Getting a different taste of the Big Apple

By: Ronak Ghorbani Editorial Assistant

New York City — home to over eight million people and spanning over 790 square kilometres. It’s a big place that can be overwhelming for first-time visitors.

Too much time in Times Square can leave you feeling nauseated and itching to get a real bite of the Big Apple. 

In February, I spent a few days in the charming city and explored away from the typical NYC tourist spots (i.e. the MET, Empire State Building, etc.). 

The real NYC lies in the alleyways of Chinatown, the record stores in Greenwich Village and conversations on the subway. Here’s an alternative guide to New York City.

Travel and accommodations

Being a student means my friends and I have limited resources. So when it comes to travel, airplanes definitely don’t make the list. 

We took a bus to NYC, it was about 10 hours long, but only cost $15 for a return trip. Megabus.com has some sweet deals if you book far enough in advance (we reserved our seats two months earlier). 

Staying in Manhattan can be astronomically pricey, even the hostels are expensive. We faced a 40-minute commute to Brooklyn and stayed at a hostel. For three nights in a private room with four beds, it cost $52 person. The hostel, named Loftsel on Greene Avenue, is minutes away from the G subway line. 

Staff and guests were super friendly — we were invited to a party on our first night! There’s a kitchen on each floor and free access to the internet. Rooms are clean and the décor looks likes it’s been pulled out of an Ikea catalogue. 

To book a room, visit loftstel.com 

Who needs a tour bus when you’ve got the Brooklyn Bridge?

Walking across the Brooklyn Bridge gives you a spectacular view of Manhattan and you end up near China Town. It’s a little over 1.8 km long and runs over the East River. You get a stunning view of the skyline and there’s info stops with descriptions of how the bridge was built. Only warning: watch out for bikers, they get pissed when pedestrians walk on their bike path and will yell at you to move. 

Chinatown

NYC’s Chinatown is really different from Toronto’s. It’s full of nooks and corners and feels more like a neighbourhood than a really long street full of stores. People are friendly and it doesn’t have that overly crowded, congested feel Toronto’s Chinatown sometimes does.

Columbus Park Pavilion

This park has been ridiculed by some New Yorkers as run down and dingy, but I got a sense of community from it. Granted, the pavilion could use a paint touch-up, but who cares about aesthetics when you’ve got tables upon tables of Chinese checkers grids? Games take place daily, with crowds of seniors surrounding the game, eagerly looking on and socializing.

When I was there, a man approached another man practising tai-chi and learned some moves himself. The park is great for resting. There are a lot of benches, and it’s a great place to see a community in action. 

Tasty Dumplings – 54 Mulberry St.

The perfect place for a quick, filling, cheap meal. This quaint restaurant is sparsely furnished but serves up the best dumplings (I’ve ever had). The most popular are cabbage and pork fried dumplings (5 for $1.25) and veggie boiled dumplings (8 for $3). Service is fast and efficient, with many customers streaming in and out, taking their food to go. 

Ten Ren Tea Shop – 75 Mott St.

This shop has great deals on tea from China and Thailand. Prices vary based on quality, but the free samples are great for newbies to tea drinking. You can also get small packages of almost every kind of tea for $0.50, which is great if you’re indecisive like me.

SoHo 

This area’s full of shops and trendy boutiques, but it also has a few nifty art galleries. 

Puffin Room – 435 Broome St.

An open space art gallery housing mostly trendy/hip young artists. One curator told me they represent real culture, “New York still has a little edge left,” he said. 

While I was there, their show was Play Ground – transitioning from childhood to adulthood. My favourite piece was an installation by Jillian Leigh Fedorman. It was a daycare cubby — on one side, there were high heels, pills and cigarettes, and on the other was a juice box, little red sparkly shoes and toes. My boyfriend described it as “debauchery.”

Yellow Rat Bastard – 483 Broadway St.

This store is like no other. Bringing the streets indoors, Yellow Rat Bastard’s urban-inspired décor is unique, to say the least. With graffiti on the walls and street signs directing you to the shoe department, YRB’s layout is as unique as the discount deals you’ll find. They sell designer brands like Levis Jeans for $25 and Billabong skinnies for $45. Books about the Brooklyn Kings, heavy metal portraits and deviant desires will keep you entertained if you’re not the shopping type. YRB also has a selection of skateboards for sale, blank boards starting at $35. This store provides a shopping experience much different than Macy’s or JC Penney. Yes, it’s all brand name at YRB, but at least it’s cheap. 

Bowery

We walked through Bowery at nighttime and were envious of all the people walking into the many bars and bistros ($3 beers anyone?). Being one year shy of 21, NYC can be depressing at night, especially in this pub-filled area which reminds me of College St. in Toronto.

Bowery Poetry Club – 308 Bowery St.

This poetry club and café has some cheap coffee ($2 a cup) and diner-style food. Besides regular poetry readings, they also have a reading group and open mic.

Drop by on Monday nights to play some bingo while listening to M.I.A.. For two bucks a card and a bar by your hand, this ain’t your grandma’s bingo night. 

St. Marks

St. Marks reminds me of what Queen West used to be – before all the goth/punk boutiques were bought out by Aritzia and Zara and hipsters took over the streets.  

The Sock Man – 27 St. Mark’s Place

Toe socks, knee socks, ankle socks, plain socks, socks with rainbows, socks with chilli peppers, panty hose, leopard print leggings – you name it, the Sock Man’s got it. This store is just fun to stand in, I never knew there was such a vast quantity of different socks. Prices range from $1-$30. 

Ray’s Pizza Place – 2 Saint Marks Pl.

This eatery has a huge selection in cream cheese (including tofu cream cheese!), pizza galore and heart attack inducing lasagna. I got a spinach, broccoli and black olive slice and for $4, my mouth partied hard. 

St. Mark’s Comics – 11 St. Mark’s Pl.

I’m not one for comic books, but my friend Shawn insisted on going here, and I have to say, I was blown away. The store is small, on the basement floor of a townhouse, and it’s crammed with comics. Besides the typical Spidey and Superman, the store has a section dedicated to graphic novels and toys (err, action figures). With three big bins of 50 cent comics, this store is great for new collectors (like me) or if you’re trying to find an obscure read. I ended up with a treasure: a feminist comic book!

Greenwich Village

Bleeker Bob’s Records - 118 West 3rd Street

Bleeker Bob’s has been around since the 1970s and they’re open late into the night. The place has that dingy record store smell; you can practically sniff out that rare LP find. 

My favourite was the “budget Latin and jazz” with records under $5. They have dozens of boxes of 7 inch records of every genre from 50s pop to punk/hardcore. 

The most expensive album for sale is John Lennon Sings the Great Rock and Roll Hits, priced at $500. The person working told me it was released on a tiny indie label so there are only a few of the albums floating around. 

The coolest hat store in the world

The Village Scandal – 19 E. 7th St.

Have you ever walked into a place and knew right away it was magical? The Village Scandal is one of those, housing hundreds of hats; some are even made in NYC. The shop keeper is friendly and encourages you to try on the fedoras, top hats, knit hats with yarn mohawks, monkey hats, elephant hats, old-lady church looking hats. I felt like a kid in a candy store, except I grabbed flapper hats instead of chocolate bars.  

It all leads back to Times Square

New York City is a city that never sleeps (literally, their subway system is 24 hours). It’s gynormous, yellow taxis swarm the streets, and sometimes all you can hear is honks and curses coming from cars. But there’s a beauty to it. Among the madness and havoc of it, you meet people who are trying to get by, trying to find inspiration in this giant town. 

We met a guy named Mikey Angelo, he’s a rickshaw biker, and he stopped us in the street to ask about my friend’s dread locks. Mikey comes from Florida and told us how disappointed he was in NYC. 

