Month: February 2012

Categories
Opinions

In Rhodes we should not trust

SACKVILLE, N.B. (CUP) — The Rhodes Trust recently announced that yet another Mount Allison University student has been awarded a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship. These scholarships were created in 1902 from the estate of British imperialist Cecil Rhodes. According to the Rhodes Trust website, Rhodes’ vision in founding the scholarship was to develop outstanding leaders who would be motivated to fight “the world’s fight,” to “esteem the performance of public duties as their highest aim” and to promote international understanding and peace.

These aims are well and fine, but Rhodes’ idea of international understanding and peace was contingent on the rule of the British Empire, which Rhodes envisioned ruling the African continent “from Cape to Cairo.” The Rhodes Trust uses words to distract applicants from reading deeper into what the scholarship is about; however, I have to wonder about those who accept the financial support of a man who made his money in the worst of ways.

Rhodes made his millions in the diamond mines of southern Africa founding De Beers, a diamond company that has been a target of numerous legal accusations of anti-trust. Rhodes was also prominently involved in the Jameson Raid, an event that led to the outbreak of the Second Boer War. This war pitted Great Britain against the Netherlands for imperial control over southern Africa and resulted in collateral deaths of tens of thousands of native Africans.

Ninety-four Oxford University fellows deplored the decision to allow Rhodes on campus to accept an honorary degree. The opposition stemmed primarily from Rhodes’ involvement in the Jameson Raid and his circumvention of law in southern Africa. After the raid, Rhodes’ brother was tried and convicted of murder. His execution was commuted to a 15-year sentence before Rhodes spent £30 million (approximately £2.7 billion in 2012) in order to have him released.

Rhodes was obsessed with personal gain and expanding the wealth of De Beers. Even at the outset of the Second Boer War, Rhodes attempted to persuade military officials to protect his mining interests, rather than Britain’s military interests. Accounts of Rhodes during the time of war expose his fleeting concern for the lives of others and shed light on his perception of others who were not as “civilized” as the British.

Are the achievements of Rhodes scholars overshadowed by the atrocities Rhodes committed during his lifetime? Are the students receiving scholarships concerned that the $100,000 they receive from the Rhodes Trust comes from the imperial exploitation and war-mongering Rhodes took part in?

I know I would be concerned. If I claimed to care about corporate social responsibility, I would not be able to bring myself to accept the money. Being nothing more that a “C” student, however, I don’t have to create an excuse to deal with the ethical dilemma of being awarded a Rhodes Scholarship. What excuse does the current class of Rhodes scholars have?

Categories
Arts

Sweet dreams are made of this

A scene from Black Diamond: Fool's Gold. Cinema Politica is screening the film Monday, Feb. 13.
A scene from Black Diamond: Fool's Gold. Cinema Politica is screening the film Monday, Feb. 13.

