Musician draws on his Capilano cohorts to make sweet sounds

Some of best times I’ve ever had playing or seeing music have been in living rooms. There is something about a big, open, comfortable space that is conducive to making great music. And when you can stand inches behind a drummer who is really digging in, it makes for an experience unlike any other. A Ghost To Kill Again’s inaugural show at the Vancity Culture Lab was like being on a really sweet sofa, and having your mind blown watching a wicked band.

The Culture Lab is just one result of the 14 million dollar renovation of The Cultch. Once known as the Vancouver East Cultural Centre, The Cultch has been a hub of artistic endeavor for 36 years. Among the many changes is the introduction of the Curators-In-Residence, a program that is “making the Lab available to young artists making waves in Vancouver”.

Aaron Joyce isn’t just making waves, he’s tsunamiing your ass. As the first to helm the new series at the Cultch, Aaron and his band A Ghost To Kill Again really broke in the new room with their modern take on Prog Rock. Although Joyce isn’t consciously trying to channel bands such as King Crimson, Yes, or 70’s Frank Zappa, the result of his “wanting to make a new music record that happened to be in the guise of a rock band” definitely owes much to those caped and bell-bottomed hair farmers. Joyce is drawing from the same pools of inspiration as the progressive rock bands before him, incorporating elements of classical and world music, as well as jazz improvisation.

Accompanying Mr. Joyce were his long time associates and compadres, Alvaro Rojas on lead guitar, Cory Curtis on bass, and Sam Cartwright on drums. The band formed during their tenure at Cap’s jazz program. Aaron’s reasons for choosing Cap were more than just learning to play the guitar: “When I first went to Cap, my only goal was to meet other musicians and start a band.” He found the majority of his musical relationships through the program.

The evening also served as the CD release of AGTKA’s second album, Stockholm Syndrome, a fantastic sounding production recorded at The Hive Studios. Joyce is no stranger to the Hive, having recently produced a new album for singer Jess Hill. “The album has very lush instrumentation, violins, violas, cellos, mandolins, banjo, upright bass. Part of being a good producer is getting the best performance out of the musicians, but it’s also being really organized, booking rehearsals, writing arrangements, making sure people are being paid.”

The set up for the first performance really was like a living room, with the band in the middle of the large performance space facing each other inwards. At one point Aaron asked the audience that surrounded them to move closer, and they happily did. Corbin Murdock is the Youth Coordinator of the Cultch, and he loved the way that Aaron used the space: “It created a totally unique concert experience. You could hear every note and nuance. It was one of the best shows I've seen all year.”

Murdock sees the Culture Lab contributing to Vancouver's emerging cultural community. “As well as boosting the profile of the curators themselves, the program aims to showcase the best of what is happening in Vancouver. It is about exposing The Cultch's existing audience to artists in this city, as well as bringing new audiences to The Cultch.”

On top of the Curator-In-Residence program, Murdock is responsible for creating opportunities for young artists, including mentorships, performances, and the IGNITE! Festival. The Cultch is further committed to making the arts accessible to youth through the TELUS Youth Pass. “It is available free at the box office. It'll get you $2 tickets if you are 12-19 (however, keep in mind, we don't ID).”

Aaron’s next performance is September 27th, and will feature his band Microscopic, an improvising trio in which he plays the Weissenborn guitar, an acoustic lap-steel that is played with a tone bar. That show will be a CD release as well. And to cap off his residency he will be unveiling Spearbeak, a ten-piece atonal Afrobeat project. “It’s highly rhythmic, all the crazy things I don’t get to do in A Ghost To Kill Again I do in this project.”

There is no doubt Aaron Joyce is making waves, and with the Youth Pass available at the Cultch there is no reason to miss the great work of these Cap alumni. Spearbeak will be playing a crazy Halloween show October 30th, so check out Joyce’s blog at http://cultchcurators.wordpress.com, or go to www.thecultch.com for more info.

Mike Kennedy
Arts Editor

Basterds Rewrite History: Because facts are for pussies

The time machine question is a device that proves very few care for Hitler. When asked, “What would you do if you had a time machine?”, a staggering number of people will say, “Go back and kill Hitler.” Why? Sure, everything he did was problematic to humanity, but why kill? Maybe go back and arrange it so he actually got into Art School. Everyone has it out for Hitler, and Nazis as a whole. When it comes to the topic, people want blood. Nazi blood! The blood of the guilty! So, failing an actual time machine, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds serves as the next best thing, and is possibly the first film to give audiences flat out Man on Nazi violence.

When it surfaced that Tarantino’s long awaited “World War II film” (rumours started spreading a good year before Kill Bill was in the works) was a film about killing Nazis in cold blood I immediately loved it. A group of Jews beating the shit out of Nazis for a film’s premise - I can get behind that.

Many people will tell you that this is a war film. It isn’t. It’s a Nazi film. There is a difference, especially in this case, because WWII is merely the setting for the story’s progression. The dual story lines found within the film are connected only by the shared goal of the protagonists: to kill the Nazis dead.

Nazis have been firmly cemented into the pop-culture collective consciousness as being the unquestioned personification of evil, which makes them perfect film villains. A Nazi’s only characterization is the fact that he is a Nazi. One of the first things to come out of Aldo “the Apache” Raine’s mouth is that a Nazi “ain’t got no humanity,” solidifying their reputation as a soulless mass of evil.

Another way that it works to Tarantino’s advantage is that the main villain is the entire Third Reich. Nazis have been through the genre-bending rigmarole before and are easily fitted with other even stranger genres. This is what Tarantino loves - schlocky pastiche. Nazi films have a long history of being thrown into any fine genre-blend: Shockwave was Nazi zombies, Boys of Brazil was Nazis and clones, Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS is Nazis and 70‘s sexploitation, and Dead Snow was Nazi zombies, again. Inglorious Basterds has been compared to the “spaghetti western,” a favourite of Tarantino’s, and it’s a fitting description. Brad Pitt’s Aldo “the Apache” is basically Lee Van Cleef’s Angel Eyes from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, dressed in 1940’s War garb.

What separates Inglorious Basterds from any of the aforementioned films is that it’s better than all of them. This is a Nazi film with larger dimensions; a Nazi film where the Nazis are actual characters. The Basterds’ view of the Nazi is they are guilty by association, yet the film’s main villain is more fully realized than the majority of the other characters. Right from his first scene, Standartenfuhrer Hans Landa comes off as a man simply doing his job, and seems rather innocent and polite about it – always holding himself with a sense of class and social awkwardness thrown in for charm, misusing English sayings and phrases. This isn’t some cruel death machine SS character from the 70’s. This is an actual human being. Peel back the skin of the character and his true evil can be found, but Landa’s evil is one of a rare subtly. Nazi officials are more frequently characterized by mindlessly gunning down people. This is probably why he survives so long.

Inglorious Basterds starts off with the killing of nameless Nazis but eventually grows to showcase the actions of human beings when faced with what they see as evil. Tarantino knows that Nazis are evil and that evil must be destroyed, but along the way he gives us characters that carry more humanity than your average villain, making this possibly the best of the genre.

Sam MacDonald
Writer

Digital Downloading Comes at a Cost: Flat fee could save you from a lawsuit

Canadian news bloggers have been excited the last few weeks: it’s not every day you see a target as easy as the recording industry’s evil shills. They’ve been surfacing in Toronto to stack the deck in a series of “town hall meetings” regarding the future of Canadian copyright law, and these oleaginous disembodied suits are pushing for an American-style system – complete with six-figure fines for every illegally downloaded song. So if you’ve ever gotten music for free, this debate might interest you.

Up here, the four dominant corporate record labels call their mouthpiece the CRIA, or Canadian Recording Industry Alliance. Artists and small labels largely consider this group backwards and authoritarian. In 2006, the Songwriters Association of Canada (SAC) was formed in an attempt to reverse the damage. Bill Henderson (of Chilliwack fame), the vice president of this association, recently tabled the most reasonable suggestion that’s been heard in a while. Henderson suggests a flat monthly tax on Internet file sharers, with the proceeds going primarily to artists. A watchdog group would patrol peer-to-peer networks and locate non-paying downloaders, who will be subject to some kind of lawsuit. (Presumably with a fine under a hundred grand. Ours is a warm-hearted country.)

He’s unequivocal about his acclaim for the peer-to-peer networks. “It’s the most efficient distribution system of the largest repertoire of music ever assembled,” says Henderson. “What’s not to love about that?” If you’re dead set on monetizing file sharing, there’s an obvious advantage to this business model. While the mainstream content industry grinds its gears trying to compete with free, by endlessly building pricey online versions of its physical storefronts, services like Soulseek and BitTorrent continue to thrive. Henderson’s idea is to piggyback on the simplicity and near-perfection of pirate networks. They already exist, they have better and more diverse content than the best online stores, and they have one crucial feature: you can download whatever you want, without restrictions, period. Because they weren’t built with Big Content’s archaic restrictions in mind, they amount to the single greatest library of music ever amassed. Toss out BitTorrent for the iTunes Store? Every record store geek, everywhere in the world, is laughing.

