SPUR Magazine Issue The First by SPUR Magazine

This is a magazine called

Issue the First Volume the First Smarch 2012

SPUR and it contains an exclusive interview with

DAS RACIST a guide to the Fringe Festival an interview with Tom Gaynor poetry by Aidan Coleman reviews of 1Q84, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Descendents, The Iron Lady, Hunx, The Pogues an article by Rob Hunter an appeal by an Adelaide University student/parliamentary candidate short stories page numbers and more.

Also, it is free.

Contents Editorial

The Big Picture by Justin MacArthur

What Happened to History? by Vedrana Budimir

A Letter From Your Local Anarchists

Modern-day Antisemitism by Daryl McCann

An Interview with Raff Piccolo

Shit Politicians Say by Angus Shaw

Entrenching Disadvantage by Michael Arnold

Local Person: Tom Gaynor

An Interview with Das Racist

Music reviews

Fringe guide

The Life of the Artist by Jas Shenstone

Review: ‘One-Boob-Eighty-Four’ (Murakami’s 1Q84)

Film reviews

The Crow, a story by Lucy Haas

Principles of Two-Dimensionality, a story by Katie O’Hara

Poetry

Fun.

No Laughing Matter by Rob Hunter

The editors would like to thank all the contributors and advertisers who helped make the inaugural issue of SPUR Magazine possible. If you would like to advertise in subsequent issues of this magazine, please send an email to spur.mag@gmail.com with any questions and we will get back to you as soon as possible. If you would like to learn more about SPUR Magazine, visit our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/spurmag

Welcome to

SPUR We are tiny specks, hurtling towards death. Shortly after we get there, our children will die, then our childrenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s children, and so on. Some of us will die today, and some of us will be given a little while longer. None of us will be here for very long. With so little time left, why waste it reading inferior quality student magazines? When we enrolled at University we assumed there was going to be a magazine like this one, were excited to read a magazine like this one, and were disappointed to find that a magazine like this one had not yet been made. Certainly, student magazines existed, but something was amiss. Where were the poems that got people thrown into the River Torrens? Where were the idealists with their passionate and ill-thought-out manifestoes? Where were the debates? Where were the people who knew how to spell? Enraged by the mediocrity that surrounded us, we decided to make our own publication. When a student magazine that promotes excellence appears in the world, you may know it by this sign: that the dunces are all in conspiracy against it. Indeed, there are those who informed us that editing a magazine would be frustrating, that it would be too difficult, that we did not know how much labour was involved. They were wrong. The hours of challenging work felt like leisure. The yoke was sweet, for righteousness is never a burden. Inside these pages are appeals by Greens and Anarchists, as well as a defence of the State of Israel and a damnation of affirmative action. If you violently disagree with any of the opinions in this magazine, write a reply. We few, we happy few, would like to be a happy many. Join us. Write reviews, essays, poems and stories, and let them be published in SPUR. You do not have to be a student â&#x20AC;&#x201C; you just have to be worth reading. This magazine was not bankrolled by a union, or a university, or a political party. Although capitalism is a cold and cruel machine, it affords great freedom. It is criticised in this magazine, and this magazine exists because of it. Just as Betamax and cassette tapes have vanished, SPUR will stop being published if it stops being relevant*. If only every magazine had the same constraints. Serrin Prior Samuel McDonough James McCann

*Should further publication of this magazine prove infeasible, we would, however, still format articles and plan printing schedules in our spare time, if only for the reward these activities offered in themselves.

Appeals Are you a tortured soul? Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t keep your art in a closet, force it upon the world. SPUR is looking for poets, fiction writers, playwrights and visual artists of all kinds. Longer works will be published if they are of a high quality. Send us an email at spur.mag@gmail.com under the subject header I AM A TORTURED SOUL

Are you passionate about an issue? We want diverse views to compete within these pages, so we are looking for polarizing polemicals - perhaps about a political issue, or a cultural issue, or an issue of SPUR Magazine. Send us an email at spur.mag@gmail.com under the subject header THIS IS IMPORTANT YOU GUYS

Are you angry about something in SPUR? Hopefully, this magazine is sufficiently diverse and galvanizing that by the time you finish, you will have read something that you violently disagree with. We want to hear from you, so if you are so inclined, please do write a reply.

Are you looking to rent out a room? SPUR magazine will be read, prospectively, by thousands of university students, many of whom will need a place to live. Rates negotiable. Send us an email at spur.mag@gmail.com under the subject header ROOM TO RENT

Are you an impoverished wretch? Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t get an actual job, just sell some of the things you no longer need. Place an ad in on our trading post. Rates negotiable. Send us an email at spur.mag@gmail.com under the subject header TRADING POST

Are you a pathetic, lonely mess? Pull yourself together and put the tissues away; SPUR is here to help. Place an ad in our personals section, and find the man / woman / thing of your dreams. 10 cents a word. Send us an email at spur.mag@gmail.com under the subject header SAD AND ALONE

Do you want to write about Op Shops? 5

Or maybe you want to write about how much you like knitting, or your favourite youtube videos, or how much you wish people would cycle more, or where your favourite place to buy free trade coffee is? Send an email to ondit@adelaide.edu.au

Opinion

The Big Picture Justin McArthur is an Adelaide University student who recently ran in the Port Adelaide by-election.*

Eighteen years, I’ve lived here, in this house, held together by the web of cracks in the ceiling, and the wood that the termites have left us. I learnt to read in this house. My mum tells me I used to grab ten books, make her read them to me, and then grab ten more, eyes wide open. I wasn’t a confident By the time you read this, either I have been elected, or I kid – so my mother took on the role of debating coach at my am a normal person again. Either I have a real and wonder- primary school, and taught herself the art, just to teach me. ful opportunity to make a difference, or a real and wonder- I owe her many things, and have repaid few. ful opportunity to sleep properly. Either I am your elected member for the seat of Port Adelaide, or I’m just some guy I remember woodworking, too. My father and my brother that’s grown up here and hopes to see it change. I’ve lived and I used to make little model trains, and solder LEDs onto here all my life. I am a part of Port Adelaide, and it is a part circuitboards. I would watch Dad make doors and shelves of me. I would not be who I am if I did not live here. And and cupboards for our endless extensions. It’s an example yes, I say ‘here’, for I write this from my messy bedroom, full of his good humour that I looked down at his hand one day, asked him why it had wrinkles and spots, and he gruffly of leaflets and corflutes. Hi. My name is Justin McArthur. I’m an 18-year-old third year Media and Arts student. I’m this university’s student Environment Officer, and one of its union’s Board Directors. Also, I ran for State Government over the uni holidays.

said, “Life, son. That’s just life”. Perhaps that’s part of why I’m the other guy’. It’s a sad state of affairs when our democracy a philosophy student now. Yes, that’s it. Confusing parents. consists of ‘listen to the people when they’re a threat to you’. So, sorry, I’ve given it a go. Times change, and people come and go. Politically speaking, Kevin Foley has been Port Adelaide’s elected member for the Because I don’t think I need to be old to be a good representpast eighteen years. Maybe it’s too gutsy to challenge him, ative of the Port. I’ve lived here for eighteen years. I know having been alive for only that eighteen years. Or maybe it’s the political issues, because I see them. I read the newspapers, I talk to the people, I catch the train, I breathe the air. just gutsy enough. I met my first girlfriend here, back when my biggest fear See, I have a lot of hope for the young people of this coun- was that if my braces caught on hers, we might need either try. I think it sad that our elected representatives often pan- a surgeon or a mechanic. I wrote my first stories here, about der only to older voters, that they feel that the votes of the the repetition of the daily train ride, and the graffiti etched young are not worth campaigning for. I am extremely disap- into the windows of the trains. And I would not trade any of pointed that the only criticisms I seem to have received this that for anything. campaign are “You’re too young” and “You have a sense of Like I said, I have a lot of hope for the young people of this humour”. country. I don’t think you need to have lived a long life to I would be genuinely overjoyed if someone attempted to understand the present, and to try to care for it, as much as criticise my policies. I can respond to “Marine parks will kill I respect our history. I don’t think you need wrinkled, pockthe recreational fishing industry” with “No they won’t, fish- marked skin like my father’s to understand the ways of the ers need fish”. I can respond to “We already have two arts world, as much as I respect him for his. And I don’t think buildings in the Port” with “Hart’s Mill is beautiful, histori- that democracy is about always hearing the same voices cally and artistically, and could provide for a space unlike talking, as much as I might disagree with some of my more any other in our state. Plus, I heard the other day that 70% of outspoken political opponents, for there is no true democour state’s colonial art is not currently displayed by the State racy without disagreement. If you trust an eighteen year old Art Gallery”. But I can’t respond to intellectual comments to vote, why not trust him to represent you, if you agree with him on all things otherwise? like those on AdelaideNow: Mmmmmm...... Port Adelaide better brace itself for the young pup pushing an agenda devoid of the greater picture that life’s experience has to offer a more mature aged candidate. Bless his cotton socks, he may have had an assumed “fair go” had he not been running on the platform of the green ticket.

I have high hopes for this magazine, too, and hope that it can become grounds for people to care about politics. As hard as it is, people should care about politics. As messy as it is, changes can be made. All it takes is for someone to care, and fight for what they care for.

