Reality | Issue 6

VOL. 79 / ISSUE 06 REALITY

30 MARCH

18 / this article tastes like purple smells | 26 / thank god for the bachelor | 30 / the giant spider in the room

Contents

News: 04-17

Regular Content:

Students unite! 05

Editorial: 03 Letters: 10-12 The Week in Feminism: 13 Being Well: 14 Maori Matters: 14 VUWSA: 15-16 Comics: 35 Film: 36-37 Music: 38-39 Books: 40 Games: 41 Science: 42-43 Food: 44 We Drank This So You Wouldn’t Have To: 45 Visual Arts: 46 The Moan Zone: 47

Are universities milking international students? 09

Features: 18-33 This Article Tastes How Purple Smells: 18 Thank God for The Bachelor: 26 The Giant Spider in the Room: 30

Editor Sam McChesney Designers Ella Bates-Hermans Lily Paris West Senior News Editor Sophie Boot News Editor Nicola Braid

Section Editors Ruth Corkill (Science) Sharon Lam (Visual Arts) Baz Macdonald (Gaming) Jayne Mulligan (Books) Alice Reid (Music) Fairooz Samy (Film)

Other Contributors Brittany Mackie, Chief Sub Editor Nick Conn, Maia Te Kimaya McIntosh Koha, Rick Zwaan, Chennoah Watson, Senior Feature Writer Joe Cruden, George Philip McSweeney Block, Cameron Gray, Elizabeth Kim, Kate Feature Writers Dowdle, Jonathan Charlotte Doyle Hobman, Jack Young, Gus Mitchell Brontë Ammundsen, Lydia and Mitch, Tom Distributor and Luke Beckie Wilson News Interns Emma Hurley Charlie Prout Tim Grgec Beckie Wilson Elea Yule

Contact Level 2, Student Union Building Victoria University P.O. Box 600, Wellington Phone: 04 463 6766 Editor: editor@salient.org.nz News Editor: news@salient.org.nz Website: salient.org.nz Twitter: @salientmagazine Facebook: facebook.com/ salientmagazine Advertising Email: sales@vuwsa.org.nz Phone: 04 463 6982 Printed By Guardian Print, 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.

03

Editorial SAM MCCHESNEY

I’ve debated whether or not to write an editorial about Dunedin’s Hyde Street party.

It’s at another university, most of you will never experience one, and as an Otago alum I’m wary of strafing Salient’s pages with a heap of Southern shit that you don’t care about. So if you think these reservations are sound, you might want to turn the page now.

Once a fairly mild younger cousin of other Scarfie mainstays like the Undie 500 and the Cookathon, Hyde Street’s status skyrocketed after the city’s more Bacchanalian social events were gradually shut down.

Hyde Street became the number one event in the Dunedin social calendar, reaching a nadir of infamy in 2011-12 before becoming, in the last three years, a political football and a heavily staged-managed PR exercise for the local students’ association.

Dunedin has a complicated relationship with its students, as do its students with the media. Students’ relationship with alcohol is a bit more straightforward: they like it. The official start time for the Hyde Street party—the official start time—is 6am. Many get up earlier to complete the “six before six”, followed the “crate with a mate before eight” and “wine before nine”.

Obviously this is problematic, and not for nothing are Scarfies depicted as the symbol of New Zealand’s battle against alcohol abuse.

I’ve never really agreed with this; to me, the real symbol is the middleaged man with drink-driving convictions in the double figures and the odd slap on the wrist for beating his wife. That, or the Wellington Sevens. The reality of Scarfiedom is—well, it’s complicated.

Scarfie culture prides itself on being insular and in-jokey, to the point of a siege mentality; and it prides itself on being quirky and irreverent, to the point of outright displays of nihilistic rebellion. It’s also too esoteric for many of its own practitioners to understand.

With most Otago students knowing little else about the city, and staying for between three and four years before leaving again with their degrees, cultural emblems are rapidly appropriated and warped into meaningless rituals with every new cohort.

Ever wonder where the couch-burning thing came from? The old rugby stadium, Carisbrook, used to allow spectators to bring their own furniture to the terraces. Many students brought couches and toward the end of the game, when the temperature started to drop and the prospect of drunkenly lugging the couch home began to rear its thoroughly unappealing head, they would set the couches ablaze.

added to Carisbrook’s legend, and it was, let’s face it, kind of hilarious.

The problems only started with the next cohort, who had heard about the couch-burning from afar, thought “I guess this is what goes on in Dunedin”, and took the practice into the streets. Now Otago, much to the chagrin of those (like me) who have never immolated so much as a cushion, is the couch burning university. My BA(Hons) is a degree in Burning All the Household Ornaments.

A lot of this is driven by perception, and there is one particular culprit. The Otago Daily Times, at least when it comes to its coverage of students, is a festering shitrag of anti-journalism. Knowing full well that perception is, or at least will be reality when it comes to these things (report that the Undie 500 is nothing more than a boozesoaked riot, only people who are down for that sort of thing will go, and lo, it shall come to pass), the ODT has long been on hand to whip up the rage amongst its ageing, conservative readership.

Many blame the ODT and national media outlets for sensationalising the Undie and the Hyde Street party in precisely the kind of way that attracts the meatheads who tend to ruin it for everybody else (and it’s worth repeating that the majority of those arrested at these events aren’t students). This ignores the legitimate problems that spurred the sensationalist stories in the first place. The open hostility of many Dunedin residents encourages the entitled rejoinder that Dunedin’s economy is built around the University and, therefore, around students—don’t shoot the golden goose. This makes the antagonism worse, and discourages self-reflection. Like I said, it’s complicated.

If I had to sum up Otago students’ attitude while also making a Community reference, it’s “Dunedin is a toilet but it’s our toilet— nobody gets to crap in it but us.” Most students love traditions like Hyde Street—around one in four of all Otago students eligible to attend did so—and it’s a tiny, intensely disliked and often nonDunedin minority who cause the havoc that colours the popular perception. Most Scarfies just want outsiders to stop coming along and ruining all their shit.

So maybe it’s not that complicated. A couple of years ago Critic posted a Facebook report of a couch-burning on Castle Street (the former party street; now lame). The most-liked comment on the post read “fuck this shit, and fuck y’all who do this shit every year.”

This was a bit startling, naturally, but at the time it wasn’t that big a deal.

The ritual took place in a contained and supervised environment, it

editor@salient.org.nz

04

issue 5 | introverts

By the Numbers

(Worst) Person of the Week: Jeremy Clarkson Recidivist racist and climate change denier Jeremy Clarkson was sacked as host of the BBC’s Top Gear last week after assaulting a producer.

Clarkson, who manages to combine the affability of Stephen Fry with a truly impressive collection of despicable politics was apologetic last week, repentantly claiming that “the BBC have fucked themselves”.

Regardless of Clarkson’s hate speech and this latest incident, Salient believes Clarkson’s greatest crimes have been sartorial. The true cost of “the Jeremy Clarkson effect” has been the resurgent sale of stonewashed, mid-nineties “cool dad” jeans.

250 years The age of a pretzel that was discovered in Germany during an archeological excavation of a Bavarian bakery.

$80,000 What French modeling agencies may be charged for hiring models under a certain Body Mass Index threshold if a new bill is passed.

200 Breeds of exotic sheep currently cared for by Dannevirke farmer Brian Hales.

86%

Proportion of people estimated to be living under the wrong star sign, according to reports that the stars have realigned over a 26,000-year old “wobbling” process precession.

$170 Value of Lego used by a father-daughter duo to recreate Jurassic Park in plastic form.

1.8 billion Number of photos uploaded and shared over social media platforms including Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram each day in 2014.

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05

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

Students unite!

You have nothing to lose but your seats Emma Hurley VUWSA is urging Victoria University to reserve four of its University Council seats for staff and students.

The move is an endorsement of the Tertiary Education Union’s (TEU) stance for all University Councils to retain one-third of their seats for democratically elected students and staff.

After the passage of the Education Amendment Act (No 2), university councils must have no more than 12 members by the start of 2016. The Victoria University Council currently has 19 members, including two student representatives and three staff representatives.

TEU President Sandra Grey wants to retain the seats of democratically elected staff and students in order to “provide a counterbalance to the Minister’s growing power”.

Victoria University Chancellor Sir Neville Jordan has given no assurance that student seats will be maintained on the Council. This stands in contrast to former Chancellor Ian McKinnon and current Vice-Chancellor Grant Guilford, both of whom have expressed support for student seats in the past.

NZUSA President Rory McCourt said retaining staff and students on councils “adds value to this kind of institution, and protects it against top-down group-think. The importance of this cannot be overstated in the context of a ministerial power-grab.”

Otago’s students’ association, OUSA, did not attend the demonstration.

Labour has also announced its support of the TEU stance, and Tertiary Education spokesperson David Cunliffe has submitted a bill to Parliament in attempt to revoke the recent changes introduced by the Education Amendment Act (No 2).

Cunliffe said that the Act “flies in the face of good governance principles” and that representation of students and staff is “central to any successful tertiary institution”.

Cunliffe’s Education (Restoration of Democracy to University Councils) Amendment Bill proposes to restore the requirement for all universities to have democratically elected staff and students.

Sir Neville spoke of the potential for a Council member to stand in as a representative of student interests, without actually being a student.

VUWSA submitted against the Education Amendment Bill (No 2) in 2014. They said the changes would threaten student and staff representation, perpetuate the lack of ethnic, socioeconomic and gender diversity on councils, and make councils less effective.

“It’s not about having a post on there or not, it’s about having someone to represent students, which is very different,” he said.

VUWSA will continue its campaign to retain student seats at the Council table, amid fears that Victoria University management will tell students, “you can’t sit with us”.

The TEU and the New Zealand Union of Students’ Associations (NZUSA) recently held a demonstration at Otago University to launch a national campaign in support of the one-third proposal. They will continue to protest the changes to councils and will urge universities to retain staff and student representation.

editor@salient.org.nz

issue 5 | introverts

Hyde Street headlines from the ODT

NEWS

06

2015: “Close to the edge” “Student’s attack on ambulance slammed” “Drunken incidents mar Hyde Street party” “On watch as young cut loose in Studentville” “No hiding party’s stressful shards”

Image credit: Critic

ODT Gives Students a Hyde-ing Once Again Beckie Wilson Once again the Otago Daily Times has “reported” on the debauchery that is Dunedin’s annual Hyde Street Party.

In previous years the ODT has ripped the event to shreds with sensationalist headlines and inflated arrest statistics. However, with an instant roof fine of $1000 and a threat of a total scarfie liquor ban, everything “seemed under control” for 2015.

Landlord Phil Seaton remarked that the kegger “went well” and that in the last two year’s he’d seen a “great improvement with how they control it”. Seaton said that Hyde Street was an important experience for students.

Additionally, a spokesperson for Dunedin Hospital said that the number of people presented to the emergency department was “no busier than usual”.

The Otago University Students’ Association (OUSA) has run the event for the past three years. Paul Hunt, OUSA president, said they coordinate with police and the Dunedin City Council and have introduced safety measures to ensure the event continues.

Despite this year seeing one partygoer smashing an ambulance windshield, and 15 people arrested, the event has become safer since OUSA took over running the event.

Organisers and volunteers had expected the party would mimic last year’s event with almost 4000 general admission tickets sold out in three and a half minutes.

In a statement, OUSA said that the “overall impression of the day was very positive” and

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that “the total arrests at the party represent just 0.3 per cent of the total ticket holders for this event and are on par with previous years.”

Josie Cochrane, editor of Otago student magazine Critic, said it was “a great day” and that she “only saw a couple of incidents where they didn’t look like they were having a safe time … it was safer than a lot of rugby games I’ve been to.”

Cochrane said she had spoken to the Proctor (responsible for overseeing student discipline at Otago) and the Vice-Chancellor, both of whom had agreed the event went well.

Dunedin’s Scarfie culture of extreme binge drinking has been somewhat curtailed in recent years. Popular student bars including the Garden Tavern (Gardies), the Bowling Green (the Bowler) and the Captain Cook have closed, and once-annual events such as the Toga Parade, the Cookathon and the Undie 500 have been banned.

Despite this, the ODT printed its usual screed against student culture and supported it with seemingly contradictory police statements.

One article reported that that police were satisfied that the event could be made a “safe and enjoyable occasion for all students.”

Another article stated “the Hyde Street event was far from being what police deemed a safe event.”

While an editorial insisted “no-one begrudges young people a chance to let off steam”, Salient would like to point out that the ODT certainly seems to.

2014: “Police slate Hyde St party organisers” “Partygoers still get too drunk: Hayne” “Ultimatum over Hyde St party” “Pupils gatecrashing a worrying trend”

2013: “Hayne’s Hyde Street warning” “Hyde St flats to stash mates” “Taxi company expects more keg party hassles” 2012: “Raw video: roof collapsing at Hyde Street keg party” “Should Hyde Street keg party be banned?”

“Landlords say stop Hyde Street keg party” “Spotlight on ‘crazy’ keg party” “Keg party costs high” “Hyde Street party impacts on ED wait times” “Hyde Street party has had its day” 2011: “Student hot spots will be monitored” “Student hits back over Hyde Street” “Dunedin police battle booze-fuelled mayhem” “Idiotic behaviour angers fire fighters” “Street parties out of control” 2010: “Student knocked out at Hyde Street brawl” 2009: “Bedlam on Hyde Street: a student perspective” “Nine arrests at Hyde Street” 2008: “Hopes for quiet Hyde St party”

07

NEWS

Cost vs Quality: Are universities milking international students?

Charlie Prout New Zealand is becoming an increasingly popular destination for international students, with overseas students making up 12.3 per cent of Vic enrolments this year.

Radio New Zealand reported a 12 per cent increase in international students in 2014 compared to 2013. Of the international students who arrived in New Zealand five to six years ago, 37 per cent have stayed in New Zealand for work.

As well as this, in the 2013-14 financial year 42 per cent of skilled migrants were previously international students in New Zealand.

Education New Zealand Chief Executive Grant McPherson said that the priorities of international students are changing, with employment and immigration becoming more important. Although Mr McPherson insisted that international education providers were not necessarily a pathway to employment in New Zealand, he maintained it was still “a pathway people will think about and explore”.

A representative from the newly-formed VUWSA International Students’ Representative Group (VISRG) agreed that a significant number of international students are currently interested in staying in New Zealand after study.

