A ‘women’s magazine’ for students in Oxford is currently being developed, but the project has been met with mixed reactions. Is there a need for such a magazine? Who would read it?  What should it include? It isn’t immediately obvious.  A survey of forty-two female students found no significant agreement on whether there was a need or even a general want for such a magazine, but a significant majority of respondents felt that they would read such a magazine if available. It is difficult to know exactly what these responses can tell us, since the terms used in the questionnaire are, sadly, somewhat ambiguous. Should we take the term ‘women’s magazine’ to mean glossy copies of Eve and Cosmo or a hardline feminist journal without pictures?  

Any type of media with ‘woman’ in either the title or tagline can be scary. It creates the impression of being exclusively for a female reader or listener or viewer, and isn’t exclusivity exactly what the 21^st century hopes to leave behind? Take Woman’s Hour on Radio 4 for example.  Sally Feldman, one-time editor of the programme argues that the title is a reference to its contents and style, and not its audience. But what does this mean? How can the term ‘woman’ be applied to such things as content and style?  

Sally Feldman explained it in terms of ‘the twin peaks’. Firstly, she argued that women’s media involves encouraging a ‘female’ perspective on all issues. It isn’t hard to achieve, you simply need female editors, female reporters and female voices. Secondly, it should focus on topics that are thought to be of special interest to women. More than tampons, eyeliner and needlework, this applies to all areas of life in which women’s experiences can be seen as separate and different to those of men. The separation and difference are, of course, matters of opinion. But when has objectivity ever been a golden rule for the media? 

The areas of life that remain different for men and women are constantly changing. It would be naive to suggest that such differences don’t exist. But what if by focusing on them, we simply prolong and exaggerate them? Perhaps we should be striving for a public sphere such as that envisioned by the great philosopher and sociologist, Jurgen Habermas. He developed the idea of having a place for unified rational discussion between all individuals. A place in which one’s argument means more than one’s identity. He suggested that the modern media would be the best way for this ideal to be brought to life. 

However, isn’t Habermas’ concept of the public sphere a bit naïve? Is it possible that such a sphere could ever be equally open to all members of society? His vision of so-called ‘identityless interaction’ was, after all, based on the coffee house discussions of an eighteenth century French elite. Do we not need to realise that there are ‘informal impediments’ to participation in the public sphere which can easily persist even if everyone is formally included?  For example it is well known that research has shown that women are more likely to be interrupted in formal settings such as academic meetings, than men are.  How therefore, can a single public sphere ever allow individuals to be ‘identityless’?  

In order to remove these ‘informal impediments’, some people have therefore argued for a multiplicity of public spheres – a range of discursive arenas geared towards different groups. Ideally, these arenas would allow each group to find its ‘voice’ and the confidence required for successful interaction in the unified public sphere. This is where women’s media comes into play. A female only space gives women the opportunity to have their say on issues that matter to them, something which is more difficult in the public sphere than is always recognised. 

These conclusions suggest that research into the consequences of a women’s magazine in Oxford needs to be more imaginative. Rather than asking participants directly about the want or need for such a magazine, perhaps we need to look at the how female students in Oxford feel about their interaction within the wider student body. If most women feel that they are impeded in such involvement, then maybe a separate sphere for women’s media in Oxford is a good idea.

By Mona Sakr

One of the largest nightclubs in Oxford, Park End, is about the undergo a redesign.Over the next month, Park End will be transformed into a Lava Ignite club in a massive £500 000 redesign.The popular student venue is being taken over by Lava Ignite, who have bases across the country. Regular club nights won't be affected during the revamp, as the dance rooms will be decorated one by one. The new venue will maintain its 1200 person capacity, but organiers hope that the changes will improve the clubbing experiences of the locals.The £500 000 revamp, which will be completed by November 30th, will see a new decor for the club, as well as new flooring and exterior, and special VIP areas which will be available for hire. In addition to this, the range of music played will be widened to cater for all musical tastes.With threats from new student nights on the increase, Park End has had to take some drastic steps to capture the attention of clubbers. Manager Ken Getgood said: "The club has been known as the Park End for over 15 years and is one of Oxford's longest-running nightclubs. Once complete, however, the re-fit is certain to attract every clubber in the town."