He described an art party he went to, how excited he was to meet other artists and to collaborate only to realize these kids from NYU (New York University) weren’t interested in him because he’s working class.

“There’s a big class divide between the rich and the poor. Now the rich are getting poorer, can’t complain about that,” he said before we walked away.

This mammoth of a city isn’t what TV or the movies make it seem. It’s raw, it’s real and it’s full of passion. A guy staying at the hostel told us that for some reason, whenever you’re in Manhattan you always end up in Times Square. It happened to us and the chaos of tourists rushing past me made me smile. There’s beauty everywhere, you just need to seek it.

Zine culture is booming in teeny tiny little steps

By: Ronak Ghorbani Editorial Assistant

On February 12 and 13, Sheridan College’s student atrium in Oakville was turned into a festival of zines. Folded and stapled papers scattered over tables as zinesters talked to each other about their newest projects. Curious students walked by, picking up zines, studying them carefully. Some dug their pockets for a loonie or two to purchase the mysterious pamphlet-like publications.

A zine is a hand-made publication that can be about anything; whether it’s about your favourite singer, a guide to going vegan, or your adventures in suburbia. They come in all shapes and sizes and can be as basic as paper folded into four pieces or elaborately hand bound.

Sheridan’s Oakville campus has a zine library and with the help of the Sheridan Self Publishers (aka zine team), the two held the fair, Gettazine. Organizer Jennifer Pilles told the Ryerson Free Press why zines should be preserved and why they’re cooler than blogs.

Ryerson Free Press: So Jen, what is Gettazine?

Jennifer Pilles: A zine fair. Okay well, the whole purpose is to show Sheridan students what zine culture is all about by inviting people from the outside world to come in.

They see our zines in the library, but we want to integrate them more, so this is like an awareness thing.

It’s basically to promote zine culture and also to introduce the outside world to Sheridan’s zine culture because it’s thriving and it’s booming in teeny tiny little steps. We want to mesh those two worlds.

RFP: Why is it important to educate people about zine culture?

JP: Well, I think zines are an amazing thing for absolutely everybody in the whole world.

Sheridan specifically has a really creative population. We have a huge art (programme) and there’s the journalism students.

It’s a thing they can actually use for their careers, for themselves. It’s a great outlet.

I think students should make zines and I think it’s a release kind of things because sometimes you feel, “Ahh I’m creative but I have so many of these parameters and outlines and deadlines!” These things that restrict your creativity. But a zine is just for you and you can take all the things you want to be making in school but you can’t because of a project guideline and you put it in your zine…it’s a way more personal thing.

RFP: Since there are blogs and websites, why should people read zines? Why do they matter?

JP: I think that the whole textile thing does matter…I mean, they say print is dead but I don’t think it ever really will be because there’s something really beautiful about a tactile object you can hold in your hand.

Part of the joy of making a zine is that you can use your hands. In a blog, you’re typing and uploading photos, it’s all staring at a screen. But with a zine, you’re cutting and pasting, you’re printing and stapling, and you’re folding and all these things and you’re getting way more involved in it…it’s a lot more human than a blog.

RFP: How did you first get into zines?

JP: I got a zine at the Warped Tour when I was 14 and I was just like, “This is so cool!” And it changed my whole world.

I was always really creative…I made a ton of shitty (zines) in high school and I think I’m kind of refining it. I’m leaning towards illustration now.

RFP: What are your zines about?

JP: It’s mostly personal.

My early ones I had one called “How to start a revolution” and I thought I was really punk rock. I was really into anarchy but I didn’t know I was just young. They were naïve rants, stuff like that. And then I had “Tiki Girl Without a Cause” which was science fiction stories which I thought was so cool but I see them now and I’m so embarrassed. But mostly everything I have on my table now (at Gettazine) is personal.

RFP: Why do you choose to use personal as your theme?

JP: For me, zines are almost like a healing thing.

I wrote one this summer about moving because I was living in nowhere land. I moved out of one house but I had nowhere else to move. I was living with my brand new boyfriend who I didn’t even know if we were going to date for long and I felt really homeless and lost and really sad, you know? So I was like, how can I express this? How can I release this sadness? And I made a zine and I felt so much better.

I have one called “Art School Love Letters” that was actually taken from a love letter I wrote to a long distance friend that I missed so bad; I took that and put it into a zine.

Zines for me are healing, they’re therapy. I’m always journaling and making art so it’s kind of like a natural tendency.

RFP: There isn’t really an outlet or place for zinesters or people interested in zines to get to know each other. So why are zine festivals so important for the community?

JP: I think it’s a good way for us to see each other, all the vendors.

I’ve seen some of these people at zine fairs before and we only ever see each other at zine and craft fairs so it’s kind of that community thing.

But you’re right, zines are like you do it at home, you send it in the mail…Actually we have zine reading parties (the Sheridan Self Publishers). We read zines together.

That’s why we have a club, that’s why I started the club in the library first. I was like, well you can’t have a community without people, people will be reading them (zines) but I want to get people really into this so we made the club and meet on a regular basis now.

RFP: How many zines do you have in the library?

JP: Almost 500.

RFP: Why is it important to preserve zines?

JP: Because they’re so unique.

I only make 20 copies of mine but every time I make one, I put one in the zine library and that’ll exist there forever.

Zines are the kinds of things that get put in the back pocket, broken in, torn up. They’re pretty fragile right? They’re paper; they don’t have hard covers or anything like that.

Man, I wish we had a place for every zine in the world to put in one place because they really are special…I love the idea of zine libraries and that they have a home.

RFP: How can someone get involved with the zine community?

JP: I hate to say it but check the internet (laughs). There’s a great website called We Make Zines (wemakezines.ning.org) it’s kind of like Facebook but only for zinesters. You have a profile page and you can exchange e-mails, update people, have events on there.

We don’t really have a way of meeting each other, other than at zine fairs, so a lot of it is done through online…The coolest way to get involved with zines is make your own and trade with people and write letters to people’s zines you like.

If you read a zine and think, “Oh, this is so nice,” you write a letter (to the zinester) and they write back to you. A lot of my personal zine relationships are with people I’ve never met. We just exchange letters twice a year.

OACT outing leaves something to be desired

An honest and critical look at a night of amateur theatre by Ryerson Free Press reviewer Stephen Carlick

Pointing out the obvious flaws in Lily Allen’s latest album is relatively easy; one can rest assured that Lily will never pick up the Ryerson Free Press, and even if she did, she’d have her critical acclaim and financial success to reassure her that music was the correct path for her to follow (arguable as that may be). The same can’t be said about reviewing the works of one’s undergraduate peers. To engage in such an activity poses a conflict of interest, namely the very real threat of hurting the feelings of people who simply haven’t mastered their craft, and are perhaps still finding their theatrical feet. However, that being said, the very point of criticism is to be honest, even though it may come across as vindictive to some. Certainly, to sugar coat a review and give credit where it is not due cheapens the credit for those to whom it is. Additionally, it would be patronizing to treat these plays as though they are merely the work of students, rather than professionals. And to shrug it off by saying “Well, they’re only kids” does not do our age group justice. Undergrads are no more than four years away from entering the real world, where glaring mistakes mean not making it in the business, and where critics take no prisoners. Thus, the following is an 100 per cent honest and critical look at “Oakham Amateur Campus Theatre presents: Mood Swings,” attended on opening night, February 26.

The night consisted of five short plays — three of which were written by Ryerson students themselves. Short dances were performed by Carol-Ann Bohrn and Lauren Pederson, who provided graceful performances to fill the void between plays while the next was prepared. The fact that it was so difficult to tell which plays were student-written and which ones were professionally done was a good sign, but the overall outcome was relatively disappointing. On the whole, the plays all suffered from the same group of ailments: indecision regarding genre, misjudged length, and general lack of character sympathy and plot belief.

