Capilano Courier | Vol. 53, Issue 3

VOLUME 53, ISSUE NO.3

NOVEMBER 2020 UNOFFICIAL CSU BY-ELECTION RESULTS - CSU EQUITY CONFERENCE - "CHEAP, DILIGENT, FAITHFUL!" - ADVENTURE TIME - THE ANDROGYNOUS COUNTERCULTURE OF THE (FRENCH) BOB - BREAKING NEW GROUND - THE GOLDEN BOY - COVID-19 NOTIFICATIONS IN VCH REGION - DO STUDENTS DREAM OF ELECTRIC CREEPS? - TOP 5 GOVERNMENT-APPROVED GLORYHOLES IN GREATER VANCOUVER PORTRAIT OF DORA MAAR - HOROSCOPES - AND MORE

letter from the editor

ANA MARIA CAICEDO

Editor-In-Chief

On Grieving and Loving the Natural World In September, at the height of the wildfire smoke in Vancouver, I bought an air purifier. It occurred to me that this smoke would return each year, summer after summer, and that realization made my heart ache.

I grew up in West Van, and I distinctly remember my walks along Taylor Way to and from school. The road was lined with towering trees, creeks, and bushes. I was a lonely girl—I was bullied in school and didn’t have many friends, and the passing of my Mom when I was ten years old broke my father. For a few years he was a shell of himself, half-there and consumed with sorrow.

It was the land around me that kept me company day after day, nurturing my imagination and spirituality.

This Coast Salish land has soothed me time and time again; for me, there is no questioning the magic it yields. The forest, ocean, rivers and creeks have an energy that has held and grounded me at my most unstable moments.

As I watched the smoky skies and thought of how this land will inevitably change as resource extraction and climate change continues to desecrate it, I wept. I was grasping just how devastating a loss this will be, and I mourned for it.

Our cover feature this issue explores how food security and agricultural practices are related to climate change.

In it, there’s a quote from Hannah Estabrook of Community Cabbage that spoke to me: “It’s about not allowing yourself to become numbed to the realities of the world…It’s about allowing yourself to feel the grief of the world, while simultaneously being really in love with the world, and reveling in your connections to people, the natural world, and the magic of natural systems—that’s where we gain motivation for change.”

It's easy to feel powerless in our ability to change the course of environmental devastation under capitalism.

Still, it’s important not to be consumed by our grief.

As Estabrook emphasizes, it’s through revelling in the beauty of our natural world that we can find the energy we need to fight for its preservation.

Mar i a Lu i sa San tan a

@malu.santanax

editor-in-chief Ana Maria Caicedo capcourier@gmail.com

features editor Sarah Rose specialfeatures.capcourier@gmail.com

Managing Editor Alisha Samnani manager.capcourier@gmail.com

Arts & Culture Editor Claire Brnjac arts.capcourier@gmail.com

news editor Alisha Samnani news.capcourier@gmail.com

Opinions Editor

associate news editor Bridget Stringer-Holden associatenews.capcourier@gmail.com

Literature & Humour Editor Sarah Rose

art directors Emma Sato Sara Nguyen artdirector.capcourier@gmail.com

Staff Writer Joss Arnott

opinions.capcourier@gmail.com

Staff Illustrator Valeriya Kim

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Alexis Zygan, Alden Wallace Mackay, Freya Wasteneys, Hassan Merali, Jason Arkell-Boles, Mayumi Izumi, Nirosh Saravanan, Pro State, Sheila Arellano, Stephanie Duke, Tamia Thompson, Teanna Jagdatt, Valeria Velazquez, Wen Zhai

FEATURED ARTISTS Ana Maria Caicedo, Che Zugazaga, Gianmarco Iuele, Haluka Yagi, Jason Arkell-Boles, John Pachkowsky, Maria Luisa Santana, Naomi Evers, Tiffany Zhong

CONTRIBUTING ILLUSTRATORS Alba Palomar Robisco, Alison Johnstone, Amy Asin, Anais Bayle, Emma Sato, Jamie Kusack, John Pachkowsky, Katrina Lashmar, Lou Papa, Mikaela Johnson, Naomi Evers, Sara Nguyen, Tiffany Zhong

Cover Art John Pachkowsky COLUMNIST PORTRAITS Emma Sato

VOLUME 53 ISSUE NO.3

NEWS

FEATURES

Unofficial CSU By-Election

Breaking New Ground

28

The Golden Boy

32

Results

6

Whitecroft Forest Yoga

8

CSU Equity Conference

10

Indigenous Digital Accelerator

12

North Shore Rent Bank

14

ARTS & CULTURE

OPINIONS How Not to Say Sorry

37

COVID-19 Notifications in VCH Region

38

Do Students Dream of Electric

"Cheap, Diligent, Faithful!"

18

Creeps?

Adventure Time

20

Controversial Advertisements

Inside the Culture Crawl

22

in Vancouver Push One-Child

Internal Conflict

23

Policy

42

CSIS and Academia

44

Inside the Studio: Ariane Lapointe

24

The Androgynous Counterculture of the (French) Bob

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WE'RE HIRING AN OPINIONS EDITOR, COMMUNITY RELATIONS MANAGER AND BUSINESS MANAGER! Send your resume and a brief statement on why you want to work with us to capcourier@ gmail.com.

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COLUMNS Back Home

48

Coast to Coast

50

Maple Syrup Art

52

HUMOUR Government Gloryholes

INTERESTED IN CONTRIBUTING? Email capcourier@gmail.com

LITERATURE

INTERESTED IN ILLUSTRATING? Submit your portfolio or samples of work to artdirector.capcourier@gmail.com

Portrait of Dora Maar

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Unofficial CSU By-Election Results Released Oct. 8 Newly elected CSU directors and CBPS executives to assume their roles for 2020-2021 school year ALISHA SAMNANI Managing Editor, News Editor BRIDGET STRINGER-HOLDEN Associate News Editor

Unofficial CSU by-election results were posted on the CSU’s Simply Voting website on the evening of Oct. 8, where 701 students voted.

The elected CSU directors and CBPS executives for the 2020-2021 school year are:

Name: Richard Lam Pronoun: He/Him Position: Capilano Human Resources Management Association President Statement: I’m very thankful to be selected as the president of the HRMA. I'm most excited about hosting virtual events for the first time. Our goal for this year is to create a relationship with the Human Resource Professional Association, allowing students to gain hands-on experience in their field.

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Name: Chan Cardin Pronoun: They/Them Position: At-Large Representative Statement: I plan to use my role as a platform to represent and empower transgender, non-binary, and other gender non-conforming students at Capilano University.

Name: June Reisner Pronoun: She/Her Position: Accessibility Justice Coordinator Statement: I’m so excited and honored to have been elected for this position!

I look forward to making some changes in our school to make education more accessible to everyone. If you are a student facing an issue of accessibility at Cap, please feel free to reach out to me via my Cap email!

Name: Ritika Rana Pronoun: She/Her Position: Capilano Business & Professional Society Vice-President Statement: I am thrilled to be elected as Vice-President of Capilano Business & Professional Society. I have an attitude of moving forward and creating a change because who likes to sit around and do the normal? I am eagerly awaiting all the learning experiences and excitement along the way.

Name: Michaela Volpe Pronoun: She/Her Position: Queer Students Liaison Statement: I was delighted to hear I was elected to the position again! I can’t wait to get started back in as the queer students liaison. I would like to get started right away trying to rebuild the online presence and community that we had pre-pandemic!

Name: Akira Yamagishi Pronoun: He/Him Position: At-Large Representative Statement: I am incredibly excited for the opportunity to be joining the passionate team that advocates for all students here at CapU! During this elected term I hope to engage with and listen to fellow students so I can push forward ideas and improvements that will benefit the entire collective.

Name: Aidan Lastoria Pronoun: He/Him/His Position: Capilano Accounting Association President Statement: Thanks for believing in my abilities and electing me as President of the CAA. I am looking forward to an exciting school year full of CAA events!

Name: Jaspreet Kaur Pronoun: She/Her/Hers Position: At-Large Representative Statement: I am really excited to meet everybody and fulfill my duties for improving the student experience. Stay Safe, Stay positive!

Name: Alex Bergen Pronoun: He/Him Position: Fine & Applied Arts Representative Statement: I am absolutely thrilled to be representing Capilano Fine & Applied Arts this year! I want the students to know I am in their corner, always available to help, and ready to work with them to create a safe space that is inclusive and healthy. Let's get this started!

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Whitecroft Filmmaker Wants to Teach You to Breathe with Forest Yoga CapU f ilm instructor Dasha Novak aims to bring the community together amid COVID-19 and to give back to nature WEN ZHAI Contributor ALISON JOHNSTONE Illustrator

COVID-19 reminds us of the importance of mental well-being and of the connections we take for granted with the community and nature. To combat this, Capilano University (CapU) film instructor Dasha Novak moved to Whitecroft—located at the foot of Sun Peaks Mountain—where she started a non-profit organization to address the mental health struggles people have been facing during the pandemic.

“I found myself at a place where I felt at peace... things just made sense when I was in the forest at the creek doing meditation or yoga,” said

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Novak. During the summer, she decided to provide yoga classes at the creek. “The philosophy is to give back to the forest. It’s been a labor of love, but mostly it’s been an amazing journey. I had a few people from the community helping me build [a deck for classes to take place on].” The 20x20 deck can hold 12-15 people normally and 6-8 people observing social distancing.

As human beings we are used to using nature as a tool—but Novak believes it is time to think about what we can do for the forest. “The most obvious is to disappear and let the forest be… but it’s kind of an extremist position.” Novak hopes to give people

the opportunity to experience how these connections happen. “We are connected to each other and to nature—[during a session] everybody becomes aware of where we are and how we are connected to the flow of everything around us.”

A yoga and meditation practitioner on and off for ten years, Novak once signed up for a course to be a yoga instructor but didn’t get to complete her course due to COVID-19. Novak plans to resume the sessions in springtime. “It’s a lived experience,” said Novak. “You can read magazines, and you can read other people’s ideas and research and philosophies but unless you actually get onto a yoga mat and do it yourself it’s very hard to fully comprehend and absorb that energy and what it can do for you.”

Novak thinks lots of people have misconceptions of yoga as a rigid, perfectionist-ridden practice. “If you want to start by laying there the whole class and watching the sky and the trees move above you, that’s completely fine. Or if you go inside the classroom, wherever you are,” said Novak. “The most important thing is that you show up and you are open to the energy that is offered by the instructor.”

property. “I’m working on my two own projects that are more experimental, just playing with ideas,” said Novak. “As an artist, I’ve been working experimentally with ice and snow and building different sculptures and installations.…A big part of what I do is to document that process,” she said, “ I don’t think I can keep making film without having this outlet to experiment with different ways of looking at nature—especially in winter with ice and snow and water in different forms.”

Novak hopes to establish permaculture while keeping the forest and the landscape the way it is. “The idea of it is beautiful, but the reality of it is pretty hard... There’ve been some challenges that I needed to figure out,” said Novak. “I’ll never take any water, especially hot running water for granted, because [I’m] aware of what it takes to bring it home.”

For Novak, yoga allows us to be in the moment. “I think we just spend so much time planning and trying to foresee events or we spend time in the past regretting or reconstructing things. Everything that we really need is available within our own capacity. You just need to learn how to breathe.”

In addition to yoga classes, the North Vancouver director hopes to hold outdoor film screenings at the

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CSU Equity Conference to Take Place Nov. 16 to 20 Catalyst: From Agitation to Action provides a place for real, honest and authentic dialogues about equity at CapU BRIDGET STRINGER-HOLDEN Associate News Editor LOU PAPA Illustrator

The Capilano Students’ Union (CSU) will be hosting an equity conference called Catalyst: From Agitation to Action, from Nov. 16 to Nov. 20. It will be a series of remote sessions held from 6 pm to 9 pm over Zoom. Capilano University (CapU) students, faculty and staff are able to register for free, while others can purchase a ticket for $25.

What sets this conference apart are the hands-on aspects that allow members of the CapU community to be involved and engaged.

“Attendees should expect a real, honest and authentic dialogue on equity,” said Shanti Scarpetta-Lee, Vice-President of Equity and Sustainability at the Capilano Students’ Union. “This isn’t going to be a more traditional conference where you go and there are presenters and you listen to them and that’s it, it is going to be a lot more interactive and personal.”

