ANCHOR Metropolis Issue

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2 | ANCHOR | CONTENTS

Dear Readers, Winter is coming and students everywhere try to accommodate the demands of their exigent tutors, whilst keeping up with the Christmas shopping and at the same time avoiding the busy pandemonium of Oxford Street and all the pickpockets it harbours.

This is life in a metropolis, “inner city life”, as Flight of the Conchords so aptly put it, full of “inner city pressure”.

With all the opportunities it harbours, urban life can often be utopian: be it the numerous options we as Londoners have to explore tastes from all over the world, living in a Multicultural City (see Carrie’s column), the countless exciting exhibitions opening every week (see Ted’s recommendations), or the rich historical setting urban spaces provide, as described in Dr. Catherine Brown’s exploration of Moscow.

Yet, life in a city can be demanding, and even dystopian. Shakespeare recognised that cities can be a hotbed of social turmoil and inequality, with different social classes pursuing their ambitions on very little space, as described in Conor’s piece on The Bard and the City. Today’s rise of political populism and ethnic nationalism can be explained by a newfound divide between urban and rural, industrial and post-industrial, educated and uneducated, threatening the very foundations of our often liberal urban spaces, and the democracies built upon them. Our featured articles deal with this particular issue in the United States’ latest election, whilst Esther explores the prospects for democracy in Africa; Laura in the West; and Marius Ostrowski gives us his perspective on why politics is becoming more and more dystopian, even beyond Bedford Square.

But there is no need to despair! The term is almost over, and we have prepared some playing cards to cut out for you to remember its best moments. As always, our students have a lot say. Tom recommends sounds to make life in the metropolis more bearable; Phoebe mourns a symbol of metropolitan life; and Anchor’s very own former editor-in-chief Soila makes an apparicion.

Brace yourselves, dear readers.

With love, Laura, Ted, Karishma, Tom

Anchor is a thrice-termly magazine of news, interviews, comment, and frivolity, written and edited by students of the New College of the Humanities, but remains completely independent.

To write for us, advertise in us, or simply comment on how we look, our email is ed.anchormagazine@gmail.com.

To read our previous issues, visit www.issuu.com/anchormagazine.

To follow us on Twitter, our handle is @AnchorMagazine, and on Facebook, we are www.facebook.com/anchormag.

CONTENTS | ANCHOR | 3

Featured Apoca Apoca: Trump and the End p. 4 Is Trump the Price We Pay for Our Own Entertainment? p. 5

Politics Dispelling the Myths of African Democracy p. 7 The Winter of Our Discontent p. 8 Brexit Means Brexit Means Nothing at All p. 10

Bloomsbury A Multicultural City p. 11 | Cards Against Humanities p. 12

Science Smell-O-Vision: A History of Olfactory Cinema p. 13

Culture On Fears, Hopes, and Living Life p. 14 | On the Heartland: A Literary Treatise p. 15 The Bard and the City p. 16 | Exhibitions Not to Miss this Winter p. 18 Escaping the Metropolis p. 19 | Moscow: History of a Symbol p. 20 | Sounds of a Dark Metropolis p. 22 | What We Think About When We Think About Maps p. 23

Comment Eulogy to the Arcade p. 24 | No Shit Sherlock: Am I a Journalist Now? p. 25 Beyond Bedford Square with Marius Ostrowski p. 26

Editor-in-Chief Laura Dubois Deputy Editors Tom Bostock Karishma Patel Ted Simonds Assisstant Editors Poppy Glaister Antonia Jovanovska Iona Popat Scarlett Swain Cover Art Hannah El-Hawary Design Laura Dubois Contributors Carrie Altug Soila Apparicio Tom Bostock Dr. Catherine Brown Esther Brown Tahmid Chowdhury Laura Dubois Shree Ganguly Dr. Marianna Koli Gigi Lynch Phoebe Maunder Marius Ostrowski Karishma Patel Harry Sherwood Ted Simonds Conor Turley Anchor Founders Jamie Allcock Josh Dell Rory Keddie

4 | ANCHOR | FEATURED What is there to say for a black person in a country of which the Presidentwhich maybe-possibly-was-relevant-to-something-but-we-can’t-prove-itelect is a man who has been endorsed by the Klu Klux Klan. What to say, as yet. Sarah Palin might not have known where Russia was. And, to a certain a queer person, knowing that the soon-to-be vice president says homosexual extent, it is valid that these politicians had to be held accountable for these union causes “societal collapse”. Or as scruples. That is how democracy an immigrant, having witnessed, and works. We say, take the wheel between having seen your fellow countrymen now and the election and we will keep witness, and then democratically you in check by hanging over you the condone, a man rallying furious crowds threat that you won’t get our vote next to the chant “build a wall”. What do time. You are bound to us by your need you say to that? Racist, misogynist, and desire for our approval. This is a homophobic, xenophobic—Hillary discursive system encoded in terms of Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” has looking good.

Gigi Lynch been emptied on the political stage, used up on nuance. I can mention Now, after Trump’s election, these the involvement of the President-elect in the racist anti-Obama ‘birther’ politicians’ embarrassment and earnest attempts to atone for those failures, movement, and you already knew that; I could remind you that at the time or even just deny them, seem endearing, sweet. At stake is more than of his nomination for the party candidacy he was awaiting trial for rape embarrassment, it is the deferral to a set of standards, decided and cherished accusations (the allegations vanished over the following months without far beyond you and your party, which are held within the system of public life. ever going to trial); but that disappears, because we all know that each of Embarrassment, which we understand as something innate and inevitable, these evidences are just the ones that have been holds us in some tiny way accountable to a “Trump is boasting that he has proven and made it out to the public stage, and shared system of norms. Being embarrassed we are not just prepared for, we fully expect doesn’t mean that you are sorry, or that you are avoided taxes, boasting that that there is more, uncounted, uncountable— going to change, and yet it is fundamental, it is an he sexually assaults women, infinite—that marks him as unviable. experience that is, as well as mental, physically reflexive, pre-linguistic: true. For someone to not boasting about his penis size in a I compiled a rough timeline of Trump’s be embarrassed to have let you down is weirdly presidential debate.” campaign, outlining the main incidents and a huge insult, because it speaks of a disrespect events which made headlines over the last which is untenable to persuasion. Trump is eighteen months. Putting a red dot next to the moments not embarrassed. His approval ratings are almost that would have, in previous circumstances, been negatively correlated with his adherence to serious enough to threaten to end a presidential ‘good’ political action. bid. I ended up with 42. By about the twentieth, though, my eyes were blurring, and I could What do you do then? How do you feel my standards straining, curling in a place pressure on a president to little bit to shake off the half-dots, the honour his promises, to listen to probably-ruinous-but-not-as-bad-as-thosethe will of his people, if he doesn’t so-not-gonna-dot-it-because-I-will-losecare if he looks bad? If he looks so credibility-if-I-have-hundreds-of-thesebad already (in the logic of your red-dots. I put red dots beside things like political system) that you cannot the Trump University fraud, slandering make him look worse, and your John McCain, slandering the parents attempts to try to do so melt into of Captain Khan, slandering Hillary. repetitions which render absurd Boasting that he has avoided taxes, terms once used to call out boasting that he sexually assaults injustice? Racist racist racist women, boasting about his penis size in racist. Saturated in platforms a presidential debate. Being denounced for discourse on social media, by major players in his own party, being coming in with a “basket of denounced by the current president, deplorables” as our tools, our being denounced by the Pope. Lying weapons, we have realised we and being proved in the saying to be are firing blanks. lying. Lying more, lying again, lying new lies which contradict old lies in the saying, Trump has broken words as lying again. political tools. He is a disaster in discourse. The Trump victory, and the Huh. By comparison, Rick Perry nearly pulled impending Trump presidency, stand out of the running because he forgot what he had to enact an apocalypse of language. prepared to talk about during a debate. Hillary Between the ‘this is’ of dogmatic Clinton was demonised for involvement ideology and the ‘but suppose that in an email scandal this is’ of political rhetoric, there must always be (Continued on p. 6)

Apoca apoca: Trump and the end

FEATURED | ANCHOR | 5 In the days after November 9th 2016, the world has been left asking what led was also, crucially, cultural debate. Editor of the National Review (which to election of a bigoted, unqualified demagogue as the leader of the free world. his friend President Raegan would later say changed his life), when asked if The left blame the right for nurturing extremist views for their own gain; the there was anyone he would not debate, Buckley replied after communists, it right blame the would have to be left for narrowing Gore Vidal. the scope of political debate and igThus the stage was noring the voices set. Two intellecof the disenfrantual giants were chised; the midpoised against one dle classes point another, baited to their working like circus aniShree ganguly class counterparts; mals for our enterthe young look tainment, all the with disdain to the old; women decry misogynists, regardless of sex; urban while masquerading as something wholly grander. The Best of Enemies thus elites deride their supposedly racist, bigoted countrymen; racial tensions and captures a unique turning point in our history. It simultaneously marks a new hate crimes are at an unbearable high and the media is held in contempt by era for television whilst harking back to the days when those invited to comjust about everyone for bias and ineffective coverage. Two once great nament and educate the masses were truly experts of their respective fields. The tions appear to be tearing themselves apart to see who can accelerate their people had not had enough of experts, and indeed Buckley and Vidal perhaps own rate of decline faster; other western democracies seem eager to follow. represent some of the last true American intellectual elites Fear and hatred have bubbled over and percolated the majority of our who could lay claim to being household names. Yet society. Both Brexit and Trump have proven that the West is hopethis was not debate, it was a blood sport amongst lessly divided. The polls and pundits were consistently wrong. the greats. As Eric Alterman laments, it was And, as evidenced by the season finale of Last Week Toa “harbinger of an unhappy future”. night with John Oliver, they are mournfully scrambling Audiences were gripped; ABC’s ratings for answers. rose from last to first place; journalistic responsibility began to erode into Perhaps a little light can be shed if we look back the shell of its former self, which and consider the topic of Robert Gordon and we recognise today. More imMorgan Nevilles’ 2015 documentary The Best of portantly, and more damagingly, Enemies. In 1968, lacking funds, talent, and ratthey created supremely fantastic ings, the American television network ABC had entertainment. This victory had one last attempt to save itself with its coverage seen a small battle won for of the Democratic and Republican conventions. It ABC, yet the war was truly set out to create an event which, for the first time in lost for television and cultelevision history, sought to incite controversy in the ture. All networks quickly name of political commentary. ABC found two intelfollowed ABC’s lead and lectual opponents, both as intimidatingly well-matched the quest for primal enterand as extreme as each other. tainment quickly defeated any attempt at true disNowadays, every other supposed debate or news outlet is course. (Continued on p. 6) but vitriolic theatre, appealing to the audience’s cruder instincts and, cruder still, the network’s ratings. By rejecting the norms of television in ‘68, ABC ensured that the hailed American institute of television grew into a wholly different monster.

Is trump the price we pay for our own entertainment?

“There is an implicit conflict of interest between that which is highly viewable and that which is highly illuminating” - William F. Buckley Jr. The opponents Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr. formed two sides of the same coin. Their backgrounds were conspicuously similar: both had prestigious upbringings; both had courted political careers in vain; both were part of the intellectual elite circle and, unlikely for the time, both despised one another openly enough to spit vitriolic hate at the other on national television. Gore Vidal was the left leaning satirist and author of Myra Breckinridge, a controversial novel regarding the adventures of the eponymous transsexual. Vidal was hailed for his contentious approaches to feminism, homosexuality, transsexualism and queer culture in the novel. For those same reasons, he was reviled by those conservative critics who viewed the novel as pornographic. Bill Buckley, the darling of American conservatism, certainly shared these views. He understood that ideological debate

6 | ANCHOR | POLITICS Apoca Apoca: Trump and the end some kind of tension, until the possible and actual meet at infinity. It is precisely the power of hypothesis of imaginative culture to conceive and reveal something wholly other to institutionally sanctioned Reality: the “hope” that Obama asked us to call upon. That prevents us from full closure, from coming to the end. Leaders in democracy promise to hand over power after a given number of years, belying a faith in an ongoing project of social progress, that there will always be more to do, and another person to do it. There is not an end point. Since the world is not yet a void, and we still remember our past, apocalypse exists only in discourse: the play of signification has a limit, and that limit is apocalypse.

