At the end of last year, I had the pleasure of taking part in a public dispute with you – I was an editor at The Daily, you wrote an outraged response to an editorial, and I replied in a commentary piece in the same issue of the paper. I couldn’t have disagreed more with what you said, but the whole exchange was a positive experience.

Your latest email update on the MUNACA strike was anything but. (And Michael Di Grappa’s most recent “Strike Update” was hardly better.) In it, you wrote about mutual respect and open discourse, which is striking given that both of these were in alarmingly short supply. No one reading accusations of “vandalism” and “violence” without any further elaboration would think a handful of stickers and a few flowers thrown at passersby, which by all reports is what these amounted to. Your use of language is clever, but totally disingenuous.

What’s more, your email is decidedly one-way, anything but the beginning a clash of viewpoints or the sharp but civil discourse that you write about.  Since only you and a handful of staff have access to the list of every McGill student and employee’s email address, anyone finding themselves agape at your message has the option of writing you personally, but certainly has no chance of reaching the same audience. There’s an inequality implicit in this exchange that is not conducive to meaningful debate, which requires  – for a discussion to be meaningful – the participants need to treat each other as equals. It’s hardly a real debate if the format so obviously favours one of the participants.

As much as I would love for you to simply retract your message and apologize for your rhetoric, I know that’s not going to happen. Having spent the better part of your eight year tenure as Principal pushing for education “reform” that would make McGill operate less like a university and more like a major corporation, I can understand why you’re pulling out all the stops to reach the settlement that’s best suits your vision of the University.

However, there’s a conflict of interest, and not one that you can’t simply excuse yourself from. You can’t both run McGill as if it were a for-profit company and also act as the leading representative of the McGill community. With your last email, you took a sharp turn toward the efficient manager you want to be and an even sharper turn away from being the representative of students, staff, and faculty you claim to be. You talk a lot about community, but it’s starting to ring increasingly hollow. Your email opens with the line, “We are all McGill.” Just apparently not those people unfairly targeted and excluded in your email and not the MUNACA members who are being denied a fair contract.

Elena Comay del Junco is a U1 German Studies and Philosophy student and a former Design&Production and Coordinating Editor of The Daily.

The post Fight fairly appeared first on The McGill Daily.

A lot has changed in the ninety years since then, and most of what appears in The Daily proudly wears its politics on its sleeve. Rather than trying to feign neutrality, our mandate “recognizes that all events and issues are inherently political, involving relations of social and economic power.”

It’s because of our commitment to making these relations transparent that we try to focus on marginalized groups, both on and off campus. It’s also why we endorse candidates – in student politics just as in federal elections. This can provoke strong negative reactions. Our yearly SSMU endorsements often receive the most scathing criticism on our website, with commenters taking The Daily to task for perceived favouritism.

The pressure to find a supposedly neutral centre is strong everywhere, and growing stronger. In a repeat of last year’s call to be “green together,” the latest candidates for SSMU President ran platforms based on issues like sustainability, cooperation, and transparency – hardly objectionable ideals, but totally meaningless. Cooperation, sustainability, and transparency should be taken for granted, not presented as innovative platforms.

Following a similar logic, calls to abolish the General Assembly were couched in a neutral language of reform, ignoring the fundamentally political question at the heart of any matter to do with misrepresentation and legislative processes. At a time when the overwhelming impulse is to take the politics out of politics, The Daily’s approach can seem antiquated.

But the desire to transcend politics is neither harmless nor apolitical; it’s one of the most politically motivated and consequential positions out there. It limits what can and can’t be said. People who continue to focus on topics outside the boundaries of acceptable political debate are branded either as extremists, members of a radical fringe, or pedants needlessly harping on about something that should be buried away and forgotten. This applies to the Jobbook scandal just as it does to the question of Israel-Palestine.

Principal Heather Munroe-Blum’s article in this issue of The Daily is a case in point. (For argument’s sake, I’m going to set aside the fact that her article is misleading: The Daily’s call for McGill to cut ties with Hebrew University wasn’t due to “political controversy in that university’s geo-political environment” but because of concrete – and highly political – actions made by the institution itself.)

Munroe-Blum’s response engages in all too common patterns of depoliticization when she writes about “knowledge and discovery that transcends specific political situations, promotes human understanding, and advances the civilizing power of knowledge.” This is either the naive hope of a political neophyte or a calculated measure to remove a controversial situation – the role of Hebrew University in Israel’s ongoing occupation – from the realm of what can be addressed in political discourse. Heather Munroe-Blum is no neophyte.

On the contrary, the Principal’s response is an attempt to limit what’s acceptable to say, what opinions are valid, and ultimately what role students have in shaping the future of our university. But the fact that the principal of a 35,000-student university would take the time to write such a response also points to something else.

