he McGill Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism and the McGill Faculty of Law present:
he Litvack Lecture:
LSAT MCAT GMAT GRE Preparation Seminars
“Celebrating Two Decades of Audacity in the Defence of Human Rights” Featuring laureate and guest lecturer Asma Jilani Jahangir and panelists Bassem Eid and Irwin Cotler Tuesday, 24 March 2009 Lecture and discussion at 5:00pm Reception to follow Moot Court, Faculty of Law McGill University, 3644 Peel St. RSVP (by 18 March 2009) to litvacklecture@gmail.com or 514-398-3577 he Robert S. Litvack Award was created in 1987 to recognize distinguished achievements in the defence of the rule of law and the protection of the individual against arbitrary power. his year’s recipient, Asma Jilani Jahangir, is co-founder and chair of the Pakistan Human Rights Commission and UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion and Belief. Ms. Jahangir founded Pakistan’s irst female law irm in 1980 and has, at her own personal risk, fought human rights violations in the courts and in the media for almost 30 years. Ms. Jahangir’s talk will be followed by a panel discussion on the challenges facing human rights activists, and will include the participation of he Hon. Irwin Cotler, M.P. and Bassem Eid, a past Litvack recipient and director of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group in East Jerusalem.
DR. MARTIN A. ENTIN LECTURE IN THE HISTORY OF MEDICINE Sander L. Gilman Distinguished Professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences, Professor of Psychiatry, Director of the Program in Psychoanalysis and the Health Sciences Humanities Initiative - Emory University
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News
The McGill Daily, Monday, March 23, 2009
3
Elections McGill staff resigns Electoral office chastises SSMU for public bickering Erin Hale The McGill Daily
A
ll four staff members of Elections McGill simultaneously resigned after announcing the official results of the SSMU elections to Council last Thursday, making this the second time in three years that the body has walked off the job. The Chief Electoral Officer (CEO), Nicole Gileadi, presented her report, chastised Council for its March 5 censure of SSMU’s independent electoral agency, and then resigned to Council’s surprise. “Elections McGill is hereby tendering its resignation immediately,” announced Gileadi as she handed
over the office keys and computer passwords, and left the room immediately. The March 5 censure stated that Elections failed to sufficiently meet SSMU standards on bilingualism, that they undertook insufficient promotional activities, printed inaccurate materials, were inaccessible to election candidates and referendum committee members. “I think [the censure] was unfortunate. Council had some legitimate concerns, but they went about it the wrong way, and they compromised the way we functioned,” said Gileadi later. “Very counterproductive, very unprofessional.” According to Gileadi, Elections McGill often takes the brunt of complaints for a phenomenon that they
have trouble controlling. “Elections McGill is a very easy scapegoat for student apathy,” Gileadi said. “I am proud of the way that we conducted ourselves.” SSMU councillors, who had questions prepared for the CEO, took a few minutes to regain their composure and were then required to formally adopt the election results. Councillors then decided to remove the strengths Elections McGill had included in their report analysis. “Can we remove a section [immaterial to the results], like, say, ‘Significant Achievements’?” Law Senator Alexandre Shee asked the Speaker, to much laughter from other councillors. Hours later, Council passed a motion partially aimed at reconcilia-
tion, mandating the SSMU Executive to release a statement saying that they “regret to have contributed to the deterioration of the relationship between SSMU and Elections McGill” but “continue to stand by our criticisms of Elections McGill that led to our censure, and do not support their resignation.” Councillors had considered not accepting the Elections McGill staff’s resignation, and encouraged them to come back and talk to them. Gileadi said she would be willing to talk to Council if they had any professional questions. “If there are concerns about the electoral period itself, I’d be happy to talk about it with them,” said Gileadi. “It felt a little strange to stick around [after resigning].”
The bylaws were also a problem, Gileadi said, who believed that they needed updating in order to actually be enforced. “The bylaws are in certain cases very difficult, especially with the Internet,” she said. “It’s very difficult to apply bylaws that were written in a different time for the ‘modern era’.” Two years ago, Elections McGill CEO Bryan Badali and his staff resigned when the Judicial Board overturned the extremely close presidential election because Badali had not, according to the Board, publicly reprimanded one candidate when his opponent’s campaign posters were torn down. Badali called the decision a travesty. – with files from Nicholas Smith
Canada obstructs refugees seeking status Current system separates families and deports individuals back to dangerous situations Josh Nobleman The McGill Daily
C
anada’s Immigration Policy makes it difficult for those fleeing oppressive regimes or civil war to gain refugee status, Stewart Istvanffy said, Montreal refugee lawyer, at a lecture held by the McGill Refugee Research Project (RPR) on Wednesday. “There is a growing tendency to defend the system rather than the fundamental rights of refugee claimants,” said Istvanffy of those who apply for refugee status in Canada. Claimants who gain refugee status can legally work in Canada or apply for welfare, but are not considered citizens or even permanent residents. Istvanffy – who has represented refugees in Canada for 20 years – challenged the government’s assertion that, as a sovereign state, it reserves the right to choose who crosses its borders and who gets to stay. He recounted representing Enrique Falcon-Rios, a man working in Canada for over a decade, who was tortured by the Mexican army in Chiapas at age 17 in December 1998 – with 16 visible cigarette burns on his arm. Though Falcon-Rios would be in danger of torture upon returning to his country, Canadian immigration refused him a risk assessment. His subsequent plea for citizenship for humanitarian reasons – an expensive and time-consuming process – was also rejected. “A general rule of international law is – you don’t deport law-abiding people who are raising children in your country.” Under the current refugee system in Canada, claimants are not guaranteed their right to a lawyer, a court
of law, or the protection of family rights. Claimants are also not legally protected from arbitrary detention or deportation to a country where they risk torture or execution. “People are being put in extreme danger,” Istvanffy commented. Officers of Citizenship and Immigration rule on refugee claims made at the border by new arrivals, but it often takes months for those claims that are deemed eligible to be processed by the Immigration and Refugee Board. Successful applicants are declared “Protected Persons.” However, refugees cannot always produce evidence necessary to prove to the Canadian government that they are in danger in their home country. The government is supposed to conduct a pre-removal risk assessment for claimants whose case is rejected, but Istvanffy has often seen the government forgo this step prior to deportation. “Refugees make great efforts to then get proof, but when presented at the pre-removal risk assessment, this evidence is immediately dismissed as evidence which could have been presented at the refugee border,” Istvanffy said, shaking his head in frustration. “The Court often comes out and says [to me] ‘We don’t want to hear these arguments,’ and they don’t.” Sarah Hausman, U3 psychology and international development studies major, was struck by the story Istvanffy recounted during the talk of a Nigerian man who was separated from his wife and Canadianborn children when the government refused him refugee status. “Separating families like this undermines notions of what it means to be Canadian – on what grounds does Canada justify such blatant violations of human rights?”
Shu Jiang / The McGill Daily
Refugee Lawyer Stewart Istvanffy explains the failures of Canada’s refugee system.
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News
The McGill Daily, Monday, March 23, 2009
UniversityJunction aims to link students from 56 campuses Vicky Tobianah The McGill Daily
W
ith exam season approaching, a new note-sharing web site, UniversityJunction.com, is hoping to create an online academic community that will provide students with accurate information on courses, exam notes, and tutoring services. According to Liz Mitchell, Communications Director of UniversityJunction.com, the free site was created by a group of recent McGill graduates who were frustrated by their undergraduate learning environment. “[We] found that the professor didn’t explain the concepts as well as they could or [students] just didn’t have enough information to learn the material,” Mitchell wrote in an email.
