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Volume 97, Issue 43

March 20, 2008

THE

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News

The McGill Daily • Thursday, March 20, 2008

SSMU calls by-election

UQAM strike persists through injunction ALI WITHERS

JENNIFER MARKOWITZ

News Writer

The McGill Daily

N

ewly-acclaimed SSMU VP Finance & Operations Peter Newhook declared his resignation Monday, triggering a byelection to fill the position.

Newhook claimed his resignation was motivated by personal issues.

“I was learning fast, and I felt ready [for the position], but it didn’t make sense for me to delay [graduating for] a whole year,” Newhook said.

Setting election dates normally calls for a vote of Council, but since Council was not scheduled to meet until next week, on Monday executives used their power to call for a by-election. Every executive save VP University Affairs Adrian Angus, who disagreed with the others’ interpretation of the SSMU by-laws, voted in favour of a by-election.

This year’s SSMU elections were marked by several candidate dropouts – including that of fellow Finance & Operations candidate Rushil Mistry, who rescinded his candidacy on March 4 – but the resignation of an executive so quickly after the election brings the Students’ Society into unprecedented territory.

“Executives don’t normally resign, so this isn’t a situation we’ve dealt with before,” said Corey Shefman, Elections McGill’s Chief Electoral Officer.

Nominations for the position opened on Monday and will last until April 1. While no candidacies have been confirmed yet, several students have expressed interest.

Yahel Carmon, a U2 Political Science and Economics student and the SSMU Speaker, worked closely with Newhook during his campaign and is now considering candidacy.

“Simply, I need to talk to my family and see if it is the right place for me at the moment.... I want to be confident that if I don’t run there is a candidate who can do the job,” Carmon said, noting that he will decide after seeing who else is running.

A newbie to student politics, U2 Accounting and Finance student Tobias Silverstein has also expressed interest.

Campaigning for the by-election begins April 2 and continues until April 8. Polling runs from April 7-11.

The last resignation from a SSMU executive position was four years ago, when President Alam Ali stepped down that September.

SSMU did not hold a by-election, and the VP University Affairs assumed the President’s role.

Last year saw SSMU’s most recent by-election, when Presidential candidate Floh Herra-Vega contested Elections McGill’s enforcement of electoral rules, causing the original election to be invalidated.

3

A

chain of 150 student demonstrators joined hands Tuesday to protest a court-approved temporary injunction on student protests at l’Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), where stringent plans to dig the university out of its deep debt are being finalized.

The injunction, which lasts until March 27, was imposed by the UQAM administration last week and approved by the Quebec Superior Court on Tuesday. It aims to prevent UQAM’s 14,000 striking students from disturbing the regular class schedule, or demonstrating within 100 metres of campus.

Tuesday’s human chain assembled just outside of the 100-metre boundary. Any infringements on the injunction can result in a $50,000 fine.

“We’re going to respect the injunction within limits,” said EveLyne Couturieu, communications officer for the striking Association facultaire étudiante de science politique et droit at UQAM “We’re also going to look for other means to proceed,” she added.

Another protest is planned for today at 2 p.m. in Berri Square.

Strikes and demonstrations began breaking out at UQAM last semester, as part of a provincial movement against the defreeze of tuition fees.

But the movement eventually shifted focus to oppose cost-cutting plans forwarded by the UQAM administration that aim to pull the university out of its $350-million debt.

PriceWaterhouseCoopers, hired

Ali Withers for The McGill Daily

UQAM students joined hands in a human chain Tuesday.

by UQAM to draft a plan de redressement, released its final financial plan on March 5. Among other measures, the report calls for increasing student tuition fees, cutting 77 teaching positions, and freezing employee salaries.

Claude Corbo, the rector of

UQAM, has maintained that the plan is not final.

The plan was in its formative stages since February; since then four of the seven student faculties at UQAM have initiated strikes. The first was l’Association facultaire étudiante des sciences humaines (AFESH), which

voted to begin an unlimited strike in February.

UQAM imposed the injunction in response to protests last week, when students disrupted an administrative meeting that was considering failing striking students.

Dominique Guay, VP Internal of l’Association facultaire étudiante des langues et communications, argued that it was too soon for striking students to return to class. Guay and two other students were suspended earlier this month for admitting their involvement in strike actions.

“If we go back to class now, we scrap all the efforts we’ve made in the last five weeks,” Guay said. “It’s worth nothing right now because we have no contract signed.”

Professors have also come behind for the striking students, some writing an open letter in support, and some joining student demonstrations.

“It was a really big deal for us to get the professors support,” said Valerie Reine-Marcil, communications officer for AFESH. “There was much too much control in the injunction.”

Student negotiations with the administration will continue Monday.

The UQAM administration has stated that funding cuts will not threaten the survival of any programs.

According to McGill student Zoe Page, the radical student group GrassRoots Association for Student Power plans to use the UQAM strike as an example when mobilizing McGill students.

“There isn’t a strong enough movement for solidarity [at McGill] with all the students in Quebec,” Page said.

Algonquin community decries government meddling JAMES ALBAUGH News Writer

A

lgonquin speakers from the Barrière Lake community criticized the federal and provincial governments for meddling in their traditional governance, dishonouring land-use agreements, and exploiting divisions within their community at a panel discussion Tuesday night.

Held at the Native Friendship Center of Montreal, the event hosted representatives from Barrière Lake, a community of about 500 people 350 kilometres northwest of Montreal, who explained that the government had yet to follow through on a resource-sharing agreement signed in 1991.

The Trilateral Agreement, signed between the Barrière Lake Algonquins and the federal and provincial government, was initially established to balance traditional Algonquin land use with logging practices. However, Indian and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC), a branch of the federal government,

stopped funding most of the arrangements by summer 2001.

Event organizer and former Daily editor Martin Lukacs explained that the Trilateral Agreement would set a precedent for native communities by awarding the Barrière Lake Algonquins control of over 10,000 square kilometres of Crown land without compromising other rights.

“The agreement would give them decisive say in the management of their land and a share in the resource revenue, which amounts to $100-million in hydro and logging, from which the Algonquin have derived not a single cent,” Lukacs said after the event.

“From the government’s perspective, Barrière Lake is a bad apple that might rot their entire barrel.”

The panel focused on the preservation of the Algonquin culture, explaining that the preservation of its traditions was more important to them than securing more governmental services in compensation for the use of their land, in contrast with the goals of the INAC-recognized government.

“They’re just fighting over the ser-

vices, not the real issues,” Marylynn Poucachiche, the public spokesperson for the Barrière Lake Algonquins, said of the interim council.

Panel members explained that INAC and Quebec’s provincial police force, the Sûreté du Québec (SQ), are currently propping up a minority faction that many Algonquins do not consider the legitimate rulers of the community. On March 10 the INAC shifted its recognition from Chief Benjamin Nottaway – who held the support of the panel and the Barrière Lake community – to Chief Casey Ratt.

“The federal and provincial governments orchestrated what amounts to a coup d’état – illegally deposing to the customary chief and council which has been struggling to implement the agreement and is supported by the entire community,” Lukacs said.

Poucachiche and others called for educational reform, calling for more Algonquin teachers and the incorporation of their language and culture into the curriculum, which they said the community implemented until the SQ closed the school on Tuesday.

Rose Matchewan, a community member, claimed the SQ sent a locksmith to Barrière Lake in order to keep them out of the school, and said that the SQ threatened to arrest any member of the community attempting to enter the building.

They also accused the SQ of brutality, claiming the provincial police force resorted to beating and pepper-spraying protesters.

“My daughter was pregnant, she was pushed. My son was 14 years old, he was pepper-sprayed,” she said.

Madeline, an audience member at the forum, compared the government’s tactics in dealing with the Barrière Lake Algonquins to those of Apartheid-era South Africa.

Others asked what they could do to help. Rose suggested writing letters to Parliament.

“Our main issue is just to keep the Trilateral Agreement alive,” Matchewan said.

Midnight Kitchen, a vegan food collective at McGill, provided a free dinner to each attendee.

– with files from Max Halparin

4

News

The McGill Daily • Thursday, March 20, 2008

Students to boycott corporate cafs next week SHANNON KIELY The McGill Daily

S

Stephen Davis / The McGill Daily

Demonstrators at Saturday’s anti-brutality march charged through the streets, dodging police with pepper spray.

Police and protesters clash at anti-brutality march DAVID PARKER News Writer

M

ontrealers caught downtown near Berri Square and Place des Arts Saturday afternoon were witness to violent clashes between police and protesters during the 12th annual International Day Against Police Brutality.

Despite mass arrests, property destruction, and incidents of police brutality, organizers said the event was successful overall.

“There have been mass arrests at this event in past years, but people aren’t afraid to come out in big numbers to denounce the brutality,” said Francois Du Canal, a member of le Collectif opposé à la brutalité policière (COBP).

About 300 protesters assembled at Berri Square, including a troop of dancing clowns and a 10-piece anarchist marching band.

Approximately 100 police officers were already stationed around the square by the start. Officers filming the crowd refused to reveal to journalists why they were filming, prompting a protester to grab the camera and throw it to the ground.

Members of Stella, a sex workers’ rights organization and one of the 22 organizations endorsing the march, spoke to the crowd at the start of the protest.

“Sex workers are criminals in Canadian law. Police harass sex workers who can’t get legal protec-

tion from abuse because they are constantly evading the law,” said Jenn Clamen, a member of Stella.

As the crowd wound through the streets towards Place-des-Arts, a Sûreté de Québec helicopter followed the protest from above – which Du Canal pointed to as one of many police intimidation tactics.

“They struck protesters with batons, performed illegal searches in the metro before the march, filmed the crowd, used pepper spray, intimidated the crowd with rubber bullet guns and...and made arrests in civilian clothes,” Du Canal said.

Marching down Maisonneuve, protesters with covered faces smashed signs and windows of commercial stores including Starbucks, McDonald’s and Bell Canada. Police, passersby, and other marchers were forced to dodge hurled snowballs, ice, rocks, and wooden sticks.

Participants paintbombed police cruisers and vans and firebombed a car. When a handful of rioters smashed in the window of a police van, 30 police in riot gear descended from vans and rushed the crowd.

At about 4:30 the police announced that the demonstration was illegal and ordered the crowd to disperse. Within seconds, officers in riot gear charged the march from Ste. Catherine and forced the demonstrators up St. Denis, cornering dozens of marchers.

Police pushed and shoved them in the ribs with batons.

Damon Van Der Linde, a former

editor of Concordia’s The Link, was arbitrarily arrested and assaulted by a police officer.

“When getting put into the group, I was hit in the ribs a bunch of times,” Van Der Linde said, adding that he had not been protesting when he was arrested.

“I was just standing on the corner when I was rounded up. I just happened to be there,” he added.

Many were put in police vans, detained, searched, and then let go.

Others were charged with unlawful assembly and “failure to move.”

“It’s mostly the same people being arrested,” said Montreal police media relations officer Olivier Lapointe. “Some people arrive ready for war.”

COBP organizers said that 42 people have been killed by the Montreal Police in the past 21 years.

In December, 38-year old Quilem Registre died several days after being tasered six times by police following a drunk driving infringement. In 2005, Mohammad Annad Bennis was killed by police officers. No officer has been formally charged for his death.

Other incidents include police assaulting three women at a march for last year’s International Women’s Day, and police inciting violence and using batons at August’s Security and Prosperity Partnership Summit in Montebello.

– with files from Jesara Sinclair, The Link (CUP)

tudents organizing a two-day boycott of McGill’s corporaterun cafeterias next week are already running into institutional hurdles.

Boycott organizers serving a Midnight Kitchen lunch outside the Redpath Library yesterday faced off with McGill Security, who demanded to see a permit for the public gathering. When the students did not produce it, Security recorded one participant’s name and student number. “[Boycott organizers] are opposed to having to have a permit to assemble. That’s why we haven’t gotten the permit before. As students, we should be able to assemble in public spaces on campus,” said Bridget Simpson, a Midnight Kitchen cooperative member.

McGill’s Planning and Institutional Analysis Office requires that students fill out an application for outdoor campus events, which can take several days to process.

The boycott is scheduled for next Thursday and Friday, when the Food Services Committee of the GrassRoots Association for Student Power (GR ASPé) and Midnight Kitchen will dole out free vegan food to protest the prevalence of corporate food service providers on campus. The committee has not secured permits to serve food outside.

Over the past several years, McGill has phased out student-run food initiatives on campus and contracted out food services to corporate providers, with Chartwells College & University Dining Services the most widespread example.

Derek Lappano, a GRASPé organizer, wasn’t convinced that the boycott would kick Chartwells off campus. But he was optimistic that next week’s actions would promote

the student-run initiatives on campus that have survived despite the corporatization of McGill’s food services, like Midnight Kitchen.

“I think people prefer to go to student-run food services, but sometimes they don’t know about the options available to them. We want to let them know here’s an alternative,” he said.

The committee was inspired by the 2004 boycott of corporate-run cafeterias, organized by the Coalition for Action on Food Services (CAFS) against McGill granting a single company a monopoly contract.

Without the possibility of an exclusivity contract, boycott organizer Maria Forti was not sure participation in next week’s actions could match the turnout four years ago.

