South Asia is a place desired for its beautiful things- buildings, songs, colours, and spices- but never for its people. The land contains an array of sensory delights and academic niches engaging and mysterious to Western audiences. But any reminder that these are tied to a heritage and a people beyond their grasp is unattractive and unwanted.
Desis are often forced to exist in a polarising landscape, whereby they can either be the ugly punchline of a joke with a strange accent, or exotic and untamed. This dichotomy is strongly influenced by gender, since desi men are typically seen as predatorial and perverted- no doubt we’ve all heard jokes about ‘weird Indian men’ in white girls’ dms; whilst desi women are either bestial and ungroomed, or heteronomous objects.
The stringent categorisation of desis by outsiders also leaves those in the non-binary, genderqueer, and transgender communities out, forcing perceptions of them to fit one of these two cis-normative categories. No one can win, especially when our appearances are so important to defining how non-desis see us.
Approaching this issue from the perspective of a cis-gendered South Asian woman, I think it’s a nice form of bonding for us desi girls to recall our experiences of being the ‘undesirable’, or even ‘weird’ one amongst our (white) friends.
Having attended several social events recently, I’ve been making a much greater effort with my appearance than usual. This includes kohl, wearing kurtay as dresses, and intensely watching different celebrities’ Vogue makeup routines.
Despite all this effort, I regularly feel overlooked in favour of my white peers. I know that this isn’t just a ‘me problem’, having discussed this with my other Asian friends, but it feels incredibly personal.
No matter how much time I spend trying to look presentable, figuring out which angles my nose looks okay from, my attempts to look nice will always be tinged with a foreign ugliness that disparages my aesthetic and even academic efforts (but that’s another conversation). And this will stay the same for as long as my skin is tinged with melatonin. There are some brown girls whose adherence to modern beauty standards are so obvious, that their attractiveness is never in doubt: but I’m not one of them and there’s nothing I can do to change that.
I believe that the rest of us desis are stuck, knowing that we’ll never be considered the pretty one. How they might feel hideous and trapped in an immediately unsightly form; how pretty is never our default. It takes an extra effort to feel good, but this merely highlights the disparity between me and my white friends. I find myself comparing facial features and body type in a horribly objectifying, demeaning, but reassuring manner, just to figure out where the difference lies.
I’m 20 now and I’ve finally found it.
This feeling of inferiority has been made explicitly to me and others in many instances, but most often in the pits of Atik or Rusty’s, where swarms of sweaty, handsy men clamour for any girls’ attention except for ours. The few times I’ve been considered ‘enough’ by wider society have also had confusingly disparaging, racial undertones. A few times my skin colour has been an outstanding and exotic feature, “lovely” but ever so noticeable for it. In other instances, my small size is made out as appealing: an infantilising and disturbingly common depiction of desi women.
There’s a long list of dangers that result from pandering to the same gaze that rejects us.
One is seeking validation- about appearance, personality, and so on- from others, whose job it is not to reaffirm our beauty. Related to this, is the tendency for accelerated romantic relationships that some desi women might experience. Because with these, one might gain constant reassurances of being desirable without having to delegate the task of reassurance to different people who might not be up to it.
Another danger is comparison with other girls, especially desis, and thinking of the things that we could do to emulate or distance ourselves from them more. There are the girls we try to be like, and those we try to avoid. I’m sure most high schools have had at least one of each type in every year group, and as damaging as it is to surround oneself with pretty white girls and always be the second-choice-token-brown-girl, it’s devastating to be dismissed completely.
Some (including myself) come to the natural conclusion that it’s easier to appeal to European ideas of beauty. We figure out early on that whilst beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the beheld is marginalised, the desi beholder is degraded, and the non-desi beholder gratified.
In spite of my attempts to offset these expectations by reclaiming the beauty in my South Asian-ness, I can never entirely get rid of the worry that I’m underperforming for my beholder. That if I try to represent myself in a way inclusive of being desi, I’ll be considered strange or like I’m trying too hard to obtain an ultimately performative image. I’m scared to face those not from my community without first filtering my image through a lens already familiar to them.
So, I keep trying. Listening and carving my appearance into a collage of palatable brown girls and neutered South Asian aesthetics.
