by Lucy ArchibaldPart Two of the Ashmolean’s Chinese Prints exhibition showcases the work of established Chinese printmakers to Western audiences for the first time. The Chinese tradition of print-making is over a thousand years old, but this modern collection is more dynamic than dusty. Without the shock value of a more avant-garde exhibit, it is subtly disarming for its plethora of “alien” terms and references to less than familiar print techniques and events from Chinese history. Nevertheless, the colourful range of styles, subjects and images on offer – spanning a period of Chinese history which has evolved at an unprecedented rate – is both satisfying and stimulating. If you consider Chinese prints synonymous with water lilies and perhaps the odd reed-warbler, this collection will subvert your expectations. The exhibition does include Zheng Shuang’s Black Peony, White Peony, which is representative of the artist’s exclusive interest in floral subjects post-1970, but in general, the collection is indicative of the powerfully politically charged tendencies of print-making now. Perhaps the most moving of these is Wong Gongyi’s delicately entitled Autumn Wind and Rain (1980) which depicts at severely intimate quarters Qiu Jin, the poet, revolutionary and symbol of female independence, who campaigned against the binding of women’s feet and selling of women into slavery. Wong Gongyi’s print depicts the moments before her execution; monochrome and cut with hard lines, the medium of the piece seems to reflect its unsettling subject. This anguish is further reflected in the artist’s description of the creative process: “…dripping with sweat and tears, in a small storage room, my heart filled with grief and indignation.”Equally unsettling, perhaps, is the sense of a pervasive propaganda “theme”, particularly in the work of the 1950-70s. Next to Qiu Jin’s intense and unsmiling face is a representative of the Sichuan School – Xu Kuang and A Ge’s The Master (1978), depicting a Tibetan farmer in the Soviet style with axe in hand as a grinning and accessible heroic figure. In Reading Hard (1962) another Tibetan figure, a male shepherd in this instance, sits placidly reading amidst a monochrome yet bustling pastoral scene. The artist, Li Huanmin, seems to suggest that Communism has thrown off this individual’s shackles and in contrast he now sits reading. The description of the subject “reading hard”, however, seems intended to collide the leisure of reading with hard work and thus imbue the subject with a level of Communist acceptability. The artist acknowledges this political dimension to his work, regarding it as providing historical insight at the level of the individual: “I depict people, their noble characters, their rich inner world and their graceful bearing, because people are the motive force of history.” Zhang Chaoyang summarised his artistic project rather differently: “Beauty and freedom have been the goal of my aesthetic pursuit.” Yet he represents a strikingly similar scene in his autumnally-hued Heroes and Heroines Are All Around (1970) which (rather obediently, we suspect) chronicles a harvest scene in the midst of the Cultural Revolution when the artist volunteered to go to the Great Northern Wilderness. Subsequently, Zhang Chaoyang’s work was to become less propaganda-influenced and instead preoccupied with female classical beauty. This development is perhaps prefigured in the pretty girl clad in communist garb, who sits scribbling in the foreground of the scene. This recurrent artistic focus upon an individual pulled from a crowd seems somewhat incongruous with the political systems they articulate.The most recent work demonstrates a more satirical or at least enquiring edge. Kang Ning’s Forest (2004) in particular shows a progression from the earlier prints, while Li Yili’s Hometown Record with its mingling of realist and fantasy elements enacts his artistic intention to ‘create’ “…one’s ideal world” rather than merely document that already in existence. Short, if not sweet, this concise exhibition will certainly leave you with plenty to ponder, and is the ideal reason to finally (!) make it through the doors of the Ashmolean.
Chinese Prints runs until the 24th of February.

Are we all slaves to the Oxford mindset? And is it really all that bad, Sam Harding asks.

Last week, in a spare hour between a lecture finishing and my tutorial starting, with the essay safely completed and printed, I spent a happy hour in the Grand Café. The scrambled eggs and smoked salmon bagel was the perfect brunch. But upon leaving, I felt a tingling sense of guilt that I’d wasted away an hour that could, and maybe should, have been far more productive and perhaps ‘academic’.

