Ryerson Free Press March 2009

MAR

2009

‘do as I saY, Not as I do’ Is thIs rYersoN’s NeW motto?

AfteR sHeldon levy AgReed to pAy up to $100,000 to investigAte tHe Rsu foR bAseless AllegAtions, RyeRson is noW in Hot WAteR oveR A pRivACy bReACH And CHeAting WitHin tHe senAte eleCtion

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MARCH 2009 ryerson free press

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NEWS

The city is a sweatshop Morgan Dunlop “The time to fight is now!” said Farrah Miranda, a member of No One is Illegal-Toronto (NOII). She addresses a group of students, professionals and migrants in the Library Building’s auditorium on February 21.

Her call to action comes mid-way through the “Stolen Labour on Stolen Land” speaker series, the final event of NOII’s four-day awareness campaign called “The City is a Sweatshop”.

“We know that Toronto relies on its image of multiculturalism and diversity, and that’s an image that we are dragging through the mud,” said Miranda. “It’s a sweatshop city. It’s a city that maintains a system of economic apartheid and treats huge layers of this migrant population as second-class residents.”

After eight months of planning and preparation, NOII, a volunteer-run organization, launched the ambitious campaign, complete with engaging speakers and dazzling artistic performances that addressed a smorgasbord of social justice issues centered around one central theme: equal rights in the workplace for non-status workers.

The message they hope to convey, explains Ryan Hayes, a member of NOII and a University of Toronto student, is that migrant workers face tremendous struggles in Toronto.

“Despite the economic situation around us,” says Hayes, “we are not going to let the sweatshop continue. We will shut it down.”

The Stolen Labour on Stolen Land speaker series brought guests from across Canada and south of the border to speak about struggles that migrant workers face, with a particular emphasis on the fact that this “stolen labour” is taking place on soil that was robbed from Indigenous

people a few hundred years ago.

“We don’t like to think of hierarchies of struggles,” said Harsha Walia, a Vancouver-based organizer and writer, “but we really have to understand indigenous sovereignty as foundational for any of our struggles to be meaningful.”

Recently, immigration enforcement officers have posed as lawyers and social service workers while attempting to trick non-status immigrants into turning themselves in, explained Miranda. They have also entered women’s shelters to capture migrant women who have suffered domestic violence.

“These tactics might give us the impression that Canada is trying to get rid of immigrants,” said Miranda. “This is not the case. The purpose of these tactics is to create a revolving door immigration system, to maintain a cycle of fear and intimidation, where workers are constantly coming in and being tossed out. And when you do this, it is much harder to fight for better working conditions.”

The first stop of the speaker series began at a media conference at Toronto City Hall on February 19. After speakers called on government for help, claiming 85,000 non-status workers live in the GTA, they delivered a failing grade report card to Mayor David Miller’s office—saying that Miller has failed to help immigrants find social housing, access education and secure more than just low-wage “sweatshop” jobs.

The following day, NOII held events that focused on their “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, which they hope, when implemented, will allow non-status workers access to essential social services like education, health care and women’s shelters—without worrying about deportation.

Later that evening, they staged another event titled “Queering Our City,” where migrant drag kings and community

organizers addressed the struggles that LGBT immigrants face against poverty, racism and sexuality-based discrimination.

On February 20, the second-last event of speaker series was held at the University of Toronto. As supporters got seated—on lush carpets located on either side of the stage, or on rows of chairs around the room—performers conducted last-minute rehearsals. The evening was rich with energy, talent and emotion.

A migrant farmer, Philip Allen, who at first seemed like a joker, brought the crowd to a sombre silence. He shared his story of being accidentally sprayed by chemicals on a farm, subsequently being dumped by his employer and of now being dependent on dialysis for his failing kidneys. Today, he has no health care and no employment. He has very few options.

“I would be homeless if it weren’t for the generosity of strangers,” he said. “They [the government] want me to go back to Jamaica. But what will I do there?”

NOII has student groups at the U of T and York University, but none exist at Ryerson. Despite this, they still feel the support from student volunteers at Ryerson and from the generous sponsorship of CESAR, the part-time students’ union. The City is a Sweatshop also enjoyed support from Ryerson’s CAW-Sam Gindin Chair in Social Justice and Democracy, to which author and activist Judy Rebick was appointed in 2002.

“They are an excellent group,” said Rebick. “They have a very democratic way of organizing and they address a series of issues faced by migrants. I was happy to support them. Hopefully some people who were at the events here at Ryerson will be inspired to start a group here.”

MARCH 2009 ryerson free press

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Ryerson exposes students’ private information Potentially tens of thousands of students at risk

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the monthly newspaper for continuing education, distance eduation and parttime students at ryerson

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nora loreto news editor A “weird software glitch” accidentally exposed the private information of at least 588 students, said Ryerson’s privacy coordinator, Heather Driscoll.

At a press conference held on February 23, Driscoll assured journalists that Ryerson fixed the breach by installing a patch to correct the software problem. They have also contracted the services of Ernst & Young to help test the new patch and investigate what happened in the system.

After notifying the community through a media release sent only to Canada Newswire, Driscoll said that Ryerson had retained the services of Ipsos Reid to investigate how many more students may have had their information exposed.

An email was not sent through infoline or Campus News to students, staff and faculty.

Hamza Quresh, a second-year Aerospace Engineering student only heard about the security breach through reading an article in the Toronto Star.

“How can we trust Ryerson in the future when they don’t have the sufficient controls to stop people hacking into our personal accounts?” he asked.

Gail Alivio, President of the Continuing Education Students’ Association of Ryerson (CESAR), said the administration made no attempt to contact her or other elected representatives at CESAR. “I read about this breach from the newspaper like all other students,” she said.

“We had a class representative meeting on February 26, and many of our reps had questions about the security breach,” she added. “We had nothing to tell our members. This is pretty disappointing.”

It is estimated that up to 369 students had access to an Excel spreadsheet that contained the personal information of thousands of Ryerson students. It happened when students were registering for courses

in second semester. Their name, gender, date of birth, student number, mailing and email addresses and social insurance numbers were on the spreadsheet.

“In Canada, in some ways, a social insurance number is more valuable than a credit card number,” said Quresh. “I feel sorry for people who were put at risk.”

Driscoll said that they had reason to believe that it affected students enrolled in the School of Continuing Education. She would not elaborate further, nor would she indicate the years, programmes or any other traits of the students who had access to student information.

Ryerson administration was first informed of this problem when one student contacted them during the winter holiday. After two other students came forward saying they too had access to the database of information, the university began its investigation.

Ryerson’s student administrative service RAMSS was upgraded on November 17. Driscoll said that the administration was “unsure if [the security breach] happened as part of the upgrade or not,” but did acknowledge that the problem could be one that originates with Oracle, the company that owns the software that powers RAMSS. Student information was available from the day of the upgrade until the patch was installed on January 9.

Ryerson estimated that the three students who came forward about the breach inadvertently saw

the information of 588 individuals. Driscoll would not confirm or deny that the other 363 who had access to student information saw the information of a similar ratio of students. Tens of thousands of students potentially could have been affected.

Students who have been affected have been counseled by Ryerson to seek a personal credit check.

Driscoll would not comment on the potential of the same glitch exposing student information at other colleges and universities who use Oracle software for their student administrative services.

The three student informers have been commended by President Sheldon Levy in a personal letter from him for having brought the information breach to the attention of the administration.

Driscoll would also not comment about how much it cost Ryerson to contract the services of Ernst & Young or the services of Ipsos Reid, and could not give an estimate of how much Ryerson would be willing to spend during this process.

Ryerson’s recent student election to the Senate has brought into question what the university views as democratic.

Throughout the student campaign, which ran in early February, complaints were made that candidates walked around with laptops forcing students to vote for them. Ballots were cast online through Blackboard.

As a result, a meeting was held by Diane Schulman, secretary of Senate to explain the rules and regulations of the campaign, noting a candidate providing a laptop for students to vote on was strictly prohibited.

The cheating allegations were reviewed by the Senate Nominating Committee but no candidates were disqualified.

There is nothing in the Terms of Reference for the Nominating Committee to oversee the elections of Senate in any way.

The Senate is the school’s academic policy-making body and decisions made there affect every student at Ryerson.

“I think it’s totally hypocritical of the university to suspend and expel students when they cheat at class, but they pat their head make them go to a workshop when they’ve (senate candidates) been caught cheating,” said Rebecca Rose RSU’s vice president of education. “They’re so very strict around academic integrity but they’re not enforcing integrity in

their own elections.”

Rose was tabling for the RSU election as Senate campaigning was under way. She said many students approached her who were concerned about Senate candidates harassing them to vote a certain way. However, none of the students wanted to be named out of fear of academic penalties and being socially ostracized.

But complaints were sent and candidates were spoken to, one of them being Omar Taha.

Taha, a second-year engineering student who won the engineering seat on Senate, had complaints filed against him claiming he was aggressive and forced students to vote for him.

“When I asked them for their names, first thing you ask for the names, they (the Senate) say, ‘sorry we can’t tell you,’” he said. “They treat me as a suspect instead of very carefully listening to me.”

The problem with the anonymity of complaints, Taha said, is that essentially anyone can log one against you, even a competing candidate.

He also said that the Senate’s election rules clearly state harassing students while campaigning is prohibited, as is soliciting in computer labs and sending e-mails to listservs.

What wasn’t clear, he said, was whether or not the use of laptops was not allowed.

“I was one of the students with a laptop and when Diane (Schulman) asked me if I used a laptop and she was angry and I said yes I did use a

laptop,” he said. “But I did not use it to force students and intimidate them and then when I found out I couldn’t use a laptop, I stopped.”

He said he started to use his laptop after seeing other candidates campaign with them. Taha eventually got a chance to explain his case and was allowed to continue with the election.

These unclear online voting regulations can easily be abused to the advantage of candidates, which Toby Whitfield, RSU vice president of finance and services, and unsuccesful Senate candidate believes happened.

“This situation reaffirms why online voting doesn’t actually make sense,” he said.

In November Whitfield opposed a bylaw proposal that would have changed RSU’s paper-based elections to online elections. What he feared would happen occurred in the senate elections - people walking around with laptops and telling students how to vote. The bylaw failed by a vote of RSU’s general members at the SemiAnnual General Meeting.

But Schulman wouldn’t call this cheating, but rather a misunderstanding.

“If someone was actually cheating we would disqualify them,” she said.

“We decided the campaign practises needed to be qualified and decided students need to have education about democratic processes.”

Whitfield says even after Schulman talked with the candidates, laptops were still being used to solicit votes.

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“It’s pretty clear when someone says you’re not allowed to supervise someone voting and you continue to supervise someone voting. That’s not misunderstanding a democratic process, that’s ignoring directions.”

A workshop about how democracy works will be held for the newlyelected student senate members in the summer.

“I don’t think a lot of them understood how voting ought to go,” said Schulman. “I sort of assumed that students understood democracy, as they lived in one. I don’t think some understood the nuance of what they were doing” But this won’t solve the problem said Rose.

“I think a workshop is a complete bandage solution; I don’t think it’s going to do a thing,” she said. “If students are going to be discouraged from cheating they should be disqualified for cheating. The results showed they’ve been awarded.”

Whitfield agrees with Rose and believes the Senate doesn’t value its student representatives.

“The university Senate demonstrated, I think, (that it) doesn’t take the role of student representative seriously. Because if they did then a huge infraction like this wouldn’t have been acceptable. I think it’s acceptable because it’s not taken seriously,” he said. “There’s almost no point in doing elections because it’s not fair when students violate the rules and there’s no recourse at all.”

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Mexican human rights defender asks canadians not to be complicit in impunity Omair Quadri

governmental organization (NGO) that operates in areas of civil conflict. Inspired by the philosophy of Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi, it uses non-violent means to Tita Radilla Martinez sat at the front of the room. Her eyes were cast downward, dark deter politically-motivated violence and to expand space for local human rights defenders wavy hair tied back in a ponytail and a white shawl draped over her shoulders. and organizations to work safely. Currently, PBI has field projects in Colombia, Guatemala, “Canada must intervene,” she said in her native Spanish. “Otherwise, countries won’t Indonesia, Mexico and Nepal. feel forced to resolve human rights violations they have committed.”

At the invitation of local organizations, PBI sends teams of trained volunteers to areas of Martinez, vice-president of the Association of Relatives of the Detained, Disappeared and conflict and repression. Volunteers have accompanied clergy, trade union leaders, human Victims of Human Rights Abuses in Mexico (AFADEM), was the guest speaker at “Instirights activists, internally displaced communities and returning exiles, including Nobel Prize tutionalised Injustice: Impunity, the Dangerous Work of Human Rights Defenders.” The Winner Rigoberta Menchù. In 2001, PBI received a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize. event was hosted by Peace Brigades International-Canada and held on February 24 at the Martinez, who is also accompanied by PBI volunteers in Mexico, spoke about the United Steelworkers Hall. struggles she faces as a human rights defender in the country, and the impunity with which Peace Brigades International (PBI), founded in Canada in 1981, is an international nonthe country operates.

Along with the thousands who were tortured, raped and executed during the Dirty War in Mexico in the 1970s, thousands more disappeared. One of those who disappeared was Martinez’s father, a community leader who campaigned for education and health reform in the city of Guerrero, she explained as she wiped the tears trickling down her face.

She co-founded AFADEM in 1977 with other Mexicans whose family members disappeared during the war.

The Mexican government, Martinez said, has deliberately delayed the legal process, constantly dismissing the human rights commission in Mexico. As a result, only 13 cases have been heard out of the 300 that have been filed.

“It’s this kind of impunity that’s a green card for governments to do what they want because countries like Canada won’t come after you or hold you to account,” said Christine Jones, National Director of PBI-Canada. “Impunity really is the core issue.”

The best way for Canadians to get involved is to educate themselves on the issues and write to their Members of Parliament, added Jim Hodgson of the United Church of Canada. “It’s really important,” he said. “It’s not just something we see on television. It’s reality.”

Tita Radilla Martinez (second from left) discussed the impunity granted to human rights violators in Mexico at a recent PBI panel.

RYE Market lets students showcase their ideas Alyssa Friessan Jordy Lucier stitched her success together one seam at a time. A rising star in the arts and crafts industry, Lucier is living testimony of how entrepreneurship events at Ryerson are turning students’ ideas into realities.

Lucier taught herself to sew on her mother’s Kenmore Ultrastick 12. She began with the basics, making lines of straight stitches until she was skilled enough to experiment with various fabrics and patterns, creating handbags out of old jeans and altering clothing to fit. Then one January morning in 2004, Lucier posted a handbag pattern on a popular craft-lovers message board, Craftster.org. Five years later, the “Jordy Bag” post has received thousands of hits, her work has been featured in TIME magazine (among other publications) and Lucier is the entrepreneur behind Jordynn Mackenzie, a limited-edition fashion accessories website.

“I was never a handbag person,” she said. “I just loved sewing.”

Lucier graduated from Ryerson in April 2008 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in New Media. She has been making bags since 2004, selling them to family and friends. She opened a studio in her Toronto home in 2005 and named her business Pink Olive. Changing the name to Jordynn Mackenzie this September, Lucier is about to break into the house wear market, expanding her line to include items like tea-cosies. How does a New Media student go from pressing the pedal of her mother’s sewing machine to being featured in TIME magazine?

“It was a natural progression,” Lucier said.

About the time she created Pink Olive, she started taking her items to local craft fairs, and showed them in Ryerson’s Young Entrepreneurial Market (RYE Market) in 2006 and 2007. She built a rolodex of contacts, familiarized herself with her market and networked with creative business

owners like herself. In the beginning stages, Lucier says it was advantageous that she was a student. Ryerson gave her numerous opportunities to learn about entrepreneurship, show her items in events like RYE Market and meet other young entrepreneurs.

“I learned a lot about my niche market—where to locate and who my customers would be,” she said. “And I got to show my work!

RYE Market, created in 2006, gives students who dream of starting their own business the chance to sell their own goods and services. Organized and executed by Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE), the goal of the event is to provide students and alumni with a test market to showcase their products, receive feedback and generate revenue while networking with the local community and entrepreneurial peers.

Jeffrey Peng, RYE Market project manager, is excited to see students across the campus getting involved in entrepreneurial activities.

“We discovered that the entrepreneurial spirit is not limited to student and staff members from the business faculty, but from other faculties as well,” he said.

Lucier encourages students to “seize the opportunities that are in your face! You’ll never have the chance to market your idea freely as when you are in university. After you graduate, it’s much more difficult and you have to work harder to get exposure.”

Lucier’s items are available in four shops in Toronto and Kitchener, and as of this February, she has an online shop through itsy.com. She continues to feature her items at various craft shows in the GTA, and is focusing on expanding her business this year.

For more information about RYE Market and other SIFE Ryerson events, please visit www.startmeupryerson.com

City of Toronto budget advocates climate initiatives, help for seniors Frances Opoku At a Feb. 11 meeting, the City of Toronto’s Budget Committee recommended their 2009 Operating Budget. Parties discussed directions and guidelines, gave an operating budget overview, addressed Toronto Helps, priority investments and performance measurement.

Toronto Helps is primarily concerned with people and businesses. For people, they offer rental assistance.

To pay for this, the budget would take an enhanced loan from the bank, offer a new emergency rental deposit program and a social housing allowance.

There’s also employment assistance which are as follows: Employment Resources Centre at the Metro YMCA Hospitality Training Programme, which is new and lastly, a TTC fare freeze for 2009.

There will also be help for seniors and others via long-term care homes and

services. These services will include enhanced homemaking services, extended cafeteria services and safe senior drop-off. The following help seniors and persons with disabilities: Tax increase deferral program, tax increase cancellation program, development and jobs.

Priority investments were also addressed at the meeting. The speaker discussed how included priority neighborhoods were getting increasingly accessed due to the continuing service increases that were introduced in 2008. Also the flow of TTC cars was improved.

A climate change investment of $94 million will be made, one of the idle-free campaigns for the city’s TTC fleet. They also promoted opening 70 km of additional bike lanes, and implementing the mayor’s towers renewal strategy and continue the climate change adaptation strategy.

MARCH 2009 ryerson free press

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Frequency fight may wipe U of Windsor’s campus station off current spot on radio dial After 25 years on the air, CJAM 91.5 FM is involved in a tug-of-war with a commercial U.S. radio station— and it looks like the university station may be on the losing end of the rope. Amanda-Marie Quintino tunes in

The voices on 91.5 FM may not sound so familiar soon.

CJAM, the University of Windsor’s campus community radio station is currently campaigning to remain on-air following the American Federal Communications Commission (FCC)’s decision to grant a private American company, equipped with a stronger signal, a license to broadcast on its frequency.

The station could lose its license if the American broadcaster, which broadcasts from a tower across the border in nearby Detroit, manages to muscle its way onto 91.5 FM. “This is the issue that citizens of this Canadian border city are faced with as we watch CJAM, our only independent community broadcaster, being muscled out of a spot that it has held for a quarter of a century,” Robert Woodrich, a third-year Communication Studies student and CJAM host, wrote in a press release.

“In a market saturated with American noise, the last thing Windsor needs is the death of its beloved CJAM.” CJAM is a community-based and community-focused radio station with a mandate to broadcast non-mainstream music content. By building its broadcasts around diverse music or discussions on topics such as women’s issues and gay rights, the station seldom plays more than one or two percent hits.

Realizing its relatively tiny broadcast tower had no chance against its American competitors, on February 2, CJAM responded to the lease request by applying to move its signal up the FM dial to 99.1, and seeking protected status under Canadian Radio-Television Communications Commission (CRTC)-FCC regulations. This would protect

other stations from effectively jumping CJAM’s claim.

The FCC and CRTC are responsible for regulating the licensing of frequencies to radio stations, television stations and all other media outlets, due to the fact that all airwaves belong to the public in Canada and America News of this media turf war was made public in The Windsor Star on February 11. In an article entitled “CJAM license in jeopardy,” Ted Shaw outlined how this was not the first time the U of W’s campus radio station had battled bigwig broadcasters to keep its spot on the airwaves.

“The move is the latest slap in the face for CJAM, which languishes in unprotected status with its low-power signal,” wrote Shaw.

In 1997, CJAM increased its signal power from 50 to 1,000 watts, allowing it to be heard in metropolitan Detroit. Because this raised the ire of stations in Michigan, the FCC forced the CRTC to retain its lower-power designation, making it an unprotected signal.

CJAM has since been left at risk of losing its signal to other applicants. In the fall, the CBC tried to snag the station’s frequency in an effort to move its Radio One service off the AM dial. Although that application has since been withdrawn in favour of a different frequency, the CBC is still requesting 91.5 FM for its service in Leamington.

“CJAM is currently applying for an amendment to our broadcasting undertaking to assume a new signal at 99.1 FM,” Adam Fox, the station’s manager, wrote in an email to The Ryerson Free Press.

“CJAM is cautiously optimistic that our current applica-

tion before Industry Canada and the CRTC will be viewed favourably and passed,” wrote Fox, acknowledging that switching frequencies is a much more appealing option than being taken off the air altogether.

By moving to 99.1 FM, the station will still be heard around Detroit without posing a problem to other broadcasters in the same spectrum, Fox said in an interview with The Windstor Star.

