A Liberal Democrat leadership contender found his days at Oxford coming back to haunt him this weekend as an article he wrote advocating the use of hard drugs surfaced in a national newspaper.Chris Huhne, who is one of the favourites to take over from Sir Menzies Campbell, waxed lyrical about Opium, Heriod and LSD in a February 1973 issue of Isis magazine, which he wrote while an undergraduate at Magdalen College. The article, which was published under the heading 'Oxford escapism,' presents a beginners guide to a plethora of drugs. Of LSD he says, “Acid is manufactured in the labs and is the only drug which is getting cheaper . . . The considerable number of students at this university who drop acid are well-balanced highly intelligent people . . . if one is able to live with oneself . . . then acid holds no surprises.”But at the weekend the MP for Eastleigh claimed he couldn't remember writing the article, and said, “the views that were [expressed in the article] are certainly not my views as they are at the moment."

It should be noted at this stage that I’m in no position to review this album objectively. I fell in love with Jimmy Eat World the summer I was 15, and have probably played at least one of their albums at least once a week ever since. Fortunately, any idiot knows that music reviews cannot and should not ever be objective – how can you give a detached opinion on something that by its very nature should aim straight for the heart?

Having got that out of the way; Jimmy Eat World are a band frequently misunderstood, who have charted a deceptively varied musical path in their 14-year career. I would quite happily rate each of their last three albums – 1999’s stunning, heartbreaking Clarity, their adrenaline-charged 2001 breakthrough Bleed American, and 2004’s darker but similarly beautiful Futures – ten out of ten. It seemed that when I first listened to all of them, they managed to exactly match my mood and life situation at the time.

Chase This Light is not a ten out of ten album. It’s flawed. Butch Vig’s production is ludicrously over-the-top at times. The lyrics are perfectly serviceable but lacking in the emotional depth-charges they used to deliver (see 23 and The World You Love on Futures, If You Don’t Don’t on Bleed American, or basically anything on Clarity). The album fails to deliver on the signpost marked by the murky, emotionally wrought standout tracks on 2005’s Stay On My Side Tonight EP, and isn’t anywhere near as cohesive as their previous works (especially Clarity – you can probably tell by know that I consider that album to be a landmark work not only in the emo genre, but for music in general).

However, all of those criticisms are based on the fact that Chase This Light isn’t really the record I was expecting, or perhaps hoping for. Taken on its own merits, Chase This Light reveals itself to be, unexpectedly, a pretty awesome album of straightforward pop-rock. Jimmy Eat World have been slowly bleeding away the emo-tag from their genre classification over the course of their career, and Chase This Light is the moment where you realise they aren’t an emo band any more in any possible sense of the word.

The album sprints out of the blocks with first single Big Casino, which sounds absolutely huge (one of the occasions where Vig’s production definitely works). “I’m the one who gets away, I’m a New Jersey success story,” yells Jim Adkins in one of their finest choruses to date. Chase This Light is chock-full of up-tempo rockers, none quite as brilliant as Big Casino but all of them bright, uplifting and endearing.

Let It Happen and Always Be fly by in a flurry of big, OC-friendly choruses (and I don’t mean that as a slur). The energetic Electable is absurdly catchy, enough so that you don’t mind the vagueness of its political slant. Feeling Lucky is essentially a less-good rewrite of Bleed American’s Authority Song, but something about its guileless enthusiasm makes it hard to resist. Most successfully of all, Here It Goes experiments with synths and danceable beats, resulting in a delirious piece of pure pop that beats Hellogoodbye et al at their own game.

The slower moments provide more mixed results but occasionally great rewards. Gotta Be Somebody’s Blues feels out of place here but is still a welcome throwback to the prevailing mood of Futures, all shuffling unease and queasy strings. Carry You and the title track aren’t exactly weak songs, but they tend to collapse slightly under the weight of their own sappiness. Closing track Dizzy, on the other hand, is quite wonderful, a spiralling emotional climax that sparkles and burns like the most perfect October sunset.

