Issue 83.10

Issue 83.10

INSIDE:

Pop Culture Special www.facebook.com/onditmagazine

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On Dit Magazine Issue 83.10

Issue 83.10

CONTENTS "Pop culture is a refle ction of s o cial change, not a caus e of s o cial change."

John Po dhoretz

ON CAMPUS

MORE CULTUR E

Editorial ............................................................ 2 How to Contribute to On Dit ........................... 3 What’s On ...................................................... 4-5 SRC President ................................................... 6 Student Election After math ........................... 7-8 AUU President .................................................. 9 Humans of Adelaide University.................. 20-21 The On Dit Files ....................................... 28-29

The Trouble Reality of Award Shows ....... 16-17 Fear and Loathing of Shiny Lapels ........... 36-37 Opera, Mozart and Madness ..................... 34-35 Tinder is Terrifying, Long Live Tinder! .......... 32 SANFL ...................................................... 42-43 I’ma Let You Finish ........................................ 41 Adelaide Film Festival Inter view ............... 44-45

MI SCE L L ANE OUS POP CU LTU RE

US Election Summary ................................ 10-11

Riding in Cars with Kesha ......................... 14-15 The Definitive Guide to Doctors .............. 18-19 Wanna Come Over for Netflix and Chill?.. 22-23 Selfies through the Ages ........................... 24-25 New Slaves ................................................ 26-27 Five Great Soundtracks ............................. 30-31 Cosplay and Discrimination ........................... 33 I Eat Chips and Rate Them ...................... 38-39 Sean Bean Song (creative writing) ..................... 46 Culture Debate .......................................... 12-13

On Dit is a publication of the Adelaide University Union EDITORS: Daniel Millburn, Daniel McLean and Leighton McDonald-Stuart

R E VI E WS Music Review: Kingtusi..................................... 44 Film Review: Don’s Party................................... 45

DI VE RSI ONS Confessions of a Law Student ...................... 47 Crossword ....................................................... 48

SUB-EDITORS: Mandy Li, Natalie Carfora and Lur Alghurabi

COVER ART: Viray Thach

CREATIVE TEAM: Viray Thach, Sarah Boese and Anna Bailes

INSIDE BACK COVER: Delia Chin Published 14/09/2015

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Editorial You and 6 others were tag ged in On Dit’s photo – watching BITCH WARS feat: Nicki ‘Hot Buns’ Minaj vs Miley ‘Wrecking Ball’ Cyrus Oops, you’ve stumbled into one of our “Netflix and chill” sessions, where the popcorn’s gone cold, the credits rolled two hours ago, and none of us are wearing any pants ... We have no idea how this happened.

Diving into this week’s episode, we’re 48 pages deep in popular culture, where celebrity egos slowly drown us; meanwhile Sean Bean has already died (pg. 46). Pop culture, for the sur vivors, is knowing when to clap in the Friends theme song, and waiting for your letter from Hogwarts. It’s praising infinite cat memes and understanding the sins of Instagramming your dinner plate. It’s mainstream, and (excuse the juvenile expression) it’s fully sick.

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On Dit Magazine Issue 83.10

Unfortunately On Dit has not the funds to build a shrine of Kardashian selfies, nor does it possess the technological expertise to generate angry Nicholas Cage GIFs. Instead, we honour selfies through the ages (pg. 24), and rage at the racism in film and music industries (pg. 16). We scrutinise the latest incarnations of the Doctor (pg. 18), and learn that despite the total inanity of Hollywood’s UFOs, scientists believe life beyond the stars in facts exists (pg. 28). (drops mic and walks off stage) The On Dit Team War ning: Netf lix-and-chill sessions are always risky; you never know when someone will walk in on your “chilling”.

H OW TO C O N T R IBU T E Want to contribute to On Dit? It really is an easy process…

SUBMISSION DEADLINES FOR

I f yo u w a nt t o w r i t e a n a r t i c l e , h e r e’ s s o m e a dv i c e b e f o r e yo u g e t s t a r t e d :

A RTWORK AND WRITTEN CONTENT ISSUE

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Have a chat to us. Your chances of being published are much higher if we’re all on the same page.

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Want to write but don’t know what to write about? We have a long list of things we’d love people to write about.

Don’t be shy. Come in for a chat.

We’re down the dodg y-looking stairs near the Barr Smith Lawns.

AUU 120 Years

28th September 12th October

Corre ction t o article in On Dit 83.9

Make sure what you’re writing can appeal to a wide audience. If it’s a technical topic, try to explain it simply. Don’t presume people know all the specifics of niche topics.

No one likes a pretentious wordsmith. Try not to use jargon.

CONTRIBUTION DEADLINE

83.12

On Dit is primarily read by students who are easily exhausted by longwinded pieces of writing, so please keep it concise.

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83.11

THEME

In Brydie Kosmina’s “Give Me the Vote!” an incorrect date was published in paragraph two: ‘1985’ should have read ‘1895’. We’re indubitably sorry and thankfully were only one hundred years off...

C O N TA C T U S !

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O N D I T O F F I C E LO C A T I O N Down the narrow stairwell. Watch out for twerking editors. www.facebook.com/onditmagazine

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WHAT’S ON + NEWS: Generation You Adelaide

Lavazza Italian

18th September

15th September - 21st October

Where: 91 Hindley St, Adelaide

Where: Palace Nova Eastend

Cost: Concession $69 Tickets from generationyou.com.au

Film Festival

A one-day event run by mentors, entrepreneurs and managers designed to help students moving into the workplace. There’s 12 fantastic speakers and 480 minutes of learning to help you get ahead of the pack and stand out from the rest.

SA Writers Centre:

The

Little Red Writing Workshop with Mark Tredinnick.

19th September Where: SA Writers Centre (2/187 Rundle St)

Cost: Movie Club $15.50, Concession $16.50 Tickets from Palace Nova This year the Italian Film festival features 32 films from the land of pizza, which are about topics that diverge from delicious food and range from experimental cinema to the classic Italian romantic-comedy-drama. Live la dolce vita and enjoy an Italian film.

Moon Lantern Festival 27th September

Time: 10am-4pm

Where: Elder Park

Cost: $120

Time: 4pm-8:30 pm

Tickets from the SA Writers Centre (8223 7662)

The SA Writers Centre is running the Little Red Writing Workshop for anyone who wants to improve their writing. This course is aimed at improving sentence craft as well as technique and will suit creative and professional writers alike.

Your editors highly recommend the SA Writers Centre to anyone looking to improve their craft.

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On Dit Magazine Issue 83.10

OzAsia Festival brings you Australia’s largest lantern parade celebration. Featuring food trucks, roving perfor mances, lantern installations, fireworks and an actual (lantern) dragon from Hong Kong!

SEPT 14th to 25th Flinders Street

Sweet Tooth Market 19th - 20th September Where: Flinders Street Market Flinders Street Market is hosting their inaugural “Sweet Tooth” Market! Swing by and select from a range of sweet treats from over 80 dessert, chocolate, and sweet stalls. Highlights include the Barossa Valley Ice Cream Company, Happy Maple, Healthy Little Lady, and Shirni Parwarna Afghan inspired desserts. Raw/vegan/glutenfree/sugar-free options available!

Fork

20th September

on the

Where: Bonython Park

Road

Time: 12noon-4pm

Come along and enjoy the great local food from an amazing range of food trucks. All your favourites will be there! Importantly, you can show your support for Adelaide’s food trucks and Australia’s first Food Truck Festival.

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S RC C O L U M N Renjie DU, SRC President

Hey all, If you’re reading this, congrats; you sur vived election week! Firstly, I would like to congratulate everyone who has been elected. I would also like to thank everyone who has been involved with organising this election, the returning officer, the AUU staff and all the volunteers involved with it.

I’ve always found election week to be a remarkable time to watch human behaviour. It has always been interesting to watch candidates yelling, crying, mocking, laughing, complaining, lying and fighting.

Unfortunately almost all student politicians have to face a dilemma: to win the election or to be a good person. If you try not to harass anyone and wait until they come to talk to you, you are basically doomed to get zero votes. Even if someone does come to you, the conversation could be interrupted by someone else, and unfortunately the voters would tend to vote for the more “active” one. It therefore becomes a race to the bottom.

I have heard and received numerous complaints from students about candidates’ election behaviour; however, being a candidate myself, I found there is little I can do to change the situation. I am even more powerless than you. From the conversations you had with these candidates, you may have already found out that almost none of these candidates have any care of campus issues or anything about students’ general wellbeing; almost everyone is running for these positions for a political interest, whether they admit it or not; almost every candidate was boasting about their achievements and making promises they could never achieve.

A lot of students were feeling uncomfortable about being approached by campaigners, and some of them even claimed to be bullied or harassed by candidates. Being an engineering student, to be honest, student politicians are definitely not the kind of people I prefer to hang out with. I’ll probably get in trouble for saying this, but I’ll say it anyway: lots of student politicians are bullies.

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On Dit Magazine Issue 83.10

What you experienced last week is what I experience every day. I have a parody account under my name called “Renjie DONT” which tweets more often than my actual account. I have been constantly mocked by other student politicians about my accent and my English. During student election week, even my drawer was opened and checked by my colleagues when I was absent, trying to find out more evidence to stop my team from campaigning.

Ironically I had been called “douchebag” by one of the previous welfare officers during Mental Health Week, and I was being called a “loser” by one of the Welfare Officer candidates during this student election.

Being the SRC President, I was rarely treated by my opponents as a human being; instead, I was nor mally regarded as an object stopping them from obtaining leadership. Regardless of what I do, from their point of view, it can only be wrong, because they are politicians and I am their opponent.

How could we change this? I honestly don’t know.

Student politics just tends to attract a certain kind of person. Maybe this won’t help either. After all, we are not the only university filled with political hacks, every single university shares the same issue.

I would like to give myself a thumb up for not voting for the first two years of my degree. I remember I was making a joke with my friend and said “these candidates are all the same, I would vote for the looks”.

Perhaps I was smarter back then.

STUDENT ELECTIONS AFTERMATH Author: Leighton McDonald-Stuart

There’s a ver y good reason that Overheard has gone quiet.

Student elections, along with the incessant nagging by campaigners, have finally finished. Walkways are now cleared of endless pitches designed to get you to vote, and banners no longer hang from Union House and Ingkarni Wardli.

For the political junkie this is an exciting time, even more so than the actual election. Why? Results. Join On Dit as we take a dive into the deep end of student politics affectionately known as ‘STUPOL'.

AUU Board For the uninitiated, the AUU Board is the decision making body of the Adelaide University Union, and as such it has control over a multi million-dollar budget. The AUU funds the SRC and On Dit, as well as giving grants to clubs and running important student centres like Employment Ser vices. In short, it manages a huge aspect of campus culture; hence why its ten board director positions are highly desirable to the discerning student politician. Each AUU Board Director is elected for a two-year ter m and so five are elected each year on rotation (like the Senate but with two years instead of six).

This year’s elections will see a dramatic shift of power on the AUU Board with the Right bloc now commanding a majority. The existing Right board directors, Rhys Williams (For U), Yiran Tan (Progress), and Joe Lu (Progress), will be joined by Jack Newton (For U), Jeffrey Yang (Progress), and Renjie Du (Progress).

Renjie Du, is no newcomer though, with this

election securing him his second consecutive two-year ter m on the Board.

Within the Left bloc of the AUU Board existing director Adi Rai (IndyGo) will be joined by Sarah Tynan (Activate) and Iran Sanadzadeh (IndyGo).

Georgie Morphett, who was elected last year, will continue into the second year of her ter m.

Rhys Williams and Adi Rai are expected to contest the AUU presidential vote at a special meeting of the new Board next month. The current AUU President is Amelia Brig gs (IndyGo). The new Board, which takes office on 1st December, appears without a Labor Right (Fresh) director after that ticket’s failure to have Labor Club President Josh Boughey elected. Fresh, a for mer ally of For U and Progress, joined forces with the other Left teams this year in the hope of seeing Boughey elected, however he received only 128 votes.

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SRC While a power shift on the AUU Board has been taking place for the last two years, the SRC (Student Representative Council) is expected to see a far more abrupt (and radical!) change. The SRC is the peak student representative body on campus and it runs events such as ‘Stress Less Day’ as well as lobbying the university to ensure your voice is heard.

Socialist Alternative’s (Student Voice) candidate for the role, Tom Gilchrist, was elected after receiving 1,486 votes to his competitors 1,346. Gilchrist was able to secure the presidency after Student Voice, IndyGo, Activate and Fresh for med a coalition to go up against Progress and For U. The count of the SRC Office Bearer positions produced some mixed results with For U picking up General Secretary (Nicholas Garbas), Queer Officer (Matthew Macowan), Social Justice Officer (Henry Symons), Rural Officer (Angus Crouch), Welfare Officer (Nicholas Baric) and Women’s Officer (Erin Murray) while Progress won Environment Officer (Brian Wang) and International Student Officer (Siyuan Gao). On the left, Student Voice claimed Ethno-Cultural Officer (Angelo Tavlaridis) and Education Officer (Claudia Keogh) while Activate’s

The General Councilor (GC) spots went fairly evenly amongst the high polling tickets. Progress picked up two spots (Vincent Yu & Chris He), as did IndyGo (Alexander Durnan & Ellie Thomas).

Activate, For U, and Student Voice picked up one spot each (Cassandra Yankoff, Henry Blacketer, and Jack Crawford respectively). Independent Beau Brug was also elected to a GC position.

These results leave the Right with eleven positions on the 23-seat SRC, requiring the support of only one of the independents to for m a majority. The Left, with ten positions, would require the support of both independents (Beau Brug and Richard Matthews) to for m a majority on the assumption that the broad coalition (which includes socialists, the independent Left and both Labor party factions) can hold together.

Student Media

NUS

The student media side has been much simpler this year, but for the budding Radio Directors, it was a ner vous wait. With a margin of just 21 votes (1,369-1,348), Rob Lawry and Sophie Atkinson were elected, narrowly edging out Isabella Xu. Lawry and Atkinson have promised to re-establish long time staples ‘Left, Right and Centre’ as well as ‘Midnight Static’. Power to them!

For the 7 National Union of Students (NUS) delegate positions, Beau Brug (Independent) and Renjie Du (Progress) were elected on the first count while Kyriaco Nikias (For U), Amelia Brig gs (IndyGo), Madeline Edhouse (Student Voice) and Tom Gilchrist (Student Voice) were also elected. The NUS, the peak organising body for student unions and representative councils, will hold its National Conference (or ‘NatCon’) in December.

