Since the Highland Pub is closed this summer, we’ve taken matters into our own hands and started The Peakeasy!
Drink of the Week: Wheat King
Stay tuned for weekly videos where we make cocktails and drink them and talk and stuff!
Shot by Adam Madojemu
Featuring Jess Whitesel, Nathan Ross, Maia Odegaard
We address the philosophical topic of things we’re told about time in University.
Created by Adam Madojemu
Since the Highland Pub is closed this summer, we’ve taken matters into our own hands and started The Peakeasy!
Today. we make another Cocktail!
Stay tuned for weekly videos where we make cocktails and drink them and talk and stuff!
Shot by Adam Madojemu
Featuring Jess Whitesel, Nathan Ross, Maia Odegaard
We ask SFU students what they think about Donald Trump.
Created by Adam Madojemu & Tatum Miller
Since the Highland Pub is closed this summer, we’ve taken matters into our own hands and started The Peakeasy!
Shot by Adam Madojemu
Featuring Jess Whitesel, Nathan Ross, Tamara Connor, Maia Odegaard
[dropcap]A[/dropcap]t the end of last month, The Guardian posted an article by Rana Dasgupta titled “Posting photos online is not living. You are producing your own obituary.” The article begins by making large sweeping statements about tourists taking pictures and using them as “material for a personal online story” in lieu of truly immersing themselves in their travel experiences.
This opening sets the stage for the rest of the article, which can be best described as a rather incoherent attempt by Dasgupta to sound profound and edgy, while actually coming off as supercilious, assumptive, and poorly thought out. The main downfall of his argument is that it considers social ‘media-ized’ experiences and actual experiences to be mutually exclusive — which has about as much of a logical following as Scientology.
Cynical criticisms of technologies are hardly new; even Plato once quoted Socrates saying that writing “will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.” Older generations and Luddites have likely been skeptical of the new innovations used by younger people since the invention of the wheel. This is why I cringe a little every time I see yet another article added to the already superfluous amount criticising people for using modern technology.
Even if their criticisms are true in some ways, these technologies catch on because their cost-benefit is worth it. Condemning people for using them is being overly judgemental.
Dasgupta tries to sound profound and edgy, while actually coming off as supercilious, assumptive, and poorly thought out.
Despite the article’s title, I’m still not quite sure how Dasgupta reckons that our social media accounts eventually being used for obituaries is bad; personally, I’m fine with my friends and family having an easier time finding my pictures and listed life experiences after I’m gone, as opposed to having to scavenge to find such documents like previous generations may have. Most technology is made for the purpose of making life easier, and this is another instance of it doing exactly that.
Dasgupta claims that the things people post on social media “become significant only at the moment of death,” which only takes a quick glance at Facebook’s recent “On This Day” feature to refute; people look back at their old posts to reminisce all the time. The article really doesn’t provide any substantiation for this statement at all. I can only assume that he included it to show off his prophetic powers, foretelling the destiny of content submitted by people who use social media in a way he doesn’t approve of.
Both my favourite and least favourite statement in the article is, “In an era when people still believed in their own lives, they wrote autobiographies. We, by contrast, have become auto-obituarists.” First of all, plenty of people still write autobiographies. I’m not quite sure when this supposed era of people believing in their own lives ended, but I, for one, certainly don’t think of myself as fictitious. Also, autobiographies and obituaries aren’t exactly contrasting concepts, so I’m a little perplexed over what point Dasgupta is trying to get across here.
Overall, this article feeds into an already existing notion of media-use shaming. Sure, perhaps some people could greatly benefit from taking time off from social media to smell the ‘IRL’ roses; but that’s hardly something you can assume from noticing someone snap a few photos. It’s also entirely their prerogative, and they don’t deserve to be condescendingly judged for it.
Poverty among school-aged children remains an ongoing concern in Canada. However, positive results from a breakfast program at a local Burnaby elementary school could indicate an important step towards resolving this problem.
From October 2014 until June 2015, Douglas Road Elementary in Burnaby has offered the Breakfast Club program for all students.
During this period, 83 out of 255 students were enrolled in the program, and roughly 1,820 meals were served.
Andrew Gemino, associate dean, and Ben Tan, research assistant of the SFU Beedie School, conducted a study into the cost-benefit of this program.
“Initially, a lot of folks were under the impression that everyone was well-fed,” said Gemino.
Unfortunately, even in Canada children are often coming to school hungry or without having eaten a proper breakfast. Canada is the only G8 country that doesn’t have a national school meal program. Education is managed on a provincial level. As a result, breakfast programs are typically funded by private, corporate, and public donors, Gemino and Tan explained.
The Breakfast Club program at Douglas Road Elementary was founded with the support of Mary-Ann Brown, principal of the school, and Burnaby School District 41, along with The Vancouver Sun‘s Adopt-A-School program and a private donation from Ryan Beedie and the Beedie Development Group, led by Mason Bennett.
