Onward!

A new kind of mind-meld: The WEEKEND Kraken.
By WEEKEND
Friday, October 5, 2012

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gallant Nikita, sir Chase and fair Erin — offered up wisdom and scraps of paper coded with the runes of InCopy and outdated passwords to servers.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

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

Here’s where our heads are at:

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

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

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

With the modest soap box of these twelve weekly pages, we’ll try to confront the above — whether in features, reviews, or social critique. Not to mention the intoxicating prose of Chloe Drimal ’13.

There is a mind-meld that comes about in the process of putting out a publication, with the necessity of coordinating staffers, deadlines and assignments, of proofing pages in time for that distant, out-of-sight printing (the means of production ever hidden — the owners of the presses with their early mornings, breakfasts, families).

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

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

Here, among the ephemera and yellowing covers from decades past, there is a crystal(esque) decanter we hope to keep filled, a ribbon-less typewriter and an original Mac, with its spectrum of neon stripes and the still-visible bite-marks of the original chomp of knowledge. Once, in times of yore, the entire rag that is the News was processed through its now-dormant motherboard. Requiescat in pace, outmoded machine, dusty technology. A few issues from now, News Haven will shut its doors…

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

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