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Blog Page 1770
Fresher dies of heart failure
First year engineering student Chao Cao, of St Hilda’s College, has died of a sudden heart failure. He was found in the shower on Thursday 27 October.
Known to former schoolmates as Bryan Cao, his Facebook page has since been flooded with friends’ comments. In an email to St Hilda’s students, college Principal Sheila Forbes said that “he was taken to the John Radcliffe Hospital but sadly they were unable to revive him, and he died at 1.30pm.”
College became a sombre place in the aftermath of the news. The chapel was opened for quiet reflection, and the Chaplain led prayers in the SCR at 8.00pm that evening. “If there was any consolation in this tragedy, it was the profound sense of community during the service,” one undergraduate at St Hilda’s told Cherwell.
The Oxford University Chinese Society held their own series of prayer events at the college the next day, Friday 28 October, while a commemoration service was held at St Hilda’s last night, 3 November.
Dr Margaret Kean, Dean of St Hilda’s College commented on the solidarity felt amongst college members following Chao’s death, telling Cherwell, “We are a community united in grief, and one that has shown remarkable dignity and discretion in dealing with the situation.”
JCR President Sarah Finch also expressed feelings of gratitude for what she said was “an admirable reaction among the undergraduate body, proving how close-knit we are as a college.”
A board was set up in the foyer of the Jacqueline du Pré Music Building for Chao’s friends to write tributes, one message saying, “Chao, I’ve only been friends with you for a few weeks now, but I could tell you were going to be one of the best.”
Professor Guy Houlsby, Head of the Engineering Department sent an email to all engineering students yesterday announcing the tragic news. In it he said, “I understand that whilst very rare, such unexpected conditions occur occasionally in young men.” “His family, who are in Shanghai, have been informed of this sad news and will be travelling to Oxford. I am sure staff and students in Engineering Science would join me in extending our sympathy to them and to Chao’s friends at this difficult time.”
St John’s second year Siyi Hao, a fellow engineer who went to sixth form college with Chao, commented, “Chao was a quiet and smart lad. He had always been careful and considerate to his friends, and his humorous character always lightened up everyone around him. Chao struck me as an extremely hard-working person as well when we talked about his preparation for Oxford interviews. He put a great deal of effort in everything he worked on, and the results were always near perfection.
“The tragedy has stunned every one of his friends, and many of them came to pay tribute to him. The length of a life is limited and he had achieved so much during his 20 years. I hope he had no regret when he left, and his parents, sister and girlfriend can go through this tragedy peacefully together.” Those wishing to add their messages to the remembrance board can leave them at the St Hilda’s Porters’ Lodge.
Sudden Death Syndrome is the term used to encompass the many different causes of heart arrhythmias in young people, which can sometimes cause a sudden death. There are 11 major causes of unexpected cardiac death in the young, the leading cause being hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), a condition associated with high levels of sports and activities.
About 10,000 British people are known to have HCM, but many more are believed to have the potentially life threatening condition without realising it. Charities such as Cardiac Risk in the Young (CRY) aim to raise awareness of such conditions and to promote “good practice and screening facilities devoted to significantly reduce the frequency of young sudden cardiac death throughout the UK.”
Review: Sandro Perri – Impossible Spaces
‘How could I save it for the morning after / some kind of antimatter,’ Sandro Perri softly intones as his latest record draws to a close, his poised, unaffected deliverybestowing a gravity upon what seems in isolation to be a faintly absurd couplet. In fact, Impossible Spaces is an album saturated with‘anti-matter’; the loose compositions that make up the Toronto artist’s second full-length under his own name are anchored by an acute awareness of the importance of negative space in music.
Throughout the album, Perri’s own guitars, analogue synths and modest yet striking tenor are embellished with flourishes of flutes, strings and horns, but nowhere does he allow the ornate arrangements to overflow into gratuitous sentimentality. The wide array of instruments is used instead to colour Perri’s meandering, often elusive, vocal melodies with subtle organic textures and hints of tropicália, giving the music an intangible, breathy quality that is at once both lush and generously spacious. Sandro Perri withholds a lot from his audience. Both emotionally guarded and musically understated, Impossible Spaces can seem vaguely inconsequential when approaching it for the first time but it is in its reserved nature that the album holds its irresistible allure.There is a sense of incompleteness running through Perri’s music – melodies turn unexpectedly, or trail off completely, and moments of catharsis are completely avoided, even when threatened numerous times on the album’s centrepiece ‘Wolfman’ – surrounding the record in an intoxicating air of mystique defying full comprehension.