In an essay entitled ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now’, Jacques Derrida writes about the threat of nuclear war—a literal, physical, worldly apocalypse. He points towards the limits of discourse in encountering the infinity of destruction. Trump really does pose apocalyptic threats.

He is not a nuclear bomb with a clock counting down seconds, but he is disastrous and unprecedented.

Encountering the possibility too slowly, the US and world media failed to predict or keep pace with his rise to power. In relation to nuclear apocalypse, Derrida describes a “speed race” between the real world and the language through which we can understand it: “At the beginning was the word; at the beginning was the act. No! At the beginning—faster than the word or the act—there will have been speed, and a speed race between them.” And thusly we can view discourse scrambling after this man, trying to grab him by the back of his shirt as he moves through the finish line of the first lap, outpacing any words we have to match him. Trump is an apocalyptic referent, he is so radically other to the field of political precedents, that that field, viewed as a text (a field of difference, contingency, gaining traction from the interplay between the word and its other) is unable to accommodate him. To try to do so breaks that text. If we call the pussy grab recordings a ‘scandal’, then we ought to change what we call the question of George Bush Jr’s possible DUI—but that breaks the system, because it is important that it be possible to hold him accountable for breaking the law. Put simply, it is just not possible to include Trump as just another element within the textual play of signification. Trump as referent is the apocalyptic referent, a “finitude…the total destruction of the archive”.

Language is an instrument, and Trump has walked on stage, a Sex Pistol, and smashed the guitar, blown to pieces the field, and sits in the broken shards of sense, the only one undaunted by the broken terms and histories around him. ‘Dummy’, ‘Loser’, ‘The Worst’ are his most used words on twitter. This childlike language is what rules at a ground zero of language.

“Make America Great Again”: what does that mean? Make America like it was in the 80s? Make America Great Again like how it was pre-Civil War? Or Make America Great, Again: let’s wipe the field, let’s start again. Bang bang bang.

Is Trump the price we pay for our own Entertainment? “These great debates are absolutely nonsense ... there is almost no interchange of ideas, very little of personality. The terrible thing ... is that hardly anyone listens, they sort of get an impression of somebody and they think they figure out just what he’s like by seeing him on television.” - Gore Vidal Today, we live in a world where news, punditry and debate has been corrupted to such a great extent in the name of entertainment that it struggles to resemble reality. Journalists and commentators obscure truth in almost any media, be it television or tabloids, to suit one’s audience.

In this digital age particularly, news and information is increasingly targeted to fit one’s prejudices and preconceptions. Democrat or Republican, Brexit-er or Remain-er, your social feeds will be entirely different as determined by algorithms, so as to be populated by only those facts you want to believe.

Social media, the supposedly great equaliser, only divides us further by pandering to our own prejudices. Yet, the unreliability of the internet is not particularly newsworthy. What is new and concerning, as John Oliver notes, is that for the first time political leaders are giving credence to such lies. Furthermore, any attempts at truth are drowned out by divisive, populist cries. Was anyone truly surprised to learn that the Oxford Dictionary’s international word of the year in 2016 was “post-truth”?

Of course, it was not solely this historical event in television’s history which led to this decline. Likely numerous factors, which should each be discussed in their own rights, all contributed. The loss of deference was a noticeable phenomenon in the western world, particularly in 1960s England. Political sex scandals and a general disdain for the establishment (which is not invalid in and of itself) led to the creation of a new, more biting form of journalism and entertainment. It also made audiences hungrier for scandal: eager to believe anything sordid enough, regardless of the validity of the claims, and eager still to tear down those who supposedly seem above us. Indeed, Oliver owes his own fame to the rise of political satirists.

Perhaps this decline was ultimately inevitable. Perhaps a demagogue like Trump was always going to be perfectly placed to succeed. Perhaps our primal natures, which led the Romans to pit gladiators to fight each other to the death, ensured our thirst for entertainment would always win.

Or, perhaps, Mark Fisher’s diagnosis of modern society’s growing mental health endemic not just as “depression” but “depressive hedonism” in Capitalist Realism is correct. The bleak picture he paints of a society stuck in a depressive state which only regresses further despite constant stimulation and entertainment is all too familiar to many of us. And if, as Morgan and Neville conclude, the only thing bringing us together is the constant stream of entertainment, little wonder then at how divided we are when the pictures in our heads are so different, and so dangerous.

POLITICS | ANCHOR | 7

Dispelling the myths of African Democracy Esther brown

Since 2011, trends have shown declining support for democracy by African peoples, sparking recent allegations of crisis. A quick glance at the statistics seems to support these fears. Between 2011 and 2015, support for democracy in Nigeria dropped from 52% to 41%, from 78% to 58% in Zambia, and from 67% to 47% in Ghana. When you consider that the last two are officially regarded as established democratic nations, things do not look good for democratic principles on the African continent.

In fact, relative to the global democratic recession, Africa has been making notable gains. In many cases the dissatisfaction with governments across Africa has manifested itself in fortifying procedural democratic principles such as increased electoral participation and competition in the democratic market place. This is textbook consolidation as it shows change being seeded through the existing power structure and democracy becoming the “only game in town” (Giuseppe di Palma, 1990).

It is no matter of controversy that democracy has only slowly spread to The obvious example of this is Nigeria. According to the earlier stated Africa, with many of the problems stemming from its illiberal colonial data, demand for democracy in Nigeria has been in decline, critics fearing history: resource dependency, ethnic tensions within artificial borders, and further breakdown. But in March 2015 the country actually made its first inadequate institutions. Yet the recent downturn in democratic support is not cautious steps towards consolidation, where lack on faith in the system and to be tarnished with the same brush as colonial anger at widespread corruption resulted in the problems, it is a symptom of the global democratic first successful and peaceful electoral handover “Here’s an Africa beyond the recession. in Nigerian history, rather than a military coup. popular newspaper headlines The defeat at the ballot box of Goodluck Jonathan African civil liberties have been in decline since and images of crippling poverty, in favour of Muhammad Buhari, who has vowed their peak in 2006. But if we look closer this to constitutionally address corruption and low bloody civil wars and failing incomes, is an example of change been made does not necessarily signal a move away from democracy: according to the freedom house index within democratic structures. democracy” this is part of a global trend. The global index of freedom shows a 2% decline in the number of countries ‘fully free’ and a 2% The use of the electoral system as more than just a façade was further evident increase in the number of countries ‘not free’. Blaming it all on African antiin Cabo Verde. The defeat of the incumbent on the 2016 election in favour of democratic sentiment seems a little simplistic. the Movement for Democracy Party proves that democracy in the region is far from declining.

Whilst the main contributors to this decline are China, Russia and the Middle East, civil liberties have also been stretched in consolidated democracies. The Even more reassuring is an increased rejection of ‘Big Men’ rulers that have migrant crisis in Europe has sparked doubt over the application of universal so frequently reversed democratic progress throughout history. According civil liberties and there have been rises in populism all over the continent. to the Afrobarometer, 78% of Africans reject the idea of a presidential The US is also on a backwards trajectory due to usage of ethnic screening and dictatorship and encourage horizontal accountability across government the potential policies of the President-elect. institutions. The development of these sentiments further demonstrates that the downturn in support for democracy since 2011 is not symptomatic of a Considering this global decline, it is of little surprise that African civil breakdown of Africa’s advocacy for democracy. In this sense, these beacons liberties have suffered as well. The rise of terrorism in the North of Africa of democracy in the continent are not only progressing, they also provide has re-fuelled religious divides in countries like Nigeria and Sudan, and the hope of democratisation for currently authoritarian regimes. sharp drop in oil prices has resulted in declining social development among oil exporters. But it is really important not to see this decline as a sign of An example of this is Burkina Faso. In 2014 president Compaoré tried to democratic breakdown: democratic support in Mali, an autocratic country amend the constitution to extend his 27-year rule, but was confronted with that has long grappled with terrorism, is continually rising from 32% in 2011 mass disapproval. Following this, a successful election was held, making to 44% in 2015. The same is true in Burundi, where demand for democracy current President Kaboré one of the only leaders in Burkina Faso’s history is at a record high of 65% (2015) despite coming close to civil war earlier in not to come into power via a coup. The list goes on. When we look at specific the year. examples rather than aggregate statistics, democracy is alive and well on the African continent.

What’s more, the decline in civil liberties among pre-existing African democracies hasn’t been drastic enough to relegate them from ‘free’ to ‘partly To deem this progress as consolidation is perhaps premature, and gloomier free’—Ghana and Botswana, Africa’s democratic stars, are still classed as prospects still exist elsewhere: in Rwanda and the Demoratic Republic of ‘free’ by Freedom House.

Congo, presidents have successfully changed the constitutions to allow themselves to stay in power. But it is important to acknowledge that there is The point of this comparison is that the challenges facing democracies in an Africa beyond the popular newspaper headlines and images of crippling Africa are challenges the whole world is facing. Whilst they may signal poverty, bloody civil wars and failing democracies. Democratic progress is democratic decline, they are not symptoms of democratic breakdown. being made in the continent, despite the global recession as a whole.

8 | ANCHOR | POLITICS

The Winter of our discontent

How structural inequality and political stagnation caused the populist surge in the west Laura Dubois

The election of Donald Trump and the successful referendum on Brexit are only the latest symptoms of the creeping advance of populism in the Western world. Over the last five years, populist parties have earned an average of 16.5% of votes in 16 European countries—ranging from less than 1% in Luxembourg to a staggering 65% in Hungary. Populism claims to speak in the name of the collective will: it separates society into ‘the people’ and ‘the corrupt elite’ who is to blame for social decline. Yet in doing so, populist parties promote the interests of only a part of society, and become elitist in themselves.

populist policies. There is a deep-seated alienation and discontent in this part of the society that the elites are ‘selling’ the country to foreigners, indirectly protected by established political parties and financial pressure groups, because the wealth generated by the post-industrial economy does not trickle down to them.

Free trade and global interconnectedness are partly to blame for this development, as companies outsource sections of their businesses abroad and maximise efficiency through international supply chains. Many developing countries now offer cheaper manufacturing than the traditional industrial powers.