The History Faculty has announced that Professor Peter Thompson has agreed that he will not have any contact with students this year, after allegations of inappropriate behaviour were widely publicised following an Al Jazeera investigation. He will also not attend events by the History Faculty and Rothermere American Institute.
Professor Thompson is the current Sydney L. Mayer Associate Professor of American History at Oxford, with research interests in Colonial North America. A former student described Professor Thompson getting drunk and engaging in physically inappropriate behaviour with female students. In 2020, the University upheld complaints of excessive alcohol consumption and sexual harassment against Professor Thompson.
In an email sent to history students, the Faculty said that media coverage of the allegations against Professor Thompson “suggested that the University took no action in response to complaints raised in 2019-20″.
“We would like to reassure you that the complaints against Professor Thompson were fully investigated by the University and that follow-on disciplinary action was instigated. As a result of this, measures were implemented to ensure that the conduct was not repeated and to safeguard staff and students. Monitoring is being undertaken and any breach of those measures will be acted upon,” they continued.
The Faculty are inviting students with questions and concerns to attend a faculty-wide “Listening Exercise” on Friday 12th November at 2-3:30pm on Microsoft Teams. Along side the faculty board will be at least one of the faculty’s harassment officers.
“Everything learned during the course of the Listening Exercise will feed into the work of the Complaints Procedures Working Group established at the end of Trinity Term 2021. The Listening Exercise will not be the only opportunity for students to comment: we will shortly be recruiting student members to that group, and we will seek further input through the Athena-SWAN project on gender equality in the History Faculty, the Race Equality Action Group and through the Faculty’s Gender, Race, Disability and LGBTQ+ Working Groups,” they said.
To not think about a film’s sound is to not think about cinema as a whole experience. However, I’m not going to lie, I have no musical knowledge. For me, soundtracks are one of the most inaccessible elements of film. Yet I’ve learnt by trial and error (and a lot of YouTube videos) that you don’t need to understand music theory to catch a glimpse of the meanings of soundtracks. A great starting point is to simply understand how music makes you feel, and then ask yourself why. Your answers start small – this song makes me feel sad – and you can build from there, considering what this means in relation to a scene. It is in this connection, between sight and sound, we find hidden meanings, story resolutions and emotional journeys – all without a drop of musical theory.
One of my favourite movies of all time is La La Land, and, thanks to being a musical, it possesses bucketfuls of musical symbolism. The final scene of Seb’s jazz bar is one of the most poignant scenes I have watched. The rose-tinted veneer of the musical numbers comes to an end, as both Mia and Seb got their ‘happy ending’, just not with each other. Mia’s story arc concluded with her being a successful actress, but Seb, who always reflected and romanticised the past, never quite being able to let go, is not yet finished. His final piece is a musical medley of their relationship, that turns into a dream sequence of what could have been. The music forces us to reflect, just like Seb, on their relationship and how it almost went so right for them. The music taunts its audience to hope for a happy ending. After seven minutes of montage, the music slows to only a piano, as it plays the simple melody of Mia and Seb’s theme once more. Seb plays it slower and slower, dragging out every key as if he doesn’t want it to end: the melody, and their relationship, helplessly falls through our fingers. But Seb never finishes their theme. What does this tell the audience? That he’s not ready to let go of their relationship for one, but it is also a question for Mia as to whether or not she would like to continue their song. She shakes her head, and Seb leaves the song, starting a new piece instead. Maybe Mia, Seb, and the audience could never get their happy ending of musical proportions, but at least Seb experiences closure, and the dream of La La Land can now come to an end. It’s fitting that a film about music would have its resolution in it as well.
There’s little chance of me talking about soundtracks without talking about Shrek and how it’s a great example of how pop songs can emotionally enrich a soundtrack. The YouTuber Sideways has a whole video about this which I would highly recommend, but I will condense it for you here. When we hear All Star or Bad Reputation, we recall Shrek as happy in the swamp and then fighting people, rendering him a conventional villain. However, if we actually remember the plot, Shrek isn’t happy in the swamp, as he is lonely, and he dislikes the reputation that comes with being an ogre. The pop songs are therefore deliberately misleading; they don’t align with characters’ feelings but instead what people expect from them. Whereas the Shrek score accompanies genuine and honest character moments.