Henderson’s system sure isn’t ideal, because it still reinforces the essential lie that free music is morally wrong. (Can you imagine A Tribe Called Quest reaming you out for borrowing their album from a friend, or hearing their songs on a mixtape?) It’s a problem of perception. Under this system, you’re not paying for a service; you’re paying for immunity from prosecution. But there’s nothing illicit about downloading an album – it’s become too universal. The breathtaking online library and its access systems aren’t going anywhere. Like physical libraries, it helps make creative culture a basic component of our everyday. The access to new music shouldn’t be considered a commodity. It’s as essential as power and water. So by all means, give me the chance to drop in ten bucks a month, and I’ll sleep easier knowing independent musicians are paying rent. But we need to kill these screeds about how downloading is a danger to music. When I get behind on my hydro bill, I don’t become a danger to electricity.

Martin Hazelbower
Writer

High Politics: The Curious Case of the Arctic Sea

How do you lose an entire ship full of weapons? While it’s hardly a headline now when a freighter is hijacked off the Somali coast, it certainly is one when a freighter, purported to be carrying a clandestine arms shipment is – especially when the hijacking occurs not off the Horn of Africa, but rather in European waters, in the Baltic Sea.

The ship in question is named the Arctic Sea and hails from a Russian port. On this specific run, the ship was headed from Finland to Algeria with a cargo manifest purporting to contain of over $ 2,000,000 worth of timber, according to reports published by The Telegraph on September 6, 2009. While the ship was on a trip from Finland to Algeria, it’s original port of call was Kaliningrad on July 17th, a place well known for being a hub for illegal arms trafficking from the former Soviet states to destinations and buyers unknown.

The Arctic Sea was originally reported hijacked on July 24th as it made its way through the Baltic Sea to pass through the English Channel. After the ship passed through the Channel on July 28th, it was reported to be ‘lost’ on all radar and a massive search involving both Russian and NATO naval fleets ensued. A rescue party dispatched from a Russian Destroyer off the coast of West Africa eventually recovered the ship on August 17th – detaining the hijackers (7 Estonians and 2 Latvians) and rescuing the Russian crew. This is where the official stories seem to end and the conspiracy theories begin.

In an article dated September 6th, The Telegraph reported that several sources in both Russian and Israeli security services have questioned the official Kremlin explanation of the hijacking, reported by the Lawyer for the accused hijackers to have been some sort of Eco-terrorism gone awry, and instead have focused on what many security sources believe was an interception of a secret arms shipment. While reports differ as to the cargo, many point towards a possible shipment of Russian S-300 Surface to Air Missiles, a state of the art anti-aircraft weapons system, rumoured to have been ultimately bound for Iran. Because of the Iran angle, the story has received a fair bit of coverage in Israeli newspapers, specifically the Jerusalem Post, which was one of the first papers to report the theory that Israeli security was responsible for taking over the ship.

The major problem with this theory is that the detained hijackers are all Eastern Europeans with no connection to Israel and are claiming to be involved in an Eco-guardian ship group akin to Green Peace. The editor of a small Russian online paper, Mikhail Voitenjo, who was one of the first Russian journalists to break the supposed arms deal angle, spoke to The Telegraph, stating that he has been forced to flee the country after receiving threats from people he believed to be involved in Russian Security Services. Ultimately, whatever actually happened on the Arctic Sea will likely not be known for quite sometime, but the “facts” will likely come out as the hijackers are tried before a Russian court sometime in the future.

Aaron Bolus
Columnist

Love, Awkwardly - Episode One: The Clean Break

How does one end a five-year relationship with someone? In past decades, a heart to heart conversation would have sufficed. In the eighties, a John Hughes-inspired dance floor break up may have commenced. As I learned last year, the common way to cut the string on a relationship in the 2000s is easier than you might have thought, and summed up in one simple word: Facebook. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it, as it basically paints you out to be the tool of the town. But for those with testicles the size of frozen blueberries, it's a pretty easy and clean way to deal with things.
The ultimate icing on the cake is that my now ex chose to wait until I left our home for the day, and catch me during my shift at work while I was on the now loathed Facebook chat feature. Mid shift, a message popped up, and a conversation soon took place that would alter the course of my love life. A small pop up on the bottom of my screen, abrasively reading "Hey, I don't think this is working for me anymore." Confused, I rebutted with "What isn't." A one word ending, brisk with a sting: "Us." When I tell people I was broken up with on Facebook, they either laugh or presume I'm joking. In hindsight, it seems pretty fucking post-modern and hilarious. At the time, I was more enraged than amused.
On my walk home that day, staring off into the rainy Vancouver skies, little did I know what was ahead of me – something altogether new and unheard of. Something called dating. Gulp. From the time I was nineteen until early last year, I was in a relationship with the same person. Coming from a very traditional small town, I never experienced much in the way of dating, romance, or sex. Oh, little did I know the joys and terrors that lay ahead of me. Much as it was awkward to not have my first kiss until 19, it was equally awkward to try dating for the first time at 24. You see, as soon as I arrived in this beautiful city almost six years ago, I found myself not dating, but immediately paired with and living with someone who I would be with for five years. Ridiculous, right? I missed out on those awkward teen romances, and uncomfortable early twenties dating pools. Well, now it's all been about playing catch up.
In day-to-day actions, in customer service jobs, and transit run-ins, I had learned just how bizarre human beings can be. But when you actually attempt dating them, a whole new Pandora's box is opened: one filled with tortured creatures of every type. Each specimen remains a ticking time bomb that erupts at the most random and inopportune time, but each accompanied by a priceless and curious story to tell friends over drinks. Everyone has these stories, sure. But it wasn't until this year that I was able to know just exactly what this dating world was all about. And I'm not sure if I'm better or worse off because of that.
In the coming weeks, I will indulge you with the socially bizarre individuals I've met along the way.


[Blurb]
JJ Brewis is a student at Capilano University. He writes on his experience as a mid-twenties gay man who suddenly finds himself single for the first time since teenage years, and attempts the reverse order of dating after a relationship.

JJ Brewis Columnist

An Age Beyond Authenticity: The secret lies of hipsters

i-ro-ny
–noun, plural -nies.
1.
When, through any means, a stated meaning differs, or particularly is opposite, from an intended meaning. - New World Dictionary. J.L. Bathurst. 2004.

Montreal, the birthplace of hipsters1, is drowning in irony – no one even knows what it means anymore. Like a self-referential spiral, irony has created a cultural milieu where the actual meaning of the world is impossible to discern. Immersed in it, we have lost touch.

Example: I'm outside this bar smoking, my iPod in one ear. There's a group of people next to me, and I can't help but overhear them. One girl is doing most of the talking. She’s wearing a Gary Glitter tee-shirt and bright yellow pants, and she's pretty hot. Stunning actually. Blond. Gorgeous. Leather jacket. Think Patricia Arquette in True Romance.

The group of guys around her are in rapture. They're all “actively listening”, throwing in little "yeahs" and "rights" whenever there’s a pause in her monologue, and she’s saying something like:
"Of course, since Duchamp, art doesn't have to be beautiful, or even good. It just is.” She pauses and slyly smiles before adding, “Right? I mean, MC Hammer is as necessary as Brian Jungen..."
She drags on a cigarette, slowly exhaling, letting the smoke drift out of her open mouth. There’s a little chorus of affirmation from the boys.
“I love ThunderCats, right? I can say that. Cause they’re hilarious. But who honestly loves anything anymore? I mean, apart from Lil Wayne. Everyone loves Lil Wayne.”
"Art doesn't have to subsume itself to your expectations anymore... It doesn’t exist for you. Duchamp killed aesthetics, and content’s been passé since the dandies...”
She smiles again. Another drag. Another chorus.
"Of course, no one knows that. I mean, there are still people who try to make music that’s,” she raises her fingers to make air quotes, “‘good.’ I have no idea why..."
“Quality is boring,” she says, “and so is beauty... Mediocrity is the avant-garde...”
She ruffles in her purse and pulls out her phone, spends a minute listening then hangs up. “That was Chance. She’s up the street. Let’s go.”
As she leads them away, I hear her say, “You guys want to go to Aids Wolf on Saturday?” One guy asks her who Aids Wolf are and she replies, “Don’t worry, babe, they’re hilarious.”

If she were still alive, art critic and literary theorist Susan Sontag might have something to say about the monologue above. Her 1961 piece of writing “Notes on Camp” articulated for the first time the basic approaches and sensibilities of pop art, the obvious precursor to the hipster irony of the new millennium.
Writing on camp, she points out that the two main pioneering forces of the modern sensibility are Jewish scholarship and “homosexual aestheticism and irony”. Homosexuals, historically underrepresented, developed a playful relationship with a culture that had little regard for content in favour of style. In doing so, they were able to incorporate themselves in a culture that wanted nothing to do with them.

