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Peak Week June 3 – 8

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Peak Web
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Eats

The Portside Pub will be hosting Riverboat Throwdown as part of Vancouver’s Craft Beer Week celebrations this week on June 6. The pub, already decked out like the interior of a big wooden ship, will be transformed into a riverboat casino, complete with chance games and professional dealers. There will be a 10-keg “cask off” where brewers will show off their one-of-a-kind crafted beers, brewed specially for the event, and compete for the title of “Cask Maverick.” Servers will be dressed in saloon-style costume, and there will be a performance by live swing band Sweetpea Quintet. Tickets are $25 and include game tokens and one tasting ticket.

Beats

Music Waste is back!  The Music Waste Festival runs from June 6–9, with performances by various local groups including Waters, Dead Soft, The New Values, Crystal Swells, Watermelon, and many many more. Performances are going on at several venues around the city, including the Anza Club, The Rickshaw, and Artbank. On June 8 the Biltmore Cabaret and Music Waste Festival presents Go Your Own Waste, featuring Inherent Vices, Hermetic and Diane.There are also comedic performances and art events around the city. Check out the full schedule at musicwaste2013.com.

Theats

Check out the Rio Theatre on June 6 for a screening of The Piano Has Been Drinking: A Tribute to Tom Waits. Tom Waits songs will be performed live on stage as part of a fundraiser for Battered Women’s Support Services Charity. Waits’ unique blend of jazz, theatricals, grizzled blues, and whiskey has earned him a long cult following. Tickets are $12 in advance or $15 at the door. The show begins at 8 p.m.

Elites

Seeing as the forecast doesn’t seem to be getting better anytime soon, why not spend the night inside a bowling alley? Grandview Lanes on Commerical Drive only costs $5 per person for five pin bowling, or $5.25 per person for 10 pin, so it’s a cheap night out and a great excuse to get a bunch of friends together. Plus, there’s cheap-ass cans of beer, those nachos with the nasty neon cheese, and a few hot dogs forever rotating in a hot food display. It’s a fun time for all, I will promise you that. Hint: wear white and go glow bowling.

Treats

The Chinatown Experiment, a storefront offering its space to up and coming entrepreneurs, will have its space occupied by Citizen Grace, an online boutique offering goods from local Vancouver designers. The designers and curators of the shop will be bringing their collection of unique jewelry, clothing, and accessories to the Chinatown space, running from June 8–9. Expect to find things like the thin gold kitten ring by Foe and Dear, anchor stud earrings by Wolf Circus, and floral leggings from B.B. Revised Vintage Clothing.

 

Author Profiles: Crossing borders

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Peak Web
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Ayelet Tsabari_openbooktoronto.com

 By Monica Miller
Photos by openbooktoronto.com

Ayelet Tsabari’s first language is not English, yet her manuscript You and What Army was shortlisted for the First Book Competition, and her new book of short stories, The Best Place On Earth has received glowing reviews in national newspapers. Tsabari is an Israeli of Yemeni descent, grew up outside of Tel Aviv, and served mandatory time in the military as a young adult. In Israel, Tsabari worked as a journalist writing non-fiction but when she moved to Canada in 1998 she found these skills non-transferable from Hebrew to English.

She took a break from writing because it felt debilitating being unable to express herself properly, and explored other forms of storytelling. She studied film and photography at Capilano University and one of her documentary films won the grand prize in the Palm Spring International Short Film Festival.

In 2006 she returned to writing, but this time in her second language. “I was often resorting to cliches,” laments Tsabari. She enrolled in The Writers’ Studio at SFU where she “found [her] voice and childhood dream.” Learning many practical skills and a business knack was important, but it was the community of like-minded people that made the experience notable for Tsabari.

Her life in Israel is a big inspiration for Tsabari, who says that “writing keeps [Israel] close to my heart.” She had initially resisted the urge to write about Israel, but realized that she needed to. “The subject chose me, I had to let go and let it happen.”

The details, smells, and sounds are a catalogue of her home, and part of the sensory experience in her writing. The Best Place On Earth gathers these elements and follows Mizrahi characters — Jewish people of Middle Eastern and North African descent. The novel examines identities inherent in our cultures and how we navigate the crossroads of nationality and religion. These themes also echo Tsabari’s personal essays in You and What Army, which she describes as “non-fiction stories about my life that document leaving my home and finding my way back.”