Opening play “The Express” was about the plight of a good-natured, rural-suburban boy for whom life is simply not fair. The boy is forced to care for his mentally unstable single mother who frequents the local railway station, inquiring loudly that her train will come and deliriously wondering whether she has missed it. The boy’s one escape from her is his girlfriend, but he goes insane when the girl’s father informs him that she is most likely his sister. The boy is last shown at the railway station begging, like his mother, to know when his train will finally come. The play’s aspirations were lofty, considering that it had a mere twenty minute timeframe to both endear the main actor to the audience and convince them that the boy was driven as mad as his mother simply because he had accidentally fallen in love with his sister. There was no time for either. And the result was a play that lacked enough back story to answer some very pertinent plot and character questions like: What was it that drove the mother insane? Why does the girl return to embrace the son after she knows they are siblings? Perhaps most importantly omitted was the significance of the train station. The symbolic freedom of the train image is not lost on me, but if the train-related madness is common to both the mother and the son, surely it needs to be explained why the son would end up grieving there, despite his misfortune happening completely independent of the station.

“Firing Francine” was a shorter affair that began brightly, but overstayed its welcome and seemingly lost its course. The play began as a comedy that saw a young man trying desperately to fire a female employee who always has a ready retort. Its initial charm lay in the way that he continually was thwarted, being forced to ask her over and over to leave the room and re-enter (after he had swallowed a pill) in order to start the conversation over again. However, what started as a clever running gag got drawn out too far, rendering the play both annoying and puzzling. What should have been the climax happened the fifth (as far as I can recall) time Francine re-entered the room, as the employer, Iris, fired a pistol squarely at a stunned Francine. Now, had the light gone out as soon as she was hit with the bullet, I’d have called the play a suc cess, but the play continued. Francine re-entered many times more, acting in a way that hardly seemed as though she had been shot mere seconds earlier, and ended with Francine embracing Iris consolingly, who subsequently flops to the floor defeated. At the point of the embrace, both the sense of escalating humour and the momentum of the play is lost — if the play is a comedy like the actors made it out to be, what is it that suddenly turns the goofy character of Francine into a sympathetic friend? The only conceivable reason for her sudden difference in character is that each scene is meant to stand on its own and is detached temporarily from the last scene. However, this would make the hug, which seemingly is an after-effect of the torturously long melee they’ve moments ago experienced, would appear unwarranted. And the fact that I couldn’t tell whether the play ended comically or sadly demands the question of whether the actors performed the play, written by an established playwright, the way the author originally meant it to be performed.

“Ugly on the Inside” was the second of two non-student-written plays of the evening. The play is about Della, a white-trash woman whose best friend Rayanne always finds a way to murder her groom-to-be. When Rayanne accidentally kills number six (or is it seven?), the two engage in a conversation about men and friendship that gets continually interrupted by Charlie, who continually rises from the grave to aggravate the two women despite having a cake knife buried in his stomach. The idea behind the story was simple and comical enough, but the play suffered from a herky-jerky plot that, like “Firing Francine,” didn’t seem to know whether it was a comedy or drama. The comical Tarantino-esque violence of the play was too often interrupted by man-on-woman violence and moments of frank discussion that victimized the female characters who seemed, besides these exceptions, to be pretty self-reliant. The play was a tad too long, but it benefitted both from ending well and from featuring Emily Nixon, who was arguably the best actor of the night.

One of the weaker plays of the night, “The Rain-dance of the Leaves” suffered from what seemed like self-indulgence and lack of any significant or unique meaning. The plot was meandering, and while it was apparently about “two people and their struggle for connection – to each other, to the city, and to themselves,” it seemed to be too much about writer Rodney Barnes. The play featured him dancing, waxing philosophically about life in the city and the nature of love, and generally being melodramatic about concepts and questions that everybody faces in their lifetime. The play admirably sought to find beauty in pain and loneliness, but it’s been done so many times before that it came across as being stereotypical and concerned too heavily with image, rather than substance and meaning. The play could have benefitted from a thematic refinement, perhaps by choosing to focus on love, life in the city, or the construction of identity. In trying to cover all three in just twenty minutes, the play lost the opportunity to explore one of the concepts deeply and meaningfully. Nonetheless, the acting therein was done suitably, and the use of music was effective at conveying the mood of the play.

At this point in the show, I thought I knew what to expect. I had seen four of the five plays, and the last was a student-written play called “Uncle Spam talks Turkey.” I was wrong. The closing play was stunning. It was very post-modern. The plot was non-linear, just a series of vignettes that each addressed a different facet of inequality and corruption in capitalist America and beyond, using a style that mixed spoken word, hip-hop rhyming, and beat poetry to astonishing effect. It was a delicate balancing act, as a play so meticulously written and so dependent on the actors’ delivery was always going to be at risk of losing momentum. A mere forgotten line could destroy the rhyme structure that made the play captivating, or obscure the significance of following lines that made the play meaningful. The play never faltered, and its success can be attributed mainly to the fact that writer Darcy Corbett never put rhyming ahead of coherence, nor stretched the meaning of words just so that they fit the scheme, as is so tempting when trying to rhyme. For the first time that night, the play being performed felt like the work of a professional despite being one of only three student-written plays, for which Corbett deserves all recognition he gets and probably more. His acting was superb, and he surrounded himself with the best actors present, using Emily Nixon and Jamieson Child to great effect. Nixon played the lawyer, effectively using her stage presence to convince the audience of her legal prowess and sharpness-of-tongue, while Child was a phenomenal judge, giving his lines powerful and unsettling emphasis without going over the top. This play single-handedly made the show worth seeing. I regret that this review couldn’t have been printed in time to urge students to attend one of the performances, if only to see why Uncle Spam talking turkey is not at all what it sounds like.

New book shines spotlight on not-so-usual suspects

Barbra Streisand isn’t the only successful North American Jewish woman. And a new book by a North American Jewish woman proves that. Maiya Keidan finds out more about the females featured in its pages.

 

Lisa Kogen’s new book, With Strength and Splendor: Jewish Women as Agents of Social Change aims to celebrate the fabulousness of North American Jewish women — mission accomplished.  

Forty-eight inspirational women are listed for their extraordinary achievements, in a wide range of career paths, such as sports, medicine and law. Highlights include entertainers like Sophie Tucker and Gilda Radner and innovators of the fashion and beauty industry like Donna Karan and Estée Lauder.  

“You find an extraordinary large number of Jewish women who were really in the avant-garde of roles of professional pursuits from which women had been completely prohibited,” said Kogen during an interview with the Ryerson Free Press. 

Kogen, a Jewish woman herself, first recognized a severe underrepresentation of Jewish women through her study of traditional Jewish history at the doctoral level.  

When she began working for the Women’s League for Conservative Judaism, she had an opportunity to steer the movement towards celebrating women. Kogen recounts that it was only her second day at work and they were discussing how to honour the upcoming 350th anniversary of Jews in America already. 

The author remembers listening to all the suggestions being tossed out, one after the other. ‘We’ll talk about the history of synagogues,’ said one co-worker. ‘We’ll talk about prominent Jewish leaders,’ said another. That was when she piped up with the shockingly revolutionary idea of talking about great Jewish women. 

It was remarkable that no one had thought of this idea, despite it being a women’s organization, remembers Kogen. 

“Here was a group of very intelligent women who had internalized the male-centric world,” she said in a disapproving tone of voice.  

Strongly affected by the need to share the many accomplishments of great Jewish women, Kogen turned her idea a visually stunning book. 

