See what some SFU students have to say about unpaid internships and their personal experiences.
Peakcast: Aboriginal commodification
We discuss the appropriation and selling of Aboriginal designs and art with George Nicholas, Kristen Dobbin, and Brian Egan of IPinCH, the International Property Issues and Cultural Heritage research project.
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Peak Week May 13–18
Eats
Nicli Antica Pizzeria is offering up three craft beer and pizza pairing dinners through the month of May, starting with one on May 13. For this first dinner, they’ll be pairing up with local brewery Parallel 49. The hand-crafted Neopolitan-style pizzas will be paired with brews that showcase and compliment the pizza’s flavour profiles. The dinners will start at 8:30 p.m. and will feature four different pizzas plus dessert and a beer from the featured brewery, costing only $45 per person.
Beats
The Astoria is bringing back The Dark Eighties, a night to indulge in your love of The Smiths, The Cure, Depeche Mode, Sisters of Mercy, Echo and the Bunnymen, and Siouxie and the Banshees. DJs Nikki Nevver, Virginia Frazer, Szam Findlay will be spinning all night long, unearthing the inner 80s goth in you. There’s no cover, and drinks are named after your favourite heartthrobs, including a shooter called Morrissey’s Tears. There’s also a pool table and pinball games!
Theats
The Troika Collective presents Chernobyl: The Opera, coming to Carousel Theatre Studio and running from May 14–19. The piece for cello, accordion, guitar and voice focuses on the nuclear reactor disaster at Chernobyl in the Ukraine in the late 20th century. Composer Elliot Vaughn has created a hauntingly beautiful backdrop for the stories of survivors of the meltdown of the nuclear reactor, as well as those who have chosen to resettle in the region following the disaster, despite the health risks. The text is taken from a collection of interviews and sung by an ensemble of seven vocalists. Tickets are available at brownpapertickets.com or at the door.
Elites
SAD Mag presents MAD MAD WORLD, a tribute to new wave and electro-pop. The dance party is taking place at the Remington Gallery, and will be headed up by local musicians and artists, including The Kingsgate Chorus, City of Glass, and a DJ set by Phil Intile of Mode Moderne. Next door, The Gam will be showing a sneak preview of the artwork from the next issue of SAD Mag. Hint: several bands were given disposable cameras to bring on tour.
Treats
Every Thursday and Saturday Forbidden Vancouver offers a Prohibition City tour, taking guests along a tour of historical Vancouver and mapping out the rise and fall of the prohibition. Part of the tour are respectable hotels that were once illegal drinking dens and the alleyways where the blind pigs once hid. You’ll hear stories about Vancouver’s prohibition-era mayor, L.D. Taylor, showgirls, and the most successful rum runner. The prohibition laws, while short-lived (only lasting until 1921) were so strict that bootlegging and speakeasies stuck around until the 1950s. Sign up for a tour at forbiddenvancouver.ca
Album Reviews: Vampire Weekend, Savages, and Kate Bush
By Max Hill
Vampire Weekend – Modern Vampires of the City
Let me begin this review by admitting that I don’t like Vampire Weekend. No, scratch that — I didn’t like Vampire Weekend. Don’t get me wrong, I love when educated white 20-somethings co-opt African rhythms in order to sell pop records. But lead singer Ezra Koenig and the band’s pretentious post-graduate approach to popular music always struck me as a little anonymous. Despite their unique sound, Vampire Weekend’s music never struck me as anything more than middle-of-the-road fodder for iPad commercials and indie radio stations.
Modern Vampires of the City changed my mind. Maybe it’s the band’s reluctant farewell to its Afrobeat crutch; maybe it’s their new tendency towards experimentation on tracks like harpsichord-sweetened “Step” or pitch-shifted “Diane Young”, but the album feels more varied than any before it.
As he bids farewell to his turbulent 20s, Koenig’s lyrics have shed their Ivy League references in favour of a broader scope of experience. He waxes poetic over adulthood and city life without sacrificing his hyper-literary style, and comes off as more clever and less condescending in the process.