“Unless you’re really involved, you might not know about what’s happening. This time, there’s not a huge rallying point,” she said.

The Food Services Committee tried to raise awareness about the boycott through workshops held this week and next week.

On Tuesday, roughly 20 people discussed anti-capitalist environmentalism and food in a Shatner conference room. Representatives from Food Not Bombs shared tips on dumpster-diving and Ambrose Kirby of Le Frigo Vert critiqued the “sustainable business” model.

“We wanted to get people talking about food in a radical way,” Forti said. “We wanted to put it in a context and let people know that this isn’t just about food. There are corporations everywhere – even in our bathrooms.”

Forti stressed that the boycott will not target corporate cafeteria workers, and explained that the Food Services Committee is in the process of drafting a letter to workers introducing the boycott.

“We don’t have a problem with the workers.... If they have a problem, they can contact us,” she said.

Xiao Yu for The McGill Daily

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News

The McGill Daily • Thursday, March 20, 2008

7

University reform Examining McGill’s upper echelons

McGill admins come from outside academia Corporate managers in the admin detract from collegial governance structure ADRIENNE KLASA The McGill Daily

R

ecent appointments to McGill’s top administration from the private sector have brought the question of “professionalization” of the administration into focus.

SSMU VP University Affairs Adrian Angus explained that since being appointed Principal, Heather Munroe-Blum has assembled a team of Vice-Pincipals around her – known as the P7 or the Principal’s Seven – who act as her close advisors. Two of the VPs appointed in 2007 have come from corporate backgrounds outside McGill.

VP Public Affairs Michael Goldbloom is a McGill alumnus and former publisher of both The Toronto Star and The Montreal Gazette, and VP Administration & Finance François Roy, formerly a financial manager at Quebecor, Avenor, and Telemedia, was hired to dig McGill out of its $58-million deficit. Roy is the first VP Finance at McGill to have been appointed from outside the university community.

In an interview with The Daily earlier this month, Munroe-Blum defended the choices.

“I think it is fantastic that we have someone with business experience who is working with me and [Provost] Tony Masi on running an over a billion-dollar-a-year organization,” she said.

If students or faculty are con-

cerned with hiring trends, they have little sway over decision-making.

According to SSMU President Jake Itzkowitz, the administration hires a recruitment firm to compile lists of potential candidates from both inside and outside academia. An advisory committee then examines the candidates and makes a recommendation to the Principal – who is in no way bound by this advice.

If Munroe-Blum approves, the candidate is presented to the Board of Governors (BoG), the University’s highest governing body, which can then accept or reject the candidate.

Senate, the highest academic governing body, has no control over the decision – and according to Angus, BoG rarely rejects the Principal’s choice.

“Essentially the Board just rubber stamps,” he said. “Theoretically, they can reject the Principal’s recommendation, but that hasn’t happened in the past 10 years.”

When Munroe-Blum described the hiring process to The Daily, she emphasized the “advisories and searches” that occur before hiring a new VP or Dean. She said that half of McGill’s VPs and Deans come from outside the University, and that most Deputy Provosts come from inside McGill.

“Far and away it’s balanced in academics – half from within and half from outside – both within James [Administration] and across the Deans,” she said. “I think it’s very healthy.”

Further, in a break from the past, no university administrators currently teach classes, and there has been less fluidity concerning university administrators returning to the faculty ranks.

Angus said that administrators often refer to a push to “professionalize” its directors.

ment pressures and financial difficulties, they have won. In 2006, Oxford’s governing body defeated a proposal that proposed modernizing reforms that would have completely changed the governance structure of the 800-year old institution.

The Guardian reported that the proposed changes would have ended self-governance and brought the university under the centralized control of business leaders and politicians outside the university community. Each college at Oxford is still governed independently today.

The management report

Ben Peck / The McGill Daily

Administrators increasingly control the strings of the University.

Hire away McGill’s system for appointing VPs in a closed process fits in with trends across Canada, where universities are turning to more corporate managerial models for their highlevel administrations as opposed to the traditional collegiate model of shared governance.

While many see the streamlined process of the corporate model as essential for universities competing in the global marketplace, Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) Executive Director James Turk expressed reservations.

“Other than the Catholic Church, no other institution has survived as well as universities,” Turk said.

“This shows that there is something of value in the structure of shared

governance.”

The old model of hiring, in which administrators, deans, and principals are appointed from within the university through a democratic process that involved the entire professional community of the university, is fast disappearing.

Turk said the process is being sacrificed in the name of expediency.

“Notions of efficiency often exclude student and faculty participation. Especially in university settings, efficiency is not the only value,” Turk added.

While in North America corporate management models can be found in nearly every major university, Oxford and Cambridge have fought to preserve a shared governance model, and, despite govern-

In September 2007, a report released by the Institute for Governance of Private and Public Organizations (IGOPP) – an elite task force of university administrators, of which Munroe-Blum is a member – argued for smaller, more centralized, and more exclusive governance.

The report calls for a new approach to selecting the top executive of a university, including “ensuring that both internal and external candidates are considered and that the search process is equally open to both,” and calls for a fully confidential hiring process.

The IGOPP report also calls for smaller boards, of which two-thirds of the membership is composed of “independents” sourced from outside the university community.

Turk noted that nation-wide, BoGs tend to be very strongly corporate.

“We need to remember that universities are governed, not managed,” he said. “Faculty aren’t employees and students are not customers.”

– with files from Kelly Ebbels and Jennifer Markowitz

Conference encourages undergrads to link work with community activism McGill and Concordia students hope to expand to include French universities SARAH BABBAGE The McGill Daily

F

rustrated by the lack of opportunities available to apply your undergraduate work offcampus? Well, now’s your chance: this April’s second-annual Study in Action conference aims to bridge the gap between academic research and activism.

Organized by students from McGill and Concordia in conjunction with the Concordia chapter of the Quebec Public Interest Research Group (QPIRG), Study in Action combines presentations of student research with workshops hosted by community organizations. QPIRGConcordia Coordinator Nathalie

Cohen said the conference’s goal is to bring young academics into the community.

“The idea for the conference came from the coordinators’ feeling that there was a gap between what they were doing in school and their desire to have a greater impact on their community,” Cohen said.

The theme of this year’s conference is social and environmental justice.

“Our intent is to study and discuss how environmental degradation is disproportionately shouldered by marginalized communities,” said cocoordinator Emilie Connolly, a U3 McGill Cultural Studies student.

“Combining student presenters and community groups is unique because it lets you see the link-

Community organizations will ages between research and on-thehost workshops to complement ground work,” she added.

The conference groups student the talks. Last year’s community presenters based on the themes of organizations included Head and their research papers. They each Hands, Solidarity Across Borders, present their papers, and then discuss the theme in a two-hour panel.

So many times as an “So many times as an undergraduate, you feel undergraduate you feel like like you’re in a bubble and you’re in a bubble and no one no one reads what you reads what you write. write and you don’t read what other people write....

– Naomi Lightman So it was nice to have some U3 Arts and Daily staffer discourse on it,” said U3 McGill Arts student and Daily staffer Naomi Lightman, who and Colours of Resistance. This presented a paper on aboriginal year’s organizations are not yet conhealth on native reserves in Canada firmed.

One of Study in Action’s longat the conference last year.

“

term goals is to become fully bilingual, which will allow it to connect with all the Montreal universities. In the meantime, submissions are welcomed in both French and English.

About 100 participants attended the conference last year. Cohen hopes to have at least double the turn-out this year.

“April is a tricky time of year to run a conference,” Cohen said, pointing to students’ exam schedules. But by calling for submissions and advertising earlier in the semester, she hopes to hook students in before they get busy.

The deadline for submissions to studyinaction@gmail.com is March 24. Study in Action runs from April 18 to 20 at Concordia.

News

The McGill Daily • Thursday, March 20, 2008

9

SSMU, admin disagree on Quebec budget EMILY GENNIS News Writer

T

he Quebec government announced last Thursday that it would contribute an extra $250-million over five years to postsecondary education, garnering divided opinions from administrators and student groups.

In a press release by the Conference of Rectors and Principals of Quebec Universities (CREPUQ), McGill Principal Heather Munroe-Blum heaped praise on the government. The report stated that – including other sources – Quebec postsecondary institutions will receive $453-million more in 2008-2009 than in 2006-2007.

“The confirmation of additional resources from federal transfers for postsecondary education is excellent news, as is the announcement of a supplemental government investment of over $50-million,” Blum wrote.

But not everyone is as pleased with the budget report.

“It’s extremely disappointing,” said Max Silverman, SSMU VP External Affairs. “It falls well below what’s needed and what was promised.”

Silverman said the provincial government originally agreed to match every dollar universities charged in tuition with $10, but quickly forgot its promise after the tuition defreeze.

“The province would rather cut funding for students than cut taxes for baby boomers,” Silverman said.

SSMU commissioned a research project last year that concluded that the provincial government would need to provide $1.22-billion to eliminate tuition in Quebec. One half would eliminate tuition and ancillary fees, and the other would be used to alleviate the province’s funding crisis. “[With the provincial government’s budget plan], all we’re getting is about $75 million,” Silverman said.

Blum did not mention free education in her report, but stressed that the increase in provincial funds represents an important step towards eliminating the funding crisis.

“Today’s announcements have been very well received by Quebec universities and constitute a major step in the right direction with regard to the universities’ chronic underfunding,” she said.

Silverman said Blum’s praises were a “political statement.”

“I don’t know how she could say that with a straight face.”

L’Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante harshly denounced the budget in a press release, in which Hubert GendronBlais, the association’s communications secretary, said the only solution to drastic underfunding is mobilization.

Stephen Davis / The McGill Daily

This summer will see Montreal’s oldest Irish pub torn down, and replaced with either a hotel or condo development

Welcome to the new Old Dublin Famed Irish pub to get torn down, move to new location ARIEL LEFKOWITZ The McGill Daily

M

ontreal’s oldest Irish pub will be torn down this summer – only to reopen at a new location days later, if all goes according to plan.

Developers have bought the land the Old Dublin Pub sits on at 1291a University, and the famed local staple will be replaced by “a

condo or a hotel or a hotel condo,” according to the Old Dub’s owner-manager and McGill alumnus Johnny Asad.

But the pub’s new location at 636 Cathcart will be larger than its predecessor, and will finally have direct sidewalk access. The Old Dub’s present location fronts a parking lot, but in the past had been completely obscured from view from the street by another tavern.

“We were thinking of renaming it the New Dublin Pub, but I’m not going to wipe out 30 years of history,” said Asad, adding, “A lot of McGill students met their wives or husbands here.”

A landmark of the Montreal community around McGill campus, the Old Dub caters mostly to business-

men during lunch and happy hour, and to tourists and McGill students in the evenings.

Asad promised that the new pub will preserve the ambiance, including 15 types of half-pound burgers, each named after an Irish family.

As a graduate student at McGill, Political Science professor Jason Scott Ferrell began inviting his classes to the Old Dublin at the end of each semester, trying to recapture the intimacy of his smaller American alma mater.

“One of the things I noticed at McGill is, since it’s such a big institution, it seems like there’s not a real strong sense of community with students sometimes,” said Ferrell.

“I wanted to do for you guys [students] what had been done for me,” he added.

Twelve years later, Ferrell’s Old Dub posse has grown so much that Asad gives Ferrell’s classes the entire second floor of the pub when they come.

“It got to be such a big thing that students started bringing students... one time we must have had about 60 people there,” Ferrell said.

St. Patrick’s Day, one of the Old Dublin’s busiest times, attracted droves of McGill students and locals alike.

“It was packed. The music was pretty cool, and it was a good time,” said U2 Jewish Studies and Philosophy student Daniel Garwood.

Keep Canada neutral: Palestinian journalist JEFF BISHKU-AYKUL News Writer

O

il and Israel are responsible for the plight of Palestinians, according to Palestinian journalist Abdel al-Bari Atwan in a lecture titled “Palestine: The Way Forward” at McGill last Friday.

Born in the Gaza Strip in 1950, Atwan is the editor-in-chief of Britain-based pan-Arab newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi, often censored or banned in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Jordan due to its strong criticism of Arab regimes’ conciliation with the U.S. and Israel.

Atwan began his discussion speaking of American foreign poli-

cy and the impacts of oil, asserting it is the most significant factor in determining affairs in the Middle East.

“Anybody who puts their hands on the Middle East’s oil will control the future of the world,” he said.

Atwan also suggested that the U.S. may launch a war against Iran, aided by Israel and moderate Arab states.

“The next country following in Iraq’s footsteps is Iran. They are definitely trying to produce a nuclear bomb.... [The U.S. has] a president who is a warmonger, and doesn’t want to leave office without saying, ‘Look, I managed to neutralize the Iranian weapon program.’”

But even if moderate Arab states

opposed a war against Iran, their reluctance would likely not be influential, Atwan claimed.

The journalist showed little optimism for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, singling out Israel for an ineffective attitude toward peace and implicating Israelis for hostile relations with Palestinians.

“I don’t believe Israel is capable of making peace with Palestinians,” he said.

“I don’t know what we did to God, as Palestinians, to receive this enemy... As Palestinians we don’t like to kill and be killed. We would like to be normal. We would like to be painters, teachers, and to be normal...peace is still far away,” Atwan said. “It is not because of us. We want peace with the Israelis. But we

have two curses in our part of the world, oil and Israel.”

