–
Blog Page 1929
Corpus tortoises lose to Jesus
Sunday saw the annual Corpus Christi College Tortoise Fair take place, in which reptiles from nine different colleges were pitted against each other in a race in the college grounds.
Competitors ranged from the formidable Emmanuelle at almost a hundred years old, who was representing Regent’s Park College, to the tiny, four-year-old Percy, racing on behalf of University College.
To ensure a level playing field, the competitor from Magdalen, who looked suspiciously like a student in a tortoise costume, was forced to devour a whole iceberg lettuce before he was allowed to cross the start line.
In the end, Tilly from Jesus College, a newcomer to this event, took home first prize, with Mackie (Regent’s Park) and the imaginatively named Turtle (Christchurch) taking joint second place.
It was a disappointing result for the host college, Corpus Christi, whose two contestants, Foxe and Oldham, not only failed to bag any of the top prizes but actually indulged in some spirited, mid-race wrestling along with Frederick from Lincoln College.
Professor Richard Cawardine, President of Corpus Christi College and provider of the race commentary, told Cherwell that “the tortoises have become too complacent”, after Foxe’s victory in last year’s race. He also threatened to summon the reptiles to “penal collections” to discuss their shaky performance in the event.
Alex Coupe, the official Corpus Tortoise Keeper who has devoted the last few weeks to training the creatures for the race, took a more optimistic view, saying that while he was “obviously disappointed” with the result, “Foxe and Oldham were the most energetic tortoises out there”.
It is estimated that the fair raised over £2000 for Leukaemia and Lymphoma Research. Corpus JCR President Jack Evans called the day “a tremendous success”, saying, “the fact we’ve raised so much is a tribute to all the effort that’s gone into the event – it’s just a shame it was Jesus who took home the prize!”
The Lives of Others
[mm-hide-text]%%IMG_ORIGINAL%%3290%%[/mm-hide-text]
[mm-hide-text]%%IMG_ORIGINAL%%3287%%[/mm-hide-text]
[mm-hide-text]%%IMG_ORIGINAL%%3288%%[/mm-hide-text]
[mm-hide-text]%%IMG_ORIGINAL%%3285%%[/mm-hide-text]
[mm-hide-text]%%IMG_ORIGINAL%%3289%%[/mm-hide-text]
[mm-hide-text]%%IMG_ORIGINAL%%3286%%[/mm-hide-text]
[mm-hide-text]%%IMG_ORIGINAL%%3291%%[/mm-hide-text]
The Case for Privacy
The vested interests in the tabloid media are invoking fallacious arguments in promoting free speech ahead of privacy. The most common is some analogy of the ‘victimisation’ of consenting women by rich, famous men who are full in the knowledge that their actions can be veiled by an injunction. But the reason why it is predominantly the rich and famous who seek injunctions is not because they are the sole perpetrators of wrongdoings; it is because the costs of litigation exclude the majority, and it is only the famous that have their, otherwise, banal engagements embellished by the media. This argument therefore doesn’t address the morality of seeking injunctions.
The judiciary are set the task of balancing the conflicting human rights of free speech and a right to privacy. The central message from Lord Neuberger’s report on Friday was that free speech supersedes privacy either when an illicit activity has taken place, or if the matter is in the public interest. The Supreme Court make these judgments on a case-by-case basis. If an individual’s actions are legitimate and have no externalities then the public have no right to have exposure to them, unless they are collectively willing to engage in reciprocity, or in other words, they are willing to engage in a society with no privacy whatsoever.
Max Mosley is right. Whilst his actions with those women were far from orthodox, they were consented, perfectly legal and nobody’s business. But because his achievements have caught the public spotlight, it is inanely assumed that every trifle in his life is in the public interest. And though the classic retort claims that public figures should be scrutinised because of their elevated position – as if they were now sterile and inhuman, not every figure in public life wished its demands upon them. The late Princess Diana’s treatment by the media and her interview with Panorama in 1995 give weight to this notion. We should therefore assume that all famous people may not appreciate perpetual intrusion into their lives.
The central reason for the exposure of the idiosyncrasies of familiar people by the media is to provide entertainment. It is entertaining for some to find out that John Terry had transgressions with the girlfriend of a former team-mate, but the very same incident involving three members of the general public, unknown to the fourth person, would evoke indifference, not interest, in the fourth person. The same can be said about any personal issue or activity that someone may have or have done, which they’d prefer not to be shared with the world. So the moral debate should centre here: whether someone privy to an affair, vice or insecurity should have the responsibility to tattle. If society has said no, then it shouldn’t exhibit double standards by making spurious exceptions with criteria that clearly lie outside the accepted conditions of legality and public interest.
