Band returns by popular request for Halloween party

Ian Kaufman
Features Editor

Thunder Bay has seen a lot of Elliott Brood lately, but we don’t seem in any danger of tiring of them. This is unsurprising considering their dynamic stage show, impeccably crafted narrative songwriting, and the raw energy of their performances. Fortunately, unlike many up-and-coming bands, they’re not inclined to skip northern Ontario on their tours. On the contrary, they’re actually going out of their way (between shows in Toronto and Ottawa) to play here on Halloween.
The special stop comes thanks to the raucous reception they received in September, which earned them the invitation. Vancouver’s Party at the Moontower and a slew of local openers (the Mike Filipowitch Band, Married Singlemen, and Fluorescent Brown) will be providing support. Brood vocalist and guitarist/banjoist/ukulele-ist Mark Sasso spoke with us from New York before the final show on the U.S. leg of their “Future Ghost Towns” tour:

Q: Have you noticed a difference in reactions between Canada and the U.S.?

A: I don’t think the States are as crazy as the Canadian audiences, but I think we kind of worked that over time. [Canadians] come to the show and they know what to expect, whereas here in the States they don’t.

Q: There’s a warmth and an energy to your live shows that’s pretty rare. Is that an intentional thing that you guys think about?

A: Well, we look at playing live as throwing a party: we want everybody involved. You don’t invite somebody to a party to have them sit on the couch and not talk to them, you know? We like to engage people, and we pride ourselves on that, actually.

Q: You’ve called your tour “Future Ghost Towns” and you have a voiceover you come onstage to. I was wondering if you could explain that theme.

A: It’s a theme that’s been going on for years; even in the ‘70s people were talking about it. We’re not trying to be overly political, but it’s that theme of, nature is probably going to take back what is rightfully hers… Every town is pretty much a future ghost town if we don’t get wise to things. We’re obviously not the only people saying that, but we’re kind of drawing on that theme.

Q: That kind of environmental consciousness and sort of pastoralism seems to be making a resurgence in Canadian music, especially with country and folk bands like Sarah Harmer and the Acorn. Do you consider yourselves part of that?

A: I think we just consider ourselves part of the group of people in the world who are trying not to cause too much of a disturbance. You look around and there’s just excess in everything, and we don’t want to be excessive. You can live within your means and be pretty happy – you don’t need all that stuff. I’m kind of getting off-topic on it… we’re not trying to be preachy or anything like that with our music, just putting it out there and making a little point. And I think you can hear [in the music] that we’re not trying to hit anybody over the head with it.

Q: I hate to ask you a question that you’ve probably been asked a lot, but your music is a pretty unique blend. I know the label “death country” has been thrown around a lot -

A: [laughs] Someday it will die, but that’s alright, go ahead.

Q: - yeah, what were your musical influences that created that blend?

A: There are three of us, so I can only speak for myself. But I think the one that we all kind of draw on is Neil Young, and Bob Dylan. But at the same time, I also like bands like the Jayhawks, who are not really overly popular in Canada (and they’re no longer together) and Grant Lee Buffalo. Those kinds of bands changed me quite a bit. And I mean, I also loved CCR and The Band, stuff like that.
I think what makes stuff unique is kind of how you view life. I mean, everybody takes in the same music, to a certain degree, and it’s [more] your take on it. You know: the books you read, the people you hang out with or what you discuss… that’s what makes it different. It’s something that’s kind of intangible.

Q: Do you have any special plans for the Halloween show?

A: Oh, we’ve been discussing that for the last few days. We don’t know yet what we’re doing. We think we’re going to dress up, for sure, ‘cause it’s Halloween - we love playing on Halloween! We have the weekend to decide.