But Madeline MacIsaac, a third-year English and Creative Writing major, isn’t responding so well to the switch.

MacIsaac was horrified to hear that CJAM was being forced to change frequencies from 91.5 to 99.1 FM because of its American neighbours. And although she has signed her name in support of CJAM’s new license application at the CRTC’s website, she still worries.

“Even if CJAM is granted frequency on 99.1 FM, it may still have a highly limited broadcast range or problems with interference [due to being bookended by a 50,000 watt jazz station and a 17,000 watt country station],” MacIsaac explained.

Despite her distress, MacIsaac created a Facebook group with Woodrich in order to encourage supporters of community radio and alternative media to support the station’s application. “Save CJAM!” attracted over 1,000 supporters just in the first three days.

For more information regarding CJAM’s license application, visit www.cjam.ca.

Interventions for or against the application can be made online at www.crtc.ca, by fax at 819-994-0218, or by mail to: CRTC, Ottawa, Ont., K1A 0N2.

Education is a treaty right: students Moving funding from band councils to student loans hinders aboriginal education, critics say Andrew McMonagle WINNIPEG (CUP) – Access to education for Aboriginal Peoples is a treaty right, but critics say the Government of Canada isn’t holding up their end of the bargain.

A recent move away from funding education through bands and councils, in favour of a student loans program has many people upset.

“We don’t want a loan program,” said Chief Donovan Fontaine of the Sagkeeng First Nation. “Education is our future. It’s our way out.”

Sagkeeng First Nation, also known as Fort Alexander, is about two hours northeast of Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Fontaine notes that in his community of 7,000 people, there is only one postsecondary counsellor.

There are no resources for people who have questions about post-secondary schooling, Fontaine says.

Dennis White Bird, treaty commissioner for Manitoba, feels the government has closed the issue of post-secondary for Aboriginal Peoples without getting feedback from those it affects most.

“It’s an old issue already [in that] we don’t have a say in it,” said Bird.

He feels that a treaty is a sacred agreement that cannot be ignored or changed.

“Treaties were made in the presence of our creator,” he said. “They were made and then they were shelved, so they need to be followed up on and implemented.”

Others feel government bureaucracy makes it easier to ignore the treaty right to education.

“There is no specific judicial authority on aboriginal education,” said Paul Chartrand, director of the Aboriginal Governance Program at the University of Winnipeg, noting that if there were, the issue might not be as major.

If the treaties were respected, funding for education would remain in the hands of the Aboriginal Peoples, not the Canadian government, Chartrand said.

The new federal budget does not meet the needs, he argues.

“There’s a blind spot,” he said. “Treaties can be looked at as the foundation for a new normative world.”

Department of Indian and Northern

Affairs (DIAND) provides funding for aboriginal students through their PostSecondary Student Support Program. The program has a two per cent cap on annual funding raises.

In 2007, an DIAND formative evaluation said the two per cent cap wouldn’t be enough for the growing aboriginal population. DIAND could not be reached for comment before press time.

The Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) considers this cap to be a major roadblock.

The CFS organized an emergency conference January 22 at the University of Winnipeg, where Fontaine was a speaker and Chartrand was an attendee.

Seraph-Eden Boroditsky, co-president of the Aboriginal Students Association at the University of Manitoba, feels this issue must not be ignored.

“The cap is slightly archaic,” she said.

“It doesn’t cover inflation, the population growth, or the rise in tuition.”

She says lifting the cap would be an important step towards enhanced selfgovernance for Aboriginal Peoples.

Boroditsky says education should be free for everybody, but especially the aboriginal population, which she argues has already made its investment.

“We’ve already paid for it when the treaties were signed,” she said.

Chartrand says control over education fuanding is a primary human right for Aboriginal Peoples, included in self-determination.

“There’s no room for debate on this issue,” Chartrand said. “Indigenous people should have control over their education.”

What’s in a treaty?

A treaty is a formal agreement between two parties. - In Canada, treaties were used to create a relationship between the First Nations and the Crown, where the expectations of both parties were expressed. - Treaties were written pre and post-confederation (1867). Source: Treaty Relations Commission of Manitoba, Indian and Northern Affairs Canada.

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MARCH 2009 ryerson free press

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Emoti-Chairs convey the sound of music to the deaf Ryerson researchers pioneer technology to feel sound vibrations

Stuart Paterson This March, deaf people will be able to better experience a rock concert.

Although they won’t hear it, they will certainly feel it, thanks to a new invention called an Emoti-Chair.

The device was pioneered by Ryerson’s Centre for Learning Technology and the Science of Music, Auditory Research and Technology Lab. Using groundbreaking technology called the Model Human Cochlea, the chairs transform sound waves into strong vibrations that are felt all over the body, just as the human ear does with translating frequencies into what are heard as tones.

Dr. Deborah Fels, one of the project’s leaders, said the concept was born from initial research into how to convey sound

through a form of enhanced captioning for film.

With closed captioning, deaf viewers get only the basic words, Dr. Fels explained. “You don’t hear how it’s said, any sound effects or music.”

The aim of enhanced captioning was to convey emotion. From there, the researchers began experimenting with different methods, finally arriving at a nonvisual solution.

Research assistant Carmen Braje was one of the Emoti-Chair’s inventors, although he says it was not the first attempt at allowing deaf people to feel music through vibrations.

Previous studies have been done involving “speaker listening,” where a deaf person puts his or her hands close to a set of speakers and receives vibrations while music is playing.

With speaker listening, only bass vibrations can be felt.

“There’s no melody,” says Braje, but that’s why the Emoti-Chairs are so revolutionary: the person can feel more than just a vibrational breeze on their skin. They will feel subtleties like timbre and the forcefulness of the piece of music.

Although they won’t be able to hear musical notes per se, “They can detect the same note played by different instruments, like a trumpet and a flute,” Braje said, because the timbre of those notes is noticeably different. One is soft, while the other is rather harsh.

Also, since a person’s chest cavity is so large, the chairs allow the music to resonate inside the participant’s body, leading to a more emotional response.

“With the chairs, we finally have the ability to communicate

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emotion,” Braje said, based on tests that have shown deaf people can identify whether the music is happy or sad just by feeling it.

Dr. Fels said the tactile system of human skin is vastly underused. “It’s a huge organ...but we don’t use it as much for collecting information as our ears.” That’s where the chairs come in.

Crafted in Holland by project contributor Graham Smith, most of the Emoti-Chairs resemble regular plush leather desk chairs, except they are mounted on wooden frames and have speakers in the arm rests and back. Actuators in the front act as pistons, bumping the chairs with every bass drum beat.

With the hardware in place, the technicians use professional mixing software either to separate the individual instrument tracks -- sending the drums, guitars and bass each to different speakers -- or to divide the sounds by their frequency ranges.

For example, all the instruments that emit tones ranging from 0-100 Hz would appear in one speaker, 200-300 Hz tones would appear in another, and so on. This distributes the music and, consequently, the vibrations, around the chair based on how high or low the tones are.

Brjae prefers the former “track model,” though, because it means more control over what sounds vibrate where on the person’s body.

With the latter technique, dividing the instruments into “frequency bins,” sometimes the sounds bleed into each other, making the vibrations less precise.

But feeling the music would be pointless without a visual frame of reference, so interpreters will be on hand at the upcoming concert to translate lyrics. Open captioning, as well as music visualization, will also be provided.

The difference between open and closed captioning is that you can turn the text off when it is closed. Open captioning means that it is running all the time. For this concert, the lyrics will be precaptioned, but live captioning will be done for anything spontaneous that happens on stage.

Music visualization is also a relatively new concept. It looks similar to the flashy, spiraling graphics on Windows Media Player, but it applies specifically to MIDI instruments. It takes in the electronically-generated notes and creates a corresponding fan-like pattern across the screen.

But Braje said the visualization won’t play as big said role at this concert as he would like.

“We’ll just do a quick demo at the beginning,” he said, because the graphics only work when receiving data from MIDI instruments. Since most of the bands are playing live instruments, it would be too difficult in the project’s early stages to transform

the acoustic sound into a digital signal.

Apart from the entertainment value, the research team also hopes to gather some scientific data at the concert, based on the responses of attendees.

Similarly, the chairs were given a test run at the Ontario Science Centre in the fall, where people can try the technology and give the researchers direct feedback through computerized questionnaires.

The team discovered that people who knew the function of the chairs before taking a seat were more likely to understand and enjoy the experience, whereas people who came in with no prior knowledge were confused by what they felt.

Also, Braje said kids liked it more than older people.

More recently, the chairs were tested at the Bob Rumball Centre for the Deaf, and Braje and Dr. Fels both beam when they say that elderly deaf people -- who had never heard music in their lives -- were conducting with their hands to classical music played through the chairs.

“The seniors were totally surprised,” Dr. Fels said. “They were dancing with their hands.”

“There were deaf people tapping their toes at the Science Centre, too,” Braje said. “It was really amazing to see.”

Ultimately, the team would like to do more research and, once they get a patent, possibly take the Emoti-Chairs to the commercial market, branching out from music to include film as well.

“A core assumption underlying this work is that emotional aspects of music can be ‘translated’ across modalities,” reads a press release from the Emoti-Chairs’ Science Centre appearance last fall.

“I can see them being in every movie theatre across the country,” Braje said. The implications of being able to feel the on-screen action are immense.

However, in the short term, there is still much testing and showcasing to be done.

The upcoming concert promises to be eclectic, with an array of local musicians taking the stage.

These include electronic artist ill.

Gates, shoegazer band Fox Jaws, glam-rockers Hollywood Swank, and others.

DJ Stéphane Vera has even composed a special song for the Emoti-Chair technology. Dr. Fels calls it a “vibrational composition,” and suggests that there could be more music like it in the future, if the chairs catch on.

Apart from the musicians, Braje expects an eclectic crowd, too.

“It’ll be all over the map, not just the usual hipsters.” He anticipates some senior citizens and, since the venue is accessible, wheelchairbound people as well.

7 Radical profs refuse to give out marks MARCH 2009

ryerson free press

news

Joe Howell, CUP Ontario Bureau Chief Amanda-Marie QuintinO, CULTURE Editor

“I don’t grade. I don’t give any requirements, including attendance, in my course,” says York University professor David Noble. “The reason is simple: all my students are adults.”

He has just begun a joint lecture with fellow unorthodox professor Denis Rancourt, who has been suspended from the University of Ottawa and barred from the campus after a number of disputes with the administration about his teaching methods, and it is already clear that the reason is a good deal more complex than that.

“Grades create an environment of terror, fear, [and] intimidation, and therefore subvert the possibility of education,” continues Noble. He thinks other professors participate in the system so they can shift their anxiety about public speaking onto their students.

The social sciences professor believes that the pressure of having student performance judged makes real education “impossible,” because the desire to learn must come from within.

“No one can teach anyone else. That’s a myth. It’s a scam.

It’s a con. People can only teach themselves,” said Noble.

But “these institutions are not about education,” he explains.

“That’s just branding. . . .They’re about the reproduction of subordination.”

The statements are polemic, but the two educators are no strangers to controversy.

The lecture is titled “Critical Pedagogy: Activism Inside the Classroom,” and that’s putting it lightly.

Noble once sued York University for $10 million, alleging that it was part of an effort to “publicly destroy [his] reputation” for criticizing Israel. He won $2,500 for having his right of academic freedom breached.

Rancourt, a self-described anarchist, has previously had his Ottawa Cinema Politica film group banned from U of O facilities, and once tried to create a class with the course code “SCI1984.”

He was recently charged with trespassing for entering the campus.

They were both at the University of Toronto as part of the Students’ Union’s Xpression Against Oppression Week during the last week of January, where they presented marking as one more tool of subjugation.

“Grades foster the presumption of inequality. We’re not equal – some get As and some get Cs,” said Noble.

“I start with the presumption of equality: We’re all of equal intelligence. Some of us excel at some things, others excel at others.”

York made Noble’s class a pass/fail to get him off the ‘radar’ he said.

Rancourt spoke next, explaining at length his battle with the administration. After the dean rejected his bid for a similar pass/fail structure, Rancourt gave everyone in his fourthyear class an A-plus.

“And this is a real problem,” he said.

Now the administration is claiming that these marks were given “arbitrarily.”

“They’re calling it a form of academic fraud,” said Rancourt.

He argued the reasons he was given for being disciplined are specious, and that there are many other factors at play.

One of them is that he’s a “pain in the butt.” Rancourt runs uofowatch.blogspot.com where he “reports all the malfeasance and corruption” he can find.

Rancourt also thinks the U of O faculty is unnerved by his campaign against marking students.

“They don’t want to be unmasked. They don’t want it to become obvious that professors use grades to hide their incompetence,” he claimed.

He cites opposition from other U of O professors to his unconventional teaching style as part of his proof.

“A third of the Faculty of Science has written a joint letter to my dean asking that I be disciplined. They couldn’t explain why – ‘He’s just wrong! You have to do something about this guy.’”

And so they have. A dean of U of O has recommended to the board of governors that they dismiss Rancourt, but a resolution is still pending.

When contacted by the Ryerson Free Press, officials at the university refused to comment further on the grounds for the dismissal recommendation.

If he is indeed let go, Rancourt won’t regret it. He said that he recognized the risks before undertaking his struggle, and said to himself: “They’ll fire you . . . but it’ll be worth it. I will be alive; I won’t be subservient anymore. I’ll be doing what I think I need to do.”

Noble and Rancourt may seem radical, but they are not alone when it comes to their opinion regarding marks being oppressive.

Alan Sears, a sociology professor at Ryerson, who is sympathetic with his fellow professors, admits to finding himself

teaching in a situation not of his choosing with its own structures and requirements, so he grades -- but not because he agrees with the system, because his job description requires it of him.

“I think marking is the enemy of learning,” said Sears.

“It makes learning the means to an end with the mark being the end rather than the learning. It is about teaching people to submit to authority, not about helping them learn.

In a popular education context (activism, politics, unions, etc.) I have taught without grading, and it is way better.”

He currently uses marks to grade his students partly because it is a condition of his employment and partly because everyone, including students, expects it.

Sears believes this norm can be modified, citing a situation in the 1960s when hundreds of free universities and alternative centres of learning thrived, and the power of the professor and the bureaucracy was challenged in the classroom.

“The only way this will change at the university level is if students mobilize and demand a meaningful education,” said Sears.

Professsors David Noble (top) and Denis Rancourt (bottom) have repeatedly had political clashes with their administrations.

CFS launches task force to combat systemic campus racism Rebecca Granovsky-Larsen Editor in Chief In the wake of a rash of troubling raciallymotivated hate incidents at Ontario schools over the past several years, the Canadian Federation of Students - Ontario has launched a Task Force on Campus Racism.

“These incidents are not isolated, but are part of a broader systemic problem,” explained CFS Ontario National Executive Representative Hildah Otieno at a press conference on February 18.

“Students realize if the issue is not addressed it could really divide our campuses, which is why students are taking a lead role on this.”

The campaign will follow a similar structure to the 2007 Task Force on the Needs of Muslim Students which sought to address the structural ways students were excluded from participation and flagged incidents of racism.

Task Force members will visit schools across the provinces to hear the challenges and successes of racialized students, staff and

faculty, culminating in a report and campaign to be launched this fall.

Terry Downey, Executive Vice-President of the Ontario Federation of Labour and Task Force member recalled experiencing racism as Black woman when going to Dalhousie University.

“Every day racism still exists, no matter how subtle it is we need to weed it out and show it for what it is - to show that actions that may not be intentional and may not be perceived as operating in a racist way, but people must know how it is perceived and expressed and hurts individuals.”

One subtle incident of racism Downey recounted was how a Muslim student was berated when her long skirts stuck in an elevator, noting that she doubts a non-Muslim student would have received such a reprimand.

“You are paying to go to school and have a right to be treated with dignity and respect.”

She also cites more overt recent manifestations of racism, such as ongoing reports of racial profiling by Black Student Association

members and recent bigoted vandalism and graffiti at various Toronto area universities.

Khaled Mouammar, National President of the Canadian Arab Federation said that despite being a rich country, Canada has failed to adequately fund post-secondary institutions, which is having a disproportionately negative impact on minority groups’ free speech rights on campus.

To fill funding shortfalls he said universities are increasingly turning to private donors who pressure administrations to curtail faculty and student’s rights to political dissent.

He noted recent incidents at York, Concordia and Carlton where students had problems in renting rooms, experienced repeated events cancellations, were denied the right to protest and had their funding slashed.

Mouammar attributes this to “calls by donors that muzzle freedom of speech to not receive funding. There are serious moves to constrain what was happening on campuses.”

This past month, university administrators rejected the call of former judge Paul Stanisze-

wski to limit the scholarships he funds from being given to Muslim students. He established scholarships at York and the University of Windsor. Krisna Saravanamuttu, vicepresident of equity of the York Federation of Students, and a member of the Task Force told the Toronto Star that he was appalled at Staniszewski’s comments.

The CFS filed a police report a week after the Task Force launch when they received a letter containing a racially motivated death threat against panel member Otieno.

“Receiving a hateful letter wishing death upon me and members of my community was a very upsetting experience,” said Otieno in a press release dated March 5. “There is no way that threats and insults are going to intimidate students out of confronting racism. We won’t back down.”

The cross-province hearings will conclude at the end of April, when the statements will be compiled and formulated into a report which will be launched in fall of 2009. For more details visit noracism.ca

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MARCH 2009 ryerson free press

opinion

OPINION RCS supports tax increase, Letter Athletics referendum anti-democratic to the nora loreto news editor At the end of February, the Toronto Star reported that there is growing pressure from some administrators within Ontario’s post-secondary education system to increase tuition fees by as much as 25 per cent.

For Ontario students, 25 per cent of the current average cost of fees ($5,643) equals an additional $1,410.75 in fees. Should your math skills need some help, that would make the average cost of tuition fees a whopping $7,053.75.

Of course, ancillary fees are not added in, so the total cost would be closer to $8,000 per year.

Tuition fees in Ontario have increased steadily over the past decade and-a-half. Average starting wages, however, have not. This leaves many students and their families caught in a cycle of student loans, credit cards and one, two or three part-time jobs.

Despite the threat of higher fees, Ryerson’s benevolent administration has allowed for two separate referenda to occur during March: one to increase fees for the Ryerson Commerce Society and one to increase Athletics fees.

fee increase will also increase the value of the Ryerson degree.

Wait, did the RCS just confuse value with cost? There are many things that have no value but high costs: a losing game of poker, for example.

Business students are being asked if they want to increase their fees to the RCS by 200 per cent. It seems that RCS is hoping that business students have not learned much about the value of the dollar. After all, a 200 per cent increase is not small change.

In a time of economic crisis, wouldn’t the RCS (at least by its own logic) help Canada’s economy more by allowing students to keep their money to spend more?

Decreasing students’ purchasing power is not the smartest decision a society of commerce could make. It’s basically a tax increase. Has the RCS been infiltrated by a bunch of tax-andspend liberals? Worse, has it been taken over by communists?

We shall see. Students will vote on blackboard from March 3 to 5.

Ryerson Athletics

Ryerson Commerce Society fee: a 200 per cent increase?

The Ryerson Commerce Society (RCS) is a club that exists to ignite the capitalist spirit within Ryerson’s business students.

In addition to representation by the Ryerson Students’ Union (RSU) and programme-specific clubs, business students are also represented by the RCS. And for an additional $40, which represents a 200 per cent increase in fees, they may soon be represented in even more ways than that. Part-time students are not eligible to vote in this referendum, despite the Board of

{

Students are also being asked to pay more so that Sports and Recreation can build a new athletics facility. That vote will last from March 1619, and will also be conducted on blackboard.

The last time Ryerson tried to slip through an athletic referendum was in 2004. The administration was widely criticized for using financial resources to sway votes, obscuring the facts and keeping the vote quiet so that few students would vote. In the end, students rejected the $61 fee increase.

This time, it seems the administration is doing the same thing. Ryerson’s homepage makes no

“A referendum to increase athletic fees is completely unfair for students. No one who signed up to go to Ryerson agreed in their forms to have their administration play students off of each other.”

Governors website incorrectly stating they were until a week before the vote.

Even with all this representation, the RCS has still had a rocky history.

It was only a few years ago that it stopped asking RSU for a loan between $20,000 and $40,000 every fall because of poor money management (an early form of the now ubiquitous “bailout” package). It still owes more than $2,000 to the RSU for frosh week material from 2006.

According to RCS, any new money collected from an increased fee will allow business students to hold more conferences, to support student groups and to generate more respect from Ryerson president Sheldon Levy and Dean of Business Ken Jones. The RCS argues that a

mention of the impending referendum. Neither does Blackboard. Sports and Recreation’s website lists an aptly-titled help page: “Get the FAQs.” Too bad for us: we’re actually looking for answers, not more questions. The website makes no mention of who is eligible to vote (part-time, full-time, CE?), or how much the increase will be.

This information is only available here, buried deep inside the Board of Governors website: http://tinyurl.com/c6a6ez.

The proposed fee increase is $126. It will be pro-rated for part-time students.

Even more troubling, the vote is misleading and undemocratic. Democracy is the principle that people have a right to vote on an issue that is directly related to them. The referendum on

athletics fees is a vote that will be made by students today for a fee to be collected by students once the building is built. According to the referendum declaration, this will be no earlier than 2012.

