From tahini to jelly beans, and marmite to macaroni cheese, Marc Kidson asks what people in Oxford are eating to fend off those Fifth Week blues.
Next week, tune in for more video recipes from Kidson’s kitchen.
Blog Page 2034
BNC intruders chased out
Last Sunday, a group of Brasenose undergraduates took the law into their own hands and apprehended three women on suspicion of robbery.
Duncan Morrison, Matthew Osman and ‘Tricky’ Wilson performed a citizens arrest on three woman who had hidden in and later run from Brasenose.
But police later confirmed that no crime had taken place and the women were allowed to go free.
“Their brave vigilante action was all in vain,” said Theo Barclay, a Brasenose third year. “We viewed them as college heroes.”
Thames Valley police confirmed that they had been contacted by a group of international students who were concerned about the theft of a games console, but explained that a misunderstanding appeared to have taken place.
The girls entered Brasenose College, followed by a group of Asian exchange students, one of whom appeared to think they had taken his games console.
There the girls caught the attention of Morrison and Osman, who thought that they were acting suspiciously.
“We saw these pikeys in college trying to find an exit, going up and down stairs and trying to find a way out,” said Wilson.
The group had been led to believe that the girls had taken a games console from one of the exchange students.
“Someone beckoned me over and told me they’d stolen something,” said Wilson. “Someone said this girl had a knife.”
According to Morrison, it was at this point that the girls became rude and he, along with a growing number of students, led the girls from close to the college library to the lodge area. Morrison took the step of asking the duty porter to step in.
The situation escalated and the girls started to act confrontationally towards Morrison. “All I was trying to do was to diffuse the situation and get the poor man’s PSP back”, he said, “it was now that they became a bit more threatening in their behaviour.”
One proceeded to push Duncan Morrison and this led the on duty porter to call the police and shut the college gate in order to stop the girls from fleeing.
At this moment, the gate was opened by two shocked Brasenose students who saw the girls run past them.Morrison, Osman and Wilson gave chase onto the High Street. Morrison then spotted the girls, approached them and placed them under a citizen’s arrest. Wilson found a police officer who arrested the three girls and thanked the trio for their assistance.
However, it later emerged that the police were originally contacted by the exchange students from McDonald’s on Cornmarket Street, and a spokesperson for Thames Valley police outlined that it was their understanding that the students believed a group of three girls had stolen the item.
The spokesman added that it transpired that the owner of the console appeared to have simply misplaced the item, and that since there seemed to have been a misunderstanding about the incident, no further action would be taken by the police.
On being told that no theft had taken place, ‘Tricky’ Wilson said that he felt “a bit hollow”.
“I feel very conned,” he said, “conned by all of them.”
But Brasenose students still praised Duncan Morrison’s spontaneous actions.
Charlie Marr, a first year History undergraduate, commented, “Duncan displayed chivalrous, brave and courageous behaviour and deserves all the praise he can get.”
Morrison explained that he “simply thought that it was the right thing to do.” He added that he was enjoying the praise of his fellow students and that it “was all in a day’s work”.
Fine Dining: An Ashmolean Affair
True story: walking over Magdalen Bridge the other day, I get a call from a girl at a London PR agency. Do I want to go and eat at a restaurant she represents? It’s in a village in Oxfordshire and it’s just won back its Michelin Star. Well, I tell her, it’s miles outside Oxford and horrifically expensive and therefore totally irrelevant to the vast mass of Cherwell readers, but it’s a free meal, so of course I’d be delighted. I email Marta, Cherwell editor, and offer to take her, hoping that if I ply her with plenty of expensive food and wine she might not sack me next time I’m three days late with my copy. I settle back to anticipate a happy evening of gluttony. The next day, I get an e-mail from her boss: the restaurant is ‘reviewing their PR opportunities’ and so they don’t actually want any critics to come after all. Sorry, do keep in touch, and all that. I’m devastated, but much, much worse, I now have the unhappy chance of telling my editor that the posh dinner she was looking forward to is now off; demotion to deputy assistant recipe writer surely beckons.