The count for On Dit wasn’t nearly as close as it was for radio. Going for his second tilt at the editorship, Anthony Nocera teamed up with Max Cooper and Emma Doherty. While they secured 1,170 votes, it wasn’t enough to see them across the line. 2015 On Dit contributors Lur Alghurabi, Natalie Carfora, and Celia Clennet took it out with 1,548 votes, a margin of 378 votes.

Soon after the On Dit result broke, the Nocera-Cooper-Doherty team took to Facebook to blast the winning team for having “a complete dearth of interesting content”, amongst other slurs. It appears voters didn’t share the same view.

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Jacqueline Dettman was elected as Mature Aged Officer and IndyGo’s Myall Tarran was elected to the position of Post-Graduate Officer. Independent Richard Matthews took out the Disability Officer portfolio. ATSI Officer went automatically to Student Voice given that only one candidate, Pete Howlett, contested the position.

On Dit Magazine Issue 83.10

Keep reading On Dit as we gear up to cover the AUU presidential election!

Leighton McDonald-Stuart is an editor of On Dit and was a candidate in the elections on the For U ticket.

AU U P R E S I D E N T Amelia Briggs, AUU President

At the time of writing, student election week has just wrapped up and even more people than last year have cast their vote. Although I have my own personal opinions on whom we need in charge of our valuable student ser vices, events, and political actions, I’d like to thank every single person who came out to vote in the elections, regardless of whether they voted for left-wing groups or not. It’s only with a high turnout of students coming to vote that we can truly represent the views, priorities, and needs of students here at Adelaide, and as someone who has spent a long time attempting to do this, it means the world to know that people are taking this right seriously.

There’s a lot on in this issue of On Dit around pop culture, and the Union has also dipped our toe in with the first ever Harry Potter quiz night, which has just been held in Bonython Hall. While my table didn’t win, it was still amazing to see the night looking eerily like Hogwarts, and some impressive costumes. I also realise I know far more about Harry Potter than I’d ever given myself credit for, and will probably crack out the books again once the semester break rolls around.

We’ve had some great feedback about the event so far, and we’d love to know what else you’d all be keen to see from us because from what I’ve seen everyone loves a night of dress-up! We’re proud of how quickly the event sold out and would love to bring more joy to everyone with a few more events like this.

to my twitter feed and Facebook because I’ll be setting up hours for you all to come visit soon enough! Also, if anyone would like to help me move copious amounts of furniture or donate us a few couches, I’d be extremely grateful. Otherwise I’ll have to hit up tradelaide for some stuff.

On the subject of moving places, plans for the Union House redevelopment will soon be up for everyone to look at and have your say on these.

I’ve been extremely involved with giving student feedback on the best options and priorities for people, and I’m pretty stoked at the new things that the University has planned for the whole precinct. Of course, I do my best to represent students and I think there’s something for everyone in this proposal, but it’s a good idea to have a look yourself as I can’t know everything that’s important to everyone. Plus, it’s good to participate in democracy wherever you can.

Beyond that, we’re getting pretty close to the holidays and after that it’s a pretty short ter m until we are at the end of the semester. That means a sweet summer break for those of you studying coursework degrees, and a little break off for those of you in research degrees. I’ll see you again in a few more weeks for another issue of On Dit, and I hope you enjoy the break – I know I’ll be out enjoying the weather.

I’m also busy at the moment moving offices to a sweet new digs – still on Level 4 Union House.

The office will face straight out onto the level’s walkway, so you’ll be able to come and pop by when I’m there working and have meetings and chats about things that are going on. Stay tuned

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T H E U N I T E D S TA T E S E L E C T I ON S F O R P R E S I D E N T:

A N OV E RV I E W Author: Ben Hosking The American presidential races often heat up well over a year before the actual election, so even though we — I am an American-Australian — do not vote until November 4, 2016, the debates, and accompanying vitriol, has already begun. You may ask why the US elections are worth covering, which is fair. We are in Australia after all. It’s simply due to the significant influence the US has on global affairs. As the saying goes, when America sneezes, Australia catches a cold.

inexperienced), Ted Cruz (too partisan), Marco Rubio (too pro-immigration in the past) or Rand Paul (too libertarian). These four, although polling relatively well among Republicans, will not be the nominee for the bracketed reasons.

A small note: in the United States, we have what is ter med plurality-based elections, which means that there are no run-offs; thus, the candidate who has the most votes in a state wins “electoral college seats,” which are mostly based on population with a minimum of three seats per state. This means that Californians, when based solely on percentiles, have less of a share than those voters in Wyoming.

Donald Trump (26.0) — Right-wing.

This article will cover each of the top contenders within their respective party primaries — the nominating competitions that narrow the field to two major party candidates. I will do my best to remain objective in my over views, outside of an epithet blurb, but I do have a favorite, which I will discuss at the end of this article. I will include the top three Republican candidates in their primary polls and then the top three Democrats.

Let’s start with the Republican party, which has seventeen candidates running for their nomination, which roughly translates to the equivalent of sixteen more conser vative Tony Abbotts and one Donald Trump (the Donald is his own man) trying to be the leader of the Liberals. I considered writing analyses of each one, and promptly gave up. So here are the top three by Republican primary poll numbers as of August 11th according to the Huffington Post: Donald Trump (26.0 per cent), Jeb Bush (11.8), and Scott Walker (8.6). I did not include other potential nominees, Ben Carson (too 10 On Dit Magazine Issue 83.10

All three of the discussed candidates oppose climate change solutions, gay marriage, welfare, federal education, government regulation, and many other internationally mainstream positions.

Some call him “The Donald,” which is an apt description, as he would probably see the other Donalds of the world as “losers,” a ter m Trump often uses. Despite his lead in the Republican primary of around 25 percent, Trump has alienated most Americans with his near-xenophobic comments on Hispanic immigrants. He said that the Mexican government was not sending its best to the USA, going so far as to label them as “rapists and murderers.” He also has a history of sexism, calling women “pigs,” “slobs,” “ugly,” and so on. However, Trump has billions of dollars in assets to fund his campaign, and refuses to back down, making him the candidate of choice for many Republicans. I have never heard him fully apologize for anything, nor release a full, thought out policy package.

Florida Governor Jeb Bush (11.8) — Right-wing.

Although Bush III seems a better nickname, “El Jebe" (pronounced Yebe by commentators) has a somewhat consistent pro-immigration stance, as well as fluency in Spanish and a Hispanic spouse.

He is the Republican party establishment candidate of choice, yet he has lost significant ground as the Tea Party activists of the Republican base flock to Donald Trump as the anti-establishment candidate.

Bush has centrist views on immigration, but is further to the right than his brother George W., advocating for an end to the Affordable Care Act, as well as numerous federal government programs in education and welfare.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (8.6) — Far right-wing.

Scott Walker, Wisconsin’s conser vative governor, passed some of the most anti-union legislation in the United States, subsequently copied in many other Republican-dominated states. He opposes immigration, all abortions, gay marriage, and gun control, while supporting an expanded role in the Middle East. ***** Moving on to the Democrats, the three top candidates are Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Joseph Biden. There are three other declared candidates: Martin O’Malley, Jim Webb, and Lincoln Chafee. None of these three are polling above four percent.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (54.0) — Center-right.

She has been called cold, calculating, and the epitome of political evolution — not a positive epithet. Hillary Clinton has been called Republicanlite. Although she has a progressive social policy platfor m, supporting gay marriage, abortion, gender pay equity, and anti-racism, she remains “Wall Street’s darling,” with a heavily pro-finance and pro-war record. Her top campaign donors are hedge funds and investment banks. While she stands at the top of Democratic polls, this is largely due to her experience as Secretary of State and the perceived inevitability of her victory. However, this is hurting her enthusiasm among supporters, as she is known as the lesser evil, and not the best representative of voters. Numerous “scandals,” some legitimate and some not, have enveloped her political career. She has a net unfavorable rating among all Americans, but a favorable rating with Democratic voters.

Oregon, and thousands more in Texas, Louisiana, Arizona, Wisconsin, Iowa, Maine, and New Hampshire. He is an extraordinary candidate; as the longest ser ving Independent in US congressional history, he has a record of strong support for organized labor, workers, gay marriage, women’s rights, protective trade, universal healthcare, free public university education for those qualified, regulations on Wall Street, and opposition to the flooding of US elections with money from what he calls “the Billionaire Class.” If elected, he would be the first social democrat and secular Jewish president. Some have criticized his moderate support for Israel and his solutions to gun control.

United States Vice President Joseph Biden (12.2) — Center Biden is President Obama’s right hand man. He’s a top negotiator and advocate of Obama’s policy, and most Americans consider him honest and loyal. Biden offers similar policy as Obama and Clinton, but there is one big caveat: he hasn’t declared his candidacy. He is currently exploring a candidacy, according to close sources, but his entry would erode Clinton’s support dramatically. Unlike Clinton, he does not suffer a tarnished, scandal and dishonesty ridden candidacy.

As for my preference, Bernie’s the only “nor mal” candidate by international standards, supporting successful policies adopted in Australia and Europe, such as guaranteed healthcare, a solid safety net, government funded university education, diplomacy-based foreign policy, greater wealth equality, stronger unions, and civil liberties from marriage to abortion, and voters’ rights to ending institutional racism. Meanwhile, the Republican candidates are Tony Abbott’s dream come true, while Hillary Clinton and Biden to a lesser extent are ideologically halfway between the Liberal Party and the right-wing part of the Labor Party.

I maintain a blog, hoskingthoughts.com, and Twitter @hoskingthoughts. Feel free to reach out with your thoughts!

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders (18.1) — Left-of-center Bernie has been surging in the polls all summer, bringing his angry “grandfather” appeal to the race. Despite looking, acting, and speaking like an ordinary American with a heavy Brooklyn accent, the news media continues to label him unelectable, despite his huge crowds — 28,000 in Portland, www.facebook.com/onditmagazine 11

High Culture WHY YOU SHOULD NOT DISMISS HIGH C ULTURE Author: Kyriaco Nikias

It’s deceptive to impose the division between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, which suggests that there is, at least to some extent, mutual exclusivity between the two. The for mer likely produces in your mind the picture of some grumpy old man at the opera, or reading Dostoevsky, and the latter an image of hipsters in vodka-drenched flannies at a warehouse party [n.b. warehouse parties are great]. This characterisation is so wrong I wouldn’t know where to begin if I were to attempt to dissuade you from shovelling the arts into these two categories. But for the purpose of appealing to you not to dismiss the riches of high artists like Stravinsky and El Greco, for example, I’ll keep to the distinction.

What is high culture? There can be no clear definition – but at least on face value let’s presume there’s an intuitive distinction between Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Ig g y Azalea.

It gets messier when people consider, for example, Mozart’s The Magic Flute to be high art, because Mozart produced this 18th Century equivalent of a modern musical to appeal to a mass audience of Ger manlanguage speakers rather than to a Latinor Italian-speaking elite.

I can’t appreciate high art; am I a philistine? Well, in a sense, yes – but it’s complicated. The assertion that underscores philistinism is that high, or ‘serious’, art is so intellectualised that its for mality diminishes its accessibility and its appeal, and moreover that

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the artist’s expression is creatively restricted by artificial modes and for m. Pop culture, if seen to be the adversary of high culture, however, supposedly addresses our imperfect desires and indulges the soul without for mality.

It’s right to rebut that this philistinism is partly based in ignorance of the depth of emotion found in the liberal themes of Chopin’s nocturnes, or of the sublimity of each brushstroke in Caravag gio’s depictions of human tragedy.

Works such as those are the material expression in the external world of the most internal emotions, ideas, and senses – I challenge the view that these are lofty concepts – wrath, misery, love, envy, placelessness, among others, are elementary states of the human condition. These works are essays on the drama of life – pure accounts of the paucities and excesses of the lives of the artists, each picture a window through which we can inspect others’ lives and better understand our own.

The tragedy of Lord Byron is one example of this – an Englishman who, having been imbued with an addiction to the cultural output of the ancient Hellenes, sacrificed his life for the cause of liberating Greece from barbarity of Ottoman rule.

Inspired by the likes of Homer and Plato, Byron’s own works of poetry and prose are themselves Greek epics; they are tales of the pursuit of pleasure, and a romantic viewpoint whereby no social structure, custom, or injustice is beyond scrutiny.

This is why high art is universal – the elementary nature of its themes means that it stands true and relevant across continents and through centuries. It is moreover the way we can understand the reason why things exist in the way they do – because high art provokes our instinctive desire to explore and to make right what we see to be wrong.

VS. LOW CULTURE LOW IS THE WAY TO GO Author: Ta ylor Rundell

My name is Taylor. I’m uncultured, and I’m proud of it.

Many of my friends make small talk in international politics. They learnt classical piano, theolog y, and all the airs and graces of polite conversation at school. They rattle off their varied pursuits with a certain pretence, and I can’t help but feel like I’m excluded from their little culture club.

But when I get caught up in one of these conversations, I can’t help but think: ‘Do you actually enjoy this? Do you genuinely appreciate the technical virtuosity, the emotion, the delicate deliberate decisions painstakingly made by your artiste of choice? Or do you just get a kick out of being a ponce?’

This doesn’t mean I think the humanities are a waste of time. Far from it: I’m a music lover and live for the perfect pop song. But to me, the joy of art comes not just from the work itself, but from the reactions of others. And frankly, popular media is the only art that most people genuinely enjoy.

It is a mistake to decry “low culture” art as being effortless garbage. Quite the opposite is true: pop music can be with as much attention to detail as a symphony. Teams of six, seven or eight producers creating the final product; every note, every tone, adjusted to get precisely stuck in the listener’s head. The same could be said of The Bachelor or Fast & Furious 7. Sure, they’re not full of literary allusions, and they can’t be said to have much beyond the surface. But they aren’t ramshackle assemblies of randomly filmed scenes. They are textbook exercises in pop psycholog y, made to elicit particular reactions from a particular audience.

art as a result. But a divergence has existed between creative work for the masses and the bourgeoisie for a long time.

All modern pop and rock music owes its existence to traditional folk music – sea shanties, drinking choruses, work songs, nursery rhymes. This is the music of the prisoner, the sailor, the parent – the commoner.