When an audience member mentioned Canadian airport security’s treatment of Arabs, Atwan urged the audience to protect Canada’s image as a welcoming country, which he felt was being impaired by the war on terror.

“Canada should be raising its voice and protecting its interests.

I don’t know why it is following American footsteps into Afghanistan.

We should keep the image of Canada as a neutral nation. But this is up to you, not to me,” he said.

Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights, the Coalition for Peace and Justice in Palestine, and Montreal’s Badr Islamic Center hosted Atwan’s visit to McGill.

Commentary 11

The McGill Daily • Thursday, March 20, 2008

Yes to accountability, no to neverendums

Our Dollar Store Principal

JEREMY DELMAN

Apparently, the recent tuition defreeze just wasn’t enough for McGill Principal Heather MunroeBlum. In an opinion piece posted on The Gazette’s web site last week, the Principal laments Quebec’s “Dollar Store” tuition policy, once again encouraging the province’s universities to hike fees and sink or swim in the free market.

Munroe-Blum’s 900-word article is thick with corporate newspeak. She waxes on about “strategy” and “competition,” as if our universities were cutthroat private operations in a zero-sum game. It’s clear that the Principal is thinking big: she even introduces the article by asking us to consider Quebec’s competition in “a globalized world,” as if that cliché hadn’t lost its meaning long ago. It’s troubling that our Principal would view universities in such terms, affording little room for a vision of universities as places of learning.

Her other arguments are just as troubling. In her 10-point wish list, Munroe-Blum makes clear her idealized university system: it would be unburdened by regulation from the government or its cumbersome equalization programs, so that universities could build “core distinctive strengths in key areas of advantage.” It would target international students, who fill McGill’s coffers with much higher tuition, over Quebec’s own students. It would emphasize graduate studies and high-profile research over undergraduate learning. Above all, it would allow for a tuition system that asks students to foot more of the bill, making university less accessible.

In arguing for hiking our “Dollar Store” tuition, Munroe-Blum is in effect calling for a less educated Quebec. From British Columbia to Ontario, the record shows that when tuition goes up, governments don’t step up financial aid enough to keep universities accessible. Her calls for international tuition deregulation and against equalization efforts would mean that the financial rift between schools like l’Université du Québec à Montreal and McGill grows wider.

Perhaps most unsettling is that Munroe-Blum’s call for increased government funding is an apparent afterthought at the bottom of her list. At a time when the Principal is racking up donations from private philanthropists and corporations, it’s left to students to lobby the government for more funding.

More help from the federal and provincial governments is the only guarantee of Quebec’s universities remaining high-quality and accessible, but Munroe-Blum has shifted her focus toward demanding less regulation, less equalization, and less accessibility.

This vision directs resources toward the province’s richest universities, and away from Quebec as a whole. For Quebec’s universities to succeed, its leaders and students must continue to demand proper funding from Ottawa and Quebec City. There is money there: Canada is sitting on a sizeable budget surplus, and the provincial Liberals chose to cut taxes last year, despite polls showing that Quebecers would prefer the money went to public programs like education.

Munroe-Blum has once again put forward a vision of universities as companies producing for a global economy, rather than places of learning and growth. If our Principal wonders why students voted to censure her at a 600-person SSMU General Assembly last semester, she now has her reason: we simply don’t see eye to eye on what make a university system great.

HYDE PARK

T

hough some of you are still celebrating the resounding Yes vote The Daily got on our survival the other day, we’re already thinking about the next time around.

Under the guise of keeping the campus press accountable to the student body, the McGill administration wants to force The McGill Daily and its French sister paper, Le Délit, to put their existence to a student vote every five years. It also plans on doing the same to the Quebec Public Interest Research Group, CKUT-Radio, and the Legal Information Clinic. Turning survival referendums into “neverendums” is no way to gauge student support.

It is, rather, a way to set the newspapers up for failure. No matter how many resounding victories the newspapers win, one No vote by the smallest margin at some point down the line would force them to close up shop.

The neverendum process ignores the channels that the newspapers already have in place to ensure student support, the most basic one being our open door. Though The Daily aims to do more than just mirror campus attitudes, a campus newspaper is inherently responsive to student views because its ranks

are constantly renewed. If you didn’t like, say, this year’s News editors, you’re in luck. A new lot will take their place come the fall. And the same will happen a year later. You may even be part of that renewal.

Don’t have the time to become a full-fledged editor? Then come by one of our meetings and pick up a story in need of a writer. Run for a columnist position. Send in a strongly-worded letter.

Don’t have the writing skills to do any of the above? Then feel free to drop by the newspaper office and express your views. After all, it’s your office, too. Or express those views at our Annual General Meetings, where you can also run for a position on our Board of Directors. Or just contact the public editor and let him know how you feel.

Unlike a survival referendum, these mechanisms actually allow you to effect change at The Daily.

Voting No simply shuts down the newspaper without giving you a chance to change the newspaper in the way you think it should change.

If the administration was really serious about making The Daily more accountable, it wouldn’t force students into the all-or-nothing decision-making that constituted the question you overwhelmingly approved. These neverendums put one of this University’s oldest institutions on an extremely shaky foundation.

What’s more, neverendums would

Editorials

Sasha Plotnikova / The McGill Daily

continuously distract editors and us board members from what we were elected to do: keep the newspapers pumping out some of the highest quality campus journalism in the country. That award-winning journalism is put into jeopardy when we don’t know if we’ll be around in a couple years’ time. The spectre of a No prevents us from investing in our future. More importantly, it compels editors to avoid the controversial, but critical, issues that might foment a backlash against the press.

Thanks again for your Yes. But please, keep in mind that there are more commonsensical ways for you to show your support and disapproval.

Jeremy Delman is a member of the Daily Publications Society Board of Directors. Etymologists will one day credit him with coining the word “neverendum.”

More elections shenanigans from Jake Itzkowitz?

Letters Jake Itzkowitz is Karl Rove?

Dear Mr. Itzkowitz, At the beginning of the campaign period, the Arts Undergraduates Society (AUS) made clear to candidates that 20 posters would be stamped in the office and allowed to hang in the Leacock building during the campaign period. Any additional posters were to be removed.

Following the events of March 10, I feel it necessary to bring to public attention your blatant disrespect for the AUS Office. The more than 30 posters that I removed were in clear violation of these rules. Your actions as campaign manager to assure that your candidate obtained more than the permitted number of posters were reprehensible.

I am proud of the work that I have done for the AUS as the Office Manager over the past year. I take my responsibilities very seriously and I am sure that the executives also see their positions, efforts and policies the same way.

I expected that you, a former

member of the AUS executive, would understand the efforts of the organization and its members.

I am sad to see that I was mistaken.

The disrespect that you have shown me personally in regards to Miss Turner’s campaign is deplorable.

Yelling at me for doing my duties as AUS Office Manager and purposefully making my job harder exhibits an extreme lack of professionalism on your part. Your efforts to violate building policy in order to get a few votes hindered my abilities to carry out my duties as AUS Office Manager effectively. The appalling nature of your behaviour, for example, calling the office to note my hours as to poster when I am off the clock, exemplifies a lack of respect for not only me, but the organization as a whole.

If I worked in any other capacity, such as retail, food services or a private office, your actions – which border on harassment – would have had you removed from the premises. Yet, since I work for a student-run group in a public space, your misconduct goes unpunished.

As a student leader and as a role model, I expected more from you. I supported your own electoral efforts without question last year, but now I regret that decision.

If this letter finds you in apathy, as a fellow student and person, then I will know that the leadership

of the Students’ Society of McGill University does not care for its student body. I hope with all sincerity that this is not the case.

Emily Elizabeth Goodman U3 Psychology & Art History Send letters to letters@mcgilldaily. com. The Daily received more letters than could be printed, they will appear in a later edition.

ERRATA The article “TAs to demonstrate at Roddick Gates today” (News, March 13) reported that TA salaries make up six per cent of McGill’s budget. In fact, TA salaries make up 0.6 per cent of McGill’s operating expenses.

The article also reported that McGill’s TAs make $22.40 per hour, when in fact they make $22.24 per hour.

Finally, the article misquoted Natalie Kouri-Towe as saying that TAs will not strike. A decision to strike must come from AGSEM membership, not from an Executive Committee member.

The Daily regrets the errors.

Boycott Chartwells next Thursday We’re just three short months into 2008, but things are looking a lot like 2004. That year, a group of students called the Coalition for Action on Food Services (CAFS) formed to fight the McGill administration’s corporate approach to food provision. One of CAFS’s most important actions was a three-day boycott of McGill’s favourite food-service company, Chartwells.

With little change in the administration’s attitude over the last four years, a new group – the Food Services Committee of the GrassRoots Association for Student Power and Midnight Kitchen – formed this winter to continue the battle. They’ve been organizing workshops on cooperative kitchens, critiques of the “sustainable business” model, and the success of student-run food options at other universities. Most importantly, the group is organizing a boycott of all corporate food vendors next Thursday and Friday, and will make sustainable, student-run alternatives available across campus.

In a year that has seen labour disputes at the Chartwells-operated Bookstore Café and a McGill takeover of the formerly student-run Architecture Café, next week’s boycott is hugely important. Chartwells is one of North America’s biggest campus food providers, and from Louisiana State to Carleton to McGill, the concerns are the same: high prices, poor quality, employee mistreatment, opposition to employee unionization, and even the occasional food-safety scandal.

Earlier this month, Principal Heather Munroe-Blum said something bizarre to The Daily. “I see no evidence that student-run initiatives work better on the food, quality, variety, and pricing size,” she told us. We wonder if our Principal has ever eaten on this campus. If she had, she’d know that in terms of quality, variety, and price, the few student-run options still around beat out Chartwells every time.

So next Thursday and Friday, skip out on your twice-reheated Pizza Pizza, bring a tupperware to school, and give Midnight Kitchen a try.

The

Literary Supplement

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Literary Supplement 2008

PJ Vogt / The McGill Daily

haverford, pennsylvania 2001

T

wo friends from high school. I shot their picture outside my parents’ house, six months before my dad moved out. This roll of film was the first I managed to properly load. The day after I printed it, I went to the photo lab during one of my free periods to work in the darkroom. The teacher was showing my photo to another section, which made me proud, until I realized he was using my scratched, damaged exposure as an example of what happens when you don’t care for your negatives.

The blond-haired girl on the left is my friend Jess, who died two Septembers ago. I drove home for the service. It was held in a modern, suburban church that felt as profane as a conference room. A young – too young – preacher with a reedy voice guided us through a string of psalms and hymns that seemed unconnected to her. I’d never known that she was religious.

Jess had cystic fibrosis, and spent most of high school in Philadelphia’s Children’s Hospital.

We’d visit her on weekends, a bunch of us squeezing into an ancient orange VW Bug for the long drive down. We’d talk and play Connect Four and eat McDonald’s – the hospital’s only restaurant was a McDonald’s. Looking back,

what’s strange about our hospital days is how normal they seemed. We were teenagers, we were always hanging out – in diners, on corners, and now, at the hospital.

This isn’t to say that we ever lost sight of her disease; we didn’t. Teenagers have an appetite for tragedy. At our age, we thought it was important to tie people to their problems with appositive phrases (“Jess, my friend with cystic fibrosis...”).

But once we were in the hospital, where the reminders were constant and omnipresent, we somehow forgot. Strange occurrences seemed normal, like the way people disappeared, or how a nurse would occasionally interrupt our conversations to pound Jess’s back while she coughed up the phlegm and fluid in her lungs.

Whatever thoughts Jess had about her mortality, her future, or spending half her life in the hospital, I never knew and didn’t ask about. I don’t remember whether incuriosity or grace held my tongue.

We stayed friends, although the hospital visits became less frequent as high school wore on.

Toward the end of senior year, my high school girlfriend drunkenly went down on a quarter-

two untitled poems i saw you on whatstoday whatstoday whatstoday

back. It seemed like a good time to end things.

A few weeks later, I watched a movie with Jess and we hooked up. This would be the first in a pattern of trading good friendships for awkward one-night stands, then scurrying off. Afterwards, Jess and I didn’t talk, mostly because I avoided her. I went away to college and our friendship stayed behind.

I knew I owed her a letter or a phone call, and that I didn’t have long to fix things. People with CF don’t usually live past 30. Instead, I did nothing. I was too ashamed. For her, there were much more important things to worry about.

For me, this was the first time that I had broken something I couldn’t fix.

I wanted to feel some part of her at the funeral because I wanted to be forgiven. Instead, I found myself in a room scrubbed of her presence.

At some point near the end of the service, the preacher stopped talking, the hymns ended, and they played a song I’m sure she had requested, “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries,” an old Judy Garland standard. I’d never heard it before, but it felt right. Jess liked old things – old movies, old songs.

You’ve probably never heard this one. It

pj vogt starts off slow, with Garland singing softly over a rhythm guitar, Life is just a bowl of cherries Don’t take it serious It’s too mysterious Her voice starts to swell with that 1930s big band sound. Inevitably, horns blare. Her voice rises, and she bellows, The sweet things in life to you were just loaned So how can you lose what you never owned?

