by Rosie Pope

Les Biggs – Trace  

Pitt Rivers Museum, 20th October 2007-29th June 2008

High-street homogeneity and disposable culture are intrinsically hateable, yet, as any Primark-goer will testify, they are also a persistent part of student life. For those who appreciate craft, who believe in looking after things, the Pitt Rivers Museum is the ultimate eye-feast. Even if you have frequented the legendary building tucked behind the Natural History Museum before, there is now the chance to peep at Les Biggs’ installation Trace, and extend that inter-essay musing.

The artist has reacted to the museum’s extensive collection, much of which is not on show to the public, but is kept in storage, carefully labelled and boxed. It is this neat and meticulous system of ordering behind the scenes that was the main inspiration for Trace.

A homage to orderliness, the artwork is comprised of over a hundred ceramic boxes with delicate quotes and fictitious artefacts fired-on underneath their glaze. The little doodleish watercolour images could be taken for actual objects considering the sheer quirky range of things housed in the museum. However,  they are merely products of the artist’s imagination. The quotes beside them are seemingly whimsical but are factual, dictionary definitions of words, quotes and references to cultural eccentricity. The porcelain boxes’ interiors are open to imagination. Their labels are suggestive and at times comic. The installation is almost magnetic as it is presented in a museum-like cabinet, encouraging passers-by to peer in.

Yet passers-by are all who look. Modesty is the name of the game here. Tucked away in a remote corner of the museum and barely advertised (the security guard didn’t know where it was!), the piece tries to, and succeeds in, simultaneously blending into and standing out from the museum’s dense displays. The installation is even more entwined with the collection than meets the eye, as 96 of the boxes are dotted around the rest of the cabinets, sitting next to masks, knives, shrunken heads and voodoo dolls.

Trace is an antidote for those tired of clinical white-box artwork and of factory produce. The close relationship with the thousands of beautiful, curious, unique objects housed within the glass cabinets and labeled boxes is palpable. Biggs has succeeded in creating a self-effacing display which instead turns the viewer back to the curious around him.

An Elizabethan tapestry map previously thought to be lost forever is to go on display at the Bodleian Library in January. The 16^th century map is part of a set of four huge pieces woven from wool and silk, which would once have covered some 80 sq ft of wall space. The Bodleian already has two of the four maps and a third is in the Warwickshire Museum. This newly-discovered part of the jigsaw depicts Worcestershire, Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire and Warwickshire. In the years when it was missing it is believed to have been used as a fireguard in a private house. It was discovered last year and bought by the Bodleian for £100,000 with the help of the Art Fund, charities and private donors. The combined maps offer a unique representation of the countryside at the time of Shakespeare, when modern mapmaking was in its infancy.

Oxford pubs are under threat, with as many as one pub closing every eight weeks as a result of the smoking a ban.Since September, both the White House pub in Botley Road and the Marlborough House, at the corner of Western Road, have both closed and with the winter months setting in, it is predicted that the problem will worsen, with smokers reluctant to stand outside to smoke.Tony Goulding, chairman of the Oxford branch of the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) said: "Pubs are closing at an alarming rate and the situation is getting critical. In the old days, people went to the pub and the cinema – those were their main distractions – but people lead such busy lives nowadays and it's hard to get them to come out to community pubs."In Oxford, estimates suggest that trade in pubs has dropped by around 25%. According to the Oxford Mail, there are currently 28 pubs for sale in Oxfordshire, including four within Oxford. John Madden, of the Guild of Master Victuallers, said the problem is worse when considered on a national scale, with as many as two to three pubs closing daily.

I have spent hours telling potential applicants that Oxford is not that odd. Reassuring them that although we do have to work harder than at other universities, student life here is not that different to anywhere else.  Forget ‘Brideshead Revisited’: we are a perfectly normal set of people.  

But, let’s be honest, there are quite a few things that you get at Oxford which you just won’t find anywhere else. And although the thought of such things unnerved me a bit before coming up, I have to admit that now I’m here, I quite like some of the quirky traditions we have.  Public School-like it may be, but ‘sconcing’ is one of them. 

