Friday 11th July 2025
Blog Page 2260

Review: The Sabotage Café

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"These things are hard to say. I’m not sure what’s true and what isn’t."

 

This is the opening of The Sabotage Café, Joshua Furst’s tale of a dysfunctional family relationship born of painful memories and mental illness. Welcome to Dinkytown, Minneapolis, scene of the 1980s punk rebellion from which Julia has escaped, and still home to an underground world of narcotics, anarchy and tempestuous youth.

Into this meleé runs Cheryl, Julia’s 16-year-old daughter, escaping the confines of suburbia and her mother’s oppressive presence. As we are drawn into Cheryl’s world of drugs, sex and squalor mixed with hashed-up ideals about the demise of ‘the establishment’, we also journey into Julia’s past, picking up the pieces of a life diverted and damaged. How much of her experience is real, and how much is imagined by the fearful and delusional Julia remains unclear, as Julia’s disturbed mind produces illusions which become increasingly difficult to distinguish from flashback and reality.

What Furst does brilliantly is portray through projected emotion and internalised argument the lonely struggle of each character to find meaning in their situation, or to deny it. The gung-ho bravado of the boys Cheryl ends up with is nothing more than a face for their insecurities, the outcome of youth burdened by their parents’ blunders as well as their own.

Furst’s blunt and epithetic manner  shocks rather than draws sympathy at first, but his open style creates the sense of hopelessness in which the book’s characters dwell, empty and needy, clawing into each other’s lives as if some solace can be found by living vicariously. His compassionate exploration of life in the grimy fallout of a failed revolution and the desire to obliterate the self is a first novel to be proud of, and one that provokes.

Omkar triggers Union poll

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Krishna Omkar (right) stood against Charlotte Fischer (left) in Michaelmas Term 2007
Photo: Eddie Gallacher

 

Krishna Omkar has raised over 150 signatures petitioning for a poll that could radically alter the Oxford Union’s election rules.

The poll of all Union members will go ahead on Monday. The motion, if it is passed,  will mean that a re-poll will happen automatically if any candidate gets disqualified from Union elections. The verdicts of election tribunals, which currently decide if the re-poll goes ahead, will also be open to debate and possible to reverse in the House.

Union President Ben Tansey called Omkar’s move “surprising” given that a packed House in the Union last Thursday voted against similar proposals by a large margin.

“The poll was an interesting decision,” Tansey said, “200 people… decided [the motion] wasn’t a good idea.” He refused to comment on whether he supported Omkar, but denied that the issue would overshadow his term as President, saying, “People are bored of Union politics.”

The motion was originally brought by Remi Drouin, and supported by Omkar.

The motion comes after Omkar was banned last Michaelmas Term from ever running for Union president again, when a tribunal found him guilty of electoral malpractice. Since then he has attempted to change the Union rules so that tribunals can no longer impose lifetime bans as punishment, however his attempts last term were delayed, then blocked completely.

Omkar has argued that the ban constitutes unfair treatment, and that he was only following standard Union practice.

“The rules as they stand encourage duplicitous hacking. The vote on Monday is about discussing election tribunals. Standing Committee delayed the vote because they wanted to change the regulations to allow open hacking in the poll.”

He expressed upset that an emergency Standing Committee meeting had been called the previous Monday despite the organisers allegedly knowing Omkar would not be able to attend.

“I’m not angry, just disappointed that they delayed the vote. It’s not a personal thing, it’s the principle. I’ve been vilified…I didn’t cheat, I didn’t do anything that [other people] didn’t do.”

Union rules forbid candidates from soliciting votes from anyone other than close personal friends. However, candidates sometimes form ‘slates,’ in which several candidates with similar views support each other’s election.

One former Committee member, who preferred to remain anonymous, condemned Omkar’s attempt to have the rules changed, calling the move “deeply regrettable”, adding that the Union is, “fundamentally not an appreciation society for prominent people.”

Both sides, Omkar for the motion and Luke Tryl against, will be circulating publicity on the motion over the weekend.