Marta took pity, but I was still puzzled. Surely no PR agency can be so stunningly incompetent as to offer a critic a meal and then withdraw it the next day (particularly a critic as powerful and internationally-renowned as the principal restaurant writer of Cherwell). Now I know why they got so nervy; ‘Michelin-starred chef quits restaurant in row over “poncey food”‘ reported The Times yesterday. The owner, it reported, didn’t like the Michelin-starred food the chef was cooking, because he though it was too ‘sophisticated’ and expensive for the local residents (of the famously impoverished county of Oxfordshire). He wants to serve burgers and chips instead; the chef, the hugely-talented Ryan Simpson, understandably thought this was a little below his dignity, and walked out, taking all the kitchen staff with him. Good for Ryan.
The Ashmolean Dining Room has been reviewed by just about every national paper going since it opened last term, but I only got there on Tuesday. It is, as the name suggests, a pleasant room on top of the newly-refurbished Ashmolean museum (what do you mean you haven’t gone yet?) where you can get a bite to eat after admiring the Greek pottery, or, if you’re a philistine like me, you can go in the evening after the Museum’s closed to enjoy the view of Oxford college rooftops (this was, in reality, rather disappointing; the only college you can see by night is St John’s, and who wants to spend an evening staring at them?). Despite the unfortunate aspect, the food is actually pretty good.
Pot roasted partridge with cotechino sausage and the distinctly unappetising-sounding ‘wet polenta’ was a fat, well-cooked bird tasting suitably gamey, with some really good sausage on the side. The ‘wet polenta’ was more damp than wet, but was pretty good nevertheless. Ben never gets to eat interesting food because he’s a vegetarian, but his pumpkin and chickpea tagine was as good as anything without dead flesh can be. My baked egg custard tart was superb, sweet and eggy and full of punchy cinnamon. It’s not cheap – most of the mains are £17.50 and for three courses and some decent wine you’d be lucky to get out for less than £60 a head – but there aren’t any other central Oxford restaurants of the same quality that are cheaper. In fact, I might go so far as to say that there aren’t any other central Oxford restaurants of the same quality at all, and certainly none with as nice a room. There’s even an outdoor terrace for summer. It’s almost enough to make trooping past the vases downstairs seem worthwhile.
Rating: 4/5
In short: Makes museums fun
Review: The Lovely Bones
After watching this film, I found its title more accurate than one might think —’lovely’ applying to the fleetingly lush beauty of this new production, and ‘bones’ being a grisly apt word for death and destruction, not easy viewing for 10am on a Monday morning.
The film, based on the internationally best-selling novel by Alice Sebold, follows the life, death, and afterlife of Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan), a 14-year old girl whose murder sends shockwaves through a small Pennsylvania town. Susie narrates from her front-row seat in heaven, trying to guide her shattered, grieving family to her neighbor and murderer, the eerie Mr. Harvey (Stanley Tucci). The ripple effect of her mysterious disappearance and horrific murder extends to Susie beyond her brief life, and she is stuck in the ‘in-between’ world until she can see that justice is served.
Ronan, whose dramatic whispering and gasping earned her an Oscar nod for best supporting actress in Atonement, falls flat here. Her dreamily sighed narrations sound cloying and forced—and, God help me, almost over-dramatic in a story about rape and murder. Tucci, however, plays an excellent sinister villain, planning out the murder of his next victim in his khakis and the safe cocoon of unassuming American suburbia. Sarandon is also predictably excellent, as Susie’s brassy grandmother, who wears too much eyeliner and says everything she is not supposed to.
