Friday 4th July 2025
Blog Page 1997

It’s time to bake a cake filled with rainbows and smiles

Everyone knows the scene towards the end of the sublime Mean Girls, when the fat girl gets up on stage, her eyes filled with bittersweet tears, and reads from a crumpled piece of paper: “I wish I could bake a cake filled with rainbows and smiles and everyone would eat and be happy.”

Reading our feature on the secret lives of Organ Scholars this week, it’s hard not to be reminded of this speech. The article ends with the suggestion that “next time you’re at Evensong, check out the guy/girl in the loft. There might be more to them than you think.” It might not seem like a call-to-arms of a closing sentence, but the message is clear. It’s time to break down the walls which have been erected between the various tribes which form themselves in Oxford, look past the occasionally ghastly exterior and appreciate whatever we might find within.

Freshers’ events and the few weeks after are the only times most of us mix with genuinely different people. After that the cliques are formed, and thesps are rarely to be seen out drinking with Rugby U21s, while the Library Massive are unlikely to be tempted out to Park End.

Like the Mean Girls’ cameo, we think that’s a shame. As this week’s feature shows us, even Organists, the most lofty of social groups (pun fully intended) are just students like everyone else. So Union-haters, e-mail yourself in for President’s drinks and spend a night with the hacks. OCA members, stop and ask the student selling Socialist Workers how the revolution’s going. The lovecake is big, and there are enough slices for all.

 

Blind Date: Week 3

0

Rachel Cohen,
French, St. Hugh’s

Low-work, high maintenance Fresher linguist, searching for the Prince to her Jewish Princess.

After four minutes of sitting awkwardly next to a tall blonde at the bar I finally realised he was in fact Mark, my blind date. Awkward introductions aside, we sat down to our meal and the chat began to flow. When I say chat I mean stories about ‘attempted’ foursomes (his not mine), how Christ Church is ‘simply the best college ever’ and ‘strawpedoing’. After finding common ground in discussing our mutual love for The Bridge, he worryingly mentioned that he had seen me around said haven before in a little black dress, noticing me as I looked ‘very Jewish’…potential stalker attracted to my (not so) religious side? Overall, my date with this self confessed Big Dog in ‘The House’ (if the Cardinals actually let him in, that is) was an experience to say the least.

Banter: Lad
Looks: Not quite Fit College
Personality: ChCh lad – yawn
2nd date? Bbm me, sometime…

 

Matt Ramher, Biology, Christ Church

Upper class Christ Church millionaire looking for fun.

After agreeing to the blind date on the prospect of meeting a tall, blonde Australian I was initially let down, but things could only get better.
Her lack of conversation and desire to replenish her energy after the marathon from her college meant that this was a one-way conversation. Of course this was not all bad, I simply wracked out the bounty of stories that Christ Church had to offer, and she seemed fairly amused, well, it met her expectations anyway. I mentioned I had seen her in Bridge before but however stalkerish this sounded it could not deter the blatant love brewing in the air. By the end of this somewhat tiring event I figured we might as well stay in touch. After all, this is a numbers game.

Banter: Decent
Looks: Adequate
Personality: Vacant
2nd date? Yes, definitely 🙂 

 

The results of the election are in, so why are we still waiting for the verdict on fees?

By the time you read this, the polls will be closed, and we will probably have an idea of how the next government is going to be made up. One stage of months – years – of debate will have come to an end. What we won’t be any closer to knowing is what this government’s decision on University tuition fees will be.

The Browne review, the body which will advise on the future of University fees, will not release its findings until later in the year. As this newspaper reported last week, the Russell group of Universities, of which of Oxford is a member, will not release the information it sent to the Browne review into the public domain.

While the Liberal Democrats promised to scrap tuition fees altogether in their manifesto, and the Labour and Liberal Democrat candidates for both Oxford constituencies have pledged to vote against any rise in fees, the reality is, when we headed to the ballot box, we didn’t have any real confirmation of where the next government would stand on this issue.

We can hazard a guess, though. Chris Patten, our Chancellor, has repeatedly called for fees to be raised, labelling the amount we currently pay as “preposterously low”. And as reported this week, Browne has, unsurprisingly, privately recommended the removal of the current £3,225 cap. Fees would be raised by £1,000 annually from 2013 up to £7,000, while the price of a science course would reach £14,000.

The writing on the wall says that the cost of a University education will go up and up. Deliberately holding the Browne review’s report until after the election has stifled debate on the subject. What will our vote mean for the price of higher education? We don’t know, is the implication; let’s wait to hear from Lord Browne.

