The Cascade Vol. 24 No. 6

FEBRUARY 24 TO MARCH 1, 2016

VOLUME 24 ISSUE 6

Trying our best not to get sued since 1993

What would an earthquake do to UFV? Pages 10-11 WWW.UFVCASCADE.CA

www.ufvcascade.ca

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2016

CONTENTS

News

Opinion

UFV starts search for new president

The Homeless Arena

Mark Evered’s term to end in 2017

A modest proposal to solve Abbotsford’s little problem

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Culture & Events ScreenGasm

Arts in Review Almost Famous Women

UFV art exhibit features dark and trippy film clips

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Feminist short story collection has one foot in history, one in fiction

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CONTRIBUTORS

STAFF Editor-in-Chief Michael Scoular michael@ufvcascade.ca

Opinion Editor Alex Rake alex@ufvcascade.ca

Illustrator Sultan Jum sultan@ufvcascade.ca

Managing Editor Valerie Franklin valerie@ufvcascade.ca

Culture Editor Glen Ess glen@ufvcascade.ca

Webmaster (interim) Michael Scoular michael@ufvcascade.ca

Business Manager Jennifer Trithardt-Tufts jennifer@ufvcascade.ca

Arts in Review Editor Martin Castro martin@ufvcascade.ca

Multimedia Editor Mitch Huttema mitch@ufvcascade.ca

Copy Editor Kat Marusiak kat@ufvcascade.ca

Production Manager Brittany Cardinal brittany@ufvcascade.ca

Staff Writer Sonja Klotz sonjak@ufvcascade.ca

News Editor Vanessa Broadbent vanessa@ufvcascade.ca

Production Assistant Danielle Collins danielle@ufvcascade.ca

Arts Writer Jeffrey Trainor jeffrey@ufvcascade.ca

Harvin Bhathal Remington Fioraso Megan Lambert Raynah McIvor

WWW.UFVCASCADE.CA @UFVCASCADE FACEBOOK.COM/UFVCASCADE INSTAGRAM.COM/THE.CASCADE

Pankaj Sharma Jasmine Hope Silva Rachel Tait

Volume 24 · Issue 6 Room S2111 33844 King Road Abbotsford, BC V2S 7M8 604.854.4529 Cover image: Sultan Jum Printed by International Web exPress

The Cascade is UFV’s autonomous student newspaper. It originated under its current name in 1993, and achieved autonomy from the university and the Student Union Society in 2002. This means that The Cascade is a forum for UFV students to have their journalism published in an entirely student-run setting. It also acts as an alternative press for the Fraser Valley. The Cascade is funded with UFV student funds, and is overseen by the Cascade Journalism Society Board, a body run by a student majority. The Cascade is published every Wednesday with a print circulation of 1,500 and is distributed at Abbotsford, Chilliwack (CEP), Clearbrook, and Mission UFV campuses and throughout the surrounding communities.

The Cascade is open to written, photo, and design work from all students; these can come in the form of a pitch to an editor, or an assignment from an editor. Writers meetings are held each Monday at 2:00 p.m. in The Cascade’s office on the Abbotsford campus.

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In order to be published in the newspaper, all work must first be approved by The Cascade’s editor-in-chief, copy editor, and corresponding section editor. The Cascade reserves the right to edit submissions for clarity and length. The Cascade will not print any articles that contain racist, sexist, homophobic or libellous content. Letters to the editor, while held to the same standard, are unedited, and should be under 400 words. As The Cascade is an autonomous student publication, opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect that of UFV, The Cascade’s staff and collective, or associated members.

www.ufvcascade.ca

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2016

EDITORIAL EDITORIAL

NEWS BRIEFS Cascades women’s basketball team to compete in playoffs After a six-game winning streak, the UFV Cascades women’s basketball team will be facing the UBC Thunderbirds in the first round of the Canada West playoffs. The winner will proceed to the conference quarter-finals against the Saskatchewan Huskies.

The games will be a best-of-three, with a game on Sunday in the case of a tie. This is the fifth time the team has competed in the CIS national playoffs since 2011.

—UFV Athletics

SUS hosts all-candidates meeting for upcoming elections The Student Union Society (SUS) will be hosting two all-candidates meetings as part of the campaign period for the upcoming SUS elections. The first will be held at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, February 24 at Baker House, and the second at 4 p.m. on Monday, February 29 in the atrium of the Student Union Building. The campaign period ends on March 6 and the voting period runs from March 7 to 10.

Kinder Morgan rejects concerns from Abbotsford City Council Kinder Morgan has rejected the majority of the concerns raised by the City of Abbotsford in its final submissions to the National Energy Board (NEB) regarding the twinning of the Trans Mountain Pipeline. The City’s concerns include that the pipeline will cost the municipality millions of dollars in infrastructure expenses over time, and that its emergency plans need further improvement. The Trans Mountain Pipeline currently runs for approximately 30 km through Abbotsford, and the proposed project would triple its capacity. The NEB will present its recommendation to the federal government in May, and the government will make a decision by the end of 2016.

—Abbotsford News

Test your Oscars predictions!

Film is only one of many industries where racism still preserves its oldest tradition: power MICHAEL SCOULAR EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

“There are so many questions. And that’s something I’ve been accused of: of raising questions without having answers. But I’ve never felt it was the filmmaker’s job to have all the answers. To find answers for racism and prejudice in films? You can’t do that.”

— Spike Lee “Social scientists studying in-group decision making have long observed a pervasive phenomenon: groups unconsciously privilege ‘their own kind’ when deciding how to distribute resources. And this is across the board.

It’s something ingrained in human behavior and studied for over 50 years …when we make group decisions — as is done on a panel, selection or nomination committee — with a group of people just like us, that bias is reinforced and amplified.”

— Esther B. Robinson “Let’s acknowledge that the Oscars are bullshit.”

— Manohla Dargis

Everyone, of course, thinks they’re probably right. About how important or unimportant the Academy Awards are. About what the best movie of the year was. About how racist the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) is. There are a million people writing billions of words about this. What will it solve? I haven’t watched a live broadcast of the award show since I started studying at university, but that doesn’t change how much I hear about it, and it doesn’t change that, however adjusted it might be because people are talking about entertainment, this conversation — about race, about colonialism, about barriers — is not contained to just movies. Movies enable conversations, and, this year in particular, that includes the industry’s annual variety show.

First, let’s get a couple things out of the way: the Academy Awards have never been about quality — they are about access. The Academy is not an elite group of film-watchers, able to discern something you and I can’t — it’s a club of industry figures, some high profile, but many not.

If someone is busy doing work on a film, they probably don’t have a lot of time to watch most of the films that come out during a year, leaving the entire process up to the promotion budgets of studios and the free time of, well, roughly the same demographic that makes a checklist of best picture nominees and attends them at a theatre near you: mostly white, mostly senior, and mostly male.

In turn, Oscar nominations allow movies to open wider (reaching Abbotsford, Mission, and Chilliwack — though this can seem like an “American issue,” most of the films that play in Canadian theatres are American), influencing what we consider popular culture, directly resulting in the mass of coverage I mentioned above. If everyone was left to their own devices, the movies we’d end up talking about at the end of the year would look very different, but that isn’t reality: what movie theatres play, what critics review, and what shows up on the front page of YouTube still has a great deal of influence.

“

It’s not unlike the student protests and confrontations seen in the past year at some North American university campuses: what do you do with a history of racism at an institution?

Do you ignore it? Has that worked?

Now, many people don’t care — every year, good movies come out.

People see them. Sometimes they get awards. But the award ceremony boycotts, the op-eds calling for change, the technical adjustments by the Academy to introduce some of that change, slowly, “if you’ll just be patient,” all this isn’t nothing. It’s not unlike the student protests and confrontations seen in the past year at some North American university campuses: what do you do with a history of racism at an institution? Do you ignore it? Has that worked?

No one article is going to figure this out. Given another decade or two, it’s unlikely AMPAS will have either, not completely. Relying on

Illustration: Sultan Jum

institutions to bring about change is almost always a long, unsatisfying process — and none of us have any power to influence that body anyway. So what’s the worry? Like Sal’s Wall of Fame in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, one argument will always say to leave the decoration alone, just enjoy the pizza, leave it alone, don’t start anything stupid.

But there’s one part of this that sticks out as particularly wrong.

After Jada Pinkett Smith, among others, announced they were done trying to hang out with a party that doesn’t want to recognize a significant amount of their work, interviews began to probe the issue.

It probably would have been too much work for writers to, you know, watch some movies and talk about what the Academy doesn’t notice (bringing up biopics like Straight Outta Compton and Concussion is just playing into the same, rigged game), so question after question asked any African-American actor nearby: what do you think about this? Do you support it? Are you angry?

By the end of the week, commentators will have finished filing their pieces anticipating the material Chris Rock, the host of this year’s ceremony, will use to try and defuse or pile fire on the situation, depending on how predictably “clever” this year’s joke writers are.

But a year ago, while promoting a film he directed, Rock already had an answer to this. Asked by New York magazine how he would have covered sites of racial divide like Ferguson, Missouri, in a way better than the often bewildered or limited way journalists at the time did, Rock responded this way: “I’d do a special on race, but I’d have no black people.”

“Here’s the thing,” he said. “When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it’s all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they’re not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before. To say Obama is progress is saying that he’s the first black person that is qualified to be president. That’s not black progress. That’s white progress. There’s been black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years.”