I know I’m not the only one to have these self-induced guilt trips. Many students feel an onrush of shame for every hour wasted over coffee, Facebook, long lunches and pub excursions. We have it drilled into us that every minute can, and must, be spent applying oneself to study. My friend from Bristol, who kindly called on Sunday night to bask in the glory of having spent nearly all weekend in bed, albeit with the company of her laptop and the OC rather than the dashing History student she is currently pursuing, did not, when I asked her, feel any guilt whatsoever. She had an essay due in on Tuesday, but it could easily wait until the end of the week. And the term’s reading list was, she admitted, a little too long for her liking (four books), but she could probably read over the holidays. But more than just the artificiality of deadlines and long-winded essay titles, with even longer reading lists, all crammed into one week, is the inherent psychology of the place. It’s hard for anyone to specify, but there is a general sense of work, work, work, and shame on you if you don’t.

Having said this, two of my closest friends seemed to have struck a clever, albeit physically demanding balance last term. Throughout the day, they are chained to their desks, ploughing through their work with relentless focus. But when the Tom clock struck seven, the switch was flicked, and an all-night marathon began of drink, drink, drink. Their enthusiasm echoed through the Meadows buildings until the early hours, as they tottered to their rooms. Admittedly, this term they have drawn up strict exercise regimes to balance out the damage inflicted by Messrs. Gordon’s, Smirnoff, and Sauvignon.

Indeed, there is a culture of work hard, play hard(er) that runs through the university. And perhaps it is effective, preparing us for after graduation, when many will pour into the 14-hour days of Med School, investment banking, journalism, politics, and law. Employers favour Oxford graduates for more than the reputation. Without tooting our own horns, we are accustomed to working ridiculously hard for prolonged amounts of time, and still finding time to socialise our cotton socks off. Yes, there’s the 5^th week blues, but no-one even considers taking a week off, or slacking the pace. We plough on through, not just because we have to, but because we’ve worked out how to. 

Perhaps we should all take a bow, and bask in our super-stamina. But don’t worry, narcissists, I’ve no doubt next week’s tutorial will bring us all back to reality.

by Sophie Frew

See also: video preview of the play

A few first night fluffs aside, this cast made a very strong team under Alex Worsnip’s direction. The Flu Season is self-consciously modern in the language and the images used by its narrators. The prologue and epilogue act as a commentary from the playwright, as if he began in love and this subsequently turned sour. These might have become redundant once the pivotal rejection takes place yet there is then a partisan split, the epilogue on side with the man and the prologue with the woman. Hannah Martin as the Prologue dealt well with a difficult transition from one side of a single mind to embodying the rejected spirit. The position of an amending epilogue jarred with the central message that both love and life are fleeting and imperfect. But Sam Caird, acting as the epilogue and voice of Will Eno, impressively portrayed the smugness of hindsight and the manic perfectionism of a writer who is even now correcting this work.

The sense of foreboding in the production was slightly overplayed, which prevented the audience from becoming fully involved with the love story. But the beauty and innocence of the love between the man and the woman comes because they do not overanalyse its consequences – as they do those of their conversations. Andrew Johnson and Lucy Murphy gave real humanity to the awkward inmates who seem destined for one another. The man’s change of heart makes this relationship reflect the previous experiences of their attendants, his glazed expression and passivity contrasting with the train-of-thought dialogue. Lucy Murphy had exceptional depth of emotion in the rejection scenes, making her story the most convincing within the play.

Sam Bright and Amy Mulholland, as the doctor and nurse, served as a quirky reminder of the hopefulness of love. These positive characters were brightly played, competently fulfilling their role of retrieving the audience from the edge of despair.

This tragic story was a cathartic experience which reminded the audience to go out and live. As the epilogue points out, there is no man and woman, their story is not real, but it is brought to life by this cast and, ostracised from society, the couple make their mark through love. Although dominated by the pessimistic epilogue, this is without doubt a highly affirmative and optimistic play.

Only the Germans would put their Goal of the Year competition in February.

But here it is anyway, the winner, Diego’s 62.6m punt for Werder Bremen against Alemannia Aachen in April. Almost 20% of ARD television viewers voted for it.

