The Manitoban

Arts & Culture section

• Amber Alert

  In the past few years, a coterie of musicians, many, if not all, graduates of the University of Manitoba’s School of Music’s Jazz Studies program, have been transforming the music scene in Winnipeg. Amber Epp, the talented singer from Steinbach via Rio de Janeiro, Havana and Lima (at least in attitude), is the only female [...]

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  Booze cruisin’ to the bottom

  Dan Fante’s new novel, 86’d, is a rip-roaring novel about a forty-two year old alcoholic, pill-popping loser at life on his last legs. The story is humourous, if you like laughing at people who fall down and hurt themselves, the language profane but real, and the characters flawed but human. Fante, son of the late [...]

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  Yore Lore: The battle of Stalingrad

  The scene occurs in broad daylight, but everything is gray — the sky, the buildings, the ground, the characters’ faces. Jude Law and Ron Perlman are waiting to jump across an opening in a fragmented, war-torn building. Jude Law is handsome, confident, smiling. They must decide who is going to jump first. They discuss whose [...]

• Sex and the Campus

  A promise seems to mean nothing until a ring accompanies it. It has long been the tradition that upon asking someone to marry, and as a method of signifying that a person was “claimed,” there would be a ring or rings to hold the finger during the engagement until the actual wedding. In recent years, [...]

• Yankee Doodle

  The Doodle family was at a loss last week when they discovered that their loving father figure, Yankee, had passed on. Although not personally known to many, Yankee Doodle was famous in his own way. His contributions are known, but his full story has rarely been told. A young Yankee Doodle grew up with many [...]

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  The springs of Springfield: Superintendent Chalmers

  Superintendent Chalmers, the man who strikes fear in the heart of principal Seymour Skinner, is a thoroughly boring man. His no-nonsense attitude and stern demeanor do nothing to indicate that he has any sense of humour at all. This is exactly why he is such a funny character. He proves this in the eighth season [...]

• The springs of Springfield: Gil Gunderson

  As I sit down to write this, nestled within the sundry walls of the Manitoban office, I’m receiving some flak from other writers about my choice of character. In this instance, the character is Gil Gunderson, the sad, lonely, frequently out of work pariah who used to pop up on The Simpsons, making us laugh [...]

• Doughboys

  Hello Doughboys Where is your war today? Vietnam’s nitroglycerin jungles weren’t enough, Now that the jungles are stained red The sand has to be painted With new swords unspoiled That are built to destroy the plow To not be beaten And tear holes in earth, Rip men from their sanity Dear Doughboys, Where is your [...]

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  Yore Lore:

  “Where Sydney Cove her lucid bosom swells, Courts her young navies, and the storm repels” — Erasmus Darwin In the 1980s, North America was invaded. Mad Max tore up our screens. AC/DC tore up our eardrums. Foster’s flooded the streets. Crocodile Dundee showed us what a knife was and Men at Work told us where [...]

• Sex and the campus

  We’re all back to school for the first full week, and I can guarantee that with all this academic tension in the air we will all settle at some point. Settle for the class we had to take because the one we truly wanted was full, settle for the professor we dislike because there are [...]