by Hayley MirekWe live in a culture obsessed with celebrity. The sheer number of gossip magazines demonstrates this, but it is somewhat disturbing to think that the toils and hardships of Britney Spears are, in terms of column inches, far ahead of famines in Africa and that beautiful young “actresses” have a place in Heat regardless of whether or not they actually possess any talent.
Sienna Miller could be called such an actress. That is why it was odd watching her in Interview and discovering that she can indeed act. Miller plays Katya, an actress who, like her portrayer, is better known for her romances and fashion choices than her acting roles. Steve Buscemi plays Pierre Peders, a man who considers himself the polar opposite to tabloid journalism. He is a “real” journalist, a man who investigates and exposes the ills of society – yet he has been demoted to interviewing Miller’s frivolous starlet.
Interview is an adaptation of a Dutch film, originally directed by Theo van Gogh. Directed by Buscemi, it is the first in a planed series of adaptations of van Gogh’s films. It maintains much of van Gogh’s style; intense dialogue between flawed, textured and fiercely realistic characters.  
An early scene sees Pierre Peders sitting at a table waiting for Katya, fuming about the fact that he should be in Washington reporting the real news. Once Katya arrives Peders does little to hide his disdain for her. The interview is a disaster and they leave swearing at each other.  
After Katya is blamed for a car crash, Peders finds himself in her apartment and what follows is a magnificently tense scene between the two. In short, Interview is a long filmed conversation; it is certainly not a film for Bruce Willis fans who dislike films lacking in explosions and gritty action. Yet, superb performances from Miller and Buscemi combined with unpredictable plot twists make the conversation fascinating.  
It is clear from Katya and Peders’ conversation that the conflict between them is not based on genuine hate (or even dislike) but a fundamental misunderstanding of what the other represents. For Peders, Katya feeds the insipid, trashy side of journalism that keeps the public distracted from the real stories. For Katya, Peders represents the papers that print lies about her and are more concerned with her fluctuating breast size than her talent.
Buscemi and Miller were made to play this film’s principal characters. Buscemi’s famously worn, dishevilled appearance works beautifully for the decidedly creepy Peders. And Miller is pretty, thin, and charismatic enough to play a coke-snorting actress who seems to never wash her hair and yet can seduce any man with a smile.  
I didn’t like either of the characters, but then I don’t think that is the director’s aim. Despite this, I did really did enjoy Interview. It is a film that you won’t be able to forget after leaving the cinema. Funny, uncomfortable and sad, it proves that Miller is more than Jude Law’s ex-fiancée.  
Britney Spears once said “I don’t like movies that make me think.” If you share Britney’s sentiment, do not see Interview – you will hate it.  But, if you like a strong film that won’t leave you emotionally satisfied, you should see Interview.

by Mary WaireriRodolphe Marconi’s Lagerfeld Confidential is an intimate portrait of one of the most iconic figures of the fashion industry. Born in Hamburg in 1938, Lagerfeld moved to Paris at 14 and by 20 was working for established fashion houses such as Valentino. Since then, Lagerfeld has designed for Chloe and redefined Chanel. He has been so influential in the fashion world that Vogue named him “the unparalleled interpreter of the mood of the moment”. Marconi followed Lagerfeld for two years, enjoying unprecedented access both to Lagerfeld’s public and private life, producing over 200 hours of footage. Luckily, the film is only 87 minutes long, and all the better for it. The result is a dense, skillfully edited documentary that does not waste a single frame. Marconi is adamant that Lagerfeld Confidential should be taken seriously as a film; “it is not another film about fashion or ‘appearances’. Rather, it is a human portrait of an exceptional man.”
It is easy to see why Marconi chose Lagerfeld as his subject; he’s intense, compelling and witty and the film captures Lagerfeld’s many quirks and idiosyncracies perfectly. He is a man who is at once an integral contributor to the fashion industry yet strangely removed from it.
Furthermore, he is fiercely independent, living largely in physical and emotional isolation from others. In fact at one point he claims “I don’t want to be a reality in people’s life, I want to be like an apparition”. This sentiment sums up the impression the viewer is left with by the end of Lagerfeld Confidential. Lagerfeld is an intriguing character but he remains inaccessible to us in many ways. This is partly Marconi’s failing; he displays a laughable level of coyness when questioning Lagerfeld on his sexual relationships and positively skims over more awkward lines of questioning – in particular, the moment when Lagerfeld explains his mother’s hostility towards him when he was sexually abused as a child. Therefore, the most important criticism of Lagerfeld Confidential as a documentaty is that it feels somewhat superficial.
 Many of the insights into Lagerfeld’s personal relatonships and upbringing are interesting but Marconi seems reluctant to probe too deeply, which is difficult to understand considering the rapport he clearly established with his subject in the period of filming.
The fashion world is almost exclusively painted as a hollow and intellectually bankrupt environment so Lagerfeld Confidential is an achievement in showing us the humanity behind the Haute Couture. Lagerfeld Confidential is unexpectedly engaging but ultimately falls short because of its failure to give us a more complete impression of its

