Schizophrenic weather changes, grass stains, undercooked beefburgers, and a mixed-bag of bands: last weekend, Wadham College managed to recreate the authentic summer festival feeling with Wadstock, the daddy of student band events. The diversity of the styles represented frequently left the inebriated audience befuddled by the sudden transition from accessible folk music to angsty cathartic metal. Openers, the Wadham Swing Band eased the early arrivals into the proceedings with an innocuous and chilled-out set, which didn’t quite prepare us for the distorted aural assault of Advert From TV. Initially insipid and lacklustre, the band warmed up to belt out a medley of The Hives-influenced rock sounds. Follow-up act Saturday Night Suicide peddled that generic indie-schmindie punk with which we’re all a bit too familiar. However, they managed to raise themselves above the banal with the occasional flamenco guitar moment, and a dash of Smashing Pumpkins-esque melodic rock.
The Alternotives, a cappella group fronted by two sweetvoiced darlings, got the audience going with well-known tracks like ‘Kiss The Rain’ and ‘Like A Prayer’. The group clearly have talent in spades, but the grubby faux-festival atmosphere did them no favours, the backing singers frequently slipping out of step with the lead vocalists. At Risk were a cut above the average rawk band, fluctuating between heavy distortion and melancholic introspection, with innovative electric violin moments thrown in for good measure. Even those who weren’t enamoured by the prospect of ‘rocking out’ in the rain could nonetheless appreciate the eye candy of a Brian Molko-alike guitarist, just one of the obscenely attractive band members. More visual treats were in store, the compère informed us drunkenly, in the shape of Rich Reason, vocalist, guitarist and purveyor of all manner of random instruments, in Vaughan. The compère needn’t have talked them up, for Vaughan were undoubtedly the most technically competent and refreshing act of the day, marrying eclectic jazz, funk, rock and folk sounds in a sonic onslaught that was consistently surprising and upbeat. The audience was also treated to trumpet-playing, a violin solo and swift hand manipulations on the decks, gaining a genuinely enthusiastic response.
So as the sun set over Wadham, now littered with plastic cups, and drunken students, the college could breathe a sigh of relief. Not merely the satisfaction of having pulled off a monster band event, but also the relief of having a whole year to recover before Wadstock 2004. Every student worth his Belle and Sebastian cds and designer denim will be waiting with bated breath.
ARCHIVE: 4th week TT 2003

I want to bottle-fuck you slowly with my sunglasses on. Well, there’s something to try out next time you’re in Filth. Yum. These are words spoken by Eric Packer, the central figure in Don DeLillo’s new novel, Cosmopolis (Picador, £16.99), to one of his many women. The moral throughout the book is the corrupting power of capital: DeLillo creates a Capitalist nightmare/ dream in which he places a man utterly devoid of human sensation. His only forays into feeling consist of bestial urges, eating and screwing. And abusing drink receptacles too, apparently. Ultimately, the super-rich, superbright twenty-something dot com entrepreneur discovers that his only hope of escape from a dampened existence is in his own destruction at the hands of a rambling former-employee. DeLillo has been internationally lauded and won many awards for critically acclaimed best-sellers like Americana and more lately, Underworld. I haven’t read either. If I were to judge this author by this book, I wouldn’t bother. It’s never nice admitting publicly that you aren’t impressed by a book, especially one that seems to promise so much. Reading it, you can’t help but feel that it’s a bit of a cop-out – the half-fulfilment of an idea that could be fascinating, were it not something we are already aware of and familiar with. His prose is blunt with its own poetic concision, but is never quite as punchy as he might have hoped. There are brilliantly executed moments in the novel. For example, some of the most interesting passages in the book are those that depict Packer’s thoughts as he lies awake before starting his day. The theme of order against disorder, patterns in chaotic economy, is also effective and cleverly wrought, as is Packer’s unsettling indifference to almost everything around him. Overall, though, it’s somewhat disappointing. It’s not that this book lacks style or interest – DeLillo’s images of a bleak, looming city are effective, as is the fragmented, passionless progress of Packer’s day, giving form to the notion of the loss of human sentiment. Once you grasp the direction in which the novel’s headed, though, nothing spectacular happens; maybe DeLillo intended this, but it doesn’t bring anything to the narrative itself.The flaw of this book is that it reveals nothing particularly new. We have now all heard of Anti- Capitalist movements, and their arguments; we have all witnessed immense political and corporate ambition. Cosmopolis, then, presents a strong dystopian vision, and one that is, in itself, not impossible to foresee. Read it, by all means, and enjoy its many strengths but don’t hope for much more than a depiction of how a modern yuppy realises the vapidity of his existence.
