"Recasting Robots: The Place to See and be Seen"

Artist Nick Alex stands by his central piece Friday.

 

On Friday, July 12, at the Catamount Arts centre in St. Johnsbury, crowds filled the hall to study and admire the artwork of two local artists. What they didn't understand until later was that the art was also studying them.

Nick Alex debuted his art show "Recasting Robots" on Friday, filling the hall with dystopian, steampunk renderings of the many ways in which we are constantly monitored. The overarching theme of Alex's work is a critique of the Foucauldian, Big Brother world in which we live now. With a background in sociology and criminal justice, Alex is more than qualified to comment upon the topic.

Alex's central piece was a carousel inverted to form a panopticon, a structure originally designed for prisons by Michel Foucault to replace the system of corporal punishment. A panopticon places the prisoners in a circle surrounding a guard tower with blackened windows so that the prisoner is never certain whether he is being watched. Theoretically, the prisoner is therefore more likely to self-monitor his own behaviour.

"[It's a] complex metaphor of how society functions," the artist explained as people gathered around his main exhibit. On it were photographs of people riding the carousel inverted around a metal hub reflecting flashing lights. What caught the eye was the way Alex took a carousel, something people associate with lighthearted fun, and turned it into a striking commentary on the state of society and the government's involvement in the private lives of its citizens.

Nick Alex could not have read the political climate better when timing the debut of "Recasting Robots." Governmental monitoring and heavier involvement in civilian and private sector affairs is a hot topic these days for voters and politicians alike. Alex's commentary added to the nationwide conversation in an intelligent, quiet, and sophisticated way.

When Alex was asked what he plans to do with "Recasting Robots" and his art career in general, his answer was a very open-ended "Who knows?" We look forward to seeing what's next.

March Madness in Lennoxville: Curling Club Goes Pie Crazy

Curlers compete in the Mens' Invitational Bonspiel

(Lennoxville) - The 81st Lennoxville Mens' Bonspiel, affectionately referred to as the Pie Bonspiel, is in full swing.

The matches started at 10 a.m. on St. Patrick's Day with 52 teams registered to play and will go throughout the week. There will be senior matches during the day and all day on Friday.

The bonspiel will be spread out among the ice in Sherbrooke and North Hatley as well as the Lennoxville Curling Club, as each team is guaranteed three matches with the price of admission. Five trophies, named after donors, will be awarded at the end of the bonspiel: the Nichol Family Trophy, the Mooney Family Trophy, the Global Excel trophy, the Ultramar award, and the Clarke et Fils trophy.

Jim Stone, the second for the Whittier team, isn't curling until Wednesday evening, so he had some time to tell us about the bonspiel. He has curled in this event for ten years. "My favourite part is getting to meet new people," he says, watching the ice. "The pie is a very close second."

Oh yes, the pie. One of the major draws to participate in the Mens' Invitational has always been the celebration at the end: all-you-can-eat homemade pie. It has become a second competition of sorts throughout the years. Stone's personal record is five pieces, although a few years ago, the club record was broken and reset to 14 pieces.

Spectators are more than welcome to watch the curling all this week at the Lennoxville Curling Club and the rinks at Sherbrooke and North Hatley. Unfortunately, the pie event is only open to curlers. Good luck, gentlemen!

Booking it to Belize: Hiding from Winter in Paradise

A sunny day in San Pedro

 

Nobody smiles in February. Cop to it. The only time I ever smiled in February was when I saw someone snowshoe right into their own car. February is mostly just slush. Things start to get a little better in March, when hope starts to break through the grey and give us spring, but the last leg of winter is just there as a test of human patience.

So it's usually around this time of year that I make like a bird and migrate south. My family has a condo in San Pedro, Belize and it's the perfect place to hide and wait out the slush.

Belize is a third world country with a population of roughly 357,000. Located next to Mexico, the mainland is beautiful and lush, exploding with jungles and humidity.

San Pedro is on a little island called Ambergris Caye, which is off the coast of mainland Belize, about a twenty-minute flight in a propeller plane. (Belize fun fact number one: Ambergris is a waxlike substance found in the intestine of a sperm whale. It's used in the manufacturing of perfume.) It's an adventure town and about the only place on the Caye, unless you count the jungle.

Belize fun fact number two: Madonna's song "La Isla Bonita" was written about San Pedro, and it's easy to see why. It rains once a day for about a half an hour, but apart from that, the sky is this perfect, deep Prussian blue. It looks like china, like a cloud would break it. The sunlight is effusive by the Equator. You can actually feel it soaking into your skin. (For a pale blonde, that's not necessarily a plus.)

There are blossoms everywhere. The air is heavy and laden with the scent of pinks and hibiscus. It's slow, heady, prelapsarian. The Atlantic ocean is as warm as a bath and the blue-green of something prehistoric and ancestral. It's easy to feel like you might be just about to bloom with the rest of the flowers.