I know every article in this magazine will likely be followed by a quote from Martin Luther King, Barack Obama, MothI can’t change who I am. I am 18 years old. I haven’t lived my er Theresa or Gandhi, but indulge me just this once in typing the words I see on my t-shirt: whole life. And, damn it, I like cotton socks. (Source: AdelaideNow)

More importantly, we have a strange mix of dispassion and “Our lives begin to end when we become silent about things discontent in this country. We get angry at politicians that that matter.” - Martin Luther King don’t listen to us, and then when it comes to the polls, we vote the same people back in, because they’re ‘better than *Editors’ note: Since this article was written, the Port Adelaide election has come and gone. Labor candidate Susan Close won while Justin received 5.8% of the primary votes. You can find out more about Justin’s politics at the Greens’ Port Adelaide page: http://sa.greens.org.au/portadelaide/ or you can contact him at: srcenvironment@auu.org.au

Opinion

What happened to History? A plea by Vedrana Budimir

When I tell people I’m currently reading a Niall Ferguson book, many of them give me a face where it seems that their eyebrows have become stand-ins for question marks - the higher they go, the further the line of unspoken questioning. The questions seem to me to be those of incredulity: are you some kind of conservative? Do you know what you’re in for? Are you doing it to be ironic? Why did I start reading the work of a conservative Scottish Oxford graduate renowned for his ‘British is Best’ attitudes? It was mainly because I decided not to hate Niall Ferguson like everyone else until I’d read and assessed the merits of his work myself. I picked up his latest work, Civilisation: The West and the Rest. The title seemed to say it all: to put it politely, Ferguson was going to challenge me. As it turns out, he did it before he’d even started chapter 1. In the introduction, Ferguson bemoaned the state of history as a discipline, both in the way it was taught and the way it was written: “Watching my children grow up, I had the uneasy feeling that they were learning less history than I had at their age, not because they had bad history teachers, but bad history books and worse examinations.” In Ferguson’s view, the teaching of history had degenerated into atomised bubbles of knowledge and ideas, or “modules”, leaving students unable to connect events to one another or envision their context. In other words, history had stopped being “narratives, much less chronologies” for students to learn, and more a set of disconnected snippets of facts and an undue emphasis on “formulaic analysis of document excerpts” (Ferguson, xix). So why do Ferguson’s opinions matter? Quite simply, because history matters. Professor David Starkey, popularly known for swanning around draughty castles in tortoiseshell glasses and striped scarves in his documentaries about the Tudor period, hit the nail on the head: “With-

out an awareness of the need for collective memory any notion of community, value or stability vanishes and we become merely individualised flotsam and jetsam.” In other words, history education does not just shape the individual, but the community as a whole, in an idea of what the community itself is and how it came to be. Governments know the power of history: the potential for the discipline to act as a vehicle for shaping a nation’s consciousness of itself and to justify particular kinds of social and foreign policy is well-known: in France, arguments regarding immigrant Muslim populations and the concept of Laicite (or separation of religion from public life) have centred on the understanding that France has a proud history of secularism since the Revolution. In Austria, post-war guilt over the Anschluss led the government of the 1950s to institute a national history curriculum focusing on the glories of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to distract students from the more recent and far more disturbing chapters of their national history that had resulted in an alliance with the Third Reich and complicity in the Holocaust. A history education therefore does more than provide a recital of dates and names.

(Above: Niall Ferguson looking stern)

Stories, after all, are the cornerstone of our modern understanding of the world. They offer explanatory models by ordering events, assigning importance to them and providing causal links between them. Ferguson is less concerned with how many students can name the date of the Battle of Waterloo correctly (though in his view, this is also significant) than with how many students can say why the Battle of Waterloo was a key point in the story of how Britain, in his view, “made the modern world”. The actual process of putting the story together, however, is a complicated one and has led one scholar to refer to the collective noun for a group of historians as a “malice”. Determining what is important in history will change according to the historian telling the story; a view of history which Ferguson and Starkey take issue with.

of picking apart history at the seams and questioning whether the Battle of Hastings actually happened in 1066. There is an element of exaggeration in these statements which does not do justice to the way in which history is taught. But are Ferguson and Starkey really crying ‘wolf ’? With regard to the idea of losing our “map of time” with isolated modules, BrynleyMillward, a PhD candidate of the University of Adelaide and a recent graduate of Honours in History and Politics had this to say: “Ultimately, when you teach pick and mix history, you get a pick and mix view of chronology”, which according to Brynley is taught “abysmally” at University level. But history, as we have established, is more than just chronology or straightforward plot lines: “History is narrative,” says Brynley, “but history is also debate”.

Dr Tom Buchanan, American History lecturer at the University of Adelaide’s School of History and Politics, agrees. Defining ‘narrative’ as “a story, that has plot, characters, a setting, and pays attention to issues such as dramatic tension, crisis and resolution, and so forth”, Buchanan makes a compelling point in favour of keeping the ‘story’ in history: “Narratives on a grand scale can help convey much about the “big Picture” changes in history, and provide an effective mode of grasping them…on a practical level I believe historians who seek to abandon narratives will destroy what has made history popular beyond the academy. Ordinary peo(Above: David Starkey, also looking stern) ple have little tolerance for leaden prose, and micro analysis In Starkey’s view, history education has bred up an endless that makes no attempt at larger themes. It is the stories that scepticism over the nature of ‘facts’ where “one is constantly make history resonate, and I believe we need to maintain re-inventing the wheel, sending children off to do research those elements to keep the discipline vibrant.” that comes up with the amazing discovery that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066, something which…is a relatively Looking at the figures for book sales, it’s hard to argue. well established fact. Why waste time doing this?” According The history books that tell large stories like Antony Beevor’s to Starkey, we’re losing confidence in our knowledge. Fur- Stalingrad (one for fans of the BBC’s Peep Show there), thermore, he says, history had become an endless parade of Amanda Foreman’s heartbreaking account of The Duchess, apologetic self-flagellation, averring that “we have overdone the critical element of history. I think there is a very powerful place for the celebratory.” The big story of British history, he claims, is an “optimistic” one, a story which is fast becoming lost as more and more students are encouraged to criticise and question the big stories and the broad generalisations. You may, at this point, be wondering what exactly is wrong with being sceptical of broad generalisations and applying critical thinking skills. If you are a student of history like me, you may also scoff at the idea that history education consists

(Above: Tom Buchanan has been accused of not really being a historian, as in this photo he does not look stern)

or Starkey’s ever-popular Elizabeth have one thing in common: they fly off the shelves because people are fascinated by the drama and particularly with the stories of the larger-than-life historical figures that inhabit these accounts. History telling grand stories of heroism or tragedy is a damn sight more compelling than an account of Quaker farming patterns in seventeenth-century Essex. And why shouldn’t we enjoy these stories? The danger in becoming attached to these stories is the possibility of erasing whole chapters of history and whitewashing others. Marxist, black, queer and feminist historians and countless others have done much to resurrect peoples of the past whose stories were completely ignored or underplayed in the effort to tell broad-brush stories of major events. Dorman Hobbs’ 1966 The historian’s contribution to Anglo-American misunderstanding report of a Committee on National Bias in Anglo-American History Textbooks was really only the tip of the iceberg. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (1995) by James Leowen reveals more of the Euro-centric, mythologised bias evident in the history we teach our children. In a paper entitled “In This Curriculum, I Don’t Exist”, Marika Sherwood revealed how black history is seldom taught in the UK because there are seldom resources available to the teachers (Sherwood 2005). In Australia, the landscape of history has been strewn with casualties from the widely publicised ‘History Wars’ which created major rifts between those historians seeking to tell the story of Aboriginal dispossession and those wishing to affirm the triumph of Australia’s pioneer past. The new National Curriculum for history shook up some controversy amongst those who said that there is now not enough mention of Britain’s political and institutional influence on Australia (Roskam 2011). Changing political attitudes led to a change in the way that we think about history and even the roles of historians themselves, and it is not surprising that the trend in history education was to emphasise the critical elements of sources analysis and historiography and finding ‘gaps’ the big narratives (though I would argue that some history graduates’ understanding of historiography is as sketchy as their knowledge of basic chronology). Yet laboured micro-analysis is not the only way to contest a big narrative. Big narratives are written in opposition to other big narratives. Tom Buchanan points out that “it is much easier to critique than create, to reveal a particular fact instead of a general theme. Furthermore the embrace of one grand narrative (say the Marxist vision of history) can rub

up against the other grand narratives (such as the rise of nation states, and the growth of liberal democracy) and such differences require analytical skills to reconcile.” It sounds like the best of both worlds: expansive pictures of history that make sense of the map of time and critical skills? Sign me up! I’m not going to pretend that this article is the answer to ALL of the history problems, ever. But it seems to me that while I was expecting to disagree violently with Ferguson, I can’t disagree with everything, either. Big narratives, big themes, expansive pictures of history are important - but let’s not forget that they are not monoliths that stand unquestioned and without foundation. Vedrana Budimir is one of those rare history graduates with a history-related job. Really. When she’s not trying to finish reading several books at once, she can be found immersing herself in debate at her feminist reading group, swing dancing or trying to finish writing articles for Spur magazine.

Fun fact!

Since history’s conception, people have disagreed on basic facts. For example Heroditus and Thucidities (both pictured), gave radically different accounts of the Persian war, as a freak birth defect meant they were always looking in opposite directions.

Feature

A letter from your local anarchists... Gabriel Evangelista & Jesse Holly Organise!

In this section of the magazine, we feature an appeal from a political group or a political ideologue. This issue features an article by two members of ‘Organise!’, an anarchist collective. Anarchism is a political movement and a social philosophy with a long, rich history. It has, since its birth, been denounced as Utopian fantasy, a petit bourgeois (small property owner) ideology, or more commonly, a synonym for chaos. In reality, anarchy is to chaos what communism is to modern China. Anarchism as we mean it is the movement which grew from the revolutionary politics of the class struggle as it developed under capitalism in the 1800s, and its development into the 20th and now 21st centuries. We consider Anarchism to be the anti-state wing of the socialist movement. Capitalism is a fundamentally unstable economic system, as evident in the Global Financial Crisis, the repeated recessions and depressions, the Great depression, etc. It requires a very high level of global poverty, while there is tremendous wealth centralised in the hands of the folks running the show. Ecological disasters, climate change – all in a day’s work for global capitalists. Like international gangsters they send armies across the planet chasing oil, leaving countries torn to pieces in their tank tracks. It’s not hard to have a bone to pick with capitalism, but it is a little more difficult to work out how to change it, and what exactly it is we want to change it to. Anarchists desire a libertarian communist society, stateless and classless, with all industry socialised and decisions made directly and democratically, from the bottom up. Instead of commodity production, industry would be geared to providing for societies’ needs, not accumulating wealth for corporations and investors. The goal is not different from the communism envisioned as the end-point of a socialising transition period, as expressed by Marx. Though, rather than a workers’ party seizing power and a ‘withering away of the state’, anarchists advocate building working class power here and now, through unions

and political organisations, and defeating capitalism by directly seizing control of production. We call this building the new world in the shell of the old, or ‘dual power’. The most developed form of anarchist strategy is anarchosyndicalism, which arose from the real struggles of the working class in France at the beginning of the 20th Century. The idea is that unions of workers be formed to defend and extend living and working conditions at present, and prepare the working class to take control of production. Anarcho-syndicalists were responsible for starting the first trade unions in many countries, such as Cuba, where anarcho-syndicalism was influential until Castro’s government expelled all anarchists from the unions.