It’s a campy song, full of a kind of sentiment that had no place in 2006. When I heard it, I bawled. I hadn’t seen Jess for two years. I was starting to become a better person than I’d been then. It was too late to earn her forgiveness – she was dead, and the way I had treated her was irrevocable. The part of her I thought I recognized in the song couldn’t offer redemption or forgiveness. But for a moment, my shame receded, and grief took its rightful place.

kate mccurdy

sunday close screens streaming corners

bathed in light light light and like an ambush there you were, humming something. somethingsomber somethingsamba somethingsomnambule something blue

and i couldn’t for my life make out a word.

Ghostly voices are spun in the threads of this hammock. Sitting back with a handle and our hands on our stomachs, we recount the days of lofty words and minor scandals, books that followed, braying, into bed.

Mosquitoes, now as then, buzz and saturate the breeze already thick with dead white men echoing back at us. One such insect mounts my unprotected leg, licks; I am bitten – my blood submits, ceases to coagulate.

Perhaps it’s been infected with my old ideals, preserved in minute nerves and bites that never heal: too much laid bare, I’ve sat up nights, I’ve had my fill of shallow breaths from deep air.

Literary Supplement 2008

gordon the incredible G

ordon LeBarre was born in 1913, and has spent almost every day since then in Hamilton, Ontario, straying only periodically to attend the various acclaimed theatre festivals of Ontario. His mother named him Truman, but died when he was so young that he can’t even remember what she looked like. And after she died, he went to live with his grandmother, who told him, “Truman is no name for a boy.” And so she called him Gordon instead.

Gord only has a few stories, now that he’s 94, and most of them can be found in the Dec. 18 issue of The Hamilton Spectator. They dedicated a whole page to Gord for living so long – December 18 was his 94th birthday.

He’ll tell you, and I’m sure he told the friendly reporters, that he never asked to be born six days before Christmas; sometimes he wonders why he couldn’t have been born in June. Gord hates to be bothersome.

He’ll also tell you that when he was born, he was only knee-high to a grasshopper. You and I both know this to be impossible, and might not even find the comparison amusing, but these expressions keep him making sense, and it really is amazing how small the man is. He comes over for dinner, and all the guests laugh when he says he weighs 100 pounds.

“Soaking wet!” they say

“With stones in your pockets, maybe!”

“I’m two and a half of you!”

He amazes them. Gord chuckles proudly – he loves to amaze people. It’s not as difficult for old people or children to be impressive as it is for all of us.

“I walk so fast,” Gord tell us. “There are some people in the village,” – Gord lives in a gated community for old folks, which is not a nursing home, never a nursing home – “some of them in the village wonder how I walk so fast. At my age! You know, I’m so light that I can fall on the ice and I get right back up laughing!”

Gord is small because he was a child of the Depression, and when his father and grandmother realized that there wasn’t enough money to support a growing child, they sent him to an orphanage, where he didn’t grow much at all. This is one of Gord’s favourite stories: being forced to eat mutton and getting slapped on the wrist when he tried to write with his left hand. It usually starts: “You know, I was raised in an orphanage, and ohhh it was grim.” Although he’d never ask us not to, we don’t serve lamb when Gord comes for dinner.

Last time he was over, we sat together on the couch and told me to stop him if he’d already told me, but did I know that,

3

Mariel Capanna / The McGill Daily

rosie aiello “My real name is Truman, but after my mother died, my grandmother…”

“Said that Truman was no name for a boy.”

“Oh,” he was disappointed, but not surprised, “you know that one already.”

“I’m afraid so, Gord.”

“I’m just so forgetful. When I was 49, you know, I never to used think about my past, but now I do think of it, and it’s so sharp it’s as if it were yesterday.”

The irony of Gord’s statement is that he likely had no memory of what had happened the day before. I heard noises, like a bird breaking open chestnuts and I looked down to see him picking at his fingernails. His hands looked so big on him.

“Some wag said, ‘You know you’re getting old when you start reminiscing.’ So I guess I’m there!” Gord likes these sayings. He smiles quite uncontrollably when he says them.

“And who’s the wag who said that Gord?”

“Oh…I don’t remember.” And then even the wag’s words made him uneasy and he tore frantically at his nails. He stared ahead, and his eyes watered because he had so few eyelashes left to protect his hazy eyeballs.

He forgot what he was worried about and smiled, and grabbed my hand and kissed it. The milky tears squeezed through the meandering pathways that lead from his eyes to his cheeks.

“You are very lucky,” he smiled, “you and your dear brother, to have such a wonderful mother.” He stared at my mother across the room. “I don’t remember my mother at all, she died giving birth to my sister. I was only two, so I went to live with my…”

“Grandmother.”

“Oh, I told you that already. I’m so forgetful these days.” And the lines on his furrowed forehead met the ones curling around his eyes that met the ones on his cheeks.

And so it goes. Most visits, Gord will ask us if we’ve heard of Jane Austen (though it usually takes upwards of five minutes for him to think of her name), or if we’ve read his short story, “The Donut Hole” (he assures us it’s only a silly story, since he’s had to teach himself to read). My mother does Gord’s taxes, and she often finds three or four receipts from dryer repairmen, which read: “Checked dryer, no problem found, $50.00.” He hates rock music, he really hates rock music, even jazz, and if we put on something he likes he faces the speakers and conducts to an imaginary symphony. He still doesn’t know that John and Ken, who have been coming to Thanksgiving dinner for years, are gay.

So remember, all you have to do to be amazing is to live for 94 years. Though 94 years is a long time to live.

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Literary Supplement 2008

peninsula ethos

sarah allux

because I have to believe in orchids and dolomite, the way you have to believe in waking up, in Euclid; otherwise, what have I got to stand on because I believe in small treasures: mittens, acorns, rubber boots in larger ones: peregrine falcons, universities, the Georgian Bay it’s not always the most obvious thing, how we grew up inside these familiar stories, the comfort of them, believing in public libraries and travel mugs, in wisdom, educated and otherwise in otherwise in canvas bags and the CBC, in houseplants, and clarity, and the geese staying longer each year in the idea that, somehow, everything matters because, somehow, it’s got something to do with those bow-legged white cedars they’ve been here a thousand years they’re not sorry Sasha Plotnikova / The McGill Daily

a leading out The mother Takes the hand of the girl After eye surgery— Cataracts they said— And leads her from the house Under the dark mosque of clear Night sky, Removing bandages Like packages of warm Red clay, Moistening away dried Halos of blood Around the stitches, And finally brushing her eyelashes Gently with the nail On her pinky finger To separate them From each other.

They step together Through the open door.

The trees sway, All is sparkling.

matthew donne

claire caldwell

still winter I’d really love to give up the ghost: been scrubbing palimpsest hands since Sunday, sick of false starts and easy endings. my red rainboots so tired of making statement after

bonanza

Someone’s sad eyes remind me: we were too late for the gold rush.

They’re cranking chords at the piano.

Lonesome thumping. Rubberfist. Sawdust.

Satin feathers ruffle my chest.

Outside, ravens shush around the doorstep like a crime scene.

Sun squeaking over treeline and only three beers left for the night. Can’t see my breath.

They’d said: one day in the riverbed is muscle.

In the morning I had six matches and a pick-axe.

The eyes knew it since the piano strings snapped.

And out in the chapped yard one raven winked slyly at the gravel dawn.

statement on the sidewalks, my box of pencils lost in the wash. one purple sock to my name and that rasping voice in my face saying again & again.

Literary Supplement 2008

shirts A

t the confluence of three streets stood Elisabeth’s building, anchored to the corner against the tides of the city. The house faced onto a small traffic circle ringed with older buildings, a discrete hub around which the rest of town unknowingly spun. She stood just behind the lace curtains in the unlit kitchen looking down onto the small patch of green at the center of the intersection, grass dotted with stray yellow flowers brought there by the wind. Mottled shadows played across the electric range of the stove behind her. On the curb closest to her building a girl stood staring up at the house. Elisabeth glanced at her watch.

Both of them stood very still.

She rubbed one hand over the back of the other and reached for the envelope on the counter behind, put it in her apron pocket and shut the apron into the broom closet, leaning into the flimsy door and closing her eyes as she did so, extinguishing the uneven light that roved across the room.

It was early fall, and dead leaves scattered across the pavement outside. The sun glinted off the dirty windows of Blohm’s bookstore across the street. Elisabeth moved back to the window, but the girl had gone. She brought her face closer to the glass, as close as she could without disturbing the curtains.

A small bell clanged as Meike entered the bookstore. She had been there before, nearly every day now, since arriving in the country.

The man behind the counter peered at her over his impeccable moustache, looking, as always, as though he were being rudely dislodged from someplace in the depths. There was an air of great dignity about him, though he wore it soused, like a good suit that’s been slept in.

“Going to see her today?” he asked.

“Maybe today,” she replied.

The first time she came she had bought a small paper book of baby names. Her name was in it, and so came her first dose of a cheap sense of belonging, available on paper for the price of two shots of vodka, or a kebab with cola, with fries, if you had a small.

He was glad she never bought anything else after that; it was difficult to look at her, with that bare-faced stare she gave him, blunt and glaring like a fresh scar. It was hard to evade her grey eyes, pale against her dark face, the way they roved idly around the room without motivation.

“Are you lost?” he asked the first time she came in, eyes glazed over in the way being lost can do. He recognized Elisabeth’s jaw line immediately when she nodded, the unmistakable way her neck tightened, chin stuck out, tensed the way hers got when she tried to hold herself in.

“There’s a tram you can pick up a few blocks from here,” he said, “if you keep on in this direction.” He gestured vaguely toward the window with one hand.

The words weren’t coming easily, so she said the first thing that arranged itself in presentable order in her mouth: “I’m going to need more help than that.” ~ Elisabeth heard the doorbell ring, and counted quietly to three before she opened it. She set her tea cup and saucer down on the table to stop it rattling in her hand.

“What should I tell you,” she said, as the girl sat across from her at the dark wood table.

The room was small and crammed to its corners with the accumulated bric-a-brac of the past decades. The portraits on the walls stared out of their hanging worlds with eyes that seemed to watch her, and Meike looked away.

She sat with a piece of cake in front of her, push-

5

braden goyette ing it around the plate with a fork.

In the bookstore Blohm sat in the glow of his reading lamp, hunched over the desk, pretending to read the paper. His mind wandered. He spent most of his days half-dozing now, eyelids drooping, hunched in his chair. Behind his closed eyelids a flash of light troubled him briefly, and a splash of remembered sun stirred in his mind’s eye, reflected on a face with freckles that spread as her face broke into a laugh. He lit a cigarette and smoked it slowly, though his eyes began to water in his ruddy face. ~ There was joy then, there must have been.

She could feel the echo of it somewhere under her skin, whenever an old song would play. At least, a song that sounded old, that she thought must have been from that time, when (she imagined) her mother still danced and her father’s smile spread to reveal two rows of perfect white teeth.

This is what she saw when she looked at the photograph: light figures against a grainy black doorway. One whiter, one less. Two figures, under a roof in the rain. Almost touching. Almost not. One of them with eyes dancing. The other with a distant look and white, perfect teeth. ~ Elisabeth frowned at the photograph the girl had handed her. The clock ticked loudly on the other side of the room.

“Of course,” she said, rubbing the back of her neck with one hand, “I would have had you stay here, but it’s so small, you can see that.”

Meike’s expression stayed blank as she stared around the room, not seeming to recognize the things around her.

Her mother had just died. She sat with her hands gripping the seat of the chair, looking stranded in the middle of the room. Elisabeth got up, pushing her chair out abruptly behind her. She came back with the envelope.

“Here,” she said. She was still standing.

Around them the apartment slumbered in dark wood and olive greens, fantastic floral prints blooming up the walls, blackish blue with detailed pastel blossoms.

Elisabeth smiled weakly.

“Have more cake,” she said. ~ Five days before, Blohm had plucked up the courage to ask if she and Elisabeth were related.

Meike smiled at him, a bent, sardonic smile, as if he’d told an off-colour joke. For a moment the light off a passing car dazzled his eyes and he had to squint at the girl in front of him. Blohm nodded when she told him Elisabeth was her father’s sister. He vaguely remembered Elisabeth mentioning a brother who was dead now. Died young, and suddenly, somewhere in the United States. ~ “This is what he looked like,” Elisabeth said, holding the envelope out to Meike in the halflit room. She tried to keep her voice light: “I thought you’d be curious, maybe.”

Elisabeth put the envelope on the table in front of her. Meike blinked, and looked at her passively.

They did not talk about the plans for the memorial service, though Meike could still see her mother sitting up in the hospital bed, only a week ago, face contorted, choked with the sudden urge to speak.

She could not remember this woman’s brother, the man in the photographs laid out before her. The cups in the kitchen rattled faintly against their saucers from the vibrations of the subway running below. She had one image of him in her mind, the one her mother described as the words poured rapidly out of her mouth,

Ben Peck / The McGill Daily

loosed from her lungs with such force into the climate-controlled air of the hospital room.

How he climbed into the sea one day with his shoes still on. A day in February when the sky was grey. ~ “What is she doing?” Meike asked Blohm, three days before she knocked on Elisabeth’s door. The bookstore was open late Thursday nights, and they sat in the glow of his desk lamp with smoke wafting to the ceiling.

