With 2.37 million citizens displaced, Syrians about to become the world’s largest refugee population

Imagine caring for a severely injured loved one, while struggling to cope with extreme weather conditions in a tent, makeshift shelter or the back of a garage. Since 2011, that has been the reality for many Syrian families who escaped the conflict and atrocities in their homeland for refuge in Jordan, Lebanon and other neighbouring countries. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Syrians are about to become the world largest refugee population: a staggering 2.37 million have been displaced.
The most vulnerable are the disabled, the elderly and children with spina bifida, cerebral palsy and other chronic diseases. More than 30 per cent of Syrian refugees are living with impairments, and more than one in 20 have suffered injuries that often result in amputations. Even with the humanitarian aid available to them, help is hard to reach when you haven’t got two legs to walk on.
Local humanitarian groups in Jordan and Lebanon are meeting this challenge by partnering with international organizations such as Handicap International, which provides prosthetics, physiotherapy, psychosocial supports and other medical care to help disabled refugees regain their physical independence.
“We have a compound to provide health care and a workshop where technicians fit patients with prosthetics and orthotics,” explains Sarah Pierre, regional communications advisor for Handicap International. “We also have mobile teams going to the shelters and camps to find the highly vulnerable persons.”
Since 2012, Handicap International has fitted more than 2,700 refugees with prosthetic limbs and orthotic devices.
“When you go through an amputation, it’s a quite shocking experience,” explains Pierre. “The physio will work with the patient before they’re fitted with the prosthetic, to strengthen the limb. The aim is to prevent permanent disability, and the psychological consequences of that. It’s amazing to see someone being fitted with an artificial limb and getting up and moving for the first time — it’s always an emotional moment. The person gets their mobility back and will be able to have a normal life again.”
Currently, Handicap International employs 500 frontline workers, the vast majority of whom are local physiotherapists, occupational therapists, paramedics and other medical specialists.
“We depend on the teams in the field,” says Pierre. “Most are quite young. They’re highly motivated and great with the patients. They want to do good and meet the patients’ need as best they can in the field. It’s quite impressive.”
In Canada, Handicap International’s office in Montreal supports the international effort in Syria with funding from the federal government.
“Our motto is vivre debout — ‘stand tall,’” says Roxanne Tremblay, institutional fund manager of Handicap International Canada.
“We support people with a handicap around the world, so that they can stand tall and lead a normal life.”

Girl in a Band by Kim Gordon: Review

Hipster goddess credentials don’t get any better than Kim Gordon’s. She was the bassist and lead singer of apparently defunct “noise rock” band Sonic Youth, said to have spawned the indie and grunge movements.
Her friends, deceased or still with us, include rocker Curt Cobain and filmmaker Sophia Coppola.
She’s a conceptual artist whose work has been displayed at London’s influential Gagosian Gallery. At the age of 61, she remains an icon of cool.
And like her female bohemian-rocker forebear Nico, of Velvet Underground and Andy Warhol entourage fame, she is blond, blessed with high cheekbones and killer legs (which look particularly good in the silvery shorts she has sometimes worn), and cursed with a lousy singing voice.
Gordon admits her vocal powers are limited in Girl in a Band, her much-anticipated — in alt-rock circles, at least — new memoir. It details how she and longtime Sonic Youth collaborator/husband Thurston Moore came to a parting of ways in 2011.
It was a sundering that broke indie-leaning hearts. “They were cool and hardcore, with a profound seriousness about their art, and they hadn’t sold out or gotten soft,” Elissa Schappell wrote in Salon. “In an age of irony, where I’d feign indifference and cover up my insecurity with mockery, they weren’t too cool to care.”
Gordon and Moore’s is such a clichéd story: after 27 years of marriage and artistic collaboration, not to mention a 20-year-old daughter, Coco, he fell for a much younger woman, and Gordon discovered his years-long betrayal in his email. Guys, how hard is it to cover your cyber tracks?
Gordon’s memoir vibrates with the pain of that dissolution. But it’s also a smart — for Gordon is clearly intelligent — and insightful to a point — for she is also, by nature, an emotionally guarded individual — reflection on what it’s like to be the “girl in the band.” And to be a mom going out on stage every night creating a din of ecstasy (to borrow an album title from the late guitarist Chris Whitley).