The Industrial Workers of the World is one such revolutionary union. Formed in Chicago, USA in 1905 by unionists, socialists and anarchists, who were determined to build an international union for all workers – with the abolition of capitalism as its explicit aim. The IWW was not a political party; it didn’t seek to take the reigns of the state. It aimed to build working class solidarity and with one mighty swoop replace the capitalist system, with the democratic union structure being used to take control of all industries, production and distribution. The IWW has a history in Australia that can be looked at elsewhere – we won’t go into it. The union still exists, more famous contemporary members include Noam Chomsky, Tom Morello (of Rage Against the Machine) and Jeff Monson, a champion UFC fighter. Although there have been many attempts at workers’ revolution, only a handful of attempts at establishing an anarchist society have succeeded, and only for short periods. Catalonia and Aragon during the Spanish Civil War is probably the best known and most discussed. The civil war destabilised the Spanish state, so starting in Barcelona, the National Confederation of Labour (CNT), an anarcho-syndicalist union, began taking control over workplaces and running public services, as the existing government apparatus collapsed. It should be noted that Barcelona was the most industrially developed Spanish city at the time, lending considerable clout to the idea of organising a largescale industrial society without centralised authority. It lasted three years, before it was crushed by Franco’s forces, with some incidental assistance from Stalinists. Another attempt occurred in Korea and lasted almost three years, 1929-1931. Organised by the Korean Anarchist Communist Federation, Autonomous Shinmin was both an attempt at creating a new society, while also being a base for resistance to Imperial Japanese occupation and pro-USSR Stalinist forces. It, too, was defeated by force. While there are few examples of anarchist societies, there have been plenty of social experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of worker-controlled workplaces – such as the factory occupation movement in Argentina (see film ‘The Take’), or the Chiapas region in Mexico, which has been under control of the EZLN since the mid 1990s, where farmers and indigenous people reclaimed land which they now run cooperatively, and operates with a three tiered model of participatory democracy. Many other examples exist: cooperative businesses; community gardens; housing co-ops; the

Occupy movement; etc. Although they make no challenge to capitalism, they at least provide a snapshot of how society could be democratically organised in future. So it’s not all molotov cocktails and black hoodies. Anarchists have always been involved in community activism, women’s liberation (see anarchist feminism), anti-war movements, Free Speech fights (Google that), political prisoner solidarity (see Anarchist Black Cross), and have been against racism, homophobia, sexism, fascism, Stalinism, and all authoritarian and divisive ideologies. Noam Chomsky is an anarchist - what more do you want? To find out more about Organise!, Adelaide’s anarchist group, email: organise@riseup.net

The black flag is synonymous with anarchism. Pictured above was a photograph of the band Black Flag, which was regrettably blacked out at the last moment in a copyright dispute. Do you belong to a political party (or have political beliefs), and have a rabid urge to enlighten the general public? Good news - you are most welcome to do so here! Please submit your appeals/manifestos/declarations of war to: spur.mag@gmail.com under the subject header: HACKS AND CRACKPOTS.

Opinion

Modern-day Antisemitism and the Campaign for Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions ( BDS ) Dear Protester,

Allow me to introduce myself. I am a passer-by who gave He, like nearly everyone else, was surprised at Barak’s you the evil eye last week outside an Israeli-owned busi“remarkable” offer that gave the Palestinian state ness in Rundle Mall. I was on my way to a second-hand about 97% of the occupied territories, the Old City of bookshop; you were banging your drum in support of the Jerusalem other than the Jewish and Armenian QuarCampaign for Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS). ters, and $30 billion in compensation for the refugees. A word bubbled up inside of me, as I frowned in your direction, and that word was “antisemite”. Though privately agreeing with Bandar that Barak’s representatives were “doves”, Arafat abruptly rejected the Israeli The National Socialists initiated the dark art of targeting proposal. Bandar, according to Dershowitz’s account of proJewish-owned stores back in April 1, 1933. Of course, you ceedings, described Arafat’s bewildering refusal to cut a deal would argue that targeting Israeli interests has nothing to with the State of Israel as a “crime” and a “tragic mistake” for do with an irrational enmity towards Jews, and everything the Palestinian cause. to do with the injustices perpetrated against the Palestinian people by the State of Israel. You are not some brown- Arafat’s negative response flummoxed Western journalists shirted brute of yesteryear but a principled man of the Left and political commentators. It should not have. What Arafat who seeks nothing more than fairness. Far from being an was being offered could be categorized as the most generous antisemite, you have transcended all forms of ancient (and version of the minimalist agenda – that is, the establishment modern) bigotry. You oppose discrimination, are offended of a Palestinian state in the territories that had prior to the by it, which is why you signed up for BDS in the first place. Six Day 1967 War been occupied by Jordan (the West Bank I beg to differ. To put it bluntly, you are either a full-blown and East Jerusalem) and Egypt (the Gaza Strip). However, antisemite in your own right, or a lack of knowledge has Arafat did not form Al-Fatah in 1958 to pressure Israel into resulted in you being manipulated by ideological bullyboys withdrawing behind its 1967 borders. That would make no who are antisemitic. I will give you the benefit of the doubt sense. The founding purpose of Al-Fatah was to destroy the and assume the latter. State of Israel or, in the lyrics of a Palestinian nationalist song, to expel the Jews from “the river to the sea”, the river One BDS slander is that Israel has always opposed the estab- being the Jordan, the sea being the Mediterranean. This, lishment of Arab self-governance in the territory formerly dear BDS activist, we shall call the maximalist agenda. known as Mandatory Palestine. Has it come to your attention that Ben-Gurion, on behalf of his fellow Jewish settlers, Yasser Arafat’s particular talent during the seven years of the accepted without demur the decision of the United Nations Oslo peace process (1993-2000) was to adopt the manner on November 29, 1947, to partition British Palestine very of a minimalist while the entire time remaining true to his much in favour of the local Arab community? Furthermore, unreconstructed maximalist self. With an avuncular grin are you aware that in January 2001 the Prime Minister of Is- and a calm demeanour, Arafat allowed credulous Westernrael agreed to the founding of a Palestinian state, along with ers to believe what they wanted to believe – namely, that almost everything else the Palestine Liberation Organiza- reconciliation in the Middle East was at hand. A signifition had demanded (at least when communicating through cant proportion of the local population, both Arab and Jew the Western media) in the wake the 1993 Oslo Accord? alike, were also hoping that a permanent and non-violent solution might be found. For Arafat, nevertheless, the deAlan Dershowitz, in The Case for Israel (2003), notes that struction of the State of Israel remained his heart’s desire the Chairman of the PLO, Yasser Arafat, personally selected and any outward show of good will was a ruse that should Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia to assist him with the 2000 not have fooled a child. How did this lifelong purveyor of Camp David negotiations. After every contested detail had violent extremism maintain a straight face on being awardat last been locked into place by the mediators and delegates ed (along with Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin) the 1994 from both sides, Bandar implored Arafat to sign off on the Nobel Peace Prize? agreement:

Arafat’s subterfuge was eventually found out thanks to an unlikely conjunction of circumstances. With his tenure in the White House fast running out, President Clinton – between July and December 2000 – pressed Israel’s leftist Prime Minister, Ehud Barack, to offer Arafat every possible inducement to get on board the peace train. Barack complied with Clinton’s command, partly as his own time in office was also coming to an end, but also because he was imbued with the quaint Ben-Gurion-type notion that the bloodlust of Arab extremists can be assuaged. When Arafat vetoed the best offer the Palestinian Arabs could ever hope to receive within the framework of a two-state solution, President Clinton turned apoplectic. “You are leading your people and the region to a catastrophe,” he shouted, banging his fists on the table. Clinton was more right than he could have known. In the opinion of Arafat, it was a “catastrophe” (nakba) that the State of Israel came into existence in 1948, and it would take a “catastrophe” – at least in the dictionary sense of “upheaval” and “cataclysm” – to see to its destruction. Arafat never believed a genuine peace treaty was in the best interests of Al-Fatah. Thus, he rebuffed Israel’s hand of friendship and initiated the Second Intifada (2000-05), a blood-fest that resulted in the murder of some 1,100 Israeli citizens. There have been attempts to blame the origins of the Second Intifada on Israeli provocation, but the Communications Minister for the Palestinian Authority, Imad Faluji, gave the game away on October 11, 2001, when he admitted that Arafat and Al-Fatah had initiated the whole terrible episode. The Palestinian leadership achieved nothing for its people with the Second Intifada, merely death and mayhem, greater unemployment, plus a security wall that winds its way through the outskirts of Jerusalem and certain neighbouring districts in the West Bank. That wall, by the way, prevents terrorists taking pot shots at Israeli civilians, a regular occurrence during the time of the Second Intifada.

