Mind | Issue 15

issue 15 vol.78

salient.org.nz

body and mind 2

20 july

MI N D

The Pretentious Issue Cheese Dreams / Are Police Decriminalising Weed? / Psychopathy / Antidepressants and “Discontinuation�

Come On! Feel the Harsh Noise! 12

/

The Malickthon 18

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Panel Experts 26

CONTENTS 4–15

NEWS AND OPINION

REGULAR CONTENT

05

Nothing says Re-O-Week like no

tutorials and a black out

09

Internship cancelled amid slavery

3 Editorial 6 Notices 8 Ask Agatha 8 Bridget Bones’ Diary 10 Maori Matters 10 The Week In Feminism 12 We Drank This So You Wouldn’t

Have To 12 The Moan Zone 14 “Letters” 35 Games 36 Science 38 Music 40 Food 40 Fashion 41 Books 42 Film 44 Visual Arts 46 VUWSA 47 Puzzles

accusations

16–34

FEATURES

16

A Cheese Dream Journal

20

The Police Are Decriminalising

Weed in New Zealand

26

Would You Chop Up a Giraffe?

32

The Discontinuation Method

34

An American in Wellington

Editor Sam McChesney editor@salient.org.nz Design and Illustration Ella Bates-Hermans Lily Paris West designer@salient.org.nz News Editor Nicola Braid news@salient.org.nz Investigative News Editor Sophie Boot Chief Sub Editor Kimaya McIntosh Sub Editor Zoe Russell

Senior Feature Writer Philip McSweeney

News Photographer Jess Hill

Read Salient online at salient.org.nz

Feature Writers Sharon Lam Gus Mitchell

Section Editors Sharon Lam (Visual Arts) Jayne Mulligan (Books) Bridget Pyć (Science) Kate Robertson (Music) Fairooz Samy (Film) Jess Scott (Fashion) Jack Young (Games)

Contact Level 2, Student Union Building Victoria University PO Box 600, Wellington 04 463 6766

Distributor Beckie Wilson News Reporters Tim Grgec Emma Hurley Charlie Prout Beckie Wilson Elea Yule News Interns Jordan Gabolinscy Rachel Gifford Alexa Zelensky

Other Contributors Auntie Agatha, Bridget Bones, Te Po Hawaikarangi, Brittany Mackie, Lydia and Mitch, Tom and Luke, Cameron Gray, Ania Upstill, Ruth Corkill, Hamish Popplestone, James Keane, The VUWSA Exec, Puck

Advertising Jason Sutton sales@vuwsa.org.nz 04 463 6982 Social Media Philip McSweeney philip@salient.org.nz fb.com/salientmagazine @salientmagazine Printed By Inkwise, Ashburton

About Us Salient is published by, but is editorially independent from, the Victoria University of Wellington Students’ Association (VUWSA). Salient is a member of the Aotearoa Student Press Association (ASPA) and the New Zealand Press Council.

Salient is funded in part

by Victoria University of Wellington students through the Student Services Levy. The views expressed in Salient do not necessarily reflect those of the Editor, VUWSA, or the University.

Complaints People with a complaint against the magazine should first complain in writing to the Editor and then, if not satisfied with the response, complain to the Press Council.

See presscouncil.org.nz/ complain.php for more information.

Editorial For the undergraduates among you, this time of year will be one of unbridled optimism. You WILL be more organised, you WILL work it harder make it better harder better faster stronger. Put this editorial on ice for a few weeks, when that all gives way to blind panic. For those of you doing a thesis or dissertation, that panic will have likely already set in. It did for me.

It was around this time of year—perhaps this very week—when my Honours dissertation topic fell apart and I spent the better part of a day lying in the foetal position having suicidal thoughts before breaking down over the phone to my mum. At her urging, the next day I went into Student Health and, though this was Dunedin and not Wellington, I was told what many of you at Vic have been—that counselling appointments were booked up for the next two to three weeks and I’d have to wait.

That was the first and only time I’ve asked for counselling and, though I’m sure those services do the best they can with limited resources, the experience kind of put me off asking again. Of course, there’s a fuckload of other factors at play as well. Pride. This stupid stoic ideal that’s foisted on men. Guilt, both over being a burden to others and over presuming that my problems warranted the attentions of a trained professional. I can function just fine on a daily basis so I’m likely to only need those services again in a crisis in which case, same answer. We can book you in for two to three weeks’ time. Thanks.

For most of us, university will be the best period of our lives, but it often doesn’t seem that way at the time. After all, uni holds the key to all our future endeavours—no pressure! On top of that, many of you will be like me, your sense of self-worth tied almost exclusively to the capabilities of your brain. When that bit malfunctions, or starts looking insufficient, this can be pretty cataclysmic. In a ceaseless intellectual crucible, the last thing you need is an attack of existential angst—seriously, fuck that. The only reason I was able to drag myself through my degree was by being freakishly passionate about political theory, and really wanting to write about how to reconcile neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics with a liberal-rights framework via Gadamerian hermeneutics. Obviously, this isn’t going to work for everybody.

None of this should be interpreted as me telling you not to seek help, because you should. But if you can’t or won’t, you shouldn’t have to rely on periodic waves of inspiration to carry you through. Thankfully, there are still things you can do to make the ride easier, particularly during the stressful run-in to the end of the year. Looking after myself during my university years involved a lot of trial and error; here’s a list of the things that helped me the most. Most of them will seem trite and obvious, but that’s kind of the point—all too often the pressure of study makes us forget the basics.

Sam McChesney

1. Eat properly. Chips are not dinner, although breakfast cereal can be. Flat meals are a huge help. This is number one on the list for a reason.

2. Get enough sleep. Cut down on caffeine and sugar, particularly from late afternoon onwards. Eat properly (see above) and exercise if possible. Bear in mind that getting enough sleep is not the same as sleeping in. There’s this thing called “the morning” that contains a whole bunch of extra hours you can add to your day—bonus! a) For a few weeks in second year, I started making coffee at night and leaving it by my bed in a flask, all so that I could chug the cold, grainy liquid in the morning and give myself the kick I needed to get out of bed on time. It was surprisingly effective, and anybody who isn’t instantly repulsed by the idea and can see the merits might be the kind to find it useful.

Apparently there are alarm clocks attached to coffee machines that automatically start making coffee five minutes before going off—teach your grandma how to use Amazon and start dropping Christmas hints.

3. Facebook is an enormous time sink and has an observed, adverse effect on the user’s mental health. Deactivating your Facebook account isn’t enough, because you can reactivate it with just your password. Instead, get a friend or flatmate you trust to change your password before deactivating, and to keep the password secret until after exams. On an average day this will save you between one and two hours; on days where you’re stuck at the library with nothing to do but study, it could save you half a dozen.

4. Have at least one outlet. My outlets were a weekly column and occasional benders. a) Keep in touch with your flatmates to maintain a minimum level of human interaction. If you don’t have that kind of flat, stay in touch with your other friends.

5. If you’re in Honours or Masters or a similar sort of hell-pit, use your shared misery to bond with your classmates. This is particularly advisable for classes with an abundance of hotties.

04

Person of the week:

salient

BY THE NUMBERS 18 People rescued from a clothing store in suburban Paris, after an armed robbery this week.

NZ$890 TThereward rewardformer formerTeen TeenMom Mom The star (and now another sort of star) Farrah Abraham gave gave her six-yearstar) Farrah Abraham old Sophia for losing her her daughter six-year-old daughter Sophia for losing her two two front teeth. front teeth.

20% The tax doctors wantlongest to newUK record for the impose on sugary in man plank hold, set by drinks Swedish an effort Tom Hoel.to fight the obesity epidemic.

Mhairi Black This week, 20-year-old Scottish National Party MP and the youngest person to sit in the British House of Commons, Mhairi Black, gave her maiden speech in the House. After the SNP took a large portion of previously Labour seats in Scotland, Black called on Labour to join together to oppose the Tory Government. Not only was the speech rife with zingers and oratory prowess, but, dear readers, it gave Salient a glimmer of hope that students, democracy, and the rights of the neglected might have some clout after all.

www.salient.org.nz

US$43,301 Proportion of New What blogger MikeZealanders O’Keeffe who rate their sense of purpose estimates it would cost per highly, according to the most recent year to attend Hogwarts GeneralofSocial Survey.

School Witchcraft and Wizardry.

7,750 miles The distance prison sentence The NASA’s given New to an Arizona who ranPluto over her Horizonswoman probe passed husband for failing to vote in the at this week, the closest it will 2012 presidential elections. ever get to the dwarf planet.

issue 15

05

NE W S .

KE E N EYE FOR NEWS? S END ANY T IPS , LEADS OR GOSSIP TO NE WS @S ALIENT.ORG.NZ

Nothing says Re-O-Week like no tutorials and a black out Nicola Braid

In the wake of Victoria’s proposed University Council changes, VUWSA has blacked out the main windows in the Hub to represent the “blacking out” of the student voice.

VUWSA said that that Cras non varius augue. Maecenas tristique nulla id feugiat aliquam. Cras luctus scelerisque placerat. . ““Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Aliquam sit amet lacus facilisis,,” President Rick Zwaan told Salient. He then Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consect—wow!

Under the proposed changes, seven members of the University Council would be appointed by a committee rather than election, with four more appointed by the Minister for Tertiary Education and one more, the ViceChancellor, appointed by the Council itself.

As a result, students would have no direct say over who their two Council representatives would be.

Vic is the only University in the country to propose getting rid of student and staff elections.

VUWSA has been particularly vocal in its opposition, with its tagline “Don’t let Victoria Blackout Democracy”” making the rounds on most social media platforms.

According to students, Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Quisque convallis dignissim urna, at pretium lectus condimentum vitae. Sed hendrerit gravida orci, et porttitor ante ullamcorper et. Also, Proin lacus nibh, molestie vel faucibus ut, vehicula ut nisi.

Curabitur with a cabbage and rhoncus velit. Nulla vel arcu consequat mi vehicula elementu.

“Can we trust this process? I’m not sure,” Armstrong wrote on 13 July. “Can you imagine the appointments process?

‘Should we appoint President Molotov oiii the Bolshevik Tendency who was recently arrested for burning a flag, or ioung Boffin who is far less popular but is currently completing a Masters in Accounting and run the university computer club?’”

Not overreacting in the slightest, Armstrong’s column was accompanied by a picture of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

The Tertiary Education Union has also come out against the removal of elected staff seats.

“Our position is that all staff should elect staff on Council.

The Canterbury, Otago, Massey, Auckland and Lincoln universities are all taking that approach,” said TEU President Sandra Greyi.

When asked for Vic’s response to VUWSA’s protest, a University spokesperson told Salient that “all views [were] considered” during the consultation process, but refused to make any further comment.

The second round of consultation on the makeup of Council will take place until Friday. There will be student consultation forums at Kelburn on Monday, and at Pipitea and Te Aro on Wednesday.

For those of you still making comments like “VUWSA stole the sun”, “how about they don’t fuck with the sunlight”, or “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit”, you can find more about VUWSA’s petition on their Facebook page.

Dominion Post writer Dave Armstrong has joined VUWSA in opposing to the process of appointment rather than election. editor@salient.org.nz

N otices

Victoria Abroad– Student Exchange Deadline for Trimester 1, 2016 exchanges is JULY 16th!

Cuba Character – Stories from the street Q: What does an elephant race, Charlotte Bronte’s bestie and good coffee all have in common?

A: Cuba Street VUW Museum and Heritage students, with the support of the National Library, present an exhibition highlighting the people, buildings and stories that have taken place on Wellington’s most famous street.

What made Cuba Street what it is today?

Take a closer look behind the street we all think we know so well.

Content: Why not study overseas as part of your degree?!

Study in English, Earn Vic credit, Get Studylink & grants, explore the world!

17 August – 11 September 2015 Turnbull Library Gallery, Level 1 National Library of New Zealand Molesworth Street, Wellington

Deadline: July 16th!

@cubacharacter http://cubacharacter.tumblr.com/

Website: http://victoria.ac.nz/exchange

Amnesty at Vic presents: Freedom Week 2015 This year, the theme is raising the quota of refugees accepted into NZ 29th July Film Screening and Q+A panel 30th July gig at Meow 31st July wind-up drinks at The Hunter Lounge #RaisetheQuota

Careers and Employment 2015-16 Internships and 2016 Graduate Jobs

TEAR FUND TEAR Fund New Zealand is looking for amazing student interns that will help us take our Live Below the Line campaign to the next level! Successful candidates will become a TEAR Fund intern for three months (July to September) and work with a team of other interns on campus up to 8 hours a week supporting this great campaign fighting human trafficking. Internship positions are available in Event Management, Social Media, PR & publicity and Sales.

If this sounds like you please email mikhailsbirch@ gmail.com for further information.

Looking forward to hearing from you! :)

See Recruitment Schedule for details: http://bit. ly/1zGNacY Currently recruiting: NZ Transport Agency, UBS, Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment, AMP, NZ Superannuation, Goodman Fielder, Disney, ANZ, Zomato, CAANZ… and many more.

Connect with employers via Recruitment events: http://bit.ly/1DOS0WK

Free Movies Every week with the Victoria University Film Society.

Movies every Monday at 6:30pm in the Student Memorial Theatre.

Join our Facebook group or keep an eye out for our posters to find out what we’re playing,

Upcoming employer presentations: Communication Agencies Association of NZ (22 July), Toyota (23 July), Disney (29 July), Plant & Food Research (6 Aug) .. and more

We’ll see you there :)

Check in with a Careers Consultant during our daily drop-in sessions! http://bit.ly/1A1ORgv

Operation Christmas Child

Get help with your CV, Cover Letter, Interview skills etc For more info, login to www.victoria.ac.nz/careerhub with your Student Computing login!

Help us send Christmas gifts to children all over the world! Operation Christmas Child—VUW is holding a sausage sizzle at Bunnings, Lyall Bay. Come along on Saturday 25th July from 10am onwards and support us.

Hope to see you there!

issue 15

Monumental nightmare occurs as computers shit themselves Nicola Braid

Last week the University’s newly introduced myAllocator system well and truly failed to provide incoming trimester two students with access to tutorial sign ups.

The system overloaded after the number of students using the programme to sign up for tutorials exceeded capacity.

The malfunction came with the message to “remind all of your friends to logoff when they have finished, otherwise their sessions will remain active for longer than necessary and therefore prevent you using the system”.

The system capacity of 500 active users was a default setting that University technicians

VUWSA: We are the voice of NZ students!

NZUSA: Um, no, fuck off Sam McChesney

The New Zealand Union of Students’ Associations (NZUSA) and VUWSA have again found themselves at loggerheads, this time over the future of the New Zealand student movement.

VUWSA, which intends to withdraw from NZUSA this September, wrote to NZUSA President Rory McCourt on 17 June. In that letter, VUWSA said it intended to withhold its remaining NZUSA membership fees of around $11,000, and to spend this figure on a VUWSA-hosted national conference to “flesh out the overall vision for the future of the national student voice”.

In response to VUWSA’s letter, which NZUSA members widely viewed as an unsubtle power-grab, McCourt proposed that the conference be held in Christchurch

News and Opinion had failed to change during installation.

According to the University’s Director of Student Academic Services Pam Thorburn, the default setting “should have been identified in earlier testing” and expressed “the inconvenience to students at the start of the new trimester”.

While the University assured Salient that the issue was identified and resolved in “less than three hours”, students took to social media right up until this publication’s time of print to complain about the seemingly ineffectual system.

Students went as far as launching a petition on change.org in the hope of restoring S-Cubed back to its former glory—“glory” being, you know, a system that actually functions.

The petition declared, “students need to be able to enrol into[sic] the tutorial of their choice more easily. A website that fails in design and capacity to meet this need, must be changed”.

While there was speculation that VUWSA might endorse the petition, the VUWSA Executive maintained that the issue was with

and hosted by LUSA, of Lincoln University, and UCSA, of Canterbury.

McCourt also rejected VUWSA’s proposal to spend its NZUSA levies on the conference, telling VUWSA that the levies were needed to cover essential operational costs.

As Salient went to print on Thursday, VUWSA Academic Vice-President Jonathan Gee and Education Officer Ellen Humphries had drafted a response to the response (sigh).

They wrote that it was important that NZUSA “not seen to be controlling this open discussion” and proposed that VUWSA, not UCSA, co-host the conference with LUSA—despite the two associations inhabiting different islands.

The letter also reiterated VUWSA’s wish to have its remaining NZUSA levies go toward the conference, and not to NZUSA itself.

The letters follow months of brinkmanship between NZUSA, VUWSA, and Otago association OUSA over membership fees.

VUWSA and OUSA, which both gave a 12-month notice of their withdrawal from NZUSA last year, have resisted paying their 2015 levies. The associations only brought themselves up to date with payments in June after NZUSA threatened legal action.

07

myAllocator’s implementation, rather than with the system itself.

Support for the system was also maintained by the University. According to Thorburn, “myAllocator contains more up-to-date and accurate information as it is integrated with other university timetable systems”, which S-Cubed could not provide.

Despite this, unhappy punters took to Overheard@Vic and the page quickly turned into what looked like an Apple troubleshooting forum.

The website’s interface was also described as “half baked”, “ugly”, “unintuitive” and a “slow piece of shit”.

