Pelican Edition 2 Volume 84

PELICAN

Mystery Ed. 2 Vol. 84

Experiences that mean the world The Melbourne JD Law degree

www.law.unimelb.edu.au/jd

Picture by Kate Prendergast

Contents

REGULARS

MYSTERY

SECTIONS

4 credits

10 paul?

22 politics

5 editorials

11 who are you?

26 arts

6 what’s up on campus

12 miranda?

29 film

7 advice corner

13 how does she do it?

34 music

8 miscellany

14 horsemeat?

38 culture

20 diversions

16 dna?

42 books

46 jerk circle

17 peacock?

18 sex?

20 eating?

21 africa?

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CONTRIBUTORS

ADVERTISING Alex Pond DESIGN Jennifer Breeden SECTION EDITORS Books - Zoe Kilbourn Culture - Simon Donnes Politics – Richard Ferguson Music – Connor Weightman Arts- Kat Gillespie Film – Wade McCagh SUBEDITORS Josh Chiat Richard Ferguson Aarushi Garg Kat Gillespie Wade McCagh Eunice Ong CONTRIBUTORS *- words Marnie Allen*^ ^- images Stephanie Ball^ Lucy Ballantyne* Tom Beyer* Darcie Boelen* Matthew Bye* Jessica Cockerill^ Josh Chiat* William Dixon* Simon Donnes* Elle Evangelista* Gillian Farquhar* Oscar Felsch* Richard Ferguson* Kat Gillespie* Alex Griffin*^ Brad Griffin* Djuna Hallsworth*

Tom Hutchinson* Sven Ironside* Brooke Jackson* Kevin Kendrick* Zoe Kilbourn* Danica Lamb* Hugh Manning* Shaughn McCagh* Wade McCagh* Alice Mccullagh*^ Grace McKie^ Deblina Mittra* Cameron Moyses* James Munt* Alice Palmer^ Brennan Peers* Kate Prendergast*^ Harry Quinlan* Mason Rothwell* Gideon Sacks* Philip Sharpe* Caz Stafford* Ed Taylor* Elisa Thompson* Thea Walton* Connor Weightman* Lauren Wiszniewski*^ Natasha Woodcock* Bernice Ong^ Eunice Ong* Romany Pope^

COVER ARTIST Alice McCullagh Alice is a person that does art, amongst other things. Often, this art involves videogames, and is drawn on the side of shoes. Sometimes, she does more deep and meaningful stuff, but it rarely sells as well. You can see a partial collection of her work, old and new, at www.thetoaster.deviantart.com

CONTACT PELICAN Pelican is funded entirely by campaign donations from the National Party and is proudly dedicated to a advocating on issues such as gun ownership rights for motor vehicles and strip mining the Ningaloo. For complaints, comments, thoughts and feedback, contact us at pelican@guild.uwa.edu.au, or come and visit our office on the second floor of the guild building here on campus. If you’ve got mad skills/no skills and want to get involved on our merry old ship, don’t be shy! If ya hate what you see, let us know, or even better, be the change you want to see in the world and contribute.

The views expressed within are not the opinions of the UWA Student Guild or the Pelican editorial staff; rather, they belong to the individuals writers and artists.

Nangs make you smarter, 9/10 doctors guessed.

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picture by Stephanie Ball

EDITORS Marnie Allen Alex Griffin

PIZZA AD?

PREZITORIAL The theme for this Pelican is mystery. As Reggie Watts once said: You’ll never know, unless you ask them. And often times when I ask people things they oftentimes will oftentimes say something often and the more often that I notice that they’re saying things that I think that they are going to say over and over again, which would classify as often, I feel as though there is a tranquil sunset setting in over my mind which indicates that the world is going to be a pretty cool place at some point and then it’s going to be horrible again. But then it’s going to be really cool but then it’s going to be not so good and then it’ll be pretty decent for a while and then it’s going to be like “uh oh!” and after all that’s the engine of reality.

The Guild is a vessel for the transmission of reality. We are your dream engines, providing you with welfare support, academic representation, a kick-ass social life and discounts on an increasing number of food and drink options. On the 17th April, PROSH will give you the chance to be a dream engine for those who are less well-off, by raising important funds for the Song Room, icea foundation, Huntingtons WA and Miracle Babies Foundation. Make sure you get involved!

Mysteries are sometimes good and sometimes bad. If you feel like the Guild is a bit of a mystery, remember that I am always more than happy to explain what we can do for you, assist you with an issue or simply point you in the right direction.

Thank you.

Cameron Barnes

MARNITORIAL Is the Loch Ness monster real? Can Mongooses (mongeese?) really talk? Who did let the dogs out?

Prominent unsolved mysteries like these can cast a pretty big shadow on the everyday, banal problems that we experience. But that shouldn’t stop you from spicing up your life with a bit of detective work.

Next time you put your phone somewhere weird like in one of your boyfriend’s crocs, or forget how you ended up in bed with a fourteen year old Boy Scout named Kenneth, have a bit of fun while you find the answers you’re looking for! Buy a magnifying glass, perhaps even a notepad and get sleuthin’! After all, we are catapulted with problems to solve and questions to answer on a daily basis.

This month, Pelican aims to bring a little light to some of the mysteries, conspiracies, unsatisfactory answers and enigmas that YOU, the reader, encounter on a daily basis. If you read through the entire Mystery Edition and still haven’t seen the light, don’t ruin everyone’s day and put your hand up in a lecture to find the information you seek; instead direct your inquisitive spirit towards the Pelican office, second floor of the Guild. 100% satisfaction, guaranteed.

Xoxo Marnie

GRIFFITORIAL Hey student(s)!

Before we get into Mystery, I figured it wouldn’t be a bad idea if I helped clear up some questions about myself, the Pelican, and this edition. Height: 5ft jerk. Weight: 60kg in layout week, otherwise 65. Orphan: Not yet. Occupation: undersecretary for Humoring Marnie. Age of the Pelican: 84. Does it put out: it’s a magazine. Can I get a little jiggy: jiggy. Can I get high in your office: ~maybe~. Political affiliations: Serbians for Muammar Gadaffi. Campus affiliations: Liberty puppet. Did you see a dolphin today: yes. Joondalup: nope. Element: Normal/Psychic. Special Dfc.: 56. Level: 33. Evolves to: Cirrhosismon. Dogs are: wet and stupid. Phone number: not ‘til marriage. Marital status: suppressed.

Favourite Beatle: Keith. Should I get involved in Pelican: is Skrillex dead? How many pages is this edition: 48. Are there secret pages: yes. Where can I find these: enter the 36 chambers. John or Paul: R. Kelly. Did he urinate on that twelve year old: that is a question for the courts. What’s inside this edition: amorous children, unnecessary references to Juggalos, strippers, girls getting lost in the bush. That sounds like filth: I love Karl O’Callaghan. Are you proud of yourself: I sleep on the backseat of a long black car that is constantly driving due East, surrounded by guns and money. Is there anyone you’d like to thank: everyone who contributed, Marnie, Jen, A-Pond, and Kelsie for the typewriter.

Luv Griff

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What’s up on campus University Writer’s Club Do you have a strong passion for writing? Do you have a moderate passion for writing? Do you like: Books? Movies? Coffee? Pandas? The alphabet?

The question mark? This series of thoughtprovoking questions? If your answer is ‘’Hells yeah!’’ to any of the above, then this is the club for you.

The University Writer’s Club (UWC) is the place where write-minded (pun!) folks can come together, kick back and talk about all things writing-related. We aim to foster a supportive environment for aspiring writers at UWA by holding weekly meetings where members can provide constructive feedback and ideas for each other’s writing ventures!

Meetings are held every Wednesday from 3-5pm at Guild Seminar Room 2

UWA Pantomime Society Nightmare on Wall Street is an original pantomime playing at the Dolphin Theatre, April 11th, 12th and 13th, 7:30PM. Amidst economic crisis, stockbroking company Jumpoff, Tower & Die is doing well.

Some might say suspiciously well. Employees who once joined the company to fulfil their aspirations now find these same dreams turning against them with creepy and hilarious results. Featuring audience interaction, more innuendo than you can poke a stick at and one huge murderous corporate empire. Tickets are $10/$12. Book now by emailing uwapanto@ gmail.com, or purchase them on the Oak Lawn on the week beginning March 25th.

UWA Duke of Edinburgh Club The UWA Duke of Ed Club represents and helps promote the internationally recognised Duke of Edinburgh Award amongst university students up to 25. The award is an exciting way to meet new people, experience new and exciting opportunities and it looks pretty good to potential employers! As of 2012 there were 850 000 people participating in the award worldwide across over 140 countries!

If you are interested please check out UWA Duke of Ed Club on facebook!

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The West Australian Medical Students’ Orchestra The West Australian Medical Students’ Orchestra is now recruiting! If you are studying at uni and want to get into med, or have a guaranteed position, and would love to keep up with your music, have fun, and contribute to charity, then we want you - no auditions necessary! Chuck us an email at: medicalstudentsorchestra@gmail.com AIESEC Want to do something different and challenging this winter break? Why not go on Exchange overseas? Step out of your comfort zone and experience a new country, culture and of course taste new foods! AIESEC Exchange applications are now open, apply now at: http://tinyurl.com/goglobalapply or visit our Facebook page for more information: www. facebook.com/aiesecuwa Parlez-vous Français? AIESEC presents its 3rd installment of SLAP (Secondary Language Acquisition Program) endorsed by the UWA Student Guild! Learn French at an affordable price taught by a native speaker at both beginner & intermediate levels! For more information and to sign up: http://www. surveymonkey.com/s/CKCCWSJ or check us out on Facebook: www.facebook.com/slapuwa

The Winthrop Singers The WINTHROP SINGERS are a guildaffiliated chapel choir, directed by Dr Nicolas Bannan and comprised of students from all academic faculties. We perform Evensong every Thursday 6pm, religiously (pun), at the St Georges College Anglican Chapel. We also perform at a number of concerts throughout the year, with our musical repertoire ranging from biblical to barbershop. Check out our upcoming performances on the UWA Guild Calendar or on our public facebook page, and don’t forget to come along to our weekly FREE evensong performances at St George’s – people of all faiths (or lack thereof) are more than welcome to attend.

University Buddhist Youth Club Better than a thousand hollow words, is one word that brings peace – Buddha. Do you wonder about Buddhist quotes and

teachings? Is Reincarnation possible? Did you ever question “Why Me?” in troubled times? Will Meditation improve our life? Well, we, University Buddhist Youth Club (UBYC), try to answer those questions and then more.

Come down and join our Dharma Discussions, Tea Appreciations, Meditation, Experiences sharing, and other event off campus. We can learn to improve our lives while having fun with new friends. Now you’re thinking of dropping by? Like us on facebook.com/ UniversityBuddhistYouthClub

Free Trade on Campus!

UWA has gone fair trade!

This is a change that’s been led by UWA Sustainable Development, supported by UWA Enactus and UWA Oxfam. What this means for you is that there’ll be more environmentally friendly produce in your daily coffee, chocolates and other products at outlets all over campus, and a significant reduction in the amount of orphan tears involved in bringing your food to you. Yay! PROSH. APRIL 17th. DO EET. Hey reader! Given that you like reading things, we’ve got some thrilling news for you! On April 17th we’ll be holding the biggest blockbuster event held once a year by UWA! Any idea what it is? Nope, it’s not Cam Barnes’ pubic grooming ceremony, nor is it that one day people ACTUALLY read the Pelican. IT’S PROSH; the most exciting day of the student calendar where all of you sexy students get into the craziest costumes you can find and start selling our PROSH newspaper all across Perth! Last year, our PROSHers managed to sell over 120,000 papers in ONE DAY(!) and made over $150,000 for our selected charities.

Given PROSH is crazy fun and makes you feel good inside, there’s no reason not to do it! So if you’re interested in getting involved with PROSH, like us on facebook or email the sexy directors (proshdirectors@gmail.com) some dick pics that we can put in our spank bank ;-D. Or alternatively come to one of our Writer’s nights every Tuesday if you’re keen to write for PROSH, paint banners for PROSH, or let PROSH get in and around your mouth!

XoXo - The Directorz (4 LYF) out http://www.marxismconference.org for full program. Hosted by Socialist Alternative.

Pelican Advice Corner Providing advice this edition is Damon Roxon, one of the most enigmatic musicians of the 1990s. A founding figure of the Britpop movement, his band Haze produced several records occasionally described as seminal by Pitchfork before disbanding in 2001. Roxon has since faded into relative obscurity, although comeback album rumours are persistent.

I recently purchased a plastic Keep Cup to minimise my ecological footprint, but am too image conscious to actually use it in guild cafes. Do the bright colours clash with my outfit? – Becky

In fact, the following sure-fire techniques succeeded in landing me dates with all three original members of the Sugababes.

Firstly, don’t waste your time with conversation starters or friendly greetings.

Girls find such social niceties dull and predictable. Instead, spend your time in tutorials cultivating a mysterious but apathetic presence. Sit at the back and shoegaze as hard as possible –think lead guitarist in a My Bloody Valentine cover band. Occasionally lift your head to offer softly spoken insights about whatever Kafka text is being discussed. Look thoughtful but distant.

Dear Becky, I deeply admire your commitment to sustainable living. Since retiring from music I have become increasingly and inexplicably eco conscious myself, considering the thousands of miles jet travel, wanton towel usage and heavy consumption of carbon intensive heroin that came with fame. Having recently purchased a free range vegan raw food farm in Sussex, I now split my time between giving nostalgic NME interviews and harvesting organic produce.

If years of moving in the same social circles as Bono have taught me anything, however, it is that environmental activism is pointless if it does not benefit one’s image in some way. With this in mind, lose the Keep Cup. Nobody ever used the words ‘fluoro’ and ‘integrity’ in the same sentence. Drinking out of what looks like a repurposed Croc is a depressing way to begin your day and reflects badly upon all of us as a society.

Dispense with traditional drinking vessels altogether and simply drink the coffee with your hands. Feel the hot espresso against your skin. Not only will the experience provide an emotional release, but it is likely you will save the lives of several dolphins. Additionally, your cries of pain will serve to alert passers by to your environmental credentials.

-Damon Years of schooling at a private all-boys school have left me socially inept. How do I approach all these girls in my classes? – Neil Dear Neil, What you call social ineptitude, I call a dating goldmine. In my experience, women happen to love awkward clueless losers such as yourself.

Try to develop either an extremely positive or negative stance on hip-hop. Keep an unkempt hairstyle and let go of society’s expectations about regularly washing your jeans. If possible, upload a series of experimental ambient noises onto Soundcloud and send a link to all the ladies in the class.

Above all, keep it real.

-Damon Now in the fifth year of my arts degree, the presence of young, virile freshers on campus makes me feel more irrelevant with each passing day. Should I persevere with my studies or cut my losses and leave? – Noel Dear Noel, Don’t be intimidated by these young children, with their swags and yolos and Twitter accounts. While I admit the company of anyone too young to remember Ally McBeal is an unsettling thing, as an ageing rock star I firmly believe that you can still maintain a level of success no matter how out of touch and irrelevant you are. If Morrissey can stick around, so can you.

Rather than trying to blend in with the kids, try to pass yourself off as somewhat retro, as the symbol of a cooler and better time, which you no doubt are. If this fails, do as my record company advised me to do before the recording of my comeback album – watch as many Gossip Girl episodes as possible until you feel comfortable assimilating into youth culture again. I ship Chuck and Blair.

I am the lead singer of a struggling local band whose existence subsists on Triple J Unearthed profile views and occasional gigs at the Rosemount hotel. How can we take our career to the next level? – Roxanne Dear Roxanne, My first piece of advice would be to lose the band. Your craving for success will only be hindered by those deadbeats. Record a solo album in your bedroom and release it under a confusing moniker for maximum effect.

If you’re not keen to go solo, it’s time to form a collaborative side project. Unlikely collaborations work best in terms of creating internet hype– I recently formed a supergroup with the Madden brothers, Kylie Minogue and the drummer from Silverchair. Several eminent blogs are very excited about us.

Good luck!

You should probably also move to Melbourne.

-Damon

-Damon

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8 picture by Romany Pope

Edymology

by Edward Taylor mystery, n.

The word “mystery” comes to us from the Ancient Greek term μυστήριον (transliterated for your convenience to “mysterion”) meaning “secret.” This, in turn, was probably coined from μύειν, “to close the lips or eyes.”

With this in mind, mystery’s etymology must be fairly straight-forward, must it not? As is so frequently the case in English: not on your life! μυστήριον most frequently occurs in classical literature as its plural form which specifically meant “secret rites, rituals, or ceremonies.” The most famous of these (if you’ll forgive the irony involved in calling a ritual defined by its secrecy “famous”) was conducted exclusively by the initiates of the temple to Demeter at Eleusis being the only people permitted to attend and know how to conduct the rituals.

From this point things become increasingly unclear, so bear with me. In the Septuagint, the original Greek translation of the Old Testament, the words is used in two books to refer to a clandestine gathering of civil or religious officials. In later Christian usage the term came to more generally mean “sacrament,” but also resumed its original meaning in a very specific context: a secret only known by or knowable to god. Some combination of these two definitions brought it, by means of the Christianisation under Rome and the Carolingians, into Old French and so Old English.

Here we stumble upon the word’s use in a context of which many of us may have heard: the “mystery play.” For those who don’t know, mystery plays were theatrical performances by touring troupes which

promoted the grace of god by contriving a moralistic story around a miracle. This is an important etymological milestone as the same, late-medieval and early-renaissance, performances were and are often termed “miracle plays.” In conjunction with ecclesiastic records and lay-poetry, this development suggest that the term “mystery” had become almost exclusively synonymous with “miracle,” probably based on the earlier meaning of something only knowable to god and so beyond human comprehension.

The idea of being “beyond human comprehension,” appease to have stuck and then extrapolated to simply mean “beyond comprehension from the information currently at hand.” How exactly this development occurred, with the records we now have, however remains... well... a self-referential joke.

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Paul’s Dead

by Matt Bye The following emails were recovered by police from the computer of a suspect in a homeinvasion case last August. Certain parts have been redacted in order to protect the identities of anyone uninvolved with said case.

called the real Paul and the fake. The photos are pretty grainy on the face of it, but there are some subtle differences that I can’t quite put my finger on.

What have they done to my brain!?

I don’t know what to make of it all. I just thought I’d share it with you considering how much of a fan you are. I think I might do a bit more research on it.

Hope you are well,

Rob,

Reply Received: 03/06/12 11:02AM

I think you’re reading too much into this. No one killed Paul and no one is brainwashing you with Beatles music, ok?

You should just let it go and stop.

Rob ***name redacted*** Reply Received: 02/06/12 8:37PM Hey Rob, Yeah it has been a while, hasn’t it? How have you been?

I’ve heard about this story, there’s a few people who seem to reckon Paul died back in the 60’s, a load of shit if you ask me. They all talk about hidden clues in the music and the symbology of the Abbey Road photo (apparently it’s meant to be some kind of funeral procession), but I just can’t see it. I really don’t believe anyone would go to the trouble of a cover up for one and I mean, it’s plain obvious that it’s the same Paul as it’s always been.

Picture by Jessica Cockerill

***name redacted***

What if Paul didn’t just die? It seems a little too convenient for him to have died and someone to have assumed his place so easily. I’m thinking, what if he was murdered?

It makes perfect sense. The whole cover-up seems so perfect that someone must have planned it in advance... to have found or even made a doppelganger of that quality can’t have been something they could have pulled out of thin air, it must have been in the works for a long time before…

I need to know the truth.

Sent: 03/06/12 4:20AM Sent: 14/06/12 12:36PM You won’t believe what I’ve found!

Sent: 02/06/12 06:43PM Dear ***name redacted***, I know it’s been awhile, but I’ve found something that might interest you.

I was cleaning out my parent’s shed earlier today when an old newspaper headline caught my eye, “Paul McCartney Dead.”

According to the article, Paul McCartney had been killed sometime in the late 60’s and a doppelganger had assumed his identity within the band as part of a cover-up. It was pretty vague with its evidence; mainly it talks about a secretly recorded interview with an insider and a series of photos comparing what they

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Sent: 08/06/12 5:13PM

I’ve been looking around on the net for anything related to the story and I’m really starting to believe that anything is possible.

I managed to find a site with better versions of the photos from the article and it may have taken me a few hours to see it, but now that I can see it, it’s just so obvious. Like his hair, it’s not quite the same shade of brown and you can totally tell that beneath his beard his jawline has changed, even if it’s not immediately clear.