What unites militant Arab nationalists (Al-Fatah and the Syrian Baathists), Sunni Islamists (the Moslem Brotherhood, Hamas, Al-Qaeda) and Shia Islamists (Hezbollah and the theocratic-fascist regime in Tehran) is a virulent form of Judeophobia that finds its inspiration in twentieth century European antisemitism, including The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution. These latest trends in Arabic and Islamist antisemitism are accessible at the site provided by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). Translated into English from the original Arabic, Persian, Urdu and Turkish are everyday newspaper editorials, television interviews and public addresses. The 2007 New Year’s message delivered by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Iranian television provides us with a snapshot of the current state of Islamist antisemitism: “The Zionists

are the true manifestation of Satan.” Unable to stomach the enduring presence of “the Zionist Entity” in the Middle East, the mortal enemies of Israel have only two options open to them, and neither includes a two-state solution. Firstly, the anti-Zionists can attempt to wipe Israel off the map, as Ahmadinejad with his emerging nuclear weapons program keeps promising. Secondly, and not disconnected from the above, they can delegitimise the State of Israel in the eyes of the world, and thus bring the day of its destruction that much nearer. BDS campaigners are not alone in demonising Israel. In The Case for Israel, Alan Dershowitz notes Nelson Mandela’s depiction of Israel as “white” in contrast to Iraq being “black”. Considering that “white” Aryans slaughtered six million Jews, and that the State of Israel served as a post-Nazi shelter for tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors, Mandela’s remark is regrettable – and also inaccurate. Over the past two decades 130,000 Ethiopian Jews having emigrated to Israel, almost all of them with the assistance of the Israeli government. What is more, since the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran around 30,000 Iranian Jews have sought refuge in “the Zionist Entity”. And what about the 900,000 Jews from North Africa, Yemen, Egypt and, yes, Iraq, who have either chosen or been forced by antisemitism to relocate to Israel? Finally, let us not forget the more than 1,000,000 Russian Jews who moved to Israel in order to escape Soviet-era discrimination. The collective Muslim world, in contradistinction, has yet to resettle the 1948 West Bank refugees. Modern-day Israel is, in reality, a heterogeneous, multi-racial, go-ahead place. Much to the dismay of the Palestinian leadership in Gaza and the West Bank, many of the 1.5 million Arabs who reside inside Israel proper refer to themselves as Israeli Arabs rather than as Palestinians. MEMRI, for instance, provides examples of Arabs who have no desire to relinquish the political, economic, educational and social welfare benefits accorded to every citizen of Israel irrespective of colour, creed or ethnicity. Israel certainly has the problems of a typical liberal-democracy, but perhaps Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is projecting when asserts that “the Zionists are a group of blood-thirsty savages putting all other criminals to shame”. The psychosis that has gripped militant anti-Zionists is the belief that a Great Peace can only be achieved if the Jews are purged from the landscape. Sir, we have been here before, seventy years ago to be precise, so do please reconsider where you bang your drum. Daryl McCann is a contributor to Quadrant, which can be found online at www.quadrant.org.au

Interview

Raff Piccolo Raff Piccolo. 2011’s Adelaide University Union’s President and 2012’s President of the Clubs Association. Initiator of the inquiry into the controversial Humanities tutorial cuts proposal. That guy with the article that you saw last year on the back pages of On Dit every couple of weeks. And also, in the words of the previous On Dit editors, “the man who helped cut our issue 12 funding”. . So… Good guy? Bad guy? Feeling a bit ambivalent right now? Spur’s Serrin Prior caught up with Raff recently to hear his take on what has been, to say the least, a tumultuous past year, and found that – surprise – you shouldn’t believe everything you hear.

I met Raff in his new Presidential office in the Club’s Association, a room that was full of sunlight and right in the thick of various clubs associated activity, even during this, the Summer break (indeed, listening to my recording of our conversation afterwards, I could clearly hear the smattering of voices nearby that provided the chirpy background to our meeting). Having visited the AUU president’s office recently (a room buried in Union House, completely removed from student activity), and after having garnered a bit more of his personality after our chat together, I felt that this was the right setting for Raff. He was polite and softly spoken, if a bit rushed (don’t read: ‘thoughtless’) in his responses – as though he had much to say and wanted to fit it all in. When asked about how he first got into the student politics scene, he recalled an initial two years of university that would hardly have suggested the path he has since gone down. It was time like that lived by many the disinterested student; perhaps signing up to the odd club or society, but never actually going. He even exclaimed how “proud” he was of the fact that he had avoided student politics (“I didn’t want to be one of those hacks on the lawns”). Well, when your father is Tony Piccolo, State MP for Light and the Parliamentary Secretary to the Premier, you have to rebel somehow. But, as we can gather, destiny called when he realised, “Actually, I’m missing something.” From his involvement with Amnesty, he started going to the Uni Amnesty Club, “and from there you meet certain groups of people and they’re involved in student politics…”

He reminisced, little short of fondly, about his time as a ‘hack’* on the Barr Smith Lawns. For those of you first year Adelaide students out there, or general members of the public, Adelaide University is unique in that it has not moved to online elections. Students are persuaded – cajoled? coerced? – to cast their votes to determine the Board of the Adelaide University Union (AUU), the Student Representative Council (SRC), the delegation to the National Union of Students (NUS) and the On Dit (the AUU-funded student magazine) editorship. This is done by those dreaded creatures, the student politicians, who stalk the areas around the Lawns for a week, aiming to get as many votes as they can by walking students ‘across the line’ and into the voting tents. Piccolo recalled an encounter with a fellow student he knew from some tutorial or another, who suddenly announced that he did not in fact speak English, and was thus able to make his hasty escape. When asked about how he dealt with this time (a week in which you feel as though you’re “really hated by everyone”), he spoke of conversations. Conversations with the students walking by, he explained, were the way he distinguished himself from everyone else out there; they allowed him to try and chip away at those ‘ingrained mindsets”. Though, having said that, he was certainly able to empathise with the students who viewed student political organizations as “not important to them.” He pointed out that many students feel this way because they “don’t feel like they have a voice or they can contribute or [that] it’s actually worth their while.” The SRC, for example (a relatively new institution, having only been established in the past decade), apparently still has a way to go before it can really call itself “representative.” The key, he thinks, is to stick to points that are actually important to students, like the price of accommodation and books – rather than, for example, broad social justice issues, like the recent Occupy Movement. The key to Piccolo himself really seems to be conversation. He described one of his proudest achievements as AUU President, seeing through the HUMSS issue**, as an exercise in mediation, between students and university staff, both who “[didn’t] want to compromise”. “I’m not a person to go up there and smash down doors and do rallies,” he said, continuing on to speak of his worry that if students did decide to rally (which, in the event, they did not), that he would lose the chance to rationally and calmly discuss the situation with them. Instead, Piccolo was behind a forum between students and faculty members and staff, in which students made clear their fervent disapproval of the plan, and it was subsequently scrapped.

Something that Piccolo expressed some discontent with, was the scandal of sorts regarding the last issue of On Dit. As given by last year’s editors, Piccolo apparently cut funding for the last issue of the magazine (there are traditionally twelve issues per year, with provisions made for this in the AUU budget at the beginning of the year), and forced them to either put issue 12 online, or to merge it with 11 and have a ‘bumper edition’ (which is what they chose). In retaliation, they made several visual adjustments to the AUU President’s column, which included printing his report upside down (see picture below). Piccolo’s own version of events, however, was missing from the issue. He describes the affair as being far from a question of funding (“It wasn’t about saving dollars…[The AUU has] run surpluses for the last few years”), but instead about practicality. With the editors unable to meet their planned schedule for issue releases throughout the year, the last issue would have come out after the twelve weeks of semester two had finished – by which point students would be studying for exams and not be on campus. Referring to an issue 12 he said, “It’d get wasted.” Agree with this or not, it was clear that he meant what he said and really felt himself to have had students’ interests at heart. But why take my word for it? You can find Raff in his new office in the Club’s Association in the Lady Symon Building (just near Mayo Cafeteria). Go and ask him yourself – he’d certainly be willing to have a talk.

Exhibit (a): That On Dit article (issue 11, volume 79)

*”A negative term ascribed to a person who is part of the political party apparatus, but whose intentions are more aligned with victory than personal conviction” (courtesy of Wikipedia) **Last year the university proposed cutting the number of tutorials for courses in the Humanities and Social Sciences faculty – a move that was described by the institution as being motivated by a rethinking of the best way to achieve learning outcomes. The vast majority of students saw it in more blunt terms – a way to cut costs.

Opinion

Shit Politicians Say by Angus Shaw The last few weeks have been a bountiful time for those of us who cannot help but enjoy the utter insanity spilling from the unrestrained mouths of the august representatives of the people. With the New Year comes presidential primaries and while we’re persevering through monotonous fear-mongering about the carbon tax on our shores, the great politicians of the U.S.A. can sometimes make the comments of Ms. Gillard and Mr. Abbott look like a profound philosophical debate. Of course, that is not to say that some of our polies are immune from nonsensical jabber, for they are not. Rick Santorum – Republican Presidential ‘candidate’, fmr. Senator from Pennsylvania, USA had this to say: ‘I do not want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money, I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money,’. I’ve got to say, when I read this, I was pretty sure it was the best moment of my life. When a Republican from somewhere other than Carolina or Mississippi says something hilariously racist, don’t we all get this perverse, arousing feeling of self-satisfaction? I know I do. But the great thing here isn’t the sheer insanity, or the fact that the Iowa Republican crowd is whiter than the average Klu Klux Klan social, it’s the response. See, Santorum fears confrontation, being another swing-state tory. Rather than admitting his mistake, he says ‘I actually said “blah people”’ and when less people believed him than watched the third season of

Newstopia he went on to say ‘I actually said “plives” not “lives”’. Really. If your defence of your racist statements is that you use words that aren’t real and have a fundamental misunderstanding of Basic English, you’re in trouble. Bill Shorten – Assistant Treasurer. ‘Australia’s social security system needs to provide a strong safety net for people who need financial assistance while also acting as an incentive for people to take up paid work’ Normally this wouldn’t be so bad. In fact, most of us will agree that incentivizing return to work is fantastic, as is a social safety net. The problem is that this quote ‘justifies’ not increasing centrelink payments with CPI, despite them being about half of the poverty line. Because hey, it’s so much easier to find a job when you can’t afford food, rent AND bills. Those hunger pains? They’re just reminding you to get a job right now. When the business lobby is saying you’re too hard on social security, something’s really wrong. These comments are obviously hurtful to large groups of people and should therefore never be said on the political platform where a large audience is exposed to bludgeoning ignorance. Having said that; it’s almost too damn funny to get them to stop.

