Blog Page 1602
Jammin to… ‘Apricot’ by Basil Hogios
Originally the soundtrack for the short-film, Apricot, this Basil Hogios instrumental sounds exactly as you would expect from its title: as sweet and soft as that orange-yellow fruit with its velvety skin. It is easy to understand why Briand chose Hogios as his film’s sound artist: it is a truly soporific sound, rendered both emotive and evocative through its mix of the traditional and the more studio produced. You wouldn’t have thought it but Latin seems to sum up the song’s effect perfectly, with the adjective ‘apricus’ meaning ‘exposed to the warmth of the sun’, ‘in a sunny spot’, and the verb, ‘apricari’, meaning ‘to sunbathe’. And indeed, for a brief 1 minute and 35 seconds you are tricked into believing that your life is a peachy existence of spending whole days lying in the warm sun, and not the reality of sitting inside, staring at the word count on your laptop. Yet, as the music slows further in the last ten seconds it sounds as though Hogios too knew that reality was not so, that the season for the orange-yellow fruit was not forever, and that the orange-yellow sun will always eventually set. Nevertheless, for those fleeting 95 seconds, I am capable of convincing myself otherwise, as I am sure you could do too. Of course, it only lasts 95 seconds – but there’s always the repeat button.
Daft Punk in a funk
It’s been twenty years since Daft Punk formed, and their latest single – a collaboration with Pharrell Williams of N.E.R.D. fame – shows the age of both parties involved. ‘Get Lucky’ starts exactly as it ends, and very little of interest happens in between.
The disco groove established by Chic’s guitarist Nile Rodgers and the rhythm section, complete with old-skool hand claps on beats two and four, sounds like a throwback to the 90s. In fact, the track as a whole feels like a pastiche of Travelling Without Moving-era Jamiroquai. However, the forceful vocal performance of Jay Kay – or even of Pharrell Williams – is nowhere to be found. His performance is surprisingly bland, and his voice comes across as uncertain, with an uncharacteristic fragility to it, perhaps due to the lack of rhythmic impetus in the rest of the song; a common feature in his previous projects. Even his trademark “Huh” after the opening “like the legend of the phoenix” sounds forced and self-conscious.
The lyrics themselves are also remarkably unimaginative. In the chorus, Williams sings: “We’re up all night ‘til the sun / We’re up all night to get some / We’re up all night for good fun” and although the title line “We’re up all night to get lucky” sounds tacky the first time, its excessive repetitions border on the annoying. Although lyrical variety has hardly been one of Daft Punk’s strengths in the past (“Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” is a case in point), the lack of vocal intensity – or any intensity aside from in Rodgers’ guitar playing – reduces the already banal, misogynistic lyrics to a subterranean level.
That Daft Punk were even involved in this single at all would have been anyone’s guess until over halfway through, when the French duo decided to whip out their trademark synthesisers and vocoders, but the effect is again one of pastiche. The difference is that they are pastiching themselves from twenty years ago. As is the case with many groups who last longer than their pre-allocated minutes of fame, they have become their own cover band.
More disconcertingly, this track has made it to the number one spot in the charts. It is an island in the ocean of mediocre, over-dynamicised chart music that is paradoxically enjoying commercial success because of its complete lack of dynamic interest; a “breath of fresh air” as Fatboy Slim has called it. Maybe this single’s success tells us more about the metaphorical air we have become used to than it does about the quality of Daft Punk’s latest offering.
Local Elections: Mad Hatter Interview
Local council elections will take place across the country this Thursday, and the election campaign is well underway. Oxford is divided into 24 Wards, each of which elect two councillors to represent them on the City Council. Currently, the Oxford City Council is made up of 27 labour, 13 Liberal Democrat 5 Green and 1 Independent councillor.