ARCHIVE: 4th week TT 2003

Help me. I’m standing in front of five hundred or so people, on stage with a guy who looks like Errol Brown. I was called up here with another Caucasian, two Hispanics, two Japanese people (one of whom is bonkers), two black people, and another Caucasian, this one an uninvited teacher from Baltimore. I’ve somehow been roped into an ethnically-based dancing competition, where I will defend my race’s dancing ability in front of, seemingly, the whole of Harlem. Since my dancing is usually described as grotesque’, I’m not feeling that confident. Welcome to the World Famous Apollo Theater (I realised a few days later that I had heard of it, in the song ‘Walk on the Wild Side’), whose Wednesday Amateur Nights, like this one, have helped to launch the careers of some of America’s most prestigious black performers: Ella Fitzgerald, James Brown and Michael Jackson, being a few. The set-up is aggressive and confrontational: for each member of the audience, absolute commitment to each act is necessary as basically every performer is subject to a constant wave of either cheers or jeers, sometimes changing if they miss a note. They do this often, because they can’t hear over the cheers. It strikes me that if the audience shut up, they’ll get a better show. The dancing competition is the first twenty minutes of this drawnout and reasonably embarrassing show. People of different races are invited from the audience onto the stage to dance for thirty seconds; one imagines that this is intended to disprove racist stereotypes about dancing ability, however, in my case, it merely served to firm up the assumption that white people can’t dance. Remarkably, from the very start of a show which is ostensibly whole-heartedly multi-cultural, celebrating the very foundations of the rainbow nation of America, I start to feel marginalised. Of course, I suppress this awkward inclination. I am aware that the history of representing black voices in theatre is a chequered and nasty one: the tradition of minstrelsy which dominated the American popular theatre for about seventy years was about entrenching stereotypes of black Americans: the wise old Uncle Remus, the strong, matriarchal Mammy, the loveable buffoon. The most distressing part of this construction of black identity is the way it has pervaded black culture itself, as a still-racist Hollywood has an unpleasant ‘black themed’ Oscar ceremony, compéred by matriarchal neo-Mammy Whoopi Goldberg and celebrating derivatives of whitedefined stereotypes in “Monster’s Ball”, or the cultural predominance of images like The Fresh Prince of Bel- Air, a show run-through with colonial imagery. One cannot accuse the Apollo’s Amateur Night of the same tendency. Granted, the compere has a few crap ‘black people are different to white people’ jokes, but there are no post-minstrel images. Daisy Donovan turns up, in a surreal twist, and is booed off-stage almost immediately: partly because she was rubbish, partly, I suspect, because her choice to sing ‘Simply the Best’ was met with suspicions of racism. There are two questions which this theatre asks: first, is this aggressive or antiwhite? And secondly, what, if anything, can white theatre learn from such a vibrant event? This piece of theatre, like other plays I saw in America, had less selfawareness than one might expect from a diffident Oxford student’s effort. There was nothing suspect about a singer telling an audience, mid-song, that he chose God over land, over money and over his own name, and then inviting the audience to chant “Jesus”, which they refused to do, while simultaneously celebrating the fact that this demand was being made of them. I felt implicated more as a Brit than as a white person, becoming awfully worried that maybe there was something undignified about this level of commitment to the theatrical moment. This, of course, was something which shocked me about myself: surely we should encourage this engagement. Antonin Artaud and Konstantin Stanislavsky would certainly support this, since one of the most important points of overlap between their theories is the sweatiness and guts to be involved in any theatrical production. Here is absolute commitment, absolute physical exertion in the theatre. Brecht would be excited by the importance of participation in this theatre, and Augusto Boal certainly would. Both being theorists who demand that their audiences exercise their own personal agency, be it intellectual, political or, in some of Boal’s work, physical. Amid the cheers of hundreds of people in either voracious support or disgusted condemnation of any fool who decided to give a half-baked and over-long version of ‘Unbreak My Heart’ by Toni Braxton, the first question in “why do I care what you think about this performer?” As a fellow performer, my first instinct is to cheer all the louder when someone is doing badly. Again, I was missing the point. don’t care what a busload of schoolkids from Delaware think of the god-botherer, but more importantly, I don’t really care about the godbotherer either. The audience forced into an often brutal and necessarily empowered critique of the performance and, even better, constantly forced to act on the basis of it. This, I finally concluded, was the point, and I was glad to have felt a little uncomfortable. The energy is not racial in character at all; it is the fundamental of an exciting and relevant theatre. Our ‘national’ theatres in Britain do nothing compared to the Apollo towards achieving this vitality, which restores one’s faith in the threat of live action, the violence of true theatre. The entertainment on offer is often banal, but the effect legendarily powerful; the audience leave the theatre running into Harlem, shrouded in senses of occasion, personal potency and ritual. Who could say that about Merry Wives of Windsor at the RSC?
