that label! I definitely wouldn’t want to go around drinking drinks with 60 “average” or 60 “fat” calories! “Selling Smoke” reveals that our advertisement techniques haven’t changed so much, just the products. Ads throughout the exhibit focused on taste (milder! richer! better!), production (100% pure tobacco!) and setting (share a pack with friends!) — all focuses of food advertising today, giving the exhibit contemporary relevance. In an American Cancer

society PSA titled “Do You Believe This?” a Mike Doonesbury cartoon depicts his nightmare of “creating an ad to help sell cigarettes.” Doonesbury dreams that an animated cigarette, Mr. Butts, talks to teenagers to convince them that smoking is normal among teens, and harmless to your health. In this scenario, it’s nightmarish for Doonesbury to think that he could partake in the manufacturing of such a destructive social practice. Pieces such as this contribute to the exhibit’s focus on the social element of advertising. The use of a variety of media — from a television flashing ads to antique smoking paraphernalia — helps the audience consume a bit of smoking culture, if just for a few minutes. The pieces in the collection are diverse and provide food for thought; in the words of a Chesterfield advertising slogan, “they satisfy!” Contact CAROLINE HART at caroline.hart@yale.edu .

// MOMO CHAPA

From a smoky exhibit.

A “Rendezvous” Through Cubicles // BY CAROLINE WRAY

The McKnight Crosby Jr. Gallery is either the art gallery with the most office supplies or the best decorated, small middle-management office in America. Right now, it is showing “Rendezvous,” an exhibit that boasts 50 pieces across no less than 25 media. When I ride the elevator up to the gallery’s entrance, the first thing I see is a receptionist. Her desk is decorated with photos of her kids, a calendar and one of those spiral-cord office phones (You might wait for her to answer it and say, “You’ve reached Dunder-Mifflin, this is Pam.”) In short, not the most intuitive façade for an art gallery. “Rendezvous” is the Arts Council of Greater New Haven’s annual members show. It’s been up since July 10 and will go down next Friday. Each of the 50 works displayed is by a member of the council, which seems to be one of the only common threads underlying the works. The office setting makes for a unique viewing experience, to say the least. As I look at the art, I try not to peek inside of the cubicles behind them. The pieces wrap down the paths between cubicles and into a conference room. The show ends by the back corner office. The whole thing can be done

in about 75 steps, and along the way I see everything from stoneware to watercolors to acrylic paint canvases to digital photographs. I linger on “Teapot with Hinged Lid,” by Hayne Bayless, a Connecticut potter. I am drawn to the pot’s contrast against the mass of two-dimensional works but am grabbed even more by its imaginative curvature and speckled print. The handle is shaped with a flourish, and the “hinged lid” topped with a large apple-inspired stem. It’s both tasteful and imaginative: think the tea party in “Alice in Wonderland”, but for the rich and classy parents. In the conference room, I stop at “Subway,” an oil-andpen piece by Frieda Howling. The work features faces drawn in black ink within an oval, all within a rectangle. The train appears to be floating in crimson paint, with thin straggled black lines creating waves behind it. Occasional red and blue circles create a sense of disorientation. I love metros: I love the speed, the people-watching, even the grime and the pungent smell of urine (They make me feel tough.) And the more I look at this canvas, the more I feel the sensations of the underground. “Sub-

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way” recreates the feeling of being among these strangers, hurtling through space in a dimension below the reach of sunlight, a dimension silent except for the absurd: a crazy man who may or may not realize he’s singing, a couple who’s lost themselves in an argument, an unemployed single mom who tells you about it and asks for some change. “Denise, Maurice called. Do you want me to take a message?” This sound, from the other side of the conference room wall, jars me: back to reality. Back to the office/gallery. On the other side of the conference room, I find an acrylic painting, “Abe & Nate” by Joan Jacobson Zamore. It hangs next to a watercolor, by Abbie Rabinowitz, of “Harold & Kiki.” Abe and Nate are two young men wearing yarmulkes, their arms draped over one another, smiling as though for a camera. Harold and Kiki are a naked, elderly couple spooning in bed. Kiki is the big spoon. Her leg is up around Harold, and you can see the side of her breast, the rolls of her full skin. It is peace. Their eyes are closed. They are smiling. Harold feels safe and Kiki feels satisfied. I think I hear a fax machine. Harold and Kiki are lost. I’m

DOCUMENTARY FILM SCREENING: “DAMNATION” Whitney Humanites Center // 7 p.m.

Guess they didn’t leave it to Beaver…

no longer watching a peaceful moment of pure intimacy. I’m just an intruder in an office, someone who’s looking at a lot of different kinds of painting while listening to a fax machine. I wander over to the back of the room, toward the woman in the corner office, who politely redirects me. She isn’t part of the exhibit. There are some beautiful moments in “Rendezvous,” including the psychedelic thrill in Kristina Zallinger’s acrylic work “Pick-Up Sticks” and the morphed reflections in Martha Struber’s “Lower Duck Pond.” But there’s no unifying theme. The prices range from a tiny $75 photograph to a vivid $1,000 oil painting. When nearly 50 different, non-collaborating artists produce 50 pieces of art across 25 different media, it’s probably impossible to make them all sync. Ultimately, it was hard to immerse myself in the art when I felt like I was poking around someone’s workspace. True, there’s something “modern” about pairing the realities of mundane daily life with artwork. In the case of “Rendezvous,” though, I’d wager that the juxtaposition isn’t intentional.

In her essay “Chic—English, French and American,” Nancy Mitford tells a story of Queen Victoria. “When the Empress Eugénie paid a state visit to England she went with Queen Victoria to the opera. The Londoners sighed a little…the beauty in her Paris clothes, beside chubby little red-faced Victoria. Then the time came for them to take their seats. The Empress, with a graceful movement, looked round at her chair, but Queen Victoria dumped straight down, thus proving unmistakably that she was of Royal birth and upbringing.” Her Majesty Victoria’s subjects found something infinitely superior in her self-confidence. We feel the same way looking at Alfred Gilbert’s famous bust of Queen Victoria in the opening foyer of “Sculpture Victorious.” There she is, all jowls and severity: neither the many folds of lace nor the pearls can soften the dowdiness of the Queen. We almost overlook the bust of a young, fresh-faced woman, no older than nineteen, right in front of her. Then we realize that this, too, is Queen Victoria. It’s a marvelous contrast, and an elegant start to “Sculpture Victorious,” the Yale Center for British Art’s exhibition on sculpture of the Victorian era, which runs from September 11 through November 30. What follows is as imposing and hefty as the Queen herself. “Sculpture Victorious” is one of the YCBA’s most ambitious undertakings to date, billed as “the first exhibition, on either side of the Atlantic, to offer a thorough account of Victorian sculpture” (“Director’s Forward to the Catalogue,” Amy Meyers, Penelope Curtis). Many of the works have rarely, if ever, been shown outside of the United Kingdom, chief among these “Saher, Earl of Winchester,” which comes to us from the House of Lords, and “American Slave” by John Bell. Bell’s sculpture merits particular attention. It is one of the centerpieces of the exhibition, despite being a generally forgotten piece of abolitionist artwork. The curators have included “American Slave” alongside Hiram Powers’s “Greek Slave” and Harriet Hosmer’s “Zinobia in Chains.” Bell is the only Englishman among the three; Powers and Hosmer are both Americans. This circumstance would no doubt raise some eyebrows were it not for the strength of the juxtaposition. “Greek Slave” is a Venus de Milo in chains, “Zinobia” much the same. Alongside

