The Spriit Lance

Demonstration leads to Oscar reform

Blue and gold are the colors of the University of Windsor.

Bad attitudes traced to Lebel Building

This is one I wrote. The subtle humor is who will Chris Chang go after next in his spirit cleansing campaign? The answer, the School of Visual Arts. The School of Visual Arts and the School of Education were the two departments that were located off campus. The Education building was remote, about 15 minutes away by car, an eternity by foot, and it was located next to a scrap yard. The students in education were rarely noticed except at election time when they made their displeasure known by voting against everyone and everything on the ballot.

The School of Visual Arts fared a bit better in terms of physical segregation. It was a walkable distance from the main campus but just barely so. Once you walked to Lebel from your dorm, you pretty much stayed there. What took place within the walls of Lebel is what I came to term "incestuous thinking" during my student media days. When you spend all your time with people just like you who think just like you, dress just like you, eat just like you, and smoke what you smoke, it becomes hard to accept that people could be both intelligent and hold an opinion different from the group think you live and breath. It's a bit like people who don't speak English very well. Since you had to make little to no effort to speak English well, it seems speaking English is the easiest thing in the world to do. Those that struggle with it seem necessarily dumb. So not only were the art students generally gifted with a talent few in the mainstream have or can understand, but their cloistered day-to-day existence lead to a certain disconnect from the mainstream. This disconnect made the Lebel students seem arrogant and elitist (but not arrogant and elitist in the way the mainstream understands and grudgingly accepts i.e. people with a lot of stinking money).

Some or maybe all of the visual art students liked the moatish separation. What none of the vegan, clove-cigarette-smoking student artists liked, however, was the school was located right next to a McDonald's. If that wasn't bad enough, the school was also located next to the bridge to the USA. There was a constant rumble of 18-wheeler truck traffic in front of the school, hauling cargo to/from the USA. It was an ever-present reminder of the reality of global trade.

The K. Joseph in the article's byline is me. Karl Joseph Mamer. Lorenzo Bouvier is a nod to Martin Deck's genius type friend Lorenzo Buj (pronounced roughly like Boo-ee). Buj, I believe, was one of Windsor's original punk rockers. Lorenzo's younger brother Otto Buj was also an interesting character. Otto was an uber-art/communications student. Around about 1990, an art project by Otto had much of Windsor's west end and Windsor's water and sewer department up in arms. On the grounds of the Lebel campus, right where traffic coming off the bridge from the USA could see it, Otto erected a huge sign that said in alarming yellow-and-black text:

THERE ARE

DRUGS IN

THE WATER

Now most people who drove by the Lebel building every day had little idea that it actually was a school building. It was fairly nondescript brick affair and for all the world looked like a Windsor utilities substation. Drugs in the water? Holy fuck, Ethel!

Panicked phone calls were made to Windsor utilities asking about what was wrong with Windsor's water supply. When Windsor Utilities put it together, they sent a crew to the Lebel building with a chainsaw to cut the sign down. A Lebel prof had to explain to them that this was private campus property, the sign was a student work of art, and they simply weren't free to saw the sign down. A few more calls were made by Windsor utilities, up the university's chain of command, until someone with authority, like the dean of arts or the school president, told Bui's prof to take the damn sign down.

The quotes from Page 56 of the report were inspired by a bizarre thing I read in the newspaper a year or two before. There was this devastating earthquake in one of those Soviet republics like Akbarakastan. Thousands died. Before the earthquake Akbarakastan was sharply divided by along ethnic lines. The majority of the republic's citizens were Islamic but the ruling class were Christians settled there by the Soviets. The hardest hit areas were the Christian areas. This wasn't surprising because the generations-old Islamic inhabitants had learned over hundreds of years not to build houses along fault lines and subduction zones. The Christians, however, didn't quite buy the argument that their communities were ruined because the Soviet bureaucracy had mindlessly settled the Christians on fault lines. The Christians preferred to believe the quake was caused by the Muslims. As evidence, a woman was quoted saying something like "I noticed a lot of the Muslims moved from this area shortly before the quake. How do you explain that?"

Unreal Astrology

I'm not sure why Capricorn is picked on so much in this horoscope. Mac Hall was the men only residence at the U of W. There was an urban legend that Mac Hall had the lowest combined GPA of any residence in Canada's university system.

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