It may seem dull and obvious that a student paper has chosen to focus on this issue in a political event which necessarily encompasses so much more than this. But this isn’t simply a ‘student issue’. If Labour were serious when they set the target of fifty percent of young people going on to higher education, then this is an issue for fifty percent of the population. Not just us at University here and now – if anything, we have less of an interest in this, as at least we know exactly what we’ll be paying for our education.

It’s a question for every family with a child in school, for everyone – parents, grandparents, siblings – who will be thinking about where that £7,000 will be coming from. Maybe the state will subsidise tuition fees for the poorest. It is possible, though unlikely, that fees won’t be raised at all. We’re not reactionary enough to say that scrapping fees completely is unequivocally a good thing – this is obviously a complex issue and needs to be debated in depth. The problem is we haven’t been able to do that. However we voted, in this sense we’ve all been shut out of the system.

 

Top Five: Summer accessories for men

0

5th: Espadrilles

This classic rope-soled shoe is the elegant-casual summer footwear for the well-heeled gent. Once the preserve of Pyrenean peasants, espadrilles have grown in popularity over the years, graciously saving us from the unseemly sight of gnarly men’s toes.

4th: Financial Times

Poseurs read poetry, but the true Renaissance Man’s summer reading is definitely the FT. Inform teasing girls that it has by far and a way the best arts section of any newspaper. Comes in fetching pink and looks perfect rolled under the arm.

3rd: Clubmasters

Sunglasses, the most practical accessory of the summer. Wayfarers have unfortunately gone the way of Burberry, but timeless preppy elegance can still be achieved with the Ray-Ban RB3016. Express your individuality with a choice of bright block colours but for eternal style choose tortoise-shell.

2nd: A girlfriend

For the ultimate AMOG (alpha male of group), this much desired accessory immediately has your friends vying for your attention. Perfect for Port Meadows picnics, coffees in Radcliffe Square, and of course the VIP sofas at the Bridge. Comes in all shapes and sizes. The only problem, the cost.

1st: An apple

Nothing says ‘fresh’ like an apple. From Pink Ladies to Granny Smith, this is one accessory that’s sure to have heads bobbing. The one acceptable thing to eat in public, the al fresco apple eater is insouciant but healthy, carefree but considerate.  The best bit? Tossing the core casually over your shoulder.  Keep a penknife on hand for stylish sharing, and remember that it makes a fantastic addition to Pimms. Green is definitely the go-to colour – ‘core blimey!’

Dine Hard: Combibos Coffee

0

Combibos Coffee, 93 Gloucester Green

‘The arsehole of Oxford’. ‘Whoever designed it must have been on crack’.

Arguably an eyesore on the city of dreaming spires, Gloucester Green is contaminated by the bus station next door, a great prevalence of pigeons, and an ugly mix of shops. Sitting in the bleak square can feel like you’re trapped in a red brick box. To add to this all, on the particular morning I went to Combibos, my friend and I, before we had even uttered a word of our orders, were told by the lady behind the counter that there was a forty minute wait for food, because ‘the kitchen was very busy’. On what has been said so far, if I were the owners of this coffee shop, I would be worried about even so small a food review as this one is.

Fortunately the owners are the Hanss family. And they know good coffee. The roast they use has been ‘Hanss’ selected for its caffeinated goodness, so even though my partiality to black coffees means I don’t get the chance to appreciate the signature Combibos ‘latte art’, (down to the precise and fresh steaming of milk apparently), I enjoy my coffee a lot.

It also costs a mere £4.50 for said good coffee and a hearty breakfast, to satisfy even the most voracious of appetites. Their pancakes, sprinkled with icing sugar and served with a little pot of maple syrup, are delicious. By the time they arrive, I have finished my coffee but they do an equally good job of keeping my fear of pigeons at bay.

Combibos deserves its acclaim as one of The Independent’s top fifty coffee shops, if not for placating my bird phobia, then certainly for coming up trumps, and delivering something marvellous against the Gloucester Green backdrop.

5 Minute Tute: Human Evolution

0

When and where did humans evolve?