To point out that the process of de-colonialism will never take root in some of this continent’s oldest institutions until some people’s power is reduced, until there are fewer white people at the top of many organizations, is sometimes seen as insulting. It’s “reverse racism,” or now more commonly, just “racist.” But to follow that line is to not talk about race at all — to repress it, to say it’s a non-issue, to say, well, look at the few exceptions; isn’t that enough? There are many factors of course; race is just one (and while this particular conversation is mainly about black and white representation, the broader picture is not that simple). But in order for people to be comfortable talking about that one topic, we need to at least be honest about what ours does for and to us. We can’t wait for Los Angeles to.

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WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2016

NEWS Search for UFV’s next president begins Evered to retire at close of 2017; search to be conducted in private

Want to get paid for writing?

The Cascade is seeking staff writers to write two articles per issue (one news article and one of your choice).

Pay: $50/issue To apply, email your resume, cover letter, and a writing sample to valerie@ufvcascade.ca.

Photo: UFV Flickr

MICHAEL SCOULAR THE CASCADE

With UFV president Mark Evered retiring at the end of the 2016-17 academic year, work is beginning to search for his replacement.

The university’s Board of Governors is creating a search committee to consider candidates and, finally, make a recommendation for hiring. It will be composed of 13 members: three board members, including the chair, Barry Delaney; the chancellor, Gwen Point; two members of the administration; three faculty members; one staff member; two students; and one alumni member. (The Board will select a member of the executive administration; Senate will select an academic administrator and the three faculty; the Student Union Society will select the students; and the Alumni Association will select the alumnus.)

However, if the search committee proceeds as planned, the scope of updates from here to the hiring date for the public will be limited to public forums hosted by Delaney and a search firm, Boyden Global, and an online survey. The entire candidate process will be conducted in private: “The names of candidates and any information about candidates will be kept confidential by the search committee,” reads a procedures document released by Senate.

Sean Parkinson, the president of the Faculty and Staff Association at UFV, says this is an unnecessary move. (Delaney did not respond to a request for comment by press time; neither did SUS president Thomas Davies.)

In a letter to faculty and staff, Parkinson writes, “Given financial difficulties, it is easy to see how boards might be tempted to hire a president with a corporate orientation who will run the university as a business.”

Parkinson adds, in an interview, that while closed searches are increasingly a trend for Canadian universities, UFV’s specific mandate makes it particularly appropriate — and open searches were the norm at UFV when Skip Bassford, the president

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who preceded Evered and oversaw the institution’s transformation into a full-fledged university, was hired. As well, open searches are still used to hire deans, the provost, and associate vice-presidents.

“We’re a regionally-focused, teaching-intensive university,” Parkinson says. “I think the community is always important to a university, but where UBC may define their community much broader than just Vancouver … I think we have to be particularly responsive to the Fraser Valley, given that it’s actually in the [university] act and our mandate.”

Parkinson adds that where Boyden Global may be a firm used to serving the corporate world, the world of academia is particularly suited to open searches.

“The common argument against an open process is that candidates don’t want their current employer to know they’re applying for another job … [but] this is not an investment bank. You’re not going to get fired for going to the competition.”

In an open search, short-listed candidates would be encouraged to meet with the community, including faculty, staff, students, and the broader community, take questions, and prove themselves as able to communicate with the people they would be working with as president.

Parkinson notes that where student and alumni groups are represented on the committee, the FSA is not — Senate will choose faculty members.

“I would prefer that the union be able to appoint someone, but the bigger point here is there are not a lot of students and there’s no community members,” Parkinson says.

“I know the bigger you make the tent, the longer things take, but I think it’s a lot safer to go open than closed because I would bet [most] of the time an open process and a closed process would choose the same person. Everyone wants the best candidate. But the closed one generates the suspicion.”

As of the most recent academic year, the president was the highest-paid employee of the university, receiving over $200,000 per year.

www.ufvcascade.ca

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2016

NEWS MITCH HUTTEMA THE CASCADE / PHOTO

On the evening of February 15, 2016, fire crews responded to a tent fire in the protest homeless camp on Gladys Avenue. The cause of the fire is still unknown, and the Abbotsford Fire Department was unable to share any information regarding the fire.

Following a long history of problems between the City of Abbotsford and the homeless camp, the City served the occupants of the camp an eviction notice requiring them to be out by Wednesday, February 10. However, several occupants still remained at the site of the camp past the eviction deadline.

UFV to fly Pride flag for one day VALERIE FRANKLIN THE CASCADE

Following the burning of a rainbow Pride flag at UBC in mid-February, UFV will fly the Pride flag for one day in support of the LGBT+ community. The flag will be raised in a ceremony from 7 to 7:30 a.m. on Wednesday, February 24 on the Abbotsford campus, and will be taken down at dusk the same day.

Although the flag-burning incident at UBC occurred over a week ago, director of Student Life and development Kyle Baillie says the date of February 24 was

chosen to coincide with Pink Shirt Day, an annual anti-bullying initiative. The university originally intended to fly the Pride flag for one week, but UFV has only one flag pole and is not permitted to fly more than one flag on it at a time. Baillie says the university will add a second pole or a yardarm to avoid this problem in the future.

According to the CBC, the individual who burned the flag at UBC has likely been identified. RCMP are investigating.

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www.ufvcascade.ca

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2016

NEWS New recreation centre for Chilliwack campus in planning stage Renovations would convert former RCMP firing range

SPORTS NEWS This week’s results Basketball Men’s vs MRU @ MRU Friday, Feb. 19: L 87-70 Saturday, Feb. 20: L 94-83 Women’s vs MRU @ MRU Friday, Feb. 19: W 53-70 Saturday, Feb. 20: W 54-82 Photo: Mitch Huttema

Volleyball Men’s vs CBC @CBC Thursday, Feb. 18: W 0-3 Friday, Feb. 19: W 0-3 Women’s vs CBC @CBC Thursday, Feb. 18: L 3-1 Friday, Feb. 19: L 3-1

Next week’s games Basketball Women’s vs UBC @ Abbotsford Friday, Feb. 26: 6 p.m.

Saturday, Feb. 27: 6 p.m.

Sunday, Feb. 28 (if necessary): 5 p.m.

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VANESSA BROADBENT THE CASCADE

Plans for a recreation centre at the Chilliwack CEP campus are in development following a student survey conducted online.

“What we wanted to do was make sure that we talked to all the stakeholders, starting with the students who spend a lot of time on that campus, to really understand what the options are,” says Steve Tuckwood, the director of athletics and campus recreation.

Following the approval of federal funding for a new indoor firing range for the RCMP, UFV is considering what to do with the now-vacated space.

Hoping for an influx of feedback, the athletics department asked for students to participate in an online survey, which received over 400 responses. The survey included questions about student fitness, activities at the CEP campus, and potential features of the recreation centre.

One question asked students to consider their preferred choices from among a list of options, saying, “Findings … will be used to further explore these potential options.” The 10 options included larger space-filling additions (running track, rock climbing, “gymnasium-type space,” turf, archery range, a staging area for water sports), common uses already available in Abbotsford (weight, fitness, and multi-purpose rooms), as well as study or lounge space for students.

Though the firing range will require retrofitting to house any of those larger components, those last options could be well-suited to the building’s current set-up. “There’s a small building that’s

right beside the former firing range, and it was actually used by the RCMP as a classroom and some office space,” he says. “What’s nice is that it’s an indoor space ... if you need classroom space, washrooms, showers, offices, they’re all right there.”

Tuckwood hopes that the survey will provide the athletics department, as well as RC Strategies, an Edmonton-based community development company they’ve partnered with, with a sense of what students hope to see in the centre.

Currently, CEP is driving distance away from larger amenities, including food, drink, and activities like the ones the recreation centre would potentially bring to the campus.

So for Tuckwood, the rec centre is part of a larger plan for recreation at the CEP campus, which might include attempts to connect it in a larger way to its surroundings, such as the nearby Rotary Trail.

“I’m sort of of the belief that anything is an improvement — we really don’t have a presence there from a recreational standpoint,” Tuckwood says. “It’ll take a while to build, undoubtedly, but I think it [would be] better than what we’ve been able to offer so far.”

“I don’t have any delusions of grandeur that this thing is going to turn into some hub of activity in a short period of time,” he adds. “I think over time it will build and that, to me, I think is a positive thing for the university and for the student body.”

The current goal is for the recreation centre to open without any new fees to students, but the major undecided part of the change at this point is funding — UFV doesn’t have additional resources to dedicate to this project. When The

Cascade reported on this project last December, it was presented as the work of the Student Union Society (SUS), with Student Life and Athletics assisting. Now, the SUS is mainly involved as a funding source through the already-existing U-Pass program.

“It would be included as part of the U-Pass programming,” says SUS president Thomas Davies. “Any student who has paid for the U-Pass would be able to access [the centre].”

The second section of the student survey asked specifically about U-Pass usage, asking both where students currently use their card and to what degree they feel their needs are met by the current discounts available through the card — currently, the U-Pass gives students free access to the Abbotsford, Cheam, Chilliwack, Matsqui, and Mission recreation and leisure centres.

“What we would be doing is redirecting some of those funds that already exist into this opportunity,” Davies says, who adds that there would be no change to the semesterly U-Pass fee.

For now, details are not yet finalized, including the date of the centre’s opening. When SUS was heading the project, Davies cited the Fall 2016 semester as a goal, but Tuckwood says there’s no certain date until more planning has happened. “[RC Strategies] is coming back on campus in early March to do some follow-up focus group meetings with some students, as well as some other stakeholder groups,” he says. “And then the expectation is we’ll have a report from them about all of the components probably in April sometime.”

www.ufvcascade.ca

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2016

OPINION Homelessness in Abbotsford: how to improve our city’s image ALEX RAKE THE CASCADE

So Abbotsford has a problem with homeless people.