Across the traffic circle they could see Elisabeth’s shadow framed against the light from her window, moving strangely back and forth in the same spot.

“She irons her husband’s shirt collars twice a week,” Blohm said. “She stands by the window to get the breeze while she does it. Usually she has the radio on.”

“You’ve known her for a while then,” Meike said. He nodded.

“Do you see her often?”

“Not so much as before,” he said. His eyes watered, and he batted the smoke away, the air grown suddenly too thick. ~ “Why did your mother want to be buried here?” he asked. The light from the desk lamp cast a pool around them, leaving the rest of the store in relative darkness. He had turned the fluorescents off, unable to stand their buzzing in the heat.

“Not exactly here,” she said. “Where my father was born.”

“Ah. So your mother was a romantic.”

Meike shrugged, and asked about Elisabeth’s husband.

“Who knows where he is,” Blohm said. “No sign of him for at least four years now.”

He thought about this for a moment, squinting into the street. “Or maybe she hears from him now and then, I wouldn’t know anymore.”

They looked to the window again, watching the shadow move laboriously back and forth. ~ The light drew itself out as the sun went down behind the surrounding buildings, its glow lingering above the city. It was late. The girl had gone, and Elisabeth stood by herself in the kitchen, window open to the humid dusk. The last light went off in Blohm’s shop on the corner.

She saw him rummaging for the key in his jacket pocket, standing on the stoop underneath the

streetlamp’s light. His paunch had grown over the past year. A cyclist pedalled his way past.

Old ghosts come out at night, she said to herself, watching Blohm cross the small patch of grass. She pictured her mother saying it, when she was a girl and their father turned up.

She shut her eyes. Too soon, she said. Take it back. ~ In Meike’s mind the sea was unbearably blue in front of him, rushing loud over the beat of his heart as he walked down the beach, over the snow. A vivid, bright blue against the grey of the sky, his polished shoes, his coat as he threw it off behind him. That blue got into her head like a sickness. It was strange what a person could get used to, what you could go without wondering about for years. ~ Blohm went to knock, only to find the door already open.

“I told you not to come here,” Elisabeth said.

“Don’t turn on the light!” she added, though he already had. Her skin was yellowed under the light, more shrivelled than he remembered.

He sighed and walked past her before she could speak a word of protest.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she called after him, as he switched on the light in the bedroom and threw open the closet, exposing a straight row of white men’s shirts. He started ripping them off the rack with manic speed, throwing them to the floor and stamping on them even as he reached for more, grinding them into the carpet under his feet. He worked with the energy of a man half his age and with much better lungs, and when he was finished he looked at her, deflated, and moved forward to leave.

“No. No,” she said. “What makes you think ...” she trailed off.

The floor was covered in white, crumpled arms pointing in every direction.

He straightened his collar and the cigarette in his mouth, inhaled and exhaled slowly. Sweat beaded on his face.

She opened her mouth but no sound came.

He went out. She moved towards the window, straining for the sound of traffic outside, for the cool of evening descending on the street, something to block out the starched waved of shirts before her, the only sound in her ears the retreating rush of the sea.

6

Literary Supplement 2008

jillian oliver

repair T

here was always something broken in the house. No matter how they tried to prevent accidents, things in that house just had a faulty way about them. Over the years the efforts had been tremendous. Several layers of padding under the carpets, corners of furniture sanded down to be rounded instead of sharp, replacement of glass with plastic whenever possible, to name a few. Still, every once and a while something would fall, be knocked over or weather with time. They took to more realistic strategies, such as turning things around so the unbroken side wouldn’t show, moving furniture over stains, etcetera. Nowadays they sit around drinking tea and musing about how funny it is that broken possessions can break spirits too.

Ben Peck / The McGill Daily

a train named engineuity “S o you see it is not really the state of things that matters, at least not in the way you understand it. What is more plausible is the being that they possess, you know, the thingness of their being. That is to say, well, think of it this way. We have all got this essence to us, and so it is best to think of it instead of things that are in the state of being with other things; that it is instead one big essence that is being, and in this way all the things are…hm. I seem to have lost my train of thought.”

Claudia looked at Anders’s bewilderment.

They had spent a great deal of time together up to this point but she was only just beginning to think that their May-December relationship wasn’t as sound as it had initially seemed. Anders’s train

chlorophyll melissa bull He conjugates my synapses – cell and cell filament a spirogyra net of singular structure.

Mouths mouth words typed papillae finger syntax sing-snaps anemone flors me.

of thought had recently been running off its analytical rails rather often, and with increasing frequency.

Of course it wasn’t that Anders’s was old.

With the vaults of medical science available it was likely that his earthly life would be prolonged beyond multiple horizons. Probably one day, Claudia thought, we’ll all just expect to live forever. With respect to Anders, though, this was irrelevant because he did not live in his skin and organs. Anders’ self dwelled instead in the body of his mind. And his mind had been worked so hard and been so consistently sharp that it had lived twenty lives compared to his physical body’s measly one. A consciousness that has lived twenty times, Claudia knew, would

improve and then plateau before it began to fade, and it had begun to fade.

She had watched Anders well the past few weeks while he read, pondered and wrote in his study. What had especially tipped her off was the way in which he had begun to study Heidegger. Heidegger had been a general source of knowledge from which he could extract both anecdotes and broad concepts for his writing and discussions. Now Anders poured for hours over a single page of Heidegger, massaging the same sentence with the tip of his finger. He would then tap his finger on the book, pause, and write down several pages. Irked by the sudden volumes he was producing on Heidegger compared to his previous concise essays, Claudia had investigated

superhero

and found them to be disjointed and inconclusive musings bizarre of his past ingenuities.

“Do you recall what I was saying?” Anders asked.

“No, I’m sorry. I wasn’t on board.”

“That would make two of us,” he chuckled, adjusting his glasses and picking up the book to his left.

“I love you,” she said.

“Have you read de Beauvoir’s The Woman in Love?”

“Yes.” “Eh…that’s my girl.”

If his rational mind was not being replaced by an emotional one, she wondered, what could possibly be filling the void?

zack schuster, dark poet

If I was a superhero I would order custom made velour gloves and put them on and punch you. The comfort my fists would feel in the custom made velour gloves could be severely contrasted with the immense pain you would feel.

You would not know my superhero name or my secret identity because there are no comic books based on my existence nor is there a line of kids’ pajamas bearing my likeness. Perhaps I would have no superhero name.

cowboy BANG BANG the cowboy says. YOU’RE DEAD. i think you’re mistaken I REPLY. you are the dead one cowboy. you are confined to misrepresentation in cinema and silly anecdotes. perhaps you should consider Boca Raton as a viable location for your impending retirement.

BANG BANG the cowboy says. I’M DEAD

nightclub If I opened a nightclub I would call it Transylvania and advise you not to go the bathroom.

Sasha Plotnikova / The McGill Daily

Literary Supplement 2008

sniffer I

am trying to find the perfect metaphor for Tommaso Palladio: perhaps he’s a pig sniffing out truffles.

We’re sitting in his living room while his mother cooks us dinner.

“Too much tarragon,” he says. “Always with too much tarragon. Can you smell it too? I should have hidden the tarragon. I am sorry.”

I tell him it’s no big deal as I like tarragon.

“Tarragon,” he continues, “has haunted me since my childhood.”

I can believe this. Tommaso, more than any other man or woman on this planet, is prone to be affected by herbs. He wiggles his nose and flares his nostrils next to me: “I hope you like your spaghetti sweet too. She’s going to overwhelm you with flavour.”

I assure him that I can handle both sweet and savory.

“I apologize,” he says.

I tell him not to worry and we begin to talk about him. Tommaso emigrated here, to Southern California, in the early 1970s from Udine, a town in northern Italy. At night school Tommaso learned English. He was taught

by Ana DeLouvigne, the sister of Gabrielle DeLouvigne, who at that time was seeking to launch her perfume business.

“It was a divine intervention,” Tommaso says.

“Ana came in and began to teach us about toiletries and had brought a little bag of stuff: shampoo, soap, some deodorant. She’d lift up an item and call on one of the students to identify it. Then she pulled out a bottle of her sister’s perfume which was still in its test stages. She squirted it into the air and asked us what it was. I was immediately disgusted, I must tell you. Ana must have seen me recoil or something and asked me what was wrong. And I told her: too much patchouli.”

Intrigued, Ana introduced Tommaso to Gabrielle, whose perfume was having major problems in preliminary testing. Tommaso

7

Mariel Capanna / The McGill Daily

robert kilpatrick promised to stop by the office and offer Gabrielle some advice. “He was brilliant,” Gabrielle had told me over the phone. “He just walked in with this sort of swagger that bewildered everyone.”

“I was disgusted,” recalls Tommaso. “The whole operation was foul. I told Gabrielle immediately that she was being tricked. She needed to fire her advisors immediately. Those people knew nothing about smells.”

Gabrielle hired him, and by the end of his first week Tommaso had laid much of the basis for what would become DeLouvigne’s Memories.

Memories, of course, went on to great international success and is still considered by perfuming experts one of the few modern classics.

“My company was built on Tommaso’s brilliance,” acknowledged Gabrielle. “And for that I am incredibly grateful. He really is an artist.”

We are gathered around the Palladios’ dining table. I stand next to two of Tommaso’s kids, Peter and David, and across from Samantha, his wife. Tommaso helps his 83-year-old mother carry the spaghetti, which is drenched in a pulpy tomato sauce, over to the dining table. He serves us all a plate and we join hands and say grace. After my first bite of spaghetti I know that Tommaso is correct and that he probably always is: there’s too much tarragon in this sauce.

In the early 1980s, Tommaso met Samantha Douglas, who is still beautiful 25 years and four kids later. She wears her hair in a bun and screams in broken Italian. She brandishes her ladle like a sword, slicing at the children as they come running, muddied, through the kitchen.

“Children are impossible,” she tells me. The children hear and giggle.

Samantha and Tommaso were late to parenthood. He was 45 and she was 40 when their first child, Lydia, was born. They often wonder if they’re too old for this.

I inquire about their first meeting. “I was a nurse,” she tells me as she juggles four packed

lunches. “Tommaso came in one day with a stomach ache. He was pretty scared. Turns out it was just gas.”

I am at the Palladio household at 7 a.m. It is hectic and beautiful. Today, I will tag along as Tommaso and his crew film part of an episode of The Sniffer Trials, Tommaso’s nationally syndicated television program.

“He doesn’t like to brag,” Samantha says stuffing a child’s limb, any limb, through a coat sleeve. “But he was headhunted by all the big perfume companies. All of them. They all came and wined and dined him and laid a big fat check under his nose. He said no.”

The two fell in love. Tommaso would stop by the hospital for any reason. “It got to the point where I thought he was becoming a hypochondriac,” Samantha laughs. “I guess love’ll make you do stupid things.”

Tommaso was unassuming in his approach.

“I had to be the one to ask him out on a date,” Samantha says. “Can you believe that?”

I tell her I can.

In 1985, Tommaso and Samantha, who had quit her job, opened a clinic together with the goal of offering practical dieting advice to people in need. In 2000, Jerry Haftameier came across the clinic. He was overweight and depressed. He was also a television producer.

“When I met the guy I was greatly impressed,” he tells me as we drive over to the home of Annie Clyde, the woman who will be featured in this episode of The Sniffer Trials. “He was just so enthusiastic and bubbly. He had just turned 50.

I was sitting there and thinking, ‘Boy, is this guy great or what?’ And he is. He’s really great. I lost a lot of weight and felt healthy for the first time in my life.”

Jerry drew up plans for a pilot episode of the show. It proved a hit. Viewers, just like Jerry, loved Tommaso.

Annie Clyde’s home is a mess of a bungalow.

A beagle patrols the lawn, snapping and barking at strangers. Three kids terrorize the living room. Chocolate is smeared everywhere.

“I’m a bit embarrassed,” Annie confides in me. “I’’m going to be on television and this place is a mess. I tried to clean it but these kids can ruin anything.”

I ask her if she’s embarrassed about essentially defecating on television.

“Heavens no,” she replies. “I am grateful for this opportunity. I am thrilled Tommaso is here.”

The beagle has stopped barking and the cameras are rolling. Tommaso walks in with a flourish. Annie’s eyes light up. She shakes his hand and he gives her a kiss on the cheek. They both smile and Tommaso gestures toward the bathroom. Annie walks off unselfconsciously and closes the door behind her.

She emerges three minutes later and doesn’t need to force a smile. She is thrilled. Tommaso takes her place in the bathroom, also smiling.

He closes the door behind himself too, shutting the master and the canvas off from the rest of the world. He emerges a minute later.

“Let’s take you shopping,”” he says, his white teeth bared. I now know that I have no need to follow Tommaso and Annie down the supermarket’s aisles as he plucks items from shelves, dumps them into the shopping cart and carefully explains the merits of his choices.

I know how the events will unfold hereafter: Annie will be healthier and fitter and happier in five months time. I know all of this and now I think I have found the metaphor I have been searching for: Tommaso is not the pig. No, he is the truffle and in some great instance of luck we (who are collectively the pig) have somehow found him during one of our lethargic travails through the forest.