San Pedro is ultimately an adventurer's town, though. About the only sport you can't take up there is cross-country skiing. There's a Jet-Ski rental on the dock about thirty feet from our apartment. Those things can get up to 80 kilometres an hour. Nothing beats cresting the shining waves over the barrier reef on a Jet-Ski with a full tank, knowing you could take it around the island twice and be home for dinner. If you cut the engine and drift, you'll see manta rays the size of tables rippling lazily around the coral.

If under the water is more your speed, you can try SNUBA diving. It's like scuba diving, but rather than carrying the air tanks on your back, they float on top of the water in a raft, and you breathe through a hose. You don't need a scuba certification, either. It's amazing to see all the colours of the reef and the tropical marine life. I chased a sea turtle the first time I went down.

Next time I go, I want to try cave tubing. It's a slow journey through the damp caves of the Belizean jungle in an inner tube, and it sounds glorious.

Belize fun fact number three: It's a Commonwealth Realm, just like us. A picture of the beautiful, younger Queen Elizabeth II adorns their currency. It's a friendly, welcoming, and fun place to lose yourself for a while, especially in the dusk of pre-spring weather. I can't wait to go back.

Lennoxville Curling Club Juniors to compete in Jeux de Quebec

 

(Lennoxville) - On March 5, at 7 a.m., nine boys and girls from Lennoxville and their parents will board a bus headed for Saguenay, where they will curl for five days straight, sleeping in classrooms and gym floors surrounded by teams from all around the province.

These nine players make up the Junior Boys and Girls curling league of the Lennoxville Curling Club, who are excited to play in the Jeux de Quebec this March.

21 sports will be represented at the Jeux, with approximately 3,000 competitors 15 years old or younger, says junior program coordinator and girls' coach Judith Cassidy. "It's a well-organised event," she goes on. 75,000 spectators, including parents and coaches, are expected.

Girls' skip Meaghan Rivett says her team will "definitely" be trying for the top 10, while the boys are "hoping for the top 8," according to boys' skip Andy Porter.

While some of the players have played in the Jeux de Quebec before, for most of the Lennoxville group, this is their first time at the competition. "[We're] excited," boys' lead Aaron Charron says.

The boys will be competing against 15 other curling clubs, while the girls will be facing 13 rivals.

We wish the Lennoxville Curling Club Juniors good luck in Saguenay. We'll be catching up with them when they get home.

The Bishop's University Chamber Orchestra is back!

The orchestra will perform at Bandeen Hall.

The Bishop's University Chamber Orchestra has risen from the ashes.

In 2003, the Bishop's music department started the orchestra with direction from professor Andrew MacDonald. However, MacDonald had to give up conducting to work on a composition of his own, and after a few years, the chamber orchestra found itself too low on string players to continue.

"After a break of several years, I'm delighted to return to developing the chamber orchestra at Bishop's," MacDonald says. "We have a really good core of string players and we're very excited about the repertoire we're working on."

The orchestra is still looking for players, especially for the string section. Right now, the orchestra consists of 17 players altogether, including woodwinds and strings. MacDonald is aiming for 25 players for the final concert in April. "Strings sound wonderful in Bandeen Hall," MacDonald says of the chamber's acoustics.

MacDonald would like to welcome players of all ages, whether in attendance at Bishop's or residents of the surrounding community, to rehearse with the orchestra and take part. He describes the chamber orchestra as "good community music-making" and encourages anyone with an instrument to come try it out.

The Chamber Orchestra will make its second debut in concert on April 7 at 3 p.m.. They will play selections from Holst, Grieg, Respeghi, and Mozart. "I've always wanted to perform this music," MacDonald tells us, looking happy to be back up at the stand. "We're going to put on a fantastic concert."

Anyone wishing to join the chamber orchestra should contact Dr. Andrew MacDonald at amcdona@ubishops.ca.

By the end of the interview, he'd convinced me to dust off my violin and get back on stage. We hope to see you too!

Bianca Letarte, the Lone Wolf Goalie, on Stopping Pucks

The Bishop's University Polar Bears prepare to compete at Fredericton.

 Letarte centre.

 You can see how important hockey is to Bianca Letarte every time she turns around: the back of her neck is tattooed with a red stop sign with the word 'puck' in all caps. She definitely stops pucks.

The 21-year-old Sherbrooke native is the only goalie of the Bishop's University women's ice hockey team, the Polar Bears. She has played for the Bears for four years, although she has attended Champlain College for three. The Bears have worked hard this season to find the back of the net, struggling with scoring, but have put up a good fight in the Maritime Intercollegiate Women's Ice Hockey league tournaments. Letarte sat down with us and described her passion for the sport.

Letarte started playing hockey at five years old. "I started really young," she tells us with a smile. She started as a forward, but a year later discovered her true passion in the net. Her father played hockey throughout her childhood and she remembers watching his games. She traces her interest in the sport originally back to her father, but she pinpoints the 1996 Winter Olympics as the moment she decided to start playing herself. Goalie Manon Rheaume's silver medal "really made an impression", she recalls.

Even though the Bears practice Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays at 6 a.m., Letarte says that her favourite part of the sport is the training. She loves the "dedication and work ethic" of her teammates and the feeling of improvement, which doesn't come through in a game situation.