The year 2012 is a generation away for undergraduate students. In 2012-13, first-year students will have graduated and kids currently in grade 11 will be in their third year. It is absurd to allow for a vote that will adversely affect students that are not even at Ryerson yet. It is contrary to democratic principles. The administration is using tactics that should be condemned.

Here’s an idea: build the facility and hold the referendum in 2012. The outcome is the same.

Imagine if the Continuing Education Students’ Association of Ryerson put forward a referendum for students to double its fee, but in five years. Students would be outraged and the administration wouldn’t stand for it.

A referendum to increase athletic fees is completely unfair for students. No one who signed up to go to Ryerson agreed in their forms to have their administration play students off of each other.

Whether or not you use the RAC makes no difference. President Levy should be on his hands and knees to the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities begging for more money to operate the university, not sitting back and watching varsity athletes hiss at students who do not support paying more for athletics.

This approach represents yet more downloading of university costs onto students’ shoulders.

What’s the common denominator here? Online voting.

Rather than holding a fair vote where poll stations are set up and voting areas are monitored to ensure that students are not coerced into voting a certain way, both votes will happen online—with all the problems that entails.

In Ryerson’s recent past, there have been numerous allegations of cheating through online voting. With every computer a de facto ballot box, anyone can shove a laptop into someone’s face and instruct them on how to vote.

Last year, there were a number of allegations that some students who won Senate elections did so by cheating. This year, cheating was recognized as a widespread problem. Sadly, the solution was to run all the winners through a “democracy lecture” rather than disqualifying anyone.

With online voting slated for these two referenda, don’t be surprised if you have a laptop shoved in your face and are told how to vote.

Should this happen to you, politely decline and vote in the comfort and privacy of your own home.

Could Ryerson’s administration be ignoring the problems that online voting have caused in the past to push forward their own political agenda? Why couldn’t they just hire students to staff poll stations like during a real referendum?

Maybe it’s because the combination of a lowprofile vote and a core of active students who are zealously in favour of these fee increases means both votes have a better chance of passing. If both succeed, Levy’s honour will indeed have been bought by RCS, and a new building will be built for Ryerson’s athletes.

editor

To the editor: Based on the unbalanced reporting on the Gaza conflict in your February 2009 issue, you should be ashamed to present yourselves as a legitimate media outlet. The issue was fiercely and completely one-sided on the topic of Gaza and the Mid-east conflict, a decidedly two-sided issue.

There were multiple articles on the topic, all of which were strongly pro-Palestinian and antiIsrael. And as I’m sure you are well aware, interviewing a proPalestinian Jew is not getting the other side on the topic; it is simply strengthening the pro-Palestinian argument.

In your extreme bias, you undermine the intelligence of your readers, denying them the right to assess more complete information and to come to their own conclusions. Instead, you choose for them.

This is not journalism; this is propaganda. And you know it.

Michelle Bitran The RFP replies: The Ryerson Free Press welcomes any feedback, including criticism and disagreements, about the content of our newspaper. However, we do not apologize for taking sides in debates, especially this one.

As a leading independent student newspaper, we seek to amplify those perspectives that deserve a wider hearing but are often marginalized.

The Palestinian perspective is one such case. In the broader media, the perspective of the state of Israel and its supporters dominates, creating a wholly uneven and lopsided debate. Worse, many media outlets that favour Israel’s perspective also claim to be objective, an attempt to hide their pro-Israel bias. By giving voice to those whose perspectives are rarely heard (including Palestinians and their Jewish allies), the Ryerson Free Press aims to restore some balance to a debate that needs more attention, not less.

We believe that our job as responsible journalists includes challenging accepted norms and supporting dissident opinions. As university administrators move to repress debates about Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians on a growing number of campuses across Canada, it is even more urgent for the Ryerson Free Press to continue expanding the range of debate and discussion on this topic.

MARCH 2009 ryerson free press

opinion

9

Memo to Minister Kenney: Criticism of Israel is not anti-Semitism Judy Rebick Alan Sears

As Israeli Apartheid Week gets underway, there is a major campaign currently underway to deny freedom of expression on campus to those in solidarity with Palestine on the basis of alleged anti-Semitism.

The Equity Office at Carleton University banned the Israeli Apartheid Week poster and the Provost issued a statement that threatened students with expulsion. B’nai Brith took out newspaper ads calling on University Presidents to “prevent Israeli apartheid week” in order to “take a stand against anti-Semitism on campus”. This builds on a pattern established last year, when McMaster University banned the use of the term “Israeli apartheid” (eventually rescinding the ban) and the University of Toronto cancelled room bookings for a Palestine solidarity student conference.

The argument that criticism of Israel is inherently anti-Semitic rests on the notion that Israel is singled out for undue criticism because it is a Jewish state. Immigration Minister Jason Kenney used this logic when he said recently: “We do see the growth of a new anti-Semitism

predicated on the notion that the Jews alone have no right to a homeland.”

This statement is only legitimate if we completely ignore the situation of the Palestinians, the residents of the land Israel claimed as a “Jewish homeland”. The recent assault on Gaza, in which more than 1,300 Palestinians were killed, including at least 346 children, is just the latest in an ongoing saga of displacement, occupation and dehumanization dating back to 1948.

Critics of Israel are not singling it out for undue criticism, but merely holding it to the same standards as all other nations in such areas as respect for human rights and international law.

Defenders of Israeli policy routinely attempt to direct our attention to abuses happening in other places and insist that a hidden agenda must underlie any focus on Israeli brutality in this unjust world. This argument would lead to paralysis in human rights activism by claiming that one must address all cases at once, or only the “worst” cases. Should we have told Rosa Parks, who refused to go the back of a segregated bus in Alabama in 1955, to quit whining as conditions were even worse in

South Africa, or colonized Kenya, or for that matter for Palestinians in refugee camps?

The deployment of anti-Semitism as an accusation to silence criticism of Israel is also a serious setback in genuine struggles against anti-Semitism and other forms of discrimination. It is based on a claim that the State of Israel is the single outcome of the history of the Jewish people, the final end of generations of diasporic existence. It attempts to make the Zionist project of a Jewish nation the only legitimate project for all Jews.

This nationalist project has largely marginalized Jewish universalism, which argued that the future of a minority, diasporic community depended on winning widespread freedoms that applied to all members of society. That meant that in Canada, for example, the Jewish population was historically very active in struggles for a wide range of social rights and against the idea of Canada as a Christian nation.

The misuse of equity claims to silence Palestinian voices is a setback in the advancement of a human rights agenda. Further, it is a dangerous strategy that makes critics of

the State of Israel into enemies of the Jewish people despite themselves. It even casts those of us who are Jewish allies of Palestinian rights as enemies in the battle against anti-Semitism.

Further, it disarms us in the face of anti-Semitic incidents, weakening the credibility of organizations that have used the term too broadly and blurred the line between opposition to the State of Israel and anti-Jewish prejudice.

Anti-Semitism has no place in the Palestine solidarity movement and as Jews in that movement we can attest to the fact that the leadership of the Palestinian rights movement and many Arab and Muslim communities are actively addressing anti-Semitism wherever it raises its ugly head. On the other hand, false claims of anti-Semitism from pro-Israeli groups undermines their cause and creates more polarization, fear and anger around these issues than there needs to be.

Judy Rebick and Alan Sears are both university professors and Jews in solidarity with Palestine. The abovzzze article was originally posted online on rabble.ca: tinyurl.com/cfxmhw

Attention Feminists: A Call to Action Alexandra Mandelis

‘Would you like to have a taste today, sir?’

The joys of working a part-time job

Huda Assaqqaf Have you ever worked a parttime customer service job to pay your cell phone bill? Most of us have, and we can work anything, even at minimum wage, to get that bi-weekly paycheque deposited into our bank account.

I am working such a job, where I have to convince people that the product I am sampling will be the best they will ever taste in their life, regardless of whether I have ever sampled the product myself, or I hate it so much I would never give it to my worst enemy.

In search of a temporary job after graduation, I came across a company called InStore Focus, a national product sampling company that has been around for about 50 years now. Here’s how my job works: on weekends, I receive product profiles and the grocery store location where I will be performing my demonstration. The demos are 12 to 14 hours long, and split over two days.

I have had many products like SlimFit bars, Starbucks Coffee, Lindt chocolates, ice-cream, some luxurious high-class Italian

cheese, and even jam and muffins.

I really hated the Mott’s Clamato demo: after more than 14 hours, I only gave out 50 samples. The rest of the time I was counting the seconds on my watch.

I sometimes meet interesting shoppers: those who don’t want to try anything and give raised eye-brow looks, as well as those who stop, sample, praise and move on. Sometimes I get those who sample, go shop, come back, take more for their “other family members” and leave. I sometimes encounter those who are more curious about me than the product: they simply stop to chat, talking politics, weather, news and everything you can imagine. I often wish I could just disappear to stop hearing them.

The shoppers in the grocery store reflect the neighbourhood around it. At some Loblaw’s or Metro stores, I notice BMWs and Ferraris in the parking lot, and shoppers wearing suits and diamond earrings, filling up their carts with carefully selected products. In some not-so-rich areas, whole families come shopping and take whatever is on

sale. With the cheapest products in their carts, they rarely buy my product—unless I have a coupon for it.

The principal goal of my job is to get the customers to put my product in their carts. I use the attributes of the product to market it. For example: “this ice-cream is fat-free” or “you add milk, shake and bake.” I love to see the reactions on people’s faces when they taste the products; sometimes I wish I had a camera to record it.

Sometimes when I’m bored and no one is trying my product, I literally chase down the customers, forcing them to try it: “Hello, madam. I’m sure your child will love this” or “this is so easy to make” or “would you like to have a taste and compare it to the brand you usually buy?” When the store’s employees see me doing this, they start laughing. But then they line up at my station to have a taste.

It can be an interesting job, but it all depends on the product and my mood, of course. And at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter—as long as it pays for my cell phone bill!

I am a feminist.

Do you consider yourself a feminist? Perhaps you’ve done some research on feminism or taken part in some feminist activism. Maybe you even went so far as to get a university degree in Women’s Studies.

I did.

I graduated from the University of Toronto with a degree in Women’s Studies in 2008, and yet I do not have a working knowledge of feminist history. That is inexcusable. Communication and storytelling are essential to the development of any social movement, and the feminist one is no exception.

Feminists of my generation, this is a call to action.

We can no longer afford to sacrifice women’s solidarity to the silence brought about by the continued comparison of labels of oppression.

Global political and social forces have conspired to strip away the rights our mothers and grandmothers fought so hard to win for us throughout the last 100 years.

We have all been celebrating the fact that Barack Obama is now the US President, the first Black man to win that office—and a self-proclaimed feminist.

His victory was dependent on women’s right to vote—a right denied to all American women regardless of race, age, class, immigration status or anything else until 1920, only 89 years ago.

In Canada, women won the right to vote two years earlier in 1918. But women were still not considered to be “persons” under the mandate of the British North America Act, a law that restricted their full participation in legal, political and social life in Canada.

I learned from my mother—and not from any classes—that October 18 is Person’s Day, the date in 1929 on which women finally won legal recognition as “persons”, following a ruling by the Judicial Committee of

the Privy Council in England.

Today Canadian and American women are not in imminent danger of losing the vote. However, we are in danger of losing the basic right to control our bodies. While I spent five years writing essays apologizing for being a white, privileged, straight woman in the ivory tower, the Bush administration was galvanizing an extravagant, organized, global war on women’s rights unlike any previously seen in history.

Shame on my generation!

We have political power like never before in human history, and yet we squander it to fight amongst ourselves. No one else wants to say it, so I will: We are missing the bigger picture. What good are small gains in our rights when the very basic ones teeter so close to the brink? How will you access that hard-won specialized program/service/right without the right to decide the basic course of your life?

In the last few years, we have seen renewed global interest in a number of noble causes: environmentalism, nuclear disarmament and democracy.

Why not feminism, the movement that stands for the rights of half of the Earth’s population—the half with the special ability to create and nurture life?

From this day forward, I will live my feminism.

I will be an ally.

I will name misogyny, violence against women and other crimes against my sisters when I see these things happen.

I will remain critically aware of, but not apologize for, my sexual orientation, skin colour, age, class and all of the other characteristics that make me unique.

After all, well-behaved women never make history.

I will not seek out what makes me different from my global sisters.

Instead I will focus on what we share.

I am a feminist. Are you?

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MARCH 2009 ryerson free press

opinion

Obama-mania in Canada’s Capital Alexandra Mandelis “YES WE CAN!” read the poster on a telephone pole outside the House of Commons, freshly stapled there on the morning of February 18, 2009. In a parody of the “Do Not Litter” campaign, the poster showed a stick figure tossing a stylized blue Conservative Party “C” into a garbage can.

I grinned and took a snapshot for my politically-minded friends in Toronto. For this activist who campaigned for women’s rights during the worst of the Bush and Harper years, visiting Ottawa during President Barack Obama’s first state visit felt like homecoming of sorts.

An hour before Obama’s anticipated noontime arrival, the US Secret Service and the RCMP blocked off all routes to Parliament Hill. I was stopped at the corner of Rideau and Sussex Avenues, as were some protesters holding a banner that proclaimed “Harper Lies about Climate Change”.

Frustrated by the closed streets, Ottawans and political pilgrims alike spilled into the surrounding streets and nearby Rideau Mall.

At the barricades I met a University of Ottawa graduate student, Carmela, who had also hoped to catch a glimpse of President Obama. Together we listened to the helicopters chopping above, surveying the airspace while Obama’s motorcade brought him to Parliament for his scheduled meeting with Harper.

Shortly after, the barricades were removed and people were permitted to walk and drive up to Parliament Hill.

After warming up at a coffee shop, Carmela and I decided to wait at Parliament for Obama’s departure, thinking we’d get an even

better view than we would have in the morning, had we been a part of his welcoming crew. Just as we had hoped, Carmela and I arrived in time to secure optimal viewing spots of the House of Commons’ bulletproof-glass covered door—second from the front of the barricades.

From this vantage point, we could see other evidence that Harper and his buddies had done their best to roll out the red carpet for America’s new royalty: the Stars-and-Stripes flying on the Hill and snipers placed on the roof of the building.

President Obama’s rumoured 3pm departure attracted a modest-sized crowd throughout the afternoon. Talking to others who were sporting Obama t-shirts, US flags and “Obama blue” clothing, I learned that people had come to Ottawa for all sorts of personal reasons. But the common thread that connected us all was “hope.” If change could happen in the US, it can happen in Canada too.

As the clock on the House of Commons struck three, I turned around to see that the crowd had become larger.

People were chanting “O-BA-MA! O-BA-MA!” Cheeky requests from some diehard fans to “bring Obama out” did not hasten his exit from Parliament. But it did inspire one man to tease the crowd by waving and pretending to be Obama. By 3:45pm, it was clear that the visit was wrapping up as Obama’s motorcade began to assemble outside the Parliament Buildings.

As a veteran of many rock concerts, I knew that as soon as Obama was seen (or thought to be seen) I would be jostled about and unable to see him, much less take photos. Unfortunately, this proved to be true. Although I am certain he would have loved to bask in the crowd’s adulation, Obama really had to go—his meeting with Harper had run over time and the Secret Service and RCMP were standing by for Obama’s escape. As the crowd dispersed, the presidential motorcade and circling helicopters disappeared as quickly as they had arrived that morning.

Carmela and I decided to head to the nearby Parliament Pub for a toast to having witnessed history in the making. Some spectators said they had seen him wave his hand as he got into his car, but most (yours truly included) stated they were just “happy to be there” for the historic occasion.

Many exchanged contact information, and between diehard followers, there were goodbyes punctuated with “see you at the next Obama day!”

When that day will come, we can only guess!

Why Big Media is bad for journalism Steve Anderson Media giant Canwest reported a $33 million loss in the quarter ending November 30, 2008, and an overwhelming $3.7 billion debt. In the past 12 months, Canwest has also cut over 1,000 jobs and is scaling back local operations, and considering shutting down some stations entirely. Collectively Canwest, Torstar, Quebecor and CTVglobemedia have cut over 1,300 more jobs in the past three months, on top of deep cuts made last year. With ad revenues expected to slump further, there is no end in sight. The effects of these dramatic cuts in journalism will negatively affect public debate and discourse in Canada because, as former Toronto Star publisher John Honderich notes, “the quality of public debate, if not the very quality of life in any community, is a direct function of the quality of media that serve it.”

journalism’s woes are caused by the slumping economy or the displacement of audiences to new online media. While these are factors, the primary cause is the highly concentrated media ownership in Canada combined with the deepening bottom-line mentality of Big Media corporations. Media ownership is more highly concentrated in Canada than almost anywhere else in the industrialized world. As of 2005, almost all private Canadian television stations are owned by national media conglomerates and, because of increasing cross-ownership, most of our newspapers are owned by the same corporations that own television and radio stations.

Something to think about is how just hours before CTVglobemedia announced its intention to take over CHUM, they laid off 281 people and canceled news broadcasts across the country.

Journalism’s diagnosis

Big Media’s race to the bottom

In his piece entitled “All the news that’s fit to fund,” John Honderich does a good job of explaining why journalism is important in a democratic society. Honderich also gives good ideas on how to revive journalism however; he fails to discuss why journalism is in its current state of crisis.

So what is the cause of the current state of journalism in Canada? In a statement made

by Leonard Asper, Canada’s largest media baron, on the likely demolition of TV stations located in Montreal, Hamilton, Red Deer, British Columbia stations, Kelowna and Victoria, he declared “as they are currently configured, these stations are not core to our television operations going forward... we believe that our efforts are best focused on the areas of greatest return.” Asper poignantly reveals that news outlets, and the journalists that work for them, are increasingly treated as a part of a business rather than a unique social institution that is essential to a functioning democracy.

But Big Media executives try to claim

In 2007, the Canadian Energy, Communications and Paperworkers (CEP) union published a study entitled Voices from the Newsroom in which they found that only 9.5 per cent of journalists indicated that they believe the corporate owners of their news outlet valued good journalism over profit.

Unsurprisingly, 44 per cent of journalists reported a decreased desire to stay in journalism. The CEP report clearly illustrates the sentiment felt by many journalists: that the bottom line mentality of Big Media owners is having an increasingly negative impact on their ability to do their jobs. Allowing just a few companies to own most of our media means journalism is likely to be less grounded in local communities and thus less relevant to audiences. A newspaper is not likely to provide engaging journalism if it is geared towards efficiently delivering eyeballs to advertisers while investing the least amount of money possible in journalism. Combine this bottom-line mentality with an uncompetitive, concentrated traditional media market, along

with the erosion of ad revenue, and you’ll find a race to the bottom for journalism in Canada. The news entity that can most effectively cut costs and exploit journalists wins!

Some might argue that even if a media outlet has a social or public service mandate, it still has to make money in order to produce journalism. Putting aside the assumption that media outlets need to be run as money making businesses, let’s debunk another myth about journalism: that it is unprofitable. In looking at the Canwest job losses, we place the blame squarely in corporate mismanagement. What is the debt from? Not unprofitable journalism, but rather acquisitions and mergers that were entirely unnecessary, and profoundly unpopular with the public.

Advertising Quebecor, one of the countries largest media conglomerates, recently locked out workers of its most profitable newspaper, the Journal de Montréal. The Journal’s union estimates Quebecor drew in $50 million in profits from the Journal de Montréal in 2008. We might ask why lock out workers in a profitable business? While Quebecor may be profitable, in Canada’s uncompetitive traditional media market, it can be MORE profitable if it breaks, or at least weakens worker compensation and benefits. When a media company is focused on achieving utmost profitability, it may be inclined to continually push for more and more output by fewer and fewer journalists, thereby creating a downward spiral for journalism. The problem with journalism in Canada isn’t so much the economic slow down or new media, these just exasperate a trend that was already underway. The real culprit is the propensity of Big Media to treat news operations as just another business.

Opportunity missed, experiments needed The CRTC had a good opportunity to decen-

tralize and diversify Canadian media ownership in their 2007 Diversity of Voices hearing, but while they established important crossownership rules, they did so after allowing several mergers to go through. The new rules seemed carefully crafted to avoid any forced divestment of Canadian media companies.

To make matters worse, the response to the current state of journalism, and the wider economic turmoil, seem to further deepen the trends that have helped produce the crisis in the first place. Besides recent (seemingly) successful efforts by big media to lobby the CRTC to soften it’s regulatory orientation, The Canadian Press agency is looking to move from an industry co-operative funded by its members, to a business aimed at turning a profit for its new investors; the exact opposite of what journalism in Canada needs right now.

Despite the layoffs, weak morale and Big Media debt, journalism in Canada is far from its grave. Now that we have properly diagnosed what has deflated journalism, we can come up with the anecdote; to develop and experiment with new forms and mechanisms of financing journalism. With the decline of big business financed journalism, this is the perfect time for us to re-imagine what journalism in the 21st century should look like.

In my next column, I will lay out various schemes for a rejuvenated 21st century public services journalism in Canada. There’s no shortage of experiments underway, and you may in fact be reading this column on one of those experiments right now.

Steve Anderson is the national coordinator for the Campaign for Democratic Media. He is a contributing author of Censored 2008 and Battleground: The Media and has written for The Tyee, Toronto Star, Epoch Times, Common Ground, Rabble.ca and Adbusters.

