The McGill Tribune Vol. 29 Issue 13

MCGILL TRIBUNE LITERATURE WEEK, PAGE 9

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eM c G il l Published bv the Students' Society o f M cG ill U niversity

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Vol. 29 Issue 13 • Tuesday, November 24. 2009

McGill theatre takes centre stage with Trainspotting and In Extremis

Student actors show off their range in this week’s on-campus productions at Players’ Theatre and Moyse Hall. See more on pages 14 and 15.

JESSICA DISMONT AND ADAM SCOTT!

Symposium looks at geoengineering opportunities and challenges Experts discuss possible solutions to clim ate change TRIP YANG C ontributor

Described as a successful entrepreneur with a youthful fascination for science, McGill graduate and benefactor Lome Trottier estab­ lished the Lome Trottier Public Science Sym­ posium in 2004 to hold public discussions on

important scientific topics. In this year’s edi­ tion of the symposium, three climate scientists and one historian of science discussed today’s climate problems and possible solutions to prevent rising atmospheric C 0 2 levels.

Organized by professors in the Earth Sys­ tem Science program and the symposium of­ fice, the event, titled “Avoiding dangerous cli­ mate change: Geoengineering or mitigation?” brought together Professors David Keith of the University of Calgary, James Fleming of Colby

College, Alan Robock of Rutgers University, and Philip Rasch from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

“This series was created to hold a public forum to inspire debate and raise awareness of contemporary issues surrounding society today,” said Provost Anthony Masi in an open­ ing speech. “McGill is happy to be hosting a discussion of one of today’s biggest challeng­ es: how to understand and deal with climate change.”

McGill geography professor and sym­ posium moderator Nigel Roulet initiated the discussion by presenting alarming statistics concerning global warming. Roulet cited a 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicting worldwide tem­ perature levels to be 1.4 to 4.8 degrees warmer by 2100 compared to conditions in 1850.

“There is a large body of literature that suggests that these kinds of changes in climate

SEE GEOENGINEERING ON PAGE 3

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NATIONAL

Munroe-Blum discusses campus issues with the student press Last Thursday, Principal Heather Munroe-Blum sat down with editors from the stu­ dent press to discuss relevant campus issues.

Below are some o f Munroe-Blum's thoughts on...

Military-funded research and McGill’s research policy The line on military research appears in no other research policy guidelines at the fed­ eral government level or with any of our peer universities, and there’s a reason for that.

We have so many protocols that govern the ethics of the research we do, that it would take the onus off of us to review our own re­ search proposals thoroughly if we just default­ ed to a line in a policy on who the sponsor of the research was. And it is inappropriate, in our view, including mine, to say that the spon­ sor of the research is what dictates the useful­ ness of the research. In fact, our research is there to —you know, w e’re a public university —contribute to knowledge and the positive applied benefit of that knowledge.

So the idea was, don’t put something in as though it’s a safeguard against how re­ search will be conducted, or on what it’ll be conducted. L et’s stick with our oversight and review processes, and be honest about that. As someone who was a former vice-president of research, I feel very comfortable, indeed more comfortable, with this policy than I did with the prior one.

Underfunding and Tüition I’ve been fairly consistent on what I be­ lieve is the right public policy framework for funding of universities and that is to have stable, effective levels of public investment in universities.

That means that government stays the course, and Quebec has been good at funding universities on a per-student basis, although w e’re no longer first in the country. When I be­ came Principal of McGill, the Quebec govern­ ment gave more in operating grant per student than any other province in Canada, and w e’ve fallen, and w e’re continuing to fall on that—so w e’re fourth or fifth in the country now.

My view is that we should not be aim­ ing to have American tuition rates. We have a completely public university system. I’m very proud to be leading a public university, but it isn’t fair that those who can pay a fairer share of the cost of a university pay such low fees when there are students who are quali­ fied to come to McGill who cannot afford to come. If you’re really lacking funds, you don’t need free tuition, you actually need a grant, or a grant and a loan, or some combination of things. ... My view is that tuition should not be a stand-alone policy. It should be integrat­ ed with student aid ... because the only way you’re going to have both accessibility and quality is having enough revenues overall and having a commitment to providing support to those who are qualified to come but don’t have the support to do it themselves. I wouldn’t have made it through university without substantial support. So Quebec has the lowest tuition fees by far in Canada, and I think is third from the bottom in all of North America (not counting Mexico). We have the lowest degree comple­ tion rate, and the lowest participation rate in

ADAM

sco rn

McGill’s principal took time out of her busy schedule to meet with editors from the Tribune and the McGill Daily last week. universities in all of Canada, so it’s not a suc­ cess story. On the other hand, w e’re proud of our students at McGill, because we have both a very high academically performing student body, and amongst the highest degree comple­ tion rate in the country. So the other element that adds to the complexity of understanding tuition fees is: if you come to McGill from out­ side of Quebec in Canada, you pay the average of Canadian tuition fees; those fees just don’t come to McGill.

So we would like a fairer framework, we would like those who can pay more to pay on average the Canadian tuition fees, which in the entire world are a fair fee to pay. And for those who can’t afford to pay that fee to have more support than they have currently.

McGill’s Financial Position Our situation is very uncertain. In fact, our deficit has not been reduced to the extent that we had predicted last year. We remain with an undertaking to get the deficit down.

Our revenues have continued to go up. They have gone up every year for the better part of a decade, but our expenditures exceed our revenues. And you see with the building going on around our campus ... it’s actually a silver lining to the economic downturn because there was a stimulus project to put some money into university infrastructure development.

The majority of our revenues go into com­ pensation. So when our agreements on salary and related matter require increases, those in­ creases get built in, and, of course, those costs are seen as well. I am enormously grateful to all members of the community for engaging with us in working to cut costs in the domains that were identified through the provost taskforce. We need to stay at it. For the future, we must meet our commitments to take the deficit down and the economy is very uncertain.

So the world is changing. Quebec and Canada have some safeguards built in. Cer­ tainly, the fact that our banks are well regu­ lated has been helpful to us, but if you look at the disproportionate trade dependence that we have on the U.S. I think it would be naïve to say we are not going to feel some more pain in the year or two ahead. I believe all of the statistics that have come out about job losses show Canada at a higher rate than we had pro­ jected even a quarter earlier. Time will tell and we need to remain very prudent.

McGill’s H1N1 Strategy I have been really proud of the team and it is a broadly distributed team working on H1N1. We have had a group of 20 plus people from virtually every area of responsibility that affects the people at the university working together since the beginning of this. I believe Quebec and, frankly, every province in Cana­ da is trying to do its best under somewhat un­ predictable circumstances, even with both the availability of the vaccine changing over time and the actual questions about the vaccine and so forth happening at the same time. That being said, you know if I can wave the magic wand, I’d like it to be a whole lot easier for people at the university to have access to the vaccine.

But I'm an epidemiologist and I understand the constraints that are there. So we have explored a number of options about how to make it easy.

I’m really happy about the self-report, I think we are doing well, but you are a better judge of that than me about getting information out and keeping information timely, because virtually every week things have changed. I am glad that it looks like they are advancing the sched­ ule of people who are not at risk to go in and to have the vaccine. And if I have one message to you, it’s to say how important it is to get vac­ cinated. We have two big centres very close

to the university and we actually have easier access than other universities in Quebec and Canada do. And the eligibility for those of you that don’t have some chronic condition that al­ lowed you to go earlier will come just as you are going full out for your exams. That really means that you have to make a point to book it into your calendars. We are hoping that it will be advanced by a week

Vehicle-Free Campus We are going as fast as we can, and we are going faster than we thought we would be able to. And it’s a vehicle-free campus. And so we are on our overall sustainability efforts making great progress, but I’d say that the ve­ hicle free campus is not just sustainability but its safety as w ell—and, frankly, culture and sense of community. I loved it when we closed off McTavish during frosh week. We seem to have stronger-than-ever engagement with local government, city government on it, so we have got the bike paths in on University [Street], so these things are all getting there. [But] I am not giving you a date.

I hope to see it very soon. And it’s actu­ ally diminishing. The unfortunate thing is as cars have diminished we have all this construc­ tion going on and so it feels worse than ever with all these big trucks. But, in fact, there are fewer cars in fewer parking spaces.

Special thanks to The Daily for contrib­ uting to the discussion and eliciting some of Munroe-Blum’s responses.

—Compiled by James Gilman

Curiosity Delivers

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Geoengineering seen as a policy alternative to emissions cuts CONTINUED FROM COVER will have a profound effect on society, in­ cluding things like the global economy, envi­ ronmental resources, and water,” said Roulet.

Roulet introduced the two main policies for dealing with climate change: mitigation of greenhouse gases to reduce the concentration of C 0 2 in the atmosphere, and geoengineering, or the “deliberate manipulation of the physi­ cal chemicals and the biological aspects of the Earth system.”

Roulet then cleared the podium for Pro­ fessor Keith, a climate scientist who has worked primarily in energy technology and public policy. While Keith argued that mitiga­ tion alone will not dramatically reduce C 0 2 concentrations, he also reasoned that current geoengineering strategies such as solar ra­ diation management, the practice of reflect­ ing sunlight to cool the planet, are not reliable enough to be implemented.

“Even if we cut emissions to zero today, we cannot eliminate the possibility of really horrific climate change,” said Keith. “I think we need a serious research program to develop the capability to do [geoengineering].”

While Keith expressed optimism for fu­ ture uses of geoengineering, other panelists

were more sceptical about its applicability.

Professor Fleming, a historian of the Ameri­ can Meteorological Society, referenced failed attempts by the U.S. to control the weather.

Fleming likened geoengineering to pulling a lever to move the earth.

“Where would the [Earth] roll if it were tilt?” asked Fleming. “I’m not in favour of technocratic, pulling-the-lever type of activi­ ties. I ’m [also] not against [geoengineering research], I’m just in favor of indoors, peerviewed research. Climate change is extremely complex and deserves attention from many people.”

Professor Robock, the next speaker in line, cited experiments where sulfate aerosol was injected into the stratosphere to determine the effects on climate change. After presenting the results, Robock explained climate, politi­ cal, and ethical reasons why geoengineering may be a bad idea.

“While geoengineering may result in a cool planet, and reduce or reverse sea ice melt­ ing and sea level rise, there are 17 reasons why it might be a bad idea [such as ozone depletion and drought in Africa and Asia],” said Rob­ ock.

Rasch, a renowned expert in climate

modeling, followed Robock and similarly crit­ icized modem geoengineering as an unreliable method to control the climate. However, Rasch urged scientists and policymakers to shed any preconceived notions when discussing the fu­ ture capabilities of geoengineering “Geoengineering [techniques] require

funding and systematic study, and we are far from a time when we can depend upon them,” said Rasch.

The presentations were followed by a question and answer session between the pan­ elists themselves, which was later extended to the audience.

UP TO SPEED A Lake Worth, FL man has brought new meaning to the title o f the Leslie Nielson com­ edy classic “The Naked Gun.” 91-year-old Robert Thompson, with a little help from his dog Rett, held off a burglar, wearing nothing but a smile and his shotgun.

Despite being caught off guard sleeping in the nude, Thompson managed to hold off the thief until local police arrived.

“I think the guy was scared to death, he was really screaming,” Thompson told the Panama City News Herald. “I started to let him out the door, and he was so anxious he got caught in the door.”

According to the police, the failed bur­ glar was found on the back porch of the house, drunk and trembling from his shocking expe­ rience.

For 23 years, 46-year-old Ron Houben, a car-crash victim, had been diagnosed as being in a vegetative state. Nevertheless, he appears to have been conscious—trapped in his para­ lyzed body—the entire time.

Houben’s family, for years, refused to accept Houben’s diagnosis. His mother, Fina, 73, firmly believed that Houben knew what was happeningaround him.

“I was always convinced,” she said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press.Houben was 20 when he was injured in a car accident. Experts say that, during the 23 years, Houben could hear doctors, nurses, and visitors in the room. According to Houben, he heard that his father died, but couldn’t express any emotion.

—Sources: News Herald, AP

www. bouLe va r ds a i nt La ur e nt . c om

mcgilltribune.com

4 • Tuesday, November 24, 2009

C ITY

Montreal ranked world’s number two party city after Belgrade Significant student population contributes to ranking MATT ESSERT C ontributor

Any Montrealer can tell you that their city is a great party city, but now that claim has been officially recognized. In the Lonely Planet’s new guide, “ 1000 Ultimate Experi­ ences,” Montreal was rated the number two party city in the world, with Belgrade, Serbia coming in first.

Montreal joined nine other international cities, including Buenos Aires, Argentina and Thessaloniki, Greece, on the international guidebook’s list of the best places to party.