these smooth marble beauties stands Bell’s bronze “American Slave.” Intended as a critique of Powers’s idealized depiction of the slave-girl, “American Slave” is a “reminder that slavery is about real bodies, shackled and transported,” as curator Michael Hatt puts it. While “Greek Slave” is poised and ethereal, in Bell’s piece, the black woman’s eyes are downcast, her shackles metal instead of marble. It is a testament to the deeply felt moralism of the Victorian era, which coexisted with the pursuit of wealth and empire. The trifecta hints at the Victorians’ admiration of the Greeks, which is explored further in the rest of the exhibition. Sometimes this comes off as overdone imitation, sometimes exquisite borrowing. See for instance, the strange “Perseus and the Three Griaie”—a Greek scene painted in English style. Perseus, clad in Arthurian armor, floats above the blind women and grabs the one eye shared among the sisters. His pale and rosy complexion, the softness of his manner and the silver of his chainmail, subtly portray English gentility mixed with classical beauty. The curators showcase the many facades of the Victorians. These variations excite the imagination and please the eye. They start a lively political dialogue, which continues throughout the exhibition. “Even as one marvels,” Hatt says, “one has to retain a critical perspective and consider what was at stake . . . the political, imperial and social purposes” of Victorian art. From a balcony facing the YCBA’s courtyard, one can see a polychrome earthenware elephant, that most famous symbol of British-colonized India. The curators have taken pains to show the consumerist nature of Victorian art as well. A room entitled “Sculpture on Display” shows “Greek Slave” in its many reproduced forms—a daguerreotype, a print in a book, a miniature copy to be kept in a home or on a mantelpiece. These many currents attest to the curatorial richness of “Sculpture Victorious,” which brings together items from many corners of the former British Empire and from settings as diverse as churches, schools and government buildings. The exhibition has the luxury of ranging over the wide and sometimes questionable taste of the Victorian era, making it truthful, if not always dazzling. The broad sensibility of the curation allows the viewer to understand the beast we call “Victoria’s British Empire,” all the while presided over by its chubby little red-faced Queen.

// TATE LONDON, 2014

From the exhibit “Sculpture, Victorious”

Contact ANDREW KOENIG at andrew.koenig@yale.edu .

Contact CAROLINE WRAY at caroline.wray@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Last night’s half-eaten wenzel

Like wine, it’s a sandwich that gets better with age.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B7

WEEKEND OVERSHARES

D

o you remember the glory days, back in middle school, when your AIM away message was your entire social media presence? Now, there are just too many ways to express your feels online. You could make a status (but where?) post a photo (but WHERE?). What’s the difference between Instagram and Snapchat? We’d talk about Friendsy, but we don’t understand the question and won’t respond to it. Still, whatever your social media struggle, we sympathize. We want you all to succeed—and we’re tired of seeing Twitter-caliber posts on Facebook, so we’ve made a handy flowchart to tell you what to post where.

Do you have something to share? No

Yes

But I need it for my # brand!

NO. STOP.

Is it... ...text? No

It’s dire CALL SOMEONE/TALK IN PERSON YALE POST SECRET

Is it funny?

Yes How Impotrant?

DO LITERALLY ANYTHING

Yes

No, but I want it to be?

Yes

No I want attention

Is it artsy?

Is it important? No

Eh, I have feels

...an image?

INSTAGRAM

No

To people outside of Yale?

Is it funny?

Yes

Yes

No

To whom?

TWITTER

Is it of you?

Friends

How Pressing is it?

Filter!

SNAPCHAT STORY

Everyone

It’s personal For a Class? For a club? What Kind of Funny?

Yes

No

What is it of? SCHOOL EMAIL GROUPME OVERHEARD @ YALE FACEBOOK SATUS

S AT U R D AY SEPTEMBER 13

Mindy Kaling

Friends (over age 25)

Dane Cook

Group/Club Landscape

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Whitney Humanities Center // 11 a.m.

Chobani Yogurt

Does it make you look very, very attractive?

Maybe it will help you get into Theta.

No

Yes PERSONAL EMAIL

In a way your future boss will appreciate?

Yes

Tina Fey

TECH BOOT CAMP: FALL SESSION Pull on those USB cords.

Friends (under age 25)

Jay Leno

SNAPCHAT

No TINDER/GRINDR

FACEBOOK ALBUM COVER PHOTO

S AT U R D AY SEPTEMBER 13

FACEBOOK PROFILE PICTURE

CHEMISTRY SYMPOSIUM IN MEMORY OF HARRY WASSERMAN

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Sterling Chemistry Laboratory // 1:00 p.m.

This conference is held in honor and memory of Henry Wasserman, the Eugene Higgins Professor emeritus of Chemistry who passed away last December.

The Pantry

Just be sure to Instragram so that everyone knows you, like go to The Pantry.

PAGE B8

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND COVER

LOOKING FOR A CLIMATE CONSENSUS GREEN FROM PAGE 3 “I wouldn’t say they’re sufficient, but for right now they’re a step forwards,” Maggio said. Others argue that step isn’t quite in the right direction. Rissman said the administration’s announcements included “a lot of good things,” which still felt “insufficient when compared to the scope of the harms caused by climate change and the moral obligations we have as a University.” Barrows took the argument a step further, calling the initiatives “a distraction” from what he sees as a far more important issue. The email announcing the CCIR’s decision was titled “New Sustainability Initiatives at Yale,” and Barrows found that juxtaposition disconcerting. On top of that, he didn’t find the actions Salovey was celebrating all that great. “They seem kind of lukewarm,” he said. “They’re kind of weak to me.” *** The official statement from the CCIR on divestment, which Salovey linked to in that email, articulates one of the clearest, and most common, critiques of the issue — that it’s just a gesture. “We feel strongly that symbolic action cannot replace real and measurable steps taken to reduce or reverse the actions of climate change,” Neal Keny-Guyer SOM ’82, a member of the CCIR, wrote in an email to the News. Other members involved in the decision-making process expanded on that central idea. Jonathan Macey, the chair of the Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility, which helps guide CCIR decisions, argued that while possibly creating stigma towards fossil fuel corporations, “divestment would not affect the companies or their operations.” Instead, it’s effectiveness would lie in getting headlines, and that attention would be counterproductive if divestment seemed to have been done only for the sake of those headlines. “There has to be some argument that this is going to do some good,” he said. But the FFY members interviewed hesitated to call the action of divestment “symbolic.” It’s true that divestment from a company will not significantly reduce its stock value or immediately bankrupt it, Rissman said, but it could bring about other forms of tangible change. Referring to an Oxford University study that researched the impact of divestments throughout history, Rissman said that almost every such movement in our nation’s history has led to restrictive legislation. “Divestment leads to sentiment and stigma of the companies

divested from,” he said. “That’s what people are calling symbolic, but it’s not imaginary. It’s definitely there.” These discussions lead into larger questions about whether the fossil fuel companies are fully responsible for the effects of their products. While these companies store and market environmentally harmful goods, consumers are the ones who actually use them. That is, the demand side of the market is perhaps deserving of at least as much blame as the supply side. “It’s at a consumption level,” said Professor Oristaglio, echoing portions of the CCIR statement that argued that both fossil fuel companies and consumers contribute injury. “It’s the consumer side that needs to change.” The difficulty of assigning blame — or simply limiting it to one party — separates this divestment debate from those over other industries. Macey brought up the decision to divest from companies whose business practices perpetuated the injustices of apartheid South Africa in the early 1990s. In cases like that one, he pointed out, the companies’ control over the transgression was complete.