In Shrek 2, we get Shrek storming the castle, one of my favourite scenes of all time. If you listen to the song, it actually has Shrek’s hero theme (as heard in the first film) woven into it, meaning the song represents Shrek’s desire to be the hero, at odds with society’s external pressure for him to be the villain. And as an audience rejoicing this epic moment, we feel this journey through the music.
It’s a very similar principle to the scene where Miles Morales finally becomes Spiderman in Spiderman: Into the Spider-verse. The whole film is about Miles accepting and embracing both parts of his identity, a Hispanic-Black teenager from Brooklyn and the next Spiderman, represented in the music by hip-hop and a classical score respectively. It is in this scene, where Miles learns to embrace his role and his responsibility, that they weave together for the first time. Both Miles and the audience are finally emotionally fulfilled. While pop songs here are used to contrast to the main score emotionally or ideologically, pop songs generally are linked to a character’s emotions. Sometimes this is very simply done, other times we need to spend time thinking about what precisely the characters are feeling in a given moment.
I’ve briefly mentioned the idea of musical themes, and this underpins a lot of film scoring. Often characters or an idea is represented through a piece of music, which is played at times in the movie when it relates to that character or idea. Star Wars is a great one to practice this because John Williams has a theme for everything, from certain relationships to the idea of ‘the force’. Musical themes are an easy element to analyse and appreciate without knowledge of music, audiences simply have to recognise the significance of when it’s played and what’s on-screen. In fact, I think is the easiest way of starting out thinking about movie soundtracks. Audiences perhaps risk losing an intricate understanding of the soundtrack by not understanding, but association is a powerful tool that everyone has the capability of wielding. Starting with association, one can begin to understand why some pieces of music send shivers down your spine, whereas others can feel stale and boring. In terms of filmmaking, audiences’ emotional reaction sits at the very centre of their experience, and everybody has access to that.
Oxford is scheduled to join a number of universities across the UK in staging a protest against spiking. Students will be boycotting nightclubs throughout Oxford on Wednesday the 27th. One of Oxford’s most prominent nightclubs, ATIK, announced yesterday that they have made the decision to close in solidarity with the protest.
When approached for comment last week, ATIK nightclub had originally decided to go ahead with their planned event on the night of the boycott. However, they have recently released a statement confirming their new stance.
ATIK has released a statement on instagram saying “after much consideration and after listening to both our staff and our guests, we can confirm we’ve taken the decision to close our student night, Park End, on Wednesday 27th October in solidarity with the nightlife boycott.” ATIK was scheduled to put on a Park End night with Oxford Events featuring reggae-pop artist, Iyaz.
The statement continues, “our commitment to guest safety remains our number one priority and we will continue to improve the measures we have in place with improvements to our training programmes, communication of our We Care programme and anti-spiking devices being made available. We will continue with our 100% search policy, our security wearing body cams and our specialist welfare team including an onsite medic and first raiders managing our medical room.”
“We would like to show our support to our student partners this Wednesday in raising the awareness of safety in the night time economy. Let’s work together to stamp this out.”
Women*’s Campaign and It Happens Here told Cherwell: “We see ATIK’s recent announcement that it will be closing on Wednesday night in solidarity with the ‘Big Night In’ boycott as a step in the right direction. However, we would like to state that based on testimonies circulating online and being provided to student representatives, there is still a lot more they can do to make students feel safe on nights out.”
The Oxford Student Union will be hosting an anti-spiking demonstration at 10pm on the 27th outside the Clarendon Building on Broad Street.
A new policy briefing by a team of researchers at King’s College London and Oxford University has revealed the profound impact of the Covid-19 pandemic of the mental health of children and young people, as well as setting out various steps which can be taken to address this growing crisis.
The briefing suggests that challenges around social isolation, academic pressures, adjusting to online learning and coping with reopening of schools are but a few of the many factors which have led to the number of children’s NHS mental health referrals doubling since the beginning of the pandemic, as well as highlighting the ‘severe’ disruption to mental health services which has left many without access to proper support.
In order to address these problems, the research team has outlined 14 steps which they say should be implemented by schools, mental health services and within the wider policy and practice environment. These include: equipping school staff to normalise conversations about mental health to identify who needs help, maintaining or increasing financial support of families facing hardship caused or exacerbated by the pandemic, strengthening the provision of early interventions and providing Covid-19-related mental health resources for those who have experience trauma and loss.