The keynote speaker for the conference is Ta7talíya Michelle Nahanee from the organization Decolonizing Practices. “I heard her speak at Stratagem [an online diversity and inclusion conference] in July, she’s amazing,” said Scarpetta-Lee. For this conference, Nahanee will be speaking about Indigenous issues and the process of decolonizing, as well as how those topics relate to equity. The exact details of the sessions were left up to Nahanee to decide how she would like to interpret them.

Scarpetta-Lee encourages people to attend the conference, especially those who wish they could do more in terms of antiracism or equity work. This provides a space where they can talk about those issues in detail. The conversations will be an opportunity to learn the skills and acquire the necessary tools to do that kind of work. “We don’t want cost to be a barrier for anyone,” said Scarpetta-Lee, mentioning that in order to reduce barriers, the CSU is also offering free tickets to folx experiencing financial hardship.

Apart from the work, Scarpetta-Lee mentioned that it’d be a nice break from classes and other stresses, noting the planned performances, art and prizes. “I think it’ll be a nice combination of the fun aspect and then also what can people do about racism now,” said Scarpetta-Lee. “They can learn the skills and get the tools they need to keep doing the work.”

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As the only VP of Equity and Sustainability in BC, ScarpettaLee’s been able to tailor the role to what’s most important in the moment. She’s in charge of the collective liaisons, facilitating their activities and bringings their voices to board and the executive.

I ♥ Consent is a new campaign within the scope of Scarpetta-Lee’s work with sexualized violence and misconduct. Mental health, climate and sustainability initiatives are also part of her portfolio, with the responsibility to host events such as this one.

While she’s the executive that’s spearheading the conference, Kristi De Wolf was hired through the Canada Summer Jobs program as the Equity Conference Coordinator to assist with the logistics of the conference and the more operational side of it. Lori Kosciuw, the Director of Advocacy, and Chris Girodat, the Executive Director, are others who are involved in the planning and preparation.

These topics were something that the executive committee had been in the works for some time. Anti-racism was a topic that was in the annual operating plan, which is based on the CSU’s new 2020-2025 Strategic Plan, and approved at the beginning of the year.

“These problems have always been a really big issue, so many of them have been really exemplified these past few months,” said Scarpetta-Lee, referring to COVID and all the anti-Asian racism that came from that, as well as the Black Lives Matter movements.

“It’s clear that these are things that we need to be talking about on a larger scale and makes this work even more important,” she said.

When redoing their budget, the CSU surveyed their members to see what the budget priorities would be in case cuts needed to be made. “Students showed overwhelming support for equity work, instead of more of a focus on services, resources or oncampus events,” said Scarpetta-Lee. “This proves that this work is something that our membership really cares about too.”

Register for Catalyst: From Agitation to Action via eventbrite.

CapU community members and those experiencing financial hardship are able to register for free, while the general public can purchase tickets for $25.

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TD Grants $450,000 to CapU’s Indigenous Digital Accelerator Grant funding allows IDA to help grow Indigenous businesses in a meaningful way BRIDGET STRINGER-HOLDEN Associate News Editor VALERIYA KIM Staff Illustrator

THE LIGHTS DIM. MACHINES WHIRR, AND THE PROJECTOR ROLLS. YOUR NAME FLASHES ONTO THE SCREEN—YOU’VE FINALLY MADE YOUR DEBUT. Only, you haven’t. Not really. While directors and production companies don’t always see eye to eye, it can be a traumatic experience for individuals who are Indigenous, Black and People of Colour. Indigenous directors are often forced to partner with non-Indigenous producers, who often take advantage of them. That’s where the Indigenous Digital Accelerator (IDA) comes in. ­12

“Indigenous directors/producers don’t have the collateral to get loans from the bank... if they own a house, it’s often on a reservation, and reservation houses have no value as far as banks are concerned,” explained Doreen Manuel, Director of Bosa Centre for Film and Animation. “We help [Indigenous filmmakers like Loretta Todd] to build an online presence, like to upgrade her website and to grow her business in whatever way that means.”

Capilano University (CapU) launched the IDA fund in Spring 2019 to help Indigenous entrepreneurs succeed in Indigenous start-ups or companies, where Manuel serves as a program mentor and advisory board member. “I always saw that [Indigenous] businesses don't really seem to take off and don’t seem to go anywhere,” she said about her 15 years of industry experience. “It has everything to do with marketing and the ability to reach out.”

In 2019, Western Economic Diversification Canada (WD) partnered with CapU and offered $1.93 million in funding to be claimed by the end of 2023. Once the IDA program finds matching funds from other non-governmental donors, the equivalent WD funds become accessible.

On Sept. 28, 2020, TD Bank became the first major partner of the project, granting $450,000 toward CapU’s IDA program. This allows the program access to the matching amount of WD funding, and Manuel is hopeful that they will be able to access the rest before the threeyear deal with WD is up. To date, CapU has contributed over $150,000 in-kind through personnel contributions and aims to contribute over half a million by 2023.

The IDA program is also in a partnership with an organization called INDIGENEXT, an already established Indigenous business accelerator. Duncan and Shane Kennedy from Indigenext are mentors in the program, and will be helping the IDA program create student employment and research opportunities, as well as establish 10-20 businesses/organizations in the next three years and create 100 new Indigenous jobs by 2025.

Surveys have shown that the majority of Indigenous businesses across Canada don’t advertise to markets outside their regions and can’t figure out how to get national or international clients or customers. “We can help these little businesses expand themselves into larger markets, and that’s what our goal is,” explained Manuel, noting the struggles businesses face in order to stay afloat during COVID-19.

“I couldn’t figure out why other people don’t [have web portfolios],” said Manuel, explaining the importance of her own website. “It’s a little expensive, but I think it’s

worth it because what’s the point of making a movie if nobody knows about it?”

As part of Manuel’s advocacy, she’s trying to get Indigenous artists on all levels access to funding that will help them break through the million-dollar ceiling. “You have incredible artists, like Loretta Todd, from all across Canada who are just phenomenal, but they struggle far too hard to break the million-dollar ceiling...and to me, that’s unacceptable, especially when non-Indigenous people can,” said Manuel, explaining how there are ample funds available for emerging artists who catch up to everyone else and get stuck trying to break the ceiling as well. “The reality is,” she said, “they only [provide funding] to the same, old, white men that they’ve been giving it to forever.

Women can’t break in and People of Colour can’t break in.

So I started calling them on it.”

“I’m battling against unions in the industry because they don’t want to hire our people,” said Manuel, explaining that people give lack of experience and hours as a reason not to hire her people, but no one is willing to hire them to give them that experience. “And it’s because the industry doesn’t want to hire anybody that doesn’t look like them, and it’s predominantly white men, and it’s not just an Indigenous problem, this is a Black and People of Colour problem too, that’s why I’m fighting on all fronts for all Indigenous, Black and People of Colour.”

Two pilot projects are currently underway, funded through the IDA. A business plan and proposal have been laid out for Chastity Davis Consulting, who will receive mentorship and help building a website and an online curriculum. Micheal Auger and Petie Chalifoux own a film company called Tohkapi Cinema but can’t seem to get broadcast deals to fulfil their dreams of resting a television series. “They’re not gonna get there without help,” said Manuel, who plans to get them a mentorship with a faculty member at CapU. Both of these pilot projects will partner with Mitacs, who recently extended their program to include undergrad students instead of just graduate students. They’ll be hiring IDEA students to work on projects under faculty supervision—like establishing a website for Chastity Davis Consulting.

“Because of residential schools and the horrendous oppression that we have been under, we didn’t learn those skills,” said Manuel. “I was in residential school when I was a kid. I didn’t have any bank account when I was a kid, I didn’t learn those kinds of things. How are we supposed to–we’re already several steps back from the average person. We need to learn all that and grow and evolve.”

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North Shore Rent Bank Program Receives $75,000 Grant Harvest Project gives a hand up, not a hand out to community members In need of an interest-f ree rent loan MAYUMI IZUMI Contributor MIKAELA JOHNSON Illustrator

Mayor Linda Buchanan, the City of North Vancouver council and planners recently approved a grant of $75,000 for the North Shore Rent Bank Program. The funds will bring more grants to applicants to help the North Vancouver charity to assist their clients with finances for housing and secure food supply.

Some of the criteria for being approved for the North Shore Rent Bank program are that the applicant is 19 years or older, a Canadian citizen or permanent resident, has income to cover their other expenses,and can provide three months of bank statements, a rental agreement, and utility bills.

An interest-free rent loan is a much needed resource in the current climate as the province rolls out Phase 3 of BC’s restart plan, many still require financial assistance. In late 2019, a pilot project named the North Shore Rent Bank program was started by Harvest Project, a well known and respected North Vancouver registered charity.

Harvest Project was founded in 1993 by David Foster. “David grew up in West Vancouver and became a successful business person at a fairly young age, and at some point along that path, he fell on hard times personally and ended up losing his place… [finding] himself homeless,” recounts Lee.

“There are two really strong factors at play here, one—there is a distinct need for what the rent bank provides for folks who find themselves on the margins especially at this time so it meets a need that’s here now and number two—it gets to the City’s pledge...to make [North Vancouver] the healthiest city [in the world] and that really aligns with Harvest Project’s desire and mission to see the North Shore...be the healthiest community it can be,” explains Kevin Lee, Harvest Project Development Officer.

The grant from the city can help approximately 40 to 50 single residents and families. Although North Vancouver is one of the most affluent cities in the country, homelessness is an ongoing issue. According to a North Vancouver Task Force, there were approximately 736 homeless people in 2017, and in just two short years, that number has more than doubled—last year 2,236 people were identified as homeless.

The term “homeless” includes people living on the streets, parks, in their cars or couch surfing at friends and families’ homes. With the $75,000 grant, Harvest Project can help community members in need of financial assistance pay for their rent and security deposit. ­14

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He did find help through several community groups and churches but through this traumatic experience, he discovered that the resources available on the North Shore were not up to par. This prompted Foster to create change. He strongly believes in self-sufficiency, and continues to be the backbone for Harvest Project’s ethos of giving a hand up.

In the mid nineties, the City of North Vancouver lent Harvest Project a space on Lonsdale and Esplanade free of charge so that they could have a clothing depot. The charity organization moved to Bewicke Ave around 2000, and in 2011 they opened Clothes For Change at their current location in North Vancouver.

Despite closing their doors in late March, they have not missed a day in helping their neighbours, community and clients.

They very quickly transitioned to online and phone support and have donated $800,000 via their virtual program and grocery gift cards.

You can donate to Harvest Project through their website or through their grocery store partners.

joh n Pac h kows ky

@salt.the.earth F E AT URED A R T

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Jas o n a r k e l l- b o l e s ­16

@jasonarkellboles

F E AT URED A R T

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“Cheap!

Diligent!

Faithful!”

Marlene Yuen honors the resilience and hard work of early Chinese immigrants by exploring Chinese Canadian labour histories through a variety of media WEN ZHAI Contributor

Canadians often consider racism in their country to be something in the past, and look remorsefully at their neighbor across the border being engulfed in constant racial protests and riots with pity and moral contempt. However, Vancouver-based artist Marlene Yuen was painfully reminded of another reality by a man who yelled at her and her eight-year-old daughter on the seawall. “I tried to explain racism to her, and it was a difficult experience for me as a Chinese Canadian and as a mother,” said Yuen. This made Yuen’s new exhibition Cheap!

Diligent! Faithful! at the Grunt Gallery all the more important.

Opening Sept. 25 to Dec. 12, the exhibition showcases Yuen’s prints and paper-based artwork that explore Chinese-Canadian labour history. The exhibition is meant to remind people of the racism Chinese immigrants have endured and, most importantly, honor their resilience and hard work. With concise black ink comic drawings and occasionwl blue and yellow colouring on the accordion book stories, Yuen is able to convey strong and clear messages and hold the attention of the audience.

When studying fine arts at the University of British Columbia, Yuen was introduced to various media such as printmaking, drawing and painting. She now works as an Interdisciplinary technician at Emily ­1 8

Carr University while maintaining her 20-year-old art practice, which now includes installations and making books.