VISRG pointed out that some international students aim to migrate to New Zealand in order to escape a the a cycle of poverty. Their goals are to integrate with New Zealand society and aid the economy of New Zealand by filling shortages in the skilled job market.

A total of 93,000 international students came to New Zealand in the first eight months of last year alone, with their total spending reaching an estimated $2.8 billion a year.

However, Tertiary Education Union President Sandra Grey expressed her dissatisfaction with the way that institutions were compressing courses in an attempt to suit foreign students.

“This is where the market is driving teaching and learning,” Grey said.

VUWSA President Rick Zwaan was quick to note that marketdriven courses were not in and of themselves an issue, but said it was important that academic integrity was maintained in the face of growing profit-interest.

A spokesperson from the University told Salient that international students have the same access to career services and orientation programmes as domestic students, which “helps students adjust to life in Wellington” and equips them for job opportunities.

However, the University declined to comment on whether a focus on courses for international students was fostering profit over teaching and learning.

Others have expressed concerns about the impact of international students on the future job prospects for domestic graduates.

NZ First MP Winston Peters criticised international students as being “unfair competition” for Kiwi workers.

“Student visas should not be used to flood the job market, drive down wages and undermine conditions and increase the already record number of permanent immigrants.”

Zwaan was quick to dismiss Peters’ claims, saying “international students add a whole lot of value to the university and New Zealand as a whole so it’s quite xenophobic to say ‘let’s not’.”

Zwaan said the University was openly developing programmes catered specifically to overseas students.

“I don’t think there’s anything necessarily bad about us attracting more international students as long as we look after them when they get here.”

editor@salient.org.nz

issue 5 | introverts Well-respected caffeine provider, scone distributor and sometime-vegan café VicBooks has officially opened mini branches in Vic’s Pipitea and Karori campuses.

NEWS

08

The café/book shop has been dubbed by People’s Coffee “as much a part of life at Victoria University as pressing buttons to open doors” and “an oasis in a desert of 50page required readings”.

Students can now be served their fav beverage at locations in Rutherford House and Karori, the latter of which opened this January in time for the new term.

Coffee for the People!

Nicola Braid

After being neglected for what feels like decades, several students who attend class at the Karori campus have expressed their delight at the new outlet.

However, one student told Salient she did “feel for the baristas who have unknowingly signed up to suffer through life at Karori”.

Although, with Kaori campus set to be phased out, there is uncertainty as to how long this caffeinated ray of hope will last.

An English Lit student dubbed VicBooks Karori barista Jack “the prince Charming

POST GRAD PEEP O’ THE WEEK Harry Chapman

How would you describe what you’re studying for dummies?

My thesis looked into the social norms of talking about politics on Facebook and Twitter. I was interested in exploring what young New Zealanders consider okay to post about politics, as well as how people come to understand what’s okay. Politics on social media is a tricky business for a few reasons: people get fired up easily, you never know who’s seeing your posts and comments, and discussions easily spiral into mud-slinging.

So I was interested in figuring out how people navigate the minefield of politics on social media without making fools of themselves, and how they react when other people do step on mines.

Why did you decide to study this?

Continue studying?

I studied this topic because I think norms are fascinating—they’re sort of obvious once you think about social behaviour, but we take it for granted most of the time that there are these social rules which keep groups cohesive and help to make our behaviour understandable to others. So I was interested in studying these hidden forces shaping political talk on social media. More generally, I continued with study because I wasn’t ready to face the real world.

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behind the majestic steed that is the coffee machine” while another student went so far as to give Karori VicBooks a participatory sports award emblazoned with a vivid “best baristas in the world”.

When it comes to Pipitea’s new digs, VicBooks manager Lars declared that “the coffee is excellent, service is great and it’s a great location” with students on social media to expressing that they’re “as happy as the guys on the cup” to finally have quality coffee at Pipitea.

This comes as part of VicBooks’ continuing move to appeal to the weekend and professional market, with the twee Kitchenette at Kelburn now offering some pretty dope waffles to Kelburn mums on a Saturday.

100 per cent student owned under VUWSAT (Victoria University Wellington Students’ Association Trust) since 1975, VUWSA President Rick Zwaan is believed to be frothing at the gash at the prospect of new franchises. Zwaan said he was “excited”, although he was probably just hopped up on caffeine.

What’s the best part of studying at PG level?

I think getting to explore something you’re really interested in more or less full-time for a whole 12 months is a rare opportunity.

What the worst part of studying at PG level?

Having to motivate yourself to work is really hard. Theses are also quite strange, personal struggles. You can talk about it with other people, but it’s so long and complicated probably only you and your supervisor can really get to grips with it before you submit it.

Basically, no one can really understand your pain, and everyone around you gets sick of you complaining about your boring thesis troubles.

What’s a motto that you live by when writing your thesis?

The best I could do was: “You’ve done okay in the past—you’ll probably be okay this time?”

What advice would you give to students starting out in PG? Use a system for managing your time right from the beginning. Eventually I used the pomodoro technique with an app on my phone and it worked really well. Also, start writing straight away!

09

NEWS

Parking has become a source of frustration for many students since construction began on Kelburn’s new science building earlier this year.

A substantial allotment of carpark space has been closed off and repurposed for the construction, including the space allocated for motorcycle and scooter parking, off Gate 6.

Many students have had issues with being fined for parking outside of the designated areas. with VUWSA President Rick Zwaan admitting that “in the past, fines have been very prohibitive.”

Parking wardens are subcontracted and unaffiliated with the University, which receives no revenue for the fines paid by students.

Zwaan said VUWSA has “received a number of complaints with the changeovers… it’s the one thing that pisses people off.”

The Overheard at Vic Facebook page has seen repeated declarations of students’ dissatisfaction with the current situation.

A University spokesperson assured Salient that the amount of space allotted for motorcycle/scooter parking is the same as it was prior to any excavation taking place. A replacement area was created on the roof of the von Zedlitz Service Tower, accessible via Glasgow Street, as well as on the deck behind Rankine Brown and in an area under Laby Overall.

The spokesperson said there is still plenty of space available, yet its existence has not been successfully communicated to students.

“Since the start of the trimester, the only complaints [we have received] about parking have been from students who were unaware of the new space.”

As for cars, the University says students can park in the pay and display carpark at the end of Waiteata Road—if they pick up a VUWSA permit, they can get half-priced parking.

Last year, the WCC decided that VUWSA would no longer have assigned carparks on Salamanca Road. When development began on the new science building, VUWSA was asked to supply give up its carparks in order to make up for the estimated 60 places that were lost due to construction.

The Young and the Parkless Elea Yule

VUWSA is keen to push for more street parking, but must wait on the involvement of the Wellington City Council before it can see any progress being made.

What students say about the parking situation: “Vic removes scooter parking to make way for new building. Students take the brunt in fines.”

“There’s now only two scooter parks for the entire uni and they’re both a pain in the ass to get to.”

“The situation was bad enough last year with the Maclaurin carpark open. Come on, VUW facilities management: use your brains. It is desirable for students to ride motorcycles to uni instead of driving cars… Allocate more space for motorcycle parking!”

“I launched an epic battle against the parking peeps over summer because I parked outside the closed-down carpark. I won eventually, but they really are Satan’s spawn.”

“Just park in the Hub. That space might as well be good for something.”

“Don’t park in the Hub, I got fined $60 for parking there for a couple of hours.”

“Sign up to Massey Uni instead.”

“Imagine if you chucked a three wheeler in the mix, that’d really throw a spanner in the works.”

“Yea I might rock up to uni on my trike someday, cause some real chaos.”

editor@salient.org.nz

10

issue 5 | introverts

TEU cents’ worth

Letters Spam of the week Dear Sir/ Madam, We’d like to purchase 150,000 pcs of wooden pallets. Specification is 1000mm x 1200mm. If you’re capable of manufacturing them, we’ll provide drawing to you immediately. Pls help quote FOB or CIF（Euro）,destination port Shenzhen, China to us soon.

Once your quotation is confirmed, we’ll place an order to you at once. We’ll pay 50% by T/T as subscription, and the rest 50% by L/C. Required delivery time: 10 months.

We appreciate your prompt reply.

-Thanks & Best Regards.

Contact: Daisy

That sounds like something Salient should be doing Hi Salient, I have complaint about the traffic lights on the terrace on the right hand side. Pedestrians shouldn’t have to cross the road to risk themselves run over during rush hour, can you guys please do something about this and make new traffic lights there?

From concerned lady

Dear Salient, Your story about Victoria’s looming debate over its new council was powerful - a considered example of all the issues Parliament failed to consider earlier this year.

Now that the government has passed that law, it is up to local university communities to protect those seats ourselves. That is why TEU and NZUSA are campaigning for each university council to set aside at least one-third of its seats for democratically-elected staff and students.

In your story Pasifika student Karl Moresi said TEU’s recommendations contain no assurances about the diversity of voices within those seats.

Because we are running a nationwide campaign we left our proposal broad enough that it can be adapted to suit each university. It will definitely be appropriate for some universities to set seats aside for Pasifika representatives.

We also believe that democracy will deliver more diverse councils than appointments. The current minister has a poor record of appointing diverse councils. He has appointed just one Maori out of his thirty appointments, and no Pasifika. Students have elected far more Maori onto councils than he has appointed. Women make up just 16 percent of his appointees, but they make up 46 percent of elected staff representatives.

We also believe universities, when looking at their council composition, should consider not just the ‘traditional’ skill sets of accounting, management and law, but also the voice women, Maori, Pasifika and local communities bring to governance.

We need all those voices to counteract the growing power of the four ministerially-appointed councillors.

Sincerely, Stephen Tertiary Education Union

We could just make the letters section longer Dear Shitlient Poo news was a nice change from the usual Salient crap. It was a shame that these stories had already caused a stink in the mainstream media. You couldn’t do that shit justice. I would recommend finding some fresher stories in future. To do this plaster the walls of uni bathrooms with paper to collect and utilize the exotic array of bullshit people scrawl on those cubical walls. Sometimes it’s best to get your toilet humour straight from the source.

Regards Your number 2 fan

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Thanks!

Dear Salient, The Introvert issue was one of the best issues of the magazine I have seen in years. An interesting topic that hasn’t been discussed to death already, and treated in such a unique way.

Particular props to whoever designed the look of the whale article; the image from page 26 will be framed and put on my wall. The cover image was also particularly moving.

Best, E.

11

#Superawkward

Basically having a bitch

Dear Salient,

Dear Salient,

A couple of issues back the whole “talk to the person next to you” whole jam was discussed. I see the relevance that this has to reducing loneliness and promoting community feelings; many of us find it hard to make friends, so an action as simple as chatting to the person next to you could be great, right?

The Moan Zone is usually my favourite part of Salient.

As a cynical person I quite often relate, unfortunately Issue 5’s Moan Zone had some problematic wording.

Awkward for me then that the only person I ended up making conversation with me, who sat next to me in my lab, attempted to sexually assault me.

There’s something about this which isn’t quite dealing with the issue at hand. I can’t quite pin what it is. Maybe its cos not talking to people and feeling like an outside is a little beyond simple loneliness? Maybe talking to people and letting them in can have icky consequences.

Shit be real.

Sincerely, Grouchy and happily anti social mongerel.

Don’t you have FOMO on the 21st century?

Dear Salient, Awesome reading about introversion and extroversion in the most recent article. I find it kinda funny though that everyone is all “oh bro smartphones and internet access are totes beneficial to introverts and to those who are in the middle of the scale”. Which is craaaazy dumb cos did you know there is a kind of social anxiety you can get from fear of missing out on social events?

It’s called FOMO (fear of missing out, what a ridik name).

It’s exacerbated by having a smart phone and having constant access to social media sites in particular.

Firstly, why on earth do men’s rooms get to be called ‘Lad Pads’ while women’s are called ‘Muff Mansions.’

Lad pads sounds cool and has an added rhyming bonus. Muff mansion sounds like you’ve brought your dog named Muffy a house. Or like you’ve brought your vagina a house.

Secondly, the term basic bitch is so ridiculous. Am I basic because I enjoy the consumption of products that are literally marketed to my demographic? A bunch of fancy people in suits decide to market a product to me, go into advertising to make sure it really reaches me and unsurprisingly I take the bait and buy the product.

That doesn’t sound very simple in all it actually sounds quite complex.

I love the Moan Zone but please stop the weird stereotyping.

Yours sincerely, A very complex bitch

Hey ‘a very complex bitch’ Funny how you imply that “muff mansions” refers to a vagina house; we in fact have many houses for all the vaginas we look after. Secondly the definition for basic bitch in the Oxford English Dictionary is in fact “A girl who enjoys the consumption of products that is marketed to their demographic”. In saying this we have nothing against basic bitches, Tom actually is one.

Tom and Luke

More or less just having a bitch about one size fits all ness of being like ohmagerd technology has saved introverts and of course has no negative consequences.

Hah, yeah. It’s shit.

Sincerely

Dear Salient

The 20 y/o who hasn’t updated from a brick phone cos of social anxiety like holy shit I don’t wanna know what I’m missing.

I am just so annoyed that we are no longer getting free newspapers anymore. I used to look foward to reading the DomPost and catching up with the news, doing the crossword , looking at the photo of the pet of the day while engaging in my morning crap!!

Yours sincerely Mr Crapper

editor@salient.org.nz

12

issue 5 | introverts

Vic House’s honour defended Dear Salient,

Salient letters policy

I am writing in response to the piece The Moan Zone: He vs. She by Tom and Luke.

Salient welcomes, encourages, and thrives on public debate—be it serious or otherwise—through its letters page. Letters must be received before 4pm on Thursday for publication the following week. Letters must be no longer than 250 words. Pseudonyms are fine, but all letters must include your real name, address and telephone number— these will not be printed. Letters will not be corrected for spelling or grammar. The Editor reserves the right to edit, abridge, ordecline any letters without explanation.

Victoria House is a proud hall of residence that has been operating since 1907. Like Salient, Victoria House has radical, historical roots. It began as a place of residence for young women who wished to attend university and provided a safe family-orientated community. Today, Victoria House continues in the same vein. We aim to offer a place that emphasises friendship, community and success. We are a tight-knit family and we value our history.

Hence why it is such a shame to see such a wonderful place degraded (again) by Salient. It is a shame that Tom and Luke had to resort to putting down Victoria House in order to (I assume) boost the morale of their own article.