All in all then, there’s a hell of a lot to be enjoyed here, so long as you don’t want it to be something it’s not. Maybe they won’t ever match Clarity, but there’s always room for great pop bands and that’s what Jimmy Eat World are at the moment.

**** (4 stars)

by Griselda Murray Brown
 

‘The Journey so Far’ brings together various media and diverse places. Adeniyi’s mainly large scale, colour photographs counterpoise Konstanty’s intimate line drawings. Almost subliminally, they bring each other into relief.

Entering the exhibition space, I was struck by one of Adeniyi’s largest images, ‘mk Adamu’. It is a portrait of an old Nigerian destitute wearing a large straw hat, who, I am told, lives rough on the streets of Lagos, begging for food. Adamu’s face and hat are dead centre, and fill the frame: he looks out, yet resists engagement. The textures of his face are startlingly clear, his skin lined and wrinkled, his chin pierced with stubble of black, grey and white. There is an implicit dignity in his face. Quietly and without pomp, Adamu transcends his social place; his large straw hat becomes symbolic, evoking the haloes of golden light which crown religious figures in European Renaissance painting. The photograph won the ‘Outstanding Achievement in Photography Award’ (2007), from the International Society of Photographers.

Adeniyi was a war photographer for the British Army in Northern Ireland. Next to ‘Adamu’ is a smaller, asymmetrical, black and white portrait of a soldier in London-Derry. His look is intense, his eyes narrowed, but not hostile. The image resists specificity – the soldier’s face is streaked with camouflage paint, the wedge of background is blurry, and all is cast in timeless black and white – he is the ‘universal soldier’, so to speak.

Beside this is ‘Survival’, a colour photograph of a layer of rubbish strewn over grass in Isara-Remo, a town in Nigeria. On first glace, the objects look like strips of cardboard, bits of wood, but they are, in fact, mainly flip-flops. In the absence of a central focus, the eye jumps to the occasional coloured flip-flop, which punctuates the greens and browns. Adeniyi comments: "Isara is a society that just wants to survive for now. Everything in the image could be recycled, but lack of knowledge and the standard of living makes recycling difficult". I felt an uneasy sense of guilt, as though the mass of flip-flops were the remnants, the hangover, of the generic beach holiday.

Round the corner is Konstanty’s work. There is something deeply, indescribably satisfying about his line drawings. They are intricate, delicate, but solid; his lines are perfectly placed. His work has a cartoon quality: facial and bodily features are exaggerated, goblin-like, or grotesquely distorted. In one drawing, a figure squats on the tip of an inescapably phallic creature, as if about to launch into the air. Jack-in-the-box meets sex toy, perhaps. A disturbing sexual theme runs though the illustrations – disturbing, because violent and distorted. Genders are fused, confused, anatomically. What looks like an umbilical cord grows out of the penis of a man into an indefinable beast.

In Konstanty’s work, precision of style jars against shocking, sexual content; a thrilling tension results. As if to enact this artistically, other media is played off the delicate pen. Garish yellow highlighter winds out of the mouth of a half-monster, half-human creature, like some noxious vapour. Flower genitalia are stuck over the mouths of an alien couple having (human) sex; these mouths seem to cry out in a vocal expression of sexual sensation. Georgia O’Keefe’s erotically suggestive flower paintings spring to mind. Konstanty’s work describes the mind in over-drive: its nightmare hallucinations; visions of lurking shadows of the self; sexual ecstasy and torment.

‘The Journey so Far’ is quietly powerful. The work touched an innate, buried sense of western guilt, and of sexual shame and revulsion, within me.

Hertford College issued a warning to its students about fire safety earlier in the week after a student's pyjamas caught fire.The incident occurred when a student left their curtains open during the day. Light reflected off a mirror onto a nearby chair, burning the pyjamas that were lying there.The JCR bulletin reported: "This fire was caused by accident rather than by negligence or design but please be careful."