Cheap! Diligent! Faithful! is a reiteration of a 2017 exhibition named After Gold Mountain from the Workers Arts and Heritage Museum in Hamilton, Ontario. Yuen chose three trade-focused stories to display on the walls: laundry, restaurant and grocery. She also chose two accordion books by Cheng Foo and Mary Ko Bong. Additionally, a new publication about old Chinatown’s Ho Sun Hing Printers was also included with a dedicated site-specific mural. Yuen included the closing of the printer because it was a turning point of the once vibrant Chinatown being gentrified by big developers.

Opening a Chinese immigrant-themed exhibition during a pandemic which disproportionately witnesses hostility and racism against Asians, especially Chinese people, seems sadly prescient. “Funnily, this show was planned last year, before the pandemic. Around March [lockdown], we didn’t even know if this show would even open, but thankfully it did,” Yuen explains. “I think this exhibition is more important now than ever[…] So [many] anti-Asian sentiments came out of the woodwork during COVID-19 and still continues[…]

Racism still exists, unfortunately.”

Racism against the Chinese people began out of fear. Ironically, as the exhibition title emphasized, it might be related to the fact that Chinese labourers were hand-picked because they were “cheap, diligent and faithful.” They were paid less than their western counterparts and many lost their lives while building the Canadian Pacific Railway.

After that, some Chinese labourers went back to China, while others who could not afford a trip back opened laundry, restaurant or grocery stores—trades that didn’t require a lot of starting funds.

Like many Chinese citizens back then, Yuen’s grandfather had to pay a head tax, which was a racist tax to prevent Chinese immigrants from coming to Canada. Inspired partially by her own family history, Yuen’s motivation is “to increase awareness of Chinese Canadians and their contributions to the workforce in Canada” and, she adds, “to honour the resilience of the Chinese Canadian community as they have often endured much racism throughout Canada’s history.”

Yuen draws attention to two head-strong women—Mary Ko Bong (book work) and Jean Lumb (the comic panel story). She wanted to show that strong Chinese women and children also played a vital part in Canada’s workforce, despite the fact women were seldom mentioned in early Chinese Canadian history. “Ko Bong worked in

the WWII war effort as an optics mechanic fixing binoculars and compasses and Jean Lumb was an entrepreneur who gave up her education so her brother could go to school,” explained Yuen. Lumb achieved success not only in her businesses, but also as an activist who fought to end Canada’s racist anti-immigration laws.

Yuen is intimately aware that “racism is a difficult thing to convey,” especially when “many people refuse to believe that Canada is a racist country.” Through comic panel stories, Yuen hopes to invite people of all ages and backgrounds to learn about what really happened to the Chinese diaspora in the early days of Canada. By introducing this central part of Canada’s history, Yuen wants everyone to learn from our shared past, and challenge racism in our future.

For Yuen, younger generations need to be particularly aware of our history, and things like Anti-Asian laws, head taxes, and Chinatown riots. “Chinese-Canadians have made profound contributions to BC’s history, culture and economy. They also endured a lot of racism and their resilience should be celebrated and noted,” Yuen says.

A R TS & CULT URE

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Adventure Time Indoctrinating your friends into the cult of nerdom JOSS ARNOTT Staff Writer JAMIE KUSACK Illustrator

Part I: The Pitch

J: “The party is escorting a caravan pulled by two oxen. The track of hardened dirt beneath your feet is called the Triboar Trail by locals.

You’ve been travelling down it for roughly two days, steadily making your way to the mining town of Phandalin. The party was hired to escort the caravan by a dwarf named Gundren Rockseeker—”

S: That’s kind of on the nose, isn't it?

D: Rockseer?

“By a dwarf named Gundren Rockseeker.

For your services, you’ll be rewarded handsomely, 10 gold coins apiece, upon safe delivery. As the party continues down the Triboar trail, you all notice something

J: Rockseeker D: Oh, ok.

Recently, Dungeons and Dragons has undergone a resurgence, being as popular in 2017 as it was when it first launched back in 1974. The renewal of the decadesold franchise is largely thanks to shows like Community and Stranger Things, as well as popular podcasts like Critical Role or The Adventure Zone, and a strong presence on Twitch and YouTube. These digital shows have made D&D accessible to new players in a way that it never was before.

It’s hard to see the appeal of D&D if you haven’t seen the game in action. Afterall, it’s

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E: Only if he’s a miner.

J: *ahem* S: Maybe it’s like a stage name?

J: *AHEM*

supposed to be just a bunch of nerds sitting around a table for a few hours.

In a world full of chaos, plague, racism, sexism and homophobia, D&D offers one of the purest forms of escapism there is. D&D allows us to step out of our world and into another one, becoming the hero of our own stories. Movies, television and books are solitary experiences, but we can only ever be spectators. In the world of D&D you can be whoever you want to be, and do whatever you want to do. That’s what makes D&D so special.

up ahead; A burned-out wagon, signs of a skirmish, it looks like there was a fight…”

J: “What do you do?”

The magic of Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) stems from those four simple words.

The Dungeon Master has set the stage, now it’s up to the players to decide what they want to do next. They could make lunch, investigate the road up ahead or fan out into the woods and search for possible ambushers.

It’s up to them.

D&D subverts reality and offers up an alternative. When you sit down at the table you cease to be yourself and become your character. Trivial details like social statuses, race or gender don't really matter when there are dragons to slay and treasures to be found. You don’t have to be Bob the CapU student, for a few priceless hours, you can be Chungus the Chaste, Half-Orc paladin and a lover of orange juice. There are no pandemics, parking tickets or zoom calls in the world of D&D, only the people you bring with you and the stories you all choose to tell.

Part II: In Practice Classically, D&D is played around a table, but if you can't manage that right now websites like D20 and Fantasy Grounds let you play the game digitally. As long as you can get into the game, the medium isn't nearly as important as the people you play with.

The first and easiest way to start playing is finding an existing group of players. If that’s not possible, you’ll need to form your own party.

The most important member of any party is the Dungeon Master (DM). The DM is the interface between the players and the world, narrating the adventure and voicing non-player characters. Sort of like a referee, the DM tells players what dice to roll and orchestrates things behind the scenes.

D&D is a big game—without an experienced player to guide you through it can feel like flying in the middle of a hurricane without wings. The important thing to remember is that at its core D&D is really just one system, with infinite options. Once you’ve figured out the core system, you’re set.

The core loop of D&D is essentially; set-up, action and resolution. The DM will describe a setting, a player will roll to do an action, depending on the roll the DM will say if it works or not. Understanding this can take a

bit of learning, but once you learn the loop, you can stumble through the rest until you understand what’s happening.

Remember, the crux of D&D isn’t details and dice—it’s fun.

The first tools you need to play D&D is a Player’s Handbook (PHB) and a set of dice. The PHB holds everything necessary to create a character and understand the game from a player’s perspective. Dice are the foundation of gameplay in D&D. Every action a character makes is determined by the roll of dice, from the four-sided pyramid D4 to the twenty-sided D20 and more. If getting something more haptic is out of the question, dice can be found online at Roll20, or in systems like Fantasy Grounds.

the action and encouraging other people to engage with you in character. Put on a silly voice! Pretend to sing a song, or tell the story of how you got to this point in your life as a four-hundred-year-old, socialist Gnome, named Gnoam. If you’re the DM, you are the storyteller, the narrator of this yet to be written grand epic. Set the scene, tell the stories, make it real.

At the end of the day, D&D is a game about escaping the limitations and restrictions of society and having as much fun as you can think of.

The D&D Starter Set is perfect for a first time adventurer, it contains pre-made character sheets, an abridged rule book, one set of dice and an adventure; The Lost Mine of Phandelver. The adventure puts players right into the action, and has plenty of tips for new DM’s.

As for the rest of your party—Enthusiasm can be contagious, so the best way to get people interested in D&D is to share your own reasons for liking it. It’s your job as the shepherd of this mad journey to see your friends through it. That means leading

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Inside the Culture Crawl

East Vancouver’s annual culture crawl to commence this year following COVID-19 protocols

TEANNA JAGDATT Contributor EMMA SATO Illustrator

As one of East Vancouver's most prolific arts, design, and craft “Visual arts is kind of harder to appreciate online,” Rausenberg says, festivals, the Eastside Culture Crawl has been showcasing local explaining why it’s important to keep the keeping the in-person artists for 24 years and counting. As Artistic and Executive Director viewings. Because of this, the Crawl was able to have their regular Esther Rausenberg shares, “The premise of the crawl is about public viewings by adhering to arts and culture protocols provided by the engagement, and to lose that was just like losing our heart and soul.” provincial health authority.

In the first few weeks of March when COVID-19 started spreading, the possibility of cancellation shocked the fine arts community. With government grants and possible loss of sponsors, there was a large chance that this event would not take place this year. Rausenberg speaks on all the hard work contributors to the crawl have done to receive funding to keep this event going for both the people attending and for the artists who have been working passionately all year.

The Vancouver Foundation was a big part of rescuing organizations like the Culture Crawl by providing emergency funding. This led to the creation of a “hybrid model,” which provides both online and in-person offerings. With the Crawl being offered online, virtual viewings ensure public safety as well as making it easier for artists to expand their exposure outside of Vancouver. This offers artists the opportunity to show their work globally, which could grow their social platforms and give them the exposure they need to move forward in their careers. ­2 2

Ultimately, the artist's work is what keeps the Crawl alive. Although a part of the social aspect is gone, the passion in their work is still expressed thoroughly. Rausenberg states, “People are realizing more and more that they need art in their lives to make them feel good.”

In the times we are living in today, there is importance in standing together as a community and using outlets, like art, to keep creativity afloat. Rausenberg describes it as a reminder of how impactful art and design can be on one's life. “Your home has become this place of refuge…I'm surrounded by beautiful art pieces that remind me of how comfortable I am in my environment.”

The Eastside Culture Crawl will be taking place virtually as a preview week on November 2-9, and in-person at various eastside locations including Columbia St., 1st Ave., Victoria Drive, and the Waterfront from Nov. 12-15 and 19-22.

For more information on the Eastside culture crawl or to reserve a spot online or in-person, you can go online to culturecrawl.ca.

Internal Conflict How to deal with agoraphobia during the world's most indoor crisis

CLAIRE BRNJAC Arts & Culture Editor KATRINA LASHMAR Illustrator

In the days before COVID-19 hit in early spring, I was struggling to sit by myself in a movie theatre. My hands would get clammy at the idea that I was two hours and some light entertainment away from being home, curled up and relaxed in my bed. It wasn’t that the movie theatre itself wasn’t comfortable—I even sprung for the nicer seats in hope of a more relaxing experience—or that I even wanted to actually be home. It was the fact that anything at all could happen, and I would be at least two hours away from being safe at home base.

This, as I’ve come to find out, is a form of agoraphobia. The National Institute of Mental Health defines it as “an anxiety disorder that involves intense fear and anxiety of any place or situation where escape might be difficult,” or more colloquially, a fear of going outside. I’ve suffered a less debilitating version of it for a long time, cutting off dates and hang-outs at 8:00 pm sharp in fear of something bad happening on my way home.

Agoraphobia has recently become a hot topic as the fear of going outside has become justified. Mental health rates of the general public have tanked disastrously; anxiety and depression rates have skyrocketed during this pandemic, according to a CDC study.

I understood this firsthand. When the pandemic struck, my sense of self and confidence went out the window, and after so many months inside at home, I forgot how to be away from it. I became terrified of COVID, and what getting it would mean for my seventy-yearold father. My agoraphobia, once annoying, became debilitating. I remember sitting outside a Walmart with my groceries for the week, crying at the idea that I was so far from home and lost, and thinking that I was already sick, or getting there, no matter what precautions I took. The invisible thread that tied me home could be snapped, and I’d be lost.

Hala Abdul, a Registered Clinical Counsellor from the Anxiety Relief Centre (ARC) in Vancouver, said that this continued rise of mental illness rates might end up being the case.“More than anything, I think that this pandemic has robbed us of a sense of control since our options have shrunk,” she told me. The feeling of anxiety in this instance is a lack of control; I can’t control the pandemic, so I am afraid of it.

When I asked what she would recommend to someone like me who had a hard enough time going outside without a pandemic on, she mentioned that creating a routine can be extremely helpful.“Having no routine at all is far more exhausting than having a routine, so it’s well worth a try to figure out what it might look like for you...Creating a system that involves getting some fresh air and going for walks is a great start.” Incentivizing yourself to go outside, even just for a coffee or to walk around a part of your neighbourhood you enjoy, can make a difference with your mental health.