Through her own story, Tsabari explores the idea of “home and questioning what determines home. Is it your family, the physical landscape, where you grew up, or something undefinable?”

Writing in English is still a challenge for Tsabari, but it is both “motivating and inspiring.” Although her vocabulary and grammar skills are less in English than in Hebrew, she said it has kept her humble. “It is an exercise in constraint. Hebrew is a lot more flowery, and so I have to write a lot simpler, which I like.”

 

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Photos by Frank Lee

Daniela Elza is a Vancouver poet with four books published this year: two anthologies to which she contributed, one anthology she co-edited, and her third book of poetry. Elza doesn’t write with a specific publication or purpose in mind. “I write because I have to,” she says, explaining that sometimes the poetry pours out, and other times the poem builds on a philosophical idea or concept that is too dry or academic. As her mind circles around these queries, images arrive and fit together, “maybe a week, day, or even month later.” Her recent poetry book, milk tooth bane bone (Leaf Press, April 2013) is still a bit of a puzzle which Elza describes as “one of [her] more mysterious works.”

Alive at the Centre: An Anthology of Poems is a collaboration published by Ooligan Press with poetry editors from Vancouver, BC, Portland, OR, and Seattle, WA. The idea came out of the Pacific Poetry Project, publishing contemporary poems from the Pacific Northwest.

Daniela Elza was approached by John Sibley Williams, a poet from Portland who helped generate the idea of the book while working at Ooligan Press. Williams brought two other Vancouver co-editors on board, Bonnie Nish and Robin Susanto. They worked for two years on the Vancouver edition of Alive at the Centre, gathering poems of the “voices of Vancouver.” They made a list of 125 poets and those creating a poetry community, and narrowed it down from there.

Elza explains why she chose to participate, even though it was unpaid. “It has to be exciting for you,” she explains, gushing about the concept of crossing borders and working with Nish and Susanto, two people she already knew. “Crossing borders has beautiful side effects . . . a cross-pollination of the cultural, poetic, and social.”

The other anthology Daniela Elza has been a part of is a collection of poetry from the Planet Earth Reading Series in Victoria. The open mic reading series is named after a P.K. Page poem featuring the line: “launching pad for the energies of writers and poets established and not.” The anthology, Poems from Planet Earth, features writers from 18 years of events, and was published this spring by Leaf Press.

Following the idea of crossing boundaries, Elza completed her PhD at SFU in Education and received the Dean’s Convocation Medal. Her doctoral thesis — due to unforeseen circumstances — had to be completed in a mere four days. She ended up creating poems that were philosophical musings on metaphor research. “I wanted my work to be valid in both literary and academic journals, again crossing these boundaries.” Elza recently discovered the term “Lyric Philosophy” which fits this style of poetic inquiry.

Elza has also been collaborating with artists in other mediums such as dance and visual art, having their work inspire her poetry, and vice versa. She describes it as a “scary, intimate experience” where you have to “depend and trust the other person” and “really let go, especially of [your] ego.”

Album Reviews: Dirty Beaches, Alice in Chains, and a throwback to The Magnetic Fields

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Peak Web
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By Max Hill

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Dirty Beaches – Drifters/Love is the Devil

Through his solo project Dirty Beaches, electronic artist Alex Zhang Hungtai, expresses his experiences as a world traveler, exploring the globe without a place to call home. Born in Taiwan and raised in Montreal, Hungtai’s music is impressionistic, atmospheric and laden with nostalgia for an indeterminate time and place.

After two prolific years and a wide variety of genre experiments, Hungtai has distilled his approach into the brilliant, sprawling double album Drifters / Love is the Devil. Where his previous full-length as Dirty Beaches, 2011’s Badlands, seemed to evoke a parallel 1950s universe of hazy, film noir longing, Hungtai’s latest release is an intensely personal and impressionistic work of self-reflection.