Some highlights: “Hello? This is the 90s. We would like our technology back” “My Allocator is a joke” “This is another perfect example of Victoria University trying to blackout student voices” “My allocator don’t.- Nicki Minaj” “Good one Vic, 20,000+ students, but only 500 people can use the system at one time” “and you thought getting Hurricanes tickets was hard”

OUSA in particular has been openly hostile toward NZUSA. According to Critic magazine, OUSA has now refused pointblank to pay its remaining levies for 2015, which amount to around $20,000, despite the organisation having around $6 million in reserves.

McCourt said he had also received a “bizarre” letter from OUSA asking the national body to wind up.

McCourt told Salient he “[doesn’t] know what VUWSA’s motivations are” and accused VUWSA of failing to earn its desired leadership role.

“To have a leadership role, VUWSA’s got to be engaged,” he said. “That’s how you get the respect from other members to lead them.”

He said that when it came to the national student movement, VUWSA seemed more interested in internal politics than with genuine issues. “[VUWSA’s] got very strong views on the national student voice but are doing nothing about it … everyone’s getting really tired of it.

“It’s completely childish and people have lost all sense of perspective.” editor@salient.org.nz

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salient

News and Opinion

BRIDGET BONES’ DIARY Bridget Bones

Tinder for Dummies, part 2 What to expect Coming from a female perspective, Tinder is a minefield of half-clothed, snapback wearing, “hanging with the squad” males looking for somewhere to put their dick. I’m sure girls are just as bad, but that’s just what I’ve seen—for the most part it’s about sifting through a gazillion profiles and swiping left so much you think you’re in a Beyonce song.

If you’re using Tinder, expect to see at least some of the following: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

A selfie of them flexing at the gym.

A selfie of them in bed, looking sleepy yet seductive.

A picture of them with the squad, so you can’t tell which one you’re actually swiping for.

A list of their likes and dislikes, including how they like to have fun and/ or relax (hint: sex).

A picture of them in Thailand, probably from 2010.

A bio mentioning their Instagram.

7.

8.

An ass/abs selfie.

If you’re lucky, a picture of them and their partner saying they’re “looking for a good time”.

Tinder is comedy gold, but keep in mind these are real people, with real feelings, so be nice, swipe left if you’re not keen and keep swiping till you find that perfect person.

Ground rules for a Tinder meet up If you’re going to meet someone off Tinder, don’t be an idiot: the person may seem lovely over the app, but may turn out to be someone completely different. The internet is full of stories about Tinder gone wrong, although thankfully it’s more about cat-fishing than actual danger. However, keep the following rules in mind if you’re venturing out to meet that Tinder hottie: 1.

Meet in public. It’s the number one rule

ASK AGATHA Hi Auntie Agatha, My boyfriend dresses really badly and I don’t know how to help. He’s suspicious of me when I go to buy him new and acceptable clothing. He says he has his own style and he doesn’t want me to change him, but what kind of style is Adidas slides and ironic catchphrase t-shirts? What can I do?

-Guilty Girlfriend Hey GG, I think the style that you are struggling to identify is dude-bro style. What you need to do to help foster your boyfriend’s style is embrace the dude-bro.

First of all, he likes ironic tees? Run with that. Find some blank tees and get some of his fave texting phrases printed on them, like “haha watr u wearing”, “haha then whatr u gunna do for me” and “nohomo lol”. If you want to make sure that he knows you respect him and his style, you should bestow upon him the crown jewel of dude-bro fashion—a bucket hat. www.salient.org.nz

2.

3.

4.

because it’s the one that’s gonna keep you safe. Don’t trust anyone from the internet enough to meet them at their house on the first date. Dodgy as fuck.

Be on the same page about what you want. More often than not you’ll find people on Tinder are after sex, and nothing more. Save yourself the potential heartbreak/ humiliation by being honest from the get-go.

Use protection. If you’re gonna have sex with someone from Tinder, remember to keep yourself safe from STDs and unplanned pregnancy. If they say they’re clean, don’t trust them. If she says she’s on the pill, don’t trust her. Always use a condom.

Beware of false profiles. A lot of Tinder profiles are either bots or catfish, designed to trick you into believing you’ve met the love (or fuck) of your life.

If possible, check out their Facebook first.

Tinder is a minefield. Use it wisely, don’t take it too seriously, and enjoy yourself. And remember to keep yourself safe. Now go forth, swipe right, and see where this glorious app takes you.

askagatha@salient.org.nz

Ultimately everyone is going to have some weird thing they think is cool, whether it be the odd ironic tee or smelly jelly sandals.

So maybe your dude-bro is looking at you thinking that he needs to fix you up with some better style.

Hi DD,

If all else fails, you can always try to dress exactly like him until he is sick of looking like fraternal twins.

Start honing your skills with Photobooth and get some good background shots of resorts and scenery in different holiday locations from Tumblr and set them as a background in Photobooth. This way, while you’re studying in the library, you can fake some holiday snaps to put on Facebook. Hell, even experiment with some fake tan and really commit to the role. If all of your friends are away then they aren’t going to be able to call you out on faking.

Good luck changing yo man, -Auntie Agatha

Hi Agatha, All of my friends are going overseas and having the time of their lives. I’m just stuck in the library all day, every day not seeing anyone or having any fun. All my friends are all away on holiday, living their best life. I can’t even afford to drive out to the Hutt for the weekend! How can I improve my dire situation?

-Desperate and Depressed

I would say you need a holiday too, but we both know that you can’t afford it. So I suggest you follow the mantra of “fake it till you make it”.

Happy “holidays”, -Auntie Agatha

issue 15

Academic VP Jono Gee tells Vic “Come tri-me” Nicola Braid

VUWSA Academic Vice-President Jonathan Gee has made an official submission to the University recommending that Trimester Three not be extended.

The submission follows a survey of 463 students, carried out by the association, that saw overwhelming opposition to the proposed amendments to the academic year.

When asked whether Trimester Three should be extended, 65 per cent of respondents either “disagreed” or “strongly disagreed”, compared to 13 per cent who either agreed or strongly agreed.

The University has proposed to extend Trimester Three by one week, and, to accommodate the change, cut the midtrimester break in Trimester Two from two weeks to one.

Under the proposed changes, the University is seeking to ensure that Trimester Three is used more efficiently, thus increasing the

News and Opinion

teaching and learning facilities available for T3 courses.

However, students and staff are concerned that a reduced mid-trimester break could see students miss out on valuable study and break time, and/or be forced to work over what would be the whole break.

If approved, the trimester change will be implemented in 2017.

Trimester 3 should be extended

The survey found 68 per cent of respondents had not studied in trimester three in the past, but at least 37 per cent were planning to study during the third trimester in the future—most in order to finish their degrees faster.

The association’s submission concluded, “all in all, the crux of our submission is to preserve the student experience and well being of all those who attend VUW… it is crucial that students are not only listened to

Emma Hurley

The email then linked to an article on Stuff about the slavery allegations.

VILP confirmed to Salient that the internship was withdrawn because Mr. Thapar was recalled to India, and “with his departure from New Zealand, the internship opportunity is no longer available”.

The allegations were made by a former worker in the Thapar household, who has also left the country and returned to India.

The worker claimed that Mr. Thapar and his wife kept him in slavery, that Mrs. Thapar assaulted him, and that Mr. Thapar threatened to assault him.

Strongly Disagree : 3

34.10%

Disagree : 34.1

As well the proposed changes themselves, Strongly Disagree VUWSA raised concerns regarding theDonʼt lackknow of student consultation over the issue.

On 29 June, VILP sent an email to all applicants for the internship, which read “Thank you so much again for your applications for the India/NZIFA internship but due to the news this morning about the recall of the Indian High Commissioner, we will not be pursuing this internship any further at this present time.”

Ravi Thapar, who facilitated the internship, left New Zealand late last month after he was accused of keeping a domestic slave.

in this regard, but are also involved in the implementation process of any changes to the academic year.”

Students saw the extension as unfeasible, from 11 weeks to 12 claiming that “12 weeks for very intensive Don’t know : 4.01 course papers would be too long. [We’re] 4.01% Strongly agree : 3.15 3.15% already stressed enough”. Others expressed agree : 9.74 concerns regarding students’ time 9.74% management—“It is already cutting into holiday time and makes it hard for students to work and earn money. Especially when 30.95% summer is a compulsory part of their degree”.

18.05% Neutral : 18.05

Internship cancelled amid slavery accusations

An internship provided by the Victoria International Leadership Programme (VILP) and the New Zealand India Friendship Association has been cancelled in the wake of slavery and assault allegations against the Indian High Commissioner.

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Strongly Disagree Disagree

Neutral

Disagree

agree

Neutral Agree Strongly Agree Don’t know

The man was found by a member of the public in June after walking 20 km from Mr. Thapar’s $1.1 million house in Lower Hutt to Wellington.

Thapar rejected the allegations and said the worker had “adequate, and umpteen, dozens of opportunities” to leave the household.

“The question of slavery doesn’t arise.”

He rejected the allegations of physical assault as “bizarre and absurd”.

Police will not press charges as the worker did not lay a formal complaint.

Mr. Thapar claimed that his return to India was due to needing to look after his sick mother. “I’m the only son and I have that moral responsibility,” he said.

Students affected by the cancelled internship have been offered the opportunity to apply for the United States Embassy Digital Internship. editor@salient.org.nz

Strongly ag

met

Maori Matters

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salient

“Tama tu, tama ora; tama noho, tama mate” He who stands lives; he who sits, perishes.

“He aha te kai ō te rangatira? He Kōrero, he kōrero, he kōrero” What is the food of the leader? It is knowledge, it is communication.

“Whāia te iti kahurangi, ki te tuohu koe me maunga teitei” Pursue that which is precious, and do not be deterred by anything less than a lofty mountain.

Ngā Whakatauki e hangai ana ki tēnei mea te Hinengaro:

“He kakano ahau i ruia mai i Rangiātea” I am a seed, scattered from Rangiātea “Iti rearea teitei kahikatea ka taea” The rearea (bellbird) is one of the smallest birds in the forest, yet it is capable of reaching the top of the kahikatea, the tallest tree in the forests.

“Ko te manu e kai ana i te miro, nōna te ngahere. Engari, ko te manu e kai ana i te mātauranga, nōna te ao” The one who partakes of the flora and fauna, that will be their domain. The one who engages in education, opportunities are boundless.

The Week in Feminism

A spotlight on Malala Brittany Mackie

Malala Yousafzai was shot in the head by the Taliban because her advocacy for young girls’ education threatened their control over her hometown of Mingora in Pakistan. Malala had been blogging for the BBC about her experience living under the Taliban rule in Pakistan since 2009. At first she hid her identity and wrote under the name Gul Makai, though this only lasted a few months. The previous year she had given a speech in Peshawar titled “How dare the Taliban take away my right to an education?”, which moved thousands of people and built her support. She continued to speak out about women’s education in Pakistan and won two Youth Peace Prizes in 2011. But in 2012, two members of the Taliban boarded her school bus as she travelled home from school, called her name and shot her.

The bullet hit the left side of her head and travelled down her neck.

She should have died or been paralysed for the rest of her life, but Malala began attending school in England in March 2013 after multiple surgeries. Following the Taliban’s attack, her campaign for education for women continued to grow as she gained thousands more supporters. www.salient.org.nz

Malala’s moving autobiography, I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban, was released at the end of 2013. In 2014, Malala was the youngest person to ever receive a Nobel Peace Prize. On her 16th birthday, following her recovery, she gave a speech at the UN. Malala turned 18 last Sunday. Instead of going out and getting pissed like the rest of us, she used some money from her charity, the Malala Fund, to open a school in Lebanon for young Syrian refugee girls. At the opening, Malala said she was “here on behalf of the 28 million children who are kept from the classroom because of armed conflict”. This inspiring young woman has spent the better half of her life advocating for people that would otherwise have no voice, despite being targeted by the Taliban since she was 15 years old. Her dedication to finding an education for other young women in countries of conflict is unmatched by anyone else, adult or teenager. I wholeheartedly recommend reading her autobiography, and a documentary about her life is being released in October this year.

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News and Opinion

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Eye on Exec Sam McChesney Unfortunately, Salient had missed the last Executive meeting in June, although that time it was deliberate—we’re pretty sure that attending VUWSA meetings during the break is a new circle of Hell that Dante forgot about, probably because it was really boring.

We’re gutted, though, to have missed the (apparently very robust) debate over whether VUWSA should note the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta, whether it should refuse to note it because of the document’s colonialist and pro-aristocracy overtones, or whether the whole debate was moot because of some arcane VUWSA policy in favour of republicanism. We should also point out that whether or not VUWSA chooses to note the Magna Carta’s anniversary has absolutely no effect on anything whatsoever.

As for the meeting before that—where VUWSA secretly changed the meeting time then decided to spunk a whole load of cash into NZUSA’s gaping maw—well, the less said about VUWSA’s devilish, devious and immediately detectable deception, the better.

So it had been some time since Salient had seen the Exec’s shiny, happy faces, and we were quietly confident that they were just as pleased to see us as we were to not only see them, laugh with them, be joyous and celebrate the student voice with them, but also to sit in a room with them for two hours and listen to Rick.

Before the meeting, some of the Execcies grumbled about OUSA not only ripping off VUWSA’s cool anti-establishment slogan—“Democratic Election Not Council Selection”—but misspelling it during one of their quaint southern protests. Apparently, nothing says “elect more of us to the governing body of your multi-billion-dollar institution please” like a stack of A4 signs with “council” spelled “counsel”. Rick gave us a glimpse into his mind—“the way I remember the difference,” quoth he, “is ‘C for city, S for sadness’.” Interesting; we remember Rick’s name because we only know one Rick and that’s what he looks like.

C for City, S for Sadness Jacinta, the Secretary of the Treasure, gave a report on the last policy committee meeting.

She proposed that the Exec each be entitled to between $10 and $20 in cellphone remuneration per month depending on position (which the Exec approved), and that the VUWSA credit card limit be reduced from $3000 to $1000. “I trust everyone on this year’s Executive,” she said, “but this is a potential source of liability.” Rick, who earlier this year used the credit card to buy $1840 of holographic stickers*, was worried about the practical implications and the Exec decided to send the proposal back to policy committee for more work.

The University will hold “consultation” forums on its proposed changes to University Council, during which it will “listen” to students and “take their views into account”. There will be one at Kelburn on Monday, and one each at Pipitea and Te Aro on Wednesday. Karori doesn’t get one, lol. VUWSA is putting together a submission based on the views it collected during the first round of consultation, which seems pretty pointless since they’ll just be reheating the same ideas that the University ignored last time around.

However, submissions close at the end of the week so they didn’t really have a choice.

There’s also a petition, though, so if this whole thing pisses you off then sign it.

We apologise for the joke-free nature of the previous paragraph. For a proper joke, see the University’s proposed changes to Council.

The Executive has recently received a letter from NZUSA, as part of Rick’s ongoing pissing contest with NZUSA President Rory McCourt, over the future of the national student movement. Jono and Ellen will draft a response, and there will be another referendum on VUWSA’s membership to NZUSA. Rick doesn’t want to become the NZUSA President, so the referendum question will be drafted properly this time. See the 2013

referendum, and its author, for context. See page 7 for more on this story.

The VUWSA Annual General Meeting will be held at 1pm on Wednesday 19 August in the Hub. For those of you who don’t like to be microphoned at while eating your lunch, consider this an early warning.

The Exec then moved into committee to discuss clubs. We can tell you it was talking about clubs, because earlier in the meeting someone said, out of committee, “let’s talk about clubs in committee”.

HA! I WONDER WHAT THE SECRET CLUBS DISCUSSION IN COMMITTEE MIGHT HAVE BEEN ABOUT? Incidentally, the University took the management of clubs away from VUWSA a couple of years ago, and has been doing a piss-poor job at it ever since. SO I WONDER WHAT THE DISCUSSION COULD HAVE BEEN ABOUT. I WONDER WHAT VUWSA MIGHT BE TRYING TO DO ABOUT CLUBS? But of course we have no way of knowing what the Exec were talking about, because it was in committee. BUT I WONDER IF THERE MIGHT BE CHANGES AFOOT, THAT WOULD BE COOL HUH. The rest of committee was dominated by an outpouring of empathy for fictional cows.

Salient wishes it were joking. For a proper joke, see the University’s proposed changes to Council—it never gets old. ___________ *In fairness to Rick, the holographic stickers were a cheaper replacement for last year’s VUWSA membership cards. However, Salient would also question whether anything that can be adequately replaced by a holographic sticker could not also be replaced by a non-holographic sticker, or whether it really qualifies as essential expenditure at all. editor@salient.org.nz

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We l c o m e B a ck 2.0 We’re all back in the capital, although I don’t know if you can call those ten days off a “break”. We were eager to get home and have a well-deserved hiatus after all the work that uni threw at us for the past couple of months. However, ten days off was barely enough time to lay some groundwork on that girl back home—on the other hand, it was long enough because we found ourselves bored shitless after the first couple of days.

Being back home is similar in a way to eating a chocolate chip cookie then realising they’re fucking raisins—it promises so much but lets you down over and over again.