Angus is a retired domestic terrorist, politics student and professional leftie. Sometimes he tries to be funny and/or write things. This is one of those times

Affirmative Action: Entrenching disadvantage by Michael Arnold If there is one belief which unites all Australians, it is the principle of the fair go. We believe that, regardless of their race, gender, age, or socioeconomic background, every Australian should have the same opportunities to make of their life what they choose. We believe every Australian has inherent talents, skills, and merits and that they should be judged on the basis of these criteria. We believe every Australian should be equal before the law and equal before society. In short, Australians believe in equality. As a result, there has been a strong push from progressives, liberals and conservatives alike to address the terrible inequalities faced by disadvantaged groups such as women and indigenous people. Affirmative action is one policy which has been adopted to correct social inequalities. Affirmative action can be described as taking direct steps to ensure that disadvantaged people have equal representation. Policies created under affirmative action include gender or race quotas, such as those within the ALP and several Government-run companies, as well as actively giving preference to female or indigenous candidates applying for jobs. Affirmative action can therefore be discussed as discrimination dressed up as egalitarianism. In the short term, affirmative action may seem to be an effective way to increase participation of women in the workforce, and to remove the so-called “glass ceiling” faced by many women in the workforce. For

example, if a company it forced to have forty per cent female representation on its board, it will do so – because it has no option. However, there is a critical flaw with affirmative action: it actually entrenches disadvantage. For as long measures such as quotas are in place, any person belonging to that group will be seen as a device for fulfilling a quota, rather than an individual with unique talents and abilities. This creates the mindset among many people that women only have certain positions because they are female, which is demeaning and belittling for those women. Affirmative action does nothing to change attitudes for the better – in fact, it can work to do more harm than good. Continuing to discriminate in favour of disadvantaged groups simply prolongs their disadvantage because, by its very nature, it highlights the differences between people instead of their similarities. True equality is not defined by numbers, it is defined by attitudes, and can only come about when all members of society judge people on their merits, not their gender or their race. The only type of truly equal society is one which is blind to gender and race, not one which focuses attention on these small factors of a person’s being. Equality cannot be put in place overnight through some quick-fix legislation. Instead, the path to true equality is through a concerted effort to change attitudes, and is the responsibility of every member of society.

Feature

Local Person: Tom Gaynor

A regular feature on individuals who rate very well on the talent to nearness ratio. Tom Gaynor is a local rapper - wait, don’t leave! He’s an extremely tolerable rapper, with two mixtapes released over the last 12 months. He also an award winning stand up comedian with a show at this year’s fringe festival. Tom was kind enough to meet up with SPUR magazine to do an interview. When and why did you start rapping? I started rapping when I was about 9 or 10. I remember my first rhyme.: ‘I’m the world’s greatest rapper, Snoop dogg and Eminem are both crapper.’ I’m not sure why I started... because it’s the coolest thing ever? I have a lot of feelings and I need to get them out somehow. Have you found, as a rapper, that haters do, indeed, hate? Everyone has haters, in hip hop music hating it’s just at the forefront a little more. I’d rather have someone hate me than not know me at all. In my experience hate is a strong emotion and it’s usually not that far from love. When and why did you start stand up comedy? I started stand up comedy in 2010, I’m good sometimes and bad sometimes but I like it a lot. For me it’s a really pure connection between people, that is a pretentious thing to say but I’ve just moved to Melbourne so I’m going with it. It’s pure because you make yourself vulnerable on stage and people are entertained, or sometimes they are not... Or maybe I just like the attention. Have you noticed any striking differences about the two industries? There are a lot of differences, but there are lots of similarities too. In both industries, if you pour a piece of yourself into everything you write & everything you do on stage, you will most likely succeed.

Tell me about your new mixtape.

The mixtape is called ‘Soon I’ll Be In Cali’ & it’s free to download from www.soonillbeincali.tumblr.com - it’s 13 tracks and it’s better than LMFAO. If I remember correctly, at your last mixtape launch a man in the audience was punched into unconsciousness. Discuss. Yeah, it was actually a man punching himself in the face because he didn’t want to hear anymore of my music. I guess he didn’t know he could have just left. Your rap music is, for the most part, noticeably positive and uplifting. Yet as a comedian you are very softly spoken and frequently seem melancholy on stage. Do you think your propensity to rebel against the norm, regardless of what the norm is, is indicative of deep flaws in your personality? That’s quite a leading question. It’s making me think about my deep psychological problems and that shouldn’t happen in interviews. You can see Tom at his fringe show, Tom and Tommer, costarring Tom Shaw. He tweets @tgayallday

An exclusive interview with

DAS RACIST Das Racist, the Brooklyn-based hip hop trio rose to internet fame in 2008 with the single Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. It is the kind of song one would call a ‘novelty’ hit, if it was less good. They subsequently established themselves as a force in the rap community with two successful mixtapes, Shut Up, Dude, and Sit Down, Man. They combine non-sequiturs and humorous highbrow cultural references, and have had praise heaped on them by Rolling Stone, Spin, Pitchfork, and other people who profess to know about music.

The feature act were accompanied by cups of tea, a projector playing clips from Law and Order and The X-Men, and a cigarette that did not smell like a cigarette. During the show they engaged in frequent though good-natured crowd misdirection, and the trio stuck around for near an hour to sign posters, shirts and CDs for the fans who (for the most part) had forgiven them for not playing the strongly demanded Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. I managed to snag an exclusive interview with Himanshu (Heems) milling about near the merch stand.

They recently visited Adelaide to promote their first com Demi: Hey man, that was awesome. mercially available album, Relax. They did one unannounced show at the Big Day Out, and another at the Gov Heems: Thanks, dude. ernor, Hindmarsh, which I attended. Unforeseen publicity issues meant that the audience was small, but the evening Demi: Could I get a photo real quick? was no less intense for it. Local support act The Bottlerockets Heems: Aw yeah, sure. were wonderful - resembling not so much a band as a DJ chugging beers and climbing things, The main support spot was filled by Das Racist affiliate “Lakutis”, who, within seconds of appearing on stage, promised “I’m going to rape you with my words”, started to wield his microphone like a penis, and rapped about being “Dennis Quaid, bitch!”.

Luckily, there was a chance for a lengthier interview with both Victor Vazquez (Kool A.D.) and Ashok Kondabolu (Dap), who answered a few questions about the gig, microphone wangs and Lapsang Souchong.

Kool A.D. Dap

Heems

"The blood of Christ is WITHIN ME!"

What kind of tea is it that Dap drinks so much of? KOOL A.D.: He drinks a lot of teas. He’ll elaborate. I like Lapsang Souchong, Jasmine Pearl, Earl Grey and the green tea with the toasted brown rice in it. Dap: No comment.

On Wednesday you played at the Governor Hindmarsh. Apart from the turn-out being unexpectedly low, how did you find the Adelaide audience?

During your sets, microphones are frequently touched as if they are penises. Is this an easy mistake for you to make?

KOOL A.D.: They were fun boys and girls with a thirst for knowledge and a real passion for hip-hop.

KOOL A.D.: Slow down Freud, that’s all on you doggy. Dap: No comment.

Dap: Incredibly receptive and highly sexy.

KOOL A.D.: It was kind of like trying to get thirty people’s attention in a mall food court.

Several times at the Wednesday show, you announced you were going to play Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell, and played something else instead. Is that because you’re sick of playing it, or because you couldn’t play it because of time constraints and just really love saying the name of the song?

Dap: It was exactly the same but the people were not as attractive (physically speaking).

KOOL A.D.: It’s because we’re fun boys with a thirst for knowledge and a real passion for hip-hop.

Who are you listening to right now?

Dap: The blood of Christ is WITHIN ME!

You also played at the Adelaide run for Big Day Out. How did that set compare?

KOOL A.D.: Jerry Springer talking about unemployment and the ills of free enterprise on CNN, weirdly enough. But in terms of music, Juicy J, Future, French Montana, Beeda Weeda, SpaceGhostPurpp, A$AP Rocky, Danny Brown, Dopehead, Mr. Muthafuckin Exquire Dap: The new Blondes album, Zomby, rappers. Were the somewhat mixed reviews for Relax something you expected, given the “pop” direction the album took, compared to Shut Up, Dude and Sit Down, Man? Demi with Heems (if you look really close) KOOL A.D.: I turned off my Google alerts and only really skim the articles our publicist sends me links to but yeah, probably.

Demi Lardner is a stand up comedian and first year arts student at Adelaide University. She tweets @DemiLardner

Music Reviews Hunx - Hairdresser Blues

The Pogues - Rum, Sodomy and the Lash

Hunx is the moniker of Seth Bogart, the frontman of Hunx and His Punx, who released their debut album Too Young To Be In Love last year. Hairdresser Blues, a trip into the world of lo-fi glam pop, is Hunx’s first solo effort. And yes, apart from his musical pursuits, Bogart is actually also a hairdresser – if you’re ever in the neighbourhood of Oakland, California, check out his salon, Down At Lulu’s.

Those crazy Irish semi-punk demi-gods came up with the goods on this 1985 classic. Filled with rollicking tunes punctuated with banjos, tin whistles and Shane MacGowan’s inimitable rasping cries, Rum Sodomy and the Lash features some of the best folk rock around. Opening track ‘The Sick Bed of Cúchulainn’ may be peppered with many mentions of alcohol and its magnificence, but there’s more to both the track and the album than meets the ear. ‘Cúchulainn’, along with many other Pogues songs, incorporates both Irish history and popular culture. The Pogues also give Australians something to cry to on Anzac Day with their mournful rendition of ‘And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda’. These bad boys are hitting our shores in a few months. Don’t miss them.

By Serrin Prior

While Too Young To Be In Love sounded like the love child between Lou Reed and any one of the members of The Shangri-Las, here with Hairdresser Blues we travel forward about ten years to what would be Marc Bolan (the man that was T.Rex) – if he decided to take a break from waxing lyrical about, let’s face it, who knows what, and turned his attention to the day-to-day trials of love, letting go, and, of course, hairdressing. Hairdresser Blues is not as immediately lovable as Too Young To Be In Love, perhaps because it has progressed from exploring a very adolescent kind of love, to something a little more mature. Here, we have songs like ‘Set Them Free’, in which our troubadour tells of a lover who loves someone else. What advice are we given in this situation? “If you love someone, you set them free…” While Boagrt’s voice could hardly be called impressive in the traditional sense – it’s far too whiney, too sulky for that – if it doesn’t rub you up completely the wrong way, you’ll be able to appreciate the genuine expression he channels into it. Unlike with so many of the ‘technically good’ vocalists that saturate the airwaves of mainstream pop, we can really hear what he is feeling – from the over-the-top melodramatic, to the piteously despondent. Hairdresser Blues is set to be released by Hardly Art on February 28. And, just to add that maraschino cherry on top, pre-orders made through the Hardly Art website will receive a limited edition Hairdresser Blues comb Just ask yourself – what would the Fonz do?