With over 1,200 users and more than 1.1 million pieces of class resources uploaded from top schools in both the U.S. and Canada, the site also features a forum-based tutoring service for students who felt intimidated by asking questions in large
March, and to eventually reach 160 universities by the end of 2009. “[We hope] to establish UniversityJunction.com as the leading academic resource for university students,” Mitchell wrote. The idea is similar to a different
“We’ll commit to answering McGill students’ questions within a day, from now until exams.” Liz Mitchell Communications Director of UniversityJunction.com classes or speaking to professors in their office hours. “We’ll commit to answering McGill students’ questions within a day, from now until exams,” Mitchell stated. According to their web site, their growth plan is to provide material for 160,000 courses on 56 campuses by
McGill-based program, nerdnotes. ca, launched in September 2007, which focused on providing notes for students, typically in Arts courses, who didn’t have access to note taking classes. According to Stefan Dimitriadis, one of the creators of nerdnotes.ca,
their biggest challenge was developing the time and money to exert in such an operation, explaining that is was eventually shut down due to financial costs. “[Nerdnotes.ca was] an experiment, and the response by students was proportionate to the amount of effort [students] put into it,” Dimitriadis said. “Considering the amount of time [we] put into advertising and making the system userfriendly, the response was quite good.” While Nerdnotes.ca charged users $2.50 a lecture, UniversityJunction is trying to become an ethical alternative to note-buying sites, and wants to avoid legal infringements or violations of professors’ intellectual property rights. “[We’re providing] a greater understanding of course material without compromising ethics code,” Mitchell wrote.
WHAT’S THE HAPS
New web site helps students cram
5
Living with our neighbours Monday, March 23, 4:30 p.m. Strathearn Cultural Centre Room 428, 3680 Jeanne-Mance Become a better neighbour by participating in a workshop with others living in in the Milton-Parc community. TAPThirst Workshop: Why Not Bottled Water Tuesday, March 24, 6 p.m. QPIRG, third floor, 3647 University Did you know that bottled water costs 240 to 10,000 times more than the same amount of tap water, and that this water often comes directly from public municipal water supplies? Come out to TAPThirst’s workshop to learn more about the concerns associated with the bottled water industry and the growing movement to ban bottled water from municipalities and campuses across the country. Seahorse launch party Wednesday, March 25, 8 p.m. Leacock Room 10, 855 Sherbrooke O. Join McGill’s Undergraduate Journal of Women’s Studies for a free wine and cheese at their vernissage launch party. Open to all. Québec solidaire speakers on immigration rights Thursday, March 26, 4:30 p.m. Clubs Lounge, fourth floor, Shatner, 3480 McTavish May Chiu and Sujata Dey, two past candidates for Québec solidaire in the Outremont riding, will host a workshop on the situation of immigrant persons in Quebec. Ampersand Conference Saturday, March 28, 1 p.m. Leacock, 855 Sherbrooke O.; Trottier, 3630 University; and Shatner, 3480 McTavish Ampersand is an interactive, dynamic, six-hour conference about balance in student life that places you in the middle of the arts, music, culture, technology, and science. Learn a new skill in hands-on workshops in stage combat, the physiology of yoga, and Bali Gamelan music. Listen to presentations on extraterrestrial life, science and art, the politics of podcasting, and relationships in the postmodern world. The day is capped with a keynote presentation by Canadian sex advice icon Sue Johanson. Tickets ($29) are available either online at march-28. com or at Leacock 114B every weekday from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.
Village to be car-free Photo by Scott Baker The City has closed Ste. Catherine between Berri and Papineau over parts of the past two summers – when merry-makers want to spend all day long outside. They’ve extended the period every year, from six weekends to ten weeks, and now to three and a half months. That means no cars on a 1.2-km stretch of prime roadway in the hot summer period starting just after Victoria Day and ending just after Labour Day. It’s good for business and good for the environment, and some applaud the City’s car-free initiative as a step toward sustainable transport the island over. — Shannon Kiely
Off-campus Eye
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News
The McGill Daily, Monday, March 23, 2009
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Sexing up net neutrality Panelists agree policy makers face generational gap Ethan Feldman The McGill Daily
W
ith Internet service providers (ISPs) able to control content and give preferential speed to compliant web sites, questions have been raised about the interconnection between network neutrality and the right to free speech. Three panelists discussed net neutrality – broadband networks free of restrictions on content, sites, or platforms – on Wednesday, in a talk organized by Flo Schade, U1 Industrial Relations and Vice President of the McGill chapter of Borderless World Volunteers. Panelist Leslie Shade, associate professor of media studies and MA Program Director at Concordia University, admitted that a discussion revolving around packets and bits often makes the debate unappealing to the average person. “How can you sex [net neutrality] up a bit? There’s so much technical information that it’s hard for most to get a grasp of why it’s an important issue,” Shade said. The net neutrality debate centers on what rights ISPs – such as AT&T,
Bell, and Videotron – have over the information transferred on their wires, which may restrict end-user’s right to equal access to Internet files. As the Internet was developed to be an open, non-proprietary network, ISPs do not want to be classed as utilities, and claim their “tubes” are different from phone lines, electrical lines, and water pipes, which are more highly regulated due to their monopolistic nature. If service providers have a right to discriminate against certain content through network management, the open principles of the Internet and rights to free speech may be at stake, said the panelists. Professor Becky Lentz, assistant professor of media and public policy at McGill, believed that a clear definition of net neutrality is needed so that the regulators know what principles to enforce “Non-net neutrality positions become a method of control,” Lentz said, pointing to ISPs’ stated necessity for filtering content to protect children or stop piracy. “We have to examine what they want to control and how they argue for the need to do that.“ Cameron McAlpine, account manager at Optimum Public Relations
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use of a physical infrastructure in which they invested no money. “The ISPs don’t want your ten dollars; they want a piece of Google’s $100-million,” he said. McAlpine drew laughs from the crowd as he highlighted how support for net neutrality crosses ideological lines. “The Save the Internet Coalition’s two biggest proponents are The Christian Coalition and MoveOn. org. Try to get those two in a room together and see what happens.” Lentz agreed that the issue is far more complex than the usual causes that garner student support on campus. “You can’t look at this issue in the same way you might look at others. It doesn’t really fall on a conservative versus liberal spectrum,” she said. The panel agreed with an audience member who stated that the average Member of Parliament or Senator has no idea that this is an issue they should be concerned with. The panel then discussed how three net neutrality bills have died when past Parliaments have dissolved. “There is a big generational gap, I suspect, between the policy-makers and the youth who use the Internet on a daily basis,” said Shade.
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and former communications adviser to M2Z Networks – a company that lobbied unsuccessfully to transform the United States into a free wireless hotspot – focused on the network builders’ and operators’ argument that regulation is not necessary. “Tiering creates a free speech problem,” McAlpine said. “But the AT&Ts and the Verizons of the world would say that the way to access the network is over their pipe, their wires, and they should be able to offer a range of services at a range of prices in order to cover the cost of building the system.” Lentz also argued the physical telecommunication infrastructure required to connect users to the Internet raises questions about whether the Internet merely exists on computers, or in the wires that connect them together. “Basically, it’s just devices connecting to a large network,” Lentz said. “Some of it is physical, some of it is virtual, and it’s important to know the details so you can understand whether the Internet is the ends, or the middle, or both.” McAlpine argued that the ISPs are concerned with corporations like Google and Amazon that serve huge amounts of data and profit from the
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Letters
The McGill Daily, Monday, March 23, 2009
9
Dead people cannot respond to opinion polls. David Koch “Dead votes don’t count”
Some questions for the provoking profs Re: “Boycotting profs have it all wrong” | Commentary | March 9 We initially hesitated to reply to the provocation issued by Professors Van den Berg, Waller, and Weinfeld because their reference to those who disagree with them as “the BDS gang” or “BDS crew” seems not only disingenuous and disrespectful, but also calculated to foreclose on genuine dialogue and honest intellectual exchange. In fact, it is difficult to understand why those of us who support non-violent resistance would be characterized as a “PR branch of Hamas, Hezbollah and their patron Iran.” Such a characterization of our position short-circuits a rational discussion and would appear to be an attempt to obfuscate the basic issues. However, we do want briefly to clarify a few major points. We support an academic boycott of Israeli universities because these institutions are integral to establishing and maintaining systemic and institutionalized violations of basic human rights as spelled out in international laws, protocols, and conventions. We support an academic boycott because it is a non-violent form of resistance to ongoing institutionalized violations of human rights and offers a powerful alternative to violent resistance. To open a genuine dialogue, and because we would like a clearer understanding of the position of Professors Van den Berg, Waller, and Weinfeld – which can be seen as laying the blame for oppression on the oppressed – we would like to pose a series of questions for their response. Do they believe that an entire people forfeits its basic human rights if some of its members engage in violent resistance to military occupation and exploitation? Do they argue that Palestinians cannot be treated as legally human until violence ceases? Do they propose an unconditional surrender of Palestinians to Israel as a precondition for Palestinians to enjoy basic human rights? We look forward to reading their answers. In alphabetical order: Sajida Alvi Institute of Islamic Studies Wael Hallaq Institute of Islamic Studies Steven Jordan Faculty of Education Thomas LaMarre East Asian Studies Abby Lippman Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Occupational Health Sam Noumoff Political Science Anthony Paré Faculty of Education
Keep at it, Ricky!