Impossible Spaces’ existence is a precarious one, its unassuming nature kept from slipping into insipidity only by Perri’s canny appreciation of restraint; the plodding, metronomic percussion and clunky construction of ‘Futureactive Kid (Part 1)’ provides a glimpse of how the album could have turned out had he not performed this balancing act with such dexterity elsewhere. For the most part however, Impossible Spaces is a complex album betraying a sophisticated artistic vision and what initially appears to be a polite, mild-mannered set of mid-paced folk songs slowly unfolds to reveal an endlessly engaging and subtly nuanced work.
Review: Tom Waits – Bad As Me
Tom Waits needs no introduction. Now in his fifth decade of making music, the singer-songwriter has made the arc from nightclub-singer maudlin jazz-and blues in his time at Asylum Records,to the instrumentally eclectic synthesisof Swordfishtrombone and Rain Dogs in the early Eighties, the atmospheric skeletal rhythms of Bone Machine (1992), the backwoods blues and gospel of Mule Variations (1999), and ultimately the quasi-industrial Real Gone (2004).
His first studio full-length in seven years, Bad As Me is an astonishing affirmation of his unfailingtalent. Waits doesn’t necessarily tread new ground, but revisits the eclectic styles he has pioneeredin his career: the martial ‘Hell Broke Luce’, for example, with its semi-barking vocals and aggressive multi-instrumental rhythmic thumps, is strongly reminiscent of Rain Dogs.
But Bad As Me never sounds stale.In fact, Waits’ songwriting ability and innovation is once again confirmed: there isn’t a single weak track in the bunch. Moods shifts define the album, which flits from the smoky, melancholy ballad of ‘Talking at the Same Time’ to the swinging and trombone-filled ‘Get Lost’, to the downtrodden tango inflected lament of ‘Pay Me’. On the roaring ‘Satisfied’, meanwhile, Waits howls over the bluesy guitar riffs of Keith Richards (yes, that Keith Richards).
Album single ‘Bad As Me’ is far and away the standout, its echoing drums and baritone sax outshone only by Waits’ hoarse and near hysteric voice. As usual, Waits’ voice completely dominates the record. Able to convey emotion through the slightest of vocal inflections, it is equally captivating from the husky tones of ‘Back in the Crowd’to the smooth falsetto of ‘Get Lost’. The latter sees Waits chastising of irresponsibility (‘Everybody knows umbrellas will cost more in the rain’) while condemning our uneven application of those standards: ‘We bailed out all the millionaires.They’ve got the fruit, we’ve got the rind.’ What rind we have left, though, is worth spending on Bad As Me.
Bombay Bicycle Club curries favour
When I remind guitarist, Jamie MacColl, and drummer, Suren de Saram, that in a 2009 interview with this very paper they claimed that they still had university places waiting for them in case the band didn’t work out, a twinkle of mischief appears MacColl’s eye. ‘That sounds like something I’d say.’ It is a mark of the speed at which the career of Bombay Bicycle Club has progressed that just two and a half years after filling in UCAS forms they are appearing at festivals up and down the country and on BBC Radio 1’s Live Lounge. ‘I’d say it’s looking pretty good right now,’ says de Saram. ‘The reception to the new album has been pretty positive on the whole so the future’s bright.’
He isn’t wrong. With the release of A Different Kind of Fix, their third fulllength, the quartet have established themselves as one of Britain’s finest young bands. Recording for this, the band’s third album in three years, took place over a period of around nine months with sessions taking place in London, Hamburg and Atlanta. For MacColl, ‘This was the most enjoyable recording process. The first album was harder for all of because we weren’t used to the studio and we felt like things were a bit out of our hands. If it came down to a decision between us and the producer, the producer usually won out.’
The year after their debut, Bombay Bicycle Club underwent a drastic change of musical direction, from the jangly-indie-pop of I Had the Blues But I Shook Them Loose, to the luscious acoustic folk of their sophomore album Flaws. MacColl confesses that this change was a bid for the band to seize control and do what they wanted, not what was expected of them.
‘I don’t know if we’d admit it but that was partly a reaction to people dismissing us as just another indie band. Principally, however, we didn’t do Flaws to escape those labels, it was just what we wanted to do.
‘The fundamental aspects of what makes us a band are still the same. All the song writing still starts with Jack [Steadman, vocalist] and as a unit we’ve always said that we just want to enjoy it and that we wouldn’t want to be a band if we didn’t get on. Making music should be a fun experience. It shouldn’t feel like work.’