And it wasn’t shared in concert halls like the work of Beethoven. It was just catchy enough that people remembered it and joined in. There’s barely a crack of light between “Hey Diddle Diddle” and “Shake It Off ” when you look at it that way.

And let’s face it – sometimes you don’t want to have to think to enjoy something. We all talk about our ‘guilty pleasures’. We’ve all let out a laugh at Cartman’s absurd racism, or at Mr Bean running around with a turkey on his head. We’ve all joined in the bitchy sniping on The Hotplate. We’ve all had a guilty singalong to “Call Me Maybe”. No-one is ‘pure of culture’.

To look down on others for failing to revel in high art the way you do is just snobbery.

Low culture hardly earns points for subtlety or depth, but it does bring people together. In an age where our other divisions stand out so much, that can’t be such a bad thing.

A cynic might decry these as adventures in capitalism – manipulating the masses to buy into creative work, and devaluing the entire concept of

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RIDING IN CARS WITH

Author: Amelia Lee-Hammat Picture it: Adelaide, Australia. 2010. I am fresh out of high school and (thanks to a fundamental misunderstanding of what the ter m actually means) I am feeling free. It’s summer, it’s sticky, and my best friend has a car. Uni hasn’t started yet, we don’t have boyfriends, and we don’t have responsibilities.

There is nothing we can’t do – except agree on a radio station. I have not yet discovered the magic of pop music, and there is no arguing with him.

‘Who the hell are the Mountain Goats,’ he says, and knowing my 18-year-old self, I probably roll my eyes at him before giving him a stern lecture about real music. He proceeds to steadfastly ignore me and turn up the Top 40 station until I give up.

His taste in music is delightful pop trash, and at the time Katy Perry was just getting big. I found her displeasing to my pretentious teenage sensibilities, and when I saw the ‘California Gurls’ video for the first time I definitely called her a ‘Daisy Duke-wearing cupcake slut’, among other things.

While my older self would replace the slur with something less horrendous, I still don’t quite like Katy Perry enough to regret that entirely. At the time, though, I was fir m about where I stood. Pop wasn’t real music and it certainly wasn’t for smart, alternative girls like me. As far as I was concerned, I was better than all that.

As with most things, I am inclined to say this is my mother’s fault. My mum is kind of cool. Not Cool Mum™ cool, like Amy Poehler in Mean Girls.

I’d probably die if my mother ever offered me a condom – or, honestly, if she ever heard me call her cool. Please, nobody show her this. My mum is the funky kind of cool. Born in the late 60s, my parents are both the tail end of Gen X, and consequently I completely missed out on the whole Dad Rock experience. I also never got to

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have the ‘you just don’t understand my music, mum’ argument in my adolescent years, a fact I resent to this day. The soundtrack to our family road trips was early Green Day, Blink 182, Silverchair, and You Am I. I have a very vivid memory of being about 9 or 10 years old, and refusing to eat minty peas. My father, in the background, is singing ‘Say it ain’t so, I won’t eat those; they’re yuck they’re yuck they’re yuck they’re yuck yuck yuck’ to the tune of All The Small Things.

We were an alt-rock household to the bone, and as I grew older my tastes expanded to include sad white boys with guitars and nerdy indie weirdos with thick-rimmed glasses who sang about girls in sundresses. Notable mentions include The Decemberists, Stars, Ben Folds Five and all other Ben Folds related paraphernalia, Josh Pyke, The Shins … the list goes on. I delighted in being able to answer, ‘You’ve probably never heard of them’ when asked what my favourite band was. The first album I ever bought with my own money was The Whitlams’ ‘Eternal Nightcap’. (I was five. I told this to their frontman Tim Freedman at a show in 2011 and he said, ‘God, that’s an inappropriate album for a child. You know it’s about heroin, right?’) I told everyone who would listen about how much I loved Bright Eyes, and gleefully waited for them to say ‘Who?’ so I could demonstrate my clearly superior music taste.

In short, I was insufferable. But then along came Kesha.

She was still Ke$ha with the dollar sign then, and the specific thing that did it was the music video for Blow. You know, the one where she’s shooting James Van Der Beek with rainbow lasers? There’s a reference to monster cheese, all the waiters

are unicorns. You know, that music video. I was enthralled. She looked like she was having so much fun. None of the sad white boys whose music I was constantly championing ever looked like they were having fun. But here was Kesha, having a unicorn laser fight and more importantly the time of her goddamn life. It didn’t matter that the lyrics were simple and contained no coded references to classic books I only ever pretended to read, it didn’t matter that nobody was singing about anything intellectual like I’d come to believe a song had to in order to be musically worthy. I was enthralled. Pop music was fun.

That realisation was really all it took. Pop didn’t have to be convoluted and self-referential, it just had to make you happy, and therefore I was allowed to listen to it. The summer of 2010/2011 was the beginning of my pop music education. We drove around the city, voguing to Avril Lavigne’s ‘What The Hell’ and singing ‘California Gurls’ over the top of ‘Tik Tok’. We went halfway across the country to see Adam Lambert live. When we moved in together in 2012, we spent hours playing Mario Kart with Pink Friday on repeat in the background. I still can’t hear ‘Starships’ without thinking about Rainbow Road. Since then, my best friend has mostly moved on to a burning passion for Scandinavian pop music, and I can appreciate that to an extent. Have you seen Måns Zemerlöw?

If not, you should. But the songs of that summer are what stuck with me, and what’s infor med my musical passions in recent years.

At the tender age of 5, my childhood best friend and I for med the We Hate Britney Spears club and didn’t really ‘get’ the whole Hanson thing. At 12, I made fun of Beyoncé for rhyming ‘minute’ with ‘minute’ in ‘Irreplaceable’. At 15, I listened

nearly exclusively to sad boys who made sad music and anything associated with Pete Wentz. At 18, I discovered a whole world of music I had previously deemed beneath me. I am 23 now, and I own every One Direction album. I saw This Is Us in cinemas, and I own the DVD, and I am only a little ashamed to admit that I cry watching it every time. Last week I finally got to have the ‘you don’t understand my music, mum’ argument, and it was about my mother criticising Harry Styles. I can rap not only ‘Superbass’ but the bridge of ‘Fergilicious’, and the most played song on my iPod this week is Little Mix’s ‘Black Magic’. I often refer to Taylor Swift as my wife, and I asked my parents for tickets to her upcoming Australian tour for my 24th birthday. I actually sent a text this week that said, ‘We have to reschedule, I’m having a lot of feelings about Louis Tomlinson and I’m not sure you’re ready to love that side of me’. It’s not a phase, mum, I’m a Louis girl til I die.

Now, at 23, you could not pay me to defend The Beatles, and if asked about them I will probably call them a pretentious jumped-up boyband instead of the greatest band that ever lived. It will probably never be wise to get me started about the Mountain Goats unless you’re prepared to spend two hours listening to me describe each song in loving detail, and if asked I will say my favourite song is Manic Street Preachers’ ‘If You Tolerate This’, but the summer I discovered pop music was the most magical summer of my life. I still, however, reser ve the right to dislike Katy Perry.

Some things there’s just no overcoming.

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No Shirt, No Sho es, No Privilege, No S ervice:

T h e Tro ub l i n g Re a l i t y o f Aw a r d S h ow s Author: Lur Alghurabi

Since 1927 only 34 of 2947 Oscar statuettes have been awarded to black people. That’s 1 per cent. Only one black woman has won Best Actress. Only one black producer has won Best Picture. In 87 years, not a single black filmmaker has won Best Director. In fact, only 3 have been nominated at all. Somehow, the Academy has maintained a 99 per cent racially pure awards show since its inception almost a centur y ago.

So where is all this segregation coming from? Do we not have enough talented black people, or do we just not have enough black people? To answer that, check out what happened when rumours spread that Idris Elba was the next James Bond. In few words, everyone lost their shit. Radio host Rush Limbaugh said that James Bond was white and Scottish, and that’s how he must always remain.

Author Anthony Horowitz said Elba was ‘too street’ to play the role. Of course, both these guys were sure to make it clear that ‘they’re not racist,’ which would have been cool had these comments not been actually racist, whether intentionally or not.

Creating an empowered black character is just out of the nor m for Hollywood. It’s been obsessed with the white saviour in its movies for so long that there’s no room for a black guy in control (who isn’t an outlaw or a gangster). Think Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln: black characters do nothing throughout except wait for a god-sent white man to rescue them. The Soloist: a black violinist is homeless until Robert Downey Jr lands him some music gigs. It’s a long list: Dangerous Minds; The Blind Side; 12 Years a Slave; The Matrix; Avatar;

16 On Dit Magazine Issue 83.10

The Help; Indiana Jones and many more. So it’s not just the Oscars that dismiss black people, it’s the casting directors as well.

Of course, representation is not something only movies play a part in. Black artists have been snubbed at the film, TV and music awards for decades. The Golden Globes, BAFTAs, MTV Awards and Billboards are all being criticized for their failure to acknowledge black talents. We all know Kendrick Lamar and what a lyrical genius he is (If you don’t, get your shit together). His work’s been described as a bravura masterpiece, and ‘the ultimate rap album’. But, he’s received half as many awards as Ig g y Azalea, and a third of her nominations. Ig g y Azalea. Really. Ig g y, whose abundance of talent and wit has brought us the lyrical masterpiece of ‘fuck you bitches, you ugly bitches, you stupid bitches, you dummy bitches, you dusty bitches don’t touch me bitches whoa whoa whoa whoa no no no no no.’ I really wish I was making this up.

The issue goes beyond award shows. The snubbing of black people in music is instilled among white artists themselves. Miley Cyrus twerks on camera with black dancers surrounding her, and the camera shows none of their faces. Taylor Swift shoots a video in Africa featuring an all white cast.

When the 2015 VMA nominations were released, the industry’s attitude towards black people became clearer than ever, for a bunch of reasons.

Despite Nicki Minaj’s Anaconda video breaking the YouTube record for most views in 24 hours, it was snubbed for Video of The Year. Whether you enjoy Nicki’s style or not, this is one of the

Creating an empowered black character is just out of the nor m for Hollywood. It’s been obsessed with the white saviour in its movies for so long that there’s no room for a black guy in control (who isn’t an outlaw or a gangster) few videos that have defined 2015’s music for its controversy and popularity. Now you might say she wasn’t necessarily snubbed because she’s black, since other black women have won this award in the past. But, the racism became even clearer when Nicki reacted. By voicing her opinion about award snubbing, she was instantly portrayed by multiple online magazines and entertainment websites as the angry, crazy black woman picking catfights. She and her political opinions were portrayed as merely bitchy. Articles about this were accompanied by pictures of the angelic looking Taylor, and Nicki looking absolutely furious, pulling some funny facial expressions that Taylor’s face is apparently too lovely to have ever made.

Has the media been treating white women who complain about things in the same manner? Not really. When Taylor Swift complained about iTunes’ policy regarding their artists, not only did iTunes listen, but she was also hailed as a modern day pop culture hero. But why isn’t Nicki seen as a hero herself for speaking out against the US’s constant failure to recognize black artists?

This issue gets more serious as black people are being killed every day by racist police officers and young terrorists. With Donald Trump openly and happily stating that ‘laziness is a trait in blacks’, with Sarah Palin asking Obama to ‘stop playing the race card’, with the death of Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, and thousands of innocent black people by racist shooters, (mis)representation in the media isn’t in any way improving racial har mony in the US. The industry is collectively leaving out black voices, only to reinforce a white America where the black individual has not the slightest chance to access equal opportunities.

It would be strange now, after 87 years of the Academy, to expect a radical change in its race relations. The nominees and winners obviously reflect the taste of the voters: 94 per cent white, 76 per cent male and 63 years old on average. This is the awards show of old white men, so what do you expect? Instead of focusing on ‘repairing’ the Academy, audiences should work to empower the work of black artists themselves and resist this racial segregation. Thankfully, this is already happening online. Perfor mer Dylan Marron created a YouTube channel that features videos showing all the scenes in a movie where a nonwhite person says anything. It shows that in many movies, non-white people get less than 2 minutes of speaking time. The series is titled Every Single Word Spoken, and I strongly recommend it to find out how all your favourite movies terribly fail the Marron Test (cool coincidence: Marron also means brown in Spanish).

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The Definitive Guide to Doctors;

From Eccleston to Capaldi Author: Kendra Pratt

Ninth Do ct or: Christopher Ec cleston Cat chphras e: Brilliant.

Just like his no-nonsense, no-frills outfit of a leather jacket and plain t-shirt, the Ninth Doctor was less whimsical and more down to Gallifrey than other incarnations. Still reeling from the effects of the Time War, Nine travelled the universe with pain in his eyes, Rose in his heart and a gift of air from his lungs for anyone he came across. He may not be the people’s favourite, but he had an undeniable char m beneath his sometimes-brash exterior.

Eccleston also had the challenge of resurrecting a television series that had been off-air for sixteen years. Public expectations were high.

Is he my favourite doctor? No. He lacks the necessary follicular extravagance to win my heart, but he does have my respect. Eccleston is often overlooked as he was with us for only one season, but he damn well did a good job of it, otherwise we wouldn’t have been graced with another seven. So we all owe a great deal to our large-eared, straighttalking Doctor from the north.

Artist: Carly Har vy

angry Sycorax. The Tenth incarnation was a fir m espouser of the Doctor’s anti-weapon stance, but he liked to loosen up on occasion by inventing the banana daiquiri at a party in 18th century France.

After the seriousness and pain of the previous Doctor, Tennant brings an almost childlike enthusiasm to the role. He is always kitted out in a brown or black pinstripe suit with a pair of Converse All Stars, and has been known to bring out his “brainy specs” on occasion. According to Donna he is ‘too skinny for words’ and his definitive hairstyle is a shock of untidy brown locks.

Tennant’s final episode might just have been one of the saddest moments in television history, and I’m still not entirely sure that my broken heart has recovered. That said, he did toy with us (and Rose) quite a bit, with suspected romances with Queen Elizabeth, Madame du Pompadour, and of course his careless treatment of Martha’s unrequited love.

Tennant, you know not what you do.

Rating:

Rating:

Tenth Do ct or: David Tennant Cat chphras e: Allons-y!

Ahhh Tennant, where to begin? I may be a little biased, as I would probably give my last regeneration to play with Tennant’s sonic screwdriver (if you know what I mean). The Tenth Doctor graced our screens for three seasons and an assortment of random serials. He is arguably the most lovable doctor, and one of the most emotional.

