This Sunday’s World Cup final between Spain and the Netherlands marks several important milestones in football history.

The first is that “soccer” is finally being called by its proper name: football. Although this is undoubtedly going to vanish as soon as the CFL and NFL seasons get exciting, it’s a nice role-reversal for fans of the beautiful game.

The second milestone is that Canadians (and Americans) are increasingly embracing the sport and taking it seriously. Of course, people say this every four years when the World Cup comes around, but even if football’s popularity waxes and wanes it is definitely enjoying a long-term upward trend. The numbers help illustrate this. ESPN has seen its ratings double since the 2006 tournament. In Canada, the CBC reported over a million combined television and web viewers for many of the games.

There have been numerous other surprises to come from South Africa that have made it hard to sustain a narrative about the tournament. Hosted for the first time on the so-called “Dark Continent,” this was supposed to be Africa’s time to shine. However, five of the six African teams languished in the group stage despite fielding some of the world’s best players. Only Ghana progressed to the knockout stage, where they lost in a nail-biter to Uruguay.

South American teams didn’t fare much better. Only a week ago, many people expected an all-South American final between powerhouses Brazil and Argentina, but that too was not to be. Other traditional powers like Italy, France and England also put forth disappointing efforts, which led to the very unlikely final match this Sunday between Spain and the Netherlands.

Spain has long been an underachiever in international football. Despite being home to one of the most competitive leagues in the world, Spain only recently made its mark as a national team, winning the European championship in 2008. Since then, Spain has been a favourite to win the World Cup as well, but superstitious football observers will be quick to note that history matters — and history hasn’t been a friend to the Spanish national team.

Another team labouring under history’s weight is the Dutch side. The Netherlands also has a European championship to its name — from 1988 — but it is their 1974 and ‘78 World Cup appearances that continue to cast a long shadow over the team. The Dutch played a fiercely offensive style in both competitions known as “Total Football” and managed to reach the final both times, only to be denied by host nations Germany and Argentina.

Total Football allows players to seamlessly trade positions, where each player is a potential goal-scorer in a relentlessly attacking style of play. This tactic had its greatest cheerleader in Dutchman Johann Cruyff, who exported it to Spain where he was wildly successful both as player and coach. Watch the Spanish side’s quick, short passes while they suffocate their opponents with possession and you can see that Cruyff’s legacy lives on, albeit in a more modern form. And despite a rocky start to this tournament, Spain finally looks like it might be ready for a World Cup trophy.

The Netherlands, meanwhile, has largely abandoned the free-flowing tactics it made famous and adopted a more deliberate, cautious style of play. For years, promising Dutch squads would ride into tournaments pressured to both win and look good doing it. Faced with sides more worried about winning, the Dutch would inevitably fall to opportunistic counter-attacks or be defeated in penalties, earning a reputation as “beautiful losers.”

This time around, however, coach Bert van Marwijk has taken great pains to disavow Holland’s Total Football past and has actually produced results, propelling the Dutch to their first World Cup final in 32 years.

Sunday’s final will see the World Cup finally go to one of the two biggest underachievers in football, but regardless of who hoists the trophy, it has definitely been a historic and exhilarating journey.

A version of this article appeared on the Sheaf’s website.

image: Flickr

For about two months, talking to strangers has been all the rage.

The reason for this is the meteoric rise of Chatroulette, the Internet’s latest chat site. It matches you up with random strangers around the world. Users can communicate via webcam and microphone or simply through text, although without a camera you’re likely to get “nexted.”

Indeed, that is one of the defining features of Chatroulette: if you don’t like what you see, you simply click “Next” and get matched up with someone else.

In an age of ever-increasing interconnectedness with sites like Facebook and Twitter, Chatroulette is a refreshing splash of anonymity. It even resembles early Internet chat services in which strangers simply spoke to other strangers across the world, often looking for a sexual connection.

A brief spin through Chatroulette will have its mix of nudity, some of it mild, most of it downright scandalous. However, unlike traditional chat rooms, typing “asl” to ask for someone’s age, sex and location will get you suspended for 10 minutes.