Our second week pubcast reviews the past week in Oxford drama, featuring an interview with Elizabeth Gray, writer and star of Wish I Had a Sylvia Plath.
Part One: Guardians
Part Two: Greek
Part Three: Wish I Had A Sylvia Plath
Party Four: Interview with Elizabeth Gray
Check back weekly for new episodes!

Jane Burden, wife of William Morris, was honoured with a blue plaque yesterday at St Helen's Passage, off Holywell Street.Burden, who was allegedly born on this road, played muse to many, including Dante Gabriel Rosetti, during her life. She was a mother, a muse, a model and a maker of tapestries.The blue plaque, which is attached to Hertford College, was unveiled on the anniversary of her 168th birthday.

Sarah Fordham unweaves the rainbow of our emotions, and argues that science cannot tell us what it means to be human   What is it that most sets humans apart from all the other organic life forms on the planet? Convinced of our superiority, this is a question we like to ask over and over again. We're physically inferior in almost every single way. Problem-solving? Talk to the Caledonian crows and their tool-making. Self-awareness? Perhaps – but the line is fuzzy. Cats and dogs, for example, react to mirrors in ways that suggest they're self-aware, and chimpanzees have the same concept of mind as a 3 year old child. Emotions? Now you’re talking.   It's the vast spectrum of our emotions that we like to ponder repeatedly in art, literature, and music. Yet science seems to be destroying this particular notion of our existence, by constantly trying to quantify such sublime experiences as jealousy, love, and even happiness.If we deconstruct the physiological and psychological aspects of jealousy, maybe we can acknowledge that technically it is just an adaptive response to aid the survival of the individual within a social group. But anyone who has ever felt full blown, pea-green envy – and I'm guessing that would be most of us – this explanation seems like an oversimplification of the worst kind. In reality, there's something almost transcendental about plotting the tragic accidents that that may befall those hated individuals with more looks, brains and charisma than oneself. There's no data-set that I know of to explain that warm glow that swells up from the pit of your stomach as they play through your mind.The same form of dissection is being applied to happiness. If we actually sit back and ask ourselves: 'what is happiness', we find that even after centuries of laborious analysis, some of the brightest minds in the world still don't know. For us mere mortals, the most accurate answer may as infinitely complex and wonderfully simple as ‘ice-cream’.Why then, have certain parties recently deemed it necessary to propose to several leading diagnostic manuals that happiness should be reclassified as a psychiatric disorder![1] The symptoms of said disorder include a statistically abnormal functioning of the nervous system, with discrete symptoms including cognitive anomalies. Thankfully – as far as the writer is concerned – this proposal was rejected. Because, to be honest, is there  anything more belittling than the idea that most profound joy you ever experienced was nothing more a chemical imbalance? It's like taking all of our ideals and dipping them in pure ethanol.And I shan't begin to bore you with what the experts have to say on love, save that the so-called ‘greatest thing you’ll ever learn’ is no more than a trick of evolution to make us procreate. Well that puts Shakespeare and Donne in their places.Or does it? We may accuse the scientific perspective of being cold and sterile, but perhaps that is slightly too harsh. Some would say that there is a profound beauty in the knowledge that the rush you get at the sight of that special someone really is electricity – coursing through your Sympathetic nervous system at 7 mph – not just a poet's meagre metaphor.Dawkins' book ‘Unweaving the Rainbow’ examines this very conflict between rational and philosophical perceptions of life. The title of the book itself refers to John Keats' despair that Isaac Newton destroyed the beauty of the rainbow by explaining the origin of its colours: the refraction of light. To some it may seem, and to Keats it most certainly did, that this Newton's theories robbed the rainbow of all its mystery, and in the process crushed the infinite potential for human imagination to come up with its own hypotheses. On the other hand, for those in our midst who are so inclined, the true explanation is nothing short of the very embodiment of elegance and grace. Richard Feynman, the physicist, had an argument with an artist friend. The friend claimed that he could find a flower infinitely more beautiful than Feynman could, because Feynman lacked an artistic mind. Feynman found this absurd. He argued that everyone can see the inherent beauty in things: seeing things from a scientific perspective can only add to beauty, not take away: if the petals make him wonder about their mathematical complexity, or the colours make him think about mechanisms of pollination, it can only add to the flower. So it can be argued that the more we know about how and why we feel the way we do, the more we add to our experience of being human, not detract.And yet, something in me revolts. So here’s my point: I can't deny that there's something to be said for asking why people go through such a kaleidoscope of sentiments everyday. But even so I think we can be justified in ignoring the science, just this once, and continue to embrace the idea – however fanciful – that there is some greater power or purpose to existence; that life isn’t just survival and reproduction. Is that asking too much?