The city’s diversity, along with its geographi­ cal and fiscal accessibility, were three factors that contributed to the city’s impressive rank­ ing. Robert Reid, US travel editor at Lonely Planet, explained what makes Montreal stand out.

“It’s a bit of everything,” he said. “Mon­ treal has a great sense of humour. Its comedy festival is one of the world’s greatest, it isn’t scared of the outdoors when temperatures drop, and there are so many neighbourhoods to explore. For Americans, it’s near but feels

far. It’s like cheating to have a nearby classic vacation experience.”

Reid also explained that the recent eco­ nomic troubles have led to more people travel­ ing closer to home, or at least staying on the same continent.

“People will travel closer to home more in 2010 than in 2008 or 2007, as we struggle to overcome the recession,” said Reid. “The good side effect of that, though, is renewed in­ terest in w hat’s been missed over the years, or renewing acquaintances with places that have changed. In the U.S., you’re seeing a surge of ‘Americana’ vacations—battlefields, US his­ torical sites, secondary cities, national parks.”

Reid also said that this effect will likely be felt in Canada in the upcoming year, especially with the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, where city officials are expectig a large surge in tourism.

Many of Montreal’s party events are held on Crescent St. and are organized by the Crescents Street Merchants Association. The CSMA often acts as an intermediary between the bars and the city. Steve Siozios, CSMA vice-president, explained'that he felt strongly about Montreal being one of the world’s best party cities, if not the best.

“Second best! Why second?” he joked.

HOLLY STEWART

STEPHANIE OVENS

Thanks to numerous promotion companies in the city, there’s always somewhere to party.

Siozios believes that M ontreal’s relaxed and open attitude towards partying has helped make it a preeminent party city.

“Montreal has a very laissez-faire atti­ tude, and it’s still a relatively safe city and I think that plays a role in that rating. Most peo­ ple can be joyous all night without much fear,” he said. “The police force and the city officials are more accepting of the city’s night life than perhaps other cities that don’t see nightlife as an important or integral part of their society.”

It is clear that the many bars, clubs, and restaurants have made Montreal a party des­ tination, but it also seems that the large and lively student populations of McGill, Concor­ dia, Université de Montréal, and Université du Québec à Montréal have also helped to make Montreal a young and happening city.

Mike Ammendolia, U2 management student and vice president of the Our House Music DJ society at McGill, believes that Montreal offers a great environment for party­ ing compared to many other university cities

and thinks that this is in large part due to the promotions by multiple local party compa­ nies.

“McGill is right in the heart of downtown Montreal so [students] have all these resourc­ es of different clubs and party venues,” said Ammendolia. “There’s bound to be multiple promotion companies that would love to take advantage of that and promote to the large stu­ dent body.”

“Through all these promotion companies and through all these club owners and bar owners, there’s always an opportunity to go out and have a good time and you don’t really have to look for where the party is every night.

There’s always something happening.”

Other top party cities included Dubai.

UAE, La Paz, Bolivia, and Cape Town, South Africa.

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This week is your last opportunity to write for the Tribune news section. If you missed this week’s meeting and still want to write, send us an email at news@ mcgilltribune.com

Curiosity Delivers

Tuesday, November 24, 2009 « 5

E D U C A T IO N

Ontario targets unregistered career colleges U nregistered schools could fa c e daily fin e s up to $1,000 DANIEL OTIS SMITH C ontributor

On October 28, the Ontario Ministry of Training, Colleges, and Universities (MTCU) introduced tougher penalties and other enforce­ ment measures for private career colleges that are not registered with the government after a series of alarming Ontario Ombudsman’s re­ ports and a Toronto Star investigative piece brought attention to the issue.

The colleges, which function as private businesses offering training and degrees in specific fields, are now subject to up to $1,000 in daily fines for operating outside of the 2005 Private Career Colleges Act. The act set out regulations and standards as to what defines a legal private career college.

While the ministry could not provide an estimate regarding how many illegal private career colleges are currently operating in On­ tario, the office of the Ontario Ombudsman Andre Marin has issued two reports since July 2009 on illegal colleges. In the first re­ port, Marin detailed the operations of Bestech Academy, a school teaching gas technician technology on campuses in Stoney Brook and St. Catherines, Ontario. The report’s press re­ lease describes Bestech as “an unregistered,

illegal operation” supported and promoted by the MTCU. The school shut down in 2008, ap­ parently without warning or compensations for staff and students.

The second report focussed on Cambrian College in Sudbury, Ontario, which offered courses and degrees in Health Information Management. The students who took the pro­ gram at Cambrian found their education to be insufficient, as the school had never been rec­ ognized by the proper organizations, making it impossible for students to take the certifica­ tion exam in their field. Marin criticized the college and the Ministry in his report, saying that it “abdicated any responsibility to ensure that a college actually delivers a program.”

The MTCU refused to compensate the stu­ dents of Bestech and Cambrian, but promised to improve its performance and report to the Ombudsman regularly.

In September 2009, following these de­ velopments, Diana Zlomislic of the Toronto Star went undercover to attend the Personal Support Worker program at the unregistered Ontario Academy of Science and Technology.

Zlomislic found that the school had a single instructor, hardly any lectures, and a program padded with Wikipedia articles and instruc­ tional DVDs. She fabricated a resume and pro­ fessional references and went on to pass a job interview based on the fraudulent credentials.

In the Star report, she described the school’s

students as mostly immigrants looking for a way to secure a good job.

“We applaud the Ontario government’s recent efforts to crack down on such rogue organizations,” said Paul Kitchin, executive director of the Ontario Association of Career Colleges, a non-profit organization that unifies and provides a voice for registered Ontarian private career colleges. “The [Private Career Colleges] Act gives the Ministry more author­ ity to shut down illegal businesses masquerad­ ing as private career colleges.”

According to OACC statistics, there are 580 registered private career colleges in On­ tario from which there are 38,000 graduates annually. Private career colleges have oper­ ated in the province for over a century.

The MTCU stated that at this point, no colleges had been closed, fined, or penalized under the new enforcement standards, which also include a general campaign to better in­ form students of their rights and protect their rights against schools operating illegally. There are also several exemptions from the Private Career Colleges Act, including religious vo­ cational training, programs exclusively for youth, programs under $1,000, and language programs.

CHEAPER AM ERICAN APPAREL

NATIONAL

Universities neglect bilingualism R eport advocates intensive language learning opportunities KATRINA SIENIUC C ontributor

Canadian universities are not doing enough to support bilingualism, according to a recent report by Graham Fraser, Canada’s commissioner of official languages. The 2009 study, called “Two Languages, A World of Opportunities: Second-Language Learning in Canada’s Universities,” assessed 84 institu­ tions and determined that universities gener­ ally do not see bilingualism as a priority, and lack intensive language learning opportunities such as immersion programs.

Catherine Stace, CAPS career advisor, said that she doesn’t believe in forcing people to learn a language and that the practice is gen­ erally unsuccessful. She argued that motiva­ tion to learn a second language depends on the personality of the individual, and that making language learning mandatory at the university level could therefore prove ineffective.

Owen Ripley, a peer counselor for M cGill’s Career Planning Services, said that in terms of career opportunities, being bi­ lingual is certainly a beneficial skill, but the skill’s usefulness rests on the context and geo­ graphic region.

“It depends what job you are looking for,” said Ripley. “If you are planning to work in Montreal after graduation, you will need

French and English.”

Also, to work for the federal and some­ times the provincial government, one is ex­ pected to have a knowledge of both official Canadian languages. However, working in the private sector on the west coast, for example, does not necessarily require the same language skills.

Both Stace and Ripley agreed that univer­ sities have a role to play in encouraging and offering resources to students to facilitate lan­ guage learning for those that so desire, but that making it mandatory may be unsuccessful.

“Instead, universities need to provide the right activities in which students can practice language,” said Stace. “If institutions facilitate registration in language courses—so that there are more program options and less of an im­ pact on students’ GPAs—this could increase the students’ initiative for becoming bilin­ gual.”

As for McGill, Ripley said that “there are resources available through and outside McGill to help students learn French or Eng­ lish as a second language.” These include the McGill language centre, which promotes courses in both French and English, and the Quebec Studies program, which its students say has vastly improved their French skills.

Furthermore, at McGill, any student can write their examinations in either French or Eng­ lish.

W W W . ARCENCIELAPPAREL. C O M

6 • Tuesday, November 24, 2009

O p in io n

Massive investments in education and public services have fueled the creation of irri­ gation, damming, and government infrastruc­ ture. Our strategy of securing “model villag­ es” in rural areas has been largely successful; slowly, the long-term presence of Canadian soldiers with a community-oriented mission is turning Afghans against the Taliban.

It’s important to remember, amid the pes­ WE NEED MORE TIME simism surrounding the Afghan mission, that we have experienced some success thus far in As Barack Obama sits in the Oval Office, pondering the great American adventure in Af­ our efforts to free the Afghan people.

But our successes can sometimes seem ghanistan, his government and our Parliament small when juxtaposed with the staggering need to recognize one inescapable fact. problems we face. Afghanistan was recently We need more time.

In 2008, the Canadian government set declared the third most corrupt country on the February 11, 2011 as the date when Canada planet, according to Transparency Internation­ al. The recent election (if one could call it that) will cease military operations in Afghanistan.

But that was not a date set for the right rea­ of Hamid Karzai was proof of deep-seated corruption in the Afghan government. sons. That was a date set under pressure from Our allies in NATO seem less and less a Parliament sensitive to the weary attitude of willing to fight. Some nations have withdrawn most Canadians towards the war.

Those opposed to the mission in Afghani­ their troops, while several others are contem­ plating doing the same. stan see it as hopeless, as the act of a country As the Standing Committee on National following in the wake of American conquest.

But we must not forget that the Taliban re­ Security and Defence noted in their report on gime was evil, and it had an agenda to support Afghanistan, we face a warrior culture used to defending their soil against the encroach­ those who sought the downfall of the Western ment of larger powers. These same insurgents world.

Canada has already served admirably as expelled the Soviet Union in the 1980s. They the caretaker of the Afghan people, but we have a “home team” advantage, a familiarity with the Afghan people our soldiers do not need to do more if we hope to liberate the necessarily share. They have grown rich on country from its oppressive past.

The Canadian government identified six the poppy trade—one of the most troubling is­ priorities for combating the problems in Af­ sues facing Afghanistan today.

Even worse, the insurgents have time on ghanistan. To summarize, they are: to enhance security, particularly along the Pakistani bor­ their hands. They will be there as long as they need to. Meanwhile, attrition is wearing down der; to provide essential services (including our politicians and the public. jobs); to provide humanitarian assistance; to Afghanistan is vital to our global strategy stabilize the military, political, and judiciary of dealing with Islamic fundamentalism and branches of the Afghan government; to build democracy; and to reconcile the diverse forces terrorism. Failure would likely lead to a full­ blown Afghan civil war, and in a worst-case at work in the country. scenario, failure means the Taliban return to Although progress has been challenging, power. Nothing would be more abhorrent. we have made incredible gains in these areas.

There is nothing worse than a political The Afghan National Army continues to grow in size, with increasingly modem equipment activist whining about an unchangeable past.

We are done asking questions about whether supplied by NATO. In Kabul alone, Afghan military casualties dropped 61 per cent in or not we should have been in Afghanistan in the first place. That decision is long past. Do 2008, according to NATO. The first national election since the inva­ we not now have a fundamental responsibility sion had a voter turnout of 75 per cent, with to finish what we started? I think we do. Ap­ polls suggesting that only four per cent of the parently, the public disagrees with me.

Still, we cannot let a country crumble be­ population would prefer the Taliban back in cause we are weary of war. power.

QUESTION THE STATUS QUO I know that my views, as espoused in this column, put me in the margins of general so­ ciety. And I understand the cringed faces and rolled eyes at the perceived clichés of student radicalism. I even acknowledge that on a very superficial level, I’m not much more than a cliché: a middle-class, white, Toronto-born student that uses the great privileges afforded by my societal position to espouse ideas that require that same societal privilege they un­ dermine. And I get that certain classmates find my constant challenging of everything put for­ ward in class to be frustrating and disruptive.

But sorry kids, this isn’t high school any­ more. If you’ve been my classmate, it means

you’ve delved into the social sciences and supposedly are trying to study how and (more importantly) why the world—or at least Can­ ada—works. Or at least you should be. But all too often the “Why?” is missing from our dis­ ciplines, and that’s the question that I often get irritated looks for asking.

