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First Impressions: Drake’s “God’s Plan”

On Feb. 16, Drake dropped his newest music video, “God’s Plan.” The video, which heavily implies that Drake is, in fact, God, has already gone triple platinum, further proving Mr. Graham’s messianic claims. The McGill Tribune Arts & Entertainment team gives their first impressions on the most controversial Drake video since Creative Director Noah Sutton set “Passionfruit” to jazzercise.

(0:01)

 

Declan Embury: My first reaction is that I have a feeling that the label would be ok with this sweet marketing move.

Gwyneth Boone: Is Drake God here? Is that the point?

Tristan Sparks: Ugh, this is the song that my siblings always listened to in the car this summer.

Ariella Garmaise: No they didn’t, it just came out.

TS: Ok, well it was a different Drake song then.

AG: Tristan, this segment is literally called First Impressions.

(1:33)

 

DE: Why University of Miami? Does he like their football team or something?

Domenic Casciato: Yeah, I was gonna say, why Miami at all?

Dylan Adamson: You mean why not Toronto?

AG: Because all Torontonians go to Miami during the winter.

DA: Haha, Drake goes to Fort Lauderdale to hand out wads of cash to Toronto seniors.

(2:20)

 

GB: I’m confused. Is Drake bringing people to Saks Fifth Avenue to buy them things, or is he buying stuff for people already there? I feel like if you’re at Saks Fifth Avenue already then you don’t need Drake to buy you stuff.

DA: I would love to see Drake giving a rich old white lady a wad of cash.

AG:  My friend Rachel once saw Drake at the Gap. I don’t know what he’s doing at a Sak’s Fifth Avenue now.

(Rachel Harrison, U2 English and History, and Drake at the Gap, 2010)

 

DE: Me and my dad saw Tommy Chong at the Gap.

(Sean Embury, father of Declan Embury, U2 Economics, and Tommy Chong at the Gap, 2010)

 

(The Gap was big for celebrity sightings in 2010).

(3:23)

 

DA: I feel like no one actually knew the words and they had to practice.

DC: Do you think Drake was dancing out there for a while before the crowd came?

GB: This makes me like Drake less.

DC: As an avid Drake-hater this video makes me like him more.

DA: Oh yeah, I love it.

DC: I feel like we should be thanking Lil Wayne, because it’s his label’s money.

DA: I would feel awful if this was coming out of Lil Wayne’s pocket.

(4:49)

 

DC: I still don’t get the dancing on tall places thing.

DA: Oh, that’s just cool.

TS: I like that Drake has gotten the feedback that people don’t like his dancing but still continues to dance anyway. That shows character.

(4:51)

 

DC: Drake’s done this shit before. When he was beefing with Meek Mill there was this school in Philly that Meek Mill always donates to–Drake donated more. And he built a studio at the school, and everyone was like ‘What the fuck?’ It was so students could have rap careers.

(5:26)

 

Selin Altuntur: Well, I certainly didn’t cry.

DC: I liked it but I don’t think Drake should be thanked.

SA: It’s sort of like you left your parents’ house with 100 of their dollars, and then gave it to a bunch of people, and you’re like “you’re welcome” and take credit for it.

DA: My initial response was like, “Drake why are you filming this, cool, you’re a good person,” but it feels weird as a white person to say, oh this is so performative and phony. But also Drake was never broke.

DC: How many times does Drake talk shit about other people for being broke in his music? How many times does he brag about being on the Forbes list? A lot. It’s weird for someone who engages in classism to brag about spending his label’s money.

SA: A lot of rap music videos are just about having money, cars, and champagne. This is giving other people money, cars, and champagne.

AG: Yeah, like subverting that trope.

SA: It sets an interesting precedent that’s like, yeah, I’m flaunting my wealth, but I’m doing it in a generous way.

SA: I think my biggest problem with this video is that it’s called “God’s Plan” and Drake is literally God.

DE:  Overall, definitely not as good as Passionfruit.

DA: It is literally so much better than Passionfruit.

