Friday 11th July 2025
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Intoxficated

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‘There’s nought so much the spirit calms as rum and true religion.’ Byron.

This week we’re talking about what is perhaps my favourite of the spirits, Rum. I should declare an interest: I live in the Caribbean, where it pretty much is the only thing drunk. I drink it, when at home on the verandah, like a whisky or brandy – aged and in a balloon glass, or alternatively if ‘liming’ (Trinidadian slang for ‘hanging out’) with soda or coconut water. Rum and Soda is the classic: it’s invigorating and energetic, and cuts straight through the heat of the tropical sun. Note that I’m talking about gold rum here, Mount Gay being the most commercially available example. White rums like Bacardi are too sweet and have little flavour. Dark or ‘navy’ rum is so disgusting that it beggars belief – it’s like drinking tar with added caramel and Tabasco. No, what I’m talking about, and what all rum aficionados are talking about when they mention rum is gold rum, and the aged stuff at that.

This article got me feeling slightly homesick, so I went down to the Grog Shop, a Jericho landmark. They had a selection of about six rums, all about the £15 mark and, as I write this, I’m sipping away at some Mount Gay ‘Eclipse.’ I’m a little disappointed actually: it’s very smooth but a little insipid. Of course, it’s their basic range (I’d recommend Mount Gay XO) and goes wonderfully with club soda, but it doesn’t have the depths, complexity or the lingering languidness of a first class rum. That’s what I’m hoping people will get from this. I’m hoping people will see a good aged rum as a match to a fine single malt or X.O. cognac. It’s much cheaper too. Our standard, everyday brands at home are the Guatemalan Ron Zacapa 15 year old, the Guyanese El Dorado 15 year old, and the Jamaican 21 year old Appleton Estate. The latter two should be fairly available at a good off-license, so please do keep your eyes peeled – you’re in for a treat.

Creaming Spires

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So, anal sex. The ‘apotheosis’ of intercourse, according to Russell Brand. The thing that your boyfriend wants more than a First in Physics. But why? What is the enduring appeal for men to travel up the dirt track, if you’ll pardon the expression? Girls have a less favourable relationship towards it, I find. If you ask a group of girls at hall tonight whether they enjoy it in the annus horriblis I would bet you that, they’ll look at you with apparent unmitigated disgust, probably leaving their Black Forest Gateau untouched, and profess complete horror. This is understandable. When my friend succumbed to the tabooed temptation, her boyfriend filmed it and showed everyone in sixth form.

Now, I think we can all agree, no one wants their bum hole on film, no matter what’s going into it. Myself? I have something of an ambivalent relationship with the Nastiest of the Nasty, something akin to the Freudian ‘uncanny’, you could say, an attraction and a repulsion, a cognitive dissonance, in that I feel in my heart that essentially it is a bit gross – it is, after all is said and done, your ‘poo shoot’ as my ex boyfriend charmingly referred to it – yet it is this very taboo that makes me, at the end of a night out, quite want to do it. Oh dear. Perhaps this is a massive overshare, even for an ‘anonymous’ column (or it would be anonymous if the boyf didn’t keep telling everyone).

A friend came to visit recently, and she admitted that, for her, the bum holio is a one way street. Fair enough, you’d think. But no. I drunkenly insisted on encouraging her to try the wonders of the hallowed poo shoot, but to use ‘a lot of lube, because only a fool goes to brown town without it’. Cringe. Incidentally, though, I would also advise first-timers to be drunk, otherwise the physical reality may dawn on you mid-act, and the last thing you want is to be tense. You know what I mean.

I bet there’s far more tabooed activity going on in Oxbridge than any other university. When you’re working to the best of your ability, the pride and joy of your parents at home, while balancing multiple social and extracurricular activities (and probably a bit of volunteering) you want to do something a bit, well, nasty. And sometimes a calorie overload at Hassans just doesn’t cut it. Though I wouldn’t indulge in the Nastiest Nasty after a Hassan’s unless you wash your own sheets, I can otherwise only imagine the dystopian nightmare that your unwitting scout would confront as she pulled back your regulation orange duvet. Now that is nasty.