Perhaps this metaphor isn’t perfect but it’s the best I have.

8

Literary Supplement 2008

winter I have yet to use the oblong soap bar shagged with hairs of the people living here and of me to wash my legs.

I laze around and leave bending in the shower to summer and to smaller clothes But tonight I walk from my bed wearing on my chest only hair. Over my leather backed desk chair I sling the pants I have worn so long now. I am a naked boy, butt and ankles for the people living here and for me.

In the washroom and bath I see the moon ink silver on the muted water soaking full my calves and their groaning under

samuel woodworth

to my husband Oh baby, why’d we have to take that vacation in the city?

Fresh out before big toothed Montreal you looked little and gone guarding our packs full of apples and cheese.

You were some scared blue eyes off a steamer flagged to port and brackish tides so I tapped your chest the way I do.

Even when you made me that night your eyes were gone and your voice little.

the oblong soap bar shagged with hairs of us.

Mariel Capanna / The McGill Daily

light on the underside

suzanne philippot

The dinner table cleared we sat down for swans the swept floor dishes dined a fit little dirge it was elastic a candle lit sit-in and such a spread! we didn’t really get in until later but the leaves were leaving anyways.

So sorry to have missed you we really should see sideways more silently sometime the pine trees are dying in this lime morning sun thick branches, for uncles a hollow ringing bowl a pool of koi we saw the biggest tree trunk a car could have passed through into the elevator up up up on a teetollers exhale a car part of the grand scheme could pass but the lions at the front door wouldn’t let him through.

This is our yearning for the dietitian and the homemade house to pound the grains of wheat next to the moss next to the pounding magnet mountain a dish prepared to live by an aisle in the grocery store in the center of the province, or on an island we got there by the only free boat left a leftist sort of thing it was a passing thing these good deals last for only so long well, what shall we watch in the dark?

Open doors, a painting room, the nuns slept down there and prayed down stairs a breakfast with the woman who won the babies no one wanted old graveyard if you want to sing out came out one year after the airbags crushed our left side that yellow man was put into the ocean too and then the younger one eight cases of beer to wish the dishes away! or a coffee with an older man, who says it was for the best the best is yet to come the day is done.

that dream where you walk around naked jessica patterson Wrapped, shoulder to hip in loose red towel, I walk to your house.

In your doorway, your aunt, though she is not herself, glares. Holds back a dog I've never seen.

Down in your room, though it is not itself, I steal your clothes.

I swear she knows.

Photo 13

The McGill Daily • Thursday, March 20, 2008

Photo Exposure.

Lights, Snow, Action.

[Mont Tremblant, Feb. 29, 2008]

email submissions to photos@mcgilldaily.com subject: photo exposure Photo Exposure is a space dedicated to photography and art that will appear periodically in the Daily.

Submission can be of anything that makes you stop, look, and re-evaluate the moment, whether it’s through your camera lens or paintbrush.

Camille McOuat for The McGill Daily

p

o c l i

y p

Y o u ’ v e

S I G N E D M c G i l l ’s

sustainability PLEDGE-

now come learn about the latest green PROJECTS on campus,

ra i ct

se

and tell us how we can DO M O R E . . . t o g e t h e r.

CONFERENCE OUTLINE

The 7th annual Rethink conference

sea e 28.mar.08 change > 7:30 Registra�on, con�nental breakfast > 8:00 Part I: • KEYNOTE: Gault@50 - Dr. Mar�n J. Lechowicz • Environmental policy implementa�on at McGill: presenta�ons from the SCE and student groups > 10:00 Part II: The Quebec sustainable development strategy; followed by breakout sessions.

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information+registration: www.mcgill.ca/rethink

16

Graphic Essay

The McGill Daily • Thursday, March 20, 2008

Culture

The McGill Daily • Thursday, March 20, 2008

15

Garcia Bernal’s shady past Babenco’s The Past has all of the elements, but doesn’t work BEN FRIED The McGill Daily

H

ere’s a depressing proposition: On the one hand, we have Latin America’s biggest film star, the young, handsome, multilingual, and (lest the inferiority complex become too crushing) short Gael Garcia Bernal. He is in The Past, a new Argentinean movie with beautiful women who can’t help but throw themselves at him, and he features in at least three great sex scenes. On the other, there is the hapless student reviewer who arrives at the Ibero-Latin-American Festivalissimo barely on time, forgets his glasses, and is ushered in only to find out that the movie doesn’t have subtitles. So who has a better time? The answer is me, but only because this movie must have been even more painful to make than to sit through.

The evening began well. Ten minutes before showtime, a boisterous queue snaked up from Cinema du Parc’s doors nearly all the way to the far-off Uniprix.

Passions were running high.

Excited chatter about Gael echoed in three languages. People were dissuaded from cutting the line by a patrolling mustachioed septuagenarian with an open shirt and a gold chain. This, it turned out,

was the theatre’s manager, Roland Smith. With an air of growing contentment, we eventually entered, passing an empanadas y churros stand on the way. It would have taken a cold heart not to smile at the whistles and cheers that greeted Garcia Bernal’s name during the opening credits.

Those sounds were soon replaced, however, by a dull buzz of confusion. Garcia Bernal was on screen, but where were the subtitles? And, irony of ironies, was he really playing a translator making his living by writing film subtitles?

The non-Spanish segment of the audience became increasingly perturbed until 15 minutes in, when the film abruptly cut out. The lights came on, and an organizer came in to explain that the print had not been previously viewed and offered the discontented their money back.

I stuck around though and, aided by the whisperings of a helpful Chilean woman, slowly pieced together the elements of the movie.

Rimini (Garcia Bernal) ends his marriage of twelve years to Sofia (Analia Couceyro, more appealing than her underwritten role would suggest), and moves into a beautiful Buenos Aires apartment. He proceeds to romance two other women, one an inexplicably highstrung model and the other his seductively professional translating colleague. He goes to clubs, snorts

a lot of cocaine, carries on a fantastic (and graphically depicted) sex life, and, in short, seems to be having a great time. But his past, in the shape of the increasingly deranged and intrusive Sofia, keeps creeping back into his life.

It is always daring to place a deeply unsympathetic character at the centre of the audience’s attention: done well, it can easily be either marvellous fun or startling enough to give the viewers an interesting jolt. But the makers of The Past do not seem to realize what a lousy human being their hero is. Devoid of both a sense of humour and any self-awareness, Rimini’s continual disregard for his girlfriends is surpassed only by one’s amazement that they should still find him attractive. Caring for this empty individual, the other characters soon become equally ridiculous, and the suspense in his relationships ebbs away. The moment when Sofia briefly steals Rimini’s newborn baby, which should feel like a kick in the gut, passes by with barely a whimper.

If the centre does not hold, things soon start to fall apart. Poor Garcia Bernal struggles gamely enough to gloss over The Past’s glaring inconsistencies, but he has the dazed expression of a man who wishes he was still playing Che Guevara. For starters, Rimini’s cocaine habit rears its ugly head only to disappear with-

Noelani Eidse / The McGill Daily

out any explanation a third of the way through the film. Likewise, no indication is provided when leaps in time occur, leaving the audience to wonder why only 10 seconds after their first hook-up, Rimini’s translator girlfriend undergoes a caesarean section. The less said about the central twist – an attack of amnesia – the better. But we must note veteran director Hector Babenco’s ability to provide a resolution even more baffling than the plot turn’s confused introduction.

At the end, Rimini returns to Sofia for a one-night stand, the implication being that he finally puts his troubled past to bed. The reality is that the only people who should feel more abused and betrayed than Sofia are the long-suffering audience.

The Past plays as part of Festivalissimo at 7 p.m., March 25 at at Cinema du Parc (3575 Parc).

Visit cinemaduparc.com for more information.

An exercise in shimmering nothingness De Salvo and Fogwill’s film Kept and Dreamless is visually pleasant, if a bit vapid IAN BEATTIE The McGill Daily

E

very frame of the Argentinean film Kept and Dreamless is marked by splashes of colour: orange stairwells, fluorescent pink clothing, and dyed yellow hair flash on screen with all the brightness of a matador’s costume. Even in scenes that take place at night, something is always shimmering, from the luminescent blue of a street lamp reflected in a rain puddle to the chrome stylings on an old Volvo. Kept and Dreamless is so visually impressive that when certain scenes open you feel yourself take in a little gasp of air. But it soon becomes evident that the film’s aesthetic appeal is a veneer:

stylization masks a weak plot.

Dreamless focuses on the troubles and triumphs of mother-daughter pair Florencia and Eugenia, who live in a squalid apartment in the slums of an unnamed Argentina city.

Florencia gave birth to her daughter while in high school, provoking permanent bitterness between herself and her mother, a wealthy psychiatrist who is unable to deal with her daughter’s flaws. Florencia’s mother reluctantly pays for her daughter’s living expenses so she will not have to work, but often cuts payments when Florencia messes up. Florencia rebels against her mother’s controlling parenting by constantly testing her patience. She uses cocaine and has unprotected sex with innumerable shady characters, confident that her scandalized mother will pay for her abortions.

Florencia’s rebellion against her mother’s bourgeois values – which her self-imposed exile to the slums authenticates – could be seen as admirable, if somewhat over the top. Yet Eugenia, who is nine years old at the start of the film, inadvertently draws attention

to the cracks in her mother’s moral framework. Florencia is totally inadequate as Eugenia’s mother. Engrossed in her own angst, she seems to forget that by martyring herself she has also condemned her innocent daughter to a deprived life. Often, it is Eugenia who must mother Florencia, shaking her out of a mid-afternoon hangover for a parent-teacher interview, or convincing her to get a job so that they can pay their gas bills. Eugenia’s circumstance is rendered truly tragic by her ignorance of her own condition.

For Eugenia, life is a constant party, despite the slaps she receives for the cocaine in the kitchen sugar bowl. “We are what we are, and we’re happy,” she tells her shocked grandmother at one point. Towards the end of the film, Eugenia gets her first period. The symbolic step towards adolescence, made all the more significant by the fact that her mother has apparently never told her about menstruation, reminds the viewer that while Eugenia might be having fun now, the deficiencies of her childhood threaten to make growing up a disaster.

But the critique implicit in directors’

Martin Desalvo and Vera Fogwill film lacks a sense of cohesive direction. At times, Dreamless veers towards social commentary, when themes of poverty and social justice flare up and Florencia and Eugenia momentarily appear to be victims of circumstance. At others, it’s a cynical portrait of Argentine youth, particularly during one scene where Florencia psychoanalyses herself while lounging in a lawn chair, sporting Ray Bans and smoking a cigarette. She’s so cool she’s bored with being cool.

During these times, Eugenia is kind of tucked away in a corner, an inconvenient reminder of how extraordinarily selfish Dreamless’s main character really is.

Dreamless is not only unable to fully develop either of these themes; it is also a poorly crafted narrative.

It’s unclear that Florencia comes from a wealthy family until well into the film. And even though Dreamless explores motherhood, her relationship with Eugenia is never resolved, though the birth of her second child seems to instantly place her on higher moral ground. In a conversation with her mother, she haughtily

explains her cocaine-addled theory of non-parenting as some form of idealized anarchist motherhood.

Wait, what? Our little tragic heroine is still sailing happily and blindly into impending disaster when she waves us goodbye, preceding the film’s climactic final scene that ends on a note of disillusionment.

With Dreamless, Desalvo and Fogwill have created a colourful, creative film; the lush cinematography keeps us from ever getting bored. To their credit, every character in the film is wonderfully crafted, made believable by their flaws, yet the film is a tangle of loose ends.

Every time it seems to be going somewhere, Dreamless loses its way and stumbles off the path again.

After watching it, one is left frustrated and confused, yet, at the same time, somewhat charmed. A head scratcher, but a pretty one.

Kept and Dreamless plays as part of Festivalissimo at 9 p.m. on March 23 at Cinema du Parc (3575 Parc).

Visit cinemaduparc.com for information.

STARTS FRIDAY, MARCH 28

Culture 17

The McGill Daily • Thursday, March 20, 2008

Dan Snaith: straight outta Dundas, Ontario Caribou’s mastermind creates his own musical scene from his bedroom JOSHUA FRANK The McGill Daily

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rendsetting magazines and web sites have always looked for indie music’s new “it” spots, from L.A. to New York, and Montreal to Baltimore. Chances are, though, not even the most intrepid Pitchfork scribe would ever make it to Dundas, Ontario. The 10,000 person county outside of Hamilton is no musical hotbed, but it is where Caribou frontman Dan Snaith spent his formative years.

As a teenager craving creative stimulation in a hippie town where Nirvana’s popularity in high school paled in comparison to the Grateful Dead, Snaith quickly adopted an “anything goes” approach to discovering bands.

“We were obsessed with finding out about other weird music,” he explains, “and it didn’t matter whether it was a Dennis Wilson record or techno from the UK going around at that time.”

While previous releases followed a more loop-based, repetitive approach, Snaith admits diving into full-fledged pop territory on his new record, Andorra. “I consciously set out to write all the songs on this album in advance before I started recording, which is unusual for me,” he notes; writing and recording “usually just happen at the same time.”