Indeed, the folk release asserted the band’s musical talent and won them a more diverse group of fans. A Different Kind of Fix sees Bombay Bicycle Club plug their electric guitars back in and proves to be their most experimental effort to date, with a far denser layering of sound and the use of more sophisticated studio techniques. When asked about this, the second big change of musical direction of the band’s career and their increased confidence in the studio, MacColl answers: ‘To be honest maybe we’ve gone too far in that way, but I’d rather have done that than try to play it safe.’
Having completed a successful tour of America, the band are currently mid-way through a tour of Britain, after which they will travel around Europe via Brazil. With their new, more complex songs and busier schedule, Bombay Bicycle Club have forced themselves to develop. ‘It’s definitely harder to recreate the new stuff live. The more electronic songs have taken more work but the end result still works. We’re not just a four piece indie-rock band anymore.’
Cyclist dies on Woodstock Road
A woman has died after being involved in a collision on the Woodstock Road this morning.
The crash took place shortly after 9am. The victim, who was on a bicycle, encountered the cement mixer lorry near the junction with Polstead Road. The road was closed by police throughout much of Friday morning.
The victim, thought to be in her thirties, was taken to hospital, but pronounced dead shortly afterwards. The man driving the lorry, a 74-year-old man, was arrested on suspicion of causing death by dangerous driving, but subsequently bailed by police.
First Night Review : Children Of Oedipus
Any classicist will remember how the first read-through of a Greek tragedy feels: stilted, sometimes soporific, other times ludicrously over dramatised, always unnatural: Children of Oedipus had many of the same qualities. The acting was generally fairly average, rarely sparkling and often unbelievably awkard: none of the characters achieved the necessary emotional development, with the result that their final outbursts of lamentation seem contrived and embarrassing. It’s rare to see a Greek tragedy, even adapted, transfer well to a modern audience, and to a great extent it’s not the fault of this company.
Also certainly not their fault is the notorious problem of filling the O’Reilly, which suffers from being neither the BT, with its cosy audience of friends, nor the Playhouse, where students mingle with real grown-ups. As a result, the theatre lacks energy: a few critics, a few friends, some parents, and a couple of solitary Euripides-lovers do not a packed house make, regrettably. Audience conceptions of dramatic technique have changed too far, it seems. The emotional intensity required would be difficult for even the strongest of actors, and no one in this piece had the bravado to carry off the visceral pain experienced by the various members of the House of Cadmus as their city and their family are torn apart by internecine strife.
Nevertheless, there were some strong moments: an unusually attractive and blonde Tiresias in Jack Wills put in one of the strongest performances, aided by the clever conceit of a radio standing in for Tiresias’ messages from the gods. Also strong was the messenger speech, which was transformed into a duet by the dead brothers Polyneices and Eteocles: any lover of meta-theatre would have been delighted by the image of two dead brothers announcing their own death under the pretence of being a fairly uninteresting messenger character.
The set design was also very effective, reminding one of a decaying English country house, entirely appropriate despite its apparent anachronicity for the falling House of Cadmus. The danger of the traditional Oxford thespian self-confidence is that all your dramatic choices imagine that the acting will be fantastic in your play: for Children of Oedipus the sonorous, powerful drumbeats could have fitted very nicely into a generally strong performance, but in this middling, uninspired rendition, felt overbearing and ineffectual simultaneously. On the whole, this performance was fine: the play was delivered, the meaning got across, the lines remembered. Yet it seemed to lack any lift, any buzz, any tension, and in consequence one left feeling underwhelmed and uninspired – there was an unshakeable and destructive feeling that all involved were merely going through the motions. Euripides deserves better, but like all tragedians, seems fated never to get a truly effective, exciting modern treatment.
2.5 STARS
University applications down
Oxford has largely managed to resist a fall in the number of applicants for entry in 2012.
Figures published this week show that applications to Oxford, Cambridge and those for Medicine, Dentistry and Veterinary Science have fallen collectively by just 0.8% on last year’s figure.
This figure, taken on 15th October – the deadline for these applications, contrasts favourably against the number of applications made to UK universities in general, which stands at 9% behind the figure taken at the same time last year.
This overall fall in applications coincides with the first intake of UK students who are forced to pay an average annual tuition fee of £8,390, but who could be paying as much as £9,000 per year to study. Indeed, this drop becomes 12% when foreign students are factored out.
Of the 7,000 fewer students to apply, the most significant falls are to be seen in the number of female students and mature students making applications, with a 20% drop in the number of prospective students over the age of 25.
The number of applicants from Wales has suffered similarly, falling by 8.3% compared with last year. However, Welsh universities will not increase their tuition fees until a year after English universities. Consequently, National Union of Students (NUS) has expressed concern that Welsh applicants considering Welsh universities are unaware that the increases will not affect them this year.