Sorry for using you
Dead votes don’t count
Ghetto kids are little shits
Re: “Right our wrong over Iraq” | Commentary | February 16
Re: “I understand why AUS needs French translation” | Letters | March 16
Re: “I demand that you take a stand” | Letters | March 12
Posted on mcgilldaily.com
I found your article well-researched and an excellent analysis of the current situation. I have often found myself deluged by the “hacks” you describe who offer their half-wit opinions on Iraq. Many of these so-called “experts” often state that the Iraq adventure was a foolhardy endeavour, where the chance for any sort of success has long since passed. Furthermore, the evidence to back up their quackery and opinions are often only based on what they have seen on the ground (or endured while fighting, in the case of soldiers), and lack the insight and understanding that is available to you as a McGill U1 Arts student. Now I am the first to admit that I was one of those who opposed the Iraq war on the grounds that there was no reason to invade a sovereign state that had not directly threatened the U.S. However, now I realize the error of my ways and must concede that you are correct: the war is well on its way to being a success. I now realize that I failed to consider the following markers of success: (1) Over 4,000 U.S. military deaths since the war began (the majority of which have come after President Bush declared an end to combat operations), and thousands more injured. (2) Over 100,000 Iraqi citizens killed (according to The Lancet). (3) An estimated cost of $100 million a day (money far better spent on a war than on alleviating the current financial crisis, fighting diseases, developing clean energy, or aiding the world’s poor). So, with all this in mind I urge you to keep up the good work, and I wish you the same level success in journalism as those we are currently seeing in Iraq.
Maya Frieser: For having mentioned you and Mr. Louis-Michel Gauthier without reflecting on how you would react, I apologize. I should have thought of the people I was using as a pretext. In response to your three points: The article was in fact directed not at you and Mr. Gauthier, but rather at the general public, in order to raise the profile of translation, for I believe that it is a widely misunderstood practice, especially in the anglophone community. You did indeed ask me for directions on where to obtain a good translator; for writing as though you had not, I apologize once again. I ought not to have used you and Mr. Gauthier as an excuse to write my little FAQ; you both clearly know the value of translation. However, though it’s true that francophones generally have a more acute linguistic consciousness than anglophones, I must draw your attention to the very low profile of the French language and literature department, not only at McGill, but in the entire province. The department’s low visibility is a frequent topic of discussion at departmental meetings. An illustrative anecdote: some of my colleagues at the Commission des affaires francophones (CAF) did not know of the department, nor of its translation program, until I joined the CAF in January. (That was my impression, at least.) Merely speaking French as one’s mother tongue does not guarantee knowledge of a French department at a prestigious anglo institution. As for your third point: touché. Well played, Ms Frieser, well played indeed. And merci à vous, for having called me to order.
In a recent letter to the editor, Daily columnist Ricky Kreitner asked me to clarify whether or not I think the Iraqis and Kurds are worse off due to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Kreitner may be aware of the results of a public opinion poll released by the British company ORB last March, which indicated that more than half of Iraqis (51 per cent) prefer their life today over life under Saddam Hussein (22 per cent). But even if the following point is obvious, it deserves emphasis: dead people cannot respond to opinion polls. A callous observer may dismiss the astronomical civilian death tolls in Iraq by adapting the Cold War slogan “Better dead than red” to the 21st century under Saddam Hussein. However, I maintain that the human cost of this war has been unacceptable. We should not ignore those who see a better life beyond the rubble. These survivors may be better off for the invasion. But neither should we ignore the chance that a better life could be achieved without following some “decider” headlong into carnage.
Rob Kozak PhD IV Microbiology
William Burton U3 Lettres et traduction françaises CAF member French Literature Students’ Association (AGELF) VP External
David Koch U3 Political Science Daily Staffer
I lived in the McGill Ghetto for 12 years and endured ongoing disturbances and vandalism from McGill students every weekend and more. My old car was vandalized about seven times over the course of three to four years, to the point where this driver, with 30 years’ experience and no responsibility for any accident, is now uninsurable. I recently moved to the other side of the campus, at Sherbrooke and Drummond. I picked up my new car yesterday and am writing to thank the screaming McGill shits who ripped off my side-view mirror last night, less than 24 hours after I took possession of my new car. I studied at McGill and earned an MBA (I didn’t trash anyone’s things back then). I make enough money to make generous donations to the school, but you know what? I’ll fix my car instead and keep the rest for a worthy group. It is depressing to think that McGill is educating the leaders of tomorrow. McGill’s tolerance for the disturbances caused around its campus is incredibly hypocritical, as if nothing could be done to control the vandals. I can hear the counter argument now: how do you know it was McGill? Gna gna gna... Let’s not act too surprised when these self-entitled little people continue to cheat and steal once they reach the job market; we will have given them the license to do it all. Richard Holder MBA ‘96
Send your letters to letters@mcgilldaily.com from your McGill email address, and keep them to 300 words. The Daily does not print letters that are racist, homophobic, or otherwise hateful.
Commentary
The McGill Daily, Monday, March 23, 2009
11
Lonnie Nadler and Rebecca Chapman for The McGill Daily
HYDE PARK
“Hey, gimme back my sand pale or...or...I’ll censure you!” “If you censure me I’ll just quit.” “Wah...”
COMMENT
Caution: children at play Nicholas Smith
T
his is my third year covering SSMU for The Daily, but I have never seen such a sorry state of affairs as I did this past Thursday in the Lev Bukhman Council Room. Even compared to the ridiculous situation in the House of Commons – chided across the country – student leaders deserve to hang their heads in shame. Let’s back up two weeks. Hours before polls open in the SSMU elections, Council decided to publicly reprimand Elections McGill, its own independent electoral body – an unprecedented move. The decision addressed Elections McGill’s “failure to meet SSMU standards on bilingualism,” “insufficient promotional activities,” “inaccuracies in print materials,” and “inaccessibility to election candidates and referendum committee members.” For a body that produces nearly all its documents uniquely in English – including its web site and the ads it places in The Daily, gets pathetic turnout at student activism events like general assemblies not involving Gaza and Reclaim Your Campus, and doesn’t even have a list of its members on its web site, that’s pretty rich. But still, if Elections McGill wasn’t doing its job, it deserved to be censured, no? I mean, if there’s anything more useful than a non-binding motion attempting to shatter confidence in its own electoral agency and distract it from its job on the eve of the election by bickering in public, I don’t know what it is. Not that it’s all Council’s fault. At its meeting four days ago, Council got to witness Chief Electoral Officer
Nicole Gileadi officially present the results of the votes to Council, after which she rightly chastised Council for its childish actions two weeks earlier and then, like the kid taking the ball and going home, announced the entire agency’s staff’s resignation, handed over the keys to the office, and left. But it didn’t end there. Council was then required to formalize the voting results by adopting the report, normally a routine, uncontroversial event. Instead, councillors got their own ball rolling, ridiculing Elections McGill by proposing to amend the report to include under the section “Significant Achievements” the statement that very few candidates presented themselves for the race. After frequent requests from the Speaker for decorum, Council eventually decided to strike the whole section, and would likely have struck more if not for its concern that its actions might invalidate the razor-thin QPIRG referendum result. One of the agency’s achievements that Gileadi frequently repeated was the relative lack of campaign violations. Does anyone think this would be the case if the positions were all strongly contested or Jake “not here for the first time in four years” Itzkowitz was around? I suppose it’s possible, given that Elections McGill isn’t even close to having the resources to monitor, let alone enforce, the rules. Here’s a Daily editorial from two years ago that still rings true: “Right now poster restrictions and campaign committee regulations are so stringent – and so frequently broken – that they are indeed meaningless.” What should Council have done? Along with the five other bylaw
changes it is proposing in its next meeting, it should overhaul its electoral bylaws, which now have 30 clauses and a litany of sub-clauses and sub-sub-clauses, with voting procedures that frequently refer to paper ballot voting, now only used when online voting doesn’t work. As well, the impartial agency in charge of administering a fair election should not be in charge of encouraging people to run against alreadydeclared candidates. In fact, if officials had actually read the bylaws, they would have discovered that the definition of the “spoilt” ballots so critical to deciding whether QPIRG’s result achieved a “simple majority” – different from an “absolute majority” – is irrelevant, because the ballots in question should have been rejected, not spoilt: spoilt is for when a ballot is found defective before entering the “ballot box;” rejected is for when it’s found not to be a valid vote afterward. Anyone who’s worked a day at a polling station for Elections Canada or Quebec should know that! Luckily, there’s still one Council meeting left this year, so in a display of good faith, and to prove that Daily editors don’t just whine and complain without offering any constructive help, I’m willing to work with any councillor to rewrite the bylaws from scratch before Council adjourns till the fall. I’m at least mildly hopeful that one of you will take me up on my offer. Nicholas Smith is a Daily news editor who’s been to the Law Building twice in his life. If you want him to do your work for you, contact him at telso@videotron.ca.
