“Picasso at the Lapin Agile” feels like a Steve Martin stand-up routine grafted onto a fun, if flimsy, plot: a pair of twenty-something no-names — a painter and a physicist — meet at a Paris bar in 1903. One is called Picasso and the other is named Einstein, and they spend the night exchanging jokes, competing for women’s attention and announcing their plans to revolutionize the 20th century. The play was Martin’s first, written in 1993.
Each role in this delightful farce is a Martin alter ego embodied — a comic conceit come to life — and the actors in Long Wharf Theatre’s excellent new production have obviously studied Martin’s mannerisms: More than a few lines are inflected with the comedian’s trademark loopy delivery.
The subject matter is uneven. Bathroom humor is unceremoniously thrown together with overwrought soliloquies about the nature of genius, but the powerhouse cast is able to take an already-charming script and wring out a moving and uproariously funny play.
A married couple — Freddy (Tom Riis Farrell) and Germaine (Penny Balfour) — run the Lapin Agile. Among their guests are Gaston, an old man whose perversion is rivaled only by his incontinence; Suzanne, a beautiful young woman eager for a tryst with Picasso; and Sagot, an art dealer whose money-mindedness serves as a foil to Picasso’s romantic idealism.
Freddy and Germaine are ordinary compared to their larger-than-life guests, but they too have their outré moments: a shouting match over whether Germaine is a post- or neoromantic is interrupted by Gaston, who reminds them, “This is not some sleazy dive!”
The show’s greatest comic pleasure is Jonathan Spivey in the tremendously idiotic role of Charles Dabernow Schmendiman, an inventor who is confident that his building material — a mixture of asbestos, kitty paws and radium — will guarantee him a prominent place in the 20th-century pantheon. Onstage for 10 captivating minutes, he is the play’s strongest invention — even if the joke can only be sustained for a short burst.
Einstein, in the hands of Robbie Tann, is also delightfully weird, prancing and cackling his way through the 85-minute show. Picasso (Grayson DeJesus) is a caricature of the appallingly self-obsessed artist: picture James Franco or Kanye West at their most cringe-inducingly pretentious.
The rapport between the two men is the backbone of the play: Already convinced of his own genius, each man gradually becomes convinced of the other’s, too, until they are awash in a sea of self-congratulation, shouting lines like “My only regret is that we’ll be in different volumes in the encyclopedia!”
Perhaps here it is appropriate to note that the play’s armchair philosophizing is on a par with Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar”: Orations on the subjectivity of the universe are either rousing or woefully out of place, depending on your mood.
Over and over, it is pointed out that the 20th-century revolutions in physics and art both involved a radical relativism — which is an idea, sure, just not a remotely original one. Granted, no one expects Steve Martin to be Tom Stoppard, and his effort to dramatize an historical moment is perfectly admirable.
Thankfully, there is an endless stream of goofy, meta-referential moments and absurd tangents: When Suzanne coyly asks Picasso when he will return to his room, he answers, “When the play is over.” Einstein seeks to explain why “e” is the funniest letter, individually assessing every other letter in the alphabet to prove his point.
The audience’s knowledge of history provides another rich vein of humor, as when Germaine offhandedly predicts the advent of air travel, television, the atomic bomb, computers and lawn flamingos — before being dismissed by her husband as foolish.
The futuristic bell that chimes whenever anyone enters or exits the bar is a subtle clue that the bar exists in a special realm unto itself. But any subtlety on this front is left in the dust in the play’s final sequence, when the bar’s magical qualities are brought to the fore in a preposterous finale that only Steve Martin would dare to include. No spoilers here!
Suffice it to say that the play is an idiosyncratic love letter to the 20th century. It darkly hints at the impending world wars, but also seems to hold up Picasso and Einstein as secular saints — individual minds whose elegance might be capable of redeeming the century’s legacy. Steve Martin might not belong in their rarefied air, but even as a rookie playwright, he has created an enduring work of his own.
The first album I listened to properly, and I mean from cover to cover, was Eminem’s “Marshall Mathers” LP. It was released in 2001; I was nine and my older brother had been given a copy by his best friend. The album had a canary-yellow sticker on it, warning young buyers that they needed parental permission to purchase it. Nothing could have made it more appealing; I took the album, put the disk into my Walkman and listened to Eminem for three days straight.
From that moment on, rap became my favorite genre, an obsession I was vaguely ashamed of but needed in my life. Initially, its attraction lay in the cursing I could discern amongst the rapid-fire rhymes – words I’d hear my mother hiss when she smashed a plate, words a kid called Evan at my school used bountifully, usually before being sent out of the classroom.
But as I went through high school and college, rap came to mean way more than just alluring obscenity. I became picky, developing on the one hand an interest in the worlds being rapped about and on the other a keener ear for poetic and witty lyrics — even if they were sometimes sexist. Jay-Z’s “99 Problems” came out in 2004, when I was midway through my second year of boarding school in England. Once the lights went out in our nine-girl dormitory, I would listen to the album under my duvet, reflecting sagely that however huge my homework pile, I at least was not being afflicted by “bitch problems.” And now I’m a feminist. You probably know the deal – I believe that women should be treated equally to men, that they should be able to climb career ladders despite their ovaries and retain jobs in TV when they get wrinkles. I’d like girls not to feel outsexed by Barbie; I’d like to live in a time when ladies who, to use today’s parlance, “sleep around” aren’t condescended or shunned but are treated as normally functioning people whose sexual appetites are as by-the-by as their tastes in upholstery.