Of course, the consensus would be different, should the party privy to the information have loyalties to other parties and feels obliged to divulge. But this is acceptable because the social setting is more intimate, and the interested parties have a broader understanding of the demeanour and intentions of others, placing the incident in a context for which to make a better judgment. Tabloids feel obliged to their readers, and represent a macrocosm of the first case: documenting every move of an easy, recognisable prey and creating a distorted, caricatured and, therefore, untruthful context with the sole aim to profit through entertainment.
Lord Stoneham’s justification of using parliamentary privilege, allowing MPs or Lords to override court injunctions on free speech, to reveal Sir Fred Goodwin’s affair with an RBS colleague at the height of the banking collapse is contentious. To say that the affair blighted his judgment is completely irrelevant, because it’s an unverifiable claim and there are no meaningful lessons to be learned from it – except, maybe, the tautology that people in positions of power and responsibility are also subjected to the whims of human nature. One is not condoning Goodwin’s actions but merely removing them from the realm of perceived abnormality.
We should therefore welcome Lord Judge’s wider condemnation of the dissemination of defamations on the largely unregulated social networking platforms. In addition to declaiming that modern technology is ‘out of control’ in terms of restoring the balance between conflicting rights, he said: ‘ I am not giving up the possibility of people who, in effect, peddle lies about others using modern technology may one day be brought under control’. This is a slightly different issue, but both comments lie at the heart of the argument about using platforms to degrade people who have done nothing illegal and in the public interest. He was speaking in the context of influential Twitter users who promulgate information which for, whatever reason, should not be expressed with the intention either to mislead or to breach another person’s privacy. Lord Neuberger’s choice of words may have been improvable, but they encapsulate the need to rebalance the tradeoff between free speech and privacy, for however liberating the internet has been, liberation restricts privacy, and legislation needs to redress this. But in terms of the Supreme Court’s record on issuing injunctions and super-injunctions, it is getting the balance right.
One lucky bastard
I write plays in order to contradict myself in public,’ said Sir Tom Stoppard epigrammatically as he delivered the 21st Richard Hillary Memorial Lecture. Stoppard was introduced as a ‘national treasure’, a title which, despite sounding stickily sweet, cannot be shrugged off: the playwright’s work in writing for radio, theatre, and film have produced classics such as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966), Travesties (1974), Arcadia (1993), and The Coast of Utopia (2002), plays which have been intellectually stimulating and verbally pyrotechnical, but also popular.
Hailed by the president of Trinity, Sir Ivor Roberts, as an internationally acclaimed playwright, Stoppard modestly assured his audience that he was not an ‘internationally acclaimed lecturer’. Speaking anecdotally on ‘The Pragmatic Art’, Stoppard read a conversation from his play Travesties, during which the historical figure Henry Carr wonders at the fact that ‘artists are members of a privileged class. Art is absurdly overrated by artists, which is understandable, but what is strange is that it is absurdly overrated by everyone else.’ Stoppard quoted his character Carr’s statement that out of 1000 people, there are 900 who do the work, 90 who do well, nine who do good, and one ‘lucky bastard’ who gets to be the artist.
What does an artist do? Stoppard asked. How does one justify being an artist? What does it mean to be an artist during a moment of war? (Here he was playing tribute to Richard Hillary, author of The Last Enemy, who was a pilot killed during the Battle of Britain.) Stoppard did not answer these questions, but did admit – in his acknowledged role as Great British Playwright and Great Artist – his unease with the generous socio-cultural assumption that his role is worth preserving. Stoppard meandered into a weighing-in on the moral role of the artist, and the theatre as ‘event’, without losing his audience. His lecture resembled a self-conscious and knowing conversational monologue rather than oration, and was all the better for it.
In her conclusion to the lecture, Professor Hermione Lee, president of Wolfson College, read Isaiah Berlin’s tribute to Aleksandr Herzen (who was appropriately a character in Stoppard’s Coast of Utopia) and praised Stoppard’s ‘opulence of intellect’.
For a man whose plays are poised between moral drama and farce, which comfortably pairs Beckett and Shakespeare, Romantic poetry and thermodynamics, dandies and Dadaists, secret agents and the laws of probability, Stoppard embodies his belief that intellectual generosity is a moral necessity.
Review: Les Précieuses ridicules
Two young women come to Paris to find jeux d’esprit and witty beaux in a new staging of the satirical comedy of manners Les Précieuses ridicules, produced by Projet Molière, an organisation which gives students of French an opportunity to practice the spoken language in a friendly environment.