As a result, irony created a text that only the culturally initiated could read. “Notes on Camp” is dedicated to Oscar Wilde for a reason – look up gay slang at the turn of the last century and you’ll find that The Importance of Being Earnest is literally a coded script that only gays at the time could decipher. Earnest meant gay.

The ironic is still a coded text. Understand it and you’re in. Take the girl I described, slyly smiling while denying most of the conclusions of art and aesthetics in the 20th century. The guys she was with didn’t know whether to laugh or argue – but they laughed anyway, eager to be in on the ironic subtext to the whole conversation.

And while this originally served the purpose of strengthening the intra-communal identity of culturally repressed homosexuals, among mostly white, predominantly middle class hipsters it seems to have little purpose at all. “Indie” music and its ironic cultural milieu have become the prime cultural gift of the first decade of the new millennium, so no one’s excluded from anything, except from the actual nature of a joke that everyone’s pretending to get. Think of those boys traipsing off to see Aids Wolf even though they had no idea whether they would like it nor not.

This article is more of the same: it’s written for people who already know Duchamp and Brian Jungen. And if you don’t know Aids Wolf, how can you tell if she really liked them, or more importantly, if I do? (I decided to include it for a reason). No one’s “in on it” any more – in an age beyond authenticity, everybody’s out.

Cole Robertson
Columnist

Hard Light: Bringing Better Pong

Some years from now, you will be trying to download hip music. Let us imagine that, by such and such a time, Led Zeppelin will have been resurrected via AI simulation. So you’re maneuvering your online self down the Zeppelin aisle, avoiding all the blaring ads for canned hovercrafts, when suddenly a pair of disembodied buttocks breaks away from your computer display. Trailing promises that the first month is free, they hover, wobbling, and begin to rhythmically batter at your forehead. A bead of sweat falls from the butt cleavage and gets in your eye. It burns.

A few weeks ago, a team at the University of Tokyo cooked up the latest thing (still nameless) in holograms. You can touch them. You can reach out and grab a hacky-sack made of nothing but light, and you’ll feel every little bead under the canvas. I am not even shitting you. (And because of the world network’s specialties, this technology will be used to try and sell you porn. Every. Single. Day.)

It’s not revolutionary science, really – nobody’s invented a new kind of light. The technology involves ordinary holograms, some sensors to track where your hands are, and a way of generating ultra-low-frequency acoustic waves. When you bring your hands up to the hologram, you feel an appropriate sense of pressure on your skin, like the pulsing sensation you feel when you move your hand near a loud subwoofer. This ultrasound system runs concurrently with the visuals, like the way a television broadcast is comprised of audio and video signals.

By the time the gimmick wears off, they’ll be using it for everything, if the technology becomes cheap enough. And until somebody figures out how to throw digital signals directly into your brain, it’ll be among the most defining aspects of human-computer interaction in history. Not because it can make weird floating stuff pop into existence and rub up against you, but because it lets your computer disappear.

Here’s the thing. As you get closer to a computer’s real nature, it becomes more arcane and abstract. The actual ones and zeroes getting pushed around are hardly user-friendly. A good piece of software is almost always a kind of mask for your PC to wear – something to disguise its basic computer-ness, and make it more like (for instance) a photo album (Picasa), or a jukebox (iTunes). The ultimate computer interface is one that you don’t notice.

Ideally, one day we’ll be manipulating displays and data with our hands rather than keyboards and mice, in a procedure that’s continuous with the natural world itself. Think about the Nintendo Wii’s “Wiimote” controller, which is revolutionary because it’s not really a controller. Rather, it’s a way to extend the possibilities of digital gaming into analog space, into the real world that gamers really inhabit. Or even the mouse, probably the single greatest step in user-interface history, and its incalculable addition of the user’s desk space to the computer’s file system. The hard light from Tokyo is something like that.

We’re on the verge of a great shift in computing perspective, and that’s not even counting the implications for porno. Our interface devices won’t necessarily have to look like mice anymore, or keyboards, or anything in particular. Feel like playing a boxing game? Your computer can project you a pair of boxing gloves. Want to avoid carpal tunnel syndrome? Try a weightless keyboard that automatically grows and twists to compensate for your typing style.

In the early eighties, future-minded architects planned fully computerized houses: a Commodore 64 unit embedded in the kitchen wall to display recipes, another in the bathroom to report on the weather while you wash your hands. The idea’s no less silly with modern terminals; for many users, the ideal computer isn’t shaped like a computer. Society might turn toward truly ubiquitous computing, but not by making every surface a screen. Rather, we would need to undo the difference between what’s a computer and what’s not. So hold out your fingers for this one.

Martin Hazelbower
Columnist

XOXO XX XY Newsflash: Gay is okay, despite what your therapist tells you

I’m back for my second year, mostly because having a sex column is a good party trick. Try it - go to a party, introduce yourself as a sex columnist (make up the paper, or just say you’re me) and I guarantee you will have melted the ice so fast you’ll be in Caribbean waters. People in line for the bathroom especially have no shame. Still, while it makes me new friends, I don’t think this is what my parents had in mind when they encouraged me to do what I love.

GAY CAN’T BE PRAYED AWAY
Last month the American Psychological Association voted that health care professionals should refrain from telling clients that they can “pray the gay away.” Why it took until 2009 for this to take place, I have no idea. You would figure that the respectability of the Kinsey scale (a chart that measures sexual orientation) for the past 60 years would have sped the decision up a little, but no such luck.

Anyway, the American Psychological Association, with 150,000+ psychologists across Canada and the United States, voted 125 to 4 that members should not tell clients that they can become straight through therapy.

For years, reparative therapy, or sometimes conversion therapy or reorientation therapy, was used as a means to try to turn gays and lesbians straight. While there are secular reparative therapy programs, the majority are religiously affiliated, predominantly Christian.

Some of the methods used to convert gays into heterosexuals include: pairing them up with an older same sex buddy (because, according to psychologist/theologian Elizabeth Moberly, homosexual desire is to compensate for a lack of bond between father and son), having male patients in the fetal position on the lap of a male therapist (method of therapist/Evangelical Christian Richard Cohen), or behavioural modification which can range from masturbatory reconditioning to electroconvulsive therapy.

In 1997, the American Psychiatric Association declared that "There is no published scientific evidence supporting the efficacy of reparative therapy as a treatment to change one's sexual orientation.” To put this to rest officially, the APA assigned six members to examine 83 studies on reparative therapy written in the past 40 years.

APA isn’t banning reparative therapy, though, rather just strongly encouraging its members to exercise caution in suggesting reparative therapy. They do advise finding different methods than deprogramming for religious convictions and sexual orientation to co-exist, ranging from celibacy to switching churches to one with a more queer-friendly stance.

"Practitioners can assist clients through therapies that do not attempt to change sexual orientation, but rather involve acceptance, support and identity exploration and development without imposing a specific identity outcome," the report says.

TEENAGERS NOT PICKY WHEN IT COMES TO SEX
Besides, it may be too early to tell, anyway, to send Tommy and Sue to Camp GayNoMore. According to Ritch Savin-Williams, a clinical psychologist at Cornell University, teenagers don’t categorize their sexuality as clear-cut as adults. They haven’t pinpointed exactly how many teens are actually queer - studies show it is somewhere between 5% and 24%. In other words, they have absolutely no bloody clue. Furthermore, they’re less likely to say they are gay, even with same-sex encounters or attraction.

Part of this may be pressure from peers, or simply uncertainty. Both teenagers and psychologists see sexuality as fluid, and as not defined by sexual experiences. Keep in mind though, that we also live in the time of “I Kissed a Girl” and Girls Gone Wild - that’s going to affect some of the same-sex experience, the exhibitionism. Some people make out in front of others because they don’t really care where they do it, and others do it strictly because other people are there. The findings are pretty shallow, but that could be because Savin-Williams is giving the media just a taste of his book The New Gay Teen. I will keep you informed on that, if I ever get around to reading it.

All right, there you go, you’re all caught up. Welcome back.

Megan Drysdale
Writer

The Magic Bullet

My earliest memory was the birth of my baby sister. I was two and a half years old, and I remember driving to the hospital with my dad across the Harbour Bridge in Saint John under a clear sky and full moon. I remember my dad in green scrubs, the shiny white of the hospital walls, my mother in a gurney, and an endless stream of nurses and doctors, scuttling to and fro. But what I remember most vividly is an enormous glass bottle of Coca-Cola, which I was kindly allowed to indulge in without restraint.

Imagine. My earliest memory. The birth of my beloved baby sister. My severance from the center of my parents world and my exile to satellite siblinghood. All sponsored by Coke, weaning a generation with her sugary wiles.