What is most significant about the Principal’s response is not her obvious defensiveness, nor her disrespectful tone (accusing your students of cowardice, really?) What’s most striking is that it demonstrates that student voices can make those in power listen. Whether or not you agree with the editorial that provoked the principal’s response, you can’t ignore its effectiveness at making the administration pay attention.

Giving up on politics means abandoning the possibility of change. Agreeing to neutrality means accepting that only those with power – like university administrators – can make decisions and shape the future of our University. Given the looming prospect of tuition hikes, it’s vital that we resist these paradoxically political moves toward depoliticization.

Regardless of your own political bent, The Daily is one place where this can happen. Our editorials take up one page, and they’re going to remain as political – and potentially controversial –– as ever, but what we print on the others is up to you.

Elena Comay del Junco is a U1 Arts student and The Daily’s Coordinating editor. Write them at coordinating@mcgilldaily.com

The post Don’t depoliticize campus politics! appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Born in Chicago, Katz moved to Israel in 1993, where he served in the Armored Corps of the Israeli Defense Force. He has since worked extensively as a journalist and editor, covering the 2006 war in Lebanon and Operation Cast Lead (Israel’s 2008 air campaign against Hamas in the Gaza Strip) for the Jerusalem Post and USA Today.

In his speech, Katz focused on Israel’s current standoff with Iran, arguing passionately for the use of military force against the Islamic republic. He also described Israel’s wars with Hamas and Hezbollah as proxy wars with Iran.

He later stated that if “Iran were to tomorrow begin to enrich uranium to higher levels, the levels required for nuclear weapons – go to what’s referred to as the “break out stage” – that would constitute the grounds for an Israeli strike against Iran, sooner rather than later.”

In his characterization of the threat of Iran developing nuclear weaponry, Katz also posited that the development of nuclear technology by Iran would “motivate other countries to test the NPT [Nuclear non-proliferation treaty] and to test the world’s willingness and readiness to take real and decisive action.”

When asked why Israel’s own officially-denied but widely-acknowledged nuclear arsenal hasn’t created a similar license in the international community, Katz paraphrased current Israeli president Shimon Peres’s response to a similar question.

“The nuclear program was to allow Israel to make peace not to make war and that’s part of the idea behind the program – to create a strong Israel so that enemies wouldn’t attack it,” said Katz.

Katz went on to underscore what he sees as the fundamentally cyclical nature of the conflict.

“What we’re looking at today are cycles. … All you can really hope for today [is] to postpone the next conflict for a significant period of time,” he explained.

According to Katz, war is essential in these cycles as a tool to reach settlements, a theorization he traces back to the early 19th-century.

“[Carl von] Clausewitz, who was a very famous Prussian military theorist…said that war is part of the process to create the conditions that will allow the diplomats, the political levels, to create some sort of just resolution,” he said.

Clausewitz’s most famous formulation – that war is politics by other means – has been thrown into question since the advent of world warfare and weapons of mass destruction in the course of the last hundred years. Nonetheless, Katz defended warfare as an essentially political tool.

“What war can do is create viable conditions in order to create new realities. And we’ve seen that, for example, in the second Lebanon war, in 2006. Israel was attacked. Two of its soldiers were kidnapped. Rockets were landing in Israel. And Israel decided to go to war. It could have decided to suck it up, to swallow hard and ignore what had happened. But it decided to go to war, and I think legitimately.”

Decisions like these, he argued, do not provide definitive solutions, but their short-term impact makes them worthwhile despite the human cost. Katz again used the 2006 war in Lebanon and the 2008 Operation Cast Lead as examples.

“The fact of the matter is that for the past four years there’s been quiet in Lebanon. So that war led to [UN Security Council Resolution] 1701, which led to this new quiet, which led  to this new understanding of the threat from Lebanon. … Operation Cast Lead in Gaza last year was very controversial, but also led to a new period of quiet which Israel has never had before, almost two years of quiet in the Gaza strip. Is it the end of the conflict? No. Did that war in Lebanon end Hamas or end Hezbollah? No, but it’s able to change the reality.”

Hearkening back to his cyclical view of conflict, Katz gave the example of the First World War as an effective, but temporary political tool.
“Think back to the end of the First World War,  when Germany was deterred until the beginning of the Second World War, when they were no longer deterred and decided to attack and invade Poland. So the concept is that these are all cycles and that’s what this warfare is all about. What Israel can hope for is that it can push off and stave off that future conflict for as long as possible.”

Katz did recognize the possibility of a paradigm shift in Israel’s situation with the arrival of new political actors.

“Hamas is part of the political process in the Palestinian arena, Hezbollah is part of the political process and part of the government in Lebanon,” he said. “Do we give them recognition? Do we talk to them? So that’s a whole separate issue in itself.”