Tracks like “Finger Back” and “Worship You” are as sugary sweet as any of the band’s previous singles, but instead of grating on repeat listens, they seem to deepen and reveal new layers. In particular, drummer Chris Thompson and bassist Chris Baio are in fine form during the album’s faster-paced moments, which come off as more focused and propulsive than ever before.
For a band as popular and well-liked as Vampire Weekend, there are basically two routes from which to choose: either plunge into the mainstream deep end, like Modest Mouse and Interpol before them, or reinvent themselves entirely.
Modern Vampires of the City chooses the road less traveled, and it makes all the difference. The album is both their most experimental and easily their strongest. Vampire Weekend has left behind nearly every aspect of their sound that earned them their initial hype, and for the first time, I feel like I recognize them.
Savages – Silence Yourself
British post-punk quartet Savages aren’t fucking around. The female foursome, characterized by lead vocalist Jehnny Beth’s Siouxsie Sioux wail and Ayse Hannan’s swaggering basslines, sport a sound inextricable from their influences. It’s nearly impossible to listen to the band’s debut LP, Silence Yourself, without hearing the ghosts of Gang of Four and Joy Division.
However, instead of coming off as a spiritless rehash, Savages’ sound is aggressively modern. By employing a style designed to comment on the artificiality and emptiness of society in the 80s, the band manages to say something unique and original — and, arguably, just as compelling — about society today.
Beth’s vocals are deep and unrelenting. Her whispered refrain in “Husbands” and broken balladry in “Waiting For a Sign” speak to her confidence as a performer and conviction as a social commentator. However, much like the post-punk legends of yesteryear, Savages’ greatest asset is its rhythm section.
Acting more often than not as the band’s background vocalist, Hannan’s insistent, Peter Hook-style bass playing pumps blood into Savages’ veins, while Fay Milton’s propulsive drums follow along steadfastly, a percussive call-to-arms. Gemma Thompson’s guitar seems to revolve around her bandmates, choppy and aggressive, almost argumentative. The band’s chemistry is astonishing, considering their short time together. Each member seems to play off of one another, resulting in a compelling, powerful sound that challenges but never overwhelms.
Despite its austere lyrical content, Silence Yourself is an inviting and immersive listen. Savages make their political statements and disillusioned fury seem universal by letting their invigorating musicality speak for itself. By pairing their observant and relentlessly opaque lyrics with jagged, exhilarating post-punk, Savages have made one of the most exceptional debut records in recent memory.
Kate Bush – Hounds of Love
Hounds of Love begins with the sky and ends with the water. Not unlike David Bowie during his Berlin trilogy, Kate Bush split her 1985 masterpiece Hounds of Love into two sides: one is propelled by inventive synth pop, the other submerged in atmospheric ambience.
Having eluded the public eye after the mixed reception of her previous album, The Dreaming, Bush seems to strike back at the commercialization of her image. Though singles like “Cloudbusting” and “Running Up That Hill” are among some of Bush’s best-known and most accessible work, they’re far from the usual radio fare: The former examines the relationship between psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich and his son, while the latter explores masculinity and femininity within the confines of a romantic relationship.
On the other hand, Hounds of Love’s more avant-garde passages are always grounded by the emotional honesty of Bush’s lyrics: “Every gull seeking a craft / I can’t keep my eyes open / Wish I had my radio / I’d tune into some friendly voices,” she sings on “And Dream of Sheep,” the tender emotional ballad that opens the album’s second side. Individually credited as The Ninth Wave, the album’s profound part two is permeated by a haunting sense of desperation, given weight by Bush’s uncharacteristically measured vocal delivery. The lack of form and complexity throughout The Ninth Wave complement Bush’s more accessible tracks perfectly — the muted, melancholic yin to Side One’s mellifluous yang.
As much a comment on her own celebrity as an elaborate double concept album, Hounds of Love seems to highlight the duality of Kate Bush as the introverted eccentric and Kate Bush as the theatrical pop star. Both sides are given equal weight, and by closing track “The Morning Fog,” Bush seems to have reconciled the two into a singular, unique identity.
Like the tumultuous decade that spawned it, Hounds of Love is schizophrenic and multi-faceted, but Bush’s skill as a songwriter and tender approach as an artist unite its many themes into a singular work of art that stands among the greatest and most enduring albums of the 80s.