Sconcing, as it is understood by the students who practice it today, does not follow exactly the same procedures as it used to.  It can be traced back to at least as early as 1617 when the word ‘sconce’ meant a fine or penalty.  A person would be ‘sconced’ at a formal dinner if they broke table etiquette – for example by talking about women, religion, politics or work; by referring to the portraits hung in the hall; or by pronouncing the Latin grace wrong.  All very serious stuff.  The tradition then evolved from being a monetary fine to the penalty of having to drink a tankard of ale which the sconced student could share with his fellows, thus making amends to those who suffered his breach of etiquette. Only the master or senior scholar at the table was able to impose a ‘sconce’: if other people at the table felt that a sconce was necessary, they had to make their request to their senior in Latin or Ancient Greek.

Nowadays sconcing is practiced in different ways by different colleges, and the variations are quite revealing.  The standard format goes something like this: At a formal dinner someone will stand up and say “I sconce anyone who… (insert amusing/offensive/salacious comment here)”. A particular favourite of mine was the person sconced for falling over while thinking about prime numbers.  The people or person who fits that description then has to stand up, and has to down his or her drink 

In most colleges sconcing is mainly practiced by rowers, which perhaps tells you about the love of tradition in boat clubs.  However, subject societies and other sports societies do it too. In Hertford the Tanner Society (for physicists) and the Music Society are known to be keen sconcers, although I’m told by a Hertford physicist that sconcing only happens after dinner, not during it, because the two don’t go well concurrently.  Civilised sconcers indeed. The fact that we’re still eating dinner has never stopped anyone I know.  

In Balliol ‘revenge sconcing’ is frowned upon – for example sconcing people who row on bow side cannot be countered with a sconce against those who row on stroke side.  Balliolites demand ingenuity in their sconces.  An ‘incorrect sconce’, i.e. a sconce description which doesn’t fit anyone present, is met with the cry of SHOE! This then results in the abashed would-be-sconcer having to remove their footwear, pour their drink into it, and down it from there.  Pretty gross.  This doesn’t happen in all colleges that sconce though.  A St Hughs student told me that they’d seen it on a crew date but had wisely avoided adopting it.  Not so in Oriel.  Apparently it has to be the president of the boat club’s shoe which is used and because of its popularity he has particular shoes for the purpose, so that the others don’t get ruined.  Presumably this is a remnant of the old tradition when only the master or senior scholar could impose a sconce.  Clearly Oriel is more traditional than most. 

At St John’s sconcing seems to be less popular now, but until recently it was traditional for rowers to ask for permission from the president of the boat club to sconce people, and to do this in Latin.  They have giant solid silver flagons which are worth about £16,000 each that they put out at some formal dinners. It is suspected that these might be old “sconce pots” which are mentioned in early accounts of sconcing. 

  Sconcing isn’t something done in all colleges though and its not done anywhere in Cambridge.  Wadhamites for example, are clearly too cool for any of this sconcing lark. As one Wadham third year put it “it sounds like a slightly uprated, posher, boatier version of ‘I have never’”. He perhaps has a point.  Sconcing is daft, posh and ultimately very Oxford.  It can get offensive if done by certain people, but I think generally it is quite good fun and pretty harmless. 

by Jack Farchy

Why would anyone want to be in a 24-hour play? Land a part in a play that is conceived, scripted and rehearsed all in the space of 24 hours and you’re likely to find yourself rushed on stage, lines half-learnt, to fudge your way through a play that feels like it was written at four in the morning, because it was. And then the lights go out.

There were plenty of painful moments in the five short plays on show: in one, the actors delivered their bedroom conversation with such intimacy that no one else in the theatre could hear it; in another, an actor was spotted surreptitiously reading his lines off his hand. But there were, in the course of the evening, little moments of quality that glimmered fleetingly, and made the whole exercise worthwhile.