The service is relatively young and has only gained in popularity in the last several weeks. Started by Andrey Ternovskiy, a Russian teenager who wanted a new way to chat with his friends, the site soon gained a following and its user base exploded. Ternovskiy, 17, built and maintains the site by himself but he has already attracted the attentions of people in the tech industry with deep pockets.

Ternovskiy told the New York Times that he never advertised his site, “but somehow, people started to talk to each other about the site. And the word started to spread. That’s how the simultaneous user count grew from 10 to 50, then from 50 to 100 and so on.”

Chatroulette’s website shows there are “more than 20,000” users online at any given time, but the real figure is likely much higher, perhaps in the millions. That means that Chatroulette offers users the chance to come face to face with over a million strangers (or their genitals) all around the world.

I tried my luck at Chatroulette and got a mixed bag. My first stranger was a young man in his 20s looking disinterestedly at the camera, a cigarette tucked behind his ear. After saying hello and not getting a response, I clicked next.

A blank screen. I clicked next.

Another blank screen. This time I waited and repeatedly asked if anyone was on the other side. Suddenly the blank screen changed and revealed a man’s erection. I clicked next.

On my next try, a friendly wave hello merited me an immediate disconnection. As did the next five tries. At this point, I almost wished for the erection to come back on screen. At least it didn’t skip me so cruelly.

One last try, and I got matched up with a blonde 19-year-old woman with hoop earrings taking long drags from her cigarette between one-word responses. She was from Turkey.

I asked her why she used Chatroulette, but she just stared back at me in boredom before disconnecting. It seems no one really knows why they go on Chatroulette. They just do.

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After a year in office, U.S. President Barack Obama has shown that even the greatest orators must eventually face the difficulties of governing.

Swept into power by an American public hungry for inspiration and a change from the disastrous policies of the Bush administration, Obama was doomed to disappoint his followers sooner or later. Indeed, those disappointments started coming fast and frequently.

The decision to close the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba was made on Obama’s first day in the Oval Office but a full year later, almost 200 prisoners are still detained there. Even worse, the Obama Justice Department has said about 50 of those detainees will be held indefinitely, without trial. This comes after two years on the campaign trail during which Obama repeatedly condemned the detention facility and the practice of indefinite detention for tarnishing America’s image.

Guantanamo Bay is not the only area in which Obama has embraced Bush-Cheney tactics. Obama has also endorsed military commissions rather than court trials for detainees, and has adopted sweeping secrecy privileges for his administration, which was highlighted by his refusal to release reports about the torture or abuse of prisoners at secret CIA prisons.

The United States has maintained its military presence in Iraq, has escalated the war in Afghanistan, has increased strikes within Pakistan and has carried out strikes in Yemen. This has all come at the hands of a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Obama’s approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has also been more of the same. Although initially he leaned on his Israeli allies to stop building settlements on Palestinian lands — a major obstacle to any peace process — he soon softened his stance, allowing the hard right in Israel to continue undermining any hope for peace.

In all these examples, Obama’s policies have been marked by an eager willingness to abandon his positions and reach compromise.

Rather than taking the hard road, closing Guantanamo Bay and truly rebranding America as a beacon of human rights, the Obama administration found it expedient to continue the same policies of the previous eight years.

Rather than abandoning decades of one-sided support for Israel and encouraging a fair peace process, the administration found it too easy to throw their hands up — “We tried, after all.” — and allow ongoing encroachment into Palestinian territory, which is sure to breed distrust and violence on both sides of the conflict.

Even in his attempts to restructure American health care, Obama compromised until there was little left to give away. Instead of pushing for universal coverage under a single-payer system like Canada’s, he instead pushed for the nebulous “public option.” When Democrats faced continued opposition to health care reform, they soon dropped that too. If Americans are to have any health care reform, it will be a far cry from what candidate Obama promised to deliver back in 2008.

On the environment, Obama is a far cry from his predecessor. But when the young president travelled to Copenhagen in December, the best deal he managed to get was a non-binding agreement to one day in the future deal with climate change. The efficacy of international agreements like the Kyoto Protocol is questionable, but Obama invested very little effort in reaching a stronger deal in Copenhagen.

Ultimately, whether or not Obama succeeds as a president will depend on pocketbook issues. “It’s the economy, stupid,” was the Clinton campaign’s unofficial slogan in 1992, yet its simple message still holds true to today. Obama could easily enjoy a second term if he shows he can improve the day-to-day lives of his fellow citizens.

