Lucy Teitler's Articles

Chapel Hill News -- October 15, 2005

2005-10-24T15:18:00.000-07:00

For anyone who has ever lost a friend
LUCY TEITLER

Cameron, the protagonist of Leah Stewart's second novel, "The Myth of You and Me," is 6-foot-2. Stewart herself is a much more average 5-foot-4.

Also unlike Cameron, Stewart does not live in Oxford, Miss., Worcester, Mass., or out of the back of her car. She lives in rural Hillsborough.

When I first see her standing on her porch, errant raindrops falling from the roof creating a permeable wall between us, she seems no more familiar to me than she would be if I had not read her book.

"Especially when you work in the first person," she explains, holding her 11-month-old daughter, Eliza, in her arms, "it is difficult to make people understand that the narrator is not you. As my husband says, you don't have a window into my soul."

"This book isn't a window into your soul?" I ask, only partly ironically.

Perhaps because "The Myth of You and Me" deals with the very personal subject of the painful demise of a friendship between two women, part of me does want to believe every word of it is true, despite its label as fiction.

She laughs.

"Well," she admits, "a book is always a little bit of a window into an author's soul."

For all her differences with Cameron, Stewart does have some similarities as well. Like Cameron, her father was in the Air Force and she moved around as a child. She too went to high school in New Mexico. She too went to Vanderbilt.

And she too had a best friend, like Cameron's Sonia, with whom she had a traumatic breakup over a man. At least it seemed like it was over a man.

In the book, Cameron discovers that Sonia, her best friend through high school and college, has slept with her boyfriend, a man with whom she is moving to a new town, possibly to get married.

When she finds out, she leaves both her boyfriend and Sonia, a double loss that has led her to the reclusive life that she leads at the beginning of the novel.

In real life, Stewart did not find out that her own non-Sonia had slept with her college boyfriend until she had already split from him, which she says simplified things for her.

"My reaction was entirely about her having betrayed me," Stewart says. "Which I think is part of the reason why it lingered."

Losses of friendships can be as damaging as romantic losses. Still, people often feel the need to justify their lingering feelings.

"I struggled with whether it was worthy of being a topic," Stewart says. "At the time there were so few books where the primary relationship is a friendship."

Now, "The Myth of You and Me" seems to be part of a trend, headed perhaps by "The Friend Who Got Away," a collection of essays about broken friendships among women, edited by Jenny Offill and Elissa Schappell, with whom Stewart appeared on WUNC's "The State of Things" in September.

But there is still something fundamentally interior about the loss of a friend. After all, to whom do you confide your feelings if it's your confidante you have lost?

"There's no structure in our culture to analyze these kinds of break ups," Stewart says. "There are no sympathy cards for them. No one would count it as a good excuse for anything, except maybe skipping a cocktail party. And even then you'd probably be seen as immature or a drama queen. It's this intense thing that all these women go through and wonder, worrying if there's something weird about us."

Perhaps it is this pervasive insecurity that made me hope that Stewart was Cameron, that made her assertion that the book was not a window into her soul so strangely sad.

Stewart has seen her college best friend once since their last big fight, five years ago at the wedding of the man in question. They had lunch, each accompanied by her husband.

"It was interesting," Stewart says. "Pleasant."

When they saw each other, Stewart says, "I was looking at her thinking, 'do I still know you?' I think that's one of the main questions of my book: Do we still know each other if we don't know each other in the here and now?"

In the weeks after the book was released, had a special promotion allowing readers to send a free advance copy of "The Myth of You and Me" to a friend. There was even a box to check to send the book anonymously.

When it arrived at the home of the friend, lush and red, its spine contained a sentence instead of a title: "A novel for anyone who has ever lost or found a friend." Folded inside was a letter from the publisher.

"If you'd like to know who requested that we give you a copy of this book," it read, "just send an email to me."

But Stewart herself does not see this book as an attempt to reunite with her college friend.

"I don't want her to read the book," she says. "I wouldn't want it to seem like an act of revenge. I keep having to talk about her because people are curious. But I don't have any ill feeling toward her at all and I wouldn't want her to think I did."

I suggest to Stewart that the friend might have the opposite reaction, interpreting the book as an invitation for reconciliation.

"If she interpreted it that way," Stewart says skeptically, "that would be fine."

By this point, Stewart has put Eliza to bed and we are alone in the room. No one speaks for a moment and we hear the music on the stereo, a band that she identifies as The Rudds.

The male lead singer's voice sings, "I've never had a friend like you."

His heartache is so apropos that we smile at each other.

A few minutes before, Stewart has told me that in adapting the true aspects of her life into fiction, she "amps everything up."

I reflect on that comment now because The Rudds' lyrics are coming from an amp, but also because if their words had interrupted a similar conversation in Stewart's book, it would have seemed heavy-handed.

But my thoughts are interrupted by Stewart's.

"I'm not saying I'm unwilling to re-establish my old friendship," she says. "It just doesn't have the same urgency for me as it does for Cameron."

Perhaps that is the great privilege of a writer. Cameron drove from Mississippi to Massachusetts to find her old friend, sleeping in scary motels and her car along the way. Stewart did not have to leave her desk to resolve her lingering feelings.

"I went through my college things and read her old letters and short stories," Stewart says. "Writing the book was the equivalent of Cameron's journey for me."

New York Observer -- June 23, 2003

2005-10-24T15:07:00.000-07:00

Scream and Scream Again

At rush hour on June 9, as shadows began to creep across the stone side of St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery, hundreds of women (and one drag queen) stood in the courtyard and screamed bloody murder. The event was the Women's Action Coalition's "Scream Out!", and its leader was Karen Finley, the performance artist and activist most famous for infuriating Jesse Helms, smearing chocolate on her naked body and taking the N.E.A. to the Supreme Court for censorship.

Forty "charges" were leveled against George Bush and his administration at the gathering, and each one was punctuated by a single scream from a different screamer. Each participant preceded her scream by traversing the stairs to the screaming platform, as if she were going to hurl herself from it once she got to the top. There Ms. Finley stood with a mane of red hair, more than six feet tall in black boots and tight pants embroidered with dragons. "You might have to scream out more than once," she told the designated screamers, "'cause that's how life is. You give and then you might have to give again."

The screams ranged from the hoarse roller-coaster scream of the tall, blond drag queen to the high-pitched shrieks of a woman dressed in subtle white linen, from the melodic chant of a woman wearing an African robe (accompanied by a confused grimace on Ms. Finley's face) to Ms. Finley herself, whose scream was deep and guttural, half-laugh and half-howl.

Ms. Finley said that she conceived of the "Scream Out" because "screaming is sometimes a woman's only way of defense, and she's criticized for being a screamer, for noise. So we're taking that, in the same way that ACT UP took the word 'queer' and made it pro-active. We shouldn't be embarrassed for being emotional. We're outraged, emotionally, over political issues.

"We got together in a friend's apartment," Ms. Finley continued. "We put this together in the past month, and I think that's also what I want to show: Protests, rallies, can happen on a small scale. We have to start working locally. And I feel very strongly, being a New Yorker and being here on 9/11, that the Bush administration uses the tragedy of that day, and the fear and terror of being here on that day, to take away our civil rights. And I was depressed for so long, but now we've got to get back moving, get back going. The purpose of this event is to take the energy and go forward. We're New Yorkers, we have the right to free assembly, we're here, and we just want to show our feelings together."

-Lucy Teitler

New York Observer -- September 15, 2003

2005-10-24T14:58:00.000-07:00

Yalies Go Hungry?

Capitalism is raw right now at Yale. Ever since more than 2,000 clerical, dining-hall and maintenance workers went on strike as the school year was starting, resulting in protests and over 100 arrests, most of the well-appointed dining halls in the residential colleges where most students take their meals have been closed, and students have been prowling the mean streets of New Haven for some grub.

On a recent afternoon outside of the post office, on a busy corner usually reserved for newspaper boxes and jaywalking students, a man stood behind a food cart selling falafel and humus sandwiches as fast as the line of Yalies could place their orders. He also flashed a menu from Mamoun's Falafel Restaurant, where he works. He started the cart business after the strike; business at the restaurant itself, he said, was up about 15 percent.

A woman in a maroon Jeep Cherokee pulled up. "Oh, Mamoun's!" she said. "I thought you were Jorges' partner. We're around the corner at Funky Monkey. My husband has a cart on Chapel Street."

Meanwhile, Marc Woll, owner and chef of Gastronomique, a tiny take-out restaurant too small to contain a single table, was also benefiting from the strike. "Business has tripled," he said. "It's been almost hard to handle."

Mr. Woll offers a Gastronomique meal plan. You pay $350 to eat 30 meals in 30 days. If you use the plan for 10 dinners, you get one for free-which comes to about the same price as buying all your dinners in Commons, the only campus eatery currently open. And no one wants to eat at Commons-it's cash only, and there's a highly verbal picket line out front. At least five Yale students have signed on with Gastronomique's plan.

"The business we're doing is almost unbelievable," said Mr. Woll.

A skinny assistant chimed in from the counter: "You said 'God bless the strikers.'"

"God bless the strikers," said Mr. Woll.

Two Yale juniors, Andrew and Chris, arrived for dinner.

"I haven't gone shopping. I'm mostly going out," said Andrew.

"Or just not eating," said Chris.

"Yeah, I'll just skip a meal," said Andrew. "I don't really think much of it."

"I don't eat breakfast.""I don't eat breakfast either. There's no really good breakfast place and it's so expensive, I just don't bother."

Because the campus meal plans are pre-paid, Yale has been sending students rebate checks each week. Andrew and Chris said the rebate checks don't cover the cost of eating off-campus.

"But everyone's bitching and moaning, so I don't want to bitch and moan, too," said Andrew. "It's better food than in the dining hall."

Indeed, conditions are far from dire: The residential colleges are providing meals once or twice a week with their own funds, and coffee and soda machines have been adjusted in many of the campus buildings so that drinks are dispensed for free.

But there has been some disruption of dating etiquette.

"The trouble with the strike is that it's blurred the boundaries between date and non-date," said Ana, a junior. "You can no longer differentiate between what is a date and what's not a date by saying, 'Let's go to the dining hall.'"

Ana added that she wanted The Observer to know she has a boyfriend.

--Lucy Teitler

New York Observer -- August 4, 2003

2005-10-24T14:45:00.000-07:00

Kiss Chew

On Wednesday, July 23, a line of expectant Kiss fans waited outside of the Best Buy on East 86th Street, hoping to get a glimpse of their reptilian heroes, who were at the store to publicize their new album, Symphony: Alive IV. A Kiss impersonation band called Parasite, billing themselves as "The Reincarnation of Kiss," roamed the block-long line, shaking hands and looking remarkably like the real thing.

Indeed, the only discernible difference was that the real band, standing inside on a stage surrounded by reporters and photographers, had cracks in their substantial makeup from the enormous amount of Juicy Fruit gum they were chewing.

Towering over the room in their huge platform boots, their jaws grinding, Kiss looked like a band of malicious, middle-aged frogs-especially bassist Gene Simmons, who occasionally stuck his trademark tongue out at the crowd, and drummer Peter Criss, who wore bright green makeup around his eyes.

The gum seemed to come from a tall, long-haired biker guy holding a dozen packs in his big hand, maneuvering past the garish quartet with an ease reserved for those who know what they're doing. When asked what flavor they were consuming with such relish, Mr. Simmons replied: "Free gum."

The chewing was especially jarring because it almost allowed you to see the real men behind the makeup. For those who haven't exactly followed the band, there was a brief period when Kiss made a go of it sans maquillage. But that didn't last very long.

Still, we had to ask: Do they get recognized without their makeup on? Mr. Criss smiled.

"Sometimes," he said.