While the “rags to riches through hard work” narrative may anchor capitalist ethos, it lacks the glamour we tend to think should accompany success these days. Slow aggregation just isn’t sexy. No one strives to be Cornelius Vanderbilt anymore; Jonathan Duhamel or Mark Zuckerberg feature in today’s schemes and dreams. And, though it may be the American Dream’s most exclusive kin, the story of the elite athlete, say Michael Jordan, is perhaps coveted most.
This shift from Vanderbilt to Jordan also alters the character of the almost-made-its. Those who worked hard to build a business, but never neared the staggering success of the Commodore, still built something; they won’t be remembered as titans of business, but they’re not often cautionary tales. The same cannot be said about elite athletes.
For every LeBron James, there’s a handful of Hook Mitchells: athletes who came close to the big time but are derailed through bad decisions, bad management or simple bad luck. Now imagine the kids striving to become the poster on their wall who face higher stakes, consequences even more dire and have no semblance of a legal safety net to protect them. This gets you somewhat close to the situation documented in Black Diamond: Fool’s Gold.
Black Diamond focuses on young boys in Ivory Coast and Ghana who share dreams of playing professional soccer, not just for the glamour but, as one of the 13-year-olds says in earnest, to repay their mothers for all they did to feed their growing kids.
It’s immediately clear most of these kids will never play professionally, not in Uruguay or Japan and certainly not in Europe; there’s far more of them than there are spots in the pros. So there’s a feeling of dread pervading their conversations with the filmmakers about playing for
Barcelona or Juventus or Marseilles. And it’s not long before we realize the kids aren’t just fighting against statistics. We’re introduced to a program called ASPIRE Africa through a talent call on Ghanaian television. We later see their van parked at Accra’s main square, blaring “your dreams will come true, your dreams will come true” over the roof-mounted loudspeaker. Called the largest football
talent search in history, the Qatari-backed program annually screens 500,000 13-year-olds from seven countries, hoping to find Europe’s next imported stars. We join the 50 finalists in Ivory Coast and in Ghana, where they are playing for scouts from football royalty.
ASPIRE looks benevolent on the surface, providing a stage and spectators with legitimate clout. But a little digging unearths a sinister network manipulating the boys and conning their families.
Agents and managers who attend the showcase offer positions in Austria or Morocco, if the kids can pay up front fees of three or four thousand dollars. When parents balk, they are asked why they would damage their kid’s chances for overhead costs sure to be recouped 10 times over. Your child will be happy and your finances secure, they say, but only if you pay now. Not many parents are able to resist this dual-pronged entreaty.
The players arrive, bright-eyed and ready to make their mark, only to be abandoned penniless in a foreign country. It turns out ASPIRE is more of an early screener for other semi-pro teams; the 13-year-olds are too young to train, but scouts want to know who to keep their eyes on. For the rest of the kids, the camp is a spider web in which self-interested businessmen and experienced con men ensnare their marks. The players’ elders warned of these spiders, but the siren song of Adidas kits and Umbro shoes is too hard to resist. (A visual aside: the spider motif slowly makes its way through Black Diamond visually, culminating in one of the most unsettling, illusion-breaking moments I’ve seen in a documentary. I won’t ruin the surprise, but it’s a rare instance where the verisimilitude of documentary is subverted to its advantage.)
The film is explicit in comparing this modern-day industry with the slave trade. It may be an extreme analogy, but it’s hard not to compare the gated training schools where kids are used and disposed of like commodities to the coastal fortresses built by the British.
Every NFL or NBA player leaves dozens of high school peers behind, working minimum wage jobs, wishing they hadn’t listened to the sycophants and opportunists who promised glory but disappeared when expectations weren’t met. It’s an upsetting story, but it pales in comparison to the one Black Diamond tells. Because for every Didier Drogba or Michael Essien, there are hundreds of Ivorians and Ghanaians who were tricked by soccer’s swindlers, and who started with nothing but somehow now have less.

Black Diamond: Fool’s Gold is showing on Feb. 13 at 7 p.m. in H-110. For more information, visit www.cinemapolitica.org/concordia.

Categories
News

Dance professor Ken Roy loses year-long battle with cancer

Concordia dance professor Ken Roy loses one-year battle with cancer
Concordia dance professor Ken Roy loses one-year battle with cancer

On Jan. 28, 2012, dance artist, professor and mentor Ken Roy died at the age of 49 after succumbing to cancer.

Originally from Nova Scotia, Ken began his professional career working under Peter Boneham as a dancer with Le Groupe de la Place Royale. His career allowed him to travel around the world performing with many of Montreal’s well known choreographers such as Jean-Pierre Perreault, Louise Bédard and Sylvain Émard.
Ken had been a staple in the Concordia contemporary dance department for the last seven years, teaching daily technique classes and providing support to the students’ physical and creative training.
He pushed the boundaries of what each student believed to be their personal potential, bringing into the studio an extraordinary amount of visceral force, dedication, and above all, joy and passion for movement.
While his death is a great loss, all of the students and staff recognize his presence is not lost and continues to inspire their artistic endeavours.
In the words of Ken Roy: “We’re dancers, this is what we do.”
Categories
Arts

