Pelican Edition 4 Volume 84

PELICAN

Fortune Ed. 4 Vol. 84

Picture by Lauren Wiszniewski

CONTENTS

REGULARS

FEATURES

SECTIONS

4 credits

10 genies

23 politics

5 editorials

12

27 film

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what’s up

13 hogesy

32 arts

7

advice column

you’re wrong

14 psych

35 music

8 miscellaneous

15 horoscoping

38 culture

46 casino

16 golddigging

43 books

17 whoring 18 monsanto 20

lucky country

21

get rich quick

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EDITORS Marnie Allen Alex Griffin ADVERTISING Alex Pond DESIGN Jennifer Breeden COVER ARTIST Jessica Cockerill SECTION EDITORS Books - Zoe Kilbourn Culture - Simon Donnes Politics – Richard Ferguson Music – Connor Weightman Arts- Kat Gillespie Film – Wade McCagh SUBEDITORS Josh Chiat Simon Donnes Richard Ferguson Kat Gillespie Zoe Kilbourn Wade McCagh Lauren Wiszniewski CONTRIBUTORS *- words ^- images Thomas Adolph* Kiya Alimoradian* Marnie Allen*^ Stephanie Ball* Matthew Bye* Tom Beyer* Lyndon Blue* Yvonne Buresch* Matthew Bye* Dylan Caporn* Kevin Chiat* Jessica Cockerill^ Samuel J. Cox* Anna Curry*

Xavier Daniels* Simon Donnes* Richard Ferguson* Mason Fleming* Ayeesha Fredericksen* Kat Gillespie* Jessica Gould^ Matthew Green* Alex Griffin*^ Zoe Kilbourn* Danica Lamb* Akima Lateef* Alexandra Leonzini* Brigette Macfarlane* Ante Malenica* Hugh Manning Matthew Mason* Shaughn Mccagh* Wade Mccagh* Grace McKie*^ Alice McCullagh James Munt* Patrick Marlborough* Kate Prendergast* Harry Quinlan* Mason Rothwell* Philip Sharpe* Natalie Thompson*^ Thea Walton* Camden Watts^ Lauren Wiszniewski*^ Kenneth Woo* Natasha Woodcock* Stephen Yates* Wenny Yeo*

PELIAPOLOGY: The Oblivion review in edition 3 on page 28 was written by Mason Fleming, not Mason Rothwell. Mason F, come up to the office for your informal group sorry hug. It will last as long as you like it to.

CONTACT PELICAN Pelican has a chronic back complaint and will be in a horizontal position for the next two months, so we aren’t up to much. We want to hear from you! 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.

Get involved with your local bird!

DISCLAIMER: The views expressed within are not the views of the UWA Student Guild or the Pelican editorial staff. I wish Axel Rose was dead.

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Picture by Ashleigh Gould

CONTRIBUTORS

PREZITORIAL

When it comes to fortune, I’m a very superstitious person. When a friend decides to tempt fate, I will yell at them to go and find a tree branch to touch so that the universe forgives us. This has proven relatively effective to date; I’m quite sure if I didn’t do this during the Guild elections then I wouldn’t even be Guild President.

Misfortune can happen at the least convenient times. With this psychedelic weather we are experiencing at the moment I wouldn’t be surprised if many of you are feeling the urge to reach for a tissue or a panadol (the rest of the magazine is much better than this Prezitorial, so hang in there and keep reading!) Life as a student is often lived on the edge- with practically nothing in the bank and everything left to the last minute. Sometimes it only takes a bit of misfortune for everything to suddenly unravel and fall apart.

Thankfully, when it comes to dealing with misfortune, the Guild can help make things a little easier. Whether it’s an interest free loan, someone to advocate for your rights or even just a friendly face to talk to. If you go through a tough time and need a bit of help, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me on 0438156596 or at president@guild.uwa.edu.au.

If you things are going well for you right now, why not get a bit of good karma and help those going through tougher times? This year, volunteering and service learning have become a major priority for the Guild. Our Volunteering Hub is growing and Faculty Societies are developing new skilled volunteering initiatives backed by the Guild. We should also see more service learning units in the future thanks to the University accepting our proposal to fund a Service Learning Co-ordinator.

So roll that dice, touch wood and if things turn out pear-shaped, I’ll be here to help.

Cheers, Cam

MARNITORIAL Whenever someone is down, I try and steer clear of the whole ‘Hey man, there are kids dying out there/first world problems/count yo blessings/at least you’re not Griff!’ angle in my cheering up routine. It’s not that I want to encourage people other than myself to indulge in pessimism or hypochondria, I just think that even if you have food, shelter and health, it’s ok to feel like the world is crapping on you every now and then. That’s the thing about fortune. If seemingly small things didn’t bring us down, equally insignificant things like finding $10 in your pocket, or discovering Cher’s bat-shit insane twitter account (I can’t thank you enough, Alice) wouldn’t build you right back up again. And I suppose at the end of the day it all depends on what you consider your fortune to be.

Perhaps C.R.E.A.Y. Maybe you’re stoked simply being alive after surviving an accident or battling an illness. Maybe you’d rather leave it up to a higher presence, or even get a head start on what fate’s throwing at you by booking an appointment with a clairvoyant. But regardless of how we measure fortune, it will always be countered by how we measure misfortune. Aim low, and you’ll probably be pretty, pretty, pretty happy.

Hasta luego, MARNOSSS xx

GRIFFITORIAL DEAR SIR, I am Prince Kufour Otumfuo the elder son of the late King Otumfuo Opoku ware II whose demise occur follow brief illness. Before the death of my father, King Otumfuo Opoku ware II, authorised and officially known as the next successor to Traditional rite. Murdered in South Africa, before his death he was the CEO of porsche Motors.

My urgent need for a foreign partner that made me to contact You for this transaction. I got your contact from yahoo Tourist search while I was searching for a foreign partner. As this message might meet you in utmost surprise.

However, it All just sure of your capability. And reliability to champion This business opportunity when I prayed to good Lord about you. Before his death he left the sum of 22Million Usd with the ABSA Bank of South Africa were currently work as a banker, and all attempt to communicate with him Family was no no avail, and he never included any next of Kin on this account and until now no one has steped forward to lay claims on the entire funds The Below Link will give you an insigt of his story. Therefore i require your partnership to stand as his next of Kin to enable me prepare all legal paper works in your name to have the funds moved out in your name, and if you agree do respond back to me to enable me furnish you with more details as to the way forward in how this can be achieved.

Immediately you receive this letter. Please indicate your Willingness by sending your information to enable us enter into the official stage of this transaction.For more Clarification and easy communication. You can as well call my Direct line for further up date +27604603020.Also Visite our website www.ABSA.CO.ZA I await your response.

Thanks, Luv Griff

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WHAT’S UP ON CAMPUS UWA MUSLIM ASSOCIATION The month of Ramadan (fasting) will soon be upon us and you know what that means... it’s time for our Annual Community Iftar (Friday, 26th July at Hackett Hall)! This dinner is an amazing opportunity for us to share the experience of Ramadan with the UWA community. Halal food has also been introduced into our cafes (Reid, Hackett and Guild) so make sure you try it out! The UWA MSA works to cater to all in our vibrant university community. For more info and updates on our events, visit our website (http://www.uwamsa.org/) or Facebook page (www.facebook.com/groups/uwamsa)!

UNIVERSITY WRITERS CLUB University Writers Club supports and promotes creative writing and reading at UWA. We hold weekly meetings for review and inspiration. Whether you love to read, write, are looking for some friendly peer review or a splash of inspiration this is the club for you. Like us on Facebook or contact us on universitywritersclub@gmail.com.

Meetings Every Wednesday 3-5pm Guild Seminar Room 2.”

UNIVERSITY PHYSICS SOCIETY Greetings from the University Physics Society, the club that aims to create a fun social environment for students studying or interested in physics.

Aside from our hard work maintaining the club room for 3rd year Physics students, we also hold regular events including the screening of documentaries and science related films, and evenings at the Varsity Bar in Broadway where members can unwind with a few drinks and good company. There is also a LAN Party in the works for semester 2, so if you’re interested, get in touch and we’ll let you know when the details are confirmed.

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HIP HOP WHITE NOW Is the poetry club not dropping enough beats for you? Want to tell others about the time you punched that guy in McDonalds? Hip Hop White Now is for those who come from the wrong side of Dalkeith and want to tell the world.

No longer do you have to struggle alone about your conflicted feelings over being middleclass and white. Join your fellow hiphop artists/ rappers today. Meetings are held Wednesday, 5pm weekly in Business school, Room 3.02.

UWA GRINDR ASSOCIATION The UWA Grindrs are having their annual AGM on Monday. Come along to our Common Room (cubicle #2 in the Hacket Hall male toilets) for mates, dates, and maybe a bit more. Contact President Trent Reznor on the Grindr profile NSA@Reid.

LES ASSASSINS DES FAUTEUILS ROLLENTS UWA Venir, les frères, au rassemblement inaugural du mouvement pour le séparatisme quebecois sur le campus. Le temps pour perdre le joug d’ONAN oppressif est venu, et il ne peut pas y avoir de retard.

Les instructions pour l’exécution de la destruction ultime, rapide et exsangue de l’état américain impérial seront disséminées.

Aucuns dépensiers de temps ou gadabouts.

Les appels de mission, et nos gens doivent mobiliser, sur deux jambes ou deux roues. Libérer trier de film, foie gras et le parallélisme. L’adhésion quinze f.

THE CREATIVE PALINDROMIST’S UNION Stuck on “Madam I’m Adam” and “avid diva”? Still misspelling words to make your ideas fit? Then come down to our special meetings to get you tattarrattat-ing on the door of palindromic success. Join our fearless leader Comrade E. Darmoc at our AGM in the Pelican office on

13/6/13 where we’ll discuss how to support that fellow ol’ left hat.

UWA KATTER’S AUSTRALIAN PARTY One nation under a hat. Katter’s Australian Party is the new kid on the block with an eye on the sky and a helping hand for you and your livestock. Don’t faff around or make a blunder, cos’ Katter’s the man to keep us from going under. With his hat on tight and his roots in the sand, he’s working with you to save this land. Introductory ‘meat-and-greet’ session at the agriculture department Tuesday the 22nd. BYO whip and detailed plan for Australian industrial and agricultural self-sufficiency.

UWA SPORTS APATHY ASSOCIATION Struggle to enjoy even the most ‘engrossing’ of sporting fixtures? Regard team sports as joke played upon the willing by the ignorant? You’re not alone! Seek out your fellow confused brothers and sisters for twice-weekly gatherings on James Oval for everything from knitting to Calvinball and theoretical discussions of the possibility of imaginary exercise. With UWASAA, there’s no winning or losing- just giving up. 0452500043 UWA DEAD POETS SOCIETY “All we were going strong last night this time, the mots were flying & the frozen daiquiris were downing, supine on the floor lay Lise listening to Schubert grievous & sublime, my head was frantic with a following rime: it was a good evening, an evening to please, I kissed her in the kitchen—ecstasies— among so much good we tamped down the crime. The weather’s changing. This morning was cold, as I made for the grove, without expectation, some hundred Sonnets in my pocket, old, to read her if she came. Presently the sun yellowed the pines & my lady came not in blue jeans & a sweater. I sat down & wrote.” Sound like you? Foreshore opposite the Tav, 2pm Tuesdays.

Dear Lady Constance,

Dear Duchess,

The lease on my shared house is up in two weeks and it is looking as if it will not be renewed. This means I will have to move back to Gosnells. What on earth can I do? Melanie.

I am set to give a presentation to my tutorial group but I suffer from stage fright. Any tips on how to survive? Jessica

My condolences for this awful renting business.

This ghastly European idea of sharing houses and letting other people live in one of your vacation properties is abhorrent. Surely it is against everything this great Commonwealth has fought for! Society is clearly divided between those who own property and those who scrounge off others. My advice is to marry someone who will at least inherit a granny flat of some kind.

You remind me of a young girl whom Her Majesty once asked me to tutor in the ways of aristocratic society. She too suffered from an awful bout of crippling shyness that prevented her from speaking publicly or from hosting the royal functions a lady in her position would often find herself. It may have had something to do with the death of her mother at a young age.