ARCHIVE: 4th Week TT 2003

I’m on a bike, up a mountain, in Bolivia, and I’m remembering that bit in The Beach, the part where Richard talks about the futility of Travel. Travel deserves a capital ‘T’ because it’s not achieved by just going on a poncy holiday somewhere. You don’t Travel just by grabbing a backpack and this year’s edition of Lonely Planet. Travel is a state of mind, it’s about doing something different. Only it’s hard to actually succeed in being different when no matter how far away you get, someone with the same guidebook as you has got there first. So you keep trying, thinking that that elusive, profound, and above all unique experience of Travel is just past the next llama. Bolivia is a good place to visit if you want to experience “the world’s most” of pretty much anything. For example, the road starts just north of La Paz, the world’s highest capital city. Carved into sheer mountainside, it was built by prisoners taken during Bolivia’s war with Paraguay in the 1940s. To get the image of this stretch into your head, imagine a road slightly narrower than Turl Street. Imagine this ‘highway’ stretching for miles, almost always downhill at a sharp decline, with a vertical drop permanently to one side. Imagine that the road goes unpaved in many places, with numerous potholes, and every corner a hair-pin bend. Now imagine that two lanes of traffic run all times, including articulated lorries and large passenger buses, with no attempts to control the traffic save the occasional locals who wave vehicles around corners seemingly at random. Other than that, drivers avoid certain death only by beeping their horns when coming at a turn at high speed. Often two trucks end up facing each other, both perched on a corner, resulting in a battle of wills to ascertain who will compromise his manliness and reverse, very, very slowly. The sides of the road are dotted with memorials to the dead; the highest death toll yet one crash is eighty. Unsurprisingly it has taken on a kind of notoriety among Bolivians. Then, one day, some enterprising young travel agent realised that here was a golden opportunity: buy some mountain bikes, hire couple of guides, and market this jaunt as an unmissable adventure experience. This is how it came to pass that this road now daily sees collection of die-hard cyclist nuts from across the world zoom down it at break-neck speed, hugging the edges and feeling their masculinity assert itself at every turn. This is also how, bizarrely, dangerously, and almost certainly suicidally, I ended up on it as well. The irony is that you don’t actually have to hurl yourself down 4000m of badly paved highway to come home with decent stories from Bolivia. Wandering through La Paz, nearly five hundred years after colonisation, one can never be sure to what extent Spanish culture has ever taken hold. Shopkeepers burn llama foetuses in their doorways to ward off evil spirits, while many women still wear their traditional dress of long flowing skirts and bowler hats. Quechua, the language of the Inca Empire, is still widely spoken. Travel in the countryside reveals many who have no knowledge of Spanish at all. West of La Paz lies Lake Titicaca, which is where, according to the Inca legend, the sun was born. It used to be the case that any traveller on the lake who was swept overboard could not be rescued: he or she would be left as sacrifice to the gods. Luckily, we were never forced to discover whether this rule still applies. To the north of the capital lies the Bolivian section of the Amazon jungle, where tourists can take jungle safaris, living river-side for days, and seeing alligators, anaconda snakes, and curious pink fresh-water dolphins. Those seeking a unique experience can travel to the south, where a guide will drive you on a three day journey across wilderness-like terrain and into Chile. The trip takes you past volcanoes, steaming geysers, hot springs, and over the enormous Salar de Uyuni, a salt-lake of perfectly flat whiteness stretching in every direction to the horizon. For sheer terror, however, there is little to compare to that road just outside of La Paz. In the end, my bicycle juant proved every bit as scary and painful as I thought. A 60-year-old French woman overtook me half way. I rode consistently in the rear and slowly. The American drugs checkpoint was a particular highpoint: they have installed a post to search all traffic for the raw ingredients of cocaine. Nevertheless, I would recommend the Bike Ride Of Death to any would-be Traveller to the region. It may not make you into a man, it might not be as original as you hoped, and it certainly won’t make women fall at your feet (except when they collapse in boredom at your latest story about llamas), but it will be different to anything you’ve done before. Especially if you’re scared of heights.