Media Links is a syndicated column supported by CommonGround, TheTyee, Rabble.ca, and VUE Weekly.

MARCH 2009 ryerson free press

opinion

11

CKLN: It’s time to take back our radio!

Carmelle Wolfson It’s hard to believe that a resolution has still not been reached at CKLN. A year has passed since the CKLN special meeting where membership voted overwhelmingly (over 90 per cent) to impeach non-student members on the Board of Directors and to dismiss the appointed Station Manager and appointed Program Director. Two boards still remain in place: the board that was voted out on February 23, 2008 (some directors refuse to resign to this day), and the new board that was legitimately elected by membership following the impeachment.

At least 60 volunteer programmers have been locked out of the station, their shows taken off the air, and all the workers who unionized last fall have lost their jobs—all acts of reprisal since the special meeting.

However, some promising developments at CKLN may lead to this battle’s conclusion. Three people who played key roles in maintaining the autocratic rule over CKLN have been booted out of the station, and the locks to the station have been changed. Now, for the first time since the board was legitimately elected by membership following the February 2008 meeting, the powers controlling CKLN have agreed to meet with the other board to develop parameters for an upcoming membership meeting and elections.

In the past, the impeached board repeatedly refused the National Campus and Community Radio Association’s offers for mediation between to the two boards. These developments have not happened in isolation. This has been part of a long and sometimes emotionally draining struggle to restore democracy at CKLN 88.1 FM. I’ve been meeting with the Take Back Our Radio (TBOR) organizing committee in cafés in downtown Toronto weekly for over a year now. Dismissed volunteers and community supporters have been tirelessly picketing outside the Student Centre every Sunday since the lockout began last May. We have issued media releases and conducted interviews with community radio stations in Toronto, Winnipeg, Montreal, Kingston and elsewhere. Articles have now been published in campus, independent and mainstream media: the Ryerson Free Press, the Ryersonian, the Eyeopener, Xtra!, Eye Weekly, NOW Magazine, Exclaim!, Shameless Magazine, CP24, the Toronto Sun, the Toronto Street News, Basics Community Newsletter, Toronto Social Justice Magazine, Mostly Water, Pitchfork Media, the Varsity and the Voice have all written about CKLN. We have spoken out about repression and censorship at CKLN at various public forums. Most recently, Hood 2 Hood organized a musical event dedicated to laid-off assistant news director Norman “Otis” Richmond. Norman has been a part of CKLN in one way or another for over two decades. He was let go in advance of February’s Afrikan Liberation Month, an event for which he has coordinated programming for many years. Last month, a motion was passed at the Ontario General Meeting of the Canadian Federation of Students in support of this grassroots organizing.

TBOR has so far collected over 500 signatures petitioning law firm Iler and Campbell (who has many clients in the non-profit sector) to stop representing the current regime at CKLN. Additionally, former Anti-psychiatry radio host Don Weitz took CKLN to small claims court in February for wrongful dismissal. He has been awarded $100 to cover legal costs, but a settlement has yet to be reached, because those named in the statement of claim did not show up to the last court date. These events have forced Iler and Campbell to drop the illegitimate management and board of CKLN as clients.

In the past, CKLN showed leadership by providing comprehensive, inclusive and cutting- edge programming and coverage of community actions and events. International Women’s Day (IWD) programming was an important highlight during the month of March, including the live-to-air broadcast of the IWD rally. Wimmin techs, programmers, hosts and volunteers at CKLN would volunteer their time and effort to infuse the airwaves with innovative and meaningful content for and by wimmin.

Pride Day has also traditionally been a programming highlight at CKLN. However, the lack of special programming at CKLN from last year’s Pride proved that the current management in control of the station is not committed to its social justice mandate. When CKLN followed its social jus-

tice mandate, it produced high quality alternative coverage of events like IWD, Pride, Afrikan Liberation Month and Prisoner’s Justice Day. Although the locked out wimmin programmers and techs of CKLN have been barred from the physical premises of the station, we continue to fight to reclaim our community radio space. On March 11, we will take the airwaves once again for a five-hour national broadcast. Marking IWD, the Take Back Our Radio organizing committee—including the hosts of CKLN’s only two feminist programs, Frequency Feminisms and Radio Cliteracy—will air programming that features voices otherwise silenced in the mainstream. It will also focus on community grassroots media across this country, its significance and its importance.

While recent developments at CKLN are heartening, we cannot assume that everything will work itself out and that all the hard work is over. The future of CKLN is now particularly precarious. The quality of programming at CKLN has deteriorated as a consequence of the volunteer lock-outs and lack of paid staff, while the annual fundraising drive (usually accounting for 40 per cent of the station’s operational finances) had abysmally low numbers. There are allegations of fraud and mismanagement of funds at the station. Finally, it remains unclear if CKLN will follow through with its lawsuit against the RSU and Ryerson at this point.

The next Board of Directors at CKLN will have all these issues to contend with, on top of having to decide what to

do with the 60-plus volunteers and staff who were driven out of the station. We cannot make the same mistake that many members made upon walking out of the special meeting last February. Members thought that by dropping their vote into a ballot box the problems at CKLN would immediately be fixed.

As a former volunteer and student, I also wonder who will be allowed to participate in the upcoming membership meeting and therefore determine the direction the station will go from here. Will community members whose donations were refused or who did not want to donate to the current regime be allowed entrance?

There are other unanswered questions as well. For instance, why have I heard that security forces will be called upon once again to survey this upcoming meeting? And finally, who will even want to run for a board position when the station is in such a mess?

Carmelle Wolfson is a former Radio Cliteracy volunteer, a show that aired on CKLN every Sunday morning for a year before members were locked out of the station. She is also a Ryerson Journalism alumna.

The IWD broadcast and community event will take place at the Imperial Pub on March 11 from 5pm to 10pm. Please join us in taking back our radio! The program will air on numerous community radio stations across the country For more information, please visit www. takebackourradio.blogspot.com

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MARCH 2009 ryerson free press

opinion

Why we should all support Israeli Apartheid Week This is the fifth consecutive year of Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW). Launched in Toronto, this week-long initiative hosts a string of lectures, film screenings, panels, demonstrations, cultural performances and other events on campuses and at community centres around the world to inform the public about the continuing violations of one of the longest and most devastating occupations in modern history.

IAW seeks to raise awareness about Israel’s apartheid policies towards Palestinians and to mobilize support for the growing international boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign initiated in July 2005 in a statement by over 170 Palestinian civil society organizations.

If you didn’t support IAW in the past, now is the time to start.

McCarthyism on Canadian campuses In February 2008, the McMaster Student Union (MSU) and McMaster’s Human Rights and Equity Services (HRES) office banned the IAW poster due to allegations that it was “inflammatory.” That decision was made in the shadow of attempts by the McMaster administration to ban unequivocally the mere usage of the phrase “Israeli Apartheid” by student groups on campus. What was then an explicit and unprecedented attack on the right to academic freedom, the right to organize and freedom of speech has become the norm for Canadian universities during this year’s IAW—all of which was successfully documented by organizers.

Both Carleton and University of Ottawa banned the IAW poster featuring Carlos Latuff’s cartoon of an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) helicopter firing a rocket at a Palestinian child in Gaza holding a teddy bear.

IDF killings of unarmed civilians, including over 400 children, in the Gaza Strip during the latest onslaught is a well documented part of the IDF’s policy of collective punishment of the 1.5 million-person civilian population of the Gaza Strip.

In a blatant violation of free expression for students drawing attention to Israel’s indiscriminate military offensive, these administrations issued communiqués making contrived claims that the poster violated the Ontario Human Rights Code and so-called “civil discourse in a free and democratic society.”

As neither university administration responded to student calls for a statement condemning Israel’s indiscriminate civilian killings and the bombing of the Islamic University in Gaza, it is evident that they are simply unwilling to engage in the same human rights and democratic discourse they spuriously allege the IAW poster violates.

Another well-documented elaborate campaign against IAW played out at the University of Toronto, where the administration, with the collaboration and direct involvement of pro-Israeli organizations and other Ontario university administrations, attempted to prevent student access to campus space.

Pointing to email correspondence gathered through a Freedom of Information request, between U of T President David Naylor, the university’s Assistant Provost, the university’s Interim Vice-President Provost and Hillel of Greater Toronto, among others, IAW organizers exposed a coordinated attempt to cancel a Palestine solidarity event—even before a request for space had been formally submitted.

At York University, Students Against Israeli Apartheid (SAIA York) recently “received notice of a 30-day suspension, a $1,000 fine and an individual fine of $250 for the student signatory for the group” for “actively participat-

ing” in a rally on February 12, using “various sound amplification devices and other noise making instruments” that disrupted classes.

SAIA York notes that despite redirecting the rally from Vari Hall to deliver a letter to the administration, York imposed the “maximum monetary penalty” and violated its own procedures by not following the “verification process outlined in the university’s Student Code of Conduct.”

This decision follows York’s precedent of censoring political speech in an arbitrary and discriminatory manner.

In addition to statements by University President Mamdouh Shoukri “calling for peace” on York campuses, and motions for the re-evaluation of campus spaces such as Vari Hall for protest activity, signal a growing nervousness among Canadian university administrations about increased student organizing around issues of social justice.

Indeed, for the most part, pro-Israeli groups on the aforementioned campuses argue that Israeli Apartheid Week creates “fear on campus” making it more difficult to “speak out in defence of Israel.”

What is missed here is that however outrageous and infringing on basic freedoms of thought, speech, opinion and expression; banning a poster, censoring a phrase and denying campus space will not stifle discussion or debate.

Nor will it quell the responsibility and drive of students and community members to condemn Israeli war crimes. Rather, confidence in terms like “tolerance...civil discourse...free and democratic society” is the real casualty of the latest wave of campus repression.

Attacks against community organizations, trade unions In a speech at the Inaugural Conference on Combating Anti-Semitism held in London, UK, Canadian Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Jason Kenney declared that the Canadian Arab Federation (CAF) and the Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC) should not expect to receive govern-

ment funding because of what he called “their hateful sentiments toward Israel and Jews.”

The conference was largely organized by the former Canadian Minister of Justice Irwin Cotler, a staunch pro-Israel advocate who gathered similar-minded pro-Israeli parliamentarians and advocates including: Co-chairperson of Liberal Parliamentarians for Israel, MP Anita Neville; former chair of the Canada-Israel Friendship Group, MP Carolyn Bennett; Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC) CEO Bernie Farber; CEO of the Canadian Council for Israel and Jewish Advocacy (CIJA), Hershell Ezrin; and MP Bob Rae, member of the Tribute Committee of the Jewish National Fund.

Pointing to their criticisms of Israeli war

crimes during the second Lebanon war in 2006 and during the recent military attacks in Gaza, and their condemnation of increasing institutional collaborations between Canada and Israel (particularly in regards to issues of national security and public safety), Kenney depicts CAF and CIC as undeserving of “official respect from the government or the organs of [the] state.”

In a recent interview with the Canadian Jewish News, Kenney even voiced a vicious personal attack on CAF President Khaled Mouammar, as representing a “kind of shrill, cartoonish voice of extremism”. While the vilification of respected community leaders and organizations is troubling, perhaps what is more chilling is the explicit use of government and taxpayer money to financially blackmail recognized groups who disagree with the political direction of appointed members of parliament.

Similar harassment is directed at the Canadian Union of Public Employees – Ontario (CUPE Ontario), whose delegates voted in favour of a resolution to investigate the links between research at Canadian universities and Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian Territories.

The resolution is a peaceful form of protest against Israel’s recent offensive in Gaza. Joining an international chorus of voices calling for political, academic and economic pressure on Israeli institutions for the state’s war crimes, CUPE Ontario President Sid Ryan argues that the resolution targets “academic institutions and the institutional connections that exist between universities here and those in Israel,” with a focus on those “doing research that benefits that nation’s military.”

The call for boycott aimed at challenging deep rooted alliances between Canadian and pro-Israeli institutions on university campuses—the types of alliances allowing for the aforementioned instances of repression faced

by IAW organizers—was met with pressure from all sides.

Reiterating his previous statement when the resolution was first proposed, CUPE National President Paul Moist swiftly announced his disagreement with its passing and highlighted the autonomous character of the provincial branches of the union.

The resolution was also condemned by the Liberal Party of Canada, whose spokesperson—Justice Critic Dominic LeBlanc—pointed to “widespread academic collaboration between Canadian and Israeli scholars” and deemed the CUPE resolution “foolish” and “reckless.”

These statements are made in the shadow of a wave of scathing press releases, memos, letters and email campaigns initiated by the Canada Israel Committee, the Canadian Jewish Congress, the Jewish Defence League, and B’nai Brith Canada which flood countless inboxes with outrageous accusations of “antiSemitism” directed at community representatives such as Ryan and Mouammar.

Baseless accusations of anti-Semitism One of the most troubling trends in Canadian public discourse around Israel is the explicit equation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.

At the London Conference, Kenney contrasts “old-school anti-Semitism” with what he calls the “new anti-Semitism.”

This new anti-Semitism is the “anti-Zionist version of anti-Semitism,” argues Kenney, one “predicated on the notion that the Jews alone have no right to a homeland.” In other words, the anti-Semitism of the right is replaced with the anti-Zionism of the left.

At the very least, such a warped argument should make students of this conflict very nervous. Criticism of Israel has long been equated as an expression of hate against the Jewish people by Israeli lobbyists, who inflate the definition of “anti-Semitism” to capture any and all criticisms of Israel.

Indeed, this all-encompassing umbrella would capture even Jewish and Israeli political opponents and critics of Israel.

There is no question that organizers of IAW and community representatives are openly critical of Israel and, like countless international and Israeli human rights organizations, demand that Israel be held accountable for its continued war crimes.

However, to apply anti-Semitism to their anti-Zionist policies and criticisms is to dilute the intense moral condemnation that should accompany accusations of anti-Semitism.

Anti-Jewish racism exists.

But when it comes to the question of political criticisms of Israel’s constitutionally entrenched ethnic exclusivity and continued policies of Zionist land appropriation at the demise of the Palestinian population, such accusations are unfounded.

Zionism is not just racism. It is deeply rooted in racist, militarist, nationalist and colonial thought. Kenney’s argument that Zionism is simply a belief that Jewish people are a nation and thus entitled to self-determination like other nations is a grotesque oversimplification.

From the onset, political Zionism was a controversial movement even among Jews, and Israeli historians and academics have since provided a range of arguments, and uncovered evidence that Zionism is both historically and thematically rooted in racist, nationalist and colonial thought.

Baruch Kimmerling argues that Zionism is a “mixture of territorial nationalism with colonialism;” Gershon Shafir calls it a “clear variant of colonialism;” and Ilan Pappe deems Zionism as an “unconventional colonialism... [whose] thought and praxis were motivated by a national impulse but acted as pure colonialism” (Atlantic Quarterly, Fall 2008).

It is well documented by both Israeli and ‘APARTHEID’ CONTINUED ON PAGE 17

PHOTOS OF TORONTO Demonstration Against Israeli Assault on Gaza BY MEDMOISELLE T @ FLICKR.COM

Shourideh Molavi

MARCH 2009 ryerson free press

features

MONTREAL (CUP) have never been to war, but when I read a dispatch from Robert Fisk, I think I come a little closer to understanding the consequences of conflict.

After reading his account of the Iran-Iraq War, I couldn’t relate to those young boys in the trenches of Dezful, their heads wrapped in red bandanas that read: “Khomeini, we are ready.”

But, I better understand the pain experienced by those who lost loved ones to conflict when I read lines like this: “As we walk to sit down in the dirt, I see another body in a gun-pit, a young man in the fetal position, curled up like a child, already blackening with death but with a wedding ring on his finger. I am mesmerized by the ring. On this hot, golden morning, it glitters and sparkles with freshness and life. He has black hair and is around 25 years old.”

“Where was he from, this soldier-corpse? A Sunni or a Shia or a Christian or a Kurd? And his wife. He could not be more than three days dead. Somewhere to the north of us, his wife is waking the children, making breakfast, glancing at her husband’s photograph on the wall, unaware that she is already a widow and that her husband’s wedding ring, so bright with love for her on this glorious morning, embraces a dead finger.”

Journalists, Fisk explains, are the nerve endings of their media. They must remain neutral, but on the side of those who are suffering, not necessarily to convince the world that war is bad, but to break the comfort of ignorance. Fisk’s journalism forces us to see conflict not as a hockey game between two equally matched sides, but as a series of asymmetrical tragedies.

I

ON IsRAEl AND lEBANON Gieseppe Valiante: What kind of influence will the Israeli election have on lebanese politics?

Robert Fisk: The problem with [Benyamin] Netanyahu, [leader of the conservative Likud party], is he’s been in power before; he was a failure. He still believes that his failed policy – which is the hard fist – is going to bring security to Israel. It is not.

Since 1948, the Israeli policy has been: Beat the Arabs; hammer them into submission.

Force is the only thing they understand, and you will have peace. And there is still war and it’s 2009, so it doesn’t work.

You’ve got two sides [Hezbollah and Israel] who I think are still waiting to recommit themselves to war. The question is when and over what excuse. You don’t need an excuse to fight a war in the Middle East. There are a thousand excuses; you can pull them out of a hat. Because I think both sides want a war, you see.

GV: Why? RF: Hezbollah’s got new weapons. There is no doubt about that. And they’ve built this huge system of underground concrete bunkers in the mountains above the Litany River.

They’re not in the [United Nations] zone; they’re completely out, militarily.

GV: Have you seen them?

RF: You can see some of them, yes. I have seen them. Some of them are meant to be seen. I think they are intended to be bombed by the Israelis. I think they’re come-hither bunkers, do you know what I mean?

I suspect [Hezbollah have] got ground-toair missiles to hit aircraft with. I suspect the Israelis have got some new bombs to try out from the Americans. The Hezbollah try out weapons for the Iranians, and the Israelis try out weapons for the Americans. Let’s not forget, the Israelis are a proxy force for Washington, and the Hezbollah are a proxy force for Tehran, which, any way that you look at it, that’s what it comes down to. So both sides want to see how their weapons are going to work. It pretty much depends on the relations between [U.S. President] Barack Obama and the Iranians.

GV: And how do you think those relations will be?

RF: Barack Obama asked Iran to unclench its fist. Well, Iran would say: “We’re not clenching our fist. It’s been the Americans who have been threatening us for the past umpteenth number of years.”

You can go on forever with this game, and it doesn’t look at the moment that the Iranians are in any great mood, not until after their June elections, to talk to the West in a serious way, and I can see why that would be the case.

But again, I fear very much that there will be a Hezbollah/Israeli war, and of course, if indeed Hezbollah have weapons that can clear the skies of Israeli aircraft . . . and that’s what I think most serious people in Lebanon are worried about. Saad Hariri, for example, the son of the assassinated former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, a few days ago I was chatting with him, he said: “If there is another war, it will be hell.” Well, all wars are hell, but the way he said it was somewhat different . . . and that’s probably true.

But, the thing you’ve got to remember about Netanyahu is that he’s not interested in a Palestinian state. Nor was [former Israeli prime minister Ariel] Sharon.

Netanyahu talks about security, security, security. And his theory is, if you [give] the Palestinians a good amount of autonomy, they’ll be happy playing around in their economic playpens, you see. But the problem is, if you look at Palestinian demonstrators, they’re not carrying banners saying: “We want more pre-natal clinics,” “Please reopen our casino,” “Repair our roads.”

They’re carrying banners saying: “We want Palestine.”

The real issue is not the relationship between Lebanon and Israel.

The real issue is between Israel and the United States, and what is Obama going to do with this? It’s one thing to put a trillion dollars into the U.S. economy and tell people he’s doing

it for their good, but what is he going to do after the Israeli election? That’s the question.

ON CANADA AND AFGHANIsTAN GV: I’d like to focus a little on Canada. I have yet to hear a satisfactory answer to the question of what exactly we are doing over there. so maybe you can help me.

RF: I think the Canadians are in Afghanistan because . . . it’s part of the Canada-U.S. relationship.

Let’s be really frank about this; Canadians have been peacekeepers since Korea . . . now you’ve got them for the first time back in battlefield conditions. I think to some extent all armies – I’m talking about the leadership – want to have soldiers who can fight, as opposed to just build bridges and dispense bandages to people, and I think there is no doubt . . . to some extent, Afghanistan is a training ground. I think this is a political agreement.

Let me give you the example of Washington (I know you want to talk about Canada).

Politics around Washington revolve around democracy, freedom, human rights, justice.

It doesn’t. It revolves around political power.

And that’s how America works.

From that is the fact that a lot of countries deal in this political power. [Former British Prime Minister Tony] Blair didn’t ally himself with the illegal American invasion of Iraq because he cared about Saddam Hussein; he never gave a damn about Saddam Hussein before. It was about his decision that Britain’s own advantage . . . would be advanced by increasing the military relationship with the United States.

So you know, you’ve got to realize Canada doesn’t sign up for a joint peace-keeping/ battlefield mission because it sud-

13

denly has a split personality. It’s because the Americans wanted the Canadians there, and they got them. I think they should have never been there.

I’ve just been to Kandahar, and the conditions in the hospitals there are appalling.