Anne’s flag tension escalates

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Tensions have escalated at St Anne’s following an incident involving a student who displayed a Tibetan flag in her window.

Last week third year Sophie Chau had stones thrown through her window. A number of Chinese students have now hung the Chinese flag in response to her Tibetan one.

The day after the stone-throwing, carried out by three unidentified students, Chao was approached by a Chinese acquaintance in college who asked her to take down her flag.

The student, who wished to remain anonymous, defended his decision.

He said, “I asked Sophie if she could consider taking the flag down because we didn’t want to escalate this issue.

“Hanging the ‘Snow Lion’ flag is a very serious criminal offence in China, as people perceive it as a symbol of violence. Any Chinese students would be disturbed by this flag.”

Chao responded, saying that the Tibetan flag “is in no way anti-Chinese.”

“The Tibetan flag is not pro-independence; it is a pro-human rights and this is not particular to China. This distinction is one that many Chinese people fail to make.”

The political stand-off in St Anne’s has affected the student body, with Chao saying, “The atmosphere in College is slightly tense. My flag looks down on the Quad. It is provoking quite a bit of discussion.”

One first year at St Anne’s described college atmosphere as “awkward”.

She added, “Expressing political opinion is one thing, but it shouldn’t have to affect the community we all live and work in such a negative way.”

St Anne’s College Dean, Dr Liora Lazarus, condemned the response to Chao’s flag, although she admitted that she could see why it might have caused offence.

She said, “Throwing stones at somebody for whatever political beliefs they hold is just not acceptable.

“But we appreciate that there are some students in this College who do not agree with the hanging of the Tibetan flag.”

One St Anne’s student, Edward Allbutt, an undergraduate in Arabic studies, described the violence that had taken place as “shocking”.

He claims to have found the behaviour of some Chinese students strange. “It’s frankly bizarre that they think they can just casually complain to the authorities and so force someone to stop making a slightly controversial political statement.”

Chao has expressed surprise at the controversy she has caused.

She said, “I was disturbed by the reaction of the Chinese students studying in Oxford. I had expected a higher degree of open-mindedness from these people.”

The College authorities claim that they do not want to intervene in this situation from any political angle and stressed that they wished to remain neutral.

Lazarus stated,  “It is not the place of the College Dean to stipulate whether or not people should exercise their political rights.”

“All the students are intelligent and are able to make this decision for themselves. The College respects everyone’s right to express their political belief and is certainly not taking a political stand.”

To this she added, “Everyone has a right to hang up a flag should they chose to do so. At this stage we would like the students to come to a resolution on their own.”

JCR President Amaru Villanueva Rance, said he supports students’ rights to express their beliefs, but added that he hoped students would be able to work through the issue without too much College interference.

He said, “What we don’t want is latent animosity in College. We don’t want to cauterise debate and pretend nothing is going on. We also want to prevent the issue from snowballing.”

There have been no further incidents of physical hostility from any students in St Anne’s.

However Chao claims that due to the negative response, she no longer intends to remove her flag any time soon.

She said, “Recent developments have placed me in a position where I cannot remove it. Chinese flags will stay up and it will legitimise their claim of being the victim in this scenario.”

She added, “Some college students have even asked me to get hold of Tibetan flags, and the order is underway!”

In a bid to settle the problem, Villanueva Rance said that he was willing to give time to the issue at last Sunday’s JCR meeting.

“Before the meeting I mentioned that we would be talking about the flags issue. I was hoping that there would be a debate and that the students would work out a solution or a compromise.

“We made reference to the situation during the meeting but it seems that no-one turned up to discuss it.”

He added, “The JCR wants to protect freedom of expression and in this sense we support people’s freedom to exhibit their flags in public from their balconies.”

Four take May Day leap

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Photo: Patrick Macfarlane

 

One reveller makes a run for it

Election: OULC and OUCA lose out

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{nomultithumb}Check the final election results here

 



 

The Liberal Democrats have conceded control of Oxford City Council to Labour, despite strong support in student wards.

 

Voters in Oxford headed to polling stations on May 1st to choose 24 of the city’s 48 councillors.