These views didn’t suddenly walk into my head on my 18th birthday; they were there all along. But the older I get, the crankier gender inequality makes me feel.
Recognizing that I’m a feminist has not provoked some astronomical life change. Feminism is, after all, a cartoonishly broad church; I still wear make-up and I still like rom-coms. But it has made me examine my music tastes with a shrewder eye. Is my rap habit – which has only increased in intensity since “Marshall Mathers” – incompatible with my views on gender?
Listening to the past month’s biggest hits, it’s hard to deny that misogyny is still alive and well in the rap industry. In Meek Mill’s latest track, he says to a female addressee, “It’s two words, ‘bitch fuck,’” and then, more charitably to a male adversary, “You can have my old bitch cause I don’t do the same hoes.” In Big Sean’s single “I Don’t Fuck With You,” he says as much to his ex, calling her “you lil stupid ass bitch” before adding for good measure, “fuck how you feel.”
This stuff is pretty inarguably misogynistic. Not all rap and hip hop is as bad, obviously—in “Dear Mama,” Tupac thanks his mom for being “always committed.” But derogatory images of women remain dominant in rap music. Women are rarely presented as smart or superior; they “ain’t shit,” as Dr. Dre observes, “but hoes and tricks [to] lick on these nuts and suck the dick.” Some artists even underline that they specifically enjoy having sex with independent women so as to put them in their place – B.I.G. likes his ladies “educated” so that he can “bust off on they glasses,” a lyric which, as a spectacle-wearer myself, has always made me chuckle.
Of course, I’m not the only white, privileged female to enjoy this sort of music. But instead of squirming at my ability to stomach the woman-hating I hear, it seems useful to examine why rap is sexist. The misogyny didn’t pop up ex nihilo: As rap became increasingly produced by major record labels, artists had to offer more hardcore content. Research has shown a direct correlation between a rap album’s explicitness and its success.
Too $hort addresses this connection head on, replying in “Thangs Change” to the charge that rappers are “always disrepectin’ ladies.” He basically shrugs it off, saying, “I get paid to talk bad about a bitch.” Rappers shouldn’t be let off the hook entirely – denigrating women is, after all, a cowardly way of squandering poetic talent. But the issue of misogyny in rap is not quite the black and white ethical field it is often framed as.
No musicians create in a vacuum; rap lyrics reflect the realities their writers deal with on the day-to-day. That’s not to say that the songs’ extravagant tales of pussies and gangbangs are legit – they’re often exaggerated, intent on gratifying demands for stereotypical representations of ghetto life. But the need these young, usually black, usually male artists feel to trumpet their own virility via the denigration of the female reflects a sociocultural situation that is absolutely real and, on the whole, horrific. For some of these artists, the opportunities for proving their masculinity in more palatable fields – professional frameworks, for instance – have been sparse, denied by a society that incarcerates over 12 percent of its African-American population.
Yet even if rappers are exhorted to churn out misogynistic content by industry fat-cats, and even if rappers’ creativity can only unfurl within the boundaries of a warped sociocultural context, misogyny in rap remains problematic for feminist listeners. How can someone who wants women to be respected listen to, much less pay for, content that perpetuates harmful gender norms?
It’s an issue that I’ve struggled with a lot – I’ll feel outraged by a lyric that I feel goes “too far”, before forgiving a song that is just as offensive, but which I like for its solid boardwork.
At this point, I’m reminded of Sarah Koenig in the “Serial” podcast, who also swings from one point of view to another. I don’t have the answer, essentially – all I know is that I believe in gender equality, and yet I like rap music, including songs that are insulting to my sex. I also like Flaubert, the 19th century French novelist whose female characters were also almost all one-dimensional. The reasons why we respond positively to certain art forms over others are complex, and while I would like my political stances to dovetail with my tastes in art, music and literature, they just don’t. Figuring that out is one of the hardest tasks of being a modern feminist, because it involves a constant evaluation of where lines can be drawn and where they cannot.
“War,” written by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz DRA ’12, is characterized by its tensions: between present and past, brother and sister, family members; across racial divides and language barriers; and between two different shows playing on one stage.
At the beginning, the lights go up on the show’s minimalist stage to reveal two armchairs, two siblings, one comatose mother in one hospital bed and a strange woman by her side who claims in a mixture of heavy German and broken English to be the mother’s sister. Tate and Joanne, the two siblings, have never heard of the woman, who calls herself Elfriede. Further complicating this is the fact that Elfriede is white and German, while Tate, Joanne and their mother Roberta are African-American. What brings them all together is that Roberta has had a stroke.
As Tate and Joanne sit waiting for Roberta to wake up, they are left to confront and reconcile their long-simmering tensions.
Over the course of each act, the two ridicule each other’s decisions and words, from the minor and recent to the lifelong and festering. Gradually, we learn about the family of four that the siblings share even as they divide it. The two decorate the stage with bitter words about loyalty, hypocrisy, Joanne’s decision to drop out of law school and marry a white spouse, and Tate’s career burnout.
As the show delves into the complexities of familial relations, it also experiments with complex narrative forms. From time to time throughout the play, the lighting changes without a moment’s notice, the stage physically rises and the characters — doctors and family alike — drop to all fours and begin to act not as people but apes. Dressed in a ghostly, white hospital gown, Roberta — dazed, amnesiac, lost, confused — wanders among the apes, trying to recover her memory and understand where and who she is. As Roberta stands next to the hospital bed her body occupies, one gets the impression of a purgatory, of an out-of-body experience. A show about family is interlaced with a one-woman act (save, of course, for some apes).