[Parents] were bringing in kids who are dying. And I was saying: “What’s wrong with this child?” and the doctors are saying: “It has no food, it’s hungry, there is a famine.”

I didn’t know there was a famine around Kandahar. Why hasn’t this famine been discovered before? These kids were coming in looking like children from the Ethiopian famine or Bangladesh famine.

GV: That’s where the Canadians are stationed.

RF: I know that’s where the Canadians are.

But you should understand something: the Canadians are miles away from Kandahar – their base is totally cut off from the city.

GV: You’re the first person to tell me that there is a famine in Kandahar.

RF: I don’t know if there is a famine per se, but there’s a lot of hunger. These children haven’t been fed. And when the parents [were] asked why not, they said they had no food.

Now the problem with the Canadian mission is the same as the British mission or the American mission: You cannot go out with battlefield troops saying you’re coming to build bridges, either the political or the physical kind.

People know how to build bridges, they know how to build hospital machines, they know how to re-concrete roads. They’ve been doing it for years. What they need is not the security structure, but the political structure in which to do that.

GV: And wouldn’t the argument be that we can’t do any of these things before a stable security force?

RF: And who has to impose security in Afghanistan?

GV: I don’t know.

RF: Well, Afghans, I would have thought. Listen, the whole problem is that we’ve set up a structure of putting [Afghanistan President Hamid] Karzai in charge. And Karzai put in all the ‘FISK’ CONTINUED ON PAGE 18

Q&a

with war journalist robert fisk by giuseppe valiante, CUP QUeBeC BUreaU ChieF

health haRms in san miguel iX inc. opeRates an open-pit, c dUring a series oF 20 interviews, conducted in december 2008 - January 2009 by Francois guindon and Karen spring, rights action documented many people in villages in san Miguel ixtahuacan suffering rashes, hair loss and other health problems that had not been present before goldcorp began its gold mining operations in 2004. of the participants in the interviews, more than 60 per cent reported that someone in their immediate family were suffering from types of health problems they had never experienced prior to 2007.

From rights action’s work in the goldcorp inc. gold mining-affected communities in honduras, similar skin rashes, hair loss and health problems have been documented after goldcorp began its mining operations in honduras in 2000. the pictures and stories are samples of the health impacts that mining is allegedly causing in communities near goldcorp’s “Marlin” mine. all of the individuals in the photos are Mayan Mam. as in honduras, goldcorp denies their operation is causing environmental and health harms. observers worry that these health conditions will persist in the communities long after the company finishes its mining activity in the region.

Maria, the Mayan Mam mother of this 6-month old newborn lives in the community of San Jose Ixcaniche, one of the communities allegedly most affected to date by Goldcorp’s “Marlin” Mine.

Another newborn baby affected by skin rashes

This photo was taken in December 2008. Three months prior to this photo, her baby started getting skin rashes, concentrated mostly on her arms and torso.

Shortly after that, she began losing her hair. Julia and her family bathe and wash in a river close to her house, near the mine.

Xtahuacan WheRe goldcoRp cYanide leeching gold mine

Julia, the mother of baby Fernando, has used at least 10 different types of creams and lotions on the rashes that her son has on his feet, legs, torso, arms and neck. Nothing has helped cure the skin problems.

This 1-month old baby died. This photo and the photo below, taken shortly before the baby’s death, show rashes and open wounds.

A

fter completing interviews in San Miguel Ixtahuacan with people who are suffering from rashes, hair loss and other unexplained health problems, Rights Action and the local population believe that there is a connection between these health conditions and Goldcorp’s mining operations in the region.

One interview participant stated: “What is going to happen after? If there is an illness or two, three, four, five … or ten illnesses, what is the company going to do? Will they be cured quickly? Will they leave big hospitals or leave them to die? … The people die and they won’t care. They will leave and won’t care what happens to the people.”

For more information, please see “Who Is Emeterio Perez”: tinyurl.com/cl85f5 See report “Investing in Conflict” about Goldcorp’s operations across the Americas: tinyurl.com/d3wtot See film All That Glitters Isn’t Gold (tinyurl.com/bqprx9) that documents health and environmental harms allegedly related to Goldcorp’s “San Martin” mine in Honduras.

WHAT TO DO There is no easy way to help the mainly Mayan Mam villagers allegedly being harmed by this mine. Goldcorp Inc. has the full support of the governments of Canada and Guatemala; early on, the World Bank was an investor in and supporter of this mine.

It is fundamental that North American citizens hold Goldcorp Inc, its investors and shareholders and the American and Canadian governments accountable for the environmental and health harms and human rights violations allegedly being caused by Goldcorp Inc. in Guatemala, and elsewhere.

American and Canadian citizens should write to - and continue writing to - their elected representatives, making them aware of these situations, demanding that our governments prioritize global human rights and environmental concerns over global business interests, demanding that our government leaders use their power and authority to help hold our corporations accountable if/ when they violate human rights and/or cause environmental and health harms.

Canadians and Americans should write to and continue writing to their own Pension Funds and Investment Brokers – including the Canadian Pension Plan, to find out what types of corporations and businesses they are investing in, to demand that our investors prioritize global human rights and environmental concerns over profits, to insist that investments be withdrawn if/ when profits are being made at the expense of environmental and health harms and/ or human rights violations.

This is slow, long-term work. We need to make our governments, companies and investment firms accountable to us in all facets of global economic relations and policies.

Photos courtesy of Rights Action

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features

WrIsters:

the canary in the Mine of shallow Middle-age fulfillMent Matt kinDreD Any Vegas night is a surefire place to commit a multitude of sins. There’s no question that the town is a teeming hotbed of avarice, corruption and vitriolic-fuelled lust. The day: Friday. The place: Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville, an oasis for those weary from long walks on the Strip and in need of a decent nacho plate and a titular margarita.

Fridays are different at Margaritaville than any other night of the week. Sure, there are the requisite fanny-pack travelers and corpulent peons gorging themselves into an early grave, but Fridays are usually reserved for the many bachelorette parties in town and the rowdiness that always follows. Along with these troves of young, attractive women taking the perilous plunge is an interesting subgroup of the male species—one that, if guys are not careful, they may well become.

They are known as Wristers: men from the Baby Boomer era who enjoy the company of women half their age and who relinquish copious amounts of money just to be in their company. Of course, they rarely if ever, get to sleep with their objects of desire, despite their various attempts to do so. What they do get is far more meaningful: serious wrist caressing action. As the evening wears on and the party of women gets more and more inebriated, the Wristers continue to assist them in any way they can: holding drinks, cameras, purses and phones, gently guiding the girls into group photos and then throwing down more cash to continue their drinking escapades—all for the sake of caressing their forearm in a sexual, yet nonthreatening manner.

Their introductions to the ladies are friendly enough, much like a father meeting one of his daughter’s friends at a Fourth-ofJuly barbeque: “Hi, ladies! How we doin’?”

Depending on the girls’ drunkenness prior to this salutation, they will either welcome the men and engage in conversation or, if sufficiently sober, bluntly reject their pretext to further courtship. If the situation

presents the former, the Wristers are more than happy to oblige the ladies in a series of “comped” libations, among other things, becoming what could essentially be classified as indentured servants for the duration of the evening. However, should the latter present itself, the men will quickly move to their next prospect with a stoic composure and a staunch diligence not found among the future generations.

It’s no mystery why the Wristers of Las Vegas choose to operate out of Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville. The place caters to a by-gone era imbued with an abundance of sexual prosperity. A looped digital video of Buffet himself plays on the jumbo screens throughout the Mexican-themed bar. The poorly cut montage shows Buffet and his cadre of Boomers trying desperately to relive the halcyon days of his fame with a lengthy road trip across Middle America—all the way to the sun-drenched beaches of Southern California. This is all under the pretense of a “Comeback Tour.” It’s a winsome viewing experience to be sure, and more than sufficient to put a lump in even the most jaded post-modernist’s throat.

When I saw the Wristers go to work that Friday night, I was completely dismayed, and almost ashamed of my gender. Is this sort of behaviour the sad eventuality for all men over the age of 43? Is this the proper way of handling yourself in the company of youth, dropping c-notes like Monopoly money all for the remote possibility of caressing a young lady’s arm?

“It’s what keeps me alive,” says Mike, an avowed Wrister who is no stranger to Margaritaville. Mike—who chose to withhold his actual name (for obvious reasons)—tells me that he goes out almost every Friday night to find rowdy bachelorette parties with his group of friends.

“I go out and it’s like a game with myself.

See how many groups I can

buy my way into and see how long I can hang out with these girls before they get sick of me. Luckily, I still got all my hair on top and I keep fit so I don’t usually get called out.”

Mike informs me that being “called out” is one of the worst things that can happen to a Wrister. It basically means that one of the women has literally told the man to leave— because he’s too old.

“You hear it all the time,” Mike says.

“Some girl in the group says, ‘fuck off old man, go back to your wife’ or something like that and you’re just stuck there: embarrassed and speechless. That’s when you know it’s high time to leave.”

Throughout the course of his time as a Wrister, Mike has only been called out three times. Each time gets easier, he claims, by virtue of the fact that Las Vegas is a Mecca, its populace ever-changing along with the demographic of women he so desires. I ask Mike how it all started and why he became a Wrister in the first place.

“About a couple of years ago I became an ex-husband, an ex-cop and an ex-father. My life was really empty and after about a few attempts to rejoin the world, I really saw the fucking void. Just black. My life was in the garberator and I really wanted to get myself away from these awful feelings.

“A job came up in Las Vegas to do private security. It was a really lucrative position for a guy like myself and I knew that I wanted to relocate, so I took it. The first week there, a bunch of the guys I work with took me to Margaritaville and introduced me to it.

“That first night was astounding; all the attention I got, all the laughter from my jokes and stories and all that… After that, I realized that it was just the thing to pull me out of my slump, you know?”

I ask why he doesn’t go after women his age. Why it is only the young and beautiful that he chooses to pursue. He smiles a big shark-like grin that shifts his prominently grey moustache and exposes his nicotinecoated teeth. “Gravity,” he tells me, and then laughs an all too familiar smoker’s hack.

“There’s no question that most women don’t age well. They put on weight and get wrinkles and cellulite and varicose veins and all that

crap.

I mean, I’m not one to talk. I’m no George Clooney, and I don’t think I will ever be.

“But it’s just that I don’t want to be constantly reminded of my age and how old I am getting. If I had the chance to go after Angelina Jolie over Bea Arthur, Angelina would obviously win. No contest.”

The Wrister phenomenon is not strictly restricted to the Las Vegas community. Go to any Philthy McNasty’s, Hooters, or any kind of sports bar on a weekend evening in Toronto, and you are bound to find a group of men somewhat resembling Burton Cummings, dropping roughly 400 bucks on a 200-dollar tab, trying to keep up the lie with himself that he doesn’t have a wife and two kids waiting for him at home in Brampton.

They may not have as much money to burn as the Vegas Wristers, and their margins of success might be narrowed because of it, but they still manage to quell the bitter pangs of loneliness and nostalgia—at least for one more night.

Dave is new to the game. He’s married with kids but cannot stand the sight of them.

At first he was angry with these feelings of apathy toward his family, but then he chose to accept the fact that things would not change.

“I’m not the cheating type,” he assures me over our second round of Rickard’s Red and overdone calamari at the Philthy McNasty’s on Yonge and Eglinton. “I wouldn’t do that to my family or my kids because it would destroy them. I come here and I really am not looking for anything other than a good conversation with one of the waitresses or one of the girls around the bar.”

I ask him if he has a favourite, or someone he goes back to when he returns to the bar.

“There is a couple” he tells me, mid-bite into some rubbery-tasting squid. “I know they think I’m some kind of perv or something like that, but I don’t care. Most times I really just want someone to talk to.”

What comes off to some as misogynistic logic for why Wristers exist is also a sad testament to what our ideas of beauty have become on both sides of the sexes. For women, crow’s feet, stretch marks and saddle-bags are a cause for dismay amongst men. For men, baldness, psoriasis and love handles are strict no-nos for women looking for the ideal mate. The exigencies of our culture’s vanity, or presumed vanity, have far outweighed the proper criteria for what makes an ideal partner—so much so, that men and women as they age grow to despise the protracted decrepitude they find about their bodies.

Perverts and Cougars are what the Western world defines respectively as older men and women who fecklessly seek out members of the opposite sex who are markedly younger than themselves. And when they are seen in action by the youth culture, they are criticized for their callow and ultimately pathetic behaviour. The youth attest that the best thing for them would be to go after someone closer to their own age.

The interval in age between the pursuer and the pursued is so large that people vow they will never commit that kind of indecency when they are as old. “It’s pathetic,” says one witness who watched Mike and his consorts go to work on a merry band of young margarita-fuelled women. “I hope I never get like that”.

Yet the sad truth is: we all become like that. Enslaved by our puerile views on what constitutes atheistic beauty as opposed to true beauty, we inevitably resign ourselves to a future of finding pleasure from the young, desperate to be sated of our own decline by their mere presence, and waiting for that ephemeral moment of having their nubile hand touch our decaying flesh—be it with a handshake, a quick hug, or even, the gentle touch of a wrist.

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Toronto doctor helps heal the world Tracy Chen Her situation is all too common. An eight month-old girl is very sick. Her mother is dead and her father doesn’t want to take care of her. She arrives at a hospital to recover and a doctor attends to her. She is very quiet and it takes months before he sees her smile. After treatment, she becomes a lively, bright and happy girl and he considers adopting her.

“I never did. I thought about it a lot,” said Dr. James Maskalyk. “I decided that maybe the best thing for me to do was to help find a solution to the problem rather than just affecting one life.”

Dr. Maskalyk spent five months in 2007 with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in Abyei, Sudan. Abyei is a town in South Kurdufan, linking north and south Sudan.

It is an area rich in oil production and the cause of much tension.

“I still kind of struggle with that because I don’t really know what happened [to her],” he said. “There, in terms of prioritizing children, the youngest are valued the least and obviously children that are not your own are less likely to receive the last bit of food.”

In Abyei, Dr. Maskalyk often tended to sick children who died from preventable illnesses, such as measles and malnutrition.

“When you come back, you end up really overwhelmed by that feeling of helplessness.”

Maskalyk worked with MSF and vaccinated 20,000 Sudanese people from measles. As an emergency physician, he was often on call.

“He would get calls in the middle of the night, when he should have been sleeping,” said Ken Tong, manager of web development at MSF Canada. Maskalyk was in Sudan during the hottest season, with temperatures around 40 degrees Celsius. “[There was] not enough power for a fan,” said Maskalyk. “Eventually I slept outside for a few months.”

He kept a record of his mission in a blog he wrote for the MSF Canada website. His blog was featured by Reuters, in the Globe and Mail and the London Times.

“He was one of our first bloggers,” says Tong. “For him, I know that writing the blog was really therapeutic… [I]t allowed him to process all the stress he was seeing in his clinical life.”

Maskalyk also wrote a book about his mission called Suddenly Sudan, which will be released in April. He wants to show people what life was like for his patients in Sudan.

“I think if I took 10 people and I took them to Sudan and showed what a starving kid looks like, eight of them would turn to me and say we can never let that happen again.”

‘APARTHEID’ CONTINUED FROM PAGE 12

non-Israeli historians that early Zionist leaders spoke openly about ethnically cleansing the Palestinian population.

In fact, Israeli politicians continue to do so today, as with recent statements made by the so-called centrist Kadima party leader Tzipi Livni who, prior to winning the largest number of Knesset seats in the February 10 elections, said, “Once a Palestinian state is established, I can come to the Palestinian citizens, whom we call Israeli Arabs, and say to them ‘you are citizens with equal rights, but the national solution for you is elsewhere.’”

Indeed, IAW lectures, panels and workshops also illuminate the effects of Zionist policies on the Arab community inside Israel, the remnants of the ethnically cleansed Palestinian community in 1948, pointing to its

The work is not easy and can be dangerous. Soon after Maskalyk’s mission, Elsa Serfass, another MSF worker who was stationed in Chad, was killed when her vehicle was hit by gunfire. About a year after Maskalyk left, fighting between the Sudanese armed forces and the Sudan Liberation Army devastated Abyei.

With MSF, Maskalyk has also traveled to

becoming a B-Boy. “Who wouldn’t want to break dance?” he says.

But he never really got enough time or practice. He plays the guitar in his spare time. Maskalyk also used to DJ. “He’s got a pretty impressive collection of vinyl and a real love of helping ‘get down’ as well as ‘get well’” says his friend, Matt

Bolivia, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

“There will always be a part of me that will never stop wanting to see the world,” Maskalyk said.

The only regret that Maskalyk has is not spending enough time with music.

“It’s such an important part of my life,” he says.

Growing up in Alberta, he considered

Thompson. “I would say he’s a pretty darn multi-faceted guy: he’s equally comfortable spinning records in a hipster Toronto bar as he is moose-hunting in rural Alberta.”

Maskalyk’s parents own a lumber mill.

His first job was working there as a courier.

He learned from watching his parents manage their company.

“They had a business where they really

legal forms of ethnic discrimination designed to maintain the exclusive “Jewish character” of the State.

incursions, widespread searches, restrictions on movement, shootings and nightly raids that continue to occur throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The above events point to an alarming rise of neo-conservatism on Canadian campuses and cities, and a silencing of expressed dissent against their ties to Israel’s political and corporate establishment.

This year’s Israeli Apartheid Week is about reclaiming university campuses as spaces within which our basic rights to speech, expression and political opinion are protected.

It is about our responsibility to hold elected and appointed Parliamentarians accountable to our social, academic and political demands, and liable for their verbal and bureaucratic attacks on community organizations and trade unions.

‘Standing united with the people of Gaza’ This is the theme of this year’s Israeli Apartheid Week—and for good reason. I do not need to repeat the devastating casualty figures, or recall the horrifying and sickening images of mass suffering, dismemberment and widespread destruction in Gaza.

Just last week, between February 12 and 20, the IDF killed three Palestinians, including two children, and wounded fifteen others including six children, in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

This does not account for the number of

cared about their employees. They really gave them second chances and third chances and fourth chances,” he said. “Even if they wouldn’t pay them back.”

Maskalyk followed the advice of his guidance counselor who encouraged him to choose medicine over English. At 17, he went to the University of Alberta and earned a degree in physiology. He became the first person in his family to graduate from university. Afterwards, he spent three years at the University of Calgary medical school.

One of his first experiences with international aid work was between first and second year when he worked in Santiago, Chile, as a cardiologist in public health care to help victims of a flood. During his residency, he earned a scholarship to work in Cambodia to target malaria. He assessed the health care infrastructure and met with elderly villagers to discuss barriers to health.

In 2002, Maskalyk declined Harvard’s master’s program in public health to do his editorial fellowship at the Canadian Medicine Association Journal (CMAJ).

“It was a good chance to do some writing and work with words,” he says.

In Toronto, Maskalyk works as an emergency physician at St. Michael’s Hospital.

He says there are a lot of homeless people, people addicted to alcohol and drugs and people that are psychiatrically involved. It’s why he likes working there.

“A really good spirit of people gather around that kind of work,” he said.

“People sometimes just come to the hospital because they don’t get a lot. It’s like that one place where they can get some amount of respect. Someone says how can I help you today?”

Maskalyk is also an assistant professor in the Division of Emergency Medicine, Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto. Maskalyk wants to visit Ethiopia with U of T in a project to improve the retention of doctors in Ethiopia.

“There are more Ethiopian physicians in Chicago than there are in Ethiopia,” he said.

He compares his current project with growing bacteria in an agar plate.

“You put one little speck of bacteria and it grows and from that grows other things and eventually they overlap and eventually the whole plate is covered,” he says.

He hopes that this educational exchange will not only create more qualified doctors in Ethiopia, but will also spread to other parts of Africa.

His motivation with his humanitarian efforts is to work himself out of a job.

“Eventually you don’t need to me to go anywhere. I’ll just relax,” says Maskalyk with a chuckle.

It is about the absolute need not to allow lobbyists and advocacy groups to exploit their financial and political ties to sway the decision- and policy-making of our university administrators.

Most of all, Israeli Apartheid Week deconstructs the mirage of academic institutions as apolitical spaces, demanding our active intellectual and political engagement with global issues playing out on our campuses. The list of reasons goes on.

Shourideh Molavi writes regulary on, and reports from, Palestine, and also lives in Toronto. The above article is a slightly edited version of the original which appeared in the Bullet, an online publication of the Socialist Project: www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/bullet190.html

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‘FISK’ CONTINUED FROM PAGE 13

old warlords. Well, stop paying the warlords!

I was not long ago in Kabul, and I spoke to a member of parliament, and he said: “Well, what can I do? I have powers to administer the local towns, and every time I want to do something, I’m stopped by armed men who are paid by the Americans as a security force.”

What do you do? We didn’t go there to help the Afghans.

We went there in 2001 to close down the Taliban and make sure they didn’t come back. We ended up not helping the Afghans sufficiently and still the Taliban came back.

The problem at the moment, I think, is we don’t have any sense of perspective. Everything happened yesterday and nothing happened the day before yesterday.

GV: But, there are intelligent people in the Canadian and American armies who have read history books.

RF: I gave a lecture not long ago in Ottawa, in which there were members of the Canadian Forces present, and when I said that Canadians should leave Afghanistan now, they were the first people clapping. Not because they like Robert Fisk, but they agreed. The generals will always say what the government wants to say. It’s always when they retire when you hear what they really think.