Palaeontology, archaeology and genetics confirm Darwin was right to identify sub-Saharan Africa as humankind’s area of origin. Hominins (the group of animals to which modern humans and our immediate extinct relatives and ancestors belong) split from the lineages leading to our closest relatives (chimpanzees and bonobos) 6-7 million years ago and are known from several places in South and East Africa. Our own genus, Homo, evolved – perhaps in East Africa – about 2.5 million years ago and was the first hominin to leave Africa. But the lineages that first did so are almost certainly evolutionary dead ends. DNA analyses of people alive today show beyond doubt that all modern humans have a much more recent African origin. Along with fossil finds, they indicate that our own species, Homo sapiens, evolved south of the Sahara about 200,000 years ago.

When did we move out of Africa?

The fossil record is clear that hominins moved out of Africa more than once, the first time about 1.8 million years ago. Those movements brought several species into Europe and Asia, including the ancestors of the Neanderthals and those of the ‘hobbits’ (Homo floresiensis) found a few years ago on the Indonesian island of Flores. However, modern humans spread beyond Africa much more recently than this. A first move, indicated by 100,000-year-old fossils from Israel, is often considered a failed colonisation, though new work by Oxford’s Mike Petraglia and others suggests that it could have reached as far as India. A further expansion some 60-70,000 years ago saw people cross the Red Sea into Arabia and move around the Indian Ocean rim from there.

Who were the Neanderthals and why aren’t they here today?

DNA analyses of Neanderthal bones show their ancestors split from ours about 600,000 years ago and that genetic drift and adaptation to the severe cold of repeated Ice Age conditions produced the distinctive skeletal characteristics known from fossils across much of Europe and western Asia. In general, Neanderthals seem to have been heavily carnivorous and they were clearly efficient hunters of medium and large game. However, archaeology suggests that they probably had more limited cognitive capacities than our own ancestors. In particular, there is next to no convincing evidence that Neanderthals made and used art, jewellery or complex tools of the kind associated with Homo sapiens. It seems likely that, socially and technologically, modern humans could cope better with severe fluctuations in climate and food availability, outliving, outbreeding and outcompeting Neanderthals across their range. The last known individuals died out in Spain about 28,000 years ago.

When did we first start producing art?

The cave paintings and decorated objects left by Upper Palaeolithic people in parts of Europe (especially southwest France and northern Spain) were long thought to place the answer to this question no more than 40,000 years ago. Now, shell bead jewellery from sites in Africa and Israel demonstrates that people have been using material culture to make statements about their identity for at least 100,000 years. Equally startling, geometric designs scratched into pieces of ochre go back to around 75,000 years ago at Blombos Cave, South Africa, and can be paralleled only a little later at other sites on ochre and on ostrich eggshell.

Are there any new discoveries?

Absolutely. Just in the past few months three big ones have occurred. First, the ancestors of the Flores ‘hobbits’ turn out to have got there, across the open sea, over one million years ago. Second, mitochondrial DNA analysis of a finger bone from a cave in Russia’s Altai Mountains shows its owner to belong to an evolutionary lineage that split about this same time from those leading to the Neanderthals and us. Not only does this mean there was a third (previously unknown) hominin species in Siberia as recently as 40,000 years ago, it points to a previously unsuspected migration out of Africa about 1.0 million years ago. And third, there are the two beautifully preserved partial skeletons of Australopithecus sediba from caves near Johannesburg, a new species perhaps directly ancestral to our own, from just under 2 million years ago. Human evolution continues to surprise.

 

A Lot to Bragg About

0

Bar few, the eminent figures of the arts world over the past decades have had one thing in common: they’ve all been interviewed by Melvyn Bragg. It really wasn’t much of a surprise then when Bragg’s apology for keeping me waiting at his ITV office was because he’d been busy organising an interview with Victoria Wood.

The Cumbrian culture vulture is host and editor of TV’s longest-running arts programme, The South Bank Show, now in its final comeback series called Revisited. The programme has brought writers, actors, musicians, dancers, directors and artists into often surprisingly sincere close-up. He’s chatted to Laurence Olivier on his deathbed; he chased the French composer Olivier Messiaen for twenty years; and George Michael marked the occasion by lighting up an enormous spliff. In addition to the show’s unparalleled duration, Bragg can also claim credit for his role, as he puts it to me, “in tackling opera and pop music with equal seriousness”.

‘Oxford and the movies were where my whole life really started’

But above all there is his gift for disarming some of the trickiest and most fortified egos on the planet. Finding that parenthesis, getting that foot in the door to the mind of the interviewee must be a real challenge? “Yes. You’ve got to get it right. The point of entry; that’s the really the hard bit”. Most people, he tentatively explains, start out looking like they’re shot through with nerves, jittering apprehensively. “Not about me, or my questions”, he’s quick to add, “but because they’re on screen; it’s very different from the way you talk to your pals, or even the way you talk on radio. You know that your face is going to be in other people’s faces”. Bragg pauses. He seems slightly hesitant. “The way you look counts for a big percentage of the way people see you, and they know that.”