COVID-19 has made an agoraphobe a recluse. Having no control over my life has made me spiral into two different haircuts and an impromptu Blogilates phase, but as I work on leaving the house, I feel like I’m starting to have more control over what I do. Going outside is something I can start to enjoy, even just to our community mailbox. Before, the feeling of being outside for a second thrilled me before the feeling eventually snapped back to fear. Now, while I collect my many unwise internet purchases from the mailbox, the seconds-long thrill of being outside grows longer. It’ll take a while, and the end result will be nothing groundbreaking, but I think of a day where I go somewhere spontaneously, and I enjoy being a person outside the house again, even with wildfires, rogue bears, and a pandemic out to get me.

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Ins ide A view into the life of a tattoo artist in 2020

SHEILA ARELLANO Contributor

The body is a canvas, a blank slate on which people can express themselves and their identity. Tattoos are a vessel to communicate emotions and convey memories. They adorn one’s skin and enhance already existing beauty. Tattoos are as personal and ever changing as their meanings that evolve through time.

Lapointe is a tattoo artist based in Vancouver.

Originally from Quebec City, she has been on the West Coast for four years. Throughout her career, she found her style while learning how to draw. She began tattooing four years ago, but she only dove into it full-time in April when everything shut down. “When the big quarantine happened, I found myself trying new mediums. Before I didn’t have the time to try these things, but COVID helped me explore, which was very refreshing,” Lapointe said.

In the same way, the tattoo industry is forced to evolve and adapt. Like every industry in the world, it has been affected by the global pandemic. Tattoo artists all over the world have been impacted as unexpected consequences tumbled into everyone’s lives at the beginning of March. Ariane Lapointe provides an insider’s view into the changes brought by COVID-19. ­2 4

The shut down also revealed something surprising for the tattoo industry. For some, crises can be blessings in disguise. With the shutdown, people became more

the

spontaneous. “I am more busy than if COVID didn’t happen,” she said. “I think people are craving tattoos quite a bit. Because we might close again, there is a sense of urgency.”

However, the pandemic has definitely affected tattoo shops physically. The number of clients and artists is limited and the sense of community has dimmed. However, Lapointe hasn’t been discouraged from this as she has built a community online. “Growing an Instagram platform is nerve-racking and awesome at the same time,” she said.

“Instagram is the only way I have pursued to build a community. But it also grew through word-of-mouth.”

S tudio:

Today, tattoo artists are adapting to the new world. Even though creativity might be limited due to the lack of physical interactions, the community is still present online. As Lapointe mentioned, “The creativity I would get from going out or seeing other people is gone. But apart from that, tattooing has not been that different. Obviously we have to wear masks and gloves, but all the sanitation is the same as before. It hasn’t been too bad, which we are all very grateful for.”

Ariane Lapointe’s stunning work can be found on Instagram @strawberry_softserve.

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The Androgynous Counterculture of the (French) Bob From liberating rebellion to status quo: What about this simple coiffure symbolizes rule-breaking style?

ALISHA SAMNANI Managing Editor, News Editor ALBA PALOMAR ROBISCO Illustrator

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On May 1, 1920, the Saturday Evening Post published F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” a short story about a young woman who is tricked by her cousin into allowing a barber to chop off her locks. With her new ‘do, she is outcast by everyone, uninvited to a gathering held in her honour and locked away in haste for fear of bestowing scandal upon her family.

On May 1, 1920, the Saturday Evening Post published F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” a short story about a young woman who is tricked by her cousin into allowing a barber to chop off her locks. With her new ‘do, she is outcast by everyone, uninvited to a gathering held in her honour and locked away in haste for fear of bestowing scandal upon her family.

Louise Brooks maintained her dark, tightly framed childhood bob when she took on the role of Lulu in the 1928 film Pandora’s Box. Lulu, much like the woman who played her, was a seductive, uninhibited young woman who possessed raw sexuality. Indeed, after her death Brooks was as famous for her sexually-liberated nature as she was for her “helmet-like coiffure.”

The seriousness surrounding this imagined haircut is vividly contrasted by the moment that 1890s France introduced the world to Polaire, an actress whose defining characteristic was “a shock of short, dark hair”. This jaw-hugging look would come to be known as the French Bob.

Only a year earlier did actress Mary Gorden tell the Pictorial Review: “I consider getting rid of our long hair one of the many little shackles that women have cast aside in their passage to freedom. Whatever helps their emancipation, however small it may seem, is well worth while.”

In Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s romantic comedy film Amélie, this jaw-length curl perfectly framed the shock on his painfully shy waitress-turnedheroine’s face as she learnt the news of the death of Princess Diana.

The hair Audrey Tautou has in the 2001 film is instantly recognizable as the epitome of French-girl chic.

While the bob started to re-emerge in the 1950s, it wasn’t until the 1960s that the bob reached its height of the French New Wave, when social and political views replicated those of the 1920s.

The cut had its first major celebrity moment in 1909, when hairdresser Antoine de Paris popularized what was known as the “coupe à la Jeanne d’Arc” amongst his famous Parisian clientele. The cloche, a bell-shaped hat that rose to fame only the year prior, was unable to be properly worn with the long hair most actresses sported at the time.

The bob was, by nature, controversial from the start. Some variations, such as the shingle bob—tapered, and exposing the back of the neck—were said to cause medical conditions such as the shingle headache, which was described as “a form of neuralgia caused by the sudden removal of hair from the sensitive nape of the neck.”

Regardless, the decision to chop off one’s hair was a liberating reaction to conventional times. An article from the June 1920 edition of the New York Times revealed that rebellious young women would go so far as to be diagnosed with “falling hair” in order to be prescribed a remedy of one bob haircut.

There was a cry for more gender equality, and the shorter, bobbed hairstyle allowed women to attain a more androgynous appearance.

Many fashionable women bound their breasts to give themselves a boyish, flat-chested look. By the following year, multiple fashionable women chopped off their hair in pursuit of the neutral style.

Fitzgerald exclaimed: “I was the spark that lit up Flaming Youth, Colleen Moore was the torch. What little things we are to have caused all that trouble.”

In Jean-Luc Godard’s 1962 film Vivre sa Vie, Anna Karina sports an inky black bob that remains perfectly curled by her ears as her character Nina leaves her husband and newborn son in hopes of becoming an actress. The striking cut is reminiscent of the one worn

by Brooks in Pandora’s Box. Our heroine embodies Brooks’ character in more ways than one, as she also falls into prostitution and has her life culminate into a gruesome, violent death.

By the start of the 1970s, the classic French cut had transformed into the sleek bob made infamous by Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde, soon to be replicated in multiple fashion editorials throughout the later half of the millennium. Aggressive generations of ads told American women: get a bob to attain that coveted French sex appeal—a version of beauty couched in equal parts mystery, sophistication, laziness, and je ne sais quoi.

In American and British incarnations of the French, the bob became an obvious nod towards the Parisienne, a cliché to be summoned along with the Breton shirt and a beret whenever it was deemed necessary. It’s the easiest way to obtain the aspirational aloofness of French femininity, or at least enough to evoke the illusion of the ever-elusive laissez-faire attitude possessed by such a woman.

Although the modern-day bob has been co-opted into the status quo, the most genuine bob-bearers may well be those who wear the look slightly unkempt, those who have an air of mystery about them, those who are just unbothered—and confident—enough to rebel in the spirit of the once-counterculture of the French Bob. A R TS & CULT URE

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BREAKING NEW GROUND Young people are rising to the challenge of addressing hunger and the climate crisis through community, connection and an interdisciplinary approach FREYA WASTENEYS Contributor JOHN PACHKOWSKY Illustrator

Every Wednesday at 7 pm, a small group of twenty-somethings gather in a church parking lot to go hunting for treasures. They assemble and disperse into the evening by car, foot or bike. Among them is Hannah Estabrook, 21, sporting a distinctive bob that falls mid-ear.

She’s all earnest eyes and big smile. Brandishing headlamps and rubber gloves, Estabrook and the others make for the fertile grounds of the smaller, local grocery chains and their unlocked dumpsters. It won’t be long until someone strikes gold—a carrot, cabbage, or maybe broccoli. After an hour or so, bags brimming, they will reconvene and stash their bounty in someone’s car. Tomorrow they will wash and admire their new-found abundance, and turn it into an elaborate, shareable feast.

the CBC reports that an estimated $31 billion in food is wasted in Canada each year. As soil fertility around the world is impacted by industrial farming practices and increased salination due to rising sea levels, questions of agricultural sustainability and food security are pressing and will only become more so if unaddressed.

The idea of the group, according to Estabrook, “is to reframe food as a source of community connection, show the potential of what’s deemed waste, and reduce as many barriers to food access as possible.”

For her, Community Cabbage was a gateway group of sorts, and her first foray into enacting social changes to address issues she cares so deeply about.

The concept of Community Cabbage is simple: each week, the Hailing from Mi’kmaw territory in Nova Scotia, Estabrook grew up group turns perceived food waste into meals, sharing their creations with a passion for food and her environment. She spent her early with fellow students on Fridays outside the University of Victoria’s years developing a deep connection to place through the teachings Student Union building. Through their work, the group aims to of her grandpa, an environmentalist, recycling depot owner and raise awareness for food waste, security and sustainability, while hobby farmer with an extensive garden network. A self-described promoting the perspective of food as a communal resource and “stoked eight-year-old,” Estabrook fondly remembers nerding out source of connection. over edible plants on morning walks. She was privileged to grow up in a family that fostered her love of the natural world and credits her While the concept is simple, the issues they are trying to solve are parents for instilling an awareness of world issues from a very young not. With rising tuition costs and housing prices, Meal Exchange cites age. Naturally, this combination of awareness and connection soon that 2 in 5 students experience food insecurity—and yet the issue of turned into a growing concern for environmental degradation and food security remains one that gains little attention. At the same time, the climate crisis.

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“Fix the soil, fix the plants, and we regain our ability to begin the process of regeneration.”

“By 13, I started to feel really passionate about these issues and was Researchers are increasingly beginning to understand the importance really perplexed why no one seemed to be talking about these things,” of weaving together perspectives across multiple fields and taking an says Estabrook. “It made me feel really alienated from my peers. I felt actionable, systems-oriented approach. The issues of hunger, poverty stuck—I was still in public school—and my realm of agency felt very and climate change are all interconnected—and so are the solutions. limited.” She began to develop obsessive tendencies towards foods, like controlling what she put in her body and where it came from— Skylar Kylstra, a researcher based out of UBC with a Masters in Land something she now recognizes that not everyone has the privilege to do. and Water System Management, points out that it’s estimated our food production will need to increase by 50 per cent to accommodate “While I think that this came from a largely well-intentioned place, upwards of 9 billion people in the next thirty years. While we may feel it ended up positioning food as a big source of my isolation and we’re sheltered from immediate food security issues in BC, Kylstra furthering the disconnect from other people,” she says. “It also stresses that 80 percent of BC’s growing land is in the low-lying Fraser prevented me from trying to understand environmental issues at Valley, which is already seeing decreased crop yield due to soil salinity a deeper level or trying to connect with people over these issues. I from sea level rise. Tackling these issues demands not only a shift embraced this idea of individualism and was quite judgemental from the status quo but envisioning a different future with different towards others—believing in this idea that we could solve global solutions. A future where young people like Kylstra and Estabrook problems by making the best individual consumer choices was a appear to be leading the way—vying for a seat at the table, and not thread that ran through my high school years—which, in hindsight, just the proverbial one. wasn’t particularly helpful.”

Like Estabrook, Kylstra is a 23-year-old with an interest in the At 18, upon graduation, Estabrook fled to the West Coast to join the intersection of climate change and food security. It was a love of Environmental Studies program at UVic. Her roommates were equally plants and science that drew her to pursue a degree in Biology at UBC, passionate about food and the environment, and over the course of but after learning more about the climate crisis, she quickly switched weekly shared dinners, her perspective began to shift. “Conversations to a Bachelor of Science in Global Resource Systems. As she speaks, flow so naturally over a shared meal,” reflects Estabrook. a collection of little plants in the slit of a window in her basement apartment frame the silhouette of her head.

She met people, her circles broadened and she began to see not only the importance of food, but the potential food had as a positive tool “I love gardening and growing food, so for me the soil science side of for social change. Community Cabbage was one of the first places she things really worked in my brain as far as being able to understand found connection and purpose but it has since inspired her to take on physics and chemistry and biology, because you can actually see it new projects and initiatives within the realm of food-related activism. applied to something real and tangible,” says Kylstra.