[Former Canadian Forces Chief of Defence Rick Hillier] called [the Taliban] “scumbags” and I sat there and thought: “Hang on a second, the Taliban are winning.” When [British] General [Bernard] Montgomery was fighting [German Commander Erwin] Rommel in the desert in 1942, he had a field caravan where he carried his maps and his documents. On the wall of his caravan . . . he had a picture of Rommel of the Wehrmacht.

He sat there and respected Rommel and he said: “I want to know what this guy is thinking, so I look at him every night.”

I’m not saying that you should respect the Taliban, but when you are calling your enemies scumbags, you’re not going to win a war.

On journalism GV: You mentioned in a column recently that “journalists

used to report without being frightened of damaging their impartiality” and you aren’t sure if this is true anymore.

RF: My view is that journalists should be neutral and impartial on the side of those who suffer.

GV: Right, you’ve always written about the underdog, I mean— RF: It’s not about the underdog – and I’ve never used the word underdog. I hate that word; it’s a cliché.

When I started as a journalist . . . you report football matches, you report on public inquiries into new motorways that cut through green areas, and you give time and space in your article to each side.

But the Middle East is not a football match, and it’s not a public inquiry into something that will benefit the community – it’s a massive, bloody tragedy. And it doesn’t mean we take sides in the war, but we must take a moral side.

You see children dying, your sympathy and your spirit must be with them. And you have every right to say: “How dare do you kill those women and children?”

GV: Why must it be with them automatically?

RF: Because you’re a human being. The idea of a journalist is not to be a machine that goes in and spews out stuff where you give 50 per cent to each side. We’re human beings. We’re sent out there to be the nerve endings of our newspaper.

Our job is to tell it how it is. Not to report on a football match.

If you were reporting the slave trade in the 18th century, would you give equal time to the slave ship captain? No. You’d be talking to the slaves. If you were present at the liberation of a Nazi extermination camp, would you give equal time to the SS spokesman? No. You would not, you’d be talking to the survivors and looking at the dead.

When I was in Jerusalem in the summer of 2000, a Palestinian suicide bomber walked in to an Israeli restaurant and killed 16 people, most of them children. I didn’t give equal time to the Islamic Jihad spokesperson.

GV: Why do you think that I’m not hearing about what’s really going on in Afghanistan?

RF: Because you’re not reading the Independent.

GV: Why do I have to read the Independent? Why can’t I get the info at home?

RF: I don’t think you have a press here that reflects reality in the Middle East. I think it doesn’t want to reflect reality, because it wants to have a soft, pro-American, right-wing coverage. That’s it.

GV: The French-language press Le Devoir is actually much better on the Middle East.

RF: One thing you have to understand: I don’t believe there is a big conspiracy.

I think journalists fall in line generally with what think they’re expected to write. We are not brave animals. We have mortgages to pay off, real estate to buy, kids who go to school; we don’t want to be controversial, we don’t want to upset the editor. We want to have a nice byline on page one; we’re all like that a bit. I’m not making myself out to be a special person. And there are a lot of journalists who try to do what I try to do.

When you have all these journalists who are always walking backwards, putting down stop signs, rather than walking forward saying, “Hey, I’m coming,” you’re not going to read it through. It’s not a question of censorship . . . journalists want to write the way they think their papers want them to write.

GV: Are you tired?

RF: I’ve got other things to do actually.

GV: I’m talking about, you know, are you tired of always telling people to learn history and everything is repeating – RF: It’s a cliché that history repeats itself. But it’s equally a cliché that we don’t remember that history repeats itself.

We’re not reading books. Far too many people are glued to screens and Googling and the Internet. Give it up and read books. You’re not going to learn about the past through screens. Sorry, but there you go. Read books. Read proper history.

GV: What about the rest of 2009? What do you see?

RF: I – my crystal ball is broken. Long ago.

MARCH 2009 ryerson free press

TRAVEL

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TRAVEL Getting a different taste of the Big Apple me they represent real culture, “New York still has a little edge left,” he said.

While I was there, their show was Play Ground – transitioning from childhood to adulthood. My favourite piece was an installation by Jillian Leigh Fedorman. It was a daycare cubby -- on one side, there were high heels, pills and cigarettes, and on the other was a juice box, little red sparkly shoes and toes. My boyfriend described it as “debauchery.”

Ronak Ghorbani Editorial Assistant

path and will yell at you to move.

New York City -- home to over eight million people and spanning over 790 square kilometres. It’s a big place that can be overwhelming for first-time visitors.

Too much time in Times Square can leave you feeling nauseated and itching to get a real bite of the Big Apple.

In February, I spent a few days in the charming city and explored away from the typical NYC tourist spots (i.e. the MET, Empire State Building, etc.).

The real NYC lies in the alleyways of Chinatown, the record stores in Greenwich Village and conversations on the subway.

Here’s an alternative guide to New York City:

Chinatown NYC’s Chinatown is really different from Toronto’s. It’s full of nooks and corners and feels more like a neighbourhood than a really long street full of stores. People are friendly and it doesn’t have that overly crowded, congested feel Toronto’s Chinatown sometimes does.

Travel and accommodations Being a student means my friends and I have limited resources. So when it comes to travel, airplanes definitely don’t make the list.

We took a bus to NYC, it was about 10 hours long, but only cost $15 for a return trip. Megabus.com has some sweet deals if you book far enough in advance (we reserved our seats two months earlier).

Staying in Manhattan can be astronomically pricey, even the hostels are expensive.

We faced a 40-minute commute to Brooklyn and stayed at a hostel. For three nights in a private room with four beds, it cost $52 person. The hostel, named Loftsel on Greene Avenue, is minutes away from the G subway line.

Staff and guests were super friendly -- we were invited to a party on our first night!

There’s a kitchen on each floor and free access to the internet. Rooms are clean and the décor looks likes it’s been pulled out of an Ikea catalogue.

To book a room, visit loftstel.com Who needs a tour bus when you’ve got the Brooklyn Bridge?

Walking across the Brooklyn Bridge gives you a spectacular view of Manhattan and you end up near China Town. It’s a little over 1.8 km long and runs over the East River. You get a stunning view of the skyline and there’s info stops with descriptions of how the bridge was built. Only warning: watch out for bikers, they get pissed when pedestrians walk on their bike

Columbus Park Pavilion This park has been ridiculed by some New Yorkers as run down and dingy, but I got a sense of community from it. Granted, the pavilion could use a paint touch-up, but who cares about aesthetics when you’ve got tables upon tables of Chinese checkers grids? Games take place daily, with crowds of seniors surrounding the game, eagerly looking on and socializing.

When I was there, a man approached another man practising tai-chi and learned some moves himself. The park is great for resting. There are a lot of benches, and it’s a great place to see a community in action.

Tasty Dumplings – 54 Mulberry St. The perfect place for a quick, filling, cheap meal. This quaint restaurant is sparsely furnished but serves up the best dumplings (I’ve ever had). The most popular are cabbage and pork fried dumplings (5 for $1.25) and veggie boiled dumplings (8 for $3). Service is fast and efficient, with many customers streaming in and out, taking their food to go.

Ten Ren Tea Shop – 75 Mott St. This shop has great deals on tea from China and Thailand. Prices vary based on quality, but the free samples are great for newbies to tea drinking. You can also get small packages of almost every kind of tea for $0.50, which is great if you’re indecisive like me.

SoHo This area’s full of shops and trendy boutiques, but it also has a few nifty art galleries.

Puffin Room – 435 Broome St. An open space art gallery housing mostly trendy/hip young artists. One curator told

Yellow Rat Bastard – 483 Broadway St. This store is like no other. Bringing the streets indoors, Yellow Rat Bastard’s urban-inspired décor is unique, to say the least. With graffiti on the walls and street signs directing you to the shoe department, YRB’s layout is as unique as the discount deals you’ll find. They sell designer brands like Levis Jeans for $25 and Billabong skinnies for $45. Books about the Brooklyn Kings, heavy metal portraits and deviant desires will keep you entertained if you’re not the shopping type. YRB also has a selection of skateboards for sale, blank boards starting at $35. This store provides a shopping experience much different than Macy’s or JC Penney. Yes, it’s all brand name at YRB, but at least it’s cheap.

Bowery We walked through Bowery at nighttime and were envious of all the people walking into the many bars and bistros ($3 beers anyone?). Being one year shy of 21, NYC can be depressing at night, especially in this pub-filled area which reminds me of College St. in Toronto.

Bowery Poetry Club – 308 Bowery St. This poetry club and café has some cheap coffee ($2 a cup) and diner-style food. Besides regular poetry readings, they also have a reading group and open mic.

Drop by on Monday nights to play some bingo while listening to M.I.A.. For two bucks a card and a bar by your hand, this ain’t your grandma’s bingo night.

St. Marks St. Marks reminds me of what Queen West used to be – before all the goth/punk boutiques were bought out by Aritzia and Zara and hipsters took over the streets.

The Sock Man – 27 St. Mark’s Place Toe socks, knee socks, ankle socks, plain socks, socks with rainbows, socks with chilli peppers, panty hose, leopard print leggings – you name it, the Sock Man’s got it. This store is just fun to stand in, I never knew there was such a vast quantity of different socks. Prices range from $1-$30.

Ray’s Pizza Place – 2 Saint Marks Pl. This eatery has a huge selection in cream cheese (including tofu cream cheese!), pizza galore and heart attack inducing lasagna. I got a spinach, broccoli and black olive slice and for $4, my mouth partied hard.

St. Mark’s Comics – 11 St. Mark’s Pl. I’m not one for comic books, but my friend Shawn insisted on going here, and I have to say, I was blown away. The store is small, on the basement floor of a townhouse, and it’s crammed with comics.

Besides the typical Spidey and Superman, the store has a section dedicated to graphic novels and toys (err, action figures). With three big bins of 50 cent comics, this store is great for new collectors (like me) or if you’re trying to find an obscure read. I ended up with a treasure: a feminist comic book!

Greenwich Village Bleeker Bob’s Records - 118 West 3rd Street Bleeker Bob’s has been around since the 1970s and they’re open late into the night.

The place has that dingy record store smell; you can practically sniff out that rare LP find.

My favourite was the “budget Latin and jazz” with records under $5. They have dozens of boxes of 7 inch records of every genre from 50s pop to punk/hardcore.

The most expensive album for sale is John Lennon Sings the Great Rock and Roll Hits, priced at $500. The person working told me it was released on a tiny indie label so there are only a few of the albums floating around.

The coolest hat store in the world The Village Scandal – 19 E. 7th St. Have you ever walked into a place and knew right away it was magical? The Village Scandal is one of those, housing hundreds of hats; some are even made in NYC. The shop keeper is friendly and encourages you to try on the fedoras, top hats, knit hats with yarn mohawks, monkey hats, elephant hats, old-lady church looking hats. I felt like a kid in a candy store, except I grabbed flapper hats instead of chocolate bars.

It all leads back to Times Square New York City is a city that never sleeps (literally, their subway system is 24 hours).

It’s gynormous, yellow taxis swarm the streets, and sometimes all you can hear is honks and curses coming from cars. But there’s a beauty to it. Among the madness and havoc of it, you meet people who are trying to get by, trying to find inspiration in this giant town.

We met a guy named Mikey Angelo, he’s a rickshaw biker, and he stopped us in the street to ask about my friend’s dread locks.

Mikey comes from Florida and told us how disappointed he was in NYC. He described an art party he went to, how excited he was to meet other artists and to collaborate only to realize these kids from NYU (New York University) weren’t interested in him because he’s working class.

“There’s a big class divide between the rich and the poor. Now the rich are getting poorer, can’t complain about that,” he said before we walked away.

This mammoth of a city isn’t what TV or the movies make it seem. It’s raw, it’s real and it’s full of passion. A guy staying at the hostel told us that for some reason, whenever you’re in Manhattan you always end up in Times Square. It happened to us and the chaos of tourists rushing past me made me smile. There’s beauty everywhere, you just need to seek it.

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MARCH 2009 ryerson free press

culture

CULTURE Walking the line

Max Arumbulo doesn’t care what the Academy awards indicate. Man On Wire, a documentary that coalesces some Blair Witch-style shooting and a Fear Factor-esque stunt, deserves more lauding With every second that passes, I like Slumdog Millionaire and The Wrestler a little less. Maybe it was all that Oscar buzz. Or it might be that they were just good, nothing more. I also hate The Reader and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button more and more as time passes, despite the fact that I haven’t yet seen them.

But I spent an anxious 30 minutes in Suspect Video on Bloor St. last week. Anxious because I couldn’t conceive of renting something I’d enjoy as much as my most recent movie experience: Man On Wire. It actually deserved its Oscar (Best Documentary), and destroys the shit out of all the movies mentioned above.

The film, using real footage, dramatization, and interviews, tells the story of Phillipe Petit, a talented tightrope walker and juggler, and his quest to tightrope between the World Trade Centre towers in 1978.

It’s amazing that it took three decades for this movie to be made since all the pieces are there.

The most prominent of which is Phillippe himself -- physically talented, a featherweight in the mould of Peter Parker.

But he’s charming too, possessing that messianic stuff, small man charm, and gift of gab that can move people to act.

For instance, he describes, with calculated storytelling hyperbole, the sound of the crowd’s murmur, even though he was too far, hundreds of feet above New York’s financial district, to actually hear. In his prime, Phillippe dazzled every and any audience. He filched, in one instance, some much needed supplies by performing for the owner of a wire company. He even seduced (in the purest sense, and sometimes in the less pure sense) regular people into becoming his disciples.

Then, there was his straight-laced friend Jean-Louis Blondeau, who felt the need to temper Phillippe’s dangerous enthusiasm and protect him. There was the doting and

hypotized girlfriend, Annie. And there were the random hippies and office workers who played bit roles in Philippe’s scheme.

Director John Marsh said he wanted to make a heist film. After all, Phillippe needed help to sneak up the towers and get fake IDs. It was a solo performance, but a team

There’s photos, too, of Phillipe and one of his men posing as reporters and sneaking on to the in-construction towers to do some recon. There’s a sense that they were scheming just to scheme, but also a sense that it was a collective effort, something done together, joyously.

their accomplishment with a sharp poignancy. Jean-Louis, poker-faced for practically the whole film, breaks down trying to describe how beautiful Phillipe was on the rope. Annie describes what she had seen from the NY sidewalk with the awe (fanaticism?) reserved for witnesses of, say,

Photo courtestY of Jean Louis Blondeau

When he was a young man, Phillipe Petit, heard the Twin Towers were being built in New York City, and he immediately wanted to walk on a high wire between the two buildings. On Aug. 7, 1974, he made it happen. mission. (How’d they get the wire across the two buildings? A bow and arrow.) That Ocean’s Eleven stuff is exciting and all, but the better way to watch the movie is as a reflection on youth and *gasp* beauty.

The gang documented all their planning.

So the film incorporates grainy camcorder videos of the young friends arguing, giddily, the logistics. Before that bow and arrow, there was a golf ball with the wire attached, then a soccer ball, then a baseball (“But then we’d need to learn baseball”).

The interviews, filmed in the more recent present, on the other hand, are only with each of the individuals involved. JeanLouis and Phillippe are interviewed separately so we don’t get to see the two now middle-aged men reminisce together. At one point, Jean Louis soberly explains that their friendship was never the same after the WTC walk. They didn’t have a falling out. They just grew up.

Despite all of this, or because of all this, (plus time), Phillipe’s friends still describe

a resurrection. She speaks with her eyes turned upwards, repeating her 30-year-old words (”Look, look!”) in whispers.

Man on Wire, notoriously, doesn’t mention the events of September 2001. Leaving this unmentioned, such a simple move, emphasizes the elegiac, the notion that youthful accomplishments eventually become past, but not nearly lost. You really can never go home again. What you can do, though, is rent and re-rent this movie, and watch and re-watch.

Art conservationists fill the bullet holes Saskatchewan churches bear the cost of art restoration Molly Thomas The Carillon (University of Regina) REGINA (CUP) – Beautifully detailed oil paintings line several Catholic churches across Saskatchewan – but many of them are not what they once were.

Since most of them were created in the early 1900s, many incredible works have lost their original sparkle. Soot, from the burning of incense and candles during mass, has particularly dirtied these paintings.

But just like the church’s redemptive message, there is hope. Art conservationists across the country devote countless hours to restoring historic, cultural, and artistic objects.

In Canada, Queen’s University is the only program that offers a master’s degree in art conservation.

Brenda Smith, a graduate of this program, now works as a conservator at Saskatchewan’s Mackenzie Art Gallery.

As the only certified conservator of paintings in the city, Smith is busy with both gallery and private projects, which

sometimes include church paintings.

But, conservation does not come cheap.

At $55 to $65 an hour, conservation prices are often too high for many Saskatchewan parishes.

Such is the case in Wolseley, small town 61 miles east of Regina, and home to some of the province’s most unique Catholic works.

St. Anne’s Catholic Church houses five oil paintings. Created by former resident priest Father Charles Maillard, the paintings are well over 100 years old.

Not your everyday priest, Father Maillard grew up in France, where he served in the army and went to theology school. But no matter what he was involved in, he always had an interest in drawing and painting. The constant challenge for Maillard was to swirl both religion ‘CONSERVATIONISTS’ CONTINUED ON PAGE 21

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RECORD REVIEWs Toronto-based group issues nature-inspired, soul-infused debut If you ask me, there is perhaps too much indie folk going on right now. And with the outrageous amount of hype surrounding last year’s Fleet Foxes, the demand for organic and nature-inspired music seems to be at something of a high.

In the past couple of years, a barrier has always stood between my liking these albums because of something that until now I couldn’t quite put my finger on. A Mountain is a Mouth exposed that barrier.

The issue was that while many albums seemed to make a claim that they were inspired by or evocative of nature, their representation thereof was problematic: they were too pretty; they were too refined

(see Bon Iver’s For Emma, 2008). Nature can be pretty, of course, but to dwell on beauty, serenity, and calmness neglects a characteristic of nature that is far more easily transferred into powerful song writing and dynamics -- sublimity. It’s the genuine feeling of sublimity that makes A Mountain is a Mouth so special. It is the dynamic juxtaposition of walls of thunderous drums with the gentle plucking of banjo strings and the isolated rasp of lead singer Matt Cully’s baritone growl before the band’s choir floods in, that makes Bruce Peninsula’s debut a true evocation of the rawness and grandiosity of nature.

Through repeated listens, you can hear

the echo of the voices and instruments in the silence, as if the songs were actually recorded in a rivered valley at the foot of a mountain range, each song being a musical representation of the various elements of the scene. “Steamroller” is a violent gale, the powerful voices of the choir seemingly ripping through the valley until the river that is “2nd 4th World War” is coursing along at a rollicking pace that full-bodied chants like “Satisfied” and “Crabapples” hail back to throughout the album. I won’t be surprised if this album blows up in the coming months. If it doesn’t, we’ll just consider it our little secret. —Stephen Carlick

Bruce Peninsula – A Mountain is a Mouth Rating: A-

London pop-star delivers second album, earns ludicrous title I recently heard an ad for Lily Allen’s latest record that called her “the Wordsworth of the Myspace generation” -- and it irked me something fierce. Surprisingly, it was not just the obvious implication that our generation is vapid and incapable of handling poetry of Wordsworth’s quality that bothered me, it was the fact that Lily Allen would be offered such a generous amount of acclaim for “poetry” that sounds ripped from the pages of a ninth-grader’s diary (albeit one that talks way too much about cocaine).

The lyrical content of this album is not only juvenile, it’s banal to the point that you can anticipate what a song is about based solely on its title! Is “Back to the Start” about wishing to turn back time in a relationship? Yep. Is “Never Gonna

Happen” about a guy that Lily refuses to sleep with? Mm-hmm. Could “Fuck You” possibly be an angry rant about a guy that Lily disapproves of?! At the risk of ruining the surprise, here are two of Lily’s Wordsworth-quality verses from the song itself: “So you say it’s not okay to be gay, well I think you’re just evil, you’re just some racist who can’t tie my laces, your point of view is medieval...

You say you think we need to go to war, well you’re already in one, ‘cause it’s people like you that need to get slew, no one wants your opinion.” The only “poetic” thing about her verses is the fact that she has rhymed them (which, in the first place, is hardly a necessity in true poetry), but in-so-doing, she has ignored grammar (he needs to get “slew”?) and

lost the resonance her words might possibly have enjoyed otherwise (she probably needn’t have pointed out that the racist “can’t tie [her] laces”). “Fuck You” is a microcosm for the entire album.

Lily Allen experiences the same worldly pains that we all do, but can’t relate her experiences without singing childish, angst-ridden and trite lyrics over musical production that is predominantly comprised of cheesy genre-interpretations (see “Not Fair” for faux country, “22” for faux wedding schmaltz, “Never Gonna Happen” for faux circus pomp, and “He Wasn’t There” for faux 30s jazz, vinyl crackle and all). If this album qualifies Lily Allen as the Wordsworth of our generation, this review makes me the new Shakespeare. —SC

Lily Allen – It’s Not Me, It’s You Rating: D

Hip-hop landmark gets re-issue treatment, proves its continued relevance/excellence God, I was hesitant to review this album.