The briefing also suggests that reforming the benefit and universal credit systems, as well as exploring the feasibility of implementing a guaranteed income scheme, would also be beneficial; analysis of data from the Millennium Cohort Study in 2012 found that children in the lowest income quintile are 4.5 times more likely to experience severe mental health problems than those in the highest, with the pandemic only exacerbating this growing disparity.
Of the proposals, Professor Cathy Creswell, Director, UKRI Emerging Minds Network and Professor of Developmental Clinical Psychology, University of Oxford said: “In seeking to limit the impacts of the pandemic on young people and provide much needed supports, we need a multi-pronged approach that incorporates actions in each of these settings. This is so that we can foster the environments in which young people can thrive – in communities, in schools, and at home – and provide the mental health care that an increasing number of young people need.”
The proposals, which are set out in a new policy briefing jointly produced by the ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health, Emerging Minds, and The Policy Institute, were developed out of a policy lab held in early 2021 which included participants from policy, academia, wider society and schools, as well as young people with lived experience of mental health issues.
Dr Helen Fisher, Reader in Developmental Psychopathology at ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health, King’s College London said: “It is imperative that we understand, quickly, the impacts of the pandemic and related social restrictions and school closures on the mental health of young people, particularly young people in marginalised and vulnerable groups. This is so we can develop and implement, again quickly, measures to mitigate these impacts, to ensure – as we emerge from the pandemic – that all young people are enabled to flourish.”
Oxford University will ask students to fill out the COVID-19 Vaccination Survey during the third and fourth weeks of Michaelmas term. Students will receive an email with a link to the survey on Tuesday October 26th.
According to an email sent to students on October 25th, the survey will be voluntary, and the University will protect the anonymity of students who take part. Colleges and departments will not be able to find out whether an individual student will have been vaccinated from this survey.
Cherwell has already reported that St Edmund Hall and Lincoln College had asked their students to tell them their vaccination status in order to see what proportion of their population were vaccinated against COVID-19. Students who have already completed surveys within their college are asked to participate in the University-wide survey as well, because surveys used within colleges were not designed to be shared with the Office for Students.
The Office for Students, the independent regulator of higher education institutions in England, has asked all universities to run these surveys. The University said that “high levels of vaccine uptake recorded through the survey is likely to provide assurance to the wider community”.
The regulator did not ask for university staff to be surveyed.
Experimental statistics from the Office for National Statistics show that 90% of students in England had received a COVID-19 vaccine, and that 78% had received two doses. However, these statistics are based on a small sample size with a low response rate, so the ONS recommends interpreting this statistic cautiously.
Responses to the survey will be used by the University to understand what percentage of students are fully or partially vaccinated across the University, its departments and colleges. Once this has been calculated, students’ responses will be deleted and will not be shared with anyone, nor connected to their student record.
Oxford University says that they consulted staff and students about the survey via the University’s COVID-19 planning groups. Oxford University Student Union is supportive of the survey.
The deadline for completing the survey is 5pm on Friday November 5th. Further information can be found here.
“If you could talk, old building, what would you tell us, what would you say of the things you have seen?’ reads the opening quote for the Covered Market’s new website addition in which visitors can access a short history of the market.
The Oxford City council commissioned the Oxford-based multimedia artist Charlie Henry to create an interactive installation which voices stories from both visitors of the market and those who work there. The installation was in place on the 16 and 17 October.
Last weekend was the un-covered market launch weekend; a pop-up recording booth was set up in which members of the public could offer their own memories and personal stories of experiences in the market. These audio recordings are being collated into a new Covered Market oral history archive which will be accessible for future generations. A drop-in poetry workshop was also put on for the public. Poetry formed an important part of the audio with poetry from local artists, including Barney Norris, Naomi Poole and Carl Tomlinson.
The audio tour combines a mixture of sound recordings, poetry snippets, and a series of overheard conversations. The audio tour describes itself in the intro as “a process of mindfulness” which gives people permission to notice ‘unseen details’ of the market, often pausing for moments of listening and encouragements to look up to notice the ceiling.
The voiceovers for the tour are provided by Charlie Henry, the creator of the audio installation, and Dexter Woodley, who works at Bonners, a family run business which supplies locally sourced fruit and vegetables.