Professor Daniel Esty, Director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, argued that the data to determine which companies are doing significant harm is not reliable, or even totally available. “Existing metrics that are being used to gauge which companies are doing well in response to climate change are currently insufficient,” he said. The official statement from the CCIR made much the same point, stating that determining which companies are socially injurious enough to justify divestment is a question “fraught with difficulty.” But some have more faith in the methods. Professor Oristaglio, for example, said there are enough metrics to make an informed decision now. And according to Rissman, the process is simple. In revising their proposal in response to criticisms from the ACIR, FFY identified methods that would make this determination even easier — focusing on specific sets of readily available emissions factors. The arguments go beyond the numbers, however. Some members of Fossil Free Yale, Rissman among them, assert that in deciding not to divest, Yale has failed to

“WE FEEL STRONGLY THAT SYMBOLIC ACTION CANNOT REPLACE REAL AND MEASURABLE STEPS TAKEN TO REDUCE OR REVERSE THE ACTIONS OF CLIMATE CHANGE” NEAL KENY-GUYER SOM ’82

Additionally, not all actions involving fossil fuels are necessarily bad — fossil fuels are burned in daily actions such as transportation. Fossil fuels, ironically, are even fundamental for researching new sustainable energy alternatives. “I’m not suggesting these companies are benign, but they’re only one half of the total picture,” Macey said. While agreeing that the consumer side certainly contributes to the issue, members of FFY argued that action against the supply side in ethical investment cases is not unprecedented. Consumers are not an organized entity, so their contributions are harder to address. University campaigns against tobacco companies in the 1990s, Rissman pointed out, all targeted the supply side of the problem. But even after deciding what side of the problem to target, specific perpetrators are hard to pin down. Those interviewed disagreed over the quality of the metrics currently used to determine which companies are harmful enough to necessitate divestment.

adhere to its own ethical guidelines. The social injury caused by the problem, he argues, is clear; President Salovey himself referred to global climate change as “the most important issue that faces the world in our time” in an August comment to the News. “[The members of the administration] understand the social injury associated with climate change,” Rissman said. But just because something is a social injury, Macey argued, doesn’t mean that it’s one that needs to be addressed through divestment. He believed that divestment is last step in an ongoing process. “Social injury is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for divestment,” he said. If new arguments and data convince him and the other members of the ACIR that divestment would be effective, Macey says, the outcome could be different. But for the moment, they’ve read what there is to read and remain unconvinced. That the question of divestment is far from over is one thing, at least, that everyone can agree on.

How important is the issue of climate change to you?

Not Very Important 9%

Contact EMMA PLATOFF and WESLEY YIIN at emma.platoff@yale.edu and wesley. yiin@yale.edu .

None 3% Both 31%

Somewhat Important 23%

SEPTEMBER 13

Yale College Council endorsement. YSEC oversees funding for its constituent groups, and Leibovic said it’s important to recognize various causes. He added that the debate over which tactics are most useful — and implicitly, to which initiatives resources are allocated — is not a new one. “In my experience, I think that no one knows what the best way to address this issue is, or else we would have solved it already,” Leibovic reasoned. His personal preference is for the development of renewable, more efficient energy technologies, but he also said ideally, there should be a balance between different components and methods of environmental action. Carlos Gould ’15, who has been involved with both FFY and the Sustainability Service Corps, and who now works for Yale Facilities, said he believes that the best driver toward sustainability is behavioral change. In his position with the SSC, Gould worked with the Energy Team and investigated energy use within the residential colleges. He found that a significant chuck — 15 percent — of all electricity consumed within the colleges comes from dorm rooms and not just energy sinks like dining halls, libraries and other public spaces. The Corps now focuses on programming that will help students better manage their carbon footprints. Such positive changes in habit will carry on through their lives, he said. “If we can change you to be more sustainable now, you’re going to be more sustainable for the rest of your life,” Gould said. He added that as individuals begin to act more sustainably, they may, in turn cause their friends to reconsider their habits. Others agreed that individual actions may contribute broadly to the sustainability effort. Esty emphasized the positive effects of becoming a more conscious consumer. In a similar vein, Barrows said he personally has adopted a vegetarian diet and made efforts to fly less. When asked what Yale students, in general, can do, Maggio, the president of Project Bright, had an answer that summed up others’ sentiments. “Be supportive of the sustainability efforts at Yale. It’s little steps — shorter showers, turn off the lights. Making lifestyle alterations is just as much a part of it as demanding larger action. But obviously there’s only so much you can really do. The best thing we can do as students is just to be as educated about the issue as possible.”

What do you think Yale should do to fight climate change?

Very Important 29%

Not At All Important 3%

S AT U R D AY

In fact, the issue may just be heating up — for better or for worse. Macey saw the current state of the debate — especially at other school, where negotiations have broken down further — as a “power struggle,” with both sides prioritizing a win over a fair discussion of ideas. FFY has no intentions of backing down, or even complying with the framework proposed by the administration. At a recent meeting, members overwhelmingly voted to adopt a more radical, less compliant approach to convincing the Yale Corporation to divest. “We felt held back before, and now there’s nothing holding us back,” Barrows said. “The disrespect that we felt, not just as Fossil Free, but as students, has led to this conclusion that we don’t think we need to follow somebody else’s rules anymore.” *** Environmentalism hasn’t always been a standoff. Decades before the members of Fossil Free Yale protested outside Woodbridge Hall, student environmentalism took root with the founding of the Yale Student Environmental Coalition. Established in 1986, YSEC became an umbrella organization for all environmental student groups and initiatives. According to YSEC’s website, the University created its Office of Sustainability following the organization’s compiling and submission of a report called “The Yale Green Plan.” Today’s YSEC oversees six subsidiary groups, including FFY, Yale Food Action and the Yale Undergraduate 3D Printing Organization. YSEC’s first meeting saw an attendance of 60 — a turnout that Daniel Leibovic ’17, the group’s president, was very happy with. In his estimation, student interest in the environment is as strong as ever. Of the possible issues for students to get involved with, divestment has lately seemed to be the most easily available. Still some interviewed voiced criticism of the way that debate could overshadow other discussions. In responding to the News’s survey, 63 percent of students (74 people) agreed that in response to climate change, the University should both engage in research and development and invest responsibly, but 31 percent (36 people) said that the University should exclusively focus on research and development. Many proponents and members of Fossil Free’s campaign are quick to cite the results of last November’s Yale College Council referendum — in which 83 percent of voters expressed support for divestment — as an example of the students’ support for climate change initiatives. But only 54 percent of the student body even voted on that issue — barely enough to make the referendum binding to a

Important 37%

INTRODUCTION TO LIGHTING DESIGN

Stiles-Morse Crescent Theater // 2:00 p.m. Learn how to develop and hang a lighting plot, how to prepare your lighting console and to create and execute lighting cues!