Enjoy.

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I used to think Evelyn Waugh was a woman, because I didn’t think a man could be called Evelyn. Then I discovered that there were men called Hilary and women called Robin.

In any case, I always found Evelyn Waugh to be a very strange person. Brideshead Revisited, as the suggestive name, erm, suggests, is about a boy at Oxford who falls in love subconsciously with another beautiful boy called Sebastian; later sublimates this desire into heterosexual love for Sebastian’s sister, Julie; and finally transubstantiates his blood-and-flesh desires into overwhelming love for God (precipitated by a World War, no less). At least, that’s how Freud and I see it.

It’s a theme that recurs in so many homosexual novels, though usually in reverse: the pious boy who loves God, then loves God-made-flesh in man, eventually discovering that true ecstasy inheres in the bodies of all the men in the world.

Fast-forward to present-day Oxford and some things have changed. These days the homosexuals generally don’t flounce around Christ Church meadows with beautiful boys carrying teddies; they’re more likely to be found gyrating in Pop Tarts with muscular daddy bears. They probably won’t end up in bed with their boyfriend’s sister except by way of having discovered a three-way interest in Bertolucci’s Dreamers, and why wear a pince-nez when there are other better ways of gripping appendages?

The glorious days of surreptitious, you-and-me-against-the-world schoolboy encounters in the dark cloisters of interwar society have given way to  tight-shirted boys in shiny Dolce and Gabbana sweating to the house-y beats of Rihanna’s latest dance track. It’s been quite a radical century, if you ask me.

But traditionalists will be glad to note that some things don’t change. Last week, for instance, a couple of gay men were beaten up – again – outside the Coven, which hosts gay nights every Friday. Like a string of pearls passed down from generation to generation, this incident is merely the latest in a series of gay-bashings that include other gay-bashings outside the Coven and another that occurred at, of all places, the Wadham Queer Bop two years ago.

In a place where the trains often don’t run on time, gay-bashings every few months or so seem to run perfectly on schedule. What’s more shocking, though, is that these things are accepted as a matter of course. For instance, I never did find out what happened to the students who beat up the gay man at the Queer Bop.

I assume they are lurking around somewhere in the Gothic architecture, because beating someone up on the basis of sexual orientation here doesn’t seem as unacceptable as beating someone up on the basis of race or gender.

It’s not just drunken louts who crash the gay party and disfigure a few faces. The intellectual establishment still seems to have the propensity to think of homophobic agendas as constituting something morally courageous. I can think of two recent Rhodes scholars from Princeton who have achieved recognition for, among other better things, leadership of an ignoble society known as the Anscombe Society.

This is a society which opposes gay marriage – nay, even gay sex – and proposes a “scientific” ontological understanding of humans to the extent that they “cannot support homosexual relations which fall outside the goals of chastity, nor the proposition for same sex marriage, which challenges the fundamental definition of marriage”.

I’m not sure what the point of this society is, since all they seem to do is condemn homosexuals to a life of chastity. Yet the Rhodes Scholarship committee evidently and manifestly must think that this constitutes moral and philosophical interest in society, or evidence of leadership.

I’m not opposed to people having their own opinions, however unsupported and pernicious they may be. I’m usually fine if certain people think that what I am is fundamentally immoral, as long as they don’t shove it in my face, pious faces notwithstanding. But this is something quite different.

To recognize the implicit gay-bashing intentionally performed by leaders of homophobic societies by bestowing intellectual and moral laudation is tantamount to giving people who punch homosexuals for no good reason a trophy for being upstanding men of action and courage. That kind of thing is enough to make my blood boil.

It’s almost as if we were still living in the crumbling interwar era, where men were called Evelyn and Hilary, and where homosexuals in fits of bathetic spiritual ecstasy would immolate themselves upon altars of self-abnegation. It’s certainly Brideshead revisited, except that it’s the spectre of a corpse bride that continues to haunt the oppressed.

Johann Loh is a visiting Philosophy student from Princeton University.

by James Wright.