Where stories and histories meet

Do you remember your childhood imagination? Mine was a vibrant mix of superheroes, nightmares and the stories told by my grandmothers, both Italian immigrants.
From their terrifying narratives of leaving behind a war-torn country to their folktales about wolves that would eat disobedient children, their stories were entertaining, imaginative—and scary.
Personal Mythologies, a new exhibit on at the MAI gallery until Feb. 18, explores exactly that kind of personal, imaginative headspace. Featuring two Montreal-based artists, Osvaldo Ramirez Castillo, whose work is inspired by his family’s escape from El Salvador’s civil war in the 1980s, and Marigold Santos, whose work reflects her family’s emigration experience from the Philippines to Canada, Personal Mythologies is intellectually and emotionally engrossing.
Hanging before the gallery’s windows like haunting dreamcatchers are several installation pieces by Santos featuring braided artificial hair, stapled paper and knotted cords, reflecting her fascination with ‘the woven.’ She says in her artist’s statement: “[The woven] becomes a form of talisman” with the “ability to invite, and repel.” Taking note of the whimsical and eerie elements included in Santos’ pieces—a braid, a jewelled necklace—viewers construct and weave their own stories, connecting the pieces.
“When I was looking into my own culture and paralleling my own experience of history with that of a culture and folklore that existed before me, it was a way to experience this mixing of eastern and western culture,” Santos said of her art. “I came to the idea of an identity based on a combination of different cultures that I could re-create.”
War, death, the afterlife and the lives left behind by war are all themes that Personal Mythologies invites readers to contemplate. In the centre of the room, Monument, an installation work by Castillo, incorporates earth, dolls, shoes, moss and plants to create an organic-looking space paying tribute to those left behind by war. Facing Castillo’s installation, Santos’ HEX (Secret Signals Hands), a series of large, finely-detailed illustrations of hands forming letters spell out: HOW DO WE TALK TO THE DEAD?
Across the room, Castillo’s illustration and painting piece My Tyrant, My Protest, My Myth showcases his finely-detailed drawing and ethereal execution of watercolour-like paints, depicting soldiers, priests, men with tattooed faces, muscled and contorted dogs, beasts and war imagery of all kinds. Bathed occasionally in red and always rendered with the same amazingly precise lines—Castillo cites Albrecht Durer as one of his influences—each individual face invites the viewer to look closer and appreciate all the subtlety those fine lines create.
One of the great triumphs of Personal Mythologies is the mix of intriguing subject matter and spell-binding execution: both Castillo and Santos trained in print-making, and it’s a joy to walk through the exhibit admiring their skillful drawings. From Castillo’s postcard-sized portraits of Canadian soldiers, civilians and bizarre beings, to Santos’ series Secret Signals: 1, 2, and 3, featuring otherworldly-looking women in pastel and acid tones and incorporating string and braiding motifs, most of the artworks in Personal Mythologies are so detailed—and the lines so fine—that it’s almost impossible to believe that someone has drawn them so precisely.
“I draw in a very organic way that really fits my style, and I don’t tend to plan out my pieces,” says Castillo. “Mylar allows me to draw and paint on both sides of the sheet,” he says of his use of the polyester film medium, which seems to make the paper glow with a pearly sheen, “and it creates a different effect than paper does.”
It’s clear that curator Zoë Chan has put together the ideal exhibit: works by Santos and Castillo seem to speak the same visual language, but the viewer is able to see each artist’s style and techniques as distinct and appreciate their uniqueness, creating an exhibit that is both harmonious and dynamic.
I don’t usually write this personally about exhibits, but I left the MAI thinking about Personal Mythologies all day long. If you’ve got love or want to think up your own stories, Personal Mythologies is a must-see exhibition.

Personal Mythologies is at the MAI gallery (3680 Jeanne-Mance St., suite 103) until Feb. 18. Admission is free. For more information, go to www.m-a-i.qc.ca.

Categories
Sports

Big win and tough loss for Concordia men

Peter Karvouniaris makes a sprawling save in a 5-3 loss to the Ottawa Gee-Gees. Photo by Navneet Pall

Just like the women’s team experienced a week before, the men’s hockey team was unable to stop the Ottawa Gee-Gees as they played their second game in a row on Saturday night.