His highlights include a deliciously undefined and unfulfilled but most definitely tangible romance with Rose Tyler (who didn’t cry their eyes out when he had to leave her at Bad Wolf Bay?) as well as his constant battle with the Master, whom he badly wanted to save. And let’s not forget the time he quoted the Lion King to an assembly of 18 On Dit Magazine Issue 83.10

Eleventh Do ct or: Matt Smith Cat chphras e: G eronimo!

All of a sudden Matt Smith comes crashing (literally) onto our screens as the Eleventh Doctor, and his first episode is still one of my favourites.

Watching Smith eat a variety of foods from beans (‘beans are evil, bad, bad beans’) to yogurt (‘I hate yoghurt, it’s just stuff with bits in it’) and finally settling on a delicious meal of fish fingers and custard is an endlessly entertaining scene. His beautiful relationship with Amelia Pond as her father figure, best friend, possible romance, and finally son-in-law (yeah…don’t ask, it’s confusing) blossoms over three seasons. His relationship with Clara makes you want to poke your eye out with a fork.

Matt Smith is the youngest ever Doctor, but it’s obvious that his wild eccentricities, such as the bow ties and the fez, hide a deep pain, which he refuses to deal with. Matt Smith could be seen as the Doctor who ran away. He left Amy and Rory after they believed he was dead and he ran away from the memory of River after her death. Perhaps he is childlike because he avoids his responsibilities.

Although he is one of the lightest characters on the show, he is also one of the darkest. Devil’s Run is the turning point for number Eleven, the battle in which he calls in favours from every person he ever saved, in order to save himself. Not only is it terrifying (they call him the oncoming stor m, and establish an entire order to stop the monster that they believe is the Doctor) but it doesn’t even work. They win the battle, but in the process Amelia loses her newborn daughter.

There is more to Matt Smith than his bowtie and tweed jacket, and he takes us from the highest highs to the lowest lows. My big gest concern, however, is that his eyebrows seem to slowly disappear from episode to episode. Should we send out a search party?

Rating:

Twelth Do ct or : Peter C apaldi Cat chphras e: Unknown.

The Twelfth Doctor is still pretty new, so I’m hesitant to pass judgement on him. It always takes a while to adjust to a new Doctor, like putting on a new pair of shoes. They chafe for a while and you long for your old comfortable pair, but you know

you have to push through and get used to them.

So what do we know about him so far? Well, he’s the oldest Doctor since the series was rebooted, a throwback to the earlier incarnations. He is also angrier and more irritable than our previous Time Lords, so no chance of a weird age-gap romance between him and Clara, unless she has some pretty serious Daddy issues.

Peter Capaldi was a popular choice for the role; he had a strong fan base from his previous series, The Thick of It. He often seems to care very little for the safety of Clara and other unfortunate souls who manage to get caught up in his misadventures, but it is clear that deep down, he can’t help but look after them. Although he is often frustrating and even outright rude, we can still see the essential glimmer of the Doctor lurking not-too-deep below the surface.

If we’re being honest, his sex appeal is zero. If we’re being really honest, he’s not too bad for a 57-year-old man — if you tell anyone I said that I’ll deny it. What I do like about the Twelfth Doctor, however, is that his age changes the tone of the show. It focuses less on appealing to hipsters and teeny-boppers (God, I must be getting old…) and more on what the show is really about: unbelievably confusing plots, endlessly imaginative alien creatures and always using the companion as an audience surrogate.

Rating:

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HUMANS OF

ADELAIDE UNIVERSITY

1) H: 90 per cent of the time I’m awake.

S: Always on Facebook, almost ever y second.

2) S: Angelina. She’s already a part of the UN and has a bit of experience with political issues.

H: Brad Pitt because he said Angelina.

Hassam (Mech Eng) & Sam (Petroleum & Mech Eng)

3) S: Game of Thrones. It gets me in the mood.

H: Antman because it’s shit and nobody wants to watch it.

4) H & S: Duck face!

Calum (Mech Eng + Aero)

Kai, Thierry, Eden, Lauren (Left to right) (Health Science) 1) K: One or two hours.

T: No more than half an hour.

E & L: About three hours.

3) E: Blue Mountain State.

K: Rick and Morty.

T: Suits.

L: I don’t really watch TV.

2) T: Eminem – he seems trustworthy.

E: Floyd Mayweather.

L: Beyonce.

K: I’ll stick with Kanye.

4) E: Selfie sticks, oh my god they’re awful!

T: Selfie spots.

L: YOLO

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1) Two or three hours 2) I wouldn’t vote for a celebrity if I had a choice, they don’t often have the necessar y skills. If I had to though, I would go with Derek Muller who’s a Youtube celebrity, at least he has a science degree.

3) Not a ‘Netf lix and chill’ kind of guy.

4) The way we’ve dealt with various political issues. Our handling of the refugee crisis has been horrendous.

Even today we’ve gotten to the point where we look at our dealing of gay rights issues quite cynically.

1) How much time p er day do you sp end on s o cial me dia?

2) Kanye West wants to run for President in 2020. Which c elebrity would you like to s e e ele cte d?

3) Which TV show is b est for ‘Netflix and chill’?

4) What will b e the most embarrassing cultural trend of our time when p e ople lo ok back?

Ben (Classics), Garrett (Maths), & Pyotr (Demographics) Suresan & Marlee (Commerce)

1) B: One or two hours. G: Three hours.

P: Two hours.

1) S: Two hours M: Three hours 2) S: Will Smith, he doesn’t seem too arrogant.

M: Kevin Parker. He seems like a good guy and he’d probably mellow ever yone out with his psychedelic music.

3) S: Sex and the city, just ‘cos.

M: Titanic, just ‘cos.

4) S: Top knot.

M: Fashion of pop idols. Kanye West’s masks that he wears during perfor mances.

Jaden Smith’s smocks.

2) B: Nick ‘The Honey Badger’ Cummins.

G: Donald Trump.

P: Jeremy Clarkson. I actually signed a petition for him when I was fourteen.

3) B: Something short.

G: The Ali G Show.

P: The Notebook. B & G (in response): No! 4) B: Selfies P: Selfie rods.

G: Dumb words like ‘bae’. Phrases like ‘Netf lix and chill’. Selfie rods are here to stay though.

Lur (Arts) 1) Two hours – all on Overheard.

2) Kanye for starters. He could counteract the George W effect. I’d also vote for Chief Keef (lol jk) 3) Community. Funny is always sexy.

4) There are so many. Ugg boots though. What the hell are they even?!

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“WANNA COME OVER FOR

AND CHILL?” Author: Tash Loh

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Artis t: Emil y Hart

“Netf lix and chill”. The for mer, a vastly popular online streaming ser vice that has recently opened our humble nation to a world of inter national entertainment previously unavailable to us. The latter, an innocent for m of slang originating somewhere in 70s teen culture with a mildly “cool” implication of hanging either with a friend, a partner or by oneself. Put them together, and you’ve crafted an invitation to a good, wholesome evening of entertainment and relaxation with someone of interest to you. That’s it. Wholesome relaxation. Nothing else*. Here’s how to craft the perfect personalised phrase to get to know your potential bae a little bit better:

‘Wanna come over and watch Bl ackfish and chill?’

Translation: let me show you how worldly and conscious I am of animal welfare and contemporary issues. Let me “wow” you with my extensive knowledge of the perils of megafauna captivity, while we both educate ourselves on the consequences of big corporations exploiting relatively defenceless animals for profit. Afterwards, we can indulge in some wine and cheese. As the vino flows and our inhibitions lower, we can let the blurriness overcome our senses and dare to risk... ... going on the #askseaworld hashtag and watching Seaworld defend themselves, as we laugh the night away and remain as innocent as Tilikum.

‘I’m feeling up for a marathon run, wanna binge watch OITNB and chill?’

Translation: I’ve had a relatively productive day and I’m feeling pretty confident in my stamina right now. I’d love to engage in something that’s gonna take me all night, and what better way to do that than an epic binge-watch of Orange is the New Black? We can rug up on the couch in our comfy clothes, immerse ourselves in Litchfield and snack on popcorn all night. Let our creativity get the better of us as we watch the relationship between Piper and Alex unfold. Let our minds and hands wander as we engage in the not-so-innocent activity of planning how we could probably make a metric crap-tonne of money by smug gling drugs internationally. We are now experts in how to handle prison, after all.

‘Wanna ruin our childhoods by watching Shrek on Netflix and chillin’?’

Translation: I’m feeling like I want to escape from the endless sexual innuendos bombarded at us in our everyday lives by watching a good old heartfelt children’s film with no ulterior connotations whatsoever. Come on over and find that Lord Farquaad isn’t the only one compensating for something: I have a fast internet connection to make up for the fact I can’t afford Netflix HD. And here, HD is something we really, really enjoy, but I guess just D will have to do. Join me for a night of childish fun as I show you my HUGE love for Smash Mouth and impress you with my ability to recite every single line from Shrek 1 and 2 (we’ll pretend the other two films never happened.)

Whether you’re in the mood for sharing an intellectual journey with your clever-as-acucumber honey, or wanting to feel slightly daring and empowered as you watch the inmates make it through daily prison life, or tap into fond childhood memories and condition bae to enjoy your company as much as they enjoyed preadolescence, you should be well-equipped to send them a good old-fashioned invitation to join you for a classic night in. Embrace the new generation’s affiliation for technolog y, and feel truly “up with the times” by engaging in an outing (or in-ing) reflective of our cultured ancestor’s fondness for opera, ballet and theatre dates. With a world of entertainment right there on your laptop screen, what partnered activity could possibly be more interesting?

*Contrary to popular belief, “Netflix and chill” often implies much l ess whol esome activities.

Beware of scandalous fuckboiz/gurlz.

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Se lfie s Through Selfies: if you take them, you’re a self-obsessed jerk; if you don’t, you’re probably ugly; and if you don’t know what they are, you’re most likely already dead. For the benefit of our non-living readership, selfies are basically the latest and greatest reason older generations have found to disparage the generation that will take over the planet when they die. Alternatively, a selfie is a photo one takes of oneself taken with one’s mobile phone. Either definition will get you through even the most animated discussion on the subject.

Now, despite the fact that your parents probably have at least five photo albums devoted to their early twenties, they are almost certainly the kind of people who like to think that selfie culture is the root of all evil and economic collapse, instead of, say, ill-considered budget decisions by the politicians of their generation. To the doomsayers’ collective, I have two things to say.

The First: Don’t act like you went backpacking with a friend because you liked them; admit that you went in pairs because you needed someone to take Polaroids of you. You’re just jealous because the invention of the front camera allows me to roam the world sans an unsuitable travel partner.

The Second: A well-researched and considerably objection than the first, starting now.

longer

The idea of recording and preser ving your identity, your life, is not a new thing. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that the fear of dying and being forgotten is pretty much universal among our mortal compatriots. Now, as time and technolog y progress, people attempt to leave their own stains

The Age s

Aut hor : Lan i Ger bi

upon the sheets of humanity in different ways; some people deface public property with the classic ‘someone irrelevant was here’, others paint their likenesses on cave walls or canvasses, and still others split their souls into seven pieces and scatter them around England, and they would have gotten away with it too if it hadn’t been for those meddling kids – but I digress, mix my references, and call attention to my own digression to avoid having to write myself out of a hole. All of these are horrible crimes for a writer. Moving on, or rather, backwards. About two thousand years backwards, and several thousand kilometres North West to Pompeii. (Yes, the place that was buried under volcanic ash while Jon Snow was at his night job as a pretty, leather-clad slave boy. No, it’s not fanfiction; enjoy.)

In that great and now somewhat unsettling city of corpses, there are plenty of examples of people wanting to be remembered; from the traditional minting of rulers’ faces on coins, to the somewhat more casual ‘Secundus defecated here’, etched thrice onto the wall of a latrine. (Well done, Secundus; you truly are the suppository of all wisdom. Or perhaps I should address my compliments to the latrine…)

Going back another 20000 years or so, we find a woman’s face car ved from mammoth ivory in the Czech Republic. Yes, that’s right. The oldest portrait is so old that it’s made out of Manny the Mammoth from Ice Age. But there’s not all that much happening 20000 years ago, so let’s move about 18000 years forward to the Classical Era. That oft revered part of history when Greeks, I think it’s safe to say, at the top of their game. At least as far as cool stories go. Apparently. (Okay so The Odyssey covers about twenty years and reads in real time, but they did

Art ist: Sop hia Geo rgi adi s

come up with Hercules, and you can’t argue with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.)

The Greeks loved sculptures. We’ve all seen an ungodly amount of those curly-haired marble renderings of various ancient Greeks, yes? Why do you think they had those things car ved? For fun?

Because they enjoyed sitting still for ages? I mean seriously: do you know how long enough it takes for some dude to make a face out of marble? It’s a long, long time. Most likely, the Greeks just liked seeing their own faces – just like us.

And while we’re on the subject of things that take a really long time, let’s talk about portraits.

Portraiture had a little down time during the Dark Ages but it lurched back to life in the Middle Ages, and supplied us with all of those wonderful pictures of women with weird cone headdresses.

Google it. You’ll see.

The Renaissance was even better though because at that point in time, a little thing called humanism came along to help ruin the comfortable hegemony of the Catholic Church. You know what people did when they started to care about humanism?

They painted themselves as saints. No, it’s not a metaphor. Wealthy European families would commission artists to paint famous biblical scenes, featuring themselves and their relatives in the leading roles. I kid you not. Still think we’re in the lead for ‘Most Self-Absorbed Generation Ever’?

I don’t know about you but none of my friends routinely post staged pictures of themselves blessing lepers. #Blessed, anyone?

So if we’ve always been hideously vain, what’s the difference between our generation and every generation that came before? The front camera, actually. Literally just the front camera.

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NEW SLAVES Author: Grace Denne y

I suppose you could say it was my fault, really. The usual Christmas lunch a.k.a. I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here, featuring me (celebrity), my Grandpa (camera man/ultimate troll) and my distant relatives who I never see unless someone is born, carks it or cooks a feast every once in a while. So, with my red paper crown perched on my head like a mountain climber dangerously close to slipping, and being more than a little merry on the bubbles from the methode traditionelle, I leant over to my little cousin, who was preoccupied on her iPhone, and sug gested she ‘add me on Snapchat’.

This proposition soon came back to haunt me, much like the prawn cocktail I’d consumed as entree.