Tonya Perkins, who plays Roberta, delivers a stellar performance, leaving the audience entranced as she weaves in and out of her own consciousness and memory.
Just as chilling are her direct addresses to the audience. She speaks directly to us, asks us who we are, what we are doing here and why we won’t speak back to her.
A common motif of the play is the characters’ breaking of the fourth wall. They often not only interact with the audience, but observe it and make a spectacle of it. The very opening of the play features all of the characters (except Roberta) walking on-stage and slowly breaking into laughter at the audience, as if slowly catching on to some inside joke that only they understand. This image is paralleled at the play’s end, when a group of the characters go to a zoo to look at the ape house and end up looking through a window at the audience itself.
While this adds a surreal element to the play’s many complicated themes and questions, it seemed tangential — if not distracting — to the play’s pathos.
As Tate and Joanne try to grapple with the story (often lost in translation) of this strange German woman and her temperamental son, Tobias, they discover that Elfriede and Roberta share a father.
“I wanted to write a play about black Germans for a very long time,” Jacobs-Jenkins said in an interview published in the playbill. “Specifically something that dealt with the mischlingkinder (children born to white Germans and African-American soldiers during the American occupation of post-WWII Germany).”
Jacobs-Jenkins has constructed a play focused on a unique and unknown component of WWII history, but perhaps the most appealing aspect of “War” is its unique use of the stage. The elevation of the stage to create the rainforest purgatory is enticing. A space in the middle of the stage creates a wall between the characters, a threshold for the apes and a window for the characters to look at the audience. One of the characters exits the stage by walking right off of the downstage steps, joining the audience in the front row. In the physical and the visual, “War” is superb.
However, in its emotional appeal, “War” had its moments of brilliance, but it fell short in its ending. The catharsis it had promised was never fully realized. When the lights dimmed for the final time, I sat at the edge of my seat expecting one more scene. After all, the emotional release had only just begun. But then the audience began to clap, and the players took their finals bows.
I first heard Dylan Thomas’s famed villanelle, “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” just a couple weeks ago in the new Christopher Nolan blockbuster Interstellar. Michael Caine, each time the topic of mortality comes up (which is often) beats us over the head with it — “rage, rage, against the dying of the light” — and proceeds to build a giant spaceship. I can’t say I was particularly enthralled with Thomas after that. The grand conclusion of his poetry — don’t die? Try really hard not to die? I was unimpressed.
But pretentiously waxing poetic about immortality and actually achieving it are two different things. Thomas — his poetry and humanity brought to life by Welsh actor Ben Kingdom for an hour — achieves the latter in “Dylan Thomas: Return Journey,” a one-man-show that played at the Yale Center for British Art on Thursday. This frustratingly simple production is not a play or a monologue; it is something much closer to a resurrection.
Although performed by Kingdom, the play is a seamless stringing together of Thomas’s prose and poetry, and feels driven by Thomas himself. Without much reason (but a good amount of rhyme) “Return Journey” shows Thomas ambling into the past, deep into his childhood. His destinations are trivial: The stories he tells of old men pub-hopping and Christmas Eve fires are amusing and laden with nostalgia, but of little apparent significance. Along the way, however, Thomas runs into poem after poem. At first, they seem random, out of place, but we begin to see that these memories may be the underground springs from which his poetry surges forth.
With whimsy and subtle melancholy, Thomas tells us of throwing snowballs at the neighbor’s burning house until the fire engine came. He gets a look in his eyes, the lights dim, and the poetry commences. More uncanny than Kingdom’s embodiment of Thomas’s ghost, however, was how this famous poem felt as natural as the story that launched it. Yes, obviously this was a poem: The shadowy intensity of the moment commanded a little bit more of our attention, the language was a little bit denser. Yet it was an organic outpouring.
That this piece captures the end of Thomas’s life seems rather fitting: It can be seen as a meditation on death in form and content. It has a certain movement to it — the audience laughs much more at the beginning. Though it remains amusing the whole time, the dry humor is supplanted by a gentle darkness as the piece orbits death at an ever-decreasing distance. And by confronting us with the reality of death, only to contradict itself by placing an immortal Thomas in front of us, the piece succeeds in a way that few performances can: It gives profundity to its source material. Thomas’s poetry about death is what brings him back to life. While I’d thought Thomas to be a shallow poet ruminating in a mildly interesting way on the oldest idea in the book, “Return Journey” showcases the nuances of his approach in a beautiful and unexpected way.
All this being said, I was not as spellbound by the show as many reviewers have claimed to be. At times, Thomas’s tale seemed a little too self-indulgent, his accent a little too impenetrable. In these fleeting moments, the magic was interrupted, the narrative thread lost and I had a vague sense of annoyance at the whole ordeal. Though it’s possible I just needed more coffee, I think that this excessive theatricality was a trait of Thomas himself. Just listen to a recording of him reading one of his famous poems. Though haunting and passionate, Thomas savors his words just a little too much, as if to say “I know this is good.” While that same pomp sometimes bogs down “Return Journey,” it is, on the whole, a successful resurrection of Thomas in all of his spirit. “Return Journey” was only at Yale for one night, but with a volume of Thomas’s poetry and a bit patience, you can resurrect him yourself.