Magdelon and Cathos are the précieuses, ladies who are desperate to integrate themselves into high society, through their exaggerated refinement, but scorn their eligible suitors, considering them too vulgar. In revenge the suitors play a trick on them, whereby their valets, Mascarille and Jodelet, call on the ladies, pretending to be nobility and behaving in the most outrageous fashion, only to be fawned over by the two social climbers. What follows is a ludicrous display of suavity pushed to the extreme. With a modernized set and performed in the original French (but with English surtitles for those of us who are somewhat less than fluent), this production is both light-hearted and enthusiastic. Undoubtedly I would have enjoyed it more had I been able to understand the French – in my ignorance I found my eyes constantly gravitating towards the surtitles and this caused me to miss some of the action not taking place centre stage, and I felt that Molière’s biting satire on the ‘preciousness’ of the circle which the title characters represent was rather forgotten under the silliness of it all. Nevertheless, the dialogue was fluid and the voices and movements were so full of character that I still would have been laughing along had I not understood a word of the text.
Particularly good was Aurélien Pulice as the flamboyant Mascarille, whilst Emma Maitland and Béatrice Mercier were entertaining as the précieuses; however the whole cast deserves praise, particularly those actors for whom French is not their native language. To memorise a script is one thing, but to do so in a foreign language is quite another, and the commitment displayed here was commendable. Combining French comedy, feather boas and Lady Gaga, Les Précieuses ridicules provides the audience with a whimsical hour of amusement without prompting them to think too hard.
And the rest is art history
Andrew Graham-Dixon, one of the BBC’s best known art critics and BBC 2’s The Culture Show presenter surprises me when I meet him in his North London home: the stories he tells me about his experiences as an English student at Christ Church in the early 1980s seem somewhat at odds with his laid-back, sociable manner. ‘I was enjoying the reading so much that I tragically neglected other aspects of university life, to the extent that when I went for a drink in the Buttery at the end of finals, they wouldn’t serve me because they wouldn’t believe I was at the college.’ He concedes that he did party at Bristol where his girlfriend studied and as a postgraduate at the Coutauld Institute in London he spent the majority of his time playing snooker.
He makes his rise to the summit of journalism sound like the sheer result of chance encounters: ‘I started doing journalism because I thought I had to do something’. He explains how the first job he got in journalism came about through writing a letter to completely the wrong person, Lynne Truss, who at that point was editor of the Times Higher Education Supplement – ‘She gave me a job reviewing exhibitions.’ But is this apparent insouciance belied by the fact he had managed to become the main art critic for The Independent by the tender age of 25?
Since then, his career has prospered. He became a Sunday Telegraph columnist and won several journalism awards before coming to the attention of the BBC. I wonder if prospects are less bright for today’s graduates considering a similar career. ‘You have to be determined,’ he says. ‘These are interesting times and there is economic pressure on things like television production companies. What that means is that people are more open to the idea of employing younger, therefore cheaper, people than five years ago. So in some ways it is easier for someone from university to get experience.’
Graham-Dixon’s own determination resulted in his promotion to the position of main presenter of The Culture Show, for which he has interviewed personalities such as John Lydon, also known as Johnny Rotten of The Sex Pistols, whom he describes admiringly as a ‘sacred monster’, adding ‘there is something just extraordinary about him.’
Much of Graham-Dixon’s energy, however, goes into his own art programmes. Planned for 2011 is a series entitled The Art of America (following on from his series The Art of Germany and The Art of Russia) as well as a ‘cultural and culinary’ history of Sicily, co-presented with the chef Giorgio Locatelli.
I ask if condensing hundreds of years of a nation’s artistic history, into – at most – 3 hour-long programmes is a daunting challenge and he replies ‘I think of them as essays not histories. Film can be poetic, elusive and suggestive.’ He cites John Ruskin in support of his view that ‘through a nation’s art you understand its history.’
What can we expect from The Art of America? ‘If you’re looking at America outside the ethnographic realm, you are essentially looking at it as a post 17th-century culture, starting with the Puritan movement. I personally would prefer to deal with that in one programme. I think the 20th century stories are so interesting. One could quite easily create a whole TV series about what is happening in American art now.’
The topic of art ‘now’ is a thorny one, as it must inevitably deal with the questioning of the very concept of ‘art’ itself. Graham-Dixon co-curated the first public gallery exhibition of Damien Hirst, Rachel Whiteread and their generation, ‘Broken English’ at the Serpentine Gallery in 1991, and he has a clear view on the matter: ‘Anything can be art. It’s just a question of whether it is good art or bad art.’