More than anything, what pains me the most in academics—and in life—is the cel­ ebration of the status quo. Again, I get it: “the system” (whichever one it is that w e’re study­ ing on that particular day) has worked for a lot of people. Hell, it’s worked for me, too. My family is descended from dirt-poor Eastern European migrants who worked their way up to the relative affluence that allows me to go to McGill, live in the Plateau, and drink mint-infused green tea at lunch. But if I were satisfied with the “the system,” I would have stayed out of the social sciences. And you should have too. Our societal order is pretty unthreatened at the moment. We’ve got a four-party system where all four parties are hell-bent on opposing any sort of societal reorganization, a military bulwark to the south imposing its “order” on

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mcgilltribune.com

Fresh Hell

Zoe Daniels z d a n ie ls @ m c g illtr ib u n e .c o m MCGILL’S ANTI-CYCLISM There is apparently a secret vendetta by the McGill administration against cyclists and it’s being fought with contingent statements and flawed logic.

Surely, McGill security officers are sick of being ignored and grimaced at while pa­ trolling that belching concrete pit near Ferrier. Cyclists, in turn, are sick of being told to get off their bikes when they can navigate just fine through the Caterpillars and concrete tubes littering the road. They've been dodging cars and pedestrians since 8 a.m. thank-youvery-much, and they've got class to get to. Of course, the war between bikers and others on the road has been going on since the pennyfarthings first rumbled down cobblestone streets, but I've never seen it manifest itself so passive-aggressively as in the lock removals of Thursday, November 5.

A friend of mine locked his bike to a pole near the back of the Birks Building, a place many students resort to after the racks by the McConnell and James buildings are full. He came back after his classes and found his bike's lock had been cut and his bike removed. He was one of at least ten students who had their bikes confiscated by McGill Security that day, according to an article in the McGill Daily.

After recovering his bike, he contacted the ad­ ministration in an attempt to get reimbursed for his lock. (A good bike lock costs upwards of 25 bucks, not exactly pocket change to someone who's chosen self-locomotion over a bus pass.) The email response to his complaint from Pierre Barbarie, associate director of uni­ versity safety, is infuriatingly jargon laden and his reasoning is flimsy at best.

Barbarie claimed that there are no "no bike parking" signs anywhere on campus be­ cause ”[i]t would be virtually impossible for the University to post signs at all locations where bikes are not permitted." This is a non­ argument. There are "no smoking" signs, and "no eating" signs in every building and every room on campus. Probably half of the houses in Montreal have quaint little "pas de vélo SVP"

the rest o f the world, and a media egging them on. So why, then, do we need to devote our intellectual energies to defending this order?

We would not tolerate this defence of the status quo in the pure sciences. Could you imagine the outpouring of justified rage from all sectors of society if researchers declared that everything with cancer is—more or less— going well? Could you imagine the response of donors, the media, and the general population, if the Canadian Foundation for AIDS Research declared that they were pretty happy with cur­ rent AIDS treatments? No one would take such crackpot scientific declarations seriously and no one would accuse critics of “radicalism.”

Even though we’ve made huge strides in both cancer and AIDS research, the point of scien­ tific inquiry is not to praise what’s going well, it is to examine, question, and seek solutions to what’s wrong.

And yet, in the social sciences, trying to prove “how awesome we are” is common among students. There should be no doubt that our society has come a long way in the fields that most social scientists study (access, exclu­

signs on their railings. It would take prob­ ably three hours and about five bucks worth of printing supplies to post comprehensive "no bike parking" signs on campus. McGill has been paying security guards to stand at the Milton entrance for over three months. In ad­ dition to telling people to get off their bikes and walk, they could also be instructed to cau­ tion students who are illegally locking up their bikes. They look bored. They might enjoy the human contact.

Barbarie also stated that, "even if there was no prior action on our part for bikes locked in these locations, this still does not mean that it was allowed." This is ridiculous. How on earth could someone know they are parked in a prohibited area if there is no signage and no mention of its illegality? Furthermore, how can the university feel it's right in confiscat­ ing these bikes if it has made no mention of its intention to remove them? The administra­ tion sends about three dozen mass emails per month. Not one of them mentioned that on this particular day, security services were going to start removing bikes locked in unacceptable places. That seems like either egregious irre­ sponsibility or willful omission.

The purported reason for the lock re­ moval was understandable at least. Barbarie explained that security must "eliminate all potential threats" to community saftey from areas where they are liable. Some of the bikes had handlebars and pedals perceived to be obstructing exit paths from buildings, which could impede both disabled peoples' mobility and emergency procedures. However, there would be no "potential threat" if McGill had stepped up in the first place and made its com­ munity members aware of their intentions and rules regarding bikes. Making infractions and consequences well known is McGill's job, and if the administration had been proactive enough to do so, they would have found out that the hundreds of students who rely on bicy­ cles to get to school are generally reasonable and would happily comply with the school's rules.

The real issue is not bike parking or even cycling in general. It is the university's com­ plete lack of respect for its students in this area, and I am appalled by it. At the very least students should be compensated for the locks that security broke which, without warning the students involved, amounts to petty van­ dalism.

sion, inequality, overt discrimination, etc.).

But does this mean that the job of those disci­ plines should be to prove how well everything is going? Should researchers scramble to try to disprove the claims of communities that be­ lieve racism is still alive, that women still face barriers to participation, and that Aboriginals are still facing a colonial system that is con­ tinuing its original goal of (at least) cultural genocide? No. If you think people making these claims are wrong, you are not alone: the majority of our society, our public education system, and those controlling the government agree with you.

And yet, we seem to encourage an “it’s all good” mentality in the Canadian social sci­ ences. We have classes devoted to the alleged science of how awesome Canada is; profes­ sors who make their careers on propagating the “Everything is—more or less—OK!” line; and most frightening of all, a generation of stu­ dents who see their goal as memorizing why Canada is “more,” and rebuking claims of why it is “less,” than an “OK” country.

Tuesday, November 24, 2009 • 7

Curiosity Delivers

9*

IMCGILL StT R lB U N E www.mcgilltribune.com

E D I T O R I A L --------------------No girls allowed: IOC grounds female ski jumpers

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Thom as Quail editor@ m cgilltribune.com

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A three-year quest to force the Interna­ tional Olympic Committee to include wom­ en’s ski jumping in the 2010 Winter Olympics came to a bitter end earlier this month, when the B.C. Court of Appeals ruled that the Char­ ter of Rights and Freedoms does not apply to the selection of Olympic events.

The appeals court upheld an earlier ruling by the B.C. Supreme Court that the defendant, the Vancouver Olympic Organizing Commit­ tee, has no power to decide which events will be included in the 2010 Games. The sole au­ thority to determine Olympic events lies with the IOC, an international organization based outside of Canada, to which the Court deter­ mined the Charter does not apply.

While the decision was likely correct from a legal standpoint, it was nonetheless ex­ tremely disappointing. Male ski jumping has been an Olympic event since 1924, and the IOC’s continued refusal to add a w omen’s dis­ cipline is bewildering, irrational, and unfair.

In 2006, the International Ski Federation approved women’s ski jumping for interna­ tional competition by a vote of 114 to one and urged the IOC to do the same. However, the IOC said the sport did not meet their “rigid criteria” and shot down a proposal to have it included at the 2010 Games.

This decision made no sense. The IOC

charter obliges them “to encourage and sup­ port the promotion of women in sport at all levels and in all structures with a view to implementing the principle of equality of men and women.” Adding women to the ski jum p­ ing discipline would require only minor re­ scheduling and no new construction costs, yet IOC officials seem to insist on upholding their mysterious technical criteria (that are some­ how dramatically different from the standards of the world’s governing skiing organization).

Some, including IOC President Jacques Rogge, have claimed that there are not enough high-level ski jumpers to warrant its inclu­ sion in the Olympics. But as Deedee Corradini, president of Women’s Ski Jumping USA, pointed out in an interview with the Canadian Press, the 83 female ski jumpers that compete on the Continental Cup circuit is larger than the number of female athletes competing in bobsledding (26), skeleton (39), and luge (45), which are all included in the Olympics. The most recently added sport, ski-cross, also has less female international competitors than ski jumping.

Even if we grant that Rogge and others of his ilk were trying to make a crude point about the lack of popularity of female ski jumping, the Olympics are at least partly about recog­ nizing obscure sports that no one would other­

wise watch. Very few people would give a sec­ ond thought to sports like skeleton and cross­ country skiing if they weren’t accompanied by the patriotic propaganda that accompanies the Olympic gam es—that’s why amateur athletics and the IOC itself rely partly on government handouts. And any sporting event that accepts public funding should have to provide equal opportunities, within reason, for both genders.

Otherwise, the sport is discriminating unfairly against women.

In 1991, the IOC introduced a progressive rule that stipulates that all new sports added to the Games must have events for both genders.

Bizarrely, however, this rule doesn’t apply to sports added before that date. And with the addition of women’s boxing, ski jumping is the last sport in either the Summer or Winter Games to exclude women.

In the face of logic, the IOC is undeterred, despite the fact they can’t give a coherent rea­ son for their stance. Maybe the male-dominat­ ed IOC is still wedded to the old, medically unproven notion that ski jumping can dam­ age the uterus and ovaries—because at least then we could understand the “logic” behind their ridiculous refusal to include women’s ski jumping in the Olympic Games.

basic human rights, not to mention the rights accorded (not given) in the treaties.

As a proud McGill alumna, I occasionally check in with the Trib to see what is happen­ ing on campus. I hope that in the future when Mr. Steven, or anyone else, chooses to write about Aboriginal affairs, they do a little bit of historical reading first. This kind of misrepre­ sentation is unacceptable, and, frankly, embar­ rassing.

—Estelle Hjertaas McGill Alumna

ments (‘Timmy did it too!’) to justify their ac­ tions. That this delegation wants to press CFS on its perceived lack of democracy and trans­ parency is just too much irony for this grad student to stand!

—Matthew Hodgetts M aster’s Political Science I

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The McGill Tribune is an editorially autonomous newspaper pub­ lished by the Students’ Society of McGill University in collabora­ tion with the Tribune Publication Society. Opinions expressed do not necessarily represent those of the Students’ Society or McGill Uni­ versity. Letters to the editor may be sent to letters@mcgilltribune. com and must include the contributor’s name, program and year and contact information. Letters should be kept under 300 words and submitted only to the Tribune. Submissions judged by the Tribune

Estelle wrote on Brendan’s wall.

Re: “Right Minded: Brendan likes the Gitxsan’s status update”' by Brendan Steven (17.11.09) While I too have been very interested by the Gitxsan proposal, I think that this article completely misses the point. Steven writes, “The Indian Act was intended to allow Native culture to thrive, to acknowledge their unique place in Canadian history. But it has failed.”

There is no bigger lie in Canadian history. The Indian Act was created to shackle the Aborigi­ nal population of Canada. Reserves, as John A. Macdonald once said, were created as a temporary measures “until the Indians assimi­ late or die.” The reserve system perpetuated by the Indian Act was never intended to be a long-term solution, and is the cause of many of the health and social problems that we see today.

The Indian Act banned traditional cer­ emonies like the potlatch and the sun dance, disenfranchised the Indigenous population (not even allowing them to choose their own chiefs and governance system), and even prevented them from gathering in groups of more than a few people. The Indian Act re­ quired that all “Indians” get a pass to even leave reserve territory. This included to access hunting and fishing grounds—it’s no surprise hundreds starved. This was a clear violation of

r

Can we go too?

Re: “PGSS submits referendum petition to disaffiliate from CFS” by Tori Crawford (27.10.09) To all concerned, it has come to my atten­ tion that the PGSS executive has made some dubious additions to its delegation to the annu­ al meeting of the national student’s union (the Canadian Federation of Students): undergrads from other universities and a Daily reporter.

This decision was made without council rati­ fication and when pressed on these additions, the response was that they were ‘staff’ and that other delegations did the same thing. It is in­ teresting that ‘staff’ have only been needed for the delegation in the year that certain members of the executive seem determined to wage a personal vendetta against the CFS, a position not yet approved by PGSS members and one which has already brought the PGSS national ridicule. And how is it that they could not find a single student qualified to ‘support’ the dele­ gation with ‘research’ from the McGill student body? It also makes me sad to see graduate students employing playground-calibre argu­

Oh. You’re not kidding.

Re: “Pop Rhetoric: Choose Snob" by Ryan Taylor (17.11.09) Dear Ryan Taylor, Oh, sweetie. You are so gracious to “not stop” me from listening to Kid Cudi. I don’t actually know who Kid Cudi is, but if I lis­ tened to him and you smirked at me, I would judge you, not for having different musical taste than me but for being a pretentious hip­ ster expletive. If your Pop Rhetoric article was meant to highlight the vast variety of music available to today’s listener and the sometimes polarizing emotions we feel about it, then it was entirely obscured by your condescension towards everyone else and failed attempts to establish yourself as an intellectual with re­ fined taste. Sure, you may not like some pop music, but your error is in using this dislike to somehow assert your own worth, an all-toocommon phenomenon these days. Grow out of it—most of us did in the eighth grade. Also, since you profess to patronize Sala Rossa, I hereby invite you to Corb Lund’s concert there next time he comes to Montreal. H e’s pretty obscure in these parts, and you’ll even get to wear flannel.