The guy who runs the site thinks that they gave the doppelganger a beard as a distraction and so they would forget what the real Paul looked like.

I really think he might be right.

And that’s only the beginning! I looked up what you said about clues being hidden in the music.

According to this one guy, that’s not all that’s hidden in the music. He says that whoever covered-up Paul’s death is using the music to subliminally brainwash everyone who listens to it. That kind of scares me actually when I think about how much I used to listen to their stuff…

It all fits together. The hidden subliminal messages in the music, the beard, the sudden love of farming… The whole cover-up was a Communist plot!

Through the Beatles they could brainwash the West’s youth into being a mix of free-loving hippies and generally unproductive members of society, setting back the Western economy by decades! It must have been their plan all along. Who knows what damage they’re still doing? What other dormant messages they’ve put inside our heads? Maybe their music is brainwashing us into limiting our own potential. It explains so much!

The world needs to know the truth; I need to show them what’s really been going on. I need to find hard proof though, so that everyone will truly believe and not cast me off as some moon-landing nut. I’ll find it and show them so they can’t deny.

As angry as I feel about all these lies, I do feel a slight pang of guilt. I liked Paul. Why couldn’t it have been Ringo?

The semaphore letters on the album cover to Help don’t spell out H-E-L-P; rather, it’s N-U-J-V. Given that Paul’s real first name is James, it’s obvious that NUJV is short for New Unknown James Vocalist. Free the truth!

Living Vicariously

by Simon Donnes We’ve all had days that we wish were more stimulating. Perhaps at work or school, where nothing was out of the ordinary, or at home, where we lazed around all day kind of wanting to get something done to no avail. It’s a fairly innocent desire in itself – we all have long slogs of tedious monotony, days where the clock won’t tick over fast enough and we just want to go home, or times we wish were just more exciting. Behind this unassuming want, however, is a brutal conflict with ourselves.

But some people take fandom too far.

Dressing up as a wizard and waving your stick around is fine; there’s tons weirder stuff just on campus alone. What’s over the metaphorical line is the infatuation with fantasy to the detriment of our involvement with the real. The people who make charts of Bret and Jermaine’s friendship during Flight of the Concords and are able to recite lines ad infinitum, they aren’t the ones to worry about.

The ones building shrines and writing letters in blood are.

The why, is the question. Firstly, why do some, otherwise totally normal, people have their entire mental state occupied with media in a way that puts those 99% guys to shame?

Secondly, why fixate on a single fantasy?

Keep in mind this is some heavy bro-science we’re heading into, and as reasonable as it may seem, quoting Pelican won’t fly in your sociology mid-sems.

The problem stems from our ability to handle reality itself. In the primeval breadbasket of human development and survival, we grew as a social animal. We recounted stories to one another, providing social contact, vital information to survival, and most importantly, escapism. Even primordial man needed his downtime, and without Facebook, he was forced to communicate in that old fashioned way.

Picture by Alice Palmer

From the moment we’re able to comprehend our surroundings and escape into fiction, we are enabled to do so by media. We’ve been consuming media since birth, media specifically targeted to us by age group – school children get Harry Potter, Glee and Mean Girls, the uni students get Community, American Pie and and the ‘grown-ups’ get The Sopranos, Mad Men, Desperate Housewives.

They’re examples. Maybe you loved Twin Peaks as a toddler, my mum made sure I did.

As we learnt to tell stories, so to did we learn to listen to them. Seems very simple to say, but it would have blown Ugg and Grug’s minds at some point that they could inform the other of events that they weren’t there personally to see.

For this process to work, the listener needed to relinquish control over their reality, and submit to the reality of the storyteller. This would be the first way in which man would experience something outside of his direct reality.

Storytelling, even retelling of completely real events, gave rise to the first fantasies.

So we grew dependent on this ability to submit to another’s reality as a survival mechanism – it let us know where the sabre tooth tigers were and let us blow off some steam. As culture developed, storytelling, the cornerstone of civilisation, grew with it. Throughout history, we’ve seen massive growth in the number of stories being told. Visual media, audio capture, the motion picture, the goddamn internet – they all skyrocketed the diversity of media and lowered the bar to entry. The result is a flood of information, of billions of stories, all now preserved forever in cyberspace.

Much like how the human body does not deal well with a primarily carb’ diet, the

circumstances we find ourselves in are very different to the ones we are naturally equipped to deal best in. Put simply, we’re most capable of handling a small number of detailed stories in a tribal, closely linked environment, rather than millions of them at once. It should be no surprise then, that we can be inclined towards latching onto one fantasy and holding it tight, be it resembling our real lives or have no resemblance at all; doing this provides a sense of security, identity and cohesiveness, things that are harder to access the higher the options stack up. How well we deal with this overload of alternate realities, and the surrogate we find that strikes a certain chord, just come down to personal adaptability.

You’ve probably seen the result of someone going down the dark path personally. For the uninitiated, have this bleak picture painted - be they a friend, colleague or countryman, they are reduced to a shell. Adept at all manner of obscure trivia, infatuated with fictional constructs and utterly dissatisfied with their “boring life,” despite the cause being their source of regufe. This comes down to a balance.

If you can get lost in fiction without it affecting your life, great. If you can’t, get help – nobody likes a daydreamer.

At the 2009 Gathering of the Juggalos, showing your “dick or tits” at Juggalette’s Bistro on site would get you a free drink. Batteries were three dollars apiece.

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THE SECRET OF HANGING ROCK An enigma wrapped in a mystery wrapped in a petticoat

by Harry Quinlan “Miranda? Miranda! Miranda, don’t go up there!

Come back!”

On a hot Valentine’s Day at the turn of the 20th century, four schoolgirls and their teacher separate from the group whilst on an excursion to Hanging Rock in the Victorian outback. Only one returns. Another is found a week later, remembering nothing, and the other three are never seen again. This is the central mystery of the 1967 novel Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay (adapted for film by Peter Weir in 1975), one that is infamously without resolution.

However, there is more to the mystery of the girl’s disappearance than many realize.

The film version of Picnic at Hanging Rock is notable as one of the first true international Australian hits. Weir’s dreamy, languid photography and his stylistic use of music and sound perfectly realize the tone of Lindsay’s novel. The eerie and unsettling events that passed at Hanging Rock proved so strange and richly actualized that many became convinced that it was based on a true story. Lindsay refused to provide answers as to the fate of the girls Miranda, Miriam and their teacher Miss McCraw, and most delight in declaring the mystery one for the ages. However, the original draft

contained 18 chapters, not the 17 that made up the published book. Whilst it would be neat at this point to say the chapter resides in a crate secreted in the warehouse from the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, alas, the chapter was in fact published as “The Secret of Hanging Rock” in 1987. Over twelve short pages, it’s revealed what happened to the girls after they left their classmates.

As the girls climb the rock, they observe several strange phenomena, including the sensation of being pulled “inside out” by a force like a “tide,” as well as encountering a wild looking woman who it is strongly hinted is their school teacher, Miss McCraw. When the girls and the woman take off their corsets and toss them over a precipice the woman points out how they do not fall but instead appear to stick fast in the air. The group observe a hole open in the rock that is neither “a hole in the rock, nor in the ground, but rather in space.” The woman transforms into a crab-like creature and goes through the opening, as do Miriam and Miranda, but before Irma can follow, the rock sinks, sealing the portal and leaving Irma ““tearing and beating at the gritty face of the boulder with her bare hands.”

Lindsay conjures the notion of a disconnect between the events on the rock and reality.

Perhaps the girls perceive the corsets to stick fast

in the air because they have slipped out of time with the rest of the world. This goes some way to explaining why, when Irma is found unconscious some days later, her bare feet are perfectly clean, unscratched or bruised, as though they never really touched the ground at all.

Most critics agree that the original novel was stronger for the omission of this final chapter, and as “The Secret of Hanging Rock” is no longer in print, it would seem that the public agreed.

The film and the novel are not really concerned with the fate of the girls, but rather with the effect the unsettling events have on their small rural community. Both explore the destructive pursuit of man to know the unknowable, and as the rock refuses to give up any of its secrets, those are left only to proverbially thrash at the boulder with their bare hands. What was at the start of the novel a beautiful landscape, regarded as poetic and sublime, inexplicably cruel, uncaring and terrifying, as though its inability to provide answers is an instead an active refusal to part with them.

But to say the film and novel are more powerful without any kind of closure is to do a disservice to the material. The real beauty of the lost chapter is not that it perfectly elucidates the fate of the girls and puts an end to the mystery, but instead that it alludes to an even more unsettling, Lovecraftian mystery of Hanging Rock, and by extension, the nature of the Australian continent.

The girls did not meet some predictably sticky end, like murder, kidnapping, thirst or exposure, but instead fell victim to a strange phenomenon as ancient and as natural as the rock itself.

Picture by Yutika Donohue

Picnic at Hanging Rock is perhaps one of the best attempts at describing the indescribable uniqueness of the Australian landscape, a continent as old as the earth is round, worm flat by millennia, primordial, arid, uncaring. I am reminded of the first paintings of the Australian country by colonial artists, how wrong the flora and fauna looks, as though it proved so baffling and alien to the eyes of the artists, trained on familiar willows and heathrow, that they could not even make sense of it.

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In the end, the mystery of the girls who climbed Hanging Rock and never came down again has not proved so enduring and compelling because we yearn for it to be solved, but since it alludes to something sublime, terrifying and totally beyond the remit of our comprehension. The groaning, ancient hearts of Hanging Rock and Australia itself hold a mystery without answer, and one that given half a chance will swallow up those unwitting souls that stray too far gone on hot and dreamy summer days.

Russell Boyd, the film’s cinematographer, is said to have enhanced the film’s diffuse and ethereal look by placing a piece of bridal veil over the camera lens.

I Don’t Know How Sarah Jessica Parker Does It

by Thea Walton As most twenty-something university students with issues with their character are wont to do, I blame my upbringing for my lack of understanding of the mysterious ways of the female gender.

I don’t think my mum was trying to make any kind of stand against traditional gender roles through the way that she brought me up, nurturing my sister and I into paragons of a new form of gender identity. She probably just thought she was following a best-case practice in Good Parenting when she dressed me in androgynous clothing.

This not only left me with a cupboard full of clothes that even Good Sammies would probably reject, but also led to me continually being mistaken for a boy during the summer of 1999. I sported a trendy cropped haircut to match my cargo pants and joggers, as if I was unwillingly starring in a children’s version of Twelfth Night. Mum’s moratorium on feminine things included, but was not limited to: Cosmopolitan, dyeing your hair, wearing bikinis, plucking your eyebrows and shaving anywhere.

Admittedly, Dad tried pretty hard for the first decade of my life to help me get in touch with my femininity. He was definitely on the ball when it came to dressing girls under the age of twelve. Favourite outfits of that era included a trim pair of orange overalls from OshKosh B’Gosh, a soft purple Esprit cardigan and an incredibly versatile pair of blue Sketchers. Dad was all about the labels. However, as I grew older, it became apparent that Dad was less and less equipped to handle the changing fashion demands of a teenage girl. I think he felt that if he kept dressing me like a ten yearold I would remain that way forever, like a character in a modern-day fairy tale and/or HBO miniseries.

“I don’t know how she does it,” and in no way do I mean to make any reference to the Sarah Jessica Parker film of the same title. I constantly feel like I’m surrounded by girls my age who just get how this whole “being a woman” thing works, while I’m left working out how put on nail polish without it looking like a five year-old painted my nails with a paint roller.

In no particular order, the things* I find most inscrutable about feminine ways are: 1. Make-up: Everyone around me seems to revel in wiping mascafoundationshadow all over their face on a daily basis.

Where do they find the time and, more importantly, the willpower? I find mascara splodges incredibly demoralising. Each black spot represents my inability to control another facet of my life.

2. Online shopping: No one ever needs that much choice. This is freedom taken to a whole new, and ridiculous, level. Can’t we just go back to that time when everyone wore the same t-shirt from Jay Jays?

3. G-strings: Did you know you can also minimise your Visible Panty Line by wearing a skin-coloured, thigh-hugging pair of shorts that come up to your bellybutton? That honestly, to me, seems like a more practical solution than the g-string.

4. Blowjobs: Unless everyone around me is lying about how they give great BJs, I am the only woman in the world who struggles with BJs. I’d like to blame my poor gag reflex, but it’s probably just my lack of tenacity in the bedroom. I should probably also stop calling them BJs. 5. Regular grooming: I understand that admitting to points

four and five will probably prevent me from getting any over the next year or so. In my defence, I recently endured my first bikini wax and I didn’t cry. On the outside. On the inside, I wept for my lost innocence and some lost skin. The waxing beautician, who was from some vague Eastern-European country, showed no mercy. I think she was just pretending not to speak English.

6. Eating muesli: Fuck cereal.

But, despite what it may seem, I don’t envy or pity women who just get how to do lady things better than I ever will. Rather, I admire their can-shave attitude, their ability to find the perfect ASOS dress on-sale in their size and the tenacious spirit they employ when giving BJs blowjobs. I sometimes dream of a day when I, too, will be able to eat muesli without gagging, but for now I’m pretty content to just marvel at those women with their mysterious ways. *Of course, none of these things are exclusively feminine, but I’m just considering this all from the point of view of a lady (a.k.a. me) trying to understand lady ways.

Thus, as an undergraduate with no PSYCH101 courses on my transcript, I can safely say that it’s a direct result of my childhood that I now find it incredibly difficult to understand how women do womanly things. At times I feel as though I’m a fifteen year-old boy who thinks a period is about as gory as a Tarantino fight scene. On a daily basis I find myself thinking

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What’s Our Beef With Horsemeat?

by Kate Prendergast It also caters at Ascot. Hah! Droll! I’d always thought that it was glue or pet food that they made out of the nags that stumbled in last across the finish line, not stuff for human consumption. But then, racehorse flesh has already been beaten into tenderness. The broken creatures must be led out back by tiny

It was late last year that the scandal reared its ugly head. Rumoured to have been acting on a tipoff, the Food Standards Agency undertook a survey in which a team of boffins genetically deconstructed supermarket ready-meals. They found horse DNA in a third of the samples. From Ireland— the scandal’s epicentre— the protesting finger of blame has since been thrust east at the industry’s continental suppliers, implicating factories in Poland, Spain and the Netherlands. Anticipating that customers would suddenly turn ghost-horse whisperer and hear the rumble of hooves thundering vengefully down cold-section aisles, retailers hastily withdrew suspect products faster than you can say “Ginger’s dead”.

Initially, authorities tried to soothe the restive public by telling them that the DNA results could be explained as a mild case of “contamination”.¬ In other words, we were meant to imagine some mopping-boy’s laxity on the killing floors, or that blind Noddy had accidentally walked into a meat grinder. But after some so-labelled “beef” lasagne came back as 100% horse, they’ve been forced to face up to the bothersome reality of international, industry-wide fraud. As the executive of Ireland’s FSA conceded: “we are no longer talking trace amounts. We are talking about horse meat. Somebody, someplace, is drip-feeding horse meat into the burger manufacturing industry”.

Even one of the Britain’s largest catering companies has become embroiled. Sodexo’s involvement has amplified the scandal across society, with its client lines running to schools, prisons, care homes and the military.

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Perplexingly, one columnist felt obliged to add that the Queen regularly attends Ascot for the annual ‘Golden Cup’—perhaps wanting to share some schoolboy titillation at the thought of his monarch unknowingly participating in common barbarism. But the reference could also constitute a thinlipped reproach; an insinuation that the Brits really have gone to the dogs for allowing the adulteration of the royal soul.

Then again, maybe he was implying that the Queen — like an omniscient yet silent, gloating God— is in fact complicit in the scandal; risking her kingdom for a horse, the silly old bird! Wielding her mace like the glorified medieval bludgeon it is, she’s been performing the ritual sacrifice herself for years in some clandestine stall out back, in which no amount of fresh hay can ever cover up the bloodstains. Yeah, that’s probably it. Yeah it is. No shut up, I’ve got this.

Meanwhile, consumers are furious that they’ve been taken for a ride. The lies!

All the filthy lies! It breaks a consumer’s plastic-filmed heart.

Remember the devastating wave of rage and despair you felt when it came out that Beyoncé was lip-synching at Obama’s inauguration? Well, replace Beyoncé with a Bird’s Eye readymeal, and the pre-recorded American National Anthem with horse meat, and you’ll be able to understand how many a UK citizen feels right now. Played and sullied.

men, who shoot them with tiny guns, wearing tiny gloves on their tiny tiny hands. And no one ever sees the skulduggery committed by these pale Oompa Loompas, except eagles, horse fleas and sentient magnifying glasses. Having failed to satiate human greed on the racecourse, the ex-horses are then served as hors d’oeuvres at the private parties of the winning trainers to make up for lost bets.

Yet like the Beyoncé scandal, we must ask ourselves why. Why do we care? Why not apathy? Moreover, why is the horse so superior to the cow, the snooty glam twat of an animal? High in protein and low in fat, horsemeat is superior to beef health-wise.

It’s also cheaper, which explains why it’s being used as a meaty “meat extender”. Many of Britain’s neighbours are shrugging their shoulders at the hue and cry, having long bartered horsemeat at weekend markets.

The French call it ‘chevaline’. It’s like a psychosomatic horse virus is sweeping the isles, causing rolling waves of contagious

Picture by Kate Prendergast

Europe’s fraternity of Bronies has recently gagged, spat out their mouthful of burger patty and shuddered bubble-tea tears off trembling lashes after it was discovered that amongst the pig entrails, protein mulch and bone-scrapings in their cheap frozen dinners, bits of their equine friends had been surreptitiously disguised.

Sixteenth century gentleman politician Sir Thomas Bedingfield advocated a positively amatory relationship with the horse. “You shall lik chieflie his nostrills with perfumes & sweet handkerchiefs: for neatnesse & swee

knee-jerking. People are stamping and fretting and convulsively pawing the ground all over the place, much like a colicky horse.

But they do have valid reasons for doing so. On a serious and rational level, the scandal should trouble and rile the public.

This is because it is, at its heart, a breach of professional ethics and consumer trust. All industries have a responsibility to be clear and upfront about what they’re cajoling us to buy – especially those that are telling us what to put in our gobs. Usually, producers can weasel around this by encrypting the list of ingredients. The side-packet panel is often so exhaustingly unintelligible, the average consumer gives up trying to decipher it, settling that a lot of sophisticated food science must have gone into his macaroni and cheese for it to sound so complicated. Or they just give up, because hey: nobody ever died of macaroni and cheese.

Even ingredients that seem innocuous and familiar have back-stories that dismay one’s gut. For example, if you sent your marshmallows off to the laboratories tomorrow, there’s a good chance they’d test positive for horse too. This is because the plant-root extract from which the squashy sweet got its name has largely been replaced by another substance, called gelatin, which, of course, is made from a protein called collagen— obtained through the process of boiling the connective tissues, bones and skins of animals. Yum yum.

However, when it comes to raw meat, there’s not a lot of sneak-room for manipulative labelling. I guess that’s why the industry— wobbling as it is under the fierce, fitful winds of a market economy in strife—instead resorted to outright misinformation.

Yet the question remains. Why do we experience such stomach-churning horror at the thought of consuming horse? Why does it instinctively feel as though it’s only some gruesome, last-act evil Siberian trackers commit when they’re alone and starving and approaching insanity in an eternity of frozen tundra? And even then, it’s still only conceivable after they’ve licked all the lichen from between their toes and gnawed off each other’s frostbitten ears.

There was this Elizabethan gent called Sir Philip Sidney who said that “as man borrowed the horse’s body, so he lent the horse his mind”. By this he meant that through the horse/man partnership, some modicum of human intelligence had irradiated and illuminated what would otherwise be a dumb beast. It’s, on one hand, a pigheaded idea that is both anthropomorphic and anthropocentric, but, if interpreted another way, one can divine a far more trenchant truth— that our minds have absorbed and arrogated the horse-concept; made it— like all technology— an extension of ourselves.

Note how the skilled rider is hybridized as a “horseman”. Annexing its body for our own movement, we create the perceptual illusion of solidarity. It’s like a muscular appendage has become enjoined to our arse, responding to our desires as though linked into to our nervous system. (No wonder the horse is such a virile symbol).