Mr. Simmons interrupted. "It's like the same with girls," he said. "When girls take off their makeup, do they get recognized? Sometimes you wake up with a girl next to you and you're not sure if it's the same girl from the night before." Mr. Criss popped another stick into his mouth.

"He said that, not me."

--Lucy Teitler

Yale Herald -- Friday, February 25, 2005

2005-10-24T14:37:00.000-07:00

Society drop-outs abandon tombs and traditions
The real secret is why seniors are choosing to ditch their societies
BY LUCY TEITLER

Among Yale myths, perhaps the most pervasive is that of the secret society: a small group of privileged students, hooded and huddled together in a sequestered tomb, poised to inherit the secret handshake that controls the universe. Interest in secret societies even seems to have increased in recent years, spurred by last fall's Skull-and-Bones-centered presidential race and media inquiries into President George Bush's, DC '68, youthful indiscretions. Rare is the Yale undergraduate—whether uninitiated freshman or secret-bound senior—who has not come face to face with the rest of the world's curiosity about this epitome of Ivy League elitism.

What overzealous media and inquisitive relatives never question is the idea that membership in one of the senior societies is something too valuable to give up. In fact, seniors frequently quit their societies, for a range of reasons from overcommitment to disappointment with other members.

TOMMY SANGCHOMPUPHEN, PC '95, QUIT THE SOCI-ety Elihu in 1995 with an editorial in the Yale Daily News. "The whole experience has been a farce to me," he wrote in the final paragraph. "I am not comfortable perpetuating this system and the distorted sense of friendship endemic to societies in general. Therefore, I cannot continue playing along with the farce and must end my affiliation with The Elihu Club."

According to his classmate Graham Boettcher, PC '95, GRD '06, "That was his official resignation."

Boettcher remembered that Sangchom-puphen's editorial "created a buzz in the dining hall the day it came out." Sangchompuphen's public renunciation did not match with the popular conception of societies. "People tend not see the downside of secret societies," said Boettcher. "People who aren't part of them only see them as something special that they've been excluded from."

And people who are not yet seniors do not want to be excluded from something that seems special. "I think most people come to Yale knowing about secret societies, and most people, despite what they say about them being elitist, want to get into them," Alina Zhitskaya, ES '08, said. Ivy Wang, ES '06, agreed. "Most people want to be tapped," she said.

But just as the general attitude towards societal mystique has not changed in 10 years, so have some members of the class of 2005 followed in Sangchompuphen's footsteps, looking traditional prestige in the face and bidding it adieu.

Hallie Haglund, ES '05, quit her society soon after winter break. "It's really fun when you tell people you go to Yale and they ask you if you're in a secret society and you can say 'yes', but that's not a good reason to do it if you feel it's not the best way to spend your time," she said.

Haglund quit primarily because of her other time commitments—a spring semester internship at The Daily Show in New York and five classes—but she also shared some of Sangchompuphen's frustrations.

"I realized if it's second semester, either you're at a point where these people are really your friends, or they're not and [if not] you should make time to spend with your actual best friends," she said.

Haglund compared secret societies to Greek life."A lot of people who wouldn't be interested in [fraternities and sororities] buy into the society thing because of all this hype," she said. "It's really the same thing, and there's nothing wrong with that, but I would never have rushed a sorority."

Perhaps the most important difference between Greek organizations and senior societies is the centrality in senior societies of "the bio," a presentation that each member of a society must give about his or her life.

According to Haglund, bios were one of the most valuable aspects of her society, but their value did not necessarily translate into a genuine feeling of community. "It's a little contrived to imagine you can become really close friends with people just because you spend two nights a week together," she said.

Another senior who almost left her all-female society agreed. "I like bios," she said. "But it is weird to get those intimate details in four hours. In some ways I know the girls in my society so much better than my close friends, but that doesn't make for actual closeness."

According to Diplomat-in-Residence Charles Hill, however, it is this very artificiality that makes societies so important. "The senior societies were originally created as a way for an individual, at the crucial turning point between college and career, to describe and explain himself to a small group of similar individuals who were not family, not rivals, not elders or employers, and who would be quite critical but supportive toward the one attempting to define himself, and would keep what they heard secret," he said.

Because of the importance of this process, he predicted dire consequences for dropping out: "Those who dropped out might never really fully understand themselves or how others saw them."

ROBERT O'CONNOR, SM '45, THE SENIOR TRUSTEEof the Aurelian Honor Society, a secret society, said that the issue of students dropping out of all the societies is an enduring problem.

"It is more a pandemic phenomenon rather than an epidemic affecting only a few at a time," he said. "It does not affect one society more than the other, but when it happens, it's a disappointment for all."

While drop-outs are still rare, they occur often enough for O'Connor to ask why they happen and what can be done to prevent it. "Someone loses a great opportunity in their senior year," he said. "The potential tap should know what he or she is getting into day by day and what commitment it requires of the individual." But in the chaos of the springtime tap night, it is not always easy to ensure that juniors understand what they are entering into for their senior year.

One student who wished to remain anonymous realized after the first meeting that the time commitment for his society was going to be more than he could handle. "It was a matter of priorities," he said. "I spend so much time doing [other activities] outside of class that I don't even have time to see my friends. The prospect of not being able to see my friends senior year just depressed me. I thought I would be happier if I quit."

He said he purposely left his society early in the year to avoid awkwardness or guilt, sending an e-mail to the group list. He had been afraid that the other members of his society would hate him, but he appreciated their understanding. "They responded very sweetly, amicably, like a nice break-up," he said.

Many seniors agree that secret societies are not universally appealing. "Being a member of a society is what you make of it," Howard Han, SM '05, said. "It's an opportunity for a great experience, but it just isn't for everyone." Not all are as sympathetic, however. "I think that when we agree to join societies, we're all aware of how big of a commitment it is, both in terms of time and emotion," Reese Kwon, JE '05, said. "There aren't too many excuses for flaking out. I'd be pretty hurt if someone dropped out of mine."

AS WITH SO MANY THINGS IN LIFE, PEOPLE LOVE THEIR secret societies for the same reason they want to quit them. Many seniors feel torn between the desire to broaden their social horizons senior year and the desire to spend their last year at Yale with their closest friends.

One senior in particular, the self-proclaimed "token artsy one" of her all-female society, embodied this tension. She felt so estranged from the other students in her society that she prepared to quit in October, even writing a draft of a goodbye e-mail. "Everyone else is a jock, or at least, Toad's crowd-ish," she said. "They would gossip about people in their community and I had no idea whom they were talking about. Sometimes it was so foreign I felt like I was visiting from another school."

In October, she decided not to send the e-mail based on the advice of some of her friends in other societies, and now she is glad she stayed precisely because of the diversity that she once found so off-putting. "It's nice having friends not in my regular community," she said. "Sometimes my friends are so caught up in their emotions. "It's really refreshing to hear people laugh at what's going on in their lives rather than bitching or crying."

"I'm glad to be a part of it, but not by any stretch of the imagination is it the center of my life," she said. Moreover, despite hearing their bios and stories, she still feels that those stories are somewhat foreign to her. "It's like bizarre-o Yale," she said.

Indeed, even Haglund, a decided society malcontent, admitted that she did not quit until second semester because of a similar ambivalence.

"You know the end of Annie Hall ?" she said. "Woody Allen's character tells a joke about relationships. He tells another guy that his brother's crazy and thinks he's a chicken. The other guy asks why he doesn't send his brother to a mental hospital and the Allen says, 'I would, but I need the eggs.' Maybe I needed the eggs." She considered this for a moment and then laughed. "Except I guess in the end, I didn't," she said.

Yale Daily News -- Sunday, May 8, 2005

2005-10-24T14:30:00.000-07:00

The Liberation
LUCY TEITLER

My sister still goes to my old school. So even though the pandemonium of my last month in high school led me to declare in my journal that, "to burn my bridges would be no great violence," my bridge remains pretty sturdy. I still hear about which new teachers are hot, who has turned into a fake goth and which sixth graders intimidate with their Prada wardrobes. I've read every high school yearbook published since my own.

Over spring break, my sister actually convinced me to go to a school play. Afterward, I played poker for M&M's with three of her friends. I mixed screwdrivers for all of us while they talked about their graduation dresses. At the mention of so many white gowns, all I could think was that I, like Emily Dickinson, had no life outside the home.

Sometimes, when I'm at home, I sulk about my sister's continued enrollment at an institution of my past, blaming her for my vacation regressions into adolescent, well, sulking. If only she went somewhere else, I think, I would never come home from parties and drunkenly read my old journals until dawn. I would live life only in the present.

For most of this school year, I have unconsciously assumed the same thing would happen with Yale. I would graduate, only to return a few months later to help my sister move her new extra-long sheets and stacks of old mix CDs into a small room on Old Campus. I would have a vague plan to move to Eastern Europe and she would stay up nights talking with her roommate, a girl who played jai-alai and liked to read Spanish translations of Jack Kerouac. My sister would paint all over her walls. She would start taking Urdu classes, because with Urdu it's easier to learn Arabic and Farsi. She would get a Sudler Grant to make a full-length feature film. She would always have a reason for falling in love. She would be discreet, even on the weekends. She would remember to close windows when it was raining. She would spend summers studying plant life in Madagascar. She wouldn't wait until after graduation to go to East Rock for the first time.

When I would call her after she settled into Yale life, she would tell me stories about my younger friends, whom she met by the decimated bar at some overwhelming party. She would tell me about the Davenport renovations and how they compared with Pierson's. She would keep me abreast on the organic food situation. For another four years, my life would be framed by my past. I wanted my sister to get in, but I couldn't help thinking in shameful moments that her impending Yale career was going to stand between me and the future. The Thanksgiving dinner table conversation would still linger on Hillhouse Avenue.

I had finally come to terms with these feelings when I found out that my sister didn't get into Yale. My sister, with her perfect SATs and straight A's and radical politics and red hair. I couldn't believe it.

I cared much more than she did. She never really wanted to go here. She said, no offense Lucy, but hanging out with a bunch of privileged white kids is what she did in high school. I threw a book out my window.

But why was I so upset? I should have felt liberated. Yale was now mine, only mine, forever.

There are people who plan, and there are people who revise. I revise: e-mails, English essays, conversations, movies and, I realized last month, college experiences. I wasn't afraid that my sister was going to replace me. I was obsessed with showing her how to do it as well as possible. I wanted to take Urdu. I wanted to make a feature film. It was only when my sister told me in her perfectly calm way that she hadn't gotten into Yale that I realized that I wasn't going to be here either. Graduation wasn't a viral outbreak or a wrecked roller-coaster. It didn't happen to other people. It was happening to me.

When I was a senior in high school, I had a fantasy of going to UC Berkeley. I imagined January sun dresses and midnight revolutions. I knew I really wanted to go to Yale, but I hoped that at some point in my 18th year, I was going to become the kind of person who went to Berkeley. And I didn't get in, so I never had to release the fantasy. The summer before college began I was walking my dog in Central Park and thinking that if only I was going to Berkeley, my whole family would probably move back to Los Angeles, where we had lived when my sister and I were younger. Then I'd go to there for vacations and would never have to come home and face any of the people who were driving me crazy again. I could start my life again from scratch. Only then, I thought, could I be truly free.

My sister got into Berkeley and she called me last week to say that she has decided to go there. The professors are amazing, and in other countries, the most famous American universities are Berkeley and Harvard. In August, when she moves to California, my parents will move to North Carolina, where my mother has a new job. This year's Thanksgiving dinner, my parents will talk about a Southern state that I know only in the negative (not the state that contains Myrtle). My sister will tell stories that take place on streets whose names I know only from Joan Didion essays. We'll all have new lives. But afterward, I know I'll still be reading old journals until dawn.

There are people who live and there are people who fantasize. After hanging up the phone with my sister, I went on the Web and started browsing for a plane ticket to the Czech Republic. I want to be both.