— Tereza Jamikova U2 Biology and Mathematics

No one cares what you think.

Publication Society to be libellous, sexist, racist, homophobic or sole­ ly promotional in nature will not be published. The Tribune reserves

(Unless you’re a Tribune columnist.)

the right to edit all contributions. Editorials are decided upon and written by the editorial board. All other opinions are strictly those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the McGill Tribune, its editors or its staff Please recycle this newspaper.

Two of our dear columnists are leaving, so if you’re interested in your own personal soapbox, ^ ________send^coveivletter and two^sample^columi^ jj

8 • Tuesday, November 24, 2009

St u d e n t Li v i n g

mcgilltribune.com

RESTAURANT R EVIEW

Riz en Folie: putting a fun (and healthy) twist on a classic dessert One year in, this unique rice pudding bar is going strong JULIE BEAUCHAMP C ontributor

Riz en Folie, Montreal’s first rice pudding bar, opened in July 2008, and its popularity keeps growing. This unique concept was first developed in New York at a restaurant called Rice to Riches, which is where Riz en Folie’s owners, siblings Nathalie and Dave Dubé, got their inspiration.

Montreal is the first city in Canada to have a rice pudding shop. The owners look to change the misconception of rice pudding as an old-fashioned, bland dessert. Riz en Folie presents rice pudding with a different texture—creamy like a pudding, and which comes in different colours and flavours.

The flavours were first created by Decca

77 chef Darren Bergeron and are now devel­ oped at the shop. Among the most popular are Souvenir d ’Antan, sugar cream, cheesecake and real vanilla. Riz en Folie alternates fla­ vours daily, with 16 to choose from at any given time. Others flavours include chocolate mint, spicy chocolate, lemon, coconut, tiramisu, rough and tough—a mixture of choco­ late, marshmallows and pecans—and apple pie. Toppings such as fruits and nuts are avail­ able and the rice pudding can also be served in a waffle bowl.

Customers can choose from a vast selec­ tion of complimentary coffees, hot chocolate, and teas. There are seven flavours of hot choc­ olate, including milk chocolate at 38 per cent, dark chocolate at 58 per cent and 70 per cent, and white chocolate.

Riz en Folie is also environmentally friendly, something which is essential to the Dubés. Recycling is a must: on your first visit,

you get to choose a brightly coloured plastic container in vibrant shades of blue, green, orange, or pink. Every time you bring it with you afterwards, your pudding will be 25 cents cheaper. The containers are even microwave and dishwasher-friendly.

“Riz en Folie presents rice pudding with a different texture—creamy like a pudding, and which comes in different colours and flavours. ”

The prices and portions vary from 4 oz. for $2.50, 8 oz. for $4, 12 oz. for $6.00, and a fiesta portion of 80 oz. for $30.00. The 8 oz. and 12 oz. options allow for mixing two fla­

TASK FORCE A M A K E S H IF T T H A N K S G IV IN G

Calling all members of the McGill community Do you have ideas about: • encouraging a culture of inclusion on campus; • enhancing our commitment to excellence; • reaching out to the broader community?

The Principal's Task Force on Diversity, Excellence and Community Engagement wants to hear from you!

I’ve eaten turkey on every American Thanksgiving for the past 20 years, excluding ’04, when I was a strict vegetarian. Each time, I gorge myself full of turkey, stuffing, brussels sprouts, string beans, and mashed potatoes and then sleep off my food coma on the couch with football—or, in one of the weird Levine family traditions. The Color Purple— blasting in the background.

This year, confronted with the workload of six classes and looming graduate school application deadlines, I have opted to remain north of the border. I know a lot of Americans at McGill like to gather together on Thanks­ giving, roast a turkey, and commemorate the Pilgrims, but I honestly don’t have time this year. So I came up with a brilliant solution.

This weekend while doing homework and cramming for exams, I set a pot of turkey and white bean minestrone on the stove to simmer.

I made enough to feed a very hungry person for about five days. This week, in between re­ search papers, exams, and grad school appli­ cations, I’ll get my annual dose of tryptophan while simultaneously facing the demons of my final year.

The soup was fairly painless to make. In a large stock pot I sautéed chopped onion, car­

vours. Hot chocolate is $3.25 Riz en Folie also offers delivery every Wednesday (orders have to be placed on Tues­ day before six p.m.) with no delivery fees for residents of the downtown area with a mini­ mum purchase of $10. Rice pudding is a great alternative for a dessert choice as it is healthier than ice cream or a slice of cake.

Best of all, students are spoiled at Riz en Folie: upon presentation of a McGill ID card, you can get 10 per cent off rice pudding and 25 per cent off coffees, hot chocolate, and teas.

Riz en Folie: 2153 Mackay St. (514-7503415, www.rizenfolie.com). Free wireless in­ ternet. Riz en Folie is opened Monday, Tues­ day, and Wednesday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Thursday, Friday, and Saturday from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m..

rots, and bell peppers with olive oil, salt, pep­ per, oregano, rosemary, and dried basil. When the vegetables were tender I added five turkey sausages (casings removed). It’s important to break up the turkey meat while it cooks at this stage: you don’t want large chunks of turkey sausage in the final dish. With the sausage cooked, I added two cans of white beans, a can of chopped tomatoes, and four cups of chicken broth (always look for low sodium broth and then adjust the seasoning yourself). I let this simmer, covered, for about an hour, and added one cup of elbow pasta. Be really careful to prevent the pasta from overcooking—doing so will make a disappointing soup. As my pasta was finishing cooking, I stirred in a few cups of baby spinach and let it cook quickly.

I am all too aware that this is by no means a roast turkey dinner. I am bitter, disappointed, and nostalgic for my motherland. While I will forego the roast turkey, there is one annual sta­ ple that I will not abandon: Martha Stewart’s cranberry compote. Combining fresh cranber­ ries, the zest and juice of one orange, and half of a cup of white sugar, simmering it until the cranberries burst, and then adding chunks of green pear and some chopped walnuts, this compote is tart, refreshing, and tastes more like home than anything I know.

Even in my stressed and fragile state, I remain enthralled by the social and cultural power of food. The absence of turkey from my diet this week might very well have driven me crazy. I don’t even really love turkey, but it’s definitely keeping me sane, fed. and relatively cozy and content right now.

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Features: Literature Week

It had been a very long time since we had stayed anywhere very long. Time itself felt like a compilation of unpredictable shortcuts that never seem to turn out quite right. Night­ time in particular felt merely like an exten­ sion of things unsaid and undone in the heat of daylight. But there was little rest for either of us then, between Kedamine and healthy fits of exhausted rage, convinced that we were the only man and woman in the world snorting lines and screaming at each other in poorly lit bedrooms. Julia slept some in the early morn­ ings while I tried to write and decide whether I would ever stop feeling so goddamn sick. I slept very little then and imagined that it made me the stronger of the two of us.

We rarely bought tickets to ride the train, and when we did, we would mostly pass the hours in the dividers, between the cars, where we could smoke and talk loudly and watch the landscape change. I must admit here, that on those train rides, the pathetic fallacy seemed to be anything but false to us; we believed deeply, in fact, that the land was a perfect mirror of our most inner truths and somehow contained a shared secret that neither of us yet knew. We were not naive, but simply restless, and rootless, and indeed, overly romantic.

When we arrived in Puri I immediately felt that we might stay. The heat was different here somehow: less sadistic, less controlling.

It seemed to purify rather than condemn. As we stepped off the train platform onto the red, dusty street, Julia gripped my hand tightly.

“Things might be different here, Henry,” she said smiling, and I realized that it was the first V . time I had seen her smile in a very long time.

We walked slowly from the train station to the centre of town through narrow, chalky

side streets full of children playing cricket and men squatting, sipping chai and looking on.

The tourist in India is always an enigma to the local mentality. There is no way to escape the strange radiance of white skin trudging through the static heat of a South Asian after­ noon. And so we trudged, white skin and all, only smiling through our blinding sweat at the groups of men and children staring wide-eyed at us, giggling or drop-jawed. “Namaste!” we called to each new collective of gawkers, wav­ ing our hands idiotically, far more enthusiasti­ cally and frequently than would seem natural or necessary.

An especially narrow alley behind a butcher’s shop, where a pack of dogs fought viciously over pieces of indistinguishable animal entrails, snapping and snarling spastically at one another, opened onto the wide and heavily congested main bazaar leading to the Jagannath Temple. Thousands upon thousands of pilgrims, some dressed in white shrouds, some nearly naked, filled the street, pushing and shuffling languidly, forward towards the temple. Black, tarp-made tents stood on all sides, with women selling dosas, chai, and beedies underneath. Julia and I became the gawkers, glancing with childish curiosity all around, at the most ancient of urban forma­ tions, the temple promenade. Both of us had spent a fair amount of time in India already, and we thought that we had grown accustomed to the extreme differences from Western life.

But neither of us had ever seen anything quite like this, this centre of religious pilgrimage, and it filled our eyes and minds with a sensa­ tion of curdling awe.

Much later, in a letter to my brother I would write with the utmost sincerity: “the city feels much how I imagine ancient Jeru­ salem to have been: filthy, choked, divided, overflowing and fucked—and all in the name of some strange G o d ...” But this attitude to­ ward Puri would come much later for me.

Upon arriving, Julia and I were only shocked by the holiness of a place that felt so very old, and so very different from the India we thought we knew.

We rented a small room on the outskirts of town, above the shop of a Muslim antique dealer named Bhezad. He was an old and lonely widower with soft, dark features, who loved more than anything to discuss religion and politics with guests over sweet tea. He rented us the room for a hundred and forty ru­ pees a week, the standard price for a pilgrim­ age house, telling us that he considered us pil­ grims in our own sense.

He liked Julia very much, and never failed to remind me how lucky I was to possess such an angelic and cream-skinned woman as she.

He did not know her as I did, this is for certain, and though her skin was indeed like perfect cream in complexion, I would hesitate to ever describe her as angelic, or my relationship to her as anything even contiguous to ‘posses­ sion.’ If anything, it was she who possessed me.

The room itself was simple: white and cramped, but clean. It had one barred window looking down onto the street below. This is where I would write most days, sitting in a plastic chair, rocking back and forth, imagin­ ing other worlds and gazing out onto a reality that I could never quite comprehend enough to capture on the yellow page in front of me.

It has been years since I sat in that chair, star­ ing out onto that quiet street, and yet now the pages seem to sop up my memories like French bread does vinegar. It is a beautiful and fearful thing, I think, to remember.

We were lying on the floor one afternoon, head-to-head, smoking beedies and staring blankly at the low, white ceiling. We had been lying that way for several hours without speaking and the silent smokiness of the room was a comfort from the midday heat.

“Do you know what I heard yesterday, Henry?” she asked, whispering. I didn’t re­ spond. “Do you know what I heard yester­ day?”

“What?” I said, feeling annoyed that the peaceful silence had been broken.

“The temple has the largest kitchen in the world. Did you know that?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.”

_ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ _ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ _ _ ^ T u e s d a ^ N o v e m b e r 2 4 i 2 0 0 9 « ll ALL LITERATURE WEEK SKETCHES BY ZOE BREWSTER AND LAURA TINDAL.

“No, it’s true, three hundred cooks. Isn’t that unbelievable?”

“I believe it,” I said.

She sat up cross-legged and turned around and I was looking at her face upside down now. She was less beautiful that way. I kept smoking, lying on my back.

“Can you be serious for one fucking sec­ ond?” she said, raising her voice. It cracked and I closed my eyes but I could tell that she had started to cry. She stood up and walked over to the window. It was silent again, but not peaceful. I stood up slowly, tossing my beedie aside.

“I ’m sorry,” I said. “I’m serious now.

What did you want to tell me?”

“Fuck you,” quietly.

“I’m sorry. I was only kidding. What was it?”

She was still looking out the window with her back to me, standing just where I sat most mornings when I wrote.

“Three hundred cooks and they’re cook­ ing all day, and I don’t know, maybe all night, and all that food, do you know what happens to it?”

“What?” I said, wishing with all my strength that she would turn around and look at me and not out the window.

“They bum it, all of it. That is—the priests eat a little of it—but the rest is burned, meat, and daal, and chapatti. They bum it as sacrifice to lord Juganot.” She started to cry again.