Invest Responsibly 4%

Research and Development 31%

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Starbucks protein boxes

But if there’s only one left, don’t take it. You’ll make a certain WEEKEND editor very upset.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B9

WEEKEND SNOOZES

SLEEPLESS IN NEW HAVEN?

The Controversial State of Sleep Centers in the Elm City // BY THERESA STEINMEYER

In early winter, Gretchen Rose wasn’t sure about the fate of her job at Yale Medical Group’s Center for Sleep Medicine in New Haven. And six months later, when she stood as a witness before the Department of Public Health at Gateway Community College on June 18, she was still in the dark. “Hi. My name is Gretchen Rose, and I hereby adopt my pre-filed testimony,” she said to the hearing officer. “And I’m going to read it anyway, so everyone can hear.” Rose worked at the Yale Medical Group sleep center for 15 years, until she was laid off last December after its closing. The center cited decreased demand for its services, in part due to home sleep study technologies. She and her coworkers were assured that their clinic was not being purchased by the Yale-New Haven Hospital as part of a merger. But she wasn’t so certain. “The [Group] denied that YaleNew Haven Hospital was taking control of the practice. They told us that it was not happening, that they didn’t know where we were hearing that from,” she said. “It was denials everywhere.” *** In 2013, the prognosis for another sleep center — Gaylord Hospital Sleep Medicine in North Haven — was also grim. The 12-bed facility provided diagnosis and therapy to patients with sleep problems like sleep apnea and narcolepsy, but overnight patient visits decreased by 26 percent between 2011 and 2013, and in 2013, the sleep center took over $137,000 in losses. That figure was projected to hit $307,000 in 2016. And so the Gaylord sleep center did what many failing businesses would do: It decided to shut down, a decision solidified in November 2013 when it filed a Certificate of Need application with the Department of Public Health’s Office of Health Care Access. Conveniently, Yale-New Haven Hospital’s North Haven Medical Center was located next door. So when Gaylord began planning to close its facility, YaleNew Haven Hospital, which didn’t have its own sleep center, stepped in to purchase it. Meanwhile, Yale Medical Group also closed its Center for Sleep Medicine, a timing that raised suspicion of a hushed negotiation. While Rose and 10 other members of the UNITE

S AT U R D AY SEPTEMBER 13

HERE Local 34 labor union for Yale clerical and technical employees lost their jobs, their patients were able to access their old doctors. “Our patients are still being seen by our doctors, but, during the closure time, it was very confusing as to who was going to see them, where they would get an overnight study, and, right now, it’s still confusing,” Rose said at the June 18 hearing. “Our patients are still calling and don’t know where to go. Phone numbers are not in service.” Rose and other employees were wracked with uncertainty. Was the Yale Medical Group sleep center really closing as they were told, or was Yale-New Haven Hospital absorbing it in a hushed asset transfer, laying off workers and inconveniencing patients in the process? If this were in fact the case, then Yale-New Haven Hospital would force Yale Medical Group patients and employees to commute to Gaylord’s old North Haven facility. Rehired employees would receive lower salaries and would lose the benefits and seniority from their Yale Medical Group jobs. And New Haven patients, many of whom are ethnic minorities with low-income backgrounds that heighten their chances of struggling with sleep problems, would need to travel to a location that previously drew only a quarter of its patients from New Haven. And so Local 34 petitioned to have the June 18 public hearing before OHCA, at which the union would challenge Gaylord Hospital’s application for the Certificate of Need it required to close its sleep center. Local 34 hoped that OHCA would deny the application in order to prevent Yale-New Haven from absorbing the Gaylord facility. The controversy even drew the attention of New Haven Mayor Toni Harp. She wrote to OHCA in support of Local 34, commenting on the difficulties that New Haven patients would face in having to commute to a North Haven sleep center facility. “I encourage you not to grant this Certificate of Need as presented. Instead, I encourage you to require Yale-New Haven Hospital to file a Certificate of Need of its own for this practice and to bring its plans, policies and prices into the open as a result.” But if this timing — Yale Medical Group’s decision to close its sleep

center and Yale-New Haven’s interest in acquiring Gaylord’s struggling facility — is no more than a coincidence, then Local 34 stands to obstruct Gaylord Hospital’s attempt to close its failing sleep center, and jeopardize Yale-New Haven’s reputation. W h e n Me l i s s a Dawk i n s Doumbia worked at Yale Medical Group’s sleep center as a temporary employee last December, she believed that Yale-New Haven was taking over Yale Medical Group’s practice. At the hearing before OHCA, she said, “I was instructed by management to tell patients, ‘Yale-New Haven Hospital will be opening up a sleep center. They will be taking over our practice. All of your charts and medical records will be switched over to the hospital.’” “I’m just asking that you please call Yale-New Haven Hospital to the table, and, you know, there’s a lot of things going on, and we haven’t heard from them.” *** Yale-New Haven Hospital and Yale Medical Group tell a different story.

demand for its services. This decrease in demand for sleep center services is a widespread problem, one all too familiar to Gaylord Hospital President and CEO George Kyriacou. Gaylord owned three other sleep centers in addition to its North Haven facility, and all four centers have seen a decline in activity over the past seven years. Gaylord has filed Certificate of Need requests to close all of the facilities — but the controversy with the Yale-New Haven acquisition has brought special attention to the North Haven site. As Kyriacou saw it, the problem in the sleep center closings lay in the financial viability of sleep medicine centers as a whole. Home sleep study technologies give patients the opportunity to record diagnostic information as they sleep, which decreases the need for overnight stays in sleep center facilities. In 2011, he said that this home sleep testing really began to catch on. Insurance companies now often mandate that patients take advantage of this new technology instead of paying extra for overnight sleep monitoring services at centers like

“IT WAS DENIALS EVERYWHERE.”