However, even on this front Obama has shown a willingness to accept too little and give up too much. The enormous Wall Street bailout that he oversaw successfully rescued most financial firms from bankruptcy but high unemployment and tight credit still exist for everyday people. The banks seemingly got everything they asked for but Obama and the Democrats are hard-pressed to pass any sort of financial reform that will prevent future financial meltdowns. Some form of financial reform bill may eventually pass, but whether or not it will add any meaningful protection to the financial system is uncertain.

The first year of a four-year presidency is not always a good gauge of a leader. However, President Obama’s supporters are sure to be disappointed by his thin record of achievement so far. With most major policies, the 44th president has shown that he would rather accept a compromise — any compromise — rather than fight a prolonged battle for a more favourable outcome. The day-to-day troubles of governing have reduced Obama’s inspiring, idealistic positions on the campaign trail to the chastened, compromising policies we see today.

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A version of this article ran in the Sheaf on January 27, 2010.
image via Flickr

I, too, have created a monster whose whims I must obey. I have grown an unsightly moustache that, despite my best efforts, I cannot destroy.

It started as a lazy Halloween costume when I decided to simply shave my facial hair but leave the whiskers. Although there was more to the outfit, I was essentially dressed as a dirtbag — a slimeball, an ogre, a fiend or any other type of villain whose persona depends on a disgusting moustache. But moustaches don’t have to be repulsive.

Since 2003, the month of November has unofficially become “Movember” for some men as they grow moustaches to raise awareness for prostate cancer. According to Prostate Cancer Canada, one in six men is diagnosed with the disease and 4,400 men die from it each year. The idea of Movember was hatched in Australia an easy way for men to sport moustaches while also confronting an important health concern. In some cities, Movember culminates with grand moustache parties where men revel in their creations.

Moustaches offer men a rare opportunity to literally craft new personalities for themselves. For some people, the moustache takes on a life of its own; it would be difficult to imagine Burt Reynolds, Tom Selleck or Hulk Hogan having made the same impacts on pop culture without their trademark lip-warmers. Salvador Dali, Ron Jeremy and Frank Zappa are other prominent examples of men unafraid to go “au naturel.” Others oscillate between the worlds of the hairy and the shaven. Jeopardy host Alex Trebek is a famous apostate and film critic Roger Ebert has identified the Kevin Kline Moustache Principle, which states that the actor has a moustache in comedies but is clean shaven for serious roles.

Despite the illustrious history of the moustache, however, it has become increasingly rare for people to grow them, especially for people in their 20s and 30s. Perhaps there have been too many distasteful characters with moustaches over the years. For every Albert Einstein, there has been a Saddam Hussein and for every Ghandi, a Stalin. Adolf Hitler single-handedly ruined the toothbrush moustache for all mankind.

But the unbridled power of the moustache can be harnessed for both good an evil, as the Movember campaign shows. Perhaps it is time for men everywhere to stand up for the stache. For too long has facial hair in movies been shorthand for denoting villains while their clean-shaven counterparts save the day. The shaving industry preys on this insecurity by introducing more and more blades to razors while promising ever-closer shaves.

Many firefighters and police officers — the males at least — have long done their part in reclaiming the moustache. If other men follow their lead, a moustache Renaissance may be coming soon.

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Sean Connery photo by Alan Light

A new global study of Internet service shows Canada is falling behind in terms of broadband quality and may not be able to keep up with future needs.

The University of Oviedo in Spain and the Said Business School at Oxford University used millions of user records to reach their conclusions, placing Canada 30th in terms of broadband quality.

Canadian broadband quality slipped from 26th in 2008 to its current ranking. Broadband Internet service is anything faster than 56k dial-up service.

Canada also placed 30th for download speed, 31st for upload speed and 17th for “broadband leadership,” meaning total access and broadband quality.

Alec Couros, professor of educational technology and media at the University of Regina, says Canada’s lacklustre showing is partly due to the “connectivist agenda” of the 1990s.

“I think the metric they started out with was connecting every school, connecting all over the nation and worrying less about the actual delivery of data over those networks,” said Couros.