Email: editor@salient.org.nz Post: Salient, c/- Victoria University of Wellington Hand-delivered: Salient office, Level 3, Student Union Building (behind the Hunter Lounge)

Because they have done this on more than one occasion, I am led to believe that they are struggling to fill their word count quota every week.

I hope, in future, to see a more creative, humorous piece from Tom and Luke in next week’s article, instead of having another go at Victoria House.

Kind regards, A Proud Victoria Houseman.

Dearest ‘A proud Victorian Houseman” That letter provided me with about as much knowledge that I couldn’t give a shit about as my year 9 history class. But you made a couple of good points let us list those for you 1.

Funny how you say it was established in 1907, by the looks of things it hasn’t changed since then 2.

Yes we do degrade Vic House in order ‘boost our own morale’. Looks like it seems to be working 3.

Yes we do struggle to meet our word count every week. I mean thank god we’re at University so we have a 10% leniency with that.

Tom and Luke

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

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13

NEWS

The Week in Feminism How Roastbusters got away with it

“Roast Busters” case essential timeline 2011—Three different girls, two 13-year-olds and one 14-year-old, come forward with complaints regarding three members of the “Roast Busters” group. Each case involves a preliminary statement being made.

Brittany Mackie

A

n Independent Police Conduct report has finally admitted that the numerous victims of the “Roast Busters” group were let down by the police and that the investigation was not “thorough”. Most people reading this will be uttering a collective “No shit”. The handling of the three year “Roast Busters” case was fundamentally flawed from the very beginning when a 13-year-old girl came forward to press charges—two years before it hit the news. This girl was the first of seven victims to come forward with formal complaints and begin the traumatising and frankly terrifying process of our court system. Each of these complainants was worn down by the sceptical, drawn-out process and eventually decided they didn’t want to continue into court. The police then decided there was not enough evidence to prosecute any of the five suspected offenders, and closed the case in November last year.

In the IPCA report, however, a judge found that the police did not do a thorough investigation, did not follow up enquiries and pursue positive lines of investigation, failed to keep records of evidence, and in a number of cases “failed to adhere to the basic tenets of any form of criminal investigation”.

The police didn’t even check whether the suspects had been involved in any prior related incidents. They also decided they didn’t want to work with Child, Youth and Family on the case—a strange and flawed

decision, especially considering that many of the girls involved were underage children.

It has also been highlighted that there were options to prosecute the young men involved that were not explored or discussed with the victims—after the police explicitly said there was not enough evidence to prosecute.

NZ Police Commissioner Mike Bush has accepted the report and agreed with the statement that the investigation was not “robust or thorough”. When asked whether the officers involved will face any discipline, he responded that they will remain in the NZ police force but will no longer be a part of any child protection or sexual assault investigation teams.

There has been word that the findings of the report will go a long way to ensure this doesn’t happen again. I can’t imagine that these hollow apologies or promises of change will bring any peace to the young girls who were sexually assaulted. The police investigator’s failure to deliver justice to these girls is tragic and a sign of a deeply lacking system.

The consequences of the unjust outcome of this investigation go beyond just the “Roast Busters” case—as someone challenged Police Minister Michael Woodhouse earlier this week: how can someone making a complaint of sexual assault expect to be taken seriously, given the report’s findings? If we cannot put our faith in the police, what else do we have?

2012—Child, Youth and Family notify police of a possible Mass Allegation Investigation regarding the “Roast Busters” group and name four suspects and six new victims involved, all attending the same secondary school. The officers previously involved in the investigation decide no new evidence had come up and do not make an effort to work further with CYF in their investigation at that stage.

2013—More young women come forward and make statements regarding members of the “Roast Busters” group. At least three of these girls are between the ages of 13 and 14.

November 2013—Video of the “Roast Busters” group emerges showing them laughing and bragging about having sex with intoxicated, underage girls. This was the first public emergence of the group.

October 2014—Victims and their families are told by the police that no charges will be laid due to insufficient evidence.

March 2015—ICPA report shows the investigation was flawed, highlights numerous police discrepancies, and clarifies that they have not done a “thorough and robust” investigation.

editor@salient.org.nz

14

issue 5 | introverts

Maori Matters

NEWS

Being Well

Ow, My Ankle Nick Conn

Purangiaho

I

have been aware of my ankle recently. Since Christmas I set myself the challenge of running 100 runs in 100 days. It’s going really well but my ankle is occasionally irritable.

My ankle is stiff because I didn’t rehabilitate it thoroughly when I was younger. I played a lot of sport through university and had several injuries. At one stage I sprained this ankle every football season for four years. This was before I became a physiotherapist and understood the importance of rehabilitation.

Ankle sprains are really common in active young people. In the year to July 2014, ACC reports there were 28,602 ankle sprains (1524 year olds) at a cost of $12.9m.

Most ankle sprains are significant and some are very complex. Every ankle injury is different. The longer an ankle remains swollen or stiff compared to the other ankle, the more complex. Good first aid including resting from aggravating activities, icing, compression, elevation, and light movement will reduce the damage.

If there is a loss of ankle movement, the muscles become weaker, your sense of balance will reduce, and you will lack power and strength. A poorly rehabilitated ankle injury will reduce your performance, make you more likely to re-injure, and can lead to bony changes (early onset of arthritis). You should be aware that, even if it feels good, for many months after you will be more likely to re-injure the ankle.

Your physiotherapist will diagnose the problem and get you on the right track. The main aim is to get the swelling under control, return full movement and recondition your ankle. We will tape, stretch, strengthen, improve balance and agility, and reduce your risk of re-injury.

I know that when I was at university, I didn’t follow through and fully rehabilitate my ankle—partly because I thought it was okay, and partly because I didn’t want to spend the money on extra sessions.

Now as I look to complete my running, I wish I had had more foresight and looked after my ankle more thoroughly at the time.

Always consult a physiotherapist to get some good advice. I highly recommend coming and seeing us at Willis Street Physiotherapy @ Vic. We are experts in rehabilitation.

Ground Floor, Student Union Building, Gate 1, Kelburn Parade, Kelburn Phone: 04 384 8314 Email: info@vicphysio.com The ACC website is a good source of injury prevention and injury management information.

www.salient.org.nz

Maia Te Koha

T

he life of a first-year university student can be both stressful and intimidating—starting out in university, learning to manage heavy workloads and keep up with lectures and tutorials.

As first years we are still trying to find our feet, and for many of us it is our first time away from family. For many of our Māori students, our on-campus Marae, Te Herenga Waka, is a place of rest and a slice of home.

On 20 March students of all ages were given the opportunity to attend the Pūrangiaho event, held at Te Herenga Waka Marae. This was organised by the executives of Ngāi Tauira, Māori Students’ Association in collaboration of the staff of Te Herenga Waka.

This wānanga was a chance for students to come together and learn about the rich heritage of Te Herenga Waka Marae, of some of the past students who have also attended Victoria University, and the history Ngāi Tauira. Our guest speakers included our leaders on campus, such as whaea Te Ripowai Higgins, the manager of Te Herenga Waka Marae; Marie Cocker, manager of Te Putahi Atawhai Student Services; and Te Wehi Wright, one of the presidents and leaders of Ngāi Tauira.

Not only was this wānanga held to offer students an insight into the history of our Marae but also the success of past Māori students.

This wānanga was an opportunity to look at where we see Ngāi Tauira in the future, and to work on our succession plan to see our Māori community at Victoria grow and prosper. Many ideas on how we, as a community, could work to ensure the success of our peers in school and reach those who have yet to join Ngāi Tauira.

Our goal in the future is to see our community grow and strengthen.

Ngāi Tauira firmly believes in whānaungatanga (a sense of family connection), peer success and Māori recognition, and being proud of our culture, heritage and Māori community. Ngāi Tauira works to build strong bonds with all its members to create a care-free and welcoming environment for all students. Ngāi Tauira is a family that welcomes, with open arms, new students every day.

Pūrangiaho was an opportunity for students to feel that sense of belonging within Ngāi Tauira, Ngā Taura Umanga, Ngā Rangahautira. It was a chance to meet new friends, learn about our Marae’s construction and rich history, and successful Māori students of Victoria University. Now, with this new found knowledge, we hope to guide Ngāi Tauira and our Māori community down the path of success and a prosperous future.

15

Yarn with Zwaan NEWS

Rick Zwaan

T

his week I thought I’d set myself a challenge and dedicate this column to convincing you to come along to the VUWSA Initial General Meeting (IGM) this week. In case the intrinsic desire to participate in constitutionally required meetings isn’t enough to get you to come, I’ve come up with a compelling list of why you should come. free pizza! Let’s be real, free food is reason enough to do 1. There’s most things. We’ve timed the meeting to coincide with lunch

(kicks off at 1pm) so perfect time for a few slices of delicious pizza.

2.

3.

Find out how we spent your money. After a few consecutive years of record deficits, at the IGM you’ll get presented with the financials and learn how VUWSA posted a profit last year.

Added bonus—for the first time ever the whole ‘VUWSA Group’ audited accounts will be presented and they include the VUWSA Trust and VicBooks for the first time. Free pizza AND free audits?! We totally get you.

Figure out what it is we’ve been up to in the past year. We’ll be presenting the Annual Report from last year which covers the key highlights and achievements for VUWSA in 2014. There’s a few pretty pictures in it too.

the Living Wage and what it means for students.

5. Discuss Wouldn’t it be sweet if you earnt $19.25/hr and didn’t have to

live off two-minute noodles? There’s a growing movement on campus and in Wellington to support implementing a Living Wage. For me, there’s some pretty simple benefits—making tertiary education more widely accessible, allowing us to work fewer hours and focus on our studies, and ensuring all of us can afford decent food to keep ourselves healthy.

have a Twitter feed on a screen so you can tweet your 6. We’ll heart away and see it on the big screen. Or like my flatmate did

at a VUWSA event last year, try get #PizzaCountdown to trend (good luck Angus).

the above didn’t convince you than there’ll also be a few other 7. Ifgoodies to give away and it’s in the Hub so if you want to sit

there and do your readings while you wait for the pizza than that’s cool too.

So anyway, please come, it’s at 1pm in the Hub on Wednesday the 1st of April. It’ll be fun, you’ll love it, I swear.

questions, raise general business and vote on things. This is 4. Ask the best part where you can ask questions about what VUWSA

is up to, raise motions or points of order and vote on things. Or you can also just vote on the things already on the agenda and get the free pizza sooner.

editor@salient.org.nz

issue 5 | introverts

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www.salient.org.nz

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16

17

An Auckland judge excused a man from jury duty last Tuesday by virtue of his having a ticket to the Cricket World Cup semifinal at Eden Park. Having witnessed the Hairy Jav and Co. bring it home for the Black Caps, the man returned to the courthouse on Wednesday to fulfill his service.

I Pity Anyone Willing to Watch This Show Mr. T, the former A-Team star and the guy on those Snickers ads a while ago, is set to host a new home makeover series called I Pity the Tool. The show will see Mr. T and his famed Mohawk destroy various dwellings of a family home, to then renovate accordingly. The show’s title has been cleverly derived from Mr. T’s famed catch phrase, “I pity the fool”.

#TurnOffToTurnOn Condom Giant Durex has launched a smartphone app, dubbed Connect, that turns off lovers’ smartphones automatically at agreed upon times. Research from Durham University found the best thing couples can do for their sex life is to turn off their phones. So Durex has come to the rescue ahead of Earth Day, with couples who turn off their phones now satisfying both their own coital urges and clauses of the Kyoto Protocol.

“This University Sucks” Supposedly, among Victoria’s fifty or so plaques on campus, there is a memorial at Kelburn that simply reads: “This University Sucks”. The plaque was laid sometime in the 1970s or 1980s, forever hidden under a flowerbed. It is said the 2010 campus redevelopment forced a move in location for the nameplate, though it still exists somewhere secret onsite. Such mysterious.

Sleep Driving

Taylor Swift Porn Taylor Swift has bought the rights to two potential raunchy websites in an attempt to stop her name being used for porn. The 25-year-old pop sensation is now the proud owner of the domain names TaylorSwift. porn and TaylorSwift.adult. It is still possible to Google image search “taylor swift nudes” on the uni computers.

A man was found asleep inside his stationary car in the middle of the 110km/h zone of an Australian motorway, the car’s engine still running. The bizarre and dangerous parking maneuver was sighted around 2am local time at the Gosford M1 on-ramp in New South Wales. Emergency services were called to the scene, arresting the man only to obtain a urine sample— which came back clear. Having also passed a breath test, the driver was released without charge.

editor@salient.org.nz

NEWS

Good Cricket All Round

19

This Article Tastes How Purple Smells PHILIP MCSWEENEY Like many people with synesthesia, Tori didn’t know that her senses worked a little differently until she was 15. The school she went to screened a short film about the perils of not wearing a bike helmet.

One scene showed a man crash his bike before cutting to a close-up of the fellows head being crushed under the wheel of a car; it then panned to his arms, which were visibly gravel-rashed. Tori, feeling faint and in excruciating pain, caused a commotion in her seat, shouting at the teachers to turn it off. Everyone looked at her, asked what was wrong. She replied “didn’t that hurt any of you? did no-one else feel that?”

According to conventional wisdom, a generic human form is endowed with five senses: Sight, Touch, Smell, Sound and Taste (listed in order of how much they stimulate my sex drive. You’re welcome!). We give some credence to the idea of metaphysical sixth senses—the ability to perceive ghosts, ESP, telekinesis—but unless you’re Hayley Joel Osmond or a member of Sensing Murder (good job on solving all those homicides, team!), or alternately you’re blind or deaf, you will have five senses and these five senses alone.

Unfortunately for the Primary School Syllabus, this is a common misconception. Napoleon, in fact, was taller than most men of his time; chewing gum does not seven years to digest; clicking on that link and watching that video won’t increase your THROBBING COCK’S length or girth, let alone make you irresistible to MILFS; humans possess up to 20 senses, depending on the definition of what a “sense” is.

Along with the usual quintet, the sensation of needing to void your bowels or bladder have been distinguished not just from each other but from the sensation of “feeling”, for two examples. Others

include thermoception (recognising temperature), equilibrioception (balance), proprioception (feeling the sensation of pain) and Inception (the unique sensation describing the covert joy you feel after watching a Hollywood blockbuster). So the last one hasn’t been scientifically corroborated (YET: patent pending), but scientific studies conducted late last century showed that, at least for those first three, these senses are concrete and distinct phenomena that intertwine with other senses but are not manifestations of them.