Drifters is the more accessible of the two albums: each track is built around a sparse, lo-fi structure of tinny drum machine beats and throbbing bass lines, texturized by Hungtai’s melancholic synths and throaty Ian Curtis-style vocal delivery. The tracks here range from the airy synth pop of “ELLI” to the dark, computerized post-punk of “Night Walk.”

The theme throughout both albums is heartbreak, and Hungtai’s no-holds-barred performances seem therapeutic: On “Au Revoir Mon Visage”, he yells intermittently in French over a tribal drum machine loop, exorcising identity crisis demons in hauntingly direct fashion.

Where Drifters is expressive and pulsating, Love is the Devil is fragile and directionless, abandoning the former’s rigid song structures for ambient genre experiments. It’s on this second album that Hungtai excels. The weeping orchestration of title track “Love is the Devil” and the sparse piano chords framed by electronic oscillations on “Woman” are among the most beautiful music Hungtai has ever written, and seem to convey his longing and heartbreak more subtly and more effectively than Drifters’ trembling electronica.

Though Drifters / Love is the Devil is far from easy listening, Hungtai’s knack for experimentation and harrowingly beautiful instrumentals will reward attentive listeners. By finding common ground between introversion and extroversion, left brain and right brain, body and mind, Hungtai has made two of the strongest albums released so far this year.

 

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Alice in Chains – The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here

For aspiring music fans during the grunge explosion of Seattle in the 90s, Alice in Chains was the heaviest option: Eddie Vedder’s leathery croon had nothing on Layne Staley’s raspy roar, and the guitar solo on Soundgarden’s wildly popular “Black Hole Sun” seemed tame when compared to Jerry Cantrell’s visceral guitar work on 1992’s “Them Bones.”

Naturally, when Alice in Chains was exhumed in 2005, many wondered if the band would be able to recapture the musical musculature of its glory days.

But rather than softening their sound, the zombified Alice in Chains became heavier, shedding its alternative rock sensibilities for churning sludge metal: 2009’s Black Gives Way to Blue was heavier than anything the band wrote in the 90s, and re-casted the band as an alternative metal act who might feel more comfortable sharing a stage with Tool than with Nirvana.

The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here, the band’s second album with its new lineup, sees them settling into a similar sound as their seminal 1992 album Dirt. But where the latter’s release seemed to reflect the musical tone of the era, The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here seems aurally out-of-place: grungy, capable rock songs drained of the potency and immediacy that so defined the band’s earlier output.

Fans of Alice in Chains will find little to complain about here. Tracks like album opener “Hollow” and the tongue-in-cheek “The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here” are mistaken as belonging to the band’s 90s catalogue, and heavier numbers like “Stone” and “Breath on a Window” continue the band’s gradual metal metamorphosis.

But like its predecessor, The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here comes off feeling empty: the songs are catchy and sturdy, but whatever quality that made Alice in Chains so relevant during the days of grunge is missing.

Maybe it’s too late for these men, who are almost 50, to be making hard rock that stimulates the 20-something audience it caters to. In any case, the music on The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here is as dusty and anachronistic as the Cretaceous skeleton on its record sleeve.

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The Magnetic Fields – 69 Love Songs

It’s all you need, according to The Beatles. Joy Division told you it’d tear us apart, but the Captain and Tennille assured you it would keep us together. Karen O knows they don’t feel it like she does, and Whitney Houston knows she’ll always feel it.

Where so many artists see the archetypical love song as a tired cliché, Stephin Merritt sees a motif. He mines the potential of what a love song can be by incorporating a wide variety of genres and points of view. “I had nothing qualitatively new to say,” he quipped in a 2000 interview following the album’s release. “Hence the idea of saying something quantitatively new.”

69 Love Songs features everything from the blushing beginnings of romance (“Absolutely Cuckoo”) to yearning better to have loved and lost ballads (“Busby Berkeley Dreams”) to anti-love beat poetry (“How Fucking Romantic”). Merritt’s thin baritone and verbose, often hilarious lyrics make the album an enjoyable listen, despite its daunting tally of tracks and its monumental 172-minute runtime.

However, not every song on the album is perfect: Tracks like “Love is Like Jazz” and “Experimental Music Love” seem deliberately added, as though Merritt had a self-imposed rule to include every musical genre.