Clarifying the kitchen’s plans Marie Thomas and Theresa Knoppers
U
nbeknownst to anyone involved with the Midnight Kitchen, the proposal for its expansion recently became a focal point in Marshall Peters’ campaign for SSMU presidency. In his March 9 interview with The Daily, Peters said that he wished to see Midnight Kitchen expand to serve 1,000 students per day, and to begin serving free-range meat and dishes containing eggs and dairy. In his vision, this food would still be cheap, but not necessarily donation-based – and therefore less accessible. We’re open to the idea of expansion, and are glad for the attention and interest. In fact, the Midnight Kitchen has been steadily growing since it was founded in 2002, increasing serving times from two to five days per week, providing more food to more people, expanding our collective and volunteer base, gaining a student levy, and hiring our first paid positions. We hope to continue expanding our services and outreach. However, we’re uncomfortable with the way in which Midnight Kitchen has been used as a means to some political end. We were never consulted about our role in this campaign, nor was our purpose accurately represented. The Midnight Kitchen was founded as one political response to the increasing monopoly that the Chartwells corporation was gaining over food services on the McGill campus. By serving affordable, healthy meals to as many people as possible and using food surplus that would otherwise go to waste, we aim to provide a socially and environmentally viable alternative that counters this privatization. We also try to foster the
educational and community-building potential of such a service. While we are a SSMU service and operate out of the Shatner building, the day-to-day logistics and larger vision of the Midnight Kitchen are directed by our collective, rather than handed to us top-down. We are a volunteer-based initiative that is adamantly not a business. Our collective, which is made up of volunteers and paid positions, runs by consensus and organizes around principles of anti-oppression. That those people working at the Midnight Kitchen make the decisions of our organization is fundamental to our vision; it makes us an alternative to marketbased systems of food production and distribution. This self-direction is extended to our space itself: we have had autonomy over and full access to our kitchen since the Fall General Assembly in 2006. There are already a number of other alternative independent and/ or student-run food sources across campus: the Architecture Café, Frostbite in McConnell, Snax in Leacock, and the Rabbit Hole Café at the Yellow Door, among others. We support any student initiatives to create similar organizations in opposition to the corporatization of food on campus. We would be enthusiastic to lend our experience and skills if someone on SSMU made food politics one of their main priorities, but to make sweeping proposals in the name of the Midnight Kitchen is to make false promises. Marie Thomas and Theresa Knoppers are members of the Midnight Kitchen. Interested in helping out with the collective? Drop by their kitchen or a serving in Shatner room 304 or write them at midnightkitchencollective@gmail.com.
“Impact” is an ugly, ugly font. Thus, do good things in life, including but not limited to: eating local food, getting lots of sleep, and writing Hyde Parks. commentary@mcgilldaily.com.
12 Features
As for me and my tent Niko Block travels to Nashville, TN to witness life in Tent City, a shanty town that attests to the drastic rise in homelessness in the States
Despite Tent City’s reputation as a hotbed of drugs and violence, the community is tight
B
eyond the crash in the stock market, staggering rates of household debt, and a steep downturn in commodity prices, the current recession in the U.S. has seen the rise of another ominous throwback to the Great Depression: shanty towns.
The homeless have always sought refuge in the inconspicuous margins of the urban landscape, but in the wake of skyrocketing foreclosures and layoffs, their numbers have jumped to levels that urban nooks and hideouts can no longer accommodate, and open-air encampments have become the only option for thousands of Americans who have lost their homes and their savings in the recent market chaos. I became immersed in the issue after watching footage taken on shaky handycams of homeless Floridians having their tents demolished by local police, and post-foreclosure Californians cooking over fires on the outskirts of Los Angeles. I decided to investigate the homeless situation in Nashville, Tennessee, which was the closest city I could find with a major tent community. Nashville is among the dozens of American cities that has apathetically watched encampments flickering in and out of existence for generations. Several of them have been demolished over the years, only to spring up in different, more obscure locations. Having existed for over 20 years, Tent City, on the banks of the Cumberland River, has been the most enduring of them. Last summer the municipal government decided that Tent City would be gone by the end of November, but the plan to demolish the encampment had to be cancelled after a massive campaign organised by a number of church and student groups rallied to Tent City’s defence. The mayor’s office postponed the demolition to
June 1, and set up the Metropolitan Homeless Commission, which has conducted a series of public hearings on how the broader Nashville community thinks that the city should approach the housing issue.
T
he day I left for Tennessee, Barack Obama announced his Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan. The initiative will primarily funnel money into Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, but it is also designed to preclude foreclosures by helping struggling homeowners to refinance their mortgages at more affordable rates. A similar plan, called the Great Save program, was offered to 2,000 of the state’s residents by Tennessee’s governor, Phil Bredesen, last fall. But with over 44,000 foreclosures last year, up 70 per cent from 2007, Tennessee’s swelling lower-middle class has good reason to believe that the Save may not be all that great. Opposition to demolishing Tent City at the Homeless Commission’s fourth and last public hearing was almost unanimous. The audience consisted of roughly two dozen churchgoers, outreach workers, and homeless people. About half as many municipal administrators, including Nashville’s Homeless Services Coordinator Clifton Harris, sat behind a table across from the microphone. “We don’t want people being moved from the next location to the next location to the next location because the problem does not get resolved that way,” Harris later told me over the
phone. “But tent cities are not the solution to ending chronic homelessness. At best, they’re a temporary fix to getting people off the street.” In addition to the opinions expressed at the public hearings, Harris said that the commission’s recommendations to the mayor would be influenced by their observations of other cities, like Reno and Seattle, which are experimenting with integration and regulation of their tent communities. “We’ve looked at costs, in terms of safety and public health, because they are communities – though they may be unusual communities to most people. For now, they still need to have access to emergency management and to police,” Harris said. But he acknowledged that the commission’s findings would have no bearing on the demolition of Tent City, and told me that the encampment will be gone once the 40-or-so people living there find accommodation, or by June 1, whichever comes first. At the hearing, Harris sat next to the chair of the commission, a straight-talking woman named Luvenia Butler, who answered the occasional question and asked people to please state their names before they spoke. Sitting in front of me was a belligerent old man with a scraggly grey-blond beard and an army backpack, who occasionally interrupted the proceedings by saying things like, “You people don’t give a damn about the homeless.” Butler eventually turned on him and said, “Excuse me, sir, do you have something to say?” “Yes, ma’am, I got a lot to say.” “Well then, why don’t you say it at the microphone.” He got up and took the microphone. “Please state your name,” she said. “Jim Johnson,” he said. “Now, I don’t even
know why you’re all here. It’s already been cut and dry what you all are gonna do. We all know that. You’re going to shut it down and run the people off like stray dogs. The problem is you’re not sure where you’re going to send them people.” The panel looked at him with expressions of disinterest and exasperation. “But these people ain’t got nowhere to go,” he said. “We need to have a voice. We need to be part of the solution.”