One of the best things about being home is the heating. Freshers won’t understand this; I know I didn’t last year. Te Puni was so warm I had no idea why everyone was complaining

that Wellington was so damn cold. This year I understand completely, but I still don’t understand why I have a draught coming into my room even though my windows are closed. But due to this experience, I can somewhat say that I have experienced life in Vic House conditions and frankly, I don’t like it one bit.

Now that it is the start of the new tri, I think we can all appreciate and enjoy the first couple of weeks where we have no work due, (unless you do Law) because without a doubt it’s going to be the only time for the rest of the tri where you can do next to nothing and not feel guilty. It also gives you time to reflect on your performance from the previous tri, with many people adopting the “New Tri, New Me” theory. I, for one, learnt that crying

is not the best study method and putting baking powder on your grades does in fact make them rise. Dad jokes aside, remember Cs do get degrees, but they don’t necessarily get jobs.

Tip of the Week: Wear stripes to your lectures and tests because in most courses it’s important to get the basics right first.

See you ‘round campus, Tom and Luke P.S. For all you freshers, I bet you never realised how much of a novelty three-ply toilet paper was until you moved into a hall.

We Drank This So You Didn’t Have To

Powerade Mountain Blast Cost: $4 Alcohol volume: Do breath fumes count?

Pairing: Grease, incorporeal sense of doom.

Verdict: “PHARMAC should subsidise this.” www.salient.org.nz

Lydia and Mitch

It was Saturday morning. Our heads hurt and our lives seemed over. Gone were the thumping beats of that one Atomic Kitten song we knew, only to be replaced by dry mouths and an unquenchable thirst. When you reach a certain stage in your drinking career, you develop morning-after habits that are difficult to break. Mitch likes to buy a bottle of Powerade the night before and pop it in the fridge to ease his transition back into personhood. Lydia tends to writhe in bed and groan audibly until a sympathetic flatmate brings a cup of pity coffee.

Powerade is clearly the more sensible choice, so we thought we’d take this opportunity to review everyone’s favourite hangover tonic.

Powerade Mountain Blast, or “Blue Powerade” as it is more commonly known, is a New Zealand classic. Powerade is not alcoholic*, but is inexorably linked with alcohol. We’ve heard that some people use it for “sports”, but we’ll believe it when we see it. For us, $4 or $6 for two from your nearest

BP petrol station is a trifling price to pay to start on the road to recovery. We Googled the science behind why Blue Powerade is such a miracle worker, but were confused (thanks BAs) so decided to blindly accept that it must be good because the All Blacks use it. The advertising leads us to believe that we will become Very Muscular People upon imbibing the blue stuff. As it stands, we are still human slugs who spend 80 per cent of our waking hours in bed nuzzled against a bottle of $8 red but we’ll keep you updated.

Like the pill, it doesn’t work every time.

Sometimes it needs to be supplemented by a sausage roll or supermarket chicken.

If it’s really dire, you might need both. We all know some fuckwit who thinks going for a run or kale sludge smoothie is the best hangover cure. We are not that person and we hate that person. It’s clear from our not inconsiderable experience that the best course of action is to wallow in your own filth, find a bottle of blue glory, and try to ignore your mistakes. Better living, everyone.

News and Opinion

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Kids, you can no longer call people names on Yik Yak, or any other electronic platform for that matter.

Parliament recently passed its Harmful Digital Communications Act, which will see laws against cyber-bullying take effect this month.

Under the legislation, an “approved agency” may investigate and police harmful electronic communications via email, text and social media.

Online antagonists now face a fine of up to $50,000, or even two years in jail, for posting or sending “harmful digital communication”—anything online that is likely to cause distress.

The Act also introduces the crime of inciting suicide, which is punishable by a jail term of up to three years.

Abuse against race, disability, sex, religion and sexual orientation is also covered under the legislation.

The Act was a response to the growing number of online bullying cases, such as the 2013 Roast Busters scandal.

Don’t Be Mean Behind the Screen Tim Gregc

The same year saw Facebook shut down the “Otago Uni leaked Snapchat” page that Otago University lecturer Dr. Lesley Procter at the time dubbed a “gross invasion of privacy”.

Objectionable pages such as “Rack Appreciation Society”, which saw the private nudes of Dunedin woman put on a public Facebook page, and “Skank Central ChCh Name and Shame” have only compounded the controversy surrounding online bullying, particularly amongst young people.

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However, ACT leader David Seymour defied his rulers in the National Party and, along with four Green MPs, voted against the Bill in its third reading on the basis that it might curtail people’s freedom of speech.

“Our rights are being traded away in this Bill,” Seymour said.

Other concerns were raised with the law’s use of terms like “indecent” and “false”, with some speculating that material used “to harass an individual” could be interpreted too broadly.

VUWSA Welfare Vice President Madeleine Ashton-Martyn supported the Act in principle, but also questioned its use of language.

“These issues are just so new that the easiest way to address them appears to be knee-jerk reactions in an attempt to regulate online behaviour, without having the fuller picture to be able to do this effectively,” AshtonMartyn said.

The University told Salient it does receive complaints about students posting offensive imagery and threats online from time to time.

Student Interest and Dispute Resolution Advisor Jackie Anderson said students could only be reprimanded under the Student Conduct Statute for such behaviour if it occurred within the University precincts (or Halls of Residence), occurred in the context of a University activity, or was related to the person’s status as a student of the University. “[Cyberbullying] is an area the University takes seriously and we use all possible avenues to follow up on all incidents that are drawn to our attention,” Anderson said.

FESTIVAL OF NEW THEATRE 10-25 JULY 2015 BATS Theatre, 1 Kent Tce Book online at www.bats.co.nz Or call (04) 802 4175

6.30pm

8.00pm

9.30pm

How To Catch A Grim Reaper

The First 7500 Days Of My Life

The 21st Narcissus

By Helen Vivienne Fletcher Director David Lawrence

By Uther Dean Director Sally Richards

By Sam Brooks Director Uther Dean

editor@salient.org.nz

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News and Opinion

salient

L

etters

Last week, we received no letters. None. What the hell, people? We published naked pictures and everything!

So here is a picture of us buying coffees with the Letter of the Week vouchers. Those coffees could have been yours. But now they’re ours.

Send us letters. Seriously.

Auckland University has introduced a mandatory academic integrity test for all its students, making it the first tertiary institution in New Zealand to require a “how to not plagiarise” quiz.

The online test, which had previously been optional, aims to clarify issues surrounding what is and is not academic plagiarism. The exercise includes five topics with associated readings, quizzing students on various aspects of academic honesty.

Truth Telling 101 Jordan Gabolinscy

The move came in response to uni students around the world, including in New Zealand, stepping up their forgery game.

Some students have gone so far as buying and selling answers to essays and tests and sharing photos of upcoming exams, and some British students resorted to the use of Morse code for communication during an exam.

Auckland’s Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) Professor John Morrow was quick to dispel the idea that the ethics test was aimed solely at cheating. Rather, the test looks to educate students as to “how they can use printed and published resources in an effective way in their own work”.

Auckland University students Salient spoke

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to agreed with the test. “It’s really helpful to ensure that people know what is and isn’t plagiarising”, adding that “most people probably need it,” said one.

However, some saw it as a slight on their capacity as students. One student called the test a “pointless waste of time”, and another said “you can usually use your common sense to work out if it’s cheating or not.”

A Victoria University spokesperson told Salient they had noted the test’s introduction at Auckland, but said Victoria “was not planning anything similar”.

However, the University’s current review of Academic Integrity will be be considering the matter of academic honesty, and the spokesperson assured Salient that “staff and students throughout the University will be consulted”.

Like Auckland, students at Vic also saw the benefits of such a test, with one student calling for a similar system to be introduced at an undergraduate level.

But the suggestion of an immediate compulsory course at Vic was quickly shot down. If introduced gradually, students said, “it wouldn’t be a bad thing”, but anything faster, “they can fuck right off with it”.

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Football Blowout A Grimsby Town football fan has been prosecuted for assaulting a steward with an inflatable shark after watching his club win. The 51-year-old Kenneth Meech was given a 12-month conditional discharge and ordered to pay £700 in costs, as well as a victim surcharge. The victim of the attack, Mr Gladyng, said Meech was waving the shark “like an axe” and described the three blows to his head “as like being hit by a roll of paper”. Though Meech escaped a football ban, the fine somewhat detracted from his team’s success. “I’m a bit deflated, to be honest,” he said.

The Call of the Stage

Oregon installs new wind-chimes Pairs of dildos have been strung across power lines in Portland Oregon, causing many residents to blush during their daily commute. Numerous photos of the phallic embellishments have been tweeted, including one captioned “anyone lose a set of dildo nunchucks on Alberta?”

While the “installations” made some residents hot under the collar, a spokesman for Portland General Electric assured the public the rubber rogers were not likely to cause a fire.

A desperate US student was roundly jeered by his fellow audience members after he climbed onstage, at the beginning of a Broadway play, to charge his iPhone 6—unaware that he was using a prop power outlet. “I was thinking that they were probably going to plug something in there on the set, and I figured it wouldn’t be a big deal if my phone was up there too.” Despite being reprimanded, he remained unwavering in his quest to find a functional socket. “Girls were calling all day. What would you do?” (Turn your phone off; you’re in a theatre, you cretin).

Women go apeshit A “very good-looking” male gorilla has been bringing all the girls to the zoo. Shabani, an 18-year-old silverback, resident at Higashiyama Zoo in Japan, has been compared to a “male model” and variously described as having “brooding good looks” and “rippling muscles”.

Zoo spokesman Takayuki Ishikawa said that the zoo had seen a rise in the number of female visitors, noting that his paternal skills, in particular, had proven a big hit with the women.

Getting down to Brass Tax (Yes, pennies are made of copper, rather than brass.

Sue me. It was a good effort) A North Carolina student who refused to pay a parking fine has protested by trying to pay for his ticket with 14,000 pennies.

The 26-year-old’s act of rebellion was about more than cheap thrills: “Why are college students – who are arguably one of the most fiscally challenged group of people – supplementing the funding of public schools when this is actually the responsibility of taxpayers?” he demanded, five trips and 40 hours of coin-counting later.

Gone, but not forgotten Residents of Toronto paid their respects to a fallen member of their society: a dead racoon found on the pavement. Following a tweet to Toronto’s non-emergency city services, alerting them to the deceased rodent, many people began tweeting their condolences, using the hashtag #DeadRaccoon(TO): “sleep well my sweet prince, people loved you and remember you #deadraccoonto” “Residents are being asked to keep their green bins open tonight in honour of #DeadRacoonTO” “Candlelight vigil now being held for #DeadRaccoonTO” The raccoon was eventually removed but the flowers, framed photo, candles and heartfelt messages remained so as to ensure that “Conrad” would not be forgotten.

Stories That Matter Elea Yule

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salient

ABUSE OF DAIRY COMES AS NO SURPRISE: A CHEESE DREAM JOURNAL

SHARON LAM A familiar situation: you’re in bed and as you wake up, you recall bizarre scenarios dreamt up the night before, way stranger than usual. Instinctively, you ask yourself—did I eat cheese last night?

Along with oysters and aphrodisiacs, asparagus and pee, pineapple and jizz—cheese and dreams are another food-phenomenon pair that are well-known but scientifically dubious. The myth that digesting cheese can conjure up extra strange dreams, or nightmares particularly, can be traced back to as early as Charles Dickens’ time via A Christmas Carol. Other than literary fromage-homage, there has been one significant study conducted with 200 participants, with 67 per cent of participants recalling cheese dreams. However, this was not the most scientifically stringent study and was carried out by the cheesemakers themselves—the British Cheese Board.

The science behind cheese dreams is also not that grate, and while

www.salient.org.nz

cheese-sourced chemicals like tryptophan and tyramine have been identified as the curd-be culprits, the research is still incomplete.

From my own experience, although I have had my fair share of strange dreams (recently I had a sex dream about myself) and far, far more than my fair share of cheese, I failed to recall any particular dream that I could assuredly credit to cheese. However, the quaintness of the cheese dream myth is so charming that I badly want to brielieve that they are real, and that some of these dreams have risen out of steamy cheese fondues and the strings of mozzarella-drenched pizzas. So, as both an avid dairy consumer and an avid sleeper, I was overjoyed to embark on a week of cheesesponsored slumber in search of the truth—and the best cheese for the job.

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Features

NIGHT 1: CAMEMBERT

I begin the experiment with what I believe to be a healthy state of mind and body, though on the dream front I have been suffering from a drought of sorts, with the last dream that I can remember being over a week ago. My trusty dairy-constituted steed that I choose to help me ride out of the drought is a familiar wheel of camembert. Great for when you’re feeling a little bit fancy but know you have a crippling student debt, wheels of camembert usually find their way into my fridge on a fortnightly basis, in bodily rhythm with New World’s specials cycle. Fortnightly also appears as a reasonable length between extra peculiar dreams—could camembert be the cheese of my weird dreams?

In the British Cheese Board study, participants ate 20g of cheese 30 minutes before they went to sleep for the night. I am very happily eating my camembert with some crackers when I remember this and see that I’ve almost eaten half the wheel. This is how I very scientifically establish half a wheel of cheese, or about 75g, as the amount that I will eat each night for my study. For further scientific integrity, I use an episode of Lost as an accurate timer, with the beginning of an episode serving as ingestion cue, allowing 10 minutes for cheese enjoyment and 30 minutes later, bedtime at the end of the episode. However, on the first night, I only come up with this ingenious method already partway through a Lost episode so I end up watching two more episodes and go to sleep approximately two hours after eating the camembert.

NIGHT 2: BLUE VEIN

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Amongst those with whom I’d discussed this experiment, the crowd favourite prediction for weirdest dream-creator was blue cheese.

Indeed, some of the research into cheese dreams suggests that the fungal growth in the cheese may hold high concentrations of effective chemicals. Visually analysing the dark blue of the small wedge that I had bought, I found that the vein-like branches held the same mystique of tea leaves or lines of a palm—random, but governed by something higher. As I tried and failed to read my future in the wedge of cheese, I realised that this was the first time in a long time that I had bought blue cheese at the supermarket. Although I enjoy blue cheese, I prefer it in sauces and dressings than in pure solidity, hence its usual absence from my own fridge. However, due to my cheap and gluttonous disposition, solid blue cheese still enters my greedy body on a roughly fortnightly basis, courtesy of complementary cheese platters at various talks and gallery openings.

Once again, I bring up an episode of Lost to help time my experiment, and I enjoy how the outdatedness of the television show mimics the age of a fine wine that I could be enjoying with my blue cheese instead of the ready-salted chips I use as a pair instead. The experiment is going well until the last five minutes of the episode, which force me to watch another four episodes before going to sleep, thus going to sleep only slightly later than science intended me to.

THE DREAM:

I start off dreaming that I am in a South Korea with sequined streets, though this quickly evolves into an exaggerated Wellington, where the hills are practically vertical and a lot of my dream consists of me trying to get somewhere by patting a vertical hill in a miserable attempt to get further up (not far from reality, actually). I remember the dream being in a purple wash and I have also written down on my bedside notepad what I make out to be the word “commune”, most likely referring to one of the many numerous mini-dreams that I have as I drift in and out of sleep before I fully awake.

I am hanging out with two friends in an unknown country when I meet a nice boy who has the most perfect voice in the world. We exchange telephone numbers and he calls me later to arrange a pizza date. Over the phone, his voice is even more impressive, and the dream-me is swooning, practically dribbling into the phone. There is then an intermission from Perfect Voice Boy and I am somewhere snowy with family members taking photos of the aurora borealis (though it could have been the aurora australis), and I leave via a flying balcony that I choose to dangle off rather than sit on. The dream then switches back to the pizza date, where the unnamed boy reveals that his parents left him when he was very young, and then he shows me a cupboard in his house that was made to the exact dimensions of a pizza box, and I wake up unsure if the pizzacupboard was the reason he was abandoned.

THE VERDICT: 3/5

THE VERDICT: 4/5

The dreams that I can remember do not seem too strange—I had recently been in South Korea and live in Wellington so they are familiar locations, and struggling to walk up any slightly-angled surface is also very real. Also of note was how I woke up partway through the night, at a natural break in the dream, which is unusual for me. Furthermore, the camembert succeeded in breaking my week-long dream drought and although I couldn’t accurately remember their content, the many dreams I had right before waking up were fired off with an unusual vividness.

Once again, I wake in the middle of the night, just as I am dangling off the balcony above the clouds, and I find that I am even sweating.

In terms of content, this dream sequence is a lot further from reality than the first night, notably Perfect Voice Boy and being seen in public with my whole family, but it is the realness of the dream environments that gives blue cheese high potency points. Even writing this a day later from scribbled notes, I can recall almost exactly how the places looked and felt to be in, and perhaps somewhat creepily (or prophetically), I feel I could still identify the nice dream boy’s voice if I were to hear it again in reality (okay, definitely creepily).

THE DREAM:

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NIGHT 3: CONTROL The third night is cheese-free to act as a control night in the experiment. Is it usual scientific protocol to have the control right in the middle? I’m not sure. Did I forget to nocturnally eat cheese because I had been watching Lost consecutively for eight hours that day? Definitely.