But these occasional missteps don’t detract from the overall experience. Apart from being an impressive feat of obsessive-compulsive songwriting, The Magnetic Fields’ collection of 69 Love Songs happens to contain some of the best ever written, from the stripped-down beauty of “The Book of Love” to the electro-pop ecstasy of “The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side.”

Though there are few among us who can claim to have listened to the entire album from start to finish, it’s a challenge that any music lover should be required to undertake. 69 Love Songs is an audacious experiment that will test your patience and your iPod’s battery life, but few albums are as worthy of your time as this one.

Time to start putting people over profit

By
Peak Web
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Placing multinational corporations on the stand

By Alexis Lawton-Smith

After the horrific fire of the Rana Plaza in Bangladesh, I ruffled through my wardrobe and looked at the labels enclosed with each garment. The results weren’t shocking or unexpected, but a sweeping sense of guilt washed over me.

Aside from some jeans, some sweaters and a few jackets which touted a “Made in USA” label, the majority of my clothes were made in China, Vietnam and India. I also found one item that was made in Bangladesh — my favourite pair of boots. I suddenly felt dirty for buying them.

It’s no secret that most companies outsource labour to foreign countries. It’s also no secret that many companies exploit these foreign workers, forcing them to work in unsafe conditions, and often for meagre wages. The term “sweat shop” is part of our vernacular and we all know what it means, yet we do little to stop it; foreign exploitation is proclaimed on many labels, but we turn a blind eye.

When we shop, we look at the price tag, but not the label enclosed. We often don’t stop to think about where the products we enjoy come from or how they are made. I think it’s about time we did. It’s time to stop this intentional denial, and finally help others in less fortunate circumstances.

To accomplish this, citizens must stand up against the sociopathic nature of multinational corporations. The current free enterprise system needs to change, and regulations must be brought in. Without regulation, multinational companies will continue to exploit everything from human life to the environment.

I am not advocating that capitalism needs to be abolished or that outsourcing cannot occur. I am, however, advocating for adjustments in our system to happen. While companies should be able to enjoy a profit, the bottom line should not be more important than human life, human dignity and the environment.

As consumers, we may feel that it is not our responsibility to oppose multinational corporations, but it is. Everything that we buy supports the current system. This support is akin to a direct vote that allows exploitation to continue.

As consumers, we seem to forget that we have an immense amount of power: if we collectively demanded change, companies would be forced to adapt their means of production to suit the demand. Demanding change won’t be easy. It would involve co-ordinating, planning, petitions and boycotts. It would mean giving up some of your time. It may also mean having a little less, so that others have a little more.

Although life in Canada is hard for many of us, are lucky to live here. As students, many of us are drowning in debt and struggling to make ends meet, but the difference in our society is that we have options to better our lives and to enjoy a decent standard of living. For the many factory workers producing our goods, these options are not available; instead, these workers are forced to accept work in dangerous conditions for an unlivable wage.

The poverty that many of these workers face is incomparable to us even at out poorest. Aren’t we willing to help others with far less opportunity? Although it won’t be easy, I truly believe that it is possible for far more people to have a decent standard of living.

As a privileged nation, it’s time that we took a hard look at ourselves in the mirror, past our trendy clothes and iPhones. While we may enjoy all of our stuff, is it really worth the real price tag?

Don’t let questions get the best of you

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Peak Web
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A case for questioning all questions

By Ben Buckley

One of my favourite clichés in televised news is the way they present stories not as complete sentences, but as questions: “Could eating carrots be slowly killing your children? Details at 11.” It doesn’t matter whether the answer is “yes” or “no.” Simply by asking the question, the reporter has planted the idea, “carrots equals dead children” into your mind. Contrary to our intuitions, questions can be, in a sense, wrong. They can be misleading, if not downright incorrect.

The first kind of “wrong question” is the kind that doesn’t need to be asked in the first place. By asking a question, you are implicitly expressing the belief that the question needs to be asked. In other words, you are saying the answer to the question is probably surprising, in the sense that it might justify something something.

Often, news outlets ask questions, not because they’re worth asking, but because they present the illusion of a nice, marketable controversy. In the words of Doug Henwood, “we can’t tell people what to think, but we can tell them what to think about.”