However, this week Cherwell spoke to the Mad Hatter, a local tour guide hoping to be elected as the first Monster Raving Loony Party candidate in Oxford. Enouraging voters not to be taken in by “tweedle dee and tweedle dum”, the Mad Hatter’s controversial policies include replacing the Oxford skyline with teapots and forcing every single person in Oxford to marry a foreigner.
Debate: Can your tutor also be your friend?
YES! – Alexander Rankine
Dear tutor,
Although we once met in the pub after a scheduling fiasco, I think it is fair to say that we are not really friends. We might occasionally share a dash of mirth
during the grim and earnest tutorial grind, but we’re careful to laugh about something safe; preferably the weather, a minor mishap, your rival’s most cherished theory. I now see that starting our relationship out by questioning the intellectual basis and credibility of your subject in my first ever tutorial was probably not very wise.
There are certainly a great number of bridges to cross as we try to rebuild our amity. We are separated by years and intellect. But then, by the end of 6th form we were often quite pally with our teachers, sharing gossip and meeting them out of lessons, and promising to stay in touch. Of course, the Oxford tutor poses their own particular difficulties. Some of you are just a bit strange, with touchingly circumscribed extra-subject conversation, profoundly alternative senses of humour, or a pronounced and intolerant dogmatism. But real human hearts beat under most of those priggish suits and ill-chosen denim jackets, just as they do under the elbow patches which are now worn – confusingly – mostly by the student body. And you yourself seem like quite a nice sort, with a good variety of interests and cultural references hinted at in our tutorial conversations.
But how can we get to know you better? Well, if fresher’s week teaches us one thing, it is that alcohol is the ticket to instant friendship (or a three-year long avoidance of certain other members of the college community).College is certainly willing to provide here, what with its entertainment allowance.
After we had dinner together in the SCR you even suggested that there might be enough left over in the kitty for a whisky tasting night. Indeed, I saw you drunk (at fresher’s formal) before I ever saw you teach. Bring on the booze. I believe that Tolkien used to hold tutorials in the pub, this too might be a way to go.
But no booze-broken-ice can stay melted for long without mutual respect. I now recognise that brazenly attacking an academic’s position during your tutorial whilst repeatedly failing to correctly pronounce his name was a daft position to take with your thesis supervisor. To the contrary, I now regard his theory as a shining paradigm of reason and sense.
Equally, the next time my tutorial partner sticks his head out the window, it would be nice if you did not threaten to slam it shut. A little guillotining between friends can do a great deal of harm. Your acts of kindness also seem like a nice way of building up trust between us, giving us pringles to explain maximisation problems was inspired, even if I did eat the relevant study tool before you could explain the theory.
Ultimately, friendship must be based upon shared interests. I already see hints of these, like the time we carried on our tutorial in the quad after the ‘official’ end. Offering us one of the roll-ups you smoked during our chat would be the next step, but it was nice to see that not every conversation with a tutor need conclude with awkward silence.
Here’s to a new friendship,
Alex
NO! – Anna Cooban
True friendships do not spring suddenly into existence, they take time to develop and certainly cannot be nurtured during the course of a one-hour tutorial discussing Darwinian theory and the numerous pitfalls of my essay.
Friends are your literal crutches on the long journey from bop to bed, friends upload horrendous photos onto Facebook and kindly remember the tag, lend you money at dinner when your bod card balance runs low and provide the simplest of comforts.
Would my tutor turn up at my room at 3am armed with a tub of Ben & Jerry’s because my boyfriend dumped me? No. Any friend who treats you as an
academic punch-bag at the beginning of every term is simply not worth keeping. Collections are perhaps the bane of every Oxford student’s life, turning every vac into a six-week-long procrastination where relaxing is something of a luxury and not an expectation.
Socialising with your tutor in the weeks that follow when your collections papers are still unmarked, underscores any dinner or drinks event with a palpable tension and fear of the dreaded email asking for a ‘chat’.