Yale Daily News Magazine -- Thursday, October 7, 2004

2005-10-24T14:25:00.000-07:00

Norman Mailer, fearing democracy's last gasps
BY LUCY TEITLER

I arrived late to see Norman Mailer speak at Sudler Hall on September 23rd. I had mixed up literary engagements in my date book and went first instead to Battell Chapel, where Adrienne Rich was scheduled to speak a week later, and found myself confronted with the Christian group "Real Life."

"Where the hell is Norman Mailer?" I asked. They looked askance.

So by the time I mounted the stairs to Sudler Hall, the crowd was literally spilling out the door. I had to crane my head around to see even the backs of seated heads and the low rattle of applause was all that I could hear. It seemed like a pointless endeavor and I was ready to turn back.

But I ran into an acquaintance named Michael, however, and we decided to go around to the other side of the building and try the College Street door. That door was locked, so after a few curses launched at the lucky and punctual few, we called it a day ("'New York Magazine' did an interview with him over the summer," I said, "I'm sure he'll say the exact same thing"). Just then, we noticed an open window, not five feet off the ground, leading right into the stairway to the Hall. By this point a little colony of late-comers had gathered with us by the locked back door and now stood with us, looking at this open window. Suddenly Michael threw his bag inside, eliciting cries from spectators ("now you're committed!") and catapulted himself through. He opened the door and a whole swell of us climbed up the stairs, feeling very entitled to be there.

Nearly the entire grey marble floor was empty on this remote side of the throng and I settled myself in an alcove behind a uniformed security guard, not more than 20 feet from Mailer's small jacketed frame. The security guard was an African-American man in his early middle age. He sat just behind the double doors that lead into the main hall of Sudler, perhaps at Mailer's three o'clock, or two-forty-five. And he was reading a New Haven Register.

I would not say that Norman Mailer was universally interesting in the body of his speech. He read passages from pieces he had written over the years, about Dorothy Parker and narrative voices. I found them interesting because I found them interesting. The constant shuffle of newspaper in the security guard's hands annoyed me the way a jackhammer or a car alarm would have annoyed me, but I could not really condemn the security guard for his lack of interest. I checked my snobbery, reminding myself, as a good liberal does, that it is only by rights of my privilege that I find interesting what I find interesting, reminding myself that to the ubiquitous "average person," checking his mail or doing her nail polish while waiting for the popcorn to cook, the time-scarred voice of a writer who punctuated his speech with remembrances of his Harvard days was not the most fascinating thing in the world. To the man who sat in front of me, it was less interesting than the advertising section of the Register. I checked my snobbery. I did my best to hear over the crinkle.

Throughout his speech, Mailer assured us that he knew we just wanted to talk about politics. I was happy to hear him speak of literature, but at the end of his hour-and-a-half, he finally did turn to politics. He described a series of dialectics that had been working their way through his mind over the past years, with regard to the conflict in Iraq. He knew that the members of the Bush administration were very smart, so he kept asking himself, with an increasing degree of confusion, why they were doing so many stupid things. He said it became a kind of mantra to him, repeating itself in his head. He could barely do anything without the hovering question: Why are they doing all of these stupid things? And finally he decided it was because they had to, because America has become so wholly dependent upon other countries for labor and oil that if we don't gain control of the Middle East now, then in 10 or 20 or 40 years, we are going to become a second-rate power. Like Britain, he said. And as smart as leaders of the Bush Administration are, from the cores of their beings, they cannot sit by and see that happen.

At the end of his speech, which was as powerful and articulate as any I have heard over the course of this much-articulated election year, a student stood and asked him if he thought we were still living in a democracy.

"My fear," said Norman Mailer, "is that we are living at the very end of one."

Throughout this latter portion of Norman's program, the security guard in front of me had been eating a bag of peanut M&Ms, and he finished the last one just as Mailer finished this grave declaration. Chewing the last M&M, the security guard in front of me looked around for a moment and then, like a night watchman who has tired of watching the reflection of the moon on a deserted field, he closed his eyes.

It seemed to me that he was just the man half the members of the student audience had probably spent all summer long trying to register to vote (or just the weekends when their internships could spare them). It seemed to me he was just the sort of man they had sought, setting out across Ohio and Pennsylvania and Oregon and Maine with patriotism in their hearts.

He was not 15 feet from a Pulitzer-Prize winning author who was telling him that American wealth and ambition and power were over, and the only way to save them would be to keep fighting our bad war, to add more and more soldiers to the cynical quagmire, to draft his sons and his friends and maybe his daughters to the whirlwind of a cause that meant nothing to him, in defense of a wealth in which he had no part. He heard that democracy was dying and he closed his tired eyes.

Democracy is dying, because he closed his eyes.

Yale Daily News -- Friday, January 30, 2004

2005-10-24T14:21:00.000-07:00

Artspace's 'For the Birds' fails to take flight
Mixed media installment falls short of expectations, leaves audience grounded
LUCY TEITLER

"For the Birds" is a title with potential. Taking into account David Smith's wrought iron ornithological sculpture, Alfred Hitchcock's chilling aviary masterpiece, and most recently Santiago Calatrava's soaring project for the PATH station at Ground Zero, birds have provided a departure point for art that veers from the sublime to the scary. Unfortunately, ArtSpace's latest stab with the loaded symbol has produced nothing so effective.

Artspace attempts to accomplish two things and has little success with either. In the catalog that accompanies "For the Birds," curator Denise Markovish explains that when selecting which artists to feature in her show, she "chose the artists who [she] felt had a connection to birds, who in varying degrees had that obsession within them." She also asked all of the artists a series of questions, listed in the back of the catalog. "Do you self-identify as a birdwatcher?" reads one such inquiry. Though only half the artists represented in the exhibition identified themselves as birdwatchers, Markovish's organizing principles might have predicted the final product feeling more like a bird appreciation festival than a cohesive art show. Though it clearly tries to be art about birds, the show can better be described as rather bland art that incorporates birds.

Karl Unnasch, one of the 32 artists on view at ArtSpace from now until March, has contributed three-dimensional pieces consisting of stuffed bird bodies arranged along with found objects. I particularly liked one such sculpture, the decomposing body of a seagull arranged with small model conifer trees appearing to grow out of the corpse. The piece piqued my interest because Unnasch successfully combined disparate objects in pursuit of a unified, conceptual goal: the decomposing body of the seagull had returned to the earth, lending new life to the trees that flourish on top of it. The work was refreshingly clear, eschewing the "difficult for the sake of being difficult" approach that can make art so unappealing to its viewers.

Ambreen Butt showed two untitled drawings, both depicting a woman against a light blue background, standing with a swarm of birds at her feet. In one version, as a phallic shape descends from the top of the picture into the woman's mouth, the birds swell up towards her body from the base of the canvas. The effect is of water in a vacuum. Butt's drawing is rife with violent energy. The blue background provides a flat, vacuous space -- breathless and asphyxiating in its totality. The woman seems on the brink of being swallowed up into the ocean, or threatened by an ocean of space that she's being forced to swallow. So effective was this first drawing that I couldn't help but feel disappointed when I examined Butt's second work. This time, the woman appeared to lead the birds off into the distance, unaware of or ignoring their menacing potential. The scene was the stuff of Snow White and the enchanted forest; all of the intense emotionality of the former piece was drained from the composition.

I liked Rebecca Doughty's cartoonish drawings, especially the one entitled "story #3 (birds on wheels)." In contrast to Butt's drawing, they were charming without being sacchriny. Most importantly, Doughty's childlike, unsteady hand bore no resemblance to the simple-minded illustrations in a nature magazine. Despite the handful of redeemable works, in the end the show did not enhance my appreciation for birds or aviary art.

"For the Birds" runs until March 20. One should not give up hope for ArtSpace, which from time to time produces exhibitions truly worthy of a visit. This spring's "John/Jane Project" seems promising. The mixed media installation takes over two adjacent bathrooms. It is amusingly wicked, particularly in the somewhat misanthropic room entitled "Self-Loathing Tangent". Now if that isn't a cliff-hanger of a description, I don't know what is.

Yale Daily News -- Friday, October 31, 2003

2005-10-24T14:18:00.000-07:00

From a book, an epic tragedy
LUCY TEITLER

As the leading credits roll for "The Human Stain," we watch a Volvo station wagon maneuver along the icy curves of a New England road. We see the car from an aerial view and we see a close-up of the man and woman in the car. We see the car from a third perspective. From this perspective, the car drifts in and out of view, out from behind the snowy overhangs of conifer trees and back into the rolling hills of the countryside. We are watching the car from the vantage point of a red pick-up truck. As the Volvo approaches, the truck accelerates and turns onto the road, and we watch as the truck turns suddenly into the Volvo's lane and the Volvo swerves to avoid it, tumbling off the road and down into a ravine.

The two people who meet their death at the bottom of this ravine are a classics professor and a custodial worker. The film tells the story of the events that lead them to their final moment.

Coleman Silk (Anthony Hopkins) is an old, respected professor at a small New England college until a statement he makes in class is misinterpreted as racist and he resigns in a fit of rage. His wife dies suddenly and he begins an affair with Faunia Farley (Nicole Kidman), a working-class woman who is still being stalked by her ex-husband, Les Farley (Ed Harris), whose experiences in Vietnam have left him violent and delusional. Silk's only friend besides Faunia is Nathan Zuckerman (Gary Sinise), a writer who narrates the film that we are watching, weaving Coleman's past into the events of his current life.

In one marvelous scene, Nathan and Coleman are sitting on Coleman's porch on a summer night when "Cheek to Cheek" comes on the radio. Possessed by his newfound vitality, Coleman convinces the younger man to dance with him and we watch as they twirl and bend beneath the gnat-infested light. This is Anthony Hopkins' best scene, a scene in which his performance seems to encapsulate a whole generation of irrepressible, vibrant, American men. But Coleman's relationship with Nathan is not the focus of the movie. Coleman's relationship with Faunia is -- or at least it seems to be.

The backdrop of the President Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal and Coleman's study of classics suggest that Coleman's sexual obsession with Faunia is intended to be the architect of his grand tragic demise. Indeed, the first sequence of the movie creates the inevitability and suspense that defined tragedy for the Greeks. The audience is supposed to see Coleman sinking deeper and deeper into a love affair that he will not abandon, holding on to it more and more as people try to convince him that it is stupid. We are supposed to think that Coleman is half-crazy when he tells his friend that his affair is worth dying for.

It is Hollywood legend that Marlon Brando could not get a role until after he broke his perfect Roman nose (in a boxing match). He was simply too beautiful.

Nicole Kidman brilliantly creates Faunia. She does not make a false step. But you can't help thinking of Brando: as you watch her cry over the death of her children and her stepfather's childhood abuse, you cannot help pondering all the moments of Faunia's adolescence and adulthood when a photographer or a casting director might have discovered her and brought her the fame that Kidman's beauty demands. You have to wonder if she should wear a fake appendage in all movies, like her fake nose in "The Hours," just to justify her presence anywhere but a runway or a studio lot. It seems to be our fault and not hers, but Nicole Kidman's beauty is distracting. Her beauty plays its own unspoken role in the plot of the movie. Coleman is a man who has spent his whole adult life repressing his true identity in order to please society. The story would have us believe that with the help of Viagra and a sexually uninhibited custodial worker, he is finally rebelling in his old age. But having sex with Nicole Kidman is not a rebellion. Having sex with Nicole Kidman is damn good luck.

But perhaps it is not fair to say that the filmmakers intended for us to believe that Coleman Silk was rebelling. Rebellion or not, the film is about a love affair that ends tragically. And Kidman, whose beauty at first seemed to be a liability, harnesses its very power to become the perfect actress for doomed love.