The tour highlights historical moments experienced in the Covered Market; it notes that the market remained open during World War Two and was a ‘vital resource for the community’, providing food, clothing and other essentials. The audio likens the vitality of the market during the war to the recent times of the Covid Pandemic in which the market was able to provide food to locals when supermarket shelves were bare.
Most of the permanent stalls are independent, family run businesses which trace back for generations. The market dates back to the 1770s and has provided Oxford locals with fresh produce, clothing and crafts since. It was originally established after the Oxford Improvement Act of 1771 to better the ‘untidy, messy and unsavoury stalls’ located on the main streets in central Oxford. It is considered by town and gown alike as part of the heart of the city centre and has also been visited by Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall in May 2017 receiving “the Royal seal of approval.”
Leader of the Oxford City Council, councillor Susan Brown, said: “Charlie Henry’s audio art installation brings our beloved covered market alive. This is a fantastic opportunity to hear more about the market and for members of the public and market traders to contribute their own accounts of using the market.”
Funding for the audio tour was supported by the Oxford City Council and The Museum of Oxford.
When I think of stage classics, productions like Les Miserables, The Lion King, and Wicked come to mind. These are all shows which hold great weight in the theatre world, and for me they bring a sense of nostalgia; I remember being ten years old and being completely bowled over by seeing The Lion King after growing up on the Disney adaptation.
Yet, recently, there’s been a trend of seeing classical literature brought to life on stage. At the Oxford Playhouse this term, Emma Hawkins has directed a version of the Greek myth Persephone with musical director Carrie Penn, which places the themes of the myth in contemporary society. The Keble O’Reilly theatre will also be staging a production titled Murder in Argos in conjunction with Votive Theatre which seeks to reflect on the mythical past through the context of the author’s experience in the 1960s. In 2020, the Oxford Playhouse also staged an adaptation of two Classical Greek tragedies by Euripides and Sophocles, titled Shadows of Troy. Outside of Oxford, Hadestown has seen great success in the United States, with previews beginning in 2019, and the show subsequently receiving numerous awards and nominations.
This trend certainly finds a parallel in the re-emergence of the classics in our cultural mindset; authors like Madeline Miller (think Circe, and The Song of Achilles), Stephen Fry (Mythos), Pat Barker (The Silence of the Girls), and Natalie Haynes (A Thousand Ships) all take the enduring myths of the classical period and frame them for a modern audience. Yet, for me at least, the stage does a better job of conjuring up these legends of eras gone – but why is that?
In part, at least for me, this stems from the prominence of theatre in the life of classical Athens. The ‘Dionysia’, which was a large festival in celebration of Dionysus, was largely based around the performance of tragedies, and later comedies, with theatre being intensely linked to the religious and cultural life of many Athenians. The idea of theatre as something devotional continued into the Middle Ages, with play cycles based around the life of Christ being written and performed on feast days, such as that of Corpus Christi, all around the United Kingdom, such as in York and Chester. The revival of these festivals, with many ancient theatres in Greece still holding performances of plays old and new, connects us with theatre as a force of contemplation and teaching.
In Shadows of Troy, which was written by Jamie Murphy and commissioned by Stupid and Brave productions, the use of the chorus, as it was used in classical Greek plays, attested to the sheer power of theatre, with drumming and chanting by the chorus adding a ritualistic tone to the performance. For me, seeing these Greek plays staged in a way similar to the way in which they first might have been staged added so much more to the story than if I was simply reading the script. That might sound obvious – after all, scripts are always going to be less engaging than the plays which come from them – but the fact that so much of classical theatre is taught in classrooms all over the world, rather than watched, minimises the real power of so much of it, especially the devotional aspect, which would have been so important to those who first wrote these plays.
The classical revival is certainly an exciting thing and making classical literature more accessible can only be a positive.
In basketball, the game clock stops when the ball goes out of play. But the game clock’s been stopped for a while now, and the players are sitting down, and the coach is pointing at a little whiteboard. We’re 3 minutes and 28 seconds in to the first quarter of the first game of the season, and I’m confused. It’s been three minutes, and the Blues have called a timeout. And yes, they are 7-0 down, and yes, they’ve messed up a couple of times, but what on earth is there to talk about?
This is not the only time I am a bit lost over the course of the next hour and a half. In fact, I watch the game in a fairly permanent state of dissociation. The game ebbs and flows, at least according to the scoreboard, but I can’t really work out how or why.