Nobody ever died of macaroni and cheese

More importantly, considering for how long and in so many ways have we yoked the creature to Western culture, it’s become the equivalent of Hinduism’s sacred cow; sanctified by nationalist myth rather than religion. University of Kent’s Professor Landry provides historical insight: “during the eighteenth century” she writes, “a particular disposition of the human body on horseback became part of a [British] national identity...

Horsemanship became synonymous with the art of politics and imperial rule... This was ideology as fully embodied, viscerally enacted, by riders in a largely horse-powered nation.”

For centuries the horse has been saddled to human civilization. It’s been man’s companion on the roads of travel and the travails of war. It’s been the co-sufferer of the industrial proletariat and remains a nostalgic form of transport despite the “Great Manure Crisis of 1894”, in which the

London streets were filled so monumentally with horse poo, it was feared society would sink beneath the stinking mass. Though the animal’s “functional” use has diminished in modern times, this is of small concern for the Age of Entertainment, which continues to flog it as a play-and-money-maker. Certainly, its “uselessness” only serves to expedite its easy trot into the hills of legend.

But don’t for a minute be taken in by this romanticized “noble steed” idea. It’s complete bollocks. Horse and man did not co-evolve so that one could exploitatively sit upon the other. Anyone unused to riding long distances will gladly show you their bum blisters in proof of this.

Rather than enjoying a benevolent companionship, the horse has been cruelly conscripted into human service from the start, bearing— often literally— the worst of the load. As the better part of cavalry, they have been driven to impale themselves upon enemy lances in the charge. Moved from their natural habitats to moist, soft-grounded climes, they’ve had to have heavy metal shoes nailed to their feet so as to prevent them splitting open. For larks and gold, we’ve hit them with sticks and pricked them with spikes to make them run round and round an old tradition for the hedonistic and foolhardy, round and round in circuitous torment whilst the spectators laugh and lose and win and booze, like some hideously manifested metaphor for modernity’s insane ennui. And of course, there’s dressage, the so-called “sport” known as horse-ballet for the leggier breeds: the ultimate equine contumely.

My point, at the end of all this, is that we don’t really care about the animal itself.

Animal concern isn’t what this scandal has inspired in our troubled hearts. As usual, the species we’re concerned about is ours. At the root of the furore is a deep-dwelling fear and repulsion that man has somehow cannibalized some “noble” part of his cultural self. What’s our beef with horsemeat? A semi-repressed centaur complex.

kewise please him much to cherish him with your hands, when you weare sweete gloues,” he suggested, “wiping his face, and etnes be two things wherein a horsse dooth singularie take pleasure”.

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The mystery of genetic purity

by Kevin Kendrick

A huge amount of the human genetic code comes from nonhuman sources. Even motherhood, which is usually thought of as fairly central thing to being human, comes from an invasive base. The development of the human placenta was believed to be kickstarted by a viral insertion similar to AIDS millions of years ago, which relied on parasitic, immune-suppressant qualities to survive. Fetal development may similarly be virus-linked, with involvement implicated in the differentiation of organs from the intestines, to the central nervous system and the kidneys. Recent studies have indicated that upwards of 8% of all human genetic material has a viral origin.

How this impacts the legitimacy of some company’s claims that the cells they have derived from modifying stem cells are “no longer human” is open to debate. Certainly the argument has done little to convince critics of Pepsi and its hired research company Senomyx, who utilised virally-infected cell lines from aborted fetal kidneys in the development of artificial sweeteners. Perhaps a better question to ask is whether the base composition of a cell’s DNA is in any way sufficient to determine humanity. Experiments in 2011 showed that human brain cells implanted into a mouse developed along mouse lines to form a mouse brain; leading to the conclusion that if it moves and squeaks like a mouse, it probably is one.

The precise function of much of this virally derived material is unknown. Most are believed to be “junk” footprints of long-ago infections, using the human breeding system for intergenerational transmission. But some have more obvious positive or negative effects. Some viral material has been linked to cancer and

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Picture by Grace McKie

Messing around with human and animal DNA is pretty widespread practice these days. In 2011, over one hundred and fifty animal-human hybrid lines were created in the United Kingdom alone. In China the technique of fusing animalova with human cells was pioneered over a decade ago. In America, pigs have been created which have pseudo-human blood running through their veins, theoretically capable of assisting with our blood-bank depletion problem. However, at each new breakthrough there has been a massive outcry, citing perversion, depravity and a fundamental abuse of human nature. Yet, most arguments for or against genetic hybrids overlook a key point; genetic impurity is central to human nature. In fact, it’s one of the most human things there is.

Viral integration may have also been a major accelerant in evolution. Analysis shows that in less conserved mammalian genes, endoviral integration is significantly higher. Each viral insertion offers an opportunity for genetic rearrangement, both through increasing the rate of mutation, and eliminating organisms lacking redundancies that protect vital functions. Other theories suggest ‘epigenetic’ or gene-expression altering functions may have been derived wholesale as viral mechanisms to stop other viruses from invading infected cells are utilised to defend the organism as a whole.

Even at the most basic level, the human cell is the product of predatory symbiosis. Inside cells, tiny organelles called mitochondria operate to produce the energy that power the entirety of the human body; using the oxygen taken in through the lungs to drive microscopic engines based on fat, sugar and protein. In some cells, the mass of mitochondria can take over twentyfive percent of the cells net volume. What’s more remarkable is that the mitochondria have different DNA and reproductive mechanisms to the rest of the body. Like viruses, mitochondria are a separate but integrated lifeform. But unlike viruses, they were not the parasites, but prey, consumed by the predatory predecessors of human cells, gradually stripped of their ability to function independently, and “enslaved” to provide energy. And in case there’s any doubt, there are independent bacteria currently alive who carry out the process of enslaving as a natural part of their life cycle, capturing free-floating energy-producing cells, and then working them to death.

This is not to say that viral infections are a good thing. Many viral infections are harmfully parasitic, and even if a HIV-like retrovirus at some point triggered the development of the placenta, it would still have wreaked havoc on the hundreds of thousands of infected individuals before that point. But the role of symbionts within the human body is not to be underestimated.

Given the predatory nature of the development of the human species, it’s hard to criticise the actions of modern scientists as out of step with evolutionary development. The modification of the human genome by humans is little different from that which nature has done for us all along. Whether the actions are wrong is one thing. Whether they are natural is an entirely different matter.

autoimmune diseases. In Africa, sex workers resistant to HIV were identified as being more likely to have specific viruses coded into their genome. In monkeys, viral DNA has been linked to blocking development of leukaemias, and in certain very simple bacteria, viruses have been able to perform the ultimate in bizarre moral breakdowns by resurrecting dead bacterium, albeit partly under their own control.

The UWA Peacocks

by Djuna Hallsworth

Many a time have I observed students quietly trying to eat their lunch and being harassed by the oversized birds. They sneak around under the guise of being elegant and sophisticated, and then circle you, their go-go-Gadget necks ready to spring out and snatch your meal.

Only recently I saw a poor fellow completely fraught with fear because one of the males wouldn’t leave him alone. A stern word and a slight wave of the hand didn’t achieve much, nor did his standing up give the beast the hint it needed to leave this young, innocent student alone. He left his books and bag and took off with his meal to seek refuge. It was amusing to watch a human adult reduced to such a state of fear and trembling by an uppity fowl, but in all seriousness, the frequency of events like these are turning peacocks into a veritable problem. Eating lunch can be stressful enough as it is (what with ridiculous uni timetabling, Perth-priced food and other potential dangers such as a toothache); would it be fair to say these monstrous birds are selfishly compounding our first world problems? Yes. It is the university’s responsibility to ensure that students can eat lunch in peace and free from distraction (particularly if you’re grappling with a unit reader which requires undivided attention… although perhaps when reading it you’d welcome any distraction).

affectionately, the sheet states that peafowl may take food from your hands, if offered.

This should be read as a warning. I know for a fact that they WILL take food from your hands without dallying for an invitation; thankfully, I had The Grapes of Wrath on hand as a shield, and bravely batted the peahen on the beak before dashing off quicksmart.

Mild and timid? More like wild and rabid. The also defecate everywhere they go. Not my words, the words of the University of Western Australia.

In the midst of my rage about actually being attacked by a peahen, I made it my duty to warn my Facebook friends about it. I surreptitiously took a photo of the notorious white one, and posted it with the caption “My Archnemesis.” Unfortunately, there was a girl sitting on a bench behind the peahen who was also in the photo, so I hastened to add to “the bird, not the girl” so that she wouldn’t one day stumble on the photo and wonder who I was and why I considered her my archnemesis.

It is my understanding that many people share my rational fear of excessively large winged animals, and if you don’t, I think you should.

Apparently, a train driver in India was attacked by a peacock that wandered onto the train while it made an unexpected stop. The fellow was hospitalised. It’s true. It was on the internet.

If, however, you are particularly fond of enormous birds and would like one to eat from your hand, the procedure is to make a “bup bup bup” sound, as this is how parents encourage chicks to eat. You might think it would be embarrassing to bup about the place in public but I’m sure stranger things have happened in the Arts courtyard (Ed- Allegedly the UWA student-cum-superpoet Dorothy Hewett deflowered James Oval, so that’s something).

They are allowed to eat breadcrumbs, apparently, so in case you have some going spare, there are five hungry beasts called Eddy, Alistair, Vern, Susan and Penny who’d gladly snatch them from you before rushing off to screech outside a tutorial room.

The UWA website provides an interesting peacock fact sheet, which is something of a propaganda pamphlet that advocates keeping peafowl as pets (which to me seems like possibly the most ridiculous thing I could do, akin to joining EMAS despite my hatred of electronic music). My personal vendetta is with the white bird, which is not an albino, but a very common variety of the Indian Blue peafowl with a recessive white gene. Indian Blues are reported to have a mild, timid nature, and as such make lovely pets. Rather

Peacocks have harems of up to five peahens. Sounds pretty good.

Picture by Lauren Wiszniewski

The UWA peacocks are something of an enigma for non-Arts students, and something of a nuisance for those of us frequenting the Arts building courtyard and New Fortune Theatre. Five of them were gifted to the uni in 1975 by Sir Lawrence Brodie Hall. Two were run over within a short space of time (this was before the days of the underpass) and another went for a walk to Monash Ave in Shenton Park and never came back. “Good riddance!” you may be thinking. But decades on, another five remain, eternally lurking and shrieking around the gardens.

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DON’T HAVE SEX BECAUSE YOU WILL GET PREGNANT AN Demystifying sex education

by Marnie Allen

Hands up if you had a single comprehensive and satisfying experience with sex education at school? Didn’t think so. About the only thing I remember from primary school sex-ed was the teacher informing us that ‘erections feel really good’. If that wasn’t comprehensive, wait; in secondary school I learnt that a sex-worker started gaining unwanted weight from the extra calories she was ingesting through semen. Helpful, yes, but not helpful enough. Sex is plenty mysterious as it is, what with all the surprise fetishes, and the clothing that conceals genital deformities until it’s too late to turn back without looking totally shallow and uncool, not to mention the suspicious looking rashes that crop up every now and then. Ahem. I feel as though I had a healthier understanding of sex prior to sex-education lessons. As a toddler, my favorite picture book was called A Baby in the Family. I used to gleefully point out to my family and anyone else who cared to notice a page of the book, picturing a naked father and son standing in a bathroom, apparently bonding over their tackle. My early appreciation of the male form continued as I started to question why I, unlike my four brothers, was missing an appendage of sorts down there. My solution was to don an elasticated witches’ nose from the costume box around my waist; when I had that fleshy DIY phallus on I felt that I could finally be at one with the Allen brethren. A child exhibiting such behavior would probably mortify some parents, but I doubt my mother and father even batted an eyelid.

How many girls can say they developed and still suffer from made a full recovery from penis envy, all before they began kindergarten?

There seems to be an overwhelming belief that children can be sexually corrupted if they are exposed to inappropriate information or experiences of a sexual nature. But perhaps an equally problematic influence on children and sexuality is

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misinformation and withholding of the facts.

Thomas Vinterberg, Danish film director and co-founder of the Dogme 95 film movement, brilliantly portrayed this idea in his 2012 film The Hunt. The film explores a series of devastating events that follow a fouryear-old girl’s false accusation that a male kindergarten teacher sexually assaulted her.

Rather than portraying the child as a liar or attention-seeker, or the accused man as a sex offender, Vinterberg captures the confused, unprofessional and misguided handling of the situation by the other employees of the kindergarten, the parents of the child, and the specialists called in to help with the case. The girl is fed rhetoric and prompted to give information about things she couldn’t possibly understand, and when the sharp kindergarten student attempts to confess her false description of events, this confession is brushed off and generalized as a symptom of sexual abuse. Misinformation is the real perpetrator in the film; the kindergarten teacher and other people involved in the case fail to conduct

a thorough investigation of the situation out of discomfort and inexperience.

The themes addressed in The Hunt could be used to describe my experiences of sex

AND DIE. education; generalizations, omission of detail, immaturity and corner cutting.

While teachers and parents would probably consider it better if their child thinks that ‘doggy style’ means anal sex, the curious teenager who asks his girlfriend if they can try the aforementioned position and then gets his heart broken when he attempts to ‘go through the back door’ without the permission he thought he had probably doesn’t find it very helpful. I’m sure many people don’t think there is any need for enhanced sexual education now that we can all educate ourselves via the Internet. But let’s just think of the kinds of people that actually submit questions and answers to online forums, and then consider if they are the people we want providing us with solutions to our sexual queries.

My solution was to don an elasticated witches’ nose from the costume box around my waist While high school students are perhaps more likely to feel comfortable talking about sex with friends and will seek the information they find relevant to them, our curiosities about sex begin far earlier than age thirteen.

We should be able to feel comfortable and informed rather than alienated and shy when it comes to understanding our bodies. When I was about 8 or 9 I attended a drama class at Helen O’Grady’s drama school. My teacher had long grey hair with several scrunchies in it and her name was Lemon. One day, a boy in the class (let’s call him Toby) decided to remove his teeny little tally whacker from inside his power ranger jocks, and started playing with it in the middle of our vocal warm-up. The girls, in their little netball skirts and frilly socks, all squealed in horror, and stuck their tongue out at Toby for unleashing the source of his cooties. Lemon’s reaction was indicative of the level of child psychological training that she had received in order to qualify as an extra-curricular drama teacher; she made him sit outside. We got over our little ordeal and returned to rehearsal. But it wasn’t long until Toby had poked his head around the corner and smiled at us deviously

while reaching back into his jocks for another ‘session’.

At the time I was inclined to swing my ponytail over my shoulder and dob on him to Lemon, but after going through puberty and, y’know, learning more about life and stuff, I think I would have felt sorry for the guy. If you yell at a kid for eating too many cookies but don’t tell them why eating too many cookies is bad, they’re not going to understand the problem and will invade the cookie jar as soon as your back is turned. So, telling Toby to sit outside because he is inexplicably playing with his junk during a rehearsal of ‘Pirate Joe’, is going to do little to help Toby understand that it’s a bit inappropriate to expose your underdeveloped scrotum to a class full of other children.

Another experience of public scrotestroking I had was last summer while awkwardly checking out the nude beach in Swanbourne with my boyfriend. We sat on the sand, silently daring one another to get naked like the cool, wrinkly free spirits that were splashing around in the water in front of us. Suddenly, I turned to my right and saw a tubby, leathery old dude lounging on his side; his enormous gut splayed out on the sand while he propped his head up on his elbow and gave himself a good old-fashioned rub’n’tug. This wouldn’t have been too bad if it weren’t for the fact that he was staring right at my boyfriend and I, with a smile that said ‘I’m mazzing out to you guys and you can’t do anything about it…SUCK ON THAT.’ At the time I ran away in horror before he had the chance to show us his creepy old O-face, but looking back on the experience now I wonder if he might have been a confused little boy, just like Toby, who was just sent to the corner without explanation, who never learnt why touching yourself in public isn’t cool.

So if somehow this magazine ends up in the hands of the Curriculum Council, I hope

that they consider updating their sex education resources and training methods. Cosmic Condom and Where did I come from? just ain’t gonna cut it any more. Contraception, sexual hygiene and emotional health are one thing, but fetishes, effective treatment of STIs, information about abortions, emergency contraception and masturbation are all equally important. Let’s hope that in the future, a kid can put his or her hand up in class and ask if using nipple clamps can damage future breastfeeding ability, or what to do if they get a cucumber stuck up their butt, and get a mature and comprehensive response from a well-trained sexual educator.

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The Mystery of Healthy Eating

by Eunice Ong

We live in a sick and twisted world, where quitting sugar or losing weight has the potential to elevate you to ‘celebrity status’. Where obesity is considered a ‘disability’, yet people who are born disabled are placed on the waiting lists of charity organisations for necessities like wheelchairs. Where discovering how to eat a normal amount of food gets you a book deal. Where the definition of ‘healthy food’ is a mystery to many. We have a culture of dieting and self-denial in a land of plenty – yet people in less-privileged parts of the world struggle to obtain enough food merely to subsist. How has our society turned food consumption, a natural and compulsory aspect of our daily life, into something that is fraught with mental challenges and battles?

Many people have a practically religious philosophy regarding the food they eat, bragging on Facebook about their achievements in denying themselves some cake, or feeling like they have ‘been good’ when they eat a salad, as if vegetables taste terrible and eating some is akin to purgatory, or going to the gym after an unhealthy meal is your punishment. Sadly, this is predominantly observed in females, who feel guilt-ridden for ‘giving in’ because they consumed dessert, making rash promises to go for a run the next day to make up for it. This logic is problematic; we eat food because our bodies need this fuel to function – it should not be something that we need to deliberately control and restrict. The most terrifying aspect about this phenomenon is the way the media has capitalized on our insecurities and cultivated the view that females should engage in self-denial, or at least pick the ‘guiltfree’ options they are cheerfully advertising.

The mere fact that females in particular are expected to feel guilt is incredibly twisted, and further perpetuates the idea that the most important trait of a female is their physical appearance.

Aside from shows like The Biggest Loser, broadcasting corporations have taken the art of taking advantage of people’s unhealthy relationships with food a step further – Skinny vs. Curvy: a ‘documentary’/reality TV show created in Britain where two people (usually female) at extreme ends of the ‘size spectrum’ are instructed to swap diets with each other for a week, whilst viewers watch the ensuing shitstorm unfold with a sick fascination. Aside from trivialising people’s food problems and possible mental disorders, it adds to the voluminous

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amount of mixed messages we receive regarding body image and eating habits.

Eating ‘healthily’ ought to be a logical and natural process; yet this concept has become ridiculously complicated in our privileged, first world society. Shops are rife with diet books costing exorbitant amounts, professing to hold the ‘secrets’ of weight-loss – each preaching contradictory diets and meal-plans that one ought to religiously follow in order to achieve the supposed nirvana that is Weight Loss. These ‘secrets’ vary: from purely vegan, semi-starvation diets (Skinny Bitch), to minimal vegetable consumption coupled with maximum protein consumption (Dukan Diet), or the 5:2 Diet – where you basically starve yourself two days per week. With such variance between messages, it is no wonder people still find the answer to a healthy lifestyle mysterious and unreachable.

The loss of our ability to eat intuitively partly stems from the messages surrounding food being perpetuated by food corporations and the media, rather than our own bodies. We have an influx of low-fat and sugar-free food products that would not exist in a low-fat or sugar-free form naturally, and a litany of lower calorie choices, each claiming to be more ‘low cal’ than

the rest. Not to mention the incredible number of advertisements we are bombarded with on a daily basis – for strange products such as ‘meal replacement shakes’ (because apparently we are infants who can only consume liquid meals?), to cardboard crackers which profess to be ‘low calorie’ (because each cracker is tiny!) and even ‘Zero Noodles’ – noodles with 10 calories per serve, meaning you eat them for the sake of eating, because they contain barely any nutritional value whatsoever! That, to me, is the epitome of a first world problem.

Perhaps the secret is to consume what humans used to eat before the influx of obesity and health problems became widespread in our (over-) privileged society. Perhaps we should eat the food that existed before multi-national corporations with a view to maximise profit for their shareholders began manufacturing processed ‘food’ in convenient little packages with ridiculously-unnatural shelf-lives. All these conflicting messages we are overloaded with merely contribute to and maintain the unhealthy relationship with food that so many members of our society struggle with. Eating ought to be a pleasant experience; simple and intuitive – not a regimented, timetabled process one adheres to, or a mystery that requires a health book to decipher.

GRIFFONOMICS: Beijing, Namibia

by Alex Griffin Whether you’re Bob Katter fretting over selling the farm or Colin Barnett learning how to pronounce xie xie properly, China is a Big Deal these days if you’ve got resources to hock.