Yale Daily News -- Friday, October 31, 2003

2005-10-24T14:15:00.000-07:00

Ghosts and exes haunt GPSCY halls

2005-10-24T14:09:00.000-07:00

Ghosts and exes haunt GPSCY halls
LUCY TEITLER

GPSCY on a Thursday night is the place for false lives. In between ducking behind corners to avoid the TA whose section you skipped last week, you can be anyone you want. Loretta the Southern art student, Noemi who is getting her M.B.A.

But GPSCY on a Tuesday night is the place for Grey Goose gimlets, beer on tap, and wistfulness.

Brian and Amir are telling me the truth about this place called both GPSCY and Gryphon's ("Gypsy, definitely Gypsy," Brian says). We sit at a circular table by the window and I play with the flame of the single candle on the table as we talk."The only things you can order," Amir says. "Grey Goose gimlets and beer, ask the bartender." He takes a sip of his post-gimlet beer and reflects. "Did I tell you about when I brought the Kurdish rebels here? We played a drinking game. I did pretty well, but the rebels won and then they ended up in the upstairs bathroom with a South African Law student."

Brian shakes his head.

"The upstairs bathroom is the place for sexual encounters on Thursday night."

"Is it co-ed?" I ask.

"Co-ed. Sexual encounters of all kinds."

My co-reporter Tyler approaches the table with an apple martini and tells us that the bartender has just told him a ghost story.

"Ghost stories?" says Amir. "I'm telling her about sex stories and the toilet!" He turns back to me. "Also, the bartenders here, you wouldn't think they would be so revealing. But that Med student with her boobs out" -- he looks at Brian -- "you know who I mean, she actually apologized. One is a public health student, one is a medical student. They work the cleavage angle."

Brian laughs and shakes his head again.

"So how do you get to be a bartender here?" I ask.

"You're a grad student and you apply," Amir says. "They stay for a year or two and then leave."

We look around the sparsely-crowded bar for a moment and reflect upon the fact that people leave.

"It was better in our day," Amir says. "It was crazy."

Standing by the bar is a cluster of people. Beyond, a couple of guys are shooting pool.

"The undergraduates used to not go to bars," Brian says, "but now they go to every bar, but they don't go to this one."

"This is a frequent place where people meet significant others in grad school," says Amir, turning back into my guide for the night. "A very central place. It peaks in September and then by October everyone is coupled and they stop coming to GPSCY. I met my ex-girlfriend here."

A girlfriend, Amir clarifies, whom he dated a long time ago.

"It's good being a graduate student," he says. "Undergraduate minus the stress. You can really go out any night of the week and it won't affect you. Which is why social centers like GPSCY become so big. When we went here, there were parties afterward in HGS. Then sleeping until one in the afternoon. It was a good life. We stayed in bed. We went to brunch. What else do you want out of life?"He takes a sip of his beer and seems to gain confidence in this line of thought."We slept, we ate, we had sex, what more is there?"

"Art?" Tyler asks.

"Art, yes, making love is art. Isn't it?"

Yes, Tyler has to agree.

You must do what you want to do, Amir says, do what makes you happy because everything is hard. Everything is hard and life is too short and you never know what's going to happen so just do what you want as long as you can make enough money to feed yourself.

He stops talking and turns to me."This is the problem with GPSCY," he says, "People take themselves far too seriously."

Yale Daily News -- Friday, October 24, 2003

2005-10-24T14:08:00.000-07:00

Don't go without 'Life Without Me'
LUCY TEITLER

Lede: If you are feeling depressed, do not see this movie.

Lede: If you are feeling depressed, do see this movie.

Lede: I had heard that this movie was bad and had a first line all picked out: "It is a sad day for Spaniards and Blondie fans." The line still applies, but the movie is not bad. It is a sad day for anyone who sees this movie. It is a sad movie.

The remarkable specificity of the cultural references in "My Life Without Me" seem to narrow its audience to those who know the fear of death that an unread copy of the gargantuan "Middlemarch" can inspire. But the most daring aspect of Isabel Coixet's new film is its willingness to deal with the perennially abused topic of someone dying too young. Coixet uses a second-person voiceover and gets away with it. Her main character, Ann (Sarah Polley), contemplates death while rolling a cart through a supermarket fantasy full of people dancing and twirling through the aisles, and Coixet makes it poignant. Ann is a beautiful 23-year-old girl who loves her life and her husband and her children even though she lives in a trailer. She goes to the hospital thinking that she is pregnant and the doctor tells her that she will be dead in two months from Ovarian Cancer.

The movie is full of cliches. Cliches flood the movie like the cancer in the main character's ovaries is flooding her stomach and liver. In the beginning of the movie, when Ann is driving her debauched, depressed and over-the-hill mother (Deborah Harry) home from work, her mother asks her why she listens to Spanish language tapes instead of music "like normal people."

"Mom, no one's normal," Ann replies.

Then, after the conversation has changed and they are saying goodnight, her mother says, "Barry Manilow."

"What?" asks Ann.

"Barry Manilow is normal."

I may have seen this exact exchange before. But the point is that it doesn't matter. The point is that people have that conversation. The point is that you have not seen this movie before -- even if you have cried over "Terms of Endearment" and "Love Story" and everything else. The point is that these cliches are not just cliches. The point is that the story of a kind, intelligent, sensitive 23-year-old girl dying is not too-played-out for life.

Perhaps what is not like most stories is Ann's highly questionable decision not to tell her family when she is diagnosed. The distance that this secrecy creates between Ann and the outside world seems to make a stereotype of everyone in her life (with the exception of her lover Lee, played by Mark Ruffalo with all the charisma of his breakthrough role in "You Can Count on Me"). In this way, "My Life Without Me" is a deeply narcissistic story, a story in which the intimacy between Ann and the viewer flourishes at the expense of all of her other relationships. And it is to the great credit of both Polley and Coixet that the bond between Ann and the audience is so intense that we grant her that narcissism without judgment.

After this movie ended, I looked at the candy in the display case until I heard someone else coming out of the theatre. I turned to him: "Am I a sentimental maniac or was that the saddest movie you've ever seen?"

Lede: If you are depressed, see this movie.

Yale Daily News -- Friday October 17, 2003

2005-10-24T13:59:00.000-07:00

Democratic ideals, fiscally Republican
LUCY TEITLER

It is two o'clock in the morning on a Thursday and I am walking home, past the nocturnal electricians packing amps and instruments into trucks outside of Toad's Place and boys throwing their drunken arms around drunken shoulders. I have just come from six hours of reading submissions for the Yale Literary Magazine and the sounds of occasional car wheels and clicking traffic lights seem to be contorting themselves into iambs and elegiac couplets. I'm thinking about the poetic potential of watching a tired family pile into an old Volvo when something catches my eye on the rained-clean asphalt of Tower Parkway.

It is a 50 dollar bill.

I squint at it and then cautiously pick it up. I am suddenly sure that something terrible is about to happen, that the power plant is about to open its harrowing gates and unleash its two stone lions, hungry for blood. The light is green but there are no cars anywhere.

I pick up the bill.

I have found three large bills in my life. The First was a 20 dollar bill in a pile of garbage on my way to school in seventh grade. I pocketed it happily. The Second was a 20 dollar bill in the back of a taxi cab this past summer. This bill posed more of a moral dilemma. I used it to pay the fare and then folded the change into the seat for the next passenger ("Why didn't you just buy us all drinks?" asked my friends). And now I have found this: a sodden, crumpled, strangely valuable image of Ulysses S. Grant.

I remember the moment earlier in the night when a homeless man stopped my friend and me on our way into Gourmet Heaven. "Congratulations," he said to my friend, who is not my boyfriend, "the girls weren't that cute in my day. Do you have some money for the shelter? Just a dollar?" He was not letting go of my friend's hand and we just wanted to go, just wanted to get away from him.I fold menacing General Grant into my back pocket. This time, it is clear: I will have to give all the money away.

I call my friend Vanessa. We walk back to Gourmet Heaven and change the 50 into fives and 10s. But the homeless man from before is gone and the only person we can find to help is a French-Canadian freshman who wants a pack of cigarettes.

1) "Camel Filters," I say."$5.75."

"Thanks."

"My generosity has no bounds."

The boy is drunk and it is only getting later and the streets are empty. A boy I do not know tells me to buy pot with it and give joints away instead "if [I] really want to help people."

2) The next morning I see a toothless woman I recognize.

"Honey, do you have a cigarette?" she asks.

"No--want some money?"

"Honey, I'm just looking for a cigarette."

"Well, if I give you money, you can buy a cigarette."

She considers. "Okay,"she says.

$5

3) Home in New York, I go to the subway station with my sister. We buy two rides from a guy hustling rides ("a single ride? Want a single ride?") instead of paying the actual tollbooth. Everyone wins. The MTA loses. Standing in the stale air of the platform we wonder: if you can't use an Unlimited Metrocard more than once in 15 minutes, how many does the man have? $4

4) We see two young people sitting on the sidewalk with a dirty stuffed porcupine and a sign: "It is getting too cold to sleep on the street. Please help us buy a bus ticket out of here." I ask my sister to give them the money, but she insists that I do it. There's only a penny in the cup until I add my bill. $10

5) We walk past the Housing Works Thrift Store on 23rd Street and look among its tattered racks for something as cool as the tweed jacket in the window. There isn't, but there is a donation basket. We wedge money in among the pennies. $4

6) On the subway platform, a man plays Coltrane and we watch his light fingers tap the tired pad of his sax. A little boy puts a dollar in the hat by the man's foot. $10

7) We walk into the uptown Ricky's. Neither of us knows what we're going to be for Halloween, but we each buy fake eyelashes and tubes of glitter.

"Think we can share one?"

"You'll be in Vermont and I'll be in Connecticut."

I reach for my wallet (the change from the 50 is in my back pocket) and then stop. This is more important than charity; I need to be a glam rocker.

$11.51.

Liberal guilt can wait. I found a 50 dollar bill on the ground.

Yale Daily News -- Thursday October 2, 2003

2005-10-24T13:56:00.000-07:00

Sexism in the English Department
LUCY TEITLER

Imagine an economics seminar in which there is only one woman. You do not have to stretch your imagination particularly far. Simply flipping through the online facebook will tell you that more men than women take economics classes. Now imagine that the professor of this economics seminar, who is a man, says that he likes having the girl in the class because when the men get carried away and start talking too much about violence and war, she reels them in with her feminine presence. This circumstance seems far less likely. And yet it is exactly parallel to what English professor Stefanie Markovits said in the Sept. 29 article titled "In English Seminars, where are all the men?"

Speaking of the one man in her Jane Austen seminar, Markovits said: "He provided a much-needed male presence on those few occasions when the women would start using the word 'cute' too often." She did say those occasions were few. And she did say she liked him also because of his confident and self-possessed attitude in a female-dominated class. But she implied in a surprisingly overt manner that men make a class more serious. She is not concerned that the class will suffer from lack of diversity of opinion, but rather that the class with suffer from some kind of overload of women and female insight. Self-consciously admitting that Jane Austen is sometimes grouped together with "girly books," she seeks male approval in order to legitimize Jane Austen and the class.

But at least Markovits is trying to attract men in order to change their ideas about literature written by women. Annabel Patterson has no such ambition, saying in the article, "Women always outnumber men in any English department course -- try changing society." So why is Patterson tinkering with the gender balance in her class? According to a student quoted in the article, on the first day of her seminar "Doomed Love in the Western World," Patterson immediately accepted all the men who had come, and then subjected the women to further criteria, eliminating them if they had not read "Anna Karenina." She effectively created affirmative action for men.

Affirmative action for minority groups aims to promote diversity, but it has the equally important purpose of compensating for disparity in opportunity. Certainly the men of Yale are not lacking for advantages. (The fact that the paucity of men in the English Department is news is also annoying because the paucity of women in departments like Math and Economics is not news.)