T
he next morning I went downtown to meet Jeanie Alexander, an outreach worker at a homeless relief organisation called Park Center, whose SUV was decorated with multiple bumper stickers that said things like, “War is not the answer” and, “Stop factory farming.” As we stocked cardboard boxes full of canned food in the centre’s storage room, she told me that she had worked as an attorney until last year, when she decided to dedicate more of her time to homeless outreach and advocacy. Every social worker that I talked to told me that the ranks of the homeless in Nashville have exploded in the past year. One woman, who runs a soup kitchen a few blocks away from the recording studios and honky-tonks of downtown Nashville, told me that she’s seen the number of people showing up for free meals double in the past six months. And the director of another soup kitchen in the more derelict neighbourhood of East Nashville said that more and more whole families, children and grandparents included, have been coming in lately. “It’s like there’s a war going on in Nashville that you wouldn’t know about unless you’re in it,” said Alexander. “And I expect things will probably get worse in the near future. I don’t know how it’ll go for Park Center; we’re already pretty under-funded.”
The McGill Daily, Monday, March 23, 2009
knit and reasonably safe. Still, most residents plan to leave, should their circumstances improve.
We drove to Tent City. On the other side of a barbed wire fence that lined the lot Alexander had parked in was a stout man wearing a toque, work gloves, and a dirty T-shirt, who introduced himself as Papa Smurf. I lifted the box of food over the fence to him. He had a friendly demeanour, and once Alexander and I had walked from the lot to the far end of the encampment, he introduced me to his wife, Mother Theresa, and welcomed us into his tent. It was constructed of a large blue tarp suspended about ten feet above the ground, with four smaller tents along the edge. A semicircle of lawn chairs surrounded an oil-drum woodstove, and the floor had been carpeted with gravel. “I got [the gravel] from the train tracks,” Papa Smurf said. “Took me 25 trips.” Papa Smurf originally hails from New York state, where he worked for several years as a carpenter. He and Theresa moved to Tennessee about two years ago looking for work, but jobs have been sparse since the construction bubble burst in 2006. Without any source of unemployment insurance, temporary agencies have been Papa Smurf’s best bet, though employment opportunities there have been low-paying and irregular. “A lot of temp agencies have closed recently, so it makes it harder for the ones that are still there. Most of the time you’ll be sitting in a chair all day, and if you do get out the door, you’re stuck in a position where after child support, taxes – and you still gotta pay $7 to get back and forth to your job site – you’re left with about $20 a day.” He finished rolling a cigarette and lit it. I asked if he was optimistic that the broader Nashville community would be able to forestall the demolition again come June. Not really, he said. “We’ve got a few months left here and that’s
it. So I’m hoping by then we’ll have enough money saved up that we can buy a place, maybe get a piece of land and build my own home.… But I’ll miss this place ‘cause I like it here and it’s been home for two years now.” Before she married Papa Smurf, Theresa had been a social worker in Fyffe, Alabama. “The nation’s capital of incest and meth addiction,” she told me. “It was tough work. I’m glad to be out of there in some ways, even though I’ve got no job here in Nashville.” Theresa was extremely fast-talking and amiable, and made jokes about homelessness at every possible opportunity. We were talking about the church groups that occasionally visit Tent City to dole out sandwiches when she picked up a plastic rifle sitting next to her and said, “We could hunt our meals if we had to. I’ll bet I could get five squirrels in an afternoon. Tomorrow we’ll be eating rodent stew, just you wait.” She put the rifle down. “I’ve got to get some BBs for that thing,” she chuckled, taking a sip of coffee from a mug that said, “Freedom is Not Free.”
I
n spite of its reputation as a bastion of lawlessness, drug addiction, and violence, Tent City is a reasonably safe place to live – certainly more so than the streets. Its residents frequently mentioned that illegal drugs were virtually never brought into the camp and that the community fosters a strong sense of mutual support. Conditions there have improved since last summer, when outreach workers installed a source of drinkable water, a dumpster, and port-o-johns. Finding a place to shower is still difficult, especially in the winter, and poor hygiene is one of the factors that the city has cited as justification for closing the camp. After leaving Papa Smurf’s tent, I talked to a 45-year-old man named Kevin, who had only
been living in Tent City for a month, and had recently finished a two-year prison sentence for a DUI. He said that he had never seen such bleak prospects on the job market. “I worked through the last recession. I had to work for a little less money, but I was working. This time it’s just not like that…. When I started working with the temporary services I always had a job, I was always able to get a room. But when I got out of prison this time it was something totally different. These temporary services aren’t doing anything; there’s just no work to get. And here I am caught up in this stuff, and this is not – ” he trailed off. “Not your scene,” I said. “No,” he laughed. “This is not my scene.” Few of the residents of Tent City have attended the public hearings, and most of those whom I talked to, including Kevin and Papa Smurf, echoed Jim Johnson’s sentiment that the Homeless Commission is basically a whitewash. But many of them have also shied away from political activism because they have no intention of remaining in Tent City permanently.
A
few days later I met up with another outreach worker named Steve Samra, who writes a blog about homelessness called Stone Soup Station. He brought me to the site where a smaller encampment had been demolished earlier in the week. Somebody had apparently moved back already, and his or her sleeping bag and a box of Corn Pops were lying not far from where the fire pit had been. “This was a great camp,” said Samra. About 15 people had lived there since last August. But drunken rows were chronically reported, and after the owner of a nearby auto body shop complained about the noise to the municipality, local authorities moved in and
13
Niko Block / The McGill Daily
confiscated their tents and other belongings. “If the government can’t provide affordable housing, and doesn’t have any drug or alcohol treatment available, but instead has shifted the bulk of its funding to law enforcement, then this is what’s going to happen,” said Samra. “Our prisons are the biggest homeless shelters in the world; so they’re spending pounds for the cure when they should be funnelling money into the ounces of prevention.” Neither Samra nor anybody in Tent City is optimistic that the municipality will be able to relocate the entire community into affordable housing within the remaining two months before June, when the camp is slated to be demolished. Tent communities need to be recognized as the most viable short-term response to the spike in homelessness, he said. But if what little the homeless community has is denied them, a rise in crime and civil unrest is a near certainty. “A man or a woman has got to survive, and if you keep pushing their backs up against the wall, one of two things is going to happen: you’re either going to kill them or they’re going to start fighting back. There’s this tension right now in this country that being walked over, being neglected, being overlooked – people are fucking done with that. I think we’ll probably give Obama eight years, but if we don’t see substantial change by then, having a revolution in this country would not surprise me. I think the conditions are pretty ripe.” CKUT Audio: To hear Nico Block’s audio documentary on Nashville’s Tent City, check out The Daily’s Multimedia Blog at mcgilldaily.com. The report will also air on Tuesday, March 24 between 5 and 6 PM on CKUT 90.3 FM and will stream live at ckut.ca.
DAY AFTER DAY UNTIL THE BIG DAY
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...reports from the outgoing board, Rad Frosh Coordinators, School Schmool editorial board, and Summer Stipend recipients ...a review by all of our working groups of what theyʼve accomplished in the last year ...audited financial statements
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Culture
The McGill Daily, Monday, March 23, 2009
15
Rethinking raw concrete Exploring the ideals behind brutalist architecture Kira Josefsson Culture Writer
A
rchitecture buffs, and probably some of the rest of us too, will get pleasant feelings upon hearing the name Le Corbusier. There is something vaguely noble about that name, something refined that doesn’t only have to do with the beauty of a French name. The architect is well-known for his great contributions to 20th-century architecture – and his sleek and harmonious buildings may not be the first things that come to mind when you look at McGill’s Leacock or MacLennan buildings. Yet Le Corbusier is a pioneer of brutalism, the style in which those buildings, as well as Burnside Hall (also known as “the cheese grater”), are made. The huge concrete constructions are characterized by uncompromising geometrical regularities, as can be seen in the structure of the windows in Leacock. The technical functions of the building are usually made visible to passersby – nothing is hidden or covered, which has prompted its supporters to call brutalism a very honest style. And although it may not seem so if you have ever scraped your skin against the ridged texture of Leacock’s
walls, the name of the style has nothing to do with brutality. Rather, it comes from Le Corbusier’s usage of raw concrete in his later works – in French, béton brut. You might not be a fan of Leacock’s starkness, but many are. “Architects love brutalism,” says McGill architecture professor Annmarie Adams. “The ideology behind it is closely linked to the free speech movement, so I see it as a great architecture of activism and frankness and expression of free will – all the really good things about the sixties.” Brutalism’s heyday was in the middle of the last century, at a time when North American universities expanded to make room for the baby boomers of the forties; many new buildings were built in the concrete blocks of brutalism and stood as a backdrop to the student protests of 1968. The style matched the political sentiments of the time – Adams calls it a kind of architectural protest, breaking with the international style that was so popular earlier. It prescribed the same solution no matter the location, whereas brutalism, she says, is all about the individual, the user, and the actual, individual experience of the building. “The idea was that [the buildings] would fit into their context. It’s
Scott Baker / The McGill Daily
a very humanistic part of brutalism,” she explains, and points at how Leacock matches perfectly with the Redpath Museum. One example is how the roofs of both buildings are made of copper, so that they, in a way, blend in to each other. And it’s true – it’s hard to imagine Leacock not being there. It sits very naturally in its surroundings. While Le Corbusier was the one who gave name to the style, one of the biggest names in brutalism is Paul Rudolph, who designed the Yale School of Art and Architecture, recently renamed Paul Rudolph Hall. The building was highly controversial from the start. People either loved it or hated it, and when it was partly destroyed by a fire in 1969, some blamed the Fine Arts students, many of whom weren’t exactly fans of the
building. McGill’s brutalist constructions may not have been subjected to fire-raising, but not everyone shares Professor Adam’s love for the style. It is not an aesthetic that welcomes you in a warm embrace – concrete is a stern material, and it is easy to feel alienated and insignificant when it towers over you like Burnside or Leacock do. Sometimes it seems like the only reason that Leacock sits so comfortably in its location is that the colossal building dominates its space. Housing projects, such as London’s Robin Hood Gardens, that were built in a brutalist vein have become sites of criminality and social misery, developments attributed in part to the unfriendly and estranging character of the houses.