Friends also have a habit of mincing their words to protect your feelings and often the best advice has the harshest delivery. Half-baked criticism for a truly shoddy essay is helping no one and sometimes being told that you’re crap is the most helpful and truly motivating thing you could ever hear. Friendships, like relationships, are supposedly based on honesty, but in practice the white-lies told by friends are designed to spare you heartache where it is needed.
Instead, the brutal, bare-faced honesty of a tutorial report gives you heartache where it is most certainly needed. This is why OxCORT exists – to shatter any illusion that your tutor was ever, or could possibly become, your friend.
Perhaps it is Facebook and the entire social networking phenomenon which has made ‘friendship’ seem so easy. The simple click of a button enables people with even the most tenuous connection to instigate a virtual ‘friendship’ without the rigorous tests set by physical proximity. These sorts of Facebook friends cannot pull your hair back after a heavy night at Camera, nor can they file away embarrassing anecdotes from fresher’s week to be dragged up when you’re about to sit your finals. Tutors are like these nominal virtual friendships; they show cordiality and respect – the equivalent to a ‘like’ on a profile picture – but in reality they are just as distant, just as indifferent and just as anonymous as the 500+ friends on your timeline.
And if you think this view of the impossibility of tutor-student friendships is dismissive to those who genuinely do feel as if their tutor would distract them from their work to play pool in the JCR or would scrutinise all potential love interests as unworthy of their time, then, for your sake, I urge you to end this destructive relationship now. Once finals come around and you graduate, the tutorstudent dynamic will be broken and you will wonder why you invested so much energy in the friendship of a middle-aged don with whom, aside from a shared love of 19th century lesbian literature, you actually share very little in common.
Do not feel disheartened at the loss of your tutor’s seeming friendship – you could always add them on Facebook.
Oxford must get rid of stigma attached to mental health
This article was prompted somewhat by an advertisement that came into my inbox recently. As deputy comment editor of Cherwell, I was invited to apply for a job writing for Keep Off The Grass, OSPL’s Fresher’s guide.
Given that I didn’t have a Fresher’s period since my lungs decided to unilaterally stop working that week, I felt my input would be inappropriate. However, there is one very important point that I think merits a mention.
I’m not the only person who invested a lot in attending Oxford University. Having always felt somewhat isolated throughout most of my academic career, I thought that I would finally find a safe haven for my self-indulgent geekishness. Of course, what I immediately proceeded to discover was that almost everyone I knew appeared far cleverer than I did.
Generally, if you feel inferior to someone when they recount the details of their interview entirely innocently, that’s not a good sign. To make such a transition, I would argue, is even harder than the move to independence for some people. I easily settled in to a life independent of the comforts of home- but to adjust to a world where what had previously defined my identity was suddenly nothing special was a lot harder.
Pretty soon, I was having daily thoughts of “I don’t belong here”. Every time I hit a wall, I took it highly personally. It was getting to the point where my constant anxiety was a serious strain on those closest to me. Yet I resisted any sort of counselling, convinced that my problems were only temporary.
It was only after 4th week when I eventually sought a GP and was referred to the university service that things started to improve. One of the first things that the counsellor told me was that hundreds of people passed through daily, that I wasn’t alone. This was what gave me the confidence to be able to treat my problems seriously.
I had to be told that this sort of thing was actually fairly common. I’ve spoken to people since who have been through the process, and it’s clear I’m not alone.
But I didn’t know that at the time. And next year, there’s going to be another generation of freshers who will struggle mentally, for similar or even entirely different reasons. What matters is that they don’t feel weak asking for help.
It would have been far better for me and a lot of people close to me had I done so earlier. Oxford is an amazing place, and I wouldn’t wish to be anywhere else. At the same time, it can be incredibly mentally taxing, and some people may need more support than others. It’s a good idea to highlight the importance of peer supporters just as the Wadham fresher’s guide did.
However, this is no use if such occurrences are treated as alien to the authentic Oxford experience, as for some people they are all too real. I don’t want any upcoming Oxford students to feel the sense of shame that I did in seeking help. I want them to have the confidence that they belong here that I was denied, and in some cases counselling etcetera is a perfectly legitimate means of securing that.