This time around, Snaith tried to “condense [his] ideas as much as possible to fit things into short pop songs and squeeze out all the excess.”

Snaith sees himself as a musi- he was imagining. Ironically, after cian rather than lyricist, investing naming the album, he travelled to most of his songs’ feeling in sound Andorra for the first time, findrather than words. “It’s all about ing it “all tacky souvenirs and coming up with melody and harmo- crappy ski chalets for Europe’s ny that have some kind of emotion- rich bureaucrats” rather than the al connection,” he says, then adding mountainous paradise envisioned.

While he may draw inspiration lyrics to reflect the song’s feeling, whether it’s euphoria or melan- from the romantic promise of farcholy. Snaith may be reluctant to off lands, Snaith’s work retains couple his tunes with confessional the unshakeable influence of his lyrical outpourings – “[It’s not] me native country. “I was really aware sitting down and writing down my when I started recording music life story and fitting music around that I was some dude in a bedit,” he explains – but his eclectic room and had grown up in rural musical tastes keep Caribou songs Ontario, the middle of nowhere,” comfortably removed from superfi- he explains, from his London, England apartment. “There’s a cial party pop.

Still, with their winsome melodies, Caribou songs tend to be perI ‘m kind of glad that I’ve ceived as overtly happy – never really been part of a a fact that puzzles Snaith.

“Inevitably, in the process scene...I’ve just been left to do of recording an album my own thing. for a whole year, I was in every single possible – Caribou’s Dan Snaith mood at some point,” he says. “My music tends to be more optimistic than it is pes- sense of Canadianess, of remotesimistic, but there are some songs ness and ruralness, rather than [on Andorra] that are more mel- being another DJ from London or ancholy…. It’s not like I’m happy New York.”

“I’m kind of glad that I’ve never for the entire year!” he exclaims.

It’s clear that Snaith is generally really been part of a scene,” he unwilling to limit Caribou’s sound adds, “I’ve just been left alone to to one category – understandably do my own thing.”

With an ear that loves Nelly just so, seeing as since 2001, his albums have run the gamut from ambient as much as noise-punk and the energy to last a marathon threeelectronic to psychedelic pop.

With its carefully-crafted har- month tour, we can be glad Snaith monies, Andorra sees Caribou has emerged from his bedroom at their most melodic yet. Snaith once again. admits he picked the remote prinCaribou plays with Fuck cipality nestled between France and Spain as an album title because Buttons on Sunday March 23 at it “seemed like a good physical La Tulipe (4530 Papineau). Tickets home” for the “overtly emotional, are $18. Visit caribou.fm for more romantic and lush sounding world” information.

“

Nadja Popovich/ The McGill Daily

Ultimately, Andorra’s songs still can’t help but spill over the sides of their immaculate pop mould, but they come out all the better for it.

Sunny melodies shift in and out of psychedelic freak-outs, as Snaith swaps instruments and his band alternates between chiming vocals, textural, swirling guitar, and frantic two-person drum solos.

Perhaps it’s this gotta-playeverything restlessness that makes Caribou’s most recent record so engaging. Snaith packs wide-ranging ideas into his songs, excitedly sharing his broad musical interests in five-minute sonic bursts. It’s refreshing respite from the armies of indie-rock soundalikes who promise they just want to make you dance.

No need to get carried away over originality, though: Snaith’s

inspirations are clear, too, from the Beach Boys to NEU!. Still, the unlikely musical pairings made by such a voracious listener suggest progression and synthesis rather than uninventive copycatting: he tosses around influences as diverse as obscure no-wave and decadesold progressive rock. Instead of falling into a lull of ho-hum candycoated melody, the songs trip into mesmerizing kraut-rock drones and blast off with commanding energy.

Inspired by the physicality of groups like noise duo Lightning Bolt and Japan’s legitimately-crazy Boredoms, Snaith – who writes and records all of Caribou’s songs alone in his bedroom – reworks his material with a full band before touring, explicitly keeping their live show in mind.

The Fugitives:“Montreal has figured out the whole wet sock/ dry sock issue” Vancouver slam poetry group hosts a musical orgy – complete with handclaps, banjo and melodica “A journalist is simply someone who has a good memory.”

These words began Vancouver performative outfit The Fugitives’ set at L’Inspecteur Epingle on Wednesday, March 12. Ironically, I may be misquoting them slightly – something band member Brendan McLeod has given me permission to do. I hesitate to definitively categorize the group’s performance.

The Fugitives’ show was a child of dubitable parentage: a banjo, melodica, slam poetry, handclaps, joy, and frustration were only a few of the participants in their musical orgy. Adler – wielder of the melodica and a recognized figure in the Vancouver Poetry Slam scene – graciously allowed me to probe her mind.

The McGill Daily: How did

you get into performing poetry?

Barbara Adler: I went to an event to see beat poetry done by a guy who literally wore black turtle necks and berets, and did poems over bongo drums and saxophones.

Luckily, I was more impressed by the peformance put on by the Vancouver Poetry Slam team, which had R.C Weslowski, Shane Koyczan, CR Avery and Cass King. They promoted the slam, and I went out to see it. I ended up writing a paper on slam poetry for a class I was taking, and listened to a track so many times that I started to have the feeling I just have to do this.

MD: What is your power animal?

Is your onstage power animal different from your regular, everyday power animal?

BA: I actually think that it’s a little

gauche to ask what someone’s power animal is. You aren’t really supposed to say, especially if it’s crucial that your power isn’t diluted. I will tell you though that my regular power animal naps a lot more than my onstage power animal. My onstage power animal might be a member of the ungulate family (can’t tell you which one, but that group includes deer, moose, elk). It is alert, fleetfooted, and wary.

MD: What song best captures your present mood?

BA: There’s that Bright Eyes song, I think it’s just called “Travelling Song,” off the album that I think is called I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning.

I know, I know, it’s obvious, but I am travelling right now, so it fits. Plus he sounds tired all the time, which I can relate to in general.

MD: If Vancouver were a person, what would he/she be like? What about other cities you’ve visited on tour?

BA: Oh man, Vancouver is definitely a Mountain Co-op junkie on a constant mission to keep their feet dry. This makes them earnest, a little bumbly, and too busy to go inside and catch some culture.

We’ll just say that Montreal has somehow figured out the whole wet sock/dry sock issue a little better, and is therefore capable of being the drop-dead-gorgeous woman or man on the camping trip who is somehow wearing leopard print tights and high heels and not looking uncomfortable at all. In fact, she or he probably set the tent and chopped all the fire wood. And is smoking, and will probably not get lung cancer. I know this is a stereo-

type, but it’s coming from a place of sheer awe. Vancouver is neat too – eating granola and high-fiving seals and stuff. But seriously, it’s hard to look cool doing any of that if you are constantly worried about your feet being wet. Or maybe that’s just me.

MD: Does Montreal seem like a person you might like to date?

BA: Obviously. Why are you even asking that? Is that an offer?

Barbara Adler is “on a personal mission to make our band come up higher than the FBI Most Wanted Fugitives website on Google.” Help her live the dream by going to fugitives.ca.

– compiled by Madeline Coleman

18

Culture

The McGill Daily • Thursday, March 20, 2008

Urban Joseph make noise with guitars and Chinese toys CAITLIN MANICOM The McGill Daily

A Caitlin Manicom / The McGill Daily

flashing plastic owl, a children’s toy piano and two Arts students – Daily staffer Joshua Frank and Yannick Kuch – were the musical highlights of Fridge Door Gallery’s third vernissage yesterday evening. Urban Joseph is the duo’s newly hatched brainchild. While they have been playing improv for some time, they first performed at art col-

lective lab.synthese just over a month ago. Urban Joseph’s experimental noise is a mix between the hilariously entertaining (their last show involved Frank crawling on the floor with a flashing owl tied to his head) and musically innovative. And while the variety of plastic musical instruments suggests child-play, the aggressively loud music is anything but puerile.

Urban Joseph’s messy four-minute set at lab.synthese has evolved into a mature, 20-minute show. At The Fridge Door, Kuch called the

audience to attention by switching a miniature television to “static fuzz” mode. As Kuch’s classically-trained fingers gently pawed a colourful toy guitar, Frank’s eager feet pedalled in time to his noisy bass. Although Urban Joseph’s music lacks a clearly discernible rhythm, Kuch’s laptop beats and Frank’s Buddha box chants had the vernissage attendees foot-tapping in no time.

The Fridge Door Gallery is located in Leacock 111.

STARTS FRIDAY, MARCH 21 EVERYWHERE

ATTENTION CULTURE WRITERS: The section’s final meeting is happening this Tuesday. And you’re giong to get a chance to evaluate the shit out of the culture editors.

Win Free Tickets

Air your viscious grievances this Tuesday at 4:30, Shatner B-24.

On Tuesday Mar. 25th, come by The McGill Daily Offices - Shatner B-26, to get a pair of tickets to The Laboratory. First come first served. McGill Student ID required.

(We’ll accept hugs, too.)

Culture

The McGill Daily • Thursday, March 20, 2008

19

Life in plastic...it’s fantastic?

Janet Werner’s saccharine sweet portraits confront us with modern takes on the feminine “ideal” NADJA POPOVICH The McGill Daily

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rtificiality: it’s such a major theme in modern art that the concept itself seems, well, artificial. Still, we are inexplicably drawn to it when assessing our post-modern position in art. Commodification and artificiality have been the ideological centerpieces and major creative forces driving artistic practice for a long time. But at this point, what more can be said?

According to Jeanie Riddle, creative director of Parisian Laundry, plenty.

Artificiality will always have its place in modern art. In fact, it is the central issue that informs the creative decisions of Parisian Laundry, a striking gallery in St. Henri.

“We live in all things plastic,” she asserts, and we need to embrace it.

Janet Werner’s newest show fits this criteria perfectly: the materiality of the saccharine sweet portraits featured in “Too Much Happiness” force us to face the reality of their artificial construction.

Werner confronts the viewer with the idealized female of the 21st century: the magazine girl.

The magazine, as an artistic forum, defines and perpetuates the new “ideal” female: beautiful, inexorably thin, vacant, with not a hair out of place. Yet below this plastic exterior lurk larger implications for contemporary society. Though the idealized female has been a centerpiece of art history for centuries in one form or another, Werner tackles the theme from a distinctly modern perspective.

This is the point for Riddle: what defines art today are new, novel combinations of old themes and practices.

In magazines, woman has transcended her classical place as idealized form on canvas and become a part of everyday life. What more obvious place of her continued existence in modernity than the magazine? Through her contemporary paintings, Werner reclaims the model-as-modern-Venus’s place on canvas once more.

The classical nature of Werner’s medium – large-scale oil portraiture – alludes to what was once considered a category of “high” art in which the female was central. Yet Werner’s paintings never lose their “pop” quality; their essence is sugary kitsch. The subjects could have sprung from the pages of today’s Vogue; even their impassive stares are reminiscent of the blank-faced models gracing the magazine’s glossy pages.

As the works are not reflections of real life, but of the magazine’s construction of reality, Werner’s art takes on the artificiality of the idealized female form in a new way. The self-referential nature of the portraits – their play between painting

Nadja Popovich / The McGill Daily

Werner’s paitings explore the artificiality of the modern feminine “ideal” at Parisian Laundry this month. and magazine as separate artistic media – complicates the distinction between the two. But what seals the deal is the way Werner every so often inserts these model girls into ever more campy natural landscapes.

These fake, kitschy scenes are so blatantly disconnected from the girls themselves – though they both reside in the world of the unnatural – that they only serve to further reinforce our unease with the world of the idealized forms that face us.

Yet if the artistic endeavor is to openly evaluate, and perhaps even subvert, the fashion model ideal, it falls short in the end. Though Werner questions the constructed nature of these girls by multiplying the codes of artificiality that mark them, she provides no alternatives. What’s more, by pushing the boundaries of kitsch so strongly in the scenic backgrounds, she seems to step into comical exaggeration rather than critical inquiry.

Still, these women can’t help but persist as an ideal. In the end, the exhibit feels more like a musing on the exaggeration of kitsch through the idealized female form, rather than a true critique of our conceptions of her elevated place in contemporary culture.

“Too Much Happiness” is running at Parisian Laundry (3550 St. Antoine O.) until April 19.

Serendipitous sounds: Montreal’s Random Recipe VALÉRIE THÉRIEN The McGill Daily

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usic brought Fab and Frannie together when they bumped into each other at a concert a few years ago. The pair bonded over similar musical tastes and soon began jamming in Frannie’s backyard shed. Their first public performances took place in the metro, in parks, and in taxi cabs (“We played to every taxi driver in Montreal. They know us,” laughs Frannie). Today they call themselves Random Recipe, the little group that could.

“We never decided we’d be a band. It kind of happened a couple of months ago when we were forced into one,” explains Frannie. Things took off for Random Recipe after they met Hot Springs front-woman Giselle Webber (aka Giselle Numba One) while playing on a sidewalk one night. Giselle took them under her wing and got them to play at a monthly improv-rap event held at Quai des brumes (4481 St. Denis) called Rap Maudit. They received a modest yet positive response. From then on, despite limited music biz knowledge, the girls practiced with established musicians (mostly friends

of Webber) and learned the basics of studio recording. Since October, they have been asked to play at various shows – mostly with their “jamming crew” including Webber, Lisa Gamble (Gambletron), Danni Manni (CPC Gangbangs) and Donzelle – and the demand keeps growing.