The fragmented life in To the Wonder
Terrence Malick’s most recent effort is more poetry than narration
By Will Ross
Now that The Tree of Life is well behind us, Terrence Malick’s rep as the most radical director in the mainstream seems to have held firm. That’s a difficult, even paradoxical label to live up to, but I doubt anyone expected the reclusive tastemaker to give a damn about living up to anything but himself, and his follow-up To the Wonder confirms that in abundance.
It is at once the most radical extension of his impressionistic style to date as well as his smallest, most restrained work, a film with near-total confidence in its formal power, largely foregoing dialogue and plotting in favour of narratively disconnected micro-vignettes of characters’ day-to-day lives.
What story there is centres largely on Marina (Olga Gurlyenko), a French mother and divorcee who meets Neil (Ben Affleck), an American environmental surveyor who brings her and her daughter back to America.
Neil is suspicious of strong emotions and commitment, and so his relationships are in flux; after a falling out with Marina, he falls in love with Jane (Rachel McAdams), a quieter rural woman. A subplot that follows a lonely and conflicted priest (Javier Bardem) is mostly-unrelated to Neil’s story on paper, but fits perfectly into the fabric of the film (this is, after all, the director who successfully interpolated the birth of the universe into a suburban coming-of-age story).
All the details of story and emotion — like one character’s feelings of suburban suppression, or a central breakup — are handled with extreme ellipsis; but though major events often occur off-screen, it’s never hard to understand what has happened. But the real emotional heavy lifting is all done by the gentle slashes of the cutting, Emmanuel Lubezki’s light-as-a-feather steadicam cinematography, and perhaps above all else the meticulously expressive sound design by Erik Aadahl.
It’s a risky strategy. Malick is, now more than ever, more poet than narrator, and poetry depends on a near-alchemic mix of abstractions that not all filmgoers are sensitive to. The film is an experience in immersive sensitivity, one that delivers us the characters’ fears and hopes and implacable inner demons. They move through a world that provides lush beauty and tragic degeneration by turn — sometimes both at once — and struggle with how to find constancy through the unseen and oft-unfelt presence of a Christian god.
But the film’s psalmic mode is only one of the ways it interfaces with its themes of the search for constancy in a changing and impermanent life. Most important is Aadahl’s aforementioned sound design, which is surprisingly quiet in To the Wonder. If criticisms can be made of the uniform beauty of the film’s visuals, surely those must be tempered by the way the accompanying sound reconfigures those images.
Those reconfigurations, more than Malick’s famous use of voiceover or classical music, are the key to the film’s impressionistic power. Foreboding tones and sucked-out soundscapes over a beautiful image of a carnival allows us to see that ordinarily joyous vision of life in motion as the character does in that moment: as a harbinger of life’s frightening speed and unforeseeable fractiousness.
Such is Malick’s cautious optimism that when characters pass through these moments of doubt and dilemma, they can still turn their heads and see wonder.
A Perfect Getaway is form turned inside out
If you haven’t seen it before, consider checking out this psychological B-movie
By Will Ross
A Perfect Getaway does not occasion the sort of cult one might expect from a cursory overview: it is a psychological thriller B-movie about three couples on a Hawaiian hike who begin to suspect they are being targeted for murder. Its stars are best known for the Thor and Resident Evil movies; and its writer-director’s most notable prior achievement was the Riddick franchise of sci-fi action movies. One might expect a cult to develop out of adrenaline excess or a glut of memorable one-liners.
The tiny yet intensely committed contingency of Perfect Getaway devotees (mostly Toronto film critics) do not love it as a popcorn-munching candidate for the Midnight Movie cycle. They love it as a form-shaking masterpiece.
That’s not to say it’s not a rousing film. Its slowly-stoked tension and eventual explosion between the couples is amply entertaining. As the couples move along the trail to an exotic beach, suspicions between them and the audience slowly build after they find news reports of pair of murderers killing newlyweds. The meeker honeymooning yuppies Cliff (Steve Zahn, best of a sensational ensemble) and Cydney (Milla Jovovich) are especially nervous.