Quotations from male professors are markedly absent from the article, possibly because a male professor who admitted students to his class as Patterson did might fear an accusation of sexism. And he would be right to fear. While some might argue that the female professors have more license to favor men, I argue quite the opposite.

Imagine a black professor immediately accepting all the white students in an overcrowded African-American literature class. Or a gay professor favoring straight students for acceptance into a seminar. All marginalized groups face the fear of appearing insular and irrelevant when studying their own histories. But there is something different about these female professors in the English Department.

In other minority groups, people have had voices within their own societies even when mainstream Western culture has oppressed them. Feminism gives a voice to a group that historically has had no voice, even within its own society. We are all so used to the dominance of the male voice in English literature that when we walk into a classroom and find it dominated by women, we feel as though there is something wrong. It does not have to be like this, but it will be until professors like Markovits and Patterson stop marginalizing the voices of their female students.

Yale Daily News -- Friday September 26, 2003

2005-10-24T13:50:00.000-07:00

From Rick to -- Rick: favorite movie characters
LUCY TEITLER

Ah movies, the great democratizer. Aside from a woman in the English Department office and a man at the exit desk of Sterling Library, everyone watches them. You sit in a dark air-conditioned room, munching on popcorn or Twizzlers. You enter into another world. A world where people always know just what to say in every situation, where no outfit ever clashes, where the music plays when people look into each other's eyes, where the camera cuts away in boring moments. And everyone has a favorite character.

Scene writer Lucy Teitler finds out who likes who (and they say we don't have a gossip column).

"Inigo Montoya from 'The Princess Bride' has got to be one of the world's all-time greatest characters. All his life, he has searched for the six-fingered man who killed his father, and when he finds him, he knows exactly what he will say: 'Allo. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.' That's a man with a vision you have to respect."--Ben Healey '04, Ward One Alderman

"My favorite movie is definitely "Casablanca," and my favorite movie character is the wily Rick, played by Humphrey Bogart. Bogart's role combines every vice and virtue into one personality -- affection, hatred, distrust, loyalty -- and shows each at the most unexpected times. There is truly no other character in any other film about which I can read a new angle every time I see the film." --Daniel Kruger '04, Ward One Alderman candidate

"I'd have to say my favorite movie character is the Tramp because he is very rebellious, but in the end is brought back to a state of care and manliness with his love for Lady." --Lauren Rogers '05, New Blue songstress

"Loved Lt. Col. Frank Slade (Al Pacino) in 'Scent of a Woman'--- anyone who can have such a wonderful love-hate relationship with life rocks! Also loved Rick in 'Casablanca': Bogey's a real badass in my opinion. On the same badass note: John Wayne as Shawn Mercer in 'Hatari' which has the fun of him doing his own stunts lassoing giraffes, zebras, rhinos and what have you. --Sulmaan Khan, '05

"My favorite movie character is Patton, in the movie Patton, which is the last movie that I saw, sometime in the 1970s, I think."--Charles Hill, Diplomat-in-Residence

"Two of my favorite actors are Sidney Poitier and Meryl Streep. Both actors portray their characters with depth and feeling along with a touch of elegance and class that for me keeps me very engaged with their on screen work like 'They Call Me Mr Chips' and 'Bridges Over Madison County' respectively. Peace." --Reverend Frederick J. Streets, University Chaplain

"The shrink in 'Matchstick Men,' as played by Bruce Altman wins hands down. Of course, I am a Bruce Altman groupie. I loved his lawyer in the final show of last season's "Sopranos," his dad in 'L.I.E,' his psychiatrist in 'Girl Interupted,' and his counselor in 'Cop Land' with DeNiro." --Rabbi James Ponet, Jewish Chaplain and Director of the Slifka Center

"The Bette Davis character in 'All About Eve', Margo Channing. She's able to shoot off apt and razor sharp comments without a moment's reflection... the kind of thing we all wish we could do." --Architecture Professor Alexander Purves

"When I was a freshman in high school I was obsessed with the movie 'Biodome.' The guy with the dredlocks." --Emily Wheelwright '06

"Right now my favorite movie character is Elle in 'Legally Blonde.' I enjoy her beauty and intelligence, her integrity, her determination, and the fact that everything works out happily for her." --Jane Levin, DS DUS

"The infinitely embattled Carol White (Julianne Moore) in Todd Haynes's great 'Safe;' almost any of Roman Polanski's protagonists (from Carole Ledoux in 'Repulsion' and 'Rosemary' to Wladyslaw Szpilman) could be chosen as well. And of course, Chaplin always." --John MacKay, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures

"Oh Jesus Christ, Maria Braun. Do I need to say any more?" --T.S. Coburn '05, scene columnist

"My favorite character is Ty Webb from 'Caddyshack.' This is controversial because Ty was played by Chevy Chase, who is kind of a huge loser nowadays... But in my opinion, as awesome and hilarious as Bill Murray is in that movie, it is Chevy Chase's Ty Webb who really gives 'Caddyshack' that je ne sais quoi that makes it not just a hilarious film, but profound, emotionally resonant, life-affirming, life-enhancing." --Hilary Hammell '04, Yale Literary Magazine

"Definitely Woody Allen. The fact that he plays nearly the exact same role every time yet continues to amuse leads me to believe that he is not only the best movie character, but very possibly the best fictional character to have ever been created. You may ask, 'what about Hamlet?' Well, Hamlet's great in an instant but I wouldn't want to read 30 different versions of the play." --Juliet Lapidos '05, literature major

"My favorite movie characters are the Heathers from the movie of the same name. I adore them. 'Veronica, come talk to me. Whether or not to commit suicide is one of the most important decisions a teenage girl can make.' " --Bradley Bailey '05, Yale Daily News

"Travis Bickle, 'Taxi Driver.' He's tough." --Jonas Oransky '04

"I always liked Clint Eastwood in 'Dirty Harry.' He acts the way we'd all like to act if we were in the similar circumstances. Be tough at times, when the situation calls for it." --Harry Neveski, the guy by the exit at CCL who checks if you're pilfering any library books

"Lloyd Dobler in 'Say Anything.' He's the quintessential John Cusack character and I love John Cusack." --Eliza Triggs '05, Hipster

"Forrest Whitaker in 'Ghost Dog.' Because I like kung-fu. Though there wasn't really any kung-fu in that movie." --Jacob Brogan '05

"Harvey Pekar in 'American Splendor.' I just saw the movie and he's not actually a character. He's a real person." --Alexa Garvoille '07

"This is embarrassing, but one of the first characters I can remember really identifying with was Rick Moranis in 'Little Shop of Horrors.' He was Seymour, the kind of gross, schlobby guy, has this crush on this gorgeous almost drag-queen blonde bombshell. He lives on skid row which is the bad part of town. He's really poor and he lives in the basement of this flower shop. He just cant get his shit together at all. And that was me." --Matthew Schneier '06, mohawked Herald editor

"Julia Roberts in 'Pretty Woman.' She was sassy in a way...I liked the glamour of her shopping." -- Annette [would not say], Berkeley Dining Hall

"Lola in 'Run Lola Run.' I like her because she's tough. She doesn't say much. I like that she runs a lot.' --Katherine Collier '05

"Denzel Washington in 'Remember the Titans.' I like it because it has a lot to do with racial tension and because everything was going on, but he brought the team together and it was a good team. And it's a true story." --Dexter Butler, Berkeley Dining Hall

As for my favorite movie character, I offer four in chronological order:

1) Sky Masterson in 'Guys and Dolls,' for whom I fast-forwarded many a nasal rendition of Adelaide's lament.
2) Ingrid Bergman in 'Casablanca' because she made such an impression on my young self that I named a finger puppet after her and later left it in a hotel in Washington DC, only to uncover it inexplicably six years later in my Dad's car.
3) Glenne Headly in 'Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.' Janet the Jackal!
4) Cheech in Bullets over Broadway. I stalked Chazz Palminteri after watching this movie for the first time (last year) and decided that I could only ever spend my life with a Mafia-genius-playwright. I'm pretty sure I haven't changed my mind.

2005-10-24T13:44:00.000-07:00

I'll meet you at The Place
LUCY TEITLER

They told the reporter they were meeting her in front of the Admissions building in ten minutes so she stood there in the dim streetlamp light of Hillhouse Avenue waiting to go to "The Place." Which place she had no idea.

The car pulled up and she got in, noticing the two six-packs of beer that lay sprawled across the middle of the back seat. They had been looking for her, they said, so don't be surprised if there are some notes on your door, or a few angry messages on your machine. Get in.

The drive was a dark spattering of exit signs and blurred yellow lines and soon it began to look like the Connecticut of her imagination, all green lawns and white houses. Until they reached a clearing and a big wooden sign that read "The Place."

The reporter got out of the car and there it was: an enormous rectangle of light, full of circular red tables and people munching happily on ribs and seafood and roasted corn dripping with butter. In the middle reigned the open grill and the upright menu, projecting out like the screen at a drive-in movie theater. Clams, mussels with wine and garlic, catfish, ribs, chicken, lobster.

The reporter sat down and broke open the Sierra Nevada, but not before talking to a blond 15-year-old named Eric and a dark-haired 17-year-old named Matt, both of whom worked roasting the corn during the summers. This can't be the community utopia that it looks like, she thought.

Are there really annoying regulars? she asked Eric.

He smiled and gestured behind him at one of the crowded tables. "See the guy in the blue hat with the woman whose face looks well done?"Matt laughed."They think they're like a part of the crew and they try to call you nicknames like Corn Boy and it makes you want to smack them."

The reporter says the corn looks good. How much corn should they get for four people?

"For four people," he considers, "twelve should do it."

So do you guys like working here?

"It's a love-hate job," said Eric. Another one of the waitresses came over to pick up a pile of particularly luscious looking corn. "I mean," said Eric, "I love it all the time."

The waitress loaded up the corn and looked at the reporter. "It's a love-hate job," she said.

Yale Daily News -- Friday, April 25, 2003

2005-10-24T13:41:00.000-07:00

Yale night at Catwalk club lacks Elis, sex
LUCY TEITLER

I'm not going to say I didn't like the cross-dressing. I liked the cross-dressing. Wearing black pants and a tuxedo shirt, I imagined myself as a kind of Gina Gershon in "Showgirls," the kind of woman who was tough, who could separate herself from it all, could handle a strip club like a man. I walked in beneath the dark purple of the entrance. All seedy underbellies belonged to me and I to them.

Then I saw one of the girls. "Ah!" I said to Tyler. "She's naked!"

"It is a strip club," he said.

Below us, five steps down and twenty feet away, Cici, a busty Latina with long black hair, stood on all fours wearing just a thong. Two feet from her bare body sat two men, nodding approvingly.

"I don't think I can handle this," I said, but Tyler didn't hear me. So I decided to calm myself. I thought about the night over winter break when a bunch of my guy friends were watching "Showgirls" and challenged me to watch with them. At first it disgusted me, but after a while I got used to it and began laughing at the jokes just as they did. Surely the same would happen here. I was no puss--I looked around at the dancer on stage who was slipping her thong around her ankles and off. I could handle this.

I sauntered up to the bar and asked the bartender, a small woman with beady made-up eyes, if she had a schedule or a calendar that said who was dancing on what night. She handed me a year's calendar with a picture of a different girl for each month. "All the pictures are on the back," she said. I looked at the excited expression in her eyes and turned the calendar over to see the same eyes smiling up from a naked body.

"Thanks," I said quickly and hurried away. There was no escaping it. I had to go down to the stage.

Four men sat around the stage, as though they were the regular counter customers at a local diner. On one side, two men sat together, one hooting appreciatively beneath a dark mustache, the other wearing two giant earrings oddly reminiscent of Elton John. Across from them, a pudgy teenager sat next to a man with the huge glasses and greasy hair of a TV movie pervert who was reading a porno magazine.