When the quest for the women began, Kogen already had a list in her head of the people she might like to profile. However, she wanted to expand her search beyond what she dubbed ‘the usual suspects.’ She means the same four, five, six famous Jewish women who keep being named over and over again, such as Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Supreme Court justice, and Barbra Streisand. Although she believes these women deserve every ounce of credit they are given, Kogen wanted to shine the spotlight where it quite possibly had never been shone before.

And she did this by expanding her hunt for great women beyond New York City, her home branch, using the 25 branches of the association as a starting point. As a result, she collected a list of women that stretched across North America, including three in Canada. One Canadian woman was Torontonian Celia Franca, founder of the National Ballet of Canada. 

Famous women or women associated with the religious community were not the women that Kogen restricted herself to either. She even added Theda Bara, a silent movie star who was famous for her role as a seductress, though she had to defend her inclusion.  

“Some of these older women saw this half-naked woman with the breast plates and said, ‘Ach, what kind of a Jewish woman is that?’” she said. 

Nevertheless, Kogen was dedicated to all the women she picked. So dedicated that it’s nearly impossible for her to pick her favourite. 

“I hate this question!” she exclaimed when asked who her favourite was. She narrows it down to three: Ida Cohen Rosenthal, creator of the brassiere, Gertrude Weil, for her commitment to civil rights, and Ray Frank, the first woman “rabbi.” 

Yet, Kogen added, “I have to say I love them all. Every single one of them was a remarkable woman, every single one.”

It was far easier for her to provide the identity of her real-life female role model. The answer to that question was simple, answered with no hesitation. The answer is her mother, a woman who was left alone at 41 years old, with five children, because of the early death of her husband. The oldest was in university. The youngest was Kogen herself at seven.  

Her mother’s only desire had been to get married, a task which she’d accomplished with the unfortunate consequence of marrying before completing her high school diploma.  

But despite the many hardships, Kogen’s mother didn’t crumble. She took good care of her children and of herself. She went back to school and lived the remainder of her life as a geriatric nurse.

“She was the model for, ‘You got to do it. If you have to do it, you got to do it,’” reminisced Kogen.

From regular Joe to cups of joe

 

Maiya Keidan speaks to a former dog walker turned coffee shop owner. Find out how a boring desk job and a loyalty to learning inspired this coffee drinker to create a career out of coffee-making 

 

It’s 6 a.m. and all seems to be quiet at Bulldog Coffee. For now.

The café, humble contrary to what its name may allude to, is nestled along Granby St., mere metres away from Church St., anticipating the radical rush of java junkies sure to show up shortly. And even though it doesn’t open its doors until 8 a.m., owner 43-year-old Stuart Ross is up early getting those cups in lines and those beans ground to perfection.

As sure as the sunrise, Ross begins his day by battling with his monstrous, gold espresso machine and roaster. Everything has to be perfectly consistent for his customers – ranging from the amount of pressure applied to the ground beans to the steady drip of espresso from the golden device.

Using a roaster, he grinds the coffee. Once the beans have been through the machine, Ross levels them — brushing the ground beans with the same pinky finger every time — preparing for the impact of the espresso machine, at roughly 220 lbs. of pressure, 76 degrees Celsius. Next, he struggles with the machine’s flow, timed to the second. He tries 25 seconds. He tries 24 seconds. His hand stops at 23 seconds. That’s what tastes “perfect” today.

But beginning the day isn’t the only challenge. Depending on the weather, he might have to change the roaster settings as many as three times a day or adjust the amount of pressure applied to the ground beans before they’re fed into the espresso machine. On top of balancing all of these parts, Ross must also ensure the machine is kept clean – a tricky, but doable task considering he’s dealing with such minute coffee grounds.

Ross’s customers appreciate his tireless efforts to achieve that perfect cup. Watching him being interviewed, his regulars are eager to endorse their little hangout.

“Stuart, I must say, one of the things I like about you is when I’m gone for a month, I know what I’m coming home to,” pipes in one lady.

For Caleb Gilgan, a first-year Ryerson student, going to Bulldog is a family tradition. Gilgan has been a weekly fixture there since his brother, a Ryerson veteran, suggested it.

“Yeah, his whole family has been here,” injects Ross.

“It’s a family vacation,” says Gilgan, who occasionally makes trips to the café with as many as three of his five other brothers, as well as his mother.

Accolades for Ross’s efforts don’t just lie in the roast regulars or the steady stream of customers that drift through his café. He is also an award-winning barista.

Ross didn’t always belong to the world of fancy lattés and cappuccinos. Instead, he began his early career with an economics degree from McGill University, thrusting him into the world of stock brokering. Discovering his hatred for the long, grueling hours which glued him to his desk and telephone, he quit. Afterward, he drifted between jobs that varied from serving as a counselor in a dating agency to sporting good sales to dog walker.

It was August 2004, when he’d only been a dog walker for six months, that he spotted a “For Lease” sign that changed the course of his life. He stopped to look at the store, marveling at how neat it was. There were two entrances and glass windows that covered the entire storefront. Though he’d had no particular entrepreneurial stirrings beforehand, he thought to himself, “Wow, wouldn’t this be a great place for a coffee shop?”

And soon after, Ross picked up the phone and dialed the number, beginning the tumultuous journey of birthing his café, equipped with no knowledge of coffee except that he’d been drinking it for eleven years.

Inspired by the dogs he walked, Ross named the café after his favourite breed, the bulldog.

“Do you know what a Bulldog looks like? They’re really mean and ugly looking, right? But if you get to know them, they usually end up being such a great pet,” Ross explains.

Espresso, Ross cautions, can taste horribly acidic or burnt if every step of the process isn’t followed meticulously.

“But…” he says, slowly unveiling each word as if he’s imparting the secret to the universe, “if you run it perfectly, it becomes the most beautiful cup of coffee ever.”

Even the most fanatic anti-coffee drinker can’t help but be riveted by his absolute love of the art of espresso. If you haven’t already tried the coffee at Bulldog, I recommend you head to 89 Granby St. and get your caffeine kick. 

March record reviews

By: Stephen Carlick

Toronto-based group issues nature-inspired, soul-infused debut

If you ask me, there is perhaps too much indie folk going on right now. And with the outrageous amount of hype surrounding last year’s Fleet Foxes, the demand for organic and nature-inspired music seems to be at something of a high.

In the past couple of years, a barrier has always stood between my liking these albums because of something that until now I couldn’t quite put my finger on. A Mountain is a Mouth exposed that barrier. The issue was that while many albums seemed to make a claim that they were inspired by or evocative of nature, their representation thereof was problematic: they were too pretty; they were too refined (see Bon Iver’s For Emma, 2008). Nature can be pretty, of course, but to dwell on beauty, serenity, and calmness neglects a characteristic of nature that is far more easily transferred into powerful song writing and dynamics — sublimity. It’s the genuine feeling of sublimity that makes A Mountain is a Mouth so special. It is the dynamic juxtaposition of walls of thunderous drums with the gentle plucking of banjo strings and the isolated rasp of lead singer Matt Cully’s baritone growl before the band’s choir floods in, that makes Bruce Peninsula’s debut a true evocation of the rawness and grandiosity of nature.

Through repeated listens, you can hear the echo of the voices and instruments in the silence, as if the songs were actually recorded in a rivered valley at the foot of a mountain range, each song being a musical representation of the various elements of the scene. “Steamroller” is a violent gale, the powerful voices of the choir seemingly ripping through the valley until the river that is “2nd 4th World War” is coursing along at a rollicking pace that full-bodied chants like “Satisfied” and “Crabapples” hail back to throughout the album. I won’t be surprised if this album blows up in the coming months. If it doesn’t, we’ll just consider it our little secret. —Stephen Carlick

 

London pop-star delivers second album, earns ludicrous title

I recently heard an ad for Lily Allen’s latest record that called her “the Wordsworth of the Myspace generation” — and it irked me something fierce. Surprisingly, it was not just the obvious implication that our generation is vapid and incapable of handling poetry of Wordsworth’s quality that bothered me, it was the fact that Lily Allen would be offered such a generous amount of acclaim for “poetry” that sounds ripped from the pages of a ninth-grader’s diary (albeit one that talks way too much about cocaine).