This is undeniably a Peter Jackson production—the man definitely loves his lengthy epics. He does an excellent job with the suspenseful parts of the film, creating a few heart-pounding scenes that, at times, I could barely view through my fingers. Though the real-life element can be captivating, it is the imagined reality of the otherworld that didn’t seem to appeal. Jackson imagines the ‘in-between’ as a lurid Technicolor fantasyland; I sometimes half-expected Frodo’s curly mop of hair to emerge from the sweeping mountain landscapes of limbo. But it is Jackson’s interpretations of the more gruesome parts of the novel that are the most disturbing. Where Sebold succeeded in the novel was in the grace and dignity she allowed to even the most horrific of moments—here, Jackson’s overly vivid interpretations wallow in the muck and gore. Watching Tucci haul Susie’s body around in a burlap sack was physically sickening, made all the worse by the accentuation of sound as he drags it across his basement floor and hurls it into a rusting iron vault.
This movie wasn’t overly bad, and I’d even go so far to say that it was engrossing and touching at times. But it is doomed from the start as an adaptation of a novel that combines so many genres of fantasy, crime, romance, and melodrama. It lacks the beauty and grace of Sebold’s work, leaving this film as just a pile of bare bones that are far from lovely.
3 stars
Should France ban the full Muslim veil?
Conan Mckenzie, Lady Margaret Hall
‘The burqa is a uniquely isolating garment’
One of the British tabloids’ favourite stories, which they wheel out several times a year almost without fail, is the ‘Muslims are taking over’ piece. It can be adjusted to suit different times and different outlets, but it is essentially homogenous, a one-size-fits-all insta-story ready
to be resurrected whenever there’s a bit of a slow news day. The story may be about proposed Mosques, requests for Korans in local libraries or lessons on Ramadan in schools, but the cumulative narrative never changes. According to this narrative, Muslim immigrants, with their veils, their Sharia Law, their Mosques and (never explicitly stated, but always implied) their habit of occasionally exploding, are engaged on a great mission to transform the country into an Islamic state, street by street, town by town. It’s an absurd distortion of the facts, but, like most stories that appear in the great British press there’s a seed of truth in amongst the exaggerations and falsifications.
The British government’s approach to immigration over most of the last sixty years has been dictated by the doctrine of multiculturalism, under which immigrant groups are encouraged to form their own communities and maintain the old cultural traditions that they brought with them from their previous homes, including those traditions that so annoy the tabloids. Multiculturalism hasn’t been entirely successful; separation, it turns out, tends only to encourage fear and suspicion amongst the majority community about the minority; hence the tabloid scare stories.
The French have a better system. Their approach focuses not on multiculturalism but on assimilation, on encouraging new immigrants to discard the trappings of their old countries and cultures, and instead to integrate into mainstream French society. To this end Muslim children are required to abide by French secular norms and are forbidden from wearing headscarves in school, just as Catholic children are forbidden from wearing visible crucifixes. Now Nicholas Sarkozy wants to go one step further, and ban adult women from wearing the burqa, on public transport and in all publicly-owned buildings in France. This policy is a continuation of the long-standing French emphasis on immigrants adopting French cultural norms. But the importance goes beyond cultural tradition; the burqa is a uniquely isolating garment, because by hiding a woman’s face, it prevents other people from having any sort of meaningful interaction with her. It cuts its wearer off from society, and isolates her from the community (sometimes involuntarily; there is considerable anecdotal evidence that many Muslim women are forced to wear a burqa against their will). The burqa makes a mockery of France’s aim of integrating immigrants into society.
France has, so far, done a reasonably good job of preventing recent immigrants from retreating into their own ethnic communities; banning the burqa in public buildings will continue the good work, and enable Muslim women to play a full part in French society. That way, the French tabloids will have nothing to complain about.
Myriam Francois-Cerrah, Meida Representative, Oxford University Islamic Society
‘The integration debate, of which this the latest manifestation, is poorly veiled racism’
No one in France actually wears a ‘burqa’, the traditional garb imposed by the Taliban on women in Afghanistan. By using the term, Sarkozy was using a mental slippage technique which allowed people to feel like they were opposing oppression in Afghanistan through supporting state oppression of women in France. Less than 2000 French women actually wear a face veil which explains much of its mystic and the inability to focus on the bigger picture.