This is of some interest to science (duh), but also to its more philosophyminded cousin-once-removed. Devotees of British Empiricism claim that all human knowledge comes from sensory experience—we can only know what we experience through touch, smell, sight, and so “reality” is dependent on “perception”. The upshot of more senses? An added insight into how we generate knowledge and experience. The existence of synesthesia must no doubt be exceptionally pertinent to these ideas; it means there are physiological grounds for synesthetic perceptions, an entire reality that non-synesthetes will never be privy to.

I don’t fancy my writing enthralling enough to read entire paragraphs of, so if you’ve skipped a couple of my tangents be aware there is one point I’m trying to make here: our senses, and the idea of what constitutes a “sense”, is way more complex that most of us realise.

People with synesthesia complicate matters further, the dastardly rogues, but offer us all a new way of approaching what perception really is.

“The Synesthesia Battery”, an online resource that offers a test to anyone who wishes to determine whether they have synesthesia, defines synesthesia as “a perceptual condition of mixed senses… a stimulus in one modality involuntarily elicits a sensation/experience in another modality.” In less verbose terms, people with synesthesia basically get two or more senses for the price of one; one sense is

editor@salient.org.nz

20

issue 5 | introverts stimulated, more than one responds. The word’s etymological origins can be traced back to the Greek “Syn” (together) and “aisthesis” (perception), a literal approximation of the simultaneous perception the word has come to mean.

The most common manifestation of synesthesia, and the one you’re most likely to have heard of, is nicknamed “colour synesthesia”.

People with this variation always perceive (not see, but perceive—this is important) a particular colour when they see a different letter of the alphabet, character, or number. For some individuals, this extends to moods, concepts and unique words having their own colour. It’s not just that they associate a word with a colour, like we associate red with anger and green with jealousy, say—they actually perceive it.

As the synesthete writer Patricia Duffy puts in her poignant memoir Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens: “I realised that to make an ‘R’ all I had to do was first write a ‘P’ and then draw a line down from its loop.

And I was so surprised that I could turn a yellow letter into an orange letter just by adding a line… I suddenly felt marooned on my own private island of navy blue Cs, dark brown Ds, sparkling green 7s, and wine-colored Vs.” To experience synesthesia, despite its irrefutable coolness and advantages, must be pretty lonely sometimes. The condition is rare, and science has only recently formally—and according to some synesthetes, begrudgingly—acknowledged its existence. Research on the subject is surprisingly scarce.

Support groups, where people can share experiences and foster understanding and compassion, are almost unheard of outside select internet forums.

To help me shed some light on the subject, I met with Tori Bright, a synesthete who experiences a comparatively rare, exceptionally under-researched variant of the condition: Mirror-Touch. Tori is Bright by name and by nature. If you think this is an egregious pun based on her intelligence and thoughtfulness, you’re right, but it also serves double duty by encapsulating her disposition aptly. She hardly needed the coffee I bribed her with; cheery and unassuming, immaculately dressed, on-point nail-polish, I warmed to her immediately as she spilt the beans on what it means to be a synesthete.

What exactly is mirror-touch? “When I see someone touch someone else, I feel it… I feel the sensation. It’s hard to explain, but it’s like… when I see someone tap someone on the shoulder, I literally feel a ‘ghost-touch’ of someone tapping me on the shoulder.” What do these “ghost-touches” feel like? “It’s hard to explain, sorry! The closest thing is pins and needles, but I’ve felt pins and needles before and it’s not like that, just a bit similar. Sometimes I feel the exact sensation but only if I’ve experienced it before, mostly it’s like a tingling, but a tangible one.” I put it to her that it must be impossible to explain to someone who doesn’t have the condition; “you know I can’t feel your ghosttouch, bro” if you will. “Exactly! It’s just like that.”

“I was so surprised that I could turn a yellow letter into an orange letter just by adding a line.”

A large amount of misconceptions linger from the nascent days of scientific research. Though the symptoms of synesthesia have been documented for centuries (millennia, according to some sources), synesthetes have been variously condemned as “liars”, “fabricators” and “needy exhibitionists with overactive imaginations” in times of yore. Synesthesia has also been falsely perceived as a delusion and thus a characteristic of severe mental illness.

While it would be soothing to think that these errant opinions have been relegated to history, they still prevail in some scientific discourse. It took me five minutes perusing JSTOR to find two articles published and ratified by members of the scientific community in the last ten years that propagate these archaic conceptions. In one article, published in 2007 by the fucking Stanford Journal of Neuroscience no less, symptoms of synesthesia are conflated with schizophrenia, which is insulting to everyone involved. In another, published as recently as 2010, the condition is characterised as “a mental disorder”.

This categorisation perhaps bears more weight, at least in semantic terms—“disorder”, in its medical-dictionary definition, refers only to something that exists outside the norm. However, in common usage and in basic connotation, the word corresponds with notions of impairment, disability, otherness—even, most pejoratively, freakishness and inferiority. And in its insistence in adhering to the “normal”, the field doesn’t reflect on a difficult fundamental question: what constitutes “normal”? How do you decide what’s “abnormal”,

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and when does it start mattering? I’ll discuss this in greater depth in a later, hopefully more triumphant paragraph, but suffice to say that when it comes to synesthesia, scientific accuracy is sorely lacking.

“I took a film course last year on horror movies, and that was interesting.” Pardon? “Yeah, I only had to walk out of one—Evil Dead. Oh, and Hostel… that scene where the guy gets his achilles tendon snipped? So much pain… I couldn’t walk for hours afterwards because I was afraid it would come back.”

The film course must have been an excruciating experience! “Not as much as you’d think—I have what I call a ‘fiction filter’, and I don’t usually feel pain if I haven’t experienced it myself anyway.” I inquired whether the fiction filter was something she developed over time or something she was born with. She thinks a while before answering.

“I think it’s something I’ve developed because it’s gotten easier over time, and I think I’ve definitely become more desensitised, but I honestly don’t know. I couldn’t tell you.”

When it comes to more innocuous ghost-touches, I posit that it must be distracting. “Not really,” she rebukes gently, “and why would it?

It’s something I’ve had my whole life, so I’ve never had to get used to it. It’s just natural for me.” What about, err, y’know, umm, sorry to ask a salacious question, but, uhh… “Ha, that’s the first question most people ask me: [in dudebro tones] ‘what’s it like when you watch porn?’. I tell them I don’t really watch porn,” she says, laughing. “But again, I don’t know what it’s like for people who don’t have MirrorTouch, whether they get excited in the same way I do. I guess they must not, that I must get excited in a different way, but I don’t know whether it’s just different paths to the same ending.” Nice entendre.

“Thanks! Yeah, I don’t know… if the Mirror-Touch made me feel twice as much pleasure as pain, it would be a lot easier… or maybe not.” We both giggle a bit and I drop the subject.

21

It would certainly be spectacularly unfortunate if she didn’t feel pleasure or neutral sensations to compensate for the pain, because it sounds bloody awful. “In my first year, this guy was telling us this story about how he broke his arm after falling off a trampoline, and I didn’t want to say ‘stop’ because I was knew at a hostel and I didn’t want to be that girl, even though I wanted to make him stop so much.

Every time I’d think about it, my arm would hurt. This happened for weeks” So it’s not just visual, in the moment? It’s your imagination too? “Exactly, yeah,” she confirms. Her right arm is visibly tensing.

Tori first realised that she perceived touch differently in the cruel and unusual circumstances outlined in the first paragraph; before that, especially because of her Mum’s similar sensitivity (“I think she might have it, but she doesn’t really want to admit it or acknowledge it, y’know?”), she assumed everyone felt the same. “And then— you know how sometimes you find out about something, even a particular word, and it pops up everywhere you go?”. I do. “Well it was like that—that night I listened to a podcast before I went to bed, to help me sleep, and it was about Mirror-Touch Synesthesia and I realised ‘hey—that’s what I have! That’s me!’.”

A trip to a neurologist, for unrelated reasons, confirmed Tori’s suspicions. She met the three criteria that are required for a formal diagnosis. The doctor couldn’t offer her any more than affirmation.

The first medically confirmed case of this disorder, despite its prevalence, occurred in—I jest not—2005. (An estimated 2.5 per cent of a given population experiences Mirror-Touch to varying degrees, though few of this percentile are aware they have the condition.)

As such, very little is known about what causes Mirror-Touch.

According to Tori’s neurologist, some research had tentatively uncovered a link between Mirror-Touch and epilepsy—which Tori’s elder sister has. If this hypothesis was corroborated, it would indict the Temporal Lobe as the major culprit. However, other studies have witnessed increased activity in the premotor cortex and insular cortex—among others—in Mirror-Touch synesthetes. Where MirrorTouch stems from remains, as with other forms of synesthesia, a mystery, the domain of endless hypothesising, aborted research and frenzied debate.

The lack of knowledge affects Mirror-Touch synesthetes in a more personal way. There is no real medical advice, no support groups.

Developing strategies to combat the deleterious effects of the condition is very much an individual—and onerous—task. This is not necessarily true in Tori’s case. She grew up in Sanson—a tiny locale near Bulls with “an antique shop, a dairy and a fish and chip shop [according to Tori, the best in the country]”—and attended high school in Feilding. The support services for even conditions as wellknown as dyslexia are notoriously deficient in rural New Zealand, but Tori managed by developing coping strategies: going outside and getting fresh air when necessary, focussing her thoughts away from triggering ones, avoiding certain stimuli. While she is nonchalant about these experiences, I suspect that these processes were cultivated in the midst of rather difficult trial-and-error.

Moving to Wellington for university did not bring her into contact with other Mirror-Touch synesthetes. She has met two other people with synesthesia in her life, neither of whom had her particular

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“In a vein that can only be described as ‘buzzy as fuck’, there has been a documented case where a colorblind synesthete has reported perceiving colors she couldn’t ‘see’ in her day-to-day life.”

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Speaking of research: if you’ve ever felt hunger, there might be an element of synesthesia in your genetic make-up too. According to one group of researchers, “hunger” is a sensation comprised of four separate senses: taste, smell, touch and sight. If the research bears delicious-smelling fruit, it might demonstrate an evolutionary purpose to synesthesia. Shit—it might even support the idea, espoused by Cracked commenter/scientific mastermind Ricky Zapf, “I beleive that synthesia is the next step in human evelution”.

brand (one had an equally rare type, “spatial synesthesia”, who aligns numerical sequences as points in space in their head). The internet has helpful communities—Tori is especially fond of Reddit’s r/synesthesia board—but even that focusses on colour synthesia, or the kind that makes you smell bacon when you see, say, a fire hose, or taste wasabi when you hear a note on a violin. She’s had one moment of particular pride: she related her experience and someone identified, saying “I’ve always thought there was something wrong with me… now I know there’s not. That’s what it is!”

“And I mean, I know, I don’t know if they were trolling, ‘no-one lies on the internet’ and everything, but still.”

What ultimately struck me about Tori was that she was so, well, normal. This is not to say she was generic, or boring—quite the opposite—but that her life has charted familiar territory. She moved to Wellington for the university experience and independence. She has worked in a call centre to help herself out financially. She lives in a grungy but great student flat, drinks on occasion, she wants to study post-grad film in England and travel Europe. She was raised by two Mums—which you can read more about in a tender, heartfelt piece written for this magazine—but aside from that her childhood was typically happy and pleasant. Her experiences mirrored mine, yours, your friends.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that someone with synesthesia is well-adjusted, socially confident, lacking in eccentric bugaboos or picadillos. But the way the condition is framed as a “disorder” lends credence to the perception of synesthetes as some kind of other— maybe gifted, maybe weird, but certainly not like you or me.

These tidy delineated categories belie a weird truth that there is a common humanity running through each of us, no matter how we perceive our external worlds. I was interested to learn that deaf people sign to themselves in the same way that we talk to ourselves; deafmutes utter phrases to themselves involuntarily, no matter how learned.

In a similar vein that can only be described as “buzzy as fuck”, there has been a documented case where a colorblind synesthete has reported perceiving colors she couldn’t “see” in her day-to-day life.

This anomaly is of tremendous importance to scientists studying perception and probably a fair few philosophy professors too—it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine one of them crying “the land of the Noumenal has been confirmed!”, spilling coffee down their anorak in the process.

It isn’t only as participants in science experiments that synesthetes make their mark. Nobel Prize-winning mathematician and physicist Richard Feynman saw equations in colour, which enabled him to solve them with increased efficacy. Olivier Messiaen and Pharrell are two synesthetes who have incorporated their condition into music to tremendous effect. Messiaen even created chords based on his perception of colour in music that “he may not have discovered otherwise”.

The classic mind-experiment, usually relayed to me by some bodystoned friend or other, that “what if my red isn’t what your red looks like?”, reveals a harsher truth that it realises. We can never know anyone fully because we can never share their perception, see through their eyes, walk a mile in their feet, listen to that Arctic Monkeys album that you love but they hate, through their taringas. It can be as drastically different as the African tribe who can’t perceive blue but can perceive variations of green that all other eyes cannot, or as close-to-alike as a .05 difference in our short-sightedness. Every synesthete and every non-synesthete perceives an entirely unique world according to their unique brain make-up.

This need not, however, be a depressing or lonely realisation. We are wonderfully one-of-a-kind. The commonalities between the way we use our senses brings us together, inspires camaraderie, even as we are inevitably apart; the differences keeps it interesting. When I asked Tori whether she liked having synesthesia, she replied “I do, I really do. I’m weirdly proud of it. It’s something special about me. I’ve never had trouble making friends because of it, but I have something, something tangible, that no-one else has.

“And it’s a fucking great party trick.”

This isn’t to say that people with synesthesia have nothing unique to offer. While no-one could ever mistake me for a science major, I thought it interesting that Tori mentioned “seeing anxious people play with their hands makes me feel anxious”, especially given that for many GPs in New Zealand, the first port of call when treating anxiety is medication that prevents the physiological effects of anxiety, not the psychological ones. She believes that while she’s not endlessly sympathetic, her physical empathy has translated to advanced emotional empathy—a feeling supported by research that found markedly higher empathy levels in people with synesthesia.