Up until the B.C. Supreme Court struck them down last October, there were bylaws in place that prohibited sleeping in public spaces. Also, the city itself made a request for an injunction against all homeless encampments on city property.

Geordon Oman of The Canadian Press reports Abbotsford’s relationship with homeless campers succinctly: “The legal action

by Abbotsford was the latest attempt to evict homeless campers that began with issuing bylaw notices, but escalated to spreading pepper spray and chicken manure on the camps and finally damaging or disposing of tents and other personal property.” It hasn’t been a very nuanced approach.

Since the Supreme Court’s ruling, Abbotsford’s city council has passed bylaws legalizing encampments, but this doesn’t mean that the attitude toward homelessness has changed. Abbotsford isn’t devoid of compassionate people, but these bylaws existed because there is an aversion to the very image of homelessness in Abbotsford.

Besides its attitude towards homelessness, Abbotsford also has a minor problem with its huge, expensive arena, the Abbotsford Centre. They usually run only two public events a month (though this April seems well-booked), and not many of them are from or for the community; it’s mostly visiting performing groups that fit relatively niche interests like the WWE or the Blue Man Group. Also, they still haven’t found a replacement for their hockey team which, according to the CBC, left the city with a $12 million loss when their contract was ended.

Let’s kill two birds with one stone and transform Abbotsford Centre into what it was always meant to be: the Homeless Arena. Provide your people with a place to stay, Abbotsford, and provide the rest with something to see. Homeless Olympics,

Photo: Mitch Huttema

Homeless Got Talent, Homeless Gladiator, you name it! Finally, your people will be off the streets and doing something more useful than uglying your public spaces: entertaining your regular citizens on stage.

And what will be the cost? Pay your new performers with room and board, free popcorn, free tickets to the Harlem Globetrotters. Charge $10 a show and the arena will be packed.

The current attitude towards homelessness will combine with the perceived lack of stuff to do in this city, creating something bigger than any regular entertainment centre, bigger than the city itself. Your citizens, once divided amongst their many

ethnicities, classes, and churches, will unite before this common entertainment experience, and you will once and for all create a real culture, a real and proud sense of Abbotsford-iness that you have been dreaming about for ages.

The only real cost will be the work of coercing and transporting the homeless people. But you’ve got pepper spray, and everyone knows someone with a truck. You’ll be fine. Your Homeless Arena will put you on that ever-elusive and tantalizingly exclusive map, and your parks will be cleaner than your collective conscience and moral resume. Godspeed, Abby. Godspeed.

SATIRE

Carly Rae Jepsen and the Trump phenomenon The Trump campaign seen through the lens of “I Didn’t Just Come Here to Dance”

JOSH FRIESEN CONTRIBUTOR

Recently Carly Rae Jepsen took the pop world by storm with her fantastic album EMOTION, yet few realize how valuable Carly Rae’s insight truly is. Now, due to recent events in American politics, academics are beginning to understand just how important a work EMOTION is. With stunning foresight, Carly Rae predicted a number of political events of the past six months, but like many true artists she is more interested in understanding the mechanisms behind such movements.

Presenting a complete analysis of her masterwork is beyond the scope of this essay, so I will focus on one small and accessible piece: the song “I Didn’t Just Come Here to Dance.” In this house-dance bonus track, form and content are unified completely. But I will focus only on the content.

“I Didn’t Just Come Here to Dance” is an allegory of the rise of Donald Trump as well as a complex meditation on his appeal. The work is told through the use of oscillating perspectives, a common device found throughout Carly Rae’s work.

Take the first line: “I didn’t just come here to dance, if you know what I mean, you know what I mean.” Of course, we all know what she means; Trump didn’t just come here to fool around, he came here to run for president. We must take him seriously, because he takes himself seriously.

What makes this piece so interesting (and no doubt in need of further study) is the use of the first person pronoun. Carly Rae is not simply announcing Trump’s presidential bid; she becomes Trump and makes the announcement herself.

Our excitement at the prospect of a political campaign matches our excitement regarding the dance beat about to be dropped. Trump, much like dance pop, is a seductive figure, playing on our desire for entertainment as well as appealing to us on a more intimate level. Both first proliferate themselves widely through the media before attempting to ask for more from us. The next line continues from the perspective of Trump, as she attempts to bridge the gap between entertainment and intimacy: “If you just give me a chance, you’d see what I see / Do you see what I see?” From where we stand, it is clear that the American people have decided to give Trump a chance, and they are seeing through his racistcoloured spectacles.

In the next section Carly Rae shifts perspective again, becoming a Trump supporter who now sees the world as Trump sees it: “It’s your fault, baby boy, ‘cause you’re the one that sparked this.” “Baby boy” is a not-so-subtle reference to Trump’s baby face. This line points not just to the changing worldview of many of his supporters, but also to the singular effort of Trump in his campaign. Carly Rae foresaw the decline of super PACs in the coming election, understanding that it would be personality that would dominate American politics. (Personality politics are a running theme throughout her work; see “Call Me Maybe.”)

Jepsen highlights Trump’s isolationist leanings in the next verse and hints at the possible demise of NAFTA: “Hey Joe’s calling me over, Tino’s calling me over, I only came here for you.”

Tino is an obvious reference to Latinos, which brings to mind Trump’s controversial proposal to build a giant wall to keep Mexicans out of the U.S. Joe is an equally obvious reference to us Canadians; she is referring to a popular beer commercial from the mid-2000s in which a man named Joe (who represents all Canadians) makes a stirring speech about what it is to be a Canadian.

The third line confirms our suspicions, “you” being the only country left to personify — the United States of America. Once this piece is in place, the rest comes together. Trump is not interested in Canada or Mexico and in fact wants nothing to do with them; all he is interested in is America (and only one specific vision of America).

Carly Rae’s last verse before repeating the chorus twice reveals the true devotion of Trump supporters, and completes their transformation: “Baby I, I’m not going anywhere without you / Drive me home, ‘cause I like every single thing about you.” With this line, the transformation is finished; the Trump supporter has moved from initial curiosity to sparks of similarity, and finally to dependency. They now see Trump as their only option, the saviour they didn’t know they needed until he announced himself so triumphantly. He didn’t just come here to dance.

I have not argued that Carly Rae is herself a Trump supporter. Anyone who believes such need only to listen to “Favorite Colour.” Yet Carly Rae Jepsen understands and articulates the Trump phenomenon incredibly proficiently, and I urge academics interested in the subject to get hold of her via Twitter.

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www.ufvcascade.ca

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2016

OPINION S

Phoneless and free Sonja Klotz

Get iSmart Mitch Huttema

Not having a phone is one of the best and smartest decisions I have made so far this year. I feel like I can actually contemplate life without having constant information thrown at me and always being updated about every little thing that happens.

I can look up information, check my emails, and connect with people when I want to, not with each notification.

I am amazed at how fixating phones can be. I used to be glued to one wherever I went, and no one could keep me away from my beloved handheld for long. There is nothing more socially debilitating than a little device that splits your attention between your present moment and what’s happening around the virtual world.

Since giving up my phone, walking down the street and listening to the sounds of people talking or birds chirping has awakened my sense of space and time. While smartphones have many efficient features that have greatly improved our communication, I can live without relying on such devices. After all, human societies have succeeded so far without them, so let’s not forget that phones should not be the only means for connecting with each other.

Left- and right-wingers have always duked it out over how much privacy to surrender for the sake of security, but now, with the news that Apple is refusing to comply with a judge’s order to unlock a phone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters for the FBI, the fight has come a little closer to home.

To worry over threats of terrorism and hackers is one thing when it has to do with some obscure legislation. But when it has to do with the iPhone in your pocket, when the FBI and a federal judge require Apple to provide a master key that can open and shut every one of its phones, it becomes easier to understand what’s at stake.

Everything on your phone is incredibly personal.

You text from it, you shop from it, you take photos call your parents from it. The precedent that could be set here, making something so close to you vulnerable to prying eyes is an issue that hits close to home. Regardless of how loudly Trump, who has called for Apple to bend to his (and the FBI’s) will, hollers to boycott Apple, I’m hoping this won’t lead to our privacy being compromised.

Curtailed commentary on current conditions Illustrations: Danielle Collins

My dear Canadians, I want to let you know that while it has taken time to rejoin you, the importance of young, hard-working Canadian students was never far from my mind. Over 100 days in office is a little late, and yes, it took a dark moment, with people saying budget-deadline-this and Saudiexport-that and not-that-transparent-after-all, for me to remember a bright spot on the other side of the country, but it’s shared Canadian experiences that unite us. And while I’ve never seen what is surely a picturesque campus (I received pictures; they’re very green), I can imagine how excited you are for me, and how bad you are with deadlines, promises, and ethics.

We forget that this job is hard — and by we I mean I, and by hard I mean forget I said that — but if you’ve seen me, with ums and pauses during Question Period, or repeating vague but hopefulsounding promises in interviews with regular folk, know that it’s because I’m trying to consider all views. There’s lots! Here’s where you come in: what this country needs — oh, what a shame, I’m out of space. Well, until next time. Don’t worry, I’ll figure it out.

Inbox (1) Definitely not not Justin Trudeau

Litter at the park-and-ride Megan Lambert

Birds fly high in the clear morning sky as you pull into the glorious treasure trove of free parking at the McCallum park-and-ride. This is your sanctuary.

You almost always find a spot. The walk up to UFV helps you calm your mind — then your foot goes straight into a half-full discarded Tim Hortons coffee cup.

These cups are everywhere. There is so much garbage lying around at the park-and-ride, so much disrespect for the place, that I wonder if our generation has been introduced to the concept of littering. Here’s a mini lesson: If you throw your coffee cup — or anything that doesn’t naturally come from the ground — anywhere but a garbage or recycling bin, that’s littering. If you’re throwing around your apple cores or banana peels, great.