In response, he asked, rhetorically, “What is there to talk about if they don’t recognize my right to exist?”

However, Katz did not entirely rule out the possibility that Israel would benefit from negotiating with Hamas and Hezbollah.

“So Israel refuses to talk to them. Is that the right or the wrong move? That’s a good question.”

The post The principles of war appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Two shows curated by Art Pop artistic director Matt Goerzen typify the range of artistic responses to new media.  “Technological Strategies” (October 1, Le Pop Up Shop, 5330 St. Laurent, 7 p.m.) and “Material Solutions” (October 2, Notman House, 51 Sherbrooke O., 4 p.m.) “complement each other in an exploration of postdigital, post internet art making practices,” according to Goerzen. The artists participating in the first use the internet as a medium in their work – take, for example, the Dutch internet artist Harm van dem Dorpel’s “Ethereal Self” and “Ethereal Others” project, where visitors to etherealself.com are photographed and their images archived at etherealothers.com. On the other hand, “Material Solution” remains grounded in historical – that is to say, material – modes of representation, but is no less preoccupied with new media and technologies, though it uses media like painting, printing, and sculpture.

Perhaps the festival’s most ambitious undertaking, the “Daily Printing Project” at DHC in the Old Port (468 St. Jean, every day during the festival from noon to 6 p.m.), is both an experiment in print media and music journalism. It’s also Art Pop’s most concrete link with the larger and more established music component of Pop Montreal. Each day during the festival, a group of artists, journalists, and academics will write articles, lay them out, and then print a newsletter to be distributed at around 20 venues across Montreal. Goerzen described the newsletter, organized by local artist Stacy Lundeen as “an equal blend of columns commenting on the festival and articles that are responding to shows…there will be reviews of shows but they won’t be what you expect them to be.” One column, for example, will review shows based purely on data collected at them – number of attendees, drinks sold, decibel levels, whatever.

Nonetheless, Art Pop seems more interested in media than music. A third exhibition tackles print media from another direction – abandoning print as a vehicle for communicating information, and focusing on its potential as a medium for aesthetic practices. As the internet has outstripped books, newspapers, and magazines in speed and capacity for the dissemination of information, artists around the world have turned back to these static and historical forms as artistic praxis. “Published / Self-Published,” at Yves Laroche Galerie D’art (6355 St. Laurent) is a selection of artists’ books, art magazines, as well as self-published, limited edition, or handmade publications presented by two local magazines: Palimpsest, which publishes artists’ editions and whose first issue was a collection of artists’ editions and articles in a box, and Pica, a publication put out by UQAM design students. Yves Laroche is a major Art Pop hub; on display alongside these publications-as-art is “Par chemin,” a large group exhibition of work on paper.

The post Art Pop appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Protesters filled the streets of downtown Toronto today for a march organized by the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty. Police estimated around 2,200 people in attendance, while organizers and media cited figures over 3,000.

A protester waves a banner for ‘No One is Illegal’ before the march.

Many demonstrators brought musical instruments to enliven the protest before the march began.

Women and trans groups led the march

Protesters march through downtown Toronto.

Thousands fill the streets.

Police lining the march’s route donned riot gear

A police officer shouts for protesters and journalists to move back after a man was arrested.

A protester yells at police officers for arresting a man in first confrontation of the demonstration.

Police form a barrier against protesters with their bicycles.

Riot police with helmets and shields block off a downtown street.

Much of downtown was empty, with the summit security barrier firmly in place.

Protesters made their way south toward the security zone before being stopped by police and turning around.

All photos by Elena Comay del Junco

The post At the G20: Friday in Photos appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Drumming before Thursday’s march for native rights.

Protesters took the government to task for their record on aboriginal issues.

The protest stayed peaceful, but police had a heavy presence.

As did their horses…

…and helicopters.

An eagle staff marked the front of the march.

A large banner reading ‘Native Land Rights Now’ formed a centrepiece of the march.

All photos by Elena Comay del Junco

The post At the G20: Thursday in Photos appeared first on The McGill Daily.

TORONTO – As world leaders began to descend on Southern Ontario for the G8 and G20 summits, a peaceful demonstration of over 1,000 people made its way through the heart of downtown Toronto this afternoon. Waving flags and banners, singing, and beating drums, native and non-native marchers demanded better treatment for Canada’s First Nations, investigation into the disappearance of more than 500 missing indigenous women, and redress for past abuses such as residential schools.

Though heavy lines of police on foot, bicycle, horseback, and motorcycles were in place the entirety of the march, the protest remained free of violence. The march was organized by the Defenders of Land, which describes itself “as a network of Indigenous communities and activists in land struggle across Canada.”