Before dinner, Todd had placed a pair of white candles on the table, each held up by a kitschy ceramic pilgrim. The man had big buckle shoes, the gold on which had faded to sickly yellow after decades of use. The woman wore a white apron that tightened around her waist in a little grove that you were supposed to tie with ribbon. Todd sat at one end of the table, and I sat at the other. His two children, Amy and Cam, flanked his right and left. The three of them talked about the way the beach had changed in the three years since they had last been to this house. I had no knowledge of the details— the new restaurants, the changing cost of firewood on the shore — so I listened and watched the candles flicker and the wax melt. I knew the big changes anyway, the ones that Todd, Amy and Cam, did not mention. Three years ago, Stephanie, Todd’s wife, had died. Two years after that, he had somehow found me.
Dinner finished. Amy and Cam got up to clean the table. The candles’ flames had sunk deep into the wax. Through the window, the sun floated inches above the ocean. Todd reached his thick fingers around each candle and blew it out. The thought that he and I had “somehow” found each other, I had to admit to myself, was one of those little lies we allow ourselves. We had met online — a fact that did not bother me, but which, I later discovered, bothered Todd. He believed in serendipity. He had pretended that I was the first woman he had dated after his wife had died. That set up our first fight, when I had discovered in him a native desire for purity, a virgin-like impulse to be faithful and true. And when we fought, I realized that for 20 years, and maybe longer, I given up on such things. All I want is companionship, I had told Todd — no myths, no lies, no fantasies. Now, sitting at the table, I wondered when I had somehow changed my mind.
Todd walked over to me, placing his hands on my shoulders. “Do we have to?” I asked. “Of course,” he whispered. “Things are going perfectly.” He took the ring from his pocket and slipped it onto my finger. As if on cue, Amy and Cam walked back into the dining room. Todd held my hand in his. “It’s been long enough,” he said. “I love Anne, and I’ve asked her to marry me.”
“After a year!” Amy said. Cam said nothing, joining the group hug, but not making eye contact.
“Now,” Todd said. “That’s done. Let’s go down to the beach.”
***
“Why now?” Amy asked. It was the morning of Thanksgiving. She sat on a chair by the marble-top island in Todd’s kitchen. She wore a canvas jacket and blocky black glasses, which did little to hide the fact that she always seemed to squint.
“That’s what the recipe says,” I said. “‘After crisping the skin, turn down the heat in the oven.’ I’m not sure. I don’t really cook much.”
Amy had driven in from Silver Lake, where she volunteered at a Montessori school. After Todd and I admitted to each other that we were dating — as high school as it sounded — he finally introduced me to his daughter. She had just graduated from Occidental and took us a movie in an old Eagle Rock theater that smelled of pot and cheap beer. Afterwards, she needled Todd and me with questions: where we had met, how we had met. Amy had managed to get at everything I was anxious about — to pick at all the scabs I’d ignored. After the movie, when we were alone, she had told me she liked me and that I was nicer than the other women he had dated. That night, Todd and I had our first fight.
“Thanksgiving was a very big deal for the Brennan household,” Amy said in her deadpan drone. “I just want to make sure it’s good.”
As we worked, Amy started to recite the history of the house. She spoke without conviction but with the same certainty of fact I had seen in her father. He, she pointed out, always had a special love for the beach, growing up in Orange County, surfing and swimming along the shore. He earned his money in the real estate boom of the ’90s, fitting people into subdivisions that iterated like river deltas. To his buyers, he promised happily ever afters that, as Amy pointed out, were 40 years out of date. But that money had been enough to buy a beach house the year she was born. They had lived there full-time until Cam, the younger sibling, had moved away to college.
Amy asked why I had moved to California. I told her what I had told Todd on our first date: I had moved for work when I was 28. I had just finished law school, and I realized there were more openings in California. The more complicated answer, which I had told Todd only weeks into dating, was that I had discovered that my boyfriend was cheating on me and I had needed to escape.
Amy was still talking about Orange County — a bland, white, conservative paradise, she called it. Some of her high school classmates, she said with disgust, still lived in Huntington Beach. They’d moved back after college, or hadn’t gone to college at all, choosing instead to nibble at their trust funds. I guessed these weren’t her close friends, but the bigger demons of high school — cheerleaders, football players (from what I can imagine — I was sent to boarding school.) Todd once mentioned that in high school, Amy had stopped eating — he was not clear on the details, her mother had dealt with that.
I stacked a set of smeared glass bowls in the sink and turned on the faucet. I told Amy how my older sister had married at 25. She laughed at the idea of marrying at her own age, and for once, she seemed to admit me into the kinship of the oppressed. Or as I hoped, maybe we had found some deeper recognition, a bond between women who had both practiced the art of turning yourself off.
“I read that all the big mansions in Orange County are sinking into the ocean anyway,” she said, flicking a butter knife with her index finger and sending it spinning in circles across the marble. “Global warming. Comeuppance, I guess. Better us than Bangladesh.”
***
When Cam came into the kitchen, I was alone, picking plates out of the dishwasher and trying to find their respective drawers. Cam had promised to make pumpkin pie, as he had done every year — excepting that three-year gap which they all seemed to ignore — since he was 10. He had blonde hair and delicate, but definite, features, which looked like they’d been drawn with a sharpened number 2 pencil.
Cam was polite, but didn’t want me to say anything, really. If I struck up a conversation — asking about his drive or his graduate research in physics — he answered in one or two syllables. But if I made a move to leave, he would pause, and ask me a simple question: “How is your work?” “Hasn’t it been dry this year?” So I sat at the countertop, skimming through my phone, nodding as Cam made his own sort of conversation, full of fastidious insights. “This is a how to beat the eggs, you see?” “Most people use too much nutmeg, but really, the secret is in the allspice.”