But after the film slowly burns through its first hour, the story explodes. A hyper-extended flashback, complete change of tone, and total reshuffling of both the audience’s and character’s allegiances send the film careening off the rails. The important thing is not so much the twist itself — it can be guessed, in broad strokes, well before it happens — but the character motivations behind it.
See, A Perfect Getaway is really about movies, and our reasons for consuming, trusting and escaping to movie narratives. It deliberately shatters its own style and character psychology, and flouts the conventions and rules of screenwriting to comment on the fickle and creepy wish-fulfillment of film spectatorship. It even manages to have its cake and eat it too: the violent, pounding climax plays not as a sarcastic parody of action or horror movies, but as a genuinely gripping thrill-ride.
Only one character in the film is in constant mastery of the narrative his life takes; in such control of his metaphysical state that he feels he controls the terms of his existence (and in one beachside freeze-frame, it’s suggested that perhaps he really can.) When one considers that each segment of the film is completely different from each of the others, and the multitude of possible realities — is the ending the logical conclusion of the story, or how one of the characters wish it would conclude? — the number of narratives one can perceive in a single viewing rapidly multiplies.
If that seems terribly cerebral, more like a structural tease than the “gripping thrill-ride” I mentioned . . . well, need those things be mutually exclusive? Hell, are they even that different in the first place? The whole pleasure of the “twist” is that it forces us to review a perspective that was right in front of us, but that we missed. Teasing apart the implications of A Perfect Getaway’s central revelation is the fun of it, and all the better to do it during such ball-bustingly original and entertaining cinema.
In Review: DOXA Film Festival’s Wrong Place Wrong Time and East Hastings Pharmacy
This year’s documentary film festival shows its artistic side
By Max Hill
Documentary films aren’t always considered artistic or creative: they tend to be categorized as straightforward, didactic and anonymous, not unlike a news article. The Documentary Media Society, a non-profit organization based in Vancouver, would beg to differ. Now in its 12th year, the Society’s DOXA has become one of the foremost documentary film festivals in Canada, running from May 3–12 each year. Mixing short and feature-length films ranging from the politically charged to straightforwardly entertaining, the festival has aimed to redefine the typical definition of a documentary film.
This year’s festival was headlined by Occupy: The Movie (dir. Corey Ogilvie), which focuses on the Occupy movement, an international protest movement which took aim at social and economic inequality. Other notable films included Human Scale (dir. Andreas Dalsgaard), which explores the work of urban visionary and architect Jan Gehl; Good Ol’ Freda (dir. Ryan White), which focuses on Freda Kelly, former secretary for The Beatles; and The Mechanical Bride (dir. Allison de Fren), shedding light on the increasingly popular trend towards mechanical sex dolls and their effect on societal views of femininity.
The festival also offered several special programs, including their Rated Y For Youth program, which allows high-school age students a chance to attend the festival, and features films seeking to increase social awareness and inspire appreciation for art in young people. The Justice Forum program featured films which focus on issues of social justice, such as gentrification and racism. The aim of the program, according to the festival’s website, is “to facilitate active and critical engagement, create space for dialogue, and sow the seeds for social change.” The Philosopher’s Cafe program pairs selected films from the festival with philosophical discussion topics, and gives audiences a chance to actively engage with the subjects of a wide variety of featured documentaries.
A staple of film culture in Vancouver, the DOXA Film Festival is one of the most interesting and varied film festivals the city has to offer. Although many of the films require membership in the Documentary Media Society, the Rated Y For Youth program — which included the headliner, Occupy: The Movie — gave SFU students and other Vancouverites a chance to learn about a wide variety of subjects, and to expand their understanding of the documentary film format in the process.
Wrong Place Wrong Time
Documentary tells story of victims, not killer
By Ljudmila Petrovic
Photos by DOXA Festival
On July 22, 2011, the world was shaken by the news of the Norway shootings. The first of the two attacks, a car bomb explosion, claimed eight lives and resulted in another 209 injuries. The second target was a youth camp, where the gunman opened fire and killed 69 youth, injuring 110.
In the wake of several tragic shootings in the past several years, the question has emerged: why do we only look at the crimes and the killer? Why don’t we talk about the victims? In Wrong Time Wrong Place, director John Appel does just that.