Nationally, the local elections were the first opportunity for voters to
give their verdict on Gordon Brown’s premiership. They were also Lib Dem leader
Nick Clegg’s first electoral outing since becoming party leader.

Labour won four more seats than the Lib Dems, increasing their number in the Council to 22. This is short of a majority, but they are now the largest party by some margin.


Labour will be particularly pleased to win Blackbird Leys, beating the Independent Working Class Association (IWCA ), who have lost two of their seats, both to Labour.


The Lib Dems had signs of strong student support by winning in Carfax and Holywell. These wards cover almost all the colleges and residences in the city centre.

The Green Party won two seats, fewer than the previous election in 2006.

 

The Conservatives notably failed to win any seats, with both their councillors – Lib Dem defectors Paul Sargent and Tia MacGregor losing their seats to Labour.

Close results



In the last elections in 2006, Lib Dem candidate Richard
Huzzey won Holywell, with the Greens‘ Matthew Morton coming second with half as many votes as
Huzzey. The Greens took Carfax with only a 23 vote lead over the Lib Dems.

Of the 25 seats up for election in 2006, Labour won 10, with
the Lib Dems winning 9, the Green Party 5 and the Independent Working Class Association winning 1.

The Lib Dems had been running a minority administration of the
City Council, with Labour only four seats ahead, so the stakes were high with two leading parties neck-and-neck for most of the results.

Nationally, key issues centred around cuts in services, such
as post offices, rubbish collection, and schools, but also antisocial behaviour,
the environment and council tax.

In Oxford, most
candidates had been promoting environmental policies and plans aimed at making Oxford
safer at night. Two other hot topics were animal rights protestors and tuition
fees.

Holywell candidates

Holywell ward was expected to see a close fight, with two
student candidates: Kieran Hutchinson Dean, Labour candidate and student at
Wadham, and Alex Stafford, Conservative candidate and student at St Benet’s.


Yet in the end Lib Dem candidate Nathan Pyle, who works at St John’s and has a DJ slot at the Purple Turtle, won by a strong margin.


The results mean the two majority student wards are now both under Lib Dem control.

 

The final composition of Oxford City Council is now: Labour – 23, Lib Dem – 16, Green – 7, and IWCA – 2. 

 

Final election results:


Holywell Ward

Candidate Party Votes
Kieran Hutchinson Dean Labour  144
Nathan Pyle Lib Dem  481
Chip Sherwood Green  196
Alex Stafford Conservative  239


Carfax Ward

Candidate  Party Votes
Sarah Hutchison Labour  182
Stephen Brown Lib Dem  375
Claudia Fitzherbert Green  208
Paul Sargeant Conservative  284

 

Council Seats Won:

Party Seats
Labour  12
Liberal Democrat  8
Green  3
Conservative  0
IWCA  1
Independent  0
Respect  0

 

More results may be found at Oxford City Council’s website.

Gift Exchange

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The theory of The Gift is a fascinating one. We have by now recognised that exchange is not always what it seems. Despite appearances, anything that passes from one to another will always have ‘strings attached’. As an anthropology student currently slaving over these theories, I half-skipped my way to the OVADA gallery, impatient to see how different artists had managed to find a way of visually representing these purely academic concepts.

They hadn’t. Most pieces had such a remote connection to gifts, exchange or relationships that one couldn’t help but feel that they were scraping the bottom of the barrel in trying to link them all to one theme. For example, apparently the light and shadow plays on random surfaces that George Mogg films present themselves so rarely that when they do its a gift that there’s something worth filming. I’m not sure about worth filming, but there was definitely nothing there worth watching!

Vicky Vergou’s film An Odyssey reminded me of why I tend to stay away from conceptual art – two videos run parallel to each other, one displaying blood and the other water. The former symbolises the artist’s long-term illness, the latter achievement. Attributing symbolic meaning to something is fair enough – we do it in every field of self-expression, whether art, drama or literature. But it has to have a purpose – either to communicate something or just be aesthetically pleasing. Vergou just created symbolism and let it hang. It wasn’t even a particularly pretty installation.