However, while City University London and the University of Manchester have seen huge falls of 41.4% and 16% respectively, others have recorded significant increases in applications. Warwick’s figures are around 10% higher than at the same point in 2011, with Edinburgh and St Andrew’s witnessing significant increases as well.
Universities UK has stressed that taking a consensus at such an early stage in the applications process is likely to produce “unreliable indicators”, but if this figure turns out to be an accurate representation for entry in 2012, they will see the lowest number of university applications for 30 years.
Many Oxford students are not surprised, however, that Oxford has not experienced a slump in applications. Third year St. Hilda’s student Francesca Kellaway told Cherwell that this is down to the fact that “The education here is unique and students get a lot for their money. Even with the increase in fees, students still won’t be paying what an Oxford education is worth.”
Twenty-eight institutions have, in fact, informed government regulators that they are re-assessing the tuition fees figure they initially intended, in an attempt to make their courses more affordable. It has yet to be seen if prospective students will prioritise the affordability of a course over its reputation.
Third year Magdalen student Andrew Barrowman believes that tuition fees shouldn’t influence your choice of course or university. He told Cherwell that “You can’t put a price on your education. Applying for the course that is right for you should be your top priority. I wouldn’t sacrifice the quality of my education to pay a little less at the end of it”.
Oxford University has accordingly made significant attempts to soften the financial blow to its current applicants by appropriating more funds to financial support.
A spokesperson for the university told Cherwell how it intends to spend more than any other English university on access. More than £11m is to be spent on financial support, student services and outreach in the 2012-13 academic year alone and will increase with time.
“One in six students will receive a fee waiver and a quarter will receive a bursary, based on current student profiles. The lowest-income students will receive support totalling £10,000 in their first year and over £6,000 in every later year.”
“Oxford offers the most generous financial support for the lowest-income students of any university in the country. The University is committed to access for all, regardless of means, and is putting serious money behind that commitment.”
‘Pleb’s College’ returns in East Oxford
A ‘free university’ set up by squatters over the summer has found a new home after being evicted from their previous building.
The self-titled ‘Pleb’s College’ was set up in August in an abandoned factory off Cowley Road with the aim of creating a space where anyone could go for free to participate in or lead workshops, discussions, activities or lessons. It also provided an area for people to socialise and enjoy occasional free meals.
Despite getting a considerable amount of support from the local community, the group was evicted by the owners of the building on the September 6th and was homeless until last Thursday when they announced on their blog that they had found a new home in an abandoned office building on Union Street in Cowley.
There are currently around six people living in the building including some of the main organisers of the project. They told Cherwell that they became aware that the property had been empty for some months and found that they could get in without any criminal damage. Current law which states that if a building is abandoned, the squatters get in without breaking and entering, and they advertise their presence with appropriate signs then it is simply a civic matter between the owners and the squatters rather than an issue for the Police. Pleb’s College therefore claims legal status as legitimate squatters.
However, not everyone agrees that this should be possible and there has been pressure on the government to criminalise squatting.
Christopher Pruijsen, a second-year PPE-ist from Univ, commented, ‘They should be prosecuted, in the civil court. But law should be reformed and squatters should be legally forced to pay the going market rental rate for every day they squat in any property’.
Ben Hudson from Regent’s Park takes a more sympathetic view to the dquatter’s mission: ‘We’re not talking about what the Daily Mail calls squatting, when someone pops out to get some milk and a family of eighteen gypsies move in and drink their Cava. By making use of empty buildings, squatters such as those staying at Pleb’s College can create something important for the community.”
Nicola Sugden, the co-chair of the Labour Club, agreed with Hudson and added, “squatting is generally a sign that the state has failed to provide people with the shelter and/or community space that they need.”
The national campaign group Squatters’ Action for Secure Homes (SQUASH) is trying to prevent the government from criminalising squatting and argues that the right to take shelter in abandoned buildings has been enshrined in British Law for over 100 years. They add that criminalising squatters would be very detrimental to the community particularly given that over 40 percent of people currently squatting suffer from mental health issues.
‘Pleb’s College’ is intended to be both a shelter for homeless or vulnerable people and a provider of education, discussion and skill-sharing in the community. Some of the organisers involved are graduates of Oxford University but, when asked how he felt about the University, one commented, “it is somewhere of privilege, elitism and hierarchy that is not open to everyone especially with the increase in fees.” He suggested that this was part of his motivation to open a space where “everyone can teach and everyone can learn.”
The Pleb’s college hosts a huge variety of events to which anyone can turn up and take part and also welcomes anyone who would like to start up their own activity. The next ‘free university’ session will be this Saturday.