Well, it looks like the hell that ROSI puts us through every year continues to rage on as students continue to fight for course enrollment! Take a look at what was buzzing on Twitter this week…
U of T Course Finder
U of T already has a student-developed iPhone app, but now we also have a handy tool for searching for U of T courses online. Created by psychology student Ammar Ijaz, it allows you to search by course code, term, professor, date and time, enrollment indicators, enrollment controls, and whether or not there is a waitlist. Ammar says:
Don’t you hate trying to find courses to take? Using the timetable and calendar books is bad enough, but the archaic website is even worse! I hate searching for courses, too, so I decided to create a website to make the task easier. Looking for 3rd year psych courses? Just put in “PSY3” as a course code and hit “Show me!”
Check it out!
OH on Twitter: Course Selections
Ahhhh, it’s that time of the year that we love to hate and hate to love…the dreaded/beloved course selections. I don’t know about you but I’m on the love side. There’ s nothing like planning a fresh new academic year. It’s just so full of hope, optimism, and excitement…free of the crushing weight of readings, labs, exams, and tutorials. It’s the calm before the storm and yes, I love to savour every moment of it.
Unfortunately, ROSI wasn’t so kind to me this year. I’m in my final year of undergraduate studies and got the late 10 AM enrollment time…leaving me on waitlists for courses that I desperately want to take. But alas, that is the life of a U of T student.
Read what other students are tweeting about course enrollment…some were successful, others, well, not so much!
TO Jazz Festival Grandmasters: Dave Brubeck Quartet and the Keith Jarrett Trio
This year’s Toronto Jazz Festival played host to two legendary groups in two awe-inspiring and sold-out venues: The Dave Brubeck Quartet at Koerner Hall on Tuesday and The Keith Jarrett Trio with Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette at The Four Seasons Opera Centre on Wednesday. The Dave Brubeck Quartet gave a solid performance but one that has become somewhat less of a novelty since it was nearly identical to his concert last year and the year before. The Keith Jarrett Trio, on the other hand, gave a concert of sheer ingenuity and brilliance from start to finish, though I’d expect nothing less from this group of masters.
Dave Brubeck Quartet
On Tuesday, the current rendition of the Dave Brubeck Quartet, with Bobby Millitello on saxophone, Michael Moore on bass, and Randy Jones on drums, took the stage at Koerner Hall for one set of standards and one set of what Brubeck does best: his own pieces in odd time signatures. In the first set, they played, among others, “Gone with the Wind”, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”, “On the Sunny Side of the Street”, and a medley of Duke Ellington Songs: “C Jam Blues”, “Mood Indigo” and “Take the A Train”. The interpretations were competent and fun to listen to, but this really isn’t where Brubeck shines and there are other pianists who have better renditions of these pieces. Nevertheless, it was nice to hear a few pieces that weren’t performed in the last couple of years. Continue reading “TO Jazz Festival Grandmasters: Dave Brubeck Quartet and the Keith Jarrett Trio”
TO Jazz Festival: Review of the Stanley Clarke Band featuring Hiromi, with the Dave Young Quartet opening the show
On Monday night, I squeezed into a horribly uncomfortable, plastic seat down at Nathan Phillips Square to enjoy what can only be described as a fabulous evening of jazz music, albeit with lame acoustics. The Dave Young Quartet opened the evening with local jazz piano virtuoso Robi Botos, Botos’s brother Frank on drums, Kevin Turcotte on trumpet, and band leader Dave Young on bass. The group played a solid set which included “Me and the Boys” by Coleman Hawkins, “Mean What You Say”, Cole Porter’s “Dream Dancing”, and a very beautiful Danish folksong. The band was at its best when Dave Young and Robi Botos took centre stage, either with the melody or their melodious solos. These two are very talented Canadian musicians, staples of the Toronto jazz scene and for good reason.
After intermission, the high energy Stanley Clarke Band featuring Hiromi took the stage by storm with Clarke on electric and acoustic bass, Hiromi on a Yamaha grand piano, Ruslan Sirota on keyboards, and Ronald Bruner Jr on drums. Clarke started out the evening with some electric bass, which proves that if he were a less serious musician he could have been a seriously big-time rock star: he’s cool, he’s assured, and he’s incredibly good. Clarke took good advantage of the portability of the electric bass to move around the stage and play some great call and response music with each of his musicians, standing up close to them, one by one, and jamming.
At the end of the first piece, an audience member shouted out “You’re the king, Stanley” and Clarke responded “I’m just a bass player, that’s all”. But he is the king, not because he can be a rock star, but because of his incredible talent and skill on the bass. He is a one-of-a-kind bass player who can take the melody and have it work, who can play at the top and the bottom of the piece, and who can make melodic music with just a few notes. Of course, his mastery is best show-cased on what is thankfully his preferred instrument, the acoustic bass. After the first piece, much to my surprise and glee, Clarke set aside his electric bass in favour of the acoustic bass, and moved us into some middle ground between jazz and jazz fusion, but far enough away from pure fusion that I was happy. It was especially a treat to hear some pieces from the “Jazz in the Garden” album such as Clarke’s “Paradigm Shift (Election Day)”.
The group then went on to play a Return to Forever piece, which was even better than the first piece and featured a truly memorable drum solo by Bruner. When he lost his first drum stick during the solo, Clarke turned to him and said “you lost your drumstick! WOW!”. And then the comedy routine began: in the middle of his solo he starts beating the drum with his foot so that his hands are free to take a drink and wipe his face. Once he’s using both hands again, with a new soon-to-be-lost drumstick, he starts beating the drums in a regular pattern. As the pattern becomes familiar, Bruner encourages the audience to clap along, when he decides to mischeviously skip a beat as though to say to us “hah! got you! didn’t play that note!”. Continue reading “TO Jazz Festival: Review of the Stanley Clarke Band featuring Hiromi, with the Dave Young Quartet opening the show”
Discovery Has No Roadmap
In one episode of The West Wing, speechwriter Sam Seaborn finds himself trying to secure funding for a quantum physics experiment that has no practical applications, whatsoever. Trying to justify himself, as usual, before an unfriendly senator, Sam shouts out that the experiment matters because discovery has no roadmap, because we cannot know when something will come along that will change the world.
That’s the really frustrating thing about the humanities, even more than quantum physics – that so much of what happens in the humanities has small effects, maybe inspiring an article here, a dinner-time discussion there. If even. But every now and then, something earth-shattering comes along, some profound thought that changes the way we view ourselves, what we study, how we live, and what we do. Like the writings of Rousseau, Locke, Neitzsche, T.S. Eliot, that changed the way entire generations, entire centuries viewed themselves, or that changed, like Locke, the layout of the entire world. Celtic studies, Middle Eastern studies, and Eastern European studies are so contentious because people are still using them to define themselves. When Edward Gibbon wrote his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, his work said as much about Victorian England as about late antiquity.
And then there are those works in the humanities that will never shake the earth, but that make that which shakes the earth happen. Every discovery builds on previous thoughts. Robert Butts and Lawrence Cremin’s A History of Education in American Culture is not a groundbreaking work – it is only available in one copy in the entire U of T library system – but it informed the opinion of the court in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education supreme court case, which ended school segregation in the United States. Continue reading “Discovery Has No Roadmap”
OH on Twitter: Protests, Police, and Passion
As expected, the G20 has taken over the Twittersphere the past week with users from all ages and walks of life, tweeting about the happenings downtown. Some (okay many) expressed their displeasure and outrage of what went down during the G20, provided live updates, and others even used Twitter to organize protests. So…where were you during the G20 weekend? Did you catch any of the protests? Were you a protester yourself? Let us know!