A concrete example from the past few years would be the question repeated by the Birthers in the United States: “Was the President of the United States really born on American soil?” This kind of misleading question was infamously parodied in an internet meme, asking: “Did Glenn Beck rape and murder a young girl in 1990?”

The second kind of wrong question is the kind that makes assumptions which might not be true. The classic example is an old joke, where the joke teller asks a married man, “do you still beat your spouse?” — the assumption in the question being that the man has ever beaten his spouse.

A more realistic example of this occurs in false dichotomies, where the question gives an incomplete set of choices, as with the question “are you with us, or are you with the terrorists?” A question can also contain a framework of background assumptions. If you ask, “what should Canada’s official languages be?” you are assuming that Canada needs official languages to begin with.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing for a question to contain an assumption, provided that it’s asked in the proper context. If everybody has explicitly agreed that Canada should have official languages, it makes sense to ask which languages they should be. In that case, the question is the result of previous knowledge. The problem is when such questions are used to influence the audience’s beliefs, to introduce an idea into our minds without reason, or to narrow the discourse to an oversimplified set of options. Questions can be used to influence an audience’s beliefs under the guise of innocent skepticism.

Upon hearing a question, our tendency is to try to come up with an answer. But often it is helpful to step back and ask, “Why is this question being asked in the first place? What assumptions does it make, and how much of my time should I devote to its consideration?” This allows us to avoid useless questions and focus on thinking about what’s important.

Letter to the Editor – June 03, 2013

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Peak Web
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Dear David Dyck,

Re: “Letter to the Editor – May 20, 2013”

I am still away for a few more weeks, but my semesters abroad have not made me forget my time on the board. Stepping away from politics at SFU has given me time to reflect on my mistakes and determine methods to improve my university before I graduate.

I strongly believe in the intellect and ability of the students at SFU. I do not believe that you, David, or any member of the board, believe our fellow students are incompetent and unable to resolve “real problems.”

Anyone starting a new job faces a steep learning curve, and a departmental representative elected to forum cannot learn the ins and outs of student governance in one semester, just as no member of the board can do so in four months.

The first solution is not to ask uniformed or disorganized students to answer difficult questions, but instead to have students elected to Forum for a one year period and empower them via a comprehensive training process, just like the board of directors receives. The result will be a Forum of engaged students.

This type of student government would call for a much larger election and incorporate more students into making real decisions at SFU. Forum would not be made of a small cadre of students elected from each department, but would be organized in a representation by population of faculty body election.

Ideally, these students would already have previous experience in their faculty. The recent special general meeting formally recognizing faculty student unions is an amazing example of how determined our students are for a new form of politics at SFU. The creation of faculty student unions will allow newer students to get a taste of student politics and provide a stepping stone for them to gain experience of how larger forums and student governance work.

Bringing reform to the SFSS will require work and cooperation, but is absolutely necessary and our students are definitely able. SFU is rated number two in the top 50 universities under 50 years old in Canada. As a young institution with a great reputation, we must do our part to fix our broken system.

If you ask me, reform is not only practical and possible, but must happen to reach the democratic benchmark and organizational capacity that most of the student societies of our size have already achieved.

Sincerely,

Kyle Acierno

Poetry has become the proverbial caged bird

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Peak Web
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WEB-Poetry-Siyavash Izadi

The subject is being murdered one worksheet at a time

By Tara Nykyforiak
Photos by Siyavash Izadi

We’ve all experienced the frustration of being forced to read things for class that we didn’t want to. As students, we’ve suffered through lessons of Robert Frost and Shakespeare and afterward, never thought twice of returning to poetry. But why is that? Because of the way it is taught.

Outside, and even inside of university English classrooms, it is regarded as “inaccessible” and “pretentious” and is generally left alone. One merely has to say the word “poetry” and images of finger snapping hipsters is conjured up in the minds of almost anyone. But if poetry has played such a substantial role in our human history — through songs and story-telling and a great chunk of our printed legacy — why is it treated as alien?