Before the protesters set off down University Avenue – past the US Consulate and various Ontario government ministries – organizer John Fox emphasized that the demonstrations would remain peaceful. “This is going to be a peaceful protest,” he told the crowds, “we have our elders and children here.”

Ben Powless, a member of Defenders of the Land who helped organize the protest, said that the summits were critical in the struggle for indigenous rights. “What Canada wants to do is bring in a lot more investment, a lot more of what they call economic development to our communities and use that as a way to take away a lot of our land and resources.”

After winding through city streets, where they cause significant traffic backups at a few intersections, demonstrators arrived in Allen Gardens on the eastern edge of downtown to eat lunch and hear speakers from various indigenous activist groups. Though police presence remained heavy, organizers and officers eventually shook hands and thanked each other for a peaceful event.

The post Protests stay peaceful as summits near appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The Bureau canadien d’investigation et d’ajustement (BCIA), which employed all security guards at McGill, entered bankruptcy protection on Thursday, April 29, citing debts of over $20 million. McGill cancelled their contract with BCIA the week of May 10.

Around 80 of 100 McGill agents saw their cheques bounce on Friday, April 23, sources said. Promised payment also failed to materialize on Tuesday of the last week, May 4, and again on Friday, May 7.

Cheques from BCIA arrived late on Friday, May 7, and many guards returned to work on Monday, May 10.

However, a security guard, who cited a confidentiality agreement signed by all McGill guards and spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that some guards’ cheques had once again bounced. “Apparently there’s a limited amount of funds,” he said.

As of the afternoon of Tuesday, May 11, some guards were still waiting for cheques to clear
BCIA was granted $800,000 in financing by Quebec businessman Giaochinno Arduini on Monday, May 3, so that they could continue to pay their employees.

However, a security guard said that, “None of the patrollers showed up today [Friday, May 7]…. They told us there would be cheques at noon today, then 2:00, then later this afternoon…” He said that nearly 30 guards did not show up to work on Friday.

Head of McGill Security Services, Pierre Barbarie said that the delay had to do with banking. “Certified cheques were to be delivered. It was a delay with the bank. They can’t just certify 100 cheques in an hour.”
However, the Métallos union representative for the BCIA guards, Dominique Lemieux, was less certain that payment would be forthcoming. “The company was supposed to have certified cheques, but [those] didn’t show up, so there will just be normal cheques,” he said in French.

Meanwhile, McGill used members of Security Services management to fill in for the missing guards. “The service side of things is still there. If it’s not my McGill management then it’s agency personnel,” Barbarie said.

McGill does not employ guards directly, instead contracting private agencies to provide personnel. BCIA was at McGill since 2004, and its most recent contract, renewed last year, was set to run until 2012. The agency has been replaced by Swedish security firm Securitas.

The guards speaking to The Daily under conditions of anonymity expressed long-running frustration with BCIA. “If we don’t calculate the paycheques ourselves, they’re going to try to remove the money, try to give less money to us,” one agent said.

A second agent echoed those concerns. “I remember when BCIA came in July 2004. It’s been hell ever since. Confusion over money, paycheques,” he said.

Some of the BCIA employees targeted McGill as a source of dissatisfaction as well. “McGill did absolutely nothing for us. They set up a box of food in the office, a couple bagels,” another agent said. “They’ve washed their hands of it. They’re not accountable.”
He went on to say that McGill should not have renewed their contract with BCIA last year. “They should have investigated when they signed – when they renewed their contract.”

If there was an agency change many of the current guards would be retained, because the guards that work at McGill are specifically trained to work at the University. “Most of them just change uniform,” Barbarie noted.

The effects of BCIA’s bankruptcy have not been restricted to McGill. The company’s larger clients include the Agence métropolitaine de transport (AMT), the Société des alcools du Québec (SAQ), the Commission scolaire de Montréal and Montreal police department.

BCIA was also mired in a high-level political scandal when Quebec family minister Tony Tomassi was fired by premier Jean Charest on May 6 for using a BCIA credit card.

The company’s owner and CEO, Luigi Corretti is a close friend of Tomassi’s. A May 7 report in La Presse claimed that Corretti had forced BCIA employees to attend Liberal fundraising events for which he paid, raising the possibility of illegal fundraising improprieties.

On Wednesday, Fréderic Ramos, director of operations at BCIA, said in French that the company is “going through a difficult period, but there are still two years left with McGill and normal operations will continue like in the past.” As of Friday, BCIA declined to comment on the new allegations or the continued lack of payment for guards.

This story is in development

The post Unpaid security guards walk out appeared first on The McGill Daily.

However, as with all art forms, dance changes constantly. And for more than two decades, Meg Stuart’s experimental choreography has pushed its limits as a mode of expression – exploring the way bodies move; actively engaging with issues of sexuality, community, and relationships; and transgressing boundaries of conventionality and propriety.