Over the course of the next few days, I received a wide range of snaps. A video of her singing “Problem” by Ariana Grande (not too shabby, I must admit for her infant vocal chords and 100 second story of all the outtakes), her ‘organising the makeup collection’ (two lipsmackers, an old cracked blush and an eyeshadow palette from Kmart), and another video of her ‘& best baeee’ going to ‘get a starbucks’. By the time I received a snap declaring that ‘BOYS SUCK. Y R THEY SO LAME’ complete with a duckface to rival no other – I’d had enough. Replying with a ‘Boys are smelly and you don’t need them. Go and play outside’ snap with an accompanying selfie that truly proved why my nickname was Turtle in my Gap Year, I wondered how I, at nearly 21, had suddenly become the old stick in the mud shaking my fist at the younger generation.

I may be independent, but in my eyes I’m still in the category of “les enfants ter rible” by the standards of all the ‘real’ adults in the family. Had I pestered my older cousin with a premature pretence of wisdom, glamour and grandeur? I loved Bratz Dolls and Delta Goodrem and Star Wars movies at nine. And flared corduroy jeans. My crush was Chad Michael Murray, and the

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Artis t: Mary Angl e y

furthest I’d “gone” with a boy was daring a friend to yank a piece of his hair out for a love potion. I suddenly felt like I’d seen something I couldn’t unsee – could I ever return to a world where I hadn’t been told I resembled Miranda Sings in an unironic way by a pre-teen?

It’s nothing new to criticize t h e

younger generation. Old mate Socrates is famous for his comments on the ‘children (of today) that love luxury; [and] have bad manners’ and that guy didn’t even have basic amenities. It could even be said that in modern society, the crux of the problem began with the overly pomaded hair and hip g yrations of Elvis and the 50s, an age when the whole concept of the ‘teenager’ was developed – for marketing, for freedom, for establishing an identity. But somehow that rebel without a cause grind seems a lot more innocent than today. The inception of social media as a nor m for all ages has created a thrusting, twerking, contouring, faking, tanning, enhancing crop top wearing Lolita – the nor mative age of which seems to be steadily decreasing.

They’re younger, and not wiser.

BAES, BOYS, SQUADS, JUICE, GYM, BOOTY. It’s like a new age Psalm. They talk about ‘Netflix and chill’ and ‘fuckboys’ and I’m all up in here like, ‘I literally just went to the drive in for the first time the other week and we ate pizza and actual just chilled’ (albeit, we didn’t have drive ins where I’m from so yes, late to that Harlem Shake I know). But what I don’t understand is how these girls are having problems worth turning themselves in to Medusa for at 13.

It’s nothing new to criticize the younger generation.

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ON DIT Author: Tom Cernev

Have you ever been driving home at night on an empty country road, with the nearest gas station over 10 kilometres away? Just as your favourite song starts it’s interrupted by static. Your hand moves to retune the radio as your headlights begin to flicker. Your car grounds to a halt and that’s when you see it.

I can safely say that I have never seen an unidentified flying object (UFO as commonly known), let alone an extraterrestrial. Maybe that’s a good thing. As a budding scientist I’m not sure what I’d think if I had. What would you think if I told you I saw one?

It would be only natural to doubt the story without any evidence and see it as an embellished tale. But maybe we should take UFOs and extraterrestrials more seriously, regardless of how much pop culture has warped the idea of them.

But really? UFOs? Aliens? This is even more ridiculous than asteroid mining! Before you give me my foil hat and show me the door, I promise we won’t be talking about Area 51. It turns out there are some people who take these claims ver y seriously and there’s even some science behind it all.

Extraterrestrials are everywhere in pop culture thanks to TV and movies but also to the crazy conspiracy theories that just never go away – you must have seen the X-files or at least Dr W ho?

Surely you’ve heard of the Roswell incident? The legitimate side to all this has been overshadowed by pop culture, but scientists have given it some thought! Physicist Brian Cox, for one, believes we might find life on Mars (relax, H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds was just a story!). Also NASA crashed through the pop culture boundary last year, telling the world they hoped to find extraterrestrial life within 20 years. And sorry to all avid conspiracy theorists but they also said there’s no evidence 28 On Dit Magazine Issue 83.10

humans have thus far seen such life, let alone interacted with it. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden has said that, owing to the enor mity of space, it’s highly improbable that we’re alone.

But that’s it! Space is enormous. There must be something out there; probability tells us that. Have you ever seen Contact? Carl Sagan’s protagonist Ellie Arroway definitely got lucky when she received a message from Vega, or did she? How many alien civilisations could there be, and what would they be like? I can’t answer these questions, and even scientists find it hard to. But we do have one ace up our sleeve: an equation that tells us how many communicating civilisations we could expect in our galaxy.

N = R* × fp × ne × fl × fi × fc × L

N : Number of civilisations in the Milky Way Galaxy that are detectable R* : Rate of for mation of stars that are suitable for the development of intelligent life fp : Fraction of those stars with planetary systems ne : Number of planets in a solar system that have an environment suitable for life fl : Fraction of suitable planets on which life eventually appears fi : Fraction of planets with life for which that life is intelligent fc : Fraction of civilisations that have technolog y that can communicate across space L : Length of time that a civilisation sends signals into space

Devised by physicist Frank Drake in 1961, it looks more complicated than it is. To simplify matters, let’s think of the Drake equation as a recipe, in which each different letter is an ingredient, and depending on the value of the letter (i.e. the amount of ingredient in the mix) we have a different number of civilisations, N (i.e. a different type of cake).

Let’s bake our cake by adding some values. The original estimate by Frank Drake gave 18 750 000 communicating civilisations in our galaxy!

Estimates of the number of galaxies in the universe are in the range of 100 to 200 billion, and after some maths we see there could be 2 812 500 000 billion communicating civilisations in the universe. But relax; this is just an estimate and

Independence Day was just a movie. The variables are speculative; a range of possibilities exists. So let’s change our ingredients and make a new cake.

Using today’s skeptical values we would have only one communicating civilisation in our galaxy, but the space beyond our galaxy is pretty big, so we would still expect 78 billion in the universe – yes, this is a conser vative estimate.

While this sounds incredible, remember that we’re using probable values, based on ver y sweeping assumptions. As far as we’re aware, we’re the only life in the universe.

There’s another problem. If this estimate is anywhere near correct, where is everybody? Our galaxy, let alone the universe, should be teeming with life that we know about! Maybe aliens exist but don’t want to talk to us, or maybe Men In Black is accurate and they already live among us ... But in my opinion neither is true. There is one other solution: the possibility that most civilisations self-destruct before they can achieve proper space communication or travel.

Surely you saw Interstellar last year, where Matthew McConaughey leads the mission to find a new Earth as ours slowly became uninhabitable. Like in the movie, eventually something will threaten Earth and force us to consider our options, whether it’s an asteroid (remember the dinosaurs?), climate change, nuclear weapons, or something else entirely. It’s not unreasonable to believe that the majority of civilisations self-destruct.

Maybe pop culture does have it right. There could be extraterrestrials everywhere out there and just because we don’t have any evidence for them certainly doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Although there’s probably no Doctor in a blue police box, there may well be microbes on mars. So, leave the tin foil in the cupboard and the boards off the windows; an invasion isn’t looming. Just make sure that next time someone asks you if you believe in extraterrestrials, you ask if they know the Drake Equation.

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FIVE GREAT SOUNDTRACKS Author: Andrew Lang

Soundtracks are a tricky thing to get right. Too little attention and they can do nothing for the work they’re written for; too much attention and they can overtake it.

A good soundtrack, used well, can elicit incredible reactions from the viewer, elevating something good to something even more incredible. Even more difficult is taking that soundtrack out of its original contexts, which has the danger of leaving the music stale and lifeless. The following five albums are personal favourites of mine, both as scores and as standalone works, and are all available for you to listen to on Spotify.

THE FOUNTAIN – CLINT MANSELL WITH MOGWAI & KRONOS QUARTET The score for The Fountain was my first foray into the brilliance of soundtrack albums, and what an introduction it was. Directed by Black Swan’s Darren Aronofsky, the film follows three sets of characters – all played by Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz – from different time periods, whose stories interweave and interconnect to reflect themes of creation myths, mortality, and love. It’s a stunningly ambitious film, with a soundtrack composed by Aronofsky’s longtime collaborator Clint Mansell to match it completely.

Featuring Scottish post-rock greats Mogwai and contemporary string ensemble Kronos Quartet, the soundtrack manages to encompass a wide variety of genres and soundscapes in its mere 46 minutes. The score’s interweaving motifs give a huge sense of connectedness to the soundtrack, perfectly supplementing the film’s epic, timespanning scope. Together We W ill Live Forever, the piano solo that plays during the film’s credits, is achingly beautiful in particular. And let’s be honest, it’s one of the few things Mogwai have done that are actually worth noting.

THE MASTER – JONNY GREENWOOD Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2012 totally-not-aboutScientolog y film The Master follows a World War II veteran strug gling with alcoholism, who stows

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away on a yacht owned by Lancaster Dodd. Dodd is the leader of “The Cause”, a religious cult that’s definitely not Scientolog y in any way. Dodd begins to convert the man to this cult under the guise of helping him with his past traumas, with questionable results. The soundtrack was composed

by Jonny Greenwood, Radiohead’s shag g y-haired lead guitarist, and was perfor med by the London Contemporary Orchestra.

Under any other composer, the film would almost certainly have had an entirely different tone, and would have made for a far less affecting piece of cinema. Under Greenwood’s direction, though, it’s a whirlwind of avant-garde orchestrations and dissonant strings, setting up an ominous feeling that lasts throughout the whole film. The score manages to feel experimental without being completely unlistenable – it’s certainly difficult at times, and requires a certain amount of conscious listening in order to fully appreciate, but if you have the time then it’s worth checking out. As well as the contemporary classical tracks scored

by Greenwood, there are four tracks of songs from the film’s era, including songs sung by Ella Fitzgerald and Jo Stafford. Did I mention that it’s not about Scientolog y?

CLOUD ATLAS – TOM TYKWER, REINHOLD HEIL & JOHNNY KLIMEK I’ll start this off with a disclaimer – I didn’t actually enjoy Cloud Atlas all that much. It’s by no means a

bad movie, just a confused one that bit off a little more than it could chew given its source material (David Mitchell’s brilliant 2004 novel of the same name). That being said, the story behind the film and its strug gle to be made is admirable. Funded entirely by government funding, independent companies, and the filmmakers themselves, its $100 million budget makes it one of the most expensive independent films ever made, and was almost abandoned on several occasions due to lack of finance.

But the soundtrack. The soundtrack. It is glorious.

Written by Tom Tykwer, one of the film’s directors, and his longtime collaborators Reinhold Heil and Johnny Klimek, it’s easily the most incredible part of the movie, and considering the importance of music to the overall storyline, it’s an even big ger success. A running motif of the film is “The Cloud Atlas Sextet”, a work composed by one of the characters that’s apparently one of the most beautiful songs ever written. Most composers would crack under the pressure of trying to write to this kind of blueprint, but not Tykwer and friends. The film’s central piano theme is simple yet dazzling, and manages to only be used sparingly in the film without irritating the viewer completely.

The soundtrack album is a lengthy one at 80 minutes, and encompasses a wide variety of styles, effortlessly moving between electronica, choirs & orchestras, minimalist piano, rock, amongst many others. It’s a stunning listen in or out of the contexts of the film, and well worth a listen, even just for that piano motif.

RACHEL’S – SYSTEMS/LAYERS Rachel’s was a post-rock/contemporary classical collective that existed in the mid nineties and early 2000s under the direction of bandleader Jason Noble. The group were a tour de force in the early days of neoclassical and post-rock, and deser ve far more credit than they ever seem to receive for their efforts in bringing minimalist music into the mainstream. Systems/Layers was their final full release, and was scored in collaboration with New York’s SITI Company as a combined work for theatre and dance.

The album is easily the most frantic of their works, but easily their best, combining chamber music, rock, ambient music, field recordings, found sounds and spoken word. This constant shift of genre, sometimes even during tracks, would seem almost confused or disorganised, but somehow the chaos in the work gives the record its sense of unity. Last

Things Last, one of the only songs by Rachel’s to include vocals, is a particularly heartbreaking affair, and Even/Odd gives a beautiful sense of urgency in its veering, shifting instrumentation.

Having not seen the perfor mance that the work was written for, I can’t say whether or not the score works as a soundtrack in the contexts of the theatrical work. But as an album, it’s brilliant.

Utterly, perfectly, completely brilliant.

PRIMER/UPSTREAM COLOR – SHANE CARRUTH Okay, okay, okay, fine, you got me. It’s not 5 soundtracks, it’s 6. I hope you’re happy. But trying to go past Shane Carruth’s two experimental science fiction masterpieces Primer and Upstream Color and trying to choose between the two is an almost impossible task, let alone trying to choose between their soundtracks.

Primer was Carruth’s first feature, made entirely independently with Carruth assuming most of the roles on and off camera – as well as composing the soundtrack, he was the film’s director, producer, writer, main star, cinematographer, editor, and sound designer. The movie is notoriously impossible to decipher – Carruth studied physics specifically for the movie’s time travel-driven plot, and as a result the movie is entrenched in jargon and technical dialogue. Attempting to understand the plot after a single viewing is an exercise in madness. Made on a budget of just $7000, Primer’s electronic score is as homespun as the film itself.

Haunting pianos that sound like toys, reversing and echoing sounds from god-knows-where, and deep synthesised pads give a beautifully dark sound to the film. At less than 12 minutes, it’s a short soundtrack album that leaves you wanting so much more.

Upstream Color, released 9 years later, is Carruth’s second and most recent film. Combining pigs, lar vae, field recordings, orchids, and Thoreau’s Walden, the film is even more of an impossibility to decipher (possibly to pretension), and the soundtrack is great too. Each song takes its name from a line in Henry David Thoreau’s philosophical memoir Walden, and stylistically it manages to simultaneously echo Primer’s score and go far above it. Even if you don’t bother with the movies, check out Carruth’s soundtracks. They’re perhaps one of the most underrated parts of his films, and well worth seeking out. But see the movies too.

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Tinder is Terrifying, Long live Tinder!