Even Francis Fukuyama, who in 1989 declared the “end of history”, has been Especially in the US and Europe, this has led to a decline in manufacturing unable to account for this tyranny of the masses coming true. Journalists, jobs which haven’t grown since the end of the post-war boom in the 1970s. political analysts and pollsters alike are taken aback by the fierce rejection of The result is rising income inequality and depressed employment, ultimately the political and economic status quo. It rests on a consensus reached after causing economic insecurity for the lower and middle classes. the horrors of WWII, and again after the repudiation of communism in 1990, This is why populist parties distrust multilateral trade, foreign business and on the benefits of international cooperation, free trade, pluralism and liberal corporations, and disdain supranational bodies who allegedly pool nationdemocracy to promote peace and prosperity. Some of the proximate causes al sovereignty at a domestic disadvantage. Brexit is an example of this, as of the rise of populism undermining this consensus could be the uncertain efwell as Trump’s announcements to scrap NAFTA and back away from future fects of globalisation, the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent Euro crisis trade deals with Asia (TPP) and the EU (TTIP). In Germany, the far-right caused by the collapse of the US subprime mortgage market, or the rise in IsAlternative for Germany argues against the expansion of free trade beyond lamic terrorism. There are however more deep-seated economic and political the Schengen area, as do the idiosyncratic 5 Star Movement in Italy and the issues that have been gradually transforming Western societies. left-wing Podemos in Spain. Instead, they promote isolationism “We find ourselves with state-centred economic policies meant to provide an antiThe post-industrial revolution fundamentally changed society dote to post-industrialism. in technocratic in developed countries. Their economies have been gradually moving from the production of goods to the provision of ser- societies in which At the same time, immigration provides an easy target for peovices. This means a radical shift away from traditional manufacple’s anxieties concerning economic, political and security isthe ‘ordinary turing and manual labour to professional work relying on human sues. They are perceived to put even more pressure on a declinpeople’ are being ing labour market and resources perceived as scarce. In France, capital. At the same time, unskilled jobs emerge in the service left out.” economy and are often taken on by former industry workers or Marine Le Pen of the far-right Front National argues that the immigrants, who are desperate for work and more willing to finance industry has been actively promoting immigration for accept flexible hours, low pay and limited social security. years in order to drive down salaries, while Hungary’s Viktor Orbán wants to Overall, these post-industrial economies benefit mainly young, educated and build a wall to keep asylum seekers out. urban professionals with knowledge-based professions such as scientists, lawyers, doctors, creative-industry professionals or techies, whilst blue-colIn fact, immigration is often an effective antidote to demographic decline and lar and unionised work is declining in importance. Knowledge is increasingly has become a cornerstone of many Western economies. Instead, a big part of valued more highly than manual labour resulting in a disadvantage to the Western society does not reap the benefits of economic growth—which, ununeducated, the elderly and those living in rural and industrial areas. like wages, has not been stagnant—because neoliberal policies have not been able to mitigate the negative effects of globalisation. Free trade has actually The maps of the US election or the Brexit referendum show a striking divide been very beneficial in increasing output and lifting a great number of people between urban areas with young, educated professionals, and rural and traout of poverty globally, an example being the development of East Asian ditional industrial areas with an often older, less educated population. Those countries, who now champion manufacturing and technology. Yet the ‘losers’ who were ‘left behind’ by the post-industrial revolution tended to vote for of free trade, i.e. the manufacturing sectors in the West which formerly pro-

POLITICS | ANCHOR | 9 duced the things now made in Taiwan or South Korea, were not compensated people’s alienation from the system to its advantage. Its movements emphaby their domestic states. Neoliberals like Thatcher and Reagan have promotsise a nationalist narrative which blames domestic issues and a perceived ed deregulation, privatisation, free trade and tax cuts for the rich, without civilisational decline on foreigners and elites. They are concerned with preproviding an opportunity for those who didn’t benefit from these policies to serving an imagined cultural heritage against the outside influence of foradapt to the new features of the economy. Social mobility has declined as eigners, especially Muslims, and its subsequent decay. The French theory of manual labourers have no opportunity to be re-educated. We find ourselves “replacement” for example fears that North African immigrants will eventueffectively in technocratic societies in which the ‘ordinary people’ are being ally crowd out the French and their culture—without defining what “French left out. Due to income distribution inequality, many people of the lower and culture” actually entails. Beyond returning to a certain level of economic middle classes feel that they are lagging behind. They do not understand the well-being, the new right is thus concerned with preserving a constructed complex global world and are afraid to change the way they work and ultinational culture from external influences to provide a bastion against change. mately the way they live. This explains the backlash against the “Mainstream This also includes a return to traditional heritage with conservaeconomic elites benefiting from globalisation, and the desire for tive stances on social issues such as abortion, same-sex marriage, politics isn’t isolationism instead of international cooperation. the death penalty and women’s rights, an example of this being addressing the the currently ruling Law and Justice party in Poland.

Economic factors are, however, not sufficient to explain a dispro- problems of the portionate cultural backlash. In Germany, industry and manufacPolicies are generally expressed in a simplistic language with post-industrial short catchy slogans reminiscent of 20th century propaganda turing are thriving, yet the far-right is also prospering, for examrevolution” ple in the form of the absurd ‘Reichsbürger’ movement, which like “Austria First”, “Make America Great Again”, or “Dare the defends the borders of the old German empire and rejects the authority of the Truth” to appeal to the masses. Right-wing populism has been quite capable current Bundesrepublik. Transformations in the political sphere have facilitatin manipulating the public opinion, especially by denouncing the mainstream ed the rise of populism, especially on the right. Due to the perceived consenmedia as “lying press” and spreading non-fact based journalism, false data sus on liberal values and democracy, mainstream political parties are becomand fake news, often with the help of new media outlets, such as the righting increasingly similar and alienating voters. In many established Western wing platform Breitbart in the US for instance; this was quite successful democracies, the traditional left (concerned with the rights of the working during the US election and the Brexit campaign. The media landscape has class) and the centre-right (promoting a conservative religious stance) have mirrored the frightening move from pluralist society to one of monism, the converged in the middle. The result is a centrist and pragmatic political style dominant opinion reflecting this cultural backlash. such as Bill Clinton’s ‘New Democracy’ or Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’. Voters have, however, become tired of their incremental policies which seem Without sounding too simplistic, we can draw some frightening parallels beunable to produce significant change, whilst the transfer of power to supranatween today’s rise of populism and the rise of fascism in the 1930s. People call tional bodies like the EU leaves them with a feeling of powerlessness. for strong leaders to provide quick solutions to economic and social decline.

The past has shown that populism does not, however, express the will of the Mainstream politics isn’t addressing the problems resulting from the post-inpeople; it is a policy that divides in the name of a so-called popular voice, and dustrial revolution, nor does it address other post-material issues that have can have grave political and economic consequences. The aftermath of the gradually been surfacing since the 1960s. Basic class-related issues that preGreat Depression taught us that economic nationalism exacerbates economic viously rallied the proletariat have been settled; workers’ rights and certain issues instead of solving them and fuels conflict. Political nationalism prowelfare standards are universally accepted. Beyond class, voters today are motes the rise of racist and anti-immigrant policies which cause nationalist motivated by religious identities, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and the enviconflict and violence instead of providing a solution for coexistence—after ronment. These so-called post-material cleavages often reinforce existing all, no society is completely ethnically homogenous. Furthermore, one strikeconomic issues and thus become politically salient. The failure to offer a ing resemblance with the 1930s seems to be how the political mainstream has stance on these new social issues created a vacuum at the ends of the political so far underestimated the rise of populism. We will need to provide a stronger spectrum which has given extremist and populist parties an opportunity to answer to issues of economic decline, and find better arguments to convince rise. the majority of the benefits of liberal democracy and free trade. The stronger promotion of jobs and education for all of society and better policies of inteThe left has especially failed to reinvent itself beyond traditional workers gration are going to be necessary to make global interconnectedness viable. issues and to provide answers to new issues of immigration and industriPoliticians especially of the left need to find a narrative which is inclusive al decline. Jeremy Corbyn’s ambiguous opinions on Brexit being only one rather than divisive, and portrays culture not as a competition between fixed example of a left in deep existential crisis. The left has thus unwittingly envalues but as a foundation for cooperation. If this does not happen, increased couraged many of its working-class voters to swing to the right. Right-wing nationalism will lead to fragmentation as well as political and economic inpopulism has become even more powerful and managed to instrumentalise stability, which will severely undermine the current liberal order.

10 | ANCHOR | POLITICS

Brexit means Brexit means nothing at all Tahmid Chowdhury, Respondent in the Article 50 supreme court hearing, on why the referendum campaign is far from over

On 20 September 1610, the then Chief Justice, Sir Edward Coke, was asked to judge on whether the King could use Royal Proclamation to suspend an Act of Parliament. After identifying the case as one “of great importance”, at its heart the concern of the King’s accountability to the Commons, he ruled that the Royal Prerogative could not be used to override rights granted by Parliament.

406 years later, the current Lord Chief Justice, Lord Thomas, held that Parliamentary Sovereignty remains sacrosanct. Within a few short minutes the court delivered a unanimous judgement in a case being throttled by political controversy.

attack on the independence of the judiciary. Beyond the obscene headlines and sound bites, their emphasis on the “unelected” nature of British judges, or suggestion that public opinion should be a factor in deciding upon matters of law, is, frankly, as frightening as it is astoundingly stupid.

As fascinating as the present case is, the coming months are set to be, if possible, even more dramatic. Sarah Olney’s incredible by-election victory in Richmond Park, and indeed Liz Leffman’s performance in Witney, suggests that at least in the minds of some voters the referendum on our membership of the EU is far from over.

The Liberal Democrats in Richmond Park have somewhat overshadowed the But the court was clear. This was not about the merits or otherwise of Brexit. other significant piece of Brexit news over the last week: that a fresh legal It was not about delaying or stopping the triggering of Article 50. This was a challenge will be mounted to establish whether or not triggering Article 50 case of the black letter of the law, and, more importantly, protecting “the most would mean withdrawing from the EEA as well as the EU. The group British fundamental rule of the UK constitution … that Parliament is sovereign”.

Influence argue that instead a separate provision, Article 127 of the EEA agreement, would have to be triggered for the UK to leave the single market.

Perhaps the most important part of the judgement If they are successful, and if the Supreme Court was the court’s warm adoption of AV Dicey’s upholds the High Court’s judgement in Miller, thoughts on the judiciary’s role in Parliamentary then it would follow that Parliament could “This is about protecting the Sovereignty: “judges know nothing about any trigger Article 50 but refuse to trigger Article will of the people except so far as that will is most fundamental rule of the UK 127, ensuring some degree of economic certainty expressed by an Act of Parliament”. In other constitution: that Parliament is and political hostility in equal measure. words, the referendum, though politically important, set no legal obligations on the Even more politically controversial would be sovereign” Government nor Parliament. raising an argument before the courts that the triggering of Article 50 could be reversed, a The resistance to the court’s judgement has been immense and deplorable. question that could realistically only be answered by the European Court of From the tabloid press denouncing the judges as “enemies of the people” Justice. Having already witnessed the furore over British judges having the to the UKIP backed Leave.EU group openly calling for the Supreme Court audacity to do their job, the notion of European judges involving themselves justices to “bow to the will of the people”, the threat to our independent in the Brexit process would almost certainly send Nigel Farage’s groupies judiciary is more real than ever. into a fit of uncontrollable rage.

All parties agreed that there was no issue with justiciability in the case; although Liz Truss’s half-hearted defence of the judiciary may make one think otherwise. Similarly, the notion that the judges were in any way biased is both a laughable and dangerous proposition—one, which to his credit, the Attorney General has shut down.

It is one thing to criticise the court’s judgement; indeed, with varying strength, such arguments have been made by a number of respected legal minds, including Oxford’s Leslie Green. Very different, though, is accusing the most senior of judges of putting their own political beliefs ahead of a rigorous, independent application and interpretation of the law; essentially, accusing them of being corrupt. For the first time in our history eleven Supreme Court justices will be sitting on the appeal, so at least in a simplistic sense we will soon know if the judges got the law ‘right’. More worrying is the likely backlash against the judiciary if the Divisional Court’s judgement is upheld.

In the days that followed the 3rd November ruling we saw mainstream politicians and media outlets manipulate an appetite for ‘Brexit at whatever cost’, shared by some of the British population, as ammunition for a vicious

Yet, it seems unavoidable. There may well be an appetite for a second referendum on the terms of our new deal with the EU, or indeed Parliament may wish to put constraints on the Government’s negotiating hand, such as guaranteeing access to the Single Market or ensuring we remain a part of the European Arrest Warrant. None of that matters, though, if there is no mechanism of enforcement. If the British electorate rejects the deal on offer, rather than maintaining our current status, the EU Treaties would simply cease to apply to the UK due to the two year time limit set by Article 50.

Similarly, if the Government failed to reach a deal because of the constraints set by Parliament in triggering Article 50, the Treaties would again simply cease to apply and the UK would have no deal at all. As such, not only does it seem likely that such a case would be brought, it seems imperative that it should be done in a way that Parliamentary oversight has some teeth.

Within a few weeks the Supreme Court will decide who has the power to kick start Brexit. What comes beyond that is, if possible, even more exciting, but also completely unpredictable. What is clear, though, is that “Brexit means Brexit” means nothing at all.