“Do Animals Cry?”, the latest work from Stuart’s Belgium-based troupe Damaged Goods, opens at Usine C in Montreal next Wednesday, offering the city a vision of the family through dance. The show comes to Canada after touring European cities for several months, playing to enthusiastic reviews in Berlin to Brussels.

Dressed in pyjamas, the cast of dancers performs on a stage dominated by a large, beaver dam-like structure of rough hewn sticks. As always, Stuart examines subject matter not usually addressed through dance. In “Do Animals Cry?”, she explores in a highly suggestive, visceral way, the unspoken rules of family. She describes the piece in a press release as “a frantic reunion where loved ones reminisce for the last time before falling to pieces.”

Much of Stuart’s work has moved in the outer orbits of respectability –  the last time she performed in Montreal, it involved her vomiting on stage. “Do Animals Cry?” will no doubt present disquieting images (of humans acting and being treated like animals, for example), but it will also offer a poignant reflection on what it means to belong to a family.

Do Animals Cry is playing at Usine C (1345 Lalonde) from February 24-27. Visit usine-c.com for more information.

—Elena Comay del Junco

The post The familial jungle appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The issue is conceptual, but has practical ramifications as well. Electricity is no more than a medium for storing and consuming energy. It can be generated in innumerable ways, from solar panels to natural gas. Likewise, fossil fuels are simply means to generate energy, which is the same whether its sources are harmful or not.

While electricity is undeniably essential, it also obscures the generation of our energy. A light bulb looks the same whether it is powered by electricity generated from a wind turbine or coal – which emits the most greenhouse gases of any fossil fuel.

Though huge plants in the hinterlands of major cities now burn thousands of tons of coal each day to create electricity, energy users no longer see the tangible effects of their energy consumption. Energy production has been taken out of their hands and moved to distant locations. They no longer need to keep a furnace or fireplace stoked, dispose of ashes throughout the day, or see dark smoke rising from their house. Coal’s effects, however, remain just as harmful and noxious as they were when its smoke blackened cities and lungs during the Industrial Revolution.

Of course, it’s possible to get information on how and where one’s electricity is generated. A Google search will tell you that 95 per cent of Quebec’s electricity comes from hydroelectric projects in the province’s north, while 70 per cent of the United States’ energy is derived from fossil fuels. However, the physical and conceptual distance between us and these sources often prevents us from using this information meaningfully.

In addition, the fact that most electricity is provided by monopolistic, often government-owned corporations means that there’s little meaningful action that an individual can take to move toward consuming electricity generated from less harmful sources of energy.

Projects aimed at reducing carbon emissions by encouraging people to use less electricity – like the federal government’s now-cancelled “One Ton Challenge” program that tried to reduce personal carbon emissions to one ton of CO2 a year – have had limited success. Detractors point to general apathy among citizens of developed countries, but this can be linked to the abstract terms in which energy is necessarily discussed, given how distanced its generation has become from our quotidian existences.

Electricity grids and centralized electrical generation are obviously here to stay; it is nonetheless vital that we develop a more concrete sense of what energy is and how it is produced. Not only should governments and energy producers make more information on the production of electricity more easily available, but they should also make it easier for individuals and communities to generate some of their own power – through sources like wind and solar energy.

Support should also be given for sources of energy that skip the conduit of electricity altogether. Passive solar heating, for example, is not only cheap and reliable if properly designed, but also connects the user to the source of their heating since it is fundamentally integrated into the physical structure of their day-to-day life.

Climate change activists often speak to the need for systemic change, pointing out that residential consumption accounts for only about 17 per cent of total energy consumption in Canada. It is no doubt vital that industrial energy consumption be severely reduced and attitudes toward energy, rethought.

However, a shift toward generating electricity closer to home, as well as energy sources that bypass electricity altogether, can make people more aware of how energy is produced and consumed. With more direct attunement to these issues, we can hope for greater commitment not only to reducing personal energy consumption, but also to advocating for a systemic rethinking of how energy is produced.

The post Recharging our understanding of electricity appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Café Cleopatra is the last occupied building on the western side of St. Laurent between Ste. Catherine and René Lévesque, where the Societé de developpement Angus (SDA) is slated to build a 12-storey office tower – the Quadrilatère St. Laurent – to house Hydro-Québec offices as well as green, sustainable retail space.

Since Café Cleopatra’s October 2009 notice of expropriation, SDA has acquired the block’s remaining buildings, including Main Importing, the oldest Middle Eastern grocers in Canada, and the Montreal Pool Room, a hot dog restaurant. However, the court case has paused the demolition of the block, which was scheduled to begin on January 1.

While the outcome of Café Cleopatra’s case remains unclear, Viviane Namasté, a professor at Concordia’s Simone de Beauvoir Institute and member of the Save the Main coalition, which works for the preservation of lower St. Laurent, said it could determine the future of SDA’s project.