ARCHIVE: 4th week TT 2003

The Turf is synonymous with matriculation, mods, finals and student scum. Its mistreatment by absurdly-dressed, braying idiots, commences with the ceremony that makes one member of the University, and ends with exhausted post-finals debauchery. But that’s the price you pay for letting people bring their own champagne and flour onto the premises. Do people actually visit the Turf at any other time? Does it even exist when there aren’t finals? Perhaps some consider it their local and spend many happy evenings drinking the (admittedly excellent) beer. I’d be surprised though. In spite of being genuinely old, the Turf somehow manages to have all the character of a branch of McDonalds. Taking advantage of the many tourists who still find the place, purchasing a drink requires a second mortgage. The toilets are outside, which is annoying until the stench of piss makes you thankful for the fresh air on exiting. The food is over-priced at best and the beer gardens have far too many picnic tables, making them feel like prison cafeterias. Moving past the front bar, which overcrowding will inevitably necessitate, forces you to doubt the reputation The Turf has as being great English pub. It’s awful. After the landlord saw an early draft of this article, Pat was dragged in front of his college Dean to explain himself. The landlord had protested that the Turf goes out of its way to be friendly to students. Perhaps he had a point. To determine this Pat and Texas went for few pints on a Saturday afternoon. “This place is full of students and twats”, commented Pat over an appallingly priced glass of ice with lemonade mixer. Perhaps that’s the Turf ’s problem. It’s too friendly to students, but not in the joyfully stupid manner of a Scream pub. It’s simply old, cramped, and the service is fucking terrible.

If you answered; 4 questions correctly you are a genius, 3 correctly – you are above average intelligence 2 correctly – you are normal 1 correctly – you are below average None – dumbass Ok, so you’ve realized that the above questions were rather random, completely unrelated to each other, more than a bit tongue in cheek, and completely useless in assessing how intelligent you are, but in all seriousness… how much store do you put by the plethora of IQ tests in today’s media? Indeed, what is IQ? This is a subject of much debate, and it is actually considered to be a person’s ability on a variety of tasks. It is not a measure of attainment, but rather mental dexterity, and the extent and way in which it is expressed varies culturally. The debate has raged among scientists for over a century: do we have IQ for lots of different skills, or do we have an overall factor ‘g’, which influences all our mental abilities? The first IQ test was devised by Binet and Simon, who calculated IQ as Mental Age/ Chronological Age on a variety of reasoning tests. Although it was designed specifically to test for children in need of special educational help, its context as a purely academic measure and predictor has been lost. This is the major confound of all IQ tests – they are often taken out of context, and as such their validity is severely challenged. Other tests have been devised with various scales and subtests, and many psychologists have now argued for a much wider approach to intelligence. Vernon, a psychologist in the 60’s, included not only verbal and educational abilities, but also practical and mechanical skills. This approach has formed the basis of many of today’s more serious IQ tests, such as the Weschler test which consists of two main areas of questioning – verbal and spatial. So, is IQ a useful concept? There is no doubt that IQ measurements provide a useful platform for assessing the impact of social factors – there are clear differences between people of different economic status and race, and they have also highlighted sex differences – women perform significantly better on fine manual tasks and verbal tests than men. Recent research into these differences has suggested that the size of a region of interconnecting tissue between the two sides of the brain known as the corpus callosum might be biologically responsible for a percentage of this variation. Perhaps the most well known test at the moment is the BBC Test the Nation Intelligence Test. In an afternoon of work avoidance, some friends and I each took the test, (and breathed a sigh of relief that this 20 minute test deemed us above the national average). But is this test good one? Should we have really put any store by its results, or had we been sucked into the media hype, entrusting our delicate self-esteem to a rather arbitrary 20 minute test? Provided that the factors which are seen as central to each definition and test are established before conclusions are drawn, there is little wrong with IQ tests, and they certainly provide a good alternative to essay writing and proper work. As the a study by the psychologist, Murtaugh, found however, other factors such as context and motivation also influence performance. This study found that female shoppers in California showed excellent skill at buying the cheapest product (by unit), but performed badly on written maths IQ tests. Were the IQ tests wrong? Critics argue that these shoppers use shortcuts rather than complex maths abilities, but this demonstration of mental flexibility towards the task in hand could even be isolated as intelligence itself, and is indeed central to Sternberg’s theory, which emphasizes the context and novelty of any situation. To give credit to the BBC test, their website does point out that IQ is the source of much debate, and that depending on the definition, skills such as body awareness (think of a good dancer and you’ll realize the importance of this trait) and musical ability are also seen as intellectual traits – the importance of such skills is subject to social norms, and is reflected in the questions which comprise the IQ tests. It is perhaps of little surprise that Vernon’s less focused approach to intelligence was developed during the swinging 60s, a time synonymous with breaking social conventions and challenging well established social boundaries. On a more sombre note, IQ tests have been used as the basis for state sterilisation (eugenic programmes) in the US, and were introduced into Britain in the House of Commons in 1989. It was also introduced as an immigration restriction in 1924 in the US with the aim of removing the weakest members of the breeding gene pool to improve the quality of the next generation. Apart from clearly breaching ethical and human rights, such methods of selection rely entirely on the blinkered focus of psychometric IQ tests – in a society of racial and sexual equality, how can this still legally exist? In essence, the national obsession with not only IQ tests, but the wide variety of personality tests supplied by the media, is because they satisfy our self-obsessive nature, as well as our predisposition to categorise the people and world around us – and the BBC producers and magazine editors have been quick to recognize this selling tactic and its guaranteed audience.