Adams, however, says that brutalism was not meant to be applied to housing. “It was just really about these big megastructures that connected nodes in cities. The buildings speak out and ask to be noticed, and provoke people like a student with a megaphone. That’s the way I think about Leacock.” Brutalist buildings are not meant to be soft-spoken or compliant. They stand unabashed in their raw glory, and appear to leave few unaffected. They might make not make you feel especially at home, but perhaps university shouldn’t make you feel too comfortable and at ease. Isn’t it supposed to move you, inspire you, prompt you to think? If a building can create that feeling in its users, then it seems apt for a school campus.
16 Culture
The McGill Daily, Monday, March 23, 2009
all images courtesy TVMcGill
FOKUS FILM FESTIVAL
TV McGill’s FOKUS film festival is back for a third year, with another colourful lineup of student submissions. This year’s festival has films in five categories: fiction, non-fiction, animation, experimental, and the entries for the 72-hour filmmaking contest. The final selections, chosen by a panel of McGill professors and Montreal film critics, will show on March 24 at Cinéma du Parc at 6 p.m. We’ve previewed some of the local talent to give you a taste of what to expect on the big screen.
Bygone Moonage
An enigmatic sci-fi short shot on grainy Super 8mm film, depicting the bad trip of two friends – a spaceman and a robot – who get high by filling tin cups with black goo and smearing it on their ears. The spaceman then persuades his friend to take a walk outside, where the pair is assaulted by a gang of dancing, music-playing space creatures, who pummel their victims like the apes in 2001: A Space Odyssey, leaving the robot dead. The old-school sci-fi sets and eerie soundtrack give the tragedy an eerie poignancy. Still, a more developed story wouldn’t have hurt. – Dan Gurin
Fossils
Filmed in Prague, this fictional short tells the story of a tender old lady who lives alone in her modest apartment and has a passion for rock collections. When she’s not flirting with her neighbour, the protagonist finds consolation in collecting rocks and fossils from deserts around the globe. The little old lady is portrayed as so delicate and lonely that you just want to step into the screen and hug her. – Veronica French
Dinowar
The strange combination of deafening heavy metal, a serene foresty landscape, and plastic dinosaurs in this short is oddly fantastic. In a fast-paced stop animation, a battle breaks out in a grass patch between the little green army figures and the plastic dinosaurs. I don’t want to give away who wins, but the world would probably be very different had the outcome been otherwise. – VF
Fruit Sampling
Josh Tal presents a short experimental flick set at the Jean Talon market. This juicy montage sets looped sequences of dancing and chewing to music by Portishead. Highlights are repeated detail shots of the various actors’ teeth chomping into ripe apples. The most common effect used is a four-way split screen, which multiplies the subject by four and reduces its size. Despite the film’s washed-out aesthetic, it fulfills a craving for a sunny day with pals. – Whitney Mallett
An orchestral homage to the physics of light Sam Shalabi reprises his latest epic composition Allison Friedman The McGill Daily
S
am Shalabi doesn’t exactly think on a moderate scale. Thirty musicians, nearly as many instruments, and a 1,085-page Thomas Pynchon novel went into the making of his piece “Against the Day,” which premiered to enthusiastic acclaim at the Suoni Per Il Popolo festival this past June. The Montrealbased orchestra, collectively known as Land of Kush, filled the stage to capacity at a jam-packed Sala Rossa; they will be returning to the same venue for two more performances tonight and tomorrow. Shalabi, both composer and musician, modelled the large ensemble on Egyptian classical orchestras of the fifties, sixties,
and seventies – yet the result is anything but dated. Fusing vocal solos with a diverse assortment of instruments and electronics, he has managed to create 60 exhilarating minutes of music that reviewers can only term “genre-defying.” The same label has often been applied to the novel for which the piece is named, which Shalabi cites as his composition’s most immediate influence; its five sections draw their titles from the book’s five chapters. Thomas Pynchon’s sprawling Against the Day is not for the faint of heart. It mingles a dizzying number of subplots and characters, paying homage to several different genres while never committing to one in particular. “I’d always wanted to do something with the book,” Shalabi says. He had worked with Land of
Kush “only twice before” when organizers of the Montreal festival asked him to create another piece with the group, and gladly “gathered up the musicians again.” At a loss for what to write, however, he found himself looking to Pynchon as his muse. While Shalabi’s “Against the Day” shares its namesake’s tendency to evade classification, this was not the link on which the musician crafted his project. His inspiration, quite simply, was light. The novel “is structured around light,” he explains, “and [light] becomes a character in a really interesting way.” One narrative thread traces the groundbreaking scientific advances made in the West in the years leading up to World War I – the discovery of the photon, and the connection between electromagnetism and visible light – that led to a widespread obsession with illumination. Nikola Tesla, one of the pioneers of the second Industrial Revolution, makes a cameo; Tesla
“was doing many interesting things with light,” says Shalabi, “but was seen as a freak.” The story, he further explains, “is about those moments where no one knows what’s going on, but it’s all really exciting.” Writing for an Egyptian classical orchestra, and of Egyptian origin himself, Shalabi noted a striking parallel between this relatively modern fixation with light and the heliocentrism of ancient Egyptian religion. Pre-Islamic peoples “worshipped light and the sun as a technology,” and it is this “occult quality” of light that re-emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the West. “Light again became a mystical thing,” Shalabi marvels. “They returned to a cosmology that was actually thousands of years old.” The novel itself acknowledges the “connection between Occident and Orient surrounding light and what it was,” which forms the basis of Shalabi’s piece.
This conceptual link between East and West is evident within the music itself. Though modelled on Egyptian classical music, “Against the Day” features a synthesis of Middle Eastern, North African, and Western influences – the sounds of the Middle Eastern oud, for instance, mingle with electronics. The piece revolves around three vocal solos, for which the singers themselves crafted the lyrics; Shalabi allows for long stretches of instrumental improvisation in between these solos, creating a sense of spontaneity and ephemerality. The result is a complex cacophony that somehow blends. A number of reviewers have used the word “euphoric” to describe the performance, but Shalabi reveals that he has no fixed intention for the overall effect. “I don’t have anything specific that I want [the audience] to get out of it,” he says. “But I like music that transports, and I hope people enjoy it.”