Now in her fourth year of university, Estabrook’s interest in food has expanded to consider the industrial system it exists within, the In her undergrad, this need for a hands-on approach manifested in growing practices within it, and the intricate and strong connection growing “tens of thousands of potatoes” to measure greenhouse between the environment and food. gas emissions resulting from agricultural management practices.

Considering that agriculture contributes to about a quarter of global Today, Estabrook is an intern and educator at the Compost Education emissions, this was more than just a fun science project.

Centre, a non-profit organization that provides education on composting and ecological gardening in Victoria, where she spent According to the Netflix documentary Kiss The Ground, common her summer reinvigorating learning modules for high school students. agricultural practices such as tilling and chemical sprays lead to Estabrook hopes the new module can be a vehicle that encourages a massive scale desertification, with 40 million people pushed off their greater understanding of social and environmental issues. She urges land annually due to its effects. Without fertile land for plants, the students to envision a future that shifts the climate narrative around world loses its ability to biosequester—or capture and retain carbon environmental action from looking primarily at individual consumer in the soil. Our health depends on plant health, and plant health choices, to looking at systemic changes we can make as a community. relies on soil health. Fix the soil, fix the plants, and we regain our “I think that’s where a lot of us get really hung up,” says Estabrook. ability to begin the process of regeneration. To address these issues, “Like we have a big sense of injustice, but we have a really hard time many farmers are moving towards permaculture—using features of a articulating an alternative.” natural ecosystem in order to build resiliency and restore biodiversity.

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Currently, Kylstra is co-instructing a graduate course at UBC called “It’s about not allowing yourself to become numbed to the realities of Land and Water Resource Evaluations. “Basically, I’m talking about the world,” she says. “It’s about allowing yourself to feel the grief of how having transdisciplinary research and problem solving is more the world, while simultaneously being really in love with the world, effective for coming up with socially robust knowledge to address and reveling in your connections to people, the natural world, and issues of sustainability,” she says. “[We’re] trying to apply a systems- the magic of natural systems—that’s where we gain motivation for thinking lens to these problems, so instead of looking at things change.” For Estabrook, food is that motivation and agent of change: separately, we’re looking at how all those things work together.” To a way to connect and a way to heal. In developing these connections, amend the old adage: there ain’t no rest for the wicked, the problems we are empowered to learn, explore and envision the changes we want that come with them, or Skylar Kylstra. to see. For some, that’s through science, while others find it through food, art, politics, or gardening.

The key is not only understanding how everything works together, but how we work together as well. Connection is a word that bubbles up For Community Cabbage, it’s through cooking up delicious meals repeatedly when both Kylstra and Estabrook speak. It’s just another from unwanted dumpster vegetables and serving them to hungry thread tying everything together. students in front of the UVic Student Union building. Despite being transparent about where their food comes from, students are rarely “In wading through this stuff, I remember it all being chaos in my deterred—they typically run out within the hour, serving up to 100 head—but then there’s just this thing that started to happen once I’d students weekly. “Free lunch is a hard offer for hungry students to heard enough of these stories, and common threads connecting them turn down,” says Estabrook. While it may seem like a surface level fix all started to come out,” says Estabrook. to a much bigger problem, it’s certainly a conversation starter. Afterall, conversations flow naturally over a shared meal, especially when they She points out that dealing with these issues is all about learning to cry are served with a smile. and fall in love—with people, with food, with places and the planet.

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Rob Teszka’s Magic Dropout is a meditation on failure, revealing an emotional mixture of magic and memoir from a world built on illusions SARAH ROSE Features Editor VALERIYA KIM Staff Illustrator

The magician is a consummate showman, smooth as melted velvet, a glistening repertoire of the impossible in the form of a perfect suit and tie. Yet beneath the sheen and spotlights of the Performance Works theatre simmers an ordinary man—Rob Teszka can make a lot of things disappear, but his past isn’t something he’s trying to erase.

Magic Dropout is a show dedicated to his failures.

pass a performance exam before qualifying for membership. Which is to say, the pursuit of magic is often the other side of a double sided coin to academia—translating fantasy into science. Of course, Teszka prefers to be a little more honest, “[Academia is] a toxic face-full of prejudice and patriarchy, and the only reason I made it as far as I did is because of privilege.”

The show begins with his younger self. Teszka reveals a high school Although it’s partially through his academic research in the areas graduation photo featuring a patchy goatee and the Governor of attention and perception that Teszka already knows memories General’s academic award he won that year. It’s followed by a fairly are as malleable as soggy pasta, and our decisions are constantly innocent question: if anyone in the audience can guess what his being influenced. Magic is just a way to pull back the curtain on the average grade point was as well as his best subject—and they do, impossible. “Our art gives reverence to academics,” according to Alex almost instantly. It feels like it belongs to the tradition of parlor-room Zander, former president of the Vancouver chapter of The Magic mentalism, and yet there is still something genuinely unnerving Circle. “[Magic] is history shared through stories.” about being exposed. After all, fall is the season that naturally causes Like most talented magicians, Teszka partially found a home us to reflect on the tricks we like to play on ourselves. assisting in the manipulation of reality for the screen. Zander affirms Between transforming a pair of maraschino cherries—which he dubs that almost every special effect team and prop room is curated by a “satanic testicles”—into limes, and correctly guessing every audience magician. member responsible for a set of random drawings, Rob Teszka takes a moment. He gestures to the stage with hands as empty as the rest That’s the thing about films and magic—even when we’re aware it’s of Granville Island outside, in a room divided by a necessary isolation, not supposed to be real, it unearths the fantasies we all have stuffed “psychologists are similar to magicians in that they are both liars, the away inside our hats. Things like predicting the future, floating through the air, sometimes even surviving what seems impossible. theatre is a palace built on lies.”

Sure, Teszka can make cherries, cards and even his academic award Despite the accolade he opens with, Magic Dropout isn’t billed as a dematerialize, but try making something like anxiety about a global story of success. While studying at graduate school overseas, Teszka pandemic disappear. “Was that amazing?” Teszka asks at one point, found the infamous Magic Circle. After his research in cognitive regarding a card trick between what appears to be a first date between psychology influenced by magic techniques was rejected fourteen two members of the audience. “Sort of,” he answered himself. It was times, he permanently traded one exam for another. Founded amazing enough. in 1905 in London, The Magic Circle is one of the oldest magic societies in the world consisting of more than 13,000 magicians in When the story is over, he swaps his suit for a more casual black 88 countries. Prospective magicians must present a written thesis or t-shirt and the stage for a backdrop of bookcases at home in Coquitlam. It’s not quite the same as the one in the Vancouver Magic F E AT URES

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Circle, the largest magic library in the country housing upwards of three thousand books on the unseen arts. Still, it’s amazing enough.

“It’s possible to be manipulated, and even when you learn about it, it doesn’t mean that you’re inoculated against it.” Teszka explains that sometimes he outlines the misdirection in his tricks as a component of the trick itself. The knowledge that we’re being manipulated doesn’t stop us from being blindsided by it, “all of us lose at this all the time.”

For Teszka, magicians are the prototypical example of the master manipulators of attention, the puppeteers pulling strings to make us focus on anything, or believe anything in order to accomplish something. He insists that as far as magic is concerned, it’s largely benevolent; “Most magicians are doing this with the goal of entertaining you, but those techniques can be applied outside of magic. Advertisers, politicians, con artists—those are the same thing.”

The difference offered by Zander is the simple fact that magicians are honest about the lie. The power of magic to tell the truth through honesty is something held close to a lot of magicians, and was even championed by legendary magician James Randi. Known on stage as The Amazing Randi, he devoted much of his career to exposing con men like faith healer Peter Popoff and those claiming to have real psychic abilities.

and gives them something quietly profound. Whether it comes in the form of suspicion, hope or joy, it’s all within the suspension of disbelief. For Zander, real magic is it’s innate ability to conjure joy, “[I love] being able to see the moment of joy, and all the human variants of joy.”

Weaving classic prestidigitation and subtle mentalism, Teszka’s story unfolds into a confessional meditation on magic and memoir. The academic burnout and failures underpinning the narrative of Magic Dropout also caused an ongoing off-stage struggle with depression and anxiety. “There’s a long history of people hidden behind the stage.

Magic was an escape hatch, performing gives me joy. Magic, in that sense, saved me.”

There is a lot to contend with the unknown. No one knows exactly “[Academia is] a system that was designed in a certain way hundreds what the world will look like next month, who will be in power, the of years ago and has barely gone through any changes since, except to course the virus will take, what we are supposed to think, what we be made worse by the addition of corporate administration.” From are supposed to do. According to Teszka, that’s always where magic the long history of illusionists and escape artists to which Teszka creeps in. “That feeling of uncertainty, which we’re all experiencing belongs, magic shows us it’s possible to slip the knots and break the with dread right now, to be able to experience it with joy is something chains holding us back. “Magic has to change, because as people’s valuable. I think that’s something only magic can do,” he said. “The understanding changes, what counts as magic—as impossible, way the world is is not dissimilar to the Great Depression—Vaudeville changes.” is an escape.”

He takes a moment to wax historic, as he seems apt to do, about For most of us, the first magic trick we learn is peekaboo. It begins the famous French magician Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin’s ethereal when something a baby loves disappears—although in a far more levitation illusion. It began with showing how the unknown properties literal way than Teszka’s disappearance from academia, because of the new ether vapour could make a child levitate on the end of a babies are completely emotionally transparent. The fear and anxiety broomstick. When people learned about ether being knockout gas are real. Then the face reappears, and everything is right in the baby's with no magical properties, the magic fades. Except Houdin’s illusion world again. Anxiety is banished, replaced with giggles. Of course, has been performed for over 150 years, because it’s one of the best that kind of magic is short lived when they become aware that a hand illusions ever created. As Joshua Landy describes in his book The is the thing committing these great acts, which is why one of the Re-Enchantment of the World, Houdin’s ethereal suspension succeeds fundamental rules of magic is to never perform the same trick twice. as a model for the construction of a belief system that recognizes itself as illusory. “The mechanics of the effects don’t change,” Teszka “Magicians become jaded over the years,” shared Zander. “The more I answered, “the way people tell stories about them changes. All that learn about magic, the less I’m surprised.” Although he’s seen Teszka really means is you have to find a different way of explaining it.” perform many times, Magic Dropout still managed to offer him a few In 1917, Max Weber wrote “the fate of our times is characterized surprises. by rationalization and intellectualization, and above all, by the Hanging on the walls of Teszka’s study is a vintage poster depicting disenchantment of the world.” There’s a reason magic is as entertaining one of the greatest illusions of all time, Maid In The Moon. Most today as it ever was over a century ago, and that’s because it’s levitation illusions involve an infamously uncomfortable method, something Teszka feels no other performer can do. When presented but none quite come close to Astarte, as it was originally named in the in the right way, the same science weaponized by Enlightenment late 19th century. Astarte requires not just skill but enduring extreme ideals to disenchant the world, the magician re-enchants. The art of muscle strain while remaining in complete control as the picture magic is in re-kindling the sparks of honesty, wonder and fascination of poise and bliss. Although the ethereal woman in the poster is as with the unknown. perfect as anything carved by Michelangelo, the heart of Astarte, like “I love that feeling of not being sure whether something is real or not,” all good magic, is total devotion to the art.

Teszka says with a wry smile and a quick laugh, “let’s just keep going The audience already knows the truth; the world is simple, painful and see. Maybe this will keep me up at night a little.” and miserable all the way through. But if the magician can make us doubt for just a second, then it opens the doors of perception to the Information on Rob Teszka’s future shows can be found at possibility of a new reality. Teszka doesn’t want them to care how it’s www.robteszkamagic.com. Follow Alex Zander’s virtual shows at happening, and it’s in that fleeting state where he meets his audience www.goldtieproductions.com. ­3 4

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How Not to Say Sorry How a company apologizes can make things better—or worse HASSAN MERALI Contributor SARA NGUYEN Illustrator

When Sam Anderson revealed in a tweet that her former company Hootsuite had signed a three-year contract with United States Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the backlash was swift. Many took to social media to voice their displeasure that Hootsuite was working with an agency that has come under fire in recent years for its conduct, including separating children from their mothers. As any company in the age of conscious consumerism must, Hootsuite quickly reversed course and apologized, while promising to cancel its contract with ICE. However, when CEO Tom Keiser addressed the matter in his public statement, he undercut his own apology and made everyone question why this had happened in the first place.