GRETCHEN ROSE, FORMER YALE MEDICAL GROUP EMPLOYEE “We were surprised and disappointed that there was confusion regarding the acquisition of Gaylord,” said Vin Petrini, senior vice president of public relations at Yale-New Haven. There’s exhaustion in his tone when he affirms that Yale-New Haven’s interest in the Gaylord Sleep Center is fundamentally separate from the closing of Yale Medical Group’s facility. Like Local 34, Petrini seems genuinely concerned for the well-being of the sleep center patients. The sleep center is “literally in the next parking lot over” from the North Haven campus of Yale-New Haven, he said. “We thought it would be convenient to have those resources there for patients.” And on behalf of Yale Medical Group, Senior Communications Officer Karen Peart replied firmly to questions about the relationship between the sleep centers. She affirmed over email that Yale’s decision to close the New Haven facility was based only on the level of

the ones run by Gaylord and Yale Medical Group. And if insurance companies aren’t willing to pay for their services, then it follows that facilities like those operated by Gaylord and Yale Medical Group would predict lethal cuts to their bottom lines. *** On Monday, OHCA did approve Gaylord Hospital’s request for a Certificate of Need. There are 400 pages of records and correspondence regarding the application in OHCA’s public records, but the approval comes as a succinct 11-page file providing evidence that the North Haven sleep center was quickly becoming a financial leech on Gaylord Hospital. OHCA echoed Kyriacou’s concerns in their approval — the North Haven facility was experiencing such a decrease in revenue, in part due to the rise of home sleep testing, that keeping the overnight facility open was no longer cost-effective. But, likely to the dismay of Local

PULP FICTION SCREENING

Contact THERESA STEINMEYER at theresa.steinmeyer@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Whitney Humanities Center // 7:00 p.m. “Any time of the day is a good time for pie.” — Fabienne

34, OHCA only briefly addressed the controversy surrounding Yale-New Haven’s plans to takeover Gaylord’s North Haven sleep center. OHCA is responsible only for approving the closing of Gaylord, not for what happens to the facility afterwards. And so the order’s acknowledgement of Local 34’s conflict with Yale-New Haven is brief: “It is important to note that UNITE HERE raised the issue of YNHH purchasing the assets of the Sleep Center in the future. While this purchase is not currently under OHCA’s jurisdiction, it does confirm that YNHH will continue to offer sleep services at the North Haven location subsequent to its purchase. Therefore, there will be no effective changes to the provision of sleep services at the North Haven location other than the name of the provider.” It’s not quite an endorsement of Yale-New Haven’s planned purchase of the Gaylord facility. But if OHCA intended to support Local 34’s efforts to halt the acquisition, whatever its nature, it’s just passed up its chance. *** In March, Local 34 interviewed some of its laid-off workers and sent transcripts to OHCA, hoping to secure June’s public hearing in discussion of Gaylord’s Certificate of Need application. Melissa Mason, Legislative Liaison for UNITE HERE, interviewed Geraldine Haddon, a fellow Local 34 member who had worked at Yale Medical Group’s sleep center before it closed. As awareness spread that their jobs were in jeopardy, employees found themselves struggling to fit the pieces together. And, as members of Local 34 fear, they may never complete the puzzle. Mason asked Haddon about the order in which she and her co-workers uncovered news of the closing. “Some of the doctors I talk to, I really don’t think they had a clue. And other people that I work with felt completely different, that they knew all along. It’s really hard to say which,” Haddon said. “The whole thing comes down to they were playing with patients, they were playing with their employees’ lives. And that never should have happened.”

Alcohol

You’ll feel warm and hopefully forget you’re hungry until lunch.

PAGE B10

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND COLUMNS

PLATO’S FAVORITE REALITY SHOW It is a truth universally acknowledged that a television network in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a new concept for a reality show. But sometimes, when all the decent concepts have been exhausted, you just have to go with the first vaguely intellectual-sounding theme that comes to mind. This, I have to assume, is how we ended up with “Utopia,” Fox’s latest televised offering to humankind, which premiered last Sunday (presumably airing on the Lord’s day so that viewers and producers alike might immediately beg for forgiveness). The point of “Utopia,” as you might imagine, is to create a perfect society. In this “bold” “social” “experiment,” 15 strangers from all over the United States secede from the modern world and attempt to forge a better civilization.

THE POINT OF “UTOPIA,” AS YOU MIGHT IMAGINE, IS TO CREATE A PERFECT SOCIETY. But “Utopia” is hardly the first camera-ready social science experiment to air on American television. There’s “Big Brother” (How many seasons is too many for one show? Sixteen? Seventeen?), “Wife Swap” (Why do so many of these families work as clowns/magicians?) and “Celebrity Wife Swap” (Who are these people?) Even MTV’s “Punk’d” was an experiment of sorts, testing how much Ashton Kutcher one nation could withstand (answer: nine seasons). Which leads us to “Utopia,” in which 15 people live together in rural southern California not just to have sex, as in MTV’s “The Real World,” but also for a higher purpose: to initiate an audacious restructuring of humanity, and then also have sex. The cast of potential heroes is about as well adjusted as we have come to expect of American reality show contestants. Few of them have careers in definable sectors of society. There’s Dedeker (belly dancer), Bella (doomsday prepper) and Red (handyman/

Too Tall! Go Home!

MADELINE KAPLAN MAD TV moonshiner). If you’re upset that you missed your chance to join this noble band of heroes, not to worry: Fox is continuing to hold open casting calls for new Utopiettes. Each month, the three most useless/least popular cast members will be nominated for exile, and those who don’t make the cut will be replaced by new useless and unpopular people. And sometimes, as in the first part of the first episode, someone decides to leave after realizing that “Utopia” might not actually be the perfect world he or she envisioned. So consider using those acceleration credits you’ve been hoarding since high school to trade Yale for weird sexual advances from fellow Utopiettes. It’s probably easier than finding a spring internship. A unique aspect of “Utopia” (well, unique to anyone who hasn’t heard of “Big Brother”) is the inclusion of a live stream feed which allows viewers to watch the secluded compound at all times. According to Entertainment Weekly, over 1 million people tuned in to the live stream in the first week. All I had to do was open an internet browser, activate a suspicious plugin, and — bam! — there it was: a live stream of Plato’s “Republic.” In the first 10 minutes I saw some people hanging out outside, some people hanging out inside and a conversation about how it was probably going to rain that day, but maybe not. It still remains to be seen whether “Utopia” will change all of human civilization as we know it and/or get renewed for a second season. If the already-plummeting ratings are any indication, this experiment may not last much longer. I have been to the live-streamed Utopia, my friends, and it looks an awful lot like whatever dystopian hellhole we’re currently living in. Contact MADELINE KAPLAN at madeline.kaplan@yale.edu .