The lyrical content of this album is not only juvenile, it’s banal to the point that you can anticipate what a song is about based solely on its title! Is “Back to the Start” about wishing to turn back time in a relationship? Yep. Is “Never Gonna Happen” about a guy that Lily refuses to sleep with? Mm-hmm. Could “Fuck You” possibly be an angry rant about a guy that Lily disapproves of?! At the risk of ruining the surprise, here are two of Lily’s Wordsworth-quality verses from the song itself: “So you say it’s not okay to be gay, well I think you’re just evil, you’re just some racist who can’t tie my laces, your point of view is medieval…You say you think we need to go to war, well you’re already in one, ‘cause it’s people like you that need to get slew, no one wants your opinion.” The only “poetic” thing about her verses is the fact that she has rhymed them (which, in the first place, is hardly a necessity in true poetry), but in-so-doing, she has ignored grammar (he needs to get “slew”?) and lost the resonance her words might possibly have enjoyed otherwise (she probably needn’t have pointed out that the racist “can’t tie [her] laces”). “Fuck You” is a microcosm for the entire album.

Lily Allen experiences the same worldly pains that we all do, but can’t relate her experiences without singing childish, angst-ridden and trite lyrics over musical production that is predominantly comprised of cheesy genre-interpretations (see “Not Fair” for faux country, “22” for faux wedding schmaltz, “Never Gonna Happen” for faux circus pomp, and “He Wasn’t There” for faux 30s jazz, vinyl crackle and all). If this album qualifies Lily Allen as the Wordsworth of our generation, this review makes me the new Shakespeare.  —SC

 

Hip-hop landmark gets re-issue treatment, proves its continued relevance/excellence

God, I was hesitant to review this album. I’ve long been an extremely casual Beastie Boys fan, (I have most of their singles on my iPod), but I had never listened to one of their records all the way through. Plus, the clout surrounding the now-legendary Paul’s Boutique was such that I was intimidated both by the thought of reviewing it and adding my own spin to the already-extensive library of music journalism written thereon. Additionally, I didn’t want to let the record’s legendary status affect the way I approached the album — I wanted to be totally unbiased, as any review should be.

So here’s my verdict, both fresh and unbiased: Paul’s Boutique remains an amazing album to this day, even completely removed from its cultural context in the arguable golden age of hip hop, in which sampling without permission was not yet against the law. It was that kind of artistic freedom that allowed the Beastie Boys to construct what David Handelman (Rolling Stone) called a “rap opera,” a record that incorporates so many different samples that each song is like an orchestral movement, flowing seamlessly into the next sample. Like De La Soul’s influential Three Feet High and Rising released the same year, the album demonstrates the true artistry behind sampling, using sources from genres as diverse as classic rock (the Eagles, Led Zeppelin), old-school hip-hop (Afrika Bambaataa, Boogie Down Productions), and various soundtracks and spoken word pieces (the Jaws soundtrack) to create a sound that is masterful and impressively unified.

Paul’s Boutique is still, to this day, the perfect rebuttal to anyone who has ever claimed that hip-hop isn’t “music.” Paul’s Boutique is music in its most complete form, not to mention that it’s also fun, masterful, and innovative in a way that is not only no longer practiced, it’s against the law. —SC

Art conservationists fill the bullet holes: Saskatchewan churches bear the cost of art restoration

 

By: Molly Thomas The Carrilon (University of Regina)

REGINA (CUP) – Beautifully detailed oil paintings line several Catholic churches across Saskatchewan – but many of them are not what they once were.

Since most of them were created in the early 1900s, many incredible works have lost their original sparkle. Soot, from the burning of incense and candles during mass, has particularly dirtied these paintings.

But just like the church’s redemptive message, there is hope. Art conservationists across the country devote countless hours to restoring historic, cultural, and artistic objects.

In Canada, Queen’s University is the only program that offers a master’s degree in art conservation.

Brenda Smith, a graduate of this program, now works as a conservator at Saskatchewan’s Mackenzie Art Gallery.

As the only certified conservator of paintings in the city, Smith is busy with both gallery and private projects, which sometimes include church paintings.

But, conservation does not come cheap.

At $55 to $65 an hour, conservation prices are often too high for many Saskatchewan parishes.

Such is the case in Wolseley, small town 61 miles east of Regina, and home to some of the province’s most unique Catholic works.

St. Anne’s Catholic Church houses five oil paintings. Created by former resident priest Father Charles Maillard, the paintings are well over 100 years old.  

Not your everyday priest, Father Maillard grew up in France, where he served in the army and went to theology school. But no matter what he was involved in, he always had an interest in drawing and painting. The constant challenge for Maillard was to swirl both religion and art onto the same canvas.

Maillard’s paintings, though visible, are quite faded from dirt built up over a century. One painting in particular, “The Giving of the Keys,” is in dire need of maintenance. This 82 square-foot painting is not only blurred by dirt but also has two bullet holes from a drunken shooting attempt in the 1970s.

Smith traveled to Wolseley and observed this painting three years ago. She noted that it had white paint secretion, abrasion, and would need consolidation of cracks and filling of bullet holes.

This whole process would take about 60 hours and cost at least $6,000. Stanley Vindevoghel, pastoral assistant at St. Anne’s, hopes the church can afford it.

Vindevoghel saw the dramatic change after the paintings at St. Peter’s Cathedral were recently revitalized. He could not believe it was the same place when they were finished.

“The paintings just came alive and jumped out at you when the cleaning was done,” said Vindevoghel.

But there is more to this cost issue. This particular painting is 82 square feet and mounted on one side of the church altar. Because it is so old, Vindevoghel is worried the painting would rip if removed from the wall. He therefore believes cleaning would have to be done right at the church. This creates added expenses like travel, accommodations, and food for a visiting conservator.

Many parishioners are wondering what funding options are available.

The Catholic Diocese of Saskatoon explains that because there are so many churches, individual parishes must be responsible for their own maintenance and repair. 

The Saskatchewan Arts Board offers various grants. However, it generally awards them to arts organizations and community collaborations.

The Canadian Conservation Institute, based in Ottawa, currently has a treatment service request program. But, it is only free of charge to Canadian public museums. Religious societies such as the Catholic Church must pay $100 an hour for regular staff time, and $125 for any overtime incurred.

The possibilities for funding are not promising.

Despite financial obstacles, Vindevoghel plans to raise the necessary funds. “I know what the cleaning would do and how people would appreciate it,” he said. Vindevoghel plans to organize a restoration committee in the near future. 

But Smith also encourages community effort to get the job done. “Knock them off one by one,” she said.

In her experience, once church members see the difference, they are happy and encouraged and often join in the fundraising effort.

Walking the line

Max Arumbulo doesn’t care what the Academy awards indicate. Man On Wire, a documentary that coalesces some Blair Witch-style shooting and a Fear Factor-esque stunt, deserves more lauding.

 

With every second that passes, I like Slumdog Millionaire and The Wrestler a little less. Maybe it was all that Oscar buzz. Or it might be that they were just good, nothing more. I also hate The Reader and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button more and more as time passes, despite the fact that I haven’t yet seen them.

But I spent an anxious 30 minutes in Suspect Video on Bloor St. last week. Anxious because I couldn’t conceive of renting something I’d enjoy as much as my most recent movie experience: Man On Wire. It actually deserved its Oscar (Best Documentary), and destroys the shit out of all the movies mentioned above.