Anders Breivik — the individual responsible for the crimes — is never mentioned, and his face is shown only once; even then, it is in the context of his trial and its effect on the father of one of the victims. The documentary focuses exclusively on weaving together the stories of the survivors and of the victims’ families.
There is the man who lost his son in a base-jumping accident and then suffered even further when he was in the first explosion. There is the man who worked in that same office building, but took the day off to go base-jumping — a decision that saved his life.
There is the young woman from Georgia who was the last victim in the second shooting. Her best friend — the two usually being inseparable — was, through a twist of fate, in the washroom hiding with two other youth attending the camp during the shooting . The film follows the victim’s parents at length: the mother, clad in black, weeps and speaks of Georgian prophecies, while the father, proud but with a quivering lip, angrily shakes his head and says: “If he had not done it, nothing could have killed my daughter.”
There is the political activist from Uganda — one of the three youth that survived by hiding in the bathroom — who was two months pregnant at the time. By the end of the documentary, she has given birth to baby Michael, named after the angel she is sure was watching over them.
The thread that strings all of these stories together is that of resilience: of the families that have been lost and of those that have survived. The human lives portrayed in the film — both those that remained intact and those that were taken away — were made to seem frail; a recurring theme was “what could have happened” had the person left two minutes earlier or had made some other seemingly small and meaningless decision.
As the credits rolled, I looked around the theatre at the faces of the other audience members: those people that weren’t wiping away tears were stunned and thoughtful. It makes you think about how closely intertwined our lives and choices are, and how fleeting every moment can be.
The film is framed by a violent and tragic shooting, but there is no trace of anger or retribution in the interviews; rather, it is a film about overcoming calamity and about staying strong, and guaranteed, you will leave it with the overwhelming urge to call the people in your life with words of love.
East Hastings Pharmacy
The reality of DTES pharmacists
By Ljudmila Petrovic
Photos by DOXA Festival
East Hastings Pharmacy is Antoine Bourges’ first feature film, focusing on a methadone pharmacy in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. It combines professional actors — such as the one playing the pharmacist — and actual patients playing a sort of cameo role.
Methadone programs are prescribed as part of recovery from heroin addiction, and the province’s regulations of these pharmacies call for strict guidelines, including meticulous records of prescriptions and having pharmacists witness each and every patient drinking their methadone.
The film manages to successfully capture the monotony of the pharmacy’s daily routine, as well as the instances where individuals become irate.
The pharmacist gets to know the patients by their first name and dose of methadone, and they are usually friendly to one another; what Bourges portrays through the character of the pharmacist is the exhausting nature of helping professions, especially in an area as marginalized as the Downtown Eastside.
Yet, at under an hour, the film only seems to skim the interactions within the community — both between patients and with the pharmacist. There are several instances where we glimpse into interpersonal relationships and we see laughter or moments of bonding, but for the most part the audience is left with a framework and a mere hint at the atmosphere of this type of pharmacy — which is really all that a documentary of this length can hope for.
It illustrates BC’s regulations of the methadone pharmacies and some of the barriers and downfalls, but the director missed many opportunities to delve deeper into the heart of the community and the personal stories of the various people coming into or working at the pharmacy.
As far as an artistic analysis of the issues in the Downtown Eastside, it does not create dialogue. That being said, the specific issues surrounding regulations of methadone programs are not often looked at through this medium and the film is well-shot, and despite its downfalls, it’s worth a watch.
Forum a better choice for SFU politics
More students reached, more problems solved
By Kyle Acierno
I was on the board for two years and would like to add my two cents about what Moe needs to know. But before starting, I will give some background on the SFSS. The board is composed of the president and five executives, eight faculty representatives, and two at-large representatives (at-large means they can do anything or nothing).
The structure and working hours allotted to the board means the president and the executives spend a lot of time together. Either they love each other and are able to conspire and carry out plans behind closed doors (like the past couple years) or they do not get along and do nothing but spend their days bickering and backstabbing.