But anyway, give it a go. See if it shakes those essay blues (insert something ‘browns’ joke here). My friend texted me this morning, ‘Were going to do bum last night but got too drunk and fell asleep’. Rookie error.

Hips don’t lie

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The psychological and physical cabinet of curiosities that is Desmond Morris (both his mind and home) was to greet me last Thursday. I was somewhat apprehensive about interviewing what one could happily refer to as the world expert on body language, for obvious reasons. Yet within ten minutes of meeting Desmond Morris, his bubbling enthusiasm, wit and joie de vivre had dissolved any such paranoid notions. His memory is an overpopulated stage of actors and scenes from a fascinating life, his house a venerable melting pot in which is condensed an extravaganza of books and paintings (many being his own creations), oozing exotic artefacts from every pore – with even more exotic stories behind them. Even when seated, I realised the world of Desmond Morris is never stationary – our discussion was continually punctuated by lively demonstrations of the gestures he described.

The juxtaposition of such a diverse collection of objects and facts in Morris’ house and mind reflects his original background as a Surrealist artist. As a member of the British surrealist movement, he exhibited from very early on in his professional life, sharing his first London exhibition with Joan Miro. Through an unfortunate case of bad timing, surrealism was effectively ‘shut down’ in this country, and it dawned on him that his living would have to come from another means. He thus pursued his other love (that of animals) through a successful career as a scientist. Yet he never stopped painting. He still produces vast quantities of work, has written a surrealist manifesto ‘just for fun’, and last year sold his ‘Magnum Opus’ in London – a triptych with the dimensions of Bosch’s Garden Of Early Delights, where all his surreal biomorphic figures come together for a grand ‘gathering.’

Near the end of his popular television series in the 50s (‘Zoo time’), having mastered the self-admittedly contradictory art of ‘simplification without distortion’, he became something of a public figure and moved increasingly towards the study of the human animal, publishing the controversial book ‘The Naked Ape’. Morris removed the blinkers cast over our eyes by habit, using his highly developed skills of zoological observation to observe and analyse the human species, with spectacular results. The book was a rip-roaring success and became an international best-seller (selling upwards of 10 million copies and translated into 23 languages) that was to change our paradigm of human life as we know it.

Having accomplished fame, travel was next on the list. Persuaded to ‘see more of the world’ by his wife and friends, the Morris Odyssey began. He has now exceeded his childhood aim of visiting 100 countries, which started with a journey around 30 to create a global ‘gesture map,’ revealing fascinating links between gestures and cultural history. Not that body language isn’t subject to modification – he recounts the history of the ‘Aloha’ greeting he received (a sort of sideways ‘phone’ hand signal ‘waggled at you’) upon reaching Hawaii. Its origin was something of a mystery. It turns out to have been adopted by the Hawaiians from the ‘let’s get a drink’ sign they observed from Spanish sailors as this imitated pouring a bottle of drink into their mouths. Mistranslations in gestures are not always so happily received – he discovered that in Germany the ‘crazy’ signal of circling a finger next to one’s head can get you arrested. Indeed, having been troubled by both the KGB and the Mafia through his travels, it seems Morris had undertaken a rather risky business.

Following a mini-tour of lucky charms collected during these travels, our conversation moves into the mysterious realms of human superstition. Morris muses on the sometimes unbelievable series of rituals undertaken by many individuals, particularly those with ‘high risk’ professions – footballers being a case in point: ‘there’s one (English) goalkeeper who had 33 things he had to do before a match.’ As with body language, we often don’t know the exact reasons underlying our behaviour. ‘Do you know why you’re wearing earrings?’ he asks me. It turns out earrings are a result of an ancient practice to ‘distract’ evil spirits from entering the body through the ears. He draws a parallel to the use of ‘Sheela-na-Gigs’ – rather risqué stone carvings of women placed over churches, whose parted legs ‘distracted the devil’ (one used to feature on the Norman clock tower on Cornmarket Street). The Maltese devised a slightly more sophisticated diversion tactic in the form of two clocks, with one telling the wrong time, to confuse and distract evil spirits.