I’ve long been an extremely casual Beastie Boys fan, (I have most of their singles on my iPod), but I had never listened to one of their records all the way through. Plus, the clout surrounding the now-legendary Paul’s Boutique was such that I was intimidated both by the thought of reviewing it and adding my own spin to the already-extensive library of music journalism written thereon. Additionally, I didn’t want to let the record’s legendary status affect the way I approached the album -- I wanted to be totally unbiased, as any review should be.

So here’s my verdict, both fresh and

unbiased: Paul’s Boutique remains an amazing album to this day, even completely removed from its cultural context in the arguable golden age of hip hop, in which sampling without permission was not yet against the law. It was that kind of artistic freedom that allowed the Beastie Boys to construct what David Handelman (Rolling Stone) called a “rap opera,” a record that incorporates so many different samples that each song is like an orchestral movement, flowing seamlessly into the next sample.

Like De La Soul’s influential Three Feet High and Rising released the same year, the album demonstrates the true artistry behind

sampling, using sources from genres as diverse as classic rock (the Eagles, Led Zeppelin), old-school hip-hop (Afrika Bambaataa, Boogie Down Productions), and various soundtracks and spoken word pieces (the Jaws soundtrack) to create a sound that is masterful and impressively unified.

Paul’s Boutique is still, to this day, the perfect rebuttal to anyone who has ever claimed that hip-hop isn’t “music.” Paul’s Boutique is music in its most complete form, not to mention that it’s also fun, masterful, and innovative in a way that is not only no longer practiced, it’s against the law. —SC

Beastie Boys – Paul’s Boutique (20th Anniversary Edition) Rating: A

‘CONSERVATIONISTS’ CONTINUED FROM PAGE 20

and art onto the same canvas.

Maillard’s paintings, though visible, are quite faded from dirt built up over a century.

One painting in particular, “The Giving of the Keys,” is in dire need of maintenance. This 82 square-foot painting is not only blurred by dirt but also has two bullet holes from a drunken shooting attempt in the 1970s.

Smith traveled to Wolseley and observed this painting three years ago. She noted that it had white paint secretion, abrasion, and would need consolidation of cracks and filling of bullet holes.

This whole process would take about 60 hours and cost at least $6,000. Stanley Vindevoghel, pastoral assistant at St. Anne’s, hopes the church can afford it.

Vindevoghel saw the dramatic change after the paintings at St. Peter’s Cathedral were recently revitalized. He could not believe it was the same place when they were finished.

“The paintings just came alive and jumped out at you when the cleaning was done,” said Vindevoghel.

But there is more to this cost issue. This particular painting is 82 square feet and mounted on one side of the church altar. Because it is so old, Vindevoghel is worried the painting would rip if removed from the wall. He therefore believes cleaning would have to be done right at the church. This creates added expenses like travel, accommodations, and food for a visiting conservator.

Many parishioners are wondering what funding options are available.

The Catholic Diocese of Saskatoon explains that because there are so many churches,

individual parishes must be responsible for their own maintenance and repair.

The Saskatchewan Arts Board offers various grants. However, it generally awards them to arts organizations and community collaborations.

The Canadian Conservation Institute, based in Ottawa, currently has a treatment service request program. But, it is only free of charge to Canadian public museums. Religious societies such as the Catholic Church must pay $100 an hour for regular staff time, and $125 for any overtime incurred.

The possibilities for funding are not promising.

Despite financial obstacles, Vindevoghel plans to raise the necessary funds. “I know what the cleaning would do and how people would appreciate it,” he said. Vindevoghel plans to organize a restoration committee in the near future.

But Smith also encourages community effort to get the job done. “Knock them off one by one,” she said.

In her experience, once church members see the difference, they are happy and encouraged and often join in the fundraising effort.

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MARCH 2009 ryerson free press

culture

KATE SPENCER

Curry is Thicker Than Water is a collection of stories about life in India.

A bit of colour, some spices, and a whole lot of love

On the evening that Indian-born, now Canadian-based author Jasmine D’Costa launched her new book, Curry is Thicker Than Water, there was even more love in the room than brightly-coloured clothing or tonguetinglingly scrumptious aromas. Kate Spencer takes us there Patrons at the Gladstone Hotel at around 7 p.m. on Wednesday night would have seen a sight unfamiliar to the hotel’s lobby—women with jewels in the middle of their foreheads milling around the bottom of its stairs.

Had these patrons followed the women up the stairs, they would have been met with an explosion of colours, smells, and sounds. They would have seen women (both Caucasian and Indian) wearing brightly coloured saris, and tables dressed with pink tulle, gold ribbon, and bouquets of flowers.

These patrons have found themselves at the launch party of Jasmine D’Costa’s book, Curry is Thicker Than Water, recently published by Bookland Press.

The book is a collection of stories about life in India. A summary description included in the back of the novel reads, “A cobra flies through an open window. Wives form a pact against their bigamous, abusive husband. A mother and son battle over eagles’ eggs. A homeless guest with a secret. An elephant protests on a highway. A woman marries a pumpkin. Diverse people – one country! This is the teeming, hectic world of India. It’s also the vivid, startling world that Jasmine D’Costa gives us in her debut collection of short stories Curry is Thicker Than Water.”

D’Costa was born in Bombay, India. She got a Ph.D. and worked in India as an international banker for 25 years before she moved in Canada in 2004. While in India, she was published in academic journals, business magazines and books on international relations, trade, investment, corporate finance and banking. Since coming to Canada, D’Costa has pursued careers in theatre and writing, and is currently the president of the Writers and Editors Network. Curry is Thicker Than Water is her first book, and the launch party was a loving celebration of her life’s accomplishments.

The evening felt like a sort of family reunion – but one where all the family members genuinely like each other.

Everyone was greeted with hugs, kisses, and lots of catching up on their lives. The smell of spices mingled with the sound of voices, and the feeling of family was only enhanced by the small children running between their parents’ legs, also wearing vibrantly coloured saris.

D’Costa was the centre of all this attention, and stood out from the crowd by looking almost bridal in a bright pink and gold sari, accessorized with lots of golden jewellery. She could not move without being approached by someone new, who asked her questions, offered kisses or needed help with some of the logistics of the evening.

D’Costa clearly enjoyed the familial atmosphere, quipping, “Look at all my Canadian friends in saris!” She said also, regarding the whole experience, “I feel really full.” Especially since so many of the people surrounding her had not been in her life four years earlier. By moving to Canada, she had been set back socially by two decades, and had to find new friendships and support systems.

Not that socializing has ever been difficult for D’Costa.

Mary Ellen Koroscil, the woman in charge of D’Costa’s media relations, summed up her experience with her by saying, “Look at me! I’m an Irish woman in a sari!” Possessing the proper persuasion techniques to convince an Irish women to wear a saris has something to do with her kindness and gregarious nature, explained Koroscil.

“She connects with people,” she said, which made it easy for her to create such a wide circle of friends in only four years.

That warmth is evident to anyone who speaks to D’Costa.

While giving her speech during the launch, she spent most of her time thanking people. She made sure to give a personal message of gratitude to each individual, and waited for applause before moving on. She thanked her publisher, editor, friends, family, and everyone who was involved in making either her book or her life better. Her tone was very informal and friendly, speaking about her friends to a room filled with her friends. To one pair of supporters who were too far in the back, she said, “Can you just come up, because I need to look at you when I say this.”

That same sense of playfulness was present when D’Costa did a short reading from the book. Before she began, she joked, “I’m going to presume that you want to hear me read my stories.”

Her reading became more like the audience participation portion of the evening. D’Costa coordinated hand signals with the audience, and then members would shout out the appropriate responses at the appropriate tmes. The noise level began to raise to match the colours and scents, until a true cacophony of sounds filled the room. D’Costa stopped the crowd to quip, “Okay. That was Bombay. Thank you.”

India, and specifically Bombay’s influence was everywhere, both in the evening and in the book, which is really a collection of stories that D’Costa took from her Indian memories.

She described the process of writing the book as like being in a room with faded paint. When you first see it, you see that it requires a new coat. But eventually you get used to it, and cease to see it as faded. Living in India, the stories were so

much a part of her life that she no longer saw them as being stories. It was not until she came to Canada that she saw them as stories—and stories worth telling at that.

The decision to move to Canada was, as she said, to have “an adventure.” D’Costa had always wanted to be a writer, but in her Indian lifestyle, “everything you want you push for later.” The goal was always to survive: to put food on the table, which lead to her career as a banker. And when D’Costa first moved to Canada, it was with that same attitude of doing whatever was necessary to survive. However, she soon had a revelation: “There was no point in going on the same trajectory as I had been in India.”

So she began her journey to becoming what Brian Hull, the Master of Ceremonies for the evening, called an “arresting new voice in multi-media, multicultural storytelling,” a woman with the “courage and commitment and heart to pursue a new path in life.”

Austin Clarke, the Giller Prize and Commonwealth Writers’ Prize winning writer, seemed to share Hull’s sentiments.

He wrote the foreword for Curry is Thicker Than Water, and in it he described D’Costa as “a writer who understands how allegory can be used with light-heartedness, and placed for easier understanding on the certainty of a philosophical foundation, that heightens the traditions of culture.” Praise from such a respected writer was very appreciated by D’Costa herself, who said she was “so taken aback, so touched” when Clarke agreed to write the foreword.

D’Costa seemed eager to share her good fortune with all the artistic people she has come to know in Canada. At one odd moment, while she was giving her speech, actors posing as paparazzi rushed the stage, surrounding D’Costa and asking her questions, confusing her for various Indian celebrities, until they had an imagined sighting of Russell Peters and rushed off to the side of the room. D’Costa then called them all back and introduced them to her audience as several actor friends of hers, creating a new theme for the evening—to advertise other talented people she has come into contact with.

D’Costa also made special note of Nikhil Seetharam, the composer and performer who played a selection of songs during the evening.

The evening celebrated Jasmine D’Costa’s achievements, as well as her life. The launch of Curry is Thicker Than Water, and the attitude of its writer, can be summed up in a remark D’Costa made as she began her speech to audience of her peers: “I’m supposed to be nervous. But I’m not. I’m just very happy.”

MARCH 2009 ryerson free press

culture

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From regular Joe to cups of joe

Maiya Keidan speaks to a former dog walker turned coffee shop owner. Find out how a boring desk job and a loyalty to learning inspired this coffee drinker to create a career out of coffee-making It’s 6 a.m. and all seems to be quiet at Bulldog Coffee.

For now.

The café, humble contrary to what its name may allude to, is nestled along Granby St., mere metres away from Church St., anticipating the radical rush of java junkies sure to show up shortly. And even though it doesn’t open its doors until 8 a.m., owner 43-year-old Stuart Ross is up early getting those cups in lines and those beans ground to perfection.

As sure as the sunrise, Ross begins his day by battling with his monstrous, gold espresso machine and roaster.

Everything has to be perfectly consistent for his customers – ranging from the amount of pressure applied to the ground beans to the steady drip of espresso from the golden device.

Using a roaster, he grinds the coffee. Once the beans have been through the machine, Ross levels them — brushing the ground beans with the same pinky finger every time — preparing for the impact of the espresso machine, at roughly 220 lbs. of pressure, 76 degrees Celsius. Next, he struggles with the machine’s flow, timed to the second. He tries 25 seconds. He tries 24 seconds. His hand stops at 23 seconds. That’s what tastes “perfect” today.

But beginning the day isn’t the only challenge. Depending on the weather, he might have to change the roaster settings as many as three times a day or adjust the amount of pressure applied to the ground beans before they’re fed into the espresso machine. On top of balancing all of these parts, Ross must also ensure the machine is kept clean – a tricky, but doable task considering he’s dealing with such minute coffee grounds.

Ross’s customers appreciate his tireless efforts to achieve that perfect cup. Watching him being interviewed, his regulars are eager to endorse their little hangout.

“Stuart, I must say, one of the things I like about you is when I’m gone for a month, I know what I’m coming home to,” pipes in one lady.

For Caleb Gilgan, a first-year Ryerson student, going to Bulldog is a family tradition. Gilgan has been a weekly fixture there since his brother, a Ryerson veteran, suggested it.

“Yeah, his whole family has been here,” injects Ross.

“It’s a family vacation,” says Gilgan, who occasionally makes trips to the café with as many as three of his five other brothers, as well as his mother.

Accolades for Ross’s efforts don’t just lie in the roast regulars or the steady stream of customers that drift through his café. He is also an award-winning barista.

Ross didn’t always belong to the world of fancy lattés and cappuccinos. Instead, he began his early career with an economics degree from McGill University, thrusting him into the world of stock brokering. Discovering his hatred for the long, grueling hours which glued him to his desk and telephone, he quit. Afterward, he drifted between jobs that varied from serving as a counselor in a dating agency to sporting good sales to dog walker.

It was August 2004, when he’d only been a dog walker for six months, that he spotted a “For Lease” sign that changed the course of his life. He stopped to look at the store, marveling at how neat it was. There were two entrances and glass windows that covered the entire storefront. Though he’d had no particular entrepreneurial stirrings beforehand, he thought to himself, “Wow, wouldn’t this be a great place for a coffee shop?”

And soon after, Ross picked up the phone and dialed the number, beginning the tumultuous journey of birthing his café, equipped with no knowledge of coffee except that he’d been drinking it for eleven years.

Inspired by the dogs he walked, Ross named the café after his favourite breed, the bulldog.

“Do you know what a Bulldog looks like? They’re really mean and ugly looking, right? But if you get to know them, they usually end up being such a great pet,” Ross explains.

Espresso, Ross cautions, can taste horribly acidic or

burnt if every step of the process isn’t followed meticulously.

“But...” he says, slowly unveiling each word as if he’s imparting the secret to the universe, “if you run it perfectly, it becomes the most beautiful cup of coffee ever.”

Even the most fanatic anti-coffee drinker can’t help but be riveted by his absolute love of the art of espresso. If you haven’t already tried the coffee at Bulldog, I recommend you head to 89 Granby St. and get your caffeine kick.

MAIYA KEIDAN

Stuart Ross, owner and operator of Bulldog Coffee, a quaint coffee shop next door to Ryerson’s campus, turned him love for coffee into a career.

New book shines spotlight on not-so-usual suspects Barbra Streisand isn’t the only successful North American Jewish woman. And a new book by a North American Jewish woman proves that. Maiya Keidan finds out more about the females featured in its pages Lisa Kogen’s new book, With Strength and Splendor: Jewish Women as Agents of Social Change aims to celebrate the fabulousness of North American Jewish women -- mission accomplished.

Forty-eight inspirational women are listed for their extraordinary achievements, in a wide range of career paths, such as sports, medicine and law. Highlights include entertainers like Sophie Tucker and Gilda Radner and innovators of the fashion and beauty industry like Donna Karan and Estée Lauder.

“You find an extraordinary large number of Jewish women who were really in the avant-garde of roles of professional pursuits from which women had been completely prohibited,” said Kogen during an interview with the Ryerson Free Press.

Kogen, a Jewish woman herself, first recognized a severe underrepresentation of Jewish women through her study of traditional Jewish history at the doctoral level.

When she began working for the Women’s League for Conservative Judaism, she had an opportunity to steer the

movement towards celebrating women. Kogen recounts that it was only her second day at work and they were discussing how to honour the upcoming 350th anniversary of Jews in America already.

The author remembers listening to all the suggestions being tossed out, one after the other. ‘We’ll talk about the history of synagogues,’ said one co-worker. ‘We’ll talk about prominent Jewish leaders,’ said another. That was when she piped up with the shockingly revolutionary idea of talking about great Jewish women.

It was remarkable that no one had thought of this idea, despite it being a women’s organization, remembers Kogen.

“Here was a group of very intelligent women who had internalized the male-centric world,” she said in a disapproving tone of voice.

Strongly affected by the need to share the many accomplishments of great Jewish women, Kogen turned her idea a visually stunning book.

When the quest for the women began, Kogen already had a list in her head of the people she might like to profile.

However, she wanted to expand her search beyond what she dubbed ‘the usual suspects.’ She means the same four, five, six famous Jewish women who keep being named over and over again, such as Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Supreme Court justice, and Barbra Streisand. Although she believes these women deserve every ounce of credit they are given, Kogen wanted to shine the spotlight where it quite possibly had never been shone before.

And she did this by expanding her hunt for great women beyond New York City, her home branch, using the 25 branches of the association as a starting point. As a result, she collected a list of women that stretched across North America, including three in Canada. One Canadian woman was Torontonian Celia Franca, founder of the National Ballet of Canada.

Famous women or women associated with the religious community were not the women that Kogen restricted herself to either. She even added Theda Bara, a silent movie star who was famous for her role as a seductress, though she had to defend her inclusion.

“Some of these older women saw this half-naked woman with the breast plates and said, ‘Ach, what kind of a Jewish woman is that?’” she said.

Nevertheless, Kogen was dedicated to all the women she picked. So dedicated that it’s nearly impossible for her to pick her favourite.

“I hate this question!” she exclaimed when asked who her favourite was. She narrows it down to three: Ida Cohen Rosenthal, creator of the brassiere, Gertrude Weil, for her commitment to civil rights, and Ray Frank, the first woman “rabbi.”

Yet, Kogen added, “I have to say I love them all. Every single one of them was a remarkable woman, every single one.”

It was far easier for her to provide the identity of her real-life female role model. The answer to that question was simple, answered with no hesitation. The answer is her mother, a woman who was left alone at 41 years old, with five children, because of the early death of her husband. The oldest was in university. The youngest was Kogen herself at seven.

Her mother’s only desire had been to get married, a task which she’d accomplished with the unfortunate consequence of marrying before completing her high school diploma.

But despite the many hardships, Kogen’s mother didn’t crumble. She took good care of her children and of herself.

She went back to school and lived the remainder of her life as a geriatric nurse.

“She was the model for, ‘You got to do it. If you have to do it, you got to do it,’” reminisced Kogen.

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culture

OACT outing leaves something to be desired An honest and critical look at a night of amateur theatre by RFP reviewer Stephen Carlick Pointing out the obvious flaws in Lily Allen’s latest album is relatively easy; one can rest assured that Lily will never pick up the Ryerson Free Press, and even if she did, she’d have her critical acclaim and financial success to reassure her that music was the correct path for her to follow (arguable as that may be). The same can’t be said about reviewing the works of one’s undergraduate peers. To engage in such an activity poses a conflict of interest, namely the very real threat of hurting the feelings of people who simply haven’t mastered their craft, and are perhaps still finding their theatrical feet.

However, that being said, the very point of criticism is to be honest, even though it may come across as vindictive to some. Certainly, to sugar coat a review and give credit where it is not due cheapens the credit for those to whom it is. Additionally, it would be patronizing to treat these plays as though they are merely the work of students, rather than

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Opening play “The Express” was about the plight of a good-natured, rural-suburban boy for whom life is simply not fair. The boy is forced to care for his mentally unstable single mother who frequents the local railway station, inquiring loudly that her train will come and deliriously wondering whether she has missed it. The boy’s one escape from her is his girlfriend, but he goes insane when the girl’s father informs him that she is most likely his sister. The boy is last shown at the railway station begging, like his mother, to know when his train will finally come. The play’s aspirations were lofty, considering that it had a mere twenty minute timeframe to both endear the main actor to the audience and convince them that the boy was driven as mad as his mother simply because he had accidentally fallen in love with his sister. There was no time for either. And the result was a play that lacked enough back story to answer some very pertinent

“Undergrads are no more than four years away from entering the real world, where glaring mistakes mean not making it in the business, and where critics take no prisoners.”

professionals. And to shrug it off by saying “Well, they’re only kids” does not do our age group justice. Undergrads are no more than four years away from entering the real world, where glaring mistakes mean not making it in the business, and where critics take no prisoners. Thus, the following is an 100 per cent honest and critical look at “Oakham Amateur Campus Theatre presents: Mood Swings,” attended on opening night, February 26.

The night consisted of five short plays -- three of which were written by Ryerson students themselves. Short dances were performed by Carol-Ann Bohrn and Lauren Pederson, who provided graceful performances to fill the void between plays while the next was prepared. The fact that it was so difficult to tell which plays were student-written and which ones were professionally done was a good sign, but the overall outcome was relatively disappointing. On the whole, the plays all suffered from the same group of ailments: indecision regarding genre, misjudged length, and general lack of character sympathy and plot belief.

plot and character questions like: What was it that drove the mother insane? Why does the girl return to embrace the son after she knows they are siblings? Perhaps most importantly omitted was the significance of the train station. The symbolic freedom of the train image is not lost on me, but if the train-related madness is common to both the mother and the son, surely it needs to be explained why the son would end up grieving there, despite his misfortune happening completely independent of the station.

“Firing Francine” was a shorter affair that began brightly, but overstayed its welcome and seemingly lost its course.