In his apology, Keiser referenced Hootsuite’s longstanding “belief in the power of communications and social engagement to break down barriers.” This was, to put it mildly, a poor choice of words.

That phrase could be a standard description that Hootsuite uses when it talks about its corporate values, but in this situation it’s ironic. Hootsuite believes that its product can help break down barriers, but agreed to work with a government agency dedicated to upholding and enforcing borders, which are man-made barriers. This comes at a time when ICE and other US agencies are tasked with building President Trump’s wall along the border.

Whoever is doing crisis communications for Hootsuite right now should have read their statement more carefully.

Keiser also mentioned that a committee had been formed within the company to take a look at whether or not Hootsuite should work with ICE. Forming a committee was the right way to handle such a contentious decision, but a damning thing to disclose given the outcome.

Hootsuite is also a Certified B Corporation, which are businesses that “meet the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability to balance profit and purpose[...].” Apparently, a majority of the people on the committee tasked with evaluating whether or not Hootsuite should work with an organization like ICE knew this and decided to recommend the contract anyway.

One has to wonder about the judgement of the people involved in making this decision, as the values of Hootsuite and ICE seem to be in stark opposition to one another.

Another thing Anderson mentioned was that over 100 Hootsuite employees had vocalized their opposition to the contract, including people at Hootsuite’s Mexico City office—some of whom had personal interactions with ICE. Yet in Keiser’s statement, he said, “the decision has created a divided company, and this is not the kind of company I came to lead.” Was Keiser okay with his company being divided before this news leaked, and only concerned about division after it became public? Or did he not know that there was this kind of turmoil going on right under his nose?

All three blunders in Hootsuite’s apology—the ironic wording of their corporate values, the revelation of the greenlight committee, and the professed desire of company unity— raise questions of sincerity and competence of the company’s management. Some might say that no apology is perfect, and that these questions are bound to come up anyway; they’re wrong. When it comes to apologies, a second set of eyes can go a long way.

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COVID-19 NOTIFICATIONS IN VCH REGION Hiding COVID-19 results seems shady—and it is JOSS ARNOTT Staff Writer AMY ASIN Illustrator

It’s unclear what life would have been like if Capilano University (CapU) had reopened this fall. Would there have been a chance of finding seats in the cafeteria or library? Probably not. Would I have been able to pay attention? Possibly. What we do know is that universities and grade schools went opposite directions. The reason why people trust six-year-olds to socially distance better than actual adults is beyond me, but hey—I’m in film, not medicine.

exposures. No information is released regarding the number of cases confirmed at a school during an outbreak. VCH simply lists schools that have had outbreaks, making no reference to the severity of said outbreaks. This year, students in BC were split into cohorts of around 100 students to create ‘bubbles.’ When someone in a school’s ‘bubble’ tests positive, the entire cohort, including staff associated with it, transition to online classes.

The decision for schools to be in-person this fall was not without controversy. However, at the end of the day when the government said “jump,” BC grumbled, “How high?” While I can confidently say I hate online classes, it’s clear that in-person classes are their own kind of stupid.

Recently, second grade students at Caulfield elementary school in West Vancouver were transitioned online due to positive testing within a bubble. Parents were notified by the government, but were not told to get their children tested or that they were possibly at risk. One mother refused to get her daughter tested—she eventually tested positive. She decided to share this information on a Facebook group as her daughter had been asymptomatic. When other parents had their children tested, it was found that over half the class was positive for COVID-19.

Over 24 grade schools within the Vancouver Coastal Health Region (VCH) have recently had confirmed COVID-19 outbreaks.

The VCH is the main health authority in charge of people from Vancouver, Richmond, the Sunshine Coast and beyond. They’re in charge of about 1.25 million people’s health—including much of the Courier’s local readership.

Recently, VCH’s Chief Medical Officer Dr. Patricia Daly has faced public outrage due to her handling of school-related COVID-19 cases. Daly and the VCH went against provincial guidelines and didn't report which schools were experiencing outbreaks on the VCH’s website. Instead, the VCH was sending letters to those directly infected, but no one else.

It’s kind of like having spinach in your teeth. It’s horribly green, very noticeable. Nobody tells you about the spinach, though. You receive a letter from the government: “You might have something in your teeth? Stay home until you're positive it’s gone—Two weeks, tops!”

In the meantime, you wait by the phone, terrified to hear about who saw the spinach. Only it’s not spinach—it’s the deadly Coronavirus.

The issue of notifying affected staff and students has been cause for concern since the return to school in September. As it stands, students, staff and parents are left in the dark about possible

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The province does not want to ostracize children, so they send letters and try to handle outbreaks as discreetly as possible.

This ensures privacy for those that do get infected but leaves others unsure if they should get themselves or other family members tested.

The problem is that both online and in-person classes are imperfect solutions. I doubt there is a solution that would work 100% of the time. In times of chaos, all we can do is our best. The province tried to let younger students have a normal year—that’s not a crime.

Universities tried to turn their teachers into Twitch streamers. That should be a crime, but I digress.

The situation with VCH is complicated. At its heart it speaks to a larger problem: the pandemic. There is no perfect solution or right answer to this situation. The long and short of it is simple—nobody knows what is going on anymore. So here we are, with cases rising daily. During the writing of this article, recorded outbreaks in schools covered by VCH rose from 17 to 24. What comes next is unclear. If 2020 was a movie we’d be heading for the climax, where the world ends and the hero somehow makes it through the chaos and is better for it. But this year isn't a movie—it’s just screwed.

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Do Students Dream of Electric Creeps?

Proctoring software weaponizes the eugenic gaze, but it’s nothing new in our pedagogy of punishment SARAH ROSE Features Editor VALERIYA KIM Staff Illustrator

THE FIRST TIME THE SCHOOL BELL RINGS, WE DISCOVER A WORLD BATHED IN WONDER. SIGNS AND NUMBERS REVEAL THEMSELVES TO YOUNG MINDS RACING LIKE THE AUTOBAHN WITH NEW CONNECTIONS. ­4 0

The last time the bell rings, those memories are often replaced with resentment. That hatred, trauma and apathy directly related to classroom experiences carved deep into teenagers’ psyches is considered natural—just an inevitable developmental progression. The classroom is a place to shed the skin of innocence and enthusiasm and join “the real world.”

“No system works unless it operates with incentives,” declared the American Federation of Teachers president Albert Shanker. This sort of doctrinal consistency is a rare thing to behold—behaviorism, the philosophy developed by minds like Skinner and Pavlov in the early 20th century, still informs virtually every aspect of North American education.

It begins with a gold star sticker, and ends with an explosion of surveillance software in our pandemic age that forces students to choose between invasions of privacy and civil rights violations, or their grades. Online learning has existed for decades prior to COVID-19 without relying on proctoring. The massive push for the software now is a clear emphasis on surveillance and punishment over real education, and discrimination over evolution.

Over the last decade, higher education has increasingly intertwined itself with the online sphere. When the other shoe dropped after COVID, classes moved en-masse to a fully online model followed by an unquestioned implementation of proctoring software. Algorithmic test proctoring promises to deliver an even playing field that weeds out dishonesty and academic misconduct, but the reality is it doesn’t target anything besides the encoded ideal human body. Any deviation from the established ideal is punished because the software doesn’t actually measure honesty, a thing as nebulously shaped by our culture as the boundaries of cheating, but the human body itself. It decides which bodies are normal and safe, and which bodies are suspicious and need punishment.

Here’s how it works: the software starts recording your camera, audio and screen. It meticulously measures and tracks movement and eye movement and flags any deviations from this as suspicious behaviour. If it all sounds a bit Orwellian or a few degrees shy of being a Voight-Kampff test, that’s because it is.

Proctoring software is at its core an extension of the dominant pedagogy of punishment, the backbone of behaviourism in classrooms. With no distinction between causality in human behaviour and physical events, there’s no concern for any internal experiences of students. Therefore, institutions respond to distrust through surveillance, and if anything suspicious is seen, then a system of punishment and investigations follows.

The pedagogy of punishment completely discards the fact that the boundaries and definitions of things like cheating, plagiarism and citation are largely culturally constructed.

Introducing new students to academic conduct policies is predicated entirely on threats and fear evangelized yearafter-year in first year classrooms. When I was a new student with undiagnosed ADHD, I meticulously pruned through my first-year essays like my life depended on it, and although I didn’t understand it at the time, it did. Any extension of the eugenic gaze hinges on unequal power dynamics that aim to control behaviour around an acceptable parameter.

Making citation mistakes because of a neurodivergence isn’t an acceptable behaviour regardless of the internal reasons for its causation.

What proctoring software flags as cheating includes a wide range of neurodiverse and disabled behaviours: verbally scripting questions, fidgeting, not making eye contact and more. I was led to believe that I teetered on the edge of privilege and opportunity with one careless mistake.

Through fear it’s easy to leverage consent for invasive and discriminatory policy.

Naomi Klein illustrates this principle in detail in her novel The Shock Doctrine. With proctoring software sales up 900 percent since the start of the pandemic, these companies descended like vultures using a disaster capitalism complex on institutions desperate to uphold a standard of distrust and privilege. It taps into long held beliefs that students who aren’t white, middle-class, cis or abled aren’t trustworthy; so, they’ll cheat, and cheating hurts the “good” students, the “real” students—the white, abled students.

Even if the risks of this software to students were acknowledged by higher education institutions, which they currently aren’t, these companies are offering a product that resonates with several implicit core values and practices of education that have always outweighed student safety: exclusion, behaviourism, technological solutionism and the eugenic gaze.

Cheating is not a technological problem, it’s a pedagogical problem, and the blind faith that technology will solve these pedagogical problems is endemic to the algorithms of oppression that scholars like Safiya Umoja Noble dissect in her eponymous book, Algorithms of Oppression.

If institutions genuinely believe that the solution to the possibility of students cheating on exams is to extort them into paying for faulty, harmful software that invades privacy instead of adjusting the content and administration of exams, then the problem lies squarely with how we view education as a whole. Class dismissed.

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Controversial Advertisements in Vancouver Push One-Child Policy Addressing overpopulation is a distraction f rom the real issue at hand ALISHA SAMNANI Managing Editor, News Editor TIFANNY ZHONG Illustrator

THE ROAD TRIP: A QUINTESSENTIAL PASTIME, YEARNED FOR

BY THOSE HIT WITH THE TRAVEL BUG DURING QUARANTINE. YOU STOCK UP ON SNACKS, PILE INTO THE FAMILY CAR— MASKED UP, OF COURSE—AND SET OFF FOR AN ADVENTURE. YOU GLANCE OUT THE WINDOW AT THE POOR SOULS WAITING FOR THE BUS, WHEN YOU SPOT IT. ­4 2

A billboard, with a photo of an adorable infant gazing back at you.

“The most loving gift you can give your child is to not have another.”

You look over at your siblings—do they feel the same way?

Dave Gardner, Executive Director of World Population Balance, a U.S. non-profit group, asserted that the campaign goal was to get Canada talking about overpopulation. “Many don't realize the solution to overpopulation—and much of the environmental destruction it causes—is simply to embrace the accelerating trend toward freely chosen smaller families."

The scarcity theory promoted by these billboards has a number of issues—far too many for the scope of this article—but it can be especially alarming to people with disabilities. Capitalism often views people with disabilities as unproductive, and the effects this kind of thinking has for these individuals can be seen in things like the frailty scale used to determine health care eligibility in Ontario.

The One Child, One Planet website notes that overpopulation “... is a very real problem in the industrialized world where each new person added has an over-sized impact on the environment. Even though birth rates are already low in the 'overdeveloped world,' they need to be even lower in order to speed contraction back to a sustainable population level."

The problem with Gardner’s argument is that the Canadian population isn’t exactly out of control. A national census conducted in 2016 found that Canada’s fertility rate is 1.5 children per woman—which is far below the number needed to sustain the population.

To be frank, these advertisements are disguised as a polite conversation about a highly personal decision. Not everyone chooses to have children. Some are unable to have children.

In Canada, Indigenous women have been subjected to forced sterilization for decades, and as recently as 2018. The trauma people are subjected to when viewing these ads is far greater than any potential benefit.

There’s an astounding amount of evidence that indicates climate change isn’t a population issue—rather, it’s an issue of consumption.