by Ross PhilipsIn today’s cinema the truly epic battle scene has been replaced by computer generated images. Although the capabilities of CGI to create realistic and sophisticated battle animations have grown incredibly over the last ten years, it’s just not the same as seeing real armies and actual destruction. The most truly epic and beautiful battle scene ever captured on film is not in the Lord of the Rings. It is the attack on Hidetora’s castle, in Ran, Akira Kurosawa’s samurai inspired adaptation of King Lear.
In this scene, Lord Hidetora Ichimonji, brilliantly portrayed by Tatsuya Nakadai, is betrayed by his son, Taro, to whom he has bequeathed his crown. Instead of using fast paced editing, sound effects, and handy-cams in order to immerse  us in a first person perspective of the battle, Kurosawa uses long takes with the camera watching from high above as thousands of samurai warriors storm the castle. He shows scenes of incredible carnage, piles of bodies strewn with arrows, a man holding his severed arm, another man who has been shot through the eye with an arrow; however, instead of the sounds of battle, Kurosawa plays only the dramatic orchestral score. This allows the audience to reflect on what is being shown. Kurosawa often cuts away from these images of carnage to show the sun shining through the clouds, creating a visual metaphor of the heavens above juxtaposed with hell on earth. It is as if the camera is the eye of God watching from above.
The scene ends with Hidetora sitting motionless as arrows fly around his head and his castle burns around him. All of his bodyguards and his concubines have been killed.
The troops outside wait for the castle to finish burning down expecting that Hidetora will commit suicide rather than dishonor himself in defeat, but to their amazement Hidetora emerges from the smoke. He slowly walks down the steps towards the samurai army. Instead of attacking him the soldiers move to create a path for him to walk through. Despite his now pitiful state they are unwilling to attack the man who was once their tyrannical leader. As Hidetora walks through the gates of the exterior wall, Kurosawa frames the burning castle behind him. What makes this scene truly amazing is that there is no CGI. Kurosawa built a castle solely for the purpose of burning it down in order to film this one scene. For this reason, each shot in the scene had to be filmed in one take. Kurosawa manages to pull it off flawlessly. When it was released in 1985, Ran the most expensive ever made in Japan; however, this scene set a benchmark of excellence not only for Japan, but also for cinema around the world.

A friend of mine from my summer at BusinessWeek recently moved to a new job at another magazine. They gave her a new email address and a new Blackberry to check her messages on. Which is nice of them. But she’s still got her old Treo (like a Blackberry but made by Palm) from her old job, and since she’s been using her Treo phone number as her main cell number, she’s still getting all these messages from former sources. She knows too many people to tell all her friends to start calling her on a new number, so she’s waiting for BusinessWeek to switch off the feed from her voicemail and email to the Treo, then she’ll just get used to having two cell phones.

   The same is true for anyone who’s ever lost an academic email after graduating from school, college or university. A first-year here at Brown recently told me she’s lost touch with many of her old friends because she only had their contact information stored on her school email. I had the same experience when my Oxford address expired in July and I’m already worried about all the data collected in my Brown inbox, and all the people who only know to contact me there. Right now, I’m manning a separate Google address to try and shift my social life in advance of graduating this spring, and the business of checking two addresses (plus my Facebook) is driving me up a wall.

    The lesson is that the Internet sometimes results in too much information collected in too many places for us to handle. But it also runs the opposite risk: information on computers isn’t secure, and technology doesn’t always work.

    This Thursday, for example, I was writing a French paper—in French—and I needed to run it through the French equivalent of Spell Check, a program called Antidote . Now, it’s $300 to buy the program so Brown keeps a version on all the computers in our college computer labs. I usually just take my books there and write the paper in the lab so I can check as I go. On Thursday afternoon, I’d been writing all day and I was almost done, when the idiot sitting next to me decided to unplug the power cord to the whole computer cluster, permanently erasing my paper.

    I’m not technologically illiterate and of course, I’d been saving as I went. But in a lab where hundreds of users come in each day and work on tons of documents, they set the computers to erase every document that’s been saved each time it restarts. I had to start over from scratch, and the paper I wrote in three hours that night was a whole lot worse than the one I’d slaved on for eight.