Basketball is a heavily choreographed sport, but to the novice viewer, the alternating 20-second flurries of activity are just that—flurries. The ball is bounced and passed and the players are moving and the eyes are widening and eventually someone shoots from far, or shoots from near, or gets fouled, and it’s all over in the 24 seconds it takes for the shot clock to count down. And then there’s that moment where the ball flies towards the hoop and hits the rim, and hovers in the air, and, for that brief second, I fully understand what’s going on—will it go in? And then it does, or it doesn’t, and the ball’s already halfway up the court and the next flurry is swirling and I’m lost again.
Yet despite my disconnection, I’m right that this timeout is noteworthy. The players look dejected and the coach looks shaken, and it’s not in a dramatic way, but also… it’s been three minutes. I’m told later that the message of all the intense conversation and gesticulation at this point was basically just ‘calm down’. Understandably, when a team needs to win pretty much every match this season, they must feel a sense of impenetrability. Without that, the improbable becomes impossible. And this sense of impenetrability has been penetrated within three minutes. The timeout was to note that and to pledge to repair it.
As I say, what happened next is fairly lost on me. But after some reflection and discussion, I have cobbled together some kind of narrative. The Blues started slow. They haven’t played a team of the same low age profile for a while. Their transitions weren’t fast enough, and they kept allowing the De Montfort defence to get set. This meant they began by relying on what I call ‘explosive runs into the box’, which I soon learn to be known as ‘drives into the paint’. Basically, when everyone’s got back and is in position, the most effective way of breaking through the stasis is for one player to forcefully weave their way through to the hoop. These sequences—in the way they combine guile and power—are some of, for the two or three seconds they last, the most awesome and friendly-to-slow-motion-replay moments in this sport. And I will be sure to return to that in future weeks.
For now, though, all you need to know is that drives on a fast transition are quite straightforward, but these drives after the defence is set, though useful in that position, are not an efficient tactic to depend on. Fortunately, as the game went on, the Blues sped up, and the De Montfort players tired. The number of forced drives decreased and the number of swiftly concluded counters increased. The Blues got into their flow and, as the game wound down, Bill, the club president, shouted across the court to me (in a callback to last week’s article) ‘we’re hitting our threes now!’ To be honest, I had slightly zoned out, but as I refocused, I could see he was right. The 10-point lead that the Blues had opened up and maintained for the last 15 minutes was widening, and three-point shots were flying in from all angles.
The game ended 75-52, and the story I’ve outlined is nice and neat and reassuring. In reality, the game was not a steady arc, and there were periods of stasis and there were periods of change. Parts of this were not as clean as simply ‘they warmed up and got into their flow’. For example, in basketball, there is a limit on how many fouls a player can commit before they get kicked out of the game. When you get close to this limit, you’re in ‘foul trouble’, and the coach might sub you off for a bit to prevent suspension. Oxford started getting into foul trouble, good players came off, and their lead plateaued for a bit. Then De Montfort got into a bit of foul trouble, and the lead started growing again.
Moreover, the team depended on big performances. They depended on captain Orin Varley, clearly the best player, hitting 29 points. And they depended on Varley along with Josh Soifer (‘power forward’ by name, ‘power forward’ by nature) getting 10 rebounds each, which, I’m told, is a lot.
But of course they depended on big performances. They won by 23 points and there’s only 5 guys on the court at one time. My point is really that there’s a lot of moving parts and it’s hard to put your finger on what ensured a victory instead of a loss. But whatever confluence of factors delivers these Ws, the delivery is expected each and every time this season, and it’s an interesting question why this team is now so confident in that fact.
The change that the team has undergone from fairly dire straits to renewed hope has to be greatly attributed to one guy: the coach, Jamie Smith. He’s been at the club since last year, and he’s brought changes in all aspects. There’s of course the tactical and talent-enhancing parts of being a coach. What Jamie says about tactics sound like truisms: that it’s easiest to score when the defence hasn’t got back yet, that the good shooters should go for threes whenever they get a good opportunity, that play should be quick, and plays should be in sync. However, truisms stop being truisms when they have to be respected in every thing you do. I get the impression from players’ exhausted but appreciative look on recalling this year’s pre-term training camp, and from the way Jamie talks about these concepts, that, in recent years, drills and preparation have not been close to as purposeful and intense at OUBbC as they are now.