If you are too ugly to marry, I would recommend a parlour maid opening in my estate, Rothwell Manor. You shall observe the rightful social hierarchy, learn the arts of housekeeping and fine dining, as well as live in one of the grandest manors of our times. As a foreign worker, your wages will be probably be higher than that of the normal slum.

Constance, Duchess of Devonshire.

barebacked… with much glee

Picture by Marnie Allen

PELICAN ADVICE CORNER

I shall give you the same advice I gave young Diana, grow a pair.

People will only mock your performance at this event if you provide poor entertainment. Bat your eyelashes, whisper sweet nothings, do anything stupid girl. I must say, the positive reinforcement did good things for Diana. Didn’t avoid her tragic fate, but that is what you get for prancing around with a foreigner.

Constance, Duchess of Devonshire Dear Duchess of Devonshire,

Dear Lady Constance,

My brothers and I are planning an intervention for my alcoholic mother. How should we go about it? Oscar

I’m off to the Brownlows with my footballer boyfriend later in the year- what are your tips for mingling with high society? Vicki

Make sure you have a bottle of scotch on hand for the lads and a nice glass of brandy for your mother. These things can be so dreadfully long and dull.

Does one call a pack of working-class thugs and their vulgar young concubines high society these days?

Dear Duchess of Devonshire, My boyfriend of three months wants to experiment with bare backing. Obviously, I am concerned about not taking the usual precautions. What should I do? David I honestly do not know what you are so frightful of, child. My late husband, the Duke of Devonshire and I often bare-backed in the long English summers and did so with much glee. There is really nothing like riding a thoroughbred horse without a saddle; makes one feel completely dominant over nature.

Precautions are for the weak and Scandinavians.

Climb on the damn stallion and ride it rough like a true child of the Empire.

I must say, David is such a silly name for a girl.

Your parents named you Davina for a purpose and you should bloody well respect that, young lady.

Firstly, identify exactly how everyone in the room feels about the drinking situation.

Then, make sure you repress all of those feelings deep down as emotions are really a horrid bother when trying to deal with family matters. Once you have cleared your head, you shall realise that your mother gave you life and the least she is owed is a nice tipple now and again. A good drink and a song can really liven up a situation- my god; it got my family through the War when all our servants went to fight.

I suppose things have changed somewhat from the days where a girl was trying to make an engagement with the Foreign Secretary as opposed to an alcohol-fuelled dalliance with a goal-keeper of some sort. Hopefully, you will try to assert some sort of decorum and tradition at this event. Ensure your corset is tightly set and that all cleavage is covered to ward off any unsolicited attention. Also, ensure that only waltzes are conducted by the dee jay instead of this African immigrant nonsense from the Americas. It is up to you, my dear to ensure the old ways are preserved in the colonies.

Constance, Duchess of Devonshire

Constance, Duchess of Devonshire

Constance, Duchess of Devonshire

Empress Catherine I of Russia, one of the most powerful women in history, was famously loyal to her lovers; ex-paramours received anything from a thousand serfs to the kingdom of Poland.

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KISSCARTER Kickstarter to raise funds to keep Macaulay Culkin clean/film a documentary around the attempt. This is the year he’ll get there, guys! Prizes involve authentic props from the abandoned filming of Home Alone 9: Marv’s Revenge and methadone vouchers. www.kickstarter.com/cleanlivingculkin LOST AND FOUND Surplus. Answers to the name ‘guaranteed’.

Last seen scurrying around a corner at the ASX. Reward offered if we can find the money for it.

Canberra, ask for Wayne.

OVERHEARD I remember a song on PlaySkool as a kid. Chorus was “suck your own guts open/jump and shout/ bathroom plug gurgle/water comes out” or similar. Jemima sang it. Do you remember?

HELP WANTED Am commissioning a steampunk speculative fiction opera about the life and times of Kanye and Kim’s unborn baby. Need five dancers who are willing to perform the emotionally fraught Dance of the Afterbirth. No previous experience required. Contact Archie at madamekimye@gmail.com

FOR SALE We have about 400 packets of crisps in the office and neither of us want them anymore.

Please. One of our contributors keeps coming in and devouring them surreptitiously and we’re worried it’s their only source of sustenance. If someone comes and takes them away we’ll know for sure, which will really put our minds at rest. pelican@guild.uwa.edu.au OBITUARY Amanda Bynes’ vagina, destroyed by Drake. We may never know what you were capable of, but we know what you don’t remember. R.I.P. Love, Amanda’s hands.

PERSONALS Seeking kooky, free spirited woman to teach the ways of life, love and letting go in a whimsical and folksy fashion. Must be at least 150kgs and licensed to drive forklifts, as well as look forward to long days of cooking, scrubbing and hating me silently through her teeth after the removalist business fails and I slink into a long, scabrous depression.

John Extract, Gosnells.

picture by Stephanie Ball

CLASSIFIEDS there nobody get hand caught in the machine and she was real purdy like hair soft and nice and warm and I didn’t mean to and rabbits and purdy. PO Box 579, Lennie.

MISSED CONNECTIONS I was stumbling around Claremont off my tits on meth, you were unconscious, wrapped around a pole and dressed like Big Bird. My heart flew. 0420219352 I saw you on the train. Your dress was tucked into your undies. I want to be those undies.

In certain areas. Can I? bengibbardforever-92@hotmail.com PELICAN BIBLE QUOTE “I will rain hellfire upon that woman, and not be sated til my vengeance has been quenched.“ And the Harlem Globetrotters did tremble, and reveal their crystal dungeon. A single swallow emerged from the deepest trench in the ocean.

Turn to page 34.

Sonic’s Epistle to the Croats 4:20

Rabbits and we’ll feed them alfalfa and do you think we’ll really get to the farm George where

TAROT TONY

THE EMPEROR- Philip Ruddock, Peter Reith and Bronwyn Bishop will be cast as the new Han, Luke and Leia in the latest Star Wars movie.

TEMPERANCE- Hillary Clinton will not have decided whether she will run for US President or not. Women can never make up their bloody minds. It’s a scientific fact. Also, their feet are intentionally smaller so as to enable them to stand closer to the sink.

PAGE OF SWORDS- Scotland will become an independent nation. I look forward to working with President Belle and Prime Minister Sebastian into the future.

STRENGTH- Australia will reach the semi-finals of the Soccer World Cup but will fail to progress further when my government’s spending cuts stops their supply of shin-guards.

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THE HIEROPHANT- Pope Francis will visit Australia for the first time. He will note that the country reminds him of his youth in Argentina; with its casual attitude, beautiful women, and right-wing authoritarian regime.

and arduous period of opposition. He will die after having sat through all of budget week without a beer to sustain him.

THE LOVERS- Same-sex marriage will be legalized. LOL JKS. THE EMPRESS- The Guardian’s Australian Edition will meet great success. So much that Gina Rinehart will decide to buy the website.

THE HANGED MAN- Australian beachgoers and aquatic athletes will embrace the flattering cut and improved speed of speedos (budgie smugglers, cock-jocks, CJ’s). I like red!

QUEEN OF PENTACLES- The Witch Gillard will flee the country for fear of being burned at the stake.

KING OF CUPS- Bob Hawke will return to Parliament to guide Labor through their long

Picture by Kate Prendergast

The divine and mystical Tony Abbott consults his deck of cards and tells us what’s in store for 2013.

PELICAN IMPOSSICROSSWORD

Across 3. My heart condition 4. Joe Jackson 6. The scourge of the underclass 8. Kramer’s fragrance 10. Batman’s other car 12. Stuart from Telethon 13. Debbie Does ------14. Androgynous lead singer 15. Basic Instinct 5 Star

Down 1. The future 2. Scrooge McDuck is a ---3. Andrew O’Keefe’s drug of choice 5. Worst Beach Boy 7. Famous volleyball 9. There’s no aphrodisiac like 11. What would your mother say?

16. Alien 3

Drop off your completed crosswords to the Pelican office to redeem your mystery prize!

Includes mystery wine and mystery meat.

“Hair gel isn’t lubricant”- some guy.

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SMOKEBUSTING

by Kate Prendergast When you think of genies, you think of that enormously blue, speed-yakking hunk of goateed wisp from Aladdin. You conjure up the image of a mythical, permutating phantasm that wafts its wobbly way towards you; a bulbous vapour that calls you master in bouncingly upbeat servitude and offers you your dreams—if you can only be clever enough to organize your desires into three, loophole-proof commands. For a moment you give over to thinking how many filthy rich merchants and Emperors must have started off in the lamp-polishing trade.

But actually, what the west commonly thinks of as genies are the pop-cultural equivalent of “jinn”. Beings of ‘smoking, scorching fire’ from out of Middle-Eastern and African cultures, these spirits are said to inhabit dimensions beyond man’s perception, with their very name meaning ‘to hide’ in Arabic. Although only prophets can divine their true form, jinn nonetheless become visible on lesser planes in three kinds of earthly manifestations: ‘a type that has wings and they fly through the air; a type that looks like snakes and dogs; and a type that stops for a rest then resumes its

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Picture by Kate Prendergast

But such thinking is wrong, brother. Or at least, that thing that puffs out of your imagination has largely been manufactured in the cavernous eye-sockets of a giant mouse. Disney could be said to resemble a corporatized, kiddiwinked Shakespeare, in that its fame is inseparable from its habit of rummaging through the well-ripened literatures and mythologies of the past, and then fiddling about with their elements so that they appeal to a contemporary mass audience. Call it inspiration, call it being well-read, call it inevitable, or call it pilfering— there is an ingenuity behind this repurposing of legendary and folkloric matter. Like Old Bill Shakey was inspired by the 13th century Scandinavian romance for Hamlet, Disney’s Aladdin is a derivation of the same-titled tale in ‘One Thousand and One Nights’ a volume of Middle-eastern folktales compiled during the Islamic Golden Age. (In the original story, Princess Jasmine is an Eastern Princess named Badroulbadour). It was the popularization of this tale that transformed and standardized the genie into a wish-granter.

journey’ quoth prophet Abu Tha’labah alKhushani (a bit unhelpfully).

A more concise taxonomy sorts jinn into Jann, Djinn and Ifrits, with the most powerful and hubris-ridden being the shapeshifting Marids. In Islam, the devil himself (called Iblis— ‘he that causes despair’) is a

jinn who refused to prostrate himself before Adam— God’s “Best of Creation”—when the Almighty told him to do so. “I am better than he” protested Iblis huffily, as all the obeisant angels looked about embarrassed and disdainful. “Thou didst create me from fire, and him from clay. And besides, what’s so fantastic about that hairless pink lump

In the computer game The Sims, genies can read four times faster than humans, but cannot make beds.

wriggling and scrabbling about in the dirt anyway? Look at him. No really, look. Don’t mind magical powers, he doesn’t even have claws! Or talons or fangs. And he’s got knobbly knees. Oh and look! Now he’s picking his nose.” *Quran quote may have been subject to imaginative supplementation.

Please don’t gouge my spleen out with your hook Abu Hamza* As one of the three intelligent creations revealed by Allah alongside mankind and angels, jinn are given frequent mention in the Quran. Even the most undiligent of Islam’s pupils should know that Mohammad was to be sent to earth as a ‘prophet for jinn and mankind’. And indeed, for some modern Muslims, discussing jinn as though they were mythical creatures would be considered an insult, with these spirits occupy a significant and enduring place in their belief-system.

The exact nature of jinn is a matter of dispute though. Hardly surprising, given the many wonderfully and poetically vague descriptions that have been channelled through all of God’s anointed voice-boxes over the centuries. For books of pedantic moral instruction, holy texts can be incredibly hard to follow. Compounded with the fractal powers of human interpretation and the obstinacy of human predispositions, the ‘Word of God’ can hardly be said to be a stable thing. As scholar of religion and popular culture Celia Rothenberg writes on the topic, “many Muslims believe that the jinn may possess, punish, trouble, or indeed even bring good fortune to humans.

Other Muslims do not believe that the jinn interfere in human affairs and believing that they do play an active role in human life is the product of ignorance or backwardness.”