“[The case] could put some wrenches in the plans and there are some strong legal arguments to be made against the expropriation,” Namasté said.

Éric Paradis, president of Save the Main, runs “Club Sin,” a long running, popular fetish event at Café Cleopatra. He questioned the logic of constructing the Quadrilatère St. Laurent, which has been promoted as an eco-friendly redesign of the street.

“Our city disregards counterculture. They don’t give a damn. They’d rather have a 12-storey office tower…. It’s alternative art being given the boot,” Paradis said.

Café Cleopatra owner Johnny Zoumboulakis has also been an open critic of the way the City handled the redevelopment plan. He pointed out that no open bid was held for the redevelopment. Rather, Montreal Mayor Gerard Tremblay’s administration approached SDA privately before presenting the plans to the public.

“It’s a puzzle why Angus was given so many projects without any public consultations or open bids,” Zoumboulakis said.

Public consultations were held by the Office de consultation publique de Montréal (OCPM) in May 2009, but some activists, local businesses, and urban planning experts felt that its recommendations were not implemented.

Namasté felt that many recommendations made during the OCPM consultations did not go “far enough,” though they did caution the City to take more time with the redevelopment project.

“The City, in my view, didn’t decide to slow down,” Namasté said. “When they decided to send a notice of expropriation to Café Cleopatra, that had to be voted on at municipal council. But they didn’t have at that point a clear mock-up of what the project would be.”

The post Demolition of lower St. Laurent on hold appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Excited to prove her wrong, I arrived at the Theâtre Ste-Catherine last Friday looking forward to trenchant satire, jokes that blurred linguistic boundaries, and ribald takes on the state of la belle province. My plan was working well until I left two hours later without having laughed, with memories of bad jokes about pot, bad French Canadian accents, and an overweight exotic dancer who also happened to be the main character’s mother regrettably yet vividly imprinted on my mind.

Vulgarity isn’t the issue here, nor are politics. It would be easy to find fault with The Chicoutimi Kid for being offensive – for being crude, or sexist, or trading in on the most overly simplistic stereotypes. These are no doubt legitimate concerns, but at an even more basic level than that, the play simply didn’t fulfil the single inviolable rule of comedy: it wasn’t funny.

The show follows Larry Welkes, an alcoholic anglophone separatist from Ville-Emard (“right next to the Verdun”), and his taciturn friend, the titular Chicoutimi Kid, as they travel around the province, meeting a motley group of people, including a pair of francophone, hippie-girl hitchhikers; a middle-aged Berri-UQAM street punk; a pure laine stripper; and a louche drunk called Sugar Rock St-Pierre.

Not that I’d claim that washed-up, loser types can’t make successful comedy – take the slew of slacker movies by Judd Apatow and his ilk, or perhaps the Coen brothers’ Big Lebowski – but there’s a catch: these less-than-accomplished individuals created for our entertainment need to be funny, endearing, or, at the very least, idiosyncratic. The Chicoutimi Kid’s characters, quite simply, are none of those things.

Obscured by a façade of badly told raunchy gags, the ideas behind the show have potential. The show’s writer, Alain Mercieca, explained that he was trying to examine the complexities of Québecois identity. “Larry says he doesn’t believe in borders. He is a world citizen, yet at the same time he feels that a place as big and rich as Quebec must be considered a country,” Mercieca explains. “Larry is in love with the world, but his world is Quebec.”

And, despite the nearly complete lack of successful humour in the play, there are moments when the dark clouds of unfunny comedy thin, revealing the complexity that Mercieca and his co-actors are trying to convey.

At one point, Larry picks up a copy of Le Devoir and begins rhapsodizing about how “this paper is only eight pages! In Quebec, you take the good bourgeois when you want it,” a line that, delivered with more thoughtfulness, might cuttingly express the ongoing tensions in Québecois political discourse between populism and intellectualism.

A few minutes later, at Berri-UQAM, Larry listens to a street punk complain about “St-Henri hipster kids with ukuleles, banjos, tight rolled up jeans, and fixed gear bikes” ruining his formerly grungy neighbourhood. Again, this line alone points to a keen awareness of gentrification, subcultures, and Montreal’s polymorphous character, but barely even registers among the bad accents and poorly-played drunkenness.

The handful of lines like these, though lost in the morass of The Chicoutimi Kid, do reveal that Mercieca and his fellow comedians have a feel for how to translate the complexities of Québecois society into comedy. This begs the question, then, of why the play is so full of bad, crude jokes that are not so much offensive as they are boring.

The disaster was not unmitigated. In fact, the show was all the more frustrating because it’s easy to see how it could have evolved differently; the tritely vulgar script shows small signs of the type of self-awareness that makes crude humour funny, as well as a keenly satirical sensibility.