Yet, despite all of the gas projects and UWA Business School Chinese Century welcome breakfasts, Australia is not the centre of the Chinese universe. There’s been an awful lot of handwringing and uncertainty internationally when it comes to Chinese involvement in another sunburnt continent: Africa.

Chinese businesses have been making substantial inroads into Africa for a decade now; investment has grown in the continent more than tenfold since 1999 to over $100 billion, and the Chinese population has ballooned in similar proportions. Yet, what has been a fairly commonplace process in y’know human history (go west, son, and find your fortune) has been often perceived in the West as a pernicious, cruel threat to African sovereignty and wellbeing.

If you’ll permit me to go Heart of Darkness on you, Africa has long been perceived as mystic, dark and unknowable, but at the same time, in need of protection and control. We’re constantly urged to associate Africa with need, deprivation, species preservation, peacekeeping forces and Bob Geldof. These are all real and worthy issues, but we’ve only one dimension of what is a sprawling, rapidly changing continent. When you throw in the fear and suspicion that usually accompanies the phrase ‘Chinese investment’, you got a stew going of Western insecurity and mistrust.

In Australia, talk about African investment in the public discourse is limited on the main to mining executives crashlanding in obscure, thick forests en route to a diamond pit with more AK-47s than worksafe approved hardhats.

Outside of that, it’s Somali pirates, kidnapped British terrorists and electoral fraud- better put your money in Crown shares or on the Eagles.

Elsewhere, national discourses aren’t much different. Obama and Romney mentioned Africa three times between during their presidential debates, and all three references were to terrorism- this despite the fact African GDP is growing at 4.5% (nothing to sniff at, yo). In the

media, the tone is pretty shrill. Read the LSE blog and you’ll hear stories about Zimbabwean workers eating scraps from the plates of Chinese foremen – even the Guardian referred to Chinese investment as an ‘invasion’, fer chrissake.

These worries tend to expose Western insecurities more than they do betray a deep knowledge of African exigencies or realities.

An anxiety often voiced is that China doesn’t care awfully much about things like standards of living or income equality, a concern not limited to their external operations (namedrop FOXCONN to an Arts student on a Macbook and they’ll probably slam it shut.) The assumption usually implicit in this is that Western companies are more concerned with local welfare levels since they’re burdened by guilt

Namedrop FOXCONN to an Arts student. over centuries of brutality that they’re pretty inclined to remedy. Shell, after all, propped up Apartheid (good going guys), and as recently as the 90s were involved in bribing the military to bring about some efficiency-increasing deathaction. Mea culpa.

Another question raised is the concentration of Chinese economic power translating into political influence, with all kinds of consequences: weakening independence, preventing the flow of wealth to the poor and enabling corruption. African leaders haven’t exactly been renowned for looking out for the interests of their people (hey Idi how is it going), and oh god them awful Chinamen with their bribesBoth of these problems misapprehend the reality of the situation by universally regarding the Chinese as utterly unscrupulous or Africans and their leaders as rudderless and wasteful, constantly in need of an intervening foreign force. In countries like Zambia, where Chinese investment has been contentious but constant for over a decade now, there’s an uneasy relationship between the two parties exacerbated by tough anti-Chinese rhetoric from the President and violent incidents involving

worksite protests, Chinese employees and dead Zambians. The understanding is clear though that the relationship is beneficial, and no one is being held to ransom- as the former Kenyan vice-President Oginga Odinga said,“the African goes (to China), takes what he likes, and comes home having gained all around.” The consequences of imprinting freemarket ideologies in borderline failed states are really fuckin’ distressing, but the general Chinese hands-off money-down approach is an improvement on bartering democracy for diamonds- it’s economic involvement without the moral dimension, and if there’s one thing Africa mightn’t feel it needs, it’s lectures from foreigners about ‘oughts’.

Besides, the Chinese story in Africa isn’t just of nasty strip mining conglomerates, but of plucky entrepreneurs like Zhang Hao importing fishing nets and schoolbags, or of Wang Lina coming and helping her in-laws with their furniture store. This distinction is important, because it means it’s not just mining royaltie$ heading to government corruptffers.

Dudes spending a decade in Africa selling consumer goods at lower prices to save up for an apartment in Beijing are many, and they’re having an impact; the African middle class has increased markedly over this decade from 196 to 313 million people; bigger than India’s. Though poverty is still massive, the phrase ‘African consumer class’ that might ring incomprehensible to people who grew up with Live Aid is now very much a reality.

This infantilisation of Africa is more unnerving when one notes that the outcry over Chinese investment in Latin America is far more muted (i.e. there is none) though they’ve been attempting free trade agreements, opening billion dollar lines of credit and growing at the same clip to the same size as in Africa. Hmm. Ultimately, the truly mystifying thing for Western observers is the reality of their own increasing irrelevance; as Europe eats itself alive and America has high school shootings at a faster clip than it builds high schools and chooses between Pepsi and Coke, it’s hard to fathom that the world is going on and doing business unperturbed, in more adaptable and productive ways.

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R.I.P. Aló Presidente: The Death of Chavez and the Greatest Talk Show Ever privately-owned media. Chavez used both his public media outlets and his legislative powers to tackle this perceived threat from the private media. In Argentina, President Christina Kirchner has followed Chavez’s example by curbing the ownership rights of private media companies and Ecuador’s Correa has legislated that all media must carry government messages. Chavez’s communication strategy of strengthening government presence in the media and neutering all critical/independent/ unbiased media filters has been adopted widely in a region that still has a shaky reputation concerning democracy.

by Richard Ferguson “Humanidad! Lucha! Socialismo!”

These three magic words acted as the opening for the greatest television show of all time: Aló Presidente. Running on Venezuelan state television for thirteen years, it was hosted by none other than the nation’s controversial president, Hugo Chavez. Every Sunday afternoon from 11am to 5pm, Chavez would give long speeches on socialism, interview global celebrities like Sean Penn and do song-and-dance routines on air. Unfortunately, the show was put on hiatus in 2011 after Chavez was forced to transfer to a Cuban military hospital to treat an undisclosed form of cancer which eventually killed him in this March. The legacy of Hugo Chavez, both in terms of domestic and foreign policy, will likely be an issue of debate for decades: however, it’s hard to doubt his legacy as a mastermind of political communication who changed the way the world’s leaders talk to the masses.

Aló Presidente’s main purpose was to sustain Hugo Chavez’s carefully constructed cult of personality. From its debut in 1999, Chavez used it as his main media outlet to the point where he basically ignored all other television news programmes in the country.

The show, though officially unscripted, was executed meticulously to portray Chavez as a man of the people. Cattle ranches, military installations, farms, the beach; Aló Presidente went wherever the people were. (Note that “the people” were given very specific instructions

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on sort of questions and responses to give the Commandante.) Chavez became so fond of the programme that he even held cabinet meetings live on air – the most infamous example being when he ordered a top general to send ten battalions to the Columbian border in 2008 after their strike on FARC militants in Ecuador. The show in many ways came to epitomise Chavez’s style; brash and confrontational. However, Aló Presidente was really a first in the art of modern media manipulation. While many leaders have become well-trained in dealing with press or giving TV interviews, Chavez was one of the first to bypass any sort of media filter (government friendly or otherwise) and bring his message to the people himself.

Aló Presidente’s greater breadth of influence in the world of political communication is noted within the South American sphere that Chavez dominated for so many years. Aspects of his cult of personality are spreading across the region, as a new generation of political strongmen (and women) begin to make their presence and power felt in a way uncommon in the Western media. The most obvious aspect of this is the copycat talk shows hosted by allied South American heads of state. In Ecuador and Bolivia, the respective leaders Rafael Correa and Evo Morales both hosted political talk shows to bypass more right-wing media outlets, but though they did not have the longevity of Aló Presidente.

Daytime talk shows aside, the most concerning aspect of Chavez’s influence in South American politics is the spread of his contempt for

If a militant public media strategy is Chavez’s legacy to his own continent, his legacy to the world is opening up new ways for political leaders to enter public debates without gobetweens diluting their message. Before Chavez and Aló Presidente, the political elite’s message tended to surrender most of the control of their political message to media outlets that had their own agendas to pursue. Whilst the great speeches and newspaper columns of the past had served the global political elite well, Chavez revealed an avenue where political ideas went uncensored and untrammelled by news bulletins and antagonistic newspaper reporters.

Since 1999 and the launch of Chavez’s show, political leaders have been slowly realising the opportunities that flow from immersing themselves in media, rather than simply relying on even the most loyal media outlets. Chavez’s nemesis to the north may be the best example: President Obama’s Twitter account and YouTube channel collectively count up to 28,582,060 subscribers worldwide. Whilst we are unlikely to see the White House admit so, the ability to bypass classical media stems from Chavez’s pioneer work in delivering state propaganda himself without the need of translators, independent or not. Following the example of Chavez, nearly every modern leader now reaches their beloved masses through the power of modern forms of social media, rather than relying on the traditional media juggernauts that used to look over their shoulders and limit their capacity to deliver their message.

The death of Hugo Chavez means Aló Presidente will never get the finale it deserved. However, Chavez has created a world where the political elite can reach you on your television or computer screens without a Fourth Estate monitoring their every move. Aló Presidente may be cancelled, but it will be syndicated in the sphere of political communication forever.

Chavez once aspired to be a painter and later dreamed of being a professional baseball player. He frequently explained politics through baseball metaphors, often referencing a “pig’s tail” curveball of his own devising.

THE 85 YEAR OLD VIRGIN

by Danica Lamb As every Arts graduate will know, the search for employment is a long and draining one that rarely comes to fruition. This same search for employment is about to be undertaken by His Holiness Benedict XVI, the man who recently resigned from his position as Pope Emeritus and Sovereign of Vatican City. Pelican Politics has looked through his credentials, called his references and analysed his previous job performances to find a few future career paths that he’d be perfectly suited to.

Sex Symbol Unsurprisingly, the Pope Emeritus is by all reports an 85 year-old virgin. However, Benny doesn’t need to enlist the help of Judd Apatow to lose his V-plates. Rather, he’s relying on the church to ensure his ‘needs’ are met. After his resignation, the Pope will continue living in the Vatican with Archbishop Georg Gaenswein (who likes liturgies and long walks on the beach, and is pretty gorgeous in a Cardinal kind of way). Gaenswein, for his part, has reportedly said that his “heart beat[s] a little stronger than usual” when around His Holiness. Georg will be secretary for the new Pope by day, but will spend his nights with Benedict, which sounds quite queer, if you know what I mean.

It’s completely understandable, given Georg appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair recently: he’s a babe in hot demand. Why wouldn’t Benedict want him all to himself? After all, the Pope is only human, no matter how peerless he believes he is. This attraction has surely sparked the Pope’s retirement, as he needs time to explore his sexuality. That, and the Church remains firmly against the whole lying down with another man thing. Regardless, this budding romance opens up a whole new market in the erotica scene. Two Popes, One Altar is surely coming to a porn website near you.

Baker Benedict would be undeniably good at breadrelated tasks. Breaking bread, blessing bread, offering bread, talking about bread, introducing bread to a crowd and singing about bread are all tasks he can perform with aplomb. Word has it the Pope Emeritus has been considering opening a café in the suburb he’d feel most comfortable in, Churchlands. The name takes care of itself; Eggs Benedict.

As a secondary source of income, he could also sell pieces of toast with Catholic iconography charred into them. Reportedly, Virgin Mary grilled cheese sandwiches can sell for $28,000, and pieces of toast with Jesus burnt into them have gone for $200. Benedict can expect to experience similar blessings on his own bread

quite regularly, due to his high standing with The Man Upstairs, and may even be able to put in requests. Just in time for Christmas might be mince Pies with the sweet baby Jesus’ face burnt into them– the perfect Kris Kringle gift!

Professional Telegraph Operator The Pope has extensive experience in living decades behind the rest of the world. As a result, he’d be an amazing telegraph operator; 1910 is just his speed. His strong opinions are testament to this very fact. He has described abortion as an “intrinsic and evil crime against society” and dismissed evolution as a notion that “can’t be proven”. The Pope Emeritus’ warning that “global warming isn’t based on evidence but instead on dubious ideology” also proves that he’d feel pretty comfortable at the level of technological innovation involved in this position. As the Pope chooses to remain so firmly in the past, transmitting telegraphs provides a great avenue for Benedict to explore the wonders of modern technology at his own pace.

Grammy Award Winner Having practiced his dulcet tones in Mass singing since he was just Joseph the altar boy, the Pope Emeritus has released his own Christmas Album, Alma Mater.

For those of you who love a bit of wisdom with your wubwubwubwub, don’t expect to hear a Skrillex remix anytime soon. Benedict

believes modern genres of music are “vehicles of anti-religion,” with the biggest offenders including Pink Floyd, AC/DC and Queen. At eighty-five, ‘Stairway to Heaven’ might well be an enlightening and educational manual for The Pope to delve into, but unfortunately, Benedict believes Led Zeppelin creates “worship in opposition to the Church”.

Considering there’s over a billion Catholics in the world, his label’s claim that there’s quite a huge fan base for the album isn’t hard to believe. Advance reviews have been very positive, praising his “sweet lullabies” and the “resounding beauty” of his voice, and the Church is quietly optimistic about his Grammy chances. Adele had better watch her back.

Winemaker The eagerness with which wine enthusiasts have sat through three-hour sermons just to get a sip of Pope Emeritus’ sweet liquor is testament to his potential as a wine connoisseur.

However, Benedict has such a developed taste palette that wine won’t be his only undertaking.

His range of Pope’s Pops will see Benedict flood the alcopops market with flavours such as his signature Original-Sin Orange, which has enough standard drinks to ensure there’ll be plenty of venal sins flowing at your next party. His premixed cocktail, the Flaming Popemobile, will promise anything but a saintly night out.

The first Pope to resign was Pontian, who left the papacy in September 235. Like Benedict, he resigned over health concerns; the Roman Emperor Maximus Thrax shipped Pontian over to the isle of Sardinia as part of a violent campaign to suppress Christianity, and Pontian didn’t have a good feeling about getting off the island alive.

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GENESIS OF THE DRUG WARS Campaigns against recreational drugs are steeped in the dynamics of power. Although the war on drugs is presented as a public health concern today, the history of the events surrounding the restriction of drugs reveals that past attempts to control mind-altering substances have centred around economics, race and social change.

The first state to restrict recreational drugs on non-religious grounds was Imperial Qing China during the ‘century of humiliation’ in the 1830s. In order to purchase the valuable silks, porcelain and tea commodities of China, the East India Company was forced by the Imperial court to trade in silver. To balance the increasing shortage of silver, British traders led by the Sassoon family began to import opium into China, which the East India Company held a monopoly of in India. This became a wildly lucrative endeavour, but incredibly devastating to Chinese health and society; so much so, in fact, that the trade balance reversed and silver began emptying from Chinese treasuries back into European hands. Facing a society overrun with opium addiction and a rapidly depleting economy, the Chinese emperor Daoguang acted decisively, imposing a death penalty on smuggling opium, before ordering Commissioner Lin Tse-Hsu to suppress it completely in 1838. Seeing the trade as unwanted foreign intervention, Lin banned all opium trade, and in a nationwide campaign confiscated and destroyed over 20,000 chests of opium in 1839.

Previously in Western countries, opiates had been in widespread use as both medicine and recreation. However, with Chinese immigration into the United States and Australia, opium began to be seen as a ‘Chinese scourge’ linked to criminality and social decay. These perceptions were pushed by the Christian Temperance movement in the United States, who opposed all intoxicants as dangerous to society, especially alcohol and opiates. Their influence led President Theodore Roosevelt to begin the Opium Conferences in Shanghai and The Hague, eventually forming the International Opium Convention in 1912.

This was later incorporated into the Treaty of Versailles, thereby globally restricting the trade of opiates. The convention was the model for all later treaties on drug control to come.

Recreational drug controls expanded in the United States with the ‘Reefer Madness’ of the

1930s, directed against cannabis.

The two leading figures in this crusade were William Randolph Hearst and Harry J. Anslinger.

Hearst was the most powerful newspaper publisher in America and owned extensive timber and paper mill interests. During this time hemp (cannabis sativa) was growing rapidly as a commodity, increasingly used in clothing and paper. The main barrier to this was the difficulty of processing the hemp fibres, which was solved with the invention of the decorticator machine, greatly increasing efficiency. In celebrating this, Popular Mechanics released an article in 1938 praising hemp as the ‘New Billion-Dollar Crop’. The new affordability of hemp threatened Hearst’s vast investments in timber, which was made personal

by Hearst’s hatred of Mexicans after his million-acre Babicora ranch was sacked and stolen by Pancho Villa in 1915. Hearst’s reaction was swift and strong, as he led a vicious smear campaign against what hemp, which had been cynically relabelled ‘marijuana’ to prey on American fears of Mexicans. Its use was tied to accusations of Mexicans and African Americans raping white women to create maximum shock. This attack was reinforced Anslinger, the commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Struggling for funds after the end of prohibition, Anslinger eagerly began to work on a total ban of marijuana with statements like: “There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos, and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana use.

This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers, and any others. “ Although ludicrous by today’s standards, these tactics were highly successful, resulting in marijuana being banned in 26 states, as well as a federal control in the form of the Marijuana Tax Act. These events and others culminated in the ‘War on Drugs’ started by the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970, which is the source of current schedules

Picture by Alice Palmer

by Philip Sharpe

of illegality of drugs. This was followed in 1971 by Nixon officially declaring open war on drugs, stating that they were “America’s public enemy number one.” This came as a reaction to the rampant drug addiction (reportedly upwards of 15%) of American military personnel in Vietnam which came from CIA alliances with hill tribes in the Golden Triangle against the Viet Minh. They provided logistical support for them to sell opium and heroin, and US troops became the major customers.

A final factor of this later period was the need to suppress the central role of psychedelics in the counterculture movements of the 1960s and their entrance into the mainstream with societies such as the Harvard Psilocybin Project.

Our laws here at home and elsewhere all exist in the shadow of this complex history, and in order to fully examine the value of the restrictions we live under we must know their context and how they have come to develop.

Hopefully, if we consider the events and causes behind campaigns against recreational drugs, it will be possible to make clearer judgements on their place in society.

Over a fifth of those incarcerated in American prisons are non-violent drug offenders.

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THE PELICAN OBITUARY: Mark McGowan’s Political Career (1988-2013)

by Richard Ferguson Mark McGowan’s Political Career (MMPC for short), will be remembered for absolutely nothing at all. Even McGowan himself claimed to utterly forget the existence of his career after the trauma of its death at the last state election.

On Wednesday 18th January 2012, Eric Ripper resigned as leader of the WA Labor Party. The party elders decided to choose the new leader through a series of drinking games at Geoff Gallop’s house. Luckily, MMPC had chosen a host who had gained his experiences of alcohol as the Australian Defence Academy. Clearly outlasting Ben Wyatt in a game of Circle of Death, Mark McGowan and his parasite were crowned Labor Leader.

It was the beginning of a long journey to defeat for the parasite. Most of the media were too enthralled with Emperor Colin I to bother with the new Labor leader and most people in

the street thought Mark McGowan was that guy in Packed to the Rafters. MMPC finally made some head-way with the Metronet policy, a revolutionary scheme to lower congestion and connect all the suburbs of Perth. Metronet was later rejected by the inner-city electorates after they realised the risks of allowing people from Ellenbrook better access to their beautiful city.

On March 9th 2013, Mark McGowan’s Political Career died of starvation when barely anyone in the state bothered to nourish it with their votes. WA Labor has abandoned McGowan and is waiting for Allanah MacTiernan to rescue them from oblivion. Free of his parasite, McGowan finally free to follow his dream of becoming a local scoutmaster in Warnbro.

Mark McGowan’s Political Career was 25 years old.

Words by Richard Ferguson, picture by Lauren Wiszniewski

McGowan found MMPC in the sewerage drain outside the Rockingham council offices in 1988. After a rough night out with his fellow sailors, Mark was convinced by MMPC that politics would be better for his health than another drinking session with the crew of H.M.A.S. Brian Burke. With a new host to feed off, Mark McGowan’s Political Career managed to go all the way to the WA State Parliament in 1996. By the time its host became Education Minister, MMPC began to have dreams of going all the way to the Premier’s office. Sitting in the shadowy corner of the ALP tea room,

MMPC began watching the other parasites fall one by one into the CCC black hole and saw the path to power clearing. The 2007 election win for the Coalition was a slight setback but MMPC wouldn’t let anything kill its dreams of stardom.