In contrast with what anthropologist Robert Redfield termed the Great Tradition—a more cultivated, orthodox religious practice based on the tenets of religious texts—, “some scholars have viewed jinn beliefs and stories as largely part of the Little Tradition, as they are typically related without significant textual elaboration but with great cultural elaboration’. At times— Rothenberg goes on to say—they even ‘seem to even stray from the realm of proper Islamic belief.” If you’re thinking this sounds a little supercilious, don’t judge the lady too much— she’d just likely spent a whole year tracking the ethnography of chat-room Islam, which pops out bubbles like this one:

I think I’ve told this story before, but anyway, my mom’s uncle was a Jinn controller (sounds like some job, doesn’t it, like an air-traffic controller? oooohaaaah. ;)) He used to make them do whatever he wanted. Mostly though, he used to exorcise ppl who got possessed:possess: (mighty handy slimey) USING Qur’anic verses. So it wasn’t a hocus pocus type of thing even though it may sound ‘‘iffy.’’ I believe it only 50% myself. ;) And you know what they say? If the Jinns somehow free themselves out of their human master’s control . . . they KILL ya . . . like it’s a message: Don’t mess wid da Jinns OR ELSE:nervous . . . that’s how my mom says the Jinn-controller uncle of hers died . . . may he R.I.P. Amen.:) The bit out of that that most confuses me is “mighty handy slimey”. Anyway.

One thing that does unify many jinn interpretations is the creatures’ remarkable resemblance to humans. In many ways, their existence parallels ours. As Al-Ashqar points out, “Jinn have the same needs as Mankind; they eat, drink, procreate, reproduce and die.” They also have their own courts, uphold the institution of marriage (although sometimes they marry humans rather than each other), and live in communities “structured around Arab tribal lines”. More significantly though, like humans, jinn possess free will. This means that— although they tend towards mischief— jinn can be either good, evil or neutrally benevolent.

They even decide upon their own degree of piety.

mighty handy slimey

Furthermore, although long-lived and skilled in many kinds of sorcery (including animal and human possession), jinn are far from invulnerable. In several tales, the creatures have perished from a mere stone-drop to the head. And as you’ll no doubt be aware, humans can exploit the jinn’s powers by confining them to physical objects (not just lamps though. Any hollow vessel will do.

I recommend marmalade jars and blocked urinal pipes).

There is no three-wish fulfilment guarantee though following the rubbing. In the Arabian Nights ‘Story of the Fisherman and the

Jinni’, the jinn—imprisoned by Solomon in a stoppered bottle—had dwelt so long in his cramped glassy shell, that whilst at first he pledged to himself that “whosoever shall liberate me, I shall enrich him forever”, after 400 years he “fell into a violent rage, and said within [himself], Whosoever shall liberate me now, I will kill him; and only suffer him to choose in what manner he will die”.

Perhaps you should stop hopefully caressing that plugged urinal then. There is another way to snag a spirit slave. In the Quran, the Seal of Solomon is a piece of magical ring-bling owned by that ancient King of Israel, which endowed the lucky sod with the power to command whole hosts of Jinn.

In scripture, it’s written that Solomon died whilst watching his minions labour in the fields. Yet, as he was leaning heavily on his walking stick at time of death, he didn’t flop immediately to the dirt. For ages he leant there stoically as a corpse on a cane, whilst the jinn toiled on, becoming increasingly incensed in thinking their master was just being an especially perverse and exacting supervisor, and probably exchanging muttered plans to start up a jinn workers union. At last, they were liberated by a termite. “Naught showed them [Solomon’s] death.” relates the Quran, “but a creature of the earth that ate away his staff; and when it fell down, the jinn came to know plainly that if they had known the unseen, they would not have tarried in abasing torment”.

Look, I don’t want to be a dream-trampler, but unless you find a similar kind of talisman as what Solomon had, it isn’t likely you’ll get your three wishes even if you should massage the right teapot. If you should be so fortunate though, don’t be a silly ass and squander them. For the love of Pete, don’t be the third chap in the threewishes joke: Three men are stranded on a desert island, when a bottle washes up on the shore. When they uncork the bottle, a genie appears and offers three wishes. The first wishes to be taken to Paris. The genie snaps his fingers, and the man suddenly finds himself standing in front of the Eiffel Tower. The second man wishes that he were in Hollywood, and with a snap of the genie’s fingers, he finds himself on a Tinseltown movie set. The third man, now alone on the island, looks around and says, “I wish my friends were back.”

Silly ass.

Robin Williams refused to play the genie in Aladdin until he saw a clip of the character doing his own standup routine.

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PAUL HOGAN: FOLK HERO, OR WALKING IDENTITY-CONFLICT?

by Matthew Ewan Green When the world thinks Australia, it thinks Paul Hogan. We all know the stereotype; we’ve been tacitly accepting it for decades. Hogan is the quintessential 80s Australian icon, Croc Dundee, shrimps thrown on barbie, strewth, Fosters, etc.

If there’s anybody who conforms to the Aussie archetype, both on the international stage and at home, it’s this man. Hogan’s cultural persona cemented the image of the Australian as the rebel w/ a heart of gold, the larrikin who bends the rules of political correctness and tops the day off with a hard-earned frosty brew.

Hogan personifies the contradictory image of Australians as laid-back, yet tough as nails; a rebel without a cause, yet one who is inexplicably devoted to the society they supposedly rail against. This had wider implications, setting the tone of not only how we saw ourselves, but how the rest of the world did too. Those ‘classic’ ads and the Dundee series set in stone the stereotypes which are still thrown about today, namely that Australians-at-large are white, working class, and masculine (more or less, a boy’s club).

This is an image that many still endorse. Nick Cater, a senior editor at The Australian (don’t get me started on the nationalism inherent there), recently appeared on Q&A praising Hogan for these very qualities. This was as he was promoting his new book bemoaning the loss of our ‘Australian-ness’, while denouncing the supposed un-Australian values of the universityeducated middle class. Cater calls these unieducated people “the bunyip alumni”, the bunyip being a deceitful mythological swamp monster lifted from Wemba-Wemba aboriginal folklore.

Cater wants us to be wary of an invisible, ‘unAustralian’ elite, and he identifies Hogan as the natural antithesis: CATER: “I mean the thing about Paul Hogan was that he took off around the world. People loved him. There was something about the movie [C. Dundee] that just became, I think, the second highest box office success of its time for a foreign movie in the United States and so on around the world. What did they like about it?

What they liked about it is the Australian who just breaks the rules, who goes in there, who is, you know, mates with everybody, who sorts out the bad guy but just doesn’t abide by the conventions and I think that’s what we always love about them and it was just a shame that we...

TONY JONES: And if you go to university you lose all of that, is that what you’re saying?

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CATER: Well, I think you are getting away from my point here. My point is just simply that Australians are transgressive by nature and the world loves us because we go and break the rules and what disappoints me is that we are getting to this very constricted sort of behaviour where we’re not allowed to make jokes or anything anymore.

Strewth.

I get it. Paul Hogan sticks it to the man, and we love him for it. Hogan was named Australian of the Year for 1985, and the following year he was awarded as a Member of the Order of Australia, for his services to tourism and entertainment. But this has all been thrown into disarray by Hogan’s highly publicised battle with the Australian Tax Office. For the best part of the last decade, the ATO have been chasing him for over $150m in unpaid taxes, much of which he allegedly hid through overseas havens.

Hogan became infamous for his lavish Malibu and Santa Barbara homes, while he kept much of his earnings in a secret Swiss bank account.

Only last year did Hogan and the ATO finally reach a private settlement, but the damage to his reputation has already been done. The gulf between the image he promotes and the comfortable reality he enjoys is compounded not just by Cater’s wilfully ignorant appraisal, but our own implicit acceptance of such a flawed figure as a one-size-fits-all national standard.

Confusingly, at times Hogan appeared to assume the role that was created for him: a notable example being his taunt to the ATO to, “Come and get me. Come and get me you miserable bastards.” Let’s remember that Hogan was more or less employed to become Australia’s foremost cultural icon; in Cater’s words, “the Australian who just breaks the rules ... [and] doesn’t abide by the conventions”, and that is exactly what he went and did. Was anybody really all that surprised? Nick Cater is happy to point to Crocodile Dundee (a fictional reptile-wrestler) as the ideal national icon, because he’s a rulebreaker, and this is a quality to be admired. Even though in Hogan’s case (the very same case, in fact), his breaking the rules proved to have a significant financial cost to the rest of Australia, the country whose image he was supposed to be lifting. The sheer quantity of irony is actually mind-blowing. Strewth.

Perhaps the problem lies in our own acceptance of Paul Hogan as representative of society as a whole, when his lifestyle and wealth clearly suggest otherwise. I mentioned earlier that Hogan solidified the image of Australia as white, working class, and masculine. Hogan’s ads first appeared in 1984, nearly thirty years ago. Since then, the Australian demographic has shifted immensely. More than a quarter of Australians were born overseas, and 1 in 5 speaks a language other than English at home. There are over a million people currently studying at university in the country. Women occupy the roles of Prime Minister and Governor-General. Baz Luhrmann continues to produce mediocre films. Why should Paul Hogan get to have all the fun?

Actual dialogue from Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles- WENDY’S DRIVE-THROUGH EMPLOYEE: Welcome to Wendy’s. How may I help you?

DUNDEE: Good evening, Wendy!

LAP OF LUXURY: RUN-INS WITH YOUTUBE’S DOYEN OF DECADENCE

by Lyndon Blue and Matthew Mason “Enigmatic… rich… opinionated… can only add up to one thing.”

These are the words of internet sensation Archie Luxury. He’s referring, of course, to himself.

We’d have introduced him, but that’s easier said than done - indeed, for the uninitiated, the Archie phenomenon can be baffling. Who is this man? Does he really exist? Why does his microphone sound like tin foil being run through a mulcher? And why has he developed such a devoted following?

Simply put, Archie is a Brisbane-based “world authority on luxury goods and luxury living”, which isn’t just him big-noting himself; it’s been confirmed by a recent appearance on A Current Affair. Most of this Queensland IT professional’s income goes towards luxury vintage watches and Louis Vuitton Luggage; in his spare time, he is a reviewer of such goods. But to his fans, Archie is so much more. He is a “renaissance man for modern times.” His countless YouTube videos traverse the realms of vernacular philosophy, culinary criticism, relationship advice, accommodation reviews, generational clashes and much more, always delivered with passion, brutal honesty, and nice jpeg slideshows. Over the past year we have had the good fortune of getting to know Archie Luxury: as an entertainer, an icon, and a human being.

Matthew: Mine and Lyndon’s interactions with Archie are intertwined. We’d heard Archie’s many recordings, rants about certain individuals. I thought a great birthday gift for Lyndon would be an Archieluxury video ABOUT HIM! So I assumed Lyndon’s identity and began an e-mail correspondence with ARCHIE ‘Paul Pluta’ LUXURY. Basically, I told Archie that my girlfriend was pregnant, and I was wondering what watch I should buy using the baby bonus.

Lyndon: At first, Archie thought Matt – or Lyndon, as he knew him – was “full of shit.”

But Matt was persistent, and soon he piqued Archie’s interest by offering to buy his Omega Speedmaster – the “minty, minty, minty speedy.”

Archie was prepared to part with it, even though it was a “classic cracker of a fucking piece.”

Matthew: Right so, then we got...’the phonecall.’

Lyndon: We were both at uni at night for some reason. Archie was on the phone. Things were

starting to get “real.” Archie wanted to seal the deal, and we were on the spot: “Missus could get angry at me,” “Don’t tell her,” “I think I should spend some money on baby stuff,” “IT’S AN HEIRLOOM PIECE.” “Do you have a refund policy?”

“Yes. *pause* The policy is no refunds. I mean...

I’m not fucking K-Mart. What’s the problem?

Why would you want a refund?”

So we’d committed. The only thing to do was to follow through and send Archie the money order we promised.

Matthew: Yes, and that’s when things got interesting. Now… we could recount the story.