Here are some numbers that showcase poetry’s position in our society. BookNet Canada tracked poetry sales in Canada at a mere 73,000 books in 2010, accounting for just 0.12% of total market sales. In comparison, Apple Insider reported iTunes music sales at nearly $1.4 billion in its first quarter of 2011.

This is very disheartening because it proves that an interest in poetry exists in the hearts of many, but this interest isn’t shining through. Lyricists are themselves poets, but this message isn’t conveyed in middle and high school classrooms. It never dawned on me at 15, for example, that Jimi Hendrix was a poet, but I worshipped him as one of my idols.

The problem as I see it begins when it is formally introduced in the school setting. Poetry is presented in a very objective fashion, with attention to devices such as similes, metaphors, and alliteration. Sound familiar? Four to seven years is spent on repetitive matching games that involve pairing lines of poetry with their appropriate devices.

I acknowledge that a high school curriculum needs to be accessible, and that worksheets make this possible. What frustrates me is the outcome. By structuring these lessons like science assignments, more art-minded students become bored and uninspired, and math and science-minded students are annoyed at having to continually match up definitions that don’t interest them.

At the same time, the personal interpretation and self-discovery that poetry awards is ignored in favour of this “poetic mapping out.” It is this personal interpretation and self discovery that should be lauded by English teachers, because it directly aligns with the critical thinking skills that high school curriculums endeavour to imbue students with.

But critical thinking doesn’t just end in high school — it continues at the post-secondary level and branches outward into our artistic culture at large. This means music, story-telling, film, theatre, and many more areas demanding thoughtful and critical analysis.

And what does this do for poetry itself? With free verse and avant-garde approaches dominating the contemporary scene, it doesn’t make sense that such a great emphasis should be placed on mere definitions. English itself is a subject characterized by discussion and debate, so shouldn’t poetry be taught in a much more open-ended way? It would attract more students to enjoy it, that’s for sure, and not leave them running the other way the instant the word “poetry” is uttered.

If I was a high school English teacher, I would hope to pique the interest of my students by making poetry a more intimate and personally involved subject. I would invite them to bring in poetry in any form to the classroom (song lyrics, movie dialogues, poetic prose from a novel, etc.) and encourage them to tell me what it means to them. This should be the case for any ninth grade English class, and would be a very foundational and engaging way of introducing poetry.

Large chain theatres hamper viewing pleasures

By
Peak Web
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WEB-Dolphin Theatres-Vaikunthe Banerjee

What does that $13 movie ticket actually get you?

By Daryn Wright
Photos by Vaikunthe Banerjee

Walking into the Pacific Cinematheque theatre, it’s clear the people attending this film are of a different sort than those filling the lobby of large, chain theatres.

We are all here to see Sunset Boulevard, a film by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett. The film made its debut in 1950 and has since stunned audiences with its macabre and hilarious plot and cast of characters.

I won’t go on about the film much more — after all, this isn’t the arts section, and you should go see it for yourself — but what I do want to go on about the difference between independent, local theatres, and the ones reeling off blockbuster hits on giant-sized screens.

Pacific Cinematheque is one of Vancouver’s last vestiges of independent theatre, a place where you can expect to see a combination of film noir, Japanese horror, and the entire ouvre of Jean-Luc Godard. The theatre is tiny, with only one screen and a respectable amount of small, red-cushioned seats. The concession offers the necessary popcorn, sans faux butter, done home-style, which I appreciate, and a few select choices of rich chocolate bars or saran-wrapped toffee bars.

It’s simple: no flashy menu boards or endlessly rotating trays of nachos. Posters of the classics line the walls: Hitchcock’s profile, Hayao Miyazaki’s illustrations. These details give you an idea what kind of theatre the Cinematheque is. These people really care about films.

Not too long ago, I tried to see a film at a large chain theatre in downtown Vancouver, which I will leave unnamed. The movie was Cloud Atlas, and it was, regrettably, only being shown in one of the larger, special theatres that require a seating reservation in advance.

My friends and I had planned to meet at the movies and stuff our faces with our favourite movie goodies (sour bubble-gum flavoured bottles and cherry bon bons, please and thank you), but this was rendered impossible by this new feature. The tickets would all have had to be bought by the same person, far in advance, in order for us to even be able to sit together.