Peter Karvouniaris makes a sprawling save in a 5-3 loss to the Ottawa Gee-Gees. Photo by Navneet Pall

The night before, however, the men played what may have been their best game of the season, knocking off the CIS’ top ranked McGill 4-2. Concordia has defeated McGill in two of the teams’ three meetings this season.

This loss to Ottawa greatly dampened Concordia’s chances of making it into the CIS top 10, a place the team would love to find itself in as the regular season winds down.

“The guys played as hard as they could today with what they had left, but we just didn’t have enough energy to compete,” said head coach Kevin Figsby of the Ottawa game. “Ottawa was coming in with a must-win situation. If they lose, they are out of the playoffs. It was a tough game for us today, but you can’t do anything about it, that’s how the schedule dictates itself.”

With two games to go in the regular season, the Stingers will be without the help of goaltender Peter Karvouniaris, who is out indefinitely with a concussion he suffered in the second period as Ottawa forward Stephen Blunden ran him into the net.

Figsby believes the play was a critical turning point of the game. “We were still in a 1-1 hockey game when they ran our goaltender,” said Figsby. “We didn’t know when he got hit that it was a concussion, so he stayed in and they took two shots that went in. That turned the game around.”

The first period had Ottawa written all over it as the Stingers had trouble getting out of their own zone. The Gee-Gees had one opportunity after another as the defence was scrambling, but everything was stopped by Karvouniaris keeping the game 0-0.

Three minutes into the second period, Concordia forward François Lanctôt-Marcotte opened the scoring, making it 1-0 for the Stingers. “It’s a lucky goal I guess,” he said of the goal scored on the rebound of Charles-Antoine Messier.

After Concordia’s goal, it was all Gee-Gees once again. The Stingers had a chance to take a 2-0 lead as Ottawa forward Stephen Blunden was called for goalie interference. But the Stingers were sloppy on the power play, and gave up on a two-on-one which resulted in the puck finding its way past Karvouniaris and to the back of net.

A minute later, Ottawa added another marker as Stephen Blunden scored with a wrist shot, making it 2-1.

Ottawa made the game 3-1 before the intermission as Luc Olivier Blain was able to beat a woozy Karvouniaris.

The third period started with Nicholas Champion taking the place of Karvouniaris in the net after he suffered his concussion. To welcome Champion to the game, Ottawa scored just 40 seconds into the period.

The teams exchanged goals for the rest of the period en route to Ottawa’s 5-3 victory.

Despite the win against McGill, captain Eric Bégin wasn’t letting his team off the hook for Saturday’s game. “I don’t buy into that fatigue factor, that’s not an excuse,” he said. “We play 28 games in a season, not 82 like the pros. It’s not an excuse.”

Concordia is up against McGill this Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. at Ed Meagher Arena.

Categories
Sports

Stingers get back on track with weekend sweep

Taylor Garner battles off defenders in Concordia's victory over UQAM. Photo by Navneet Pall
Taylor Garner battles off defenders in Concordia's victory over UQAM. Photo by Navneet Pall

After watching an archrival end their perfect season last week, the Concordia Stingers were anxious to get back on the court this weekend against Laval and UQAM and atone for the loss to McGill.

Concordia turned in two impressive performances, beating Laval 80-59 on Friday at home, and then picking up a 73-62 win at UQAM.

The slow starts and periods of lackadaisical play that plagued the Stingers in recent weeks were addressed this week during practice, and the changes were noticed come game time.

“I think it was our attitude on the team [that made the difference],” said coach John Dore. “The guys had a wake-up call. We had better practices, we were more focused and intense, and maybe had a bit better understanding of what we need to do.”

While he was happy with his team’s effort, Dore was never too concerned with the overall motivation level of his team. “The guys should get excited about playing the games, that’s why we work so hard in practice,” he said. “They’re here because they want to be here, so it shouldn’t be hard to get motivated.”

On Friday night, it was guard Kyle Desmarais leading the way for the Stingers with 18 points and seven assists. Despite falling behind by nine points early in the game, Concordia battled back to take a lead into the second quarter and would not trail again in the game.