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THE VERDICT: 1/5 Terrible dream material. It also took forever for me to fall asleep, struggling to do so even three hours after going to bed. The one dream that feta did stir up was absolutely disgusting, and if my horrible dessert idea hadn’t already, its metaphor as dandruff has put me off feta for quite some time. Although disgusting, the all-toovisceral nature of clumpy-feta-dandruff was incredibly vivid and should be noted in that area of success.

THE DREAM:

NIGHT 5: EDAM

I found it hard to remember my dreams from the night before, though I do know that I had a few different ones that left a vague positive feeling waking up, though not weird. What I manage to remember is that I am at an assembly of some sort, and I am sad because I have no one to sit with, but then I realise that everyone else in the assembly is a child and then I leave, laughing as I exit.

THE VERDICT: There was a definite difference to my previous cheese dream nights, most notably in the difficulty of remembering much. This I would put down to the weak strength of the dreams, which could also be the reason I did not wake up at any time during the night. However, the sleep was still not dreamless.

NIGHT 4: FETA Its savoury, crumbly nature makes feta’s enjoyability quite different to other cheeses. It is very likely that you will find me eating a bag of grated mozzarella over the kitchen sink, but very unlikely you will find me doing the same with a block of feta. Because I quite enjoy eating cheese in the former fashion, feta is more of a monthly cheese for me.

I was also unsure how to eat the feta, since there weren’t any of the usual feta pairings (spinach, pumpkin, tomatoes) around, and I don’t think I’ve ever eaten a vegetable after 10pm. So, I decided that making a feta dessert would be a good idea and I crumbled up 70g of feta and drizzled on some honey and topped with raisins. This sounded very tasty in my mind, like a Poor Man Who Happened To Have A Block Of Feta’s baklava, but I was about to be disappointed.

While it seems illogical that by combining three delicious ingredients, all three are completely ruined just upon contact, this is exactly what happened. The feta was far too salty, the raisins were unpleasantly dry and the honey became bitter. The more the mixture sat in the bowl, somehow the honey became more watery. It began to look more and more unappealing—lumps of white and brown floating around in some yellowy liquid, the stuff of nightmares rather than dreams. In the name of science, I bravely ate as much as I could (which was basically all of it bar a few raisins), though very, very slowly across three episodes of Lost.

THE DREAM: I dream that my mother tells me that I have a lot of dandruff, and when I rebuff her and run a hand through my hair, I am proven wrong. Like the crumbled feta that was poured into the bowl, clumps of moist dandruff poured out of my scalp, enough to make snowballs with. I feel nauseous even thinking about now, making it the closest I’ve had so far to a true nightmare. www.salient.org.nz

Edam is the cheese I consume the most of by far. One of the more economical cheeses and incredibly versatile, big blocks of edam are a staple in my fridge, finding their way into sandwiches, melted toppings, sauces, or just gnawed upon immediately after purchase.

I don’t find myself getting ready for bed until quite late and quickly cut off a familiar block of edam and shovel it down like a savage, immediately before falling asleep. By now I am eating my nightly cheese less in Liz Lemon’s sing-about-it manner and treating it more like a hit of something, eager to get my daily dairy fix before another night-time high.

THE DREAM: Shock horror! The night of edam is a dreamless night, and I soundly sleep straight through to this immediate moment. I try hard to remember any sort of fragment of a dream, but not even a vague linger is present. In a reverse to the norm, I go to the fridge to check that I did eat cheese the night before (perhaps I had only dreamt I ate the edam), but alas, there is an undeniable 70g-shaped square missing from the block of edam.

THE VERDICT: 0/5 Is it worth giving e-dam about edam? It seems my new-found cheese junkie habits have perhaps led me to build up a defence to weaker, common cheeses as no dream-stirring qualities were to be garnered through edam. This recent spike in cheese bingeing, coupled by my usual steady edam intake (my body and brain could be already used to edam, nothing unusual to react to), mean that while this friendly and familiar cheese scores zero points for myself, my own habits could render this as an anomaly, and for others edam may be highly dream-potent. Nonetheless, I am very sad to find that my loyal cheese strain has nothing to offer.

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NIGHT 6: QUANTITY NOT QUALITY any water, which furthers my insomnia. I estimate that I finally fall asleep around 4 or 5am.

However, when I do fall asleep I sleep soundly, only stirring shortly before I wake up. When I wake up it is almost 3pm, which is quite awkward because I was meant to meet a friend to see a movie at 1.30pm. For experienced dream interpreters out there, you may have already guessed that the appearance of my dog and mother were likely to have been absorbed through my dog and my mother trying to wake me up in reality. I text my friend and apologise profusely, blaming a cheese hangover and warning them about the dangers of too much dairy affection in bed.

Following edam’s failure to yield any dreams, abuse of dairy came as no surprise. Disheartened, the final night involves a binge eating session of all the half-eaten blocks, wheels and wedges of cheese from the previous nights, about 600g in total (feta, however, remains in the fridge). With the rest of the cheese I make a not-too-shabbylooking cheese board, along with some sliced apples and crackers.

Like some sort of cave-dwelling animal after a hunt, I drag the cheese board to my bed where many episodes of Lost are waiting for me and together we enjoy several hours of dairy ingestion and overly dragged-out storylines.

The dream itself was remarkably easy to recall, even in my queasy, groggy state the next day. It was also the only dream of the week to have featured celebrity figures, and, once again, the worlds in which the dreams were set felt incredibly real. The most unusual part was probably the recurring nature of the Weezer concert, though whether this was a one-off event or if I will continue to dream about the band is unknown at this point. However, the 500g:70g ratio of cheese does not correlate to a similar ratio of extra dream-weirdness, which was disappointing.

I start bingeing spitefully over edam’s inabilities and start to feel a bit queasy around an hour in, about a third of the way through the cheese. The remaining half-wheel of camembert is all gone; there is a smallish chunk of blue cheese left; but many large, overbearing slices of edam remain. Despite our little tiff from the night before, I find myself getting distracted by the television show and end up nibbling away most of the edam as well. As I begin to feel sleepy, I have probably eaten 500g of cheese.

THE DREAM: I am at a Weezer concert (which is unusual because I had a dream about a Weezer concert not too long ago), and Rivers is telling people about a movie he is making. He explains how Keanu Reeves is in it but then a photo of John Cusack is projected behind the band instead. This appears to be out of confusion and not for comedic effect. Suddenly my dog is beside me and he is talking to me in my mother’s voice—it does not come across as disturbing but incredibly ordinary, almost annoying. At this point, I stir and it interrupts into a new dream where it is still the same Weezer concert but the venue has changed to a carpeted room.

THE VERDICT: 2/5 Surprise, surprise, overdosing on dairy is not a good thing to do before going to bed. I spend much of the night nauseously rolling around, trying to sleep while my stomach is trying to deal with my poor dietary decision. In my mind, all the cheese has teamed up together to form a “super ball” of cheese in my stomach, a large angry clump that refuses to be digested. I also feel quite thirsty but I am too lazy to get out of bed and also too scared of ghosts to go get

From the experiment, I believe that it is safe to say that cheese does affect your dreams. While the dreams that I had on cheese were not particularly more surreal than my regular dreams, they were much more vivid and “real”, making them much easier to recall once awake. However, truly weird dreams seem to remain free and unharnessable by dairy, their source remaining a mystery. Another important discovery was how the quantity of cheese and weirdness of dream show a logarithmic relationship rather than a linear one, with 50–80g sufficient to entice a dream or two.

For your own prophetic and recreational use, eat blue cheese to predict future lovers, and binge on any sort of cheese for celebrity appearances. Camembert is more of a wildcard, but good for breaking any dreamless spells. Also, feta is not a good dessert.

Finally, a cautionary warning for any dream cheese junkies: this experiment also suggests an adaptive tolerance to cheese and an entry-level cheese such as edam, in small amounts, is recommended as a starting point. Of course, this experiment only covers a small slice of the many different cheeses out there, and I encourage you to call upon your own favourite cheese before bed and see what snoozy adventure you have afterwards. Sweet cheesey dreams to all.

editor@salient.org.nz

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The police are decriminalising weed in New Zealand or, Why the cops are going soft on pot but politicians are not Cameron Price Chris Fowlie is the head of the National Organisation for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) and he really doesn’t like the way the police enforce the Misuse of Drugs Act. In a recent post on the Daily Blog he argued that the authorities maliciously target harmless dope smokers, causing them far more harm than a joint ever could. www.salient.org.nz

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The statistics he cites appear to back up his argument: since 1994 there have been nearly half a million drug arrests, accounting for 11 per cent of all recorded crime. 85 per cent of the arrests were for cannabis, and 87 per cent of those were for personal amounts. On average, that equates to the police arresting 15,800 users a year for possession of personal amounts of pot. That’s 43 a day, or one every 33 minutes.

Fowlie says these statistics “are illustrative of how drug policing in New Zealand has gone off the rails”. But actually, the opposite is true: a closer look at the data shows that in fact there has been a huge decline in police arrests for possession and use over time. In averaging out arrests over two decades, Fowlie focusses on the noise and misses the signal.

In the period between 1994 and 2014, annual recorded offences for possession of all illicit drugs halved. Offences for cannabis possession specifically did likewise. More interestingly, recorded offences for using illicit drugs fell from 1,307 down to 260, which was largely driven by 1,046 fewer cannabis use offences. The Police prosecute significantly fewer people for possession and use of drugs than they did two decades ago.

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And this has occurred at a time when Ministry of Health figures suggest that the prevalence of drugs in New Zealand has remained stable and, particularly in the case of cannabis, relatively high. The data shows that

42% of Kiwis aged 15 and over have smoked pot at some point in their lives, and 11% have smoked pot in the past year.

That’s 397,000 past-year tokers. The same survey showed that only two per cent of past year cannabis smokers reported experiencing legal problems as a result of their use.

So why have arrests halved if use has remained the same? There’s a simple answer: the Police are decriminalising cannabis in New Zealand.

editor@salient.org.nz

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that police approach low-level criminal offending. Wilkins says that “it would be a mistake to say it is a change that is specific to drugs. It reflects a wider change in police philosophy.” He believes the trend extends to other low-level crime, such as petty theft, and says the decline in arrests is a case of better allocation of police resources. “There’s a desire to be more effective and efficient, so that means reprioritising low-level offending.”

Dr. Chris Wilkins is the leader of the illegal drug research team based at Massey University. He first documented the trend toward decriminalisation in 2012 in a paper published in the International Journal of Drug Policy. It concludes that “since the 1990s, there has been a general decline in arrests, prosecutions and convictions for cannabis use in New Zealand.”

The explanation? According to Dr. Wilkins, “the decline in convictions was partly driven by the police diversion scheme, which now includes low-level cannabis use offences.”

The diversion scheme, together with the recently introduced Pre-Charge Warning system, allow the police to grant a kind of amnesty to drug offenders whereby they avoid going to court.

According to the Police, the diversion scheme works to deal with offenders in an “out of court” way. The Police Prosecution Service considers whether an offender is eligible for diversion. If their case is deemed worthy, they can admit guilt and take part in a restorative justice exercise. Charges are then dismissed and a conviction is avoided.

A Pre-Charge Warning is a formal warning given after arrest for a comparatively minor offence. This differs from traditional, more informal warnings given in the field, where the offender is not arrested; and the more formal diversion process, which occurs after arrest and a court hearing.

But these schemes don’t explain the decline entirely. It’s not like the Police are catching every pot smoker and then diverting them from the courts—recall that only two per cent of cannabis users reported any legal issues arising from their use. Also, Pre-Charge Warnings are still recorded as offences and appear in published crime statistics.

Another explanation for the decline is that there has been a wider shift in the way

This is supported by the data. At the same time as possession and use charges for cannabis have come down, the number of manufacture and import charges have increased. The last 20 years have also seen the rise of meth, which Wilkins says has taken up more policing resources.

“If you’re a policeman and you have two markets—meth and cannabis—you have to ask yourself, ‘which is the best use of my time?’”

What’s the official explanation for the decline?

When asked to explain the decline in apprehensions, an official Police spokesperson denied that there had been a change in official drug policy. Instead, he said there had been a change in “focus”.

But calling it a change in “focus” instead of a change in “policy” is just semantics: there’s no meaningful difference. Plus, it’s beside the point—the police are catching half the drug users they used to. They have decided that the hassle of arresting, charging and prosecuting a casual dope smoker is not worth the effort, nor the time, nor the money. They’ve realised the law is an ass, and now refuse to enforce it in the vast majority of cases.

A spokesperson for Police Minister Michael Woodhouse says that the Government didn’t direct the Police to focus less on cannabis. “It is the responsibility of Police to enforce the law. The Minister does not direct police around how they do that, as that is strictly prohibited under the Policing Act.” However, Woodhouse is comfortable with the change: “Police does [sic] embark in alternative resolutions across a number of offences and that is consistent with the Minister’s expectations.”

Is the decline in arrests for possession and use a good thing?

Ross Bell, executive director at the New Zealand Drug Foundation, believes that the decrease is a good thing, saying that “the use of drugs is a health and social issue, not a criminal one.” He says the punishment of a drug conviction isn’t proportionate to the crime, and that it leads to counterproductive health outcomes.

“There are two types of drug user: recreational and dependent.

Recreational users aren’t doing any real damage to society so it doesn’t make sense to give them a conviction, especially considering the damage that can do to their future work and travel prospects,” he says.

“Dependent users have an addiction, which is a health problem that needs to be dealt with by treatment professionals. Arresting them and then sending them to court (and in some cases jail) can exacerbate their addiction issues, not solve them.”

Encouragingly, Police Commissioner Mike Bush agrees that alternative approaches to prosecution can lead to better outcomes for users. Last month he heaped praise on Auckland Constable Scott Wolfe, “whose empathy for a methamphetamine addict helped turn her life around”.

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In a post on his “Commissioner’s Blog”, Bush explained that Constable Wolfe “arrested the woman for possession of a cannabis pipe and, recognising the signs of methamphetamine use, discovered she had a heavy addiction and was living in a car”.

Instead of prosecuting the woman through the traditional court system, Constable Wolfe referred her instead to Te Kooti o Timatanga Hou—The New Beginnings Court, which is focussed on homeless and disadvantaged people.

“She’s now in rehabilitation, has reconnected with her child and made huge improvements in her life,” said the Commissioner. “This is a superb example of the difference we can all make by showing a little understanding and using our initiative.” Indeed.

But is there any cause for concern?

Yes, there is. Professor Mark Bennett, a lecturer at Victoria University’s Law School, says that “if a certain offence will not be followed up on and there is little danger of detection and/or prosecution, there are questions around the legitimacy of this from both a rule of law and democratic perspective.”

The police can’t just decide to stop enforcing the laws of the land without there being repercussions. Dr. Dean Knight, another law lecturer at Victoria, says that one of the roles of the police is to follow the democratic will of the people and enforce the laws they voted for. “The Police probably shouldn’t effectively repudiate laws through nonenforcement,” he says.

We might think it’s fine for the Police to decriminalise pot, but what happens if one day they decided to stop prosecuting theft, say? Or assault? Or corruption? This is particularly concerning given the fact that the public is largely unaware of changes in police policy.

We asked Justice Minister Amy Adams whether she shared the law professors’ concerns about democracy and inequality before the law. She told us that the issue wasn’t relevant to her portfolio, which is bizarre. Surely it’s a matter of justice that police are choosing to take the law into their own hands, even if the outcomes are good.

Because sometimes the outcomes aren’t good. A big worry about police discretion is their wide scope to abuse it. Professor Bennett says that independent prosecutorial discretion is a double-edged sword. On the

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one hand, it means that low-level offending can be kept out of the courts. But the problem, Bennett says, is that it

“may be exercised arbitrarily and/or to target certain subgroups of the population”.

What he is saying is that while Constable Wolfe’s actions were commendable, there’s nothing stopping a police officer from throwing the book at another user in the same circumstances. The policy is capricious, because police officers have the power to arbitrarily decide when to enforce the law and when not to. And unfortunately, the people that police do choose to target tend to be minorities. Young people and those living in areas of deprivation are over-represented in the arrest data, but the biggest issue is the apparent targeting of Māori.

That is not to say that all cops are racist— some no doubt are, just as there are racists to be found in every profession. But many officers, while not consciously racist, have biases that they cannot help but act on. And the evidence backs this up: it’s been shown that Māori are proportionally three times more likely to be arrested and convicted for cannabis use than non-Māori.

So is there a way to get the same good outcomes through a better process?

Yes. The most obvious way to get the benefits of decriminalisation is to completely remove the criminal sanction for possession and use of cannabis. That was the conclusion of a 2011 Law Commission report, which recommended scrapping the Misuse of Drugs Act entirely and replacing it with a new law. The key objectives of the new regime would be “to remove minor drug offences from the criminal justice system, and provide greater opportunities for those in need of treatment to access it”.

At the time of the report’s release just prior to the 2011 election, Associate Health Minister Peter Dunne put out an official Government response titled “Next Government will overhaul Misuse of Drugs Act”. In the statement, he said that “the current Act was developed nearly 40 years

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ago at a time when drugs and their use were very different than they are today, and the argument for a substantive update is clear and compelling.” Four years on, no changes have been been made to the law.

When we asked Minister Dunne whether the Government had any plans to implement the recommendations from the report, he said that any changes to the Misuse of Drugs Act would be made in light of the National Drug Policy due to be released later this year, and not on the Law Commission report. Disappointingly, the Minister didn’t give any reason for his change of heart.