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Bonnie Wroe “Jessica Stains her Jumper� instagram.com/ welcomtobabeville

Joe Cruden & George Block

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It seems like a good moment to reflect on the place of reality television in New Zealand. The Kills and Moon episode has been the high-water mark of cultural vacuity, but there is something bigger at play here; the problems are more than superficial. It’s only in its second season but The X Factor has already become a feature length paean to late-capitalism. It’s as though the whole thing has been produced by Adam Smith and directed by Ayn Rand. Dominic Bowden swaggers about like a young Ronnie Reagan.

But it’s more than just The X Factor. The problem is that there’s nothing “real” about these shows. The “homes” on The Block are empty shells, soulless facades. We all know that Police Ten 7 uses green screens; the crims are inserted in post-production. All the “food” on My Kitchen Rules tastes like styrofoam. It is styrofoam—the cauliflower is plainly made of those little foam things that your digital camera was boxed with. Anyone can see that the courgettes are urinal cakes.

Luckily, things are about to change—The Bachelor New Zealand has revolutionised reality television in this country. Finally, this is television with heart, a show in which the hook-ups are real and the rejections count. Reality television, it seems, is no longer a misnomer.

Here’s how it works: 20 New Zealand women and one convicted fraudster vie for the attentions of New Zealand’s most despicable

male. Each week the action culminates in a tacky little ceremony in which some of our hopefuls receive a rose signifying their continuing involvement. At the end, one of these poor women will marry this dreadful bastard.

Prior to the two maiden episodes, little was known about our hero.

The network was keeping quiet about it, as were most major news networks. In a tantalising series of promos, TV3 showed us that our Bachelor was an equestrian, and that he likes to loiter down at the viaduct. And startlingly, after almost three hours with the guy, we know little more about the Bachelor, other than that his name is Art Green and that he is definitely anything but eligible.

In what is ostensibly a “get to know the Bachelor” section, we learn a little about Art, and it’s all terrible. The Bachelor starts with the basics: “My name’s Arthur, I’m 26 years old, I’m living in Auckland and I run my own health food company.” Unfortunately, there’s almost nothing more to the guy. We learn that he is fond of running on the beach (curiously, Art prefers to run in a singlet but ride his horses shirtless) and that he is better than Mike Puru at tennis. So far, so good. Art mumbles something about entrepreneurship and “pre-orders”, but neglects to mention that the company that he “owns” is in fact run by friend Ryan Kamins and the substantially more famous cricketer Mitchell McClenaghan. Nope, apparently it’s Art’s company. After seeing Art in business and in the gym (presumably the only two places he has been), we’re whisked off to the third—his family home.

We meet Art’s family at a mansion so palatial we can only assume the father is some sort of international arms-dealer.

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Obviously a devoted student of David Lynch, every one of Mike’s appearances manages to cultivate a tone of confusion and hopelessness unmatched since Lost Highway.

After an interminably long time hanging out with the family Green, we get to see Art prepare for an introductory cocktail evening.

The guy lives by the credo “healthy body, healthy mind” but appears to care much less about what adorns his body. His justbeen-to-Nepal anklet and third-form-bully G-shock are surely lowering his IQ by at least a bit. Art’s formal get-up is no better. He looks like a middling law student on his way to that ridiculous ball they’re always going to.

At first it’s a relief to see Art with some fucking clothes on, but once he opens his mouth one can’t help but wish he’d just get back on his horse. As Art’s potential fiancées emerge one-by-one from a sleek black rental car, he finds an exciting variety of ways to alienate them completely. Art’s first potential fiancée gets Art’s whole repertoire of “well”, “yeah” and “definitely”, and an indiscrete rubbing of his clammy hands on his rumpled pant leg. Art’s clearly well out of his depth.

Upon learning that Danielle had intended to compete in Ironman, he confidently assures her that he once competed in the Auckland half marathon, a substantially less impressive endurance event. Art treats each of his encounters as an opportunity for a

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disturbing game of one-upmanship followed by a lascivious “checking out” process as each woman hurries towards the safety of the mansion and what is surely better company.

Art, presumably short for Artless, is at best a hopeless fool and at worst a vainglorious arse. The prospect of spending weeks in his company fills me (let alone the women and poor Mike) with dread. Luckily, the show redeems itself—the involvement of Puru and the women (or, as Art and Mike insist, “the girls”) is a real source of hope.

Clearly the product of a deranged mind, The Bachelor is the brainchild of Flipside’s Mike Puru. While the show is ostensibly another MediaWorks production, with Puru as host, it becomes abundantly clear that Mike is pulling the strings. We don’t see a lot of Mike in these first two episodes. He appears when you least expect him—grinning silently beside Art at a Rose Ceremony, or suddenly apparating into a scene to whisk our contestants off to another one of his productplacement-saturated dates.

Obviously a devoted student of David Lynch, every one of Mike’s appearances

manages to cultivate a tone of confusion and hopelessness unmatched since Lost Highway.

His speeches to the contestants are despair writ large. To put it simply, he’s giving us televisual expressionism of a calibre never before seen in New Zealand.

Puru’s also nothing if not a masterful fixer. In the first two episodes there’s been a flight on a seaplane, an island picnic, and a thrilling jet-boat ride. He even managed to borrow a Russian oligarch’s superyacht for the day, as if the show needed another display of wealth of such disgustingly filthy lucre.

But Mike’s not without his flaws. Completely out of step with the zeitgeist, his primitive view of gender politics ensures that the contestants are constantly being portrayed as “catty”, and he’s done nothing to deter the bumblingly offensive Art from referring to them as “the girls”. It’ll be intriguing to see if Mike can grow out of his regressive views or if they’ll continue to colour his show.

And then there’s the contestants themselves.

21 women, mainly drawn from the uppercrust of the big urban centers, and all a fair few IQ points clear of Art. There’s a real

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mix of professions—teachers, advertising executives, yoga instructors—but we’re struck by how any of these people could be interested in our glassy-eyed fad diet entrepreneur. Such is life.

Mike’s bold and uncompromising direction meant we got to know far more about some contestants than others: - Rosie loves danger so much that it has become the guiding principle for her global adventures. She says she has visited both Israel and Jordan and found the thought of nearby gunfire “thrilling”.

Rosie’s politics are unsettling but she redeems herself in the first Rose Ceremony by preemptively walking out. Presumably she’s heard there’s trouble in the Crimea and is off to check it out.

sentenced to 18 months in jail in 2005 for stealing almost $40,000 from a former employer. Danielle has Art sussed immediately, and gets “given” a rose within minutes of meeting him—we can only hope that she has also made off with Art’s gaudy G-shock.

Now that we’ve met these smart young women and this awful man, how are things going to play out? In the early episodes, things begin to settle down into a pattern

- Poppy is an English yoga instructor. She’s got Art performing the “tree pose” within about five seconds of meeting him. “I can see why trees do it.” Poppy gives him the benefit of the doubt.

- Kristie’s a “dog person” from South Otago. It remains to be seen how an animagus will fare. Kristie quickly gets some alone time with Art and says she’s not here to make friends, clearly operating as more of a “lone wolf ”. She locks eyes with Art and “time stands still”. We know how you feel, Kristie.

- These contestants are talented! We have a champion in our midst. Danielle, a 35-yearold barrister from Auckland, won the National Piano Accordion Championships in 1997. One can’t help but speculate that there are substantially more competitors in this particular competition than there were in 1997—who knows how Danielle will go with so many contestants. In a clever budgeting move, Mike appears to have convinced Danielle to provide the show’s soundtrack, perhaps guaranteeing Danielle safe passage through the early rounds.

-Then there’s the fraudster. One of our contestants, Danielle Le Gallais, was

of set piece dates and talking heads—it’s easy to forget that this thing will ultimately end in a marriage. At first, we find the women lounging nonchalantly on a sort of Bachelorette Band Stand, clearly waiting for someone to come along and say “hello ladies”, which Puru dutifully does. One of them is going to be going on a date! Art has chosen Poppy for a date on Kawau because she “seems like fun”—the viewer is left to imagine Art’s lecherous wink. Poppy’s date goes well and Art gives her a rose. Poppy relaxes a little too much and does a small fart.

Now Mike has decided that Art should take a number of women on what is called a “group

date”, which most closely resembles a group interview—Art seems just about to hand the women an A4 pad and a roll of sellotape and instruct them to build a bridge that can support his bodyweight. Some of the women join Art on various vessels as they potter about on the ocean. This group is obviously favoured by Puru, for they are finally given the opportunity to drink out of real-life glass.

This time, Dani is given a rose.

While Art is busy with Dani, Chrystal holds court on the top deck, confidently assuring the troops that while women seek emotional security, men are more interested in physical attraction.

Chrystal’s right on the money if she’s talking about Art, but Danielle sees her polemic for what it is: lazy stereotyping.

“Chrystal was very opinionated,” Danielle (the fraudster, not the accordionist) complains in her piece to camera, “and wrongfully so.”

Brilliant. One can’t help but suspect a significant portion of Chrystal’s money could end up in a Swiss bank account at any moment.

This time, Art has only 13 roses for 15 girls.

Luckily, Mike has done the arithmetic for us— two more women will be leaving the mansion.

Danielle gets the last rose in a tense finale and Puru appears in a cloud of smoke to bring things to a close.

And thus stepped The Bachelor into the hell-scape. Kills and Moon are but a distant memory. The Bachelor is potential realised, promise delivered—the platonic ideal of reality television. One can only imagine what Mike’s got in store for us next week. Thank God for The Bachelor.

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THE GIANT SPIDER IN THE ROOM Gus Mitchell

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I didn’t really get why Thrones had to aim for things we were trying to get away from in the real world: cynicism and moral grayness, rape and misogyny, cruel backhanded politics with far-reaching consequences we’d rather not think about.

Winter is coming, which means yet another season of Game of Thrones is upon us. On 12 April, we’ll hole ourselves up in our cold flats or flock back to the nests in our hometowns, and escape into Westeros once more. I’m still woefully behind on the show, but I keep up when I can, and whenever I ask people what the appeal is for them, I’m always told it’s because it’s a “realistic fantasy”.

and moral grayness, rape and misogyny, cruel backhanded politics with far-reaching consequences we’d rather not think about. To my mind, fantasy is meant to be a break from reality, not a cruel reminder of it. But maybe I was looking at it the wrong way. I decided to do some digging into the worlds of Tolkien and Martin, and see where the appeal for “the real” in fantasy lies.

That always felt like a misnomer to me.

Hell, it sounds like a betrayal even, from the country that for so long was home to Lord of the Rings. Lukewarm reception to The Hobbit trilogy notwithstanding, we all went to great lengths to make Tolkien’s world real, and we went in droves. But now we’ve crossed the Narrow Sea to grittier shores. In part, this is due to the great adaptational skill of George R.R. Martin, David Benihoff and David Weiss, but at the time I didn’t really get why Thrones had to aim for things we were trying to get away from in the real world: cynicism

Tolkien lived through both World Wars, serving as a lieutenant in the first and writing throughout the second from his post as a professor of language at Pembroke College in Cambridge. It was there he published The Hobbit and the first two installments of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Tolkien would spend his vacations in the English countryside, where he took rest and respite; he came to loathe the rapid industrialisation that was occurring through much of 1940s

Britain, turning the dales and rural villages into bustling towns and roads. He made such a point of not getting with the program that never drove or purchased a car, instead opting for a bicycle.

Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit went on to reflect the values of their time. Tolkien touted the ideal of the rural middle class of England being the-best-society-of-all, as symbolised by the hobbits, and elevated the ideal of quaint domestic life to an idea of bliss, under a stable and tidy monarchy as embodied

by Aragorn. Coupled with his experiences during the war, the predominant narrative of his works was that when all was said and fought for, you retired to domestic stability, to home and hearth with family and good company. As much attention is dedicated to feasts and parties and social gatherings as it is to adventuring and fighting against the menace of that industrial upstart Sauron and his evil legions. It was on this point that

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a friend of mine, who has read the books since childhood, used to complain to me that his main gripe with Tolkien was that the adventuring and derring-do often slows to a crawl for the sake of “another fucking feast”.

But an even bigger criticism of Tolkien’s opus is that Middle-Earth’s history is one written by the victors, defending an idealised England that seemed only to exist in Tolkien’s head. There’s a noticeable lack of moral complexity throughout his works and their adaptations. Tolkien took his scope from the poetic eddas of Anglo-Saxon and Norse mythology, but its values are rooted in old J.R.R.’s Catholicism. The good guys are always good and heroic, and while they doubt themselves, it is through their heroism and good nature that they win the day. The bad guys are all obviously evil, with no defectors or sympathetic characters among their number. The good guys are also always white, while the bad guys are described as “swarthy” outsiders intent on reducing the pretty little country to ash. The women sit and look “fair”, and the eagles fly in and wrap everything up in a neat little bow.

When it comes to film adaptations, Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy is considered one of the best, but by the time it came around to film The Hobbit, Jackson and his screenwriters realised the dire need for Tolkien’s themes to be updated for a modern audience. The women, for instance, should actually do something, hence the addition of Tauriel and the women of Laketown taking up arms in The Battle of the Five Armies. On that note, it’s the last film in the cinematic Tolkien universe that actually comes close to going against the very anti-war views that Tolkien stood for, turning what was initially written as the inevitable denouement of “what do we do with Erebor now that the

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dragon’s gone” into an excuse to do a great big CGI battle royale before the rap party in the Shire.

There have been other attempts to retrofit more modern values into the legendarium.

Kirill Yeskov, a Russian paleontologist, penned a critical narrative called The Last Ringbearer in 1999. Taking place after the War of the Ring, it completely flips the traditional Tolkien moral perspective on its head. Sauron and his orcs are rational scientists who wish to bring progressive industrialisation to Middle-Earth, which is sorely lacking in innovation due to its stagnant monarchy and medieval technology. The hobbits are non-existent, and Aragorn is a puppet of the elves, who believe that they should be “masters of the world”. They enlist Gandalf, here depicted as a puritanical war-monger intent on bringing “a Final Solution to the Mordorian problem”, and yes, that is a direct quote. While lauded in its native Russia, the Tolkien estate has worked to prevent any English adaptation from reaching England and ruining the purity of the original work.

In contrast to Tolkien, industry was very much part and parcel of what made George R.R. Martin a fantasy writer (other than having two R initials to his name). Martin grew up in Bayonne, a fishing town and industrial hub on the coast of New Jersey.