By Rose Pullen

Lanie Lane - To the Horses By Rose Pullen

This sassy Melbourne lass’ debut album serves up a pleasant mixture of bluesy-rocky-folky-smoky voiced goodness. You may recognise the catchy ‘What Do I Do’ as the theme song from Crownies, the TV show that depicted Crown lawyers as fresh-faced, sexcrazed hotties. Please, don’t write Lanie Lane off because of this. Her appeal rests in the resurgence of rockabilly and associated ‘50s crazes – she’s wearing a cowboy hat and a harmonica necklace on the album cover – but Lanie takes it to a whole ‘nother level with her distinctive voice and twangy guitars. Love stories, warnings against cowboys, musings on boredom and mysterious men all feature. Sure, some of the songs sound a little similar but does this have to be a bad thing? You decide.

Fringe Guide The usual resting, steady heartbeat of Adelaide experiences a violent coronary during the wonderful time of the Fringe, and, not dissimiler a violent coronary, one can become overwhelmed by the explosion of talent on display. Our guide, of course, begins with us stating the obvious in imploring you to attend all the shows advertised within this magazine, several times, for they are indeed artists of great taste. You may be surprised, however, to find that there are other shows. Perhaps you might point your face at them.

Good Shows Charles Barrington: Inside the Actors [sic] Studio Apartment: Raw Comedy runner-up in ‘09. Not to be missed. Exquisite. The Mozart of pretending to be an actor. $10

sprinkled pepper into, not lady he forcibly made out with, not the gentleman he jumped and farted on (this editor) and certainly not the young woman he caught texting and subsequently carried from the building, forbidding her return. Deanne Smith: Livin’ the Sweet Life: Deanne Smith is a This is the show to go see. $20 stand-up comedian. She is from Canada. During her show she will stand on stage, tell jokes and stories, and at the ap- Festival Fishbowl: But if there is another show you must propriate and preselected moments the audience laughs. If see, let it be this one, as it will tell you about other shows that sounds like something you would like to see, see this that you must see. It will give you a greater sense of the comshow. $20 munity spirit of the Fringe as the amicable host of this show, Jason Chong, interviews all other people with shows in the Dr. Brown BEFRDFGTH: No one leaves his shows without fringe. Some might call this leeching off the success of otha very strong opinion on him. Not the man whose eyes he ers, but we think he’s on to a good thing. $5

The Space Between Shows Do you often catch yourself crying out to the heavens above screaming ‘Damn it, there are too many shows about objects, subjects, emotions or paradigms! I require a show about the space between!’ Well don’t worry Australia’s premiere, amateur, independent dance and theatre troupes have got you covered.

Opinion

The Life of the Artist By Jas Shenstone I have always believed I chose this life. When I am broke, which is often, and I only have a hundred dollars to last me and my partner two weeks I have to remind myself I chose this life. And since I’ve been with Chloe I can now say, we chose this life. In previous relationships my partners have worked more than me and you could say they funded my procrastination and laziness. Well now that I have met an artist I can’t procrastinate as much because, well frankly, we can’t afford it. Still, even though we have chosen a life that is not commonplace, that is not well funded, or even well liked, I could not think of another life to live.

to think of how I might try to describe the texture of their hair, or how the hair on someone’s neck is blonde and how I never noticed until now because the light had never fallen on her that way. I hope that we keep the fire lit. The desire to be an artist can be so easily snuffed out by all the doubts and all the negative opinions your family can have, society can have or even your so-called friends. And that’s not mentioning how broke you can become. I hope we can wade through the rejections and one day have children of our own who might come to us someday and say, ‘Mum, I want to be a drummer.’ I hope we can look at them proudly and to go to every concert and hold them when they cry and tell us the world is a fucking hard place to live in and that there seems to be no reason to struggle for this because everything seems to be telling them to stop. I will tell them, you do it because you have to, you do it because you’re strong enough to push away the doubts and keep going in the face of adversity. I hope we can all pass on this passion, to publish that book that has already had so many rejections, to paint that picture you have in your mind even if you have to throw away a hundred canvases before you get it right. Because the life of the artist is not getting any easier, in fact it might be harder than the ones who did it before us. And if they could, I’m sure they’d tell us to keep going.

Being an artist is the only thing that makes sense to me. It is the only thing that has ever made sense. Watching films and reading books, looking at beautiful paintings with thick heavy paint, is like breathing to me. And slowly life has been distilled into this: as long as we can afford to pay the rent, to eat and feed our animals, who cares about the rest - because the only other thing we care about is being able to create and to watch others create in awe. Chloe used the analogy of falling in love once for something that felt right to her in her heart. She was talking about going to Africa to volunteer, the thought of it felt like falling in love to her. When I watch a film that has something to say, that is done in a unique way, when I read a sentence that stands out above all the other sentences on that page, when I look at a painting and feel as if I were peering through a secret window into a scene that is occurring now and not a hun- And fuck it anyway - there’s always teaching if all else fails. dred years ago - it is like falling in love. “If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even We try to avoid the ‘hopeless emptiness’ to quote Richard start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives Yates. We try to live a life that generally no one is going to and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for support. Our parents try their best but their words or their three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. expressions always show their concern. And if in twelve It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean years I turn forty and I am still a writer, still trying to reach mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a an audience that at times seems to not exist, I don’t know test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do how my parents will feel, how I will feel. But I try not to live it. And, you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. with that fear. Chloe always says to me, what else would And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you be doing? Even if you become a teacher (which I am you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling currently considering) you will still write. And she’s right. like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights My mind will never stop its incessant talk or its nightly will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect ramblings. It will always stop me to consider a smell, or to laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.” look at an object for the first time with my eyes wide open, penetrating through the usual half-glance that is given to –From the film Factotum (based on Charles Bukowski). all the objects in my house that I look at a hundred times Jas is a writer of short fiction and poetry. You can read a day. My mind will stop me to glance at that stranger and more of writing here: www.jlshenstone.wordpress.com

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Review

One-Boob-Eighty-Four A review (of sorts) by Alistair Grantham.

Or stereotypical manga (think Sailor Moon and her hot but powerful buddies), pseudo-intellectual Freudian/Oedipal myth-riffing (this one should be obvious), or lowbrow comedy (think ‘big ass titties!’ as a substitute for ‘fire in the hole!’ in Tropic Thunder)?

Murakami’s mammoth 1Q84 (2011), so big it was published in the original Japanese in three volumes over two years, is my first attempt at Japanese fiction (at least since religiously watching Dragon Ball Z daily as a 10-year-old- that counts, right?) I ordered it as a Father’s Day gift. My Dad loves the master of magical realism, who represents the forefront of Japanese writing for the West both in sales and critical opinion. At the one-third mark, I asked the paterfamilias: why is this so disturbing? He didn’t understand what I meant. Either there’s a problem with my judgement on appropriate (late) Father’s Day presents, or with the old man’s taste, I concluded. Or, does the problem rest with this novel’s obsession with boobs? Stop thinking Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Orwell is only referenced relatively superficially. The novel is set in an alternate replacement for ‘our’ 1984, (the ‘Q’ stands for ‘question mark’ as well as being a homonym for ‘nine’ in Japanese), and knockers are everywhere. This fixation almost verges on the hilarious at first. One protagonist obsesses over the ‘shortcomings’ of her own (one’s smaller than the other, later mirrored in the slightly smaller second moon she notices). The second protagonist can’t shift his mind from a memory of his mother’s rack when he was eighteen-months-old, or his gaze from the voluptuous sweater puppies belonging to his savant partnerin-literary-fraud. And then there’s the incongruous- why would it matter that 80-year-old wealthy widow has a firm bosom when any number of other indicators of her physical fitness are mentioned? What is this, serious literature?

The thing is, it’s probably none of these, (and all of them). The clue comes from the self-aware wink at the reader when Murakami acknowledges his author character (who is writing about an author character) has Mummy issues. And I’m reliably informed that something similar is present in Kafka on the Shore (2002). Fuck yeah, Freudian psychology! You know about it, I know about it, Murakami seems to say. In other words, Murakami helps out. The year 1Q84 is messed up, have a free point. But this hides what he’s really up to. It’s not Freudian. A tiny bit of background research, such as Chambers’ excellent book Kickboxing Geishas (2007), throws a spotlight on his deeper concerns. If women in Japan in 2000 were in the same position as women in 1974 (which Chambers claims), why not extend this to 1984, (or 1Q84)? The hyper-sexualisation of the doll-child co-author Eri, 17, mocks and satirises the Japanese (and Western) media’s obsession with immature attitudes, schoolgirl fashions and high levels of sexual experience. The Dowager is the meek Japanese housewife gone wrong- highly capable but driven by a caring agenda that employs ruthless and aggressive (read: non-feminine) methods. And if the assassin Aomame is not a literal example of the threatening spectre of ‘Koizumi’s Angels/Assassins’ - talented and capable women candidates who rose to power at the 2005 parliamentary election - then she is simply a one-dimensional stereotype of the violent, femme fatale, (anti-)heroine or monstrous feminine threat. Aomame precludes the possibility these are stereotypical ‘normal’ Japanese women when she rejects enjo kosai (middle-class prostitution for luxury goods) by being anxious to not appear as a ‘pro’ while cruising a bar for casual sex. There is, instead, a stronger glimmer of postfeminist, sexually empowered, womanhood here.

I couldn’t pretend to understand whether Murakami is entirely knowing in this book - non-identical twin mammarymoons might be a bit too breast-fetishist - and that’s even before you get to disturbing sexual practices and genderrelations issues that also fill its 920-odd pages. But maybe I didn’t give my Dad enough credit when I asked him my initial question, and maybe 1Q84 is disturbing mostly in what it reveals about Japanese antipathy to women’s agency, (amongst other problems in Japanese society, including the expectations placed on men’s behaviour). At the same time, Murakami could be relatively unaware of doing so, and is simply recording what he sees (a slim chance, in my opinion). Either way, if half the fun is to try and figure out what happens next, the other half is being invited to ask What the Fuck, Japan? without feeling like you’re an entitled outsider bashing the culture.