Those items are compostable. Just make sure your compostable food items get tossed onto somebody’s windshield (true story), or onto the pavement where I’ll slip on them (also true). UFV’s parking and the park-and-ride are sins against nature as it is, so let’s not let our wasteful latte remnants add insult to injury. Keep a place for garbage in your car, or wait until you get to school to throw your cups away.

Thinking about the North American political situation MARTIN CASTRO THE CASCADE

Over the weekend, Jeb Bush bowed out of the race for the Republican nomination — and that’s cause for alarm. I look at what’s going on in the States, and I see an increase in decisions being made by the public based not on the merits of a candidate’s policies, not on the strength of their history insofar as policies are concerned, but rather whether or not they sound like the guy next door.

Enter Donald Trump (who, by the way, won Saturday’s South Carolina Primary). The man should have been laughed out of the first debate he stepped into. But he wasn’t.

The scary part is that every day, Donald Trump seems more and more like an unfortunately accurate reflection of what a solid chunk of people in the U.S. apparently believe, not just an anomaly like Rand Paul was. Among other things, Trump’s would-be policy proposals, which are more soundbites than anything else (“I’ll bomb the shit out of ISIS!”) have honestly

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put things into perspective for me.

As Canadians we can’t by a long shot claim to be bastions of social and political enlightenment. The amount of people in Canada who are somehow still convinced that all Muslims are extremists is still staggering, and our willingness to be open, caring individuals has been besieged by an overwhelming sense of anxiety and self-importance.

In the wake of the 2014 shootings at Parliament Hill, one of the resounding messages floated out to the public was: don’t let this polarize you, don’t give in to hate. That message needs to change. It needs to change not because it’s not good advice, but because the reality of the situation is that generally, hate prevails.

The message needs to be to depolarize yourself. Or, perhaps more simply, to love.

We desperately need to love.

We bicker like children over political labels, over policies. We call out our current prime minister not because of policy decisions, but because of personal characteristics, or ideological ones.

When did giving shelter to displaced people become a question

of weighing pros and cons? I’ve never seen the ideological gap between the left and the right so dramatically amplified. This is the first time I’ve felt that, even in Canada, the prevailing stance is one of “us vs. them,” and not one of balance, of cooperation.

And this amplifies my fears of a Trump presidency, one ushered in by a hateful, uninformed reaction.

Ignorance has never been so apparent to me, or so apparently damaging, as it is now. We have all the world’s knowledge and wisdom at our fingertips, and somehow we still can’t inform ourselves about the world we live in before making brash generalizations.

It’s times like these I envy Kurt Vonnegut’s ability to laugh at the absurdity of it all, instead of despair. Here are some words we all need right now: “Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”

www.ufvcascade.ca

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2016

STUDY BREAK Crossword

Last week’s answers

A Tisket, a Tasket

Across

Across

3. Wicker, wire, a place for your desires. (6)

3. CROCUS

4. RIP social life. May you rest in peace here while I finish my midterms.

7. READING

(6)

8. BUDS

7. Measure for measure, this one’s a last resort. (7)

9. CHERRIES

8. LBD and pearls. (7)

11. LEAPYEAR

9. Paper? Or petroleum and hydrocarbon polymers? (7)

12. FAMILYDAY

10. Mrs. Wolowitz's beef. “Howard!" (7)

Down

12. Mown lawn. (5, 3) 13. How you handle the new Kanye album. (Well, for some.) (5, 2)

1. CHOCOLATES

Down

2. MARDIGRAS

1. Face prep, pre-masquerade. (4, 2)

4. SHORTEST

2. The newest fashion — coming soon to a mall near you! (Think mid-

5. FROST

terms.) (12)

6. VALENTINE

5. Got a question? (3, 2)

10. HALFWAY

6. If you’re angry, take a deep breath — but don’t blow one of these. (6) 11. Your upstairs neighbours make cookies, elevator small talk, and one of these. (6)

Horoscopes

Star Signs by Sybil la Clair

Aries — Mar 21 to Apr 19

Leo — Jul 23 to Aug 22

Sagittarius — Nov 22 to Dec 21

A comedian might stumble across your favourite bar. Make sure to pack some band-aids this week.

The skeleton in your closet might rattle around a little this week. Don’t worry, his commentary is mostly humerus.

Getting a subscription to Genius Monthly might not help convince your parents that your degree means something.

Taurus — Apr 20 to May 20

Virgo —Aug 23 to Sep 22

Capricorn — Dec 22 to Jan 19

When the going gets tough, jet off to Margaritaville and lose a shaker of salt.

If your hands get clammy holding onto your sweetheart’s this week, don’t worry. It’s good that you’re coming out of your shell.

Gemini — May 21 to Jun 20

Libra — Sep 23 to Oct 22

Aquarius — Jan 20 to Feb 18

This week, a fancy new coffee shop across the street will catch your eye — but always remember your first dark roast.

"There’s going to be a heartache tonight, heartache tonight,” from your afternoon class, but “Take it easy”.

Coffee and bagels are your spirit animals this week (the cute ones from those gum commercials).

Cancer —Jun 21 to Jul 22

Scorpio — Oct 23 to Nov 21

You’ll find "37 ways to improve your life” this week, but you won't have time for that.

The eagle flies south at midnight. It scoops up your social life on the way.

Pisces — Feb 19 to Mar 20

Good news! Bacon and roses will be on sale this week. Bad news is your valentine will have run off with the Easter

Your birthday is coming up. You will start to prefer foods with more bran and go to bed an hour earlier.

BY ANTHONY BIONDI

SPACED

Bunny.

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WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2016

www.ufvcascade.ca

How prepared is UFV for an ear

By Michael Scoular Illustration by Danielle Collins Fifteen years ago, Jonathan Hughes was sitting in his Vancouver home, working on a paper.

“I was sitting there writing about earthquakes, working on my PhD dissertation — I saw my dog look up, and I looked out my window, saw all these birds take flight.”

In Vancouver, it was a brief vibration; to the uninitiated, there could have been a hundred explanations — if you were on social media this past December, you saw all of them, bumps and shudders hardly strong enough to wake you from a dream. But in Olympia and Seattle, schools, the seawall, the airport were all damaged. No one died as a direct cause, the news reports said, relieved, but the cameras still panned across enough destruction for George W. Bush, then-president, to declare the areas affected by the 6.8 magnitude earthquake a natural disaster area.

It was the first earthquake Hughes experienced — and in there is the reason earthquakes have recently been the stuff of nightmares: even if we’ve studied them, and even though we’ve felt a few over the past couple decades in BC, we have not truly met them. The drills, vaguely remembered from public school, the list of safety procedures, blurred in our heads with images of chaos from disaster movies, are mostly hypothetical — we do not know, for sure, what we would do. Where hurricanes arrive every year on the eastern coast, and floods arrive with the seasons, earthquakes might never come, or, as geologists will point out, they could be here as you read this, your homework next to you, the world ready to shift outside.

Earthquakes also happen every day — there have been eight so far today, and 16 happened yesterday in the western hemisphere alone. Where we are located, it’s possible to find historical examples of three major types of earthquakes: the Nisqually earthquake that hit Olympia was a deep earthquake, “the Big One” would be a subduction earthquake, and shallow earthquakes, bringing aftershocks and landslides.

“We’re in the window, probably of all of these,” Hughes says.

“But we don’t know if it’s going to happen next week, or 50 years from now.”

The severity of any of these is up to movements we cannot track like we do the weather: not just magnitude but the epicentre; not just the location of faults and plates, but the way they interact with each other. These factors are the reason none of the earthquakes of last night and the yesterday are in your newsfeed.

Major articles (many of them following a piece that ran last year in the New Yorker by Kathryn Schulz) tend to focus on what could happen in Victoria or Vancouver if the Pacific coast was hit by a Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake — but how prepared is UFV and the rest of the Fraser Valley?

The answer is not simple: as a university made up of multiple commuter campuses, the answer for one part will not be the same as the answer for another — where a place like UBC is essentially a small municipality to itself, UFV crosses rivers and school districts. One thing is for certain: as the Fraser Valley is further inland, while it will not be exempt from the effects of a catastrophic earthquake, it likely will not bear the full brunt of it, in the case of the subduction model. As well, while some

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may lament UFV’s lack of a long, prestigious history, that has its upsides: none of its buildings are relics.

“They’re not like some of the other post-secondary campuses that have very old structures, sometimes 100 years old,” says Mark Goudsblom, the director of facilities and project management. “In that regard, we’re well positioned.”

The oldest building UFV still uses is B building on the Abbotsford campus, which along with A and C building date back to 1983. The post-tensioning steel that reinforces its concrete structure is x-rayed every year for breaks, Goudsblom says. But building codes, which each structure at UFV is built to meet, change every five years, and newer standards, based on new information, that make for buildings better suited to withstand shaking (Baker House on the Abbotsford campus is built of a wood frame, understood to be the most flexible material usable for multiple storeys, able to move with, not strained by, an earthquake), are not retroactively applied for future tests to older buildings. They meet the codes they are built by, and are approved. UFV does not publicize its data on building management — Goudsblom would only say that the university is currently commissioning a new report on seismic evaluation as part of its regular maintenance and planning processes.

As earthquakes are unpredictable, so are their scenarios inland — both Goudsblom and Brian Leonard, the emergency management director at UFV, repeat the mantra that there are “no absolutes.” But given a significant earthquake, the events would not be a complete mystery.

In the initial shaking, the same practices anywhere else would apply: get under cover, don’t run outside, wait until any shaking stops. If the building you’re in is safe, stay. If not, move to safety.

