Yale Art Gallery | Connecticut | Bar | Manuscript Library

School Ties

by Mark Seal


What is there to do at night?
There is a really great club called Toad's, which is kind of an important venue because a lot of musicians would test their shows out in cities outside of New York as they prepared for the big city. So I think a lot of things have happened at Toad's. It looks like any other club - I mean, it's not so assuming-looking - but it's got a good history. There's also a bowling alley. We bowled a lot. There also is a bar called Bar. How would you describe Bar? It's kind of industrial in its design, and it has good pizza, too.

What are the cultural hot spots?
There are amazing museums. The British Museum is relatively new. It's got a staggering collection, and it's in a gorgeous building. Yale is mostly known for its art at the Yale Art Gallery. Louis Kahn designed it, and he's one of the best architects who ever lived, I think. So that's worth going to see for the building alone, but the art that it houses is also staggeringly great. It was just a privilege to just kind of pop in on my way back from class to my dorm room to look at the Van Gogh or the Picasso. You know what's really cool on the Yale campus? I love the old library stacks for really, really old works. It's called the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library. There are no windows, but you can see out. It's like a stone that is translucent - some amount of light comes through, but it can only let in so much or it will damage the books.

What about Connecticut stays with you?
It's not a small state. That's a really vague answer, but, I mean, my parents are New Englanders - my mom grew up in Massachusetts, and my dad lived in Connecticut - and that aesthetic, that culture and sensibility, I think informed my sense of the world pretty heavily.








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