However, these were both lost in the boring, raunchy mire of The Chicoutimi Kid. When I called my friend the next day, I had to admit that while I stay hopeful to find some good Quebec-based comedy in the future, this show definitely didn’t prove her wrong.

The post The Kid ain’t funny appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Opera McGill has done exactly that in their production of Georg Friedrich Handel’s Agrippina, which opens Friday at Pollack Hall. Written in 1709 for the amusement of the Venetian aristocracy, the opera dramatizes its titular character’s successful and vicious plot to install her son Nero as Roman emperor. Rather than setting the opera in its original ancient time and place, director Hank Knox has updated it into the 21st century, drawing direct inspiration from the short-lived television series Dirty Sexy Money.

The libretto and music remain faithful to Handel’s original, but following their aesthetic reinterpretation, Agrippina’s characters appear as “greedy CEOs…modern-day Lady Gaga-type pop divas…or modern-day lawyers,” according to the stage director Patrick Hansen’s introduction in the program.

At a dress rehearsal on Tuesday evening, Knox jokingly described the production as “very téléroman style,” about “rich nasty people who bitch at each other for three hours.” While obviously something of an exaggeration, Knox’s description conveys the overall effect of the changes.

Whatever one’s view of the merits or drawbacks of radical reinterpretations and modernization, the production unquestionably offers extremely strong performances – the cast is made up of postgraduate music students, many of whose voices are on par with professional singers. As Estelí Gomez, who plays the eponymous lead character, stressed: “Musically, we’ve attempted to stay true to Handel’s direction in the score, especially in recitative [text-heavy portions of music that are more speech-like than arias]. I believe the modern re-interpretation of Agrippina works…but we are definitely not attempting to modernize the style of the music.”

Jana Miller, whose character, Poppea, was remodelled on pop singer Lady Gaga, explained the thinking behind the modernization. “The music is beautiful, and in Handel’s day it was pop music,” she observed, “so when you really get that style into your ear it can be amazing and I love singing it. But it’s so ancient and disconnected from our music today, so I think updating it is a good idea.” Miller said that the updating makes “it an accessible opera,” especially in light of the perceived isolation of music students within the University, which she called “a problem of the music school being kind of separated. McGill is a great school and the music school is part of that – we should all support each other.”

Opera can be a daunting form of entertainment. It can also be undeniably beautiful, and, despite its reputation for seriousness and length, very amusing. Less well-known than later 19th-century works by composers like Puccini and Wagner, Baroque operas like Agrippina offer a mix of melodrama, levity, and accessibly melodious music.

Agrippina will play at Pollack Hall at 7:30 p.m., Friday, November 20 and Saturday, November 21 and at 2:00 p.m. on Sunday, November 22.

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Expressway takes its title from a central thematic concern that runs through many of the volume’s often formally structured poems. Queyras uses the cultural impact of expressways, the dominant modes of transportation in developed countries, as a starting point for an exploration of environmental, economic, political, and social change.
It is a book that is, in many ways, a critique of modern society, and it’s also Queyras’s most politically and globally engaged work yet. She spoke of making this shift “very reluctantly. Expressway is a book that has always deeply frightened and disturbed me…. It was not something I really wanted to be writing about.”
Queyras described the writing process as “a matter of trying to figure out a way to talk about the issues of our time, without being too on point, and without being pedantic…. It didn’t come easily.” However, despite the challenges involved, she maintained that poetry, like all creative expression, is, by necessity, politically grounded. “I think all work is political, particularly work that says it’s not political. I think that’s an incredibly political statement,” she explained. “[This work] is probably a bit more overtly political than I am comfortable with…. It struts its stuff a bit more than I would prefer my work to.”

Much of Expressway’s political engagement, Queyras emphasized, came from the global conditions during the period that the book was written, and the impact that time and place had on its subject matter. “[Expressway] was written at a time when it felt absolutely impossible not to be political,” she said. “It was written at the end of the Bush era, when nobody seemed to be talking about what was going on in front of everybody’s face. At least in America people weren’t. So at least to me, it seemed impossible not to be that direct.”
One of the book’s longer poems is written in the voice of Dorothy Wordsworth, sister of the famed Romantic poet. Though the rest of the book is grounded in modern life, Queyras is interested in the similarities between Romantic and contemporary reactions to change. She sees parallels between industrialization and the growing scale of war at the turn of the 19th century, and current societal transformations.
“I can see Dorothy Wordsworth wandering around the New Jersey Turnpike,” she says, drawing the connection. “We forget that what we’re dealing with now, they were dealing with then, in a different form, but no less massive. And I think that’s one of the things that really ties the 18th century to our century – the scale of transformation, it’s just unbelievable.”