The film, using real footage, dramatization, and interviews, tells the story of Phillipe Petit, a talented tightrope walker and juggler, and his quest to tightrope between the World Trade Centre towers in 1978. It’s amazing that it took three decades for this movie to be made since all the pieces are there.

The most prominent of which is Phillippe himself — physically talented, a featherweight in the mould of Peter Parker. But he’s charming too, possessing that messianic stuff, small man charm, and gift of gab that can move people to act. For instance, he describes, with calculated storytelling hyperbole, the sound of the crowd’s murmur, even though he was too far, hundreds of feet above New York’s financial district, to actually hear. In his prime, Phillippe dazzled every and any audience. He filched, in one instance, some much needed supplies by performing for the owner of a wire company. He even seduced (in the purest sense, and sometimes in the less pure sense) regular people into becoming his disciples.

Then, there was his straight-laced friend Jean-Louis Blondeau, who felt the need to temper Phillippe’s dangerous enthusiasm and protect him. There was the doting and hypotized girlfriend, Annie. And there were the random hippies and office workers who played bit roles in Philippe’s scheme.

Director John Marsh said he wanted to make a heist film. After all, Phillippe needed help to sneak up the towers and get fake IDs. It was a solo performance, but a team mission. (How’d they get the wire across the two buildings? A bow and arrow.) That Ocean’s Eleven stuff is exciting and all, but the better way to watch the movie is as a reflection on youth and *gasp* beauty.

The gang documented all their planning. So the film incorporates grainy camcorder videos of the young friends arguing, giddily, the logistics. Before that bow and arrow, there was a golf ball with the wire attached, then a soccer ball, then a baseball (“But then we’d need to learn baseball”). There’s photos, too, of Phillipe and one of his men posing as reporters and sneaking on to the in-construction towers to do some recon. There’s a sense that they were scheming just to scheme, but also a sense that it was a collective effort, something done together, joyously.

The interviews, filmed in the more recent present, on the other hand, are only with each of the individuals involved. Jean-Louis and Phillippe are interviewed separately so we don’t get to see the two now middle-aged men reminisce together. At one point, Jean Louis soberly explains that their friendship was never the same after the WTC walk. They didn’t have a falling out. They just grew up.

Despite all of this, or because of all this, (plus time), Phillipe’s friends still describe their accomplishment with a sharp poignancy. Jean-Louis, poker-faced for practically the whole film, breaks down trying to describe how beautiful Phillipe was on the rope. Annie describes what she had seen from the NY sidewalk with the awe (fanaticism?) reserved for witnesses of, say, a resurrection. She speaks with her eyes turned upwards, repeating her 30-year-old words (”Look, look!”) in whispers.

Man on Wire, notoriously, doesn’t mention the events of September 2001. Leaving this unmentioned, such a simple move, emphasizes the elegiac, the notion that youthful accomplishments eventually become past, but not nearly lost. You really can never go home again. What you can do, though, is rent and re-rent this movie, and watch and re-watch.

Wristers: the canary in the mine of shallow middle-age fulfillment

By: Matt Kindred

Any Vegas night is a surefire place to commit a multitude of sins. There’s no question that the town is a teeming hotbed of avarice, corruption and vitriolic-fuelled lust. The day: Friday. The place: Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville, an oasis for those weary from long walks on the Strip and in need of a decent nacho plate and a titular margarita.

Fridays are different at Margaritaville than any other night of the week. Sure, there are the requisite fanny-pack travelers and corpulent peons gorging themselves into an early grave, but Fridays are usually reserved for the many bachelorette parties in town and the rowdiness that always follows. Along with these troves of young, attractive women taking the perilous plunge is an interesting subgroup of the male species—one that, if guys are not careful, they may well become. 

They are known as Wristers: men from the Baby Boomer era who enjoy the company of women half their age and who relinquish copious amounts of money just to be in their company. Of course, they rarely if ever, get to sleep with their objects of desire, despite their various attempts to do so. What they do get is far more meaningful: serious wrist caressing action.

As the evening wears on and the party of women gets more and more inebriated, the Wristers continue to assist them in any way they can: holding drinks, cameras, purses and phones, gently guiding the girls into group photos and then throwing down more cash to continue their drinking escapades—all for the sake of caressing their forearm in a sexual, yet non-threatening manner. 

Their introductions to the ladies are friendly enough, much like a father meeting one of his daughter’s friends at a Fourth-of-July barbeque: 

“Hi, ladies! How we doin’?”

Depending on the girls’ drunkenness prior to this salutation, they will either welcome the men and engage in conversation or, if sufficiently sober, bluntly reject their pretext to further courtship. If the situation presents the former, the Wristers are more than happy to oblige the ladies in a series of “comped” libations, among other things, becoming what could essentially be classified as indentured servants for the duration of the evening. However, should the latter present itself, the men will quickly move to their next prospect with a stoic composure and a staunch diligence not found among the future generations. 

It’s no mystery why the Wristers of Las Vegas choose to operate out of Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville. The place caters to a by-gone era imbued with an abundance of sexual prosperity. A looped digital video of Buffet himself plays on the jumbo screens throughout the Mexican-themed bar. The poorly cut montage shows Buffet and his cadre of Boomers trying desperately to relive the halcyon days of his fame with a lengthy road trip across Middle America—all the way to the sun-drenched beaches of Southern California. This is all under the pretense of a “Comeback Tour.” It’s a winsome viewing experience to be sure, and more than sufficient to put a lump in even the most jaded post-modernist’s throat. 

When I saw the Wristers go to work that Friday night, I was completely dismayed, and almost ashamed of my gender. Is this sort of behaviour the sad eventuality for all men over the age of 43? Is this the proper way of handling yourself in the company of youth, dropping c-notes like Monopoly money all for the remote possibility of caressing a young lady’s arm? 

“It’s what keeps me alive,” says Mike, an avowed Wrister who is no stranger to Margaritaville. Mike—who chose to withhold his actual name (for obvious reasons)—tells me that he goes out almost every Friday night to find rowdy bachelorette parties with his group of friends. 

“I go out and it’s like a game with myself. See how many groups I can buy my way into and see how long I can hang out with these girls before they get sick of me. Luckily, I still got all my hair on top and I keep fit so I don’t usually get called out.” 

Mike informs me that being “called out” is one of the worst things that can happen to a Wrister. It basically means that one of the women has literally told the man to leave—because he’s too old. 

“You hear it all the time,” Mike says. “Some girl in the group says, ‘fuck off old man, go back to your wife’ or something like that and you’re just stuck there: embarrassed and speechless. That’s when you know it’s high time to leave.” 

Throughout the course of his time as a Wrister, Mike has only been called out three times. Each time gets easier, he claims, by virtue of the fact that Las Vegas is a Mecca, its populace ever-changing along with the demographic of women he so desires. I ask Mike how it all started and why he became a Wrister in the first place. 

“About a couple of years ago I became an ex-husband, an ex-cop and an ex-father. My life was really empty and after about a few attempts to rejoin the world, I really saw the fucking void. Just black. My life was in the garberator and I really wanted to get myself away from these awful feelings. 

“A job came up in Las Vegas to do private security. It was a really lucrative position for a guy like myself and I knew that I wanted to relocate, so I took it. The first week there, a bunch of the guys I work with took me to Margaritaville and introduced me to it. 

“That first night was astounding; all the attention I got, all the laughter from my jokes and stories and all that… After that, I realized that it was just the thing to pull me out of my slump, you know?” 

I ask why he doesn’t go after women his age. Why it is only the young and beautiful that he chooses to pursue. He smiles a big shark-like grin that shifts his prominently grey moustache and exposes his nicotine-coated teeth. “Gravity,” he tells me, and then laughs an all too familiar smoker’s hack. 