There is a huge stigma attached to mental health issues in this country, which is why my proposal may be difficult to fulfil. I suggest to the editors of Keep Off The Grass that they seek testimonials from Oxford students of all walks of life about their own difficulties adjusting. That way, those freshers who need support know that their personal difficulties do not invalidate their right to be here.
Welfare reps in colleges across Oxford do an excellent job of highlighting the importance of seeking help, but if the fresher’s guide acknowledged the frequency with which students seek counselling, it would send a message that it is a perfectly normal part of student life, just as much as embarrassing oneself at crew-dates. Oxford is a world leader academically; let’s make it a world leader in mental health awareness too.
The Cherwell Profile: Nancy Pelosi
Nancy Pelosi possesses the talent of a heavyweight political leader in captivating a big audience, as anyone who was at the Union on Monday night witnessed.
But in her more intimate interactions with Oxford students she also demonstrated the talent of a grandmother, gifted at dealing with inquisitive young people.
Tasked with looking after her between her mid-afternoon arrival and late evening talk, I took her on a tour of the city before dinner at the Union. I was anxious to protect such a conspicuous individual from intrusive crowds.
By the Union a scruffy looking young man in a ragged leather jacket barged in front of her, pointing a camera in her face. While security staff and I were preparing to usher her inside and block the man’s way, Pelosi struck up a conversation.
“So Jake, where would you like a photo then? Is this OK? How about this? Is that enough? It was nice meeting you Jake, you have a great day!” She carries congressional keepsakes with her, giving them out to people she meets, and has learned committee members’ names and stories before she is introduced. “Come see me in my office if you’re ever in Washington!”
As leader of the House Democrats she uses these skills to convince a disparate group of over 200 politicians, each with their own beliefs, to vote a certain way. It is initially hard to tell whether Nancy Pelosi is so good with people because she is a politician, or whether Nancy Pelosi is a politician because she is so good with people. After several hours in her company I came to believe the latter.
Her biggest legislative achievement as Speaker between 2007-2011 was extending health insurance to tens of millions of poor Americans. ‘Obamacare’ was signed into law in March 2010 after a brutal fight on the marble floors of Congress and the TV screens of America. “They spent two-hundred million dollars lobbying against the bill. That’s a lot of money, especially when it goes unanswered.”
The House Democratic caucus is now more than half female, ethnic minority or LGBT. However, she believes unrestricted ‘super PAC’ funding of political advertising is impeding further progress.
“If you reduce the role of money in politics, you’ll elect more women. Women always have an advantage in terms of ethics in government.
“Mostly people trust women more, so they go right at you on ethics. They’ll invent something. Do people want to be mischaracterised so their kids are coming home from school crying?”
A politician frequently vilified by her opponents, she has little time for the culture that dominated Congress upon her arrival in 1987.
In her book Know Your Power she describes how male colleagues were initially polite but uninterested in her political opinions. She got hers across anyway.
“It was shocking to them that a woman would speak in this male bastion. They said ‘it’s not your turn’. We said ‘no, we’ve been waiting two hundred years!’”
On Monday, one student raised the topic of the 2016 presidential race, half-jokingly asking if she was going to become the first female President. Pelosi was surprisingly open in her response. “Hillary Clinton is the full package. She’d be great. I just don’t know if she wants to do it, but I’m hoping and praying she runs in 2016.”
Earlier over dinner she told me that “Hillary Clinton would be President of the United States right now had she voted against the Iraq War. It was a ridiculous false premise, the evidence and intelligence was not there. There was no reason for us to go there, she voted for war and never abandoned her vote.”
The Iraq Resolution split the Democratic caucus in half. She doesn’t want it to happen again. She tightly whipped her troops for the Obamacare vote, which was split almost exactly down party lines – 219 ‘ayes’ to 212 ‘noes’.