Culture
The McGill Daily, Monday, March 23, 2009
This short follows a day’s bizarre events from the perspective of an incredibly adorable homeless man. Starting off in black and white, we observe the delusions of the peppy hobo, and watch him drift into the sky in his bottle-cap covered suit. The Chaplin-esque silent humour and polka music will put a grin on your face. - VF
CULTURE BRIEFS On the road Jack Kerouac and Vladimir Nabokov wrote about it. Bob Dylan sang its praises. David Lynch and Dennis Hopper made films in which it was central. Undeniably, the road and the sense of freedom it implies have captivated artists of all disciplines for years, and continue to do so today. Now, the road has again become the main focus in Road Runners, an exhibition hosted concurrently by VOX Contemporary Image Centre and the Cinématheque Québécoise. Road Runners unites numerous works from across the multi-disciplinary genre of art that takes the road as its subject. In fact, the road often functions as more than a subject. It becomes a central character in the work, a living thing. By present-
Pura Vida!
Pura Vida! is a non-fiction short documenting the travels of a few good Samaritan girls in San Carlos, Costa Rica. The girls volunteer at an elderly home and divide their time between folding laundry, playing card games, and preparing Christmas meals. There are shots of animated drawings from the narrator and interviews with the program organizers. The story is sweet and, dare I say, inspirational, filled with anecdotes, lots of rice and beans, and appropriate guitar music. – VF
ing these pieces together in one exhibition, the curators hope not only to draw out the road’s appeal and understand its attraction, but also to examine the ways in which the road functions in these different works of art, and to trace the trajectory of the artists’ fascination with it. The exhibition includes a series of photographs and documents on display at VOX, and also an ongoing film series at the Cinématheque Québécoise featuring works like Easy Rider, Journey to Italy, and Wild at Heart. For more information, visit cinematheque. qc.ca or voxphoto.com. – Amelia Schonbek
Stretching the rules If you go to see a performance by Montreal-based contemporary dance company Rubberbandance Group (RBDG), don’t expect to sit passively in your seat for the entire hour and a half that you’re there. Instead of merely taking in the performance
Your League: A League for You Your League is a non-fiction mockumentary, chronicling a mentor relationship between two officials of the McGill intramural basketball league. The film’s two writers play the starring roles, and parody their own earnestness. Lines like “I like exercise...a lot,” and Rupert Common’s explanation of how he lost his whistle, bought a new one, and then found his old one capture the film’s deadpan humour. At first we might wonder, “Is this girl for real?” as Katie Burrell gushes about her job. But on-court trash-talking like “What is this, Airbud?” clears up any uncertainty, and lets us enjoy the film for the joke that it is. – WM
going on in front of you, you will be called on to have a hand in shaping its trajectory. Dancer and choreographer Victor Quijada is committed to breaking down the boundaries between performers and spectators, and he involves his audience in every new work he creates. Quijada’s dancers might call out to the audience with a question, demanding an answer; at other moments, audience members will spontaneously begin to create the work’s score by stamping, clapping, whistling, and the like. Seeing RBDG is truly an interdisciplinary experience. “Punto Ciego” (Blind Spot), the company’s latest work, blends audience participation not only with worldclass dancing, but also with video and live audio recordings. If all this seems a bit overwhelming, that’s the point. Quijada wants to obscure the distinction between truth and fiction, to examine the way each individual views a collective reality, and to question whether that reality is in fact what it seems. Pushing the audience out
Behind the Magic Schoolbus This mockumentary, based on the children’s book and cartoon series, consists of two interviews with former “actors” from the show, now aged 26. In exaggerated slang, Keisha explains how her mean-street origins prepared her for exploring the human body – “everyone was tripping out in the esophagus [but] where I’m from I seen shit way rougher than peristaltic motion.” Arnold, the student always reluctant to participate in the class’s adventures – his catchphrase was, “I knew I should have stayed home today” – is now in a mental institute. Both performances are pretty funny, although some of the jokes about sex, drugs, and violence are a bit generic. – DG
of their comfort zone ensures that they’ll be asking these questions as they take in the activity that surrounds them. It promises to be an intensely interesting experience. To get tickets before they sell out,
visit pda.qc.ca. “Punto Ciego” runs from March 25 through April 11 at the Cinquieme Salle. – AS Sasha Plotnikova / The McGill Daily
Handout
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18 Culture
The McGill Daily, Monday, March 23, 2009
Putting women behind the lens Local director and activist demands equitable public funding in Canadian film Simone Lucas Culture Writer
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s this week is McGill’s annual FOKUS Film Festival, it is a perfect time to “fokus” in on some issues in contemporary film and television production. Réalisatrice Équitable (RÉ) is an organization fighting gender inequalities in the Canadian and Quebec film industries. RÉ conducted a study on this issue and came across some discouraging facts. Women and men make up an equal amount of the student body in film and communication programs. However, the numbers change when it comes to the professional world, as women only direct 23 per cent of films with 14 per cent of the public budget. The worst cases are in feature-length films, where women get 11 per cent of the funds from Quebec’s public financing institution, Société de développement des entreprises culturelles (SODEC),
and 11 per cent from the French Canadian one, Telefilm. Lucette Lupien, one of the leading members of RÉ, explained that the problem is not with SODEC and Telefilm refusing to fund women; it is producers and broadcasters who are not choosing female directors to work on their projects. The next step for RÉ will be to investigate the reasons for this discrepancy. One factor may be that television broadcasters target audience is 15-to-35-year-old men. While women and men might watch equal amounts of television, “broadcasters figure men hold the remote,” said Vanya Rose, a Montreal-based director, as well as an active member in RÉ. Broadcasters may not hire female directors since they assume they will not direct for a male audience. However, film and television in Canada are publicly funded, and are not profit-making enterprises, so money should not be taking priority over diversity in artistic visions. Rose hopes that RÉ will instigate dialogue between the various play-
ers in the film industry: SODEC, Telefilm, producers, broadcasters, directors, etc. Of course, talking is not enough – it must be met with action. The solution to this problem is still very murky. Though RÉ never publicly proposed quotas, and it is not their official mandate, a few journalists focused on these quotas, complaining that soon all minority groups will be asking for them. Lupien believes that in addition, women directors are weary of quotas. In French, she explains their anxieties: “They are afraid of being devalued by quotas. [They are concerned] it’s as if a boring film directed by a woman would be selected over a good film directed by a man, which is not the case.” In her opinion, setting quotas has been a standard procedure throughout the history of Canadian and Quebec cinema. For instance, after the National Film Board (NFB) moved to Montreal in 1955, they made a quota for French films. Years later, when young filmmakers found themselves
eclipsed by established auteurs such as Claude Jutra and Gille Carle, the NFB founded a program for young directors. Both Lupien and Rose wondered why, given this history, the idea of setting quotas for women has triggered such uproar. Women are, after all, 51 per cent of the population – this is not a minority issue. Aside from including women in the work force, both Lupien and Rose stressed the importance of representing the vision and imagination of women on screen. It is not only about the topics women approach, but also “how they’re choosing to show a story,” said Rose. It is problematic if solely men are to represent human relationships. In a society where children learn from television and film just as much as they do from their parents, having female role models on screen is essential. Vanya Rose confessed that while she sometimes gets discouraged with filmmaking, “as soon as I remember that there are no films showing women, it gets me back on track. It makes me nervous.
It makes me so, so nervous.” In addition, she has noticed that few films show men as sensual characters. Men on screen take on stereotypically callous, aggressive roles. In her opinion, “it has weakened the male cause. It is a disavowal of men being good people.” These fixed gender roles on screen may have repercussions in our culture at large, which, according to Rose, has a problem with “this idea of the creative woman.” The director keeps the set under control, while simultaneously acting as a friend and collaborator amongst crew and actors. Rose believes that people get nervous when a woman takes on an egalitarian position relative to her co-workers: “do they flirt with her?” On the other hand, women sometimes feel watched: “They are often very conscious of how men perceive them.” The director is both a creator and leader on set – and for many, “that’s the worst combination,” says Rose, “a woman who’s creative and the head of a team.”