When they conducted their survey in December 2015, there was positive feedback from both the staff and the students. With the Breakfast Club in place, there was a 22 percent increase in participating students’ attendance — likely due to students arriving early for breakfast, and as a result arriving on time for class.
About 86 percent of staff members said they would recommend the breakfast program to new students and staff who come into the school.
Many students have commented they were excited to be a part of the program, and enjoyed the fact the there was another option for food. The openness of the program for all students also meant that many students were able to bring friends to join them for breakfast.
In an interview with The Peak, Gemino and Tan mentioned that the Breakfast Club was an excellent way to bring people together, get them to talk to each other, and ultimately make them feel welcome within the community.
In their report, a summary of other research studies have indicated that breakfast programs offer positive effects on the students’ nutrition, cognition, and behaviour.
“[But] there was more to this than just nutrition,” remarked Gemino.
They found that this program has the potential of changing the way students viewed themselves and interacted socially. Furthermore, the program could help generate a more positive attitude towards the school environment, making the school seem less intimidating, and ultimately helping the students determine what school means for them.
Gemino and Tan both agreed that people should be aware of and support programs such as the Breakfast Club.
“There’s potential for this to be greater than it is,” said Gemino. “The program is a good start and probably the best start.”
Borrowing pieces of other cultures has become common practice in popular culture and even in literature. This leads to an important question: what is the line between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation?
SFU professor of archaeology Dr. George Nicholas — in collaboration with academics, students, individuals in the community, government, and indigenous organizations — have been working over a period of a seven years to help answer this question.
Their initiative, the Intellectual Property Issues in Cultural Heritage (IPinCH) project, is an international project to tackle cultural appropriation and the imbalances of power that accompany it.
One of the ways Dr. Nicholas and his colleagues are tackling this issue is by creating a guidebook on the ways to avoid cultural appropriation, called “Think Before You Appropriate.”
The goals behind the guidebook and the IPinCH project are to develop ways to avoid or confront these issues, or to eradicate them and limit their impact. Another main goal for the project, according to Dr. Nicholas, is to develop resources that indigenous people, policy makers, academic researchers, and the public can use to make more informed decisions to avoid appropriation.
One of the key messages in the guide is how to differentiate between borrowing from a culture and respectfully appreciating it, or disrespectfully appropriating it in ways that are harmful. These harms can be cultural, social, or economic.
“We were not trying to curtail research or put restrictions on knowledge, but knowledge needs to be used respectfully or with permission,” said Dr. Nicholas.
The guide spells out the difference between appropriation, which “means to take something that belongs to someone else for one’s own use,” and misappropriation, which is a “one-sided process where one entity benefits from another group’s culture without permission and without giving something in return.”
“Not only do indigenous peoples have little control over their own affairs, but their ways of life and traditional knowledge have been largely viewed as public domain, free for the taking. Concerns about the exploitation and appropriation of their culture are rampant,” Dr. Nicholas said in a TEDx Talk.
Along with the cultural appropriation guidebook, according to Dr. Nicholas, IPinCH also features a multitude of other resources, including the “Appropriation (?) of the Month” blog series. This series works to illustrate that appropriation comes in many forms, and that it is not always easy to discern cultural borrowing from appropriation, which explains the “?” in the title.
For individuals looking to be aware of appropriation while shopping, Dr. Nicholas explained that “If you’re interested in buying certain objects or clothes it’s so easy to Google search and see if this design has been created with any kind of input from the native artists or indigenous community, and it’s just a matter of asking a few questions.”
For those with positive intentions, there are a few precautionary steps that should be taken: “If nothing else, a lot of people want to wear or have items that have native or First Nations designs on them [. . .] Indigenous communities do want to share their heritage [but] they want it to be done respectfully and used appropriately.”
In 2013, those involved with the project received the first Partnership Award from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for their work. They continue to spark dialogue regarding intellectual property rights and cultural appropriation.
A Dead Forest Index is a musical duo formed by brothers Sam and Adam Sherry. The two worked independently as solo artists, collaborating when the opportunity arose, until 2010 when they decided to officially join together.
“Everything just fell into place when we chose Melbourne as a new base, and our project has been at the forefront ever since,” explained Sam in an interview with The Peak.
Sam is the percussionist of the two. He fills in the rhythms, as he dances with drums and piano through the undulations of Adam’s voice. Adam, the vocalist and guitarist, weaves a visual melody within the pulsing waves of Sam’s rhythms.
Currently, the duo is on a world tour with labelmate Chelsea Wolfe. Their recent performance at the Imperial was an amazing evening, as the two groups performed back to back. Chelsea Wolfe and her crew were a maelstrom of beats drumming through the body. A Dead Forest Index was an undulating wave of shifting sounds that ring true of their gentle and subtle voices.