“There’s no question that most women don’t age well. They put on weight and get wrinkles and cellulite and varicose veins and all that crap. I mean, I’m not one to talk. I’m no George Clooney, and I don’t think I will ever be. 

“But it’s just that I don’t want to be constantly reminded of my age and how old I am getting. If I had the chance to go after Angelina Jolie over Bea Arthur, Angelina would obviously win. No contest.” 

The Wrister phenomenon is not strictly restricted to the Las Vegas community. Go to any Philthy McNasty’s, Hooters, or any kind of sports bar on a weekend evening in Toronto, and you are bound to find a group of men somewhat resembling Burton Cummings, dropping roughly 400 bucks on a 200-dollar tab, trying to keep up the lie with himself that he doesn’t have a wife and two kids waiting for him at home in Brampton. They may not have as much money to burn as the Vegas Wristers, and their margins of success might be narrowed because of it, but they still manage to quell the bitter pangs of loneliness and nostalgia—at least for one more night. 

Dave is new to the game. He’s married with kids but cannot stand the sight of them. At first he was angry with these feelings of apathy toward his family, but then he chose to accept the fact that things would not change. 

“I’m not the cheating type,” he assures me over our second round of Rickard’s Red and overdone calamari at the Philthy McNasty’s on Yonge and Eglinton. “I wouldn’t do that to my family or my kids because it would destroy them. I come here and I really am not looking for anything other than a good conversation with one of the waitresses or one of the girls around the bar.” 

I ask him if he has a favourite, or someone he goes back to when he returns to the bar. “There is a couple” he tells me, mid-bite into some rubbery-tasting squid. “I know they think I’m some kind of perv or something like that, but I don’t care. Most times I really just want someone to talk to.” 

What comes off to some as misogynistic logic for why Wristers exist is also a sad testament to what our ideas of beauty have become on both sides of the sexes. For women, crow’s feet, stretch marks and saddle-bags are a cause for dismay amongst men. For men, baldness, psoriasis and love handles are strict no-nos for women looking for the ideal mate. The exigencies of our culture’s vanity, or presumed vanity, have far outweighed the proper criteria for what makes an ideal partner—so much so, that men and women as they age grow to despise the protracted decrepitude they find about their bodies. 

Perverts and Cougars are what the Western world defines respectively as older men and women who fecklessly seek out members of the opposite sex who are markedly younger than themselves. And when they are seen in action by the youth culture, they are criticized for their callow and ultimately pathetic behaviour. The youth attest that the best thing for them would be to go after someone closer to their own age. The interval in age between the pursuer and the pursued is so large that people vow they will never commit that kind of indecency when they are as old. “It’s pathetic,” says one witness who watched Mike and his consorts go to work on a merry band of young margarita-fuelled women. “I hope I never get like that”. 

Yet the sad truth is: we all become like that. Enslaved by our puerile views on what constitutes atheistic beauty as opposed to true beauty, we inevitably resign ourselves to a future of finding pleasure from the young, desperate to be sated of our own decline by their mere presence, and waiting for that ephemeral moment of having their nubile hand touch our decaying flesh—be it with a handshake, a quick hug, or even, the gentle touch of a wrist.

Q & A with war journalist Robert Fisk

By: Giuseppe Valiante CUP Quebec Bureau

 

I have never been to war, but when I read a dispatch from Robert Fisk, I think I come a little closer to understanding the consequences of conflict.

After reading his account of the Iran-Iraq War, I couldn’t relate to those young boys in the trenches of Dezful, their heads wrapped in red bandanas that read: “Khomeini, we are ready.”

But, I better understand the pain experienced by those who lost loved ones to conflict when I read lines like this:

“As we walk to sit down in the dirt, I see another body in a gun-pit, a young man in the fetal position, curled up like a child, already blackening with death but with a wedding ring on his finger. I am mesmerized by the ring. On this hot, golden morning, it glitters and sparkles with freshness and life. He has black hair and is around 25 years old.”

“Where was he from, this soldier-corpse? A Sunni or a Shia or a Christian or a Kurd? And his wife. He could not be more than three days dead. Somewhere to the north of us, his wife is waking the children, making breakfast, glancing at her husband’s photograph on the wall, unaware that she is already a widow and that her husband’s wedding ring, so bright with love for her on this glorious morning, embraces a dead finger.”

Journalists, Fisk explains, are the nerve endings of their media. They must remain neutral, but on the side of those who are suffering, not necessarily to convince the world that war is bad, but to break the comfort of ignorance. Fisk’s journalism forces us to see conflict not as a hockey game between two equally matched sides, but as a series of asymmetrical tragedies.

On Israel and Lebanon

Gieseppe Valiante: What kind of influence will the Israeli election have on Lebanese politics?

Robert Fisk: The problem with [Benyamin] Netanyahu, [leader of the conservative Likud party], is he’s been in power before; he was a failure. He still believes that his failed policy – which is the hard fist – is going to bring security to Israel. It is not.

Since 1948, the Israeli policy has been: Beat the Arabs; hammer them into submission. Force is the only thing they understand, and you will have peace. And there is still war and it’s 2009, so it doesn’t work.

You’ve got two sides [Hezbollah and Israel] who I think are still waiting to recommit themselves to war. The question is when and over what excuse. You don’t need an excuse to fight a war in the Middle East. There are a thousand excuses; you can pull them out of a hat. Because I think both sides want a war, you see.

GV: Why?

RF:  Hezbollah’s got new weapons. There is no doubt about that. And they’ve built this huge system of underground concrete bunkers in the mountains above the Litany River. They’re not in the [United Nations] zone; they’re completely out, militarily.

GV: Have you seen them?

RF: You can see some of them, yes. I have seen them. Some of them are meant to be seen. I think they are intended to be bombed by the Israelis. I think they’re come-hither bunkers, do you know what I mean?

I suspect [Hezbollah have] got ground-to-air missiles to hit aircraft with. I suspect the Israelis have got some new bombs to try out from the Americans. The Hezbollah try out weapons for the Iranians, and the Israelis try out weapons for the Americans. Let’s not forget, the Israelis are a proxy force for Washington, and the Hezbollah are a proxy force for Tehran, which, any way that you look at it, that’s what it comes down to. So both sides want to see how their weapons are going to work. It pretty much depends on the relations between [U.S. President] Barack Obama and the Iranians.

GV: And how do you think those relations will be?

RF: Barack Obama asked Iran to unclench its fist. Well, Iran would say: “We’re not clenching our fist. It’s been the Americans who have been threatening us for the past umpteenth number of years.”

You can go on forever with this game, and it doesn’t look at the moment that the Iranians are in any great mood, not until after their June elections, to talk to the West in a serious way, and I can see why that would be the case.

But again, I fear very much that there will be a Hezbollah/Israeli war, and of course, if indeed Hezbollah have weapons that can clear the skies of Israeli aircraft . . . and that’s what I think most serious people in Lebanon are worried about. Saad Hariri, for example, the son of the assassinated former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, a few days ago I was chatting with him, he said: “If there is another war, it will be hell.” Well, all wars are hell, but the way he said it was somewhat different . . . and that’s probably true.

But, the thing you’ve got to remember about Netanyahu is that he’s not interested in a Palestinian state. Nor was [former Israeli prime minister Ariel] Sharon.

Netanyahu talks about security, security, security. And his theory is, if you [give] the Palestinians a good amount of autonomy, they’ll be happy playing around in their economic playpens, you see. But the problem is, if you look at Palestinian demonstrators, they’re not carrying banners saying: “We want more pre-natal clinics,” “Please reopen our casino,” “Repair our roads.” They’re carrying banners saying: “We want Palestine.”