I felt robbed of the movie-going experience I remember having as a child and adolescent — which, relatively speaking, was not that long ago. Isn’t this what going to the movies was supposed to be about? Isn’t the whole appeal the ability to meet with friends out in the social world rather than remain holed up alone in a dark basement suite? Isn’t it an excuse to chuckle jovially with friends at Keanu Reeve’s terrible and inconsistent British accent? (My example is dated, but I think you all know what I’m talking about.) But oh, right, I forgot that most people would rather have as little social contact as possible, preferring to be plugged in at all times. But I digress.

What I love about the Cinematheque, and most other independent theatres in general (I’ll include the ill-fated Fifth Avenue Cinemas, which has recently been acquired by Cineplex), is that this social experience has been maintained, despite the changes taking place in larger theatres. You can meet up with friends beforehand without making advance seating reservations, and the theatres actually care about this experience. They also care about films, and this is perhaps most important of all. This is why I won’t be going to a large chain movie theatre any time soon. Give me Cinematheque or give me death.

From Type-A to Type I’m Okay

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Ganesha-AlexOrtega
How being unemployed was the best thing that could have happened to me
By Ljudmila Petrovic
Photos by Alex Ortega

Let’s be honest right off the bat: I embody the textbook definition of a “Type-A” personality. Now, I don’t believe in compartmentalizing or labeling people, but one of the definitive qualities of my personality is that I take on too many things at the same time: I haven’t taken a single semester off in my university career; I have had at least one job since I was in highschool; and I am a compulsive list-maker.
The amount of times I have been confused at the question “but when do you relax?” is frightening. As for “me time,” that’s when I’m doing a class reading I’m enjoying, right?

If you’re cringing and shaking your head at me, fear not, because I recently found myself unemployed. Not only was I not juggling multiple jobs, I didn’t even have one. This neatly coincided with my decision to finally take a summer off from classes. Suddenly, not only did I not need post-it notes to supplement my agenda (stop judging me, ye technology users), I had entire days with absolutely no pencil or highlighter on them.

To top off my new-found funemployed status, I moved back in with my parents for the summer, which meant that I now resembled Will Farrell in Wedding Crashers; in fact, I literally found myself in situations where I was on the couch, wearing a bath robe, and yelling to my mom about goulash (the Serbian equivalent of meatloaf, I’d say). But I digress.

My point here is not that I suddenly went from an overly ambitious, workaholic anxiety case to being society’s leech; I was now an anxiety case that watched a lot more Netflix with my parents’ cats. In my case, this is a positive thing.

You see — and I think there are many Type-A folks that will agree — as much I scoffed at the idea that I needed to relax, the life of the workaholic is genuinely exhausting. I would tell myself that I’m happier when I’m busy, that it gives my life fulfillment. This is true, but there is also a fine line between doing it all and overdoing it, and from where I was standing, I couldn’t even see that line anymore.

Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t entirely idle and I was still doing things, but by my own distorted standards, it was next to nothing. At first, I was anxious and restless, then I slowly began to enjoy having less on my plate. I caught up with old friends, I spent time with my family, and I read books that weren’t assigned to me. I began to see that things happen for a reason — whether it’s a predetermined one or just up to me to find that reason — and I got time to think about where I wanted to take my life from there.

And now, I finally come to my point: sometimes life gets shitty. Sometimes we find ourselves in life situations that make us uncomfortable and that make us anxious. And yet, sometimes these aren’t the situations we should fear — in my case, it was the comfortable rut of overwork that was really the bad situation.

My story may not relate to everyone, as personal narratives usually go. You may not have that much on your plate, you may not have the support system to accommodate soul-searching, or you may still think I’m crazy (but just more of a hippie now). The point is not that you need to relate to any aspect of my story personally; rather, it’s to take life events with a grain of salt and to not take things at face value.
Life has a mysterious way of working. You’re not going to get anywhere bitching about why this happened to you. Embrace it and use it to become a better version of yourself.