It must have been in a protected environment that Cam had time to perfect this rhythm, speaking and pausing for reassurance on the reality of his thoughts. Stephanie — mom, I guess — had been the one he talked to before. He never spoke about her, Todd told me that Cam had taken her death the worst of all the family, but I could feel the space that he was working around. Where there must have once been a partner in these little thoughts — someone who knew what to say besides “uh huh,” who could comment on spices and maybe even astrophysics — Cam had a hole in his life.
Stephanie had been the kind of mother who dedicated everything to her children. My sister had done that too. She had given up her job to live at home in Connecticut just after I moved to California. I used to find excuses to ignore her on holidays — work, travel for work, whatever I could muster. I did not want see her. I did not want to spend my time watching her bend over backwards for her children or making excuses for her husband — Terrible Harry, I called him. When I visited, he always used to disappear. My sister would tell me he was stuck at work or in traffic or something oddly generic. And then I’d have to spend my time helping out, as she asked, “Anne, could you possibly…?” “Anne, could please…?”
When I was 28, I had learned that my sister’s life was never going to be mine anyway. I can’t have kids. I hadn’t been planning on having them either — not for several years, at least — but the discovery somehow shocked me. I fell into a depression that was punctured only when I came home to our second-floor walk-up early one August afternoon and discovered that Jason was cheating on me.
Cam was still talking. I wasn’t paying much attention, cleaning utensils with an old rag and saying “uh-huh” every few phrases or so. It was comfortable, I had always known, to play mom. There are moments when this — just sitting here, listening — seems like all it takes. And there are other moments, too — when you hold your sister’s months-old son, for instance, his hand grasping the air as if testing whether the whole world is made of something as soft as he is. But if this is all so easy, those moments remind you, why haven’t you made them on your own? Why do you only witness them as a substitute?
Cam held a pie in front of me. The pumpkin mixture in the center sloshed back in forth inside the shell. “It will congeal in the baking,” he said. “It’s mom’s recipe. She used to say that this way the texture is unbeatable.”
Let’s face it. Yale is not known for sports. We are not part of the PAC 12 or the Big 10. (I know what those things are.) Our football stadium does hold a respectable 64,000 people, but we don’t sell out every game like LSU or Alabama, each with stadiums seating over 100,000. The movies made about Yale don’t feature football heroes like Rudy, but instead students like Rory Gilmore and her aspirations for journalism.
But the one thing we do have is a centuries-old rivalry which surely won’t disappoint national audiences when we’re featured on ESPN’s College GameDay. So, here is perhaps your one and only chance to get on the big screen. Here is WEEKEND’s guide to what will and what won’t get you noticed this GameDay.
Don’t Flash … Your GPA on a Sign
I know no Yalie would do this, but some poor Harvard souls think flashing their 3.6-or-higher GPAs will get them national attention. They are sadly mistaken in thinking that’ll get them on the air. Unfortunately, their inflated egos can’t handle taking that advice, and the cameras may just catch them for a special segment of “Section Assholes Gone Wild.” Just try to steer clear and make your own vibrant sign of support for the Bulldogs sans personal achievements.
Harvard Sux Apparel
Always wear your FCC “Huck Farvard” shirt. If anyone questions your reading or spelling capabilities, just tell them you attend that lovely community college in Cambridge where everyone relies on spell check. Didn’t buy these shirts before they sold out? The favorite “’Harvard sucks.’ — Gandhi” is always a safe bet.
Yale Spirited Costumes
Packed away all of your Halloween gear? Well, it might be time to unshelve those boxes again, especially if you have any Yale-related pieces. Go all out and be a bulldog — the comfy faux fur might just keep you warm in the frozen hell that is Harvard. Throw the cameramen for a whirl and dress up as Eli Whitney (offensive) or Salovey (inoffensive).
Hissing is a No-No
Sorry YPUers. Substitute your snake-like hisses for some good old-fashioned jeering and “Harvard Sucks” signs this Saturday. Afterwards we can have a spirited debate about what parts of Harvard make it the worst university in the country, complete with gavel of course.
Snapping Has to Go
It pains me to say it, but I don’t think ESPN understands the meaning of snapping in our culture. Hold your soulful finger-play for some spoken word performances. Instead, bring some vuvuzelas to the field and shout your sonnets of devotion for the Yale Defense. May I suggest “Harvard, shall I compare thee to a summer’s wildfire?” or “I took the path of Yale University, and that has made all the difference.”
Properly Learn the Bulldog Fight Song
Remember those tunes we heard once on acceptance day? Well, they are more than just songs meant for waving a napkin. Get someone from the Whiffenpoofs or the Yale Glee Club to teach you how to hold a tune or just get an a cappella friend to stand next to you (we all have at least one) and lip sync with a single tear rolling down your cheek. The cameras won’t be able to stay away.
Storm the Field, Kiss and Tell
We know it will be cold. Last year, almost everyone left after halftime, but make it your priority to storm the field with the hopes of getting your five seconds of fame. When the Bulldogs inevitably win, you need to be there and you need to be the one to lead the charge. After the final buzzer when the Bulldogs crush Harvard, hop that fence and go give the Bulldog quarterback that sloppy, frozen-lipped kiss.
Had you read it in the news? Had you see it in the sky? It is indeed this time of the year once again, when all the little biddles and jibs bundle up in their big puffy copes for the day of the big one. On to a bus and to the Harver they fly! “Bola Bola! Bully Dog Bow Ow Ow,” they say from the tip of their lungs! Yes, when the autumn leaves and goes, and the chepsnups roasted on a fire, it is the time of a Game!