Concordia faced a quick turnaround from the Laval game and was on the court against UQAM on Saturday. The Stingers jumped out to an early 17-4 lead, and though they let UQAM back into the game, Concordia dominated play for the most part and was never seriously threatened late in the game. Rookie guard Jerome Blake led the Stingers in scoring with 16 points in just 19 minutes coming off the bench.

With five games remaining in the season, Concordia has a six-point lead over second place McGill. Thus far the Stingers have been right on par with coach Dore’s preseason expectations.

“I thought we had a chance to be in first place and I sort of expected to be in first place,” said Dore. “I don’t know if I expected [to be in first by six points]. Our goal right now is to create some distance from the pack.”

Dore has never been one to rest players down the stretch, even if playoff seeding has been determined, but given some tough late season scheduling it is not something that has been ruled out.

 

Concordia’s next game is this  Friday at 8 p.m. against Bishop’s at Loyola.

Categories
Sports

Categories
News

“Anglo-Franco committee” holds protest against tuition hikes

French and English CEGEPs and universities protest to show solidarity in the fight against tuition hikes
French and English CEGEPs and universities protest to show solidarity in the fight against tuition hikes - Photo by Navneet Paul
Hundreds of students yelled and chanted their way across downtown Montreal on Feb. 2 to protest against tuition hikes — and when they did, they made sure their voices were heard in both official languages.
In an effort to show unity between French and English schools in the fight against the proposed $1,625 increase in tuition fees announced by the Liberal government last March, more than 300 students from various Montreal CEGEPs and universities gathered at Concordia’s Hall building. From there, they started marching towards the Université de Québec a Montréal, shouting their way through McGill University and the Vieux-Montréal CEGEP.

“This protest is the outcome of several inter-university meetings we held at the end of last year,” said Rushdia Mehreen, formerly of the Graduate Students’ Association and member of the Mob Squad, a student group that has given itself the mandate of staging protest and demonstrations against tuition hikes. “In these meetings, we wanted to find out a way to build more ties between francophone and anglophone universities and CEGEPs.”

The idea of demonstrating French and English came shortly after the incident that took place at McGill University last Nov. 10, when several students faced police brutality after the massive rally that saw 30,000 students against tuition hikes flood the streets of Montreal. The group of protesters was attacked by anti-riot police and sought refuge in McGill premises where the police followed them and continued to fight them back.

The incident sparked the movement “We are all McGill,” inspired by the Egyptian movement “We are all Khaled Said,” a movement created in Jan. 2011 condemning police brutality.
Students from various schools in Montreal felt the need to express their support furthermore and decided to meet last December in order to find an effective way to demonstrate unity and to solve a potential miscommunication between francophone and anglophone schools.

“On s’en calisse [we don’t give a damn] about which language we speak,” exclaimed Frank Lévesque-Nicol, one of the event organizers and member of the Comité sur la lutte sociale of the UQÀM student union. “We have to put aside these futile language quarrels and go beyond these usual divisions. We are subjected to the same threat and we are fighting the same struggle.”

The slogan of Thursday’s protest symbolically alternated between French and English, with flyers reading: “Don’t fuck with notre éducation.”

When marching through the McGill campus, protesters honoured those affected by last year’s police brutality by chanting: “Who’s McGill? It’s our McGill!”

Some organizers joked by informally calling the group who organized the protest the “Anglo-Franco committee,” but Levesque insisted that the protest was organized by concerned students and was not to be affiliated to any group or association.

However, the wish to remain a grass-rooted movement slightly backfired for Concordia organizers as only a few Concordia students showed up to the protest, with the Concordia Student Union making no publicity of the event.

“I know very little about what’s going on today,” said CSU VP external Chad Walcott, former head of the Mob Squad, who was not participating in the protest. Walcott said the CSU was not entirely informed about the protest and that it was “purely a Mob Squad initiative,” adding that he still supported the protest.

Mehreen explained that the Mob Squad was an entity made out of concerned students and that it was autonomous from any unions.

Thursday’s protest came only a day after the UQAM Faculty of Arts and Science voted in favour of an unlimited general strike set to take place next March. A similar vote will take place at Concordia during a general assembly on March 7 where undergraduate students will decide whether or not they want to go on a general strike.

Exit mobile version