“Bipartisanship is a very popular idea in America, and as long as they can make him [Obama] look partisan, they diminish him. He is not really a political president, and that’s what people love about him, but they try and paint him another way.”
Pelosi now has her sights on gun control. She gets more serious, unnervingly beating a steady rhythm on the table.
“We are not giving up. Even though we do not have a majority in the house, we fully intend to build up support. A drumbeat, if you wonder why I’m doing this, across America, to show that something must be done.
“Asking our Republican friends to join our bill, we told them 90% of their constituents support this, and they all say ‘well I haven’t heard from any of them, I’ve only heard from the other side’.”
Although ‘government’ has become a dirty word to many in America, Pelosi does not shy away from defending its importance.
“Government shouldn’t be bigger than it needs to be, but the founding fathers saw that there needs to be a public role. There are people in Congress who are at war with government. They have daily votes on things that do not support clean air and water, food safety, healthcare, social security. There has to be a public role.”
“I sometimes ask them, do you have children? Do you have grandchildren? Do they drink water, eat food, breathe air? What is it that makes you think there should be no referees on the field here?”
“I say to my Republican friends, and I have many, ‘take back your party’. To have this disruption instead of collaboration or compromise, it’s just… you just can’t do that, I can’t believe it.”
Oxford Maladies
As if having our own creole, calendar and Christmas were not enough, Oxford has also begun to harbour its very own unique set of maladies.
Sirrhosis: Inability to conceive of oneself as having a future career which will not end with a knighthood or some other high honour. In extreme cases, the sufferer may believe it is written that they will one day become prime minister.
Risk factors: PPE students; Those who seek out banking internships (may be becoming rarer now).
Imprecisionitis: Inability of a humanities student to give a precise and definite answer to a question, preferring a more discursive and allusive response. “How many tickets have we sold?: “A few, but then what is a ticket really?”
Risk factors: English students; Dyscalculics
Benchicide (ideation): The overwhelming desire for a scientist to murder their infuriating bench partner, preferably with whatever piece of apparatus comes to hand. Carrying out benchicide itself is a crime punishable by law.
Risk factors: All those with labs
Vacture: A debilitating failure to apply oneself to useful activity over a vacation. Comorbid with normal procrastination, but somehow heightened to heroic proportions via enormous sessions of box set watching, extensive Facebook stalking and blanket self-loathing.
Discoursclerosis: Another humanities ailment characterised by the complete failure of a student to adequately communicate the beauty and clarity of a particular thought to a tutor during a tutorial, instead presenting the idea as an incoherent heap of tangled nonsense.
Risk factors: Philosophy students
Donitis: (rare) Total dedication to subject at expense of all other areas of life.
Risk factors: Personal Statement writers; Some scholars
OPD (Oxbridge personality disorder): Inability to consider anyone who has not passed through Oxford or Cambridge as a serious human being with valid opinions and skills of their own. At Varsity matches this may transmute into its most extreme form: Oxford Personality Disorder.
Risk factors: Snobs, Those from families in which everyone has been Oxbridge educated since King Arthur’s knights started sending their children here in view of a rising bourgeoisie in a changing economy.
Smugture: Unwarranted smugness owing to one’s mastery of a small area of human endeavour at a university level.
Risk factors: Sports people; Less socially adept scientists
Smuture: The inexplicable tendency of your otherwise highly intelligent and cultured friend to make jokes of childish lewdness at various intervals and derive an absurd amount of amusement therefrom.
Scoopomania: Inability of a student journalist to appreciate that very few people are as excited about their revelation of petty corruption in the lowest ranks of a student society sub-committee as they are, even if they have bothered to read the relevant piece.
Risk factors: Virtually all student journalists
Extracts from: “Oxford Maladies: A compendium” available in all good medical libraries.