This is also not a feel-good Hollywood film (on which I am now an expert thanks to my extensive Netflix viewing). I did not go from being an unhappy and angry workaholic to being a yoga instructor to forest animals, or whatever it is really relaxed people do with their time.
In fact, I rolled my eyes at a yoga instructor for telling me I should take this opportunity to master meditation. I may be challenging my personality, but let’s not get excessive here. No, in the meantime, I found a job. In fact, I found two.

I was the bossy girl in Kindergarten that got all the stickers for being a know-it-all. Hopefully I have better social skills now, but I’m still a version of that girl. I haven’t changed because that’s who I am.

But I did learn that sometimes we have to take a step back from our hectic lives — be that for an hour, a day, or a month — and we have to evaluate if this is what we want to be doing. I’ve learned that you cannot change who you are and you cannot force a different personality upon yourself: if you’re like me, you will never be content with a life of Doritos and Anna Faris movies, and if you’re naturally a more relaxed and easygoing person, you cannot be happy if you’re overwhelmed.

But you can be aware of what you need and you should never ignore an opportunity to make a change in your life. As a bit of a cynic, it pains me that my words are shaping into a combination of a Dr. Phil episode and an inspirational mug, but there you have it.
At a recent job interview, I was asked what I do for self-care. For better or for worse, I am still who I’ve always been, but this time, I actually had a truthful answer.

Overabundant raccoons to take over as new SFU school symbol

By
EIC
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2

SFU_Raccoon_Hat_colour

By Meghan Lenz
Pesky creatures expected to dethrone McFogg the Dog as school’s little-known mascot

BURNABY— As many students are probably aware, SFU has for quite some time been inundated with raccoons living on campus. Although they’re pretty fat and not very sneaky as far as raccoons go (or maybe they’re just friendly), these raccoons have quickly found their way into the hearts of a significant amount of the student population.

“We should probably stop feeding them… but they’re cute, in a grungy kind of way,” explained one raccoon-sympathiser, third year Jill Stevens. “Plus they hang out in trees, which I guess is cool.”

Recently SFU has even started promoting the raccoons as a potential new school symbol. If all goes to plan, by this time next year, SFU students will no longer have to cheer for the current outdated and frankly racist-sounding Clan nickname but will instead be rooting on the SFU ‘Coons.

“Now before you dismiss raccoons as sneaky, thieving, disease ridden vermin, remember that our current mascot is apparently ‘McFogg the Dog’” reasoned Tim Bergeron, a supporter for the new mascot. “I did not make that up, first off, has anyone else heard about this supposed dog? I haven’t, however these raccoons are chillin’ in convo mall EVERY DAY.”

“The raccoons are here to support us, what has McFogg ever done?” a bewildered Bergeron continued. “Also, are we Scottish? Is that our thing, because seriously if it is, someone needs to get more bagpipes and kilts involved in our website, maybe then I’ll buy into this McFogg character.”

Unless the amount of tartans on sfu.ca increases exponentially, Bergeron believes that the raccoons are the right direction to go.

“I’m thinking the SFU ‘Rad Raccoons’, because we may or may not be Scottish, but I definitely think we’re rad,” Bergeron suggested before taking a shot at SFU’s mythical rival “thunderbirds”, “We’re definitely more rad than UBC, who’d have a stick shoved too far up their nether-regions to consider the graceful majesty of a raccoon mascot.”

Others have also joined Bergeron in support of the raccoon symbol movement, including environmental studies grad student Duncan Clark who explained just how appropriate the new name would be.

“I think the raccoon symbolizes the meeting of nature and development, as an animal that thrives in an urban world,” Clark rationalized, attempting to get quoted in this article.

“I believe that not only as students, but as members of our community that we could glean a great deal from their example and I fully support the growing movement to adopt the raccoons as our new school mascot. . . feel free to steal that for your press release SFU.”

Finally, Clark offered up the most important component of any modern social movement with his “#RadRaccoons” hashtag idea which is already much more popular than SFU’s original hashtag idea “#LetsMakeACoonOurMascot.”

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Simon Fraser University’s independent student newspaper since 1965.

Contact us: [email protected]

© The Peak Publications Society 1965-2024

Simon Fraser University’s independent student newspaper since 1965.

Contact us:
[email protected]

© The Peak Publications Society 1965-2024