The dancer now on stage was Lexy, a remarkably pretty blonde with long legs and a perfect body. She wore only a belt and translucent high heels. I was beginning to feel a little better.

If there was any power dynamic here, certainly it was to her advantage.

She brought her body close enough to touch the men and I saw that she was collecting the bills that they had left in front of them. I squinted and saw that they were $1 bills. She picked them up with a strange ritual, taking the folded bills up in her hand, then placing them in each man's mouth and guiding his head in between her breasts.

There was a moment in "Showgirls" when I stopped laughing and started hating it, a graphic rape scene that left me with a feeling of horror unfelt since the first scene of violence I ever saw, Fagan's murder of Nancy in the musical "Oliver." Suddenly, I felt that again. My fleeting maturity passed and I found myself driven from Lexy and her legs, from the $1 bills, from the dancing pole and the pervert and his porn magazine. I walked back up to the bar where a patron sat watching the game on a small TV in the corner. I breathed in the exhaled smoke and watched the way the bartender chatted with everyone as she passed out the drinks, feeling lucky that it all disgusted me, lucky that I wasn't the kind of woman who could separate myself, lucky that I wasn't that cool.

Yale Daily News -- Friday, April 18, 2003

2005-10-24T13:35:00.000-07:00

Overheard: getting the dirt with your cup of caff
LUCY TEITLER

Let's face it: if you go to a coffee shop to study, you're really just looking to overhear some good gossip.

I sit by the window at Booktrader, drinking coffee too fast. I'm trying to read Hannah Arendt, but I'm distracted by the nasal male voice over my shoulder.

"Shakespeare surfaced for the first time just after Marlow's death. Marlow had been a spy, he was really just this fascinating, fascinating man -- and then supposedly he died in some brawl, stabbed in the eye? It's absurd. What people are saying -- and it seems to be the only possibility -- is that Marlow faked his death to get out of England -- he was a Catholic, you know -- and then sent his plays back to this actor, Shakespeare. Marlow would have been in Italy at just the time when Shakespeare was supposedly writing his Italian plays. When he was writing about Verona, Marlow was in Verona."

I turn around, pretending to be checking the time on an imaginary clock, and see that the man speaking has taken a triumphant sip of coffee.

"Well you've convinced me," says another man, one of the six.

"There have always been vast inconsistencies in his biography," agrees a woman.

"Marlow went to Cambridge, you know. Corpus Christi."

"Well that explains it."

"Milton was a Cambridge man, of course. They all were."

"Of course. Wordsworth drank in Milton's room."

"Never before nor since."

One of them has to go and they all rise."When shall we six meet again?" a man asks.

They all titter with laughter and I instinctively gather my books together and stand. Doing work is bad, but how much four-hundred-year-old gossip can someone take?

I head to Koffee Too?.

At Koffee Too?, I find out that my neighbor is sleeping with a girl in my history section, that one of my professors is getting a divorce and that someone getting tapped by Manuscript has a crush on my best friend. This is before I have gotten my coffee.

"No," a girl says about the guy who likes my friend, "this is like some kind of weird S&M thing." Tugging on the scarf in her hair, she whispers, "He's a philosophy major." The girl she's talking to, also wearing a scarf in her hair, nods knowingly.

I run into a kid from my political science class and pretend that I've read the Hannah Arendt. After about 45 minutes of nonsense, the truth is starting to come out.

"I just think it's very uplifting," I say.

"But it's about totalitarianism," he says.

"Anyway," I say, looking at my watch, "I've really got to meet a friend in Starbucks."

I've only been to this Starbucks once before, but I recommended it because the tables are far apart and people I know don't seem to go here.

My "friend" is really my ex-roommate and we've gotten together to pretend that we still like each other.

"It's nice to see my floor again," she says. She says she's glad we're getting together. She wants to tell me something.

"Vin Diesel's in a new movie?'

"Seriously." She takes a deep breath. Okay, she says, she's been sleeping with my ex-boyfriend.

"What??"

"Don't pretend to be mad."

"What???"

"It just happened."

"Your room is like my junkyard."

"Um, he dumped you."

"I dumped him!"

It is starting to become a scene so we decide to calm down and play a game of chess on the board that covers our table. As we play (I take her queen, she takes my bishop), I begin coloring in the black squares with my ballpoint pen.

Suddenly one of the old men playing chess behind us sees me drawing on the board and flips out.

"That's my board!" he says."Oh, I'm sorry I was just -- "

"That's enough!" He pulls the board out from under us, scoffing at our positioning while he snatches up the pieces.

"Hey," my roommate says,"I was going to win!"

"You were not!" I say.

Just as the man is throwing the last rook into his bag, he glares at us. "You should really have this conversation over wine and dinner somewhere. Everyone doesn't have to know how obnoxious you both are." As he walks off, people at all the tables around us begin to snicker.

We look at each other in horror. All these people. Listening to our conversation. We bolt for the door, united for a moment.

Outside it is raining. She turns toward her dorm. "Serves you right," she says, "you gossip-mongering bitch."

Yale Daily News -- Friday, April 4, 2003

2005-10-24T12:34:00.000-07:00

Mondays at Cafe Nine: Beatniks' open mic
LUCY TEITLER

It's the kind of place that makes you look good on a date. It's somewhere between creepily sexy and sexily creepy. The room is dim and wooden and most of the light comes from neon beer adds and the illuminated Smirnoff Ice bottles that sit like lava lamps behind the bar.

Monday night is beatnik night -- "Hey hipsters!" the program implores. On stage is a man you think you might recognize from the weekly war protests on Park Street. He's about your father's age, and when he shouts into the microphone and expletives flood your ears and you begin to realize that he is rapping, you wonder if he reminds you more of Allen Ginsberg or Adolf Hitler in the beer hall. No one seems to be listening and you feel an odd affection for him when he sits back down in front of your booth and you see him scribbling out more apocalyptic hysteria.

Another middle-aged man comes over to say hello. "Are you reading anymore tonight?" he asks. You're beginning to feel like you're part of a scene so you look over at the other tables in an attempt to make friends. In the booth by the wall nearest you is a wild-looking man, shifting his weight and muttering hostilities.

A new man is on stage now: a solo guitarist with long hair and a vertical strip of a beard down his chin."Thanks for coming out here tonight," he says. "Though I don't know why you wouldn't. What else are you going to do, watch TV?" The crowd titters congenially. Except the hostile muttering man, who seems to be a reaching some kind of climax. You are suddenly really happy you came here. Sodas and juice are only $1 each on Monday. The cranberry juice tastes really good.

Domestic beers are $2 and imported beers and drinks are $4. You can just make out the prices on the cigarette machine: $5.75. Too bad. The machine is retro, but the prices aren't. It occurs to you that people won't be able to pick each other up in New York bars anymore, now that asking to bum a cigarette is a thing of the past.

OK. Now all you have to do is find someone to bring along, which shouldn't be that hard. Then you can walk along the dark quiet of State Street on Monday at 10 until you see the "musician's living room" sign, just before the highway. You'll go in and sit down.

"I love this place," you'll say. "It just has a sense of reality, you know." You'll lean forward so that your face is red beneath the lights. "You know someone got shot here," you'll whisper.

Yale Daily News -- Friday January 31, 2003

2005-10-24T12:27:00.000-07:00

Subtle love graces 'Talk to Her'
LUCY TEITLER

Pedro Almodovar has done it again. If anyone else had directed "Talk to Her," (Hable con Ella) it would seem like a revelation; from Almodovar, it is a reassurance of greatness. Both tragic and comic at turns, "Talk to Her" offers the viewer a subtle and aesthetic insight into the deepest questions of humanity -- love, loneliness, connection -- all with the sensibility of a man who loves people as much as he loves movies.

In a brilliant choice that immediately invokes the closely connected fantasy/reality/art connection in "Talk to Her," the film opens with the curtain at a Pina Baucsh dance concert. Two men who have not yet met, Marco (Dario Grandinetti) and Benigno (Javier Camara), sit next to each other in the audience. Marco cries as he watches the two women dance across the stage with their eyes closed -- Benigno notices, but does not say anything.

When they finally meet, it is at the clinic where Benigno works as a nurse. Marco's fiery bullfighter girlfriend Lydia (Rosario Flores) has fallen into a coma after being gored. Benigno too is in charge of caring for a particular woman, a beautiful ballet dancer named Alicia (Leonor Watling). Marco, whose relationship with Lydia was passionate and demanding (and turns out to have been more ambivalent on her side than on his), cannot adjust to her comatose state. He turns to Benigno, who speaks to Alicia and effortlessly lavishes attention upon her as though she were completely animate, and the two begin a close friendship.

Though Marco is the main character of the film, "Talk to Her" is really about Benigno, whose loving kindness turns out to be inextricably linked with a tragic and terrifying desire for Alicia. We see Benigno's story through Marco's eyes and like Marco, we cannot lose faith in Benigno's human goodness no matter what he does. Almodovar's triumph of sympathy lies in his ability to make us love this perpetrator of such a horrible deed -- to understand him, to justify him and even to question the immorality of the act itself. Nothing is as simple as we think, says Almodovar. Not morality, not love, not sanity.

These topics are as serious as any, but the film handles them with an extraordinary amount of subtlety and grace, seamlessly weaving them into the strange, sometimes funny and ultimately lifelike circumstances of the story. The most delightfully comic sequence of the film -- reminiscent of Almodovar's sexually bald "Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!" and "All About My Mother," in which a man drinks his lover's shrinking potion and begins to grow smaller and smaller until one day he climbs into her vagina and never returns -- occurs simultaneously with the most suspenseful moment of Benigno's moral struggle. Another instance of mixing the comic with the horrible is a discussion early in the film about the phenomenon of priests in Africa raping nuns because AIDS has made them afraid to rape the natives. Though the fate of these unhappy nuns is obviously not funny, the dialogue is hilarious because we recognize ourselves in the characters' outrage.

Similarly, Almodovar plays with cinematic conceptions of suspense when we follow Lydia and Marco down a quiet road to her house on the night of their first meeting and see her confidently blow him off and enter alone, the usual setup for some kind of terror scene. Then Lydia shrieks hysterically as though she is being stabbed. She is terrified of something, but that something turns out to be a tiny snake. She is a female bullfighter with a mortal terror of snakes and Marco is a tough Argentine journalist who cries at the ballet. Almodovar asks us real questions of love, morality and insanity, but we are still having fun.

Indeed, for all of its highfalutin' ideas, "Talk to Her" is not an intellectual movie. The beauty of the dancing is not distinct from the complex empathy we feel for Benigno, which is not distinct from the hilariousness of Lydia's snake fit. It is a dark comedy about men and women. It is a tale of tragic proportions. It is bizarre, it is beautiful, it is disturbing, it is hopeful, it is great. And for being all these things, it is modern.

Yale Daily News -- Friday, November 15, 2002

2005-10-24T12:24:00.000-07:00

Conventional 'Frida' treats art as novelty
LUCY TEITLER

It is tempting to say that the lack of narrative structure in "Frida," Julie Taymor's biographical film about the surrealist Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, is an intentional emulation of the stream-of-consciousness writing style of the surrealist movement. It is probably more accurate to say that it suffers from a malady common to biopics: trying to depict the entirety of an exceptional life in two hours.

The film begins with a long sequence of a four-post wooden bed being carried out of a Mexican villa, past vibrant orange sculptures and green cacti, and into a truck waiting in the street. As the camera pans out, we see that Kahlo (Salma Hayek) lies in the bed, dressed in a white nightgown. "Careful, this corpse isn't dead yet," she says. Kahlo is very clever, and her biographers rest on her laurels.

The film covers most of Kahlo's life, from her youth as an irrepressibly passionate schoolgirl, past the bus accident that turns her into an irrepressibly passionate cripple, into her irrepressibly passionate years as an artist, and then back to her dying days, when, still passionate, she cannot be repressed.