BLOOMSBURY | ANCHOR | 11

A multicultural city The best places to eat out in london recommended BY Carrie altug

Old Town 97

Maroush

Pho

Chinatown can be notoriously hit and miss, so choose carefully where to go. Old town 97 is perfect for your super cheap late night Chinese fix, it stays open until 4am!

Easily the best Lebanese in London, and also does take away. You will never eat Lebanese at any other place again — except in Lebanon.

£

£££

With winter reaching its peak, cure any colds with the perfect healthy option of Vietnamese Pho (actually eaten for breakfast in Vietnam). Delicious soup in walking distance from college!

Abeno Too

Eat Tokyo

Pizza Pomodoro

Come here to see Japanese Teppanyaki and Okonomiyaki cooked in front of your eyes. Doesn’t take reservations, but is definitely worth the wait. Best to order: Bacon Okonomiyaki.

Come to this super casual spot for the best value freshly made nigiri sushi in London. Reservation needed because it’s too popular!

A little pricy for pizza, but you get your money’s worth from the amazing live singers and soul bands they have every day of the week! Booking recommended for Sunday and Monday evenings.

Chinatown

Covent Garden, Holborn

£££

Kings Road, Knightsbridge, Edgware Road

Notting Hill

££

Soho

££

Knightsbridge

£££

12 | ANCHOR | BLOOMSBURY

Cards Against Humanities A party game for horrible students.

Coming to NCH Drama society next term: ____________.

An investigation into their financial department.

Mr. Burns. Finally.

Mug Gate: the musical (feat. classic hits “Who stole my soup” and “Exodus 20”).

Every accomplished NCH student loves to hate ____________.

Finding out that democracy might not be such a good idea.

Elitism and the fact that the class structure still exists.

Roxy.

During one-on-one tutorials, NCH students mostly think about ____________.

The secrets stored in A.C. Grayling’s hair.

Nihilist memes.

What it used to be like to have a social life.

SCIENCE | ANCHOR | 13

l l O e m Vision S A brief history of olfactory cinema Harry Sherwood

One might think Smell-O-Vision was merely a 60’s Hollywood hiccup, but rather oddly, films actually featured smell before they featured audio. 1906 was the year, and an insightful man called Roxy Rothafel—who would go on to set up numerous film theatres across the US—decided to produce the smell of roses during a screening of the California Rose Parade. The scent was produced by placing some cotton wool soaked in rose oil in front of a fan directed at the audience.

It took around three decades until olfactory experiences were again conjoined with moving pictures, with one theatre spraying scents from the ceilings in 1929 and another similar system was used in ‘33. Yet these systems faced major drawbacks: the smells lingered in the air for far longer than was useful to elicit the intended effect, and viewers at the sides of the theatre tended to sniff loudly and annoyingly to try to catch a whiff of the smell. A better distribution method than crop dusting was needed.

This came when Laube developed a system to precisely deliver sprayed odours to cinema seats. The invention was picked up by the son of Around the World in 80 Days director Mike Todd, who decided to trial it in a theatre along with a film created to show off the technology. Thus The Scent of Mystery was born, featuring a young Elizabeth Taylor chased across the Spanish countryside and a novelist who seeks to thwart her murder. Scent was used in two ways in the film: firstly, to augment the atmosphere, e.g. sea-breeze smells during beach scenes, and secondly to introduce independent plot-points to the audience. On one occasion, for example, the scent of tobacco smoke reveals the identity of an assassin and is thus integral to the participant’s journey.

But the film received mixed, mostly negative reviews.

One critic jibed that the film confused him since he had a cold and others complained that their seating location mean that the smells were weak. The creators of the film were forced to re-release it under a new name and without the Smell-O-Vision aspect. Yet as one critic noted, the unscented feature unoriginally re-named Holiday in Spain was at times—for instance when a loaf of bread was held in front of the camera for several seconds—“surreal”.

The Scent of Mystery, and other films like it, tried to beckon the man or woman who had purchased a TV in the 50s to return to the cinema. Perhaps if the silver screen offered an extra sense, people would come flocking back.

But these innovations failed somewhat uniformly, many because the smells were inaccurate or distracting. Smatterings of other scent accompaniments such as scratch & sniff cards dotted one or two films from the 70s and 80s, but have been more akin to novelty or promotional add-ons than to genuine improvements to realism.

So what does the future hold for smell-o-vision? Is it to be forgotten like homing pigeons and the bicycle-sewing machine? I think two things would enable widespread use of ‘scent media’. The first of these would be an increase in scent-realism. Unsurprisingly, the problem doesn’t lie in creating specific scents: we can create everything from popcorn to cadaver smells and anything in between. The issue instead is the creation of those smells at a with a cheap and simple enough mechanism to make Smell-O-Vision economically viable. To realistically represent a deep red rose olfactively, around 15-30 chemicals are required—the same for a variety of other smells. To be able to create any or even most smells, one would need upwards of 100 specific ingredients. Compare this with the cyan, magenta, yellow and black required to create any colour in this magazine, and you can appreciate the difficulty faced by Smell-O-Vision.

The other problem lies with us as media consumers.

Sound and vision have become paradigmatic: we barely pay attention to smells. We gobble gigabytes of movies and music yet only appreciate the input of our noses when we are presented with an unusual odour or are instructed to (what can you smell right now? No really, stop reading and sniff). Nevertheless, odours are extremely powerful evocators of emotions and memories.

Smells in the environment can even subconsciously alter our cognitive abilities and cause states of fear or contentment. Like the painter who uses red to represent anger, smell-artists could use odours in films to intensify the reaction of an audience even when they are not aware of it. In effect, we’d become more in tune with the emotions intended by the director.

But, as I say, a lot needs to happen for Smell-O-Vision to become reality. One way to bring it closer is just to smell things more. Evidence shows that the sense of smell can be improved dramatically with practice. I’m confident that through quotidian olfactory awareness, consciously attending to the pleasant whiff of croissants here or the scent of rain there, we can improve this neglected sense and put it back on the sensory pedestal from which it has, through millennia of evolution, tumbled.

14 | ANCHOR | CULTURE

On fears, hopes, and living life Dr. Marianna Koli

If you were stuck on a desert island, what book would you bring? This is the first instalment of Anchor’s Desert Island Books. Every term, we ask an NCH member of staff to tell us about a book that inspired them, that they can’t stop reading, and that taught them precious life lessons they would like to pass on. This time, Dr. Marianna Koli takes us on a journey to Finland with Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book.

Books give us the opportunity to live things we haven’t yet lived, and they show us others’ experiences where our own experience is limited. In doing so, they give us permission to be inexperienced, inconsistent, and imperfect.

The Summer Book, by Tove Jansson, tells parallel stories of fears caused by both experience and inexperience. It recounts one summer on the coast of the Gulf of Finland. Sophia and Grandmother explore their extraordinarily beautiful environment, and look after each other while being partners in crime, yet sometimes feeling uncomfortable together. They while away the days looking after animals and plants, creating exhibitions, writing books, sailing boats, and advising neighbours.

Grandmother is, by all accounts, an accomplished woman: “It was thanks to her that little girls were even allowed to be Scouts in those days.” But we only know about those accomplishments because she realises that since she never speaks about them, she can no longer remember. “I mean it all seems to shrink up and glide away. And things that were a lot of fun don’t mean anything any more. It makes me feel cheated, like what was the point? At least you ought to be able to talk about it.” However, despite her desire to be heard and valued, we come to see she is an expert deflector of all personal conversation that could enable others to take an interest in her.

Sophia is a creative and opinionated little girl, as confused by Grandmother’s bouts of sadness, anger, and reticence as she is frightened by her physical surroundings. At the same time, Grandmother offers an endless array of distractions to help Sophia philosophise her anxieties. To deal with a fright involving a worm, Sophia dictates a chapter to Grandmother about how angleworms can survive only if they accept the possibility of snapping in half:

“Take your scared worm—it will pull itself together to, say, one-seventh of its length, which makes it little and fat and easy to stick a hook through, which is not what it had in mind. But now take your smart worm. It makes itself as long as it can so there’s nothing to stick a hook through, and then it comes apart.

Science does not yet know if it just breaks, or if the worm is being clever, because you can’t always tell, but...”

Despite its simple language and elegant setting, this is not an easy read. Its simplicity almost makes it more distressing: how is it possible to complicate things so much, so often, in such a beautiful place, for no apparent reason? The imperfections of both Sophia and Grandmother are so exaggerated that they make the reader feel serene in comparison. We can empathise with Sophia’s childhood fears and admire her adventures, but also hope that by the time we reach Grandmother’s age, we’ll not only be accomplished, but lead a life of sufficient reflection that we won’t accidentally misplace our memories.

The author, Tove Jansson, was known for her work as a novelist, painter, illustrator and comic strip designer. Besides her dreamy novels, she is well know for creating the popular kids’ characters called the Moomins, who appear in comics, books, and on tv. This is her holding a Moomin.

CULTURE | ANCHOR | 15

On the heartland: A literary treatise Karishma Patel

The 19th century saw industrialisation bloom. The cost of transport being high, factories thronged together in what we now call “the Industrial Heartland”.

The word is first cited in the Oxford English Dictionary as “hartland”, first use 1634—“a place where love resides; the heart”. Of course, it then modulates with geopolitical theory to be the word we well know splashed across The Independent, denoting a powerful region, the muscle of a nation, the seat of our national attachment. It might be worth considering, in the wake of such political upheaval, what the “heart” of Britain is and has been. For the past few hundred years, we have seen friction between the urban and rural, and a regional identity in flux.

We are reminded of key literary figures—Clare, Wordsworth, Hardy— mourning the loss of the English countryside in the 19th century, the sooty fingers of the Industrial Revolution prodding at every aspect of life. Where was the heartland of Britain then? Wordsworth’s collection of poetry, Lyrical Ballads, is an attempt to preserve regional vernacular, the (supposed) language of English authenticity that industrialisation threatened to urbanise. A verse from We Are Seven:

“A simple child, dear brother Jim, That lightly draws its breath, And feels its life in every limb, What should it know of death?”

Our heart, it seems, was in this cultural heritage, so isolated from the urban landscape. The poem discusses infant mortality, from the perspective of a young, country girl; the language is unornamented, attempting to mimic regional dialect, and adopts a full rhyme scheme to give the impression of folk song, a ballad. This notion of a regional heartland and identity persisted long after the early 19th century in which Wordsworth wrote. We have long been in the business of finding our national identity lost, of gathering it piecemeal.

At the beginning of the 20th century, we have the idea of a national music, which Vaughan Williams sets out to retrieve, in fear of it being lost. In 1903, following in the footsteps of Cecil Sharp and other big names in the folk-song revival, he travelled a year to transcribe songs from the English countryside (Bushes and Briars is an utterly beautiful example of this music). These are such songs as Tess’ mother sings in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, orally passed, never written, and seminal to a rapidly disappearing regional heritage. It is worth here noting Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie, as it best captures the turn-of-the-century English countryside in decline. It seems another world, submerged hundreds of years in the distant past, not without its problems but ostensibly “English”.

Of course now, in the wake of Brexit, the notion of a heartland has come to the forefront of political discourse as something quite different. British heart, the muscle of the working class, no longer has anything to do with folk song or regional dialect, and rather has everything to do with a loss of heart. The pre-19th century regional identity found itself supplanted by an industrial one, which has in turn been whipped away underfoot with the rise of new industries. The lack of employment and investment in the once powerful northern regions has left an economic-identity vacuum, capitalised on by UKIP and a pervasive, nationalist rhetoric. Human life has altered a great deal in the past hundred years, and we are in need of a certain political adaptability in order to curb mass disenfranchisement.