Commentary, Opinion

A never ending news cycle: Responding to coverage of the American president

Since Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the Republican Party’s nomination for U.S. President two and a half years ago, he has dominated headlines worldwide. He generates an immense amount of news coverage, even by presidential standards. This has been accomplished through a careful manipulation of the media. Many people, including myself, have reacted to this by tuning out coverage of the American President. However, this behaviour has serious consequences: It leaves people uninformed, diminishing their ability to participate in political discourse. It also normalizes bigotry, by allowing prejudicial statements made by the President to go unanswered. Instead of tuning out coverage of Trump entirely, Canadians and Americans alike should filter through it, while not allowing it to detract their attention from important issues.

Trump is a master at controlling the news cycle. He redirects political discourse by inviting controversy. He accomplishes this by making hateful, inflammatory, and embarrassing remarks, which serve to keep his name in the headlines. This is magnified by social media users and immediate news notifications on smartphones. As a result, regardless of their political beliefs, anyone with even a minor interest in American politics is inundated with coverage of the White House.

In response to the incessant and entirely predictable coverage of Trump, many people, including myself, have resorted to ignoring it. Recently, I did not follow the story of Trump’s insulting comments on several African countries, as well as Haiti and El Salvador. I read the headlines, but had a limited understanding of what had happened. Upon revisiting the story, I found that I was tuning out coverage of Trump because I was not learning anything new from it. After reading further into Trump’s comments, I still thought of him as racist, insensitive, and someone who regularly draws the ire of media and celebrities.

This Trump effect on news engagement is crucial to recognize, and to work around. Simply opting-out of political journalism has serious repercussions. The fact that Trump’s recent comments on ‘shithole’ countries are no longer novel or surprising is disturbing. It suggests that this type of discourse has become normalized, and can be expected from the President. However, one’s ability to ignore coverage of Trump’s often incendiary comments depends on factors such as, but not limited to, race, sexual orientation, and gender. By attacking groups of people on the basis of their identities, Trump forces them into defending themselves, and often makes them fear for their safety. By contrast, these comments are much easier to ignore if you don’t belong to the group being attacked. These types of remarks also serve as constant distractions from issues like gun control, tax reform, and Russian influence on American elections, all of which deserve attention.

Whether the public’s growing disillusionment with American politics is intentional on Trump’s part or not, it has the effect of discouraging people from remaining informed. Shutting out the news prevents people from being cognizant of how the government policies they choose to support will impact themselves, and others. A few months ago President Trump signed off on the GOP’s Tax Reform Bill, which will increase federal taxes among lower-income Americans, despite having campaigned on the opposite. Ignoring political news also prevents people from holding the president accountable, and enables him to control the direction of political discourse. In this way, people tuning out of political journalism weakens them as political agents.

Anticipated Russian meddling in the upcoming U.S. midterm elections in November, and the recent mass-shooting in Parkland, Florida illustrate that events require being informed as much as ever. Otherwise, control over political discourse rests in the hands of politicians, instead of journalists and citizens. Following the massacre at Stoneman Douglas High School, Republican lawmakers have attempted to shift the American public away from a conversation about gun control laws and toward one on mental illness. This is not only a harmful suggestion that mental illness is a precursor to violence, but also a manipulative change of the topic to forestall action on gun control. This illustrates the need to filter through the noise of the constant White House news cycle. While the sheer volume of Trump media coverage has made this more difficult, it is a necessary step for any interested in holding politicians accountable.

 

Alex is a U1 Economics student at McGill

 

Art, Arts & Entertainment

Life Before Digital captures the day to day life of a bygone era

Life Before Digital, on display at the McCord Museum, is a collection by Montreal photographer Michel Campeau. Composed of film photography created between 2015 to 2017, the collection comprises colour and silver-print photographs of a time before the digital era.

Campeau, who studied photography at Concordia University, gained notoriety for his work in 2005 for photographs of darkrooms as a reaction to the switch to digital in the field. Life Before Digital showcases Campeau’s marked interest in developing a subjective narrative in his work; Campeau purchased anonymous amateur photography from eBay to develop part of the collection. While he recognizes the positive changes that have come with the evolution to the digital medium, Campeau also wanted to cast a retrospective eye over the film photography he has practiced for the last four decades.