Body language often reflects more about a person than they intend to give away, especially to the observant eye of the zoologist. Some are easily spotted – the nose itch of a liar (YouTube the Clinton trial to see this one in action). Fascinatingly, scratching the back of the head is a sign of concealed aggression, (thankfully) hiding the basic urge to deliver an overarm blow during everyday conversation. Others are more subtle. Morris recalls being asked to film a show on body language. Displaying a duo of identical photographs of a woman, he asked the men in the audience which ‘twin’ they would choose to spend the night with. The audience gasped as they realised that 90% put their hands up for the same picture. The explanation? ‘Pupil enlargement.’

Morris elucidates the true impulse behind the lovers gaze: ‘in actual fact they are checking pupil dilation in the other person, a sign of attraction, and we are unconsciously aware of this.’ He then went a step further: ‘we were very naughty, and went to the flat of one of the researchers to take a photograph of her boyfriend.’ Fitted with a ‘pupilometer,’ the researcher was shown a series of pictures: a landscape (elicited no response), a rubbish site (reduced the pupils to a pinprick), a fit movie star (showed evident enlargement), and finally the photograph of her boyfriend – at which point ‘the pupil just exploded!’

After a discussion of the origins of smiling, Morris notes ‘you’ll never see a Japanese girl laugh without holding her hand over her mouth.’ Morris puts down the extreme degree of control over body language by the ‘inscrutable oriental’ to their strong military history. With a strong level of self-discipline, it appears a degree of control over body language is possible. Morris recalls undertaking fieldwork at the World Poker Championships: ‘I saw a man win a million dollars and there wasn’t a flicker of expression on his face. He was a statue. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, he was presented with a mountain of cash by two armed guards and actually had to walk across the room, and wait a few minutes, and only then did he give a subtle jerk of the forefinger into the air.’

Another case of ‘training’ in body language emerged in Morris’ travels to a Geisha house. ‘I was sitting there thinking, why do I feel so good? There’s no sex involved! How are they doing it?’ He explains that Geisha’s are in effect being paid for body language: ‘they’re trained in a whole range of tiny, subtle details. You’re exposed to a series of subordinations and acts of submissiveness. It’s impossible to resist, it swirls a man’s ego without him knowing why.’ We agree that a Geisha’s guide to flirting would be a feminist’s nightmare. Subordination however is no long term aphrodisiac: ‘A Belgian friend called me up the other day, and asked me an old-fashioned Hugh Heffner question: ‘What gives a woman sex appeal?” Morris is decisive in his belief that rather than looking for a fashion model (‘exquisitely, outrageously beautiful women actually frighten a man’), most men are quite simply after someone who is physically and intellectually at their level, ‘who is not going to be submissive and subordinate as ultimately that’s boring.’

This brings us to a topic Morris evidently feels strongly about: ‘Women should run politics. Men are very bad at it – they keep mucking it up, getting greedy, going to war. Men are a disaster! They don’t have the natural precaution and multitasking abilities of the female.’ In primeval times, Morris explains, the male and female totally relied on each other. This was lost with the process of urbanisation which unequivocally favoured men. Morris is keen to emphasise that our natural habitat is certainly not the ‘human zoo’ of city life, which is to blame for much ‘unnatural’ human behaviour – the horrors of domestic abuse being a case in point. ‘You can’t say let’s go back to village life, you have to get more clever about organising city life and the way people live.’ Morris notes the amazing propensity we have developed to ignore and avoid each other. ‘It’s a modern invention that people don’t want to be intimate with strangers, for millions of years we lived in small tribes where everybody knew everybody. The natural thing to do would be to greet everybody when walking down the street, but this just isn’t practical. So we make them into non-persons, we’ve developed a switch-off.’ The exception to the rule being Moscow – where Morris recounts movement along the street seemed to occur via the process of bumping into one another – ‘maybe it’s just too cold to bother,’ he chuckles.