Ann Rapstoff’s video of a woman’s neon-pink coloured mouth uttering (in a supposedly inspirational but actually very scary) voice: ‘You are special. You are unique’ was sheer entertainment. She’s got a point – we should remember we are all worthy. But not in that way. Artists should stay away from anthropological theories if they don’t know how to do them justice. Personally, I am still awaiting some conceptual art that will not make me grimace.

Review: Kill Your Friends

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Stephen Stelfox, a talent spotter for a major record label, is going very quickly insane. His job consists of picking which of the ‘one GCSE merchants’ (the artists) will have a hit record with the ‘animals’  (the public).

 

These decisions are almost always made drunk from an Eastern European brothel, and the hits are drying up. Stelfox’s recent attempts at success (including a German electro pop number called ‘Why Don’t You Smack My Ass?’) ended in disaster.

 

His mind is like ‘a Mission with no Control.’ As the title suggests, Stelfox’s insanity and rising bloodlust is going to end badly for his nearest and dearest.

John Niven’s debut novel draws on the writer’s own experience as an A&R man in the late nineties, and its this semi fictional memoir form that’s perhaps the most enjoyable aspect to Kill Your Friends. Britpop’s at its peak, Girl Power’s just kicked off, and New Labour’s election victory is only a few months away. Niven deftly uses ironic retrospection; the reader cannot help but be amused by Stelfox’s opinion that Be Here Now is Oasis’ masterpiece, that OK Computer will end Radiohead’s career, and the description of Tony Blair as ‘that Labour guy.’

It’s a disappointment, then, that the rest of the novel is so derivative and, ultimately, boring. Niven’s stabs at postmodernism are clumsy and ineffectual, and the surreal, stream-of-consciousness dialogues begin to grate. Similarly, Stelfox’s casual racism, and not-so-casual sexism, don’t shock because they’re so contrived. It becomes obvious within about five lines of Kill Your Friends that Niven is hugely inspired by Bret Easton Ellis’ own bloody satire, American Psycho, and it is this debt that ultimately prevents the book from having an existence of its own. Mockney lads’ culture is not as interesting, or as fitting a target for satire as eighties Wall Street, and the novel’s progression from nostalgic memoir to murderous rampage is a mistake from which Kill Your Friends never fully recovers from.

 

2 stars out of 5 

Theatrical Thrills

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Something about the frisson, the chilly tingle of excitement that hangs in the crisp Valentine air, is conducive to theatre. An epic in itself,  I had finally persuaded a lovely young lady, whose name will reamin shrouded in mystery, to follow me to see Indian Ink.

A couple of familar faces on stage, perfect fodder to show off my many, many connections in the theatre world, and a nice piece of light comedy sounded like the perfect start to a perfect evening. I was soon snuggled up against my lady-companion – after some ameteur gymnastics to get to our seats.

Why is it, incidentally, that the bigger a girl’s hair, the more she complains about having to move to let others get to their seats? Do they just assume that that the empty seats on their row will remain unfilled just to please them? The one perched on the end of our row was insufferable!

Thankfully, my own companion  took her seat with perfect decorum, snatching only a contemptuous glance at the primped- up princess who was still in paroxysms of shock at our daring to pass her to reach our alloted places.
As the lights slid down, I let my hand fall into hers. As the actors entered the stage, I… well, I sat still and watched. The play, mostly, but I couldn’t help but let my attention be drawn again and again to the beauty next to me. She was holding my hand in the most casual fashion, her attention riveted on the stage.

At the interval she went done to buy some food. To my mild surprise she returned sans refreshments for me. A bit of a dissappointment. But then we forbear. As any real man would know. I imagine.

As the play moved through its second half, she moved her hand out of mine. And was it my imagination, or was she edging away very slightly? The action on stage was hilarious, and I was giggling away merily; she, though, had fallen silent, her brows creased in consternation.

When the play ended, she turned to me. Perfect, beautiful, sexy.