The real issue all women face is the struggle for self-determination – the struggle to make choices for themselves about themselves, unfettered by over-zealous clerics or patronising presidents. Muslims who wear the face veil fully support security procedures requiring their identification and have cooperated fully to this end. The core of this debate is not about security or Sarkozy’s alleged passing penchant for these women’s rights, otherwise he might have consulted at least one in the mock commission set up to ‘investigate’ the face veil. Rather, it is about vote betting in identity-crisis ridden France.
The integration debate, of which this the latest manifestation, is poorly veiled racism. White French men in power telling Arab women what’s best for them, is just the latest expression of neo-colonial arrogance. Historically, Arabs needed emancipation from their debased state of being through the imposition of ‘French’ culture. Today, many French can’t tolerate the thought these former ‘barbarians’ turned citizens might have a say in defining modern French identity.
The ripples of this discriminatory legislation will vindicate already widespread islamophobia and racism. French Muslims of Maghrebi ancestry are the victims of 68% of racist violence and face a 26.5% rate of unemployment compared with 5% overall. Young women in headscarves are already excluded from schools and public pools for adhering to their religious conviction and some women have been unable to marry, vote or take exams. In the case of immigrants, the irony is self evident: women are now being turned away from state-sponsored French language classes!
Supporters of the ban claim they are fighting for women’s dignity but few things could be quite as humiliating as being turned away from an office, denied entry to a hospital or escorted out of public transport. This legislation limits women’s participation in the public sphere and there is nothing empowering about that. Even through a burka, the instrumentalization of women’s bodies for electoral ends is clear for all to see.
The Empire strikes back, or just a clone war?
The Saatchi gallery is a marvel. The gallery spaces are immaculate, vast, and free to visit; I would recommend it if only for that. However, their current show, The Empire strikes back: Indian art today, leaves a lot to be desired.
A rare successful installation is Rashid Rana’s The World Is Not Enough, a large composite image made from photographs of social waste from around his home city of Lahore in Pakistan. The images are vivid and overwhelming, providing a stark epitaph to a world slowly filling up with rubbish. Rana’s other piece in the show is likewise a photomontage. In Title of Piece pornographic photographs are used to produce large images of faceless women in burqas. The anonymity of the women in both situations, and way it is presented here, is undoubtedly an intriguing issue. However, one questions whether the drawing together of these two disparate subjects is a successful critique of either ‘negative stereotype’, as the exhibition catalogue claims, and is not simply an antagonistic jibe.
Though I found much of the work in the exhibition both grandiose and gross, highlights included Huma Bhabha’s sculptures which play with materials, the modernist legacy and the motif of the mask.
References to surrealism also run throughout the exhibition, from a Meret Oppenheim-influenced vacuum cleaner with the head of a dog by Bharti Kher, to more complex readings of the genre, such as Atul Dodiya’s Fools House. This is a tribute to Jasper Johns, containing a painted postcard of Man Ray’s Cadeau. Far from emphasizing the painting as a gift, as the reference would suggest, it has an air of aggression. This undermines the painting’s integrity, and raises interesting questions about what can be transmitted when the art object is reproduced.
The Whitechapel Gallery currently hosts Where three dreams cross: 150 years of photography from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. With the work of around 180 artists it speaks with a multiplicity of voices, examining the social history of these countries. The exhibition is split into categories such as the portrait, the family and the body politic, and my only criticism is that there is almost too much to see. It is staggeringly diverse; 1920’s Bollywood shots to Huma Mulji’s inkjet print photographs such as SIRF TUM (Only You) depict dolls having a romantic moment on a park bench. Ayesha Vellani’s Planting Padi series was also subtly photographed, but very moving.
Both shows are very different. The Whitechapel’s vast, almost archival exhibition engages with life through a camera lems, whereas the Saatchi display, though it presents a great variety of artists, falls slightly flat.
To infinity and beyond
Just what is it about the following passage that fascinates us so? ‘Love, One. Happiness, One. Animals that change their colour, One. Propositions, Seventy-Four. Mines, Two. Honey, One. Laws, Twenty-Four. Juices, Five. Mistaken Pleasures, One. The Sea, One. Poetry, Two. Divinity, Six.’