I can see of it now, if I try. It is in of the Harver yard. All of the Big Boys of Yale down on the court, making piles of them and the pig’s skin this way and that way to the goal. “A big run!” he shouts with a hat from the announcer booth. “Anitraception!” he cry. “50, 20, 10, 7, 11, 1, he cannot stop! Tochdown Yale!” And oh how the crowd wiggles and jiggles in the sun! The Biggest Boy on the field, I meet him I did. I slap his backs as he and his band of boys walk to the court. He too, he dances a joyful one and puts a spike on the ball, just to show the red team that he has been the one to do it!
Let me tell you a story about Harver. One day, I had gone to Harver 2 years ago for A Game, and was lost in the brick and trees of Harver. I ask a little boy of Harver, I ask, “Had you seen anywhere my friend of Murphwell?” What the Harverboy say next, I can not even say to you, but at least know, if he said it, he did it, and if he did it, there was all of it there, outside, in the street with us. He look at me with his little beedy eyes he do, and his words they hisp like a saddies’ tears. This is why Harver can not even win one little point from you, my Big Boys of Blue.This is why on the court we must beep them good and well.
For this is a Game that is the oldest and rarest of them all. It stands in the hearts and eyes of the people like the old legends of sport: The Glabiaters and Charity Races of old Rome, a duel of sword and arm, the Olympus Games, golf, knights, Hide in Gosique, and A Game of Harver Yale. Equal teams have won in different years. Sometimes even something as simple as A Game is not even so simple as it may seem. Nobody even knows who won and who lost, when and where, or even why it may be. That is something only for Gog to decide. But everyone feels in their heart the win and the lose, together, like of friends.
I am not myself a man of the sport. No, for little Jame, it is the warm fire, one of Big Books hot off the shelf of a Sterling Stack, and chats of the issues of the day with the friend or two. That is a life! But this A Game is not just about the Big Boys and their bittie ball on the green and white courts. No, this is more than sport, or even a match. A Game is of people. Even with spite in the jibs and the jabs, the red and the blue at each other likes stamps on a log, at A Game, all of Yale come to as one of many, to many, and many to one, and many to all.
I must confess — I am absolutely clueless at football games. It’s a game made for television, and without the benefits of instant replay and ultra-zoomed-in shots of the defensive line, I can barely tell where the ball is. I presume that my fellow students at the Game tomorrow afternoon will face the same problem. But that’s okay, because football games are always about much more than the action itself. The music played by each school’s band is perhaps equally important as the game played on the field. And, keeping that truth in mind, I will now take it upon myself to carefully analyze the details of Harvard and Yale’s respective fight songs, for we all know that the real competition is not athletic, but musical: Which band can play better and more obnoxiously; which students can sing louder and more obnoxiously.
The Crimsons’ fight song is “Ten Thousand Men of Harvard,” a title at once perplexing and downright incomprehensible. The last time I checked, Harvard has a scant 7,200 undergraduates — so not only do they inflate grades to no end, but also the size of their own student population. What, then, could this 10,000 possibly refer to? The 10,000 outnumbered Greeks who vanquished Darius’ invading Persians on the Plain of Marathon? I would not put it beyond the Crimson to equate themselves with those noble Hellenic forbearers, but in that calculation Yale becomes the analogue of the mammoth Persian army, which has lived on in cultural memory as the paragon of all that is unruly and savage about the earth. Now, I know that Cantabs harbor an innate tendency to speak ill of New Haven at every opportunity that arises, but the Elm City is actually quite nice, with little real savagery in any of its quarters — something I cannot honestly say about the gang violence of South Boston in the 1970s. Moreover, if we do ascribe to this historical dichotomy between the noble Greeks of Harvard and the wretched Persians of Yale, we unfairly dismiss all the achievements of the great Persian culture and fall into the trap of writing white-centric imperialist history. Not that I would expect any less from Harvard: Yale does have the better history department, after all.
Now back to the music itself. Like all fight songs, “Ten Thousand Men of Harvard” is full of brash brass and messy orchestration. This model works quite well in most cases, but not in Harvard’s. The song sounds desperately in need of a real melody, rather than the monotone, vague chanting of the song’s verses, which straddles the uncomfortable line between joyous shouts and plodding Gregorian chants. There is a quasi-tune here, but it’s not very catchy, and fight songs should always be catchy. Harvard should decide whether it wants the rhythm-heavy, melody-light model of “Boola Boola” or the orchestral sweep of a more ambitious composition. Currently it has neither, and “Ten Thousand Men” thus comes across as an aimless, burnt-out rocket of sonic incompetence floating in its own orbit.
Another matter is at issue here — one of “Ten Thousand Men”’s verses is in Latin. Yes, Latin. I don’t know why the writers felt that the song cried out for a Latin verse, but they wrote one anyway. It is, of course, entirely unnecessary and completely pretentious, qualities not wholly dissimilar from Harvard’s deeply disappointing architecture; and also a rather transparent attempt to prove that Cantabs know more Latin than their one-word motto would suggest. Maybe they’re trying to make up for that — but instead they come off as irritating blowhards, self-consciously reheating the artistic formulae of ages long since past quieted.