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Fringeworld and Perth International Arts Festival In February, Perth gets good for a little while.

On an evening stroll through the Cultural Precinct during any other month you will encounter little, save maybe a seizure-inducing animated feature designed to frighten the intoxicated Northbridge patrons stumbling past it. Stroll through on a balmy February night however, and you will be greeted by the bright fairy lights of a city putting on a show.

With both the Perth International Arts Festival and Fringeworld hosting a varied array of affordable and exciting performances at the same time, the end of summer sees this town become one of those ‘real cities’ one hears so much about. Festival season comes but once a year, and it would hardly be sustainable for this number of quality productions to continue all year round. Still, it’s a shame that the warm atmosphere, pop-up bars and cute strings of fairy lights lights can’t remain on a more permanent basis.

DEATH, DUCK AND THE TULIP Death, Duck and the Tulip was the hidden gem of this year’s Festival. Adapted from the children’s picture book by Wolf Erlburch, the play takes a sentimental but brutally honest look at the process of death through the blossoming friendship between the Grim Reaper and a little duck. The two lead actors were key to this heart-wrenching show. George Shevstov was wonderful as an authoritarian but lonely Death, with Shevstov’s bellowing voice and piercing black eyes making him a capable if slightly menacing guide to this world. Duck was beautifully played by Ella Hetherington, whose lack of dialogue was transcended by her fantastic utilisation of mime and contemporary dance. The production values were also very high, with a great use of background graphics to reveal to Duck’s the many possible avenues towards death and a rather pleasant quartet to provide a suitable atmosphere to this sweet but somber play.

PIAF

It is rare for children’s theatre to cover controversial and uncomfortable topics with such honesty and humour. Sheedy’s production managed to tackle difficult material with gusto and for that it deserves praise. Armed with two fascinating performances and great production, this rises from the status of a brave experiment to a brilliant theatre experience.

Richard Ferguson MISSION DRIFT A musical exploration of American capitalism’s history and present, Mission Drift deftly switched between the narratives of an early Dutch migrant couple and a modern day Las Vegas waitress. This was a weird kind of musical - songs were embellishments rather than central to the plot, and dance routines felt more decorative than necessary. Considering much of the action took place in recession era Las Vegas, this lack of glitz was poignant but also a little irritating. Scenes felt half finished, some characters unnecessary. Still, the performances were strong, especially Heather Christian as the seductive beauty queen storyteller Miss Atomic, who sassily presided over the show’s two interlocking narratives.

Kat Gillespie BALLET AT THE QUARRY The 20th anniversary of the West Australian Ballet at the Quarry presented a glimpse of everything ballet should be. Unbelievable bodies in tights and tutus performing to dynamic music proved that even after hundreds of years, the ballet is an entirely singular experience. It was a beautiful night of dance that would make any full-time student feel wonderfully grown up.

Opening the triple bill was Jubilaté, originally created for the opening of the West Australian Ballet Centre in 2012 to acknowledge the company’s history and hopes for a brighter future. Bright is an apt word. Unconventionally, costume designer Holly Boyton dressed the ballerinas in clashing bold colours; green paired with gold, bright yellow with cobalt blue. This bold costume choice coupled with the classical music of Mozart brought ballet into the modern age. Although some of the choreography allowed for comic relief, the explosive solo of Anna Ishii was a highlight. Following this was Cass Mortimer Eipper’s work, Yes, I’ll Move For You, which was an incredibly fluid, insatiable piece of dance. Performed by an ensemble of seven dancers dressed in white, they opened grouped tightly together with dim lighting. The feeling of witnessing something private, like

HACKETT CAFÉ SURVEY 26

25% of students went to a Perth International Arts Festival performance

ival

somebody’s thoughts, was immediate. It was an exquisitely choreographed piece, flowing so constantly that its end seemed abrupt.

The triple bill ended with Voluntaries. This work was described by choreographer Glen Tetley as an intensely personal ballet, classical and pure. Sometimes I feel people use the word ‘classical’ as a polite synonym for boring-this work was indeed very classical. Set to Poulenc’s Concerto in G major for Organ, Strings and Timpani, the highly dramatic score was matched by dramatic lifts right on their music cue and dark lighting. The title indicates desire or flight, and both of these were attempted in the work. The pas de deux was incredibly sensual and complemented by the dancers visibly fit bodies. However, the ‘flight’ aspect was at times poorly executed. At one moment, leaps across the back of the stage seemed like quite an effort for the dancers.

I congratulate the West Australian Ballet on 20 years at the Quarry and the variety of their 2013 season; it was a truly engaging night of dance under the stars.

Elle Evangelista THREEPENNY OPERA If you’re interested in knowing whether or not this was an entertaining piece of theatre with high production values, then I guess the answer is Yes, It Was: and at this point, criticising Robert Wilson for his stylistic conventions (i.e. Minimalism, Repetition and, uh, Overuse Of Makeup) just feels like pissing in the figurative wind, especially when even the extended version of Einstein on the Beach injects way more interesting things into your brain than a lot of other contemporary theatre junk ever will. The acting was good, and if you enjoy German people singing I guess you’d enjoy the Berliner Ensemble.

Yes, the music was Good. You probably could have guessed that. Many other things were also Good: the set design was exactly what you’d imagine a Wilson set to look like, but not distracting or anything, as was the makeup (black AND white?!). There may have also been some stylistic references to German expressionist film (Caligari et al, or G.E.F.s, if you prefer), but whether or not this was an intentional choice made so as to lubricate Brecht’s already pretty uncomplicated political concepts – “Rich people do Bad Stuff, so we are justified in doing our own Bad Stuff!” - in a coating of universal signifiers (just in case you didn’t get it), or just some kind of cultural

38% went to a Fringeworld performance

disease that infects Teutonic things is up to The Theatre-Going Public to decide, I suppose.

It was also somehow a surprise to me that a German play performed by a German theatre company would use subtitles. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but that was the only challenge being presented by this play.

Lachlan Keeley Fringeworld 2013 FRISKY AND MANNISH This hour-long cabaret by duo Frisky & Mannish is a pop-themed musical set that picks apart the best of the last twenty years of music. The vaudevillian pair delivers parody after parody, each unique in its own right and ranging from affectionate to scathing. The set opens with a brief lesson in musical education as Frisky, the feminine half of the pair, tests the audience on their ability to identify Dido, Kelly Clarkson, and Aretha Franklin (tip: the audience is always wrong), and kicks into highgear as Frisky throws off her uncomfortable shoes and puts on some brightly-coloured sneakers.

As the set goes on it becomes quite apparent that both Frisky & Mannish know their stuff, and thoroughly enjoy what they do. It’s hard to keep from falling in love with both of them as they perform a spot-on sketch of Danni Minogue (Frisky) teaching Gotye (Mannish) how to transform his hit ‘Somebody That I Used To Know’ into an over-bearing dance number, and replace the entire lyric sheet of a Kelly Clarkson song with clichés. The best part of the set was how intelligently it was crafted – the pair are well-aware of their subject-matter and let the audience know everything is tongue-in-cheek. At the end of the show, I felt like I had a new pair of friends.

Mason Rothwell POLY “Can you fall in love with more than one person at a time?”

Where do I even start with Poly? A Cutting Room Floor (Scott Corbett and Zoe Hollyoak) production, this is one of the best plays I have seen in a long time. Intimate, funny, heart-wrenching and challenging, Poly takes its audience on a non-chronological journey, following the lives of three modern women in a polyamorous relationship. We witness

the birth of the relationship as a casual romance, and watch it flourish into a full-blown relationship with all the complications you would expect (and not expect) that come with a three-way relationship. Everything was perfectly put together; the witty script, the beautiful cast (Ann-Marie Biagioni, Verity Softly and Amanda Watson), the elegant music and choreography, even the props and set were used creatively and symbolically.

This performance was no emotional rollercoaster; it was an emotional shit-storm.

It had me in fits of laughter one moment, borderline tears the next, and at one stage I wasn’t sure whether I should stare intently or avert my eyes from the on-stage raunchiness. I sincerely hope Poly gets a revival so everyone can get it in their eyes. Would see again. And again. And again.

Sven Ironside.

24 HOUR IMPROV 24 hours of improvisation for $24 (with a $1 rebate for every hour you stay) seemed pretty exciting. Anyone who’s ever experienced the secondhand embarrassment of watching amateur theatre will know that this excitement was misguided. In the wee hours, MC Sam Longley and a fellow player riffed for a full hour on the back of three random nouns suggested by audience members. The skit kept the pace, energy, physicality and consistency that could clearly only be achieved with the two men’s years of experience.

Leaving to refuel at 3 am, feeling delirious and drunk on fatigue and Howling Wolves (note: disgusting), we promised we would return for one more. Simply put, we shouldn’t have bothered. The troupe had evidently given the least experienced actors the most undesirable slot and gone home to get some sleep. What we were left with was a performance so embarrassingly unfunny that even those on stage were cringing.

The Big Hoo-Ha’s 24 Hour Improv was a lesson in why you should always leave the party before it ends. The cost of potentially missing that ultimate party moment isn’t worth the bad taste left in your mouth when it all goes bad, or worse, boring. Don’t walk away before you vomit and pass out, readers. Run. Lucy Ballantyne

72% thought that the quality of their Guild coffee was ‘pretty okay’ 27

Beginners Guide to the WA Opera Season 2013

by Kat Gillespie LA TRAVIATA April 2013, His Majesty’s Theatre Composer: Giuseppi Verdi Synopsis: Featuring prostitutes, drinking songs and tuberculosis, the tragic La Traviata (‘the fallen woman’) is the opera that has it all.

Parisian courtesan Violetta runs away to the countryside with the bourgeois Alfredo, but their happiness is short lived when Violetta is persuaded to abandon her lover in order to save his family’s reputation. Alfredo mistakenly believes her to be leaving him for her former paramour, Baron, and bitterly renounces his love. Violetta and Alfredo eventually reunite, but it is too late – like many a nineteenth century heroine before her, Violetta has consumption.

The two only reconcile on her deathbed.

DON GIOVANNI July 2013, His Majesty’s Theatre Composer: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Synopsis: The protagonist of this light-hearted comic opera is Don Giovanni, a recklessly seductive womaniser whose character is based upon the legend of libertine Don Juan. Leaving angry women in their wake, Giovanni and his complaining servant Leporello lead a life of decadence. Pursued by those he has hurt through the course of his hedonistic actions, Giovanni is given the opportunity to repent for his sins or face the consequences.

Pop culture equivalent: Any womanising television or film character, from James Bond to Chuck Bass, owes a debt to Don Juan. Few of these characters are however punished for their wrongdoings by talking statues who drag them through the earth down to hell.

Pop culture equivalent: Moulin Rouge offers a very similar plotline to La Traviata, but with bonus Lil’ Kim. La Traviata is also the opera that made Julia Roberts cry in Pretty Woman.

LA BOHEME October and November 2013, His Majesty’s Theatre Composer: Giacomo Puccini Synopsis: Another unfortunate case of tuberculosis appears in La Boheme, the tragic tale of four impoverished young bohemians trying to survive. Central to the opera is the love story of seamstress Mimi and her neighbour, the poet Rodolfo. Their relationship is doomed from the start as Mimi gradually succumbs to her deadly illness, but she and Rodolfo make the most of the penniless life they lead along with their artistic group of friends. As Mimi’s condition worsens, the two agree to separate so she can acquire a wealthier lover who can pay for her medicines. They eventually reunite on, you guessed it, her deathbed.

Pop culture equivalent: Replace the tuberculosis with HIV, add a few drag queens, and you’ve essentially got the rock musical Rent. Rent was heavily influenced by Puccini’s opera, with most character names remaining unchanged.

The mystery of Perth’s disappearing art galleries

by Kat Gillespie It’s something of a paradox. At a time when those sweet mining boom dollars are providing Perth families with all the flat screen televisions and power boats they could possibly want, Perth’s art scene is experiencing a massive sales slump. Although interest in the art world seems as healthy as ever – the recent MOMA series of exhibitions, for example, have been met with plenty of interest – this interest isn’t translating into sales.

Sales are what keep art galleries open. By the middle of this year, four of Perth’s major art galleries will have permanently closed their doors due to financial difficulty: Perth Galleries and Gallery East in North Fremantle, Claremont’s Greenhill Galleries, and Mosman Park’s Galerie Dusseldorf. Goddard de Fides in West Perth also looks to disappear, having taken an indefinite sabbatical. These were all large galleries exhibiting the works of hundreds of local artists, while working with significant art auctioneers such as Bonhams to see those works sold.

While the trickle down effects of the global financial crisis have been blamed for decreasing investment in art, there are plenty of other factors at play. Increasing internet sales from overseas buyers in Asia render gallery spaces unnecessary. Meanwhile, new regulations forcing Australians to place their artworks in storage if they form part of self-managed superannuation funds have deterred local investment. Baby boomers aren’t buying as much art any more, and those who are buying are doing so in a different way.

The effects of this shift are most disastrous for older local artists who have lost their exhibition spaces. Adapting to a post gallery situation is easier for a younger generation able to acclimatise to the new culture of pop up spaces, smaller galleries, and other impermanent exhibitions. The way we buy art is changing, as is the way younger artists are creating and dealing with art - online sales are on a huge increase, providing arguably easier avenues for sale of works than the traditional gallery format.

The other potential losers when it comes to Perth’s disappearing major galleries are the public, who are now reasonably deprived of art viewing and purchasing avenues. To address this, artist groups such as Second Sunday Studios are forming to hold regular open studio events, encouraging more public access to the artistic process and providing an exhibition space for artists who have lost it due to gallery closures. The Museum of Natural Mystery in North Perth has also hosted initiatives to find alternative avenues for exhibition of local art.

It seems wise to view Perth’s recent gallery closures as the signal of a generational shift.

The ones losing out here are not our young, upcoming talents - rather, the older artists whom they are supplanting. While this is hardly ideal, it does provide hope that we will enter into a new era for Western Australian art, rather than settling into a disastrous one.

Best In Show: The Role of Awards in the Arts

by Wade McCagh “I have got to thank the Academy for this… for helping me blur the line between art and commerce.”

Nicholas Cage, 1996 Best Actor acceptance speech Award season is finally over. That exhausting extended period of unrelenting industry self-congratulation and consecration between December and February, concluded by the father of all modern industry awards, the Oscars. But does anyone actually take the Oscars, Golden Globes, Grammies, or any other major awards shows to be a definitive or even legitimate authority on the artistic merit and quality of their respective fields? I would propose that the majority of people look at such awards with a high degree of cynicism and dismissiveness, if not contempt.

Yet, for all that, awards have become the dominant way to honour and recognise the arts, and in fact, the various arts have responded to this explosion of prizes with everything from nonchalant complacency to full-blown embrace. Nowhere is the latter more evident than in the modern film industry. Entire projects are tailor-made for sweeping award ceremonies, from their initial conception right down to their distribution and release. There is an undeniable link between association with these awards ceremonies and the economic benefits they bestow, not just financially but also culturally and socially.

Today, there are now more film prizes each year than there are feature films produced.

While some might have qualms about the entire concept of artistic awards, either due to the competitive aspect they naturally create, the notion that there is a clear and distinguishable winner amongst works of art or the implicit deference to one group of people as somehow qualified to act as artistic authorities, it’s important to realise that awards are not a phenomenon strictly belonging to the modern age. In fact, from the very beginning of dramatic art, there have been awards. Prizes for artists existed in Greece as far back as the sixth century B.C.E., through annual festivals combining music, poetry, and drama.

The most famous of these were the dramatic competitions of Athens. These contests formed the central feature of the Athenians’ annual festivals to honour the god Dionysus,

and their religious character lent a specially heightened stature to the participating artists.

According to historian A.E Haigh, the poets, actors and singers of these festivals, especially those connected with the prize-winning plays, were accorded the respect due “ministers of religion… sacred and inviolable.” That didn’t stop the crowds hurling accusations at the judges of bribery or being generally incapable of recognising greatness. The Athenian government gave tax breaks to patrons and participants, viewing the event as a tourism promotion, and boy did it work; the festivals became legendary for the tens of thousands of cultural gluttons it attracted, spending day after day absorbing plays, and the eventual revelling and orgies that came to accompany it.

festivals around their awards announcements, which often descend into carnival-like cheering and booing from audiences and journalists.

As James E. English notes in his book The Economy of Prestige, such orgies are still visible today. If you ever attend an international film festival like Cannes or Venice, you will witness the hectic pace of moviegoers cramming six films or more a day in, the excitement of spotting directors and celebrities, and the structuring of such

Even those awards that strongly position themselves as true artistic awards that serve as alternatives to the Oscars still conform to the Academy’s overall hegemony and model. English gives the example of the 1996 Independent Spirit Awards, who actively define themselves with anti-commercial rhetoric and claim to honour the “unsung heroes of filmmaking.” While its true that their selections for Best Actor (Sean Penn, Dead Man Walking), Actress (Elisabeth Shue, Leaving Las Vegas) and Supporting Actor (Benicio del Toro, The Usual Suspects) did not receive Oscars, the equivalent Academy category winners for each category came from the same three films.

It’s interesting to note that despite the proliferation of awards shows, particularly since 1970 when television coverage made such events highly attractive to networks and the prestige of the Oscars was arguably at its highest, many of the awards positioning themselves as alternatives to the Academy have more or less become homogenous copies of one another. Between 1980 and 1999, the Golden Globes duplicated 16 out of 20 Best Picture and 14 Best Director awards with the Academy, while the Directors Guild of America picked 18 Best Pictures.

So, what exactly is the point of all of these award shows? Surely the near unanimity of selections only furthers the case for each being redundant. In my opinion, things haven’t changed much from 2600 years ago. While the rapid growth in the number of awards is unquestionably as much about profit for those involved as it is about honouring artistic achievement, there is something intrinsically enjoyable about the festival atmosphere and excessive indulgences of awards ceremonies. I think deep down we understand that no award process, with their individual criteria and rules, can ever be a truly objective judge of artistic merit. History is littered with undeserving winners and outrageous omissions. But you can’t deny that it doesn’t add to the fun, the lore and the passion surrounding the industry.

In many ways, awards have become as much a part of the entertainment as the works they honour. Are their negative consequences?

Absolutely. Are most people willing to accept those consequences as the cost of this extended orgy of indulgence? I swear by Dionysus the answer is yes.

JJ Abrams

by Wade and Shaughn McCagh Wade: In January of this year, Disney and Lucasfilm announced that JJ Abrams would be the director and producer of the next Star Wars film. Many, including myself, saw this as the coronation of Abrams as the new king of sci-fi Hollywood, recognising a man who had been so influential in creating the cultural zeitgeist on television over the last decade and had proven himself capable as a director in the realm of high-budget Hollywood franchise blockbusters. Abrams is arguably one of the 21st century’s most successful directors and writers in both television and film, responsible for hit shows such as Felicity, Alias, Lost, and Fringe, as well as directing the films Mission: Impossible III (2006), Star Trek (2009), and Super 8 (2011), and producing the films Cloverfield (2008) and Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011), all of which were pretty damn successful commercially.

Shaughn: Director, producer, writer, composer: there’s not much the man hasn’t had experience with. Abrams knows the industry, and more importantly, he understands the mechanics behind blockbuster films. While perhaps limited in his work as a director, the input Abrams brings to the table has been a driving force behind some of best productions of the last decade. While I can agree that he hasn’t exactly produced anything unbelievable in his career thus far, I think the man has the potential to surpass the run of the mill, franchise pumping, corporate blockbuster sell outs and actually create some incredible cinema. Yes, we’ve established that he’s taking the reins over the new series of Star Wars films, but there’s a difference in creating a film for the masses and creating one for the sake of the art, and I would argue Abrams understands this distinction quite clearly.

Wade: No one doubts that JJ Abrams is a capable director and producer of blockbusters. That’s a moot point. But let’s just take a step back for a moment and assess the situation. We are literally placing the future of the two greatest sci-fi franchises of all time into the hands of one man. That’s an awesome amount of power for one person. My question is, what exactly did JJ Abrams do to deserve that power? He is capable, but has to date directed three feature films, only one of which was an original idea not connected to a franchise (and even that was essentially a homage to Spielberg). Watch any of those three films, and tell me what exactly Abrams did to make it great? The man has no identity behind the camera, no recognisable

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individuality. Can anyone actually say what his vision is for Star Trek, or what he’d bring to Star Wars? I think that JJ Abrams has come to be the perfect representation of post-GFC Hollywood, one where financial security is more important than ever and anything remotely new, original or potentially offensive is an unacceptable risk.