Film Reviews with James McCann

The Descendants George Clooney is terrifically good at making women of a certain age buy movie tickets, but not as good at acting. In this film, Clooney is required to be on screen for a long time, which is good news for those women of a certain age, but bad new for everybody else. The film is not well made; it pursues every opportunity to emotionally exploit the audience, and there is only so much weeping accompanied by an acoustic guitar that one can be bothered to sit through. It is thematically uninspired, preaching that love is the answer, and that we should be ‘there’ for one another, and that we can solve most of our problems with improved ‘communication’. This film is teary titillation for ageing baby boomers. Avoid.

Alistair is a Masters of International Studies student who likes to think he has a minor in English, and that one Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows ought to give up on bad books after 100 pages. He is aware This film has cleverly been engineered to appeal to a wide that geisha is already plural, and tweets @stair. range of prospective movie goers. -Teenage boys and head trauma patients: if you want to listen to loud noises and watch bright explosions, this is the film for you. -Teenage girls and head trauma patients: if you want to watch Robert Downey Jr, Jude Law and Stephen Fry try to out smug one another, this is the film for you. -Fans of the first Sherlock Holmes film: if you want to watch Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s literary masterpiece molested on the big screen again, this is the film for you.

The Iron Lady If you did not like Thatcher, the Prime Minister, you may still enjoy Thatcher, the Movie, as it has scarcely anything to do with Thatcher, the Prime Minister. The film is actually about grief, senility, and regret. I, for one, regretted buying tickets. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy It was long, grey, slow, and wonderful. I cried twice. James McCann is performing a stand up comedy show during the Fringe called Awaiting My Moustache. He blogs at www.howexcellent.blogspot.com and tweets @Mcjamescann

The Crow A story by Lucy Haas

Gary was thirty, and probably an accountant. He lived alone, in an apartment. His hobbies included reading about diseases on Wikipedia, editing articles about diseases on Wikipedia, and the maintenance of a kind of savage discontent with the world and everyone in it. A crow was following him. He was fairly sure it was a crow. It had beady little black eyes and a smug demeanour and the jaunty way it walked made him want to boot it hard in the ribs. Plus, it had shat on his car six times. He’d decided it was the harbinger of death, because that was more grimly satisfying than any reasonable explanation he could think of. It amused his antagonist / friend (?), Anna. She was the new receptionist in his office, and a worse receptionist was hard to imagine, but it wasn’t her smile that stopped traffic and their boss Frank was a dirty old man down to his bones so she stayed. Gary was never quite sure what he was supposed to do there, and he’d long since stopped even pretending to care. The sheer incompetence of the bureaucracy above and below him meant his savage apathy was yet to meet any objections, and his paycheck was ample to live on, alone. Well, alone until the damn crow had shown up. It perched on his window ledge every morning and beadily watched him shambling around getting ready for the day. Then it followed him to work. The first few days he’d been sure he was imagining it. There were plenty of crows, right? But then he noticed its distinctively lopsided (horrible) little eyes. It was the same crow. He was sure it would come into his apartment if he let it, and he was equally sure that letting it in would be his last act. Whether it was a supernatural herald of his impending doom, or just a rabies-infested pest that had taken a liking to him, it was damn well staying outside. He fed it bits of bread every morning, for reasons he wasn’t sure of. “Good morning,” Anna sang whenever he got to work. “How’s the long, slow road to the grave treating you?” “Horribly, thanks,” he would retort. “What are you dying of today?” “Bone cancer.” She would nod. “Possibly fibromyalgia. One of the two.” Anna didn’t care about the office, she didn’t care about answering the phone, she didn’t care about filing or faxing or memos, and there was something refresh-

ing about the sunny, savage way she’d succumbed to this twenty-first century nightmare that had made Gary seek out her company. Well, she sought out his company, and he grudgingly allowed her to. It was the best he could do. Anna had named the crow Quoth, because she thought she was funny. She had taken to composing short verses to the meter and rhyme scheme of Poe’s famous poem to shout at him across the office. She had a degree in English literature, but she hated children too much to teach, so she worked in offices. He supposed she wrote in her spare time. It was hard to get to know a person when your interpersonal dynamic was based on an attitude of scorn and disinterest. “It’s a symbol,” Anna informed him one heinously long afternoon. “Of what?” He was seeing how quickly he could fill a page on Microsoft Word with profanity and pretending that her sitting on his desk, meditatively eating grapes, was a source of personal suffering to him. “Your humanity.” Her eyes flashed at him through her glasses. “Shouldn’t it be a kitten or something?” He’d seen some movies. Disliked most of them.“A puppy, maybe.” “You’d kick a puppy.” “I try to kick the crow. It flutters away.” “I kicked a pigeon once,” Anna confided. “It didn’t flutter away?” “It didn’t anticipate my commitment to pigeonkicking.” The goddamn crow, though. It was just following him like something out of some tawdry old gothic novel, and he was sick to death of it. It wasn’t like he needed an excuse for morbidity. He was overweight, prematurely balding, boring, intelligent in the least useful ways, and entirely incapable of being around other humans for more than a few hours at a stretch without wanting to massacre everyone in the name of peace. His father, once so interested in his son’s love life, had stopped even trying to talk to him about women, and his mother had quietly but firmly set all her hopes on his younger sister for grandchildren. Socially, economically, genetically, he was a cul-de-sac, and he knew it. The last thing he needed was a great big flea-ridden black bird flapping around after him. It was tacky, and beneath him entirely.

Anna still thought it was funny, though – Anna with all her thwarted dreams and luminous eyes and strange, not-quite-appropriate clothing – and her Poe pastiches had come very, very close to making him laugh on more than one occasion. One night, thinking back to her whimsical suggestion he train it as a minion, he lured the creature close to him with an outstretched piece of toast – and to his dismay, it was easily coaxed into hopping onto his arm. It perched like it had been born to perch there. The idea of breaking its neck occurred to him. He fed it more bread instead. “Now you become the protagonist of a gothic novel,” Anna recommended, when he told her about the crow’s new trick. “Well, I’ve already got an antagonist,” he said darkly. “She’s crushing my paperwork.” Anna shifted her weight, contritely. “Next, you train him to go ‘caw’ whenever you say something intimidating. Oh, and buy a cloak, that’s important. Stand on rooftops a lot, on moonless nights –“ “Don’t you have actual work to do?” “Not even slightly. I Gave Frank my notice yesterday.” He looked up from the piece of paper he’d been slowly turning to confetti. “That way my last day’ll be the day of the Christmas party and I can act like it’s all on my account.” What he wanted to say would have been out of character, so he said: “Good.” She sort of smiled and sauntered off to mess around with the photocopier, left him feeling like he’d failed profoundly at something important. There was a Secret Santa for the Christmas party, of course. Ignoring the name he had drawn from the hat, Gary bought a length of red ribbon and tied it onto the now-docile crow’s neck. Somehow, it looked more wretched than it had before. “You are a terrible symbol.” Croak. “And a terrible present.” Beady gaze. But when he got to the party Anna wasn’t there. She had been there, his boss said, eyes straying repeatedly to the crow. Then she’d disappeared. Aware that he was drawing a great deal of entirely unwelcome attention from his coworkers, he left the office and climbed the stairs. She’d said she liked rooftops, once. He had been pretending not to listen. He found her with her eyes fixed somewhere in the clouds and an uncharacteristic stillness in her gangly, ill-proportioned limbs. The crow on his arm made a hoarse noise and she turned sharply. The crow raised its wings as he lifted that arm to wave. She waved back. He had practiced

a speech. It was about how he didn’t actually want to kick a puppy, and she didn’t know him well enough, and there was stuff in the centre of him that wasn’t gloomy, and the days she didn’t sit on his desk eating grapes were the worst days, and that she was the only person he could think of whose absence would make his life worse instead of better. He said: “I’m not glad you’re leaving.” The crow made another wretched little noise, and she laughed, crossed in short steps to join him where he was standing uncertainly in the centre of the roof. They looked into the darkening sky together, where rainclouds had gathered but not broken, and for the first time in a very long while Gary didn’t see acid rain or global warming or El Nino or looming death of any sort in the clouds, he just saw the gathering storm. And he felt his arm slide around Anna’s shoulders, and he thought that all this wasn’t so hard after all.

Problems of TwoDimensionality A story by Katie O’Hara In an attempt to raise the spirits of the place, the board of finances decided to invest a portion of that year’s budget on re-decorating the interiors of the campus’ buildings. As for the box-like exteriors – short of demolition and rebuilding – they were agreed to be beyond hope. It was of course best to be realistic; nobody spent that much time looking at the outer shells of buildings anyway. This most stylish proposal was commended by the majority of the university community. Spurred on by the approbation, the board decided to spend the entirety of their finances – minus that needed for wages and such – on their project. They did not make this change of plan public however. The director felt it was time to do something magisterial with her tenure (which would be completed at the end of the next academic year) and she did not want to be boohooed by those with no sense of imagination or aesthetic taste. Anyway, what was the point of pouring money into academia when the students were too downtrodden by drabness to be enthused about it? No, the only thing to do was to give the place a good sprucing. And so, that very Summer, in a move of masterful organization, the work was done that would “reinvent the on-campus experience of students”.