But we’ll never tell it as well as Archie did. We think it best to direct you to the video in which Archie finally mentioned Lyndon Blue. Head over to YouTube, and type in “Why Y Generation still SUCKS! Alex and Lyndon Blue both SUCK.” Sit back and enjoy.

Lyndon: Archie hated my guts. He really did.

Anyway, the weeks went by. We lost contact with Archie for a while. But one day, in October, I found myself in Brisbane. As I rode the train from the airport into the city, I found myself struck by an incredible fact: I’M IN ARCHIE TERRITORY. Matthew: Lyndon messaged me telling me he was in Archie’s town! I texted him Archie’s number. One thing led to another.

‘passion, brutal honesty and nice jpeg slideshows’.

Lyndon: I told Archie I wanted to apologize. I said - let’s go to a bar, I’d buy him a drink. He one-upped me: we’ll go to a park with a beautiful rose garden and drink some “fucking excellent scotch,” he said. I found myself approaching an inner-city corner looking for a black Barina with a hot pink number plate. But Archie was already out of the car, waiting for me. He’d said he wouldn’t wear his suit. But there he was, in full pinstriped glory. Archie - the internet persona materialized before me. He was the real deal.

Matthew: I thought Lyndon might get abducted and beaten. That Archie was actually going to exact revenge for having been SCREWED OVER. Lyndon: I’ll admit, I was a little hesitant to meet the man who most wanted to wring my neck – let alone climb in his car and let him drive me to a park somewhere, or more likely, a torture chamber. But you know what they say about fortune favouring the brave. We listened to smooth jazz sax as we headed to a beautiful park in Fortitude Valley. Archie poured us tumblers of Johnny Walker – both Green Label and Black (“No, the green is VERY good. You just like the smokiness of the black because it’s novel.”) We sipped, ate chocolate and talked about life, wealth, classical music, politics and love. “This is perfect, as long as the cops don’t show up... mean, nasty fuckers.” “Archie…”

“What, what is it?” “The cops. Over there.” “Oh you’re FUCKING JOKING.” Since then, we’ve all gotten on famously.

From hip-hop collaborations to ongoing mail correspondence (Matt regularly gives signed Archie photos to his friends for birthdays), it’s been a happy ending. Archie remains enigmatic – an identity built entirely through Youtube, a man who is “self-made” both by way of his humble IT career and his snowballing digital presence. But it’s not all good fortune. Archie has lost his job, and is going through some tough times. We want to bring him to Perth.

We want him to give a public lecture at UWA (Matt: along with Lil B - but that’s a story for another edition). Really, we only hope our tale of strange fortune introduces a few new minds to the wonderful world of ARCHIELUXURY. So, visit www.youtube.com/archieluxury today, and “TELL ME WHAT YOU THINK!”

The Omega Speedmaster Professional was the first watch worn on the moon. And you wanted to buy a pram and bassinet with that $5000?

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THE PSYCHOLOGY OF FORTUNE

by Grace McKie

A lot of our thoughts regarding “good fortune” are associated with our financial position.

Researcher Ronald Inglehart established that there is a weak correlation between happiness and income. Once people have met their basic needs, any additional spending doesn’t reap greater rewards or fulfillment. This is evident is where lottery winners don’t report greater senses of wellbeing or happiness a year following their new inheritance. The adaptationlevel phenomenon may be responsible; we tend to appraise our experiences comparative to a neutral baseline. If we elevate above this level, we feel initial pleasure, but then adapt so that this becomes neutral. Ultimately, what was previously registered as neutral is now perceived as deprivation. This could be why highly affluent western suburbs in Perth are some of the most advantaged in Australia, yet they are largely unaware of their fortunate lifestyles. Once we have attained the materialistic goods we strove for in the first place, these possessions become the norm and tend to bore us. We then channel our vision beyond these to other expenses that will induce

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greater happiness, and so on and so forth.

I recently had new carpet laid in my flat and there’s nothing quite like carrying everything you own outside your house and storing it haphazardly on a tiny balcony or in your car to realise just how much your possessions weigh. It forced me to reassess what I really need versus what I’d simply accumulated and stored out of habit. Disposing of “stuff” is more liberating than one would expect. It enables you the opportunity of pack up and travel or move elsewhere with relative ease and without the anxieties of excessive storage. Our culture continuously pressures us to consume more and update our goods with the newest and most efficient models.

The idea of throwing things away seems like you’d be depriving yourself of something that you need or will need in the future. According to American psychologist Abraham Maslow, this deficiency orientation is where the perception of misfortune and unhappiness derives from what people don’t have, but think they need. It has become the norm that we should have smart phones because lest the dreaded fear of missing out and losing communication with our friends. And from where did this trend arise that we seem to think we need enormous land cruisers to navigate the horizontal and sheltered terrain that is suburban Perth? The few that are ever exposed to the outback for which they are designed raises the question of why these vehicles are perceived as a necessity.

Enormous land cruisers

We make judgements about ourselves and others, with the assistance of social comparison.

We continuously evaluate our appearances,

Picture by Grace McKie

How we perceive good fortune is subjective, but predominantly determined by social patterns of behaviour. For those of us who aren’t athletically agile, the concept of an unhappy silver medalist sits halfway between amusing and insulting. A widely circulated image of American gymnast, McKayla Maroney inspired the “unimpressed” meme after she failed to take out first place at the London Olympics. Likewise, the “I only got 99%” award in high school satirises the recipient for their dissatisfaction with a less than perfect score. I’m sure UWA students are familiar with this experience; just managing a distinction or B can be more relieving and satisfying than achieving 79 and just missing out on a High Distinction. These all exist thanks to “counterfactual thinking” where one envisions alternative outcomes that could’ve potentially occurred, but didn’t. It’s easy to see how a silver medallist imagines getting gold and hence feels disappointed for missing out, whereas a happier bronze medallist is stoked to have won a medal position in the first place and feels relieved that they didn’t come fourth.

In his research, Karl Teigen found that humans have the tendency to perceive our fortune and luck in terms of counterfactuals. “Good luck” refers to imagining a negative counterfactual such as almost falling up the stairs, but not whereas “bad luck” involves falling up the stairs when it easily may not have happened.

achievements and successes relative to those surrounding us, and Perth’s highly insular in this sense. Bram Buunk illustrated “downward” social comparison; comparison with someone less successful elicits increased feelings of fortune. On the contrary, “upward” social comparison can be met with either optimism or pessimism. Either you can look up to those who you perceive as better off with greater inspiration and motivation or you can feel deflated and experience relative deprivation. In wealthy environments people may be dissatisfied with what they possess and believe they deserve more. Even if they live in a pleasant home with a comfortable life, they may feel deprived of the seemingly superior lifestyle of their neighbours in the larger house with the bigger car. Is the grass really greener on the other side?

The reality is that these phenomena are ingrained in westernised countries where we endorse high personal achievement and materialism. Hopefully, awareness of their existence will help you appraise your own good fortunes and avoid being snarled in some of the more futile social mentalities that are around you.

On average, each Australian household wasted $1226 on items purchased but unused in 2004. Nationally, this added up to $10.5 billion.

FORTUNE-TELLING: ASTROLOGY TO ANAGRAMANCY Thousands of years ago the portents of a goat’s innards terrified emperors and decided battles, but now Psychic Central can text you your horoscope reading for only $5.25 per message. Fortune-telling, or divination, once the closest thing to predictive science available is now a highly commercialised scam-business.

Either predictions are so vague that they could apply to anyone, or they’re just plain wrong.

I’m speaking from experience after venturing into the cyber world of online fortune-telling.

First I went to Norah from Nevada. Within moments of sending her my date of birth and star-sign she deduced that I have “an extremely important event coming up soon”. Thanks for the specificity Norah. Seriously should I get my hopes up for first class honours or be extra careful crossing roads? Rather dissatisfied, I decided to actually spend some money ($10 people!) and chat online to Caron from Psychic Source (I chickened out of actually calling a psychic-line). Being gay and all, I asked her if the girl from class I fancied liked me back (I’m heterosexual with a boyfriend by the way).

According to Caron, this girl (whoever the hell she is!) is also gay! She’s only ever dated girls, although she’s never been in a long term relationship. She’s concentrating on her studies at the moment so I should wait until the holidays to get to know her better. Also, she’s very pretty. Ya. Um...I call bullshit. Nonetheless, if you’re unimpressed with your local comedy clubs then you can get a quick, albeit pricy, laugh from Psychic Source.

reading for that week and told it was their own.

They were then asked to assess how it applied to them. Nearly everyone found some way of working the general statements into their lives.

One of the few test subjects who didn’t find any relevance in the prediction was a Capricorn.

So, is there an alternative? Is there a reliable method of prediction to help you navigate your way through the pot-holed and multi-pronged road of life? Yes! Instead of investing in flimsy scams I urge all of you to take advantage of the scientific certainty of Anagramancy: predictions based on anagrams. Unlike Palmistry or Astrology, Anagramancy is simple and has been proven to work under carefully controlled test conditions. If, for example, I want to make a general prediction about my stage in life I simply transform “Anna’s life” into its anagram “fine nasal”.

Clearly I don’t have to worry about colds this winter!

Or perhaps I want to know how well I’ll do in my next essay.

“Anna’s next essay” = Asset axes nanny Obviously, I will do very well in the essay - my intellectual gifts have advanced to the point at which I no longer need to be looked after academically.

Anagramancy can even help you with your love life.

“Anna’s love life” = Naval felonies I need to watch out: a sailor is going to commit a romantic crime in my life!

So, don’t be conned by the thinly veiled lies and generalities of faux fortune-tellers. Instead, use Anagramancy to guide you through life.

Despite the mountain of personal experiences like mine refuting the accuracy of modern fortune-telling, a 2008 study found that 31% of Americans believe in horoscopes. Now, I know Americans aren’t the sharpest tools in the global shed (in fact they rank somewhere around 24 on the Nation With The Highest Average IQ leader board), but horoscopes are just nonsensical. Remember, they apply to people of ALL ages. This means that predictions of “getting lucky with the opposite sex” cover everyone from a day old baby who won’t learn to control its bowels for another two years (let alone its genitals), to a 96 year old who, likewise unable to master his/her nether regions, has all the romantic allure of…well…a wrinkly old person in a nappy. If logic isn’t enough, science has got in on the game too. In one particular test conducted on the accuracy of horoscopes a sample group representing each star-sign were all given Capricorn’s

Tactile, methodical, and willing to take as long as is needed, Virgos make excellent lovers.

Picture by Wenny Yeo

by Anna Curry

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WHORING YOURSELF FOR CASH

by Lauren Wiszniewski When you’re eating mi-goreng for the fifth time in a week, you’ll probably feel something deep inside that isn’t just that palm oil seasoning trying to find its way out again. It’s the feeling of realising that you’re dirt poor, can’t afford the rent and call a goonbag a good time. It’s at this precise moment that you think, “I could whore myself for cash.”

Picture byLauren Wiszniewski

Everybody knows that no matter what industry it is, sex sells. Selling a hamburger? Only a scantily clad woman with an “O” face of excitement will do. Perfume? Make the bottle flower-shaped like Marc Jacobs and position it in between a preadolescent’s legs.

Everywhere you look, sex is there, so why not go where the money is and get in on the action yourself?

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In 2009, Natalie Dylan decided to do just that by auctioning off her virginity. Offering a one night only package, she eventually raised $3.7 million that provided her with enough money to fund her masters course. More girls followed suit, seeing the high appeal in being paid a lot of money for doing very little. During a time when they would already be exploring their sexuality and sowing their wild oats these women declared, “Why not get paid for it?”

Millions sure beats trading in your virginity for a cheap bottle of red wine and an $11.95 pasta night.

Some of these girls try to keep romance alive, ignoring higher bids so that they could find someone that they shared ‘chemistry’ with. But in the case of Rosie Reid who sold her virginity for £8,400, the highest bidder would suffice with her lesbian lover waiting patiently behind the door. She came to regret the decision and told a British newspaper, “I felt obliged…to please him as he had just paid all this money.” Still, girls flock to sites such as sugardaddie.com where wealthy men can look for a SUGAR BABE. Beyond that, the finest people in Internet dating are right at your fingertips.