We also asked him whether he agreed that treating possession and use of drugs as a health issue would result in better outcomes for users, and he refused to answer.

Which is bizarre, partly because he is the Associate Health Minister, responsible for Government drug policy, and partly because the answer is obviously yes.

So it seems the Government has no appetite to implement full scale drug law reform.

But there is an alternative possibility: cannabis could be decriminalised through the Psychoactive Substances Act. Under the regime, psychoactive substances must be proven to be safe before they can be legally sold. Although the law is aimed at synthetic cannabinoid imitators or “legal highs”, Minister Dunne has indicated that there is a “possibility for lower classified drugs” to be tested under the Act, “but that process is likely to be years off yet”.

So politicians aren’t prepared to deal with the issue. But they’re being left behind by a society that is changing the way it views users, and by the Police who are changing the way they treat them. The Police should be commended for implementing an enlightened policy that positively impacts on the lives of users. Politicians should be condemned for sitting on their hands and failing to convert this policy into law.

Cameron Price is one of the founders of the newly-formed Victoria University chapter of Students for Sensible Drug Policy. SSDP is an international student-led organisation that advocates for better drug policies that prioritise human rights. If you’re interested in any aspect of drug law—from plainpackaged cigarettes to alcohol excise tax, medical marijuana to MDMA—join the group. Sign-up at fb.com/vic.ssdp. editor@salient.org.nz

Laura Duffy www.lauraduffy.info

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Would You Chop Up a Giraffe?

Gus Mitchell

Psychologists estimate that around one per cent of the world’s population are psychopaths. Statistically, you are bound to have met one at some point in your life. I think I met my first one last year.

I was visiting a friend in Otago. It was the first time I had ever stayed at someone’s flat in another city. He was the first one back at his flat; his flatmates, all med students, were supposed to come back at some point, he just didn’t know when. It seemed like your basic uni accommodation—five rooms, two stories, enough space for everyone to go about their business without being disturbed. Out the back of the flat, there was a narrow division next to the washing line, where someone had set up a small shooting range. White plastic pellets littered the ground, and a ventilated target still hung on the fence some distance away. When I asked concernedly what they were, my friend shrugged and said, “Oh, those are Jemaine’s.

He does shooting in his spare time.”

Jemaine arrived at the flat about two days later while my friend was out. We introduced ourselves, we talked about our majors and how I knew his flatmate. He made some crude homophobic joke about what we had been getting up to while he was gone. So much for first impressions.

Then the inevitable awkward pause. But I decided if I was going to a guest under my friend’s roof that I’d better be civil. I asked an icebreaker that I had recently learnt from reddit to keep the conversation going.

“You get given a giraffe by someone, and they tell you have to look after it, but you cannot let anyone know that you have it, even the people you live with. You have to keep it an absolute secret, and you just have to keep it at your house until such time as someone comes to collect it. How do you hide the giraffe?”

When I have asked this to most people in the past, most people stop and pause to consider the logistics of their house, their yard, how they would look after and feed the gangly, obvious animal. But after about a second, Jemaine answered.

“I’d just cut up the giraffe and hide the chunks.”

Maybe he was just being clever (I never specified that the giraffe had to be alive, after all), but the immediacy and the confidence with which he answered left me a little cold.

He spent the rest of the day up in his room with a friend, showing off and assembling their pellet guns, some of which looked remarkably similar to actual firearms.

I later learned that he wanted to specialise in surgery. At least he would be taking bullets out of people instead of putting bullets into them.

DOWN THE HARE HOLE As a culture, we are fascinated by human evil. Nineteenth century French psychiatrist

Philippe Pinel spoke of manie sans delire, or insanity without delusions. Today, shows like Hannibal and Criminal Minds construct stories where we get to safely gaze into the world of how a ruthless killer thinks and acts. Psychopathy, to the average person’s mind, can mean any number of things, from a psychotic individual to a corporate Wolf of Wall Street to a cultured cannibal.

Researchers today still heavily debate the term and what precisely we refer to when we think of the word “psychopath”. The leading expert, at least in criminal cases, is Robert Hare, a psychologist and the deviser of the “Hare Test”.

In the 60s, Hare worked as the prison psychologist in the maximum-security British Columbia Penitentiary. After a psychopathic prisoner cut the brake line in his car while it was in the prison auto shop, Hare decided to find out what exactly made these people tick. If he could find the defect that made psychopaths the cold, unsympathetic creatures they are, maybe he could find a way to detect them.

Hare began to conduct a series of trials on both psychopathic and non-psychopathic volunteers in the prison. In one of his trials, Hare would strap a prisoner up and told them he would count backwards from ten, and that when he hit one they would receive a powerful electric shock. Hare measured the brain response and heart rates of his subjects throughout the trial, and found that during the countdown before the shock the nonpsychopaths would panic, their heart and editor@salient.org.nz

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Even more shocking (at least more than any other electricity pun I could make) was the response to his findings. Hare sent his findings to Science magazine. The magazine sent them back unpublished, along with a letter saying that his results “couldn’t have come from real people”.

What Hare had found in his trials was a missing link in psychopaths’ responses—a defect in the amygdala, the portion of the brain responsible for processing emotions like fear and stress. After electro-shock was banned in the early 1970s, Hare had to come up with less extreme methods of rooting out psychopaths, and so he devised the Checklist.

The Hare test, or the Hare Psychopathy Checklist—Revised (PCL-R), is used by clinicians and researchers to identify personality traits commonly associated with psychopathy in their patients. The actual checklist itself is more a textbook than a test, and completing it from cover to cover takes around three hours in total, usually conducted as a face-to-face interview. The “test” portion itself is 20 items, divided into two sections measuring factors of personality and behaviour. Participants are asked to rank their accuracy to questions on these factors from 0 to 2, 0 meaning “does not apply”, 1 meaning “applies somewhat” and 2 “definitely applies”. Factor 1 items measure how participants view themselves and conduct themselves around other people, looking for anything that suggests an unhealthy ego (psychopaths are incredibly full of themselves) or characteristic lack of empathy. Factor 1 statements include “In important ways, I am superior to most people” and “I rarely connect emotionally with others”. Factor 2 items determine a participant’s capacity to commit and rationalise criminal acts, in relation to statements like “I need to take risks to feel alive” and “I am not or would not be proud of getting away with crimes”.

The main criticism of the Hare test is that it is heavily focused on Factor 2 traits, which firmly bases the test on a very socially constructed notion that all psychopaths are likely to be violent criminals. In the book www.salient.org.nz

The Psychopath Test, journalist Jon Ronson asked Hare about the assumptions we have about psychopaths. Hare comments that if he had had the knowledge back in the 60s that he had now, he would have conducted his research in the Stock Exchange as well as prisons.

WELLINGTONIAN PSYCHO So with this all in mind, and for the purposes of journalism, I decided to undertake the most amateur of amateur studies to see if a psychopath turned up somewhere in Victoria’s esteemed halls.

Mimicking Bob Hare and his checklist, I interviewed a series of people from different majors, asking them a series of questions

the lower numbers. This means that the people who score highly for psychopathic traits are bigger outliers than those who scored high for empathetic or nonpsychopathic traits. The peak of the curve, where the highest percentage of people scored, sits somewhere around 14-16.

My completely scientifically valid sample size consisted of five students. Noelle was a design graduate. Marshall was in his third year of law. Lorraine was doing her Honours in biomedicine and wanted to be a doctor.

Tanya was a psych student who wanted to work in the Department of Corrections, a potential Robert Hare in the making. And lastly, Jasmine, a musician with an interest in maths and physics.

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perspiration rates peaking as they prepared themselves for the painful jolt to come.

The psychopaths didn’t break a sweat, and didn’t even remember the electric shock as being painful. There was a clear disconnect between what they felt and how they felt about it.

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score about their personality and behaviour, while also quizzing them on what their idea of a psychopath was. The online Hare test that I gave my volunteers (which you can find at vistriai.com/psychopathtest) is 39 questions long instead of 20. In addition, as my editor was quick to remind me, this was for fun and I am not remotely qualified to conduct any psychology investigation of any kind.

Every volunteer who took the online Hare test scored either 11 or 12, a score on the lower end of the bell curve, below the average. The only exception was Marshall, who scored 7, the lowest score and the one outlier. Marshall and Jasmine were both relieved to be on the lower end of the bell curve.

On the PCL-R, the threshold for being labeled a psychopath is 25 in the UK and 30 in the USA. On the online test, after you submit your results, the online test gives you a number from 1 to 40 and places your results on a bell curve. The curve is positively skewed, which for you non-statisticians means that the peak leans to the left, toward

The real Psychopath Checklist isn’t available online, and Robert Hare has stated that the actual test is only to be used by clinicians.

(So I “definitely apply” for having problems with authority, I suppose.) If a real Checklist were offered online and made available to everyone, chances are it would lose any semblance of clinical reliability.

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When I asked my volunteers who the first person, real or fictional, they thought of when they hear the word psychopath, they tended to give stereotypical examples. The Simpsons, having an archetype for just about every personality, was a touchstone for both Noelle and Jasmine—the former offered the “obsessive” Sideshow Bob and the latter said Professor Frink, because he’s a “crazy scientist”, conflating psychopathy with psychosis. Marshall said Hannibal Lecter, while Lorraine offered the “evil” Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. Tanya, the only psychology student, gave the infamous Ted Bundy, whom she had studied extensively and dubbed “her favourite serial killer”.

I listed a series of Factor 1 traits to see how my subjects thought it could apply to what they wanted to do then they graduated.

These included a lack of remorse or guilt, a need for stimulation (psychopaths bore easily), being cunning or manipulative, low anxiety or stress, a lack of affect (not being fazed by anything or having a glib response to ordinarily shocking things) and finally, a lack of long-term planning, something which psychopaths have an inability to do, at least with regards to making and achieving realistic goals.

Given that all my subjects were around university age, everyone had a pretty clear idea of what they wanted to do when they graduated and how they were going to go about it. But some psychopathic traits held a certain appeal, especially when applied to certain occupations. Unsurprisingly, the one trait everyone wanted to have was a lack of anxiety or low stress. The reception to the benefits of a lack of affect or a lack of guilt was more mixed; Jasmine believed that as a musician, lacking in affect meant that you couldn’t put your emotions in your music.

Lorraine believed being a doctor meant that you had to manage your emotions, finding the right balance between empathising with people and their illness but not crying yourself to sleep at night.

Manipulativeness or cunning was rated very low by everyone, but Marshall did make the point that as a lawyer, you would need to be “clever” but not necessarily manipulative. “[Being cunning] would be quite useful because you’re trying to think of clever ways to interpret the law, maybe a certain meaning of this word that could get your client off rather than have him convicted. I

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think it would be pretty useful to any lawyer really.”

I always thought of lawyers as swaying a jury through emotion (I blame Boston Legal and its frequent soapboxing of cases), something that a psychopath would be adept at doing.

“My view of the law is that they’re there to help people,” says Marshall. “When their problem is based in something wrong [breaking the law], they’re not so much there to manipulate people [clients or juries] as to take the information they have and try to fit it into a legal context.”

I also included the giraffe question, just for kicks. Thankfully, everyone wanted to keep the giraffe alive. But I wasn’t immediately convinced.

What my subjects didn’t know was that I wasn’t just recording their answers, but how exactly they answered. The Hare Checklist is not strictly ticking boxes; its intention is to see whether certain turns of phrase, but by the way they speak, what turns of phrase they use, how they carry themselves.

The additional questions I asked were to hear people’s honest opinion of how they conducted themselves, like whether they deliberately managed the way they appeared to people or describing the last time they worked with a team of people on a set task, in order to determine how they typically spoke of others when performance or reputation was on the line. Psychopaths tend to see people less as people and more as tools or pawns. If their reputation or grandiose sense of self is on the line, a psychopath will resort to anything to readdress that balance, including theft or murder, and will feel no remorse for the outcome. They would try to make it their victim’s fault that they got killed, that their way of the world is the way of the world.

With my subjects, nothing really stood out. Everyone agreed that they present themselves differently to strangers than they would people they knew out of politeness or nervousness. No ruses or charades were exposed here, though Marshall considered that if he did think too hard about conducting himself around people, then he probably would. Which to me sounded like an honest, anxious totally non-psychopathic appraisal (so breathe easy, dude). editor@salient.org.nz

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was that the clarity the LSD and isolation these psychopaths experienced only went on to make them worse. The researchers concluded that if a psychopath were to become more empathetic, they would only get better at manipulating others’ feelings rather than understanding their own.

In The Psychopath Test, Hare explains how strange it is to hear a psychopath comment on their lack of empathy. When they see a person crying or scared or suffering, they tend not to be moved so much as fascinated, like they’re watching an animal at the zoo.

Knowing that they are likely to be ostracised or placed under scrutiny if they don’t play along and feel empathy alongside their peers, psychopaths study people and mimic their behaviour to blend in.

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When I told Lorraine my story about the potential giraffe-murdering surgeon, she didn’t seem all that surprised.

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For instance, two different inmates were caught weeks after their release having each raped and killed a young boy. One former Capsule inmate went on to try and join the Israeli army and was turned down. (“See?” said one of the original researchers, “they have standards!”) He joined the Rhodesian army instead and was gunned down by supporters of Robert Mugabe. The takeaway

We think of psychopaths as only being criminals, but they can be found just about anywhere, if you know where to look.

Research has shown that they tend to gravitate toward certain professions. In fact, a lot of the traits we typically associate with psychopaths tend to be incredibly useful in certain professions.

Science

Like any major personality disorder, psychopathy can’t be “cured”, but that doesn’t mean people haven’t tried to cure it. Elliot Barker, a Canadian psychologist working in the 60s, idealistically believed that psychopathy was less of a permanent condition and more of an ailment. He thought psychopathy or any sort of madness was something that could be burnt out of the body given enough time and attention, like a cold. He believed the best way to achieve this was in Nude Psychotherapy, a therapeutic practice in which people stripped naked and talked about their

In the end, it was an experiment gone horribly wrong. When a pair of researchers in the 90s studied whether the Capsule inmates had gone on to reoffend, they found that their likelihood of reoffending had increased from sixty per cent to eighty per cent. The treatment hadn’t made them better people, it had made them better psychopaths.

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feelings towards one another in a controlled environment. Unsurprisingly, it gained popularity with celebrities in the 60s. After obtaining a pool of criminals to test and a hospital facility in Ontario, Barker did the same thing with psychopaths. He placed them in a garish green room called the Total Encounter Capsule, with no distractions or contact from the outside world. Food and water was provided through straws in the walls and laced with LSD to encourage the therapeutic process. This went on for years, with psychopathic criminals spending several intense fortnight long sessions in the Capsule.

Primary Psychopathy

Psychopaths are clinically unable to experience the same range or depth of emotions as non-psychopaths. This leaves them a distinct lack of empathy or ability to relate to people, and influences a lot of their characteristic behaviours and personality traits: the lack of affect, the ability to manipulate, a distinct lack of remorse over their actions. However, it does gift them with the uncanny ability to be unafraid or unstressed during events that have the ordinary person jumping in fright. Depending on your perspective, that could make a cold-blooded killer or a highly-functioning surgeon or a ruthless businessman.

Fig. 1. The mean scale scores on primary psychopathy for degree type by sex.

issue 15

Features

“A lot of my friends who take medicine have that sort of sick personality,” she said, “which is why sometimes I’m like ‘Oh, should I be studying medicine?’ Because that is not my humour.”

ends on the note that commerce papers should aim to encourage ethical business practice in order to discourage the potential psychopaths in the herd. It gives a whole new meaning to “the one per cent”.

To me, developing a dark sense of humour in a job that emotionally taxing seemed like a healthy response.

On that cheerful note, I offer this one Salient piece of reassurance: if you think you are a psychopath, if you are scared or anxious that you are, then that probably means you are not one.

“Do you mean in the way that they find it funny, or is it like a release valve for when they have to deal with shitty situations?” I asked.

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Some of the names in this article have been changed.

“No, they find it funny,” she said. “They like to bounce off each other with just this kind of sick humour, like about rape and violence and all that kind of stuff.

“Seriously!” she continued. “It’s like a breed of people. I think a lot of surgeons have that mentality.”

When I asked my subjects which major they thought had the most psychopaths in it, two thought science because of their narcissism and generally “being full of themselves”, and two thought psychology due to its focus on analysing people and picking them apart.

I too had wondered, while I researched this article, in which realm of study the psychopaths sought asylum.

As luck would have it, a study done at Victoria University had set out to do just that, only with qualifications and a wider sample pool and all that jazz. Commerce turned out to be the major with the highest concentration of people with psychopathic traits, followed closely by law. Science and arts had the lowest amount, with science having slightly more psychopathic individuals than arts.

In The Psychopath Test, Ronson wonders if the psychopaths in the stock market could possibly be as bad as the psychopaths in the prisons. Hare shrugged in response.

“Serial killers ruin families. Corporate and political psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.”

Psychopaths rise to the positions of power: politics, economics, even positions over life and death, if my encounter with prospective surgeons proved anything. It’s become such a potential problem, especially in the wake of Gordon Gekko and Jordan Belfort, “the Wolf of Wall Street”, that the Victoria study editor@salient.org.nz

Features

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least until you turn to friends with similar experiences and online forums and find out that, Jesus, everyone has the same shit as you—that there are people who’ve been two months off and still suffering “discontinuation” symptoms.