Jamie Smith, OUBbC Coach. Credit: Mansoor Ahmed
Nevertheless, Jamie downplays this stuff. He says “I’m not an innovator” when it comes to tactics and game state. He learnt these principles from the greats he’s worked under like Roy Williams at the University of North Carolina and Billy Donovan at the University of Florida. What he likes to attribute success to more, and what he seems more energised and excited discussing, is how the team and the club are changing as institutions, or, more prosaically, as groups of people. He’s keen to highlight changes in culture. Turning up late to training now means harsher consequences. Team socials after every match are mandatory. Like Bill, his eyes light up when talking about the team’s newly increased social media presence, and new kits. It all contributes to a feeling that this is more than a uni team playing a fairly unpopular sport, that it’s part of a story, that people care, and that they should be proud to wear the dark blue jersey.
But I’m not sure that’s all it is—for Jamie. From a very young age, he was obsessed with America. Basketball was partly a cause and partly a result of that obsession. He played for multiple teams at once, and organised a local league, and even did some coaching. By the age of 18, his future was uncertain in his own mind, and he saw a flyer for a year abroad studying in the US. His family didn’t have that much money. He took a year out, earning what he could, and applying for this programme. He made it to Idaho, and despite loving the chance to live in this country he’d dreamed about, he realised he was not good enough for the basketball team. So instead, he went early every day to their state-of-the-art court, and practised alone. And eventually, someone on the coaching team noticed this abnormally committed guy and decided they wanted him on their staff.
Supported by almost perfect grades every step of the way, Jamie kept studying, which allowed him to stay in the US, while coaching basketball. He went all over the place: Idaho, North Carolina, Virginia, Florida, Ohio, Massachusetts, Hawaii. This was all punctuated by returns to the UK to earn some money to keep the party going. He worked for two NBA teams as a video coordinator—Cleveland Cavaliers and the Boston Celtics—being one of the only Brits working on any coaching staff in the NBA. And a key reason for that is that it’s very difficult to get a US visa to coach. Eventually, circumstances, including visa circumstances, deemed it fit to return to the UK, where Jamie worked with, and continues to work with, the GB national team.
It’s a story full of coincidence and contingency. He’s only ended up at Oxford because he shot the club an email and, by chance, at that very time, they had a vacancy. He only continued coaching when he got to North Carolina because they were impressed by his work in a summer camp in the summer of his first year. His life path was not clear or planned out.
But now we’re at this point, where I sit across from this 41 year-old guy with lightly greying hair and, forgive the schmaltz, an eminently good heart. He’s had a wandering social life transported from state to state, and spends his time either coaching basketball or reading about basketball for his PhD in the sport’s history or editing Wikipedia pages, correcting their historical basketball errors. And he seems quite happy. He is essentially married to this sport, and what started as staying up watching the Chicago Bulls instead of working on his GCSEs has basically spiralled, and I mean that in a value-neutral way.
The talk about the social media, and the team’s history, and the new kits, and the culture, and the story—it’s partly self-justifying. It’s contextualising Jamie in a tale of great import. It makes his life not just internally meaningful, but externally. This is not to say it is a charade, or a farce. Of course, I do believe that this club has a special story, and of course, it is undeniably true that it has great history. And it’s not to say that Jamie’s obsession with basketball is not ultimately genuine. But it doesn’t seem like genuine interest and self-justification can really be disentangled. Perhaps everything is path-dependent on what we find ourselves drawn to at the age of 18, and the coincidences that lead us on require us to reconceptualise what we care about so that the path remains, in some sense, the right path in our minds.
Jamie’s been given a 4-year contract at Oxford, so the path ahead, at least for now, is attached to the fate of this team. The next game is against Brookes: the biggest rivals in this division. A loss would be hugely significant for the Blues’ hopes this year. Whatever happens, I’m sure we can assimilate it in some way into the narrative, because, yes, narratives are loose and easily modified and retooled. Perhaps a loss is a spark for a fresh revival. But I’d really rather not—let’s just keep the train rolling, lads. See you next week.