Today, Canada’s broadband infrastructure is able to handle tasks such as social networking, basic video chat and small file sharing adequately. But as high-definition video and large file sharing become more popular in the next three to five years, the system will fall behind, according to the broadband study.

Particularly with media companies embracing social networking and other new technologies, the demands on the system are likely to continue growing.

Couros has harnessed the power of the web to keep in touch with colleagues and students alike, for both private and professional purposes. He points to Oprah Winfrey using Skype to interview guests on her show as an example of how pervasive social media has become.

“While I don’t really care what Oprah is doing,” said Couros, “it actually helps my job as a professor because all my students now know what Skype is.”

The top broadband leaders are Sweden, Japan and South Korea, where governments have put strong emphasis on updating and extending their Internet systems.

Indeed, the study finds a strong correlation between broadband quality and “a nation’s advancement as a knowledge economy.”

Simply put, investing in technology and Internet infrastructure has real economic impact.

But another aspect of falling behind in broadband quality is its social impact. For Couros, the educational and political uses of the Internet are far more important. He says governments should focus on net neutrality — keeping the Internet accessible to users without blocking sites or restricting activity — and broadband quality.

“The net has to be neutral and it has to be powerful and we have to be connected,” he said. “It’s going to change what it means to have a voice in society.”

One of the challenges facing many countries is an urban-rural split, in which urban centres enjoy much faster and more reliable Internet service.

According to Maria Rosalia Vicente, professor at the University of Oviedo, this quality divide “could indicate how future divides in wealth may take shape, as broadband is increasingly determining the ability of individuals, firms and nations to create future prosperity.”

Canadian Internet service is further hindered by a lack of competition. In most areas of the country, there are only two service providers to choose from. Similar conditions exist in the cellular market.

Michael Geist, professor at the University of Ottawa and Canada Research Chair in Internet and e-commerce law, has been a frequent critic of Canadian Internet policy. Earlier this year, he told the Senate communications committee that “the Canadian telecommunications scene is in a state of crisis.”

“Following years of neglect by successive governments, the absence of a forward-looking digital agenda, and cozy, uncompetitive environment, we now find ourselves steadily slipping in the rankings just as these issues gain even more importance for commercial, educational and community purposes,” said Geist.

Geist’s assertion has been backed up by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, an international trade and policy organization of which Canada is a member.

A 2008 OECD report found that Canada’s lead in broadband technology has eroded over the last decade. Countries like Japan and South Korea are already moving toward superfast fibre networks while Canada is still mostly on cable or phone lines.

“Being connected is not enough,” said Couros. “Being powerfully connected is more important.”

Couros stressed the need to be connected to new technology, comparing it to public utilities or Canada’s health care system, in which everyone shares the costs.

“I’m willing to pay for other people to be connected. And it becomes an issue just as rich and as important as health care,” he said.

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photo Gerard Girbes

As if 2009 wasn’t already a rough year for capitalism, now Michael Moore has set his sights on our venerated economic system.

In his latest film Capitalism: A Love Story, Moore uses the current financial fallout as the backdrop for his attack on the economic system that brought the world to its knees almost exactly one year ago, as well as the culture and politics that have allowed for greed to be the ruling currency of our age.

Capitalism will hit theatres Oct. 2 and early reviews have been almost unanimously positive. But the last thing we need is Michael Moore’s latest propaganda flooding multiplexes.

Moore has carved out a career for himself by championing the cause of the little guy but his methods and motivations are far from pure. His first documentary, Roger & Me, came out 20 years ago and chronicled the closing of a GM plant in Moore’s hometown of Flint, Michigan.

MichaelMoore The central theme of the film is that Moore cannot get an interview with GM CEO Roger Smith, the heartless tycoon responsible for all the misery in Flint. The only problem is that Moore did interview Smith. Twice! Yet Moore conveniently left that out of the film, since it made a more appealing story-line to exclude Smith.

Although he had taken out a second mortgage on his home in order to film Roger & Me, the risk soon paid off. Before long, Moore was producing television shows and more documentaries, all with the David vs. Goliath motif. But the pattern of deception he had set in his first film proved to be too good to abandon.

Bowling for Columbine, Moore’s anti-gun documentary focusing on the Columbine high school shootings of Littleton, Colo., used similar sleight of hand techniques to make his point. The iconic first scene of the film, in which Moore gets a free rifle for signing up for a bank account, was entirely prearranged.