Despite all this, humans are certainly not shy about self-advertisement. Cross-cultural studies searching for what humans find truly beautiful reveal frustratingly mundane results. For every tribe that found thinness sexy, another favoured the chubby; for every community that considered large boobs to be attractive, another favoured a more subtle cleavage; even a preference for white teeth is not universal – ‘some societies find blackened teeth extremely attractive.’ The only three characteristics considered universally irresistible were clear skin, youth, and health.


Another form of self-advertisement is dancing. Morris again bubbles over with anecdotes from his travels, from the ‘contrived dances’ of Eastern Europe which act out stories of milkmaids and young men to the ‘exquisite art form’ of flamenco dancing. ‘There is another kind of dancing which is, to put it crudely, pre-copulatory’ – in other words a vertical expression of the horizontal.

He nonetheless puts the pleasure of clubbing down to an experience of ‘vertiginous pleasure,’ the same joy we get from other tension-releasing ‘flowing movements’ such as swimming or bouncing on a trampoline. It appears efforts to control human bodily expressions can often backfire: in Ireland the Catholic church ‘thought it too erotic to allow waving of arms and hips around. All movement is from below the hips, giving a curiously erotic quality,’ he giggles, ‘because of its restraint, it’s almost as if they are prisoners – a case of bondage dancing as if the top part is bound and can’t express itself.’ Morris endearingly describes ‘his kind of dancing’ as that seen on a visit to Christmas Island, where all dancing was done whilst seated.

It is impossible not to believe Morris when he says ‘I really love humans’. Having dedicated much of his working life to observing and analysing their behaviour, he remains wildly enamoured by the species. He notes that his ability to switch between the objective and subjective is exercised and strengthened through his second life as an artist. His library encompasses a similar degree of compartmentalism – physically divided into his two cerebral roles. Although taking on many qualities of a library himself, a cabinet of curiosities is certainly a more apt description.

He has an upcoming exhibition in Oxford this December, continues to write and paint and is still one of the most interesting naked apes around.

In the closet

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It should go without saying that nothing looks worse than effort, and that to appear scrupulously attired bespeaks an earnestness in preparation even more tiresome to behold than to deploy. Not only this, but the expectations thus created are needlessly high, waving the fastidious flag for all to see and inevitably despair. Already we are too tired to finish this paragraph without assistance, fittingly, from Oscar Wilde: ‘To have done it was nothing, but to make people think one had done it was a triumph.’

The truth in these observations is told by the great many who tack too far in the opposite direction, trying to remain calm but often failing even to remain casual, slipping instead into carelessness. At the extreme one finds the curious case of the intentionally careless, an utterly bemusing state, which makes no sense when written and even less when put into sartorial effect.

When in doubt, defer to someone with a keener eye than thee, who is signally concerned with the features of attractive male dress, having personal experience of both its features and its fit. To wit, the best shopping assistance comes from the gay male associate, and if this is not provided by the shop you should feel free to bring your own, a practice known in some parts as BYOG. A passable alternative is the attractive female associate, but help from any other quarter is easily more trouble than its worth.

When it comes time to compose an outfit from your closet – now appropriately curated – bear in mind that most sartorial offences come in threes: matching belt, shoes and bag; or shirt, tie, and pocket square. Try to think in terms of exceptions or surprises, such as, ‘Surprise! Pink and orange work better than you think’, while maintaining a sense of proportion by confining your exclamations to one part of your outfit, perhaps the furnishings for an otherwise simple suit. The main thing is not to banish all thought of coordination, but to treat this as an afterthought, leaving you that much closer to the sartorial vanguard, almost by accident.

Review: Adolescent Funk – DÂM-FUNK

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Dâm-Funk, supreme ‘Ambassador of Boogie Funk’, is the discerning playa’s producer of choice. The guy is passionate; he ill – he cherishes vintage gear, and unlike Kanye West, knows how to use it. ‘Cos Dâm’s been in the game a long time. He released a mammoth five LPs in 2009, which were abridged and released as Toeachizown. It was hot: a mini-trend of Lakers throwback jerseys in our city of Oxford was directly attributed to this release. Electro-boogie was back and it was bubbling.