Prostitution is one of the world’s oldest professions, with men and women throughout the millennia choosing to sell themselves for some form of social or economic benefit.

From biblical references to Pretty Woman, the selling of sexual services has been well documented and highly debated. However what people often overlook is that while paid sex is empowering, it’s not necessarily empowering for the one doing the selling. The business of prostitution is the use of real human beings to support the fantasies of others: playing different roles from sex slave to super stud.

Once paid for, another person has complete power over you. This power is unlimited once society serves you a big fat serving of shame and regret.

Society makes prostitution an identity, not an occupation, and there is no expiration date on that identity. While funding your education, your mother’s medical bills and paying off the mortgage may all be liable reasons for prostitution; there are other options out

there. More often than not these young women portrayed in the media can seek financial help through their educational institution, government payments and jobs (no matter how low paying these jobs may be). Although it may seem more enterprising to put in very little effort for a lot of cash then work behind the cash register at McDonalds for the rest of your life, is it really worth it? More importantly if someone needs help financially, why do ‘generous’ strangers only appear like knights with shining armour when sex is on the table?

From the perspective of the johns, prostitution allows for companionship free from jealously and other emotions. After all, sex is just an act, and it is society’s rules that have made it a bad word. However, the fact that the most common type of customer is termed ‘the user’ reflects that the johns are also contributing to the problem. They may claim empathy yet they ride off into the sunset, never to be seen again. Many sex workers are subject to sexual and physical violence with infectious diseases, broken bones and mental health issues being the everyday.

Suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, drugs and alcohol become the answer of many.

Despite having broken minds and broken bodies, society leaves these individuals to rot; nobody is willing to help someone who they consider to have caused their own problems.

Many women who enter prostitution are unable to escape, battling emotional scars, drug addictions and violent pimps. Those who sell their virginity or see prostitution as an easy source of cash do not understand the reality of what sex work actually is, beyond what they want it to be. While in some circumstances individuals can work in a safe environment and can pick and choose clients, there are more who cannot and will never be able to leave the sex industry, let alone work in it on their own terms.

The media tends to sensationalise the stories of young women who use sex to fund luxury lifestyles. They make Natalie Dylan’s efforts seem enterprising and inspiring, but for feminism, reinforcing the idea of a woman’s body as a commodity and trapping women in a violent cycle of control and terror is far from empowering. This façade of media-inspired glamour detracts from the stories of sex workers who will never be heard and who will likely die from an overdose, suicide or infectious disease. So next time you’re pushing mi-goreng around on your plate, remember that selling yourself won’t solve your problems- there are better ways to pay the rent.

Dutch identical twins Louise and Martine Fokkens retired from prostitution in 2012 after fifty years on the job, claiming that they’d serviced 355,000 men between them. That comes down to ten johns a day, seven days a week since 1962, each.

WHAT SAMUEL BECKETT CAN TEACH YOU ABOUT GOLD DIGGING Finding a sugar daddy is harder than it used to be. Wealthy gentlemen now think twice before tearing up their pre-nuptial agreements, and many deftly refuse to wed for fear of having their billions squandered on Cartier diamonds and colonic irrigation treatments. No longer can a busty, moronic twenty-something cosy up to a liver-spotted geriatric without him (and his financial advisors) getting a little ‘spicious.

Thus begins the dawn of the intellectual golddigger, where your ass is no longer your biggest asset; now, you dig that gold with your brains.

WHY SMART GIRLS HAVE A BETTER SHOT AT GETTIN’ THA CASH MONEY Would you believe me if I told you that Samuel Beckett’s plays made a greater profit than the Superman comics? Perhaps not. After all, Superman is a household name, and most people who went to see Waiting for Godot at His Majesty’s were just in it for Gandalf.

Furthermore, the glossy, colourful, easy-toread production of Superman comics seem to have more of a commercial motivation than a challenging, linguistically complex series of plays. But S-Beck was operating on a covert level. Through producing austere, complex and intellectual work with diligence and seriousness, Beckett appeared to forego commercialism, allowing the accumulation of “symbolic capital” which later would be converted into capital gain. This theory was put forward by Pierre Bourdieu, who suggested that disavowing the economic sphere can be an economically savvy move. Beckett’s plays exemplify this; not only are they successful financially, they’re also rewarded with literary and artistic legitimacy.

“Now what the flip does this have to do with acquiring a cash flo?” I hear ya asking.

Essentially, where the Anna-Nicole Smiths and Camille Grammars of the world went wrong is subtlety. The overtness of their gold digging gave rise to a new wave of paranoia and distrust towards young, beautiful women.

ENTER THE PASTY BOOKISH GIRLS. By rejecting materialism, feigning disinterest in commercial gain and asserting yourself as a financially independent neo-feminist, you can ensure that your target billionaire truly believes you are motivated by a deep respect and adoration of his mind, body and soul.

By forgoing immediate material gain, a more significant, though delayed, commercial reward is possible. So ladies, use your arts degree, that unfinished Camus novel, and your best secondhand cheesecloth sundress to finally secure your economic future. Here’s how it’s done.

1.

Pay your own way for the first year. You want your sugar daddy to know that just because he can pay for you, it doesn’t mean he should. A year may seem like a long time to be forking out for date expenses, but part of your whimsical anti-material persona can be used to steer the billionaire in the direction of cheap and cheerful romantic adventures. Skip rocks together and feed sourdough to ducks. Go to the drive-in and bring a basket of freshly baked oatmeal cookies and a thermos full of oolong tea. Volunteer at a soup-kitchen and walk home together instead of taking a taxi. Not only will you save money and appear disinterested in his finances, he’ll admire your scrupulousness and commitment to charity.

2.

Become well versed in social and economic theory. Otherwise you are at risk of your billionaire mistaking your strategic disavowal of material pleasures for simply failing to understand the global capital systems and opportunities for economic gain. He must be led to understand that you could be extremely wealthy if you wished, but you find a commercially-motivated life unfulfilling and hollow. This will both legitimize your status as a carefree earthchild, and demonstrate your ability to see the sensitive, poetic man that exists within the ruthless and ambitious capitalist machine exterior.

backyard ceremony. They will dab at their eyes with the hand-crocheted napkins you made for each of them during a pre-wedding crafternoon, truly touched at the existence of such a pure, vital union in this cold and cruel world.

And once that ring is on your finger, you can FINALLY stop being such a SCHMINDY ASSHOLE and have a decadent time on your sugar daddy’s dime. Your hubby will probably get depressed and suicidal when he realizes his manic pixie dream girl was nothing but a hoebag all along, and will be too jaded to complain about your affair with the pool cleaner. He will live out the rest of his days lamenting the loss of those bittersweet afternoons where you made love in the green grass behind the stadium. Don’t feel bad.

While it may not sit comfortably with Beckett devotees that his oeuvre of work can be appropriated as a method for mantrapping, you can rest assured that Sam would be delighted to hear that plain, working-class females can adopt his economic model in order to secure a pampered and luxurious lifestyle. I’m pretty sure that was the subliminal message in Godot, anyway.

3.

Encourage him to embrace a more sustainable life, and to reject materialism in favour of spiritual fulfilment. By presenting yourself as an earthy, spirited dreamer who would rather live in a wigwam than a spectacular manor with heated granite floors, you may surprise and entice the billionaire into making you his bride. A pre-nuptial agreement would be an insult to the tenderness of your romantic bond. The billionaire’s children who are older than you, as well as his financial advisors and relatives will be elated to attend the quaint and modest

On his way home with some friends one night in January 1938, Beckett was stabbed by a pimp in the street. The blade just missed his heart, but one of his lungs was perforated and he was rushed to hospital. He awoke to find James Joyce at his bedside.

Picture by Marnie Allen

by Marnie Allen

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MONOPOLIES

by Matt Bye For readers unfamiliar with what a monopoly is, it’s basically a business that through whatever means have taken over and/or completely control an entire market relating to particular services or goods.

Meaning as a consumer, if you want said goods or services, you have no choice but to buy it from them. In theory, this kind of situation isn’t what you want. In a free-market, businesses are essentially free to provide whatever level of goods and services they want, for however much they feel they can charge.

Again in theory, competition between different businesses is good for the consumer due to the fact that businesses are concerned with maximising their profits through having a larger customer share than their rival, and attempt to do so through competitive pricing, better deals, better quality goods and so forth- although in practice this isn’t always true.

Thus, when someone has a monopoly, there is no longer any competition to prompt this kind of behaviour and the consumer could potentially be disadvantaged. It also can mean that the monopoly has far more power over the consumer than if it was a series of competing businesses. Whether this kind of thing concerns you or not, I think there are some monopolies you should probably know about.

Coles and Woolworths Their monopoly: Grocery shopping and supermarkets in Australia Why it matters: The main problem with Coles and Woolworths’ monopoly over grocery shopping stems from how they maintain such an empire. Have you ever wondered why there aren’t a whole lot of major competitors or even more independent stores considering the entire market is worth an annual $80bn?

It basically comes down to an issue of supply, namely suppliers are willing to cut deals and to an extent, cater to Coles and Woolworths’ desires because there’s good money in it. In fact, with C and W

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controlling roughly 70% of the market, it’s pretty much the only good source of money.

Coles and Woolworths’ relative size means that suppliers will tend to sell goods to them at a much cheaper price, due to the power of bulk-buying and to keep their business, than they would to a smaller chain, and that’s if they’ll deal with them at all. This inevitably means that Coles and Woolworths are left holding a vast majority of the power over suppliers, producers and brands in Australia.

The problem with monopolies like this is that

In 1601 The Dutch East India Trading Company was given a 21-year monopoly over Dutch activity in Asia. At the height of their wealth in 1637, they were worth 78 million Dutch Guilders, which adjusted for today’s money is around $7.4 trillion (approx. 10% of the world’s GDP), making them the wealthiest company to have ever existed.

they can effectively run a business into the ground if they don’t get their way. If they choose to dump your brand, then it can be like an instant kiss of death for people’s jobs.

They can also bully producers into an unfair deal, which Coles was accused of doing last year when they started offering $1 milk, undercutting anyone that can’t afford to do this and ruining them.

And people fear this will only get worse as Coles and Woolworths’ own brands rise in popularity. Often cheaper than their competitors, these generic brands are in effect set to destroy competition on another level and further their monopoly over what you eat.

Google Their monopoly: Your information Why it matters: Quick survey: how many of you use a Google product?

Whether it is Google Search, Google Chrome, Android, Google Maps, YouTube, Gmail, Scholar or any one of their plethora of services, Google has ingratiated its way into our digital and ‘real-world’ lives. Seriously, I don’t think a day goes by when I don’t personally use something cooked up by Google. The problem with our dependence on Google is, like all digital activities, whenever we do something a record is made and stored away on some remote server. And that’s not an overstatement either, absolutely everything. Some people scoff at the idea of an Orwellianesque ‘Big Brother’ watching our every move, but the reality of the situation is that this is already happening every day.

You may of noticed that Google pushes integration of its services like no tomorrow; some Android phones won’t even operate properly unless you also have a Google account which also services Google Search, Gmail and YouTube. Everything they do is interconnected someway and privacy is becoming somewhat of an illusion now that it’s gotten a whole lot easier to say that the person using ‘x’ phone is the same one using ‘y’ computer who searches for ‘z’. Seriously, how many of you would be comfortable in revealing their search history, from what you search to what links you end up

picking? Now imagine, that that’s not all that’s stored on Google’s servers. Seriously, you don’t trust your best friend with half of this information, why do you trust a multinational corporation who’s unofficial motto is “Don’t be evil”?

Monsanto Their monopoly: Genetically-modified crops Why it matters: Monsanto has been around for a while, yet I’m sure nearly none of you have ever heard of them. Originally a chemical and plastics producer, Monsanto now specialise as a biotechnology firm that’s famous for producing things such as genetically-modified seeds and the herbicide ‘Roundup’. Back in the 1970’s Monsanto developed what is now the most widelyused form of herbicide for agricultural, Glyphosate. Glyphosate was regarded as a great thing, low in toxicity to humans and animals and fairly broad-spectrum so it could kill a vast array of weeds. Its major downfall was that due to the way in which it worked, it couldn’t be sprayed directly onto crops because it would kill the crops too.