One of the most striking series in the collection, “Desired Instants,” compiles anonymous amateur photography from the 1950s to explore why individuals choose to take the photographs they do. Although the photographers belong to diverse nationalities and cultures, their work is joined by a motif of human subjects. In one piece, a skinny young boy stands beside his father, both clutching their cameras. The authentic feel of the photograph—the house plants in white vintage vases occupying the peripheries of the image, the knee length socks and pulled back hair—adds a dimension of realism that cannot be recreated today.

Adjacent to “Desired Instants,” the viewer encounters “Industrial Splendour and Fetishism,” a series featuring black room portraits of old cameras. The series sheds light on the often bulky material devices used in photography and, in setting them against negative space, renders the machines into curious art objects.

“I became enthralled by all the material elements of which cameras are composed: Screws, springs, shutters, bellows, cases, letters, [and] numbers,” Campeau said while giving a tour of the space. “These objects [serve as] anthropological memoirs of the culture [at the time].”

The series “In the Darkroom” underscores Campeau’s interest in capturing creative spaces. It features interiors of darkrooms from all over the world that Campeau himself captured during the 2000s. In Brussels (2009), newly developed photographs are hung out to dry on a clothesline. Even within the restricted domain of the darkroom, Campeau is able to create strong compositions. In an untitled piece from the collection of Robert Graham, two framed photos are cramped on a shelf stocked with film equipment: One a portrait, and the other a black-and-white shot of two pairs of human feet. Bringing together fragments of the body imbues the photograph with a surreal humanity.

The most extensive series on display documents the life of Rudolph Edse, a German scientist who immigrated to the U.S., through his photographic archive. The coloured snapshots, in which Edse captures the faces and the activities of his family, also appear in Campeau’s new book, “Rudolph Edse: An Unintentional Autobiography.”

Compiling family photographs has been an intimate experience for Campeau.

“The family book is a construction of the memories of a family,” Campeau said. “They don’t belong to one person. In fact, in going through these pictures, even though I had never met [their family], I felt like I was part of [them]. I saw myself in them.”

Life Before Digital runs at the McCord Museum (690 Sherbrooke Street West) until May 6, 2018. 

Art, Arts & Entertainment

Créer pour s’Aimer offers a platform for the margins of Montreal’s artistic community

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ (MMFA) Créer pour s’Aimer is an exhibition defined by its name (Creating to Love Oneself). The exhibition displays the work of individuals in an art therapy program called Les Impatients, through which members of the Montreal community with cognitive disabilities attend workshops and create art in a multitude of mixed media forms. The amateur artists featured in the show are impatient to dismantle the barriers imposed on them through stigma by furthering their artistic abilities. The program uses art to put issues of identity and expression into the participants’ hands.

Basic instruction offered in La Promenade Atelier International d’Éducation et d’Art-Thérapie educates participants on artistic technique and rendering the human form. In addition to more free association style drawing and painting practices, members of Les Impatients derive inspiration from pieces in the MMFA’s collection or work from canonized artists such as Marc Chagall. Interpretations of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s Marcelle Lender doing the Bolero in ‘Chilperic’ (1895), line one of the walls of the gallery, conveying a fascination with the dancer’s elegant pose.

The exhibition’s works take the human body and breaks it into parts—including sculptures of hands, heads, and facial portraiture. There is a sense of both composition and decomposition to the plaster molds, allowing participants to approach their own identities by analyzing features that render them no different than members of broader society despite their cognitive disabilities. Les Mains de l’Espoir captures sculptural hands in various positions and offers a sense of ambiguity; they are the hands of hope actively grasping for a sense of personal understanding, while at the same time highlighting their entrapment within the gallery walls. Les Têtes Imaginent, a series of unpainted clay heads and busts, references the ability to transcend social or personal restrictions in the imaginative realm.

Other elements of the exhibition are more playful: A life-sized human sculpture uses paper paintings to form the ruffles of her dress; portraiture in the gallery captures moments of humor by layering drawings on transparent paper on bright backgrounds. The tension between non-professional art and the MMFA’s professional environment introduces a more accessible element to the art community, in which gallery spaces are not simply limited to established artists, but have increasingly become a venue for artist-to-viewer dialogues in a less traditional sense.