Like “Lines written many miles from Grasmere,” – a poem whose title makes explicit reference to Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey…” – much of Expressway’s content, as well as Queyras’s earlier work, reformulates found material. For Expressway, Queyras used sources as varied as Google search results, traffic reports, and personal narration. “I’m not really interested in receiving a divine poem,” Queyras said, explaining her process. “I’m interested in taking material and using it in different ways…. I think it was Tom Waits who said songs are everywhere in the air and you just have to reach out and grab them, and I think that’s very true. I think there’s more information out there than most of us can handle, and I think most of us are busy trying to shut it all out, because if you let it in, it can be overwhelming. So for me, it’s a matter of knowing when to open the floodgates, and when to keep them closed.”
In Queyras’s work, collected materials are coupled with the rigourous application of formal techniques to the poems. For example, much of 2001’s Slip was written in the form of metred couplets, and Lemon Hound, published in 2006, consistently uses short prose sentences arranged to create lyrically powerful poems.
Queyras described the formal aspect of her work as a way of enabling her to express difficult personal ideas, particularly in Slip, where “at some point the formal concerns took over. At some point the whole first section became an exercise in how to make a couplet, how to think about a metrically-charged line in contemporary setting. In a way, the backdrop for me was the personal and what was interesting were the formal concerns.”

Though Expressway’s subject matter differs from that of Queyras’s previous poetry, it’s clear that experiments with form are still central to her work. She explained the process that led to Expressway as “a formal argument. [The work] asks, why is it more palatable to read a poem in tercets than one in a Google-sculpted search? Why do we consider formal properties more important than just a list of statistics, for example? So a lot of the time, I’m saying the same things in different ways, trying to poke at the way in which we are willing to take in information.”
Above all, Queyras points to poetry’s potential to impact the way people think. “I try to make space for things to happen,” she says of her work. “I don’t think Expressway has any answers at all, but I think it can evoke conversations or ways of thinking about our situation…. [Poetry] can lead protests, it can soothe souls. It can numb. It can also be used as propaganda to keep people silent. Poetry is not neutral.”

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En Masse was created last February after founder Jason Botkin and a handful of fellow artists were given the chance to show their work at Galerie Pangée in Old Montreal. Botkin remembers thinking that “a group show would be boring, so we said ‘Let’s put paper over the entire surface of the gallery walls and just draw with everyone we wanted to draw with in the city.’” A total of 28 artists were involved in the first ever En Masse show.

After the exhibition at Pangée, several of En Masse’s members remained in contact and continued to collaborate. Engaging with their community was a part of the collective’s aim from the beginning. According to Botkin, “it was always part of the initial discussion in terms of there being this collaborative event, that it was very natural that there be some sort of broader sense of growth to the project – moving into mentoring or something that had a real sense of community outreach.”

The decision to work specifically with students came about after En Masse was offered the use of a large basement in Old Montreal to decorate and convert into a shared community space. They never completed the project, because, as Botkin said, “something was bugging us about that idea, and quickly we realized that that space would have no meaning if the kids who were going to use it were not involved somehow.”

After speaking with a friend who teaches at one of the EMSB Outreach schools, Botkin and his fellow artists called schools in September looking for students who might want to be involved in creating art. By the end of the month, they had gathered 12 students, ranging from 15 to 18 years old, from six Outreach schools. The schools, which Botkin described as “really, very underfunded, real labour-of-love projects,” offer smaller, non-traditional models of education.

With six artists working with the students, a much smaller group than the original En Masse collective, the drawing on display at Red Bird was created over the space of just four days. Despite that fact that, as Botkin said, “most of [the students] had never been in a gallery before,” the students took to the project and working collaboratively very quickly.

The final product is certainly a unified work that evidences the collaborative nature of the students’ and artists’ work, but on closer inspection, it also reveals a diverse multiplicity of styles, ranging from graffiti tags to comic book-style illustration to delicate black and white drawings of faces and hands.

The drawings also contain openly political threads, which express anger and frustration. This is perhaps a reflection of the fairly marginalized position of many of the student-artists; students often come to Outreach schools because of trouble succeeding at traditional high schools. EMSB Outreach teacher Meaghan McNerney emphasized the importance of “focusing more on outreach, on the alternative network. Those kids really need some extra motivation, and they don’t have a chance to do art.”

With this in mind, the project and show have been a huge success. Initial concerns about whether the collaboration would be rewarding for the students have been thoroughly put to rest, and En Masse and the EMSB Outreach are already planning a second version of the project. The students are equally enthusiastic; according to McNerney, “the kids are already saying ‘We’re going to do this again, right?’”

The En Masse-EMSB student collaboration will be up at Red Bird Studio Gallery (135 Van Horne) through October 31.

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