Feature
Opinion
Arts & Culture
Treasures of the past on campus 14
Bioshock Infinite a rip-roarin’ adventure 18
PM prefers pandas over people’s plight 13
gateway April 3rd, 2013
Issue No. 27
Volume 103
THE
TH E O F F IC IA L STUDE NT NE WS PA P E R AT TH E UN I V ER S I T Y OF A LBERTA
Coffee Calamity Poor profits sound Java Jive’s last dance
Java Jive closing after 37 years Alana Willerton
Arts & Culture Editor @alanawillerton After 37 years of devotedly serving coffee to students at the University of Alberta, Java Jive operations will grind to a halt by the end of the month. A coffee staple at the university, the company announced Tuesday that all their locations — one in HUB, one in SUB, plus their store on 99 street — will close their doors at the end of April after years of struggling to stay afloat. Michael Ould, the founder of Java Jive, first opened one of the HUB locations in 1976, and it quickly became a popular coffee stop for students thanks to Java Jive’s dedication to quality specialty coffee. Ould later opened two more locations on campus, as well as Java Jive’s roasting facility and factory store. The university locations, which were extremely popular in their early years, have recently seen a severe decline in traffic. Along with Ould’s belief that students are spending less time on campus in general, he also
cited Aramark Food Services franchises such as Tim Horton’s, Starbucks and Second Cup as competition that have slowly been edging his company out. “I call it death by a thousand cuts,” Ould said. “This has been going on for a few years, and this last year and a half they’ve really started to proliferate the campus with these satellite outlets and it’s cut off the traffic to our locations. So needless to say, we’re the ones who are suffering from sharing with Aramark.” Ould stressed that part of the problem was the fact that Java Jive is forced to stay open 12 months of the year, while Aramark franchises can open and close depending on when it would be good business to do so. Ould pointed to the lack of campus traffic during the summer and Christmas months as being particularly financially draining, which have turned Java Jive’s university locations into what Ould calls “a six month business.”
PLEASE SEE coffee PAGE 5
dan mckechnie
theatre preview
Citadel’s Penelopiad injects female identity into classic literary tale Billy-Ray Belcourt
arts & culture staff @billyrayb Greek myths have traditionally been confined to the masculine perspectives of warriors or male narrators who put men on heroic pedestals for violent acts they committed to save society from a monstrosity or malevolent god. But where do women and femininity fit in this time-honoured body of literature? Typically in the form of the goddess, the prominent symbol of femininity with her endless beauty and allure, but also frequently depicted as a distraction or temptation. In the Citadel Theatre’s all-female production of The Penelopiad, Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s novella comes alive by injecting a male-dominated genre with a sense of humanity and feminism. Her witty retelling of Homer’s classic myth The Odyssey is told from the perspective of the “original desperate housewife” Penelope, who endures her husband Odysseus’s absence
while he fights in the Trojan War for 10 years. As hope for Odysseus’s safe return to his kingdom diminishes, hordes of suitors jump at the opportunity to marry Penelope. Convinced they have ulterior motives, Penelope enlists the assistance of 12 maids to help stall the men in order to grant Odysseus more time. In The Odyssey, the 12 maids meet an unfortunate fate as their lives are taken at the hands of Odysseus and his son upon his return. As a result, in Atwood’s version, the spirits of these 12 women, who were barely represented in the original story, haunt Penelope and Odysseus, speaking on topics from their slave childhoods to their dreams of being princesses. They’re given voices not typically granted to female slaves in Ancient Greece, and while their
ghosts serve as a reminder of the wrongdoings committed by Odysseus, they also speak to the injustice that characterizes representations of women and other subordinate characters in Greek mythology. “People deserve not just justice, but an opportunity to tell their story. Penelope’s never had the chance to tell her story, the maids have never had the chance to tell their stories (and) in fact they’ve never even been given names,” explains Keltie Brown, a U of A graduate and The Penelopiad’s assistant director. “(The Penelopiad is) about the right of every person, of every character, to have a name, a face and an opportunity to see some sort of justice done.”
PLEASE SEE penelopiad PAGE 20
“Why does the soap in the SUB bathrooms look and feel like semen?”
#3LF page 13