Even so, Bragg always seems to pull it off and lay bare the raw talent of creative minds. In the astonishing Francis Bacon interview, he and Bragg go out for lunch and get absolutely plastered on disgusting red wine. Bacon staggers to his feet, declares “Cheerio”, and fills their glasses again. Bragg asks: “Why do you want to do that, Francis?” The artist replies: “Because I like doing it. I just happen to be a painter, that’s all.” He then goes on to talk eloquently, if a little slurringly, about his work. “Francis drunk was a very important part of Francis”, Bragg said. “And when he was drunk he talked about his life to the highest level.”

Most famous of Bragg’s encounters was his interview with Dennis Potter in 1994 just before his death where he started with the question: “How did you, and when did you, find out that you’d got this cancer?” The interview rocketed round the world and people took to it because of the power of what Dennis said, and because of the way they did it: Bragg vividly describes the shabby, stripped down TV studio where Dennis was sipping liquid morphine, clasping a bottle of Champagne and heavily smoking.

Asking Potter about his cancer was a one off though. Bragg’s main focus has always been on the work of the artist, not on their personal life. It’s the quest to get to the heart of “what is real in the marrow of their work” that he sees as the definitive challenge. “Sometimes I get it and just feel rather quietly pleased with myself”.

He candidly admits that the personal does occasionally seep in, like when Bacon talked about his homosexuality. “But he brought that in”, Bragg assures me; “I didn’t sort of say are you gay or anything”.

I learn that keeping this sense of distance from people’s private goings on is a belief instilled in Bragg by his small town background – it’s something quite necessary in a tight-knit community, he points out. “You really mustn’t pry into the private lives of others”.

Part of this belief might also stem from the great personal tragedy he has had to come to terms with. His first wife, the French writer and artist Lisa Roche, committed suicide in 1971, a pain that he has said “never stops”. In 2008 he published the novel Remember Me… that addressed her death in fictional form. It took him almost five years to complete it, “rewriting and rewriting. I worked harder than I’ve ever worked at anything”.

It was Bragg’s 20th offering in a long pedigree of novels and it dug into the last part of the previous novel Crossing the Lines; the two form “the Oxford novel I refused to write”. But although part-fiction, the passages about Oxford had to be written. “They were where my whole life really started.”

So what’s the reality behind Bragg’s Oxonian turning point? “There were some crackingly good Historians to look up to”, he says. But it was the allure of the movies shown at the Phoenix Picture House in Jericho, then named The Scala, which really changed everything. “Something clicked. I saw that there was a different world out there.”

He explains how he became immersed in contemporary European film, enthusiastically reeling off an endless list of directors I’ve barely heard of. By his third year he’d moved a long way away from just wanting to pass exams. He was enjoying writing for Cherwell as film critic, acting, and had even tried his hand at writing short stories, “although I sure didn’t tell anybody”. He also loosely remembers co-directing a film at Oxford called Altogether Boys. I eagerly press him for a copy. “Mercifully none of us know where it is!”, Bragg responds.

He went on to win a traineeship with the BBC, “and that was probably the biggest stroke of luck in my life. In retrospect, I’m rather embarrassed to say, at the time, I hadn’t a clue what I wanted to do; I genuinely had not a clue”.

But Bragg moved up the ranks quickly. After a 10-year stint on Start the Week, which he turned into a Radio Four flagship, he launched In Our Time, with the county’s top boffins talking it out about anything from Platonic philosophy to the frontiers of contemporary physics. “In academia, a lot of it is taken for granted. My job is to say, hold on, I didn’t understand that Higgs boson”. He thought it would probably only last six months. Instead, it has become a benchmark of quality broadcasting and he tells me he’s just signed another three year contract. “I’m up at five am doing my final cramming session before I go in”, he tells me. “That really keeps you going”.

Now in his 70s, Bragg has more than a lifetime of experience to retell. But could he see himself being interviewed on The South Bank Show as the great populariser of the arts that he now is? “Oh no, wouldn’t dream of it.” As Bragg modestly puts it: “I’m not a very good interviewee actually”.

May Morning in Two Minutes

Didn’t quite get up early enough to catch May Morning at Oxford last Saturday? Not to worry, this two-minute video will fill you in on any hilarious episodes you might have missed.