Perhaps at this time we are suffering an identity crisis, addled with the remnants of Empire, attempting to lick post-industrial wounds and in the process of redefining what it is to be “British”. We must be careful to remain internationalist and cosmopolitan as we redefine ourselves. While Wordsworth’s attempt to save the English, regional identity was perhaps disappointed by his privilege, I believe we can safely conclude it was a nobler attempt than Farage’s.

16 | ANCHOR | CULTURE

The bard and the city Conor Turley

Shakespeare, of course, was not from the city, but travelled there, to London, early in his career and spent the best part of his working life living there. Yet, as Park Honan comments, “he was born, married and buried in Stratfordupon-Avon. And this provincial town remained, in most senses, his home”.

Shakespeare was ultimately an outsider in the city.

We find in Elizabethan attitudes a somewhat recognisable binary between the city and the country: the city is the seat of the court, the political centre, the home of Kings, Queens, Princes and their retinue of nobles. And as such, it represents the height of all that is noble and refined in human society. The country, on the other hand, is a place of simpletons, of ‘country bumpkins’— an archetype which Shakespeare has fun with: in As You Like It, Touchstone (of the Court) locates the difference between country and city folk in their respective modes of speech. He speaks condescendingly to the countrydwelling William:

Therefore, you clown, abandon, - which is in the vulgar leave, - the society, - which in the boorish is company, - of this female, - which in the common is woman; which together is, abandon the society of this female, or, clown, thou perishest; or, to thy better understanding, diest; or, to wit I kill thee, make thee away, translate thy life into death, thy liberty into bondage: I will deal in poison with thee, or in bastinado, or in steel; I will bandy with thee in faction; I will o’errun thee with policy; I will kill thee a hundred and fifty ways: therefore tremble and depart. [5.1] The word “clown” in this context is taken to mean something like “country yokel”, and the confounded William departs shortly thereafter. But this is,

more than anything, derisive of Londoners’ contemptuous attitudes to the country and its folk—attitudes which Shakespeare surely met with in his early days in London—and the play as a whole subverts such urban-centric attitudes in its celebration of the virtues of country living.

And of course, while the city has its social and intellectual elites, it also has its own share of half-wits. Shakespeare presents the seedy and raucous underbelly of the city in plays such as Henry IV Parts I and II, and Measure for Measure. In the former, he presents the tavern life of London’s suburbs— the world of Sir John Falstaff and his retinue of fun-loving, sack-drinking knaves, who in Henry V form the low-living backbone of England’s military expedition in France. As for Measure for Measure, Shakespeare’s Vienna is a bed of moral decay, a hothouse of brothels and rampant concupiscence—a place which needs to be purged of its vice, a task deputed by the Duke to the austere Angelo.

But if the city is a place of moral licentiousness and excess, it is, more personally for Shakespeare, a place of limitation: the Lord Mayor, Sheriffs of London, and the Common Council—all under the influence of a strong puritan streak running through the city’s civic authorities—were suspicious of the theatres and the plays which they staged. So many people gathered in one space, watching drama so concerned with issues of politics, religion and warfare, was a threatening prospect, and had potential as a source of social subversion, let alone as a breeding house for the plague, which intermittently ravished London. In 1580, Nicholas Woodrofe, the then Lord Mayor of London, wrote:

Some things have double the ill, both naturally in spreading the

CULTURE | ANCHOR | 17 infection, and otherwise in drawing God’s wrath and plague upon us, as the erecting and frequenting of houses very famous for incontinent rule out of our liberties and jurisdiction.

He of course refers to the playhouses which, thus banned from the city, were built outside of the City limits, in the ‘liberties’, where the jurisdiction of the city had no sway: Shakespeare’s play-going public journeyed outside of the City to playhouses such as the Globe—away from the confines of urban life, and into the world of the plays. And this exodus is often mirrored in the plays themselves, especially in the comedies, in what has been termed an escape to the “Green World”: in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the forest surrounding Athens is a green world where fairies live, where the “Mechanicals” go to rehearse their play, and where the young lovers Hermia and Lysander find a suitable antidote to the confines and social decorum of the Athenian court.

To return to the Renaissance distinction between the city and the country, the conception of the city as seat of the utmost in human thought, of refined arts and the hub of learning finds its archetype in Florence, the home of Europe’s cultural Renaissance. This is the home of the Medici family, long-standing patrons of philosophy and the arts; Leonardo Da Vinci’s birthplace and sometime home; the city where Marsilio Ficino refounded Plato’s Academy, where Michelangelo, Botticelli and many other famed painters made their living—and not to mention is home to feats of staggering and exquisite architecture.

CLEOPATRA: Melt Egypt into Nile! and kindly creatures Turn all to serpents! [2.5] These imperative outbursts deconstruct the city in the imagination, dissolving them into the liquid form of the rivers which run through their centres. Such apocalyptic imagery serves to heighten the magnificence of these characters, subordinating the cities which they rule and from which they emerge to disposable targets of their fury.

Of course, we would like to view our cities today as more stable entities, free from the whims of autocrats, but this may not always be the case. Politically, Shakespeare presents city populations which are not all that dissimilar from those which we see today: “You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things!”, Marulus accuses the citizens of Rome in the opening scene of Julius Caesar. He goes on to berate them for their fickle-mindedness in their love of Pompey one day, and of Caesar the next. Later in the play, when Brutus and Antony address their funeral orations to the citizens, their naivety and changeability is again taken to task: Antony is able to quite easily gull the crowd into his own conspiracy, after they have so resolutely pledged their loyalty to Brutus. The irony of one citizen’s declaration (after Brutus has just sermonized on the dangers that Caesar posed to freedom and democracy) “Let him [Brutus] be Caesar!” is not lost on us.

In Richard III, we get glimpses of a city population all too ready to lie down submissive to a tyrant and let him take control, against their better judgment. One citizen captures the public mood when he remarks, “O, full of danger is the Duke of Gloucester!” Yet when the time comes, and Buckingham “plays the orator”, spouting Richard’s lies to the crowd and paving his way to kingship, they look on, silently:

Yet the city as hub of learning and cultural sophistication alone is neither sufficient nor realistic. In The Tempest, philosopherking and Duke of Milan, Prospero—the ultimate in Renaissance learning—is usurped by his politically-savvy brother, Antonio. His love of learning and devotion to his studies is a weakness that is exploited: PROSPERO: ... for the liberal arts Without a parallel. Those being all my study, The government I cast upon my brother And to my state grew stranger, being transported And rapt in secret studies... ...

I, thus neglecting worldly ends, all dedicated To closeness and the bettering of my mind... [1.2] Whilst such pursuits have their place in defining a city, Shakespeare seems to be saying, the city is also a place with social and political realities which cannot be overlooked: Plato’s republic, with its philosopher-kings, whilst appealing, is something we are not quite ready for yet.

“While the city has its social and intellectual elites, it also has its own share of half-wits, a raucous and seedy underbelly portrayed in Shakespeare’s plays”

Politics is at the heart of what the city means to Shakespeare, and he explores the relationship between the political elite and the people they rule. Ancient Rome provides a particularly fruitful setting for this, with its histories as both an Empire and a Republic. In Antony and Cleopatra, cities are merely an after-thought, a backdrop against which to stage the lives and loves of their larger-than-life rulers, serving merely to deck their hyperbolic expressions of vented fury: ANTONY: Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch Of the ranged empire fall! Here is my space!

Kingdoms are clay! [1.1]

BUCKINGHAM: No, so God help me, they spake not a word; But, like dumb statues or breathing stones, Gazed each on other, and look’d deadly pale. [3.7] Shakespeare’s Londoners—like his Romans—are described as stones; but one might question which is worse, the naïve yet impassioned citizens of Rome, or the knowing yet silent citizens of London. Perhaps we can find both types in our cities today: monarchs and military leaders have been replaced by elected politicians and media moguls, but such personalities have proved just as capable of moulding popular opinion and of swaying a population into following a path otherwise acknowledged to be a bad one for the nation, as recent events both here and across the Atlantic might suggest. Similarly, there must therefore remain swathes of level-headed citizens who see questionable courses being taken, but look on regardless.

All in all, Shakespeare’s city is just as multifarious and complex as our modern conception of the city is. Morally, it is intrinsically neither good nor bad: where it holds the potential for the apex of human dignity, of the marvels of arts and sciences, it also holds the continual possibility of being a seat of tyrants, of immobile and fickle masses, and of moral decay—in short, humanity at its worst. What is the antidote to all of this? Shakespeare’s continual reference to the natural world and the countryside as a point of contrast—and as bearing redeeming, humanizing qualities—is a recurring feature of his works: and perhaps a fitting subject for further thought.

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Exhibitions Not To Miss this winter recommended by ted simonds

Robert Rauschenberg Until April 2017 Tate Modern

Donna Huanca: scar cymbals

Abstract Expressionism

Performance art?

Installation?

Architecture? Or a “highly structured architectural tableau”? This exhibition will leave you feeling confused and amazed. Within the confines of an 19th Century Methodist Chapel, Huanca exposes the human form in all its brutal inaccessibility. Buried under paint and prosthetics, the living human models are scattered amid a three storey glass structure that becomes more opaque as the models become more naked. A beautiful presentation of our reaction to flesh, you should go along and immerse yourself in what is skin and bone and magical.

Read fast: act faster. The nature of painting was turned on its head after WWII, in a haze of Beat poetry and Jazz that submerged the 1950s as Pollock and pals changed the rules forever. Towering canvases are deeply expressive, often sublime and always characteristic of the movement, whose breadth is given adequate treatment in this exhibition. Pollock, Mitchell, Rothko, Still, de Kooning, Newman, Kline, Smith, Guston and Gorky; need I say more? This has been a stellar show which you would be a fool to miss.

Until December 18 Zabludowicz Collection

An anticipant of Pop-Art, Rauschenberg’s work combines paint, collage, desk fans, and angora goat heads. His six-decade career started as a reaction to Abstract Expressionism (which you may have seen at the RA lately), but developed into a rich questioning of what art is. In this retrospective every room is a different stage in the life of the artist, a format that worked well in Tate’s previous O’Keefe exhibition. Rauschenberg was inspired by Duchamp, his Neo Dadaist work aims to fall “in the gap between art and life”, but in this exhibition you can fall in love with Rauschenberg.

Until January 2 Royal Academy of Arts

CULTURE | ANCHOR | 19

Escaping the metropolis Tom Bostock and shree ganguly

Warning: contains spoilers. A father raising his herd of children outside the confines of modern civilisation is the type of Utopian-hipster fantasy that even Rousseau would roll his eyes at. Still, in Captain Fantastic, director Matt Ross (Silicon Valley) does put in place elements that could amount to a great film, it is just a shame he fails to make use of most of them. Whilst trying to create a balanced critique which could truly force his audience into dilemma after undecided dilemma, all that Ross achieves is to lose the nuance of his arguments, despite the best efforts of his accomplished cast.

Ben (Viggo Mortenson), the cult-like patriarch of this eccentric brood, is certainly not wrong in his critique of modernity, although he’s not particularly original either (see Harrison Ford in the 1986 Mosquito Coast). But for an insightful critique of modern metropolitan society (or, though unlikely from Hollywood, a critique of left-wing liberalism), greater emphasis needs to be placed on the character’s motivations, rather than simply a focus on his actions. It doesn’t really matter that Ben is leading his family in a cinematically beautiful path away from the metropolis: in order for us to derive meaning from the movie, we need to know why.

Attempts at drawing out motivations are cumbersome. Annoyingly, Ross fails to effectively tackle the issues the film raises other than through pithy oneliners. Perhaps comedic, the only purpose this actually serves is to make the film live up to the sanctimonious stereotype films of this nature bear. The family’s exaggerated left-wing tendencies are laughable. If this is a comment on the tendencies of intellectual types to be left-leaning, this is largely lost through the fervent quoting of Marx, the childish dismissal of religion and the idolatry of left-wing figures such as Chomsky. This only proves that the family, through indoctrination, is committed to a life in the woods. It fails to be a wrenching examination of how their and our own lives are being, and should be, lived: it doesn’t to compel the viewer to want to adopt such a lifestyle themselves, neither to retreat further into metropolitan comforts.