No, I’m not behind the Northern Rock crisis. No, I’m not the cause of current global economic uncertainty. And no, despite the receding hairline, I’m not Peter Hain. But here, for the first time, I outline my part in Gordon Brown’s downfall.

When Gordon Brown became Prime Minister after ten long years of Tony Blair, the political mood of the country changed palpably. Tony Blair, the Arch-Dissembler, had been replaced by the dependable son of a preacher-man, a man of principle and integrity.

Suddenly and surprisingly, all our fears about Gordon, the dour Scottish tax-grabber, becoming Prime Minister disappeared – it turned out he was a ‘pretty straight kind of guy’ whose sobriety and purposefulness contrasted greatly and favourably with the deceitfulness of his predecessor and the flippancy of his potential successor as Prime Minister in the Conservative Party.

Indeed, ‘Super-Gordon’ not only survived biblical floods, plagues and terrorist attacks, the first crucial tests of his premiership, but his statesman-like responses to these crises ensured that he actually prospered by them, at least in terms of the opinion polls.

It was during this time that I received a telephone call from a pollster (working on behalf of YouGov) who asked me in dulcet tones about my voting intentions in the event of a snap-election being called in October. I paused.

Quietly but unhesitatingly I said that I would be voting for Gordon Brown. I was then asked a series of questions about Gordon Brown’s characteristics. At this stage he was neither Stalin nor Mr. Bean but a solid, if underwhelming, House of Commons performer: a ‘conviction politician’ and, of course, statesman-like. And, as I recall, I said as much.

I can only plead guilty on the grounds of temporary insanity; I was soon cured after George Osbourne proposed to raise the threshold for inheritance tax (at last – a tax cut!) and David Cameron allegedly made the ‘speech of his life’ but, then again, not really because of anything the Conservatives did.

It was only after the Conservative Party Conference that I realised I had been deceived, or rather allowed myself to be deceived, as the real Gordon Brown emerged – a timid, over-cautious man, who called off, as Cameron himself obligingly pointed out, an election that he was almost certainly going to win.

At that moment, for me – a disillusioned Tory enamoured of Brown’s professed love of Britain and Britishness, and who had been delighted by the pictures of Margaret Thatcher’s return to Downing Street for tea, at the invitation of the Prime Minister – Gordon Brown’s political career started to make sense. He was not the antidote to Tony Blair at all. Tony Blair had always been portrayed (rightly, in my view) as a man of no principle. Gordon Brown, on the other hand, had principles and although I didn’t necessarily like them, at least he had some. Or so I used to think.

But just as Blair fluffed nearly all of his legacy-defining tests so too will Gordon Brown (and on Europe, he already has). His Blairite rhetoric about the constant ‘need for change’ and the importance of making ‘hard choices’ is in the end no substitute for principled, resolute action.

Furthermore, I came to realise – albeit belatedly – that Brown lacks political courage; if he didn’t he would have been Prime Minister years ago. Brown, it is worth restating, was as much the architect of the vacuous New Labour Project as Tony Blair: it was merely convenient for Blair the moderniser and Brown the king-in-waiting, to portray the latter as a ‘real’ Labour man in order to carry with them both the ‘awkward squad’ in the parliamentary party.

I had misinterpreted Brown’s remarkable silence over the issues which were most dear to Blair’s heart as conscientious objection. Of course, I was wrong – it was quite literally a party trick. This isn’t to say that Blair and Brown were happy bedfellows, but their differences were – and are – more personal than political.

The current Prime Minister’s lack of principles and the reasons for the aimlessness and drift of the government at the moment (themselves causally and mutually linked) should really have been obvious to me and the rest of the country during his time at the Treasury.

Then, in the New Year, still coming to terms with Brown’s great deception, I was called again by the same polling organisation and asked about my voting intentions, this time for an election which will no doubt come in 2009 or 2010. Holding my nose, I said that I would now be voting Conservative (I am no lover of Dave). My brief – and purely political – affair with Gordon Brown was over.

On its own, my change of heart is hardly worth mentioning, but I take some comfort from the fact that I am part of a wider trend of reformed sinners and dupes that has emerged against Gordon Brown in recent weeks. The opinion poll which I participated in gave the Conservatives a lead of several points over Labour. If repeated in a general election, Labour would, according to all opinion polls at the moment, almost certainly lose power outright.