Author: Peter Thomson You see a beautiful person on the train. As they tur n to look your way, you bur y your face in your phone as your cheeks go hot red. When you get off at your stop, you stumble and drop your books on the ground. As you curse under your breath you see that person again, stooped beside you, helping to gather your things. You smile and ask them out for coffee. The rest, as they say, is histor y.

With the ubiquity of online dating ser vices, that traditional way of meeting people seems more like ancient history with every passing day. I was always pretty derisive of online dating. I felt as though meeting someone in real life included some kind of acid-test which couldn’t be found on an app. I was also lonely as fuck, had terrible self-esteem, and felt pretty dejected after the end of a longter m relationship. So I installed Tinder.

For those who’ve been living under a rock, Tinder works by showing you profiles of other Tinder users in your area. Swipe left on their picture if you’re not interested – swipe right if you like the look of them. If someone returns your swipe right, the app opens a chat and prompts you to introduce yourself with messages like ‘Tinder can’t type for you … at least not yet’.

Then I heard a ding. Someone had matched with me. Ding, ding. Another two! Then more and more, until I had more chat windows open than I knew what to do with. I beamed with happiness. For the first time in a while, I realised that people found me attractive. On the train the next day, and walking down the street, I noticed the way people looked at each other, and the way some people looked at me. Suddenly a world of black and white was filled with color, and even without a date, my anxieties melted away.

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Over the next week, I went on a few dates. They didn’t particularly set the world on fire, but after a few, I felt far more relaxed talking to people I was interested in, and learnt about a few great cafes too! But there was one chat that I was really enjoying. We started swapping our favorite songs, she sent me Tallest Boy on Earth’s “Burden of Tomorrow”. We decided to meet for coffee.

With the ubiquity of online dating ser vices, that traditional way of meeting people seems more like ancient history with every passing day.

A few days later and covered in sweat, I ran my fingers through her hair as she laid her head on my chest. My thoughts turned back to Tinder, and the completely different outlook on life I’d had just a few weeks earlier. I had planned to write about my experiences on the app from the start, and so had bought a $22.81 month long Tinder Plus subscription. Without Tinder Plus you’re limited to about 100 ‘right swipes’ a day. I wondered, as she gleefully said she could hear my heartbeat, if we would have met if I didn’t pay for a premium account.

The terrifying thing about Tinder isn’t that it works badly – but exactly how well it works. As we increasingly outsource our lives to privately-owned digital-spaces we should all ask ourselves, beyond a two-tier economy are we willing to accept a twotiered chance at love?

C O S P L AY and

D I S C R I M I N AT I O N Author: Jasmin Hoadley

Cosplayers dress up as characters from films, books or video games, often to express an appreciation of that character. The reasons for cosplay are numerous. They use it as a creative outlet, or to be involved in a community, or for the kick of entering your creations into competitions.

Within the cosplay community there is a general understanding of the time, money, and effort required to make even the simplest looking costume; there is also support for those who bear little physical likeness to the characters they imitate. Cosplayers accept that you can wear whatever the hell you want, regardless of your personal appearance or skill at making costumes.

Want to wear a Sailor Moon costume even though you are a six-foot-tall tank with a large beard? Do it. Want to be Starfire from Teen Titans even though you’re overweight? Do it. Want to be an elevenfoot, purple-skinned, four-ar med humanoid space rock called Opal from Steven Universe, even though you’re very small and don’t have extra ar ms? Do it anyway. Look at Misa on Wheels, a cosplayer with muscular dystrophy and a champion of diversity within the community, and Ladybeard, a crossplaying heavy-metal vocalist; both cosplayers are excellent examples of dressing as you please.

Many outside the cosplay community are less appreciative of those who “don’t fit” their cosplay character physically. Downright childish bullying disguised as nit-picky criticism can be particularly vitriolic towards women who dress as characters thinner than they are, and towards people of colour who dress as someone with different coloured skin.

Within the cosplay community there is a general understanding of the time, money, and effort required to make even the simplest looking costume.

Perhaps this behaviour comes from overanalysing what celebrities look like and wear; they too are often shamed for wearing the “wrong” kind of clothing for their body type, or having the “wrong” kind of hair. Unfortunately, many people who have remarkable costuming talent are underappreciated because they are not the spitting image of the character they portray. Common sense tells us that if people stuck to making costumes of characters they looked like, there would be few or perhaps even no characters for many of us.

It is important to remember that people who cosplay do it for fun. They do not put their hours and dollars into amazing costumes to have sad, bored people insult them. Of course, helpful sug gestions to improve costumes using other methods or materials are always welcome. But saying that someone should not be allowed to wear a certain costume because of the way they look is an awful thing to say. Saying this pretty much brands you as a huge asshat and makes you the fun police.

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Opera , Mozar t and

M adn e s s Author: Luca Ricci

Once regarded as the highest expression of art, opera now faces extinction. Let’s be honest, nowadays no one gives a damn about opera. As Nietzsche would put it, opera is dead. With all the modern music, should we even care about what Mozart and co. wrote?

Clearly, we should. We should remember that opera entertained as well as ironised society and its problems. From cross-dressing to mental issues, I will show you how opera is still relevant today.

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SOPRANO O TENOR? Do you think cross-dressing is a new thing? Go and ask Handel. Well, you can’t really ask him (he’s dead). But you can watch one of his operas. Julius Caesar In Eg ypt begins with the Roman leader taking possession of the pharaoh’s palace. Of course, Caesar is a man, a very virile man. According to standards of masculinity, we would expect a very grave voice, such as a tenor or a baritone. Instead, surprise! Caesar is interpreted by a soprano.

women as utilitarian goods, Mozart wanted to reassert the role of women through this duplicity.

Most female roles in his composition portray women as extremely strong-willed, still preser ving their femininity. For instance, the Queen of the Night is both a loving mother and a fierce enemy.

Even the duplicitous nature of women reflects the dual nature of opera: on one side, sweet and gentle; on the other, terrible and ferocious.

In Baroque opera they didn’t really care about being gender specific. It was common for female voices to sing male roles. I could cite so many examples: Xerxes (Handel), Cherubino (Mozart), etc. Nowadays, most opera listeners would find this strange, for it completely alters our perception of gender. We have a precise (and often restricted) description of what should be per missible to men and women. Baroque listeners wouldn’t particularly care about masculinity and femininity, as long as they heard good singing. No one would have criticised a singer for choosing to portray a man or woman onstage. In a society ridden with religious morale and doctrine, this nonconventional behaviour shows a disinterest in categorising people, thus fostering a more accepting society.

Once again, this proves we could actually learn a thing or two from the past.

WHO’S THE MAD ONE?

THE DUPLICITOUS NATURE OF OPERA Cherubino is a teenager and he is desperately in love. There’s no problem with that. But when he reveals his love to the Countess, his problems start. He’s sent overseas so that he can forget about his nonsensical love. Although Cherubino’s misfortune resembles a modern soap opera, it’s actually an eighteenth-century melodrama. Mozart was a master of melodramatic scenes and plots.

He was also a master of rowdiness. His operas are full of sexual jokes and licentiousness. The Don Giovanni (recently perfor med in Adelaide) famously has Leporello sing an aria describing the women he’s taken to bed. Clearly he wasn’t worried about political correctness. Although opera can be funny and amusing, we should also consider a more serious meaning. Opera is often described as an ambivalent art: on the one hand, you have the most vulgar themes; on the other, Mozart and co. propounded a more insightful message. In this context, Leporello’s list does not simply aim at criticising women’s licentiousness.

Instead, it emphasises the stupidity of womanisers.

In eighteenth-century society, where men saw

Sensibility to mental issues is not modern at all.

Since opera is so full of contrasting emotions, composers needed to depict the mental state of the characters. In particular, madness and mental issues fascinated composers. The best example of this is Donizetti’s Lucia of Lammermoor, in which the author connects delusion to madness. When Lucia is forced to marry a stranger, she falls into great depression, reaching a delusional and psychotic state. Apart from the acting, even the music reflects the character’s feelings since Donizetti used high notes and virtuosic vocalism. However, despite her death, Lucia could have displayed mental strength and could have reversed her folly to sanity. Verdi, instead, offers another type of mental issue in Lady Macbeth. The character’s noctambulism represents the main cause for irreversible madness, thus causing her tragic and gruesome death. Even in this instance, Verdi composed the music to reflect the protagonist’s dramatic realism. In this context, we should understand that opera does not simply deal with musical interpretation. Instead, it integrates the musical for ms into the analysis of complex social issues, such as people’s mental disorders.

I remember someone telling me ‘Opera is too posh’.

Since then, I have tried to show the unsoundness of that statement. I won’t deny that opera is hard to appreciate. However, once we delve into it, it reveals amazing things, unexpected themes, and surprising insights into the mentality of society.

Although we have become more modern and “advanced”, opera reminds us that humankind retains some common elements throughout the ages.

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FEAR AND LOATHING OF SHINY LAPELS OR

HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND

DRESS LIKE ARCHER Author: Nick Goggin

Car y Grant, with sprezzatura comin’ out of his ears

Let me start with a phrase my father taught me.

It’s different horses for different courses, a considerably more agrarian version of the phrase popularised by Different Strokes, a television show made more famous by a silly catchphrase than it has any right to be. My point is that my representation of the world of men’s fashion is by no means the only one. Wear what you damn well please. If people show you respect, you aren’t breaking any laws and it feels true to the person you are and that you want to be, go hell for leather. Just don’t wear a onesie. For the love of God, don’t wear pyjamas in public.

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The current men’s sartorial landscape is pretty barren, to my mind. It’s become too big a fan of the smell of its own post-modern, self-satisfied, smug farts. For instance, a few years ago, the fashion in men’s suits (at least according to some designers) was to wear them without dress shirt or ties, and to roll the sleeves up to the elbow. To those who wear this style, who the bloody hell are you rebelling against? The monocle wearing, crusty good taste establishment to whom you think you’re giving two fingers doesn’t exist anymore, or at the very least doesn’t give a toss what you do to soothe your postpunk sensibilities. And while wearing deliberately trousers that are too short (avec turned up cuffs)

Row suit is considered by many film critics as the best film costume of all time) meant that Grant’s iteration of sprezzatura has come unmoored from his time and place and has a timeless appeal my other examples lack.

Fred Astaire lookin’ chill af

and penny loafers without socks can look good (see any pictures of JFK exhibiting said look when on holiday in Hyannisport), the modern iteration of this look, for me, looks too forced now. The outfit seems too aware of its rubbing against the established grain. Both examples lack that elusive and treasured characteristic in men’s fashion, the pinnacle of self-expression by way of clothing, the quality of sprezzatura.

Though many achieve it by going out on their own, for me and a great many others, the classic route is the best way to achieve sprezzatura, if only for a brief moment. The ter m’s closest and most succinct equivalent could be a “studied carelessness.” It’s a more vintage, pre-Internet way of saying “trying very hard to look like you’re not trying very hard at all.” The classic examples of sprezzatura in men’s fashion can be found in figures like the Chair man of the Board, Frank Sinatra, the light-footed Fred Astaire (white tie, tops and tails!) and the philandering Errol Flynn (when not acting in godawful swashbucklers). Each man had an elegance about them that seemed effortless. They symbolised for a great many people a fir m ideal of masculinity towards which they could strive, but they also represented the fluidity of such status. Their style and appeal changed to fit their times. However, the ultimate in sprezzatura can be found in the indelible Cary Grant. Grant, given his versatility as an actor (everything from screwball rom-com to noir spy thriller) and his image as the height of male sophistication (see such classics as Notorious, To Catch a Thief and North by Northwest, a film in which Grant’s simple silvery-blue Savile

How does this relate more concretely to the world of men’s fashion, Dear Reader? I mention these men and their style to illustrate the notion of “keep it simple, stupid”. The way I live up to the example set by Grant and others can be pithily reduced to that phrase. To achieve sprezzatura, eschew shiny lapels on dinner suits. The shine of the lapels distracts from what the suit should be about, which is to accentuate features like the shoulders (the ladies love broad shoulders lads), or narrowing the torso to add the illusion of height.

Avoid peaked lapels on single breasted suits, but go for your life with peaked lapels on double breasted suits. While the for mer distracts from the cut of the suit, the latter accentuates it. Avoid turning up the cuffs of your trousers unless they are tailored that way, or are of a plain, flat colouring. Doing otherwise would distract from any patterns on the trousers or make you look like you’re playing dress ups in grandfather’s wardrobe. Though you may feel like buttoning up both buttons on a single breasted suit, only ever button the top one, never button both (unless you own a paddock suit, the favoured cut of President John F. Kennedy, the sartorial President, but that’s a whole other kettle of fish). The lower button is meant to be left open as you push aside the jacket to stand around with half a hand in one pocket and a drink (or a beautiful Russian agent) in the other, the ultimate and most accessible for m of sprezzatura for the layman. Brown shoes with blue suits, dress black for everything else (though white spats may work with certain dinner suits). Oh, and always wear calf high socks, preferably black or otherwise plain, never white g ym socks.

Look at Kennedy, Astaire, Flynn and Grant.

You’ll see that the clothes should never upstage the wearer gentlemen. You’ll see the pinnacle of men’s fashion, forever elegant and unsurpassed.

Or don’t. What’s right for you may not be right for some.

Keep it simpl e, stupid.

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I EAT CHIPS AND RATE THEM Author: Natalie Carfora

I honestly think you can tell a lot about a person based solely on their snack-food preferences. We live in the Lucky Country where we have Medicare, HECS (for now) and most importantly good chips. My semi-recent sojourn in North America proved to me that other countries are not as lucky as we are in the chip department, and that disgusting and hilarious flavours such as “All Dressed” and “Dill Pickle” really do exist. I love chips. They are unashamedly probably one of my favourite foods.

I love eating them, I love talking about them, and now I am trying to write about them.

One conversation I frequently have is ‘What is your favourite flavour of chips?

Discuss’. This exact topic is a long-standing argument between me and two friends.

I have actually lost count of how many times we have had this argument, and how many other people we have harassed for their opinion to prove to the others that our flavour preferences are the superior ones (mine are superior so stop talking, both of you). One of us loves Chicken chips, one of us hates Sour Cream and Onion; two of us love Salt and Vinegar, one of us refuses to go near them. But really, my flavour preferences are the best preferences. I will discuss with you now a selection of my favourite and least favourite chips and show why I am right and you should listen to me.