The concerns of the children’s grandparents are more understandable, if only because they are taken from a more familiar perspective. The film is admirable in its attempts to alienate us from our metropolitan views and then crashing us back into them using the foil of the gruff grandfather, Jack (Frank Langella) and the meeker grandmother, Abigail (Ann Dowd). Nevertheless, these are just attempts at a profundity which Ross has struggled to portray. For example, when Rellian (Nicholas Hamilton) breaks his arm rock climbing, an injury later dramatically declared to be child abuse. Suddenly, part of the lifestyle we had admired and accepted as desirable when seeing it from the eyes of those within it, becomes exactly the kind of lifestyle we condemn when viewed from the outside. Not the most imaginative of points to make, but even so, one which is ruined by Ben’s uncompromising, compassionless, disturbing and ultimately abusive attitude when the break takes place.

Watching Ben force his son to continue climbing up the mountain and then run through a freezing storm makes for an unpleasant viewing experience.

Instead of the shock of different world views clashing, we find ourselves wholeheartedly agreeing with the claim that yes, this is child abuse.

Unused potential overwhelmingly shines through in Captain Fantastic. Ross entirely fails to grapple with the factors that led to the mother’s suicide, instead choosing to apparently resolve the issue by having the seemingly rebellious Rellian and his father simply apologise to one another. He reduces a complex issue surrounding mental health, modernity, and morality into a feel-good message about family first. There is also a slight nod at the hypocrisy of

Ben’s own values: he advocates a lifestyle led by rational debate, yet is both dictatorial in his opposition to any conflicting perspectives and hypocritical in his oppressiveness. The depth of Mortensen’s acting is entirely wasted on this superficial narrative.

Alternatively, consider the film’s take on education. It attempts to make a very valid point about the disadvantages and the narrow constraints of an overly standardised and lacklustre American education system. The contrasts between eight-year-old Zaja’s (Shree Crooks) knowledge and passion surrounding the Bill of Rights and teenagers Justin and Jackson’s (Elijah Stevenson and Teddy Van Ea, respectively) complete ignorance of it, are amusing and touching, if again, self-righteous. Another instance is Ben and his daughter Keilyr’s (Samantha Isler) discussion regarding Nabokov’s Lolita. It is a brief glance at the nuanced film Ross could have made: not by taking a simple didactic approach but a genuine attempt at true discourse.

Captain Fantastic, then, fails to make the positive case for living outside of the metropolis. It fully fails to provide a negative one, too. Its portrayal of the evils of urban life are hackneyed and clichéd: a rant about the terrors of shopping malls; a family which doesn’t respect the more left-of-field but innocent requests in their daughter’s will; the main metropolitan characters appearing chiefly in suits. One scene does excellently portray the huge health issue with city life, the children simply wondering why everyone is so fat.

But again, it undermines itself, by displaying the astonishing lack of social skills of the children who declare that fully in public.

We ought not forget to give the film its due, however. There is searing critique of their extended family, where, despite being older, the children are treated like infants, allowed only to care about their video games. Some of the metaphors are mildly clever. For example, the use of Keilyr’s inability to decide where to lay her sympathies in Lolita to similarly confuse viewers’ sympathies between metropolitan and nomadic life. Given the limits of the plot, the acting is remarkable, particularly given the ages of the child stars.

Ultimately, we don’t feel compelled to sympathise with the wish to live outside of society, and so we don’t feel any sort of conflict when we see the bland compromise reached at the end. We are left with the tempered down, upper middle-class, organic-food shopping, liberal version of The Mosquito Coast, which, despite all its flaws, at least has bite to it.

In fact, Captain Fantastic shares a lot of obvious similarities to its less PC predecessor. Both feature a cult-like family led by their stubborn, hypocritical, authoritarian father, convinced of his righteousness against a modern, consumerist society. Both also have an obedient eldest son whose god-like reverence of his father slowly erodes as he comes of age, as well as the more emotionally and sexually developed teenage girl who helps bring about this development. The two also share a more defiant and outspoken younger son; an inevitable, eventual disaster which snuffs out any hippy dreams; and an irritatingly on-the-nose soundtrack.

Captain Fantastic tries and fails to provide an engaging critique of civilisation, modernity and metropolis, despite the material being evident in its concept. It doesn’t necessarily provide answers, nor is it that thought-provoking. But, if you are looking for a feel-good flick that is easy to watch and won’t challenge your conventional lifestyle too greatly, you won’t go too far wrong.

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Moscow: History of a Symbol Dr. Catherine Brown

Russia doesn’t do towns. There are no Russian Granthams, Great Yarmouths, or Leighton Buzzards. Its vastness prohibits such chirpy, middling, interconnected entities. Instead, its farmers live in villages whilst everyone else huddles in metropolises. Despite the unlimited, dirt-cheap land across which they might spread themselves, the Russians pile themselves in their hundreds of thousands into tower blocks, like stakes in a metal paling, guarding an older, wooden centre and its kremlin from the near-empty expanses near-infinitely around.

No wonder that Russia’s conservative-patriotic nineteenth-century novelists gave St Petersburg a bad rap (slum-riddled and psychically-threatening in Dostoevsky; corruptly glamorous, frivolous and faithless in Tolstoy). How different was Moscow’s reputation in those two demoted centuries to what it had been and would become. It was quiet, pacific, of ontological rather than pragmatic importance. When Napoleon came and—according to Tolstoy— looked down on Moscow from the hills South of the city, he saw it as a woman waiting to be raped:

For all their apparent independence, these cities have an undisputed tsar: Maskvà. Since it replaced Kiev as the capital of the Russians in the thirteenth century, Moscow has directed the expansion of its people. Most of Russia’s cities owe their existence to it, and all remain culturally, politically and economically subordinate to it. In the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, Moscow was metonymic of Russia, and symbolic of dictatorial rule.

At ten o’clock on the 2nd of September the morning light was full of the beauty of fairyland. From Poklonny Hill Moscow lay stretching wide below with her river, her gardens, and her churches, and seemed to be living a life of her own, her cupolas twinkling like stars in the sunlight.

Yet there was an interlude. After Peter I trumped Louis XIV’s moving of his court to a new palace fourteen miles outside Paris, by moving his court to a new capital four hundred and fifty miles outside Moscow, the latter city was left behind. Sankt Peterburg, as young as New York and more ambitious, represented Germany, Europe, neoclassicism, modernity, multiculturalism, multilingualism, the military, money, and the Petrine aristocracy. Moscow became a backwater, whilst remaining the home of Russia’s oldest families, kremlin, churches, monasteries, and beliefs. It was Russian; St Petersburg was cosmopolitan. St Petersburg was the head; Moscow was the heart. St Petersburg had been built with forced labour in a cold swamp where no metropolis had any business to exist; Moscow had developed organically over centuries.

At the sight of the strange town, with its new forms of unfamiliar architecture, Napoleon felt something of that envious and uneasy curiosity that men feel at the sight of the aspects of a strange life, knowing nothing of them. [...] Every Russian gazing at Moscow feels she is the mother; every foreigner gazing at her, and ignorant of her significance as the mother city, must be aware of the feminine character of the town, and Napoleon felt it. This Asiatic city with the innumerable churches, Moscow the holy. Here it is at last, the famous city! It was high time.

[War and Peace, trans. Constance Garnett] The mother was soon to be burnt by its own inhabitants in their tactical retreat from the French army. The ‘old’ Moscow that the nineteenth-century writers

CULTURE | ANCHOR | 21 knew was architecturally younger than St Petersburg. Yet its place in the body of the country remained unchanged. Romanticism projected through the Russian prism gave Moscow the aspect of antiquity, and its ‘soul’ the aspect of mysterious profundity. When Alexander II was assassinated by anarchists in 1881, the Church of the Spilt Blood on the bloody spot in St Petersburg imitated Red Square’s St Basil’s, in order to assert Russianness in the face of Western ideologies that inspired murder.

themselves to death out of heartbreak as once they did, nor are ‘snowdrops’ —frozen corpses—discovered in each spring’s snowmelt as once they were.

The birth rate and life expectancy have risen every year in this millennium.

Beggars are not visible in Moscow any more.

Moscow is no longer a cipher for anything. Despite recent Western attempts to generate a phoney neo-Mccarthyism, it is now a complex, not a simple, signifier. It no longer represents Orthodoxy, autocracy, serfdom, Communism, ‘diky’ (wild) capitalism, or any other single or simple ideology or phenomenon, either in Russia or the world at large. Its government is rightly complained at in the regions for not lifting provincial living standards faster closer to its own, and for not allowing the regions more power. Yet Moscow itself is still loved, in simple and not so simple ways.

Yet after the Revolution had exploded in, and renamed, St Petersburg, Moscow became the world’s capital of an internationalist ideology written by a German. It simultaneously reinvented the autocracy for which nineteenthcentury Russia had been notorious, whilst St Petersburg in its turn sank into a backwater, its hypnotising neoclassical facades slowly decaying, its pace of life gradually slowing. It was gripped by a sudden nine hundred days of pain during the Second World War; then the process resumed. The very historicism Red Square remains with which the city’s summer palaces, destroyed by the retreating Germans, were respectfully reconstructed, “St Petersburg was the confirmed the city’s place in the past.

head; Moscow was the heart”

Soviet Communism was directed from and exemplified

by Moscow. There the metro was at its oldest, deepest, and most chandeliered; the Terror claimed the most victims; the Lyubyanka tortured the most people; education was the best; living standards were the highest. It is a little-known fact, though recorded by the novelist Mikhail Bulgakov, that the devil and his retinue visited Moscow in 1937; but the Communists, being rationalists, have always denied this.

The Ostankinskaya television and radio tower broadcast the Communist message to all in the world who—to absorb or fight it—would listen. East Berlin’s Fernseherturm, huge though it was, was only two thirds of the height and a fraction of the authority of the Ostankinskaya needle, from which it took its message.

Moscow remained the promised land for Russians: a hugely exciting place to visit, and highly desirable place to live, but for many—as for Chekhov’s three sisters—hard to get to; distant; unaffordable; requiring a permit; a once-in-alifetime place for a holiday. Most people knew two metropolises: the one they lived in, and a semi-mythological Moscow.

Then came the collapse. Communism crashed and Goldman Sachs arrived.

Capitalism rocked up with its gloves decidedly off. Western products and ideologies sold for many times the Western price. Western cars arrived, with native oligarchs to drive them. Anti-Western Communist propaganda had never rung truer than when it was silenced. The death rate soared. The birth rate collapsed. Unemployment exploded, especially for women, who starved themselves into attractiveness to potential foreign husbands or paying punters.

Food markets were taken over by Caucasian gangsters. Literally legless Afghan vets dragged their torsos around on skateboards to beg. Professional musicians busked in subways. Professional ballerinas stripped in nightclubs.

Moscow became the inter-war Weimar of the nineties and early naughties: devastated, exhilarated, unstable, unequal, racy. Its nightclubs popped up and down, with feis-control to select sexy women and rich men, dwarfs in leopard-print thongs, male and female strippers, girls from the provinces looking for loaded lovers, semi-lit unisex toilets, strenuous imitation of a pornographically-imagined West. Western men discovered that sex was on tap, and would stay for a few years before—as novelist A.D. Miller put it —“they retreated to service more reputable crooks in London or New York, sometimes as a partner in Shyster and Shyster or wherever, taking with them a handy offshore bank balance and some tits-and-Kalashnikov Wild East stories to console their live-long commutes”.

Then, mercifully, the post-Soviet period became the post-post-Soviet one.