Municipal fire crews and paramedics would be the first responders in an emergency, but before they arrive, UFV would rely on the work of its own staff: security, janitorial staff, and facilities workers are trained in first aid, and would work to access the single emergency depots on Abbotsford and Chilliwack’s main campuses, which hold the resources also contained in earthquake kits: first aid, blankets, water.

If a significant earthquake takes place during the day, at a peak time for courses in session, it is unlikely these trained staff will be able to reach every location needing their attention, but UFV is counting on municipal assistance — it has a representative that meets multiple times a year on Abbotsford and Chilliwack’s emergency planning committee — to respond. “In the chaos of an event, there will be some confusion, [but] then our emergency response guidelines, the training, that will all kick in.”

Part of that training will mean assessing the level of safety for each building using a three-level rating-system — only a green would mean people can go inside and resume normal activity.

“You would have windows breaking, you’d have door disalignments, all of your plaster in the walls could be cracked, your corners could be cracked, you could have ceiling tiles that would come down,” Goudsblom says, listing the likeliest hazards. He’s quick to point out that the structure of the building may still be safe — no immediate risk of collapsing, and, unlike outside, a re-

U F V

duced risk of falling objects causing injury or dea a strong earthquake does strike, it will leave a ma Based on his observations of the area, Hughes ser Valley would not be as in danger of liquefa was, where underground sand layers expand, bu ground, or act like liquid, meaning anything su sinks and becomes destabilized. But it’s a valley flooding can happen even without a subduction lot of the older structures in the region are made would have the greatest potential for damages,” in the greater community, but could impact a faculty getting home, getting to their loved ones be an issue.”

Once people are outside the boundaries of U their situation will be in the hands of local and sion-makers, in homes, at workplaces, on the road nations, likely trapped or limited in mobility follo Without the large-scale, highly-monitored buildi a public university, the situation may come closer narios: “Anything indoors and unsecured will l floor or come crashing down: bookshelves, lam canisters of flour in the pantry. Refrigerators w kitchens, unplugging themselves and toppling ov ers will fall and smash interior gas lines. Hous bolted to their foundations will slide off — or, r stay put, obeying inertia, while the foundations the rest of the Northwest, jolt westward. Unmoo dulating ground, the homes will begin to collaps The hope, of course, is that because BC is star of these nightmares, plans are in place to m and respond quickly. If a significant earthquake Province could immediately declare a state of em would activate certain powers, such as evacuatio or temporary construction to manage and direct the UFV level, communications plans are in plac down, if the power is knocked out or not, if phon loaded — posters, signs, social media posts, or em official alert system will all say the same thing: t need to know to reach safety.

But based on BC’s auditor general’s findings ago, all is not well. The same inconsistency and sence from our everyday experience means that, to emergency services, it’s much easier for the prov plans for forest fires, avalanches, and flooding earthquake planning has not been made a prio ment or EMBC,” the opening to the report state planning work for a catastrophic earthquake th not occur in the short-term competes with fund more immediate needs, such as health care and tion. EMBC’s current operating budget for em ties is about the same as it was in 2006, despite BC’s population, the near doubling of BC’s prop knowledge of the devastating impact of recent Chile, Japan and New Zealand.”

www.ufvcascade.ca

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2016

rthquake?

ath — but when ark. s thinks the Fraaction as Seattle urst through the upported above : landslides and n earthquake. “A of brick — they he says. “That’s lot of students, s, all that could

UFV campuses, provincial decid between destiowing a disaster. ing standards of r to Schulz’s scelurch across the mps, computers, will walk out of ver. Water heatses that are not rather, they will s, together with ored on the unse.” now often the mitigate disaster e happened, the mergency, which ons, demolition, t people. And at ce if wifi is up or ne lines are overmails through an this is what you

from two years d myth-like ab, when it comes vince to develop g. “Catastrophic ority by governes. “Funding the hat may or may ding requests for d public educamergency activithe increases in perty values and earthquakes in

Following the report’s release, the provincial government accepted all nine of its main recommendations; but the report was made with a very clear purpose: 17 years prior the auditor general wrote a report on the same subject. The provincial government listened then, it pledged to do better then. In response this time, so far the Province’s biggest effort can be seen in the form of a 125-page document outlining an “Immediate Response Plan,” which includes endless bullet points on safety and potential actions, a “request for federal assistance” template letter, and hopelessly ugly Powerpoint slides showing the chain of command in different situations.

With no similarly sized document on preparedness to speak of yet, individual responsibility is where most advice is being directed. Dave Pinton, director of communications at UFV, acknowledges this is not something that can, realistically, be spread completely, educating everyone, impressing the urgency and necessity of knowing which steps to safeguard a house, people, supplies, planning routes around every single thing that could go wrong. “Is the awareness where it needs to be? Probably not,” he says. “Have we made some strides? Sure. And I don’t think we’re alone, I think that’s everybody, not just in post-secondary but across the Lower Mainland.”

As for Hughes, the geography professor, more information to better understand our geological underpinnings in the Fraser Valley is unlikely to come terribly soon. There is interest from undergraduate students, but undergraduates are limited in research time, and any research is limited by funding — data on earthquakes is slow-coming, expensive, and always subject to the same, ever-present factors: low sample size and unpredictability.

Still, he sees reasons to see more than just distress and under preparedness in the future.

“I haven’t gone out and sampled the public at large, but when I come across people that are saying ‘The big one!’ they really imagine this massive wall of water coming out and taking us out in the Fraser Valley,” he says. “And they really blow this thing up. And so if anything, I’d say people are aware, and they know about this big one, and I think that maybe some of their views are exaggerated in terms of what it might do. That’s not a bad thing — I’d rather people have more concern than less concern for sure.”

Moving back from an individual level, Hughes also sees the university as a potential force for good — like the major narratives in this history, Vancouver and Victoria will always be at the forefront, but not for UFV. “One way I think the university could interface with the communities that we serve is developing more outreach,” he says.

“The drop-cover-hold-on, the emergency kits that people need at their homes, how to retrofit their homes. We could be part of that message, I think. I think there are some interesting ways that we, as a service to the communities, could do maybe more than we have.”

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WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2016

www.ufvcascade.ca

CULTURE & EVENTS

Latin American club adds drop-in salsa dance classes to weekly repertoire RAYNAH MCIVOR CONTRIBUTOR / PHOTO

UFV’s newly restarted Latin American club is known for its weekly movie nights and informal Spanish lessons, and now they’ve added weekly salsa dancing classes. The classes are hosted every Friday afternoon in the Global Lounge from 4 to 6 p.m. The first of these weekly lessons occurred this past Friday — an amiable atmosphere encouraged by the 20 or so participants.

While the dance originated in its modern form in New York in the mid-’70s, it has always drawn on a variety of inf luences, such as the cha-cha-cha, mambo, and son cubano, and has also inherited other more intangible inf luences from Latin American nations such as Puerto R ico, Cuba, and Colombia. It was this vast variety that drew a decent-sized crowd to the Global Lounge — after all, it’s not every day that you get to learn salsa dancing from your classmates and peers.

The lesson began with the introduction of the basic side-step, before members from the Latin American club stepped in with some customized moves, varying their dancing according to different inf luences.

Renato Dioses Orozco’s Peruvian style included subtle kicks before each step, while Zaira Ramirez Luis’ Venezuelan offshoot was more sprightly. Monii Mendoza and Arturo Ortiz demonstrated their Mexican f lair, and Manuel Castillo showcased the more relaxed, suave, Cuban style of salsa dancing.

After these basic moves had been mastered, the five teachers demonstrated some of the turns and steps that next week ’s session will be introducing.

Renato Dioses Orozco takes the lead and adds some Peruvian flair to proceedings.

Events at UFV library and the Reach illuminate different aspects of the African-Canadian experience GLEN ESS THE CASCADE / PHOTO

This past Friday, the library rotunda on the Abbotsford campus was decorated with f lags from several African nations, traditional West African snacks, and a section set up by local business Kuomboka Crafts, which sold handmade goods and clothes.

Students were also given the option of sticking post-it notes onto a board that asked them the question, “What do you know about Africa?” It was extremely heartening to see a great many post-its stuck there. The convivial mood was also encouraged by the sight of so many different students from different cultures and backgrounds mingling and learning more about Africa.

Speaking as an immigrant from a southern African nation, I enjoy seeing people learning about other cultures. However, the event was a small one, and while it was well put together, it wasn’t as intensive or as formal as a similar event hosted the very next day at the Reach Museum and Gallery.

The Reach’s Black History Month celebration ran throughout that Saturday afternoon and featured snacks, live music, dancing, guest speakers, and a fashion show, as well as several activities for children. It was impressive to see so many young children learning about the social, cultural, and even political contributions made to Canadian history by black Canadians from an incredibly diverse set of backgrounds, but what was even more impressive was how the activities throughout the day were structured to be both entertaining and educational.

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www.ufvcascade.ca

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2016

CULTURE & EVENTS

UPCOMING EVENTS FEB 24

Archival exhibit Voices of The Valley gives first-hand glance at local history

Israel/Palestine film series: “Budrus” 5:30 p.m.

A252 Abbotsford campus

MHAC create-a-vision 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.

The Green

Pink Shirt Day Faculty Microlectures: Two Minute Challenge 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Roadrunner Cafe (A building)

FEB 25 FEB 26 MAR 1

Business After Business mixer

4:30 to 6 p.m.

Great Hall, Abbotsford campus

UFV International: World Music Fridays 3 to 4 p.m.

Global Lounge

President’s Lecture Series: Terry O’Reilly

4 p.m. to 6 p.m.