Countries in the Global North, such as Canada and the U.S, emit far more emissions per capita than those in the Global South.

Instead of overpopulation, perhaps these billboards should focus on the real issue at hand. That would be good for our planet—and its children.

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CSIS an d Academ ia Not a cold war but a cold shoulder NIROSH SARAVANAN Contributor VALERIYA KIM Staff Illustrator

OLD HABITS DIE HARD WHEN IT COMES TO FOREIGN POLICY IN THIS COUNTRY. CANADA FINDS ITSELF IN THE MIDDLE OF A STAND-OFF BETWEEN THE US AND CHINA. Much like a small boat between two ships, Canada will have to find a way to stay afloat while the two pass by.

This will depend on both Canada’s relations with the two powers and its relations with other countries. Ultimately, Canada must start to diversify its trade agreements in order to stay competitive in the global field and exert its role as a middle power.

One thing that has gotten in the crossfire is the Academic Cooperation between the two countries. An example is how the Thousand Talents Plan (TTP) is being used to attract academic talent, primarily to help with topics relating to economic and military advantage. For Canada, this is becoming an increasingly fine line to walk given the deteriorating relations between the two countries. This could not have come at a worse time as the COVID-19 pandemic requires greater collaboration between countries than before. What could have been an opportunity to pull the world together against a common foe has been mired in scandal and controversy. This led to many countries starting to pull away from the international community and starting to focus on their own interest. This has put further strain on both relationships with both China and the US. While there are benefits to trading with China, such as the large amount of capital or demand for resources, its recent behavior has shown that it is better to keep them at arm's length. Currently, relations have been strained following the detention of two Canadian citizens following the arrest

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of a Huawei executive, which has been described as “an act of hostage diplomacy.” China’s refusal to follow diplomatic norms in this incident highlight the need to keep a distance from China diplomatically.

So where to go from here? As Ken Moak points out for CGTN, a Chinese state run media outlet, “Canada can find alternative markets, but it needs many to replace China.”

The same applies for the US as well, since they make up to 75 per cent of Canadian exports. This brings us to the fact that Canada should start to strengthen their relations with both established and emerging markets.This way, Canada could reduce its dependence on the major powers. As well, Canada does not need to be hostile towards China, but should know when to put its foot down. Mutual respect between the two countries is required before anything productive can happen. There are many other fields outside of defence where both parties can find mutual benefit. But this comes with the paradox that the “scientific collaboration is not about advancing science, it is to advance China’s national security interests.”

What should be made clear is that this is a conflict of economic power between the US and China instead of an ideological one like during the Cold War. Because Canada has relations with both powers, it will have to tread lightly until China starts shifting away from national security and towards scientific advancement as an end in and of itself.

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Back Home: The Last Straw

VALERIA VEL AZQUEZ Columnist

My stomach has been aching for a couple of weeks now. It began the first week I was here, but two weeks after I arrived is when it really started to hurt. At first I thought I was just readjusting to the food here, but now I think it’s something more than that.

I’ve had digestive issues all my life and just recently decided to visit a gastroenterologist.

However, I know it’s not only the food I put in my body that is affecting it. It’s also the emotions, the sensations and the traumas stored in it that cause this pain in my gut.

Honestly, I still haven’t found the “at home” feeling I was looking for. Of course, it’s heartwarming to be in my country surrounded by the people and places I missed. It’s also hard—so hard that it’s been less than a month that I’ve been here, and I’ve already started looking for flights back to Vancouver.

I wasn’t expecting my time here to be perfect, but I certainly didn’t think I’d get to this point either. I was one click away from buying the ticket, but I didn’t. Even though I was crying so hard that I could feel the air missing from my lungs, I didn’t.

Since the moment I got here, things started accumulating. Passing comments about my body from friends and family began to take a toll on me: comments about my body hair that “makes me look like a man,” about my colourful hair, or about me not wearing makeup. I started to overthink my appearance and become more and more self-conscious.

It isn’t only my physical appearance they criticize. They also judge my beliefs.

Women’s rights, human rights, animal rights, environmental justice, religion, politics and basically every important conversational topic are things that I’ve learned I can’t express my opinion about. Whenever I do, I’m immediately mocked or attacked.

Mexico is a country where abortion isn’t legal because it’s seen as “ending a life,” and a “sin.” It’s a country where people from the LGBTQ+ community are still being sent to conversion therapy because they’re not “normal.” It’s a country where people say “poor people are poor because they want to be.”

When I talk about the women dying because they don’t have access to safe abortions and why it should be legal, I’m told I am a radical. When I talk about the violations and injustices people from the LGBTQ+ community suffer, I’m shamed and devalued.

When I cry for the many children I see every day asking for money on the streets, I am told I’m being overly sensitive. I’m being pushed to feel like I am the crazy one.

I was being patient, until the last straw broke.

Me, my family, and some family friends had gone on a day trip to a lake outside the city.

It was three hours away so we left at 9 am to get there by noon and have lunch. The night before I had barely slept because of my stomach pain, but I still had to go because my parents wanted me to.

The whole time we were there my stomach was hurting, as it had been for the past week.

I mentioned it to my parents and asked if we could leave early because I wasn’t feeling well. I didn’t want to bother them so I didn’t keep pushing much.

After about four hours, we were on our way back. About half way, they decided to stop and buy some souvenirs. After my dad came back to the car, he mentioned that we would stop somewhere else afterwards, but by that point I was already feeling bad and I kindly asked if we could just go straight home. He didn’t say anything.

By the time we arrived in the city, my mom called my dad (she was in another car) and told him to go somewhere we could have dinner. This place was about five minutes

away from my house. We were literally going to drive past my house to get there so I asked my dad to please drop me off at the house.

This might be TMI, but I really needed to use the washroom. I was feeling nauseous and dizzy and just overall really bad. He asked me why I couldn't use the washroom at the restaurant. “Dad, please, I feel really sick and I really need to get home,” I said. I could hear the angry tone in his voice as he insisted that I should just go to the restaurant, but I kept saying I needed to get home.

Before I knew it, he was yelling at me. As he kept screaming and driving, I said “Please dad, you don’t understand.” My mistake.

After that, it was rage. He turned into that man again. He turned into the man I’ve been scared of since I was a kid. He lifted his hand as if he was about to hit me.

I don’t know what stopped him, but in that moment all I could remember was the promise I’d made to myself before coming here. I swore that I wouldn’t allow him to lay a hand on me ever again, and if he did I would never talk to him again.

I was silently crying as he kept yelling at me.

He then dropped me off at the house and drove away. I walked into my house with so many thoughts running through my head and I stopped containing my tears. I cried and cried as my belly ached, remembering the many times something like this happened in the past.

This was when I thought about buying the ticket to go back. I even entered my credit card number and was about to buy it, but I didn’t. If I go back now and leave things with my family as they are, nothing is going to change. My dad’s behaviour and thinking patterns will still be there, the pain will still be there, and I don’t want it to be. That’s why I decided to stay, in hopes that together we can heal.

COLUMNS

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Coast to Coast: Grief along the St. Lawrence

ALDEN WALL ACE MACK AY Columnist

In July, I was living on a strawberry farm in “Where are all the good people hiding, Aldie?”

Trois-Pistoles, Quebec, where I’d signed up for a French language program. Actually, I “I don’t know, Papa.” didn’t have any desire to learn French. All I In the end it was cancer. read on the website was “$300. Five weeks.

Meals and accommodation included.” And that sounded like a pretty cheap side-venture to me. The town had a population of 3,000. That Friday after school I drove to Quebec Hundreds of English speaking students City, parked at the airport and flew home occupied the streets like troops in war time. to Vancouver. The funeral was on Saturday.

The only high school in town had been I was the pallbearer. I carried his body into the hearse, watched it drive off into forever. converted to accommodate us.

That night the family had dinner in his I met a young woman here who I’ll call Sarah. backyard. People asked me how my road trip She had wheatfield hair and long legs always was going. I said it was fine, didn’t eat much, on display. Eyes like Medusa. We used to and the next day I flew back to Quebec. I go down to the beach to speak English and hadn’t told anyone at school where I’d gone watch the sun set. One night she said to for the weekend. me, “When are you going to take me to your strawberry farm?”

Every day at Trois-Pistoles felt like a movie.

Later that week, eating poutine with Sarah, I was thinking about my grandfather. The weekend had gone by quick, and I hadn’t registered it all yet. I hadn’t even really registered that he was dead. Sarah asked me if everything was okay. I nodded.

About a week after I’d arrived I got a call from my father. It was lunch break and I was in the parking lot. Newfound friends were waiting for me.

“How was your weekend?” she said. “I didn’t hear from you.”

“Buddy?” he said. “Bud... Papa’s gone.”

“It was alright.”

“What?”

“Are you going to Chez Boogie tonight?”

I could hear music in the distance, feel salt winds off the river. Someone called my name. Chez Boogie was the only bar in town. On “I’m sorry, bud. I wanted to tell you before any given day of the week there was a crowd you heard it elsewhere. He’s gone.” of anglophones there. “I don’t know.”

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

Growing up, my grandfather was the “Why do you keep asking me that?” man. We spent countless days together frying sausages on the barbecue and making things out of wood in his workshop—birdhouses and boxes and bookshelves. He’d tell me I was late meeting her that night. She was stories about his career as an engineer which sitting with two of her friends, and when took him around the world, and about all I fell into the booth she held my hand. She he’d learned from life. We used to was already drunk. A glaze over her eyes. A shine to her lips. philosophize together.

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“I’m drinking a Pornstar,” she said. The drink was neon-blue.

I got a whiskey in a glass with ice and sipped from it. It tasted like gasoline. Across the bar I could see people eating their meals, and for some reason they made me very angry. They looked like animals.

“Oh my God,” said the girls at the turn of a song. And they started singing, the veins in their necks like bridge cables. I could feel the heat coming off Sarah, and I had visions of her body. Of our bodies. I could feel my heartbeat in my skull, right next to a bassline.

Ordinarily, I would’ve felt ten feet tall.

“I forgot something in the car,” I said, and I got up, went outside, and drove back to the farm.

I went in through the back door, ducked past a conversation in the kitchen and crept up the old stairs to my room where I wept like a child. It all hit me at once, those feelings of which language is too useless to describe.

I wept until I fell asleep. I could write you a thousand metaphors for that pain, but none would be true.

The weeks dragged on in Quebec, and I mostly kept to myself. I wish I could say that I was able to find solace or community.

I wish I could look back and see a version of me who was able to act as if tomorrow didn’t exist, seizing every opportunity that life offered. And life had offered many. But I was in a funk, a sunken place, wondering what the hell I was doing with my life.

It would’ve been nice to enjoy some intimacy with Sarah while I could. Before we’d part ways. Before she’d go the way of all else in life. But my hurt was deep, and I spent many evenings alone, looking at old photos of me and my grandfather on my phone, asking my cousins to send more. Eventually Sarah stopped asking me what was wrong.

Six months before he died, my grandfather “Well,” he said. “Whenever I’m feeling down I had his colon removed in an effort to combat just close my eyes and go to my happy place. the cancer. He spent about a week in the And then everything’s alright again.” hospital post-op and I went to see him every day. We held hands and chatted for as long His happy place. I wonder what that looked as he was able to. Even then, so near to the like to him. What does it look like to me? I was far from home and I had much travelling inescapable end, he was still able to smile. left to do, but I was beginning to wonder “How do you do it, Papa? How do you stay what the point of it all was. I’m not about to start philosophizing about an afterlife, but in so positive?”

the end all that we have are our beliefs, no matter how unlikely they might be. Perhaps we’ll never know if our beliefs about death are true, but if all walks in life are influenced by the end then maybe we ought to start building a better relationship with it.

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Maple Syrup Art: A Journey in Canadian Identity (Or lack thereof) JASON ARKELL-BOLES Columnist

Trying to create art that helps support ‘Canadian Identity’ can feel at once impractical and impossible. We act as if we’re independent as a nation, but as much as we hate to admit it, we’re just America’s cold, occasionally kind and culturally-void neighbor. For a contemporary Canadian artist to get big, they essentially have to make it in the US. Why is Canadian identity in art such a contentious issue? And if you want to make a ‘Canadian’ artistic statement, where should you start?