There is a lot of dissonance, then, between what medical professionals inform you you will experience and what you will really experience—a dissonance that confuses many people and turns them online for guidance, solace, answers. Who’s right? Is it a placebo effect in reverse, a kind of psychosomatic hell-scape that’s a l l i n y r h e a d?

Are you and the rest of the people you’ve spoken too rare outliers like you first thought, only more vocal?

The Discontinuation Method Philip McSweeney

Here’s a disquieting scenario. Imagine, after a period of damnable mental decline, you go and see your GP and they prescribe you a SSRI or SSNI. Either it works (my sincere congratulations!), in which case you have to ween off it, or it doesn’t work and your medicine is “reviewed”.

You’re put on a new medication which has greater efficacy, but because taking two antidepressants at once is ruinous to your brain chemistry, amongst other organs, you have to taper off the medication you were put on.

You are first forcefully assured and then re-assured, that, if done correctly, tapering off these drugs won’t be too difficult. You are also promised that these drugs are not addictive, and so “withdrawal” isn’t the right word to use at all. The side-effects will stem from “discontinuation”, and will last two or three days or so, maybe the greater part of the week at the most.

Except then the symptoms of “discontinuation” don’t go away for, at first, one week, then two. The symptoms don’t seem to alleviate over time, either—shit, if anything, they’re getting worse. So you assume you’re an outlier, just one of the unlucky ones alluded to in the fine script. At

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Earlier this year, the question was answered by a team of American and Italian researchers who offered the first systematic review of withdrawal problems that patients discontinuing antidepressants experience. Canvassing previously published research, as well as undertaking their own, the team found that “symptoms typically occur within a few days from drug discontinuation and last a few weeks... however, many variations are possible”. So there you have it—the two-to-three days thing is malarkey, especially for medications like venlafaxine and paxil (the two drugs most infamous for difficult discontinuation).

Equally telling was the team’s recommendations: “Clinicians need to add SSRI to the list of drugs potentially inducing withdrawal symptoms upon discontinuation, together with benzodiazepines, barbiturates, and other psychotropic drugs… The term ‘discontinuation syndrome’ that is currently used minimises the potential vulnerabilities induced by SSRI and should be replaced by ‘withdrawal syndrome’.” They concluded, in both senses of the word, on a harrowing note: “post-withdrawal disorders may last for several months to years.” Using the word “discontinuation” is a misrepresentation.

What’s in a Name?

The reason medical professionals are wary of using “withdrawal” when referring to medicines they prescribe is that “withdrawal” and “discontinuation” delineate “bad drugs” and “good drugs”, respectively. You withdraw from heroin; discontinue panadol. It’s a nice dichotomy, and “discontinuation” is a pretty effective euphemism—a benign sounding thing that certainly avoids insinuating that you might experience profuse sweating, tremors, nausea, vomiting, brain-zaps, diarrhoea, chills, migraines, dizziness, fainting, migraine, fatigue, insomnia, hypersomnia, agitation, impaired concentration, impaired motor skills, vivid dreams, depersonalisation, irritability, suicidal ideation, et al. This list is by no means exhaustive; these are just the common side-effects of withdrawing from—not heroin or benzos—SSRIs.

salient

issue 15

Features

Do not misunderstand me! I too react with bristly impatience when confronted by some didactic jeremiad about “over-medicated youth!!1!” or “antidepressants being handed out like candy!!1!”, or similar erroneous bullshit.

A lot of people—and especially people in their late teens and early twenties fumbling through the fraught terrain of early adulthood—struggle with feelings and emotions that are the total fucking pits, and “pathological” mental illness and the very wrenching problems of trying to establish a life you can be content with are kinda two different sides of the same coin of a currency that no-one wants to acknowledge, let alone deal in or exchange. If an anti works, take the fucking anti and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Shit, our major problem in New Zealand—and it has been since the first official report on depression was commissioned back in 2004—is that people under-report mental illness, fearing the stigma of unwellness. Besides, the tests they give people to gauge anxiety are so awful and triggering and anxiety-inducing, many patients underreport the severity of their feelings or don’t take the test at all.

Yet the question remains: why is there such a yawning gap between what GPs tell people and what they actually experience?

There’s an argument to be made about the U.S. pharmaceutical companies, to whom New Zealanders are somewhat beholden. These Big-Pharmas have to cover their bases legally. That’s why on any prescription drug you get you’ll get an exhaustive list of possible side-effects and what to do if they occur, complete with the caveat that the list is incomplete. However, when it comes to tapering off those same drugs, the science—and thus the legalese—can afford to be a bit murkier. This is because there is no “definitive pathophysiological explanation for antidepressant discontinuation syndrome”, and understandably, pharmaceutical companies aren’t exactly champing at the bit to undertake research into the matter.

Or perhaps it all comes down to the old adage: you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. In Pulse magazine, a periodical intended for and distributed to practicing medical practitioners and alumni, they surveyed a randomlyselected group of GPs on which issues they felt were the most pressing to them, vis-a-vis community health. The top two, unsurprisingly and solipsistically, pertained to the GPs themselves—lower workload and higher pay being their “in an ideal world” requisites. Following that, the third concern revolved around senior citizens’ health and their access to healthcare; increased youth funding and access was at eleven. Mental health ranked even lower.

I don’t think it’s coincidental to these bizarre rankings that New Zealand doctors are, on average, old (or at least not spring-chickens young—sorry to be ageist Mum!). The highest percentage of active doctors in NZ is between the ages of 45 and 49, with the median age also falling within that bracket. Perhaps with age comes past stigmas

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and disinclination to follow new strictures, no matter how imperative or peer-reviewed.

Or perhaps it’s simply this: medical professionals are fallible. They will make mistakes. These mistakes, when made, are impossible to deny. Personal culpability, however, is easier to repudiate, especially when you can enforce it with decades of learned behaviour.

The learned behaviour in this case is where the seemingly innocuous difference between “withdrawal” and “discontinuation” lies. The medical profession uses the word “discontinuation” for drugs that “are not habit-forming”, “are not addictive”, and “do not form drug-seeking behaviour”. But when you get prescribed SSRIs, you’ll be told to take your dose daily—not only that, but at the same time each day. Isn’t that the dictionary definition of “habit-forming”? When SSRIs are suddenly discontinued, previous symptoms will likely relapse until treatment is recontinued—isn’t that addiction, dependency?

In an example people who suffer from GAD or Panic Disorder will be all-too-familiar with, benzos—which ameliorate panic attacks and panic ideation with divine efficacy—are handed out sparingly, often begrudgingly.

There is, supposedly, sound reasoning behind this. The risk of “addiction” and “unpleasant withdrawals” are high.

Except that in 2011, a team of researchers found that SSRI “discontinuation” and benzodiazepine “withdrawal” were similarly—almost identically—unpleasant. So why are benzos so controlled and stigmatised when SSRIs are so (rightly) freely available?

One layer deeper down the rabbit-hole: 1) our society has an encompassing fear, even antipathy, towards drugs that work instantly or quickly on the brain because 2) these drugs buttress the risk of “addiction”, which 3) causes damage later on. But these clauses are not an inevitable trajectory; they’re a constructed narrative, like everything else. It’s a narrative that’s lent credence by the social attitude to addiction as irresponsible crime. But there’s another weird social conception at play here too; we lampoon Christian Scientists, but boy have we taken their belief in nobility through suffering to heart.

This is bullshit. We do not need to suffer to live a fulfilled life. We should be candid about our pain, our anguish, and we have every right to ameliorate these sufferings in ways that work and that are proven to be safe—social stigma be damned. But first we need candid, unmediated information about our pills. We need to know the pros, the cons, and the gravity involved if we are to best negotiate future suffering.

But most of all, we need to realise that medicine is not objective, but a process—a progressive multi-layered thing built around trials and errors and assumptions. And for the health and dignity of each and every member of any community, we need to know that our medical professionals appreciate this.

editor@salient.org.nz

Opinion

salient

Alexa Zelensky

An American in Wellington

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This page is for your submissions!

If you’d like to write something for Issue 17—the Queer Issue—write up a quick overview and email it to editor@salient.org.nz by noon on Wednesday. The final piece should be around 500-800 words, and will be due Monday 27 July.

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$160,000 sounds like a lot for a scholarship, but in reality it barely makes a dent. Hundreds of thousands of American high schoolers are awarded large scholarships from universities—that’s my number above, awarded to a mainly straight-A, hardworking student by four different universities—and yet, a large percentage of them will graduate with anywhere from $20,000 to $100,000+ in debt, even with generous scholarships like the one I received.

The total amount of US student debt currently sits at $1.3 trillion, making the average student feel as if they’re being milked for a profit.

Average state schools in the US are still quite pricey, with places like the University of Alaska in Anchorage costing $25,000 per year and the University of Washington in Seattle costing $46,000 per year.

If a student chose to go the private education route, they could pay upwards of $65,480 per year (Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York thinks a little too highly of itself ).

Cue thousands of Americans waking up to the realities of debt and looking overseas for their education.

There are 2,900 international students here at Victoria paying anywhere from $20,000 (education) to $30,000 (engineering) per year at an undergraduate level.

While it does feel like they’re milking the foreign kids, I like to think we’re helping to finance all those new shiny objects Vic is indulging in. Remodelling the Hub? You’re welcome. Expanding the science facility? All our doing. If they spent $26 million on changing the school emblem, it would probably be financed by us as well.

Aside from my cynicism, coming to New Zealand and studying was the right choice to make. I’m now fortunate enough to say I will never experience the amount of debt my friends back in the good ol’ US of A will have to endure and repay until well after their own deaths. I’m happy to discover that more and more kids are choosing to go abroad for learning instead of indulging America in its bad habits.

Germany, the UK, France, and New Zealand are a few of the various options for students looking to achieve their decently-priced academic dreams, and numerous schools within those countries are world-renowned and ranked (our very own Victoria University of Wellington Law School comes in at #45!). There’s a belief in the US that only American universities are quality, but, as with many other things, the US is wrong.

issue 15

Games

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Science

It’s Simple, We Kill the Bad PC Ports Cameron Gray

Praise Gaben, for he has seen the light and given power to the consumer once more. And boy have we put it to use!

Just when I thought it was about time to give up on Steam ever giving a shit about customer service, they totally redeem themselves by announcing a new refund policy. Before this policy was announced, getting a refund from Steam was a blood-from-a-stone process, no matter how broken or poor the game was. This, in conjunction with the poor moderation of Steam Greenlight, quite possibly led to a lot of developers—Triple-A and lone-kid-in-his-bedroom alike— becoming complacent about releasing unfinished, poorly optimised or just plain bad games onto the store: even if it’s shit, the suckers who buy it won’t get their money back (not to mention that this is a blatant violation of the NZ Consumer Guarantees Act, which guarantees you can get a refund if a product doesn’t work as intended, which includes digital goods).

Not anymore. From early June, any purchase on Steam can now be refunded for any reason. As the official announcement says, “Maybe your PC doesn’t meet the hardware requirements; maybe you bought a game by mistake; maybe you played the title for an hour and just didn’t like it.” Literally any reason will guarantee you a refund, as long as you played less than two hours and request it within two weeks of purchase. While not perfect (the two-hour limit seems a little short to me, plus the time limits still violate consumer law), this is immensely better than what we had before—in fact, refunds are automatic within 48 hours of purchase, and you can get a refund if you bought a game at full price that then goes on sale!

PC gamers finally had a reason to celebrate in 2015. And then, almost as soon as the celebration party was over, Batman: Arkham Knight was released.

It is probably no exaggeration that Arkham Knight is one of the worst

PC ports ever released. It runs terribly, with frequent framerate drops, and freezes even on the best hardware available. The highly-touted Nvidia Gameworks enhancements hardly make a lick of difference to the game’s performance even if you turn them off. There is even clear evidence that the PC port suffered from a visual downgrade, with screenshots from the port and the PS4 version showing the game looks better on the bloody console! Most criminally, there is a 30 frames per second lock, changeable only in the game’s installation files. This seems to be tied to some of the game’s physics (a rookie mistake for any PC developer), but even with the cap the game still runs like arse. Also, the game crashes randomly.

So, faced with a game that runs better on a potato, PC gamers asked for their money back. Because now, they know that they can.

The reason PC is popular among hardcore gamers is that they pay a premium for the best hardware and expect games to perform at their best on said hardware. The current-gen consoles are struggling to keep up with even mid-level PCs, essentially guaranteeing that PC versions of most games are the definitive version. That’s the theory anyway; Arkham Knight is actually just the latest in a series of increasingly broken and blatantly unfinished PC ports—most prominent example being Assassin’s Creed: Unity, which ended up being wank on all formats. However, Arkham Knight actually had no issues on consoles; a Triple-A blockbuster like this should not run better on a potato than on a rig worth $5000, which should be the finest gaming experience possible. Developers think they can get away with doing this because they have the ability to patch it up later, while telling the consumer to pre-order to get little extras. The result: less incentive to actually finish the game while still getting our money.

That can fuck right off. Now with Steam refunds, consumers on PC can vote with their wallet and yank their money back from underneath the publisher’s feet. That’s what has happened with Arkham Knight, and Warner Bros have learned that the hard way.

As of writing, they’ve yanked it off the Steam store and apologised for the poor state of the port. This is indeed a good move, but they shouldn’t have to do this because the PC port should never have been that bad.

Because of this mess, I actually have increased hope that PC will continue to be the definitive format for gaming, and I look forward to a future where the developers make their ports the best they can be. Just remember to not pre-order.

editor@salient.org.nz

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salient

Hello, Clitoris Ania Upstill

The clitoris is the female sexual organ. Its visible button-like portion is near the front junction of the labia minora (inner lips) of the vagina. Humans are not the only animals to possess a clitoris. Other animals, including ostriches and mammals, also possess them. In fact, the clitoris comes from the same source as the penis—an outgrowth in the embryo called the “genital tubercle”. This tubercle develops into either a penis or a clitoris, depending on the presence or absence of the protein tdf, which is codified by a single gene on the Y chromosome. Unlike the penis, however, the clitoris does not contain the distal portion of the urethra and is not used for urination.

There’s a lot more to the clitoris than meets the eye. Although the external part of the clitoris (or the “glans”) is only about the size and shape of a pea, as MoSex, the official blog of the Museum of Sex puts it, “most of the clitoris is subterranean, consisting of two corpora cavernosa (corpus cavernosum when referring to the structure as a whole), two crura (crus when referring to the structure as a whole), and the clitoral vestibules or bulbs. The glans is connected to the body or shaft of the internal clitoris, which

is made up of two corpora cavernosa.

When erect, the corpora cavernosa encompass the vagina on either side, as if they were wrapping around it giving it a big hug! The corpus cavernosum also extends further, bifurcating again to form the two crura. These two legs extend up to 9cm, pointing toward the thighs when at rest, and stretching back toward the spine when erect.”

So yeah, pretty big.

As it turns out, studies suggest that knowledge of its existence and anatomy is scant in comparison with that of other sexual organs, likely due to cultural stigma around the female body and female sexual pleasure in particular. Indeed, little research was done into the stimulated clitoris until the 1990s, when scientists used MRIs to investigate the inner workings of the vagina (similar technology had been used to research the penis in the 1970s, indicating a clear lack of equal application). Some scientists now believe that the clitoris is the cause of all female orgasms, although they are often divided into vaginal, G-Spot and clitoral orgasms. In Wallen and Lloyd’s 2011 article, “Female sexual arousal: Genital anatomy and orgasm in intercourse”, the authors state that

“since the ‘60s, the notion that some women experience orgasm during intercourse solely from vaginal stimulation has been questioned and currently the most common view is that all women’s orgasms during intercourse are triggered by direct or indirect clitoral stimulations.”

Back to the clitoris itself. The glans (external part of the clitoris) contains approximately 8,000 sensory nerve glands—more than anywhere else in the human body and close to twice that in the head of the penis. But with great power comes great responsibility. While some women derive extreme pleasure from stimulation of the clitoris, for some women too much stimulation can be uncomfortable or even painful. Thus, some women instead prefer stimulation of the surrounding parts.

Understandably so, as the visible portion of the clitoris is so densely packed with nerve endings. Therefore, preferred clitoral stimulation methods vary from woman to woman, and can even vary for an individual woman from one sexual encounter to another. So let’s all treat clitorides with the respect that they deserve, and remember another quote from MoSex—“What works for one woman may not work for another. In other words, it’s all custom under the hood.”

Na Na Na Na, Na Na Giant Bat, man!

Gus Mitchell

The fossil of a large prehistoric bat, believed to have walked on all fours, has been discovered in New Zealand. The fossilised remains of the new species, named Mystacina miocenalis, were found in central Otago last month, in sediment from the remains of a 16 million year old subtropical rainforest.

The new bat is related to two of the three species of extant bat currently living in New Zealand—the greater short-tailed bat, Mystacina robusta, and the lesser short-tailed bat, Mystacina tuberculata. These bats scuttle along the forest floor by furling up their wings and turning their hind feet backwards to walk. Fossilised remains of the limb bones

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of Mystacina miocenalis show that it walked in the same manner as its descendants.