So Peanut Butter Wolf, boss of Stones Throw Records, has seen it fit to compile a selection of Dâm’s unreleased work from the late eighties and early nineties. We don’t got vinyl crackle, we got tape hiss – and lots of it. ‘I Like Your Big Azz (Girl)’ is a killer, reflecting the most noble of predilections – that for ass. ‘It’s My Life!’ evokes the moment of the night when you’ve parked the ragtop, you’re blunted but starting to get stimmy, you greet the bouncer and miss out the queue.

The music on the disc may be juvenilia, but it’s still indispensable for all of Oxford’s heads and wannabe-heads. You’ll either get the sound or you won’t. If you want to listen to dubstep or music by white people, you can; but in the back of your mind you will be tortured by the question: ‘How You Gon Fuck Around And Choose A Busta (Over A Real Gangsta)?’.

Review: North – Darkstar

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Even in the ever-amorphous genre formerly known as dubstep, Darkstar didn’t quite fit in. The duo of Aiden Whalley and James Young released a handful of singles over the last few years, each release inching further away from the 2-step beats they started with. On North, they forsake beats entirely, transforming themselves into a downbeat synth-pop band. Think Burial’s Untrue meets The Tin Drum: evocations of abandoned factories, darkened underpasses and lakes at night.
The album’s lead single ‘Gold’ is a cover of a Human League b-side, though Darkstar treat it more like an early-eighties Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark track. Cautious, disinterested vocals float above mournful synths and skittering drums, doing away with the original’s juddering flourishes and jerky rhythm. Singer and new member James Buttery often sounds as if he’s struggling to emote against the melancholy electronics. In ‘Two Chords’, his voice is half-there, drifting above its backdrop but manipulated by it; by final track and album highlight, ‘When It’s Gone’, he has become computerized, moving down the path towards Kraftwerk’s robotics. ‘Ostkruez’ echoes Bowie’s Low instrumentals, whilst the title track wouldn’t be out of place on a Junior Boys album. Only the hypnotic ‘Aidy’s Girl Is A Computer’ betrays Darkstar’s origins – released last year as a single, it’s both danceable and unsettling, placing clipped vocal samples over a looped xylophone to create a skeletal cousin of the band’s earlier dubstep works.

With North, Darkstar successfully reinvent themselves as a synth-pop band without falling into the trap of revivalism. It’s a bold artistic move, and one that expands dubstep’s crossover potential further than ever before.

Irish Stew (in the name of the law)

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Winter is great for so many reasons. It gets overlooked next to its more glamorous
counterparts (I’m thinking of Summer and Spring, but even Autumn gets a look-in with its
jazzy coloured leaves) but in terms of cooking, it is perhaps the best of them all. And the most
glorious of all winter foods is without a doubt the stew.

Stews come in all sorts of delicious flavours and forms, and (perhaps most importantly) they
make mashed potato acceptable, and even appropriate. I think its good to remember that the
idea of ‘warming food’ shouldn’t be limited to meat, especially if you’re on a budget. So below,
I have included my top three stews, veggie, meaty and a bit of both.

Ladies, I hope the prospect of eating these makes you happier than the prospect of the next
three months of getting to wear black tights. Gents, make one of these for your gal and she
won’t be wearing them for long.