Créer pour s’Aimer is an artistic experience that uses art’s ability to convey thoughts, feelings, and visual perceptions of self through methods as simple as picking up a pencil. As an Impatient, self-expression is charged in a way often not understood by people who are not disabled. Rather than simply carrying the weight of personal perception, one must also contend with the identity inscribed upon them by a society with seemingly endless opinions on what individuals with disabilities are and are not capable of. In collaboration with the MMFA and numerous volunteers and instructors, Les Impatients have the opportunity to shed stereotypes of limitations through the creative process.

Créer pour s’Aimer is on display at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts until April 1.

Sports

McGill synchronized swimming hosts Nationals send-off

On Feb. 13, the McGill varsity synchronized swimming team hosted their annual McGill Synchro Water Show, showcasing the team’s routines before they headed off to perform at the CUSSL National Championships at Brock University from Feb. 16 to 18. In addition to providing a platform for the team’s solo, duet, and team performances, the show also featured performances from Dollard Synchro, a synchronized swimming club in Dollard des Ormeaux, Quebec.

McGill Head Coach Lindsay Duncan explained that although the swimmers usually perform their routines after Nationals—once the pressure is off—they decided to hold the show earlier this year to raise more awareness for the team.

“This was meant to be a really good opportunity for the girls to practice in front of an audience with just about as much warm-up as they would at the competition, and to […] swim in a situation where it matters,” Duncan said. “We are challenged because [McGill’s] pool has a shallow end and so we can’t host big competitions here [….] So, having a water show at this time of year is a really good opportunity to show our community because we never do have the opportunity to be on campus at the peak of the season.”

The event featured solo performances by second-year Gabrielle Cadotte, second-year Melissa Freed, fifth-year Stacy Lee, and third-year Flordespina Dodds.

For Lee, the event served as an opportunity to get a bit more practice with new routines before performing them at Nationals.

“We usually start [preparing for our solos] at the beginning of the season in September and practice once a week,” Lee said. “[But] I only started working on [my routine] about four weeks ago.”

Duet performances featured third-year McGill Synchro pair Baylie Daghofer-Hawes with Dodds, and fourth-year pair Mathilde Warren with Manon Chiorri—who had spent only three weeks practicing their routine. The Dollard Synchro Masters also participated.

The first team to perform was the expert-level Red team, who have been training individually since September, but only together since January. Then came the novice team, who placed second at the CUSSL Eastern Canadian Meet on Feb. 3 and 4, an impressive feat considering that half of their team had little to no experience in synchronized swimming before this season. At the end of the night, the expert-level Jailbreakers team performed—with six of the eight girls on the team returning from previous years.

For second-year Red team swimmer Anita Paparelli, the Water Show also served as a valuable final practice before heading off to Nationals.

“Every team worked hard these two last weeks after Easterns,” Paparelli said. “[Red Team] sort of learned our weaknesses from the last competition, with the stress, the rush, the pressure and everything and so we tried to really focus on these the last few practices [….] I can’t wait to see all the incredible routines.”

 

Moment of the Show
McGill’s expert Jailbreakers team perfectly executed two boosts, one of which included a full backward flip, and the other a two-person front dive.

Quotable
“[The show] was good to practice in front of a crowd and get rid of some nerves and a fun way to get excited for Nationals.” – Second-year Baylie Daghofer-Hawes.

Stat Corner
Experienced synchronized swimmers can swim underwater for 50 metres—the length of an Olympic-sized swimming pool—without coming up for air.

Creative, Student Life

Tessa Battistin: Pursuing Sustainable Entrepreneurship After Graduating

Tessa Battistin talks to the McGill Tribune about her experience pursuing sustainable and creative entrepreneurship coming out of McGill. Her silk-screening business, Asset Designs, produces tote bags carrying prints of her art and poetry. After graduating from McGill with a Bachelor of Arts in 2017, she founded the sustainable fashion brand Asset Designs, based in Montreal.

In this video, Battistan gives personal insight on the pursuing daunting exploit that is starting your own business right after graduating university.

Co-Produced and Edited by Bilal Virji
Co-Produced by Marie Labrosse

To learn more about Asset Designs and ethically-sourced clothing, check out Battistin’s own clothing swap and documentary screening at Maison Notman House on Feb. 22.