Where the modern and ancient bats differ is their size, and this has led some newspapers and science outlets to declarie that it is three times larger than the “average” bat, making it some kind of giant “Bat-man”. Unfortunately for fans of Bruce Wayne, the prehistoric bat is estimated to weigh around 40 grams, which is the weight of the average bat species today, like the fruit foxes. What its discoverers meant was that Mystacina miocenalis is three times larger than the average New Zealand bat, which are much smaller and weigh between 10 and 22 grams.

issue 15

Science

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Kissing is weird, say scientists Ruth Corkill

According to a new study of kissing preferences, romantic kissing is found in only 46 per cent of world cultures, making our Western preoccupation with pashing look a little odd. The study examined 168 cultures from wide range of geographical locations, historical backgrounds, and social structures, and defined romantic-sexual kissing as intentional lip-to-lip contact between adults. Previously, it was widely believed that romantic kissing was a near-universal practice. This appears to be the product of Western ethnocentrism, the belief that a behaviour currently deemed pleasurable in the West must be a human universal. Earlier surveys of kissing had not distinguished between romantic-sexual kissing and adults kissing children, or had included brushing the lips against other parts of a partner’s body in the definition of “kiss”.

Because kissing was considered universal, scientists have tried to explain why people would want to share their germs in such a slimy way. After all, one kiss can earn you 80 million new bacteria. Evolutionary anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists have argued that kissing is an important way to assess a potential mate’s health and genetic compatibility. But while there is strong evidence that scent plays an important part in human attraction, it is unclear why locking lips would be preferable to just sniffing around.

Open mouth and tongue kissing have been observed in our closest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos. But for chimpanzees, kissing is a form of reconciliation and is more common between males than females—in other words, not a “romantic” behaviour. Bonobos greet each other with sex (a “bonobo handshake”) and use sexual stimulation for all sorts of bonding. So it’s unlikely that their smooching is an important part of mate selection. No other animals are known to kiss as part of their mating ritual.

Interestingly, the study found “a strong correlation between the frequency of the romantic–sexual kiss and a society’s relative social complexity”. None of the forager groups studied in Sub-Saharan African, New Guinea, or the Amazon engaged in romantic– sexual kissing and some even labelled the practice “disgusting”. One regional exception was the near-ubiquity of kissing in the Arctic; nine of the 11 forager groups from Northern Asia and North America did kiss.

Some peoples have been kissing for a very long time—Hindu Vedic Sanskrit texts from over 3,500 years ago describe kissing as inhaling each other’s soul. In most cultures, however, the emergence of the romantic– sexual kiss has occurred very recently; for example, there are no depictions of kissing in Egyptian hieroglyphs. It may be that the

development of kissing coincides with other factors, such as oral hygiene; or as lead author William Jankowiak suggests, kissing may be primarily a product of Western societies, passed on from one generation to the next.

Since the behaviour has developed with culture, kissing can be thought of as a ritualised part of romantic and sexual foreplay, rather than as a natural and universal behaviour. The authors note that “like other romantic and sexual behaviours, while kissing may be a way to communicate intimacy in some societies or may function as a specific eroticised activity in others, it is important to note that for quite a few kissing is seen as unpleasant, unclean, or simply unusual.”

But kissing still has an important role to play.

In a Western context, studies have shown that kissing directly influences the function of romantic relationships and is an important part of pair bonding. As the paper almost poetically puts it, “the romantic–sexual kiss may be a seemingly pleasurable part of sexual repertoires that vary across place and time, but anchors on the truly universal human capacity for romantic love.”

editor@salient.org.nz

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Music

Communion Years & Years

Kate Robertson

On July 10, UK breakthrough group Years & Years released their highly anticipated debut album Communion.

The electronic-pop trio were the 2015 recipients of the prestigious BBC Sound Of… award and have had the world’s eyes on them ever since.

If pop music in 2014 was Lorde, then pop music in 2015 is Years & Years. It’s only a matter of time before the copycats will be creeping in trying to emulate the band’s signature and oh-so-current pop sound that carries throughout their album. Their heavy lyrics are masked beneath funky beats, and it’s this substance and juxtaposition that has set them apart from their more superficial counterparts.

But possessing a signature sound alone sometimes just isn’t enough, and by track ten you might start to wonder whether the end is in sight (spoiler: you still have three songs to go). Despite this monotony, born of an album full of songs that are all only slight variations on each other, they’ve managed to tick all the boxes for a chart-topping album that will no doubt be a commercial success. The reality of the situation is that they’re an emerging act that has been under immense pressure to deliver perfection, so it makes sense why they chose to play it safe and not once veer away from what they know.

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Ballad “Eyes Shut” is the clear standout of the album. It’s pretty damn powerful and, coming in halfway through the album, it will snap you out of whatever kind of dance-pop trance you’ve fallen into. It masterfully combines elements of a traditional ballad (heavy keys and percussion, and strong lyrics) with their distinct style. It shouldn’t work, but it does, and it’s damn near perfect. If you’re a sucker for songs about lost love, pair “Eyes Shut” with “Without You” and get ready for feels to be seriously cranked up a notch. If, on the contrary, you were a fan of the party tunes released prior to the album, then you’ll be happy to know that “Real”, “Ties”, “Gold” and “Border” all sound pretty much the same as “King”, “Desire”, “Worship” and “Take Shelter”—and that’s about all I have to say about that.

Communion is the album you want to be the soundtrack of your summer. The kind of album that will bode well with white sand beaches, UV paint parties and road trips.

Unfortunately for us Southern Hemisphere folk, this album can only act as a facilitator for such escapism. It’s not going to overpower your fun and it can quite happily play in the background without sparking intense conversation about the meaning of life. If you can take it for what it is and not look past surface level, then Communion is essentially just a really good time that has been perfectly packaged for the mainstream market. Nothing more, nothing less.

salient

issue 15

Interview with Dave Baxter of Avalanche City Kate Robertson

It’s been a few weeks now since the mad talented multi-instrumentalist Dave Baxter released his band Avalanche City’s sophomore album We Are For The Wild Places, so it seemed a better time than any to catch up with him and find out what it was like heading back to the studio for round two. Read on… it’s interesting.

We Are For The Wild Places has been out for about a week now, are you happy so far with how the album’s been received?

Any drastic life changes report on in the weeks since?

Yeah it’s been great! It’s so nice to finally have it out there. I’ve had really good feedback on it, it’s actually quite a relief.

Nothing life changing in the last week.

Music

The grind of writing and producing an album isn’t easy – pouring your heart and soul onto a piece of paper definitely isn’t a career for the faint hearted, did you find it more difficult the second time around, particularly coming off the back of such a successful debut album?

I was really excited about starting work on my second album. It’s so much fun being in a room surrounded by instruments and just having the whole day to explore songwriting. It was extremely difficult to draw the line and say the album is done.

That’s what’s hard about doing it all yourself.

When you have to book a studio and hire a producer you have time constraints. So that was one of the big challenges. I could sit and tweak a song forever. And yeah it’s actually a scary thing to pour yourself into songs and send it out into the world. So that’s always in the back of your mind. It was a really nervous time in the days before I released “Inside Out”. It had such a good reaction from everyone though that it made me feel better about releasing the album. There weren’t any nerves after that.

What is it about your music that you think resonates so well with people?

That’s always a tricky one to answer! As a songwriter I always try to write music that people can relate to. The absolute best thing for me is when someone listens and goes “yeah, I’ve been there! I get that!”

Kate Robertson We Are For The Wild Things is without a doubt one of the finest Kiwi albums we’ve heard this year.

We Are For The Wild Places Avalanche City

On first listen, it can’t be faulted. No detail has been overlooked and everything is exactly where it needs to be. Folk music can all too often feel overdone, but not once does this feel forced. To be able to pour so much of yourself into something and still have it come out sounding effortlessly cool is an impressive feat that shouldn’t pass by unnoticed.

I could write a thesis on this album and the themes addressed, but for now I’ll stick to one of the more intriguing. Where many artists today are all about pulling bitches and

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Unlike most Kiwi artists, you’re lucky enough to have a studio set up in your own home, do you find being able to work from home and with familiar surroundings makes a difference?

It works really good for me. It’s definitely cheaper! I love having the freedom of exploring whatever I want. I also like to work fast and if something’s not working I’ll often just switch songs. That’s a lot easier to do when you work by yourself.

I understand you worked pretty closely with Chris Walla of Death Cab For Cutie fame, how did that collaboration come about?

Ah, we just asked him if he wanted to mix the album. He only takes on projects that he wants to. So I sent him the tracks and he said he’d love to do it, which I thought was a pretty good compliment!

Finally, I know that you’re pretty popular with the hip and cool Wellingtonians down here, are there plans for an album release tour in the coming months?

Yeah, definitely!

breaking hearts, Baxter has addressed more relatable problems that arise in committed relationships such as compromise and compassion. This is particularly noticeable in “Keep Finding A Way” and “Fault Lines”, and is incredibly refreshing. Coming from any other top 40 artist, such themes could be dismissed as bland or irrelevant, but Baxter’s masterfully crafted lyrics and exceptionally put together arrangements give the themes meaning in a way that is anything but tiresome.

It’s the kind of album that on paper shouldn’t affect you on a deeper level, but the true magic of it lies in the fact that it does. It’s memorable, and in an incredibly oversaturated market, I think that’s all any artist could ever hope to be.

editor@salient.org.nz

40

Books

salient

The move from a blog, where the posts were an amalgam of structured poems, as well as open-form entries with no real structure, was a challenge. Here, in This Must be the Place, these have been collected, worked on, revised, and her words are bound together with feelings and memories. The form is stricter, but the intentions and honesty remain in the collection. Hawkins avoids high-brow language and form, aiming instead for accessibility. Her language oscillates, as if working to a pattern, between poeticism surrounding time and abstract emotions, and specific language of both time and place— with references to polar fleeces, durries, skateboards, ripped jeans, Briscoes, all carving out an eternal moment in time.

This Must Be The Place Annabel Hawkins (words) Alice Clifford (design) Makaro Press Jayne Mulligan

In a dimly lit Meow, with her glasses donned, Annabel Hawkins recites, between giggles, amid banter with the audience, a selection of poems from her debut collection This Must Be the Place. Hawkins adopts a wry smile and convinces the audience that she’s just “Jenny from the block”; having her first collection of poetry published at age 23 isn’t something she imagined happening—she’s just from Hawke’s Bay. The collection has been adapted from Hawkins’ blog, Scrap Paper and Spare Pencils. The blog started when she was 21, and filled a void that had been created in the vortex of post-university life as she prepared for her eat-pray-love adventure. Never conceived under lofty ambitions, it was merely a place where, as the name suggests, those musings found on scrap paper, written with spare pencils, were given space and permanence. They were quiet and fragile, and I think most importantly, they were honest.

After emailing her former lecturer Mary McCallum, of Makaro Press, a link to her blog, Hawkins had a book deal, and a secret. It was a summer of secrecy, as she waited for her best friend Alice to return from England. Alice would be the designer, an incredibly important facet of this book. But Hawkins knew it had to be both of them.

Alice is a freelance designer who specialises in typography. This was a perfect opportunity for both of them to have their work published, as designer and writer. While Alice battled directly with printing presses and sourced found images and rights to types, Hawkins was determined to translate the blog to a collection of poetry. www.salient.org.nz

The book, as I write this, sits on my desk, among a collection of New Zealand poetry books my mum saved from the rubbish bin at her school library. Among the 1970s editions of pastel colours, repeated patterns, and stylised imagery, This Must Be The Place looks at home.

A pallet of colours which have already faded, a book that knows its age and youth at the same time. Ingrid Horrocks, as she launched the book, called it “contemporary retro”, an accurate description of the particular aesthetics, founded upon the duality of past and present that traverses the poems in this collection. With imagery inserted throughout the collection, the design and production of this book is in direct discourse with the poems on the pages.

Hawkins’ collection is informed by her life from 21 to 23. A period of such ripening and growing has been treated with honesty and courage; an age where the relationships that change and grow become defining experiences. The collection looks at families and lovers, but spends most of its space meditating on friendships and memories— Hawkins’ work is particularly affected by those friendships and relationships that have been altered, or gone.

The collection opens with “When we flew”, which remembers nights spent skating and smoking, and the feeling of freedom that they allowed. While many poems remember past moments of intense friendship, her poem “For Alice (from Fiji)” imagines their friendship in the future, as she watches two older women enjoying the beach— “Perhaps they just stumbled home one night, clambered in to bed in borrowed T Shirts and socks, lay down and talked about their dreams, and ended up here.” Friendships exist as past and eternal in the same breath.

Her poems are full of we, a we that is of her and Alice, as well as of the reader. For we, those who hold this book, are invited to imagine their own versions of these stories beneath the poems—it is not the details that are primary, but the emotions that flow underneath.

It would be wrong to reduce Hawkins’ work to journal entries of a young woman. These are potent works, which are full to the brim with the experiences of youth, the trauma of changing worlds, and the power of a notebook. Didion writes in her essay on keeping a notebook that it is not the facts that are important to record, rather “how it felt to me, and it might as well have snowed, could have snowed, did snow”. Annabel Hawkins has evolved what lived on scrap paper, into a blog, and once more into her debut poetry collection, where her words are about finding a way back to a feeling.

issue 15

Food

Recipe: Good Old Chicken Stir Fry Hannah Douglass Purchasing all the new textbooks you need for those three pages of notes your lecturer insists you need can be bank-breaking, but dinner for the flat doesn’t have to be. This recipe is a bit of a “kitchen-sink” sort of deal—anything can be substituted depending on what you’ve got in the fridge. I’ve written it so that it’s high in protein and full of veggies. This way, at least, dinner won’t be as bad for you as textbook purchases are.

If you’re feeling really organised, make a marinade for the chicken from the garlic, ginger, soy sauce, sweet chilli sauce and lemon juice, and let it soak up all that flavour. I’d recommend doing this in the morning or night before to give it time to marinade fully.

Serves 4 You’ll need: 600g chicken breast, diced 300g middle bacon, diced 3–4 cups colourful veggies (think beans, broccoli, cauliflower, corn, carrots, capsicum, spring onion) 3 tbsp soy sauce 1 tbsp sweet chilli sauce 1 tsp crushed garlic 1 tsp crushed ginger Juice of half a lemon Salt & pepper to taste Serve with 1/2 cup of rice per person if you’re particularly hungry.

How to: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

In a large frying pan, sear the chicken on all sides on a high heat along with the garlic and ginger. Season with salt and pepper while you do this.

Move the chicken to the outer edges of the pan and add the bacon to the middle. Shuffle it around so it all crisps up evenly.

Throw in the veggies and turn down the heat a little to let them cook through.

Add the soy sauce, lemon juice and sweet chilli sauce.

Cook for a further three minutes. Take off the heat and let it sit for a couple of minutes.

Serve.

Boom. One pan, 15 minutes, and dinner is done. Use the extra time not doing tonnes of dishes to walk to your nearest bottle store and find yourself a nice wine ($10 or less, of course) to start your night off with, or maybe call your mum and say hi.

I’d recommend avoiding anything too productive though—that’s just not what Re-O Week is about.

Fashion

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Puffer Jackets Jess Scott I have a lot of very strong feelings about puffer jackets. As in, I would rather light myself on fire in a desperate plea for warmth than be seen dead (which obviously I would be if I was to light myself on fire) in a puffer jacket. If I was stranded in an Antarctic blizzard and my only chance of survival was to don a puffer jacket, I would direct myself an Oscar-worthy freezingto-death sequence. If I were aboard the Titanic, and puffer jackets doubled as flotation devices, I would enact an Oscarunworthy (sorry Leo) freezing-to-death sequence.

It utterly baffles me that any self-respecting human being would willingly subject themselves to such masochistic torment and humiliation, as to be seen wearing a puffer jacket. They are quite literally the mutant spawn of sleeping bags, with the adaptive advantage of armholes.

After several interviews with the willing human hosts of these parasitic garments, the consistent excuse for their wear appears to be “they’re so warm.”

“Yes, but you look like a walking marshmallow.”

“But I’m SO warm.”

From the perspective of someone who grew up in Sydney, city of heat waves, it quite simply does not get cold enough here for it to be acceptable for one to parade about wearing bedding.

Unless you’re on a ski trip, braving the frigid Dunedin winter for which not even half a litre of vodka could provide a sufficient beer blanket, or cosplaying the Michelin man, then please take whatever the cost of looking like an absolute prat your parents have offered to shell out for one and buy yourself a decent wool coat. Ruby has a rather lovely selection on their under $300 sale rack at the moment.

Alternate, less ridiculous-looking means of keeping oneself warm: • Buy yourself a decent coat.

• Buy yourself a decent coat.

• Buy yourself a decent fucking coat.

• Wander about with several hot water bottles strapped to your person, ensuring that you top them up with hot water to remain toasty throughout the day.

• Do not leave your bed until September. Hibernate for the winter, have a pal record your lectures for you, order your groceries with special instructions to have them brought to your bedside.