Much of the acting was below par – it is a shame that few of Oxford’s starlets could be coaxed out of their more glamorous spotlights. But there were some striking performances: Iante Roache gave an unusual and powerful monologue as a girl waiting in an airport, reflecting on the child she aborted. Her strong Italian accent, her deadpan delivery, and her unflinching eye contact with the audience gave her performance a mesmeric quality. Kabir Soorya showed an uncanny natural ability for playing a schizophrenic, lonely man who lives on take-away pizzas. My favourite moment of the whole evening came when he choked on the piece of pizza he was eating, while delivering the line, ‘I love eating pizza’ – followed by a characteristically twitchy, coy smile to the audience.

Perhaps the most fully realised play on offer was Tom Crawshaw’s Most Suspect. A classic farce, it employed some well-crafted exaggerated physical comedy, featuring a foolish detective, a drunken vicar, a cross-dressing wing commander, a fainting hostess, and – my favourite – a saucy west country cook, played by Melissa Julian Jones.

The most interesting writing came from Tom Campion and Cathy Thomas. Their two characters engaged in a fast-paced free-association dialogue in which sometimes lovely descriptions of imagined worlds and situations were bounced between them. Unfortunately, though, the play went on too long, and much of its sharpness and mystery was lost.

  Why would anyone go to see a 24-hour play? You shuffle into a half-empty theatre to watch a series of plays that begin falteringly, struggle about the stage for a quarter hour, and then end abruptly and often inexplicably. But there were enough moments of freshness and quality in this show to make me hope the event will become a regular fixture.

by Paul Hallows

Pagan Wanderer Lu – Perfection R.I.P.

****

Firstly, I feel as though I should apologise to Andy Regan, A.K.A. Cardiff’s very own Pagan Wanderer Lu. I have certainly given records more auspicious first plays than as accidental soundtracks to my sleepy washing up. Unbeknownst to me, his new E.P. ‘Perfection R.I.P.’ filtered through to my bathroom, leading me to think that iTunes had rather pleasingly found me a new Belle & Sebastian album. Wait, how long has Stuart Murdoch been sticking glitchy bits in his songs for? And did I just hear the line “spray the foam on the boy’s pectoral”? Upon closer inspection, what turned out to be Pagan Wanderer Lu’s latest effort combines the three features that underpin those questions beautifully. Melodies that scream pop while staying on the right side of cloying are offset by some extremely dark, witty lyrics delivered in an endearing Bolton accent. The opener ‘The Gentleman’s Game’ is possibly the best representation of this, with shimmering electronics underpinning wonky bass and Casio beats with plaintive reflections on how “we are loath to live vicariously, through the sporting achievements of our country”. The quality doesn’t let up from hereon in, and I defy anyone not to start happily singing along to “Perfection of a Simple Life” before suddenly stopping with the slow, cold realisation that you’ve been merrily mouthing lines like “and if they find those bodies buried under your immaculate lawn…”. As a whole, it’s an E.P. that’s a world away from its self-deprecating title. Indeed, as new single and highlight ‘Tree of Knowledge suggests”, if you don’t like it, you can “fuck his apples”. Charming.

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New research from Oxford’s epidemiology unit has confirmed that birth-control pills increase the risk of cervical cancer.

The study, published in the Lancet, involved over 50,000 subjects and research from 24 countries. Lead researcher Dr. Jane Green stressed that the increase in risk was “small and outweighed by reduced risks for ovarian and womb cancer.”

The study also found that risk levels returned to normal in subjects who had not used the drug for ten years or more.

by James Stafford

Oxford is the second best university in the world, according to this year’s THES rankings.

The table, ased on a survey of academics and graduate employers, awarded equal positions to Oxford, Cambridge and Yale, with Harvard topping the poll by a small margin. In spite of a vast funding gap with the US, British universities occupied four of the top ten positions.

The Vice-Chancellor, Dr. John Hood, paid tribute to the “dedication and commitment” of students and staff in maintaining Oxford’s global standing.

by James Stafford