Shaughn: You wanna see what I’m talking about when I say Abrams understands blockbuster film? Look no further than Star Trek, one of my favourite films of that year and, in my opinion, one of the top three franchise reboots of all time. The man understands his audience, the complexities a director faces in presenting a story to both the minority of die-hard fans and the causal movie-going majority while ensuring the final product still tells a compelling story.

Star Trek in particular could have been a horrible misadventure.

Wade: I would agree that Abrams captured the optimism of the original work, and delivered a palatable product that had enough appeal for mainstream audiences while appeasing the core fan base with enough homage and references to keep them happy.

it’s also extremely restrictive. So, when a director works within those restrictions and still succeeds to please everyone, you must give credit where it’s due. But disassociate the film from the franchise, and judge Star Trek objectively as a film, and what you’re left with is “awesome visual effects, fairly clichéd but enjoyable enough performances, and a complete lack of tension or intrigue.” Seriously, there is no story in that movie. None. It’s essentially Top Gun in space; two brilliant opposites clash against one another but have to come together in the face of adversity for the greater good.

Shaughn: But it didn’t need to be original. It needed to capture the spirit of the original, and realistically it wasn’t far off the dynamic from the original series.

Wade: Nero and the Romulans are pathetic antagonists. You get some laughs, you get some action sequences, you walk out thinking ‘I enjoyed that,’ and a week later you can’t remember the plot at all. Sure, it’s a great blockbuster film, but it doesn’t endure or

Shaughn: What made it different was how Abrams understood the appeal of the original series; it was all about stories that captivated a generation becoming increasingly insecure about its place in a universe with such zest and optimism that you couldn’t help but feel empowered by them. How immense is the idea that we could as a species, one day venture out into the void and overcome any obstacle we faced because of our human virtues? Abrams – admittedly not a fan of the show when he took on the project – was able to extract the core elements that made it so wildly successful, and shape them into a film that gave the people already invested what they wanted, and newcomers what they needed to become invested. He understands that a truly great blockbuster film needs to reach an audience on multiple levels, from the “what a deep and meaningful metaphor for the advancement of the human race via working together, regardless of sex, race or species” angle to the “Fuck yeah, explosions!” point of view.

Wade: It is difficult to reboot a franchise, and when you add in the diehard legions of fans with this project, it’s astronomically hard. With all the rabid, specific expectations involved,

J.J. Abrams loves mysteries. While giving a TED talk on the importance of mystery to good television, he walked around the stage talking to a box with a question mark on it. Abrams revealed that he bought a similar mystery box as a child, which he’s never opened.

inspire; it doesn’t attract people to the fan base.

You’d see the next one when it happens, but you’re not counting down the days in the way Christopher Nolan with the Batman franchise and Joss Whedon and co. with The Avengers managed to achieve. They had similar situations to work from (a dedicated fan base to appease, and significant obstacles with existing history and development), yet they delivered films that didn’t just suffice, but excelled in almost every way. They had story, action, character development, faithfulness to the sources, adequate service to the fans, appeal to the masses, and a level of depth that pleased the

critics. Compared to his cinematic peers, I would describe Abrams as ‘solid’ and ‘decent’, but I wouldn’t describe him as ‘elite’ or ‘brilliant.’

Shaughn: One of the most critical tools in the arsenal of the blockbuster director is the use of marketing and hype to make people want to see something. Cinema history has seen too many films fall prey to a budget that focuses too heavily on production value, only to quickly spiral out of control and into the depths of bloated mediocrity (I’m looking at you, Waterworld). While Abrams may not have much in the way of directorial style, again, his ability to understand his audience has proven invaluable to the success of his films. Take his creative input into the 2008 modern-day monster flick Cloverfield. While not a great film, Abrams’ contribution is truly remarkable in the incredible marketing campaign the film utilized. You ask someone who saw the film on a whim what it was about and they’d probably give you something like “monster attacks city, people die, shaky-cam” and they wouldn’t be wrong. The true depth of the film shines through the elaborate back-story drip fed to people through a complex series of small viral marketing campaigns. By looking in the right places, you could find MySpace pages for the main characters and start to piece together how they would interact during the film. You would find the story of a Japanese soda company by the name of Slusho and its mysterious involvement with the awakening of the monster. This manufactured wordof-mouth publicity Abrams helped to create exploded into a series of fan theories and speculation the likes of which hadn’t yet been seen in modern cinema.

Wade: But does that actually enhance the film itself, or does it serve as a distraction?

Shaughn: I would argue that it was solely this Abrams’ brand of audience manipulation (also seen throughout Lost) that made

Cloverfield a success at the box office and split critics down the line over whether it was one of the greatest examples of marketing innovation in film today or just an overhyped movie about a sea monster causing ruckus in downtown Manhattan. Make up your own mind about Cloverfield, but don’t underestimate Abrams’ ability to make people want to see his films.

Wade: But that’s the problem with JJ Abrams!

All of his work deals in overly-complicated plots and mysteries that may be really exciting and intriguing, but when they are finally revealed you realise that the mysteries really didn’t need the elaborate concealment, and it’s a huge letdown, one that outweighs all that initial excitement. JJ Abrams can create, set up and deliver the first half of anything he does better than just about any director in the business, but he is fatally flawed when it comes to maintaining that excitement and tension as you eventually bring things to a conclusion.

Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s bad guy, Nero, the Cloverfield monster, the Super 8 alien, they all fall down in the third act. Once he has to place his antagonists on screen, he gets stuck and the whole film suffers for it. He’s dependent on shadows, mirrors and avoiding directly engaging his characters with his villains. This is why people are hoping like hell that Benedict Cumberbatch’s character in the next Star Trek is Khan, because Abrams won’t have to hide him away for as long as possible. Is this the guy we want in charge of creating new Star Wars villains in the post-Vader universe?

Shaughn: It takes time to build these new universe reboots, and Abrams has proved he can make a successful, well-received base film to build these franchises on. He’s a logical, if not safe choice for this.

Wade: He’s capable and decent, and with the luxury of time that television brings, he is capable of creating some incredibly satisfying work. But if the best you can say about him as a film director is that he is a great hype man, then he is the absolute antithesis of the person we need for Star Wars. Because there will be hype no matter what. What is not guaranteed is quality. We need vision and identity in our beloved franchises. We need people who have substance, vision, something to say. Sci-fi in television and film used to be about ideas, about challenging people and society. The ascension of JJ Abrams is akin to the formal rejection of new ideas, and the reign of what is safe, bankable and inoffensive to everyone. We are all poorer for it.

The greatest mystery about J.J. Abrams is where his skull ends and his hair begins.

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FILM REVIEWS Broken City Director: Alan Hughes Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Russell Crowe, Catherine Zeta Jones

Oz The Great And Powerful Director: Sam Raimi Starring: James Franco, Mila Kunis, Rachel Weisz

Shaughn McCagh

Shaughn McCagh

Broken City is entirely predictable, packed to the brim with cliché and (with the exception of the always impeccable Jeffery Wright) the entire cast seem to have declared war on the very notion of subtlety. But much like your favourite version of Law & Order, Broken City is that particularly satisfying New York City politics and crime drama comfort food. Bad for you, but deliciously so.

Mark Walhberg plays Mark Walhberg as a private eye, called in by Russell Crowe’s thuggish mayor for a job, right in the middle of an election campaign against a challenger named (I kid you not) Jack Valiant. Faster than you can say ‘Funky Bunch’, Walhburg is plunged into a world of shadows and deceit where everyone has their own agenda and things are not as they seem.

If you’re looking for mystery, surprising twists or restraint, this is not the movie for you. If you’re looking for Mark Walhberg looking perpetually confused as he sprays wooden dialogue in an NYC accent (I think I counted at least three occasions where he literally says “What is going on here?”), Russell Crowe having fun being a junkyard dog politician, and a cast of solid actors who all seem to have seen the cheese in this script but signed on anyway for a bit of fun, this is the movie for you.

Harakiri: Death of a Samurai Director: Takashi Miike Starring: Ichikawa Ebizō XI, Eita, Kōji Yakusho

Oz The Great And Powerful tells the story of Oz, a humble street (played by James Franco), and his quest to defeat the Wicked Witch of the West. Visually, Raimi’s Oz is an incredible recreation of the same fantastic world audiences fell in love with in 1939, even going so far as to replicate the black and white to full colour transition used in the original film. Where the film fails to meet the standard of the original was in the story itself. While the same charm that pulled audiences in originally is there, you don’t start to actually feel attached to the characters until the very end of the film. Franco gives a great performance as Oz, a carnival magician with dreams of grandeur that learns the value of selflessness while Mila Kunis, Rachel Weisz and Michelle Williams give fun interpretations of the witches respectively, but don’t develop enough as individual characters to really call them memorable. While the porcelain girl, flying monkey bellhop and munchkin herald don’t quite fill the shoes of the tin man, lion and scarecrow, they’re still a lovable cohort. A film that almost recreates the magic of the original, Oz The Great And Powerful is a fun adventure both young and old can enjoy.

The Last Stand Director: Kim Ji-Woon Starring: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Johnny Knoxville, Forest Whitaker

James Munt Oscar Felsch Harakiri opens with Hanshiro, a ronin (masterless samurai) seeking the permission of the daimyo (lord) to commit harakiri/seppuku in his courtyard; that is, to slice himself open in pursuit of honour. The daimyo relates a story of a ronin who feigned seppuku expecting charity, but was instead forced into it; the story unfolds from here as the ronin’s connections to Hanshiro are revealed. It’s a far cry from the voyeuristic gore of director Takashi Miike’s earlier films; the few scenes that recall that are only to be expected of a film whose title is about disembowelling oneself. Rather Miike deals with the film with restraint & well-paced, old-fashioned finesse, influenced by genre greats like Kurosawa and Kobayashi. Whilst simple in retrospect, the story is well-executed and unfolds nicely through a series of narrative frames. This is complimented by stylish production and the eerie, melancholic quality of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s score. At times it risks getting bogged down in its use of flashbacks as a plot device, and the dim shutters can sometimes obscure facial expressions. However, it succeeds as a moving critique of the cold hypocrisy of samurai honour, thanks principally to powerful acting and Miike’s dedication to the subject matter.

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When I first heard about the plans to resurrect the career of action superstar-cum-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, I’ll admit I wasn’t optimistic. What I definitely didn’t expect was The Last Stand, a pretty solid action flick, well in the vein of classic Arnie badass-ery. The leader of a drug cartel escapes captivity and speeds to the Mexican border, where the only thing in his path is a county sheriff and his deputies (Arnold and friends).

Complete with well choreographed action sequences, not unbearable dialogue and some decent supporting performances, The Last Stand is a run of the mill action movie that’ll revive the sort of cheesy “fuck yeah!” feelings you used to get watching classic Schwarzenegger.

While it’s hard to mask the look of a 65 year old man in a leading role, Arnold still plays it with the same solid determination he’s always put into his performances. You shouldn’t be seeing this for its character development or plot, but if you want that taste of glory you used to feel when Arnold beat down punks and delivered one-liners like a badass motherfucker, you’ll find it here.

Amour Director: Michael Haneke Staring: Emmanuelle Riva, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Isabelle Huppert To date, there have been nine foreign language films nominated at the Oscars for Best Picture.

The expansion of the category to up to 10 films may well see that number rise in years to come, but it’s unlikely that Academy voters will ever choose a foreign language film over an English language production. That’s essentially why the Best Foreign Language Film award was permanently added in 1956, to acknowledge the great work of Europe and Asia that almost no audiences will see inside the US.

Regardless, should the Academy one day be so taken with a foreign film that they would award it their top honour, I cannot foresee it being for the work of Michael Haneke. As stern and defiantly austere as any director I have encountered, Haneke has spent a career creating emotionally draining, bleak, disturbing and unflinching portrayals of human nature and society. Some would describe his films as ‘sadistic’ (I would diplomatically offer ‘relentless’ as an alternative). But there is no doubting his immense talent with the camera, his patience with story and pacing, and most of all, the incredible performances he elicits from his leads in the insular, intensely isolated worlds he creates for their characters.

Amour is at its core, a love story. Well into their eighties, two retired music teachers, Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) live a quiet, private life filled with love and tenderness together. But as the inevitable deterioration that comes with age begins to claim Anne’s independence, Georges is forced to face the reality of their long existence ending and his love slowly and painfully being taken from him.

performing your weekly ritual of burning as many copies of Battleship as you can, and that’s totally fine. Accepting change can be a pretty scary thing.

Be Kind Rewind: A Retrospective Review Clue Directed by Johnathon Lynn and Gore Verbinski If I told you that it is actually possible for the words “board-game”, “movie” and “decent” to sit collectively in the same sentence (without a hint of facetiousness or irony), what would you do? Well, firstly I know you’d probably start screaming incomprehensible noises while

Let me introduce to you a good board-game film adaptation, the 1985 film Clue, based on the game Cluedo, as non-Americans (real people) know it. The premise of the film is relatively simple; the six characters from the board game are all invited to an estate by the butler (played brilliantly by Tim Curry) of a mysterious man named Mr. Boddy, a man that has been blackmailing the six visitors for years prior. Of course it’s not long before Mr. Boddy is lying dead in the middle of the library and hilarious chaos ensues as the characters frantically rush about trying to work out exactly what the hell is going on, and why there seems to be a new death the instant a light is turned off and on again.

What makes Clue great is that it is totally selfaware in all the completely right ways. It knows it’s based on a silly premise, so it effectively

There is no escaping the painful reality of this deterioration. The entire film is siege-like, taken place almost entirely in their apartment as Anne becomes increasingly immobile. The emotional intensity and depth from the two leads feels so incredible sincere, from Riva as she must increasing communicate with little more than her eyes, and Trintignant, whose heroic devotion is unwavering through the agonising process. Both are legends of French cinema, and both may have delivered their greatest performances here.

This has all the hallmarks of a Haneke work; its an organic, intimate and uncomfortably intense journey into the lives of the characters. Amour won the Palme D’or at Cannes last year, his second win in four years, and places him in elite company. This may very well be his masterpiece, and is undoubtedly one of the best films of 2012.

Wade McCagh

blends the dark storyline with hilarious oddball comedy accordingly; an example of this is when the house is visited by a policeman, to which all of the suspects respond by pretending they are having a gigantic orgy (yes, actually making out with the dead bodies) … so yeah… this isn’t exactly the Dark Knight of board game moves.

As an added bonus, Clue pulls a stunt rarely seen in cinema; it has multiple endings. This means that if you had gone and seen Clue in the cinema back in 1985, you would have only gotten one of three possible endings. You could see this as either a cheap money grab, or even as a nice throwback to the idea of the board game never having one set outcome (it’s probably both). Regardless, it’s still pretty damn entertaining to see the different scenarios play out. But it isn’t this trick that makes Clue memorable, it’s the razor sharp quality and the fun ‘Whodunit’ thrills that make it such an overlooked classic that definitely deserves a re/ watch.

Mason Fleming

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Festival Gardens: A diary Godspeed You! Black Emperor- Monday Feb 11 The thing about a black, dark sky is that it only does things of interest under specific conditions, be it a barometer dropping or a pretty dangerous amount of ice forming up there, ready to come down and crush your uninsured windshield. Without that, it’s just a gloomy, ominous hue. GY!BE are the same, in that unless the time, mood and place is right (i.e. probably not an open air temporary auditorium on a warm night) they’ll flounder.

Sure, Godspeed (complete w/ three guitars, twenty minute songs and conspiracy theory projections) provide enough portent to make Moby Dick seem like a pack of gummy worms, but if they’re off, they’re off, and they were off.

Watching them hack and struggle for lift-off was a pretty refreshing reminder of the fact that only ambitious bands have bad nights; I mean, has Neil Diamond ever fallen flat?

Alex Griffin ----------Jens Lekman – Monday Feb 18 How do you explain a swoon to someone unfamiliar to the source? I’m embarrassed to write that, and the odds are better on me making a throw rug out of my own skin than me ever saying it about anything ever again, but

that’s the impact Jens Lekman has; inexplicable waves of feeling. The thing about Lekman is that he doesn’t just inhabit his cheery, naïve, hopeful songs; he exists on completely on their level, and his exuberance when he plays them is impossible not to be won over by. If there was a cynic in the room when he rolled into the final chorus of ‘Maple Leaves’, I don’t want to know about it. After all, when Jens closes his eyes and sings that “the end of love/isn’t the end of the world,” you know it really took him a long time to figure that out and he’s glad he knows now.

He told stories, he took the piss out of himself, he played his songs like they were brand new, and as I left, my face hurt from smiling.

phenomenal performer whose powerful vocals and stage presence made sitting down feel sinful. It was an amazing act that blew me off my feet.

Alex Griffin ------------

Gideon Sacks -----------------

Axolotl & How To Dress Well – Wednesday Feb 20

The Raah Project – Friday Feb 22

Oh my. I’ve been back in Perth one day and surprise – it is hot. Tom Krell, the important half of How To Dress Well, thinks so too. Around midday he tweets enthusiastically about the weather, but by show-time he is sick of it, and it seems important to him that his audience knows this. He’s also pretty keen to explain the precise inspiration for a bunch of songs – helpful, as his lyrics are largely indecipherable, and regrettably vacuous when actually heard. The experience is not by any means a waste though, as I learn a couple of things from this set: it is definitely possible to overuse falsetto (who am I kidding surely everyone else already knew this) and there are only so many times a performer can call for the volume to be pumped up “loud, as loud as it can go, don’t hold back” before it loses all impact.

Earlier in the night Axolotl (from Melbourne) play a nervous set to a small crowd. They are pleasant but largely forgettable.

Connor Weightman ------------------

The following act was Jose´ James from the US, who could be described as modern jazz and soul with an aura of R&B. His band was world class, but one thing I found irritating was how James would often sing phrases in dissecting loops in the way a DJ might mix them, and although mildly impressive, it seemed cliché.

Although James’s act was generally groovy, Hiatus Kayote’s energetic and engaging performance is what stuck with me the most.

It’s Friday night. Festival Gardens has been cluttered with fold-out seats for this gig, but wine consumed prior to this show means that my plus one and I are going to ruin the civility for everyone by getting up and dancing and generally being a little bit attention seeking.

The Raah Project are an odd bunch – lead by a singer/MC and a violinist/conductor, they’ve brought along some 11 extra members to fill out the space normally taken by a laptop. A good thing.

Sometimes it’s a bit too big-band and we get bored. Sometimes the strings and woodwind carry the song away and it’s breathtakingly pretty. The MC makes up a song from words volunteered by the audience – gimmicky, but impressive. The closing piece refrains the line “everything you do should be covered up in stars”, a sentiment that is just vague-yetsweeping enough to be echoed for the next few hours to confused friends. We leave feeling fairly satisfied. Everything you see should be covered up in wine.

Connor Weightman ----------------

Hiatus Kayote & Jose James – Thursday Feb 21 Phronesis – Sunday Feb 24 This concert was a great showcase of the Acid Jazz/ Neo Soul genre in the festival. The gig was opened by Hiatus Kaiyote, a group from Melbourne whose debut album Talk Tomahawk has received attention from names such as Erykah Badu and Flying Lotus, and won them the title of breakthrough Artist of 2012 at the Gilles Peterson Worldwide Awards in January.

The lead singer and bandleader, Nai Palm, was a

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Phronesis are a jazz trio, and they bring all the things one would hope for in that department – addictively stimulating interplay, technical virtuosity, and wry modesty (“so how many people here knew what they were coming to see?”). Their main quirk, so far as I can tell, is the prominence of the stand-up bass, which is acrobatically played by Jasper Hoiby. As he

leads and solos and rips at the high end of the fretboard though, I can’t help but think there’s a reason why this instrument usually remains in a more supporting role – it just doesn’t have the resonance for all that noodling to have much sonic impact, as fun as it is to watch.

Thankfully, good jazz drumming can save pretty much anything.

Afterwards, we hang around for a screening of the LCD Soundsystem final gig/doco, Shut Up and Play the Hits. I enjoy it, but wish it was just the concert footage and not spliced with everything else. My +1 reviewed it thusly: the music is alright, but James Murphy seems like such a douche.

Connor Weightman ---------------Cat Power - 26 February 2013 I’m sick of people talking about how Chan Marshall looks haggard. You only have to look at the cover of Moon Pix to realize that this girl has been all about pupating into something unexpected and wicked all along.