Photo by Shannon Lepere

Jean-Paul De Roover returns to Thunder Bay to rep his best album ever

Aidan Wall

Jean-Paul De Roover is a big fish in Thunder Bay’s musical pond. His music is a significant deviation from the guitar bands that dominate the local scene. A talented singer and multi-instrumentalist, Jean-Paul performs his shows as a solo artist, mixing his looped vocals, guitar, and other sounds into a rich and flavourful sonic stew.
I spoke with Mr. De Roover over the phone while he was on the road in northern Quebec. I learned much. The first three albums he owned were Queen’s Greatest Hits, Green Day’s Dookie, and Revolver by The Beatles. The Beatles influence is most telling. While Jean-Paul is a live performer with great personal presence, the music he performs is of studio quality. Each performance is a lesson in composition, in which Jean-Paul layers guitars over percussion over vocal harmonies.
J.P.’s newest offering, entitled Windows and Doors, is his best release to date. The maestro himself made it known that he believes it to be “infinitely better” than his debut EP …Dichotomy… Expectations are suitably high for De Roover’s debut album, which has been two years in the making. There is certainly no reason to expect anything less than excellence. His MySpace features three new songs, each a carefully orchestrated piece of heart-on-sleeve electronica.
When asked about his favourite artists of the moment, Jean-Paul’s picks were suitably diverse. From British progressive metal band Sikth, to Vancouver indie rock outfit Mother Mother, J.P.’s taste is impeccable.
On October 29th Jean-Paul will bring himself back to The Study for a performance with fellow locals Gaelin Brown and The Auditor General. Eager with anticipation, this reporter can visualize the scene: a sea of happy faces smiling up at the god-of-the-moment. A community is woven together by the tuneful singing of the charismatic composer. And as Jean-Paul croons into his microphone, their earwax melts, running down their cheeks like sticky green tears of joy. Be there, or be fairly judged as square.

Dave Grad
LUSU President
Halloween is here! The best holiday, well I suppose it’s not a holiday but it should, around! You get to dress up in a costume and strangers give you chocolate – and they require nothing in return! Don’t forget to check out the Outpost on Tuesday for some Halloween prizes. There are also prizes to be won on Friday for best costume! AND all cover from Roxy’s on Wednesday night will be donated to Shinerama, a fundraiser for cystic fibrosis. Check it out!
Movember is also coming up. In case your wondering, I did not misspell November – Movember is a fundraiser/awareness campaign for prostate cancer. Trevor Cava, Josh Kolic, and myself will be growing mustaches for the occasion. If you’d like to participate and grow a mustache to raise awareness and raise money, check out www.movember.com, and join our LU Movember team. In the registration process our organization is BMOC – and our team name is LU Movember. If you have troubles registering, contact Trevor Cava or visit the LUSU office. Trev will be in the Agora Wednesday and Thursday next week to help you sign up!
I will finish this report by mentioning that our first board meeting will be Thursday October 29th. If your interested come out! See what goes down – and it’s a chance for you to speak your mind. So, in case I don’t see you – good afternoon, good evening, and good night! (As always if you have any questions/concerns/advice/or fashion tips -343-8550 or by email president@lusu.ca.

Brandi Cameron
Editor-in-Chief

Halloween isn’t the only time we wear a mask; in fact, most would say we trade various masks for different parts of our lives. For example, in school you may be quiet, diligently taking notes, then five hours later be obnoxiously loud in your home, dancing around like a fool.
Then, as you enter your partner’s parents’ house, you tone down and become a respectable young woman or man. The very next day, you head out to your sports team’s playoff game and become extremely aggressive and angry, allowing your blood to boil and your testosterone to take over.
Maybe, with people you do not know, you are intelligent and hold fascinating conversations, and then with your friends, it’s all South Park and The Hills. Or, maybe you save the intelligible side of yourself only for those who know you well just in case you are wrong in your comments.
Count the masks of these instances; it’s surprising how real these situations are for many of us.
We mould into the very person we think that situation calls for, or what we think those ’types of people’ would want. When, in actuality, if you ask anyone, they say, “Oh, just be yourself.”
What is your self?
Is my self who I am at The Argus, in class, at church, when I play soccer, bike, or am alone reading? Am I really someone different in each moment, or is it that I just take a different mask out of my purse and switch it up?
I am hesitant to say I am still ‘me’ in every instance, as you may say the same. This is because, although we all want to believe there is an essence of who we are, it’s not in our control; we let society dictate it for us, and make choices based on that; its not an inherent feature.
The appeal of Halloween is being something, or someone, completely different than your every day ‘me’. It lets us play with our imagination, and fantasize about what could be, and what is impossible to be, except on this one night, once a year.
In some ways it is riveting, but in others, is completely terrifying. All these people walking around, I cannot tell who they are– it freaks me out.
There is even this love for horror movies within us that I find it difficult to understand. The guts, blood, and gore: all stuff in our body that we watch pour, or yanked, out of people in a dark theatre with random people we don’t know.
I’m beginning to think we are all pretty messed up.