In an interview with New Jersey Monthly Magazine, Martin described his boyhood in the 1950s as alternating between reading and adventure, as he went to explore the junkyards and factories that surrounded his house in the projects.

He could never comprehend how in the books he read, there were just acres and acres of countryside. “I had a hard time picturing

that because I would say, well why doesn’t anybody live there? What do you mean, you cross the street and there’s nothing there?

You cross the street and it’s the next town. I thought the whole world was one big city,” he says. Martin has been portrayed by fans as a grim reaper killing his darlings, but it’s refreshing to see him as Bran on the rooftops.

While working as a writer for television in the 80s and 90s, he began to pen A Song of Ice and Fire in 1994. The America that Martin lived through was every bit the opposite of Tolkien’s life. The economic scene was one of cutthroat capitalists. Businesses rose and fell on the whims of their rulers, except here the wolves were more Wall Street than House Stark, and the Lannisters never paid their debts. Meanwhile, the burgeoning internet allowed people to connect and better get a look inside each other’s heads, and an increasing awareness for diversity and representation among minorities was taking root.

But what ultimately led Martin to write A Song of Ice and Fire was what he saw in Tolkien; or rather, what he didn’t see. Martin has stated that he sees in Tolkien’s work a distinct lack of human perspective, and to address it, he simply looked to reality, taking his cues from the impartial views of historical novels. Some have taken this stance on realism in fantasy in his work to mean bleak moral grayness, but when asked by the Wall Street Journal about whether fiction should reflect reality, Martin clarified and offered a sobering assessment of why we engage with these made-up stories.

“I think all fiction needs to reflect reality,” he said. “Fiction is lies, we’re writing about people who never existed and events that never happened when we write fiction… But

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it has to have a truth at the core of it. You’re still writing about people, you’re writing about the human condition.”

After April 2011, A Song of Ice and Fire became forever better known as Game of Thrones, the big-budget television adaptation. Its premiere was met with lukewarm reception, its sets and budgets appreciated, but appearing dry and lifeless upon execution. But when the finale came and showed the execution of Ned Stark, a man so bound to honour he wouldn’t look out of place in Middle Earth, Martin, Benihoff and Weiss’ intentions were clear: this wasn’t your grandfather’s fantasy series.

By that point, it was good enough for viewers of non-fantasy to start watching in great numbers, propelling the show to commercial success while sending the books to the top of the best-selling lists. Dance with Dragons sold 170,000 copies in its first day alone.

History may be written by the victors, but in Game of Thrones, the audience knows how they got there.

When I was preparing to write this article, I knew I had to go to a pro to give context to my thoughts. Fortunately, everyone has an opinion on Game of Thrones, so I didn’t even have to leave my flat. When I asked my flatmates what the appeal of Thrones was to them, beyond the immediate response of “boobs” and “sudden twists” (two things that obviously make for great television), they told me that while Tolkien did the admirable feat of building a world from the ground-up, Martin could write characters better.

Which I suppose is where the appeal of Game of Thrones lies. The decisions that transform the world come not from great battles, great men and the legends they inspired, but from the actions or inactions of smaller players all

working an angle. Even as he kills or forgets them in equal measure, Martin lovingly built a world in which to fit all his characters, and crafted a narrative wherein every reader got a peek into their heads.

And what a diverse group of heads they are.

It may not be perfect—every season seems to get a recap counting the ways in which its female protagonists get screwed over—but at the very least, the show addresses the lack of diversity and perspective in fantasy, which was previously limited to White AngloSaxon Tolkienians. If the sheer amount of progressive thinkpieces and fan praise it generates are anything to go by, Game of Thrones is giving context to the very real battles that marginalised groups face in dayto-day life. Gone are the days of the straight white dude as ruler. Now anyone can be king: women, dwarves, bastards and broken things. People who make mistakes and then suffer for them.

“Sometimes what seemed to be a good decision turned around and bit you in the ass; it was the law of unintended consequences,” Martin told Rolling Stone. “I’ve tried to get at some of these in my books. My people who are trying to rule don’t have an easy time of it. Just having good intentions doesn’t make you a wise king.”

Martin may have sacrificed world-building for character interactions, but if his monumental success is anything to go by, it was to his and Game of Thrones’ benefit. You may visit for the world, but you stay for the people.

spider” as a child growing up in South Africa, and that this was what led him to create Ungoliant and her evil kin. It seemed an oddity to me that he would elevate such an ordinary creature to supernatural status, and this primal story seemed too good to be true.

I later learned the less interesting truth: he wrote them into The Hobbit because his son, Michael, was an arachnophobe. But even if we know the truth, it’s the more visceral story that has already been made legend, which I think says more about how we come to approach fantasy and what we take away from it.

Fantasy is about taking elements from the real world and blowing them up to great proportion, but what we really want, it seems, is the psychological edge that comes with it— one that had been ignored in Tolkien’s day but fully embraced and celebrated in Martin’s books now. Perhaps in time, a new king of fantasy will rise to replace him.

Works can live and die on how they are willing to keep with the times. The social attitudes that influenced Tolkien and Martin alike came to influence their work, and in turn, those who read it. If our society is an organism, with every individual like a cell that produces and consumes, then art is the bile and phlegm that is coughed up to indicate the health of the organism. Your fantasy is more real than you think.

If you asked me what I liked about Tolkien, on the other hand, it’s always the giant spiders that seem to stick with me. There’s a story that Tolkien was bitten by a “baboon

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ESCAPE FROM CONSPIRACY EARTH

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M

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8:00 10:00

MOIST MONDAY MORNINGS with Mitchell

RIGHT with Robbie

EXACTLY WHAT YOU’D EXPECT with Alexa

JIZZ-JAZZ with Josh

TBD with Ashlee

THE HANGOVER SHOW with Jazz and Ollie

TBD with Ekta

10:00 12:00

SHENAN AND SHANTER with Jake

INFIDEL CASTRO with Phillip

MUMS CAR with Hailey and Michael

CRAZY GIRL AND OLD GUY with James

80% with Dayanthia

JUMPSTART with Hanna

WAKE AND BAKE with Pearce Duncan

12:00 2:00

MONDAY MEAL TIME with Jakie

QUEER PUNK with Kate

YOUNGTILED with Selena

GRASSLANDS with Savannah

HELP with Rob

MANDATORY with Amanda

TBD with Jess

2:00 4:00

THE SLAMMIN’ SALMON with Josh

RUGRATS HIGHSCHOOLERS

TBD with Kayla

TBD with Damon

NORTHBOUND ON RAMP with Nick and Alex

THOUGHTFOUL HOURS OF BLAOW with Hamish

PRE ROAST SUNDAYS with Olivia

4:00 7:00

DRAKE DRIVING with Kevin

TWIN GEEKS with Arie and Fairooz

B1 with Tim 1

B2 with Tim 2

BAD SCIENCE with Rachael and Harri

EATINGBANTERMUSIC with Tanaka

YOUR OTHER FRIENDS with Charlotte and Sharon

7:00 9:00

COLLEGE DROPOUTS with Jack W

DEATH BY BEATS with Jack B

NOT SO LATE NIGHT with Keari

SEVEN BLUNT with Jethro

420 AIR PURIFIER BOYS with Sean, Connor and Ollie

ADVENTURE TIME with Jack the Dog and Finn the Human

THE KIMONO SESSIONS with Kayden

9:00 11:00

TBD with Kayla and Lydia

TBD with Giorgio

DURRIES FOR BREAKFAST with Emmerson

SWAVY with Felix, Abid and Josh

THE SESSION with Ethan and Waiata

FILL THIS SPOT

RESERVED

11:00 1:00

LATE NIGHT

TBD with Chris Gilman

SHOW SCHEDULE 2015 SALIENT FM editor@salient.org.nz

issue 5 | introverts

MUSIC

36

Nothing Touches Me

Smoke and Mirrors

British India

Imagine Dragons

Kate Dowdle

Jonathan Hobman

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othing Touches Me is the fifth album release from Melbourne alternative rock group British India. I love listening to an album where the artist seems to have put real thought into the structure of the track list as a whole, and Nothing Touches Me delivers in this respect. It’s an uplifting album without being too optimistic, and it also gives doses of reality without being depressing. And let’s face it, that cover art is pretty cool too.

I read that British India play “tough but melodic garage influenced rock” (Allmusic.com), which is a pretty spot on observation. The opening track “Spider Chords” gives insight into this. Variations on the vocals, layers of chords, the building drums, and the big guitar riffs near the end all make this a great track. This song is apparently about falling in love with the same person twice, but honestly I just like the poetic lyrics that aren’t really telling a clear story, just for their quality and point of difference.

“Suddenly” is a simple but awesome song about the feeling when love first hits you. The big drums and loud, loveable chorus make this track a stand out. “Blame It All On Me” challenges your instincts and makes for an interesting track. The echoing intro with steady drums and a building beat imply that the song is going somewhere happy and uplifting, but then you realise that the lyrics are actually incredibly sad. “Jay Walker” adds a nice slow pace song for the middle of the album. The title track “Nothing Touches Me” has a more classic garagey sound, with strained vocals and a more intense use of the guitars and drums. All of the components fit really well together to showcase a total Nothing Touches Me theme. A final stand out for me is “This is How it Feels” which tells a story, and adds another nice change of pace to the album.

This album isn’t trying to be epic or life-changing—but because the album as a whole is so good it becomes better than the ordinary.

The range of songs showcases the band’s ability to build an album for listening to from start to finish. British India’s talented lyrics, vocals, and layers of tones and chords set this apart as well. I would recommend it if you like a bit of low key alternative rock—and you’re not expecting the next Bob Dylan or Kings of Leon.

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magine Dragons tend to produce the kind of music your brother or sister might listen to, assuming your brother or sister is into terrible music. Their latest album Smoke and Mirrors is better than the usual snuff I’m used to from this lot though, so I’ll grant them that.

To remind myself of the context of this album I Spotified their most popular songs and winced. There’s annoying voice enunciation, generic melody/lyrics and a lot of crowds clapping in time. I don’t believe in hipsters but I think this is the kind of people one is referring to when they use such a term. The first song “Demons” gave me the feeling that I’ve heard it on the radio… though I think realistically I hadn’t. The second song was no better. “I feel it in my bones/ Welcome to the new age...”—good lord. Oh, this is “Radioactive”. I’ve heard this one before; I didn’t like it then, I don’t like it now. As a rule, any band that goes “Oh woah-oh woah oh” I keep at arms length.

But now we come to this brand new album Smoke and Mirrors, and I think they’ve come a fair way. Don’t get me wrong, it’s entirely unremarkable, but it’s more endurable than what has gone before.

I think it’s because they’re slower and not dripping with as much confidence. It’s darker. “Stars are only visible in darkness” goes one line, pretty vanilla but you get the general vibe. There’s metal on this album—which is interesting and again somehow nicer than their usual syrup. Metal I guess is hard to mess up. I’m not a particular fan of metal, I just think that it’s like scrambled eggs or soup.

“Shots” is quite a nice one actually—a really nice one—my new favourite... of theirs. Please. Simple, genuine, really nice sweet simple guitar undertones, very sharp-y and minor, with interesting intervals music wise. They’re headed in an okay direction. It’s almost enjoyable and it can be put it on in the background without wincing. “I bet my life on you” is their new Newman-y, On Top of the World reprise.

It’s less advert fodder-y, but there’s still crowd clapping, which is a concern.

37

ustralian indie pop outfit San Cisco have just released their second studio album, Gracetown. With three EPs (Golden Revolver, Awkward, and Beach) and their self-titled debut studio album already under their belt, it’s safe to say that San Cisco is here to stay.

The quartet (made up of Jordi Davieson, Josh Biondillo, Nick Gardner and Scarlett Stevens) was formed in 2009 as they finished high school in Fremantle, Western Australia. A few years later, they released their hit single “Awkward”, which has now amassed more than seven million views on YouTube. That single, along with “Wild Things” and “Fred Astaire”, have all placed in Triple J’s Hottest 100. The band worked on Gracetown with producer Steven Schram and it’s now entered the Australian charts at #2, only just falling behind Madonna’s Rebel Heart.

Gracetown San Cisco Alice Reid

Gracetown is miles better than their self-titled debut and it speaks volumes about the progress San Cisco has made with their sound. It definitely has a more mature feel to it, but it’s still filled with the simple melodies and good hooks that they do so well. It’s also worth mentioning that the band is currently touring the album in America and Mexico without bassist Nick Gardner as he’s literally shot himself in the foot—there’s a photo of the wound in various places on the internet but I don’t recommend checking it out.

The album begins with its first single “RUN”, an upbeat track that according to the band started out as a “drum and bass groove”. Syncopated gasps and handclaps create a pretty interesting beat in this one that works surprisingly well. It’s super catchy and even though the single was only released in October, it still managed to come in at number 33 on the Triple J Hottest 100 last year. The second single from the album is “Too Much Time Together”. The song is about a dysfunctional relationship and it’s apparently the track that took the least amount of time to write and record. Again, the track is catchy and upbeat—the kind of thing that San Cisco does best. The guitar chords are reminiscent of their previous work and the lyrics are refreshing and real with the chorus “We spend too much time together/ I wanna be with you forever/ But we need space/ You should stay at your place”.

The first track on the album that features Stevens as the main vocalist is “Magic”.

The track uses vocal percussion and has a late 90s pop vibe to it (think Nelly Furtado but cooler). “Snow” is another highlight from the album that heads in a more electronic direction. It starts off feeling pretty dreamy before jumping into some high pitched vocals. Like many of the songs on this record, it’s about broken hearts and relationship struggles—this time in terms of the strain that touring and travelling puts on relationships.

The tone of the album changes slightly with “Wash It All Away”, a song that came about from playing around with “filthy drum sounds and high vocal melodies”. It’s a little more relaxed than most of the other tracks on the album with lyrics like “Tell me is it love or a lust?/ Be honest, be honest”. It’s followed by “Bitter Winter” and then “Jealousy”, which is another interesting track that began as finished music. According to the band, “Jordie just freestyled some words” on it and “it turned it out to be pretty cool”. And it did—a definite highlight, and it also features Isabella Manfredi from The Preatures.

Towards the end of the album is a fairly simple acoustic track called “Skool”, a lighthearted high school love song with lyrics like “English was not my forte/ But I fought for you/ Distraction was just a reaction to you”. It’s simple and cute, and it’s a definite throwback to the band’s earlier stuff, which is cool because it keeps that youthful vibe around.