“And those pilgrims stand out in the street, probably 15 hours a day, thousands of them, most of them starving, giving whatever

last cent they’ve got to the temple, buying food to be burnt. Do you know how disgust­ ing that is, Henry?”

I walked over to her and drew her body against mine. I held her waist tightly and kissed her neck. She flinched, and it made me shiver, and it made me want to cry. I let go of her waist and looked out the window to see what she had been looking at. The street was empty. There was nothing out there.

“That’s just the way it is Julia,” I said.

“Some things can’t be changed. Some things are just fucked from the beginning, and some things are just always fucked.”

She didn’t respond, only moved forward so that there was a small space between our bodies. I hated her then. I hated that empty street that she was staring at instead of me, and I hated that empty space between our bodies, and I hated her.

I walked out of the room without saying another word. I took my notebook and my pen from on top of the mattress, and hurried down the stairs. Bhezad wasn’t in his shop, and I was glad. I walked out into the street and I knew that she could see me from the window, but I didn’t look back. I kept my head down, my eyes focussed on the red dust as I kicked it up, walking quickly and aimlessly. I walked for a long time, maybe an hour, and it felt good, like riding a train, with the land passing, and the sensation of total freedom, the knowledge that nothing matters except to keep moving.

The heat started to bum off and with it the light, and I decided to have a chai at the tem­ ple promenade. I sipped my tea and watched the pilgrims, and thought about what I might

write if I could.

I knew that she was right, and I didn’t know why it bothered me so damn much. I still don’t. I think it was because I knew that she was better than I was, kinder, purer. It killed me when she pointed out the things I spent entire days attempting to forget. And it killed me when I realized how painfully dif­ ferent we were.

As it grew gradually cooler and darker, I felt much better. The burning I had felt in my stomach, the sickness and the hatred, and the deep sense of impenetrable anxiety, melted away, and I felt good again. I felt so good I tipped the chai woman twenty rupees and walked back toward the room, this time faster, with my head up; I wanted to see her, I felt like kissing her. I felt like making love and smok­ ing in bed.

When I got back Bhezad was still gone, perhaps at the mosque I thought. And as I walked up the stairs I suddenly had that strange awareness that my life was like a cassette tape, constantly being fast-forwarded and rewound, everyday, every minute, up and down these stairs, back and forth from the room to the promenade, from standing to sleeping; and I wondered how long it would be before the cel­ luloid got worn down and began to hum like a person singing underwater.

She wasn’t in the room and neither was her bag. I sat down at the window and lit a beedie. I felt anxious again and slightly numb.

Somehow I knew I would never see her again and somehow I knew that we had both been wrong all along. And I still felt like kissing her. That was the worst part.

Features - Literature Week

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Generally on the car ride back to the hotel after the holiday meal, they prefer not to talk. They’re content slouching in their seats, belts unbuckled, listening to talk radio.

The two of them do the Winnipeg family tour every Thanksgiving weekend; it’s three days of gluttony and then a three-hour flight back to Toronto.

Sitting up straight, hands on thighs, she asks, “How was your walk with Kara?”

“Fine,” he says. “We took Simon’s dogs around the block.”

Her arms relax. “Seems like he’s got his hands full with them.”

“Simon can handle it,” he says. “The kid’s responsible. H e’s building a hom e...”

“The kid bought a house, and clear-cut the inside. Our nephew is living in a tent on the floor where the kitchen should be. That's no home.”

He bites at his thumbnail, and a sliver breaks off, caught between his two front teeth.

He picks, she stares. He gives up.

“Simon will be fine.”

The radio talks smooth like Jazz: “ ... among thoughtful people today there is in­ creasing discussion o f political apathy and its converse - the responsibility o f the citizen...”

She says, “This really is a nice stretch of street. Like Avenue Road, just north of Bloor.”

“This is Winnipeg, honey,” he says.

“There’s no Queen or Avenue; there’s a couple stores and some more empty space.”

“That’s funny,” she says, amused. “I thought all Winnipeggers were supposed to love thy hometown? Seems like Simon would never leave. And he says that his sister—” “Kara doesn’t have a choice in the matter.

She’s not well.”

“..Postal officials say generically ad­ dressed letters to "Santa Claus, North Pole" will no longer be forwarded to volunteers in the town o f North Pole, Alaska as has been done fo r years...”

“I wanted to get out as soon as possible,” he said. “I skipped grades. I worked on a steel gang every summer to earn the money to leave. I put up with the ex-cons on the gang who bragged about eating 21 eggs a day. They would stuff their pockets with roast beef and gravy. It would drip...”

“You’re biting your nails again,” she in­ terrupts.

He wipes the spit-covered index finger on his jeans. Gripping the steering wheel harder, he wishes the volume louder.

“..T he family o f a 28-year-old woman who died five days after receiving the H1N1 vaccine is looking for answers...”

She says, “Why doesn’t your brother just sit her down and say, ‘You can’t keep up this bullshit!” ’ “She’s his daughter,” he says quietly.

“And h e’s her father! He needs to break the girl’s heart and tell her that witches and witchcraft are as real as unicorns an d ...” “ ...Like I ’ve always said, you would do well as an 18th-century progressive.”

“This is serious,” she says.

“Not really,” he says. “Odd, maybe.

Listen—Kara’s somehow managed to meld the intense Wiccan spiritualism with the en­ titlement of an MTV princess. She left dinner early tonight so she could line her room with the ‘five special objects’ and pray.”

“For what?”

“A new car.”

They laugh. She puts her hand on the nape of his neck and rubs.

He says, “She wants a new car so she can go to Arizona.”

“Why Arizona?”

“She once went on a road trip down through the Southwestern states with my brother. They stopped somewhere in Arizona in the thick of the Sonora Desert to get a drink, and when she stepped barefoot onto the sand, she felt a jolt pass through her body.”

She grabs a pad and pen from the glove compartment and pretends to write, speaks aloud in a faux-British voice:

“Arizona sun Burns red and the sand is fire.

Magic in the air?”

“How poetic,” he says, chuckling. “And she has this obsession with numbers. Like last

night, on our walk, a car drove past and Kara grabbed me and shuddered, ‘It’s an om en— I’ve seen that number five times today.’ I asked her what number it was and she said something like, ‘345. No, w ait—765.’”

She shakes her head.

“And Kara believes in past lives!” he nearly shouts. “Says that the only reason w e’re here, on earth, is to deal with our past demons. In her last life she says she died of a drug overdose. She says that’s why she used to drop speed before she went to the gym; she had to deal with it, she had to kick the habit in this life.”

“Simon’s never touched any of that stuff, right?”

“No,” he says. “She says it’s because Simon wasn’t her brother in the past life—he was her best friend. And when she died of the drug overdose, he was shattered. So he was bom repulsed by drugs. The very thought of them makes him sick.”

“Maybe the thought of drugs makes him sick because h e’s watched her struggle through the years. It’s painful for him.”

Both parties are silent. They let their breathing calm —reflect on those words just uttered.

He says, “That Simon is a good kid. A good brother.”

“Real loyal,” she says. “Imagine not being able to depend on an older sister. Maybe that’s why he buries himself in the loyalty of his dogs.”

They both sigh. And familiar silence.

They pull into the empty hotel parking lot.

He puts the car in park and turns off the ignition.

She says, “I just think that someone needs to say something to your brother...”

“I agree,” he replies. He digs deep for the fingernail.

“Kara is nearly 30 and she can’t hold down a job. Your brother pays for her entire life. H e’s clearly in denial.”

“I know ...”

“Michael,” she says, pulling her hand back from his neck. “Someone needs to talk to him.”

Outside silence and on the inside, the radio static is muffled by a wind flickered an­ tennae.

She says, “It needs to be you.”

He pulls the nail from his teeth and gets out of the car.

Tuesday, November 24,2009 • 13

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It’s Saturday night on The Main and I’m leaning up against Bain Schubert as some friends chat on the street. To my right, a few meters down the wall, there’s a young guy smiling to himself and glancing my way every now and then. I’m sort of digging his dirty, unpretentious hipster look and as I am picturing our grungy bodies smashed up against the building lost in a frothy makeout session, he looks over to me and says, “I am Jesus.”

Great, now Montreal has me fantasizing about escaped psych patients.

—Annik Babinski, U3 Cultural Studies

O k C\vas^-e, UUkc) Grill that cheese. Grill it. Flip that bread, just right, and don’t let the cheese melt and bum to the pan. He to tends the midnight meal and fixes her tea, exactly as she likes it: Irish breakfast (in the green little pouch) with milk and honey, for his honey. She sits by, waiting to be served as she shuffles tattered UNO! cards. She gets a cut, worse than a paper cut; playing cards are so damn thick.. .the “SKIP” card has rendered a chasm in her fingertip. She swears quietly, so she doesn’t wake anyone...it hurts, but they’ll play, anyway.

—Francesca Anderson, U3 Anthropology

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Nightingale: My voice is locked out. I thrill in my pale hum. As rays of song emerge, they return as golden arrows from the glass. One shaft reaches me, undoes my tongue, leaves me outside and silent.

She caresses drawers in and out and in, with lisp of hands by open forms and closed. Her fingers bring forth silken sheets, porcelain, manuscripts composed with light hand.

(Reflection breaks endless secrets of ponds.)

Philomel: Along the lines water draws, I tell my story. My picture grows, one long line of script chalked on the edge of the secret, touching it, but keeping the waterlilies to veil.

—Klara du Plessis, U3 English Literature and German Studies

^

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The man met his mother at the train station. He hugged her but could say nothing. On the way home she talked to him about how things were at home. Idle chatter had never interested him.

His distaste showed on his face if never in his voice. He let her talk, as he always did on the phone. W hen they got home he took her bags to the guest room. After lunch his mother took his hand and read him the letters he sent her every week. She missed the sound of his voice.

— Manav Sekhri, U2 Engineering

O u e i\ Falling, he held her. The door reeled, their steps unstable, tittering as they tear shirts and skirts.

Their lips were introduced as were their bodies to the floor. He heard it was her first, the alcohol never lying. It was easy, he’ll tell the boys tomorrow. He forces his hand and dismisses the finery while removing his. She protests, moans, refuses but his mind is deaf. He invades the flesh and she screams, her body objecting. Abruptly he feels a strident pain, the foreign tissue replaced by biting incisors. His horror reveals the myth is true. Vagina Dentada.

—Carina Antczak, U3 Physiology

«

14 • Tuesday, November 24, 2009

A&E

mcgilltribune.com

THEATRE

L etters on love, philosophy, and castration M cG ill D ram a p u ts on story o f A b elard an d H eloise BRAHNA SIEGELBERG Features Editor

Combine philosophical wars in 12thcentury France, a passionate love story, and a bit of testicle chopping, and the result is In Extremis: The Story o f Abelard and Heloise— the latest production from M cGill’s Drama and Theatre program. It’s Howard Brenton’s thought-provoking, comical, and captivating play about the lovers Abelard and Heloise, who are caught in a war between the conser­ vative rhetoric of the age and the desire for change, reason, and most of all, love.

Directed by Professor Sean Carney, In Extremis tells the story of the philosophi­ cally-minded Peter Abelard (Bryn Dewar), who opens a new school of Aristotelian and dialectic learning against the fabric of a fun­ damentalist society, and falls in love with his equally radically-minded student Heloise (Bea Hutcheson). Under the pretext of “pri­ vate tutoring,” the two begin a sexual love af­ fair, made all the more illicit by the fact that Heloise’s uncle and surrogate father Fulbert (Charles Harries), is a canon at Notre Dame.

When Abelard’s progressive philosophies become famous—he becomes a subject of in­

terest for King Louis VI (Fraser Dickson), and zealous advocates of the Catholic Church like Bernard of Clairvaux (Michael Ruderman) — his steamy love affair with Heloise becomes infamous. Having sex everywhere and any­ where, Abelard and Heloise turn a pious mi­ lieu into anything but. And when Bernard’s uncouth lackeys (played with comedic virtuos­ ity by Josh Tal and Marshall Zuem) get a hold of the scandal, they stop at nothing to expose the lovers, and make them pay for attempting to reverse the status quo.

Medieval context aside, this play is thor­ oughly modem in its language and its sensi­ bilities. Connoting the Latin phrase for ‘in the farthest reaches,’ In Extremis grapples with human limitations and boundaries. While as­ serting reason over faith in modern society would hardly cause a stir, the larger questions asked by the play are timeless: where do we draw the line between faith and fundamental­ ism? Between passion and hedonism? To what extent are we willing to go in order to fight for what we believe in? And perhaps most im­ portantly, what do we believe in, if anything at all?