Hayek's performance is consistently good (as is Alfred Molina's, who co-stars as Kahlo's husband and fellow painter Diego Rivera), but you begin to feel sorry for her for having to repeat the same expressions of determination and despair, elation and artistic inspiration. It is as though the filmmakers are so enchanted with themselves for making a film about Frida Kahlo that they forget to bring something new to the way her life is portrayed. Taymor's film plays as though the four screenwriters had a checklist beside them as they wrote (Trotsky? Do we have Trotsky in there? Yes, he appears and begins a subplot an hour and forty minutes into the film. Unibrow? Check. Lesbianism? Sir, we see Kahlo slide her hand up two sets of female thighs, sir).

For a film that depicts the life of such an extraordinarily unconventional woman, "Frida" is very conventional. The movie is so conscious of depicting Bohemians that it inadvertently treats Kahlo, Rivera and their culture like novelties. They have fearless sex and art and Latin music, but it lacks the central warmth of Kahlo's art and life. There is an unshakable sense of artificiality; it is too easy to imagine the off-camera grips eating potato chips while Kahlo sensually tangos with Tina Modotti (well played by Ashley Judd). It's as if the exoticized depiction of "hot-blooded" Mexicans speaks for itself, and the film need not elaborate on these preconceived notions or link them together into a coherent whole.

"Frida" never makes a big enough commitment to any single climactic moment, and so it fails to elicit an emotional response. There isn't a scene that lasts more than six minutes and it doesn't seem like there is a shot that stays still for more than one. Every scene is supposed to be of the utmost emotional importance to every character involved, but with so many scenes, the actors end up seeming like models. "Frida" is more like an emotional portrait gallery than a film. The many recognizable Hollywood faces (Edward Norton as John Rockefeller, Geoffrey Rush as Trotsky, Antonio Banderas, and Judd) give the movie the feel of a giant costume party.

However, "Frida" is undoubtedly visually interesting. Taymor, famous for her artistic eye in the stage version of "The Lion King" and her film adaptation of Shakespeare's "Titus", experiments with aesthetic possibilities by interspersing some of the most pivotal scenes of Kahlo's life with various mixed-media artworks; paintings turn into life action and Kahlo's dreams appear in surreal hallucinations. The film may be worth seeing purely for a beautiful shot of Kahlo just after her bus accident, lying unconscious and bloody as debris and thousands of tiny gold leaf shreddings float down on to her.

"Frida" is messy and ridiculous, but it's also really fun to watch. It's a romp. And you haven't seen so many boobs since your last birthday party at Hooters.

2005-10-24T12:17:00.000-07:00

2005-10-24T12:08:00.000-07:00

SUNDANCE HIGH SCHOOL, February 2, 2006

2005-02-27T14:46:00.000-08:00

There was almost nothing unusual about the conversation in the lobby of the Park City Radisson in Park City, Utah last Thursday.
“Have you ever seen ‘Hard 8,’ P.T. Anderson’s first film?”
“The film we saw last night was terrible.”
“Sort of Keanu Reeves-types acting.”
“It wasn’t like ‘This is a Sundance film!’ It was like “this is a Sundance film??”
Nor was there anything unusual about the fact that two of the conversation’s participants had worked on a short documentary that the editor of an art magazine had asked to see in the local supermarket the previous night. Nor even the fact that most of the six or seven people milling around the conversation had won filmmaking prizes at festivals in the past few years. After all, they were at the Sundance Film Festival, arguably the most important independent film festival in the world.
The only thing unusual about it was that they were all juniors and seniors at the Guthrie Center, a branch of the Houston public school system. Classmates in the school’s advanced “Digital Filmmaking” course, they had been invited to the festival by the Sundance Institute with support from the Surdna Foundation. In addition to seeing movies and attending panels, they were at the festival to make a daily podcast of their experiences and post it on itunes, where it could be accessed by the public.
The morning after they have arrived in Utah, Tommy has already received three text messages from the podcast that they put out the night before.
“We just saw you on the podcast,” one said. “We’re jealous that you’re there.”
Tommy has curly blonde hair and glasses. He is wearing Homer Simpson slippers, each one a vision of Homer’s face, opening its mouth to swallow one of Tommy’s ankles.
“Those slippers say a lot about Tommy,” says Patty Nilsson, one of the two teachers of “Digital Filmmaking” who are chaperoning the trip.
Jake and Frank, a big blonde boy and a small Hispanic boy, walk in from the breakfast room, but only for a minute because they have to go upstairs and get dressed.
“I don’t have my make-up on yet,” says Jake, who is wearing a white “Hooters” T-shirt.
“You know Frank and his hair,” says Amanda, a pretty blond in a white parka.
“He takes forever,” says Lauren.
“And Jake is like Mr. Primp!” says Patty.

Neither Ms. Nilsson nor her colleague Mr. Radler intended to be lifetime high school teachers. Working as a writer and a photographer respectively, each took a temporary job at the school and ended up deciding to stay.
“I developed such close relationships with the students that I didn’t want to leave,” Radler said. “Mothers came up to me and told me I was the only male role model their son had.”
Nilsson had a similar experience. She was teaching at the school the year that her father died and the outpouring of support was so moving that she decided to stay another year, after which she was hooked permanently.
The affection seems to be mutual. Six of the nine students on the trip are MySpace friends with Patty Nilsson (“Did you get your speakers to work?” one student has posted on Nilsson’s wall. “I’ll call you and Radler so we can get together and chill” posts another one) and the Guthrie Center program is so popular that parents in the area have begun taking their students out of private and parochial schools so they can enroll in the (public school) classes.
Since the Guthrie Center courses technically fall under the umbrella of career education, they are supported by a national endowment called the Carl Perkins Fund. The Perkins Fund has allowed them to buy Mackintosh computers when most schools have PCs, and to stay current with professional equipment, something that Radler thinks is fundamental to the students’ learning process.
“We can come to these kids and say, this G4 is more advanced than the program that the Cohen Brothers were working on when they made their first movies. It’s not saying, this is a students’ version of what real filmmakers use; it’s saying, this is what real filmmakers use.”
“High school should be about exploration,” Nilsson adds. “We take our students’ self-expression very seriously. We always tell them about festivals because it’s important that their work gets shown.”

Chelsea (5’7, Pacific Islander according to her myspace profile) tells me that she spends a lot more time at the Guthrie Center, where she is taking four classes including Commercial Photography and Filmmaking, than at her home high school, where she is taking only three.
“Not as much time as last year, though,” she says, because she is a senior and has to spend time applying to colleges, like the University of North Texas, where she thinks she wants to go.
“They have a great film department,” she says. “And this is really what I want to do. To be back here with a film of my own.” She looks out the window at the planes of bright snow that extend outward and into the mountains. “That’s the dream.”
She and Amanda won two festivals for a Public Service Announcement video they made together.
Amanda is also karate specialist even though she has yet to make a martial arts movie (“I want to so bad!”). She went to a world convention in Vegas for her form of Karate, founded by Chuck Norris, and finished fourth in fighting and second in weapons.
“What weapon did you use?” asks Chelsea.
“A bow because it’s the most practical because if you get attacked in an alley, it’s more likely you’ll be able to find a stick than a sword.”
“She’s our protector,” says Lauren.
“She’s the security,” says Patty.

One of the festivals at which Amanda and Chelsea won first place for their PSA was the 2005 Island Film Festival, a festival in Galveston, TX, founded by Patty Nilsson and Michael Radler in 2003 to “with the vision of creating a network and community for your digital media artists looking to share their ideas and works with a larger audience.” Sponsored by Mackintosh and New Line Cinema as well as more local organizations like the Houston Press, Austin Film Works and Galveston’s Strand Theater. Hundreds of high school and college students have submitted to the festival in five different categories, including music video, for which Alizsha won first place in 2004 when she was only a freshman.
The video had to be made to an original song, so Alizsha made hers, “Heat,” to a song she had written herself.
“Good times, good times,” the puckish platinum-haired girl says of her precocious success.
It is time to board the bus to their first daytime screening: a film called “Flannel Pajamas,” at the gigantic Eccles Theater.

“Hey, where’s Amanda?”
“She’s probably outside beating someone up.”

As the group tries to navigate the crowd at the Eccles Theater (“look at that woman,” someone says of a woman in a long blue flouncy skirt, folded over at the top to expose a strip of flesh. She sits on the floor in the midst of a five hundred pairs of snow-stained boots, eating a salad out of a plastic coffee cup), Patty Nilsson spots Eric Roberts and immediately approaches him, asking if he would be willing to take a picture with the kids.
He of course agrees and the next morning the picture becomes one of the many to make it into their daily podcast.
After the flurry of pictures and thanks, Eric Roberts moves into the corner of the room, where the video camera follows him, becoming a silent paparazzi-style pan.
If not out of eye shot, he is out of ear-shot and and the post-mortem begins.
“Whenever I tell people about your martial arts, I get it wrong,” Patty tells Amanda.
“So why are you telling it?” Amanda says.
“It’s cool.” Says Nilsson.
“No one cares, Nilsson. They’re like, ‘I don’t know you.’” Says Amanda.
“He’s gonna come back with like four security guards,” says Rene. The camera still lingers over Eric Roberts’ face as he takes the hand of the salad-cup-eater, apparently his date.
“But you could take four security guards, right?” someone asks Amanda.
“Oh yeah.”
“Depends on the size,” adds Rene.
“I saw him first, but I was hoping you wouldn’t see him,” Tommy tells Nilsson.
“Because you knew I’d be obnoxious,” she replied. “Well we’re going to put that picture up on our website and everyone’s gonna be like, ‘Ooooo.’”
“We would have approached him casually,” says Jake. “Me and Frank, we like to network.”

Jake and Frank are the two students who made the film that the magazine editor asked to see in the supermarket. It was about hardcore music in Houston. They had a lot of footage, but cut it down to five minutes in order to submit it to a festival.
“We always tell our students about festivals and encourage them to submit,” Patty says. “Because it is really inspirational to them to have their work seen and appreciated.”
Because of digital media and the internet, teenaged expression that would have previously gone unread, even locked, in a journal is being seen and appreciated by their peers.
“How do I see myself as an artist?” Alizsha writes later in a MySpace message when I ask her the question.
“I see myself as someone who is serious about her art and tries to do everything creatively. I don't strive to be unique or different or... weird for that matter, I just like to do my own thing and express myself as much as possible... without hurting anyone.”
So what about the internet? How has the availability of self-publishing on the internet informed her idea of her own creativity?
“Technology has also been a big part of what I do. When the Culture Shapers Art Contest announces (online) the top 20 in the film category, it's simply euphoric to see your name up there, your video clip next to another competitor. Without MySpace, I wouldn't have this potential online theatre for myself. (I'll get to work on that soon) Deviantart.com has also been the perfect site to submit all of my poetry, photography, and traditional art. Digital video is the perfect media for a poor girl with some stories to tell. DV is faster, cheaper, and more convenient and all of those wonderful aspects have steered me more into the film department, wanting and craving success and satisfaction. I want to do this for the rest of my life, I want to be respected for it, and hey, if it all works out well, get paid for it.”
And why not? She’s already won a digital camera in a festival and her poetry page has been viewed 1115 times since she began it, a year and a half ago.
“All children are artists,” Picasso famously said, and perhaps it is now true that all teenagers are professional artists, writing as well as publishing, critiquing their peers’ works, exchanging their own work via the internet the way their precursors exchanges comic books in the school yard.
“Filmmaking has become the love of my life,” she writes, with the certainty of someone who has learned by doing.