Review: The Importance of Being Earnest

0

It’s hard to imagine a better play than Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest for Ben Llewelyn and Jessie Anand to have chosen as the centrepiece for Lady Margaret Hall’s current Arts Week. Staged in the beautiful college grounds, the natural setting and low-key set works well, emphasising the centrality of performance and Wilde’s typically sparkling dialogue to the impact of the piece.

Wilde’s classic comedy of errors relies on strong characterisation and confident, well-paced delivery: enunciation and projection in particular are key to the success of the play’s outdoor performance. Nevertheless, Anouska Lester’s impressive period costume and full cast of props furnish the atmosphere of the intimate salon successfully.

All of the comic parts are played with flair and not a little Wildean camp, with Margaux Harris’ enthusiasm and idiosyncrasy in portraying Lady Bracknell’s setting a fine example to the rest of the cast throughout the show. Peter Beaumont’s sensitively interpreted, stiff upper lipped Jack and Caitlin McMillan’s Lady Fairfax share a tender onstage relationship and character is never dropped despite the appearance of ducks, ominous clouds and a chill wind.

Perhaps as a result of the cast’s evident consciousness of the necessity to speak loudly, a little of the conversational feel of the dialogue is lost, and more vocal modulation would serve the playful mood well.

Good use is made of LMH’s grounds, the play taking place in a judiciously chosen spot served by a convenient trellised backstage area. However, scenes tend to feel a little static; an upper class Victorian demeanour need not equate merely a crossed ankle, but a purposeful, theatrical equivalent to match the exaggerated, fantastical events of the play.

There is nothing quite like a good period drama, especially one of Wilde’s finest comic works, done well… Especially one with cucumber sandwiches, parasols and twinkling humour, for a summery Oxford afternoon.

Verdict: Certainly not a production of no importance.

 

Online Review: I Am Love

0

Known for translucently pale skin and chiselled features, Tilda Swinton has always cut a striking onscreen figure. I Am Love from Sicilian director Luca Guadagnino transports the ice queen of arthouse to snowy Milan in an elegant and enthralling drama of surprising warmth.
Swinton is the odd-one-out in an Italian cast, but it works perfectly for her character, Emma, the Russian wife of the wealthy Tancredi Recchi. “Collected” by him on the Russian art scene, she has since become assimilated into Milan’s haute bourgeoisie. We first see Emma as a sort of continental Mrs Dalloway, meticulously preparing her household for a birthday dinner in honour of Tancredi’s father, the founder of the clan’s profitable textile empire. She is composed, her appearance immaculate; but when talk at the table turns to business succession she takes on an odd opacity, participating awkwardly in a family toast. She regards her grown-up children – golden boy Edo and artist Elisabetta – with fondness checked by the formal mood imposed by her father-in-law.
The scene hints at a great family saga in the vein of Visconti’s film The Leopard, while the opening credit’s curlicue font and wintry wide-shots suggest a cool update on the postcard-pretty beginnings of Golden Hollywood’s melodramas. Guadagnino draws magnificently on both elements. The dynastic males of the family face a changing business world in London boardrooms, whereas Emma finds herself attracted to her son’s friend Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini), a gifted young chef. Only when her daughter tells her she is in love with another woman does Emma begin to seek her own freedom in Antonio, slipping away to see him in verdant Sanremo countryside.
Swinton’s Emma makes a fascinating protagonist, in what was previously the sole territory of Julianne Moore in films like ‘Far from Heaven’ and ‘The Hours’. Neither particularly self-perceptive nor introspective, and somewhat solitary and unconfiding, Emma is in theory a difficult character to read. However, Swinton plays her with flashes of interiority and makes her tenderness a defining characteristic. She is a sliver of a personality, consequently more likely to sympathise with others before she recognises her own particular feelings. Her affection for her children complicates her actions and leads to the film’s climax, devoid of moralising but richly powerful.
Ultimately, the plot soars above its appearance on the page because of Guadagnino and cinematographer Yorick Le Saux’s gift for telling the story in visual language. Their objective shots have a warmth and fluidity that would be hard to surpass; the camera always able to find the best vantage point, focus on the most interesting part of a composition, and then gracefully follow the movement of the scene. It’s a style that lends beauty to every detail in the shot (a plate of shrimp, cut hair, piles of clothes and bowls of transparent soup), but avoids the perfume-ad look of films like A Single Man. I Am Love is a sheer cinematographic delight that goes beyond being simply stylish: it trains the eye and intellect in the art of observation.