Many of the characters’ assertions can be easily applied to our own time. When Peter attempts to combat Bernard’s fundamental­ ist means of understanding God by asserting that, “He gave us language, and in language,

reason,” Brenton invites the audience to un­ derstand something about their own society: addressing the problems of taking religious dogma too far, and of citing rationality as a reason for abandoning faith. Abelard’s later supplication, “Don’t let the darkness fall on the minds of men,” reminds us that even— perhaps especially—in this more modem age, we are still subject to darkness and to error, and Heloise’s consistent refusal to conform to the oppressive norms of medieval marriage opens up contemporary discourses on issues of femininity.

In this rendition of the play, passionate, sultry, and scandalous moments are matched by equally quirky, comedic, and hilarious ones. Brenton takes the audience into a world of self-immolating monks, gossiping peasants, giggling nuns, and a multitude of drunken buffoons. This pleasing balance of libidinous­ ness, solemnity, and conviviality would be implausible if not for the genuinely striking acting chops of M cGill’s Drama students. As William of Champeaux, Abelard’s vehemently orthodox teacher from whom he breaks and opens a new school, Spencer Malthouse deliv­ ers a brief, yet memorable, sidesplitting per­ formance. Both Dewar and Hutcheson handle their demanding roles with grace, honesty, and professionalism. Harries, strangely believable as a medieval cleric, displays an impressive sense of comedic timing and character acting, while Ruderman is similarly convincing as a steadfast monk. The other members of the en­ semble seamlessly inhabit multiple roles, and are instrumental to the overall success of the performance.

Furthermore, Carney’s direction exhibits not only a first-rate sense of comedic timing, but also a thorough understanding of how to create theatric affects. He demonstrates Moyse H all’s full potential by displaying parts of the action on the staircases alongside the audi­ ence, and allows French Troubadour melodies to punctuate the blackouts in between scenes.

And unlike many of the other plays per­ formed by McGill Drama, In Extremis was ac­ tually written for students to perform. In this

Pop lÿietoric NO SILENT NIGHTS My father will not allow my stepmoth­ er to play Christmas music until the day after Rememberance Day. This isn’t to give our veterans the respect and attention they deserve, but because once she gets started, there will be nothing but Ella Fitzgerald singing “Jingle Bells” in our house. To Americans, it’s apparently blasphemous to play carols before American Thanksgiv­ ing. I personally believe that waiting until the last week of November is much too late to start celebrating Christmas—if you wait until then, you have barely a month of mu­ sical hype, and by the time you get the ad­ vent calendar squares opening, you should already be in the Christmas spirit.

My family’s not religious. When a friend asked me in grade three if I was Jew­ ish or Christian, I told her I was Canadian.

Little has changed since then. I love Christ­ mas for baking, decorations, Dr. Seuss’How

The Grinch Stole Christmas, family time, and Christmas music. And people who don’t like Christmas music, you had better keep your mouth shut, because you’re hating on the closest thing I have to a religion.

I understand the problem with listen­ ing to holiday music too early—if carol­ ing started in September, it would be hard to stay excited about it in December—but I cannot understand those who don’t want it to start at all. Yes, there are some Christmas music compilations that never should have been made (the Celine Dion or 98 Degrees holiday albums), but that’s no reason to take your anger out on amazing, heartwarming music covered by talented artists. James Taylor puts together the perfect collection for sipping hot chocolate, and even indie darlings Bright Eyes have A Christmas Album to warm even the coldest hipster heart. Pretty much every genre has good Christmas covers, so there’s no way you can argue that carols just aren’t your cup of

tea—unless you hate every genre of music.

There’s We Wish You a Metal Xmas if classic Elvis isn’t your thing, and it feels like every pop star from Mariah Carey to N ’Sync has done their time singing “Holy Night.” Heck, Bob Dylan just released a Christmas album this year, which shocked critics everywhere by actually being pretty good. And I assure you, Mr. Zimmerman did not grow up with a Christmas tree.

Can’t stand the classic carols? I ’ll admit that “The Twelve Days of Christmas” be­ comes a little repetitive, and “Little Drum­ mer Boy” gets tiring with all those “ba-dumba-dum-dums.” But you’re not limited to the classics: Sufjan Stevens has a five-CD set of Christmas songs, half of which are original pieces h e’s written himself, full of the fla­ vour of the holidays without the over-done taste. Still, I take issue with those Grinches bashing the classics: can you truthfully tell me your heart doesn’t grow a couple sizes bigger each time “It’s Beginning to Look

JESSICA DISMONT

Bryn Dewar crosses teacher-student bondaries as Abelard. sense, then, the issues explored are not only applicable to modem times, but relatable for an audience of university students. As Car­ ney notes, “W ho better to embody the energy, idealism and commitment at the heart of the drama than a generation of young adults who have not yet been asked to compromise their own ideals by the cynicism of the modem world?”

In Extremis will leave you on the edge of your seat if not because you can’t wait to see what’s going to happen next, then simply because the writing is so artful, the banter so snappy, and the acting so dead on.

In Extremis: The Story of Abelard and Heloise plays at Moyse Hall, November 25-28

at 7:30p.m.

LAURA TINDAL A Lot Like Christmas” comes on? Even if you’re not Christian, if you grew up in North America, you should associate that song with being out of school for the holidays and watching Home Alone.

You don’t have to like Christmas. And you definitely don’t have to like Jesus. But 1 don’t believe anybody who says they don’t like Christmas music. There’s so much se­ lection out there, so much opportunity for hilarious covers (Alice Cooper’s “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” anyone?), and I bet you your favourite musician has a Christ­ mas cover lurking out there somewhere on the Internet. Arcade Fire has a Christmas album, while Run DMC and Britney Spears have released Christmas-themed singles. I think the only legitimate arguments you can have about Christmas music are whether the Muppets do a better rendition of “Santa Baby” than Kylie Minogue, or when is the appropriate date to start blasting “Silent Night” from your speakers.

Curiosity Delivers

Tuesday, November 24, 2009 • 15

THEATRE

The original anti-C hoose L ife m ovem ent Irvine W elsh ’s cult novel com es to P layers ’ Theatre JOHANU BOTHA Contributor

“Feeling fucking filthy!”

This was director Joel Burford’s answer when asked how he wants the audience to walk away from Trainspotting, Players’ The­ atre’s second installment of the season. And for the most part, I did. Burford’s take on the play—based on Irvine Welsh’s hit novel—is edgy, raw, and downright dirty; not quite what fans of the film might expect. “The movie is hip and cool but the play is real. ... People have problems and they often die with these problems,” Burford says.

On a sparse (perhaps too sparse) stage, the action takes place with excessive light switch­ ing to denote change of location or time. This adds to the overall frantic feel of the piece, but it still feels like something is lacking. The only physical location represented is that of a shabby bedroom, which unravels along with the play to its unnerving climax.

Trainspotting addresses some big ques­ tions. Though drugs and the Scottish national identity come to the surface as major themes, they are also conduits for more universal thoughts, such as the search for and creation of meaning. Is everything we do mere blocks to build structure and pleasure in our minds?

Or is there something inherently worthwhile in our existence? In their endless spiral down into the darkest parts of Edinburgh’s psyche, a group of young people try to answer these questions with heroin and their own murky

ADAM SCOTTI

In Players’ Theatre’s Trainspotting, some people are willing to do anything for just one more hit. livelihoods constantly acting as catalysts.

This group is represented by four unique characters who guide—or shove—us through the journey. Mark (Martin Law) is the primary narrator, with whom the others’ lives are in­ tertwined. With him we travel to the grittiest of pubs, the sketchiest of shoot-up bedrooms, and the loneliest of train stations. We are with him in intimate moments, where the idea of friendship momentarily trumps all else, and we are with him when he flushes his bowels in a grimy toilet, drugs having shaken any defini­ tion of dignity from him.

The actors do well, performing cohe­

sively as a group and maintaining unwavering, stellar Scottish accents from start to finish.

Yet only Daniel Sorger (Tommy) finds mo­ ments of subtlety in his acting to really make the audience lean forward in their seats. This, though, is perhaps because of the play Burford envisioned, one that wants audience members cringing back in their seats. He is successful — but glimpses of quiet and gentleness, such as when Mark gingerly hands Tommy heroin when he most needs it, add depth to the char­ acters and make the intense sequences that much more intense, and the play could have benefited from more of them.

Near the end, Alyson (Grace Glowicki) is lit separately from scenes involving Franco (played with ceaseless fury by David Moote), Mark and Tommy. This puts sadness in her observation that allows the audience to, for a moment, really ache for these people. At one point she yells out, “What fuckin’ planet are we on?” And it is with this existential ques­ tion, for better or for worse, that you leave the play.

Trainspotting plays November 25-28 at 8 p.m. at Players ’ Theatre.

MUSIC

T im ber T im bre sum m ons up atm ospheric spook factor Taylor K ir k ’s band shakes it up with unlikely venues RYAN TAYLOR Contributor

Taylor Kirk is a thoughtful guy. It’s three minutes into our interview and the man behind Toronto gothic-folk-blues outfit Timber Tim­ bre hasn’t even answered the first question.

H e’s silent every few seconds and speaks in drawn-out phrases, not because he’s evading or has no response, but because you can tell he’s carefully formulating his words, picking and choosing those most apt to say precisely what he means.

Such is the music found on his latest selftitled album. Every note has a reason and every word is meaningful. There isn’t one upbeat track in the bunch, but that doesn’t stop Tim­ ber Timbre from being a knockout of mood, atmosphere, and subtlety.

Recently signed to Canadian indiepowerhouse Arts & Crafts, Timber Timbre is arguably the apple that falls furthest from the tree. After all, dark blues is a far cry from the fuzzed-out stylings of label-mates Broken Social Scene or the blue-collar rock of Con­ stantines. Listening to the album, you can practically see Kirk recording by candlelight in a dilapidated log cabin in the dead of night.

This isn’t what he did, but there is still a defi­ nite spookiness surrounding the music. Kirk knows how to make a listener uneasy—even when it’s only accidental.

“I like being manipulative to an extent.

[But] that’s not the goal of the songwriting.

There’s certainly parts of the instrumenta­ tion that are designed that way or designed to evoke a physiological reaction to stimulate those kinds of emotions for sure,” says Kirk.

“This spook factor that everyone keeps talking about, I didn’t think of it that way when I was writing the songs or coming up with the music.

It seemed really natural to go that way.”

Still, with all his recent success, Kirk pre­ fers to avoid the spotlight, something that has only increased the enigmatic aura of Timber Timbre both on and off stage. “ [Performing] just never really feels like a really natural place for me to be. I have a more studious approach, I guess,” says Kirk.

“I just don’t like the public presence. It’s not that I don’t like performing—I do. When it goes well, there’s no better feeling. It’s just not where I feel like I thrive.”

Though he may shy away from deserved attention, the music speaks for itself. Kirk and company have received critical acclaim for a live show that recreates the haunting musical landscapes found on the record. Granted, such a task is easier when there are certain degrees of control.

“I try to be particular about where we play,” says Kirk. “It’s kind of hard. Most shows happen in bars and those don’t always come with their own inherent atmospheric qualities or don’t even necessarily allow for a performer to create an atmosphere. It goes back to feeling vulnerable as a performer and

not really bouncing around on stage or putting on a typical rock show. It’s more about the music and w hat’s happening between the play­ ers on stage. We’re also a very dynamic band and I feel like we do our best shows when we are able to control the environment, so often a more formal space seems to work better for what w e’re doing.”

The focus on performance environment has led to some unconventional venue choic­ es, at least by traditional folk/blues standards.

Kirk has played churches, halls, the front stairs of an old stone house lit only by torchlight— and even a north Toronto public library.

“That was a dream show,” laughs Kirk of the library performance. “I didn’t really know what to expect. It was so cool to have that many people sitting cross-legged on the floor and dead silent.”

However, cross-legged isn’t the only op­ tion at Timber Timbre shows. At one show there were only half à dozen people, but it ended up being the first performance where the audience started to dance. “I don’t know whether they were feeling our pain for playing a kind of sad, empty room, but they actually got up and were doing really spooky dancing.”

Timber Timbre is definitely not your normal indie band, and may not have normal shows. But that’s nothing to sing the blues about.

JACKMAN CHIU

Timber Timbre plays Casa Del Popolo on November 25.

It’s one thing to write about “Houses of the Holy,” but it’s another to play in them.

mcgilltribune.com

16 • Tuesday, November 24, 2009

FILM

MUSIC

G ood H ustle A postle o f H ustle changes up

N othing short o f fantastic W es A n d e rso n ’s F antastic Mr. F ox teaches P ixar a lesson

RYAN TAYLOR Contributor

KYLE CARPENTER A & E Editor

Change is a good thing, and no one em­ braces this better than Apostle of Hustle front­ man Andrew Whiteman. His band has put out three records that differ vastly: the laid-back vibe of Folkloric Feel, the dense and, techni­ cal National Anthem o f Nowhere, and most recently, the dark textures of Eats Darkness.