Marshall’s husky, drowsy set-ender disclaimer of “MY name IS Shawwwwnn” was enough to make me want to destroy my own vocal chords and move to the South. She’s a goddess, even with her chestnut bangs lopped off in favour of every broken person’s best friend: bleach. I might just have a crush on people who dedicate songs to the “dead and dying,” but Chan is the best washed up old drunk to visit Perth in a long time.

Her billing at the festival appealed equally to lovers of her ingenious but perpetually caps locked Twitter as the many of us who have wept our own body weight to ‘Metal Heart.’

Barely hampered by shocking acoustics, Chan opened with ‘The Greatest’ before moving through a set dominated by tracks from last year’s Sun. Whether you liked this album or not, her vocals didn’t disappoint. The God-fearing moans were plentiful and not drowned out by the band, all decked out in black with nice shiny copper highlights in their hair. Despite inducing a big case of the dance, they did all look like the kind of people who made fun of you for getting awards back in Year 8.

The festival gardens cop a lot of flak for not being as great as Beck’s Music Box was, and maybe this is true. They still facilitate a bit of mischief, and there’s a strange novelty in realizing that you might never again dance

with a bindi-wearing girl who looks exactly like Jessa Johansson or try and help a girl find her ear-plugs by praying to St Anthony. At any rate, it was a damn nice place to see one of my favourite divas. The night was ended with a nice stretched-out goodbye from Chan, with white roses, and some inflammatory rap. She had some more important cat-shit to do.

Sarah Dunstan -----------The Tallest Man on Earth – Friday Feb 29 Once in Yaya’s I saw a dude play an acoustic version of a SBTRKT song, the whole time asking you to stare blankly into his bare soul.

He had one look. The Tallest Man on Earth Kristian Matsson has maybe one and a half, and he squeezes them for all they’re worth. A diminutive Swede, Matsson makes do in the absence of a backing band by stopping and starting, shifting volumes, repeating phrases and dancing to undanceable songs. He has two selling points. One is a perception of authenticity: he’s young man with a rustic voice, loosely poetic lyrics and a passing resemblance to Bob Dylan. The other is the incredibly earnest way that he performs, his movements and facial

expressions motivated by the point of his songs: “Get the girl”.

His set’s opener, ‘King of Spain’, wraps the getthe-girl conceit in an outlaw country theme and it’s probably his best song. He starts and stops, replaying lines and waiting for applause at appropriate moments. The crowd singing along is made up of girls who buy into the conceit and boys who apply it, or else dream to. This is a repeated theme; Matsson doesn’t really let go or do anything wild. He runs through favourites like ‘Where Does My Bluebird Fly’ and ‘Love is All’ in the same manner, to almost identical reactions to his opener.

This is where his well runs dry. There’s nothing unexpected or different or transformative, no unpredictability. While I don’t protest watching a man with a nice voice perform well-written songs to a responsive audience, too much of the same eventually becomes dull. His encore, ‘The Wild Hunt’, which turned into Paul Simon’s ‘Graceland’ half way through, was the first sign of spontaneity and joy that ran through his performance since his exuberant opener. Pity it took a cover to do it.

Josh Chiat

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ALBUM REVIEWS The Dropkick Murphys 5.5 Signed and Sealed in Blood Born & Bred The Dropkick Murphys have always been frank about their approach to music: they’ve found something that works and they’re gonna stick to it. Their formula (punk guitars and vocals, mixed with Celtic folk elements such as banjos and bagpipes) has garnered them significant international success, and their eighth album, Signed and Sealed in Blood, shows no signs of deviating from it.

The songs are all about rollicking ol’ Irish Christmases, team sports, prison, male role models and nights out with the boys.

Everything is hyper-masculine, hyper-working class and hyper-Bostonian, with sing-a-long choruses that I imagine would probably appeal to me too after 6 pints of Guinness.

If you enjoy drinking and 50s working class nostalgia, then this, like other Dropkick Murphys albums, has a lot to offer you.

I won’t deny that tracks such as Rose Tattoo and My Hero have a certain stirring, anthemic appeal, but there is little about the album that makes me want to listen to it extensively.

Ultimately, I feel alienated by the manly sentiments and a little bit embarrassed by both the folky romanticism and the fact that ‘The season’s upon us, it’s that time of year/ Brandy and eggnog, there’s plenty of cheer” is a real line. Who would have thought that sticking to the same formula for 8 albums would get boring?

Hugh Manning

Birds of Tokyo March Fires EMI

4.0

I waited nearly 50 minutes for a hook that never came.

March Fires is the disappointing, boring and ineffectual fourth-release from the Perthbased five-piece Birds of Tokyo. Coming off a string of strong alt-rock LPs, it’s a distinct departure from their tried and true sound,

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but the results are utterly uninspiring.

Repetitive attempts at ethereal ambience with synth (see ‘Motionless’ and ‘Blume’) set against Ian Kenny’s distinctive high octave howling fall flat as poor substitutes for the heavier guitar-driven sound of their first three albums. Unfortunately, Kenny and co. seem to have used ‘Plans’ – their most commercially successful single to date (and their worst- hmm, correlation?) as a template for the writing of their fourth album. If you want a return to their earlier style of ‘rock first, write lyrics later’, you’ll be disappointed. If you want an album full of ‘Plans’, then March Fires is for you. So settle in and sing along to ‘Lanterns’ as loud as you can and pretend it’s 2007.

Brad Griffin

Young Dreams Between Places Modular

4.5

When Connor sent me the list of leftover freebies up for review this month he briefly described each album, except Young Dreams’ Between Places, next to which he had in brackets “absolutely no idea”.

What could it be? I immediately chose this mysterious album, eager to witness the treasures of Pandora’s box.

I wish I hadn’t.

Each song of the 9-track album mashes together sounds from a variety of genres such as psychedelic rock, pop, and classical symphony – yet while these Norwegians try to innovate a unique style of music, the genres all clash with each other like cut and paste edits with no transitions. They fail to find the metaphorical glue. I get the feeling this could fuse spectacularly with a little more realism and groundedness in their approach. For now, it just doesn’t work.

Natasha Woodcock

Harts Offtime Island/Universal

5.0

This debut EP from Melbourne musician Harts (aka Darren Hart) is a combination of electronic beats, groovy bass, and great guitar playing. It’s a credit to Harts that he can combine electronic-indie with elements of funk and soul and manage to hold it all together, creating a sound which is fresh and interesting. Offtime was mixed by Lars Stalfors of the Mars Volta, and suitably, it’s a bit unusual. The best song is the wellbalanced and catchy ‘Back to the Shore’.

The least convincing track is ‘Music’, which sounds like a lamenting indie kid upset about not having any new tracks to boast about. Occasionally, there are certain elements which disrupt the regularity of the entire album, such as piercing vocals or a slightly unusual minor chord, and the dance beat in every song might not sit well with all listeners. Nevertheless, “Offtime” feels quite determined to be different, Harts is clearly a very talented musician, and this is definitely worth a listen.

Darcie Boelen

GOLD FIELDS Black Sun Astralwerks

7.0

There’s a lot to like about the debut album of this Victorian five-piece. Unearthed by Triple J a couple of years ago, the band has matured and released a strong first offering you can dance to, dominated by mournful electro pop. It’s full of catchy hooks, driving drum rhythms and exciting percussion (was that a cowbell?).

However, I don’t hear a unique sound, but rather a curious amalgamation of other bands. The dark, brooding vibe and lyrical content screams Short Stack, there’s Art vs. Science electronics abounding, and the vocals could easily have been provided

by Tim Ayre of Tim and Jean fame.

Subsequently, the band has broad appeal, but can’t escape being pegged as generic.

Highlights include the inevitable dance floor hit ‘Thunder’, the cacophonic percussion with which ‘The Woods’ begins and the thrumming electronics, breezy guitars and grim lyrics on ‘Dark Again’. The album’s distinctive, eye-catching cover art also deserves a special mention.

Samuel J. Cox

Dune Oh Innocence EP Independent

6.5

Dune, a collective from Melbourne, is Jade MacRae (vocals/keyboard), Luke Hodgson (bass) and Leigh Fisher (drums/samples). I’m reminded of Bowie fused with Gary Numan and Brian Eno, or Whokill era Tune-yards evoking Gorillaz Plastic Beach. Each song very much feels like a singular product though, and as such it’s hard to pin-down a great description for the EP overall. However, two songs stand out for me particularly. The title track is something I know I can come back to – it’s a dream pop anthem with a great progression and rhythmic vocals, and ‘Small Shoulders’ brings a bit more cowbell to a generation which undoubtedly suffers from cowbelldeficiency (check with your dietician on correct cowbell intake). It makes me feel like I’m blazing along the beachside, into the summer sun.

Brennan Peers

Hungry Kids of Hungary 8.0 You’re a Shadow Stop Start If you’re not familiar with them, the Hungry Kids of Hungary are an indie pop band from Queensland featured pretty regularly on Triple J. Their name alone suggests that their target audience are that unconventional sub-group of humans who don wool caps and won’t stop letting you know just how damn quirky they are. That being said, the HKOH

cover some pretty familiar territory with their latest album, refining their craft from 2010’s excellent ‘Escapades.

This is pop music, without any of the tired lyrical trappings. A full listen is likely to mellow you out, and it feels like the kind of thing you would have on when sitting around with friends on a summer day, hanging around the pool with a beach ball.

Actually, ‘summer’ suits pretty well as a description for this album, in the positive, non-carcinogenic sense; it’s light, harmless and finishes with you wanting more. ‘Sharp Shooter’ and ‘Twin Cities’ are like those memories from the holiday with friends that were the most exciting, whereas ‘Yesterday’s Gone’ and ‘Colours’ were those more sombre moments when all you did was lie on a beach somewhere, or in my case, in front of a computer screen looking at gifs. Anyway, highly recommended.

Cameron Moyses

Nick Cave Push the Sky Away Tour Red Hill Auditorium 6/3/13 Over 30 years with the Bad Seeds, Nick Cave, one of the most well-regarded Australian musicians still working today, has been responsible for a sprawling body of work. The constant in his live show however, is the characteristic swagger with which he delivers material, through his cock-sure vocal delivery, the way he saunters across stage and his fine suit & ‘stache. Backing him up are the Bad Seeds, and the musicianship of fiercely talented members like Warren Ellis and Ed Kuepper Bad Seeds is unquestionable. Cave expressed esteem for opener Mark Lanegan who accompanied him on “The Weeping Song”, and in other banter, explained his favourite Bad Seeds song was oldie ‘Stranger Than Kindness’, elaborating, “I don’t know what album it’s from but it’s fucking good”.

A mix was played of newer, softer tunes and more hot-blooded songs from the band’s catalogue, although they tended towards the latter; the contrast epitomised in encore

of fan-favourite ‘Stagger Lee’ and this year’s ‘Push the Sky Away’. Cave’s command to the drummer to “fucking hit that thing, Jim,” basically summed up the intensity of hardhitting songs like ‘Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry’. This all assured a superb night for new and old fans with Australia’s greatest storyteller, at one of the best new venues around.

Darcie Boelen

Laneway Festival Perth Cultural Centre 09/02/13 Laneway I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.

Laneway one twenty dollars and booking fee February 22, 2013. Where is my mind? I don’t feel good don’t bother me. When will you take off your fedora? I’m sick of your insane demands. Laneway after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.

Your drink tickets are too much for me.

There must be some other way to settle this argument. Ariel Pink is in San Fran I don’t think he’ll come back it’s sinister. I haven’t read the timetable for hours, every moment somebody hums ‘Laura’. Laneway I used to buy Nickelback cassingles when I was a kid and I’m not sorry. Laneway I’m addressing you. Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Pitchfork? I’m obsessed with Pitchfork. I read it every week. Its cover stares at me every time I open Firefox. I read it in the basement of the Reid Library.

It’s always telling me about responsibility.

Musicians are serious. Movie producers are serious. Everybody’s serious but me.

It occurs to me that I am Laneway. I am talking to myself again. Laneway Simon & Garfunkel must not die. The Hipster wants to eat us alive. The Hipster’s power mad. She wants to put the Flume in all our garages.

Laneway this is quite serious. Laneway this is the impression I get from looking at Alt-J. Laneway is this correct? Laneway I’m putting my drink tickets to the wheel.

Alex Ginsberg p.s. Laneway is the best festival we have.

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Picture by Alice Palmer

A Guide to Anime

by Mason Rothwell It’s hard to say it, but Dragonball Z is actually kind of terrible. We just don’t realise – who thinks back on it nowadays and is reminded only of the terrible pacing and repetitive plot?

Nobody! We instead think of how unbelievably cool it was when Goku went Super Saiyan for the first time or how we’d bond with friends at school after watching the latest episode! This isn’t actually a bad thing - watching with an uncritical child’s eye helps us; while we may not have realised, these seemingly flawless series can serve as gateways into the whole entertainment medium of Japanese animation, known as anime.

But maybe you didn’t have time to watch Cheez TV in the mornings before school, or your older sister showed you Akira when you were nine and now you’re pathologically afraid of anime.

For many people, all they know about anime comes from snippets of series aimed at children.

However, anime is not reserved for the familyfriendly audience, but the entire gamut of ages.

It’s not uncommon to find a dark and cerebral animation intended for the over-18. Quite simply, the Japanese approach to the medium of animation allows for anything quite unlike what is produced in the west.

But don’t be afraid! Anime, like every other medium of entertainment, has flaws, but is worth the effort of exploring. From the psychologically profound and haunting series about kids in giant robots, Neon Genesis Evangelion, to the mind-bending, genre-busting non-linear high school tale, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, there are some genuine works of art coming out of Japan in this format. If you want to enjoy the best of what anime can offer and find the surprisingly poignant and moving works of art that inhabit the medium, here are some tips.

Start with the classics.

When you want to get into Victorian literature, you start with the classics. Dickens, Wilde, the Bronte sisters and their frighteningly sexy Byronic heroes. Do the same with anime! Sailor Moon, Howl’s Moving Castle, Spirited Away, Akira, Cowboy Bebop; start with any one of these and you’re getting some of the best works that anime has to offer. You’ve probably heard of Spirited Away or Howl’s Moving Castle. These films are famous in the west for a reason – they touch upon universal themes and represent the best of what anime can offer you. Both films are done by the excellent Studio Ghibli, and any film

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in their repertoire is bound to be good. Howl’s Moving Castle is a fairytale based on a Dianna Wynn Jones novel, and is perfect for anyone interested in a colourful and exciting love story.

Spirited Away is a wonderful coming-of-age story that pays homage to the weirdness of Japanese folklore, and if you can get into this eccentric story, then you’ll be able to handle some of the more culturally-specific anime you discover later on. The reason these anime work so well in the West is not only due to their striking visual design but the way they utilise what anime does best – combining animation’s freedom from the constraints of live-action with the maturity and depth of media designed for older audiences.

Please don’t trust the internet.

The subspecies of human that dwell online will mislead you. Maybe you’ll be told about this ‘amazing new anime’ only to be confronted by violent tentacle porn. Or someone will mention a cute series about schoolgirls called Boku no Pico (do not Google this). The internet, however, is going to be your best resource. If you’re looking for something to watch, then Anime News Network or IMDB can lead you in the right direction. Go straight for the more official sources, and ignore the comments sections.

Dub or Sub? Anime comes in two variants – Japanese audio with subtitles (referred to as ‘subs’ online) or English audio done by western production companies such as Funimation (‘dub’). If you go on the internet, be prepared for arguments.

You don’t need to listen to purists wanking over the “wistful melancholy for adolescence” that they think is only offered by the Japanese audio of a certain anime. Others will say it’s more accessible in the English dubbed form where every female voice is a high-pitched screech. Just watch whatever version you prefer, and don’t worry about anyone else.

Following these tips affords you entrance into one of the most unique forms of entertainment available. The creative potential of anime derives from its intelligent use of a medium with few technical and practical constraints. In no other medium do you have the potential to examine and use unquestionably adult themes without the problem of what is deemed appropriate for animation in the West or worry for budget.

At its core, anime’s greatest strength is its ability to grant artistic freedom, and produce something you’ll see in no other form.

picture by Bernice Ong

The game’s afoot

by Darcie Boelen “I think that there are certain crimes which the law cannot touch, and which therefore, to some extent, justify private revenge.”

The mystery of why American producers continue to remake and revamp well-loved television shows, particularly from Britain, remains unsolved. There have been dozens of American productions based on British inventions, such as Skins, Being Human or Life On Mars, for no properly justified reason.

American audiences are being repeatedly presented with new remakes to great critical acclaim and success, but it does not appear to be for a lack of decent homegrown television.

Shows such as Modern Family, Breaking Bad or Mad Men which are successful, original shows still have to compete with remakes, the latest of which being Elementary, the new Sherlock Holmes adaption. On American small screens, Jonny Lee Miller is suddenly a new, American Holmes, but elsewhere, in movieland and England, Robert Downey Jr. and Benedict Cumberbatch are still playing the role. You wouldn’t expect to see equally iconic characters like James Bond being duplicated across television and the cinemas at the same time, so why is this happening? Using my best deductive skills, I have narrowed it down to two likely reasons.

“There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.”

Americans are unable to deal with inadequacy.

This is a theory loaded with cultural assumptions, but it’s really not too difficult to believe in an American inferiority complex.

After all, this is a nation with the biggest armies, the best technology, and the most amazing sports teams. It only fits that the American film and entertainment industry is desperate to do everything bigger and better. Not such a far-fetched theory, when you think about it.

Elementary wouldn’t be so bad if it were less of a carbon copy of the critically acclaimed BBC show Sherlock.

Perhaps what is most frustrating about Elementary is that is isn’t a licensed remake like The Office or Life on Mars – CBS has released it as an original series, due to the fact it is based on a book rather than on another show, though they are both quite similar and very recent productions. Both are modern day adaptations

of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, as opposed to the latest Robert Downey Jr. films that are set in the late 19th century.

Elementary and Sherlock both use the character of Joan and John Watson (respectively) to document Sherlock’s behaviour and his work, though in slightly different ways – Joan reports to Sherlock’s father, and John writes a blog. In Conan Doyle’s novels, Holmes used the best technology and the latest scientific knowledge to clearly solve his mysteries. Similarly, the two shows have also adapted to contemporary technology and communication, using computers, mobile phones, cameras and modern science to solve crimes. This isn’t to say that Elementary is better or worse; it’s just recycled.

“What one man can invent another can discover.”

The demand for new television is faster than the supply of new ideas.

Perhaps fans of Sherlock shouldn’t be quite so offended at an American version, and consider the viewpoint of the producers. Although creativity does not work on a strict demandsupply basis, there is always an audience out there willing to watch a new show, and television channels ready to air them. Economically speaking, it isn’t really so strange for a producer to want to fill that gap, to produce a remake with promise of good returns.

We have seen this phenomenon with reality television shows worldwide, such as Idol, X-Factor and Big Brother. Game shows are also

remade internationally – Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, Deal or No Deal and The Wheel of Fortune are some of the largest game show franchises.

When dealing with fictional entertainment, a common alternative to completely new or old material is to get inspiration from Shakespeare.

Warm Bodies is loosely based on Romeo and Juliet, 10 Things I Hate About You is based on Taming of the Shrew, and the Lion King appears to be a sort of lion Hamlet. The same angle has often been taken with Sherlock Holmes, a character and story that’s flexible enough to suit different settings and circumstances. House M.D., Monk and Psych all feature Holmes-like characters, who deduce and solve seemingly impossible cases. Perhaps Elementary can be classified as a reinterpretation, rather than a remake.

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

Whether there is enough room on the television screen for more than one Sherlock at a time is up to the audience. It’s not even that Elementary is all that bad, because honestly it’s pretty good.

It’s well written, has a fine selection of actors and is genuinely entertaining and engaging, taking its own spin on a much-loved tale.

There seems to have been a line crossed by the Americans in such a swift reinterpretation of a fairly recent television show, but whether it was because of desire or necessity, the third Sherlock has been quite a mystery.

After the disastrous American adaptation of the English sitcom Coupling started airing on NBC, BBC America started screening the original in the next timeslot, just to rub it in.