Years later, while traveling through Belize, the weight of this experience reached fruition. I was packed into a rusty, crowded school bus that served as public transportation in the tiny country of displaced Africans, passively taking in the brukdown and soca beats on the radio. An announcer came on and began talking politics, and in particular, health care. He was delivering plaintive warnings to the people of this poor country on the dangers of consuming sugary drinks as the only source of hydration. He claimed they caused diabetes and skin diseases. For the duration of my stay, I would only see the futility of this message. In every black hand was a bottle of pop, everywhere. I realized the immense control of the corporate marketing machine and saw a mirror to my own mind, my own experience. I doubted my values and my ideology, suspicious of the festering product placements and endless propaganda.

The modern techniques for manipulating the masses were developed in the 30’s and 40’s, in fascist Italy and Germany. “The crowd doesn’t have to know...it must believe,” said Mussolini famously. John Ralston Saul, in The Unconscious Civilization, wrote: “corporatist language ... is broken into rhetoric, propaganda and dialect—the three ideological tools used for preventing communication.” Like viral memes, this language becomes installed near our sense of identity, wiggling. As a result, every aspect of our lives is tempered, from the way we communicate (sponsored by Apple!) to the way we urinate (sponsored by Charmin!). So how then do we as journalists make use of information, without falling into the same holes?

Around the time when Mussolini was spreading his subversive net, an emergent ideal held sway over the minds of the news writers of the time―that of the magic bullet. The journalists believed that all the public needed was a carefully aimed slug of truth that, when fired, would immediately splinter into the noetic center and spread shrapnel through parasitic paradigms...
In this issue, we have resurrected the magic bullet, because, in fact, we are still at war, but now the stakes are much higher, and the battlegrounds are binary. We are still fighting for freedom of thought, expression and assembly, and by degrees, we are losing. So our aim is to shoot uncertainty into your value systems, to destabilize your tastes, and to undermine your beliefs. Because you never know where they are coming from, do you?

From the Editor:
Kevin Murray

The Slippery Slope of Censorship

 

Every once in a while, humans go crazy and burn books. Then people. Fortunately, a Western country hasn’t gone quite that crazy since the Nazi Germany, whose start-with-books-then-burn-people modus operandi is something we should always watch out for in our own governments.

A purportedly permissive age like ours takes for granted a great deal of pop-culture indecency, and has perhaps lost its capacity for moral outrage. On the other hand, in recent decades there’s been a worldwide resurgence of authoritarian and fundamentalist movements curtailing basic democratic freedoms like artistic expression, and our telling treatments of certain books over those decades demonstrate a stubborn unwillingness to uphold our own democratic principles.
In the late 1950s and early 60s Hubert Selby Jr. – probably best known for writing Requiem For A Dream, on which the famously disturbing movie was based – wrote a series of fiercely realistic stories set in a poor New York neighbourhood filled with drugs, sex, and violent crime, and compiled it into a quasi-novel titled Last Exit To Brooklyn, published in 1964.
Not only did Last Exit demolish the limits of graphic depiction of sex and violence – even sympathetically portraying prostitution and transvestitism – it further unsettled readers by employing an unconventional style of slang-like prose, completely lacking in apostrophes and quotations marks, blending the dialogue and the narration in frenetic, runaway paragraphs. One random snippet: “but as he got to his side he was kicked in the groin and stomped on the ear and screamed, cried, started pleading then just cried as a foot cracked his mouth, Ya fuckin cottinpickin punk…he vomited violently and someone stomped his face into the pool of vomit and the blood whirled slightly in arcs and few bubbles gurgled in the puke as panted and gasped and their thudded in to the shiteatinbastards kidneys and ribs…” You get the point.
In 1966, the book’s British publishers began a nearly two year long court battle. After an Oxford bookshop director failed to persuade the Director of Public Prosecutions to charge the book with obscenity, two British Members of Parliament – in Burgess’s estimate, “motivated by a desire to protect the public from reality” – arraigned the book under the Obscene Publications Act. A trial followed, and despite the testimony of defence witnesses – experts in aesthetics, sociology, and pornography – three copies of the book were ordered destroyed and the trial judge eventually declared that Last Exit, “taken as a whole, would tend to deprave and corrupt, and I cannot think…that it can be justified by literary merit.” That ruling was eventually overturned after an appeal in 1968.
In an introduction to the post-trial edition of the book, Anthony Burgess – whose ultra-violent novella A Clockwork Orange would be made into the controversially graphic 1971 film by Stanley Kubrick, which, like Last Exit, would be banned in the U.K., although until 2001 – speculated that “It is the frivolous mind that responds with pious horror to distasteful subject-matter and ignores the genuinely moral purposes for which the subject matter is deployed…The mature and well-balanced mind is, when shocked at revelations of human depravity or social sickness, concerned with making that shock fire a reforming zeal or, at least, stoke compassion.” 
Last Exit simply exposed some social evils and broke some sexual taboos of the time in order, in Burgess’s words, “to extend sympathy by publicising the bad news, broadcasting the agony.” The defence’s literary experts claimed that the value of Last Exit was in its honest portrayal of brutal social realities, comparable to the works Charles Dickens.
A similar misunderstanding occurred over the release of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, which featured over-the-top descriptions of torturing women, children, and animals. Feminist groups were outraged, bewildering the author, who meant to satirize and attack chauvinistic male behaviour. Like Last Exit, it was accused of glorifying precisely what it meant to denounce. Burgess ends his introduction to Last Exit, which applies perfectly to Psycho as well, by saying, “How this honest and terrible book could ever be regard as obscene (that is, designed for depravity and corruption) is one of the small mysteries of the decade.”
The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution famously states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press”. The problem is that it’s not usually Congress that infringes upon people’s right to free expression; more it’s often socially conservative and religious groups that make a fuss about obscenity. And when the intolerant community takes it to the courts, freedom of expression is usually upheld. We have less to fear, it seems, from the government and judiciary than from the community, despite today’s cynical take on politics.
The Danish Cartoon controversy of 2005, which began when depictions of, among others things, the founding Muslim prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban, is the most probably spectacular case of religious reactionism in recent years. The cartoons were reprinted around the world and some subsequent violent protests led to more than 100 deaths. The infamous fatwā issued by the leader on Iran against Salman Rushdie in 1989 for his novel The Satanic Verses further attests to the touchy sensibilities and violent reactions of the hardcore religious.
In September 2008, Jo Glanville, editor of Index on Censorship, writing about the firebombing of a publishing house in Britain that was about to release a novel about Muhammad’s wife after the original publisher, Random House, was intimidated into dropping the book, claimed in The Guardian that “Respect for religion has now become acceptable grounds for censorship; even the UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, has declared that free speech should respect religious sensibilities, while the UN human rights council passed a resolution earlier this year condemning defamation of religion and calling for governments to prohibit it.”
Glanville worried that “the threat comes not only from those who commit acts of violence, but from those who ostensibly support human rights.” She reminds us that, as Burgess put it in his Last Exit intro, “there is plenty of reforming to do…and our professional reformers must be the first to be reformed.”
Glanville was pointing out how government officials often do succumb to an intolerant community’s demands. Civil rights activists, like Capilano University’s philosophy professors Stan Persky and John Dixon, have long held the government up to its own democratic standards, and fought for the right of artists and citizens to free expression.
Persky and Dixon, also long-time prominent members of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA), co-authored On Kiddie Porn: Sexual Representation, Free Speech and the Robin Sharpe Case in 2001, arguing why the federal Supreme Court was wrong to uphold the 1993 kiddie porn law, which restricts not only the possession of child pornography but also the production of imagined sexual acts with minors. Sharpe was arrested in 1995 for possessing photos of nude youths as well as self-authored stories of sex with boys.
While Persky and Dixon agree with prohibiting the production and possession of kiddie porn, in the BCCLA annual report in 2000 Dixon wrote, “By targeting materials that are the product of imagination, like paintings and stories, rather than the abuse of actual children, the law strays far beyond its purpose of protecting children and comes dangerously close to thought control,” and lamented the Court’s failure to consider reforming “the silly ‘standard of community tolerance’ test for obscenity.” 
In an interview, Persky told me, “It's almost always a good idea to be suspicious of people who want to shut other people up. Censors have a lousy record. When we historically examine the writing and speech that censors tried to stifle over the centuries, the censors almost always turn out to be wrong. It's an especially good idea to be suspicious of censors who not only want to silence others, but who have the power to do so.”
If you happen to be a fan of American Psycho you can thank Dixon, who, in 1991, as advisor to then Minister of Justice, Kim Campbell, argued that the book should be let into the country, advising her in a memo (which he attached to an returned essay of mine that quoted the book) that although “Ellis is no Joseph Conrad or Kafka or Dostoyevsky when it comes to the dark side of existence,” “I think that you have much more to lose…by advising Customs to seize a book that can make a plausible claim to being serious piece of literature.”
Even if you believe that the absolute right to free expression is ultimately more dangerous than putting limits on free speech, you might agree at least that we need some legal framework on the issue. Or maybe you don’t care. This third position might be the most dangerous of all, because when we aren’t on the lookout for those antidemocratic forces, or in Persky’s words, “suspicious of censors who not only want to silence others, but who have the power to do so,” we might find ourselves, like Nazi Germany, or contemporary Iran, going crazy, and engaged in a start-with-books-then-burn-people modus operandi.