They’re a hard band to pin down and fully un­ derstand, but they’re never boring.

The indie rock band is fresh off a very positive tour opening for Gogol Bordello. “We felt we were with some very like-minded peo­ ple,” Whiteman says. “We definitely had our work cut out for us because [the audiences] didn’t really know who we were. It was very fun. It was a big challenge for just two people to step out in front of 1,500 people and try and get a reaction. That’s kind of our job. It’s like foreplay. You just have to warm them up and get them ready.”

The “we” Whiteman speaks of are him­ self and drummer Dean Stone, who current­ ly make up the touring band. Bassist Julian Brown was unavailable, but this new configu­ ration ended up being a musically transforma­ tive experience for the band.

“Me and Dean had to figure out a show with just the two of us, which was pretty dif­ ficult,” says Whiteman. “If you’re in a 10-per­ son band and one person leaves it’s not that big of a deal, but if you’re in a trio and one person leaves you’ve got to turn a bunch of the songs upside down if you’re going to play them. We had to do that, but it’s been working out.”

But reworking songs is nothing new for Apostle, and even as a trio the band is known for frequently rearranging its songs. Tracks like “National Anthem of Nowhere” have be­ come barely recognizable over the past year.

Switching up genres and tempo, the lyrics often become the only vestige of the song’s original version.

“We are constantly tapering and chang­ ing and rewriting and adding parts and taking parts away and changing rhythms and time signatures,” says Whiteman. “We naturally do that, but just having two people we had to re­ ally kick that into overdrive.”

The band’s songs also have a newfound energy on this tour, picking up on some of the manic gypsy-punk liveliness of Gogol Bor­ dello.

Apostle of Hustle plays II Motore on Fri­ day in one of the last chances to see them for some time. Whiteman will be on the road for most of next year playing in his other band, Broken Social Scene. In W hiteman’s words, he has to answer when BSS calls.

“I do Apostle of Hustle because it’s love and it’s obsession, I have to do it, but there’s absolutely zero money involved. I ’m lucky enough to be able to make my money playing music [with Broken Social Scene], being able to pay my rent playing music. It’s a very, very rare situation so I have to honour that.”

But that doesn’t mean 2010 is going to be a quiet year for Apostle. The band is releasing a stoner movie called Demand Age and plans to put out an album they recorded with Haitian voodoo priest Jean-Baptiste Bonga. Apostle of Hustle sure knows how to keep things from getting boring.

Apostle o f Hustle plays II Motore on No­ vember 27.

Wes Anderson, the dark, funny mind behind Rushmore and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, tackles stop-motion animation in Fantastic Mr. Fox, an adaptation of the popu­ lar Roald Dahl children’s novel. The unusual animation technique gives the film an appear­ ance somewhere between Wallace & Gromit and Team America', either way, it’s a refreshing break from Pixar’s CGI prowess, which lost its charm right around Finding Nemo.

The film has no shortage of big-name ce­ lebrities and Anderson regulars: George Cloo­ ney voices Mr. Fox with Meryl Streep as Mrs. Fox and Jason Swartzman as their son, Ash. Other contributors include Bill Murray (who is unfortunately underused), Willem Defoe, and Owen Wilson. The cast is there, and, luckily, the film is able to live up to its vocal talent.

Fantastic Mr. Fox is the story of a charm­ ing, albeit mischievous fox who is stuck in a rut after he promises his wife that he will give up stealing and settle down ( Ocean’s Eleven, anyone?). When he decides to (literally) move up in the world, Mr. Fox is tempted by the bounty of his nasty neighbours’ farms and be-

ALLMOVIEPHOTO.COM

Yes, George Clooney is a fox. We get it. gins to fall into his old ways, which comes at the cost of his family’s safety.

Much of the film’s humour early on stems from Mr. Fox’s frustration with living the so-called American dream—that is, if you trade in the suburbs for a foxhole. Therein lies one of the film’s main points of criticism: it’s funny, but not made for children. Much of the film’s humour would be lost on a child—like the quips about platinum credit cards and the

recurring joke of substituting the word “cuss” for actual swear w ords—but then again the film was never marketed as the next Incredibles. Instead of being like the Disney movies that mixed in humour for the parents as well as the kids, this one is pretty much just for the parents.

For an animated film, Fantastic Mr. Fox successfully keeps the viewer’s attention. It is engrossing aesthetically, as the animation changes depending on the action. When the camera is far away, it feels like you’re look­ ing at a set of toys on a giant landscape, while scenes involving Mr. Fox and his partner in crime Kylie (an opossum) climbing an elec­ tric fence, flash their bodies between how they normally appear and black paper cutouts to simulate electricity running through them.

Anderson’s trademark deadpan humour shines throughout the film, while the quirky visuals and talented cast each add an important element. The story is clever, sweet, and much of it surprisingly easy to relate to. Although it may not be the book you remember reading as a child, Fantastic Mr. Fox allows you to enjoy the story as an adult, as well.

Curiosity Delivers

Tuesday, November 24, 2009 • 17

BOOKS

L ove triangle takes shape in pristine cottage country The L ast W oman looks at F irst N ations land a n d culture loss CARLA BRAGAGNOLO Contributor

The love triangle is a fairly unoriginal plot line, but John Bemrose’s newest novel, The Last Woman, gives it a welcome twist. Set during a drought in northern Ontario during the 1980s, Bemrose’s story unfurls on Lake Nigushi, which is familiar territory for the jour­ nalist from Paris, Ontario. Bemrose, an avid canoeist, captures the quiet simplicity of the Northern cottage country, while consistently reminding the reader of environmental issues faced by the people who inhabit the area.

The initial chapters are devoted to intro­ ducing Bemrose’s three main characters. Anne and Richard have reached a plateau in their marriage, and both are consumed by work and the reality of not being as successful as they once hoped. They have a cottage on the lake,

where most of the novel takes place, which was inherited from Anne’s father. The return of Billy, a former chief of the local Ojibway tribe and Anne’s former lover, plunges the couple back into thoughts of their pasts.

Where this love triangle differs is in Billy and Richard’s genuine friendship. Ten years previously the two men had fought against the odds to try and win a land claim for the local people on Pine Island. Much of the novel flips back to old memories of better times when there was harmony among the three. A great­ er plot line is intertwined here, as Bemrose touches on a deep-seated Canadian issue of First Nations land rights and ownership. More than once, the reader feels sorry for the Na­ tive tribe whose home is mercilessly being de­ stroyed by clear-cutting and industrialization.

Instead of job opportunities and prosperity, the changes have led to a cultural deterioration shown in glimpses of those who have lost faith in themselves and in their way of life. The reader feels fortunate and humbled when Be­

mrose explores Billy’s inner thoughts to reveal his relationship with his spiritual powers; in such instances, Bemrose shines as he reveals his passion about these issues which he writes about with an impressive fervor.

Encapsulating these conflicts is Anne’s most recent painting, “The Last Woman,” which portrays a primitive, powerful woman being terrorized by small figures attacking her.

The reader is made to understand the symbol­ ism of the painting and the connection to what is happening to the beautiful forest around them.

While some parts of the novel are come­ dic, they are not Bemrose’s strongest, and the overarching melancholic tone is far more ef­ fective. The Last Woman's, strongest feature is its characters. Anne is caught between her roles as a wife and mother, versus the passion­ ate woman she is with Billy. Her inner con­ flicts are plausible, as are the changes in her character the reader notices when she is around Billy compared to her husband. Bemrose cre­

ated brilliant characters, who are believable in the Northern Ontario setting.

The manner in which the plot unfolds, through a series of flashbacks, is somewhat confusing upon first read. With a second read though, one picks up on subtle things like the tension between Billy and Richard upon their first few encounters, which were overlooked before.

The problem with The Last Woman is that it does not deal with original issues. NonCanadians may also have a hard time relating to the story and its characters. That being said, Bemrose skillfully captures the subtle beauty of an open lake enclosed by coniferous trees and wildlife, where one can still feel as if one is visiting places untouched by man. In a city as densely populated as Montreal, The Last Woman was the literary equivalent of a breath of fresh air.

C D R E V IE W S

THEM CROOKED VOITURES

Norah Jones. The Fall After three Grammy Award-winning al­ bums, Norah Jones has decided to take a more rock ‘n ’ roll direction with her latest album The Fall. Jones collaborated with producer Jacquire King—who has worked with Kings of Leon, Tom Waits, and Modest M ouse— and recruited Ryan Adams, Jesse Harris, and Will Sheff of Okkervil River to spice up her songwriting. Though The Fall presents a laud­ able evolution in Jones' sound, it is neither a radical rupture from her previous work nor a return to her unparalleled contemporary jazz vocal work.

The album’s first single “Chasing Pirates” is catchy and upbeat—easily distinguishable from Jones’ more ambient, coffee shop-ready hits like “Sunrise” and “Come Away With Me.” Standout tracks “Even Though” and “You’ve Ruined Me” are similarly pleasing, but the album is ultimately anticlimactic and splattered with unmemorable songs. “Back to Manhattan” is nothing more than nap-induc­ ing, while “Young Blood” is a lacklustre waste of four minutes. “Light as a Feather,” however, is a beautifully melancholy, downtempo Sarah McLaughlin-esque tune, which suggests that Jones is at her best with chill night-drivingappropriate music.

Diehard Jones fans will be happy to hear that mesmerizing familiar voice playing to a slightly different tune. While the album over­ all is pleasant and enjoyable, the tracks just don’t have possess the “It” factor of her previ­ ous mega-hits. Jazz is clearly Jones’ strongest suit—and she’d be wise to return to it on fu­ ture albums.

—Carolyn Grégoire

Joss Stone: Colour Me Free!

Colour Me Free! is the newest album

Robbie Williams: Reality Killed The Video Star

Them Crooked Crooked Vultures

by Joss Stone, the soulful, bohemian singersongwriter you may remember from her rock­ in’ performance at the 2005 Grammy’s with Melissa Ethridge, covering Janis Joplin. Her choice was apt, since for the most part, Stone’s music is a healthy, unique mix between Norah Jones, Lauryn Hill, and, yes, Janis Joplin her­ self. Although it sounds similar to her earlier albums (2003’s The Soul Sessions, 2004’s Mind, Body, and Soul, and 2007’s Introducing Joss Stone), Stone has revealed that, unlike her previous work, Colour Me Free! was writ­ ten and recorded in roughly a week.

The opening track, “Free M e,” is the catchiest song on the album. It’s also spattered with Stone’s occasional background laugh­ ter, which is a nice, complementary addition to the groovy instrumentals. Another notable song is the bonus track, “Mr. Wankerman,” a cool 13-plus-minute-long track, which sounds almost improvised and which is available only on the UK release. "4 and 20" is strong in its use of effective jazz piano, giving the album some soul. The album also features a few guest artists, including Nas and guitar legend Jeff Beck.

Colour Me Free! is a lovely, chilled-out collection carried by Stone’s raspy, soulful voice, sounding like the classic African-Amer­ ican singers of the past—despite the fact that she’s as white as can be. Nevertheless, Stone has created an album that could be listened to at any tim e—and one that should be.

Robbie Williams, tired of being fat and unsuccessful in his search for aliens in the des­ ert, decided to return to centre stage with his new album, Reality Killed the Video Star.

Nevertheless, this doesn’t feel like Wil­ liam s’ big comeback. H e’s told the media, “D on’t call it a comeback, look what I invent­ ed here.” Sadly, after looking and searching, it seems that everything on the album has been done before.

Indeed, after his failed attempt at branch­ ing out with his previous work—Rudebox was a complete disaster—Williams has returned to his original style. Reality is reminiscent of 200l ’s Swing When You’re Winning: it com­ bines digitalized electro-wannabe songs such as “Bodies” or “Difficult for Weirdos” with more lyrical ballads like “Deception” and “Morning Sun.” The contrasting combination of faster and slower paced songs had the po­ tential to be a nice blend, but it instead results in a sweet and sour mix that leaves a bitter taste when listening to the album in one sit­ ting.

Even though it was this exact recipe that turned Williams into an idol, it doesn’t work as well the eighth time around. Perhaps Wil­ liams finally found the UFOs he says h e’s been searching for his whole life and was ab­ ducted and replaced by a less talented version of himself.

Keep listening if you happen to hear one of Reality’s songs on the radio, but don’t rush out to buy a copy of this Williams imperson­ ator’s album.