Chick pea and tomato stew

This started as a recipe from Yotam Ottolenghi – but I have adapted it beyond recognition to
suit my budget, and hopefully yours.
Serves 4, approx. 80p per serving

1 onion, sliced

1 carrot, sliced

3 sticks of celery, sliced

olive oil

1 tbsp tomato puree

1 tin tomatoes (plum if possible)

2 tsp dried oregano

2 tsp dried parsley

1 tsp dried thyme

(or substitute all three of these for 3 tsp ‘mixed herbs’ – definitely inferior, but cheaper)

2 tsp sugar

1 litre stock

half a loaf of (unsliced) bread, or 4/5 slices of bread

400g can chick peas

Add 2 tbsp oil to a pan with a little bit of butter if you have it. Add onion and sauté for about 5
minutes. Add carrot and celery and cook for another 5 minutes. Add tomato puree, cook for 2
minutes to get rid of the acidity. Add the tomatoes, herbs, stock and the caster sugar (tinned
tomatoes have an acidity to them, which this balances out – but it isn’t live-or-die if you don’t
have it). Simmer for 20-30 mins – add more water if it starts to look dry.
While it is simmering, take the bread you have (ideally the unsliced white loaf variety, about
60p from the bakery section of the supermarket) and break it into small pieces. Drizzle with
olive oil and salt and bake for 10-15 mins in a 180 oven (Gas, 4). Check it halfway to ensure it
doesn’t burn. Once the tomato juice is looking ready, open the chickpeas, drain and place in a
bowl. Then half mash them with a fork (so you have a few whole, a few mushed). Add them to
the liquid and cook for another five minutes. Then add the toasted bread, mix around so the
bread soaks up most of the liquid, and serve. Great with a bit of pesto on top.

Chicken stroganoff

Serves four, approx £2.20 per (sizeable) portion

Arguably this isn’t always cooked like a stew, but I cook mine in the oven to maximise the
potential of the awesome chicken thigh (a student meat-eater’s dream, about £2.50 for four
even if you go free-range.) The smoky, pepperiness of this is counteracted by the lemony
crème-fraichiness and its delicious. Great with mash – if it looks oily when you take it out the
oven give it a good mix before serving.

Olive oil

1 red onion, sliced

1 clove of garlic

250g mushrooms

2 pack of chicken thighs (so about 8 thighs)

crème fraiche

1 lemon

2 tbsp paprika

parsley (fresh if possible)

salt and pepper

potatoes (baking, mashing, it doesn’t make much difference)

Heat a large frying pan and add some oil. Fry the sliced onions and garlic until soft – remove
from the pan and place in a bowl. Slice the chicken thighs (remove skins if they have them)
and season with salt pepper and plenty of paprika. Add a little more oil to the pan and heat.
Add the mushrooms until they start to brown and then add the meat. Once the meat has
browned, remove the parsley leaves from the stalks and add the stalks to the meat. Re-add
the onion and garlic and mix. Add the juice and zest of 1 lemon and 2 tbsp crème fraiche and
place the mixture into an ovenproof dish. Place in the oven for 15-20 mins.

In the meantime, boil your potatoes until soft. Drain, add butter and 1 tbsp crème fraiche and
mash until your elbow aches. Serve the stroganoff on the mash with the (chopped) parsley
leaves as decoration. Yum!

(If you’re a veggie – or it’s the end of term and you’re especially poor – just take out the
chicken and double the mushrooms for mushroom stroganoff, almost as good).

Sausage stew

Serves 3, about £1.60 per portion (for good sausages)

olive oil

6 sausages (as good as you can afford)

1 onion, roughly chopped

2 sticks of celery, roughly chopped

4 cloves of garlic, crushed

2 tsp dried thyme

1 tsp paprika

2 tbsp plain flour

A splash of white wine or 1tbsp white wine vinegar

750ml chicken stock

400g tin of plum tomatoes

salt and pepper

Heat some olive oil in the pan, and add your sausages. Cook them until brown on all sides
and then remove them from the pan and put them in a bowl. Remove most of the fat from the
pan (leaving a thin layer on the bottom). Add the onion and celery, fry for 10 minutes – until
they are getting soft – and then add garlic, thyme, paprika and flour. Pour over some white
wine (vinegar will do if you don’t want to waste precious booze) and let it evaporate. Re-add
the sausage, along with stock and the tomatoes. Season with salt and pepper and cook for
fifteen minutes or until it’s thick and juicy and meaty and deliciously ready to go. Serve with
rice, mash or – my favourite – a big hunk of bread.