ARCHIVE: 4th week TT 2003

In 1953, a year after deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) was identified as the molecule that carries the biochemical information responsible for the physiology, anatomy and development of a living organism, the scientists James Watson and Francis Crick discovered its now famous doublehelix structure. In 1962, along with Maurice Wilkins they were awarded a Nobel Prize for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids. Decades later, Watson assisted in the creation of the Human Genome Project, a recently completed thirteen year research effort to sequence thedouble- helix’s three billion constituent base pairs. The project is intended to facilitate genetic research in the future, and in particular to provide biomedical scientists with information crucial to ascertaining the role played by faulty genes in causing disease. The results could direct them to a new kind of treatment – gene therapy. This is evidently an enterprise of international significance requiring sustained, open debate based on informed, responsible opinions. It was therefore astonishing to hear James Watson state a few months ago on Newsnight: “I think gene therapy is a good idea because it could help make people more intelligent, and it can’t be nice being stupid.” Why is a scientist responsible for arguably the most important scientific discovery of the twentieth century expressing opinions this misinformed in a debate stemming directly from his work? The answers lie rooted within the history of science and its development as we understand it today. It is only really in modern times that has become meaningful to talk of ‘scientific method’ – an established set of procedures and approaches embodied in a distinctive philosophy of nature. In the past, individuals had to justify their procedures on a metaphysical level, which blurred the distinction between discoveries themselves and their philosophical context. But what does this mean and why is so important? To study nature at all, a few basic assumptions need to be made, such as that the world can be understood rationally in a progression from the simple to the complex, for instance, and obeys ‘laws’ which may be formulated mathematically. The reason science, and physics in particular, takes on these assumptions is not because they are a priori justifiable, but because they seem to work. In the past when an agreed scientific framework did not exist, these issues were open to debate, and were ably fostered by a classical education. However, science has now proved itself so successful that it has become arrogant in thinking that its methods are the only path to truth. This has reached such a level that some scientists believe questions like “what is consciousness?” to be answerable solely in scientific terms based on a mathematical theory and associated qualitative explanation. One physics lecturer at Oxford proclaimed during a lecture “it’s not going to be a philosopher who explains how the mind works.” But how can a scientist do it without knowing the flaws and assumptions inherent in his method? This is indicative of a generation of scientists who are isolated from both the rich historical and philosophical framework of their subjects and also the greater context of man’s attempts to understand his existence. Moreover, many eminent scientists do not believe this context to be important. Richard Dawkins, for example, noted for his dogmatic views, contempt for religion and staunch defence of reductionism, is Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. The appointment underestimates the importance of the way in which a particular scientific discovery should be presented to the public and also Dawkins’ ability to do so. Scientists now have limited means of communicating their discoveries to both the scientific community and the layman, especially in fields which depart significantly from daily experience. Meanwhile, currently unquestioned metaphysical assumptions may need updating and most importantly, scientists need to understand the limitations of their approach to a conception of the nature of the universe. Consequently scientific developments with the potential for significant social impact are often inaccurately represented to the population by the media. James Watson might be a Nobel prize-winning genius, but he is no philosopher or ethicist. We live in an age when science is the most important route to knowledge. Scientists are being asked for opinions on all sorts of questions they do not know how to answer because of their isolation from a meta,physical context. Until this changes science, and the misinformed public, will stumble blindly on believing that real truth is scientific truth and that religion, philosophy and theology are merely intellectual divertissements with no real authority.
ARCHIVE: 4th week TT 2003