In my final year of film school, I’m at the stage where I need to begin writing films that I feel are a reflection of my personal identity, if I only knew what that was. Without an exciting childhood or essence of cultural identity unique to me, I need to figure out what I want to talk about. In search of a story to tell, I’ve been trying to contextualize what ‘Canadian Identity’ truly means. Essentially I’m trying to figure out who I am and why I’m here.

I could write about my childhood stories, but I feel that they’ll have no specific Canadian edge to them, and creating a unique voice to oppose the stories of Hollywood could be challenging. So I turned to the Canadian media I consumed growing up, which only amounts to YTV and the Trailer Park Boys, and I’m on the fence about basing my national identity on Ricky or Bubbles. There’s still Canada’s natural landscape, and the connection I share with it. As a settler, I feel an obligation to leave this land and its stories to the peoples who truly have a long and fulfilling connection with it—the talented Indigenous filmmakers, for which there are many entering the scene, such as queer filmmaker of Cree/Métis/Danish descent Adam Garnett Jones, or Alethea ArnaquqBaril, who’s creating an incredible body of work centered around Inuit life and culture.

In discussing Indigenous artists, nothing has felt more Canadian to me than Kent Monkman’s work, whose exhibition Shame and Prejudice is now showing at the Museum of Anthropology until Jan. 3. What makes Monkman’s work so good is that it is innately

anti-Canadian. To critique colonialism, Monkman created probably my favourite Canadian-made art piece ever, The Daddies.

It’s a recreation of Robert Harris's painting Meeting of the Delegates of British North America to Settle the Terms of Confederation (1884), with all of them now staring at Monkman's alter ego, the nude Miss Chief Share Eagle Testickle. Along with this, Monkman’s depictions of Indigenous families being separated by the RCMP provides a less comedic and more tragic depiction of Canada’s historic evils. Monkman shows the harsh truths of Canada, and this type of work makes the lack of unified Canadian identity all the more understandable.

From this, I decided to turn away from national identity as inspiration, and rather focus on my geographic location in an attempt to see who else creates work inspired by the lands of the Pacific Northwest, and where their identity stems from.

In discussing the feeling of the Pacific Northwest, certain Washington-based musicians do it best. My personal favourite being Phil Elverum, singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist of The Microphones and Mount Eerie. His music takes the lush forests, bleak mountains, and foggy atmosphere of the Northwest and uses it as a tool to contextualize his individual experience. His lyrics tell stories by directly referencing nature, like the track Seaweed, where Elverum writes: “I can't remember, were you into Canada geese?

Is it significant, these hundreds on the beach?

Or were they just hungry for mid-migration seaweed?”

Tragic, beautiful, and without a doubt environmentally influenced, this type of songwriting consumes the familiar climate and exports it as a common language understandable by residents of the Pacific Northwest. Which is why, ultimately, Elverum and his work both musically and aesthetically are a huge inspiration for what I try to do in filmmaking.

My challenge now is figuring out how to steal from Elverum. His lyrical ability to express emotions through natural metaphors is something I’d love to grow at, but I don’t know how to transfer this style into a film.

Which brings me to my next point, which I think is the true gateway to finding your artistic and cultural voice—experimentation.

Canadian film history has a strong and significant history with the experimental.

Take Norman McLaren, who spent his entire career working in experimental animation, whether creating a visual representation of music, such as in Boogie Doodle (1941) or experimenting with the origins of stop motion in the Oscar-nominated A Chairy Tale (1947). Also in the scene were Michael Snow and Joice Weiland, an experimental filmmaking power couple who produced work like Snow’s Wavelength (1967), an emotionally-packed analysis of office space, and Weiland’s Reason over Passion (1968), a textile and film work which was entirely inspired by Pierre Elliot Trudeau's quote “Reason over Passion.”

I don’t think the high amount of experimental work coming out of Canada is any coincidence. We are a diverse nation built on violence, colonialism, and immigration— all of this culminating in the cultural void we experience today. Learning what we can from the Indigenous artists and experimental filmmakers working in the North, it becomes clear that Canada cannot be defined by nationhood or a certain artistic style. Rather, identity must be found in the voices of every individual who wishes to contextualize their experience. Our work needs to be cognisant in how it recognizes and reconciles the past, while also accepting and showing compassion for the stories of those who are new to the country. We must develop and support the cultural mosaic of Canada, by experimenting, educating ourselves, giving a platform to new and under-represented voices, and ultimately, telling the truths of our sense of home.

COLUMNS

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Gi an marc o I u el e

@giannimarx 54

F E AT URED A R T

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Top 5 Government-Approved Gloryholes in Greater Vancouver PRO STATE Contributor NAOMI EVERS Illustrator

Many are on edge these days as we continually creep closer to a literal cyberpunk dystopia: a global pandemic, a civil uprising in the US, a bureaucratic surveillance state in Europe, Russia reviving neo-tzardom, China making 1984 look like a Doctor Seuss book, and Japan being Japan. In the lead up to the 2020 summer of love Provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry advised against Tinder in the Time of COVID. Instead,

provincial health officials suggested “barriers, like walls (e.g., glolyholes) that allow for sexual contact but prevent close faceto-face contact.” With campus still closed and cuffing season right around the corner, the Courier is taking a look at this glorious pandemic-approved solution to quench the proverbial thirst in this review of some of the hottest and most popular government-approved gloryhole locations in the Lower Mainland.

5. Funky Winker Beans This place really brings the bells and whistles for everything but the gloryhole itself. The gloryhole is situated beneath the romantic blue glow of anti-vein blacklights in the women’s washroom.

It has great acoustics, thanks to having no functional doors, which means you can practice your new throat techniques to the constant ambient background music of drunk guys butchering Tool. One major problem is meeting a Tinder hookup here who’s looking for a third carries a not insignificant chance of joining a Rush cover band.

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4. Tacofino on Hastings The tacos aren’t the only thing in this small eatery that will make you put your hands together in the prayer emoji. The atmosphere is noisy but the crowd is young and fun. Ask for consent before you bring any Tapatio into the mix!

around it contains mildly edgy anti-establishment views and the people you meet there will unconvincingly tell you it’s okay if you “just want to talk, because everyone’s going through a hard time right now” in an effort to seem nice.

1. Sweet Cherebum on Commercial 3. Fortune Sound Club Before dismissing the obnoxious attraction on the aptly named Queefer Street, this club deserves a chance. Sure, the crowd is mostly people who just turned 19 and people who wish they were still 19, but what better demographic to dive into for some no strings attached hookups? As if that’s not enough, wait until the drunk Surrey guys from Granville Street trickle over; you’ll be able to spot them instantly putting their hands on women’s lower backs without consent. For anyone looking for a night they’ll be glad they can’t remember, head on down to a show at Fortune for some local artist that doesn’t mind if their audience doesn’t know where they are. The gloryhole is located between the neon signs of weird Gen Z platitudes and the VIP lounge, unfortunately it’s much more difficult to locate your dignity after watching a 19 year old snort coke off a pair of New Balances.

2. The Eatery on W. Broadway There’s a reason their unofficial slogan is: “Miso Horny!” This is a hot destination for anyone looking to get a hook up with some fresh phish around a lot of neon signs. Located close to UBC, The Eatery is a favourite for sushi among students and hipsters who like foreign food but aren’t willing to admit they’re appropriating culture. The gloryhole itself has the same vibe—a concerted attempt to be cool without trying to seem cool. The graffiti

If Sweet Cherebum can be described in one word, it’s “authentic.”

A Commercial landmark, this is a great place for anyone searching for casual veggie eats, Indian groceries, or a spiritual gloryhole experience. Legend has it that one partner has to be an experienced yogi to partake, which is confirmed when you see that the gloryhole is located 8 inches from the ground. There’s a certain yoga pose that facilitates the hook up, which makes a visit good for the mind, body, and soul.

Honorable Mention: The elevator in the Fir building Much like the more popular Grouse Grind, the Cap grind is reserved for those with ripped quads, masochists and math professors, which aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. Next time you're making the trip to the fifth floor of Fir, get ready for yet another surprise closure! The elevator in Fir is a quaint time capsule that hasn't changed at all since the last Bush presidency.

Don't worry about privacy or timing—this elevator is literally the slowest I have ever been in. No one will bother you since it takes roughly the same amount of time to get a bachelor's degree as it does to go up three floors. When you're done going down, why not grab a shitty coffee from the second floor Tim Hortons outside to rehydrate. You’ve earned it.

HUMOR

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Portrait of Dora Maar STEPHANIE DUKE Contributer ANAIS BAYLE Illustrator

person parisian photographer. lover mistress weeping woman.

one chapter in her book with volumes before and after years of work and perfecting craft now resigned to being “a muse� behind every great man is a woman his voice expressing your essence his mark on paper his more valuable than yours shadows so long, no choice but to stand in them as a sketch, or a painting, some one dimensional thing.

how many times did he make you weep before he decided it was worth the ink to remember? your image sold for a hundred million dollars hanging around galleries, waiting for recognition painted women. enough nudes for vito acconci to lay on a floor for three weeks, eight hours a day and all he did was talk dirty and masturbate.

ask a man who his favourite female artist is and he laughs. partly to fill the silence that says he couldn’t even think of one.

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LIT ER AT URE

Virgo Aug. 24 - Sept. 23

Libra Sept. 24 - Oct. 23

scorpio Oct. 24 - Nov. 22

Sagittarius Nov. 23 - Dec. 21

Capricorn Dec. 22 - Jan. 20

Aquarius Jan. 21 - Feb. 19

Pisces Feb. 20 - Mar. 20

Aries Mar. 21 - Apr. 20

Taurus Apr. 21 - May 21

Gemini May 21 - Jun. 21

Venus is in your sign, Virgo. Ask yourself how you can ‘acts of service’ your way into the heart of that crush of yours. If you’re not single, do you feel a need to improve? Do you want more?

Do you love me? Are you high right now?

Do you ever get nervous?

Seek out ways to change, morph, and adapt as you move toward your birthday. You have lots going on so keep at it! Your sun sign must watch out for communication and commuting issues this month though; Mercury is doing the renegade.

Stop being nosy! Maybe put that extra energy to good use and update your LinkedIn. Jupiter is your ruling planet and it’s transiting your sign so you’re in a good place to excel at your work.

Find a way to make your profile picture hotter somehow. Trust me.

Neptune continues its retrograde through your sign this month so I advise you avoid illusions and delusions by deleting Tinder immediately.

Make way for grounding while you seek better ideas and inspiration. And lastly, avoid looking at Banksy’s “artwork” at all costs.

Taurus, you’ve got Uranus to worry about as it will be retrograding in your sign for the rest of the year. For Scorpio season in particular, look out for unpredictable and provocative surprises that pull you out of your comfort zone: like finally losing your virginity.

Cancer Jun. 22 -Jul. 23

Are things weird for you right now? Do you find yourself feeling out of your element lately?

Go to the dollar store and get some Halloween masks that represent all the moods you feel in a day. Keep them with you at all times. That’s how being an empath works.

Venus heads into your sign just in time for Halloween, so you’ll start to feel more at home in your panties now. Can’t leave your house?

Why not dress up like a sexy Vladimir Putin or, like, slutty Margaret Thatcher (both Libras).

Vibe in your kitchen like that.

Hey Sagi, baby. Give yourself a little time alone to collect your thoughts. I know you’re stressed, but stop flooding your group chat and start planning your next solo excursion to the grocery store. Leave UberEats alone.

Shake what the universe gave you and get some physical and mental activity. Teach yourself how to cartwheel, invent a new way to do long division, maybe listen to some PC music and nightcore remixes on YouTube. Spin in circles till you get dizzy like you’re four again.

Mars, your ruling planet, is in retrograde in your sun sign this month. You could be going way too hard or so unable to go hard that it frustrates you—don’t worry, it’s a temporary block. Just don’t get into any fist fights. Actually just stay inside, please.

Start accepting and taking what’s yours. Don’t confuse that with kissing ass; that doesn’t work in Scorpio season. Give of yourself—you gotta be willing to dance battle for it. Meet me in the Walmart parking lot at sunset if you’re actually serious about success.

leo Jul. 24 - Aug 23

No offence, but you’ve got a pocketful of sunshine. You’ve also got a love that is all yours.

Do what you want, they’re never gonna break you. Sticks and stones are literally never going to shake you. Periodt.

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@CAPILANOCOURIER

capi lan o cou ri er VOLUME 53, ISSUE NO.3