These, according to Diogenes Laertius, the Dr Johnson of ancient philosophy, are some of the books written by the Peripatetic Theophrastus over the course of his long career. Yet perhaps you read that last paragraph just because you were curious to see what the connection would be, so we’ll try another one, and this time I’ll tell you exactly what the link is. In 1974 Georges Perec, figurehead of the avant-garde OuLiPo movement in France, sat down one morning in the square of St-Sulpice in Paris and tried to write down everything that he saw. Here is an excerpt: ‘Weather: Cool and dry. Grey sky. A few patches of sunlight.
‘Draft inventory for some of the strictly visible things: a few words, ‘KLM’ (on an envelope carried by a passer-by), ‘Taxis tête de station,’ ‘Rue du Vieux-Colombier.’ A few fleeting slogans: ‘De l’autobus, je regarde Paris.’ A few stones: along the edge of the sidewalk, around a fountain, a church, some houses… A fairly large portion of sky (perhaps 1/6 of my field of vision). The 84 goes to Porte de Champerret. The 70 goes to Place du Dr Hayem, to Maison de l’O.R.T.F. Exigez le Roquefort Société le vrai dans son ovale vert. A German bus. Colours: red (a Fiat, a dress St-Raphael, ‘no admittance’ signs), a blue purse, green shoes, a green raincoat, a blue taxi. The 70 goes to Place du Dr Hayem, to Maison de l’O.R.T.F…’
…and so on and so forth, til death us do part. Odd, isn’t it? Why should lists like this, from ‘raindrops on roses’ to ‘the hardy warriors whom Boeotia bred,’ exert this effortless charm over us, a charm greater than mere curiosity? Umberto Eco’s The Infinity of Lists has no answers to this question.
Here, instead, you will find some interesting theoretical distinctions between the genera and phyla of lists – ‘closed’ (so that you do not want to know more) against ‘open’ (so that you do), ‘practical’ (where the things listed are what counts) against ‘poetic’ (where the list itself is the point), ‘chaotic’ against ‘coherent.’ They are not entirely convincing. Each chapter is accompanied by an hors d’oeuvres of examples plucked from art and literature, and often the types seem hardly to cohere, or else there must always be order in the examples of chaos.
Nevertheless, because this is Eco writing, it is engaging, and never less than stimulating. Eco is famous for thought-provoking and allusive historical novels like The Name of the Rose and Baudolino, but he is also a truly excellent critic and philosopher of language. Here he shows his trademark sensitivity to connections to full advantage, and for a man who owns forty thousand books he wears his erudition with a gentlemanly lightness.
His remarks on the way in which we use lists to describe what cannot be described – God, for instance, or the reason why we love – are elegant and backed by a superb selection of sources from Ausonius to Filippo Lippi. He sees our fixation with the list culminating in the World Wide Web, which ‘really does offer us a catalogue of information that makes us feel wealthy and omnipotent, the only snag being that we do not know which of its elements refers to data from the real world and which does not; there is no longer any distinction between truth and error.’
He fails, however, to get to grips with the lists that really count, the lists that underpin the whole of modern thought: the natural numbers, the progression of history, the accumulation of stories. Hobbes’ Leviathan describes imagination as being nothing more than the reassembly of things we have already experienced. If this is true, then what is creativity but the ordering of lists? That said, this book began as a companion piece to the Louvre, and is not so much a work of profound semiology as the catalogue to a universal museum. It is in the exhibits that the true value of the book lies: ultimately this is really a species of sentient coffee-table book.The lists themselves are, as you would expect, a real mixed bag. Some of the anthology is purple prose, some of it modernist poetry, some of it obscure flotsam from the late Latin world, some of it ecstatic nationalist praise poetry, some of it Homer…you get the idea.