Ultimately, this isn’t an album that I can fault. Every song on this album is endearing in its own way, they work well together and they’re also great standalone tracks. The fact that the band can so easily break up vocals between Davieson and Stevens is always impressive, but on this album it really adds another dimension to their sound. It’s not often that a whole album comes together without at least one somewhat disappointing track, but with Gracetown San Cisco has done it well.

editor@salient.org.nz

MUSIC

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issue 5 | introverts

Kidnapping Mr Heineken

FILM

38

Directed by Daniel Alfredson

Cameron Gray

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h, beer. We Kiwis love it almost as much as we love our rugby.

It makes up the majority of our overall alcohol sales and every drinker has an epic booze-fueled story to tell, indulging in excess being a habit that has proven hard to break.

You’d therefore think a movie with the name of one of the world’s most popular lagers in it would be a smash hit, a robust and satisfying brew with a malty taste, slightly fruity aroma and dry finish with some gentle bitterness, as the actual beer’s tasting notes describe it. Unfortunately, what you’re really getting is barely-drinkable piss water that somehow smells like compost and that people only drink because the packaging looks pretty fancy.

Kidnapping Mr. Heineken is as bland and tasteless as action movies come, showing a generic bunch of criminals doing generic criminal things to their generic innocent victims. The only thing this film has going for it is its basis on real events. Yes, the head of the Heineken brewery and his driver really were kidnapped. Yes, the guys who did it really did get the biggest ransom ever. No, it does not make for an interesting movie. Not one with Sam Worthington in it anyway.

As I sat in the theatre with a few couples on their only night out, I

just kept thinking to myself: I feel like I’ve seen this before. I’ve seen it every time I’ve stayed up way too late on a Saturday night watching TV. It literally has the quality of one of those late night movies TV3 shows after Nightline or Paul Henry; you’ve never heard of it, but you know it’s going to put you to sleep with crass and banal dialogue, a lack of any semblance of character, and an overarching sense that nobody really cared. If I hadn’t been sent to an actual cinema to view Kidnapping Mr. Heineken, it could just as easily be another one of those pieces of crap. Not even Anthony Hopkins could save it. I just thought he was playing a richer and more profane Burt Munro, without the bike of course. Seriously, don’t bother with this one. You may think you’re fancy by going to see a fancy independent movie at a fancy cinema, but it just indicates you have little taste.

Kind of like drinking Heineken.

The Interview

Directed by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg

Elizabeth Kim

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fter the whole Sony scandal that occurred late last year, I really didn’t think Rogen and Goldberg’s The Interview (2014) would make the cut onto the big screen. The typecasting of Rogen in several comical roles meant that there was no room for any actual political thought to develop from the film. Categorised as a political satire comedy, the film is a meagre 112 minutes long and full of the typical comedy and action genre conventions.

The cast includes cameos from Eminem, Rob Lowe, Guy Fieri, and Joseph-Gordon Levitt, to name a few, and with this, the film has a promising potential to turn itself into a comic spectacle. However, it is no more than an unnecessary embarrassment in the filmmakers’ histories. The film is merely comprised of several mid-shots of explosions, an uncomfortable sex scene, and a gruesome death.

The film is centred on Dave Skylark (James Franco) and Aaron Rapoport’s (Seth Rogen) trip to North Korea for a scripted interview with Kim Jong-un (not played by the real Kim Jong-un just FYI) and an underlying mission to terminate him. When the two arrive in North Korea, Kim Jong-un, a devoted fan of Dave Skylark, welcomes him on a tour of his home. Dave learns that Kim,

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like any other person, likes sexualising women, blowing stuff up, and drinking margaritas.

The script involves a mix of Korean and English lines—the translated phrases on screen epitomise the lack of understanding of the language. As a South Korean viewer it was awkward to hear my native language so heavily accented that it just sounded like your school principal trying to speak Te Reo. None of the Korean dialogue spoken in the film actually sounded Korean.

Despite its many weaknesses, I can only give a subjective point of view. If you’re the type of person to wear a Native American Indian headdress to a costume party and you think sushi is the most oriental food you’re ever going to eat—you’re in luck, this film might just be for you. In contrast, if you’re the type of person who pays attention to the mise-en-scene and enjoys a good screening of your favourite Hollywood classic, I would definitely give this one a miss.

The only highlight for me was the puppy, because puppies are adorable.

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FILM

CINDERELLA DIRECTED BY KENNETH BRANAGH

Baz Macdonald

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inderella is one of the most prominent fairy tales of the twentieth century. Now, almost 70 years after the release of Disney’s animated version of the story, Kenneth Branagh has released his incredibly faithful live-action Cinderella. But despite how wonderfully beautiful and superbly crafted the movie was, I couldn’t help but ask myself: Who is this movie for? And are these messages relevant anymore?

The film tells the story of Cinderella exactly as we have all heard it a thousand times before, which is perhaps the film’s greatest flaw.

Within the first five minutes, when I realised how loyal this retelling was going to be, I groaned internally, knowing exactly how the next ninety minutes were going to play out. But I told myself: this movie is to introduce young audiences to the story.

There are two problems with this. Firstly, the film is far more mature than you would think, often recalling nostalgia for 1950’s romance and dancing movies more than it does any form of modern children’s movie. Kids throughout the cinema squirmed through intellectually demanding scenes, as I was enthralled by the pathos. So this movie definitely doesn’t seem aimed at the kiddies. Secondly, is this story really one we want to teach young girls and boys? Branagh’s retelling is entirely faithful to the 1950 film, sexist and degrading portrayal of women included. Cinderella is still portrayed as a helpless damsel in distress. There were many moments when the evil stepmother was being an absolute arsehole, and all I wanted Cinderella to do was give her a good kicking. But of course she doesn’t, spouting incredibly vague sentiments of kindness and love instead. Children’s movies have grown more complex than these Disney sentiments.

Pixar movies, for example, teach kids wonderful lessons without shoving it down their throats, simply through having narratives and characters that support good behaviours and thoughts.

Though this Cinderella doesn’t remedy the sexism of past retellings, it does attempt somewhat to balance gender representation through its portrayal of the Prince. There are several scenes in which the Prince reveals his insecurities and weakness. A particularly praiseworthy scene includes the prince at his father’s deathbed, which concludes with him weeping in the fetal position under his

dying father’s arms. Though this demonstration of male weakness doesn’t forgive the problematic representation of women, it feels better than nothing.

But despite the questions of why this movie was made and for whom, there is no denying that it is a beautiful piece of cinema. Colourful, vibrant and often a joy to behold, Branagh’s direction brings the world to life, giving the film a fluidity and form that often kept me engaged when the narrative didn’t. There are quite a few set pieces as well, such as a tense carriage ride, which give the film a muchneeded sense of action. Personally, I was smitten by an extended ballroom dancing scene between Cinderella and the Prince, the exquisitely choreographed movements accompanied by equally superb direction. However, the little girl beside me didn’t seem to share my enjoyment: she took the moment as an opportunity to turn around and rest her face against the back of her seat.

The film is very well cast, using many lesser-known talents and only ever using big celebrities in roles they are very much suited for.

Lily James as Cinderella and Richard Madden as the Prince were particularly likable, which is surprising as they both were often working with pretty over-the-top material. Cate Blanchett as the Evil Stepmother and Helena Bonham Carter as the fairy godmother were also excellent. Blanchett gave a performance which gave complexity to a historically one-dimensional character; Bonham Carter, on the other hand, was working with a script that was clearly written specifically for her, and so of course she rocked it.

Cinderella is a beautiful film, but the question needs to be asked about its relevance in the twenty-first century. In the end the real draw should be the short film that opens it: Frozen Fever. Now that is a franchise that understands how to make meaningful kids’ entertainment for this century.

editor@salient.org.nz

issue 5 | introverts

GAMES

40

Old School Gems:

VIB RIBBON Developer: NanaOn-Sha Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment

DYING LIGHT DEVELOPED BY TECHLAND, PUBLISHED BY WARNER BROS. GAMES

PC, Linux, PS4, XBONE

Jack Young

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nteresting characters, a fun crafting system, and an engaging open world make Dying Light the equivalent of a Far Cry game with zombies.

Dying Light’s gameplay is reminiscent of developer Techland’s previous work, the Dead Island games. The player primarily wields a series of ridiculous and lethal melee weapons to take down swarms of the undead. What’s new is the introduction of a free running mechanic. It feels great to move swiftly through the environment, and you’re going to need to, as the world’s size is absolutely massive!

This zombie apocalypse is set in Harran, an eastern-feeling city with a resemblance to ancient Turkey. There are two regions: The Slums and Ember City. Both offer a unique gorgeous look and exhilarating different ways to traverse the land.

Surprisingly, the personalities and plot of Dying Light surpass much of the action genre. You’ll find yourself caring about specific people, and the surviving population of Harran. This can be a real bitch because Techland is rather overzealous in its killing off of the supporting cast.

Of course, in any game featuring the living dead, combat is key. You’ll start by

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bludgeoning zombies until they drop. With time there will be a progression to more devastating melee weapons, requiring only one or two precision hits to the skull. A set of well thought out combat perks also keeps the game fresh well into its tenth hour.

Unfortunately Dying Light suffers from the same issue as most survival horror games: how does the developer keep enemies a threat whilst empowering the player? The first time I met a human with a gun, I only just killed him. He left me with an assault rifle, and ten bullets. Two hours later I had used three of those bullets, only in desperate circumstances. I did not want to attract the dead with the sound of my rifle. Experiences like these are truly memorable and make Dying Light stand out—that is, until about halfway through the campaign when firearms become easily accessible. Gunplay is solid, but I wish Techland had stuck with the survival elements so rarely done well in open-world games.

I would be surprised if Dying Light did not prove to be one of 2015’s most impressive games. Minor issues aside, a well-realised world, terrific combat and an original narrative means you should be playing this game. I know I will be.

For reasons I cannot fully comprehend, rhythm games seem to be making a comeback with the announcement of a next-gen Rock Band game. How exciting this must be for those who actually bought the plastic instruments.

I, however, have neither the space nor the money necessary to get such rubbish, so I set out on a search to find a rhythm game from the PS1 era, one that would offer fun and challenging rhythm gameplay with a great soundtrack and cool characters.

Disappointed that I’d probably have to play PaRappa the Rapper again, I nearly gave up, until I came across a strange sight on the PS Store.

A rabbit. Drawn in vector graphics.

No colour. No filled-in polygons.

Barely even a picture.

I had never seen anything like it on the PlayStation, let alone any console going back to the Atari 2600.

I instantly knew I had found that game. I had found Vib Ribbon.

If you’ve never had the pleasure of playing this weird little rarity, you are in for a real treat. Combining a simple but effective graphical style with a soundtrack of insane J-pop (courtesy of the group Laugh and Peace) and a surprisingly deep gameplay that is simple to learn but hard to master, Vib Ribbon is a fun little game that could only have come from Japan. Controlling Vibri the rabbit along that line is addictive and frustrating, but ultimately rewarding on the game’s base tracks.

The real meat of the game, however, is being able to use any music CD with the game, generating a unique level from any track off any album you want. Unfortunately, I bought a copy to use with my PSP, so I couldn’t use this feature. If anyone can get around that, let me know, or at least let me borrow your PS3.

41

The Remains of the Day Kazuo Ishiguro Faber & Faber 1989 Rob Yates

iven the formal rigour of this Booker Prize-winning gem, it can be surprising to discover that the bulk of its prose was laid down over a single four-week period— ominously dubbed “the Crash” by Ishiguro and his wife—with scarce thought given to early errors, contradictions or lapses in style. Any literary misdemeanours must have been ironed out in the re-drafts, since The Remains of the Day endures as a masterclass in character revelation and narrative architecture. Ishiguro’s brief but intensive retreat from the world, in which he spurned all emails, social calls and household chores to write from 9am until 10.30pm, allowed the novelist, in his own words, “to reach a mental state in which my fictional world was more real to me than the actual one”.

The fictional and psychological world he captures is that of one Mr Stevens, an ageing, meticulous, profession-soaked, long-serving butler of an English stately home, who decides to take a roadtrip through England’s green and pleasant land to visit an old female colleague and friend. A 1950s motorcar jaunt through the Home Counties might sound sparse on thrills, but the ride allows Stevens to meditate, reminisce and relate extensive, mildly obsessive details of his inter-war

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The Buried Giant Kasuo Ishiguro Faber & Faber 2015

Jayne Mulligan

t has been ten years since Ishiguro’s last novel Never Let Me Go was released. With bated breath the public has awaited this release, The Buried Giant, which promises to be “a luminous story about the act of forgetting and the power of memory”.

Much like Never Let me Go, Ishiguro flouts genre categories; here he refuses to let The Buried Giant be considered fantasy, though it is set in Arthurian Britain, in the wake of Roman Rule, and prior to the Anglo-Saxon take over. The medieval backdrop provides a storytelling lexicon in the old medieval sense, which enhances the themes of memory and history present throughout the novel. Most significant to the setting is the presence of dragons and ogres, and in the same land a mysterious mist has descended, erasing the permanence of memories across many villages.

While the mist takes on an amorphous centrality in this novel, the key figures are elderly couple Axl and Beatrice, who undertake a quest to find their son after their recollections become faint from the mist.

Along their quest they encounter knights, monks, and mystical creatures; there is a scene in which Axl fights pixies. Axl and Beatrice want desperately to access their memories, to remember the years of love

years, a period that sees the rise of Nazism and the jittery collapse of gentleman politics, as well as the broad straining and gradual fragmentation of an entire British social order. He reflects upon his own marginal yet quietly impressive role over this time, serving and waiting upon “great” but often flawed aristocrats and heads of state. These personal musings spiral deeper into troubling doubts regarding dignity, self-worth, responsibility and emotional detachment in the face of professional duty.

It is a short but remarkably searing account of an individual faced with the growing prospect that all he has held dear over the years, all he has placed faith in, may have been unsound.

Salman Rushdie, a great admirer of the work, described the novel rather bruisingly as “a portrait of a wasted life”. There is more hope in it than that, I believe, but the dull ache of elderly disappointment, a sense of time and opportunities lost, romances never to be regained, have rarely been explored more movingly than here. If you find screens more palatable than pages, James Ivory’s 1993 adaptation, starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, is well worth a punt.

they shared, and to find their son. But as the quest continues, we see it may not be as simple as that.