The play began as a comedy that saw a young man trying desperately to fire a female employee who always has a ready retort. Its initial charm lay in the way that he continually was thwarted, being forced to ask her over and over to leave the room and re-enter (after he had swallowed a pill) in order to start the conversation over again. However, what started as a clever running gag got drawn out too far, rendering the play both annoying and puzzling. What should have been the climax happened the fifth (as far as I can recall) time Fran-

cine re-entered the room, as the employer, Iris, fired a pistol squarely at a stunned Francine. Now, had the light gone out as soon as she was hit with the bullet, I’d have called the play a suc cess, but the play continued. Francine re-entered many times more, acting in a way that hardly seemed as though she had been shot mere seconds earlier, and ended with Francine embracing Iris consolingly, who subsequently flops to the floor defeated. At the point of the embrace, both the sense of escalating humour and the momentum of the play is lost -- if the play is a comedy like the actors made it out to be, what is it that suddenly turns the goofy character of Francine into a sympathetic friend? The only conceivable reason for her sudden difference in character is that each scene is meant to stand on its own and is detached temporarily from the last scene. However, this would make the hug, which seemingly is an after-effect of the torturously long melee they’ve moments ago experienced, would appear unwarranted. And the fact that I couldn’t tell whether the play ended comically or sadly demands the question of whether the actors performed the play, written by an established playwright, the way the author originally meant it to be performed.

“Ugly on the Inside” was the second of two non-studentwritten plays of the evening. The play is about Della, a whitetrash woman whose best friend Rayanne always finds a way to murder her groom-to-be. When Rayanne accidentally kills number six (or is it seven?), the two engage in a conversation about men and friendship that gets continually interrupted

by Charlie, who continually rises from the grave to aggravate the two women despite having a cake knife buried in his stomach. The idea behind the story was simple and comical enough, but the play suffered from a herky-jerky plot that, like “Firing Francine,” didn’t seem to know whether it was a comedy or drama. The comical Tarantino-esque violence of the play was too often interrupted by man-on-woman violence and moments of frank discussion that victimized the female characters who seemed, besides these exceptions, to be pretty self-reliant. The play was a tad too long, but it benefitted both from ending well and from featuring Emily Nixon, who was arguably the best actor of the night.

One of the weaker plays of the night, “The Rain-dance of the Leaves” suffered from what seemed like self-indulgence and lack of any significant or unique meaning. The plot was meandering, and while it was apparently about “two people and their struggle for connection – to each other, to the city, and to themselves,” it seemed to be too much about writer Rodney Barnes. The play featured him dancing, waxing philosophically about life in the city and the nature of love, and generally being melodramatic about concepts and questions that everybody faces in their lifetime. The play admirably ‘OACT’ CONTINUED ON PAGE 26

Jon Dore champions asshole comedy Gyro Johnson Excalibur (York University) TORONTO (CUP) – Jon Dore has the kindest eyes, but he can also be a real jerk.

I sat down with Dore on the set of his hit TV series, The Jon Dore Television Show. He was wrapping up the second season, which has now begun to air.

As such, he was still in costume and full of the comic energy that fuels his zany and vulgar shtick. Dressed in bleached denim with his feet up on his fake coffee table, his kind eyes allowed me to relax.

I was expecting him to be somewhat of an asshole, the way he portrays himself on television. My expectations were backed up by memories of watching him do stand-up. It’s the kind of act you watch while praying he doesn’t single you out. Most comedians are sadists.

The interview started with him executing some one-liners and asking my photographer and I some questions. We, in turn, asked some funny questions: “Do you consider yourself a sad clown?’”

This back-and-forth started to evolve and the friendly Dore slowly began to change into the TV Dore.

At the end of the interview, the publicist, who had been observing from the other end of the apartment set, came up to us apprehensively. “You realized he was joking, right?” she asked.

I hoped she realized that I was joking when I told his director that Dore was a dick. This type of interview isn’t exactly one that yields good notes or even a definite direction.

Instead, some would call it goofing off with someone who has to talk to you, which is the equivalent of going on a date with the prom queen’s sister, and only because her mother made her.

I like to think of it as more of an impressionistic interview.

Dore put it thus: “You’re student journalists; [it] doesn’t really matter.”

During the interview, I got to understand the sense of humour that propels the show – a show that somehow makes dick jokes funny again.

Each episode centres on Dore trying to better himself around some sort of theme. In doing so, he consults real people in interviews and takes their suggestions.

The kicker lies in his wacky, sociopathic interpretation of their advice. There are also short sketches, montages, and video gags.

Dore talks to the camera a lot. I’m still not sure how to categorize the show, outside of calling it an asshole comedy – so dry that it doesn’t automatically give the audience permission to laugh.

You just have to assume he’s joking.

So, when Dore told me to fuck off, threw hissy fits, and stopped talking to me, I laughed.

When he told me blatant lies and contradicting statements, I laughed.

Even when his eyes hardened into a condescending sneer, I laughed.

Then again, if he wasn’t joking, that guy really is a dick.

MARCH 2009 ryerson free press

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RiP: A Remix Manifesto is fashioned for Web 2.0 times

MARK ELAM

Amanda Connon-Unda It’s a Web 2.0 world, and those of us as part of ‘Generation Next,’ who are between 18 and 25 years old, are accustomed to downloading music on our home computers.

We crave interaction, re-creation, remixing, pastiche, user experience and mash-ups. We are likely working with an open source model or philosophy as part of our cultural ethos, whether we know it or not.

According to Wikipedia, open source is “1. A group of software whose source code is available to the general public for the purpose of improvement, modification. 2.

Any software released under the GPL, LGPL, or other open source licenses.” and lastly and most importantly, “3. The stuff that makes Bill Gates’ life sad.”

As with open source software such as Linux, the same concepts apply to an open source film -- film that is meant to be used freely, modified, expanded on and remixed. Now, a hot new National Film Board film by director Brett Gaylor is delving deep into these issues of our times: artistic creativity through sampling, and copyright law. This film is one of the firsts of its kind – it’s open source – free to be remixed by others.

As the Internet was coming into its own, during the early 1980s, hackers that didn’t want their activities to be survielled. They spoke ‘l33t speak,’ for Elite, and began using numbers to replace certain letters (mostly vowels).

But post-1994 and the revolution in PC gaming, a rise in l33t speak occurred. The same can be said of downloading. At first, it was an illegal secretive activity for people trying to bring down the system, and by now, it’s as ubiquitous as the act of sex before marriage in

our society.

But like sex, downloading music and copyrighted material can have consequences.

As the film depicts through individuals giving testimony from their homes, in the U.S., the consequences for downloading copyrighted music for free can be devastating to individuals if they get caught by the Recording Industry Association of America.

Here in Canada, new legislation has been proposed by the government under the pressure of the United States’ government and media’s demands. The Conservatives are trying to pass Bill C-61, which includes elements of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act law that the U.S.A. passed in 1997.

It is under this act that they issued subpoenas and lawsuits to a dead grandmother, computer novices and children as young as 12. In Canada, to try and prevent this kind of law that would crack down on individuals, activists are united through websites such as faircopyrightforcanada.ca, to learn about the proposed bills and the implications for artists and all citizens.

RiP director and web producer, Brett Gaylor, who lives in Montreal, also created a fun interactive website (nfb.ca/rip) which invites users to take his original footage, download it, and make remixes of the scenes of his movie. Then content generators can upload their remixed videos to his site, and gain recognition and participate in the conversation that is happening on opensourcecinema.org.

The main subject of this film – how artists use samples of previous works in music, film and art -- is not new. Nor is the way that copyright law tries to put limits on creative expression by restricting

what can be constituted as ‘fair use’ of digital materials. However, the film itself is wonderfully done and truly radical, because it challenges the assumptions that ownership and use needs to be restricted in a democratic society.

The fact that this film has created further expressions and praise as a result is a wake-up call to legislators who would otherwise want to limit creative expression in the name of retaining permissions and rights for the world’s largest and most powerful brands and companies.

In RiP, Gaylor follows several main characters and events. Girl

Mila Aung-Thwin

Brett Gaylor, Director.

Talk, a sample-based mash-up artist from Pittsburgh, goes on tour and shares his views on copyright and music. The film also features a touching story about Dan O’Neill, who is now in his 60s, the cartoonist who made a mockery of Mickey Mouse in the 1970s. O’Neill’s work was politically provocative, and he called his movement the ‘Mouse Liberation Front.’ He was one of the unlucky ones sued by Disney.

Another segment of the film follows Lawrence Lessig, Professor at Stanford Law School, to China, where bootlegs and copyright infringements are made left, right,

and centre. Gaylor also follows him to his lectures, where he espouses on the benefits of open source. In one scene, he so aptly said, to a packed auditorium, “Remixing is the writing of the 21st century, literacy for a new generation. It is building a different democracy and culture where people participate in the creation and the recreation of the culture around them.” The audience applaused loudly and resoundingly clear.

Corey Doctorow, a blogger (for his own boingboing.net) and technology activist, also had some inspiring words in the film. His view? “Technology given, technology taketh away. What was a business model in 1909 may be the business model in 2009. What was the business model in 1939 may not be the model in 2007. That’s how it goes.”

Finally, the film takes us to Brazil, to meet the Minister of Culture, Gilberto Passos Gil Moreira. He’s a bossa nova musician, social activist, and he sponsored a programme called Culture Points, which gives grants for music technology and education to people living in poor areas of the country’s cities. According to Wikipedia, he is interested in creating an internet database of freely downloadable Brazilian music.

The film is really a philosophical one. Audiences are left asking, ‘Where is the future of open source creativity headed? How can we harness legislation in favour of creative expression and the rights of artists, citizens, and idea and culture owners?’

There is another side to this story -- one that argues for the rights of corporations and individuals to hold ownership of all materials regardless of the potential benefits of sharing—but this film does not tell that story.

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culture

Zine culture is booming in teeny tiny little steps Ronak Ghorbani Editorial Assistant On February 12 and 13, Sheridan College’s student atrium in Oakville was turned into a festival of zines. Folded and stapled papers scattered over tables as zinesters talked to each other about their newest projects. Curious students walked by, picking up zines, studying them carefully.

Some dug their pockets for a loonie or two to purchase the mysterious pamphlet-like publications.

A zine is a hand-made publication that can be about anything; whether it’s about your favourite singer, a guide to going vegan, or your adventures in suburbia.

They come in all shapes and sizes and can be as basic as paper folded into four pieces or elaborately hand bound.

Sheridan’s Oakville campus has a zine library and with the help of the Sheridan Self Publishers (aka zine team), the two held the fair, Gettazine. Organizer Jennifer Pilles told the Ryerson Free Press why zines should be preserved and why they’re cooler than blogs.

Ryerson Free Press: So Jen, what is Gettazine?

Jennifer Pilles: A zine fair. Okay well, the whole purpose is to show Sheridan students what zine culture is all about by inviting people from the outside world to come in.

They see our zines in the library, but we want to integrate them more, so this is like an awareness thing.

It’s basically to promote zine culture and also to introduce the outside world to Sheridan’s zine culture because it’s thriving and it’s booming in teeny tiny little steps.

We want to mesh those two worlds.

RFP: Why is it important to educate people about zine culture?

JP: Well, I think zines are an amazing thing for absolutely everybody in the whole world.

‘OACT’ CONTINUED FROM PAGE 24

sought to find beauty in pain and loneliness, but it’s been done so many times before that it came across as being stereotypical and concerned too heavily with image, rather than substance and meaning. The play could have benefitted from a thematic refinement, perhaps by choosing to focus on love, life in the city, or the construction of identity. In trying to cover all three in just twenty minutes, the play lost the opportunity to explore one of the concepts deeply and meaningfully.

Nonetheless, the acting therein was done suitably, and the use of music was effective at

Sheridan specifically has a really creative population. We have a huge art (programme) and there’s the journalism students.

It’s a thing they can actually use for their careers, for themselves. It’s a great outlet.

I think students should make zines and I think it’s a release kind of things because sometimes you feel, “Ahh I’m creative but I have so many of these parameters and outlines and deadlines!” These things that restrict your creativity. But a zine is just for you and you can take all the things you want to be making in school but you can’t because of a project guideline and you put it in your zine…it’s a way more personal thing.

RFP: Since there are blogs and websites, why should people read zines? Why do they matter?

JP: I think that the whole textile thing does matter...I mean, they say print is dead but I don’t think it ever really will be because there’s something really beautiful about a tactile object you can hold in your hand.

Part of the joy of making a zine is that you can use your hands. In a blog, you’re typing and uploading photos, it’s all staring at a screen. But with a zine, you’re cutting and pasting, you’re printing and stapling, and you’re folding and all these things and you’re getting way more involved in it…it’s a lot more human than a blog.

really punk rock. I was really into anarchy but I didn’t know I was just young. They were naïve rants, stuff like that. And then I had “Tiki Girl Without a Cause” which was science fiction stories which I thought was so cool but I see them now and I’m so embarrassed. But mostly everything I have on my table now (at Gettazine) is personal.

RFP: Why do you choose to use personal as your theme?

JP: For me, zines are almost like a healing thing.

I wrote one this summer about moving because I was living in nowhere land. I moved out of one house but I had nowhere else to move. I was living with my brand new boyfriend who I didn’t even know if we were going to date for long and I felt really homeless and lost and really sad, you know? So I was like, how can I express this? How can I release this sadness? And I made a zine and I felt so much better.

I have one called “Art School Love Letters” that was actually taken from a love letter I wrote to a long distance friend that I missed so bad; I took that and put it into a zine.

Zines for me are healing, they’re therapy.

I’m always journaling and making art so it’s kind of like a natural tendency.

like, well you can’t have a community without people, people will be reading them (zines) but I want to get people really into this so we made the club and meet on a regular basis now.

RFP: How many zines do you have in the library?

JP: Almost 500.

RFP: Why is it important to preserve zines?

JP: Because they’re so unique.

I only make 20 copies of mine but every time I make one, I put one in the zine library and that’ll exist there forever.

Zines are the kinds of things that get put in the back pocket, broken in, torn up.

They’re pretty fragile right? They’re paper; they don’t have hard covers or anything like that.

Man, I wish we had a place for every zine in the world to put in one place because they really are special…I love the idea of zine libraries and that they have a home.

RFP: What are your zines about?

JP: It’s mostly personal.

My early ones I had one called “How to start a revolution” and I thought I was

RFP: There isn’t really an outlet or place for zinesters or people interested in zines to get to know each other. So why are zine festivals so important for the community?

JP: I think it’s a good way for us to see each other, all the vendors.

I’ve seen some of these people at zine fairs before and we only ever see each other at zine and craft fairs so it’s kind of that community thing.

But you’re right, zines are like you do it at home, you send it in the mail…Actually we have zine reading parties (the Sheridan Self Publishers). We read zines together.

That’s why we have a club, that’s why I started the club in the library first. I was

RFP: How can someone get involved with the zine community?

JP: I hate to say it but check the internet (laughs). There’s a great website called We Make Zines (wemakezines.ning.org) it’s kind of like Facebook but only for zinesters. You have a profile page and you can exchange e-mails, update people, have events on there.

We don’t really have a way of meeting each other, other than at zine fairs, so a lot of it is done through online…The coolest way to get involved with zines is make your own and trade with people and write letters to people’s zines you like.

If you read a zine and think, “Oh, this is so nice,” you write a letter (to the zinester) and they write back to you. A lot of my personal zine relationships are with people I’ve never met. We just exchange letters twice a year.

conveying the mood of the play.

At this point in the show, I thought I knew what to expect. I had seen four of the five plays, and the last was a student-written play called “Uncle Spam talks Turkey.” I was wrong. The closing play was stunning. It was very post-modern. The plot was non-linear, just a series of vignettes that each addressed a different facet of inequality and corruption in capitalist America and beyond, using a style that mixed spoken word, hip-hop rhyming, and beat poetry to astonishing effect. It was a delicate balancing act, as a play so meticulously written and so dependent on the actors’ delivery was always going to be at

risk of losing momentum. A mere forgotten line could destroy the rhyme structure that made the play captivating, or obscure the significance of following lines that made the play meaningful. The play never faltered, and its success can be attributed mainly to the fact that writer Darcy Corbett never put rhyming ahead of coherence, nor stretched the meaning of words just so that they fit the scheme, as is so tempting when trying to rhyme. For the first time that night, the play being performed felt like the work of a professional despite being one of only three student-written plays, for which Corbett deserves all recognition he gets and prob-

ably more. His acting was superb, and he surrounded himself with the best actors present, using Emily Nixon and Jamieson Child to great effect. Nixon played the lawyer, effectively using her stage presence to convince the audience of her legal prowess and sharpness-of-tongue, while Child was a phenomenal judge, giving his lines powerful and unsettling emphasis without going over the top. This play single-handedly made the show worth seeing. I regret that this review couldn’t have been printed in time to urge students to attend one of the performances, if only to see why Uncle Spam talking turkey is not at all what it sounds like.

RFP: How did you first get into zines?

JP: I got a zine at the Warped Tour when I was 14 and I was just like, “This is so cool!” And it changed my whole world.

I was always really creative…I made a ton of shitty (zines) in high school and I think I’m kind of refining it. I’m leaning towards illustration now.

MARCH 2009 ryerson free press

culture

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Hot Docs doc takes an insider’s look at community conservation in Africa Director David E. Simpson popped on a plane from the United States and then jumped into a Jeep in Africa to film a documentary about the difficult decisions community-based conservationists have to make every day.

Amanda Connon-Unda reviews.

One day last month, the Bloor Cinema was crowded as it has ever been.

By the time David E. Simpson, the director of a new documentary film called “Milking the Rhino” announced his film would start, there were no seats left in the theatre.

He said proudly as he introduced himself, “I’m from Chicago, the home of Obama,” and continued, “Growing up, I saw nature films about the mythical Wild Africa and there were always good guys and bad guys in them. The good guys were the conservationists and the bad guys were the Africans poaching wild animals.”

As Simpson explained prior to his Hot Docs “Doc Soup” screening last month, “In researching the film, I realized it’s not so simple.”

The model of wildlife conservation has been evolving for centuries in African countries and in North America. First, starting in the late 1800s, there was a preservationist paradigm -- erect fences around land to protect animals from human populations.

After that, in the second half of the 20th century, as many African nations became independent, and so conservation again became controversial and created political conflicts. But for the last thirty years, the model of conservation has been changing yet again.

Simpson said, “It’s local people having a stake more now.”

The newest model is called community-based conservation (CMC), and in it communities own land for sustainable usage.

Community groups are making decisions about how the land can be used based on their long-time traditions and new conservation education. They are sometimes

Director David E. Simpson checks playback with James Ole Kinyaga, senior host of the Il Ngwesi Lodge (Kenya) operating ecolodges and cultural tourism businesses. This model of conservation is very positive because it recognizes communities’ historical rights of tenure to resources and land, something that was taken away during times of colonialism.

Simpson explained why his film is different. He said, “Most of those nature films about conservation don’t show the people’s perspective. We filmed the people involved, rather than the animals.

We filmed two communities that are changing rapidly...”

This film features several groups of Maasai in Kenya and Himba in Namibia who are doing conservation work. And, to his credit, Simpson’s view and mastery of the camera lens is not colonizing in the way it depicts the people and the stories. In fact, it’s very critical of how some of the European tourism establishments in the

region want to impose their own image of how the local ‘traditional people’ should be. Simpson really gets perspectives from the main characters, John and James, and the people in their communities.

While the film was being created, there was a drought in Kenya and the Maasai cattle herders were in crisis because their cattle were dying from starvation. It was devastating to see that without rain there are no grasses for the cattle. The scenes were evocative and sad. The natural conflict between the cattle herders, the larger ranch owners, and the community groups operating the ecolodges for tourists set the stage for drama. Throughout the film, Simpson engages with the issues at hand, and reveals the complex decisions that these communities are making.

During the Q&A after the film,

Jeannie R. Magill

someone from the audience asked “When you made this film, how did you get the locals to trust you, to film them while they were negotiating land uses?”

Simpson replied, “We got our introductions from the right people. In Namibia, a grassroots NGO that knows the community introduced us. We filmed and followed John (a community organizer in Namibia) and James (an organizer in Kenya), and that made a big difference... The more remote the location, the more desirable they (the Maasai and Himba) become for film makers.

These communities had already had media experience. We found ourselves doing damage control.

But we wanted to get their experiences and they understood that.”

When asked for updates on the community groups, Simpson said, “In Namibia, the community built their own lodge.” And according

to Simpson, “They’re calling the shots now. And, the women in this community have expanded their business. They harvested around 50 tones of resin last year, and directed the benefits to households. They have contracts in Europe to provide plant oils for use in perfumes. The women who started this project have now allowed the men to participate. But, they are ensuring the harvesting is still done correctly.” Simpson cracked a joke about the women taking charge, and the audience laughed approvingly.

Simpson’s vision for the film is to have an open air screening under the stars in a rural tour around the regions where the film was shot. Of course he said he has already showed the participants the rough cuts, while the film premiered in South Africa.

He said, “The dream is to bring together the villagers to create cross-pollination of the ideas they have, to spur further collaborative thinking. They can look at what the Maasai are doing and take it and adapt it to their own circumstances.”

He’ll have to raise money for that though. But he’s pulled off this film with the help of many participants thus far, and garnered plenty of interest in the project.

It’s not beyond reasonable doubt to suggest that this film will encourage further community development, not just in Windhoek or Nairobi, but maybe in every city or rural area where it is shown.

Simpson said, with one camera, three month-long trips during 2005 to 2007, and after a five year process that included research and treatments, the film was finally completed. By this April, the film will be out on DVD and information can be found on its website: MilkingtheRhino.org.

David E. Simpson