I had lots of expectations for senior year. Back in my youth, I’d heard upperclassmen describe it as a golden era, a time of bucket lists and dayseizing and buying wine legally. I’d imagined I would spend it hosting terribly grown-up dinner parties, reading philosophy in the bath and swanning about campus wearing something glamorous. It seems I was wrong. So far, my senior year has confusingly turned out to be, of all things, a hotbed of casual sexism. Cut to Friday night, late August. I’m zipping down Chapel Street in heels. As always, I’m horribly late, but is that going to stop me from checking myself out in the Rite Aid windows? I’m all dressed up, and Avril Lavigne circa 2001 is telling me how fly I look. I am, in fact, feeling pretty fly. That is, until the homeless man on the corner turns and yells at me, “Too tall! Go home!” Take it from me: Nothing shakes the old confidence quite like being called an eyesore by a man wearing an empty sriracha box for a hat. I complained to another tall friend about the injustice of this. “You think that’s bad?” she asked. “One time in Chicago, someone said the same thing to me. Then he spat on me.” Charming. Now, I am a head above many ladies; I’ll give the nice man that. But I don’t think that means that I should have to stay home. This isn’t the Dark Ages; I feel like in 2014, being 5’10” isn’t some deformity you have to hide in a cloister. Particularly given that 5’10” is the height of the average U.S. male. Somehow, I find it hard to believe that Mr. Sriracha stands on the corner of Chapel and Temple flipping off every average American man that passes. I wouldn’t mind this brush with casual sexism so much if it were an isolated incident. But it’s not. I moved off campus this year, and my new landlord must have put me on some sort of local misogyny Tinder. The minute my lease began off campus, seemingly every benevolent sexist in the Greater New Haven area has swiped right on my doorstep. When I moved in, I found that one of the neighbors had left me a cream pie on my back stairs — which should have been all the warning I needed. Taped to the pie box was a note that began with “Sweetie” and offered me $150 — on the condition that I spend it only on, and I quote, “lubricants or toys for me and Kamil.” The note

ELEANOR MICHOTTE CRIT FROM THE BRIT was signed, alarmingly, “Dad.” I still don’t know who Dad and Kamil are, but I immediately regretted asking my mother to help me decipher the handwriting. Soon after came the real struggles. My landlord is notorious for leasing apartments that fall apart around you and not deigning to fix them. Sure enough, for the first week of classes, I had to choose between having my bedroom lights permanently on and killing power to my entire apartment. I called my landlord several times to explain politely that using a circuit breaker as a light switch wasn’t ideal. No dice. So, eventually, I toddled down to their offices for a serious chat. I had thought that chat would be between a dispatcher and me, but it was actually between a dispatcher and my chest. Then, when I called again the next day, the man answering the phone told me that he remembered me: “the pretty English girl.” Dude, I was wearing PJs, was sweating profusely and had circles under my eyes the size of a pumpkin because my lights won’t turn off when it’s time to sleep. The same man then told me he would send me an electrician, “But only because English girls are my favorite kinds of girls.” Thank you, good sir, for giving me access to a service you are legally obliged to provide, on the condition that you can describe me as a sexual object! No, really, you really shouldn’t have. I think the kicker came later that day, when my electrician, a gentleman missing four teeth, asked me to let him know personally if I ever needed a light bulb changed, because, as he reliably informed me, girls can’t do that for themselves. Which brings us to the million-dollar question of my senior year. How many SWUGs does it take to change a light? Evidently, fewer than there are sexists in New Haven, reaching for your bulbs. Contact ELEANOR MICHOTTE at eleanor.michotte@yale.edu .

On Paper Dear Rebecca, Can you please explain this new alien printer system to me? How do I use it, and, more importantly, what can I do about the guilty conscience it’s giving me? Sincerely, Printer-less Paul Dear Printer-less, I’m totally with you on this one. Initially, I, too, was wary of Blueprint. First of all, I was sad I never had a chance to say a real farewell to Uniprint. I hadn’t figured out how to install the Uniprint printer driver (or VPN, for that matter) until last reading week. And I was incredibly bummed when I got back to campus and realized all of last semester’s hard work was not going to pay off. Because there’s a new printer in town, folks, and this printer has a conscience. Those of you who have tried using Blueprint know what I mean. When you log on to your PaperCut user page, you see not only your running balance (in a convenient graph format, because who doesn’t love graphs?) but also the environmental impact of your printing decisions. After printing just a few dozen pages, I was shocked to realize how close I was to cutting down an entire tree. I was also burning light bulbs and using carbon, but I don’t really understand the carbon thing. So let’s focus on the trees.

S U N D AY SEPTEMBER 14

REBECCA LEVINSKY ASK REBECCA The good news for you is that I ran the numbers, and, if my amateur ratios are correct, you actually need to print approximately over 1400 pages to kill an entire tree. You on your own probably won’t do that, but if you click “Open Environmental Dashboard” under your environmental impact on PaperCut, you can see where Yale stands as an organization. As I write this, Yale has printed the equivalent of 310 trees. I know it is the beginning of the semester and so there are a lot of syllabi coming off the presses … but that’s a lot. So, what to do about your guilty conscience, Paul? You should do what we should have been doing all along. Remember that the decisions you make every day impact the environment. It isn’t just printing, but maybe Blueprint will be your starting point. But if Blueprint’s numbers don’t inspire you to act, then, as my friend who is both a FOOT leader and an EVST major suggest, go outside and breathe some fresh air. Appreciate how beautiful the world is and let that motivate you to be a little more sustainable in everything you do. Turn off your lights when you leave the room. Take shorter show-

WEST HAVEN APPLE FEST

West Haven, Conn. // 12 p.m. - 7 p.m. “We have a great time planned for you and your family don’t miss it” — the Appe Fest website.

ers. Bring a reusable thermos to Blue State. Recycle as much as you possibly can. Remind your suitemates to do the same and double your impact. You could also plant trees to help offset your printing costs. I just Googled it and found this one organization that plants trees for 10 cents each. I made the minimum $5 donation. Of course, this doesn’t give me free reign to print 50 trees-worth of paper (there’s no way I need 70,000 pages this year, even with my thesis). But planting trees is better than not planting trees. Going Green, Rebecca P.S.: Be sure to Google “Blueprint Yale,” not just “Blueprint” when you’re trying to find your printer page. Otherwise, you’ll end up on the website for that really expensive juice fast, feeling bad about the world we live in all over again. Dear Rebecca, I’ve chosen my classes. Now, how do I choose the right notebooks? Seeing dots and lines, Handwritten Harriet Dear Handwritten, It sometimes seems like notebook shopping is even harder than shopping for classes. The right notebook can make even a boring seminar an exciting time to practice your handwriting. And maybe you didn’t know

this, but I am crazy about paper. I collect and impulse-buy notebooks like I am being paid to do so. My backpack is heavier after a trip to Muji than it is after a trip to Bass because I buy more notebooks than I could ever possibly use. (If you’re looking for the black market for Muji notebooks, you’ve found it right here.) So at the beginning of every semester, I’m less nervous about turning in my schedule than I am about figuring out what notebooks I should use for what classes. Because not all notebooks are created equal, and ,when you have two friends, also connoisseurs of the paper arts, who routinely gift you blank books, you end up with a lot of choices. You could say that my notebook stack is thicker than my Blue Book. Start off by thinking about how much you’ll be writing in the class. Is it a once-a-week seminar where you will be a casual note taker? Or is it a lecture in which you will write down the professor’s speeches verbatim? Will you be drawing graphs or doing math? Each of these classes calls for a different notebook. As you reflect, consider page count, binding and paper quality. And paper comes in grid, dots, lines, blank. Run through the possible scenarios. Think about colors. Do some soul searching. And you may be tempted to think that this is a Moleskine world, and we’re just living in it. But you’d be wrong. There are Muji, Whitelines, Fabriano and Rhodia options at your disposal. Even the notebooks with