And, inasmuch as all votes count (though some more than others in Britain), that would be no small part for me to play in the ultimate downfall of Gordon Brown. Not least since I could never contemplate voting for him again, now that I – and we all – know the truth.

James Wright is a History student from Christ Church.

Blues Athlete of the Week takes the form this week of an exclusive interview with Blues’ superstar striker Alex Toogood.Does your high profile in Oxford ever lead to strangers stopping you on the street?
Haha no! As if anybody would do that! When I was playing college football in first year I sometimes got recognised, but that was mainly by guys who played for other colleges, when they were smashed in Park End. It’s usually just embarrassing because I’m awful with names and faces so I have to have entire conversations whilst not having the slightest idea who I’m talking to.What's it like working with Martin Keown?
Martin’s awesome. He really knows what he’s doing and he’s got us playing some nice football. He expects a lot from us. For example, if anyone lifts or bobbles a pass in training, the whole drill is stopped and restarted. It is hard work, but it instills the right attitude in the players. I think the fact that Martin Keown is prowling the touchline during matches makes everyone give a bit more. The fact that we are in contention to win our BUSA league having been promoted last season shows how well we’re doing under his guidance.Who's got the best banter on your team?
I think I have. Nobody else seems to agree.Does the predominance of Worcester players on Blues help?
There isn’t a predominance of Worcester players on the Blues. If you don’t include my fellow striker Niko De Walden, who we’ve actually poached from St. Bennet’s because they don’t have a team, I’m the only person from Worcester who’s starting for the Blues at the moment.Who do you support?
No one to be honest. I get a lot of stick from the team for knowing absolutely nothing about football. I watch Match of the Day sometimes but only to see the goals, and I don’t see what all the fuss is about. The only team I really care about is England, but they just break my heart every two years. I’d much rather play football than watch it.Which footballer do you model yourself on?
I only know the names of about 5 players so I couldn’t really say.What are your main strengths/weaknesses as a player?
I guess being quite fast is my main advantage, and my fitness pays off towards the end of matches. I am overly competitive and I hate losing more than anything, which can be a strength during matches. Guys often become centre-backs because they are the biggest, thuggiest players. This means that they are usually bigger and stonger than me, so that’s a weakness to my game, and I get battered around quite a bit in most matches.Do you see yourself playing football to a high standard after graduation? To which level?
Not to a high standard. If all goes to plan I will be joining the RAF, so hopefully I will have time to play for their team.Would you rather win Varsity or Cuppers this year?
I get asked that a lot, mainly by the Worcester boys. Winning Cuppers this year is extremely important to me. But I would have to say Varsity, no question. What are your thoughts about Varsity? Have you ever played anywhere like Craven Cottage before?
I want to win so badly. It was horrible losing on penalties last year. Loftus Road is the only other stadium I’ve played in, so I’m really looking forward to running out at Craven Cottage. What's your sporting highlight in Oxford?
I am extremely proud of getting my Blue. But obviously the shine was taken off it by losing. Winning the league with Worcester in my first year also stands out.Do you play anything apart from football?
I don’t really have time at the moment, and I don’t think my body could cope, particularly with my intensive Pub Golf training schedule. I do triathlon in the summer, which is very different because it’s a completely solo effort. I don’t like the fact that your equipment can make such a difference, especially on the bike leg, so people can use money to improve their performance. That aspect doesn’t exist in football – everyone is on an equal footing and the result is completely controlled by human skill, effort, and attitude.

Remember this old rustbucket? The far-left party here in Germany, Die Linke, set one loose on the streets of Frankfurt just before last week’s regional elections. It’s meant to be reminiscent of the old Trabant people drove in the former communist East Germany. I guess it looks similar (here’s the original).

Noticed the problem? Yep, the actual car they used was a Ford. That’s an American multinational corporation with a revenue of some $170b a year — making most of these manifesto points rather vacuous.

Why let principle get in the way of good electioneering?

PS Feral Beast very much welcomes your comments

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