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by Alice McCullough

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CULTURE REVIEWS Books of Adam www.booksofadam.com Website Kate Pendergast

Merlin: Season 5 Roadshow DVD Gillian Farquhar

Encountering something sweet and devoid of posturing on the internet is disarming. After dragging yourself through crass stupidity, derivative braying and aggressive neediness, discovering something charming, fresh and genuinely funny online is like running from a battlefield choked up with swollen decapitated heads that are all bouncing about and gnashing their teeth before suddenly finding yourself in a lovely little dell, where a young fawn with wobbly legs romps about, completely oblivious.

Reading Adam Ellis’ blog Books of Adam evokes something of this feeling.

Merlin has always been good at charming audiences with its good-natured storytelling and onscreen chemistry between its two leads, and it certainly doesn’t fail to disappoint in its final season. As sources of most of the magic behind the show, Colin Morgan and Bradley James are once again fantastic in their roles as lovable manservant and king. It’s honestly refreshing to see their natural banter working to balance the darker undertones of this season. The effects are consistent this time round which is a nice touch, given the show’s obviously tight budget.

The site is anecdotal in form, with the Portland-based author taking a wild, comic look at the goings-on of ordinary life. Subjects include his cat Lola who once drank anti-freeze, a malevolent olive, and his theory that he’s the botched doppelganger of a better version of himself (in the event the two should meet, he predicts that “Either I will murder him and feast on his heart in hopes of gaining extra strength and intelligence, or I will be seduced into having carnal relations with my clone”). His writing style is zany, playful and unaffected, and gets an indispensable burst of ebullience from the accompanying cartoons.

Mongrels Roadshow DVD Thomas Beyer

However, there are moments throughout the season where questionable writing decisions unfortunately make the season fall short of its potential. Angel Coulby struggles to give a convincing performance after her character Queen Guinevere suffers an untimely bout of Stockholm syndrome, and honourable mentions should be made to Eoin Macken and Tom Hopper for getting through some of the worst lines ever delivered on the show.

But while it’s certainly no Game of Thrones or Doctor Who, Merlin has heart, and this season is definitely a fitting end to great five-year run.

Welcome to Night Vale Written by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor. narrated by Cecil Baldwin Podcast William (Liam) Dixon

As I normally expect a puppet-based show of animals to be aimed at children, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I saw the MA rating on the cover of Mongrels. My best guess was something in the Trey Parker and Matt Stone mould of sex, drugs and alcohol blended with copious swearing, but I also anticipated a general abundance of wit. Whilst the sex, drugs, alcohol and swearing were there, I couldn’t find anything I could truly describe as humour.

Welcome To Night Vale is a free podcast that takes the form of community radio station broadcasts, cataloging a strange mix of everyday and uncanny events, twisted government bureaucracy and creepy advertisements. If you want the inevitable mashup comparison, it’s as if Parks and Recreation’s Ron Swanson found the X-Files in the back of his cabinet and declared over FM that the public had a right to know.

There’s nothing new to throwing together a collection of vastly different personalities together in the one show, and these character traits are as obvious as any grouping I’ve seen. The writers fail to delve beyond the stereotypes we’ve learnt to expect, be it the loud mouthed tough guy or the air headed princess, as all of the characters are unoriginal and unrecognisable from countless others.

As a podcast, the twice monthly Night Vale oscillates between funny and creepy over the course of a twenty minute episode, while making room each time for ‘The Weather’ (a performance an independent musician). Listen to it in order to follow the lives of ongoing characters, learn the history of the town and stay informed to avoid being taken in by shoddy, discount runestones. Night Vale’s Twitter feed (@NightValeRadio) is a good read, too.

Mongrels doesn’t seem to know what it is as a show, and the lack of clarity and direction leaves behind an incoherent mess that offers nothing new to the comedy genre. At best it can be something to sorta-watch whilst lazing around with nothing to do, but for all other purposes I’d just avoid it.

The biggest downside of Night Vale is the format itself; many people have never listened to a podcast and probably won’t go out of their way, but the radio play structure is something we don’t get to experience these days and is, in my opinion, definitely worth a try.

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A stern talking-to: Chatting with the author of Not Your Ordinary Housewife

by Caroline Stafford Listening to Nikki Stern, it’s really hard to shake the thought that I’m talking to my mum. Even though she’s in her home in Melbourne, I sure wish I’d ironed my shirt. Nikki’s chatting to me over the phone about her life and career as she went from being an artist with several university degrees to a star of homegrown Australian erotica, as discussed in her recent biography Not Your Ordinary Housewife.

“The immediate catalyst” for the book, Nikki says, was a “year of hell” triggered by an ovarian cancer cyst. “I was talking with a writer friend of mine and she just said I should write my memoirs, which hadn’t occurred to me at that point of my life,” she says. “It became a focus away from the cancer, which was seeming to be gone, and it became a way to document it for my kids and to clean up any questions they might have if I died prematurely. It was just better to get it out in the open for them.”

‘It’ is, of course, Nikki’s role as “Australia’s Horniest Housewife”, instigated by her husband, Paul Van Eyck. “My upbringing had been such that it was a bit unthinkable,” she says. This was the 70s, when porn, derided by radical feminists, wasn’t even readily available. “In my university days I was a bit of a radical,” she says. “I think that comes through in my book. I was always going to demonstrations and a lot of my friends were very radical, and porn was seen as very politically incorrect.”

Nikki Stern grew up as the adopted child of two holocaust survivors in Melbourne and went on to study art at Monash University, focusing her energies on her art. Her book begins there, where she took a gap year that took her life in a direction she hadn’t imagined. The book follows her life in the porn industry, as she is pushed further and further in to the world of pornography out of her comfort zone by her boyfriend and husband Paul and pulled back by the love of her children, the real family she’d never known.

After eight years of postgrad study - “I had all these qualifications, but I wasn’t really qualified for anything” - Nikki travelled, where she first met Paul. “We came home to Australia and Paul didn’t have a work permit and I found myself looking after this small baby, it’s crazy when

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I think about it now,” Nikki says. “He was so young, and I was very immature. Paul tried several jobs but none really worked out until he found nude modeling, where all he had to do was take his clothes off and found he got paid quite handsomely. Then that segued in to an offer to make a sex therapy movie. Paul talked me in to it, and originally I was horrified by the thought, but in the end I decided to do it - the money was good and there seemed to be very little effort at all. We were that strapped for cash that, that seemed the best option.”

That first shoot was “surprisingly easy”. “The photographer was not sleazy and it seemed like a natural progression. After that, Paul, being quite entrepreneurial and already very artistic, decided ‘well, I can do this myself.’”

After Paul put out the call for photographers, the couple was “swamped” by would-be pornographers, looking to photograph them for free. “Paul decided to sell all of these. After doing a couple of shoots a day for a period of time, we had a huge library of porn and were producing a couple of movies and photo-sets, hiring people along the way as we expanded.

There was a lot of demand for seeing me with another woman and me with another man.”

Getting busted by the police was a particularly harrowing experience. “We felt that the police would return, and given that we thought the police would return we felt that the only option was to move to Canberra where what we were doing was perfectly legal and we could feel a bit more safe. Again, I guess I was pressured because Paul really wanted to make a living that way and we were pretty successful with our porn cottage industry. He saw that we could be quite successful in Canberra. He just knew that if there weren’t these legal constraints we could succeed.”

With the introduction of the ACT’s 40% sex industry tax, the business collapsed. It was taken to the High Court. “Although it was eventually overturned we were all basically broke. For a while the business moved to Darwin. It got very complicated and expensive with courier bills. We diversified and went in to magazines and sex aids, but the business never really recovered. Which was the aim of the ACT government to clean up the industry by taxing it out of existence. We lost everything - the

A new porno is made every thirty nine minutes.

business, our house - so it just seemed like there wasn’t any choice and I wanted to move back to Melbourne, my home. I just wanted to get out of it. I’d had enough.”

Although Nikki stresses she doesn’t want to paint herself as a victim -“I was an adult and a fully rational person” - there was a lot of pressure from Paul. “He was extremely persuasive, extremely manipulative and certainly had psychopathic tendencies. He could get me to live this lifestyle that was extremely beneficial. Not only did he get to have sex a lot, but I was pulling in a lot of money.” Paul “basically had been an alcoholic the whole time”, and after the collapse of the Australian porn industry, he became “more difficult to manage than the kids!” The sense of isolation was strong - “I couldn’t really discuss what I was doing - I was quite ashamed” - and when the industry blew up, people weren’t particularly sympathetic. Her mother found out about Nikki’s work on the ABC news. “It didn’t give our names, but she knew instantly that it was us. She was just absolutely beside herself with grief and worry and disgust. She really wasn’t terribly supportive to me during that time. We had our child taken away, and there was such a long process to get her back and the criminal charges, and she didn’t really give us much support.”

“the couple was swamped by would-be pornographers”

Owning the footage, the copyright, and creative control gave Nikki a sense of power, too.

“Yeah, the whole point was that I was being commodified but it was about having a career that I could support my family. That was kind of how the marketing angle ran - I was this Horny Housewife who loved sex and loved fucking everybody and they were my choices.

The clients loved that. I supposed the adulation that I got was quite, nice. It fed my ego, no doubt about that. Being an adopted child, I didn’t have a lot of self esteem, I struggled to be a dominatrix, so having all these men desiring me actually made me feel better about myself.”

picture by Jessica Cockerill Nikki feels the experience of being adopted has given her a “hyper-sensitive” bond with her three kids. Meeting her birth family, however, was a “total disaster”. As an adoptee, one fantasizes about having a family that are keen to meet you and loving and nice and just perfect,” she says. “Especially the birth mother. I was guilty of having the fantasy that she wanted to meet me as much as I wanted to meet her. So when we had the first phone call it was incredibly disappointing and she never

really seemed that interested in me. In reality I would have preferred her to have the guts to say she didn’t want to meet me, and it took me a long time to accept that and realize that she was just making excuses. Our relationship didn’t progress past that point, it was just really difficult to communicate with her. “ Was there any advice Nikki would have given her younger self? “Don’t be blinded by love, and have confidence in my abilities. If I’d had the

confidence in myself I could have seen other options from those presented by Paul. Really the book is a cautionary tale in that one should follow one’s gut feeling and don’t allow oneself to be belittled and talked in to things you know you shouldn’t do, have the confidence to look back and say ‘What am I doing!’ I don’t regret anything, but I certainly would have done things differently.“

Ron Jeremy was a special education teacher working with the autistic before his girlfriend and he decided to send a picture of his ten-inch member into Playgirl in the hope of kicking off his acting career. The rest is history.

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BOOK REVIEWS The Heretics Will Storr The Heretics is not the book I was expecting. When a book is touted as an exploration of outlandishly unscientific beliefs, including creationism, Morgellons, and homeopathy, one couldn’t be faulted for expecting another 350-page tirade of a self-righteous atheist.

Instead, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Storr’s book is an earnest inquiry into the psychology of belief, the evidence behind both irrational and rational beliefs, and a genuine attempt to connect with those labeled as fools by the proponents of science.

7/10

Best bit: Storr’s brief foray into existentialism, wondering about the consequences of the arbitrary concept of humanity Worst bit: I am now deeply aware of my own mortality

Attempting to understand the evidence behind irrational belief systems, Storr engages in pastlife-regression therapy, overdoses on homeopathic Read with: medicine, attends a brutally isolating Buddhist camp, a journal of and even tours Holocaust sites with neo-Nazis. In each of these episodes, Storr’s account of his personal notes that ideological journey is brutally honest, and peppered quickly devolve with moments of genuine humanity. Storr may into ‘lmao’ deify Richard Dawkins, have little insight into basic repeated over psychological concepts, and at one point make fun of a and over. man’s miscarriage, but his sincerity and determination to question everything about himself makes The Heretics a starkly human book, and Storr a hard man to dislike.

Mason Rothwell is a tired Psychology student who is going to watch Kiki’s Delivery Service to recover.

Wrecked Charlotte Roche Wrecked sells itself with sex, in all its raw and intimate details. By the same author as Wetlands, a novel marked by its controversy and broken character, Wrecked follows much the same formula. Centred on the character of Elizabeth, the novel is told from her point of view in a stream of consciousness style. This leads itself to an emotional wank, with the reader having to endure pointless descriptions and a tendency to over share (the first twenty pages are all sex).

Elizabeth’s life revolves around her husband, daughter and three dead brothers. Her pain and grief is apparent with every turn of the page as her past and present interweaves and she reflects on the events that brought her to where she is today.

While Elizabeth may be characterized in a sympathyinducing way, the lack of a true resolution to her psychological pain causes the novel to fall short. In the words of a German reviewer, “The first novel was shit, the second is more shit.”

Lauren Wiszniewski normally likes books.

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3.5/10

Best bit: WIR FAHREN AUF DER AUTOBAHN Worst bit: Only one kind of climax, if you know what I mean Read it with: A self-help book to knock yourself over the head with

The Disestablishment of Paradise Philip Mann

3/10

Do you like xenobotany? Do you like lateBest bit: in-life romance? Then this book is for you!

Sexual Unfortunately I’m not really into either, so experiences The Disestablishment of Paradise was hard with plants to get through. This plodding sci-fi novel deals with the decolonisation of the planet Worst bit: Paradise: a lush, psychically charged world that’s proven EVERYTHING unfit for human inhabitation. A scientist and a demolition IS worker race to discover the secrets of the planet before it is CONNECTED completely abandoned by (I kid you not) the Space Council.

LOOK AT THE ‘Race’ is perhaps the wrong word. The characters gently MYSTICAL meander through this hostile world, snuggling and talking LIFE FORCE about their feelings. They cut up a tree and it’s the most OF LOVE exciting moment in the book. Any suspense or sense of FLOWING adventure is robbed by the fact that the ending of the book THROUGH is revealed in the first chapter, and we are left with a heavy focus on the relationship between two prickly fifty year olds. THE UNIVERSE To top it all off we have a godawful ‘everything is connected’ pseudo-spiritual revelation moment at the books conclusion.

I will admit that the novel has some interesting structural elements, such as the segments which are ‘interviews’ between the book’s fictional author-narrator and the main character, but this does not save it from being, ultimately, pretty dull.

Read it with: reluctance

Hugh Manning is a dude who pretends to know stuff about sci-fi but has never even read any H.G. Wells, C’MON! Fish Change Direction in Cold Weather Pierre Szalowski

6/10

Now, I’ll admit, I was excited to read this book mainly because the title reminded me of Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

by Paul Torday. I was also sold by the blurb: “Five days in a frozen city… strangers fall in love, wishes come true and life will never be the same again.” Well, hello! This was exactly the kind of life-affirming feel-good storyline that I’m a sucker for.

Best bit: I picked up my video camera but I wasn’t in the mood to look at the neighbour’s boobs

However, Szalowski’s writing style fell flat for me.

The narrator is a ten-year-old boy whose parents are splitting up, and the author genuinely tries to speak with the voice of a pre-pubescent and somewhat earnest young boy finding his way in life. Yet, try as I might, my attention kept wandering off and I couldn’t bring myself to particularly care about any of the characters. I liked that the book showed a neighbourhood coming together in a time of hardship, what with record-breaking levels of snow, power cuts, and fights at the supermarket over gas canisters.

However, some of the scenarios are a tad cutesy and overly convenient. This is a nice read if you’re feeling a bit down, but don’t expect it to change your life.

Worst bit: The chapters are titled according to the last sentence of the chapter. (e.g.: “I Couldn’t Think of Anything Better To Do”) Read it with: A glass of warm milk. else?

Deblina Mittra is a sassy fifth year law student. Ugh, the worst.

The Last Girlfriend on Earth and Other Love Stories Simon Rich I wasn’t afraid of a mid-twentieth century dictator stealing my girlfriend until I read this. Books about love and loss that claimed to be ‘funny’ have never grabbed me before, but I couldn’t put Last Girlfriend on Earth down. Simon Rich brilliantly captures the pain, grief, and joy - but most of all the awkwardness - of love and courting in the 21st century.

From the first story (using the point of view of a condom) to the last (where a ‘traded’ boyfriend finds unexpected happiness), Rich relates the foibles of love in a series of odd, telling narratives. Rich’s quirky stories take unexpected forms that tend to result in the same message: love and courtship is an uphill battle, but the losses are worth the eventual sweet victory.

The only drawback is that nearly all of the stories are from a male perspective, so a female reader may find herself isolated. If you’re a male, this collection of short stories is very relatable and you’ll soon be nodding along to some of the characters, thinking, “I’ve been there, bro.” Funny, quirky, sad and harshly truthful, The Last Girlfriend on Earth shouldn’t be skipped.

9/10

Best bit: A priest who carries a copy of Neil Strauss’ The Game around with him.

Worst bit: Occasional quick and somewhat forced ends to stories when the premise runs out.

Read with: 69 Love Songs by The Magnetic Fields playing.

Rich apparently listened to it a lot whilst writing

Brad Griffin is An aspiring jazz musician and frontman of the band Jazz-Pazazz The Fields Kevin Maher It’s 1984, and Ireland is a divided country. The Irish Republican Party have bombed the Grand Hotel in Brighton, thousands protest at an anti-Reagan march, and poor ol’ Dublin teenager Jim Finnegan can’t stop blasting Survivor from his boombox, pulling crazy dance moves in his bedroom and pretending he’s from Top of the Pops.

A refreshing and whimsical coming-of-age tale, The Fields charismatically explores the trials and tribulations of adolescence, of dealing with dark and difficult issues, the close-knit family unit and life in a turbulent country.

Maher has cleverly combined the characters of Jim, ethereal beauty Saidhbh (pronounced “sive”, like “hive”), and the crooked and deviant Father Luke O’Culigeen to produce a constantly surprising and endearing story that many can relate to. At times I found the characters to be a bit too heavy on caricature, to the point where I squirmed and shuddered, but it wasn’t long before I again found myself laughing uncontrollably at Maher’s tactful use of Irish wit.

There’s love, tragedy, humour and sadness in The Fields, but don’t mistake it for just the average read.

Brooke Jackson wants to be a teenager again.

Dollars and Sex Dr. Marina Adshade In 2008 Marina Adshade launched an undergrad course called ‘The Economics of Sex and Love’. The class was so wildly successful that she squeezed all the juicy stuff into the highly readable Dollars and Sex. Everything from prostitution and internet dating to casual hook-ups and teen pregnancy is broken up into the economic decisions we make as individuals. While we may not always be rational, it turns out we’re pretty statistically predictable.

If you’re the kind of person that likes interesting factoids about sex (who doesn’t?), this book is for you. Did you know an ugly man needs to earn about $186,000 more than an attractive man to be preferred by the average woman? On the flip side, the amount an ugly woman needs to earn to be preferred is apparently impossible to calculate it’s so large. Ouch.

With a combination of cheeky sex stats and factoids (Casanova used lemons as a contraceptive), as well as anecdotes that keep the book flowing between chapters, Adshade takes a traditionally dry subject and demonstrates its relevance to our daily lives.

You’ll come away with both a better understanding of economics and a slight feeling of arousal.

8/10

Best bit: Dry economic theory camouflaged by fun and sexy statistics.

Worst bit: Chapters often include disruptive extra information sections that, while interesting, are irritatingly placed in the main page layout.

Read it with: A notepad – you’ll want to write down statistics to tell your friends later.

Tom Hutchinson is a handsome young dormouse magically bestowed with human speech.

8/10 Best bit: Inappropriate mickey talk, eejits, and bender rants.

Worst bit: Mega-cringe factor in the character of Father O’Culigeen.

Read it with: A can of UDL for nostalgia’s sake.

Harmless Juliette van Loon Set over the course of a day, Juliette van Loon’s Harmless follows the story of three characters: Dave, an incarcerated, single father of two; his eight year-old daughter Amanda; and Rattuwat, the Thai father of Dave’s recently deceased girlfriend.

Together, Rattuwat and Amanda attempt to travel to visit Dave in prison, abandoning their broken-down car and trekking through Perth’s unforgiving outer suburbs. While they are all eventually isolated, they continue to move forward inexorably connected to one another. Piece by piece, we discover the delicate ties that link these characters.

In Harmless van Loon carefully melds cultural and generational differences with smooth perspective shifts to create a narrative that reveals much about Australia’s contemporary social climate. Her prose is remarkably well formed, and the novella’s generous content is juggled effortlessly and concisely, without the loss of any meaning. This is a short, smart and suspenseful read.

7.5/10 Best bit: Subtle foreshadowing followed by continuously surprising revelations.

Worst bit: There are too many issues brought up that cannot be addressed in a work of this length.

Read it with: Only a few hours to spare – this is a quickie.

Elisa Thompson is an Arts/Education student at UWA, completing her honours in anthropology.

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PRIMARY MARK