Preview: 1984
The production of 1984 to be put on at the Keble O’Reilly in third week is set to be an accurate and visually inventive rendition of George Orwell’s classic dystopian text. It is a well-known novel, featured on many a GCSE syllabus, which will make it all the more difficult for the director Luke Rollason to create a production which will satisfy the book’s many fans. However, if the scenes I saw during their rehearsal are anything to go by, 1984 is going to just as tense, and indeed powerful, as the novel.
The use of technology in the production will involve a live projection of audience members as they enter the theatre and at other intermitted stages during the play – it would seem that all efforts are being made to make Big Brother come to life as much as possible. In the scene of the Two Minute Hate, in which the actors switch from a office-like choreographed sequence to shouting and banging chairs in a raucous mob of hate, the energy is high. However 1984 is not just about the dystopian world of CCTV gone mad, government surveillance and mind control – it is also a love story. The main characters, Winston and Julia, try and beat the system by loving one another, and having lots of sex. From the two scenes I was shown of the lovers, played by Harley Viveash (Winston) and Alice Porter (Julia), it looks like there is going to be a fair amount of flesh on show. It makes for a good contrast with the rigidity of the Two Minute Hate, as is intended and they are well cast – Viveash gives off just the right amount of humble awkwardness when met with the lively and vivacious Porter.
With the plan for the play to come in at just over two hours, I wonder whether the levels of energy that I saw in rehearsal will be able to be maintained, and how the staging will work in the O’Reilly theatre. Rollason wants to have the stage ‘in traverse’, meaning the audience is to be predominantly seated on either side of the stage, with the action taking place in the middle. If they can get it to work with more than just a few audience members there, and I suspect they can, it will be great.
Running from the 8th-11th of May in third week, 1984 is well on its way to re-creating the novel onstage, with enough innovation, clever choreography and good acting to make it worth going to see.
Review: Life is a Dream
La Vida es Sueno, or Life is a Dream, is the University’s latest offering at the Playhouse. Playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca tackles themes of love, loyalty and existentialism, way before existentialism was even cool. This international team of actors and directors brings us a dark and gripping, yet at times comical, story of a man who is torn from riches to rags and back so many times that he begins to question the essence of his own reality.
The play is framed by the Oracle’s monologues, recounting how his own premonition of a brutal ruler led the Polish King, Basilio, to imprison his own son Segismundo. However, the monarch has decided that he should test the veracity of the prophecy by allowing his son to enter his kingdom as the Prince of Poland. Proving the Oracle correct, Segismundo is shortly drugged and thrown back into his cell, having unleashed murder and rape upon the courtiers who dare to contravene his orders. Believing it to have been a dream, Segismundo can’t quite trust in the world that he finds around him upon his second release, this time at the hands of a group of rebels who wish to seize the throne in his name. The challenge, for Segismundo, is to navigate the path between dream and reality, loyalty and betrayal, cruelty and mercy, fate and free will. A number of parallel storylines of love triangles and family reunions provide a welcome relief from the dark depths of the play’s central plot.
The action is set against an unforgiving backdrop of serrated edges and red lighting, an effective complement to the darkness and torment of Segismundo’s character, passionately conveyed by Antón Morant. The musical accompaniment, however, was shrill and jarring, detracting from the linguistic beauty of the script. Whilst a certain amount of melodrama is inherent in the work, the sound effects- along with certain elements of the direction- at times pushed the play from drama into farce, provoking laughter from the audience in moments of supposed gravity.
The true comic element of the play is almost entirely carried by the excellent Teresita Valverde Mójica, whose dance with ‘Death’ was an inspired and hilarious highlight. Another standout performance comes from Ekaterina Spivakovsky Gonzalez, whose subtle and sensitive performance as Rosaura brilliantly captured the depth of her character. The rest of the cast gave mostly decent performances, and largely maintained the eloquence of Calderón’s verse, although the positioning of the subtitles was at times distracting.
On balance, this was an entertaining and thoughtful depiction; an extremely challenging task which highlights the skill of those involved and shows the continuing relevance of Calderón’s work today.