“It has been an amazing and incredible journey so far, and actually our first time travelling around the US and Canada,” said Sam. “It would be hard to pick one place from so many cities, but travelling through a place like Memphis really stands out — so much history. Chelsea and crew are beautiful people, and it’s an honour to share the stage every night.”
A Dead Forest Index revisits the traditional and the simple, merging the techniques of looping and drones, to create a sound that evokes both thought and feeling.
As Sam explained it, the key elements in the writing process are hard to define; but imagery and words form a collection, or a kind of song cycle, that all comes back to inspiration from travelling, and something ancestral.
The duo released their debut album In All That Drifts from Summit Down in April 2016. Prior to that, they released two EPs: Antique (2012) and Cast of Lines (2014). Antique was an important starting point for them, and the recordings still hold a special place in their history.
According to Sam, Antique carries a denser and heavier atmosphere. Certainly there seems to be a more solemn tone on the EP; however, the tracks of In All that Drifts from Summit Down are equally surreal and memorable.
When asked what his favourite track from their debut album was, Sam replied with “Homage Old.”
“It’s a very special one for us and was written at the end of our period of living in Melbourne,” he explained. “The cello drone is played by our dear friend Nicholas Jones, and hearing that cello always brings me right back to watching him play in the studio, such an amazing style.”’
For their next steps, the duo is looking forward to working on their next album, while continuing to tour and travel as much as possible.
“We really love being on the road, but also look forward to finding somewhere isolated to start finishing new ideas,” said Sam.
The voices of A Dead Forest Index are clear and beautiful, but also powerful and moving like the drifting waves hinted at by their song titles. Their unique presence is sure to leave a distinctive mark in the evolving stage of contemporary music as they continue on their journey.
Ryan Gosling, as famous for his abs as for his acting, can mount character-driven indies on his ripped shoulders like a nouveau Brando. He can be charming like Clooney or evoke an existential crisis with the mere words “I drive,” like a wounded, introverted De Niro.
The heartthrob from The Notebook has developed into one of the best actors of his generation, actively transcending his on-screen persona and seeping so far into characters we forget that he’s a movie star. Somehow, even as his past roles have been iconized, Gosling has reinvented himself, peeling off yet another layer of skin to reveal a new one. His work in Shane Black’s The Nice Guys, where he plays a bumbling PI, is another testament to his versatility.
Fermented in nostalgia, The Nice Guys gets you high on ‘70s Los Angeles’ smoky air. A porn industry party is uncannily similar to that of a corrupt automotive company later in the film; a very un-PC educational video is shown in a classroom; and a haze of paranoia from Watergate and the Cold War looms over everything.
Shane Black (Iron Man 3, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang) seems to have shaped his narrative and set-pieces around the era’s weirdness, guiding us through a time when porn was in bed with politics and a hippy’s experimental porno was the only way to save the birds from a car company’s pollution. The world of shaggy carpets and open shagging is the villain, making it difficult for our very flawed and very groovy heroes to solve the case.
This is the rare Hollywood comedy that is vulgar and clever, and accessible without pandering. I appreciate The Nice Guys as much for what it is as I do for what it isn’t. Here is a groovy comedy with an engaging plot that doesn’t rely on dick jokes to keep our attention. It’s an accessible film that is about something, and doesn’t make a big fuss.
The Nice Guys is drenched in nostalgia and fantasy, but at times it feels soiled by it. In an opening vignette — which works as an effective short film on its own — a young boy steals his dad’s porno mag, only to find the naked body of the porn star he was ogling dead in the backyard moments later. What was once titillating becomes grotesque. The corpses pile up at the edge of the frame during the funny action scenes. Black’s camera takes a second longer to process what Holland March (Gosling) and Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe) are actually doing. March’s tween daughter, who seems to find herself in the middle of everything, is the human character at this film’s heart, a voice of reason in a sinful cesspool.
The humour is mostly performance-based. The story climaxes with a loud shoot-out that forgets the central theme. In this bleak world, even the nice guys have a rough edge. Healy and March are only heroes because they’re slightly better than everyone else. Russell Crowe — who plays the straight man — and the script by writer-director Black elevate this buddy action-comedy to a level that is respectable, yet hardly original. This is mostly a silly, entertaining film, and Gosling uses it to forge another tool for his toolbox: a mode of physical and improvisational comedy that is erratic yet calculated.
With daring choices and a consistent track record, Gosling, a sex symbol with a pretty face and pretty abs, has proven to be a pretty great actor as well. He is a Hollywood stud whose films you can go to for the brawn, but stay for their brains. Although you could be deceived by what seems like dumb slapstick in The Nice Guys, it’s a film with more on its mind than your average coked-out comedy.
Simon Fraser University’s independent student newspaper since 1965.
For advertising inquiries: [email protected]
For promotional inquiries: [email protected]
Simon Fraser University’s independent student newspaper since 1965.
For advertising inquiries: [email protected]
For promotional inquiries: [email protected]