Student Life

It’s cuffing season: Is getting into a relationship really the best way to survive the cold?

It’s over a month into second semester, and everybody knows what that means: “Cuffing season” has been in full swing for a while now. That time of the year when singles are more inclined to dive into comforting, albeit often temporary, relationships to keep warm during the cold months is alive and well at McGill.

The term “cuffing season” comes from the older concept of “hunter-gatherer seasons,” during which individuals would pair up during the colder months to increase their chances of survival and ability to reproduce. In fact, more babies are born in late summer, which would indicate an increase in sexual activity during the beginning of cuffing season, in October and November, when the weather begins to get colder. The term was perhaps officially coined in rapper Fabolous’ song, “Cuffin’ Season”, popularizing the term in 2014. 

For many, cuffing season is always at the top of their mind, as the colder it gets, the more they long for someone to be there to warm them up. However, for others, the concept of cuffing season is unfamiliar and confusing. Scott Nevison, U3 Arts, is an Australian exchange student who, before arriving at McGill, had never been exposed to cuffing culture. Australia’s temperature tends to stay above zero degrees, so the need for a relationship during some seasons over others does not exist.

“Seeing as it’s so bleak going outside, I guess it’s pragmatic,” Nevison said. “I can see the value in being cuffed during the winter here because people tend to socialize by drinking, and in the winter, people tend to drink all the time, which is exhaustive because this weather is so draining, it’s always dark and cold [….In the] summer I wouldn’t want to be cuffed because there’s a lot to do. Festivals, day drinking, day events, parties. It seems almost more responsible to keep yourself tamed and cuffed during winter.”

For those hoping to get cuffed, this is an exciting time of the year. In the midst of winter, a cuff may serve as a nice excuse to stay in, drink some hot chocolate, and Netflix and chill. A currently-cuffed student, Gabrielle Martin, U3 Management, has enjoyed the perks of her relationship status this winter season.

“In the winter it’s so nice because you can just cuddle up with them and get some warmth,” Martin said.

While this may sound like the best solution to a frigid winter, Martin believes that one doesn’t need to be in a relationship to stay warm this winter.

“[Cuffing season] is overrated,” Martin said. “The best part of cuffing is cuddling and you can do that with friends or family.”

So, if cuddling is the only benefit to being cuffed during cuffing season, it’s easy to grab a friend or a pet instead, and avoid the FOMO of having a wintertime cuff. But for those who find little satisfaction in cuddling, like Martin Mei, U3 Management, this time is better spent in other ways.

“There’s just so much else in life that I can do with my time, such as work, save money, build up my resume, or build up connections for a kick-start on my professional career,” Mei justified. “I’d rather spend time seeing more people than spending all of my free time with one person.”

Additionally, being cuffed during cuffing season makes it easy to end up isolating oneself from Montreal’s winter social life. When there’s a warm bed and warm body to keep you company during the cold, the appeal of spending time with friends and going out is reduced. To Felix Larouche, U3 Science, this is one major flaw to the season.

“Cuffing season limits opportunities to go out and meet new people,” Larouche said. “I prefer not being cuffed, because one of my friends is cuffed and he doesn’t seem to do anything fun anymore. He tends to now spend most of his time with his cuff. He’s not for the boys.

If students are feeling cold and lonely during these snowy months, they should try taking a page out of Mei’s book and keeping extra busy by spending time with friends and focusing on work. Soon enough, once the weather finally warms up, cuffing season won’t even be a flicker of a thought and un-cuffed students will be glad they don’t have to suffer through the infamous “What are we?” talk.

Science & Technology

AI company is developing technologies to improve healthcare

On Feb. 8, Anthony Phalen, a strategic partner development manager at the company DeepMind came to McGill to present a talk on Deep Learning (DL), as part of SUS Academia Week 2018. DeepMind is a London-based artificial intelligence (AI) company with a research centre located in Montreal. The company was acquired by Google-parent Alphabet in 2014, and Phalen started off the talk by presenting DeepMind’s mandate.

“DeepMind is focused on two things, [solving] intelligence and [applying] AI to real world problems,” Phalen said. “[Solving intelligence] means to design general artificial intelligence algorithms [that] are capable of learning from raw experience data and perform well on [many] tasks just like humans can.”