VP-Finance Josh Kolic weighs in on the other meanings of sustainability for students

Ian Kaufman

Features Editor

LUSU’s newly-confirmed VP-Finance, Josh Kolic, recently returned from a trip to Ottawa, where he met with a number of MPs and Senators to discuss post-secondary education issues. He believes that the funding of post-secondary institutions is very much tied into the concept of sustainability.
But can the current system be sustainably maintained without tax increases or cuts to other social services? “The money’s there,” he insists. “The question we have to ask ourselves is, is it being used properly?”
His answer is decisively in the negative. Tax subsidies such as Ontario’s textbook grant favour the rich, he believes, while much of the federal student loans funding is eaten up by the bureaucracy surrounding the loans programs. He emphasizes the need to convert these loans and tax subsidies to grants.
As far as provincial funding is concerned, Kolic says Ontario is not living up to its end of the education bargain. He accuses Premier Dalton McGuinty of reneging on his original campaign promises to reverse the cuts made by Mike Harris during the “common sense revolution” of the ‘90s.
LUSU is organizing a Drop Fees march for Novemeber 5 in coordination with the Canadian Federation of Students. What follows is an excerpt from an interview with Kolic:

“One of the important things Alex said at the sustainability launch is that sustainability isn’t just [about] environmental issues - it also deals with human issues, with rights issues. There are all kinds of issues that fall within the realm of sustainability. I would say that our “drop fees” campaign, the November 5th day of action, pretty much falls in that. Are post-secondary education programs currently sustainable? Well, no, they’re not. They’re not funded by the provincial government.
You may or may not be aware that this week, Ontario surpassed New Brunswick as [having] the highest tuition rates in the country… we’re also the lowest provincially-funded. You can blame the Harris regime for starting those cuts, and you can blame the McGuinty regime for continuing them, and the costs have been downloaded onto the students.
Part of what I did in Ottawa was [to go] to the federal government to bring awareness to these issues, and the fact is that federal transfers that are supposed to go to post-secondary education aren’t being used for that. What the province is doing is just cutting their contributions by the amount that’s given to them by the federal government. So you have a situation of continued deregulation – even what the federal government is giving is very low, in comparison to what it was before the cuts of the ‘90s under the Liberal government of Prime Minister Chretien. Finance Minister Paul Martin was the one who initiated the cuts, so that’s another person you can blame for that.
And we’ve seen the effects; here in the north we’ve seen some very unique effects, mainly on indigenous students with the cap on the PSSSP (Post-Secondary Student Support Program), and also talk of perhaps changing the funding to more of a student loans system. That’s frightening, especially when you consider that this funding would undoubtedly continue with the restrictions on finances in terms of the cap.
We’ve seen the effects of a %2 cap in terms of numbers: when the PSSSP program started in 1978, it was funding 3,600 indigenous students. By 1999, the year the cap was implemented, it was at 27,000. It quickly slipped back to 22,500, and then from 2001 to 2006, we saw 10,500 students turned away; they couldn’t access funding. In the year 2007-2008 alone, the last year that we have really accurate statistics on this type of thing for, it was almost 3,000 students in one academic year turned away. I mean, this is not a sustainable way to live up to a treaty obligation. Those are the types of issues we’re going to bring attention to with the Drop Fees campaign.”

Photo by Cole Breiland

The Argus talks with Sustainability Commissioner Alex Boulet

Ian Kaufman
Features Editor

With looming economic and ecological debts dominating the media of late, it’s hardly surprising that young people are becoming increasingly concerned with the future of our society and our planet. Despite the concern, however, there is not yet a mainstream environmental movement offering serious solutions to these problems. Being confronted with stories on melting ice shelves and extinct species on the one hand, and obviously insufficient solutions like energy-saving light bulbs and reusable shopping bags on the other doesn’t help.
Fortunately for Lakehead students, the seeds of an on-campus movement for sustainability, which were sown a couple of years ago with a student referendum, are growing into an organization that’s helping the school and the Thunder Bay community as a whole work towards very concrete change.
A lot has happened in two years. During the 2007/08 schoolyear, LUST (LU Sustainability Team) was formed on campus. The group pushed for a referendum question asking students to pay $3 per year to fund an initiative devoted to sustainability, which would be part of the student union. Students answered yes, and the Sustainability Initiative (SI) was born.
This year, the Initiative is headed by commissioner Alex Boulet, who has ambitious plans to make Lakehead more environmentally friendly and socially just. Hired last spring, Boulet worked over the summer on local food initiatives and “figuring out what I’m not allowed to do”.
The Sustainability Initiative will certainly come up against resistance within the university in attempting to change long-held practices. So far, though, Boulet says he has encountered a lot of cooperation. Physical Plant manager Hugh Briggs, for example, had already instituted an energy reduction plan across campus. And although food provider Aramark “as a corporation is not conducive to the things that we want to do,” the company’s Food Service Director at Lakehead, Nick Buragina, is making efforts to work with the Initiative.