If “Ten Thousand Men” feels like a semi-tune at best, I cannot say anything of the sort about “Boola Boola.” “Ten Thousand Men” formed in the brain of some Harvard graduate in the early twentieth century, but “Boola Boola” arose from the tradition of popular music in that same period, emerging a full eighteen years before Harvard’s song. The fuzzy recording of “Boola Boola” from 1910 I found on YouTube sounds like a gleeful romp, full of short little ditties and an accentuated, punctual brass section. The song feels free and loose, with none of the affected seriousness that bears down on “Ten Thousand Men.” This is a real song, too — even John Philips Sousa liked it. Another YouTube video, this of the Yale Glee Club in 2009, carries much of that same sense of spontaneity and apparent improvisation, as well as a much-appreciated lack of Latin.
The sole criticism I might lodge against the otherwise-consummate “Boola Boola” relates to the name of the song. What on earth is a Boola? Why are we singing about it? Why do FCC representatives insist on signing off on emails with those two words? How does this Boola help us defeat Harvard? Is this voodoo magic? These are all important questions, and I’m sure that Yale students have asked them for over a century. Ultimately, though, none of them really matters (except for the one about the inexplicable FCC signoff). Yale doesn’t take itself so seriously that its students can’t lighten up every once in a while, and naming our song after two nonsense words proves that. I also like to think that “Boola Boola” indirectly inspired the wonderful silliness of the Beatles’s much-maligned classic “Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da,” which I actually quite like. Maybe Paul McCartney secretly admired New Haven. One can hope, I guess.
In the end, then, where does my judgment fall? For Yale, of course — was that ever in doubt? “Boola Boola” is the far superior song, with a nonsensical title that bests the bizarre mistruth that is “Ten Thousand Men of Harvard.” Musically, “Boola Boola” carries a feeling of vivacious energy entirely absent from Harvard’s choice of fight song — this does, admittedly, raise the question of how exactly Harvard’s football team has gone undefeated thus far this year. But tomorrow afternoon, I hope that the infectious cheer of “Boola Boola” rings out through Harvard Stadium, echoing around the bowl with the ineluctable hopes of an entire school, denied glory for seven years but which shall rush its way to victory on Saturday.
So here’s what’s going on in your head right now. You just bought a ticket to the Game. You feel great because it was a long line and some people weren’t even able to get tickets. You gaze at your shiny, red ticket and think about the sick tailgates you and your friends will have the best time of your lives chilling at on Saturday morning. You imagine the laughter and Instas that will be taken and then you realize that something happens after all of that. After that there’s a football game. You sit down on the curb, dejected, because for three to four hours following the tailgating, you will be sitting or standing in the freezing cold watching a sporting event. I bet you wish you knew a little bit more about football now. Those will be three very boring hours if you don’t understand the rules. I am here to guide you through a few of the key things you will see on Saturday and tell you some facts you can tell the people around you, so you don’t seem like a total idiot.
The way every football game starts is with a player kicking the ball across the field. You can’t get around that. It has to happen. This player is assigned to kick the ball by the coach and has trained for a long time in order to be able to do this well. This kickoff kicks off the game (which may be where that phrase comes from in the first place; that just occurred to me). So the ball ricochets off of the foot of the designated kicker and then flies towards the end zone of the field. This is where the other team (wearing a different color so you can easily pinpoint them) catches the ball and runs. Sometimes they just kneel down though, because it’s one of the rules. Don’t want to get into that one right now. After this the players face each other for the faceoff that starts every play. They look at each other until the ball hikes. But, if one of the players breaks eye contact with the player across from him, it’s a foul and they lose ten yards.
Moving on. Hope you are keeping up with all of this. So then the team leader, also known as the quarterback, has a big decision to make. He can throw the ball or he can secretly give it to someone. If he throws it he’ll scan the field for an open player. I forgot to tell you earlier that when the ball hikes some of the other players run out farther on the field towards the end zone. So, okay. The people are running and the leader throws it to one of them, and then they can either catch it or not. If they don’t catch it they have to try again, and everyone gets a little more stressed out. They have four of these tries until time is up and everyone gets really mad for real.
In the case of the leader giving the ball secretly to another person, that person must be super brave. This person must keep ahold of the ball or else. They are sent to run as far as possible and can only be stopped by a dog pile. Dog piles are a big deal in football because they really get on the refs’ nerves. The refs go crazy for a good dog pile and then the rule is they have to break them up. I really hope there’s a dog pile or two on Saturday. So after all these things happen, intermittently a touchdown is gained and that’s a way to get points, which is basically the goal (despite having a good time, obviously, haha). By the end, one of the teams will have won the game and will go home the victor (that part is inevitable, and I hope it is Yale).
I hope I was able to help some of you who didn’t know what to expect this weekend. Now you know that football is a blast to watch but is also complicated. It is okay even if you still don’t get what it is about. I still struggle with some of the confusing parts, and I’m even an expert.
The first time I went to Soul de Cuba was last year, for an end of semester dinner with a seminar I had been taking on Haiti. My professor ordered seemingly everything the menu had to offer, and the feast presented to us was both impressive and borderline excessive. I left feeling as if I were about to burst. My restaurant week prix fixe lunch last Friday was a much different affair — satisfying, but not so much that I felt liable to burst at the seams at any second. When eating at Soul de Cuba, take all things in moderation — except flavor.
Heading to Soul De Cuba without making a lunchtime reservation was a mistake. We had to wait 15 minutes for a table, standing cramped between the bar and the refrigerator and awkwardly shuffling out of the way every time a waiter passed. Soul De Cuba is small, but if you have a seat it’s not so small that it feels confined — the tables are spaced just far enough apart to encourage intimate conversation. Lining the brightly painted walls are colorful, vivid Caribbean paintings and the interesting decorative choice of a flat-screen TV endlessly repeating a slideshow of old photos from Cuba. It’s a lively atmosphere.