What do you think? Has science's insights into the human psyche made our emotions nothing but so many chemical reactions, or has it led us on a new and more exciting journey of self-discovery?

——————————————————————————–[1] http://jme.bmj.com/cgi/content/abstract/18/2/94?eaf
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For this year, the role of Captain within Oxford University Netball Club has been subtly redefined. As the Club Captain (Katelin) and the Blues’ Captain (Alice) we are working together closely to allow the best possible start to the new season. However, having lost over half the squad from last year – including some very key players – this was always going to be tough.
Following trials at the end of 0th week, our replenished squad are now training together twice a week with two additional fitness sessions. We incorporate speed and agility work into all our training and aim to continually improve ball handling skills, reactions and coordination.
Our BUSA matches are every Wednesday afternoon and both teams have a very exciting season ahead. The Blues are keen to maintain the momentum gathered after an exceptionally successful season last year and Roos (2nd team) will be facing some strong opposition having now been promoted for two consecutive years.
The arrival next week of our South African coach, Sandra, whose enthusiasm and commitment to netball is incredibly infectious, will undoubtedly strengthen and consolidate the whole squad.
Our freshers may not quite know what has hit them as she introduces the new – and somewhat unusual – specialised training programme she has promised to her ‘Oxford Stars’.

By Monique Davis***In a word, Polish film Extras is decent. However, I have just been told by my editor that I am expected to write more than one word. Director Micha? Kwiecinski presents a beautifully shot film in which a group of Chinese filmmakers shoot a tragic film in Poland, under the impression that the Poles are the most miserable people. The title of the Chinese film, Sad Wind in the Reeds, is evocative, but the focus of Extras is the eponymous ‘background artists’ (ah, political correctness). The film is basically a tale of love rediscovered as the father of the Polish-Chinese translator’s child returns unexpectedly, hoping to find things as he left them when he abandoned her to go and see the world. However things, of course, are not that simple as Bozena (Kinga Preis) has married a rich dentist whom she does not love. The film-within-a-film really just serves as a trite plot device, mirroring the action of the frame story and allowing liberal usage of dramatic irony as the extras frequently comment on the main story to the chagrin of Bozena, who tries to stick to the party line of wifely duty despite her love for Romek (Bartosz Opania) the charming rapscallion. Other subplots involve a coming-together of two loveable losers and some older characters coming to terms with being cuckolded. While the film does fulfil its brief of dispelling the myth that the Polish are all miserable, the casual racism has the propensity to make the viewer feel very uncomfortable. Aside from being referred to as ‘Chinkies’, at one point Gralewski (Krzysztof Kiersznowski) pulls up the corners of his eyes and refers to them as ‘yellow’ with ‘slits’, things I have not seen or heard since the playground was my haunt of choice. Later, when the object of his affection, Narozna (Anna Romantowska), comments on his wife running of with a chorister, bites back with ‘at least he was white’, in reference to her dead husbands ‘jungle fever’. These unnecessary throwaway comments really detracted from what was otherwise a charming film.To sum up, Extras is a fantastically atmospheric film. Every shot is delicately composed and the music really adds to the slight sense of unreality. In spite of the overuse of some dramatic conventions, the slightly annoying stock characters, and the Americanised subtitles, the film really has an undeniable charm. However, it is the jarring racism that hits the film hardest in the star rating.