The real issue is not the relationship between Lebanon and Israel. The real issue is between Israel and the United States, and what is Obama going to do with this? It’s one thing to put a trillion dollars into the U.S. economy and tell people he’s doing it for their good, but what is he going to do after the Israeli election? That’s the question.

On Canada and Afghanistan

GV: I’d like to focus a little on Canada. I have yet to hear a satisfactory answer to the question of what exactly we are doing over there. So maybe you can help me.

RF: I think the Canadians are in Afghanistan because . . . it’s part of the Canada-U.S. relationship.

Let’s be really frank about this; Canadians have been peacekeepers since Korea . . . now you’ve got them for the first time back in battlefield conditions. I think to some extent all armies – I’m talking about the leadership – want to have soldiers who can fight, as opposed to just build bridges and dispense bandages to people, and I think there is no doubt . . . to some extent, Afghanistan is a training ground. I think this is a political agreement.

Let me give you the example of Washington (I know you want to talk about Canada).

Politics around Washington revolve around democracy, freedom, human rights, justice. It doesn’t. It revolves around political power. And that’s how America works.

From that is the fact that a lot of countries deal in this political power. [Former British Prime Minister Tony] Blair didn’t ally himself with the illegal American invasion of Iraq because he cared about Saddam Hussein; he never gave a damn about Saddam Hussein before. It was about his decision that Britain’s own advantage . . . would be advanced by increasing the military relationship with the United States.

So you know, you’ve got to realize Canada doesn’t sign up for a joint peace-keeping/battlefield mission because it suddenly has a split personality. It’s because the Americans wanted the Canadians there, and they got them. I think they should have never been there.

I’ve just been to Kandahar, and the conditions in the hospitals there are appalling.

[Parents] were bringing in kids who are dying. And I was saying: “What’s wrong with this child?” and the doctors are saying: “It has no food, it’s hungry, there is a famine.” I didn’t know there was a famine around Kandahar. Why hasn’t this famine been discovered before? These kids were coming in looking like children from the Ethiopian famine or Bangladesh famine.

GV: That’s where the Canadians are stationed.

RF: I know that’s where the Canadians are. But you should understand something: the Canadians are miles away from Kandahar – their base is totally cut off from the city.

GV: You’re the first person to tell me that there is a famine in Kandahar.

RF: I don’t know if there is a famine per se, but there’s a lot of hunger. These children haven’t been fed. And when the parents [were] asked why not, they said they had no food.

Now the problem with the Canadian mission is the same as the British mission or the American mission: You cannot go out with battlefield troops saying you’re coming to build bridges, either the political or the physical kind.

People know how to build bridges, they know how to build hospital machines, they know how to re-concrete roads. They’ve been doing it for years. What they need is not the security structure, but the political structure in which to do that.

GV: And wouldn’t the argument be that we can’t do any of these things before a stable security force?

RF: And who has to impose security in Afghanistan?

GV: I don’t know.

RF: Well, Afghans, I would have thought. Listen, the whole problem is that we’ve set up a structure of putting [Afghanistan President Hamid] Karzai in charge. And Karzai put in all the old warlords. Well, stop paying the warlords!

I was not long ago in Kabul, and I spoke to a member of parliament, and he said: “Well, what can I do? I have powers to administer the local towns, and every time I want to do something, I’m stopped by armed men who are paid by the Americans as a security force.”

What do you do? We didn’t go there to help the Afghans. We went there in 2001 to close down the Taliban and make sure they didn’t come back. We ended up not helping the Afghans sufficiently and still the Taliban came back.

The problem at the moment, I think, is we don’t have any sense of perspective. Everything happened yesterday and nothing happened the day before yesterday.

GV: But, there are intelligent people in the Canadian and American armies who have read history books.

RF: I gave a lecture not long ago in Ottawa, in which there were members of the Canadian Forces present, and when I said that Canadians should leave Afghanistan now, they were the first people clapping. Not because they like Robert Fisk, but they agreed. The generals will always say what the government wants to say. It’s always when they retire when you hear what they really think.

[Former Canadian Forces Chief of Defence Rick Hillier] called [the Taliban] “scumbags” and I sat there and thought: “Hang on a second, the Taliban are winning.” When [British] General [Bernard] Montgomery was fighting [German Commander Erwin] Rommel in the desert in 1942, he had a field caravan where he carried his maps and his documents. On the wall of his caravan . . . he had a picture of Rommel of the Wehrmacht.

He sat there and respected Rommel and he said: “I want to know what this guy is thinking, so I look at him every night.”

I’m not saying that you should respect the Taliban, but when you are calling your enemies scumbags, you’re not going to win a war.

On journalism

GV: You mentioned in a column recently that “journalists used to report without being frightened of damaging their impartiality” and you aren’t sure if this is true anymore.

RF: My view is that journalists should be neutral and impartial on the side of those who suffer.

GV: Right, you’ve always written about the underdog, I mean—

RF: It’s not about the underdog – and I’ve never used the word underdog. I hate that word; it’s a cliché.

When I started as a journalist . . . you report football matches, you report on public inquiries into new motorways that cut through green areas, and you give time and space in your article to each side.

But the Middle East is not a football match, and it’s not a public inquiry into something that will benefit the community – it’s a massive, bloody tragedy. And it doesn’t mean we take sides in the war, but we must take a moral side.

You see children dying, your sympathy and your spirit must be with them. And you have every right to say: “How dare do you kill those women and children?”

GV: Why must it be with them automatically?

RF: Because you’re a human being. The idea of a journalist is not to be a machine that goes in and spews out stuff where you give 50 per cent to each side. We’re human beings. We’re sent out there to be the nerve endings of our newspaper.

Our job is to tell it how it is. Not to report on a football match.

If you were reporting the slave trade in the 18th century, would you give equal time to the slave ship captain? No. You’d be talking to the slaves. If you were present at the liberation of a Nazi extermination camp, would you give equal time to the SS spokesman? No. You would not, you’d be talking to the survivors and looking at the dead.

When I was in Jerusalem in the summer of 2000, a Palestinian suicide bomber walked in to an Israeli restaurant and killed 16 people, most of them children. I didn’t give equal time to the Islamic Jihad spokesperson.

GV: Why do you think that I’m not hearing about what’s really going on in Afghanistan?

RF: Because you’re not reading the Independent.

GV: Why do I have to read the Independent? Why can’t I get the info at home?

RF: I don’t think you have a press here that reflects reality in the Middle East. I think it doesn’t want to reflect reality, because it wants to have a soft, pro-American, right-wing coverage. That’s it.

GV: The French-language press Le Devoir is actually much better on the Middle East.

RF: One thing you have to understand: I don’t believe there is a big conspiracy.

I think journalists fall in line generally with what think they’re expected to write. We are not brave animals. We have mortgages to pay off, real estate to buy, kids who go to school; we don’t want to be controversial, we don’t want to upset the editor. We want to have a nice byline on page one; we’re all like that a bit. I’m not making myself out to be a special person. And there are a lot of journalists who try to do what I try to do.

When you have all these journalists who are always walking backwards, putting down stop signs, rather than walking forward saying, “Hey, I’m coming,” you’re not going to read it through. It’s not a question of censorship . . . journalists want to write the way they think their papers want them to write.

GV: Are you tired?

RF: I’ve got other things to do actually.

GV: I’m talking about, you know, are you tired of always telling people to learn history and everything is repeating –

RF: It’s a cliché that history repeats itself. But it’s equally a cliché that we don’t remember that history repeats itself.

We’re not reading books. Far too many people are glued to screens and Googling and the Internet. Give it up and read books. You’re not going to learn about the past through screens. Sorry, but there you go. Read books. Read proper history.

GV: What about the rest of 2009? What do you see?

RF: I – my crystal ball is broken. Long ago.

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