    According to Stephen Baker , this is what made cell phones so successful: they could be made cheaply because they banked on people being happy to have something that worked most of the time, rather than wait around for engineers to make something perfect. Most people apparently like it that way; I’m not sure I agree? How come no one asked me if I was okay with this works-most-of-the-time model? And how willing are you guys to tolerate tech screw-ups and inconvenience?

A reminder: don't forget to change all your clocks tomorrow (Sunday).

Our weekly drama pubcast returns with a roundup of the week in Oxford drama and an interview with Oscar Wood, director of 'Big Breathe In.' 
Part One: Alice: A Peep Through the Looking Glass
Part Two: Interview with Oscar Wood
Part Three: King John and Crescendos in Blue
Check back weekly for new episodes! 

It’s hard to imagine a static, single-act monologue being so gripping, but Wish I Had a Sylvia Plath is nothing short of a theatrical triumph. The classic ’50s housewife – loyal to her husband, caring mother and kitchen lover – Elizabeth Gray initially reveals herself to us by removing her shocked-headed head from out of her gas oven. The effect is instantly mesmerising, and rather than ruining it with continual rants about how imprisoned she feels, the play becomes an endless energetic see-saw, with scenes that involve a mock cookery TV show, conversations with her husband or games of hide-and-seek with her child (all the different characters voiced by Gray herself).

Nothing about the drama is complicated. Her husband has cheated on her, she has an insufferable child, and she is intent on committing suicide. However, we instantly feel pity for her position, caught up as she is in a relationship with a writer while she herself longs to have something she writes published. Her desire is so strong that it is almost more hurtful of the husband to suggest that she does not have the skill to write than to see him cavorting with another woman. We see this action take place in a recorded black and white film, its scenes projected onto the back wall of the stage. The silent footage, which Gray vocalises in some of the scenes, helps to keep the action varied, but all the play’s exuberance comes from Gray’s performance itself. Edward Anthony’s script effectively presses all the right satirical buttons (the recipes, including one for “an ungrateful, cheating husband”, recited in a mock ’50s fashion, are cleverly construed) but it is Gray’s delivery, ebbing from uncontrolled madness to touching serenity that works to move the audience. When we see her take the final steps to her end, reciting the recipe for “a perfect suicide”, there is almost a temptation to cry, simply because this one person has had to perform (literally) so much, so quickly, only to end up suffocating, with her head stuck inside the very source of her imprisonment as a means to escape. For something original and greatly affecting, make sure you go along to see this. There’s a reason why Gray received a Best Solo Artist Award this year at the Edinburgh Festival for her month-long run. Oxford is lucky to have her ready to perform it at least a few more times – you’ll leave feeling glad to have had an Elizabeth Gray.

Wish I Had a Sylvia Plath runs at 8:00pm (additional 2:00pm performance on Saturday 27th), Pilch Theatre on Jowlett Walk through Saturday 27th October.

The Blues looked to kickstart their faltering start to the campaign by
taking on newly-promoted Cardiff in a top-tier BUSA South Premier clash.
Oxford started brightly from the first touch of the ball, pressuring the
Cardiff back four via the new diamond midfield formation being trialled by
coach John Shaw in a bid to freshen up the tried and tested women's system.
The tactical shift bore almost immediate fruit, with a switch around the
back through the pivotal Jo Sumpter resulting in a right flank advance. The
sprightly Jess Barnes, well served all day by the midfield, tore away from
her marker with a characteristic change of pace and fed Beth Wild who
rattled home an unerring across goal shot to open the scoring. Buoyant
Oxford were still tested by the immensely talented Cardiff spine but quickly
learned to frustrate their talismanic players and dominate proceedings.

Despite conceding a succession of short corners, Cardiff couldn't find a
riposte, largely due to the imperious form of Jess Hughes and the composed
defensive duo of fresher Jo McNaught-Davis and captain Vicky Anderson.
Hughes brought out a spectacular double-save midway through the second half
after another threatening Cardiff break and the near-miss spurred the Blues
into action, as the ball was brought out of defence again a rapid break was
spearheaded by Alice Cook, seemingly reborn in her behind-the-front-two
role. The forward phalanx won a timely short corner but the initial shot
was saved, only for the ball to fall to Sumpter in the second phase who,
with time on her side, made no mistake from the top of the D. Oxford
continued to create chances and a fast end-to-end game was enjoyed by the
modest watching throng but they couldn't pull away into a further lead
despite many clear cut chances, and the game ended 2-0