Capitalism found its gloves and put them back on. A younger generation of musicians found its way back into the Bolshoi, and the ballerinas dropped their second jobs as strippers. The business culture and night-clubs became more civilized and less inter-connected. Middle-aged men no longer drank

a place of national pilgrimage. The Alexander Garden on the Kremlin’s West wall is still the place where the country’s couples want to kiss, and Gorky Park is still where the country wants to ice-skate. The Sparrow Hills remain a place from which to gaze at the city on arrival (like Napoleon), or departure (like Bulgakov’s Satan and his retinue).

Moscow is at the heart of ‘European Russia’. It had to be located in the West of the country for the same reason that Washington had to lie in the East of the US; ethnic Russians are Europeans who spread East, just as European Americans, largely at the same time, spread West. But Russians refer to Europe as somewhere else, and it is fitting that Moscow does not lie as far West as Smolensk. The four hundred miles that today separate Moscow from NATO represent a psychological distance. The country that Moscow rules and represents is its own thing—interactive with but not to be reduced to Europe or China. The nineteenth-century anguish over the question of whether Russia is European or Asian has now disappeared, and with it the fetishisation of Moscow as the guarantor of Russianness; globalisation has undermined the very sense of the question. That loss of urgency gives the Russians a breathing space, and Moscow—still physically heavy with Soviet and tsarist symbols—is now free, for the first time in its history, to be not a symbol, but to finds its way as the complex heart and head of a complex country.

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SOUNDS OF A DARK METROPOLIS Tom Bostock

Partly thanks to the curation and scene-dominance of the Blood Music label, and partly to the popularity of the indie game Hotline Miami and its soundtrack, darkwave is emerging as the genre of London’s heavier subcultures. Alternatively known as darksynth (in connection with Carpenter Brut), or slasherwave (as attributed to Gost, Blood Music’s latest big name), darkwave has reinvigorated electronic music and revived it among metalheads and hard ravers alike.

Typified by heavy, distorted bass synths, darkwave was spawned by the retrowave, as a more oppressive and brutal cousin (for retrowave, think Dynatron, early Tommy ‘86, and in its more mainstream incarnations, Kavinsky, Com Truise and even Daft Punk’s Tron Legacy OST). Whilst retrowave (a.k.a. outrun or synthwave) focuses on forging atmospheric, hopeful and mostly slow 80s-inspired pieces, darkwave aims at soundtracking the gloomier aspects of retrofuturism, sometimes attacking with its fast, jagged, pummelling sounds.

Why write about this now? Because this is a critical moment in darkwave’s trajectory: the scene has either reached its zenith, or is just about to break into popular consciousness. The lighter synthwave has been propelled into the mainstream by the soundtracks to the film Drive and the TV show Stranger Things. The undisputed star of the darkwave, Perturbator, has just reached critical success (and inevitably induced much hipster dismay) thanks to ‘Vile World’, a B-side track released on the bonus disk of his latest album The Uncanny Valley, which opened this year’s EMAs. The scene had its biggest gig yet, with Perturbator, Gost and Horskh playing at Scala in October–only a couple of months after a Camden Underworld gig featuring Perturbator, Dan Terminus and Raveyards. Next month, Carpenter Brut and Raveyards will be back in the Underworld. Darkwave and its main tour promoters, Nightshift Productions, are setting up in London to stay.

The sound of the scene, rather than just being bedroom producers programming similarly influenced but disparate synths, has become stylistically similar.

For something similar to dance music: Dance with the Dead - ‘Invader’ Near Dark

For Satan: Gost - ‘Maleficarum’ Non Paradisi

Under the auspices of the label Blood Music, big players such as Perturbator, Gost, Dynatron, Tommy ‘86 and Dan Terminus have achieved similar, although not monochrome, sound qualities. Perturbator’s slow, unrelenting bass and shimmering high synths (check out ‘I am the Night’) are less prominent now, and gone are Tommy ‘86’s disco stylings (see his album Disco Machine).

Now the faster, more frantic, distorted styles of Gost’s ‘Maleficarum’ or Dan Terminus’s ‘Cherenkov Blue Reactor’ are in, combined with production budgets which cover more than just a few soft synths.

The anonymous, skeleton-mask-wearing producer Gost has gone a step further and transcended the creative boundaries of the genre. Rather than churning out more tracks evocative of Blade Runner-style cyber-punk landscapes, Gost has shown himself to be an artist of variety with the release of his second album, Non Paradisi, which is a trip through Milton’s Paradise Lost. The first true concept album the scene has had, it reached 11th place on Bandcamp’s ‘Dance/Electronic’ chart and 25th on the newcomer ‘Heatseekers’ chart— more extreme in its sound than any other darkwave album, and the most successful. Tommy ‘86’s Transhumanism—also a concept album and a foray into melding this heavier soundscape with the more soundtrackesque sounds that created the genre—came out soon afterwards in late October, this time based on, unsurprisingly, the rise of AIs and transhumanism.

Despite their attempt at monopolising the genre, Blood Music is not the only label releasing darkwave tracks. I’ve mentioned Carpenter Brut, whose Trilogy, with the especially fantastic track ‘Hang ‘em All’, foreran Gost’s quasi-Satanism. The Killxallxmusic label’s Occam’s Lazer produced a driving Flaggellation EP, and Dance with the Dead are producing more rock friendly techno. Blood Music aren’t only producing heavy tracks either—Dynatron’s The Rigel Axiom is a beautiful techno EP, and much of their catalogue is avant-garde and black metal that’s all worth downloading.

Be prepared to start clubbing to angry bass and oscillating arpeggios as this genre hits the big-time.

For Martin Garrix influence: Dan Terminus - ‘The Chasm’ The Wrath of Code

For arpeggios: Carpenter Brut - ‘Hang ‘em All’ Trilogy

CULTURE | ANCHOR | 23

What we think about when we think about maps Ted Simonds

A Japanese architect and artist has developed an answer to this. The map shown below is his own creation based on a complex process, and won the prestigious 2016 Good Design Award. Narukawa breaks the world into 96 regions, the regions are then put on a tetrahedron (maintaining their area ratios) and then the tetrahedron is cut out and pasted into a rectangular frame.

The map is based loosely off Buckminster Fuller’s ‘dymaxiom map’, whereby the world is projected onto a 20 sided shape (an icosahedron) and then flattened. While Fuller’s map is in scale, it is nearly incomprehensible due to the fact that the land masses are severed so severely. The new “AuthaGraph” projection from Narukawa resolves the problem.

What we think about when we think about maps is actually the 16th Century.

The Mercator projection is from Holland and from 1569. This map has a place This is exciting. In Japan this has already replaced the Mercator projection at the centre of cartographical discourse due to the fact that its cylindrical in schools, and will hopefully catch on worldwide. As amazing as this is nature allows for ‘rhumb lines’, also known as lines of constant course, and as an intellectual pursuit, I would be withholding the real ‘loxodromes’, to be presented as straight lines. Rhumb lines motives of my article if I left it at that. Maps have had an are arcs that cross all the meridians of longitude at the same “When icecaps overtly political role in discourse from their increasing angle. To put it basically, the Mercator map makes these presence in expansionist 16th and 17th Century Europe, to arcs straight lines which was handy for sailors because the are melting, it is the East-West Cold War Politics that is easily demarcated straight meridians of longitude, latitude, and of rhumb lines really important in the Mercator projection. Narukawa’s maps are ones for meant that sailors didn’t have to keep stopping to recalculate a changing world. When icecaps are melting, it is really their bearings. It was a navigational map, first and foremost. to know how big important to know how big they are in relation to the It wasn’t trying to portray the world in an accurate way, they are in relation terrestrial landmasses that will shrink as a result. When rather a useful way. This is seen in the ways that the forests are getting cut down, whether it’s the size of a Mercator projection misrepresents land masses. The size of to the terrestrial football pitch or the size of the Amazon, relative sizes will areas in the far north and south are expanded, whilst those landmasses that will play a crucial role in understanding and changing public near the equator are shrunk. This results in Africa being the same size as Greenland, Alaska bigger than Brazil, and all shrink as a result” conceptions of global issues. But it isn’t just environmental concerns that make Narukawa’s map super-relevant today, sorts of problems of scale. the projection helps us to better understand flight paths, and to settle international boundary disputes. The project took Mr Narukawa over What do we do then if we want to understand what our world looks like?

20 years, with his Master’s thesis concerning the easy creation of ‘tensegrity’ Sure, we can go on Google Earth and look at a physical representation of the structural models, which allowed him to perform the map projection seen globe. Fine. But not everyone has a computer; not everywhere has Wi-Fi. To below. put the world onto a printed page is to make it available to everyone. It is to paste it on every school child’s wall, to put it in every atlas in every library.

We should peel the blu-tack off the walls of our brain along with the infantile The printed world, as the printed word, allows for a geographical literacy Mercator induced map projection. This map is a map for our times, that could needed in this day and age. help to educate and solve some, if not many, problems facing the physical world today.

To you and I, an image of the world is one that has been pasted into our minds like the walls of our primary school classrooms. We know the colours and the shapes of the five continents like we know our times tables. It is written into the National Curriculum that every child should be able to “interpret a range of geographical information, including maps”. This is a basic and prosaic observation to make, but unlike other things you learn before the age of ten, the map you have in your mind rarely changes beyond the realisation that the world is a sphere. Herein lies the problem.

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Eulogy to THe Arcade Pheobe Maunder

It is with great sadness that I bring everyone’s attention to the passing of The Arcade, 385401 Holloway Road, from NCH’s list of recommended student accommodation. For those of us who have had the privilege of staying at The Arcade, it comes as a blow to realise that no one in the current first year, nor anyone in the years to come at NCH, will ever again be called a fellow Arcadian. Always few in number, yet greatest in solidarity, only a seasoned Arcadian will know the drama, the danger, and the delight of living on Holloway Road.

security guards, the smokers, nor the homeless men camped outside were able to prevent either the stabbing or the sexual assault that occurred in the car park, with the building being put under lockdown each time so as to allow the police to search the premises. We remain unsure as to whether the culprits did or did not manage to escape through the fire exit next to our flat, but the door was indeed found kicked in. It also came

The home, or the metropolis, of ‘never a dull moment’, The Arcade was never without a sense of a big and bustling community: lacking in any security gates whatsoever, virtually anyone was free to enter and exit the building as they pleased. One tenant, for instance, managed to lose their key fob for over half a year and rarely had any issues getting in—as didn’t any Grindr dates, either. Adding to this communal spirit, these key fobs would often malfunction, allowing flatmates to unlock one another’s rooms and literally open doors to closer friendships.

Downstairs, 24/7 security, as well as the permanent row of smokers in the alley leading to the main entrance, provided good company at any hour of the night, excepting those few times when one was not recognised as a resident and asked to leave; a sticky situation. Not everything was perfect about The Arcade, it must be said: neither the

Twelfth Week Shorts

as a surprise to learn that the fabled ‘waiting list’ occasionally mentioned by staff actually referred to people waiting to move out, not in.

But to dwell on the bad is in poor taste. In other areas, The Arcade did more than meet expectations. The heating, for instance, was strong enough to melt the ice that occasionally formed on the floors of the first-floor bedrooms, and the WiFi worked in 70% of the building. Fire alarms were buildingwide for peace of mind, so that the news that someone was burning food at 2am, for instance, was sure to reach everyone. Yet perhaps the greatest boon of all was the tea and toast often served at reception… free of charge.

It is with heavy hearts, therefore, that we bid farewell to the brief but memorable affiliation between NCH and The Arcade. A true trailblazer in student accommodation, I highly doubt that its replacement, viz.

Unite Students, will be able to fill its boots. The pedantic reader may have earlier taken issue with the fact that ‘Arcadian’ is actually the demonym for those who live in Arcadia, the pastoral paradise of Greece, but I counter this criticism, arguing instead that the term is not entirely inaccurate: for The Arcade, if not a pastoral paradise, was a metropolitan one.

The legendary rooftop at The Arcade.

Wednesday December 14th

Thank you N7 0RY for such a chapter in my life. And a special shout out to the recent graduate Louis Watts, who managed to live for three years in that shit hole.