the Yale crest are perfect for some situations. Like when you want even your notes to be pretentious. This semester, it took me two days to choose my notebooks, because I had to sleep on my decision. Twice. Now, I’m pretty excited about the orange theme I’ve got going on. I’m into the A5 size because I’m taking mostly seminars and I don’t like having pages leftover. I’m even branching out with a reporter-style notebook for my thesis. Bold, I know. So take your time. Before you make any rash decisions, go to Hulls and leaf through their amazing notebook selection. Smell the pages. I do that, and they might think I’m weird, but they still don’t know my name, so I think I’m okay. Or you could ignore all this advice and do the environment a solid. If your seminar professors will allow it, go paperless. Personally, I like my handwriting too much to be able to do that, but I’d be impressed if you could. Happiest with a new set of blank pages, Rebecca Contact REBECCA LEVINSKY at rebecca.levinsky@yale.edu .

Have more questions? Email WKNDadvice@gmail.com or submit them anonymously on the Yale Daily News website.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Not eating in Silliman for breakfast.

The hot breakfast din is too much for our morning routine. Please dine elsewhere.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND THEATER

‘SLOW DANCING’ UNDER THE STARS // BY CORYNA OGUNSEITAN

In my experience, the closer you look at things, the worse they are. Take those magnifying mirrors, for example, which seem to exist only to show you that your pores are much larger than you thought possible, and that you should be exfoliating more. When I learned that the “Slow Dancing” exhibit was an IMAXsized display of dancing in slow motion, I prepared myself for an evening spent watching people who were barely moving. I was ready to feel uncomfortable. This prediction couldn’t have been further from the truth. The dancers featured in David Michalek’s project manage to

maintain — if not amplify — all the grace and beauty associated with dance as viewed at a normal speed. I was amazed at the bravery of the dancers who agreed to this, who would allow complete strangers such an intimate perspective on how their bodies work. Every genre of dance imaginable is shown, from ballet to hip hop to traditional religious dance. The overall effect of the piece makes these genres seem more similar than they appear when viewed at their usual pace. In slow motion, the jerkiness of hip-hop and the smoothness of ballet become the same, rudi-

mentary muscle movement. Each leg lift, turn, pirouette or sashay is reduced to the specific muscle groups that allow the dancer to make the movement. Quadriceps. Core. Bicep. Triceps. What I took away from it was not so much a sense of wonder at the art of dancing, but rather an understanding of how it is, fundamentally, that people dance. Michalek’s intention is, I think, somewhat different from what I garnered. In his artist’s statement, he expresses sorrow that dance is an underappreciated art form in our society, citing the fact that only 8 percent of

Americans will see a live dance performance before they die. The goal of his creation would then be, I imagine, to take this experience and amplify it: It was as if the enormity of the screens and the almost excruciating slowness of the movements served as a sort of compensation for the number of people who never would have considered dance to be an art form worth paying attention to. In other words, it’s in your face as if to say, “No one has ever paid enough attention to this before, so now people are going to pay more attention than anyone ever would.” While I do think that the proj-

ect’s intensity — its act of putting dancers under a microscope — would force those who are indifferent to dance to reconsider its merits, the exhibit cannot be compared to a live dance show. If I had never seen dance performed live before “Slow Dancing,” I wouldn’t think of it so much as an art as I would a form of exercise. The detail in the dancers’ muscles makes it clear that dancing is incredibly difficult. At live dance shows, on the other hand, every movement seems effortless — a different, and more traditional, kind of grace. The curation of the piece is

A girl bathed in green light, lying on her back, wailing as she dies of starvation. An elderly monk swathed in orange robes, singing into a megaphone as he leads a caravan of ecstatic festival-goers. The Indian Ensemble’s original play “Thook” has activist ends — it examines issues of “food security, international trade and hunger,” according to the playbill — but succeeds in creating searing images of individual human suffering, compassion and humor. With just five actors, the production leaps nimbly from Winston Churchill’s kitchen to a corporate marketing photo shoot to the slums of present-day India. The show is divided into four scenes: a man playing Winston Churchill’s Indian cook and Churchill himself; a hellish sequence wherein three children see their father beheaded and seek refuge in an abandoned warehouse; the filming of a soft-drink advertisement, at which corporate marketers show off their blissful ignorance of third-world life; and finally, an extended story of a Hindu businesswoman and a Muslim trader falling in love in contemporary

India. Amazingly enough, it works. The disparate storylines don’t feel thrown together — in part because the costume and set changes are interwoven with interludes about global politics that are never boring or difficult to follow. The actors are utterly convincing. Just minutes before one man plays Mahatma Gandhi, he plays Winston Churchill’s dog Rufus with equal believability. One woman plays a dying girl, a monk-grandfather, a working adult woman, and, believe it or not, Franklin Roosevelt. And still, credibility is not strained for a second. While the viewing experience is smooth, the connections that we are supposed to intuit between the play’s many elements — the meaning of it all — are less than obvious. Much of the show concerns the parallel Bengal food crises of 1943 and 2008. During the former, Churchill refused to send aid, and history repeated itself five decades later when the West largely ignored the food riots. But the historical connection, while poignant, only emerges after some reflection. The ambivalence of Churchill’s

cook toward his employer reflects the audience’s own mixed feelings. Was he gluttonous, hypocritical and cruel or heroic, charismatic and affectionate? And why does Churchill shoot his dog?! “Thook” is a play of ideas, but not of easy answers or didactic conclusions. The set’s only constant fixture is a set of clouds fashioned from cotton and rope. Everything else is fluid: Effects are achieved by subtle sounds, masterful lighting and force of personality. Dripping water, ominous pulsing and distant traffic sounds enhance different settings. The show is a collaboration between the Indian Ensemble of Bangalore, who flew in from India last week, and the Hartbeat Ensemble, a New Haven-based group that explores social justice issues. Whoever was in charge of tech knew precisely what they were doing. I did not know before seeing the show what language it was in, and I am still unsure. Most dialogue is Hindi, with English subtitles projected on screens far above the stage that force the audience to choose between watching the stage or reading the text. Many jokes were obviously lost in translation and transcrip-

// KAREN YANG

Poise in motion.

artistically-informed. The fact that the dancers are only on screen at night makes for a beautiful backdrop. The effect of the illuminated bodies of the dancers against the dark screen and sky, with the moonlight to top it off, is as breathtaking as stargazing. I came away from my viewing experience wishing, more than ever, that I could actually dance. Contact CORYNA OGUNSEITAN at coryna.ogunseitan@yale.edu .

India Awakened // BY JACOB POTASH

S U N D AY SEPTEMBER 14

YALE UNIVERSITY CAMPUS TOUR

Yale Visitor Center // 1:30 p.m. - 3 p.m. Learn the totally true stories about how we use the Woolsey Statue.