• Cultivate a beard so immense that you are able to fashion a jumper from it, providing a convenient extra layer of insulation. editor@salient.org.nz

42

Film

salient

The Adam Sandler Cash Cow

All Hail the Comeback Kid: Liam Neeson and Dad Cinema

Sarah Dillon

Fairooz Samy

“Adam Sandler is an asshile [sic],” according to studio exec, Amy Pascal, in one of many leaked Sony emails last year. Since 1995, Sandler has continuously churned out films using the exact same formula with, more or less, the exact same character, and yielding an offense of critical panning, all the while booking exceptionally large revenues. Over his 20-year career, he has bankrolled nearly $3 billion; however, with only $3.20 turned over for every dollar he’s compensated, Sandler is the most overpaid actor in Hollywood, and his high remuneration demands make him all the less bankable. Last year, he ambitiously pitched an idea for a $200 million movie based on the CandyLand board game (wut?). Sony said no, and Pascal used a misspelled insult.

In ye-olden times (the pre-2000s for you undergrads), Liam Neeson was best known as a character actor. Likeably Irish, the actor’s gentle wit made him appealing to the over-35 female demographic and his grizzle was enough to draw male fans into theatres. He was riveting as Oskar Schindler, inspiring as Michael Collins, and tolerable in The Phantom Menace—a critical darling and affable everyman.

Despite his bite into producers’ budgets, he has been a cash cow, but not from Lewis Road Creamery, nor even Farmgate. The quality of his films is more analogous to the carton milk drunk in American elementary schools. His filmography mean score is a meek 32 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes, which is pretty shit. It’s a bit of a conundrum who goes to see Sandler films and why, given that they are funding the shameful Sandler legacy. I imagine the target demographic is something like “12-year-old boys who still think it’s funny to set fire to paper-bagged dog shit on their neighbour’s doorstep”. Either way, my sense is that Sandler films sit in the “so bad, it’s good” category of films, alongside Tommy Wiseau’s The Room. This sweet spot compels people to purchase Sandler movie tickets en masse for the enjoyment of cringing.

We saw this behaviour from New Zealand comedians Guy Montgomery and Tim Batt, in their “Worst Idea of All Time” podcasts, in which they reviewed the sequel to Sandler’s Grown Ups every week for a year. It’s fairly rationale to argue that the publicity the movie attracted for being so bad helped it to be such a commercial hit, earning over quarter of a billion worldwide. This is the Sandler money machine in motion—designing dumb movies that fuel the public’s hunger to cringe.

I would never condone calling someone an asshile, but it’s easy to sympathise with Pascal. It was okay to think Sandler was funny when you were 12, but, in 2015, it’s hard to laugh at a man nearly in his 50s have arbitrary anger outbursts and make fart jokes. Next time you’re desperate to cringe, watch one of the classics like Battlefield Earth.

Don’t do it for Sony or Pascal, do it for CandyLand. www.salient.org.nz

These days, Neeson is more likely to be starring in a Schindler’s List sequel, probably directed by Michael Bay, and probably titled Schindler’s Fist. What started as a sojourn into action fare, with roles in Batman Begins and Gangs of New York, has turned into an honestto-god career re-invention, with eleven of his post-Taken films casting him as Admirals, hit-men, CIA agents, and Greek Gods (was anyone crying out to see Neeson as Zeus?).

His recent box office hits risk running his newly-founded persona into the ground. You’ve seen the trailers and joked about the resemblance to Taken. It would be easy—and sometimes, correct—to point out the overuse of action clichés, many so tired they’d make Harrison Ford look lively. Run All Night, Battleship, and Unknown were deemed throwaways, while Taken 2 and 3 were ludicrous dragouts of an already played-out story. Looking at the Neeson oeuvre since his renaissance, it’s clear that his pedigree has set him above the schlocky nostalgia of his Expendables competition (Stallone and Willis) and their hyper-masculine young counterparts (Hemsworth and Lutz).

Still, how is this relevant to the rest of society? For all of the talk about marketing, target demos, and niche audiences, film-going in the modern era has become much less predictable. At a time when baby boomers are flocking to see comic book movies and the under-25 set are increasingly favouring independent fare, the appeal of Neeson’s dad-wish-fulfilment films remains curious.

Maybe Neeson’s career appeals to us because it renews our belief that it’s never too late. Maybe we’re using our dollar to buck ageist convention. More likely is that Neeson’s success is an extension of the reality that, for ageing wealthy white male celebrities—and their ticket-buying counterparts—nothing is unattainable. Will Neeson’s dad-wish-fulfilment plot machine wear out its welcome? For now, the respectability he lends to action-thrillers seems to be weathering the genre’s diminishing returns.

issue 15

Film

Aloha Directed by Cameron Crowe

James Keane

I don’t quite know where to start. This film is such an odd mess in its execution and presentation; the elements it has conflict with each other, the dialogue feels so quick that it flies over the head of the recipient. There are some good parts to it, those that felt more cohesive, but the end result is a peculiar one, and there is too much and too little happening at the same time. I don’t expect most romantic comedies to deviate from the norm and its conventions, but this one did in a sense—just from its outright weirder elements.

The film could have worked by retaining the premise that Brian Gilcrest (Bradley Cooper) is a military contractor with a history of misfortune and tribulation in the areas concerning his profession and love life. A narrated debacle in Kabul leaves him with the muchpreferred option of returning to work for the military in Hawaii.

There, the reappearance of a now-married old flame (Rachel McAdams) and interactions with his assigned bodyguard complete with an “amusing” name (Emma Stone) challenge his single lifestyle, patronising character, past, and ability to grow and become a more bearable person. Top it all off with a beautiful filming location, attractive stars, and laid-back soundtrack with a few familiar songs, and you’d have something that would be at least coherent. That would be so, if not for practically everything else in the film.

The other storyline you might not have realised was in the film concerns the launching of a satellite sponsored by a businessman played by a dishevelled and glassy-eyed Bill Murray. His own machinations, unknown to the rest of the characters, involve launching nuclear

43

weapons on board the satellite, raising the stakes to Goldeneye-level proportions. This, coupled with the sudden introduction of brief and ineffective Chinese hackers, made me completely forget that a previous moment in the film featured a heated conversation between two of the leads about their feelings for each other in a Hawaiian gift shop. Back on Earth, there are other subplots that aren’t resolved or are added for the sake of including Hawaiian elements. McAdams’ son is little more than a plot device with a constantly recording video camera, whose unremitting quotations of Hawaiian myth are only there for jokes about clichéd ineffectual parents with quirky and outof-control children.

The film also tries to incorporate Gilcrest’s developing humility for the Hawaiian way of life with the notion that what really matters is retaining a cultural and holistic outlook. There is no real resolution to this conflict, but I could see the reason for it being that way. I think what the director was really going for here was a subversion of the tropes we associate with melodrama by addressing genuine problems which we cannot immediately resolve, which admittedly the film does show. Obviously communication is key, as is our known propensity for misinterpreting people’s feelings, and the scenes between McAdams and her character’s husband are actually well-done for what they are. There are some good jokes interspersed at random intervals, some which are there for the sake of showing something unusual—like laughing at a baby named Don, or unintentionally laughing at Murray’s performance and feeling bad afterwards because he wasn’t really acting. On the other hand, some are at least reincorporated into the story, such as the husband character’s distinct muteness in several scenes, and notEmma-Stone’s constantly-reiterated Hawaiian ancestry.

It’s just that the film itself is so unfocused with what it’s actually trying to get across. The idea that a romantic comedy set in Hawaii, which devotes so much focus to a subplot about the dangers of technology and the effect it has upon protected environments, could turn out so unsatisfyingly is a strange one. I mean, the cast mostly did what they could. McAdams probably gives the best performance in the film, Emma Stone flips like a coin when her character starts to bond with Gilcrest, and Alec Baldwin shouts a lot. editor@salient.org.nz

Visual Arts

44

salient

Happy Birthday Lindsay Lohan—An Interview With Claire Harris Sharon Lam I have long held a quiet fascination with Lindsay Lohan—the Parent Trap twin conspiracy, hitting a baby in its pram with her Maserati, the Mona Lisa-eerieness of her mugshots, are all points of intrigue. So, when Matchbox Studios recently hosted Claire Harris to watch Lindsay’s complete filmography over 29 hours for her 29th birthday, I made certain to catch the performance art piece. I caught it through the online live stream, finding it the perfect balance between ridiculous and warmly provoking, its simplicity making it successful both as performance art and as an act of fan love. Wanting to know more, I emailed the artist:

A bit about you?

I’m a Wellington based artist. I work in a variety of mediums mostly with some kind of narrative basis, for example performance, video, and zines. Fandom and identity as mediated by celebrity culture is a big theme in my work. I’m also a member of art band Fantasing.

How did you come up with the idea?

I first did Happy Birthday Lindsay Lohan in 2011 on Lindsay’s 25th birthday. This was during the time when she was under house arrest due to her DUI conviction. I wanted to do something to try and express a sense of goodwill and solidarity to Lohan and to refocus attention on her body of work, and looking at how prolific her acting career had been, I realised that the runtime of all the films she had been in added up to 25 hours. That’s when the idea of the movie marathon occurred to me. I had already been musing on a kind of “deheroics” of performance art, trying to recontextualise the physical discomforts, durational endurance and repetitions of key

www.salient.org.nz

Claire Harris’ Happy Birthday Lindsay Lohan zine can be purchased at Matchbox Studios

performance art works into everyday forms of ritual and meaning creation, with the movie marathon I was able to draw a direct analogy to teen girl sleep overs as ritual sites of construction and consumption of “girlhood”.

What drew you to Lindsay Lohan in the first place?

I’d been a fan of Lindsay Lohan since her role in Freaky Friday.

I find her a compelling performer and think she would have had a great career under the Hollywood studio system. There’s a core fangirl love I have for Lindsay that’s beyond analysis. There’s also so much culturally telling stuff about our society’s dismissal of and discomfort around young women in the narratives around Lindsay.

As Lindsay tried to transition into playing adult roles one persistent rumour was that parents at test screening for Herbie: Fully Loaded had complained about Lindsay’s breast size, claiming it was inappropriate for a family film, and that the movie

issue 15

45

producers had responded by digitally shrinking her breast size in post production. That struck me as so telling—that having had a career as a child model and actress the reaction to her adult body was to see it as obscene by definition.

It also seemed to me like there was a ghoulish hunger for Lohan to self destruct, and a dismissive tendency toward her, like an assumption that she must be a bad actress. With the first HBLL I was really interested in what the reaction would be to me publically taking Lindsay Lohan seriously as an actress and culturally meaningful figure. My overall artist statement can be boiled down to “I was sick of people making fun of Lindsay Lohan”. I’ve done HBLL in some version every year since, extending the marathon by an hour each time to match her age and increasing filmography.

How was the experience itself?

The experience itself is all a very strange sleep deprived blur.

It’s great rewatching the films, I have favourite bits of each performance usually Lindsay’s social face acting. She’s brilliant at acting so that you can see that there is a interior life to her characters. My favourite of her films are Georgia Rule, Mean Girls, and Labour Pains.

I was great doing it in the front window of Matchbox Studios this year and having interaction overnight from people on the street. I had quite a few people stop and watch along over my shoulder. I love meeting fellow Lindsay fans which also happens a lot through social media as I live stream and tweet HBLL.

There’s an accompanying HBLL zine to go with the piece, what’s inside?

The HBLL zine has documentation of all previous years plus two essays, one by curator and artist James Bowen and one by celebrity studies academic Allison Maplesden. They both do a very good job contextualising the project.

Do you have any future pieces in mind?

2 for 1 Margherita

pizzas every friday from 3pm

The Hunter Lounge

I’ll keep doing HBLL every year in some format. I’ll have to change it up next year for Lindsay’s 30th. Maybe I’ll try and find 30 30 year olds to do a Lindsay movie marathon in a relay around the world?

Currently I’m working on starting up a new art zine called Contemporary Menstrual Art. I really hits a lot of my key concerns- gendered experience, embarrassing and/or overly earnest art, cultural discomfort with uncontrolled bodily function.

Finally, what do you foresee in Lindsay Lohan’s future?

The Hunter Lounge

I really hope Lindsay gets steady acting work again. I’d love if she had some weird TV protagonist roles like Nurse Jackie, or True Detective, or The Comeback. editor@salient.org.nz

46

Yarn With Zwaan

salient

VUWSA

Win of the Week

Rick Zwaan The myAllocator debacle last week showed how, at times, the University can be out of touch with students, and highlighted the importance of students being involved in the University’s decision making.

For those students who don’t have tutes or don’t frequent Overheard@Vic, myAllocator is the University’s “new and improved” tutorial sign up system introduced to replace S-Cubed. When it was launched it had a set limit of 500 users so it failed miserably.

Sure, S-Cubed was more akin to a Nokia 2000 than an iPhone when it came to user friendliness, but hey it was functional and served its purpose.

For whatever reason the uni decided to “upgrade” the system, but rather than going for the latest technology they seem to have gone for a cheap update.

Even after trials at Law school failed, and students raised concerns and provided feedback, it seems the University largely ignored the issues. Throughout the process leading up to its failed launch the uni ran trials last tri, and briefed me and a few others.

But at no stage was there a proper consultation or consideration given to how a core student system system could be developed with student input.

The University has a strategic goal of having a “student experience that is second to none”—this is clear example of how our experience is made worse when management doesn’t listen to students.

This issue has also been highlighted through University Council consultation process, where over 80% of students, 68% of staff, and over half of alumni, said they wanted council members to be elected but the council has proposed to do away with democracy all together. The myAllocator is a simple example of what goes wrong when the University doesn’t listen—the consequences for Council getting it wrong could be far greater.

Our student Council members, when making far more costly decisions, need to be connected and have the credibility amongst the student body. The Council needs people at the table who aren’t afraid to question a management proposal and know, by virtue of being elected, that they have the backing of the student body to make decisions in the best interests of the University.

If we want to have any hope of the University becoming even slightly more “in touch” with students, than a core component is having mandated, credible, and connected student reps on university council. www.salient.org.nz

For Re-O-Week, VUWSA welcomed students back to campus last week with some toe-tapping jazz from The Henry Smithers Trio and some sweet guitar tunes from Felix III. Your VUWSA Campaigns Officer, Nathaniel, gets extra Exec points for running the sound system. Photo credit: Olie Body.

Ask the Exec: Rory Lenihan-Ikin

Toby Cooper

1. Hi, how’s it going?

Great, but bloody exhausted. Tired of the University making hideous decisions... just minor things like taking away democratic elections. Some small wins in among them though—loving the bike repair station, and Pipitea is about to get its first compost bin in the Law School common room!

1. Hi, how’s it going?

Awesome thanks. I’m in the midst of marathoning this great family drama TV show Switched at Birth, where half the characters communicate in (ASL) American Sign Language and it’s beautiful to watch and I’m so glad it exists. Oh, and Re-O-Week. That was fun, but exhausting.

2. What do you study?

Sociology, Politics and Marketing.

2. What do you study?

MyVic says that I study law. So…. law, apparently.

(Wellbeing and Sustainability Officer)

3. How did you get that black material all the way to the ceiling in the Hub? An absolute mission that occupied my brain for at least a week prior. In light of Vic’s no-ladders policy (lol), health and safety labyrinth, and a very, very tall door, we resorted to standing on tables using extendable paint rollers and some heavy duty carpet tape. Lots of fun aye.

(Engagement Vice-President)

3. How did you get that black material all the way to the ceiling in the Hub? I didn’t actually see the black material get put up, but I’d guess that kangaroos were involved.

4. What is your favourite song with the word “black” in the title?

Amy Winehouse forever.

4. What is your favourite song with the word “black” in the title?

Toss-up between “Back to Black” by Amy Winehouse and “Back In Black”

by AC/DC. I’ll go for the latter, because it makes the best entrance music.

5. Shoot/shag/marry: Sir Neville Jordan, Prof Grant Guilford, MP Phil Twyford Marry Neville and Grant, might make some progress on a decent Uni Council makeup. Definitely not you this week Phil.

5. Shoot/shag/marry: Sir Neville Jordan, Prof Grant Guilford, MP Phil Twyford I’m stealing this answer from Rick: I’d marry all three, as marriage would definitely make it easier to buy a house in Auckland.

issue 15

47

Puzzles

Hard

Pretty Good—16, Solid—24, Great—30

“Q AND A” Each of the thirty-two words on the list below is found separately—“Queen” is in a different place from “Amidala” and “Queensland”. The leftover letters spell a quote from William S. Burroughs.

SOLUTIONS

QUADRATIC ALGEBRA QUAKING ASPENS QUALITY ASSURED QUATERNARY AGE QUEEN AMIDALA QUEENSLAND AUSTRALIA QUEER AVENGERS QUEST AFTER QUESTIONING AUTHORITY QUICK ATTACKS QUIDDITCH ASSOCIATION QUIET AMERICAN QUIT ASKING QUITE AWFUL QUIZ ABOUT QURANIC ARABIC

editor@salient.org.nz

DEM OCR ATIC

ELE CTI ON

NOT

CO UNC IL

SEL ECT ION The University Council has ignored your preference for elections and is proposing to hand pick student representatives.

We need independent reps who have strong connections to the student body to be our voice at the top level of the university.

To protect your right to vote, head to www.vuwsa.org.nz/ourvuw Show your support at the following forums: Sh Kelburn Mon 20th July 1:00pm SU217 Pipitea Wed 22nd July 12:30pm RWW125 Te Aro Wed 22nd July 2:30pm VS221