This is where Monsanto’s monopoly comes in. Monsanto began to genetically-modify and breed seeds with the purpose of making glyphosate-resistant crop strains, so that glyphosate herbicides could be used more effectively. Cut to today and Monsanto markets an entire range of ‘Roundup-Ready’ glyphosate-resistant seeds which have become so popular that in the US, 80% of all corn grown was grown from Monsanto seeds. Now to make this a successful business, Monsanto has had to do a few things. First, they had to protect their work which has meant that Monsanto has patented a series of genes, namely ones that they’ve developed to make crops genetically resistant.

Secondly, they had to come up with some way to make sure that people would continue to buy their seeds every year rather than just harvest seeds from crops and use them, which has been a fairly standard practice for farming. To do this, Monsanto has come up with a few different ideas. First off, is the use of ‘Terminator’ genes which would essentially render any seeds harvested from a crop grown from

Monsanto seeds infertile. Understandably this was not a popular idea, so Monsanto is yet to pursue it, although it’s technologically within their abilities. Instead, Monsanto has opted to make any farmer that purchases their seeds agree not to use the secondgeneration seeds and suing those who don’t agree.

Thus, Monsanto’s monopoly is seen by some as a veritable clusterfuck of morality and ethical issues, not to mention the perceived harm that they could potentially do to biodiversity, the heightened risk of global crop failure that comes with the use of only a few different strains of crop worldwide and general concerns over the safety of genetically-modified seeds. Oh, and there’s still debate over whether Glyphosate is actually as safe as previously claimed and there’s also a belief it may lead to soil degradation, which considering how much farmers now use it because they don’t have to be worried about it killing their crops, is cause for concern.

Luxottica Their monopoly: Glasses Why it matters: For anyone who has ever bought a pair of glasses or sunglasses, you may have been somewhat startled at how much they charge you for a little bit of metal and plastic. Luxottica is partially to blame.

Arnette, ESS, Killer Loop, Mosley Tribes, Oakley, Oliver Peoples, Persol, Ray-Ban, Revo, Sferoflex and Vogue are all in-house brands.

This doesn’t even account for all the licenses it has with various fashion labels around the world. Not content with just manufacturing a majority of the world’s glasses, they also decided they’d have a hand in selling them too. Sunglass Hut, LensCrafters, Pearle (a massive chain in Europe and America), OPSM, Bright Eyes, ICON, Budget Eyewear and ILORI are just some of the retailers they own. Oh, they also happen to have licenses to run the ‘optical’ departments in major US department stores.

This gives Luxottica unparalleled control over the entire eyewear industry, and thus its pricing of frames. Which goes to explaining how there can be such a high mark-up.

In New Zealand, Woolworths trades under the name Countdown, which is kinda stupid.

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I GUESS WE’RE JUST A LUCKY COUNTRY, OR WHATEVER

by Thea Walton

Europeans in particular have this penchant for equating food with culture, which works out pretty much in their favour. The French have baguettes and mould, the Germans have crumbed chicken, the Italians have Barilla™, and the British have that foul thing that can only be described as “blood poo”. I always panic when it comes to my turn to describe “Australian food”. I start to talk about lamingtons, but then I think that’s stupid, because no one actually eats lamingtons past the age of twelve. ANZAC biscuits hark back to an era where it was OK if you fractured a tooth eating your pretty bland snack, as long as you got some sugar in you before you spent a long winter killing Turks.

And as delicious as meat pies and sausage rolls are, I’m usually reticent to wax lyrical about a pastry that is filled with what can only be described as “indefinable meat product”. I usually end up saying something fairly vague like “We kinda just have a mix of a lot of different foods like Asian and Indian and stuff.

We eat a lot of pasta? It’s pretty multicultural, or whatever.” For someone who has grown up being able to distinguish between different nationalities based on the subtleties of how they bake their bread, this is a shocking thing to hear. “What do you mean you don’t have Australian food? Does Australia even have a culture?”

Maybe I’m a bad Australian, but I find this a hard question to answer. Since coming to America, instead just understanding my culture more fully, I’ve also become aware of how much more people from other countries, particularly America, are in touch with their own. Around the time of the Connecticut shootings one friend explained to me the intricacies of how, despite the fact that he adamantly believed greater mental health support and gun

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Picture by Akima Lateef

There is nothing more patronising than a foreigner asking you “Does Australia even have any culture?” Since being on exchange in the US, I have been asked this sporadically throughout the past year. I’m not entirely sure in what context this question usually arises, but in my head I imagine that it happens while my friends and I are discussing if there is potential for a distinct European Union culture, and whether or not that will help encourage the development of an arguably necessary Fiscal Union. Although, to be honest, I think it usually happens when we’re talking about food.

regulations are sorely needed in America, guns are an integral part of many Americans’ lives, including his own. Another time I remember explaining superannuation to my roommates who promptly, and unexpectedly, rejected the idea, stating, “Americans would not like that.

People should be given a choice as to how they save their money.”

These seem like small moments, but over time they build up until, one day, I’m sitting in the bedroom of some frat bro who’s explaining to me, as he smokes copious amounts of weed, why Django Unchained resonated with the American public. As he talked about how Tarantino was able to capture the current desire of Americans for justice to be delivered to the historic Black South, or whatever, I thought to myself “Why is it that this first-generation American has a greater connection to his nation and its culture than anyone I’ve ever met in Australia?”

For someone who’s grown up in a culture that values self-deprecation, tearing down tall poppies and takes displaying the flag as a sign of class inferiority, it is fairly confronting to encounter people who unapologetically uphold certain views and acknowledge that they are distinctly culturally based. I think that’s part of the reason why I find it hard to argue against Australia’s lack of culture. It’s not because I’m not aware of our cultural intricacies, I just didn’t grow up being encouraged to boast about

our greatness. We’re not an overly proud bunch of people, and rhetoric doesn’t fly that well with us. I really couldn’t imagine Gillard headlining massive political rallies on the scale of Obama, and the only way you’re ever going to build our national pride is if you win us a gold medal.

If we ever need to go to war we’re probably going to have to put Ian Thorpe on the front line, waving the Australian flag as the French announcer cries “Australie!”

And, yeah, I think this is a problem. I don’t really see how we can continue to be one of the safest and most economically sound countries in the world without ever stopping to think why: without considering what it is that makes us indivisibly something different to the rest of world, geography aside. What is it about us as a people that makes us great, and how can we harness this to, as Gillard loves to say, “move forward”? It’s time Australians developed a greater sense of self-awareness and owned our strengths, instead of harping on about our weaknesses. We’re not just lucky, and we didn’t just magically get here. We’re successful and hardworking and we need to own this.

Complimenting Australia may feel weird at first, kind of like when you first start acknowledging that your siblings are actually decent humans, instead of the little shits that bite you and then start crying so you get blamed. But, I promise you, it eventually gets easier, and soon we’ll all be as obnoxiously proud of our country as a stoner frat boy.

GET RICH QUICK SCHEMES

by Harry Quinlan

1. WRITE A BEST-SELLING NOVEL. I started with the simple stuff. Everyone knows it’s easy to write a best selling novel these days. The modern reader is starved for quality reading material. Did you know that an Ikea instructional pamphlet detailing how to set up a bookcase recently spent 30 consecutive weeks atop the New York Times’ bestsellers list? The only trick to writing books is to make sure your characters learn things along the way. The only sure fire way to get the reader to understand this is by ending the book with your characters listing what they learned. Also have an introduction, “In this book I will…” and all that jibber-jabber. People like that.

2. INVEST IN THE INTERNET. This is just plain obvious? The internet is hella hot right now. Just about everyone’s using it and anyone that isn’t is a donk without a clue.

Did you know that Google makes 3 trillion dollars every second you stare at one of those mind-ensnaring Google Doodles? There’s no reason you shouldn’t be getting a share of that delicious money; you deserve it! Perth’s local branch of the internet is in Bayswater. Just pop on down there and ask to put some cash down on internet stock. Hell. you may as well get your mum to drop you off because when you walk out of that office you’ll have made enough money to FLY HOME on friggin’ PEGASUS, who you summoned with your MILLIONAIRE RING. They’ll give you that too.

3. BE BORN INTO MONEY. Is your last name Rothschild, Rinehart or Apple?

Well if it is then you can attest to this scheme’s 100% effectiveness, not to mention cunning simplicity! Basically just make sure the vagina you come slip and sliding out of is stinking rich, you’ll know you got a rich one if you emerge into a bath of Evian spring water and Beethoven is playing, if you see so much as a GLIMPSE of hospital cotton you know you’ve got it wrong and to try again. When you are born you will

Picture by Marnie Allen

Ever wanted to build a swimming pool then fill it with used mannequins? Or to hang off the nose of your own giant face carved into a mountainside, while an evil butler shoots at you with a laser or something? If you answered either of these questions then your stupidity has rendered you too irresponsible to receive the VAST FORTUNE my patented get rich quick schemes will bestow upon you- but if you kept damn mouth shut like any normal human being then get ready to RAKE IT IN!

be a baby, and babies don’t have to do frickin’ ANYTHING, they’re basically one evolution above pillows. You will just instantly OWN money because of your (probably inbred) genes.

You’ll also get to wear a monocle and a little top hat and when you learn to talk you can say shit like; “you’re fired!” to the Macedonian cleaner which everyone’ll think is adorable but also YOU’LL MEAN IT. 4. HAVE A PLANE EXPLODE OVER YOUR HOUSE I’m gonna break it to you- this is probably the LEAST foolproof of my foolproof schemes. You gotta be real careful to have a plane explode that is filled with money and not just, like, razor blades or needles; in fact the plane doesn’t even need to be filled with ANYTHING to create a dangerous situation when it explodes. Planes are really big, and made from friggin’ JAGGED METAL and GLASS. Even while trying to grab the money you’d have to dodge falling debris and then there’s the matter of PLANE GHOSTS (the most persistent of ghosts.) I’m gonna go ahead and file this plan under “solid maybe.”

5. MAKE STAR WARS Holy biz, do you even know how rich Jabba the Hut got after Star Wars? Hella rich, like as mineral rich as Western Australian soil. So you can just imagine how rich Georgie Lucas got, so rich that he just went INSANE. I kid you not

that motherlicker flat out WENT INSANE FROM BEING TOO RICH. So how can you go insane rich like George Lucas? Well if you had half a brain (which you don’t) you’d see that the one noticeable difference between you and George Lucas is that George Lucas created the STAR WARS. He literally incited WAR in OUTER SPACE and we make him a gagillionaire for it, go figure. So the plan here is simple, simply make the STAR WARS happen. AN IMPORTANT NOTE, try and do this BEFORE George Lucas did it, but you’ll probably get rich either way. Heck you could probably slap a child on the street and yell “STAR WARS!” and make money.

So there you have it, or there you don’t have it, as you have ceased to read this because it has been buried under your newly acquired fortune. You can thank me later, but before I go I must warn you strongly not to contribute to society or advance humankind or your own spirit in ANY WAY as it will RUIN the feeling of blissful hollowness your money bestows you. You will no longer take joy in watching the neighborhood children trying to scale your electric fence as they attempt to reclaim their Frisbee from your sprawling property, and of course, the ghosts of Christmas present, past and future will simply stop visiting you or returning your phone calls.

Do not slap children on the street and yell “Star Wars” at them.

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Picture by Natalie Thompson

THE LONG ROAD TO WESTRALIA

by Richard Ferguson As we all know, Clive Palmer is an eccentric billionaire. Like Richard Branson and Donald Trump, Palmer has delighted us with his crazy ideas; whether it’s rebuilding the Titanic or recreating Jurassic Park, Palmer has never been one to use his fortune realistically. Now, Australia’s craziest son is moving into the field of politics. Well, into the field of starting one’s own political party. Well, into recreating the United Australia Party.

Palmer’s history of politics is colourful, to say the least. In 1984, he lost a battle for National Party pre-selection for the seat of Fisher to Peter Slipper. He’ also served as a campaign manager for the Nationals in Queensland and supported the “Joh for Australia” campaign. In recent years, Palmer was a life member of the Liberal National Party until they asked him to tear up his membership after criticizing the role of lobbyists in politics. Now, Clive Palmer is back and like Die Hard 3, it’s with a vengeance.