"You laugh like an oaf. That was the most embarrissing couple of hours I have ever spent in life!"

The shock. The utter shock. My laugh isn’t oafish. It is enthusiastic. It is rich. I dare say it has timbre. By the time I had digested this all, however, she had gone.

But what was worse, what was infinately worse, was the sickly grin I received from the big-haired girl as I squeezed past her on my way out. Cow.

Review: The Audacity of Ideas

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The Audacity of Ideas is a new play written by Oxford student Gareth Russell and set on the brink of the French Revolution.

I must admit, going by the title, I was worried that this would be seriously dry drama. Writing a play about ideas and setting it over two hundred years ago seemed a bit like walking the plank voluntarily. I expected the play to be as patchy as a student’s essay written in the wee hours of the morning after too much ProPlus. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

This is a play about ideas, yes; but ideas tested out on the streets of Paris and enforced using the guillotine. Russell’s writing is far from perfect, but it does put extraordinary words in the mouths of his characters. The Bible is memorably described as ‘almost a waste of vellum’; revolutionaries are the ‘excrement of the nation’. The urgency of the impending Revolution is brilliantly portrayed and played out among the highest aristocrats at court: ‘there is no middle road between the throne and the scaffold’, Charles tells his brother King Louis.

The Audacity of Ideas follows the politics of the French court and displays the courtiers in all their arrogance and ignorance. Camped-up Charles, the King’s younger brother (played by Gareth Russell) is excellent as he bullies and seduces his way around aristocratic circles.

The play portrays the extravagance of the upper classes, as they witter on about parties on the very cusp of revolution, and still manages to pull off a discussion of the burning ideas of the time. Yet the characterization suffers from this extraordinarily ambitious task, and sometimes slips into caricature.

Russsell aimed to introduce the audience to the smaller players at court, but I certainly came away remembering the spoilt one, the gay one and the serious one, rather than any actual names. What’s more, the play borrows rather a lot from the intrigues and the mannerisms of Liaisons Dangereuses, staged last term at the Moser theatre in Oxford.

Although a little too earnest at times, this new piece of student writing is definitely worth watching. Centuries later, revolutionary spirit is still in the air – not least on the stages of Oxford student theatre.

4 stars out of 5

Review: Rozencrantz and Guildenstern

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An existential crisis drives the plot of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. The two title characters are locked into the fate decided for them in Hamlet. While they will die, as they cannot alter what William Shakespeare created, they can debate on life, probability, and meaning- while attempting to remember their own names.

Tom Stoppard’s play takes the two characters, memorable only because they are completely non-distinguishable, and develops them into a play that focuses on their own identity crises, the action of Hamlet swirling around them.

This excellent production, directed by Krishna Omkar, places the characters on a giant chessboard, literally turning them into pawns of a higher will. Guildenstern, played by William Spray, exudes a cool severity as he slinks around the board. His tone remains composed and focused, even if his train of thought rarely makes sense. Rosencrantz, meanwhile, played by Liam Well, moves around the board with excited energy, and manages admirably to combine awe, interest, and confusion.

Finishing off the cast is a group of tragedians, led by Tom Carlisle, whose booming and confident voice makes him the ideal salesman of tragedy. The tragedians also double as the Danish court. This decision artfully meshes the two groups, since both are directing tragedies in their own right. The tragedians slide across the board like dancers, taking positions which mimic the great misfortunes of human existence that occur within Hamlet; murder, adultery, and deception.

Identity and existence are questions that the characters continually debate. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern do not connect with each other or even with their own selves, often forgetting where and who they are. The production emphasizes their confusion by placing the two under a white spot-light, while the other characters languish under dimmer lighting.

As the production progresses, the white light serves to highlight the changing movements of the title characters. Rosencrantz’s, with his bursts of fractured energy, begins to resemble a trapped animal, while Guildenstern has moments of stillness, standing locked within himself. Therein lies the strength behind the production’s minimalist set. While the action may take the characters to court or to a ship, their bodies remain attached to a game in which they cannot deter their fate.

4 stars out of 5