Kettle Sa lt and Vinegar Smith’s Cheese and Onion I love Smith’s Cheese and Onion chips. Despite the fact that they may not be a crowd pleaser, they are just such a good quality favourite of mine. They’re not offensive and they’re palatable. They’re slightly cheesy and they’re slightly oniony. I especially like the crinkle cut version of these. Cheese and Onion are excellent, down to the really nice yellow colour that Smith’s make the bag. They’re kind of like that acquaintance of yours who is nice enough and makes you laugh sometimes, but otherwise doesn’t bring a huge amount to the table. An easy 4/5.

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The bes t flav our of chip s of all tim e. Don ’t eve n try to argu e with me, you ’re wro ng. All I wan t from a goo d Salt and Vin ega r is for them to tem por aril y pre ven t me from pro per ly usin g my mou th for reas ons two -fol d. The firs t fold is the flav our. The y hav e to be so flav our som e that you r lips stin g.

The seco nd fold is the cru nch . I wan t each ind ivid ual chip to cru nch so muc h that the sha rds of chip crea te sma ll pun ctur e wou nds in my mou th that mak e the salt and vine gar flav our cau se me yet mor e pain . Thi s is the mos t deli ciou s pain . Ket tle Salt and Vin ega r tick s bot h of thes e box es. Ano ther goo d thin g abo ut Ket tle chip s gen eral ly is the rati o of wis h chip s to nor mal chip s per pac ket, and I live in hop e that may be one day all my wis hes will catc h up with me. Wh en you sit dow n with that pur ple bag , you kno w you ’re goin g to stan d up with not hin g left . And som etim es, Col es hav e a 2 for $5 sale . Sto ck up. 6/5 .

and Sour Vege Chips Sweet g Ve ge Ch ips be cau se I rec en tly sta rte d bu yin nt to co ns um e ch ips en I de cid ed tha t if I wa be I sh ou ld att em pt to ma sse the n pe rh ap s ly gib gli ne ge Ch ips are he alt hie r ab ou t it. Ve t ec sel t bu r ch ips , he alt hie r tha n reg ula ur So d an t iou s. Sw ee fla vo urs are ve ry de lic (O rig ina l tas tes lik e ur vo fla is by far the be st co sts ). Th ey ’re rea lly car db oa rd ; av oid at all go od siz e an d the y’r e cru nc hy an d the y’r e a to thy fun alt ern ati ve jus t go od sem i-h eal t no do CH ck SO MU Gr ain Wa ve s wh ich su s ve Wa ain w mu ch Gr ge t me sta rte d on ho su ck . 3/ 5.

Red Rock Deli Lime and Black Pepper

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I refus e to talk to you if you like Lime and Blac k Pepp er. In fact, just listen to me, pleas e.

YOU NEE D A HEL PING HAN D. Lime and Blac k Pepp er are not only the wors t of the Red Rock Deli selec tion; they’re the wors t out of EVE RY selec tion of chip, “All Dres sed” inclu ded. Lime and Blac k Pepp er taste s like some one has accid ental ly drop ped an Orig inal chip (this alrea dy begin s badly for them , Orig inal Shm origi nal) in grave l and then some of the grave l-dir t flake s and floor flavo urs have stuck onto the chip. I eat them some time s when my exten ded (and poor ly mist aken ) fami ly mem bers ser ve them at fami ly func tions and I cry.

Lime and Blac k Pepp er fans live amon g us and they need our help. -5/5 .

Burger Rings The thing about Burger Rings is that they honestly aren’t that good. What is that flavour? Burger flavour? No. The good thing about Burger Rings, however, is that they’re cheap and you get A LOT of them. I recently went to a quiz night where someone provided a bag of Rings. I kind of hated myself, but I really got into them. We reached the end of the night, and despite the fact that the bag had made many laps around the table, the Big Burger Taste lived on. I didn’t mind them that much at the time, but today, several nights after, I mind them a lot. 2/5 (a bonus point was awarded for the sheer quantity you get per bag).

Tasty Toobz st m e on u’r e th in ki ng. Bu t tru yo at wh ow kn I y, O ka rp ris in g, un as su m in g an d su e ar z ob To sty Ta th is, O ne of tra nt in to th is lis t. en ng vi r se de ly a tru w bi g th e t th e To ob z is ho ou ab gs in th st be th e e ba rb ec ue so m e ki nd of va gu ’re ey Th e. ar gs ba G Sm ith ’s h be tte r th an th e O uc m so t bu , ur vo fla t a ba d ra p g. Ta sty To ob z ge in ur vo fla ue ec rb Ba e sti gm a of ilu re to sp ell an d th fa eir th of e us ca be bu t ne xt sh ar e wi th Ch ee ze ls, ey th at th e ap sh e th ho riz on s, to ex pa nd yo ur ch ip g in ok lo e u’r yo e tim on e. Tr y yo u’r e in fo r a go od z, ob To e th r fo go th em . 4/ 5.

Doritos Cheese Supreme I don’t even bother with corn chips if they aren’t Cheese Suprem e. What more do you want from them than Suprem ely fake cheese powde r that will coat your fingers and get under your nails for HOUR S after the origina l eating experie nce?

You can dip them in salsa if you want, which I know really heighte ns the experie nce for some people . An added bonus for Dorito s is that you can include them into other foods like nachos and it makes chips a legitim ate(ish ) meal. You can even get one of those Dorito hats, which I regret not buying every time I eat Dorito s/buy petrol.

Dorito s Cheese Suprem e gets a comfy 5/5.

Chips are great! They’re the best sort of snack and the best sort of accompaniment to most solo and group activities. Next time you’re at a loss for conversation, split a bag with a friend and ask them what their favourite flavour of chips is. Go chips!

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“I’ma Let You Finish” W h y a K a n y e p r e s i d e n c y i n 2 0 2 0 i s i n e v i t ab l e .

Author: Athanasios Lazarou At the recent MTV Video Music Awards Kanye West concluded a twelve-minute speech by saying ‘I have decided, in 2020, to run for President’. He then proceeded to drop the mic (as all great artists do) and walked off stage.

the IMF, The G8 and the G20, the FTSE and the ASX. The recent Chinese stock market collapse is an example.

During the weeks of tur moil that marred Greece during recent political referendum, the China lost more than 10 times the GDP of Greece.

It was a statement precluded by no policy indications, platfor ms or political context, nor acknowledgement toward either party (third candidate anyone?), and it was perfect: perfectively representative of the empty politics of the present.

What has emerged is a convergence of political ideas between major parties. In short, contemporary Western politics lacks content and has too many authors. This allows a politics of personality to proliferate. But lacking content does not mean lacking attention, to which celebrity tactics work most viciously.

The following day The Guardian ran a piece titled “Why Kanye West would be the best president in US history (seriously)” that analysed his song lyrics and how they could translate to workable policy positions. Even The New Yorker ran a piece on Kanye, minus the endorsement.

The Kanye presidential announcement highlights how celebrity and political cultures are converging more and more: Donald “all Mexicans are rapists” Trump leads the Republican primaries, Greece’s finance minister Yanis Varoufakis poses for “Paris Match” magazine between Eurozone negotiations, Obama drops Spotify playlists, Abbott eats onions before announcing three word slogans as policies, Bill Shorten loves a zinger so much that KFC will have to use him for an ad soon, and even British Labour Leadership front-runner Jeremy Corbyn, a beige-clad 66 year old, has had his rise to popularity dubbed “Corbynism”.

Okay then.

The New York Times recently wrote an article about political methods which began by comparing contemporary politics to pro-wrestling. In “The Politics of Distraction” contemporary political actors don’t battle with great ideas; rather, they compete with bright, shiny objects (“B.S.O.s”) designed to win the 24 hour news cycle. These objects employ ‘principles of distraction, outrage and misdirection’. In other words, they are definitely not policy papers.

It’s about replacing political differences with theatre.

When was the last time we saw a government address fundamental issues with health, education and housing that go beyond what an election cycle can deliver? All major parties espouse the same neoliberal free-market directives which (for better or worse) bind themselves to the global economy and its multiple possibilities.

Without bold ideas, changing the economic course of a country is more limited than ever as real power is displaced to the policy objectives of acronyms such as

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Celebrity endorsements have long been a play of associating values to political candidates. Most famously in Australia, Gough Whitlam’s 1972 “It’s Time” campaign featured a medley of celebrity talents including Jack Thompson, Jackie Weaver, Bert Newton and dozens of others.

And how many times do I have to read an article about Nicki Minaj, Taylor Swift or Miley Cyrus espousing positions on political issues despite lacking an understanding of said issues beyond the average person?

I’m sure there are numerous professionals educated in their relevant fields who could communicate certain issues far more decisively, but unfortunately for them they are not famous, they do not get clicks, and they do not go viral. On a structural level, issues shouldn’t be addressed by the competing attention of celebrity.

What instead emerges from the practices of espousing celebrity association is that we dangerously continue to make stupid people famous. Before you know it the first lady of the United States will be Kim Kardashian, who last week received a letter from the FDA to remove an Instagram post endorsing a morning-sickness pill without mentioning its side effects.

Post-structuralist philosopher Jean Baudrillard writes in Screened Out that in the viral economy ‘infor mation and communication are based on the principle of a value which has ceased to be referential and is now based on pure circulation. Pure added-value – added by dint of the message, the meaning passing from image to image and screen to screen’. In this world of the screen ‘all that remains is to perfor m an appearing act, without bothering to be, or even to be seen. It is not: “I exist, I’m here”, but “I’m visible, I’m image – look, look!’

Kanye is on to something: promise people entertainment, avoid detail, make them feel things and make them tweet, then drop the mic and walk off the statge.

coming soon

2015 Adelaide Film Festival Author: Justin Mar tyniuk The Adelaide Film Festival (AFF) is our ver y own film festival which showcases an array of local and inter national films at participating cinemas across our state, occurring once ever y two years. Although one of the younger festivals, the AFF has grounded a reputation as one of the most dynamic and innovative screen cultural events in the world. Established in 2002, the biennial festival has continuously drawn larger audiences each year it runs.

Earlier in the year, I had the opportunity to inter view Amanda Duthie, CEO and director of the Festival since 2013. Duthie talked to me about her role, with CEO feeling like the ‘business’ side and the director being the ‘tone and feel’ of the festival.

‘As CEO it is really enriching to develop and evolve a really well respected SA brand, and in ter ms of being a director, it’s not all just about shopping around for the program, both Australian and international screen content’, says Duthie.

Given the rising success of the AFF, in recent years both the commercial and artistic circles of film have collided. The last festival screened Aussie films such as the dramatic Tracks or apocalyptic These Final Hours, through to the likes of the B-grade cult film Sharknado!

‘I don’t think you can have all blockbusters and all arthouse films’ says Duthie.

But she also mentions the ‘absolute heart’ of the festival is its investment fund. This investment fund lays the foundation for the festival, so that ‘we see this really exciting new wave of Australian films emerging’.

New Australian films is of the most exciting aspects of the festival. 2013’s festival saw 41 Australian films screened, 33 of which were South Australian.

‘South Australia is pumping!’ Duthie proudly states.

She isn’t wrong. South Australia has certainly grown over the recent years with successes such as The Barbadook, The Rover, and 52 Tuesdays. She continues, ‘When I’m at festivals overseas, people literally grab me and go ‘what is coming out of Adelaide this year!?’’ And this is, in some respects, thanks to the investment fund.

What exactly is this ‘investment fund’? To be honest, I don’t know. I could give statistics, but really it just helps South Australia make movies.

Duthie believes in the investment fund, but more to the point she says ‘I think Australians love seeing their own stories on screen’.

‘I think it falls back to us to continue supporting independent cinemas because they’re not in the same churn as the big chains’.

This support could also emerge in the for m of high attendance at the film festival this year.

While we don’t know everything that will be screening at the festival this year, we have a couple of things to look forward to.

Veteran Australian director Scott Hicks will have his anticipated documentary feature High Strung premiering on the festival’s opening night at Her Majesty’s Theatre.

The following night will also see the premiere of Jocelyn Moorhouse’s The Dressmaker, starring Kate Winslet, Liam Hemsworth, with recent star, Adelaide’s very own Sarah Snook. Other films that will screen this year include directorial debuts from Steven Page with Spear, and Rosemary Myer’s Girl Asleep.

There was also the announcement of a special event screening to celebrate the 21st anniversary of the cultacclaimed film Bad Boy Bubby. From legendary director Rolf De Heer, Bubby will be screened in its home at Port Adelaide for a world first binaural screening.

During filming, microphones were placed in Nicholas Hope’s hair piece in order to capture sound from inside this headspace. The same audio will be played through headsets at this special event screening for one heck of an experience!

Director Matt Saville will also return to Adelaide this year for the Australian premiere of his latest feature A Month of Sundays. Director Matthew Bate will also see his film Sam Klemke’s Time Machine premiere at this year’s festival after a successful reception at Sundance earlier this year.

This year’s festival already has some interesting Australian content, with the remainder of the program announced earlier this month.

The Adelaide Film Festival runs from the 15th to the 25th of October.

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Guide to 2015

SANFL Season Author: Paddy Reynolds Artist: George Thalassoudis The SANFL is a tradition as South Australian as FruChocs and a crippling unemployment rate.

Founded in 1877 it’s one of the oldest sports leagues in the world (Only the FA Cup and its Scottish and Welsh equivalents are older) and has a long and impressive histor y, still the second most followed aussie rules contest after the AFL which as we all know was a conspiracy forced on us by Victorians hoping to weaken us until they inevitably invade.

West Adelaide FC. The Bloods. Based at Richmond Oval they represent Adelaide’s western suburbs.

Wear black and red. Not much to say.

The 2015 SANFL grand final will be on the 27th September at Adelaide Oval, and with Hawthorn locked in to win every AFL premiership from now until the end of time it’s the perfect time to rediscover local football. Tickets are only $12, stadiums are all over Adelaide and while the quality of play is admittedly worse the pies and beer are just as good and cheaper. Here’s a guide to the clubs so you can figure out who to cheer on.

South Adelaide FC. The Panthers. Originally based in St Marys, in 1995 they moved all the way down to Noarlunga Oval representing Adelaide’s far southern suburbs. Last won the premiership in 1964 and have been searching ever since. They’re also sponsored by Flinders University so it’s debatable if you as a proud Adelaide Uni student are allowed to support them. Wear navy blue and white.

