Quote of the week:

“By refusing this award, I remain faithful to Quebec, its people, its laws and its future.” —Québécois composer Raymond Lévesque, in an open letter to francophone media, who won’t accept the Governor General’s Award for political reasons.

CKUT vote off

McGill students will have to wait at least until next semester before deciding on the fate of campus/community radio station CKUT. A referendum on whether the station should continue to receive its $4-per-student-per-semester fee was to take place on Thursday, Oct. 27, but last week the Student Society of McGill University (SSMU) passed a motion to postpone it.

According to CKUT’s administrative director Matthew Hodgins, the delay revolves around the question’s clarity. “Almost everyone was in agreement that the question was too vague,” he says. The station, the SSMU and the McGill administration will be meeting between now and Dec. 15 to re-word the question.

Hodgins acknowledges that some students are cynical about the station, who consider it irrelevant to campus life and inaccessible, but calls the charges “a myth.” He points to feedback he’s received from the station’s outreach coordinator and the hundreds of student volunteers at the station.

Some station volunteers, however, are unhappy with entering into negotiations with McGill, which they feel should be entirely hands-off the station. A town-hall-style meeting for volunteers is planned for early November. —Patrick Lejtenyi

Green ideas goes local

City hall and Montreal’s public health directorate are giving Côte-Saint-Paul, Sainte-Marie and Saint-Michel $56,000 each to put towards environmental makeovers. The money, approved last week, comes via Quartiers 21, a new sustainable development strategy of city hall. Twelve organizations across the city applied to take part in the project and three were selected.

The idea, stemming from the 1992 UN Rio Earth Summit, is to hand control of sustainable development initiatives over to the little people. Plans developed by community-based organizations will, the thinking goes, be more responsive to a neighbourhood’s needs than those conceived at city hall and applied top-down.

“We’ve designed projects that will be transferable to other neighbourhoods in the future,” says Yves Lévesque of Vivre Saint-Michel en Santé, a community organization and one of the chosen groups.

Citizen participation will itself be a goal, says Lévesque, as community members beautify parks, streets and allies and tackle safety issues.

Among the activities planned in the other neighbourhoods is the planting of 1,000 trees in Saint-Marie and home-energy efficiency education and community composting in Côte-Saint-Paul.

» Marc Apollonio

Winterizing Cinema V

The dream of rejuvenating the dilapidated Cinema V might be as unique and delicate as a snowflake. But unless some work is done pronto, those same little snowy buggers could dash hopes of a springtime regeneration of the once-abandoned cultural landmark. So efforts are underway to raise $70,000 to fix a bunch of drainpipes and complete a variety of other tasks.

“We want to make sure it’s all bundled up for winter,” says Empress Cultural Centre (as the Cinema V is officially known) rep Jodi Michaels. The gang has bagged about a third of that loot and hopes to score more at an “open meeting” Nov. 15 from 7 to 9 p.m. at the venue (5560 Sherbrooke W.).

“The dream is that this amazing hunk of a building will come back to life and that the public will be able to come back again,” says Michaels. “And that it’ll become a community jewel again and that people will be able to use and enjoy this amazing space across from a beautiful park in a neighbourhood full of artists.”

The curious can contact 245-2846 or jodihope@yahoo.com. —Kristian Gravenor

Covert art in public

Prompted by concerns of gentrification and socio-economic change, some Mile-End and St-Henri residents have clandestinely plastered their respective neighbourhoods with spatterings of public art. Dubbed “en-habitation,” the group is composed of roughly 20 anonymous citizens, and has, among other things, hijacked pylons, built instructional gardens and installed train-viewing couches in an attempt to make people more aware of their ever-changing space.

“It’s essentially a gift to the neighbourhood, something that’s not behind a fence or a wall and is open for everyone to see,” says one member, who asked for anonymity, as their work is of dubious legality. “It comes a lot from being a fairly new import to a neighbourhood and realizing that there’s a whole complexity of interactions and histories happening around me, and not really knowing how to act in relation to all of those things.”

The St-Henri portion of en-habitation runs from Oct. 27-30. A walking tour leaves at 3 p.m., Oct. 29 from the Bread Factory (617 St-Rémi). Remainders of the Mile-End exhibit, which officially ended last weekend, will also remain up. For more information, see www.enhabitation.org. —Jason Gondziola

REAR-VIEW MIRROR

12 YEARS AGO THIS WEEK
Oct. 28–Nov. 4, 1993

On the cover: Montreal funk ’n’ rollers Bootsauce, who are about to release their third album, Sleeping Bootie, and whom Chris Yurkiw interviews at Champs on St-Laurent. “We were looking for a spot on St-Laurent where no one would recognize us and bother us,” says guitarist Perry, explaining the location. “Everybody on this strip knows us.”

• Patricia Bush examines the war on pot. “I think intelligence is finally creeping into the debate,” says former NDP MP Jim Fulton, who introduced a pot decriminalization bill before retiring. “The most likely place for pressure to come first is industrial production.” He cites environmental, medical and financial reasons to decriminalize marijuana.

• “Courtney and I both hope she isn’t too interested in rock music,” says Kurt Cobain, of his daughter Frances Bean.

• Former Disney animator and Nightmare Before Christmas creator Tim Burton says working for the corporation was “like being trapped in that TV show The Prisoner, where everybody’s really nice and they smile… but you can’t leave. I was going crazy.”

Angel >> Rosa Parks On Dec. 1, 1955, Rosa Parks made history in Montgomery, Alabama, by refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man. Her arrest helped spark the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, and she became a household name. Beginning with a boycott of the Montgomery bus system—75 per cent of its riders being black—the movement eventually culminated in the repealling of the Jim Crow laws and desegregation. Parks, who died Monday in Detroit at the age of 92, had been politically active prior to the bus incident; after it, the shy 42-year-old seamstress personified black Americans’ fight for equality and dignity in the Deep South.
Insect >> Guns and the people who cherish them In Toronto, that city recorded its 62nd, 63rd and 64th homicides of the year, 44 of them being by firearm, a new city record. It’s estimated half of all gun crimes in Canada are committed with weapons smuggled in from the States, and provincial and federal justice ministers are so fed up they’re thinking about suing U.S. gun manufacturers. They don’t have much of a chance, though: Last week, U.S. President Bush vowed to sign a law that would prohibit lawsuits against gun makers.