Footage of NRA president Charlton Heston was taken out of context to paint him as an insensitive gun-nut taking joy in the Columbine massacre. In fact, the NRA cancelled most scheduled events at its meeting in Denver that year. It only maintained its general meeting, which as a non-profit, the NRA was forced to hold by law.

Heston holding a rifle over his head and growling, “From my cold dead hands,” took place a whole year after the massacre but Moore massaged the footage to suggest Heston was doing so in the grieving community of Littleton immediately after the shootings.

Bowling for Columbine went on to win an academy award despite its many flaws, launching Moore into mainstream consciousness and making him an icon of the American left wing. His subsequent films Fahrenheit 9/11 and Sicko have made Moore the wealthiest documentarian in history.

Canadians should know better than most how deceitful Moore can be. In his 2007 health care documentary Sicko, he presents Canada’s health care system as a utopian project that leaves everyone happy and satisfied. Although it is no doubt superior to American health care, Canada’s health care also has its problems such as long waiting lines and chronic underfunding. Canadians recognize this but Moore glosses over it in order to forward his political agenda.

Also, in Bowling for Columbine Moore walks around an affluent neighbourhood in Toronto and claims to find nothing but unlocked doors, What a great country Canada must be! Moore’s producer has since admitted that only 40 per cent of the doors they tried were unlocked but the truth has never stopped Michael Moore before.

Like many Canadians, Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine felt Moore was a progressive voice in American politics, fighting the conservative establishment through humour and wit. So, in 2004, the two filmmakers travelled south to film a documentary about the man they admired. However, they soon unearthed many of the common criticisms against Moore that they had previously dismissed as Republican smears.

Melnyk and Caine also found that Moore was a slippery fish when it came to actually speaking with them about his work. But even though they could not confront Moore directly, they exposed his many lies and misrepresentations in their own documentary Manufacturing Dissent.

Documentaries are strange hybrids of news and entertainment. On one hand, they try to shed light on areas of concern. On the other hand, they also have financial pressures that encourage dishonest behaviour if it might make the film more profitable.

The Center for Social Media at American University recently released a report about documentary filmmakers and what guides their storytelling. Although most people interviewed strive to be honest, they also admit to fudging the truth and manipulating certain facts and sequences in order to show the “higher truth.”

In Michael Moore’s case, this fudging is especially pronounced. Furthermore, by casting himself as a working class hero, the millionaire documentarian merely exploits the working class. In both Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11 he uses tragedy to further his own anti-Bush agenda. In Sicko, he uses the stories of Americans screwed over by the health care system to make himself out to be a hero.

In Moore’s upcoming release Capitalism: A Love Story, he once again uses the truly tragic consequences of the financial meltdown and its many victims to cast himself as the star. Once again, Moore has confused celebrity for credibility.

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photo Jonathon Berger

Now, two years later, the band seems to be listening to its own advice. Founding member and frontman Brooke Gallupe says he has no grand strategy for Immaculate Machine.

“I have no real definite plans for the future. I’m going to surprise myself as well.”

Immaculate Machine released their latest album High On Jackson Hill in April. Since then, Gallupe and his fellow bandmates have been touring sporadically around North America promoting their new material.

“I think that people who are coming in with an open mind are loving it. To me it’s objectively a big step up; it’s sounding great. I’m really excited about playing the new stuff,” said Gallupe.

High on Jackson Hill is a bit of a departure from Immaculate Machine’s previous efforts. Though the songs are still catchy pop tunes, the tempo has slowed and the guitar riffs have multiplied, infusing the album with some head-bobbing rock overtones.

Gallupe says some fans have not taken to Jackson Hill as easily as the previous albums.

“We had fans that were excited about certain aspects of the band and some people are alienated by it, by the little changes we’ve made.”

That alienation was certainly not felt when the band played to a packed house at Amigos Cantina on Sept 5. Many attendees happily sang along to the songs, both old and new.

The show had added significance since it was a homecoming of sorts for one of the touring members, Brooke Wilken, an ex-Saskatoonian now living in Victoria.

The current lineup differs from what it has been and Gallupe admitted that it is “very fluid at the moment.”