Faculty representatives work half the time and are generally half as informed. They each get one vote even though the Arts rep has 10,000 students in his or her faculty and the Health Sciences rep has less than 700. Until recently, there were no faculty student unions and the only methods to represent faculty constituents were to attend a plethora of department student union meetings all over the university, send out mass emails that are usually deleted with a passion, or go to the pub every night and exchange words with other patrons. With all this running around, faculty reps get left out of the everyday politics of the SFSS, meaning the president and executives wield an extreme amount of power.
The fact is that the board answers to no one. Although students, members of Forum, the rotunda groups, and even staff are welcomed to participate in the SFSS committees, it is very easy for students’ wishes to fall on deaf ears.
This is not just due to poor postings of meeting times and places, but also because whether a recommendation comes from Forum (which is composed of all department student unions and constituency groups) or from one of the many SFSS committees, it is just a recommendation. There are absolutely no checks and balances. This explains why the board could lock out the union, construct a student union building levy, and place a former board member and founder of Build SFU in a $60,000/year position with little to no student input.
So the problem is obvious — the board is accountable to no one except themselves. I have a simple solution that will involve more students, institute a more democratic system, and help solve many of the problems plaguing student politics at SFU.
Give the power back to the students by empowering Forum! Forum is the only truly representative student body at our university, and the board should be accountable to the students elected to serve its chambers. This would involve a three-step process: first, establish Forum as the ultimate decision making body. Second, ensure every member of Forum is involved in at least one committee. Third, eliminate faculty representatives and redistribute their earnings to the members of Forum or remove the stipends all together.
This form of student government is not just employed at more mature universities like UBC, McGill, and Queens University, but used to be the way the SFSS was governed. So Moe, if you are looking for more ways to get students involved and improve the student experience at SFU, here is your answer.
Having lots of free time sucks
If idle hands are the devil’s playground, I’m see-sawing with Satan right now and hating it
By Rachel Braeuer
Photos by Ben Buckley
Sixteen hour work days, seven days a week for two months with a week or two of rest may sound like hell to most people, but to me it sounds like the ideal schedule.
A lot of my friends have graduated and lead normal adult lives where they go to work for a reasonable amount of hours every day, and come home to do just enough self-care and household tasks to keep up to date and sane before awaking the next day to have a balanced breakfast and do it all over again. I don’t get how they do it.
Does updating the world with every instance of your daily progress help? Maybe, it sure seems to. I feel like I’m bombarded daily with all of my friends’ “achievements.” “Cleaned the house, made dinner, read half my book and in bed ready to take on the world again tomorrow!”
While fulfilling a month in one go because you managed to cram a month’s worth of cleaning into one day is dandy, shit like that just doesn’t cut it for me on the daily. It’s not that wearing clean clothes isn’t a worthwhile pursuit, it’s just that if it’s not a challenge, who cares? I can’t just do laundry, I need to do the laundry olympics ten hours before I get on a flight for which I’ve yet to pack. Only then is it worthy of my time.
I handed in my last paper a few weeks ago, and while the first bit of doing basically nothing except watching shitty TV, going to the gym in some sad attempt to make up for the last half a decade, and drinking too much on the weekends was fun, I’m now finding myself with a lot of free time and not enough worthwhile activities to cram into that time. This would make most people rejoice. Me? I’m miserable and don’t want to complete the few must-do’s still present in my life.
For the last seven years I’ve been working at least one job and going to school. At the most, I was working three jobs, paying for school, rent, car insurance and expenses out of pocket and sleeping about five hours a night, and frankly I liked it that way. There was no room for error or self-doubt, there was no “last minute” because there were no spare minutes to waste to begin with.
There wasn’t even a question of making a schedule. I got shit done because I had to.
Self-care involved singing loudly to my favourite songs while washing the dishes. Alone time was grocery shopping at 11:30 at night, roaming the aisles free of the idiots who drive grocery carts as well as their SUV’s and whose shitty babies were at home, getting ready for another day of screaming in public while their parent(s) texted their friends about how much they accomplished that day.
I don’t just wear the proverbial hair shirt, I made it myself on my lunch break while also reading some Judith Butler.
You might read this and think I’m crazy, and honestly you’re probably right. I should be enjoying all of my new freedom to its fullest. I’m sure some of you reading this would kill to have my “problems,” but I’d kill to have yours. Freaky Friday, anyone?