So I could legitimately put my shoe in Tate Modern as an exhibit? ‘Sure,’ he says, ‘it’s just not very good art. I don’t have a problem a video of a man picking his nose being put in Tate Modern. What I do have a problem with is what tradition it claims to belong to.’ He suggests that we are being misled into believing that this form of ‘modern art’ is in some sense a mutation of the specific artistic tradition that began with Giotto and Michelangelo. To look for a truly ‘modern’ work that loosely occupies a place in the same tradition as, say, a Caravaggio painting, one might do better to watch a Tarantino film: ‘It’s lit, it shows characters, it tells a story.’
Finally, he leaves me with a question: if visitors at Tate Modern can be shown a 24-hour video by Christian Marclay, why would the gallery never consider showing a two hour Hitchcock film?
Bon Iver are back
Given that Bon Iver have been laying low for a little too long now, their latest offering comes as a welcome if not anticipated surprise. A 15 second snippet of ‘Calgary’ – the new track available for free download – leaked online a few months ago and generated more hype than all the Harry Potter movies put together. Sadly though, those few moments of warm synth and creeping vocals are more effective than the full length song. I’m not sure whether my two year long obsession with For Emma For Ever Ago has rendered me incapable of appreciating anything different from Bon, but there is a sense that they’re deviating away from their idiosyncratic sound and quite explicitly dipping a toe or three into the mainstream pool.
Although being a hater is so cliche, and hating mainstream is even more cliche, to me Bon Iver belong in the acoustic and heart wrenching sections of our stores, and seeing them lean towards a generic sound is disappointing to say the least. Although this track is as ethereal as anything For Emma had to offer it fails to get those hairs on the back of your neck standing up, causing a bit of casual head swaying instead. Following the seemingly inescapable trend of synthesisers and warbling electro sounds, Justin Vernon has buoyed up his up his distinctive vocals with some subtle Kanyeish auto-tune which thank God sounds nothing like Weezy on 808 & Heartbreak but does detract somewhat from the credibility of the song. Maybe that collaboration with Mr West was not such a good idea after all.
[mm-hide-text]%%IMG%%3281%%[/mm-hide-text]
Bon Iver’s straying away from the untrodden track into a more common realm, perhaps because of its ‘easy listening’ quality leaves you hungry for more. Lucky for us though, the self-titled second album drops on June 20th and is available to pre-order on iTunes now. As there is no risk of the record company running out of albums to sell, I don’t really get the concept of pre-ordering but if you’re eager to be the coolest kid on the block, you better get on it. This release also welcomes the arrival of their UK tour where they’ll play London’s Hammersmith Apollo on October 24th and you know I’ve got my ticket. Let’s just hope that the sheer brilliance of For Emma, Forever Ago seeps into Bon Iver even if it is heavily diluted.
In anticipation of the full 11-track album, I leave you with songs that will either remind you of Bon Iver in the good old days, or give you a snippet of what his underrated collaborations have to offer – there are a few random gems in there too. Enjoy.
Joe Cornish: Chip off the old block
It was 2001 when Joe Cornish first conceived Attack the Block, in what seem like fairly unlikely circumstances for inspiration: he was being mugged by a gang of young kids. In fact, the same scene opens the film itself, which has finally leapt onto the silver screen after ten years of gestation and hard work. When I sit down to chat with Cornish, I’m sceptical that his first thought when having his wallet taken was, ‘Ooh, this’ll make a good film…’, but he laughs at this. ‘Oh no, that’s my first reaction to everything that happens to me. I’ve wanted to make a film since I was a kid, and my head’s been full of films since I was about seven. I’m afraid I’m one of those people who looks at everything and thinks about how it would play as a film.’
Although inspiration may have come from a somewhat unconventional source, the result is stunning. The plot is both simple and outlandish: a group of kids are midway through mugging a young woman, when they are interrupted by an alien invasion, and they spend the rest of the film defending their tower block from the extra-terrestrial threat. Although largely made up of unfamiliar faces, the young cast are brilliantly convincing, inhabiting a film that’s far more thrilling and cinematic than people might expect.
Attack the Block is one of the most original and stylish debuts of a British writer/director in years. This might surprise those familiar with Joe’s prior career as one half of comedy duo Adam and Joe, where the only hint of his cinematic future was the cuddly toy film re-enactments they used to make for their TV show. Despite the lack of cuddly toys here, Attack the Block looks like the work of a supremely confident and film-literate mind. Yet given its abundance of action and special effects, Cornish didn’t give himself the easiest first gig: had he always intended to direct it himself?