Gallupe started Immaculate Machine when he was still a teenager along with Luke Kozlowski and Kathryn Calder, who also sings part-time with The New Pornographers. In those early days, the little-known band toured extensively, released their own music and printed their own T-shirts.

Gallupe described their early enthusiasm when attending music industry conferences with seminars on how to tour and other tips.

“We’d sit there and listen with notepads and everything. We were really serious at that point too, and we’d come out and think, ‘Hold on a minute, we already toured. This is bullshit,’ ” said Gallupe.

“Sometimes the best way to start out is just to go ahead and do it. And we got better and better. You’re going to go and suck at booking shows, suck at making shirts, suck at playing music, everything of course, but that’s sort of the way we chose to go.”

The band was eventually signed to Vancouver-based Mint Records in 2005. However, they retain much of the do-it-yourself ethos from the early days. According to Gallupe, Mint Records is a “really hands-off label” that lets its artists make music with little interference.

“It’s basically like having another five or six band members whose job it is to every once in a while send an email out or mail your CDs to a radio station and that kind thing.”

Mint didn’t even intervene when the band re-released some of their songs translated into French.

When Grant Lawrence of CBC Radio 3 called them “language geeks” and joked that the next album would be in Chinese, the band called his bluff.

“None of us speak Mandarin or anything like that but we got our friend to translate ‘Dear Confessor’ for us and teach it to us phonetically,” laughed Gallupe.

For the latest album, Immaculate Machine teamed up with well-known producer Colin Stewart. Stewart has produced albums for bands like Hot Hot Heat, Ladyhawk and Black Mountain. Gallupe says Stewart’s style matches his own sense of spontaneity.

“Colin Stewart’s strength as a producer is also like, ‘Just try whatever’ and it’s in a really relaxed environment, and there’s usually something cool that comes out of it,” said Gallupe.

That sense of spontaneity was visible when the band performed at Amigos. At one point, two band members couldn’t help but laugh as Gallupe extended a guitar solo for several minutes. Though it was clearly not planned, everyone played along happily.

The hour-long set got the audience dancing, especially when former Saskatoon resident Wilken challenged the crowd to show off their moves. The band appeared to be having fun as well, and Gallupe acknowledged that the band loves touring. While they all get along, Gallupe did have a mysterious bruise on his arm, which he had trouble explaining away.

“Maybe someone’s beating me in my sleep,” he said with a smile. “That’s how we get our aggression out. To keep enjoying the tours we start unconsciously beating each other.”

“I’m hoping that people learn to be more critical about what the Canadian government and Canadian institutions do around the world,” said the Montreal-based writer and activist. “I’m hoping to spur increased interest in Canadian foreign policy.”

Engler’s third book, The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy, recounts the many instances when Canada fell short of its peaceful image abroad. Engler presented his findings at the Frances Morrison Library on June 16, as part of a cross-country book tour.

Some of the surprising — and sometimes shocking — charges in the book include Canada’s failed attempt to establish colonies in the Caribbean after World War One, tacit support for the apartheid regime of South Africa and helping to establish the brutal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile.

Perhaps most daringly, Engler also asserts that former Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson may be considered a war criminal for his diplomatic role during the Vietnam War. Pearson — who is the father of Canada’s peacekeeping image — is remembered as being against the Vietnam War but Engler believes his slight disagreement about the conduct of the war has been mythologized into an anti-war view Pearson did not actually hold.

“If you take courses in Canadian university about foreign policy, you don’t, in my opinion, get a very good understanding about the true history of Canada’s role in the world.”

Engler’s presentation was followed by questions from the audience. Although the crowd was largely sympathetic to his information, one woman questioned whether Engler wasn’t presenting a very one-sided perspective of Canadian actions abroad.

Engler, however, emphasized that Ottawa has consistently “sided with empire,” be it with British or American aims. Yet, instances when Canada’s policies diverged from its allies are exaggerated in order to maintain the self-image Canadians have of their country.

He says there is a “soft nationalism” in schools that is further propagated by the media that assumes an unquestioning look at Canada’s actions internationally.

“I think it’s obviously systemic in that basically all powerful institutions support the mythology in one way or another.”