Bullfrog Power

Perhaps the most ambitious project currently underway is Boulet’s proposal to power LUSU completely by Bullfrog Energy. Bullfrog is a clean-energy company, which uploads wind and low-impact hydro onto the existing power grid to replace nuclear, coal, and higher-impact hydro, which currently provides most of ontario’s energy. Boulet estimates that the extra cost for students would be about $12,000 – a figure VP-Finance Josh Kolic says looks accurate.
“I think that’s a worthwhile expenditure,” says Boulet. Besides the lowering of environmental and climate impacts, the move would have a symbolic value: “It’s something that, for the Outpost for example, if it’s green-powered, that’s a selling point. It’s a food service on campus that can get local food and is powered by renewable energy.”

Local Food

Besides Bullfrog, the Sustainability Initiative is also looking to boost Lakehead’s and Thunder Bay’s food security. “Food is a big thing in Thunder Bay,” Boulet says. “I think it’s because, first of all, we are really food insecure here. And it’s a tangible thing that’s easy to understand for people: we need food, we need food here that can feed this population that’s clean and safe and nutritious.”
Lakehead already has a large vegetable garden beside the Hangar, which is run by Thunder Bay’s Food Security Research Network. “The garden was great [this year] and I think it was useful in the sense that it brought the community onto the campus,” Boulet says, “but there were virtually no students who had plots there. That was not intentional; by the time they figured out what they were doing with it, most students had already planned their summer and gone away.”
Next year, Boulet hopes the garden could grow food to be served in the Outpost and elsewhere on campus, as well as plots for individual student use. Vegetables have also been grown in the Braun Building courtyard and the garden behind the Centre for Excellence. The Initiative’s pilot food project has already turned a profit.
“In September and October, I have made more money than I’ve spent from selling produce, and that’s only from selling Tuesdays and Thursdays in the afternoon for four hours [in the Agora],” he reports. “So in the span of four hours, I make easily $100 on food that costs me nothing but my time. So, students want it, especially stuff like the preserves. That’s exciting, because it’s a pilot and it’s making money.”
Boulet is also looking into starting a student-run farm, a step taken by many other universities across the continent in recent years. No details are confirmed yet, but the project already has momentum. Matt Boffman from Boreal Edge Farms, a local CSA, has agreed to help draw up a business plan in November.
“It won’t be on-campus,” Boulet says, “because that’s too progressive for the university… What I’m hoping is that we can find space within the city limits, something that the city owns, and make a deal with them – a cheap long-term lease, or they’ll give it to us for free. For example, if you go up Oliver to the highway, on the corner of Oliver and the highway on your left-hand side, there’s a field. That’s old farmland, and it’s still zoned as farmland, and that’s five minutes from here.”

A Vision

The main goal this year is to build a long-term vision for LUSU’s Sustainability Initiative.  To that end, surveys have been circulated among the student body asking students what their vision of sustainability is. Boulet wants an accurate reflection of student opinion on sustainability.
“The biggest challenge is that we have to talk to ‘the suits’, the engineers and the professional students who are stereotypically not interested in this stuff because they’re too busy,” he says. “I have engineering friends who are very passionate about a lot of issues, social issues, environmental issues, but they don’t have time. There are people, like me in my job, who have the time to do that stuff for them, or to find ways to build it into their lives so that they’re not doing extra work.”
“ For example, the engineering program’s students have their fourth-year project. There’s one group this year who are doing their project to design an in-vessel composter that could handle all of the organic waste from the university. I said, design it so that it can handle all of the organic waste from the university, it’s small enough, it doesn’t smell bad, and it’s easy to use. And it’ll be green-powered, so hopefully powered by itself. So they’re designing it, and if they can make it cost-effective, then two or three years down the road we might be able to strike a deal with the university, we could go halfsies on it or something. That’s something where they don’t have to do anything that they didn’t already have to do.”

Sustainable Communities in the North

The Initiative is also hosting a conference called Sustainable Communities in the North in February. “The purpose is to create a forum for Northern Ontario to come together and talk about the challenges that are particular to being sustainable in Northern Ontario. It will be teleconferenced to remote communities, and even not-so-remote communities like Geraldton and Atikoken. Those communities will be invited to have a showing of the keynote speakers and we’ll tell them what we’re doing for workshops and give them resources. So hopefully we’ll have a regional conference that happens without having to fly people into Thunder Bay, because that’s counter-intuitive.”
“We’re planning it so that it is an annual thing. LUSU is in charge of the money and ticket sales, but there’s a planning committee [including] Earthwise, Environment North, the Food Security Research Network, K-Net, and Confederation College. They’re all doing their own part of this conference and we’ll hopefully generate some funds so that next year we can continue again. How we’d like to see it formatted is that at the end of the conference, we’ll have done kind of a skills, weaknesses, opportunities, challenges for Northern Ontario. And then whatever comes out of that will help us plan for what the next year is focusing on – it’s about building a vision.”