Great Hall, Abbotsford campus

Photographs: Michael Scoular

MAR 2

Brown-bag Lunch with UFV president Mark Evered

12 p.m. to 1:30 p.m.

Aboriginal Gathering Place CEP campus

Alumni Speaker Panel: Addiction and its impact on the community 5:30 to 7 p.m.

A1457, CEP campus

MAR 2-5

Fraser Valley Stage presents: Guys & Dolls

GLEN ESS THE CASCADE

The Reach Gallery Museum’s latest exhibit Voices of the Valley will be a trip down memory lane for many long-time local residents, as it features first-hand accounts and artifacts from the settlement and colonization of the Fraser Valley. The exhibit, located in the Reach’s rear, far towards the back of the gallery, is housed in a single hallway. Some truly astounding artifacts share space with run-of-the mill mundane items whose age lends them importance; items such as old milk cans and thermal underwear sit next to intricately illustrated old bibles and diaries from Fraser Valley settlers of long ago.

Voices of the Valley was designed around eight major themes: the First Nations who lived and thrived here in the Valley prior to colonization; the surveying and settlement of the Valley; the drainage of Sumas Lake; the agriculture, brick-making, and forestry industries; methods of transportation used here in the Valley; and finally, the economics that grew the development of the Fraser Valley as we know it today. The exhibit explores these themes through several avenues, such as a digital map that charts the changes to the area as time passed, and a visual representation of the many large-scale alterations to surrounding areas brought

about by the increased development of the Fraser Valley.

Other pieces of the exhibit include signs from old stores and companies; items that were for sale as dehydrated milk, horse feed, and bricks; and more personal items from individuals such as clothing, boots, diaries, and personal effects such as compasses and watches.

But the one piece that perhaps most intrigued me was tucked away quietly in the furthest corner, just in front of an exit that led outside. It’s probably the obvious thing to say in this medium, but an enlarged copy of an old newspaper really caught my eye. The front page of the Abbotsford, Sumas & Matsqui Times belonging to the April 6, 1938 issue featured items like the price of meat, ideas for redecorating a house, want ads, personal paragraphs about businessmen going on journeys, the improvement of the BC telephone lines, and an ad for the Hotel Atangard, a building located in downtown Abbotsford. It was almost shocking having to reconcile the building I’ve walked past dozens of times with the one being talked about in this newspaper from before World War II. Who knows, maybe something you see every day will end up on some wall somewhere in 80 years — but for now, if you’re interested in the history of our neighbourhood, I’d recommend taking a look at Voices of The Valley.

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WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2016

www.ufvcascade.ca

CULTURE & EVENTS

No happy endings in ScreenGasm ALEX RAKE THE CASCADE

ScreenGasm, the current show in the S’eliyemataxwtexw Art Gallery, is an example of just how tuned-in UFV students are to the trash of mainstream visual media.

Each work highlights some implication of using screens by using screens, which is often interesting and usually hard on the eyes.

While there are many videos projected on the walls, the pieces that stand out are the installations. “T V Wall” is a stack of monitors all showing different images and clips by the participating artists, a sort of video collage that at times synchronizes in interesting ways. “T V Dinner” by Mitch Huttema is a human figure with a T V for a head, showing trashy news footage from a couple of years ago. His body is made out of edgy articles from recent issues of The Cascade, and he’s eating a plate of dirt.

None of it is very uplifting, but it isn’t meant to be. At the very least, ScreenGasm is inciteful, at times even funny, and totally worth the trip to B Building.

Photograph: Megan Lambert

Editor’s Note: Mitch Huttema is The Cascade’s Multimedia Editor.

History and education professors assist in pro-d day New curriculum rollout discussed by teachers from across BC

GLEN ESS THE CASCADE / PHOTO

Did you ever wonder what your teachers were getting up to during professional development (pro-d) days? This past Friday, UFV’s history department, in conjunction with the teacher education program (TEP), hosted an event structured around recent changes made to the K-12 social studies curriculum here in BC. UFV’s professors decided to extend an invitation to over 110 history and social studies teachers from Surrey, Maple

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R idge, Aldergrove, Mission, Chilliwack, and Abbotsford.

Over the course of the day, these educators took part in several workshops alongside UFV professors.

According to UFV history instructor Robin Anderson, the event was designed to allow teachers from across BC the time to discuss their teaching methods, as well as the pros and pitfalls of the changes to the curriculum. As Anderson said, referencing the concepts underpinning the new material, “This is an opportunity to talk about historical thinking, about teaching history, how to think about history, and to share ideas about teaching.”

The event was a comprehensive guide in how to teach

social studies. Workshop topics ranged from a basic discussion of what historians do and the methods they use, to brainstorming ways to get students to connect with the topic on multiple levels, such as through the use of historical fiction and newer forms of media.

When asked how the day went, Anderson said, “This has been an enormous success today, and we’re already thinking about doing another down the road.”

So don’t be surprised to run into your old high school history teacher here at UFV the next time a pro-d day rolls around.

www.ufvcascade.ca

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2016

CULTURE & EVENTS “Hometown Hockey” is exactly, 100 per cent what hockey in your hometown looks like GLEN ESS THE CASCADE / PHOTO

I’m a cynic, so when I wandered into Abbotsford’s Exhibition Park on Saturday to soak in the Abbotsford stop of the NHL’s ongoing Hometown Hockey event, I expected to get bombarded with branding, merchandise, and marketing of all sorts. I was right about the advertising, but I was wrong to think that the presence of all those logos would ruin the day for me.

Yes, the event featured a dizzying array of companies, all vying for my attention with glossy signs and booths overf lowing with swag. But I quickly learned to look past the publicity stunts, and saw that the park was full of families — happy families.

Children darted around with hockey jerseys, waiting eagerly in lines for snacks, for autographs with former Canuck Brendan Morrison, for free jerseys (with Scotiabank branding), and free hot chocolate (courtesy of McDonald’s). Some kids couldn’t wait to get out of the thin February sunlight and dash into a trailer (plastered in PS4 and Sony stickers), inside of which they could escape from all that real-life hockey stuff by playing NHL 16, the officially licensed NHL video game.

For the tykes that had energy to burn, there was a mini-rink waiting for them, allowing them to play some good ol’ fashioned field hockey. (Most while waiting for their turn for an “augmented reality picture” with one of 25 NHL stars.)

It was a jungle of promotion. A veritable treasure trove of advertising. But if you stared at it hard enough, it morphed into a crowded fair full of families with laughing, smiling, hockeystick-waving children running around and bumping into people, causing spilled drinks and dropped snacks galore. Seriously, one of those kids trundled into me and I ended up with a Hot McChocolate running down my shirt.

And isn’t that what family fun is all about?

FASHION

Red means one thing only: look at me DOMINGO FLORES FASHIONISTA EXTRAORDINAIRE

Let us examine the colour red. It’s a vibrant colour, one that carries with it emotions — powerful emotions. But how is it that a single colour can have such a diverse set of ideas connected with it? And more importantly, how can you incorporate those ideas into your clothing? How can you harness the vibrant emotional energy present in light that resides within the wavelength of 620-740 nanometres?

Well, let us first explore the themes and symbolisms present in the colour red. These start with the very blunt, such as the colour red being equated with blood. While the meanings of other colours have shifted throughout history, red has remained a dominant and visceral colour.

For example, during the Victorian era, blue was considered

feminine and was symbolic of innocence and chastity, whereas pink was considered a boyish colour, being closely related to red, which carries with it symbolism of violence, warfare, and bloodshed.

And yet, despite all these violent connotations that red has, it’s also equated with far sweeter ideas such as sexuality, love, lust, and infatuation. It’s the colour of passion, desire, arousal, and so many other intense emotions. And it certainly is attractive — many surveys have shown that red is the colour most frequently associated with visibility, which is why it is often used by lifeguards, firetrucks, and other emergency services to ensure that they catch your attention. Red’s also the colour that most draws the eye, which is why so many companies use red branding and logos, the better to suck you in with advertising.

But what does all this information mean? You know

what red means, but how does this inf luence your life?

Well it’s very simple: now that you know that red is the colour that is most associated with extroversion, dynamic activity, dominance, and arousal. You know now what to wear when you want to extoll those very red-related virtues.

When you’re in a competitive interview for example, red will subconsciously inf luence your competitors into considering you the dominant force in the room. When you’re in a crowded room, perhaps on a date, and you want to keep your partner’s attention firmly fixed on you, then wear red, and they won’t take their eyes off of you; after all, you’re the one wearing that sexy red clothing!

So now you know how to immediately attract attention, how to become the dominant force in a room, and how to stand out and catch everyone’s eye. Don’t misuse this knowledge, for knowledge is power, and power is red.

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WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2016

www.ufvcascade.ca

ARTS IN REVIEW BOOK REVIEW

What’s her name, again?

Almost Famous Women shakes out files in forgotten archives, diamonds fall out MEGAN LAMBERT CONTRIBUTOR

Almost Famous Women is a book that is better than its title; although a quick glance might make you think so, it isn’t “chick lit.”

Megan Mayhew Bergman doesn’t necessarily write about women who should have been famous, but women whose talents and extraordinary features didn’t propel them to immediate fame.

These short stories are down-to-earth, and not in the girl-next-door, soda-pop-and-bubblegum kind of way.

Bergman writes with a gritty, dirty, and sometimes uncouth honesty that exposes the fragility of an individual’s moral compass. She invites you into the no-holds-barred worlds of athletes and artists, and she doesn’t neatly tie up the strings at the end of each story. She leaves the messiness of their lives still untangled; the narrator and the reader only pop in and out for a minute to see the action. We leave each story without a resolution, but with a comprehensive sympathy for the characters.