The American Tongue: Resurrected

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I’m usually not the type of person to walk into a room and hover on the sidelines of a mingling crowd, prepared to wait to be spoken to before engaging in conversation. Usually it’s the opposite; I feel more at ease after I go up to a friendly-looking face and strike up a discussion. Doing this makes social events where I don’t know any of the other attendees much more enjoyable. But ever since arriving at Oxford last year, I’ve felt the urge to rein in that habit a little, primarily for one reason – the minute I open my mouth, I’m going to be marked as an “other”. My lack of a British accent will betray me, as I introduce myself in my native American tongue.

Most students at Oxford would be quick to say that they don’t view international students any differently than their compatriots, that it’s ridiculous to feel like I’ve got something to hide. And in theory, they’re right – most of my best friends at Oxford are other British undergraduates, and aside from the occasional friendly snicker or two when I pronounce something the American way, we’ve managed to get past most of our linguistic differences after more than a year together. However, most new people I meet, no matter how subconsciously they do it, instantly project a generic image of Americanism onto me before I’ve said anything about myself other than my name.

Inevitably, on discovering that I hail from across the pond, I will be asked several questions in rapid succession, which although they may vary slightly in wording, never fail to stray from a few key points. First, I will be asked where in America I am from; I will then say Connecticut, a town about an hour from Manhattan, where I was born.

Subsequently, I will either be asked where Connecticut is (if the person I’m speaking to did not hear the second bit – everyone seems to know where New York City is) or, my new acquaintance will begin to gush about someone they know who lives in New York and ask whether I know them. The answer is, for future reference, most likely no; the same goes for those who say they have friends or family in Arizona or North Carolina; chances are, I have not been to that town or met anyone from that school, unless the town is in New England or the school is in New York.

Then, of course, I will be asked where I’m studying abroad from, since the vast majority of Americans engaged in undergraduate study are of course students at universities in the United States taking a year abroad. I’m still surprised at the disbelief which sometimes flashes across someone’s face when I explain that I am a “real” student, reading for a degree in history at an “actual” college (and I’m not making exceptions for Americans here who are studying abroad, either – they’re often the most disbelieving of all!)

By this time, several words will have been exchanged, and my new acquaintance will invariably comment on the fact that my accent does not sound like a “typical American” accent. No, it does not; I am from a state where residents posses neither southern twangs nor nasal outer-borough screeches, no hint of Boston or the Rocky Mountains or California discernible in my voice. In my nation, a place Winston Churchill termed “this great novel land of yours which sticks up out of the Atlantic,” there are many accents, and many voices, and mine is distinct only in its failure to fulfil any stereotype.

But I’m perfectly content with the tone of my American tongue. In fact, though reflex may hint otherwise, I don’t really feel the need to hide anything. After all, once the initial onslaught of familiar questions is past, I’m treated just like everyone else – until the discussion turns to American politics, that is. And when that happens, I can’t guarantee anything.

I ain’t saying he’s a golddigger

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“Cash Rules Everything Around Me” – so goes the chorus of Wu-Tang Clan’s ‘C.R.E.A.M.’. In hip hop more than in any other genre, the accumulation of wealth is held up as a barometer of success. Hence bling, the hackneyed rags-to-riches rap, references to Cadillac and Rolex. So when the credit crunches, how do rappers react? Do they try to keep up appearances, or do they reverse the barometer and esteem poverty? Does their music change, and are their sales affected?

The 2009 Grammy Awards ceremony was an interesting parade of celebrity restraint and austerity – a rarity for an event that normally deals in glitz and prosperity. Lil Wayne, who only the previous year had been bragging about being “a young money millionaire”, turned up in a t-shirt and modest necklace that belied his claim; few rappers donned more than a sleek suit.