A bedfellows production

COMMENT | ANCHOR | 25

No Shit Sherlock: Am I a Journalist Now? Soila Apparicio

I made the assumption that completing an intense three-year politics undergraduate degree, editing a national student politics blog, and running NCH’s student magazine would place me in an excellent position when I went to journalism school. I thought, “journalism? Easy. Leggo. I’ll slay.”

Was I wrong? Yes, of course I was.

As an alumni of NCH, it’s only fair to say one thing to aspiring journalists in the depths of their degrees: almost everything you learn will be irrelevant at journalism school. Thought a two-page CV was tough? Try summarising your entire working and educational life on one. Thought reading a couple of articles for an essay counted as ‘research’? Nope, that’s background. What’s the story? No story? Trash it. Start again.

What is similar about the top of a news story and the first sentence in an essay?

You have to get straight to the point. News at the top, questions answered at the start.

I’m also learning shorthand, which is like relearning written English using very basic symbols based on the alphabet and phonetics. I’m supposed to be able to write both quicker than a full transcription in longhand and typing something up word for word. This makes me feel like a proper journalist. My favourite thing to write in shorthand is the phrase ‘chunky monkey’:

I’m doing a Masters in Investigative Journalism at City (and yet, my Student Union has just banned the Sun, the Daily Mail, and the Express from its premises). It’s a skills based degree. My passion for Rousseau is irrelevant here. Just War Theory? Irrelevant. Marxism? I still try.

But I love it. Every week I’m sent out into the wilderness of suburban London to find a ‘story’. Prisons, pensioners, and suspicious parcels; I’ve become a local expert on gentrification in W12 and got my classmate arrested for taking photos of a police station on my behalf.

As part of my transition from Soila to Sherlock, I’ve had to piece together someone’s entire life using public records and word of mouth as part of an investigative project. Seumas Milne is the Communications Officer for Jeremy Corbyn. On Wikipedia, his birthday is just stated as being in 1958, and his father used to work for the BBC. He is a man who has worked very hard to keep his private life, private; a ghost in the age of modern communication.

But I own a copy of his birth certificate. And his father’s will. And I know where he lives (and when he moved in), what classification his degree is, when exactly he was married… This is all on public record, the skill is in finding it (just as a note, I intend to use this skill for good—and to destroy capitalism).

Research is what makes investigative journalism. Three years of politics didn’t teach me about how to find, and indeed use, government information.

It didn’t teach me to talk to people on the street about what they think of banning the burqa, for example. We call those ‘Vox Pops’ (vox populi, latin: voice of the people).

I didn’t want to be a journalist when I first came to NCH. It’s not glamourous.

It’s not well paid. I was encouraged to write for Anchor by Josh (co-founder of this magazine). I think my first piece was on why we should sack the queen off. Professor Vernon Bogdanor told me in a tutorial that I was wrong.

And then I fell into editing it. “YOU NEED A WOMAN ON THE TEAM, LADS,” I protested, and there I was.

Journalism, many say, is a dying industry. Particularly print journalism.

Especially papers. As Helen Lewis put it, “Facebook and Google take 64% of online ad revenue, money that used to support journalism. Better hope they’re good at scrutinising politicians.” Journalism is changing, quickly.

The need for honest journalism is more pertinent than ever. Particularly after Brexit. Especially after Trump.

Do I feel like a journalist? Not quite; I’m still learning. Do I want to be one?

Absolutely. Especially. After. Trump.

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Beyond Bedford Square with Marius Ostrowski interview by Laura DuBois

Marius Ostrowski is a fellow at All Souls College Oxford, fervent tweeter and lecturer of Politics and International Relations at New College of the Humanties. He sat down with us to discuss what it is like being at All Souls, his favourite bookstores in London, and how the urban-rural divide sits at the heart of a wider political problem: the decline of the left and the rise of populism.

Laura Dubois: Can you tell us a little about your studies and career at Oxford?

might find yourself answering with your fellow university students at the pub, except you don’t have a laugh about it; it’s 9:30 in an exam room, you are brutally sober and have to write essays.

Marius Ostrowski: I started doing my undergrad in PPE in 2007. Weirdly enough, when I started, I assumed that I wouldn’t want to do Politics at I went quite rapidly from sitting the exam three years ago to setting it this year, all, coming from a fairly un-political background, and was described as an and choosing them is a lot of fun. You want to test these clever people with “unthinking Tory”. As an undergrad, I got really into political theory and questions that make them think, curveballs like “Defend Kitsch.” “Should switched my major accordingly. Then I went straight onto a masters in 2010, intellectuals tweet?” or “Design a punctuation mark and defend it.” People at which point I transitioned from a conservative to a libertarian, which was answer in all sorts of way, such as poems—iambic pentameter casually laid a significant improvement! I met some brilliant people on my course who down in an hour. The top five are invited to a viva in front of 70 fellows who opened the door to all of this left-wing, anarchist, socialist, are all incredibly famous: it is terrifying. At no stage did I and communist literature I’d previously rejected. Going to “Brexit has forced Lon- expect to get in. university after the financial crisis, we started questioning a lot of the assumptions we had. Especially with policy don to take a look at it- It used to be the case that there was a dinner as a reward after makers running around like headless chickens, everything self, for what it is as an the exam, although there are myths that your behaviour at was kind of falling apart. As a result, I became politicised the dinner was part of the exam, as the college is based urban centre, but also on good conversation. The pudding for this dinner was a and more left-wing. in relationship to the particular sort of cherry pie, and rumour has it that what So basically, you moved left all along the political you did with the pips in the cherries decided your fate! rest of the country.” spectrum! You’re at All Souls College now, and there are several rumours about how you got in, can you tell Do you feel London is very different from Oxford? us a little about that?

It’s interesting because there are parts of London which do resemble it in I am a fellow at All Souls, which means I am a student and researcher, but also ways. Universities like UCL or NCH have a similar feel to Oxford, people a lecturer. I have an examination fellowship, which is not just a scholarship, wander around and look like they’re having interesting discussions. I’m quite but a job. And to get in, you have to sit a very specific exam—it’s hard, I’m a fan of the small city rather than big—it’s very easy to get alienated in the not going to lie! The questions are the kinds of outlandish questions you big city. You see it on public transport—people hate everyone!

COMMENT | ANCHOR | 27 What are your favourite spots in London?

I’ve got a few! Some are stereotypical spots like the area around The National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, Whitehall, because they’re so politics-related.

But I can also lose myself in Covent Garden, dipping into a mini-café or a bookshop—antiquarian bookshops are the bane of my life! For example Watkins Books on Cecil Street, it has maps and lots of antiquarian, esoteric things.

Do you think London, as an international city, has been affected by Brexit?

liberalism itself is not—look at the Netherlands, France, Austria. In response, liberals have often panicked and caved to populism.

Social democracy in the 1990s thought it had won, and successfully tamed the excessive neoliberal capitalism, making social democracy corporatist. This means that when capitalism has a crisis, mainstream politics has nothing to say, because it’s become an aider and abetter to a lot of the worst tendencies of right-wing capitalism. This creates an identity crisis, especially for the left, while the conservatives are incredibly good at adjusting to new conditions, dropping and taking up new oppositions and dividing lines as they need to.

The only left that has something to say is the radical left, hence the rise of people like Sanders and Corbyn this year. On the right, the new conservatism comes back in, with the middle class fearing modern threats such as the working class, and of course immigrants. That’s where the contingent affinity for racism comes in.

Brexit has forced London to take a look at itself, for what it is as an urban centre, but also in relationship to the rest of the country. London is famously a magnet, with people coming from Kent to Birmingham, which means there is a certain divide between Londoners and the people who come with the specific purpose of working here. There are stereotypically urban places, like Canary What do you think the rise of populism means for Europe in general?

Wharf, that drive London, but are divorced from the more characteristic areas like the East End or Camden. Fortunately, there is a slight pushback Currently, governments are faced with two options: either acquiesce to the against gentrification, I imagine it will get stronger over time. There’s an populist movements, and that is a choice even the most ostensibly resistant internal compression of people into poorer areas like Tottenham and Hackney figures, for example Angela Merkel, have been forced to take; or resist them. because the affluent are encroaching; that’s just a recipe However most governments have been unable to find a for problems, which no part of the left-right spectrum can “Most governments meaningful way of dividing and conquering the people address. who support the right. We want to outlaw the racist, have been unable homophobic, xenophobic tendencies, but try to acquiesce London has its own internal problems, but if you look past to find a meaningful in some sense to the legitimate grievances, which are not the M25, there are huge differences to the rest of the Southnecessarily anti-immigrant. Complaints about the failures way of dividing and East. Then towards the north, you have the hollowing out of the global economic system are entirely legitimate, of the Midlands, even with the Northern Powerhouse or conquering the peo- which is why I think there’s a lot to learn from ruptures whatever survives of it. London will continue to threaten like Brexit and the Trump election. Bernie Sanders has ple who support the the rest of the country and the more it does, the more it taken an interesting stance on this by saying that his exacerbates the kind of tension that leads to secessionist movement will support Trump insofar as he addresses the right.” tendencies in Scotland, discontent in Northern Ireland, legitimate concerns of the working class, but will fight him UKIP tendencies… politically speaking, chaos. on anything which jeopardises reproductive rights, or the voting rights of people of colour. It’s very easy to dismiss all Trump voters So when you look at the population, there is a clear divide between social as racist and sexist and yes, they have shown an uncomfortable preparedness classes, but also country versus city, is that right? to intolerance, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are only motivated by that.

Precisely. It is very popular and post-modern to read current political changes only in terms of new divides in society, such as racial or sexual. But the urbanDo you see any parallels between the rise of fascism, in the 1930s, and rural divide is itself a division into economically stronger and weaker areas, today? with the mainly urban service sector challenging the industrial heartland. It’s a divide within economic sectors as much as it is within geographical regions.

There are definite parallels and general tendencies, such as appeasement, As a result, you have a working and lower middle class made redundant although clearly the global power relations are different. The real problem in places like Newcastle or Birmingham, which has not been given a new is that military and geopolitical technologies have improved a lot, unlike economic basis for identity. in the 1930s. There are little green men spreading and computer hackers interfering in elections, especially from Russia. Russia also withdrew from We need more of the high-tech investment the Scottish government is trying the International Criminal Court, similarly to Italy and Germany withdrawing to do near Aberdeen and Inverness to replace the oil industry in decline. There from the League of Nations. So yes, there are parallels on large scales: has to be a way of employing people while recognising the fact you can’t internationalism is under threat. Pluralism is under threat as certain liberties simply return to the 1960s and 1970s when there were enough manufacturing are being advanced at the expense of others, ethnic nationalism at the expense jobs. As one of the most developed countries in the world, Britain needs to of civic nationalism. Progress, in the social sense, is under threat. recognise that it’s not going to be able to maintain more than a superficial primary and secondary sector, and needs to reinvent its industrial strategy.

Do you suggest we need a revival of socialism to fix this?

Do you think there is a parallel between the rise of populism in different Western countries at the moment?

It is always dangerous to draw broad-brush comparisons, but there seems to be a general tendency toward right-wing populism due to those new social divisions. Up until now, that was unusual because the memory of WWII meant it was discredited, in the same way communism is largely unpopular in Eastern Europe—give it forty years, that may change. People simply don’t remember what it was like to live under fascism. The appeal of an updated form of populism is bourgeois fascism, addressing the new economic conditions we face. It’s a fascism that claims to defend the values of liberalism in a way that

I think we do need a socialism for the 21st century which takes on board postmodern criticisms. A pluralistic combination of property relations is the only way for society to function: a combination of private and social, which may include corporatist aspects. Free trade organised along socialist principles is entirely plausible, safeguarding workers’ rights. There is still a lot to learn from socialism.

These are certainly exciting times.

Certainly more interesting, but I’m not sure I want to live in them!

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