For a first course, try the yucca fries with chili and cheese, as I did. Yucca, a starchy root common in South America, has the satisfying softness of potato fries, but is richer and creamier. Topped with a thick chili and a bit of cheese, the dish is simply divine. Despite the symphony of flavors, I’m not sure how I feel about the plastic bowl it was served in. If one is paying that much for a lunch, there’s a certain expectation that everything will be served in washable, ceramic dishes.
For the main course, I cannot recommend more highly the bistec uruguayo. It’s slightly unconventional, and I’ve never quite had a mélange of meats quite like it before: a flat steak covered with slices of baked ham and Swiss cheese, rolled into a log of meat that is subsequently breaded and fried. The meat was tender, juicy and very flavorful. My only qualm was that it was difficult to properly cut with a knife because of its highly elaborate structure, with rolls of beef that spiral around the ham and cheese. The cheese used had obviously been carefully selected — in dishes where melted cheese is only a garnish, restaurants sometimes skimp on quality, but Soul de Cuba does not. And as if the two large rolls of steak weren’t enough, the dish came with the traditional Cuban staples of rice and beans. Added to garnish were two slices of plantain, soft and cooked to sweet perfection.
For dessert, try the flan Soul de Cuba. While some flans are light and airy, as though they’ve been made with skim milk, this flan tasted as though it had been made with heavy cream. The square of rich, thick cream was one of those desserts that you must stop talking, take a large spoonful, and close your eyes to really appreciate. Drizzled on top was a sweet caramel sauce — though not too sweet, it had a body and complexity that many caramel sauces lack.
While I am not yet old enough to order alcohol, I spied a few people sitting at the bar sipping on what looked to be some delicious and carefully crafted cocktails. The beer fridge that we stood next to while waiting for a table also featured some quality imported beers — much more variety than you might find at your typical American joint.
While I won’t say that Soul de Cuba wins the prize for my favorite New Haven eatery, I would definitely go there again with a friend. Fried rolls of steak interspersed with baked ham and melted Swiss cheese aren’t for everyone — but if you’re asking me? I say give it a try.
Cask Republic, with its gleaming wood, polished countertops, and fashionable gloom, feels like a bar. It is a bar. I had known it was a bar. Until last Friday, though, I hadn’t fully grasped that it was also a restaurant.
Most bars serve food, but it seems to me that some do it with noticeably less enthusiasm than others. (Toad’s, I’ve heard, serves soup.) Cask, though, in spite of its definite bar-ness, doles out food with surprising good cheer and efficiency. All in all, my three-course lunch was tasty, timely and even a little trendy.
For the appetizer, I chose the “Curried Chic Pea Fritters.” I was fairly certain these were going to be some pretty chic peas, but my waitress informed me that they were chickpeas — you know, like garbanzo beans. Still unsure whether the menu was putting on airs or just bad at spelling, I awaited my fritters apprehensively. When they came, though, they were three satisfying orbs of fried chickpea, topped with dollops of lemon dill aioli, resting primly on triangles of pita. The whole thing was festooned with a cucumber and onion salad. On the whole, it was a perfect appetizer — filling enough to pique one’s interest, insubstantial enough to leave one awaiting the main course.
Pretty soon thereafter, the main course arrived! I had ordered the “Kale Salad with Grilled Chicken.” To me, this was the ideal entrée — the chicken was a conventional, respectable option, while the kale added a crunchy soupcon of New Age daring.
I’ve never been the world’s biggest kale fan (though I’d love to meet the “world’s biggest kale fan”), but this kale salad was awesome. It was like a fluffy green cloud of awesomeness. This might have been because the salad was lathered with the creamy ginger vinaigrette, or perhaps it was because of the sizable sprinkling of cranberries, walnuts and radicchio (a purplish chicory). Either way, it was probably not too good for me — but it was very good.
The chicken was, well, good chicken. Chicken is tough to mess up. But it was cooked just right, spiced to perfection, and served in abundance. I would estimate six solid slices, balanced up against the quivering, green forest of awesome kale.
My roommate Gordon, who had come along for the gastronomic adventure, got the restaurant’s iconic burger — a hefty slab of cow topped with bacon and a few other goodies. The fries that came with the burger were excellent. But, then again, it’s hard to screw up fries.
Gordon and I ate our main courses slowly, savoring every bite. Cask started to fill with people. It never got full, exactly, and most of the lunch crowd gravitated toward the bar. Nonetheless, a cheerful sound filled the restaurant.
For dessert, I had the “Dark Chocolate Almond Brownie,” a cute little arrangement of two triangular brownies, one overlapping the other. In the negative space between them, almost like an afterthought, sat a slowly melting sphere of vanilla ice cream. The whole concoction was sprinkled — well, bathed, really — in a rich amaretto caramel. The ice cream, especially dunked as it was in the caramel sauce, was excellent. The twin brownies, Gordon and I agreed, left a little to be desired. Brownies can’t really be bad (unless you talk to Maureen Dowd), but these were just the wrong amount of flaky, not quite the right proportion of sugar to flour, or something.
All in all, my meal — appetizer, entrée and dessert — ran me $18. Pretty reasonable, but probably not an everyday outing for a college student on the meal plan. When you can, though, head on over to Cask!
And now for a joke: A horse walks into a bar. He says, “Can I have some food?” The bartender responds, “We don’t serve horses here.” The horse replies, “Oh, that’s ok. I was more in the mood for beef.”
At Cask, the bartender would say, “Great! We serve burgers!” And the fries are excellent, too.