The ceremony testified to one of the most salient symptoms of hip hop’s economic malaise: a downturn in the bling trend. Gold ostentation hasn’t been so unpopular since Slick Rick and his peers first popularized it in the late eighties. And the impact of the recession on rappers’ images doesn’t stop there: 50 Cent’s recent dramatic weight loss, for example, is doubtless the outcome of economic (as well as nutritional) deficiency. As renowned hip hop stylist Tamara Connor puts it, “conspicuous consumption in the industry is gone”.

For rappers aren’t getting paid like they used to. In the fiscal year 2008-9, hip hop sales dropped by over 20% – more than any genre bar classical, country and Latin. Top rappers might once have made $80,000 from one track; now they’d be lucky to get half that. Factors such as the advent of file sharing are also to blame for these figures. But it’s obvious that hip hop, unlike cinemas and Starbucks, isn’t enjoying a perverse boom as a recession-era “comfort product”. Rappers’ entrepreneurial zeal – itself an offshoot of the “rap as business” mentality – has suffered in these circumstances: this year, Wyclef Jean lost his Malibu mansion, P Diddy his private jet, and Jay-Z both his nightclub and his hotel venture.

However, there is as yet little evidence of a widespread response to the crunch from hip hop music itself. Some artists are implicitly denying the climate of poverty – see for example Kanye West’s high-budget, self-aggrandizing video for ‘Power’. Others are explicitly resisting it – in their single ‘Kinda Like A Big Deal’, Virginia duo Clipse brag that “it’s a blessing to blow a hundred thousand dollars in a recession”. The notion that wealth in the recession era is all the more impressive can be termed the “recession-proof ideal”. Meanwhile, hip hop radio, and artists like Dizzee Rascal, continue to drift towards the mainstream. This could be seen as a calculated survival measure: in desperate times, artists and companies alike resort to safe money-spinners.
Yet it would be premature to ascribe this kind of commercialization to the credit crunch and leave it at that. We can’t discount the dynamics of the record industry, the whims of the underground hip hop scenes, and the abovementioned problem of file sharing. And it’s certainly too early to speak of a genre of “recession-era hip hop” – or “credit crunk” – as we do of, say, “literature of the Great Depression”.

But changes in hip hop culture entail changes in the music. It’s been a while since poverty was a fashionable topic in hip hop. In its early days, the genre concerned itself with Reagan’s tough fiscal policies, and the social cleavages caused by the crack epidemic; but from Clinton onwards, the economy was kind to the industry. Now we’re coming close to full circle: Young Jeezy’s prophetic 2008 album The Recession advocated a return to simplicity, and the hip hop world apparently agrees. The credit crunch could have led to the cultivation of the “recession-proof ideal” – of bling and ostentation as escapism – but evidence suggests that hip hop’s going the other way.

In due course, rappers will invert Notorious BIG’s maxim “Mo’ Money Mo’ Problems”, and come to count the straitened economic climate as a blessing.

Hidden Horror

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Audition (1999)

Director: Takashi Miike

Truly graphic and truly gruesome, but not in a ‘Cabin Fever’ kind of way It’s a slow build up, utterly devoid of blood, until the last gruesome show down. Audition concerns widower Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi), who 7 years after his wife’s death, is still alone with his son. He auditions for, essentially, a wife. His favourite, obviously, turns out to be a nutter. Cue a creepy build up until you’re allowed to really hide behind your sofa.

Possession (1981)

Director: Andrzej Zuławski.

Another cult movie that is part drama, part horror, part thriller. A young woman leaves her family in suspicious circumstances. The husband, determined to find out the truth, starts following her. At first, he suspects that a man is involved. But bizarre incidents indicate something more. Essentially, it unleashes the crazy and pretty soon they’re cutting themselves with electric knives, running through the streets covered in blood, disposing of bodies and generally being all freaky.

Cronos (1993)

Director: Gillermo del Toro

The best Mexican parasitic vampire film. An antiques dealer discovers a strange gilded beetle, which houses an immortal parasite which grants eternal life to its host. Obviously, there is a terrible price for this ‘gift’, which Gris is doomed to discover after the object anchors itself to his body. Creepiest scene? When a murdered Gris resurrects, to discover his mouth has been sewn up. Ew.