Most of Almost Famous Women, technically categorized as historical fiction, is set in the 20th century. I found this useful while I was f lipping from story to story, as my mind’s eye didn’t have to totally deconstruct the social or economic parameters of that time. It was just like typing in “Paris to Vancouver” on Google Earth, and being drawn out of one world and into the next (sometimes giving or taking 20 years).

Each woman is unique, which gives the collection a colourful f lavour (and a smorgasbord of dynamic character development). There is a feminist undercurrent running through these pages, but each story isn’t just about these women being restricted by society. They are overcoming a multitude of personal problems that include being restricted by society, which makes this a great stepping

stone to learning about feminism. This book makes the reader feel empathy for these women — who are of colour, lesbian, single, artistic, athletic, married, privileged, and poor — by seeing them struggle in a time when the odds are already against them.

I won’t give away too much about the characters, but here’s a peek into their diversity: we’ve got a lesbian rower who owns an island and everybody on it; the estranged, illegitimate daughter of Lord Byron; and a pair of orphaned conjoined twins navigating a childhood of exploitative show biz. Each story begins with a photo and a brief description of the almost famous woman, and then Bergman’s imagination fills in the cracks of their history.

But three quarters of the way through the collection, the stories get shorter and the definition of “historical” gets broader. Bergman takes a small detail, “the boxes of lipstick,” from an anecdote of an officer who helped liberate the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and writes from a nameless point of view about the women in the camp who put on the lipstick after they were liberated.

“The Lottery, Redux” is a creative rewrite of Shirley Jackson’s famous (and, after its publication in New York in the 1920s, hated) short story “The Lottery,” a cautionary tale where villagers of a New England town blindly follow the tradition of randomly stoning one of its inhabitants to death every year. Bergman constructs a matriarchal leadership of the town, whose descendants are safe from the killings and feel guilty for being so. As the rest of the collection is primarily historical fiction, this story seemed more like Bergman serving her personal writing interests rather than continuing the theme set in the book.

That said, it was also nice to shake up the trajectory of the piece with something fictional — especially once I figured out that Bergman’s formula goes a little something like this: protagonist is potentially (or, “almost”) famous, protagonist goes through everyday life (which sucks), protagonist either dies or is left in a vague metaphysical

awareness.

However, Almost Famous Women isn’t boring or predictable. It’s well worth the time if you’re looking for an interesting and enlightening read.

ALBUM REVIEW

Foxes tries to break the curse of the breakout featured artist HARVIN BHATHAL CONTRIBUTOR

In May of 2014, Louisa Rose Allen released her debut album Glorious. While it did get some recognition, the artist better known as Foxes could not shake the label of being “that featured artist,” with her featuring on Zedd’s Grammy award-winning song “Clarity,” as well as Fall Out Boy’s “Just One Yesterday.” Two years later, it is safe to say that Allen is still trying to carve out an identity with the release of her sophomore album, All I Need.

Instead of focusing on synthpop hits, Allen aims for All I Need to be much more raw and emotional, with the talented singer-song writer showcasing her vocals — though she does retain some of the synthpop that put her name on the map.

To aid her case, no song on All I Need has a featured artist.

Throughout the entirety of the album, Allen shows how a heartbreak nearly crippled her, but rather than letting it get the best of her, she tries to chose the better path. On “R ise Up,” the voice of Allen’s niece says, “If I was a bird, I could f ly far, far, far away,” followed by an instrumental that instills the emotional feeling of rising up as powerfully as a Lindsey Stirling violin piece could.

“On My Way,” “Devil Side,” and “Scar” show Allen’s love for ballads — the pain in her voice is unmistakable as Allen tries to give the listener an inside view of what she has

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gone through. While the rendition is not on the album, the acoustic version of “Devil Side” is especially haunting as the acoustic setting allows for the listener to feel each word as if it has its own voice.

While not a ballad, “If You Leave Me Now” is equally as saddening as the two songs that precede it. It is the glue of the entire album, exploring Allen’s heartbreak head-on.

Of course, though Allen makes sure to focus the album on her vocals, she also keeps the synthpop that is synonymous with her name. The best synthpop songs of the album are “Shoot Me Down,” “Wicked Love,” “and “Body Talk.”

Allen possess an ability to play her voice against the lyrics; she disguises “Shoot Me Down” as a melodious and happy song, though lyrically it is quite dark. The manner in which the song f lows reminded me of “White Coats” from Glorious.

“Body Talk,” the album’s first single, is the most danceoriented track on All I Need. The lyrics allude to how the speaker realizes she is better off without a relationship, but misses its physicality — what better way to channel frustration and sadness than dancing? The guitar riffs have the song sounding as if it were released in the ‘80s, but with a new spin courtesy of Allen’s powerful voice.

On the other hand, “Amazing” and “Lose My Cool” aren’t too meaningful — the former doesn’t feel like it belongs on the album, with an inspirational message shoved in the listener’s ears, and the latter doesn’t have much going for it

either — though the two are undeniably catchy.

All I Need ends with a reprised version of “R ise Up,” beginning in the same way as the intro, with Allen’s niece reciting, “If I was a bird, I could f ly far, far, far away.”

“R ise Up” is essentially the credits of the album: Allen over her heartbreak, taking off as with the intro, with fantastic production behind her.

www.ufvcascade.ca

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2016

ARTS IN REVIEW MOVIE REVIEW

Shuffle

CHARTS 01

In lieu of a CiVL Shuffle this week, please enjoy this portrait of CiVL station manager Aaron Levy.

Artist: Sultan Jum

You Say Party You Say Party

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Dodgers Orphans, Fools, and Thieves (single)

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Jordan Klassen Javelin

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The Sylvia Platters Make Glad the Day

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Half Moon Run Sun Leads Me On

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Iron Maiden The Book of Souls

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Neon Indian VEGA INTL. Night School

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Modern Space Before Sunrise

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Striker Stand in the Fire

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City and Colour If I Should Go Before You

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Joywave How Do You Feel Now?

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Foreign Diplomats Princess Flash

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Library Voices Lovish

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Young Rival Interior Light

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The Dears Times Infinity, Vol. One

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Bear Mountain

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Tales of the Tomb Volume One: Morpras

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Charles Bradley Changes (single)

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Gomorrah The Haruspex

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An open letter to one of the writers of Zoolander 2

Badu

Ought Sun Coming Down

Dear Justin Theroux, What we had together was great. Those two seasons of The Leftovers will always be the best times of my life, and I doubt anyone else will come along with strong enough writing or performances to take them away from me. The more I learned about you, the greater those memories became.

IMDB credited you as the dreadlocked DJ from the first Zoolander who brainwashes Derek into killing the prime minister of Malaysia. You used a fighting style rooted in breakdancing techniques to take on Hansel during the big climax of the film.

It was dope. That movie was already one of my favourite comedies of all time, and knowing that you had it in you to do great dramatic and comedic work enriched both experiences.

And then they announced a sequel to Zoolander.

And you had a major writing credit! I can’t tell you the mix of feelings I had, the butterf lies in my stomach. Sequels to comedic films have a notorious history of being formulaic and terrible; I still had the bitter echos of Anchorman 2 in the back of my mind. Yet, it’s you. Kevin Garvey. You are the chosen one, the next big star, whose show is going to sweep the Emmys. On top of that, you’re surrounded by greatness, Ben Stiller is funny! Moshe Kasher was involved! Even Kyle Mooney had a substantial role.

So, I bought the ticket, took my girlfriend, and we made a date of it. I sat down thinking I’d be surrounded by the people I love, her and you. But I left the theatre that night with part of my heart missing.

I’m sorry Justin, but I can’t give you the satisfaction of saying “it’s not you, it’s me.” It was you, and everyone else associated with Zoolander 2.

The actors, writers, producers, and company who

let this happen. The government of Italy for letting you film. It’s so bad, it almost seems intentional. As if the Holly wood Illuminati purposely decided at a late evening wine mixer that it would be hilarious to stamp all over the legacy of a cult classic.

People can make all the fuss they want about dumb storylines and plots in comedic films, but at least Zoolander the First had internal consistency and was well written. The few bearable moments in the sequel come from Kyle Mooney, but even then he’s just doing a rehash of the same awkward character he’s had on YouTube for years.

There are no scenes with the principle leads that come any where close to being humorous. The closest I came to laughing was when I blew air out of my nose really quickly, not so much in response to a punchline or gag, but rather so I could somehow justif y to myself that I spent money to see this movie — so that at least I had some type of reaction.

Even your appearance wasn’t enough to brighten my mood. In fact, as soon as I realized that was your only scene, I began weighing the cost of staying in the theatre against the cold pasta in my fridge and a few emails that I wanted to type on my computer at home rather than my phone because sometimes my thumbs hurt.

I’m sorry Justin, the magic is gone. I just don’t feel the same way I did about you or the Zoolander series as I did a week ago. I think we are just in different parts of our lives. Let’s see how season 3 of The Leftovers turns out, and if you promise never to make a Zoolander 2 again we can pick up where we left off.

Sincerely, Panku Sharma

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WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2016

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ARTS IN REVIEW

S undBites

Animal Collective

Simple Plan

Painting With

Taking One for the Team

While scrolling through Facebook, I realized that the band that influenced me the most growing up had a new release out. For nostalgic reasons, I had to check it out. When I heard the first track, “Opinion Overload,” I immediately smiled to myself, the same as if it had been released over a decade ago.

I recognize that Taking One for the Team is not Simple Plan’s greatest work. It essentially follows the same formula as their previous releases: the songs feature the same topics in lyrical content, and they still only work on maintaining catchy hooks and the pop-punk roots that made them famous, yet this works in their favour, as it doesn’t alienate older fans.