Despite access to multiple narrators, the reader is held in an oblique position; the mist has altered every character’s memory.

Ishiguro has given the reader access to this world through the unreliability of the narrators; each has a view as opaque as the next. This is the first work in which Ishiguro explores the significance of memory on an individual and societal level; for “when is it better to remember, and when is it better to forget?”—a question he posits in a Goodreads interview that also forms the central question of the novel.

If this book were pulled apart for analysis and strong narrative theory applied to it, it would surely yield positive results. But the prose is flat, the plot is slow to unfold, the complexities are fairly uncomplicated, and the enjoyment level is like riding in neutral; you’re going somewhere but nothing is moving you. In many ways Ishiguro is resting on his laurels; symptomatic of his popularity, with two previous books selling over a million copies, his name upon this book may be all it needs.

editor@salient.org.nz

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issue 5 | introverts

SCIENCE

42

SCIENCE New New Guinea Wildlife Gus Mitchell

A new World Wildlife Fund report has announced the discovery of over 1000 new animal and plant species in New Guinea.

Papua New Guinea is an island that sits in the Tropic of Capricorn, just above the northernmost point of Australia, and is mostly made of mountains and highlands covered in dense rainforests. This makes it extremely inaccessible to both natives and explorers, who can only get in on foot or by aeroplane. And you thought it was a pain to get to Kelburn every morning.

But for biologists, it has always been worth the trip, because it rivals the Amazon in sheer amount of biodiversity. They say if you go to New Guinea and you look, you will find a new species. This goes for both land and sea. New Guinea sits in the Coral Triangle, a region of ocean that also encompasses Indonesia and Malaysia, and is described as one of the most biodiverse oceanic habitats in the world.

The survey took place between 1998 and 2008, listing about 1060 species of new marsupials, birds, reptiles, fish and insects.

Here are just some of the discoveries:

New Guinea is also home to a number of

A new honeyeater bird, the Wattled Smoky Honeyeater, Melipotes carolae, which was found just minutes after discoverers landed in the Foja Mountains in northern New Guinea. This bird is in the same family as our own tui and bellbird, but unlike its chatty New Zealand cousins, it is completely mute.

A blue monitor lizard, Varanus macraei, found on islands off the coast of the Vogelkop owr Bird’s Head Peninsula in northern New Guinea.

A new species of river shark, Glyphis garracki, a little-known genus of which only sixteen specimens have been described. River sharks dwell near shorelines and river mouths in the Asia-Pacific and are seldom seen by humans.

A new species of rainbow fish, Chilatherina alleni. Yes, just like the book, although not quite as iridescent. In the 10 years the survey was conducted, 33 new species of fish were named, seven of which were rainbow fish.

A long nosed echidna

other strange animals, some of which it shares with neighbouring Australia, while others are unique to the island. In addition to marsupials like possums and wallabies, its forests are home to tree kangaroos. These are climbing lemur-like animals that don’t resemble their ground-hopping namesakes, but still share a common ancestor. The only native monotreme (egg-laying mammal) is the long-beaked echidna, a larger variant of the spiny anteater found on mainland Australia.

New Guinea is most famous for its bird life, which includes the various members of the colourful bird-of-paradise family and the cassowary, a large flightless bird with a bright blue head and neck, which is famous for being fiercely protective of its young. One slash from its elongated foot claws is capable of slicing a man’s stomach open. Unfortunately, the natural habitats of New Guinea are constantly threatened by logging, urban expansion, overfishing and global warming.

The latter threat is usually associated with polar ice caps, but it affects tropical regions as well: increased heat about the forests and savannas in the tropics dries out the native foliage and makes them vulnerable to brush and forest fires. In response to this, almost all of the species discovered have labelled “Vulnerable” or “Endangered” on the IUCN Red List, a catalogue that keeps tabs of the conversation status of endangered animals.

You can learn more about the work of the World Wildlife Fund or make a donation at www.worldwildlife.org.

A cuscus.

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A long nosed echidna.

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Brontë Ammundsen

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team of researchers from the University of Queensland and the Queensland Brain Institute may be in the midst of a breakthrough in Alzheimer treatment research, with their latest treatment restoring memory in 75 per cent of tested mice.

erroneously formed protein clusters. These clusters manifest inside brain neurons, due to a mutation in the tau protein. Both of these undesirable structures disrupt neuron information and nutrient relaying in the brain.

Alzheimer’s disease is characterised by memory loss and cognitive functioning impairment, and is usually attributed to brain abnormalities called amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles. Amyloid plaques are extracellular deposits found between neurons, made up of aggregated clusters of the beta-amyloid protein. Similarly, neurofibrillary tangles are comprised of

The Australian research team has developed a non-invasive technique utilizing ultrasound, sending super fast oscillating waves into the brain to open the blood-brain barrier and stimulate cells called microglial cells to enter the brain. These microglial cells work as “waste removers”, and actively clear out these undesired protein clumps.

The therapy was explored by genetically altering mice to produce excess amyloid plaques. The mice were then treated almost daily for a few weeks with the ultrasound therapy. After the treatment, mice were given three memory tasks: a maze, a novel object recognition task, and an active place avoidance task. 75 per cent of treated mice showed full memory restoration, with no damage to surrounding brain tissue. A control group of mice that did not receive treatment also completed the tasks, with no memory restoration demonstrated. Higher animal model trials are soon to begin with sheep, with human trials hopefully beginning in 2017.

editor@salient.org.nz

SCIENCE

Promising New Alzheimer’s Treatment

issue 5 | introverts

FOOD

44

Review: Grill, Meats, Beer Hannah Douglass

After featuring on a Buzzfeed list of the 18 Best Burgers in New Zealand, I decided to check out Grill Meats Beer on Cuba Street. It was the first Wellington burger establishment on the list—a logical place to start when you intend to work your way through all of them. I’d walked past the place several times before and had always drooled a little bit over their specials board that nearly always featured some variation of a pulled pork burger.

The night I went, it was cold and miserable outside but when I got inside Grill Meats Beer I forgot about the awful weather. It was warm and bustling (even for 8pm on a tame Thursday night)—the smell of grilling burgers just reminded me of sunny days and work shifts that aren’t 13 hours long, unlike the one I had just endured.

We were immediately greeted by friendly wait-staff who didn’t muck around. They knew we were there to eat and didn’t waste any time with unnecessary drama.

The whole place oozes efficiency. It’s a small dining space and it could quite easily feel cramped on the busiest nights. The tables aren’t any larger than they need to be and there are even coat hooks under them to hang your stuff (most likely all your extra layers, because we do live in Wellington after all) so you don’t waste floor space with it all.

Most efficient of all was the kitchen. The chefs there work like parts of a well-oiled machine and the food comes out quickly. And what food it was! Oh my God. I ordered the chicken version of the GMB Classic: 200g of brined, grilled chicken thigh, bacon aioli, lettuce, onion knots, BBQ sauce on a brioche bun. The “onion knots” were a fairly vague description—it turns out they’re a lot like onion bhaji.

The burger was so tall it was a challenge to eat, and impossible to eat tidily. Tip for young players: it’s probably not first date material. Once you’re at the stage where you can make a fool of yourself in front of your date, that’s when you come here. The challenge was well worth it, though—that burger is among the best I’ve ever eaten.

The only real disappointment was the fries—they were shoe-string, like what you get at Maccas. I would have preferred fries with a bit more substance to them, like some chunky beer-battered chips that have the attitude to suit the gutsy, fun atmosphere and the unapologetic badass-ery of the burgers.

Average price: around $20 a meal.

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45

Lydia and Mitch

Shochu Cost: $10 per wee bottle thing Alcohol Volume: A lot, probably Pairing: Bloody top notch dinner at Grill Meats Beer, Taylor Swift Verdict: “Mitch will literally never let me rate anything this high again so I’m carpe diem-ing.”

A solo Lydia review this week as Mitch is away in Melbourne probably having a better time than all of us.* Additionally, in another departure from the norm, I will be reviewing a semi-expensive drink purchased in a bar instead of something closely resembling granny piss from Countdown in Newtown. This is both because I didn’t want to reveal my true nature and review a cheap shitty wine (again) and because Shōchū is honestly so great guys, it’s so great.

Shōchū is a Japanese spirit made from potatoes and rice and stuff. If I were at all methodical, I would have tasted it in a variety of different ways. I didn’t. For the sake of thoroughness, we can probably imagine that it tastes gross when neat, better when mixed with something, and increasingly palatable as the night goes on. As it stands I was a bit already a bit sozzled when I started drinking it and only sampled it mixed with the drink of the gods, Lift. With that in mind, you should take me incredibly seriously when I say that it was the greatest thing I could have hoped for in the circumstances.

A word on the circumstances—you may have noticed earlier that I said I purchased the Shōchū in a bar. This was a half-truth. It was purchased at the Taste of Korea BBQ Buffet where my workmates and I were taking full advantage of the excellent karaoke rooms.

Highlights of this evening included taking a picture of my sister’s boyfriend asleep on Cuba Street, more Taylor Swift than was strictly necessary, and talking (too much) about a World Trade Organization case involving Shōchū (I hate me too, don’t worry).

Shōchū was sweet, very quaffable and quite surprisingly tasted a lot like vodka mixed with Lift. I will endeavour to try it in a more authentic form someday but it was a Friday, I was singing Fleetwood Mac, and I was happy.

2 for 1 Margherita

pizzas every friday from 3pm

The Hunter Lounge

The Hunter Lounge

*UPDATE: Mitch just messaged me to say he saw a pram full of husky puppies so he is 100 per cent having a better time than all of us.

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ARTS

46

issue 5 | introverts

Your guide to the Renaissance superstars This week:

Michelangelo

Italian. Sculptor. Painter. Architect. Poet. Badass.

1475-1504

Key works you need to know by the hand of Michelangelo: that massive sculpture in Florence of David, the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and the dome of St Peter’s basilica in Rome.

Michelangelo is a Renaissance superstar because his works were all massive in size (think statues and buildings), because he was influenced by Greek/Roman sculpture (which was rediscovered and popular in this period), and because of his rivalry with Leonardo da Vinci.

Michelangelo spent his artistic career twotiming Italian superpowers the Medici family and Pope Julius II. Unlike many geniuses Mike’s talent was recognised during his lifetime (he was called “the divine one”) and Pope Julius needed to utilise this famous talent to secure his authority as the head of the Italian state. Thus Mike was dragged to Rome and ordered to design and sculpt the Pope’s tomb, because important people want kick-ass monuments to be dead in. Took him forty years—let that sink in, forty—to complete the tomb and poor Mike didn’t

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even like it when it was finished. I hope it’s the thought that counts, Julius.

During those forty years Mike was interrupted from his beloved sculpting

by Julius to paint the ceiling of the Sistine chapel. Thing is, Mike hated painting and he wasn’t taking any shit from Julius on this one. He threw out Julius’ design and planned a narrative of the Book of Genesis (that’s the one where God creates the world, Eve eats the apple and Noah raps A Lonely Island’s “I’m On A Boat”). Essentially this painting became the world’s largest and most strangely placed comic strip. It covers the entire ceiling and has some insane illusionary architecture.

Because sculpting was his thang Mike painted the figures to look like sculptures.

It took him four years of craning his neck to finish the ceiling. It should also be noted that he was painting in fresco, a mix of fast drying plaster and paint that is really difficult to fix if you screw it up.

The best thing about the Sistine Chapel ceiling is that Mike painted a lot of naked male

with

Harriet Riley

figures, just chilling in the architecture and serving about as much purpose to the story of the Book of Genesis as an Abercrombie & Fitch model. This unconventional move from Mike (supported by the hundreds of poems he wrote to addressed to males and his own diary entries) has given rise to the theory that maybe Mike liked dudes.

Now Mike, your sexuality is no business of ours—only I would kind of love it if one of the institutions that is most opposed to homosexuality had had its ceiling famously (and awesomely) painted by a gay man who took the opportunity to say “fuck you I’m painting naked dudes on your sacred ceiling because I like them that way.” Given the historical context it is unlikely the Michelangelo was so bold and there are plenty of other theories that aren’t as sensationalist, but hey, art is open to interpretation.

So that’s the very brief highlights tour of Michelangelo “the divine”, who has been setting unrealistic male muscle standards since 1505.

Howzat?

As most of you will know, the ICC Cricket World Cup is currently being played in Australia and New Zealand. NZ are doing alright for a change and have nearly converted Tom back into a fan, “nearly” being the operative word as he’s still gunning for Aussie.

We thought we would give you a rundown of what you can expect to experience at the cricket—just in case you don’t feel like giving up nine hours of your Saturday to watch New Zealand’s lazy athletes outgrow each other’s “designer stubble”. So grab your box and let’s throw balls at each other.

Whenever the Olympics roll around we suddenly pretend to care about rowing and cycling. In a similar way, whenever anyone over thirty goes to the cricket they suddenly become the bowling, batting and fielding coach—because “I was in the first XI at high school and yeah, nah, I could have carried on with it.” The only thing more lacking than their sense of modesty is the microphone they think feeds directly into the ears of every Black Cap. Luke is from England, a country that still supports its team even though they manage to out-disgrace themselves each time they perform. So he found it amusing when the whole crowd started to abuse Ross Taylor after blocking a few balls, but fair enough— he is shit.

You can expect a free back massage from the child sitting behind you. He hasn’t realised how boring the cricket actually is yet and he’s kicking with excitement. Your personal bubble will receive no acknowledgement here as the people next to you shout out to the players who apparently can hear them. I hope you brought some money. Because you will soon realise that watching the cricket

actually uses more exercise than playing the game. This is mainly due to the inane nature of cricket and the need to keep “stretching your legs”. The only way to keep yourself amused is to buy Tui for $8 a plastic cup and eat rubbish food you don’t need every twenty minutes. Oh and good luck trying to use the toilet, more exposed shnags than a public swimming pool changing room.

Going to the cricket is one of the best lads’ outings you can have. Just don’t bring your girlfriend, or she will break up with you during the halftime break and your relationship will be shorter than Elliot’s innings.

Tip of the week: Don’t make your SnapStory a screenshot from the cricket on TV, everyone who cares is already watching the game and everyone else doesn’t give a shit.

See you back in the club rooms, Tom and Luke (mainly Luke; Tom fell asleep)

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