Gordon was born in Rochester, N.Y., and raised in California, the daughter of a sociologist and his artistically inclined wife. She came to revere her older brother, Keller, who bullied her as a child — she attributes her outward reserve to his incessant teasing — and later became a paranoid schizophrenic.
She writes that she was an artist from the age of 5 and still considers herself more a visual/conceptual creator than a musician. Those impulses led her to study briefly at York University in Toronto before she attended the Otis College of Art and Design in California.
A passion for art also propelled Gordon to New York City in 1980, but it was easy in the art/music meld that then characterized the Big Apple for her to drift into rock, especially after she and Moore became a couple.
Some expected that Gordon’s book would have the evocative power of Just Kids, Patti Smith’s memoir of her start in New York. But Gordon’s writing has none of Smith’s passion and poetic sensibility.
Still, Gordon offers some great aperçus. On being the only woman in Sonic Youth: “The girl anchors the stage, sucks in the male gaze . . . Since our music can be weird and dissonant, having me centre stage also makes it that much easier to sell the band.”
On Courtney Love: “I have a low tolerance for manipulative, egomaniacal behaviour, and usually have to remind myself that the person might be mentally ill.”
And while Gordon hasn’t written the definitive book about balancing motherhood with rockdom, she does offer a few edifying snippets: “Touring with a child was nerve-wracking . . . In airports, Beanie Babies call out every 50 feet. Disciplining a child in public is no picnic, especially when a few eyes are on you.”
Ultimately, many of us who wish we’d had more rock-’n’-roll lives might envy Kim Gordon her insistence on pursuing her creativity, but then we sigh with relief that we never had to say no to a Beanie Baby with the international rock media watching.

Hot Tub Time Machine 2 an early candidate for worst movie of 2015: review

Starring Rob Corddry, Craig Robinson, Clark Duke and Adam Scott. Directed by Steve Pink. At GTA theatres. 93 minutes. 14A
With the unfortunate arrival of Hot Tub Time Machine 2, the waterlogged sequel few wanted becomes the overflowing sewer all should shun.
And it inspires a question for missing-in-action star John Cusack: How did he know that this wretched excuse for comedywould be so awful?
Did he have a crystal ball or — hey! — some kind of time-travelling device? Or did he get a gander at the sad excuse for a script by returning writer Josh Heald? This profanity-laden abstraction of penis jokes and homophobic yuks scans as if it were scratched on the back of a cigarette package by Heald while perusing one of the strip shows his characters love to joke about.
I’d like to think that Cusack turned this rancid turkey down because he’s finally getting serious about his career again, after a wrong turn that included The Paperboy and The Raven. He did David Cronenberg’s Hollywood satire Maps to the Stars instead of returning to the hot tub for more juvenile hijinks, a hopeful sign that his art once again means more to him than his bank account.
But Hot Tub Time Machine 2 wasn’t a hard movie for any self-respecting actor to say “no” to, which by implication suggests returning “stars” Rob Corddry, Craig Robinson and Clark Duke have serious self-esteem issues.

Everything that made the original 2010 film funny has been stripped from the sequel, not least of which is the grounding influence of Cusack, whose straight-man role has been gamely but vainly taken up by Adam Scott.
The amusing central conceit about horny and lonely middle-aged pals returning to the 1980s to relive their youth, via a malfunctioning ski resort hot tub, has been replaced by mean-spirited future schlock, set in the year 2025. Steve Pink is back as director, as bereft of fresh ideas as Heald.
Like similarly knuckleheaded Biff Tannen in Back to the Future 2, the most obvious of many films this one steals from or shouts out to, Corddry’s Lou, Robinson’s Nick and Duke’s Jacob have been illicitly profiting from advance knowledge their initial time-travel escapade has gifted them.
Lou claims to have invented an Internet search engine he calls “Lougle.” Robinson is pretending to be a pop superstar, the writer and performer of such hit tunes as Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know” and Lisa Loeb’s “Stay (I Missed You).” Loeb makes a brief cameo in one of the film’s few mildly amusing moments.
Jacob, neglected son of greedy barbarian Lou, simply enjoys the high life of daddy’s windfall while also reluctantly (and bizarrely) working as butler for his mocking papa.
Things take a serious turn when an unseen assailant shoots Lou in the crotch, prompting a hot tub trip to the year 2025 to try and figure out whodunit and how to prevent it.
Why go forwards instead of backwards? The answer from brainy boy Jacob makes little sense — it’s just another excuse for Lou and Nick to make fun of him for being “an effing nerd.”
But then nothing about this movie adds up, apart from the aforementioned penis jokes, profanity and vile homophobia, which pile up like dirty dishes at a frathouse.
All of which make Hot Tub Time Machine 2 an early candidate for worst sequel of 2015 and also worst movie. Good on Cusack for spotting this sloshing cesspool and staying well clear of it.