Matt Hogan
Writer

Riot 2010 - Not at all a clever nick name

Outside of the odd professional piece, graffiti is usually pretty immature. Whether it’s some wanna-be gangster scrawling his one word moniker on the side of a dumpster or a particularly committed pervert drawing a lewd sketch of a woman on the inside of a bathroom stall, tagging most often appeals to the lowest common denominator. But no piece of clan nomenclature or illustration of an excessively nymphomaniac lady is more poorly thought out or shamelessly attention seeking as this mantra I see popping up all over town.

Riot 2010.

For those of you not in the know, Riot 2010 is the latest trendy movement to name drop to “ooo’s” and “aaah’s” around those hovering well below the poverty line. Like its older sibling, Resist 2010, the motive is as clear as it is ridiculous. Simply put: they seek to ruin our fun.

Ok, we get it, prospective rioter: you’re still upset over the forthcoming Olympics. They have indeed gone far over budget. They will certainly continue to direct funds away from social causes. And yes, Natives are still getting a raw deal. We don’t all like sports. You have every right to feel that the Olympic games will be an abysmal failure that may take decades from which to recover.

The problem is, you lost the ability to “resist” anything to do with the games over six years ago.

Prior to that fateful July afternoon in 2003 where the International Olympic Committee decided once and for all that Vancouver was, in fact, cooler than Pyeongchang, there was a fair amount of action taken in opposition to Olympic bid. Anti-Olympic rallies competed for attention against their boosting adversaries, while many demanded via petition or protest that a public referendum be held on the matter. It was a fine effort that, as we all know, failed miserably to convince anyone in a Liberal seat to scrape off his or her “Backing the Bid!” bumper stickers.

At this point, any reasonable Olympic hater should have heeded their mother’s timeless advice that when one is given lemons, it is best to make lemonade. Our riot crowd unfortunately seems to prefer to vandalize the lemon tree, cut it down, light it on fire then urinate on it for not providing better care for the homeless.

Perhaps that analogy was a little stretched.

The point is, taking drastic action against the Olympics at this point offers absolutely no benefit to anyone and just comes off as sour grapes. The expensive venues whose construction you opposed as the money could be better spent on health care? They’ve already been built. The widening of the Sea-to-Sky highway that you fought so hard to stop from damaging the environment? It’s done. The six billion dollars of your hard earned cash that’s necessary to fund the games as a whole? Spent. It’s difficult to understand how one could fail to grasp this sense of finality.

If you are outraged at the irresponsible government spending that these games have elicited, than there is no action more hypocritical one could take than causing thousands of dollars of property damage by rioting. Even if you are furious about the social consequences of the Olympics, you only risk doing more harm by endangering innocent people through violent protest. We are under six months away from the entire world turning its attention to us, so do us a favor, rioting hopeful.

Don’t.

//Jordan Potter

Opinions Editor

Retail Employment Teaches Valuable Life Lessons

There is a benefit to growing up in this costly world of “iPods” and “hip-hops”; Mom and Pop certainly weren’t dishing out the dollah bills, so those of us who hail from low-income or even modest two chandelier households had to develop fiscal independence early on. Unfortunately, for today’s modern teen, the search for a part-time job rarely results in an exciting career as a dragon tamer, but rather a foray into mall or fast food horror.

Despite this dreary reality, we dove into the rat race, dollar signs in our eyes. We tenderly donned hairnets, misspelled nametags, and oversized novelty polos; We earned paycheques that, though insulting, were our very own. Those six dollars an hour have been spent long ago, but anyone who has wasted their youth behind a cash register wearing flammable pants has actually gained something much more important than any monetary reward. A deep sense of compassion overwhelms those of us who have suffered through the difficulties of trying to scrub the smell of onion rings off our skin. Though we have hopefully risen out of these employment slums as twenty-somethings with our eyes on the academic prize, we empathize with the youngsters, bright eyed and bushy tailed, who are still paying their dues. And then, there are those who don’t. There are morons out there, shopping at the Gap with their six screaming toddlers, ordering Mama burgers-but-hold-the-bun. Lots and lots of morons. People who call for the termination of anyone who dares mess up their selection of dipping sauces, who think it’s okay to carry on their cell phone conversation while placing an order on the drive-thru, who scream in your face if you ask them to please not bring their dog into a food production facility, sir.

The problem here seems perfectly clear to me – if you’ve never been a barista, you don’t know how obnoxious it is when someone orders an extra-extra-extra hot coffee and then complains to your manager when you tell him that’s an illegal temperature to serve drinks at. Walking a mile in slip-resistant shoes seems like an important step in the dickhead elimination process. If everyone had to work in a terrible, vaguely humiliating, simultaneously tedious and stressful job for little pay or praise, we would all treat each other a little bit better. Customers would understand the plight of the beleaguered cashier, or at least acknowledge that she’s a real person, and maybe the interaction would be that much more pleasant.

If you somehow have managed to slip through the cracks and have never had the pleasure of working with The Public, here are some easy to remember things that will help servers and sales clerks alike not want to punch the human race in the neck. Don’t come in two minutes before closing. Don’t bang on the door if you come two minutes after closing. Don’t block the door with your foot as the poor scared employee is trying to leave for the night. Please, please don’t haggle, and please don’t assume you can trick the employee into giving you a deal you saw on a sign outside that doesn’t exist. It may sound wacky, but even if you didn’t eat discounted milkshakes for dinner every day of eleventh grade, try and imagine you did. Or next time you’re at a clothing store, think to yourself, “How would I feel if someone asked me a question about t-shirt sizes and then wandered away while I was mid-sentence, pretending not to see her child peeing on my display?“ It’s a neat trick that will help you remember that working jobs like these isn’t always as glamorous as the media makes it out to be. Be nice. I know sometimes it’s hard not to be an asshole; just as bills, bills, bills turned generations of teens into productive members of society with solid work ethics and hearts of gold, other factors go into the production of insensitive jerks. I say, it’s never too late for enforced part-time labour. Let’s build some empathy, and maybe solve that pesky unemployment problem while we’re at it.

Stacey McLachlan
Writer

Capilano Student Unions’ Welcome Back Week

From September 8 to 11, the Capilano Students’ Union (CSU) welcomed back both new and returning students to campus with its annual Welcome Back Week, the Harvest Moon Festival being the highlight event.
These events are a time-tested ritual for universities and colleges, offering events for students to connect with university clubs, explore the campus, and meet other students.
The university welcomed over 2,000 new students at orientation, as well as more than 80 student leaders and 100 employees volunteering at the event. Carefully managed by scurrying green and blue shirted workers, the festivities went over in grand style.
The Mardi Gras Festivities of September 9 were remarkably well attended and were the most ambitious project in recent memory. Complete with ball-toss games, fashion shows, caricature portraits and music, this event was a stunning display of organization and positive energy, drawing all facets of the university together under the raucous chanting of the CSU: “CSU we’re here for you! CSU we’re here for you!”
And the new students, always shy and reserved, found it easy to break the ice and feel welcome.
Haiquan Hou described his first day as wonderful, enthusiastically commending the organizers for making him feel at home. Laughing, he said “I’ve made some friends and had lots of fun... good job!”
Catherine Wallis found everyone really nice and was excited about the draw for a free iPod. She was enjoying the good weather but avoiding the games, though she said she was definitely having a great time.
Shannon Colin, Capilano’s marketing communications advisor, believes that attending orientation events is especially important for new students.
“Studies show that students who attend orientation are more successful and engaged in campus life,” said Colin. “Our goal is to welcome new students to the Capilano University community, introduce them to the campus and its services, and create opportunities for them to make connections with students and employees.”
Services Coordinator Sarah Silvester said the CSU wanted the Harvest Moon Festival to be bigger than last year, to reach out to more students and make it one of the year’s biggest on-campus events.
“Things are going to go really smoothly, depending on how receptive student are. We think some events are going to go better than we initially anticipated,” said Silvester. “One of our major accomplishments is trying to bring all [the faculties] and build community on campus, and to build school spirit.”
And the spirit was there. It positively reeked of enthusiasm.
While the September 9 Pancake breakfast was a bit of a bust due to the rain, the cheerful demeanor of CSU Chair Trevor Page and Staff member Giselle Aiabens helped to keep people laughing. The Walkabout that happened over the lunch hour was also poorly attended due to the first day of classes, but some students did manage to follow the footsteps to the Treehouse, bumping with groovy house music, or to the Womyn’s Center or First Nations Lounge.