There are few bands that live up to the moniker “power trio,” and fewer still can ac­ curately be called a “supergroup.” However, Them Crooked Vultures—the pet project of Dave Grohl, John Paul Jones, and Josh Hom­ m e—might just be both. Their self-titled debut is bluesy yet hard-hitting, filled with grungy jams and killer guitar riffs. It doesn’t sound like Foo Fighters. It doesn’t sound like Led Zeppelin. It doesn’t sound like Queens of the Stone Age. Okay, maybe it sounds a little bit like Queens of the Stone Age, especially in “Bandoliers,” but that is by no means a bad thing.

There are touches of Zeppelin in there as well, best seen in “Elephants,” which boasts arguably the biggest opening riff of the year (not bad for a November release), and “Rep­ tiles,” which has got a bit of “Houses of the Holy” and “Kashmir” to it. Grohl pulls the whole thing together on drums, where he plays the big, steady, complimentary grooves h e’s known for with a touch flare every once in a w hile—like the fills at the end of “Nobody Loves Me & Neither Do I.” The one drawback to the album is that there’s a lot of jamming going on. Three of the songs are about seven minutes long, with an average of about four or five minutes for the rest. However, when you get three musical giants together in one room, what the hell do you expect?

— Alex Knoll

— Sam Jessula

Vultures:

Them

—Kyle Carpenter

Sports

18 • Tuesday, November 24, 2009

mcgilltribune.com

REDMEN BASKETBALL- MCGILL 102, BISHOP’S 88

Redmen gallop over Gaiters in team’s final home game T h o rn h ill’s career-high 35 points p ro p els M cG ill to victory KAILAN LEUNG Sports Editor

Bishop’s Head Coach Rod Gilpin used every defensive tactic in his playbook on Fri­ day night. Double teams. Switches. Half court traps. Zones. No matter the defensive scheme, the result was always the same: swish.

Playing in their final home game of the semester, the McGill men’s basketball team put on an offensive clinic against the visiting Gaiters, shooting 60 per cent from the field and an outstanding 68.8 per cent from behind the arc en route to a convincing 102-88 victory.

Senior Matt Thornhill scored a careerhigh 35 points as McGill broke the game open late in the fourth quarter. The offensive out­ burst was a refreshing sight for Redmen Head Coach Craig Norman, who has been searching for consistency from his veterans all season. “ [Thornhill] struggled in the preseason,” said Norman. “But you know what, the kid

works his [tail] off every practice and the last three games he’s been unreal. H e’s been our leading scorer, but h e’s [also been] rebounding and playing defence on the toughest guys [...]

He hit twos, he hit threes, he posted guys up.

He did it all.”

Thornhill came alive late in the second quarter, stealing an inbounds pass after hitting a free throw, and then knocking down a fade­ away jum per at the halftime buzzer. When the visitors looked primed to get back in the game midway through the fourth quarter, it was the fourth-year guard who responded by hitting consecutive shots from long range to put the game out of reach. Thornhill downplayed his own performance, preferring to focus on the importance of the win.

“It just shows that if [we] play hard, we can score, and really gel on offence,” he said.

“We have to take care of some defensive stuff, but overall it was a good win for us, and it gives us some momentum.”

Despite M cGill’s success from the field, the Redmen struggled from the free throw line, connecting on less than 60 per cent of

ALICE WALKER

their chances. McGill could have easily put the game away in the third quarter, but their dismal' free throw shooting allowed the Gai­ ters multiple opportunities to come from be­ hind. Defensively, the Redmen were slow to close out Bishop’s shooters, and coughed the ball up 16 times. Nevertheless, Norman knows that his team will have to improve defensively if they wish to compete with the top teams in their conference.

“It was frustrating as a coach,” he said.

“W e’re trying to pride ourselves on our de­ fence, because I don’t think we have the fire­ power to put up the numbers that we [have been]. We shot the ball at an unbelievable clip, but we kept letting [Bishop’s] back in the bas­ ketball game because of mental lapses on the defensive end of the floor.”

Thornhill echoed his coach’s sentiments, and stressed the need to put teams away early in the game.

“We have to take care of the little things,” he said. “We can’t turn the ball over like we did. We can’t allow [the opposition] to have fast-break layups, and we have to get our helpside [defence] straightened out.”

However, the Redmen would gladly live with their defensive shortcomings from Friday night if it meant replicating that type of scintil­ lating offence every game. Thornhill was not the only member of the squad to come up with a big gam e—freshman forward Nic Langley scored a career-high 18 points to go along with four rebounds and an assist in just 16 minutes of court time. The 6-foot-6 Missoula, Montana native shot seven-for-10 from the field and used his height to help stymie the Gaiter’s bigmen. McGill benefited greatly from the steady play of senior point guard Jeff Cumming, who recorded a season-high 10 assists. Seniors Pawel Herra and Michael White contributed

T h ir d M an I n A DARKER SIDE OF SPORTS Robert Enke had everything going for him. He was the captain of Hannover 96, a top-tier soccer team in the German Bundesliga. He was slated to be Germany’s number one goalkeeper for the 2010 World Cup. To most outside observers, Enke had the per­ fect life—a big bank account, a beautiful wife and his dream job. That was until last Tuesday, when Enke committed suicide by jumping in front of a train near his home­ town in Hannover.

His death rocked Germany and sent shockwaves through the sports world. Can you recall a player of Enke’s status in any other sport committing suicide in the prime of their career? Having difficulty? That’s be­ cause it rarely, if ever, happens. Enke had been dealing with severe depression for six years, struggling to overcome the death of his two-year-old daughter Lara, who passed

away in 2007. For Enke, the battle with de­ pression became increasingly one-sided, and he finally took his own life only minutes away from the cemetery in which his daugh­ ter was buried.

Mental illness is not just a big issue in soccer—it affects almost every sport, and is becoming an increasingly hot topic in the media. Some players have been able to deal with it effectively, while others have had a more difficult time facing their par­ ticular psychological conditions. Most re­ cently, Delonte West, a shooting guard for the Cleveland Cavaliers, missed the team ’s first 10 games of the season due to undis­ closed “personal issues.” West admitted last year that he has suffered from severe depression and bipolar disorder all his life.

He expressed doubts about being able to continue his basketball career prior to the 2008 season, even though he was a major factor in Cleveland’s 66-win season a year ago. Since returning from his hiatus, West

has struggled to replicate his form from last year so far this season.

In 2005, Zach Greinke of the Kansas City Royals led the American League in losses and subsequently quit baseball for six weeks. Greinke admitted that he had been dealing with social anxiety disorder and de­ pression his whole life. However, the Royals pitcher has since prevailed over his mental health issues, and was named the American League Cy Young Award winner this past Wednesday.

The stories of Enke, West, and Greinke serve to remind us all of a very important message: athletes are human. Fans often hold athletes to unrealistic standards. Superstars aren’t “supposed” to be depressed. In a profession where mental toughness is every­ thing, any sort of psychological fragility can be viewed as a sign of weakness. Yet these tales remind us that athletes are mortal, and very often have to battle their own demons in order to succeed.

ALICE WALKER

Pawel Herra was a triple threat for McGill.

19 and 18 points, respectively, with Herra hit­ ting six threes in the game. White, the team ’s most productive post player, benefited from his teammates’ hot shooting.

“It opened up everything,” he said. “It means that there is one less guy w ho’s going to come down and concentrate on me. [The defence] knows that if they come down on me I ’m going to pass it out and guys can knock down shots. It opens up everything inside, so nothing but pluses for me when guys can hit shots from outside like that.”

Unfortunately, the Redmen failed to ride their momentum to a win on Saturday, falling to Concordia, 69-65, despite Thornhill’s 16point, 10-rebound performance. M cGill’s re­ cord now stands at 2-3 in conference play, and the team will take a month off before returning to the courts for the UQAM Holiday Tourna­ ment, which runs from December 27-29.

—

JON RUBENSTEIN

Unfortunately for Enke, he hid his mental disorder for years—not even his teammates knew about it. Perhaps the Han­ nover keeper would still be here today had he chosen to go public with his problem.

However, Enke’s wife told reporters that the keeper did not want his depression known because he was worried that the couple’s re­ cently adopted baby daughter might be taken away. While Enke was unable to see one of his daughters grow up, he could not bear the thought of ever losing another child.

Over 45,000 fans attended a funeral service for Enke at Hannover stadium last Sunday. After the emotional service, Enke was buried next to his daughter, Lara. The tragedy of Enke’s death has left the sports world shocked and puzzled, but also under­ scored one important fact: mental illness is a reality, and no one is immune to it, not even the superstars we see on TV.

Curiosity Delivers

Tuesday, November 24, 2009 • 19

REDMEN H O CKEY- MCGILL 5, U O IT1

Redmen rock Ridgebacks with balanced attack Five separate pla yers fin d the back o f the net in M cG ill win MATT CHESSER Opinion Editor

Best known as an academic powerhouse, McGill University has been forging a new repputation for itself as the home of arguably the best hockey program in the country. And while the McGill Redmen haven’t enjoyed the same level of success as their female counterparts— who have won 64 consecutive games against Canadian opponents—they continue to be one of the most underrated men’s hockey powers in the CIS. McGill has qualified for Nationals in three out of the last four years and has lost only six of its last 34 games (dating back to the middle of last season). And despite losing their top two goal scorers, their best defenceman, their starting goaltender, and their head coach from last season, the Redmen have con­ tinued to excel, picking up a 5-1 victory over the University of Ontario Institute of Technol­ ogy Ridgebacks on Friday night to improve their record to 8-1 this season.

Friday night’s victory was a testament to the three important attributes that have led the Redmen to success over the past five seasons: speed, balanced scoring, and good goaltend­ ing. Five different McGill players notched goals, and goaltender Hubert Morin made 25 saves as the Redmen survived a sluggish start to knock off the Ridgebacks.

“It took us a little while to get in gear and start playing like we know we can, and as soon as we did that we were fine,” said Head Coach Jim Webster. “We’re a hard team to play against. We compete, we work hard for loose pucks, w e’re fast, and when w e’re ready for a team w e’re pretty hard to beat.”

The Ridgebacks seemed to catch the Red­ men off-guard in the first 30 minutes of action, and notched the gam e’s first goal early in the second frame. Leading goal-scorer Kyle Wettering snapped a quick shot through M orin’s five-hole to give UOIT a 1-0 lead.

“We were a little surprised by how good [UOIT was] tonight,” said Webster. “The [OUA Western Conference] is very strong so we were perhaps fooled a bit by their record. We’re a pretty fast team, and they stuck with us, but ultimately I think our speed and conditioning on all of our lines wore them down.”

The Redmen answered back with two goals over a 33-second span late in the sec­ ond period to start a second-half onslaught in which McGill would score five unanswered goals and outshoot UOIT 17-6.

Defenceman Marc-André Dorion made an excellent play on M cGill’s first goal, dropping to one knee to keep the puck in at the blueline and firing a pass to Guillaume Doucet, who, in turn, made a nice pass to set-up Simon Marcotte-Légaré for his second goal o f the season.

32 seconds later, Marc-André Daneau took a nifty backhand pass from Simon Belzile on a two-on-two rush and chipped the puck over UOIT netminder Jason Guy’s glove to give the Redmen a 2-1 lead.

Belzile, Doucet, and captain Yan Turcotte would score for the Redmen in the third pe­ riod to complete the rout. Second-year centre Maxime Langelier-Parent finished with three

assists on the night.

“We had to be patient tonight,” said Tur­ cotte. “We didn’t know much about UOIT, and when you don’t know a team, sometimes there’s a bit of adjusting at the start. We waited for them to have problems with our speed and our system in the second and third periods and then we took it to them.”

Morin, a sophomore netminder who was unspectacular in five starts last season, had a strong game to cement his place as M cGill’s number one goaltender—a position he’ll like­ ly keep when fellow sophomore keeper Dany Mireault returns from a fractured collarbone that has kept him out since the third game of the season. Aside from a poor outing in an 8-4 loss to Laurier, Morin has been solid between the pipes for McGill, and boasts the third-best save percentage in the league at .919.

“H e’s definitely playing above the level that he played at last year, and hopefully his confidence is growing with every game that he

JULIA WEBSTER

McGill winger Evan Vossen looks for a scoring opportunity against Concordia. starts for us,” said Webster. “Our guys have a lot of confidence in his ability.”

The Redmen begin a massive nine-game road trip on Tuesday against the Ottawa GeeGees in the nation’s capital. The trip includes back-to-back exhibition games against the sec­ ond-ranked Alberta Golden Bears, and should reveal how McGill stacks up against some of the best teams in the country.

“It will be an important trip for us,” said Webster. “I’ve told [the team] from the be­ ginning that our goal should be the National Championships. They finished strong last year with 12 rookies on the team, and now all those rookies are second-year players who’ve come back hungry and more experienced. So we should be able to build on that and be even better this year.”

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