Engler was once as woefully ignorant of Canada’s foreign policy as most people are, thinking Canada too small or insignificant compared to the United States. He grew up in Vancouver and briefly attended Capilano University before moving to Montreal to attend Concordia University, well known for its politically charged atmosphere. It was there Engler’s activism took shape and he served as vice-president of the students’ union.

Ultimately it was events in Haiti that inspired the writing of The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy. In 2004, a struggle erupted between Haiti’s democratically elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide and opposition forces. What ensued next depends on whom you believe. According to Aristide, he was forced from power by the American, French and Canadian governments for a more compliant government. Canadian officials dispute this claim.

“There was just too much evidence that Canadian politicians, police trainers, military, et cetera, knew what they were doing and were choosing to side with the Haitian elites and Washington,” said Engler, who has travelled to Haiti.

“And this was all obviously covered up or justified with high-minded sounding claims. But the reality was a horrible devastation to the most impoverished nation in the hemisphere.”

Dedicated to exposing the truth about Canada’s involvement in Haiti, Engler co-wrote Canada in Haiti: Waging War on the Poor Majority. However, when Engler tried to present his findings to fellow Canadians he was often met with skepticism and incredulity. This led to a more thorough exploration of Canadian foreign policy covered in Engler’s latest book.

The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy attacks almost everything most patriotic Canadians hold sacred, from Canada’s peacekeeping image and standing up to American bullying to foreign aid that supposedly helps the developing world. As for critics who might claim he is unpatriotic or that he hates Canada, Engler has a strong defence.

“I played junior hockey, I’m bilingual and I wrote most of the book at Tim Horton’s. I think that gives me pretty good Canadian credentials.”

With multiple nuanced stories and beautiful illustrations about complex characters dealing with a morally ambiguous world on the brink of nuclear apocalypse, the graphic novel Watchmen re-imagined the whole medium of comics. 

The Watchmen movie is a carbon copy of the source material. With many scenes meticulously recreated from Moore’s epic series down to the last frame, director Zack Snyder slavishly recreates the aesthetic but not the spirit of the graphic novel. Despite moments of beauty in the film, it is an overhyped and unimaginative effort by a director too enamoured with special effects to do the story justice.

The film is set in a dark age. It is the mid-1980s, Richard Nixon is serving his fourth or fifth term as president and a nuclear showdown with the Soviet Union seems iminent. Congress has outlawed masked crime fighters, once influential fixtures in America, after public outrage erupted against vigilantism. Now mostly retired, the former “masks” are brought together again after their fellow crime fighter Comedian is murdered.

The characters include psychopaths and billionaire industrialists, pudgy ex-heroes struggling with erectile difficulty and a glowing blue scientist who can manipulate matter to his will. That blue man is the frequently nude Dr. Manhattan, the only character with real superpowers.

As the story slowly unravels, each character’s back story is revealed in flashbacks that are interesting but also too indulgent in exploring their histories. Every so often, a fight scene erupts to show off the director’s special effects wizardry and use of gratuitous violence he perfected on his previous film, 300.

As breathtaking as most of these scenes are to behold, they ultimately frustrate moviegoers who see the film — with a running time of two hours and 43 minutes — as they devolve into mindless fight scenes, followed by stiff dialogue interspersed with pseudo-philosophy.

    Eventually the heroes take up their former disguises and try to save the world from nuclear war. Dr. Manhattan, meanwhile, wiles away his time on Mars, with his blue penis gently swaying in tune to the audience’s growing boredom.

Adaptations are a perculiar challenge for filmmakers — either the film perverts the original work or it stays too close to the book and makes for a poor movie. In the case of Watchmen, it is a double offence. In its attempts to stay true to the source material, very little got trimmed from the final product, resulting in a bloated, overproduced movie that is also almost three hours long.

However, the larger themes of Alan Moore’s graphic novel such as morality, authority and heroism are either ignored or turned into cheap gimmicks to progress to the next special effect. And no matter how closely the shots in the movie resemble the frames of the comics, the spirit of the original work was lost.

    Finally, the film may also have come out at the wrong time. After decades of wrangling over which movie studio would produce Watchmen, the Cold War has ended, Nixon has become a distant memory to most people and nuclear war has been supplanted by fears of terrorism. Especially as the movie ends with a thinly veiled jab at Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, it reveals itself as being completely out of touch with the current Zeitgeist.