It’s safe to say that No Time to Die has had a difficult journey to the big screen. The film has undergone a change of director (Danny Boyle out, True Detective’s Cary Joji Fukunaga in), an injury to its leading man (though he has at least made it through another Bond alive), rewrites (from Phoebe Waller-Bridge, no less), a global pandemic, and five delays to its release date overall. And yet, the final product has emerged from all of this chaos triumphant – a stylish and exhilarating thriller, dusting itself off and adjusting its shirt cuffs with all the effortless sophistication of its protagonist. No Time to Die could easily have felt stale, considering that we first saw footage of it nearly two years ago. Instead, it’s a breath of fresh air. It already looks set to bring audiences into cinemas in swathes – and deservedly so.
Fukunaga opens with a horror-infused home invasion markedly different from other Bond pre-credits sequences. It’s a brilliant introduction to Rami Malek’s masked and menacing villain, Lyutsifer Safin. The plot then picks up five years after the events of Spectre, with Craig’s beefcake Bond enjoying retirement in Jamaica (rather like Ian Fleming himself).The set-up feels a little hackneyed: this is the third successive film where Craig has had to do the ‘Bond-past-his-prime’ thing. But this is, of course, just the prelude to the plot’s main action, which doesn’t take long to kick in. Bond’s retirement is interrupted by a plea for help from his old friend, CIA agent Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright), which embroils him once again in planet-saving mayhem.
Broadly speaking, the story is far from original. Malek’s villain, of course, has a bio-weapon and a plan to kill millions of people with it. But the plot is, as usual, secondary to the spectacle – and, as has often been the case for Daniel Craig’s time in the role, to the emotional arcs of the main characters. Craig gives a bravura performance, running the gamut from fury to humour to heartbreak. Léa Seydoux is excellent as Madeleine Swann, a woman desperate to remain happy with Bond, but just as haunted by the past as he is. The strength of the performances heightens the effectiveness of the story’s emotional beats. And despite the broadly conventional nature of the plot, there are still some genuinely surprising moments.
The prospect of a Danny Boyle Bond will always be a tantalising one, but Fukunaga does an excellent job. He knows how to move a camera with real panache – as anyone who has seen that six-minute single take from True Detective will know. There is nothing here to match that (or Spectre’s opening shot), but the action scenes are all breathlessly entertaining, and there is an effectively claustrophobic single-take stairwell fight. It’s a very good-looking film, with each location vividly shot by Fukunaga and cinematographer Linus Sandgren – from the historic beauty of Matera to a murky Norwegian forest.
It’s good to see some stronger roles for women in this entry. Lashana Lynch gives an entertaining turn as new 007 Nomi, with some enjoyably spiky bickering with Bond. Ana de Armas is a lot of fun as the Cuban agent Paloma, and her appearance is the most enjoyable sequence in the film. It’s just a shame we don’t see more of her – and of Naomie Harris’ Moneypenny, for that matter. It would be interesting to know exactly how significant Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s rewrites were, and where they fall in the film; but this is a script which is sharper and funnier than I expected.
The film isn’t perfect. Malek’s Safin never quite lives up to the promise of that creepy pre-credits introduction. The exact motivations behind his plot to kill millions of people are never entirely clear, either. And it’s depressing to see another Bond villain who has facial scarring and a vaguely “European” accent, as if these characteristics are somehow outward indicators of inward evil. These dated tropes are even more noticeable because No Time to Die breaks away from problematic past Bond films in other areas. It would be nice to see a less predictable take on a Bond villain for the next entry in the series. As it stands, we’re on a dark and dangerous road towards having the meerkat from the Compare the Market ads as the main antagonist next time (only if the producers have poked out one of his eyeballs first, of course).
Overall, though, No Time to Die delivers all the exhilarating action, exotic locales and emotional moments you could want from a Bond film – as well as a theme song and opening credits sequence to die for. It’s a bold blend of old and new, and a suitably moving swansong for Daniel Craig. Inevitably, the rumours on who will be his replacement have already kicked into overdrive again. We should take a moment to appreciate, though, just how much he has made this role his own, giving us a 007 as emotionally vulnerable as he is ruthless. I saw the film at a packed screening. Seeing a blockbuster in an environment like that felt like a welcome slice of pre-Covid normality. The producers made the right move in holding out for a theatrical release, however long it took. If you can, see it in cinemas. There may be no time to die, but after a box office opening weekend like that, there’s no doubt you’ll have plenty of time to catch this one on the big screen.