Port Adelaide FC. The Mag pies. From Alberton Oval they represent the suburbs around Port Adelaide. Have won 36 premierships, the most of any team. When they entered the AFL they were forced by Collingwood to change their colours and emblem (they chose to add teal because it was the 90s and teal was considered a real colour) but here they still wear their traditional black and white prison bar jerseys.

North Adelaide FC. The Roosters. The greatest football team in Australia if not the world they play at Prospect Oval and represent the innernorthern suburbs of Adelaide. Had a shocking season in 2015 (lost all but one game) but they’ll be back in 2016. Wear red and white.

Norwood FC. The Redlegs. From their beautiful stadium on the Parade they represent Norwood and the surrounding north-eastern suburbs. Have won 30 premierships and always been Port’s big rival. Associated with Adelaide establishment.

They wear navy blue with red socks. Paul Kelly supported them as did Don Dunstan.

Central District FC. The Bulldogs. Represent the areas around Elizabeth, Salisbury, and Gawler.

Relatively new (joined the league in 1964).

Dominated the league between 2000 and 2010 during which they won 9 out of 11 premierships.

Wear red, blue and white as they were founded by British expats.

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Sturt FC. The Double Blues. Based at Unley Oval, they represent the inner southern suburbs of Adelaide. Another establishment team they got their jersey (dark blue and light blue) by combining the colours of Cambridge and Oxford University which tells you all you need to know.

Glenelg FC. The Tigers. Represent the area around Holdfast Bay and are regarded as perennial underperfor mers only winning four premierships in their 95 year history. Wear black and yellow.

Woodville-West Torrens FC. The Eagles. For med in 1990 as a merger between the strug gling clubs of Woodville and West Torrens the new club would go on to have a great deal of success and won this year’s minor premiership. Wear blue, gold and green and represent Adelaide’s north-western suburbs.

There’s also the Adelaide Crows reser ve team who joined this year. They don’t represent any suburb and are generally uninteresting and best avoided.

Wear white, navy, red and yellow.

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Kintsugi D e ath Cab for Cut ie Author: Andrew Lang

Kintsugi is the latest offering from Washington indie rock band Death Cab for Cutie. Since their for mation in 1997, lead singer Ben Gibbard and co. have provided fans with powerful allegorical lyrics and unusual instrumentation.

Their albums Transatlanticism and Plans in particular are often heralded as classics in the indie rock genre and are often placed on bestof-the-decade album rankings. More recent offerings though, such as Narrow Stairs and Codes & Keys, have been somewhat more divisive amongst fans and critics.

The album’s title is named after a Japanese artfor m in which broken pottery is put back together piece by piece. Instead of concealing the flaws of the refor med object, the signs of breakage are left present and become part of the object’s history.

With this being the last album featuring founding member and producer Chris Walla, the parallels are clear. Instead of Death Cab trying to hide his departure or compensate for it, they’ve embraced the change and allowed themselves to explore new avenues as a three-piece.

Musically speaking, the songs have a much heavier focus on electronic instruments. The band has dabbled with synths on past albums, but their presence is much more pronounced on this record.

The song that best encapsulates this change is the album’s lead single, “Black Sun”, containing an electronic riff that subtly sits beneath the rest of the song’s instrumentation. Rest assured though, Death Cab haven’t gone full electro. The songs still have that inimitable Death Cab vibe, with plenty of the usual indie rock fare to satisfy longtime fans.

The philosophy of exposing and embracing one’s scars extends to the album’s lyrics, too. Between the release of DCFC’s previous album and this one, Gibbard split with his then-wife Zooey Deschanel.

Analysing the lyrics through this context, the words take on a far more potent and personal meaning.

The lyrics are soul-searching, a post-mortem of a failed relationship. ‘Was I in your way / When the

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Instead of concealing the flaws of the refor med object, the signs of breakage are left present and become part of the object’s history.

cameras turned to face you? / No room in frame for two’ Gibbard sings on the opening track. Some are even downright acidic, directed point-blank at his for mer partner: ‘And the constellations move and the brightest point is full / But every telescope you see, was pointed only at you’. Gibbard’s lyrics here are far rawer, more personal, less allegorical than we’ve heard in a while. Only occasionally does this clarity stray into heavy-handedness, and when it does it finds its way back fairly swiftly.

Still, the album isn’t without its flaws. Beyond the changes in lyrics and instrumentation, many of the songs feel predictable. Not bad or unlistenable by any means – there’s just nothing here that makes the listener sit up and pay attention. It feels as though the band is merely going through the motions of releasing a new album, rather than produce something truly worthwhile. A couple of the songs feel a little underdone as well; in particular “Binary Sea”, the album’s closing track, feels less like a DCFC track and more like a badly written hymn.

So overall, Kintsugi is a little disappointing. While it’s certainly got some solid songs and some interesting ideas, the album as a whole feels as though it’s without polish; as though with a little more love and attention it could have been something truly great. Still, props to them for trying new things, even if the ideas don’t always quite hit the mark.

Don’s Party (1976, Double Head Pro ductions) Author: Lachlan Hunt In a Nutshell : Men want sex and women are complicated. It’s 1970s Straya through beergoggles.

The baby boomers are more than a little different to the generations following in their footsteps.

With core values like feminism and political connectedness guiding us through the challenges of modern Australia, it’s hard to imagine that one single identity could possibly encompass the values of an entire generation. The boomers got closest to this identity with “the larrikin”, the true-blue, colourful character who speaks his mind. Don’s Party pays tribute to the “larrikin” identity within a proper, suburban ‘70s culture.

Don’s Party is a lifeboat for five couples during the tense turn-over period of the Labour-winning federal election of 1969. With the first taboo of conversation on the table, we meet Don (John Hargreaves) as he makes the run to the ballot box and the beer-run on the way home. His mates and their wives happen to be a great microcosm of diverse characters – go figure. Aussie icon Graeme Kennedy is Mark, the inebriated divorcee and parttime pornographer, that steals most of the best lines of the film. Graeme Blundell is the other hot favourite as Simone – much the same shy, innocent conser vative that defined his sexual journey in Alvin Pur ple (1973).

The streak of the larrikin runs through most of the husbands (Simone excluded), chasing the lust of teenage desire. As the plot unfolds however, this becomes their downfall against a backdrop of strong, complicated and witty wives that have just about had enough of it all. The gender divide here is spectacular, as Don and his mates drink and bask in constant marital infidelities, the wives and girlfriends of the film are engaged in this unspoken debate over Australia’s social response to the sex revolution sweeping over Australia.

Pat Bishop as Jenny gives us the most heartfelt perfor mance of a wife trapped within a dwindling marriage to Mal (Ray Barret). Her and Kath’s (Jeanie Drynan) opposition to polygamy makes

No matter what kind of moral lens we choose to apply to it, the characteristics of larrikinism is the core of this film, bundled with copious marital problems and reminiscent drinking. them the polar opposites of Kerry and Susan (Candy Raymond and Clare Binney). They take the men’s obsession in their stride, getting some on the side and kneeing the creeps in the balls.

As much as you feel for the monogamous women, Kerry carries such assertion and sexy confidence in her portrayal that she seems to tears-down the male domination of the sexual revolution singlehandedly. These aren’t all redeeming arguments against the misog yny of Don’s, but they do put the power of the sex revolution in a fuller context, empower ment and marriage-strain facing off with wicked bitchiness. That said, Susan is still stripped naked and thrown in a pool with her only words of protest being ‘oi, you dirty bug ger!’

This film is naughty, funny and undoubtedly attached to our social culture today through the heart of the larrikin beating in its male characters.

I see it in my work’s break room all the time, listening to both genders of the over 40 year olds getting on through sexual innuendos and dodging political correctness with all due respect. As our values don’t align anymore, we probably aren’t going to see this identity of Aussie culture reflected in our films in the near future. But it is still a part of Aussie culture; the true-blue character among us. No matter what kind of moral lens we choose to apply to it, the characteristics of larrikinism is the core of this film, bundled with copious marital problems and reminiscent drinking. Definitely watch with mates over a few tinnies (as long as full frontal doesn’t faze anyone).

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Sean Bean (“Jolene” by Dolly Parton) Author: Andre Bremmer Sean Bean, Sean Bean, Sean Bean, Sean Bean I’m beg ging of you please don’t die again Sean Bean, Sean Bean, Sean Bean, Sean Bean You’ve not sur vived a film since god knows when You once played Captain Boromir We all knew what would happen here The only of the nine to die on screen You also were in Golden Eye The leader of those big bad guys Your death was no surprise, oh great Sean Bean In Game of Thrones you played the lead You’re finally gonna live indeed!

Alas how wrong I was, oh yes Sean Bean And so you see it’s obvious why When we see Bean we know he’ll die Forever will we mourn the great Sean Bean Sean Bean, Sean Bean, Sean Bean, Sean Bean I’m thinking hard of films where you’ve sur vived Sean Bean, Sean Bean, Sean Bean, Sean Bean There must be one where your death’s been deprived In Troy you finally didn’t die And I could hardly b’lieve my eyes I’m just so glad you’ve sur-vived one, Sean Bean So maybe now there is hope for Sean Bean sur viving a couple more Oh please enough of the Sean Bean death scenes Sean Bean, Sean Bean, Sean Bean, Sean Bean I’m beg ging of you please don’t die again Sean Bean, Sean Bean, Sean Bean, Sean Bean You’ve not sur vived a film since god knows when Sean Bean, Sean Bean 46 On Dit Magazine Issue 83.10

Confessions of a Law Student Author: Anonymous

T’w as the mor nin g afte r a uni vers ity par ty, and not a stu den t was abo ut. The y had all bee n des troy ed on teq uila and stou t.

Or din ari ly the re is wh ere the fai ry tale wo uld con tin ue, but no t for tho se of us wit h 9am tut ori als. No, thi s is wh ere my ho rro r sto ry beg ins. I had trie d my bes t to kee p it tog eth er; I’d eve n que lled my nee d to pul l ove r on No rth Ter rac e for a che eky sto p (no te tha t Na ndo s is no t inc lud ed – tha t had pro ven to be the kry pto nit e the nig ht bef ore . Wh o wo uld hav e gue sse d coe liac s and Per ri Per ri don ’t mix we ll?) . Oh yes , thi s tut ori al wa s qui te a sor ry sig ht. Fo r tho se wh o we re no t sun gla sse s-w ear ing , ber occ a-d rin kin g and inv olu nta rily cry ing the y sur e as hel l wo uld be soo n – the re wa s eno ugh eth ano l run nin g thr oug h out vei ns to get the ent ire cla ssr oo m goi ng. Th e sta le cig are tte sm ell mu st hav e bee n em ana tin g fro m the roo m, bec aus e upo n ent ran ce our tut or dec ide d ‘to kee p the ligh ts off tod ay’ – tha nk fuc k for sm all me rci es. Th ink ing thi s wa s a get out of jail fre e car d I tur ned to my 3.2 5 litr e bo ttle of wa ter to reh ydr ate .

Un for tun ate ly for me , I had for got ten the sm all ma tte r of an ora l pre sen tat ion . Wi th my gro up hav ing a col lec tiv e BA C to tak e dow n Am y Wi neh ous e, it app ear ed I wa s on my ow n. Th rou gh my haz e I tho ugh t: “ho w bad can it be? Sta nd up. Spe ak. Sit dow n.” Ev ide ntl y, my liqu id cou rag e had got ten the bet ter for me . Yo u see , wh en you r pre sen tat ion is on e of the mo st no tor iou s sub jec ts in Au str alia n leg al his tor y, the re’s litt le roo m for err or. In fac t, cra mm ed int o on e of the Ins titu tio n’s fin est tut ori al roo ms , the re’s no t a lot of roo m for any thi ng. Th is is wh at pro ved fat al. Wi th the ma gni tud e of a vol can ic eru pti on , and an aw kw ard sile nce mid pre sen tat ion tha t no t eve n Mi a Wa llac e cou ld enj oy, I had , in fac t, vom ited in my ow n mo uth . Wh at cou ld I do? Ba ttle on thr oug h a tre nch of teq uila , tac os and tea rs?

Na tur ally, I did wh at eve ry hal f-ta nke d, sel f-d epr eca tin g uni stu den t wo uld do and leg ged it out of tha t clu ste rfu ck of a cla ssr oo m bef ore deb uti ng in my Pit ch Per fec t cam eo.

Ne edl ess to say, I did n’t ear n my par tici pat ion ma rks for tha t tut ori al.

Bu t hey, you can ’t say I did n’t try.

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CROSSWORD

By Masya Zabidi

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4. Nickname of rapper running for 2020 US Presidential Election (1 wd)

1. European powerhouse nation greeting refugees with open ar ms (1 wd)

6. Canadian rocker perfor ming at the 2015 AFL Grand Final, Bryan _ _ _ _ _ (1 wd) 8. Seminal entertainment magazine featuring 8 separate celebrity Selfie covers (1 wd) 10. SANFL President, John _ _ _ _ _ (1 wd) 13. Natalie Carfora’s favourite chip brand (1 wd) 15. For mer Alaskan Governor seeking to be Donald Trump’s Energ y Secretary, Sarah _ _ _ _ _ (1 wd) 17. Director of film (Highly Strung) receiving its world premiere at the 2015 Adelaide Film Festival (2 wds) 18. Miley Cyrus’ latest studio album, ‘Miley Cyrus & Her _ _ _ _/_ _ _ _’ (2 wds) 19. Two British journalists arrested in Turkey belonged to this edg y news outlet based in New York City (1 wd) 20. Retired cricket player Shane Watson’s playing specialty/role (1 wd) 48 On Dit Magazine Issue 83.10

2. Sean Bean’s character in Lord of the Rings (1 wd) 3. Latest instalment in the Millennium Series, ‘The Girl in the _ _ _ _ _ _ _ / _ _ _ (2 wds) 5. Acronym of University with hacked Facebook page on its Open Day 7. Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art held in October (1 wd) 9. Seventh incarnation of the Doctor, _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ McCoy (1 wd) 11. Winner of the Italian Grand Prix, _ _ _ _ _ Hamilton (1 wd) 12. Michael Fassbender video game film released in 2016, Assassin’s _ _ _ _ _ (1 wd) 14. Baroque composer behind opera seria, Julius Caesar in Eg ypt, George Frideric _ _ _ _ _ _ (1 wd) 16. First woman in Queensland history to hold the Chief Justice role, Catherine _ _ _ _ _ _ (1 wd)

49 On Dit Magazine Issue 83.10

50 On Dit Magazine Issue 83.10