The UAP played a significant part in 1930s Australian politics. Started originally by former Labor MP Joe Lyons, the United Australia Party was a coalition of MPs who didn’t support the actions of the sitting Labor Scullin Government in response to the depression. Other leaders included the likes of Robert Menzies and Billy Hughes (whose greatest claim to fame was being a member of every major political party except the Nationals). During World War II, the UAP began to lose its standing. First, it lost its position as the dominant coalition partner with the Country Party and eventually, suffered at the hands of the Labor Party under John Curtin.

Eventually, Menzies determined that the UAP could go no further and founded the Liberal Party, ending Australian unity.

Palmer’s decision to revive an historic party could cause him some issues, since the UAP weren’t exactly the greatest political force in Australia, even at their prime. Plus, claiming Robert Menzies as a former leader and guiding force will no doubt start up a battle of history with the Liberal Party. There is also a problem with from an administrative sense. History has shown that those who try to restart the UAP face a resistance from the Electoral Commission.

Pauline Hanson had to rename her attempt “Pauline’s United Australia Party”, while Bob Katter faced similar issues when he tried to have

“The Australia Party” registered, opting rather to add his name as a prefix.

However, there are some positives. The party’s policies run straight to the heart of what Palmer perceives as some of the biggest issues in the nation. While axing the carbon tax is on there (apparently axing it retrospectively, but we have no idea how he could do that), there are also policies on lobbyists in politics that will no doubt have a wide base of appeal among the public. Palmer’s position on asylum seekers also makes logical sense and he receives some kudos for not joining in on the “who can go lower” in the immigration debate. His party advocates on-shore processing and there will be significant savings in shutting down detention centres.

Talking policies is all well and good, but there is debate about Palmer’s chances of making any difference in a federal election. At the official announcement, Palmer revealed that the party would be contesting each of 150 seats, as well as Senate candidates in each state and territory.

As has been said countless times before, the UAP won’t return to government but might gain some broad support in Queensland and WA where both parties are off the nose, therefore picking up some Senate positions. Palmer’s own race in the seat of Fairfax is interesting. The

long-standing LNP MP Alex Somlyay is retiring, which makes it a lot easier for another party to pick it up. This, added to the fact that Palmer is a significant public figure in Queensland, means that he could have a real shot at added “MP” to the end of his name.

For any young political party, there are two major hurdles that need to be overcome. The first is members and by extension, volunteers.

If Palmer and the UAP can’t encourage a healthy number of people to join up and follow the party, then it’s a huge uphill battle because there are no members of local communities selling his message. The second factor that needs to be taken into account is money. Palmer will no doubt use some of his considerable fortune to fund a campaign. In 2010, the major parties spent between $80 million and $100 million funding their campaign. If Palmer were to front that sort of money up, the UAP would be able to afford to run a national campaign with all the bells and whistles, which would put him in major contention with the two major parties.

If Palmer can organise both of these factors, and catch the attention of the public, the UAP could become a political force in Australia. If he doesn’t, he may have to go back to ships and dinosaurs.

In 1981, a young Clive Palmer published a book of poetry called Dreams, Hopes and Reflections. It’s available from Southport Library.

One poem reads as such: “Man of love/is my name/man of love/shall remain.” For real.

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ROAMING DRONES, NUCLEAR SHADOWS

by Philip Sharpe

The most interesting understanding about drones and warfare is not the technology in itself, but ratherhow they are being used as a means to bypass political and social “roadblocks” to military intervention. Being a recent and previously monopolised weapon, they have been operating in a vacuum of legal frameworks. This is highlighted best by the fact that Pakistan, ostensibly a US ally, has despite this allegiance been bombed 355 times in the last 9 years, with the death of at least 307 of its civilians. This ‘pseudo war’ is also being pursued in Yemen, Somalia and Libya in the name of the ‘War on Terror’. It has been to the United States’ advantage to maintain this vacuum, and the historical evolution that will unfold can be seen in similar military monopolies.

Following World War Two, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were of the understanding that the US advantage in nuclear arms should be leveraged to the fullest. Doctrine followed that full scale nuclear attack should pre-empt any war, and this threat should be used to intimidate other powers into accepting the new US post war hegemony. This was expressed best in the Berlin crisis of 1948. The musings of Admiral Souers to, “just kill ten million people and make them [the Soviets] get a political decision now [to surrender],” were seen in Strategic Air Command’s plan for the opening of hostilities with the Soviets; a colossal atomic attack on seventy cities, followed by a prolonged conventional and nuclear bombardment. Why fight a war when you can reduce a continent to slag.

This viewpoint changed drastically in 1949 with the Soviet Union shocking the world by detonating their own nuclear bomb, ahead of anyone’s predictions. First Lightning’s detonation was the incentive for all future nuclear weapon legal frameworks. The incentives were twofold; firstly the US had done vastly greater nuclear testing than the Soviets, and thus hoped to retain a nuclear advantage

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Picture by Camden Watts

We are currently living in one of those interesting lulls in history. Witnessing a watershed moment in military technology, the war has not yet occurred that will illuminate the revolutionary role they will play. For our time, this revolution is drones. These events are not a new phenomenon. In World War One, it was tanks and gas attacks. In World War Two, it was the nuclear bomb. For the Assyrians, it was iron weapons, and so on in history.

by limiting their ability to test. Secondly however, they hoped to deter the use of nuclear weapons in war now that they and their allies were facing annihilation as well. The pattern at work here is evident. Firstly, the initial nation exploits their advantage. Then, the technology is then disseminated and then restricted legally.

Reaching back to the previous examples, Germany’s use of poison gas in World War One was devastating to enemy morale but during the war, Allied nations created and expanded their own supplies, leading some to predict an apocalyptic opening to the next war.

The League of Nations acted against this by creating the Geneva Protocol against chemical and biological weapons, entering into effect in 1929. The effectiveness of this restriction, backed by mutual armament, can be seen in World War Two. Even in the darkest days of the Third Reich facing the Gotterdammerung, it is telling that Hitler and the General Staff did not authorise the use of their extensive chemical weapon inventories.

This is the crux of what will happen with drones. The United States can afford to be excessive in their deployment, because they don’t face drone attacks themselves yet. What would be the outcome of China using drones

to assassinate the leadership of Taiwan? How about Russian drones killing Chechen rebels hiding in European cities? The response would be predictable, international law would follow.

This accord is not far into the future, for we are already seeing rumblings of this. China and the US are currently involved in a ‘drone race’ further mirroring nuclear weapon history, while Russia is expanding and updating its drone fleet after they performed poorly against Israeli models used by Georgia in the Russo-Georgian War. The final irony of this is that while drones have centralised themselves as the main striking tool for US counter terrorism policy, they are also the latest tool of the terrorists themselves.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles are not hard to construct in today’s age and have now seen use

by Hezbollah against Israel, leading to Lebanon’s former Prime Minister Siniora to claim that drone infiltration ‘amounts to a declaration of war’. Perhaps with time, this will be the case.

For now however, the United States is setting the standard for what a modern country can do with these weapons. It will be an interesting future when everyone catches up and plays by the same rules.

In a November 2012 Daily Beast interview, former U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Cameron Munter revealed the actual targeting criteria: “A male between the ages of 20 and 40.”

STARGAZING AND STRIPES FOREVER It’s often the most influential figures in society who are convinced that, through the prediction of their fortune, they can come to control their destinies. American presidents are no different: Commander-in-Chiefs from Lincoln to Coolidge to Johnson all admitted to having consulted professional psychics in their careers. However, in the cases of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, an obscure belief in predictions of the future haven’t only constructed twisted versions of reality, but also failed to predict their dismal ends.

The NIXth Sense It’s 1972. The Munich Olympic massacre has just occurred. In an unprecedented attack on the Olympics, terrorists have taken the Israeli team hostage, killing six coaches and five athletes.

In response to this, Richard Nixon turns to professional psychic Jeane Dixon to update him on possible terror threats against the US. Dixon supplies her psychic ‘intelligence’ to Reagan and warns of a surge in violence between German and Jewish residents in America. Following this, Jewish leaders will accuse Nixon of failing to protect them and their people. Jeane forbids Nixon to mention her prophecy to anyone, since according to her, there are too many prominent Jewish Americans and “no way to protect them”.

In Jeane’s non-existent defence, it wasn’t hard to predict a brash reaction from Jewish leaders following the unfortunate events that unfolded at Munich. Not only was the rescue attempt completely botched, but the sight of Jewish deaths on German land only three decades after the Holocaust struck a deep chord in Israel and around the world. Dixon also warned Nixon, “the terrorists will kidnap somebody” and “they may even shoot somebody”, in the typically detailed and comprehensive style of psychic predictions. Nixon responded by asking the FBI to develop contingency plans for terror attacks in both Washington and New York and creating a government-wide counterterrorism committee.

This committee, called the Cabinet Committee on Combating Terrorism, only met once in October of 1972. It seems Jeane was solely occupied with deriving predictions that didn’t come to fruitionotherwise she might have foreseen the infamous Watergate scandal which occurred just months after. Who knew it would be that difficult for a presidential resignation, a vice-presidential resignation and the indictment and jailing of forty-six officials to blindsight the presidential psychic?

Astrological Phenome-Ron Ronald Reagan’s association with psychics was

just plain stupid instead of being sadly stupid like Nixon’s. Ronald and his wife Nancy survived assassination attempts and scandals under the watchful eye of astrologer, Joan Quigley. In an autobiography, a Reagan administrator revealed “virtually every major decision the Reagans made was decided in advance with a psychic”.

A notorious example is the signing of a treaty between the US and Soviet Union to eliminate medium-range nuclear missiles.

It seems that stars were always going to be in Ron’s favour, especially considering that he introduced legislation as Governor of California that permitted astrologers to distinguish themselves from those dirty psychics and practise their trade for compensation. Yet, against the psychic norm, there was one major life event Quigley failed to predict for her clients, with her excuses flowing out faster than a freshly eighteen-year-old girl can say ‘Wednesday night, Student Night at Varsity’. Astrologists, like all of us, do have lives of their own, however sad and contrived they may be, and Joan was simply “doing other things” when she could have been warning against the 1981 attempt against Reagan’s life. If Nancy had only called her on the day of the attempted assassination then she could have warned her about Ronald’s star charts. “Had I been looking to the stars, I would have known” pleaded Joan, but it seems her head was too busy being up her own arse for her to glimpse the sky.

Bill Clinton Pun Clinton took it a step further when it came to presidential use of psychics. The Scottish Daily Record reported that Nessie was close to being

scientifically proven for the first time in 2000 by Clinton. Classic Bill- getting things up when he really shouldn’t.

Clinton established a Psychic Spying Unit, worth around US$7 million, whose primary goal was to find the Lochness Monster via telepathy. The chairman of the unit claimed to have detected a ‘faint trace’ of the majestic and mysterious creature in his psychic radar and in reflection, Bill deduced this reading down to intellectual interference by the ghost of a dinosaur.

In all seriousness, the Unit was devised to compete with threats from an alien race living amongst humans. Clinton, along with the Chief of Intelligence for the US Army, Albert Stubblebine believed that Martians had integrated themselves into Earth communities by the leaders of the Galactic Federation- an ancient race who has been visiting and observing the earth since stegosauruses were strolling around. The team’s experience of dinosaur spirits communicating with them from the psychic plain therefore convinced them that the spirit was trying to warm them of the danger of these un-human invaders.

Unfortunately, the unit was disbanded after Stubblebine was forced into retirement. The General had been sporting black eyes and bruises around his body after he believed the dinosaur spirit gave him the power to levitate and pass through walls. The Oval Office believed the psychic influence to be too great a health risk.

If only Monica Lewinsky had run as fast out the door as Albert ran into walls, Bill would have been spared a lot of trouble.

Picture by Natalie Thompson

by Danica Lamb

While grieving for her dead son Willie in 1863, Mary Todd Lincoln invited a medium to the White House to help her contact him. Honest Abe isn’t known to have attended many of the séances, but it’s reported that a grand piano began levitating whenever it was played. I swear I’m not making these things up.