Letarte takes us deeper into the mindset of a goalie come game-time. "It's different when you're a goalie," she says, describing herself as a bit of a lone wolf. "It really is a mental game." Letarte's pre-game ritual consists of warming up with her team and then going off by herself to listen to some music. If her team loses the game, she switches up her routine by removing her right pads before her left. "When I was younger, I used to talk to my [goal] posts," she adds with a laugh. "I stopped doing that, though."

Those who have been following the Polar Bears might remember the nine mid-season games during which the team struggled to score. As frustrating as that was for the offensive players, Letarte gives us a different perspective. "I actually like it," she admits. She prefers to have lots of shots to block because it helps her stay focused and "in the zone". If she doesn't have pucks to stop, she can be easily distracted.

The Polar Bears will be headed for Fredericton, New Brunswick on Friday for another Maritime Intercollegiate Women's Ice Hockey League tournament. Letarte says the four member teams are evenly matched. "If everybody plays the game as it should be played, we can win," she says optimistically. "No doubt about it."

So, enough about the Polar Bears. What will Bianca Letarte do next? She outlined her teenage years as background. She was educated at Castleton, Vermont until she finished high school, when she was recruited to be on the Castleton team at the university but couldn't join due to financial complications. After completing high school, she applied to Bishop's University, although she was not accepted, and decided to go to CEGEP instead at Champlain College. When she graduates with a certificate in social science, Letarte plans to apply again to Bishop's and get in this time. Social science is not her passion; she hopes to pursue fine arts at university.

Bianca Letarte cannot leave the ice behind. She plans to stay in the net for a long time. Good luck to the Polar Bears in Fredericton and good luck to Bianca Letarte, wherever she ends up and whatever she decides to do. Whatever the future holds, the past has shown us that she is great at stopping pucks.

What Would You Have Done?!: Chris Fleming on Gayle

On the set of his popular YouTube sitcom Gayle, Chris Fleming plays a housewife who might have been sane three mid-life crises ago, but that's over now. Gayle Waters-Waters is, among other things, the mother of sensible Terry Gross Waters-Waters, the secretary of Mothers Against Road Head, a partner and owner of Meet Me in Hell Croutons, and a devout stalker of Dr. Bruce, orthodontist-slash-sex-symbol. Gayle snorts a line of Total cereal in the morning and wouldn't be able to stand the public humiliation of taking two trips into the house with her groceries. She hates her husband's legs so much that the camera has never seen his face, focusing on his khaki-clad "milky whites".

However, off the set, Chris is a soft-spoken tutor who has done stand-up comedy in his spare time since high school. His comedy took off when a friend posted a video on popular news and sharing site Reddit. Chris gave us some time in between filming Episode 22 to tell us about himself and his tramp-stamped, couscous-loving alter ego.

We had to know: how on earth does one come up with a character like Gayle? According to Chris, all you have to do is observe people. He tells us that Gayle was inspired by women in his Massachusetts hometown, especially one particular specimen he observed at a Crate and Barrel four years ago.

Chris walked us through a day on the set of Gayle, which is filmed at his childhood home. "By the end of each day I’ve acquired some kind of injury, 'cause I insist on doing stunts," he says, and viewers can vouch for this. Gayle is known for emotional outbursts involving theft, broken glass, and ham. "In one episode I dropkicked a mailbox twice and could barely walk after 'cause I landed so hard on my hip," he adds. However, with a lot of ice kept on set, Chris says shooting is "super fun". "[By this point] we all have a really good foundation of who our characters are, so people just flow right into the scenes."

To add to the hilarity, Gayle's best friend/worst enemy Bonnie is played by Chris's real-life mother. When Chris asked her to be part of the show, "she said okay, but that her name couldn’t be Bonnie, because she has a friend named Bonnie and felt that she would be insulted." Chris adds that his mother's friend is nothing at all like Gayle's Bonnie, but that he insisted on naming the character after her because he wanted to say "You calling me a liar, Bonnie?!"

The fast-paced show is almost Monty Python-esque in its cross-dressing, flagrantly outrageous humour. Gayle's husband is timid and soft-voiced, preferring bird-watching to Gayle's fearless, stop-at-nothing attitude. Dave is the perfect "straight man" foil to Gayle's antics, and yet he has his own flavour of neurosis, stealing his wife's November fleece to watch her go ballistic. The two are at loggerheads for much of the series, but we see a certain affection between them at the end of the Christmas special, when Gayle steals every pair of khakis in Talbots for her husband's gift.

Gayle has already been the subject of critical acclaim. Forbes Magazine decrees that "no major studio has created a stranger, more adeptly archetypal and consistently funnier character than Gayle Waters-Waters." The Huffington Post is confident that the weird among us will "fall in mad, deep love with Gayle".

This June 28 and 29, Chris will take his act to the stage for the very first time in Boston at the Davis Square Theatre. Tickets are selling for $15 each and can be purchased from a link on Chris's Facebook page. I'm already entering my credit card information. As Gayle would ask, what would you have done?!