While they appreciate their mentors’ support, Frannie and Fab want to focus on defining Random Recipe’s sound on their own terms. They want to ensure that their music stays faithful to the spirit of friendship that got them started. “If you’re tight, your music’s tight. That’s it,” says Fab. Random Recipe’s sound is hard to define, and still a work in progress.

The two friends agree that their music is a cross between CocoRosie and the Beastie Boys. Although their approach to music seems unconventional – Frannie plays a children’s guitar brought from South America, while Fab raps and beat-boxes – the result is suprisingly accessible. “We have a lot of offers because we make a really poppy and catchy sound, and also because it’s different,” says Frannie. “If it’s too different, it’s going to take a while before people like it. If it’s too poppy, then you’re like everything else.” Franny believes

that Random Recipe’s sound pushes the boundaries of conventionality without being alienating.

The group doesn’t take success for granted just yet: “If we take the time to really do something – a demo, work on a song, find collaborations – yeah, it could possibly take off. And we’d be happy about it, but right now, it’s really not our priority,” says Frannie. They are both full-time students, and do not feel a need to rush into anything. “I studied classical music for 10 or 11 years. I used to play violin, I used to play Brahms. So I feel extremely uncomfortable – j’ai une malaise – if whatever I end up playing really sucks.” Frannie and Fab hope to diversify their sound and eventually expand on their current guitar/voice/beat-box combination. If they succeed, Random Recipe could be big, really big. Frannie says: “We’re just two, so our sound is extremely small. But [in our heads] we hear violins and an orchestra and trumpets and mariachis.”

Random Recipe plays Le Drugstore (1366 Ste. Catherine E.) on March 22 at 9 p.m. and Quai des Brumes (4481 St. Denis) on March 25 at 9 p.m.

20

Culture

The McGill Daily • Thursday, March 20, 2008

In the eye of the beholder...

Nadja Popovich / The McGill Daily

Montreal’s top contemporary art galleries like Parisian Laundry pick artists whose work will sell, making it difficult for a newcomer without a solo show under her belt to break through.

In the second installment of The Daily’s four-part series on local cultural tastemakers, David Levitz takes a look at the Montreal art scene

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arc Mayer wants philistines in his museum. Surrounded by sweeping views in his downtown office, the director of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MAC) tells me that no one can really hate contemporary art anyway, because one can’t possibly know it in the first place.

“I don’t know it,” he adds.

It’s surprising that one of the most influential figures in the Montreal art scene, whose job it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, sees his world as an enigma. But arbiters of taste do operate within certain parameters, and it’s important to understand how the Montreal art world works – and why the system functions so differently here than it does elsewhere – before putting a finger on who is calling the shots.

Montreal art venues, as in many cities, include museums, commercial and underground galleries, student galleries, artist-run centres, cafés, and bars. What’s different here is that public funds are easier to come by than private capital, making the museum’s voice louder than the galleries’. Art journalist Lisa Hunter explains that, “In the United States, you have the museums following the market a couple of years behind.

There’s a sense that how good the art is is reflected in how much it costs.” Isolated from the international art market, even the best Montreal artists sell for a fraction of the prices commanded by their American counterparts.

The result is that market value does not have the same sway here as abroad. Low market prices are due in part to government agencies such as Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. These organizations pump money into local artists and institutions, creating a wealth of art that doesn’t have a high price tag because artists can rely on grants to make a reasonable living. The prevalence of governmental backing means that publicly funded institutions like the MAC and their cura-

tors have more influence here than commercial galleries.

Montreal art critics don’t have much sway either. While Roberta Smith at The New York Times can still make or break an artist, sources say that Montreal’s only truly influential critic in years, La Presse’s Jérôme Delgado, was fired for being “too academic.” Mayer, too, tells me that art critics “are the least influential people in the art world now.”

Local private collectors may rank even lower; there are no Peggy Guggenheims swinging from the chandeliers in Montreal. In New York, where art is much more of a status symbol, private collectors are eager to show off their purchases.

But when the Musée des Beaux-Arts exhibits works from local private collectors, many of them choose to remain anonymous.

Piercing the inner circle In the absence of these traditional tastemakers, the question becomes: how does an artist make it here? The short answer is that you need to be good, and you need to get yourself noticed. Art galleries at Concordia and Université du Québec à Montréal exhibit student

work, and there is a good chance of getting your work displayed in cafés or influential artist-run spaces like Vox, Optica, Galerie B-312, or SKOL. The top contemporary art galleries – René Blouin, Simon Blais, and newer names like Parisian Laundry – are a lot harder to crack. These galleries look for artists they know will sell. Blouin has a proven eye for finding young, up-and-coming Quebec artists such as Nicolas Baier.

Baier’s bio in particular reads like a manual for how to make it in Montreal: first he showed at artistrun centres Clark, SKOL, and Optica.

He was then given a solo show by René Blouin, and a year later he scored another solo show at the MAC. The underground scene is another way in. Chris “Zeke” Hand opened Zeke’s Gallery, an anti-institutional space dedicated exclusively to firstever solo shows, because, as he says, “If you go to René Blouin or Simon Blais, the first thing they will ask you is, ‘Where have you shown before?’” Hand’s model seems to have caught on: his was the only gallery of its kind when he opened in 1998, and by the time he closed last September there were a dozen

like it in the city.

While there may be a few ways to enter the scene, possibly the best promotion for a Quebec artist is getting into the MAC, which under Marc Mayer’s influence is giving more and more solo shows to young artists.

Yannick Pouliot, for example, who currently has a solo show there, was not a name five years ago. Working as a “gallery schlep” in Quebec City, Pouliot began to be noticed by fellow artists. “Artists create the art scene, essentially. They’re the ones who discover each other,” says Mayer.

Of course, the MAC is working hard to bridge the gap between Montreal and the rest of the world, and still relies on major international artists like Anselm Kiefer to bring in the money and the crowds. To find new international artists, curators travel extensively to international art fairs around the world – “the major gathering place for art tastemakers in the last decade,” according to Hunter. “Last summer,” she says, “there were so many different shows and things, it’s like people in the art market spent their whole summer in airport lobbies air-kissing each other and saying, ‘Oh, here you are!’”

Continued on page 21...

Culture

The McGill Daily • Thursday, March 20, 2008

Continued from page 20 In terms of Montreal’s art audience, private galleries can be intimidating or out of the way, remaining uninviting to newcomers. In recognition of this problem, the MAC works hard to attract a new contemporary art audience, hosting free indie concerts and showing music videos. They aim to promote both local artists and local art-goers, and their upcoming Triennial, which is the result of countless studio visits throughout the province, promises to present Quebec’s best new art, boosting local artists and disseminating cutting-edge art to the masses.

“Triennials are an important way for people to get crash courses on what’s going on, and they’re extremely useful for the artists,” says Mayer.

Mayer insists that “taste” has nothing to do with this selection process. “It’s not about us. It’s about the public, and it’s about the art.

They didn’t hire me because of my good taste. What they care about is our objective opinion of what we should be looking at.” Rather, he asserts, it’s about collecting broadly, finding the artists who fill a gap in art history, and exposing them to public.

At the same time, he also says, “You can’t get launched into the market without us.” A discerning eye is necessary these days when “there are

no movements anymore” and “the cult of originality has pretty much a hegemonic grasp on the scene.”

While the MAC works ambitiously to promote Quebec art and bring local audiences up to snuff, Mayer also understands that to make it really big – even locally – an artist has to move to a bigger city where the market is stronger. As it is, Montreal collectors are going to the Toronto International Art Fair to buy from Montreal artists. In recent years, there has been a trend towards nomadism, and successful Canadian artists like David Altmejd live in two or more cities – in his case Montreal and London. Parisian Laundry director (and practising installation artist) Jeanie Riddle says, “I don’t really think that artists are from a place anymore. Any artist I’m working with, they have the potential to go on a residency for a year, so where are they from?”

The next Berlin?

In just a few years, the Berlin art scene has undergone a snowball effect, attracting artists and galleries to become the hotbed of the avantgarde, ex-pat art scene. Montreal is one of many cities poised to undergo a similar transition. Dealers and museum directors are doing what they can to move Montreal in that

direction, and at this point it seems to be just a question of fate.

Montreal has been yearning to enter the world art stage for decades. “There’s been avant-garde here since the twenties,” according to Mayer, and Montreal artists have always chosen to make more international art as opposed to the Group of Seven who strove to make patently Canadian art. The question is whether Montreal’s bigleague aspirations can be realized as they have been in Berlin. Jeanie Riddle believes that “Montreal is in a Renaissance as well, and we are an emerging city. I think. Well, why did I go to Berlin? Why couldn’t people come to Montreal? Why can’t we set ourselves to be this really vital, important place for the visual arts?”

Artists themselves spurred Berlin’s renaissance, choosing the city for its rich history, international character, and cheap rent; the galleries soon followed. “I see an interesting sort of pattern in the cities that become Berlin, or Paris in the 20s, or New York post-war,” says Hunter.

“If you have a major, international city with a very sophisticated infra-

structure that’s fallen on hard times, that’s cheap to live in, that’s where you see a boom.”

If nothing else, Montreal is a sophisticated city, and dirt-cheap by international standards. While Montreal artists may not be breaking the international art market by staying in Montreal, they are potentially avoiding the kind of starvingartist lifestyle they might experience in New York. Given the city’s position as a cosmopolitan art scene outside of the international market, it has potential to attract outside artists who are fed-up with the bloated New York scene. Ironically, if enough starving artists came here to escape the market and enjoy the local perks, they might actually bring the market with them.

With its current artist networks and the largest contemporary art museum in Canada – as well as a government which subsidizes art in a big way – Mayer believes Montreal just needs a push in the right direction. “What I’m encouraging the government to do here is to invest in artist studios downtown. I think that lots of other artists from other

21

places in North America and Canada would move to Montreal and live here happily ever after if they could get just the studio space. And if they moved here in large enough numbers, then the galleries would follow. The dealers from all over the country would take a crash course in French and open a gallery here, which we desperately need.”

While Montreal tastemakers primarily operate through public institutions, in some ways it all comes back to the market. To have internationally recognized art stars – and to keep them here – the prices must go up.

A Berlin-style art revolution could dramatically raise Montreal’s standing in the art world and effectively lift the long-held cap on local artists’ financial success. But the globalization of Montreal’s art scene could also mean bidding farewell to the notion of a local brand and of an art scene which still values aesthetics over the mighty dollar.

But then again, in Mayer’s words, “it’s really every man, woman, and child for themselves in the art world.”

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Septembre venu, Bell se charge de vous rebrancher pour que vous soyez fin prêt à naviguer. Aucun souci, aucune attente.

De plus, simplifiez la reconnexion de votre service et courez la chance de gagner 500 $2.

Pour plus de détails, visitez-nous le 7 mars et le 21 mars sur le campus principal.

STARTS FRIDAY, APRIL 11 www.vivafilm.com www.anighttodiefor.com

bell.ca/faitesvoussuspendre

Pick up your FREE run of engagement passes for Prom Night!

Come by the D.P.S. Business Office Shatner B-26.

(1) Le client doit réactiver son service avant le 30 septembre 2008, sinon des frais mensuels de 10 $/mois seront facturés pour chaque mois où le compte était suspendu. (2) Aucun achat requis. Concours ouvert aux résidents du Québec et de l’Ontario ayant atteint l’âge de la majorité dans leur province de résidence. Le concours se déroule du 25 février 2008 au 4 août 2008. Au total, vingt (20) prix sont à gagner. Les tirages auront lieu hebdomadairement entre le 2 juin 2008 et le 4 août 2008. Le nombre de prix diminuera à mesure qu’ils sont attribués pendant le concours. Règlement complet disponible au bell.ca/faitesvoussuspendre.

No purchase necessary. First come first served. Limit one pass per person. While supplies last.

McGill I.D. required. Seating is not guaranteed. In theatres April 11th.

Compendium!

The McGill Daily • Thursday, March 20, 2008

Lies, Half-truths, & You should really get that checked out

Penny Hardaway

Condiments

23

Mariel Capanna / The McGill Daily

QUESTION: Will you be participating in next week’s food boycott?

“So, uh, I really liked your web site. Sorry about all the –” “No, it’s fine. Thanks. It means a lot, coming from you.”

“You know, your tongue is kind of in my ear.” “...”

“I didn’t say to stop.”

“What would Jacob say?”

“He doesn’t really love me ... He only loves...POWER. Ravish me, RJ.”

ANSWER: I’m sorry, uh, could you repeat the question?

A PULLMER – VOGT COLLABORATION

TUNE IN NEXT WEEK, FOR MORE OF LIFESTYLES OF THE YOUNG AND BORING!!

Photo Exposure. rubber duckie.

email submissions to photos@mcgilldaily.com subject: photo exposure

Joe Winer for The McGill Daily

Photo Exposure is a space dedicated to photography and art that will appear periodically in the Daily.

Submission can be of anything that makes you stop, look, and re-evaluate the moment, whether it’s through your camera lens or paintbrush.

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