    Alan Moore washed his hands of Hollywood following the disastrous adaptations of several other of his works and has repeatedly stated his complete disinterest in Watchmen as a movie, saying it was “inherently unfilmable.” Apparently he was correct.

In 1980, famous feminist writer Robin Morgan wrote that “pornography is the theory; rape is the practice.”

This sentiment summarized a common feminist position about pornography. Many feminists believed it to be degrading to women, encouraging rape and violence as well as the domination and humiliation of women.

Although not everyone agrees with this stance, it wasn’t until recently that feminists have developed a renewed interest in pornography.

Largely due to the expansion of the Internet within the last decade, a growing community of largely independent filmmakers has been making feminist porn as an alternative to mainstream productions.

Although feminist porn may sound oxymoronic to some, it simply means women had a part in the writing, production or direction of a film. Feminist porn also needs to depict genuine female pleasure and challenge the normal depictions of sexuality and stereotypes that are found in much of mainstream porn.

“My brand of feminism is pro-healthy sexuality and it’s all about consent,” explained Pam Ashburn, 22, majoring in women’s and gender studies at the U of S.

Ashburn said she first came across feminist porn — and feminism itself — during high school. At the time she had been more familiar with mainstream porn but since discovering an alternative, she has had a different outlook.

“I don’t want to just see the same bodies,” she complained. “You want queer bodies, you want transgender bodies, you want breast-cancer survivors. That’s the kind of stuff you want to see.”

There is widespread frustration against mainstream pornography for being too formulaic, predictable and violent rather than exploring sexuality in different ways.

To fill the void, many feminist pornographers are pursuing subjects that are normally ignored. One such example is Erotic Red, which features menstruating women.

As Erotic Red’s homepage states, “In an industry where photos of women being throat-fucked and pissed on are commonplace portrayals of human sexuality, women enjoying themselves on their periods are viewed by most pornographers as horrifyingly obscene.”

Ashburn admitted that alternative depictions of sexuality are more difficult to find.

“It’s work and you have to dig and it’s worth digging. The quality that you’re going to find in something that is positive — body positive, image positive, everything — is really well worth it.”

Ashburn insisted feminist porn wasn’t simply a quest for political correctness either.

“The terrains of sexuality are complex and I want to queer every aspect,” she said. “That is, I want to complicate what it means to be sexual and ultimately re-define the typical gender roles that are assigned to women and everyone else. I want to take back sexuality.”

Ashburn is not alone in trying to redefine sexuality. To celebrate the positive role women can play in pornography, the Toronto based sex store Good For Her has established the Feminist Porn Awards, given out each spring to filmmakers in categories such as fiercest female orgasm, deliciously diverse cast, and most tantalizing trans film.

“I think that one of the biggest problems with mainstream porn is that it really lacks imagination,” said Allison Lee, Good For Her manager and organizer of the annual awards.

The Feminist Porn Awards have existed since 2006. They came about as a result of ongoing conversations employees at the store were having about all the interesting porn that was being produced. In addition to improving the depiction of women, the awards also wanted to showcase pornography that was not racist.

“In way too much of the porn that I have seen, people of colour are really reduced to these body parts,” said Lee.

Despite the old argument among feminists about pornography, Lee explained the awards had seen relatively little backlash, although some feminist blogs complained that the organizers of the awards were “supporting rape” and other claims.

“Things that are really not true,” said Lee.

The growing amount of feminist porn may have started influencing mainstream filmmakers as well, according to Lee. For example, a female-to-male transsexual porn star named Buck Angel has seen widespread success, winning the trans-sexual performer of the year award in 2007’s AVN awards.

The AVN awards are put on each year by the American porn industry to celebrate over 120 different categories of pornography.

The Feminist Porn Awards, by contrast, only have about a dozen categories. This year’s awards will take place on April 24 at Toronto’s Berkeley Church, which Lee admits is “a little funny,” followed by screenings of different film clips the following day at a movie theatre.

With growing interest in the genre, Lee indicated feminist porn is likely going to continue expanding.

“I think that there is a growing understanding that women, as consumers of pornography, are a growing market,” said Lee.