But by the main event, the Harvest Moon Festival, students were scarce. Despite the fantastic weather and the sweet sounds of Rose Alarm (think Joan Jett meets Hole), The New Black (think Pearl Jam meets Bryan Adams) and Drohan (think Tragically Hip meets Queens of the Stone Age meets Braveheart), the call of classes drove students indoors. One Film Studies teacher even emerged from the rickety film shack to scream obscenities at the CSU for disrupting his lecture but was pacified by the sassy MC, Noah Fine. Still, children laughed, vendors sold, students mixed - faces were painted and people trickled past in a slow but steady stream. By all accounts, it was a success, especially if it was measured in hot dogs, which amounted to about two hundred―that's one hundred sixty more than last year.
“We nailed all the events,” explained Nicolle Smith, Chair of the Welcome Back committee. “And we were easily under budget … this [week] can't be compared to previous orientation weeks.” She explained that the focus of the Welcome Week has changed now that Cap is a university: “We're focusing on life on campus … and these activities cry out for heart.”
Without a doubt, it was the most warmth and welcome this reporter has ever seen at Cap. Bravo, CSU. Take a bow. You earned it.

Kevin Murray Co-Editor

Coca-Cola Extends Contract Once Again

Capilano University’s exclusive contract with Coca-Cola, which expired on August 31, 2009, has once again been extended, this time in the form of a one-year non-contractual agreement.

Dr. Greg Lee, President of Capilano University, explains that “we extended out one more year to get the new purchasing manager on board.” The purchasing manager will act as the chair of the Food and Beverage Committee.

In the meantime, this extension will allow Capilano to “retain the vending equipment in the short term, and to achieve some revenues,” according to Dr. Lee.

Capilano’s Coke contract was slated to last ten years, and was set to terminate initially in 2007. However, Capilano did not sell the 200,000 cases that it had committed to as per the contract. This led to a contract extension of two years, or as long as it took Capilano to sell the remaining cases.

The University did not achieve the sales target, and therefore had to wait out the contract until August of 2009.

Last year, with the contract deadline looming, the Courier was informed by Mark Clifford, Director of Contract Services and Capital Planning at Capilano, that a competitive bid process would be set up in order to either renew the Coke contract or select a new beverage supplier.

According to Clifford, “the Food and Beverage Committee will be tasked with providing stakeholder input from each of their respective constituent groups. A competitive bid (RFP) will be developed based on this input and published widely via the Province of BC open bidding web site.”

Capilano’s Coke contract has been the subject of much contention among students since it was signed in September of 1997. Not long after signing, the Capilano Students’ Union (CSU) campaigned to inform students about Coca-Cola’s history of ethical and environmental violations, such as accusations that bottling plants in India have been depriving locals of access to water. As a result, the CSU and the Capilano Courier partnered to bring students Big Purple: The Fridge of Choice, which contained non-Coke beverages that could be taken for an optional donation.

At UBC, resistance to a similarly exclusive Coke contract saw a switch to Pepsi in 2007, due to the fact that “Coke didn’t meet [the students’] ethical standards,” according to a September 2007 Vancouver Sun article.

Capilano does benefit financially from its Coke contract, however Dr. Lee conceded that there are other issues to consider: “We need to assess the impacts of the bottled water issue...if the committee recommends the removal of bottled water from the vending machines then, coupled with the provincial healthy products legislation, the ability to achieve any revenue will be significantly reduced.”

In initial discussions with the Courier last year, Dr. Lee said that student input would be considered in the selection process for a new contract. Later on, however, Clifford stated that he was unsure when such input would be asked for, if at all. For an in depth history of the Coke contract, and detailed revenue and sales figures, see http://www.capcourier.com/2009/01/26/caps-coke-contract-goes-flat

Natalie Corbo
News Editor

Dry Campus Gets an Option

Capilano University is a dry campus, making it one of the few Universities in the province that doesn’t have its own pub. As per its “dry” status, alcohol is banned on school grounds. However, as of Tuesday, September 8, Seymour’s Pub down the road will be giving Capilano students 25% off food and specials on drinks.

Seymour’s would like to be considered as a substitute to a campus pub, or as promotion manager Jonas Rydh puts it, the “south campus”. He hopes that this promotion, coupled with the Courier’s tentative plan to collaborate with Seymour’s on monthly Thursday events, will create a sense of community for Capilano students. Rydh admits that “there will be competition if Capilano happens to get a campus pub,” though he is not tremendously concerned at the moment.

There were rumblings among the student population at Capilano in the 2008/2009 school year that, as a University, Capilano should follow the lead of UVic, UBC, and SFU, and get a campus pub. The issue was discussed briefly and favourably at Capilano Students Union (CSU) executive meetings, and at Social Activities Committee meetings. Capilano student Erica Roberts stresses the social benefits of a pub, saying that “it would be great if Cap would… [be] a place where students can really chill out and have fun. It would be nice to relax after a long day of classes.”

In a February 2009 article of the Capilano Courier, Capilano student Mike Kennedy pointed out that the Business Program could also benefit from potential involvement. However, the administration has reservations, and Dr. Greg Lee, President of Capilano University points out that, “Quite frankly, there are some liability issues. If somebody has too much to drink on campus and goes away and kills themselves or somebody else than we can be held accountable,” adding that Capilano is not a residential campus, and that most people drive to school. However, “we do have liquor licenses for special events,” notes Dr. Lee. As for monetary benefits, Dr. Lee insists that “experience would tell us there is often not a lot of profit in a campus pub.” He does not believe that Capilano has the large volume of students that would be required for profits.

For now, Seymour’s Pub will continue to offer specials to students who provide a student card and two pieces of I.D. Depending on the evaluated success of the Capilano Courier’s first collaborated event at Seymour’s, which took place on Thursday, September 10, they may continue monthly. For questions or comments about the continuation of monthly events at Seymour’s, contact news.capcourier@gmail.com.

Lydia Adeli
Writer

Vancouver's Hidden Black History

If you ask either of my parents about black history, you’ll hear a story that isn’t often told around this part of the world. You’ll hear about white families pulling their kids out of public schools and starting their own private academies, or maybe about the KKK handing out pamphlets on street corners and bombing the homes of social workers. They were growing up in Mississippi during the sixties, trying to have normal lives in the heart of the controversy of integration and the Civil Rights Movement.

They grew up with an intimate understanding of the social dynamic of the time, but living in Vancouver, I find myself viewing all of their stories as an outsider looking in. We live in what is arguably the most cosmopolitan city on the planet. How can we really understand what it’s like to live around the intense and pointless hatred caused by rampant racism? Black History Month just passed, but I honestly wasn’t sure how to feel about it.

Kevan Cameron may just be the perfect person to help us understand; he’s a slam poet, actor, pro soccer player and black historian with an SFU Bachelor’s degree in General Studies and a certificate of Liberal Arts, but most of all, he’s a storyteller. His talk in the Birch Building on February 19 spanned the better portion of the human timeline, but was focused on the neglected elements of our history.

He kicked things off with a little Shabooya roll call, rolled seamlessly into several poignant speeches delivered by Malcolm X and gave us all a taste of his poetry: “His mighty afro-pick had teeth made of lightning rods from God. Every time he combed his hair, planets would explode, stars went nova and black holes would implode…” He even brought up some of the commonly unmentioned African roots in the Americas, including Olmec basalt carvings of African faces in Veracruz, dating back to pre-Columbian times and Nubian voyages to South America in the early 1300s. “Storytelling is essential to who we are,” said Cameron in a later interview, adding that “every arena and avenue of society has a story to share.” He feels very strongly that the true story needs to be told. Unfortunately, due to centuries of imperialism and misinformation, that story isn’t always easy to find. In researching black history in particular, he says that “it makes sense that you have to dig to find the roots.”

As a matter of fact, Cameron and a former professor of his, Afua Cooper, currently the Ruth Wynn Woodward Endowed Chair in the Women’s Studies Department at Simon Fraser University and a Canadian History PhD, engaged The Vancouver Sun in a debate by letter and email over an issue concerning the legacy of BC. They were outraged that the paper made almost no mention of the 600-800 Black pioneers invited to the province in 1858 by Governor James Douglas. These pioneers were offered sanctuary due to American racial persecution and were essential in maintaining an early permanent presence in the region, in particular on Saltspring Island, and by extension are founding fathers of British Columbia as we know it today.

The editors and writers over at The Sun eventually realized their negligence and published an article entitled “Black Pioneers Integral to BC,” which you can read on the Vancouver Sun website at http://www.vancouversun.com/story_print.html?id=1071761&sponsor.

The writer, Stephen Hume, also points out that Governor James Douglas, or the Father of British Columbia as he is known, was of Caribbean ancestry, and goes on to say that Douglas’s social vision “foreshadows the kind of compassionate, open society that much later reformers battled to attain and whose agenda even conservative governments seek to advance today.”

Though Kevan Cameron is an artist, he speaks from an activist’s viewpoint. In his opinion, Black History Month is essential to understanding society. “We need to utilize this month,” he says, adding that the stories of black history “need to be known and told… [it is] one of the most important to be known in the place we are now.”