“Flannel Pajamas” turns out to be about a relationship’s slow demise, but the first thirty or forty minutes are about the initial euphoria of love. Nearly every scene takes place with the two main actors lying naked on top of one another. There are full frontal nude shots of both the lead actor and actress, each of which lasts at least a minute. At one point, as the nine high school students sit among their two teachers, the entire screen is taken up by a scene of cunnilingus.
“I want you inside me,” says the woman.
“No, I’m not finished yet,” says the man.
Around this point, Tommy rushes out, kicking the legs of other audience members in order to get to the aisle, holding his hand to his face. He does not come back.
After the movie, Nilsson addresses the group. “Well, it was not high school appropriate, but it’s Sundance. You guys handled it maturely. You should feel free to leave any of these movies at any point if they make you feel uncomfortable.”
It turns out that Tommy rushed out not because of the content (“I thought you were throwing up,” said Alishza, mimicking his contorted expression and palm held over his mouth), but because he was getting a nosebleed. When he had tried to clean the blood off of his glasses, they broke, leaving him with two monocles.
“They’re broken in just the place where you can’t tape them,” he says, balancing them back on his face for a moment before they fall inward.
He never came back to his seat because he didn’t want to cause another scene, so he lingered in the back, where Eric Roberts was also lingering. “He was laughing at really weird times,” said Tommy.
“I know. I heard him,” said Alishza, “Like when everyone else was silent, this bizarre, ‘Ar ar ar.’”
“And he was making out with his girlfriend back there,” said Tommy.
“Really?”
“I don’t even know who Eric Roberts is.” Alishza said.
“Me neither,” said Tommy.
All of the students agreed: no one could name a single movie he had been in.
“I love Julia Roberts,” said Alishza.

Through the Island Film Festival and her connection to the University of Texas, Patty Nilsson has met Robert Rodriguez’s film teacher, a man who has become the Guthrie Center’s “technical advisor.” Even so, they were ahead of him this time.
“We showed him how to do this podcast!” Patty said.
And when some of the students and the two teachers go to a screening and lecture by David Chai, director of “Fumi’s Bad Luck Foot,” a digitally animated short, he also asks them to explain their podcast to him and his team of animators, all of whom were his undergraduate students at San Jose State University.
Patty explains: if you go to the itunes webpage and hit the podcast directory, a search button will pop up. Search for “df @ sundance” and the podcast will come up.

That night, everyone goes to the midnight screening of “The World According to Sesame Street,” a full-length documentary about international efforts to bring regionally-specific versions of Sesame Street to the troubled countries of Kosovo, Bangladesh and South Africa.
Tommy is standing line in front of an attractive dark-haired thirtysomething.
“You guys look so much older than I looked in high school,” she says. “I was like sixteen in high school.”
Tommy produces his glasses to show the damage.
“You’re going to stab yourself in the eye!” she says, concerned.
“It’s worth it,” he replies.
Chelsea tells me that everyone is “hopped up on redbull,” except she isn’t because she wants to be able to sleep when they get back to the hotel room.
“Also,” says Tommy. “I got to stand in the back with Eric Roberts. He was so weird. He wore his sunglasses all through the movie.”
“I’ve worn sunglasses to every movie I’ve seen!” exclaims the Thirtysomething. “Maybe those are his only prescription lenses!”
“Maybe,” Tommy says.
Twenty minutes into the movie, Chelsea is lying across three seats in the front row, passed out.

It is a fact of nature that thirtysomethings think that teenagers look older than they are. Some teenagers are taller than average or more poised or awkward almost to the point of ironic sophistication, but what adults are really saying when they tell children how much older they seem than their age is that the adults themselves cannot believe they are old enough to have functional human beings be twenty years younger than they are; an equal who is younger than a peer must be an exception. This dark-haired thirtysomething isn’t addressing anything but her own mortality when she says that Tommy, seventeen, seems so much older than she was at sixteen. Let’s face it: he is a teenaged boy who has had a nosebleed, broken his glasses and lost his wallet all in one hour, and is now waiting in line to watch a movie about Sesame Street.
But he certainly has more outlets for self-expression. A few days after the conference, a song called “Existentialism on Prom” plays on repeat on his myspace page, where his latest blog entry reads, “you just lost your best ‘guy’ friend, i just lost my best friend.”
Maybe the dark-haired thirty something let her thoughts rot in solitude when she was sixteen. Maybe she locked them under her bed instead. For Tommy, they disappear into cyberspace, that swamp of desire and satisfaction, separating him like an egg: the boy on the earth and the feelings on the internet. Into the net drains all of our emotions, leaving us clean, clear and practical on land. His youthful alienation has been overcome (would Freud say it?) through expression.
“Filmmaking has become the love of my life,” Alizsha wrote. “Wanting and craving success and satisfaction.” Wanting and getting it.

On Friday night, Alizsha, Frank and Jake attend a free outdoor concert featuring the Brazilian Girls, a favorite band of Alizsha’s. The lead singer is dressed almost entirely in white fur (“I would never do an outdoor concert in this weather!” she cries, almost believably), with the exception of her pants, which are black lace leggings. She has spray-painted the word “hypocrite” across the back of her white fur vest and looks, with one lock of brown hair peeking out beneath her white fur hat, like a cross between Julie Christie in Dr. Zhivago and a very well-groomed poodle.
“I just don’t want to miss out on anything,” says Jake. “I would rather not sleep while I’m here than go home and think, ‘Oh, I wish I had done that.’”
That day, the students had gone to a screening of “Wristcutters: A Love Story,” one of the hot movies at Sundance this year, a story of romance in the afterlife. One of its stars was Patrick Fugit, the actor who played the young journalist in Almost Famous, one of Frank’s favorite movies.
It also starred Shannyn Sossomon, who talked to the students afterwards, appearing in the podcast with her arms around them.
“There’s something about famous people,” Alizsha says. “You can just smell them. She was like vanilla.”
She lead singer cries on above their voices: “Some story ends and hurray/
Summer begins, what can I say/ Call it nature, Call it Fate/ How we love to exaggerate.”
But wait: is podcjasting the way wave of the future?
“Could be,” says Jake. “It’s definitely a good concept, but at the same time, I wouldn’t have known about it if my teachers hadn’t told me. The only person I know who knew about podcasting before this was my dad.”
“Are you guys still talking about podcasting?” Alizsha asks, pushing into the crowd, up toward the railing of the stage. “I want to let her know that I know the words!”
As she manuveurs her way through the revelers, a huge gust of wind sends the snow diagonally on to the stage, sweeping a thousand glittery reflections of the red and green lights up at the body of the singer, who holds one hand up like a Southern Baptist in the midst of a testimonial.
“Wow,” Alizsha says, stepping back and letting the gust run a hand through her own hair. “I wish I had my camera.”

January 18, 2006, Albion Magazine

2004-02-12T20:03:00.000-08:00

Julian Barnes' Arthur and George

Review

Arthur and George
Julian Barnes (Jonathan Cape, 2005; Alfred A. Knopf, 2006)

Julian Barnes' Arthur and George is either a conventional story or a novel of ideas, and whichever it is, it is pretending to be the other. The novel begins, in alternating short chapters, with two boys of opposite natures: Arthur is fundamentally imaginative and George is fundamentally logical. They are the boys who will someday sit, a world-famous writer and a capable barrister, and discuss whether argument is more persuasive when based on evidence or intuition. Surely, therefore, this is a novel of ideas; the artist versus the scientist, that most fundamental subject. But it is not as simple as that.

When the paths of the two men finally cross, Arthur has grown into the famous writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and George Edalji, a barrister, has become notorious because of his conviction and incarceration for the mutilating of farm animals in his home district of Great Wryley. George is innocent and he has written a letter to Sir Arthur, imploring him, the creator of the brilliant investigative mind of Sherlock Holmes, to help George prove his innocence and resume his legal practice. Arthur, who receives letters like George's every day, has seized upon this particular case in a desperate effort to seek solace from his guilt and confusion following the death of his long-ailing wife, whom he had stopped loving years prior in favour of the young and vibrant Jean Leckie. For ten years the latter has been his "mystical wife," but he has never made her his mistress because of his fidelity to an ideal of romantic chivalry that his mother had instilled in him from birth.

The meeting of the two men at the Grand Hotel is the event towards which the book has been moving for all of its previous two-hundred and twenty-five pages, but when it arrives it is a result of the miscarriage of ideas. Law, the very system in which George finds satisfaction for his talent and passion for logic, has convicted him of a crime which he did not commit and could never have committed. Arthur, who has struggled for ten years to balance his difficult romantic life with his code of honour, finds himself wondering if he has not unwittingly acted in the least honourable way possible.

Likewise, when Arthur becomes involved in the investigation of George's case he finds that the method he developed for Sherlock Holmes, which has made him rich and famous, does not work as well in the real world. In an imitation of Holmes' interactions with his associate Dr. Watson, Doyle even asks his assistant to tell him the obvious answers to a series of questions, concluding that those answers must not be right, because they are obvious. In reality, however, some of the most obvious answers are the most important ones. Furthermore, Arthur ends up being able to help George not because of his investigative skill, but because of his influence as a famous writer. Practicality triumphs.

No strict set of values survives the events of the book unscathed. Even Jean, when arguing the side of Christianity in a debate with Arthur (who is becoming more and more involved in occult spiritualism), gets her religious doctrine wrong. Arthur remarks that the two of them have their whole lives ahead of them, "And then all of eternity." In response, Jean internally "wonders what [Arthur's first wife] will be doing for all of the eternity that she and Arthur have together," finally deciding that neither Christianity nor Arthur's "spiritualism" has a solution to that question. In fact, the Christian Bible is quite clear on this topic. In the book of Matthew, a man poses a hypothetical situation for Jesus: supposing a woman had a long string of husbands, each of whom predeceased her, which one would live with her in heaven? Jesus' reply is that there are no marriage relationships in heaven, since everyone there exists as an angel.

And indeed, by the end of the book, Jean has converted to Arthur's spiritualism, a belief system so new that its doctrines are nebulous and uncertain, and one of its priests calls Arthur its St. Paul.

Perhaps, then, Arthur and George's preoccupation with belief systems is a red herring, that most Doylesque of literary devices. But if it is, from what more important mystery is it trying to distract the reader? Barnes does not seem to be trying to keep the reader off the trail of the actual criminal investigation. Though the book builds suspense at certain moments, the plot is never surprising, not does it seem intended to be. We spend a hundred pages of the book in George's head, as he watches his life go awry, trying desperately to figure out who might hate him enough to frame him, and nearly as many pages in Sir Arthur's head, as he trots through Great Wryley trying to answer the same question. However, the question is never satisfactorily answered, nor does the book give much credence to the various half-hearted theories of guilt that its characters devise. The criminal investigation is such a red herring, in fact, that I don't feel the slightest bit of guilt as I write this, because it is not spoiling the ending: there simply isn't a conventional ending. Barnes seems to be using the very rich concept of a detective writer becoming a detective in a real-life criminal case to illustrate the ways in which fiction is different from life; the obvious answer is never the correct one in Holmes' thrilling investigations, but in life, well, it is.

Barnes is hardly the first writer to discuss such a theme, nor is Arthur and George the first book in which he tackles it; the relationship of reality to representation is a great contemporary subject, perhaps the root of what we call postmodernism. But here's the rub in Arthur and George: this is not a postmodernist novel. It is a conventional historical novel, at its best when describing action with heavily-researched historical detail.

So what is Barnes hoping to achieve by enticing us with conventional story-telling, and then denying it to us? If the novel's ideas and the novel's criminal investigation are both red herrings, perhaps they belong within the gigantic red herring of narrative drive. Barnes denies us complete philosophical satisfaction and complete narrative satisfaction because, although such things may exist in the Sherlock Holmes stories, he says, they do not exist in real life, which is messier, baser and less clear. Real life, essentially, is not as exciting as Sherlock Holmes.

But of course we know that already. It's why we read Sherlock Holmes.--Lucy Teitler

January 18, 2006, Albion Magazine

2001-02-12T20:03:00.000-08:00

Julian Barnes' Arthur and George

Review