The saddest butcher of them all Pascal Blanchet’s newest graphic novel merges music and melancholy Alexander Weisler The McGill Daily
Whitney Mallett / The McGill Daily
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rois-Rivieres artist Pascal Blanchet garnered critical acclaim with his last effort, White Rapids, a graphic novel chronicling the life span of a hydro-electric outpost in northern Quebec. His flat yet dynamic figures struck an aesthetic somewhere between art deco and the TV show Dexter’s Laboratory, integrating text with the artwork to bring fifties Quebec enterprise to life. At the end of the volume, Blanchet, who’s illustrated The New Yorker and Penguin books with his jazzy style, provided readers with a playlist, a sort of soundtrack to the graphic novel. In his new release, Baloney: A Tale in 3 Symphonic Acts, the artist further incorporates music into the story, adding another element to his unique blend of text and graphics. With an orchestration detailed at the start of each chapter, Blanchet manages to make his illustrations into a graphic manifestation of sound. At the book launch last Wednesday, the artist said the idea for the book came from listening to the Soviet-era Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. “His music is renowned for being so overthe-top it’s gross,” says Blanchet, “It’s almost comedic.” He compared the sound of Shostakovich to an opera, and the plot of Baloney certainly fits that bill. The title is drawn from the book’s lead character, a widower butcher nicknamed for the saddest meat of them all. Baloney the crying butcher resides in a village nested on top of a rocky cliff with his daughter, who has lost a
leg, an arm, and her vision. Every night poor Baloney is haunted by nightmares of his departed wife, whose fall from the cliff prompted the town’s corrupt duke, Shostakov, to seal off the town. Baloney desires a proper education for his physically disabled, yet beauti-
ful daughter, while the duke terrorizes the town by regularly raising the cost of heating. Set in an unnamed eastern European municipality inspired by Shostakovich, the constant wintry gloom of the town recalls snowy
Quebec – and the duke, with his heating monopoly, is an easy standin for the menace of Hydro-Quebec in White Rapids. Blanchet joked that power is his main pre-occupation; besides having to pay the bills, many of his family members have worked
for the power company. Blanchet says he has received some negative reviews for Baloney, something that may have more to do with the marketing of the book than its contents. Released in English by Montreal-based graphic novel publisher Drawn & Quarterly, Baloney is described as a graphic novel filled with full-page panels. “People just don’t know where to put my stuff,” notes Blanchet. Full-page panels of graphic novels are not so different than the full-page illustrations of picture books, and these seem to be more like the novels. The text is also not divulged through captions and balloons like a comic, but within the artwork or beside it, a trait of picture books. As a graphic novel, it is easy to give Baloney harsh reviews, for it lacks the plot expected of the genre. The form of picture books is more appreciative of art, and this medium allows Blanchet to show off his dynamic skills. Baloney should be described as a picture book for adults, best read while listening to the playlist. Blanchet’s mixture of silk-screening and computer illustration makes for an interesting showcase of contemporary design. The tragic ending is certainly not for children, and its abruptness may have garnered some criticism; it is incomplete by novelistic standards, but falls in the operatic tradition that inspired the artist. In fact, the tale sits a little uneasily with this reviewer as well, perhaps because the illustrations strain against the confines of the page, begging to be animated and given voice. Still, it’s a testament to Blanchet’s ability that he is able to inject two-dimensional figures with so much vitality.
Compendium!
The McGill Daily, Monday, March 23, 2009
Lies, half-truths, and industrially slaughtered animals
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pension plan. New Jersey Wal-Mart superstore daytime manager, Simon Gold, is purported to be heard on a newly released audio tape in which he proclaims he is the rightful leader of Wal-Mart now that CEO Mike Duke has been killed. On the tape, Gold calls for the destruction of America and warns of future attacks upon the American economy. The tape is still undergoing analysis at the Department of Homeland Security. S. Robson Walton, Chairman of the Board and son of Wal-Mart’s spiritual leader, Sam Walton, was shot and captured by the National Guard yesterday morning after a prolonged gunfight. Walton, along with a team of secretaries, assistants, and other nonunionized insurgents, opened fire inside a Costco®, lobbed grenades at police cars and fired wire-guided rocket launchers at ambulances. Osama Bin Laden appeared in a videotape released to Al-Jazeera in which he said that Al-Qaeda supported Wal-Mart’s war against America, boasting that eventually the Taliban and Wal-Mart will govern the world in harmony. “I once prophesized that there would one day be low prices, everyday, but the American devils wish to make liars out of our people! Death to America!” Bin Laden said. President Obama stressed the risks of allowing Wal-Mart further time to mobilize in a prime-time press conference. “We have intelligence that, uhhhh, proves that Wal-Mart wishes to develop, uh, nuclear weapons,” said President Obama, “and that they will sell the technology for rock bottom prices.”
Kyle Manfeldt The McGill Daily
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ASHINGTON – Panic gripped the nation this week as President Barack Obama, acting as Commander-inChief, declared war on international terror organization Wal-Mart without congressional approval. Last Wednesday, the U.S. Air Force bombarded 24-hour Wal-Mart Superstores around America with precision-guided munitions. Luckily, there were no human deaths reported, but there were aliens on shift and trash in the aisles. Four platoons of highly trained marines also descended upon WalMart’s Bentonville, Arkansas, headquarters and engaged in a violent firefight with Wal-Mart’s most wanted executives. Chief-of-Staff of the United States Army, George W. Casey, told the Associated Press that containing the bloodlust of Wal-Mart’s top-paid businessmen was a big challenge for the disciplined and experienced marines, who had just come back from Iraq. “Considering their white collars, the elite shareholders and their assistants utilized very unpredictable guerrilla tactics and battled with ferocious zeal,” Casey recounted in an exclusive interview. “Rumour had spread amongst the militant bosses that they would get no severance package, should they have lost the gunfight, so they just kept their ground. No surrender.” What’s worse, Wal-Mart’s soldiers fight fearlessly, with no concern for their well-being, because they are offered no health-care benefits or
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Lucca Townsend for The McGill Daily
Wal-Mart gets real evil
Cookhouse adopts meaty ideas Now-formerly-vegan café listens to failed election campaign Harriet Rocco The McGill Daily
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ending shockwaves through anti-cruelty eaters across campus, the Noontime Cookhouse is taking advice from failed VP Internal candidate Sendan Brullivan.
Across 1. King, in Tehran 5. Large amount 9. James Lipton’s network 14. Shoestring 15. Biblical murder victim 16. Fanatical 17. Flair 18. Montreal, for example 19. Bypass 20. B.Sc faculty flick from 1985 starring Anthony Michael Hall? 23. Nepalese bigfoot 24. Doggie doctor 25. Except 28. Iron 31. Bouillabaisse or ratatouille 33. Bit of morse code 34. Small network, for short 35. Comfort 37. High point 39. B.Comm faculty flick from 2003 with Jack Nicholson? 42. Layers 43. Milk’s favourite cookie? 44. Necklace in Oahu 45. White or red 46. Sunburn protector 48. Corrodes 50. Branch 51. “Hold on a ___!” 52. Drudgery 54. B.Ed faculty flick from 2005 featuring Gael Garcia Bernal? 59. “Farewell!”
The U4 Music (Triangle) student suggested that the vegan café, located in the basement tunnel between Mac Med and the Education Building, switch its weekend 8:45 a.m. servings from strictly organic, locally-grown vegan offerings to meat from at least 1,000 miles outside Montreal. “Turns out the best way for things
to get done around here is when student politicians centre their campaigns around changes to a service they neglect to consult,” U3 Physics student O’Ria McRean said, before looking around to see if his friends might show up today. And then, like every other day, he tallied up his regrets.
62. Dead, to Denis 63. Doing nothing 64. Aspect 65. Chill 66. Shed (var.) 67. “So ___!” 68. Empty, for many parents 69. “Oh well...”
38. Bradley University site 40. “Dig in!” 41. Third brightest star 47. X-men member 49. Last syllable 51. Onion cooking method 53. Santa’s reindeer, e.g. 54. Pabst or St. Ambroise 55. Venetian Duke 56. “American ___” 57. Earthenware pot 58. Fishing tools 59. Astern 60. Ta-___! 61. Diamonds, slangily
Down 1. Defeated 2. Buster from “Arrested Development”, Tony ____ 3. Smoothie ingredient 4. Thoreau and Matisse 5. Midsection 6. x value 7. Meat market 8. Ace place? 9. Specialized leaf 10. Glowstick-filled dance party 11. Bloody options? 12. Seven, to Caesar 13. Bizarre 21. Abandon 22. Ambient music genre 25. St. Viateur specialty 26. Internet discussion system 27. Greek sea nymph 28. Hematologist’s study 29. Complainer 30. Former Seahawk, Bobby ____ 32. Part of a mortise joint 33. Champagne brand, slangily 36. Dumbfounded
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24 Photo Essay
Red eyes in Redpath Scott Baker
The McGill Daily, Monday, March 23, 2009