One of these forgotten stories is that of Hogan’s Alley, a black heritage neighbourhood in East Vancouver’s Strathcona area, located between Union and Prior street from Main to Jackson Avenue. It was known also known as Park Lane. While the neighbourhood saw some rough periods as a red-light district around 1934, it was also the site of the only Afro-Canadian church, the African Methodist Episcopal Fountain Chapel, established in 1918. The neighbourhood was destroyed in the 70s by the gentrification of Gastown and the introduction of the Georgia Viaduct, but many still hold it as a symbolic heart of the African community in Vancouver.

Jacky Essombe, a professional dancer and instructor, ex-member of the Ivory Coast African National Ballet and a major figure in African cultural events in Vancouver, takes a slightly different point of view. She is an unofficial voice for the black community and recently told the Georgia Straight that “[history] becomes an intellectual debate because it feels safer that way. It’s different to feel the pain of people’s ancestors. And for black people, it’s very painful. You just have to sink into that pain without feeling you have to do anything about it.”

Regardless, Black History Month commemorative postage stamps are being released to help with the resolution of this difficult history, featuring the first black man and woman to hold public and political office in Canada, Rosemary Brown and Abraham Doras Shadd, respectively. With such a sterile approach to the dark side of African history in Canada, it is no wonder that Kevan Cameron and Jacky Essombe are working so hard to get the real stories out into the minds of Vancouver citizens. Black history isn’t just the history of black people, it is the dark history of humanity: the things people don’t like to talk about because of the personal pain they fear it will cause—the things ordinary everyday people try to block out of their minds to remain sane. Black History Month shouldn’t be like a history class, full of dusty dates, stamps and empty facts. It is also the time when we need to open up to the pain of the oppressed, and lament the wrongs of their oppressors.

Not Just Desserts

Who can eat at a time like this? The meal is brought to your table, a delicious free dinner with everything you wanted; but, as is standard practice, you have to eat it while facing the room where you’ll soon be put to death. It is the ritualistic concept of the last meal; the ultimate gift bag before you have to leave the party of life.

It’s nothing new to civilization. The ancient Greeks, Egyptians, and Chinese were all sympathetic to a hungry person about to be executed. It’s somehow in the human DNA. It must have been evolutionarily beneficial for monkeys to share bananas with other monkeys they planned on killing to lessen the guilt.

Whether or not you believe in capital punishment, you’re bound to agree that a last meal is a deserved courtesy. Even Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber, got to eat two pints of mint chocolate chip ice cream before being executed and meeting the big psychopath in the sky.

However, depending on where the execution takes place, the last meal may or may not be to the prisoner’s utmost satisfaction. For example, although Jimmy McNulty of The Wire tries his best to solve Baltimore’s highest homicide rate in the country, the state of Maryland doesn’t even offer a last meal to prisoners on death row. And in Florida the price of ingredients for a last meal cannot exceed $20. Most states replace lobster with fish, and filet mignon with T-bones.

If you want to do it right, the best meals offered to condemned criminals are in the state whose name is synonymous with extra large portions. Texans are evidently proud of this fact—they are one of the only states to list the final meal requests of all executed prisoners on-line.

For example, Larry Hayes, a Texan inmate convicted of shooting his wife in the head eight times, ordered “two bacon double cheeseburgers, French fries, onion rings, ketchup, cole slaw, two diet Cokes, one quart of milk, one pint of rocky road ice cream, one pint of fried okra, salad dressing, tomato, and onion.”

And Kia Bexar, who shot the clerk of a Stop-N-Go for $23, chose “four fried chicken breasts, onion rings, fried shrimp, french fries, fried catfish, double-meat cheeseburger with grilled onions, strawberry fruit juice, and pecan pie.”

And then there’s contract killer Richard Williams, who ordered “two chili cheese dogs, two cheeseburgers, two orders of onion rings with French dressing, turkey salad with French fries, chocolate cake, apple pie, butter pecan ice cream, egg rolls, one peach, three Dr. Peppers, jalapeno peppers, ketchup, and mayonnaise.”

With nutritional factors being moot, it’s no surprise either that none of the meals were particularly healthy. Yet while some chose complete gluttony, others selected more particular, unique meals. Like John Elliot, executed for killing a young girl with a motorcycle chain, who only had “hot tea and six chocolate chip cookies.” Or Stacey Lawton, who shot owner during home invasion and only wanted a single jar of dill pickles. Or Kenneth Gentry, who murdered someone to steal their identity, and had “a bowl of butterbeans, mashed potatoes, onions, tomatoes, biscuits, chocolate cake and Dr. Pepper with ice.”

Overall, the majority of inmates chose hamburgers over steak, ice cream over cheesecake, and fried chicken over cordon bleu—pure comfort food, a trademark of human nature.

Morbidly idiosyncratic, the last meal is interesting for the same reasons that murderers are constantly represented on television, in books, and in the media. Even though they compromise a very small portion of society (Vancouver’s murder rate is 2.41 per 100,000 people), the general public is fascinated by homicide. Vice Magazine recently reported that a Toronto food delivery service is capitalizing on the fact, charging $20 to have replicas of the last meals of famous serial killers delivered to customers’ houses. Whether it’s the Robert Pickton case or watching an episode of Matlock, violent crimes always seem to pique curiosity.

Last meals are unique features that define a depth of personality. They reflect more of the inmate’s character, further defining them as real people in the minds of the hungry public. Somehow it’s easier to understand someone when you find out that they like to eat dill pickle chips as well. Many inmates decline to eat anything before being executed, and even this signal of anxiety and suffering becomes something we relate to. Texan Robert Madden, executed for murdering two people (one of whom was his own son), asked that his last meal be given to a homeless person.

Good food really is the best temporary pleasure in life, an instant reminder of how sweet some of the things in life can be. The delicate balance of well prepared pho or the brilliant gluttony of all-you-can-eat sushi are classic examples of the happiness behind flavour. Aside from rock-your-body orgasms, eating good food is the most enjoyable and satisfying part about being human. Even though last cigarettes are now forbidden, and a cold beer is out of the question, it’s somehow reassuring to know that even if you’ve been convicted of killing dozens of children, you’ll still be offered a delicious meal before getting pushed out the door of life.

Sex throughout the ages.

On any sunny day at Wreck Beach, the sand is seething with men and women of all shapes and sizes, some in swimsuits, but mostly naked. This appears to be sexuality at its peak: slightly naughty nudists secretly hoping to catch a stranger’s eye. However, Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, beauty, and sex, would disagree. The way she entered the world was far more scandalous than Wreck Beach and the Taboo Sex show put together. So what can this Goddess, who emerged from the foaming semen of her father’s castrated testicles, teach today’s lovers about how sex has changed? She can serve as a reminder that X-rated sex is nothing new; in fact, it has actually been toned down significantly.

Sex in Ancient Greece from the early 6th to the 4th century was more than a way to pass the time on a Friday night. The act of sex was considered to be an art form, and even beyond that, an act of worship towards Aphrodite. Prostitution was a sacred event back in these days; having sex with Aphrodite’s female priestesses (more commonly known as hetaerae) was one form of worship. Making Aphrodite happy was a lucrative thing in those days, since many Greeks believed that she was responsible for how much sex they had, as well as for procreation. Girls who had sex for money weren’t looked down upon as “whores” or “hookers” at that time, but rather, they were viewed as invaluable priestesses of Aphrodite, the sex momma herself. Prostitutes were the most important women in Greece, well educated and free to leave their homes at anytime to go see plays, attend banquets, or participate in debates.

An ancient Greek sex life wasn’t complete without a little bestiality as well. This was not just an occasional rowdy romp, either; there is evidence of frequent instances of humping horses, sleeping with snakes, and engaging with elephants. Men had sex with dogs, cats, and pretty much any other animal that they could work into their bedroom. This was not viewed as disgusting or degrading; it was actually elevated in ancient Greek artwork. These were paintings that were framed inside the house, and displayed as fabulous works of art. One of the most famous paintings was Michelangelo’s Leda and the Swan, which is a depiction of a swan and a woman engaging in sex. In Ancient Greece, having sex with animals actually proved that you held a high status in society.

It wasn’t only the 4th to 6th century Greeks that had sex practices that would be deemed unusual by today’s standards. Take the Romans of this era for instance. Not only did they engage in vigorous amounts of prostitution, but they also promoted incest. Women and children were all viewed as the husband’s “belongings,” which aided in making it completely acceptable for men to sleep with their wife and their children, often even at the same time. During the annual Bacchanalian festivals to worship of the Roman god Bacchus (the god of wine), exuberant displays of both heterosexual and homosexual intercourse were encouraged. The festival revolved around orgies, nude dancing, and incredible amounts of drinking and sex. Over-reproduction became quite a problem, logically, which lead to the invention of the first contraception. The two weapons of choice for birth control were mouse dung in the form of a liniment, or pigeon droppings mixed with oil and wine—both of which were applied to the female.