‘Yeah, absolutely. Always intended to. I’ve always wanted to direct, and particularly on this because I felt that would be the way that I would know exactly what was going on in the script, and be totally confident that I understood all the elements of the story, and I wouldn’t end up fucking up someone else’s masterpiece.’ So did he feel confident in steering it towards the screen? ‘No, it was surprising. To be honest, I had no idea. I’m one these people that for years has enjoyed film-going like sport. But when you actually make one, you realise what an incredible endeavour it is just to make anything coherent , and you realise the genuine amount of hard work involved. It annihilates all your personal relationships and your weekends and your holidays – it’s 24 hours a day for years, literally. But I loved it, I thought it was incredibly good fun.’
Still, Cornish isn’t quite new to this game. Over the past few years, he’s secretly been making a name for himself in Hollywood, co-writing the upcoming Tintin and Ant-Man while rubbing shoulders with, amongst others, Stephen Spielberg and Peter Jackson. I suggest that hanging around with such experts seems to have paid off, but Joe hesitates at this. ‘Riiight. Well, that’s nice of you to say, but those were both writing gigs. Ant-Man I’ve been working on for a while with [Shaun of the Dead director] Edgar Wright, and being friends with him has been a huge boon to me, because he’s taught me a huge amount, and tolerated me hanging around, watching how he does things.’ As a result of this association (Wright executive-produced Attack the Block), as well as due to its niche genre of horror-comedy, I remind Cornish that there have been an abundance of pretty lazy comparisons to Shaun of the Dead by both reviewers and the film’s marketing team.
‘Sure. I think it’s a very different film. I think Edgar’s a genius and I would be an idiot to try and do something similar. I think mine is more like a John Carpenter film. It’s less funny than Shaun of the Dead, it isn’t intended to be as joke driven. It wants to be a little more real, and maybe with a tiny bit more social commentary.’ Apart from anything, the setting is a very different one; while Shaun seemed fairly closely modelled on Wright and Simon Pegg’s own lives (give or take a few flesh-eating zombies), Attack the Block must be far less familiar territory for Wright, with its young cast and their distinctive inner-city slang. I suggest to Cornish that it wouldn’t necessarily be the first setting that people might associate with him, but he riles at this.
‘No, with great respect I think that’s a very reductive attitude. If you go through art and culture and eliminate everything that isn’t based on the author’s first hand personal experience, you’d lose the vast majority of it. So I wouldn’t even begin to think about it like that. I think that’s reductive and not the way to look at things, really.’ Feeling thoroughly scolded, and surprised by the irritation in Joe’s voice, I guess that I’m not the first to ask such a question. In fact, it’s understandable, given the work he put into immersing himself in that world. ‘The script was evolved from months and months of workshops with youth groups around south London, in which I interviewed them and talked them through the story. I recorded and transcribed personally everything they said and I taught myself the language they spoke, as if it was a foreign language. We worked extremely hard to create an authentic argot or slang, but we’ve also kept it quite simple and accessible.’
As the interview draws to a close, I feel obliged to ask about the future of The Adam and Joe Show on BBC 6Music. Even if Joe does become a big-shot director, will he continue to chat entertaining rubbish with Adam on Saturday mornings? He chuckles at this. ‘I hope so. I think what we’ll probably try and do is do little runs every now and then, if someone will have us. I think it’s quite healthy for both of us to do something outside of the radio show, and I don’t think either of us necessarily wants to spend the rest of our lives doing that show… But I came straight back from shooting, straight back onto the radio – I didn’t even have a day off, and that’s an expression of how much I love doing that show and how much I feel I owe the audience.’ Some fans might be a little disappointed by Adam’s absence from this film (if you discount his brief aural cameo, narrating a moth documentary on TV in one scene). Did Joe not want to give his professional other half a starring role? He laughs. ‘He’s my best friend in the world, and very talented, and as such, for my first film I wanted to be careful. If I fucked it up, I didn’t want to take him down with me.’
So after twenty-five years of looking at everything in the world and thinking about how anything might make a film (even a mugging), did he treat this as his one chance to shine? ‘Kind of. I didn’t sort of throw everything in like someone on a ridiculous trolley dash. But I have been waiting to do it for a long time and I’m acutely aware that the British film industry has a huge list of first time directors, a smaller list of second time directors, and a very small list of third time and career directors. I knew I had one shot. I wanted to do something ambitious, so that if it succeeded it would be exciting and if it failed it would be a heroic failure.’ In fact, it’s neither. And Joe certainly hasn’t ‘fucked it up’. Instead, Attack the Block is a fiercely original action flick that, along with similarly brilliant debuts like Moon and Submarine, represents a new wave of young British filmmaking talent. Being mugged can really pay off.