// HENRY EHRENBERG

A time-skipping trip across the world.

tion, as was obvious from the heavy and frequent chuckling of the Indian family seated next to me, at moments when the rest of the audience was silent. But at random times the actors broke into English, in varying degrees of consistency with the subtitles. But despite the jumble, there were still moments of lyric intensity that were communicated clearly and powerfully. In the final scene, an old Indian woman confronts a young African man and tells him, “You’re too poor to die. Death is an expensive affair.” The tragic double-bind of poverty and hunger could not be stated with more economy. “Thook” translates to English as “spit” and over the course of the play comes to mean something vital — a sign of love and of human instinct. It is messy and visceral and compelling and therefore a fitting title for a play that is all these things. Contact JACOB POTASH at jacob.potash@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” Whatever happened to it?

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND BACKSTAGE

ZANELE MUHOLI: A VISUAL ACTIVIST // BY MICHELLE LIU

A

South African visual activist whose photographic portrayals of LGBTI people in her country garnered her awards such as the 2013 Carnegie International Fine Prize, Zanele Muholi documents the lives of people who face incredible violence in her series “Faces and Phases.” Muholi, who co-founded the Forum for Empowerment of Women in 2002, also created the blog Inkanyiso Queer Media in 2009, a space where the stories of many of her series’s participants are featured. Two of Muholi’s photographs appear in the Yale University Art Gallery exhibition “Contemporary Art/South Africa.” Muholi herself will be giving an Artist Talk today at 1:30 at the Gallery. WEEKEND sat down with her to talk about her inspiration for the series, as well as the community that her work both draws from and fosters.

A. Beyond the exhibition, I started working on the “Faces and Phases” series, which is a group of portraits, in 2006, after I lost a friend. The photographs were inspired by a person’s life, and I realized at the time that we needed more images of black lesbians, who are doing some work or things within the LGBTI community at home. In America you have Audre Lorde; in South Africa we have different names but you never get to be at a level where Audre has been. So you have a young generation that expresses themselves differently, or human beings who identify as lesbians who contribute a great deal. I thought to myself that it was important for one to start this massive archive that speaks to different levels of who we are and what we do in South African communities. Busi Sigasa [the first person photographed for the series] was a 25-yearold friend who was a survivor of hate crime at the time, and she survived multiple kinds of rape incidents. When we lost her in 2007, she was positive and out. She was an HIV activist and spoke out about her status at the time. She was only 25 years old—she was a lesbian mother at the time. It’s then that I realized there was a need for us to

have visuals of our community members and remember them as they were still alive, than when they were gone. I started working religiously on that visual history which marked the present and the loss that we felt as friends and colleagues who were with them. Q. What made you choose photography as the visual medium through which you’re expressing these sentiments? A. I like photography because you don’t need to be literate to understand a photograph. You don’t need any level of expertise to understand and see yourself in a photograph. You could only read a few elements that are in a particular image — and go beyond if you like. I like the fact that photography is accessible for any person who is a member of a particular community, or who feels like wanting to know more by just looking at that image. Regardless of the way those images are captured, photos are about life stories, so the more I capture different photographs, [the more] I’m aware that it’s somebody’s life story, and not just subjects. I look at those photographed as participants in a project. They have their own lives in which they engage with you. I like the accessibility; I like the tangibility of those photographs; I like the fact that there is a relation-

ship built between the photographer and the people who are featured in the photograph, if the photographer cares to know more about who the people in the photographs are. Q. So can you tell me a little bit about how you forge that relationship? A. These are the people that are partaking in a visual project that marks a moment in history. I work with friends, and friends of friends, and people that I meet along the way through those that I’m connected with, so it’s never an issue of who is in the photographs and how I get to know each person or each participant in the series. The dots are connected by those who are connected to me and beyond me — some of them are ex-colleagues, people that I work with in different projects, some are people that I meet through the colleagues of friends, or ex-girlfriends and lovers, etc. Q. How do your participants respond to your project? A. Response is about involvement — how do they get involved and how do they involve themselves afterwards? Because you have already built a relationship, establishment of that relationship is major. My method has been not quite complex. It’s a method of

keeping up with the people who are in the project even though it’s bigger than me, it’s bigger than us, it’s bigger than life itself—it’s becoming even more popular than how I thought it would be. What happens now is that I try to keep in touch as much as possible with the people who are featuring in the series, and then I request some of them to write their own stories in order for people to know that they are indeed involved. We are not situated in one space — some people have since left the country, some are still in South Africa but busy with their own thing. I meet some people at protests, parties, activist events, so that relationship gets to be nurtured or nourished in various ways. Some people just vanish and are out of the radar, but the fact that they were there, or are still there, and are having their voices heard and published in various places means they cannot be dismissed. Q. How does that participation relate to your blog? A. The blog is not mine, specifically — I update it, I started it, but it’s for us. Say you are in my photographs, and then it’s your own story — you have your own personal life and how you do things — so it can’t be mine. I’m just doing my part—you have to do your part in order for other people to get to hear and get to know you better than just the photograph that I have taken. For each and every photo, especially if captured with care, there’s always that second layer, and that layer cannot just be dismissed or handled carelessly. It means that we always need to be delicate when we deal with different situations, especially where human life is concerned. Q. What do you hope the long-serving purpose, or the legacy of your project will be? A. The existence of the resistance is really, really important for posterity. For any person who doesn’t know what is going on in South Africa currently, at least people get to take something, feel something, see something,

// ZANELE MUHOLI

These photos appear in the artist’s exhibit at the YUAG.

and act or react after seeing whatever they’re denouncing. Especially right now there’s a high level of hate crimes and brutal murders of black lesbians in various townships — people have been killed unnecessarily. So when one reads about lesbians in South Africa, there’s always that question of why are these things happening? Like any other atrocity that exists in any space around the world, that becomes that moment in history that ends up with a monument of some kind. Capturing those movements as part of our moments is very, very important before any monuments are erected in whatever spaces. It’s very important for [future generations] to know that there are so many people who fought for their freedom and who deserved to be celebrated and recognized and respected for what they have done. This is a public visual history that I want the next person to access . Q. Is there anything else you would like to broach on this topic, or on your work being featured here at the YUAG? A. What is important in my work is to reach out to as many mainstream spaces as possible and to not only limit it to queer spaces. When you read some blurb that is on the wall, the questions that come after mean that one is curious and gets to be educated around issues that are happening beyond just the US space or spaces. Then, maybe it might lead to one longing for more, so I’m grateful to be invited here because if it wasn’t for this work I would not have been here. Being considered in that and having the members of my community being considered at this respected space means a lot to me, and I know that this is not only for me, but for many others who might not be here, but who exist out there in various townships of South Africa and beyond. Contact MICHELLE LIU at michelle.liu@yale.edu .

“

WHAT IS IMPORTANT IN MY WORK IS TO REACH OUT TO AS MANY MAINSTREAM SPACES AS POSSIBLE AND TO NOT ONLY LIMIT IT TO QUEER SPACES.

“

Q. Can you tell me a little bit about your photographs in the exhibition?