In contrast to the Greeks’ and Roman’s patriarchal views of sex, a very different culture arose in ancient Mesopotamia, from the early 5th century to the early 6th century. Instead of the belief that men ruled their children, wives, and animals, Mesopotamia was the other way around. Ishtar, the primary goddess of Mesopotamia, was the ruler over everything: sex, life, birth, health, and even war. This matriarchal society viewed war as belonging to Ishtar, which translates to war belonging to the females. After a war was won, the typical celebration was a victory feast, served to the lounging women by their male servants, followed by a night of victory sex.

These cultures certainly weren’t the only ones with liberal sex lives. In ancient Indian culture, raunchy sex was not only practiced, but it was written down for future generations to enjoy. The Kama Sutra, a famous book by Vatsyayana, is one of the survivors of these works of literature. It details the 64 “acts of pleasure,” complete with diagrams and how-to instructions. While it is widely accessible today, in Ancient India, this book was not made available to everyone. A person’s sex life depended on the caste they were born into; people of the higher castes had access to this book, along with all the other diverse sex literature. However, for those in the lower castes, there were set restrictions on sexual behaviour. This was an extreme sexual hierarchy: the higher the caste, the more information was available about sex, and there were abundant options for how to practice it. Bestiality, transgenderism, homosexuality, and necrophilia were common. Those that ranked high got everything, as far as sex was concerned.

Eventually, all of this raunchy sex slowed down as the crusades came. Religious beliefs suppressed sexuality, and by the time of the Victorian Era, the purity of the wife figure was promoted, which led to an extreme lack of sex throughout all society. According to English journalist Marcus Field, once-a-month sex was generally considered more than enough for a man and wife to engage in, and much beyond that was viewed as immoral and striking away from the norm. Little or no marital sex ended up leading to more prostitution, and unlike in ancient Greece, prostitution was not seen as an art form, but as an act of necessity. The “purity” of the Victorian wives led to a society inhabited by less than two million people with over 80,000 of them prostitutes, many of whom inherited innumerable STDs.

Comparatively, today’s cyber-sex and X-rated sex shops aren’t quite as extreme as bestiality and legal prostitution. However, these ancient cultures were ridden with rape cases, unhappy marriages, and sexual diseases. In current times, though certain fetishes still abound, many of these ancient sexual conventions are frowned upon, and some, most notably bestiality, are even illegal.

Classical complexity

The four members of the Fringe Group—Jonathon Bernard, Martin Fisk, Brian Nesselroad and Daniel Tones—were perched like pigeons over their instruments, hunting and pecking on bongos, congas, snare drums, marimbas, cymbals, triangles and what looked like the head of Jack Skellington from The Nightmare Before Christmas. Inspired by Balinese Gamelan and South Indian music, the precarious piece was arranged in a 23 beat rhythmic cycle and sounded like a roomful of grandfather clocks set with oddly pitched pendulums, each ticking and tocking. I was confused. Unsure of how to approach this strange music, I looked to my date for advice, but she was asleep. “So this is classical percussion,” I thought.

The program for the February 15th performance at the Capilano Performing Arts Theatre suggested that the Fringe Group draws inspiration from world music, but this roster had a distinctly Indian focus. I scoffed, put off by the Western classical sense of a stage show, with its emotionless posturing and Petri dish approach to music. In defense of classical, Jonathon Gordon, who also performs with the CBC Radio Orchestra, the Orchid Ensemble and the Vancouver Island Symphony, would later explain: “It’s our job to bring them to life with as much passion or fire and sensitivity as required by the piece itself. That’s our job as interpreters… we’re simply the middlemen between the listener and the composer.” So I began to listen—sheepishly aware of my aural ignorance and unfortunate Britney bias—as students from the Capilano Jazz Percussion Ensemble took the stage for Catch 21, a South Indian piece by Trichy Sankaran. The piece featured a cycle of 21 beats in vocal and clapped percussion, nervously delivered. It was an example of Carnatic music, one half of the main sub-genre of Hindu music, done in the gāyaki or singing style.

During intermission, Ian March, one of the seven performing students, would explain that he had also never been exposed to this kind of music before, and though he found it daunting, it showed him the richness of the Indian rhythmic tradition. “You take these rhythms,” said March “fuse them together… it [brings] you right to the source.” I began to imagine the Ghandarvas, divine musicians of ancient India who played classical music for the Gods in their palaces.
Then Neelamjit Dhillon joined the Fringe Group on the stage. A past Capilano Jazz graduate who focused on the saxophone, Dhillon has since gone on to study traditional Tabla drumming with Ustad Zakir Hussain. Hussain is widely considered the most accomplished Tabla musician in the world and has countless awards and accolades, including a Grammy. He is also the founding member of Tabla Beat Science project and a longtime collaborator of Mickey Hart, the legendary drummer from the Grateful Dead.

With the Fringe Group providing a structured backbone in the sound garden, Dhillon shattered all my sensibilities about the austerities of classical music, Indian or otherwise. With furious passion, he played in the Punjab style, sweetly stuttering through several compositions by Bob Becker, Niel Golden and Payton MacDonald, all students of guru Pandit Sharda Sahai of the Benares gharana, or school. The dimensions of the music approached quantum complexity. In “The Rebirth of Hindu Music,” Dane Rudhyar wrote: “Every race or tribe had its own distinctive cry… the resonance of the psychic matrix of the human selves.” The meaning of this was made apparent in the polarization of the two schools of music, Indian and European, joined on the stage in distinct expressions.

Later, Dhillon would say: “It’s reflected back at you… All music really has a spiritual component, it all depends on the aesthetics of the performance… Indian music is more open…it’s ok to show emotions while performing, while in the western classical tradition it’s not…but we can put these things together and try to look at things as a whole, not always trying to separate things but trying to bring them together.”

The performance closed with the famous Marimba Spiritual by Minoru Miki, which contemplates the famines of Africa. With music of such depth, grace and complexity, it is impossible to summarize a performance like this with words, and as with my snoring date, it will prove inaccessible to some, but Bernard sympathizes with us curious neophytes still learning how to listen: “It’s like opening a door…have a little look, have a little smell…the door is opened and they can go as far as they want.” For him, playing with the Fringe is “like we’re playing in the park, in the sandbox.”

Neelamjit Dhillon can be seen with the Vancouver Intercultural Orchestra on March 14th at the Chan Centre, and the Fringe Group will perform on March 20th and 24th with Carmina Burana and the Kwantlen Polytechnic University Chorus at Kwantlen U.

-Kevin Murray

Our house is in the middle of the street

If the middle class can’t afford a house, the youth are doomed.

“Ordinary people in BC can no longer afford to buy ordinary homes,” reported The Tyee on February 10. Housing is a problem for any Vancouverite, but housing for a student that is just graduating is nearly impossible. Perhaps surprisingly, it is not a problem that has arisen from the recent economic downtown. Rather, unaffordable housing in BC has been a growing trend for most of the new millennium.

What is particularly worrying for the generation of “college-age” students in BC is the apparently decreasing possibility of ever owning a home with the same relative ease that most of our parents did. For generations, owning a home was the norm. My immigrant grandparents bought a home in Kamloops in 1966 that cost them $12,000. Foreigners who spoke little English, they had relatively low-paying jobs but were able to pay off their mortgage in an astounding four years. Twenty-two years later, my parents purchased a home in Burnaby for $135,000. Today, approximately 20 years after that, the average market value of a similarly ordinary home in Metro Vancouver is $484,211.

Economists at TD Financial Group released a study in 2003, asserting that “one in five households in Canada is still unable to afford acceptable shelter.” This problem is further compounded in the Metro Vancouver area, which boasts the fourth most unaffordable housing market among all those in Canada, the USA, the UK, and Australia.

True, people have a choice of where they want to live. The argument that people should live where they can afford to does have a certain amount of validity. However, that does not mean that we should let Metro Vancouver become a region for only the rich, who can “afford” the insane housing prices. While this has occurred in small municipalities such as West Vancouver, it is not an applicable model for a metropolitan area. The potential for massive problems arises when blue-collar workers that a city relies on cannot afford to live in that city, and instead are forced further and further out in the suburbs.

The downsides to urban sprawl that allows for more affordable housing are numerous, including increased traffic congestion and pollution, as well as loss of farmland. The latter issue is more relevant than ever, as The Province recently reported that Fraser Valley farms are by far the most productive in the country.

The situation is not hopeless. The TD economists, at least, are in agreement that government action is required. While it is widely accepted that the housing market works in cycles, as does the economy, this type of speculations leads to the laissez-faire attitude that nothing needs to be done, since the market will correct itself. While this may be true for the bigger picture, it neglects the needs of British Columbians now.

The gap between what average families can afford and what homes actually cost is growing, despite a recent fall in housing prices due to the recession. So if you don’t currently own a home, you have a while to wait. Ideally, stick it out in your parents’ basement for as long as you’re in school (or as long as you can handle it), since renting a place in Vancouver makes about the same economic sense as living out of a seedy motel. On a personal level, the only solution to this problem is money, so besides living at home until you’re in your 30s, perhaps the second best advice I can give is to go the way of Oliver Twist.