Features from Nelly, Rock City, and Juliet Simms update the band’s sound, though. The

Mini album reviews

songs I continuously gravitated to were “I Don’t Wanna Go to Bed” and “Boom!”

As if that’s not enough, to wrap up the album, “I Dream About You,” fades out into a dream-like mixed-sports game. (The members of the band are the players.) Playby-play announcer Bob Cole, known from his spot on Hockey Night in Canada broadcasts, closes things out with this modest sign-off: “Simple Plan have won the game. Oh baby.”

Regardless of the 17 years since their inception, Taking One for the Team shows Simple Plan still know how to fulfill fan expectations well.

Remington Fioraso

On Painting With, everything echoes and vibrates with an experimental pop feel, and the lyrics are nothing short of picturesque.

“Dinosaurs” and “Golden Girls” are evocative of not only ancient civilizations, cave paintings, and tribal warriors, but feminist issues, too. David Portner (Avey Tare) said, in an interview with Billboard, that this interest was sparked by a TED Talk about universal figures seen across civilizations. “Usually you think about the animals, but there are actually other things that seem confusing but are in every cave painting,” he said.

Avery Tare, Panda Bear, and Geologist ​ piece their ideas together to make a very synthetic collage — if you see it as a whole, the thrash can sound overwhelming. The key is to listen for the creative details in each layer — for example, an audio clip of a reporter

saying, “While you’re out and about on the freeways, there are no dinosaurs to worry about,” amongst powerful, dinosaur-like synths and ambient jungle creature voices on “Hocus Pocus.” ​“Golden Gal” pulls a quote from “Golden Girls,” and calls out how the ideal “Golden Gal” is “complex and brave, a powerful lure without showing some legs.” Whether or not you agree with feminist values, Animal Collective argues that society values superficial issues, and the way they lay out real, complex topics in their tracks is beautiful: “You’d think the gals should feel so comfortable these days / But sex and gender bring some troubles to the fray / And trouble tears apart another golden heart / So I want to be the reminder that she’s stronger than the bulk on other days.”

Jasmine Hope Silva

Villagers

Jordan Klassen

Where Have You Been All My Life?

An atmospheric, acoustic, folk-like rhythm and a soothing voice: that’s exactly what Villagers’ new album, Where Have You Been All My Life sounds like from beginning to end.

While listening to the album, I was captivated by its melodic and harmonic components — the synthesis of bass, keyboard, guitar, vocals, and various other instruments are mystical and enticing.

My favourite song on this album is “The Wave” because of its simple yet

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Javelin intense composition; the variety of sounds, progressions, and basic rhythms used in this particular song is enchanting. Another great little encouraging tune I enjoyed was “Courage,” which was catchy, incredibly atmospheric, and engaging.

Band leader Conor O’Brien’s easygoing yet poignant lyrics and unique instrumental arrangements all worked to make Where Have You Been All My Life? an absolute delight to listen to.

Sonja Klotz

Jordan Klassen stays mostly the same in his latest release: the same melodic and melancholy tones permeate the entire track list. Usually much more reserved, Klassen explores similar emotional themes to his other records, yet in Javelin they hold a raw and confident power that he has not previously exhibited.

Klassen sings of his mother’s struggle with cancer and delves into deeply personal territory with the same delicate passion of

Sufjan Stevens, attempting to pin down his worries, failed relationships, and emotional tribulations. Yet through it all he finds time to smile and dance on “Baby Moses,” and indulge in ‘80s-like sounds on “Light in the Evening.” Javelin is confident, emotional, and heartwarming. The most significant change from his past records is the pop vibes that layer over much of his dreamy atmospheric soundscape.

Mitch Huttema

www.ufvcascade.ca

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2016

ARTS IN REVIEW MOVIE REVIEW

Documentary reveals Nina Simone's rage and passion at being an artist people hear, but don’t listen to MARTIN CASTRO THE CASCADE

One of the newest documentaries produced for Netf lix, What Happened, Miss Simone? focuses on the titular artist Nina Simone and her fight for not just creative autonomy, but also against racism and a deteriorating mental condition — for freedom, in the truest sense of the word.

“What’s ‘free’ to you?” a reporter asks Simone in 1968, after she says that she only feels free on stage.

“Same thing it is to you. You tell me,” she jokes.

Then after a moment of silence, she answers the question: “It’s just a feeling. It’s like, how do you tell somebody how it feels to be in love? How are you going to tell anybody who has not been in love how it feels to be in love? You can describe things but you can’t tell them, but you know it when it happens.”

Later she reaches a definition: “I’ll tell you what freedom is to me: no fear.”

Directed by Liz Garbus, What Happened, Miss Simone? covers Nina Simone’s upbringing and her role as a black icon, an almost militant vocalist.

The documentary incorporates recorded interviews, splicing Nina’s voice with video interviews of her contemporaries to paint a picture of the singer’s life.

And generally, Nina’s life was spent fighting.

“People seem to think that when she went out on stage she became Nina Simone. My mother was Nina Simone 24 / 7, and that’s where it became a problem,” Lisa Simone Kelly, Nina’s daughter, says as she recalls her mother’s combative life. “When the show ended, everybody else went home. She was still fighting.”

Having started her musical career as a classical pianist, Simone had to sacrifice her role as a mother so she could tour and have a life as a recording musician;

according to the documentry, she would often get angry and lash out at people, be it her manager or the crowd itself. “I just want them to listen to the music like they did in the classical world,” she says in a recording. “I thought they needed teaching. If they couldn’t listen, fuck it!”

More than anything, Nina felt dissatisfaction with the conditions in America, and anger. She let that anger out through her music, although that’s not the only outlet she thought of. “If I’d had my way, I’d have been a killer,” she says in an interview. “I would have had guns, and I would have gone to the South and gave them violence for violence, shotgun for shotgun.” Her husband (and manager) convinced her to dedicate herself to music, although he would later criticize it for being too confrontational.

The toll that this anger took on her was clear to Nina, and she addressed it: “Artists that don’t get involved in preaching messages probably are happier, but you see, I have to live with Nina, and that is very difficult.” We’re shown Nina’s journal throughout the documentary, and in it, we see a woman who’s tired of fighting everyone around her: “Through the years I’ve wasted away to almost nothing,” she writes. “Inside I’m screaming, ‘Someone help me,’ but the sound isn’t audible — like screaming without a voice.”

“Goddamn it,” Nina writes. “I could kill them all.”

The pressures of her own state of mind, abuse from her husband, as well as the stress of her own life took almost all of her, and twisted it into an indiscernible thing.

“When I was young,” she says, recalling her childhood, “I knew to stay alive.”

What Happened, Miss Simone? shows us just that: an artist, oppressed, and enraged by her oppression, singing not just to entertain, but to survive.

Grammys no longer an awards show but a one-night music festival JEFFREY TRAINOR THE CASCADE

At this year’s Grammys, over the course of a over threeplus-hour broadcast, a mere eight awards were presented (most were announced before the actual awards show).

The Grammy Awards, then, have mostly become a steady stream of performances.

A couple of the night’s best performances came in the form of tributes. At the top of this group was a reunited Eagles ( Jackson Browne stood in for Glenn Frey) performing “Take it Easy,” and Chris Stapleton, Gary Clark Jr., and Bonnie Raitt performing their take on B.B. King’s “The Thrill Is Gone.”

And then there was Kendrick Lamar: easily the best of the night with his intense renditions of “The Blacker the Berry” and “Alright,” the performance for which featured a jailhouse and a chain gang. As the performance unfolded, you could sense uneasiness among the audience due to the intensity and weight of what Lamar was singing about in his music. This is how Lamar performs, but it was heavy for the awards show setting. It felt like a truly honest moment of expression within a hollow, disconnected evening.

The reason for this hollow feeling was not only the other performances, but also some of the awards selections.

In terms of performances, this mainly came from the disingenuous feeling that came from the likes of Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber, and The Weeknd, who all came off as snobby and arrogant through their performances. The other downer came via Lady Gaga’s David Bowie tribute.

By no means do I hate Lady Gaga, but her performance ended up seeming more like a parody video, more a joke than a proper, moving tribute.

In terms of awards, I don’t know if we need a “Grammys so white” hashtag like the Oscars, but there is definitely still a long way to go; look no further than the album of the year award that was given to Taylor Swift.

I know we shouldn’t be surprised that the Grammy voting committee selected an album about #boytroubles and #squadgoals over Lamar’s social commentary and his dissection of a toxic industry. I guess we should view the fact that it was even nominated in the category as a sign of progress for rap music, often marginalized to its separate category, but it was a very obvious misstep for the award show.

However, the icing on the cake came when, after winning the award, Swift gave a speech about her own personal

accomplishments and how you shouldn’t let other people say they made you successful. The ironic thing about it was that she had a team of 10 producers and writers that worked on her album standing behind her. This again relates back to the hollow and disconnected feeling that lay over the whole event. Though Swift plays the main role in the creation of her music, it is selfish and arrogant for her to claim she created her success alone.

At this point, I almost feel it is wrong to call the Grammys an award show anymore. With the measly number of awards actually given out on-air and the lack of time given to winners to actually thank the people they want to thank, the Grammys has become more of a one-night music festival than anything else. The number of performances has skyrocketed over recent years, and perhaps it’d be best to scale back the number and increase the amount of awards given. Even the most diehard music fan will have trouble watching for a whole three-and-a-half hours, and by making better music selections and trimming the fat from the show, the Grammys could easily become a smaller night that would not only benefit those present, but also the audience at home.

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WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2016

www.ufvcascade.ca

Photograph: Mitch Huttema

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