But we digress. The point of all this really, is to explain how two people came to meet. To meet, and to fall in love. For forty-two years – ever since the building had been built – they had stood not three meters apart. Yet never once had they spoken, for, they had never actually seen each other. By this point in their lives they had both experienced much heartache. Ladies could remember her first love – a tall young man with short, curly red hair – and it still made her sigh with regret. This first was to mark the pattern of things to come. He would always walk straight past her – try though she might to catch his attention. He never even made eye-contact (or if he did, it was in an embarrassed manner, as if by mistake). Ladies didn’t know what was worse – that he knew she was there and still ignored her, or that he was completely unaware of her at all. A few years of this heartache would follow until she realised that he never came by anymore. Time heals etc., and in time she would find another to love. No-one ever found Ladies though. So too it was for Gentlemen, save that his passions were directed towards members of the female sex. There they both stood, by this point mostly convinced that love would forever just walk past. And then came the renovations. This caused some anxiety (they were neither of them young; there was every chance they would be replaced like the ratty chintz sofas and speckled lino floor) but luckily they were spared from the ravishes of Innovation. In fact, the only other notable change to their area was the placement of a ceiling to floor mirror on the wall opposite where they stood. The idea had been to make the place appear more spacious. Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t. The only really important thing to be said is that the mirror allowed Ladies and Gentlemen to see each other for the first time since they had been put side by side forty two years ago. What immediately struck the one about the other was that finally there was someone who stood still, someone who looked you in the eye. This was enough to inspire a fiery love, for both had loved for less. And, with all the time in the world to stare at each other in that happily placed mirror, their love had time to grow deep. Every time someone walked by the mirror, blocking its image if only for a second, it would cause the deepest distress to both Ladies and Gentlemen. It was especially painful at night-time when the lights were turned off and nothing could be seen for hours on end. Then came the fears that there would be nothing to see in the morning when the lights came back on. These fears were unfounded of course; neither had the least intention of leaving. There were the good times, too. The mirrors were now cleaned regularly by a team of cleaners specially provisioned for in the budget. After this was done everything could be seen that much more sharply – so the two lovers could delight in each other with a renewed clarity. There was much to delight in. Ladies adored Gentlemen’s proud, firm figure, while Gentlemen was enraptured at the sight of Ladies’ perfect propor-

tions. Most importantly, nether would ever walk away. It was the perfect match. But, just as the whims of fortune could bring them together, so too could it tear them in twain. It was not a matter of dissatisfaction with the renovation work. On the contrary, the students and most members of the staff thoroughly approved of what had been done. So much so, that productivity had sunk by an almighty rate; such was the time wasted in appreciating the thought-provoking sculpture and divinely ergonomic furniture. It was up to a few members of a certain faculty (one that will remain nameless, but that was noted for its lack of fashion sensibility) to determine the exact loss in work-hours every day (5.3±0.7 hrs) as a result of the surroundings and their splendour. They concluded from these troubling results that something would have to be done. The idea was initially vigorously opposed. Yet, as exam-time drew nearer with all the customary stresses (plus the many extras that were all due to the almost universal lack of preparation) the students began to see some merit in this sage, if grey, advice. It was eventually decided, amidst the cries of panicking students and irate staff members (who had just learnt that, due to the costly renovations, they would not be receiving their Christmas bonuses) that something would indeed be done. Naturally, there was a limit to the amount that could actually be done, but anything that could be returned or sold, was. With gusto. The money recovered was to go to hiring a squad of militant tutors to bring the many failing students to at least a passing grade. (A certain amount was also set aside to buy a fancy and superfluous electronic device for each staff member and student in the faculty that had alerted everyone to the dire situation in the first place. It was said that these devices were a “bold new approach to teaching” that would “reinvigorate the learning experience”, but really they were a shamefaced way of diverting attention from the debacle that had been that past year. No one thought otherwise.) This turn of events was happily received by everyone. Well, as could be guessed, not quite everyone. The director of finances ended her final year in disgrace, with the attractive fruits of her labour torn down before her eyes. However, she would go on to write a ridiculously popular series of books (including “Put the Feng Back Into Your Shui” and “Why Settle For Ugly?”), so she did not waste too many tears on regrets. The only real victims of the situation were two souls very much in love. With the mad rush to remove the university of any extraneous adornments went the absurdly placed mirror (resold at 78% of its original price),that stood opposite two bathroom doors. Trapped in their two-dimensions, Ladies and Gentlemen never saw each other again.

Poetry Checking Out

Steroids: The Book I’m Writing

my big hand blots and pesters sheets of butcher ’s paper words shiver out of me like lightning through a turnstile nights I glow with a holy insomnia wake to plots and schemes my head is singing and empty of metaphor big enough for the unwritten future

Aidan Coleman

Alive and the wristband a souvenir. A Friday of the mind begins with singles starting out – the air-blast from an open window. Neon sky and lit city – Pirie Street effervescent with volleyballs.

Jean

Dalzell Niece

2. Stroll the market lanes of tasty death and trodden ripeness. Last meals now first meals.

Or kicking a ball

in the slow gold of dusk between dogs and late-picnicking families, my left foot now my right foot.

Like my favourite pair of jeans I know you have to go But I hold on for comforts sake. I cling to you old and wrinkled Your zip doesn’t even drop anymore To reveal your jagged teeth. I know it’s a problem when others start to notice And now it is I who is torn Will I ever find satisfaction in another? Next time I’ll just keep you in a box.

Little Seedling Dalzell Niece

A seed planted, so small at first. Burrowed deep in rich, fertile soils. Germination like a bacterium upon me. This growing feeling. This is how it feels for everyone; First time, The rush, The giddy, giddy rush, The spin The low. The high. What if someone finds out? Is that a baby bump behind the curtain? Or will they go one Step Further and take my baby away. Used to get twenty-five thousand for seven And a half pounds. Now they only offer five. How is a legitimate man meant to survive?

Orpheus

Hannah Devereux The songs we heard are singing still, Are echoed in the chamber deep – The sound we heard while we, asleep, Let go of consciousness and will. And now he turns to look at me To ask: ‘Will I be born again? To feel the sunshine and the rain, To touch the grass, to smell, to see?’ Do not be sullen and forlorn: This undespondent harmony, Stirring here, so potently, Is waiting only to be born – I hear it rising in the day! To this one solace give your trust: Though all you were and are is dust, Your music will not fade away.

Fun.

Across 3. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 14. 15. 17. 18. 20. 21.

Of the back, within corridor salaries. (6) A force to many of spirit. (5) Dark time of day in a storm, a flyer? (11) The flower of Egypt? (4) Weasel the inner gadget, inside of the bar. (6) French spirit mixed with soft drink. (6) Unsharpened nails put into categories. (5) Show, jab the beheaded auction. (10) Terrible vicious hems are wayward. (11) Very, very ordinary. (4) Support - not quite the best. (6) Conceal strange sob remedy. (7) Pillage pool without rings, then beneath. (7)

Down 1. 2. 4. 5. 6. 13. 15. 16. 19.

A place of treatment with accomplice is behaving without emotion. (10) Not seeing the window covering. (5) To reveal one’s gay to a generation? It’s a loss of power. (6) Change the indigenous. (11) Spun like a ducks foot. (6) To alter the soundtrack after the first pious is arguable. (7) Terrible maladies? One lost, misguided. (7) Garden area with weed left in. (4) The one next to nitrogen? Actually, it’s further on. (4)

Fill with the letter of your choice!

Thanks to Demi Lardner for supplying the drawings for this edition of SPUR, as well as the cryptic crossword. To view more of her work, go to: www.locatedinyouruglyhairpiece.tumblr.com

Simile Contest Like a metaphor, the simile is an important component of speech. In each issue, we will be picking a noun and asking you, the reader, to submit a simile, or as many as you like, involving that noun, onto our facebook page. This week, the noun is ‘Thighs’. ‘Thighs’ may be used in the simile as the object described, as in: Her thighs wobbled like custard. Conversely, ‘thighs’ may be used in the simile as the aid in describing the object, as in: The custard wobbled like her thighs. Top entrants will be published in the second issue. The best entrant will win a large bottle of alcoholic drink, to be collected by their parent/guardian if they are not of age. Entries close March 10th. Submit entries by posting them on the wall of www.facebook.com/spurmag

No Laughing

Matter

A screenshot from the revised version of Scooby Doo

Not being someone who usually likes to think about important things, it recently occurred to me that whatever company manufactured and sold Scooby Snacks had the smallest of niche markets possible - one dog. Sure he liked them, he liked them a lot, but one dog could not possibly supply enough income to sustain an entire business. They must have had overheads; a factory, workers, ingredients, distributors... the list goes on. Unless a box cost about 10 million dollars, how were they affording to run this enterprise?

Jenkins: (nervous): I... I told you, I just work the coaster...

This is only one of a wide array of business planning failures, evident in the show. Where did these kids live? How did they afford their extravagant travel lifestyle? And importantly, where are their parents? At first glance, this documentary series appears to be a complete farce.

Shaggy:

With a thirst for answers I did some research.

Censors took a contentious view of the show’s graphic nature, but an opportunity was seen and the show was reworked into a delightful children’s cartoon. To appease family groups, a lovable dog replaced the excessive violence and adult themes, clothes were put on Daphne, Fred’s use of cursing was reduced by 80% and Shaggy’s insatiable appetite for blood was replaced by an insatiable appetite for food. His catchphrase was also changed from “Satan’s balls!” to the more popular “Zoinks!”

It turns out the company responsible for manufacturing Scooby Snacks does exist but the treats are actually common variety cat biscuits re-branded ‘Scooby Snacks’ for entertainment purposes. Interestingly, the actor who plays Scooby, Ralph Fiennes, apparently does not actually like the treats but his on-screen response to their taste is testament to his amazing acting talent, as is his ability to play a convincing dog.

Shaggy: Alright, if that’s how you want to play... Freddie: Shaggy, no! (Shaggy smashes elderly man in face with pool cue.) Funny, I guess now there’s one less amused person in this park.

Velma: Jinkies! (All laugh)

Inaccuracies or not, I prefer to focus on the positives emThe history of the show itself is even more interesting. Curi- bodied by this wonderful show such as the unbreakable ously, Scooby Doo was initially not intended for children. bond between friends, the use of intelligence to solve probIt was marketed as a gritty cop drama, as dialogue from the lems, and the courageous battle of Velma as an obvious sufferer of Down’s Syndrome. The real mystery here is, why pilot episode indicates: can’t everyone do the same? Shaggy: I’m gonna ask you one last time, Old Man * * * Jenkins. Where is the deed to the amuse- Late O’Clock with Rob Hunter featuring Luke McGregor and celebrity guests. Monday March 12th 8pm, The Arkaba ment park? robhunter.com.au @RobHunterswords

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