DL focuses on learning data representations, and operates as a virtual brain within a computer.

“Deep Learning is a crude representation of the human brain,” Phalen said. “It is essentially an input layer and an output layer, and a hidden layer [in between]. Each of these layers has nodes or neurons, [they represent] different mathematical formulas. Deep Learning is essentially a pattern recognition.”

An example of DL is facial recognition on mobile devices. Many phones nowadays are able to associate facial images with the person they belong to. Even under tricky lighting, these technologies can still recognize the individual. For a phone to recognize one’s face through DL, one must provide multiple photos of a particular face.

As intriguing as DL is, DeepMind is better known for another type of learning in AI: Reinforcement Learning (RL). Unlike DL, RL enables AI to learn from scratch without human guidance.

“It is simply given a goal,” Phalen said. “Put this in a [learning] environment and [let it take] actions to reach that goal.”

An example of this type of environment is the game Brick-Breaker, which former iPod Nano and Video users might remember fondly from the earlier 2000s. Players slide the click wheel left and right to move a platform to avoid the ball from flying off the bottom of the screen. To pass the game, players must destroy all the stacked bricks, with the ball bouncing off the platform faster and faster with every bounce. Using RL, the AI plays the game on its own. In the first hundred rounds, it struggles. But at some point, it will achieve a superhuman level of performance that is learned. The amazing fact about the algorithm of reinforcement learning designed by DeepMind is that a single algorithm could be used on a hundred different arcades with disparate set of rules; it achieved a superhuman playing level on 80 different games.

RL has crucial importance in the development of AI. Through RL, AI is able to come up with never-before-considered solutions to problem-solving, just as it had achieved a superhuman performance in Brick-Breaker through adopting novel gaming strategies.

“Artificial Intelligence could potentially be useful for real world application [because it could] come up with novel ways to [tackle a problem],” Phalen said.

For example, according to Phalen, AI equipped with RL in the healthcare system may benefit patients and physicians. DeepMind has been collaborating with the National Health Service, based in London, United Kingdom, since 2016, and their team goals are threefold, focused on enhancing experience and minimizing costs.

“[We’re interested in] delivering better clinical outcome for patients, better clinician-patient experience and reducing the cost for the healthcare system,” Phalen said.

There are several issues inherent to virtually every model of healthcare. First, physician burnout is a ubiquitous problem that is seen in public healthcare systems all over the world. Physicians oversee too many patients per day, and there often aren’t enough of them to do properly address patients’ concerns.

“[Burnout] is a problem [that] technology can potentially help solve,” Phalen said. Another problem prevalent in healthcare is the failure to integrate recent technological developments in hospitals. Although governments have spent much on upgrading computers, physicians still resort to using pagers and fax machines to communicate with one another. DeepMind believes that AI using an RL algorithm could offer medical staff more user-friendly applications that would allow them to communicate more quickly with one another.

Features

Softboys

If you ask someone what a “softboy” is, they either know exactly what you mean, or they have no idea.

 

When I asked Dylan Adamson,  U2 Cultural Studies, to define the term, he rattled off a list of weirdly specific, seemingly unrelated qualities.

 

“He talks about feminism a lot,” Adamson said. “He’ll recommend you bands. He’s an active SoundCloud user. He doesn’t say movie, he always says film.”

 

Yet I found myself nodding along to each example, because I know that guy. He’s in my philosophy class. He was on my floor in residence. He’s such a softboy.

 

I felt the same way reading the Medium piece, “Have You Encountered the Softboy?” by Alan Hanson. Sparse yet laser-specific, it describes a young guy who is similar to the better-known “fuckboy,” but not quite identical. He “is Nice yet Complicated,” “orders cheap beer backed with bottom-shelf whiskey,” and “may be named Tom. Or Phillip.” Again, I know that guy. Yes, I have encountered the softboy.

 

When I reached out to Anthony Synnott, sociology and anthropology professor at Concordia University and author of Rethinking Men: Heroes, Victims, Villains, to ask about the term, he’d never heard of it, so I forwarded Hanson’s piece to him. When we spoke on the phone, he couldn’t help but laugh about the article.

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