There are many snapshots of Rabelais being Rabelaisian a three year old Gargantua telling his father all the torcheculs (‘arsewipers’) he tried before settling on the neck of a goose – and a relentlessly rude vituperatio puellae (like a love poem in reverse) from Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy: ‘every lover admires his mistress, though she be…a vast virago, or an ugly tit, a long lean rawbone, a skeleton, a sneaker…and to thy judgement looks like a merd (‘shit’) in a lantern, whom thou couldst not fancy for a world, but hatest, loathest and wouldst have spit in her face, or blow thy nose in her bosom…’
The Infinity of Lists is a beautiful book, a really beautiful book, worth buying if only as an anthology. But in the end, it only grazes the surface of its potential. This could and should be a work of lasting importance for culture, but ultimately it is just a very pretty plaything.
Review: Persistance is this game
I believe you can tell a lot about a band by who they choose as their top friends on myspace (I know, I’m so 2006). It’s a chance to show the world, or at least the tiny minority who will ever listen to your music, which other artists you are grateful to, whom you are trying to emulate and whom you admire. So when I scroll down the myspace page of Straight Lines, a noise pop-cum-punk band from Wales, who are supporting The Automatic when they play the Oxford O2 academy this March, and find that the only ‘Friends’ they recognise are four different fan groups for themselves, I have to ask ‘on what is this arrogance founded?’
In listening to their debut album Persistence in This Game the answer is, broadly speaking, not a lot. One can sum up this band by listening to ‘Versus The Allegiance’, the first track and first single off their first album. It’s hook and harmony heavy noise pop, that at its best (the first 30 seconds of second track ‘Loose Change’) sounds like a watered down Los Campesinos and at its worst (when lead singer Tom Jenkins quivering vocals saw through the rest of the album) like an angry and even less charming Bombay Bicycle Club.
It’s obvious that this band have a formula for writing songs. Open with hard guitar and loud drums (eerily similar to the first five seconds of ‘One Arm Scissor’ by At The Drive-In), squawk platitudes for three minutes, such as ‘I’ve got places to go/I’ve got people to see’, the less than catchy refrain of ‘All my friends have joined the army’, then finish off the third act with some toneless shouting. I guess this might have added some intrigue to the music, if it didn’t become so predictable in its repetition.
Two stars
Review: Life is sweet! Nice to meet you
Exclamation marks don’t have a clean record in recent pop history. The resolutely entertaining efforts of The Go! Team, Los Campesinos! and !!! are scarcely able to compensate for Hadouken! and Panic! at the Disco’s sullying of this perennial tool of punctuation. All too often the exclamation mark is used as a cheap signifier for hipster flippancy, and given Lightspeed Champion’s status as one-time hipster-in-chief, the exclamation mark in the middle of Life Is Sweet! Nice To Meet You made me brace myself for an unwelcome torrent of quirkiness.
However, halfway through the first track, it becomes clear that the album’s chirpy title is an ironic disguise for what is a surprisingly grandiose and ambitious work. Produced by Ben Allen, who worked on Merriweather Post Pavilion, LS!NMY’s orchestral arrangements mark a clear departure from Dev Hynes’ last country-influenced offering. Piano and strings often accompany 70s glam rhythms and guitar solos, a combination which is effective on ‘Madame Van Damme’ and indie-disco stomper ‘Marlene’.
But ultimately, it’s the album’s vaulting ambition which is its greatest shortcoming. In ‘Faculty of Fears’ and ‘Middle of the Dark’ the melodies just aren’t good enough to carry off the unorthodox rhythms and arrangements. At over fifty minutes long the whole thing is too long, with two pointless intermissions and even a piano étude. More intractable problems also remain. The most notable of these is Hynes’ voice, which sounds like a wobbly mixture of Kele Okereke and Conor Oberst, but fails to deliver the lyrical deftness of touch possessed by either man.
It’s hard not to be impressed by what this album tries to achieve, even if it doesn’t achieve it. Hynes seems to aim at something more serious than his previous output, which, though hip has always been patchy. Even with a malcontented lyrical theme, the record is, for better or for worse, as exuberant as the title’s exclamation mark suggests.
Three stars