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PELICAN’S FEDERAL BUDGET Considering the Gillard Government’s admission that a budget surplus will not be achievable for another few millennia, we at Pelican thought we could give the Government some things to spend all that money they are borrowing from China on.

• $40 million for ABC 5- The Middle Aged British People Solving and Committing Crimes Channel PM • $800,000 to buy George W. Bush’s selfportraits for the National Gallery YB • $6.5 billion to dig out the NT and South Australia, then use an advanced hydraulics system to make WA border with the eastern states TB • $85 million for Public Relations and Spin courses in pre-primary schools in key Labor electorates PM

• $5 million to fund an elaborate hoax aimed at making Clive Palmer believe he is in fact being watched by the CIA YB • $1 million to fund McLeod’s NBN; a televised re-imagining of McLeod’s Daughters and how the characters’ lives were greatly improved by a fibre network. PM • $500 million to install large and intimidating statues of Joh-Bjleke Peterson on every government housing estate PM • $3.7 million to convert kangaroos into mobile rubbish deposit units by lining their pouches with rubbish bins PM • $800 million to put the ABC’s entire back catalogue on Betamax PM • $1.5 million to lobby the International Olympic Committee to include competitive pavlova eating as a fully credited sport at the Summer Games XD

ran festivities celebrating the premiere of Arrested Development Season 4 RF • $545 million for an “Eyebrows for a Cure” program; exploring the curative abilities within John Howard’s eyebrows PM • $7 billion to build a federal-run Death Star with the power to destroy an entire state parliament RF • $300,000 rebate to compensate for the Government’s crowd-sourcing for Peter Slipper and Craig Thomson’s legal fees WM • $780,000 diverted from university funding to night-classes for middle-aged men who have taken up wild-life photography to keep the ever-present spectre of death at bay PM These budget proposals would be funded by a super profits tax on banks and other financial institutions. Hopefully Wayne Swan is reading his monthly Pelican.

• $375 million in government grants for locally

Picture by Alice McCullagh

• $700 million for a new border protection program where 80s-style surfer dude characters ride along the coastline on jet-skis; deterring asylum seekers with gnarly flips, wave burns and radisome put-downs.PM

• $4.75 billion to invest in Don Bradman robots to teach the Australian cricket team how to actually play XD

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In 2011, $175 587 in research funding was spent by the American government on a study to determine if cocaine makes Japanese quail engage in sexually risky behavior. There was also a hundred grand given to something called the “Celebrity Chef Fruit Promotion Road Show in Indonesia”.

BLOCKBUSTERS FOR DUMMIES – ENGINEERING A HIT FILM A few weeks ago I read in some weekend review that any film featuring either DiCaprio, Will Smith or Johnny Depp was guaranteed commercial success. Looking at the revenue of any film these guys have been in over recent years, I’m not going to dispute that, but it did leave me wondering something: what else guarantees a film will be a hit? After all, evidence suggests that an all-star cast or a gargantuan budget can still produce a flop at the box office. So, is there an element of luck involved, or is it actually possible to engineer a film to ensure it makes a lot of moolah?

After considering the question, here’s the answer: my comprehensive guide to making a super-blockbuster hit.

STEP ONE. Tarantinos, Spielbergs and Camerons: First off, one of the main factors in garnering commercial success is the director. People are going to be much more likely to watch your film if you sound like you mean business. Do you have a name of Italian or German origin?

If yes, you’ve already achieved the first step to success. If no, is there any way you can marry into such a name? No? Try for the next best thing and ensure you have two first names. If that means a trip to the registry office, so be it.

Alcoholic, slightly filthy, but very sexy TWO. Target audience?

You want your film to please as many people as it can. But with our aging global population, does that mean we need to start making fewer movies about superheroes and more about finding love in nursing homes? Well firstly, think about who actually goes to the movies.

Your target audience is the age bracket that has the time, money, attention span, and bladder to withstand as many film outings as possible i.e. 15-30 year olds. Keeping that in mind, I mean all 15-30 year olds across the planet. So you will have to cater for a heck of a lot of “uninformed” people… and with a vast impact on your success being the American reception, yes, you’re going to have to please the evangelicals and gun-toting hillbillies as well. So be careful about the number of Brits in

your film – with the exception of Harry Potter, it seems that “Americans” can’t understand English accents so must make their own versions of everything.

Same goes for the number of Australians – unless you’re putting in Hugh Jackman with an American accent, or one of the Hemsworths, just leave us out of it, will you?

THREE. Featuring?

We know it would be ideal to have Leo or Johnny in a starring role, but why not chuck in Johannson or Portman for good luck?

Perhaps Keira Knightley in period costume?

How about a dishevelled former Disney channel star to get their now slightly older fan-girls back into the cinema? Just steer clear of Nicolas Cage – he’s too risky. And whatever you do, don’t let Kate Hudson get wind of it. She’s already taken Matt Bellamy; she will steal any chance of success as well. Besides, she can’t even act. Or maybe I’m just bitter.

FOUR. Bang bang bang And now for the most important bit – what is your film going to be about?

In terms of genre, things like heist movies or anything with swashbuckling pirates, zombies or men in tight costumes seem to be current trends. And whilst sequels haven’t had a lot of commercial success previously, this has changed a lot in the last decade. Maybe do another take on something already pretty wellknown – there will always be room for a few more Spiderman movies. (Have they not yet made a Titanic sequel about Jack’s return from the grave? Get on it.)

The amount of recently successful shoot-emup films suggests you’ll need a bit of violence.

Even if it’s not an epic battle scene, a shootout or even a drunken brawl will suffice - if you throw in lots of random explosions you won’t do too badly either. But remember, one thing that comes with all this violence is that someone will probably have to die. So if you’re also part of the script-writing process and

Picture by Natalie Thompson

by Natalie Thompson

aren’t sure who to kill off, don’t worry; just keep Sean Bean’s number on call.

FIVE. Title?

Ever had a conversation with a friend about that great film you saw once called Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Revenge of the Terror of the Attack of the Evil, Mutant, Alien, Flesh Eating, Hellbound, Zombified Living Dead Part 2: In Shocking 2D? Just me?

With movie titles, it’s best to keep it short and leave a little mystery behind it. What does Melancholia even mean, anyway? Don’t let it be more than four words in length. Often ‘The’ followed by a noun seems to do the trick.

Summing up, your best bet for a new blockbuster hit will be one featuring zombies, possibly an all-out war between races, starring dear Leo partnered with an alcoholic, slightly filthy but still very sexy Depp, wandering about the place seducing women, getting into fights and holding up banks. Sean can play the zombie king and carry his head around with him.

Happy directing, and may the odds be ever in your favour.

The 2005 film The Adventures of Pluto Nash was set in 2080 and starred Eddie Murphy as a nightclub owner on the moon. His co-star was an anthropomorphic robot called 27 Bruno, and the happy ending came when he purchased 78 robotic bodyguards. It lost $145m at the box office.

CAGE MATCH: A GUIDE TO RECOGNIZING YOUR MONEYED MOVIE GUYS

by Wade McCagh and Shaughn McCagh The fact is for most of us, money will be a driving influence in our lives. We actively loathe those who have too much of it, blame it for all the ills of the world and talk a good game about redistribution and equality, but not one of us wouldn’t grab our washtubs and run outside if J.D. Rockefeller came to campus in his zeppelin dropping coins on people. At least I assume anyone who still owned a washtub wouldn’t. We’re a culture obsessed with monetary wealth, and that is reflected in our art. If music has taught me anything, it’s that cash rules everything around me, so I should always have my mind of my money and my money on my mind.

But mo’ money means mo’ problems, and it can’t buy me love, so I should definitely want pre-nup (yeah).

the spending spree of their dreams buying boats, houses, exotic pet giraffes, anything and everything they could ever want.

Best In Show: Montgomery Brewster Brewster’s Millions (1985) This 1985 screen adaption on the 1902 novel of the same name tells the story of Montgomery Brewster (Richard Pryor), a third rate baseball pitcher who discovers his recently deceased great-uncle, multimillionaire Rupert Horn, has left him his entire fortune but with a catch; Brewster is

challenged to either take $1 million upfront, or spend $30 million within 30 days to inherit an additional $300 million with the conditions that he may not own any assets, give any more than 5% to charity or tell anyone why he must spend the money. While there’s some moral about money not buying true happiness or something, what makes this kind of millionaire great to watch is the ridiculous ways he tries to spend the money.

From hiring the New York Yankees for a three inning exhibition game against his minor league team, with himself as pitcher to joining the electoral race for Mayor of

But let’s leave behind the bossy realm of music shouting orders at us about cash money finances. We don’t want the sad reality of our lack of wealth thrown in our faces, we want escapism! Luckily, the land of cinema has long been providing just such an escape by looking at rich guys are their crazy shenanigans. Whether showing us the spending sprees of our dreams, or providing some tycoon with their satisfying comeuppance, film has long been providing us with fantasy rich guys. Here’s a look as some of the best in cinematic history.

The Nouveau Riche Guys Who they are: These are your run of the mill, every day Joe’s who wake up one morning to discover they’ve inherited late old Uncle Thelonious’ multi-million dollar fortune after his freak segway accident. Think Mr. Deeds, The Million Pound Note or Trading Places, these are the easy-to-relateto everymen who do what any of us would given an endless fortune; go on

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Adam Sandler’s 2002 remake of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town made $121 million of profit at the box office. Big Daddy made $200 million. Like, that’s take home money. What are you all thinking

New York in a protest campaign urging the people to vote for “none of the above”, it’s a cavalcade of crazy capers.

been portrayed on the silver screen since the mid-sixties, with a total of five different live action interpretations of the Dark Knight so far. We could sit here all day and talk about why Batman is the fucking bomb, but we’re not here to talk about that. Why is Bruce Wayne a great rich guy? Because he needs to be. The entire preppy, playboy wanker facade is quintessential to Batman’s survival. It’s his greatest defence against the criminal scum of Gotham’s underworld because, when you think about it, Bruce Wayne’s actually a pretty obvious choice for Batman. By embracing the superficial, dull-witted socialite stereotype, Wayne is able to ensure his vigilante tendencies are kept a secret to the world. He’s the ultimate eccentric billionaire hobbyist.

Runner Up: Longfellow Deeds - Mr Deeds Goes To Town (1936) The Old Money Guys Who they are: These are the silver spooners, born into their fortunes, leading lives of ultimate leisure without any real understanding of how the real world works and utterly incapable of functioning without some sort of English butler by their sides.

Some sort of crises will threaten their idyllic existence, and they’ll have to learn how to “make it” in the “real world.”

Best Example: Arthur Bach - Arthur (1981) It’s hard to naturally root for these characters given they’ve known uninterrupted luxury their entire existence, but it’s testament to the comedic genius of Dudley Moore that Arthur is one of the most lovable millionaires of all time. Completely incompetent and lacking any ambition to do anything, he describes his life as such; “I race cars, play tennis, and fondle women, BUT! I have weekends off, and I am my own boss.” But he faces a crisis when he is ordered by his parents to marry another aristocrat, otherwise he will be left out of will and made penniless. This unfortunately coincides with him falling in love with working class girl Liza Minelli. So, he’s basically the English alcoholic Buster Bluth.

Runner Up: Billy Madison – Billy Madison (1995) The Eccentric Millionaire Guys Who they are: Similar to your garden variety old money types with a little more crazy thrown in, these are the guys who have used all that abundant free time to come up with some bizarre personal crusade or vision which they then proceed to pursue with their abundant piles of money.

Best in Show: Bruce Wayne – Batman (heaps of years) While not exclusively a cinematic character, it’s hard to find a better example of the eccentric billionaire type than the Batman.

Bruce Wayne’s crime fighting antics have

Runners Up: Howard Hughes – The Aviator (2004), Tony Stark – Iron Man (2008) The Psychopathic Rich Guys Who they are: Somewhat like the inverse eccentric, these rich folk are charming, persuasive and ooze charisma, seeming like normal, rational people who are simply talented and driven enough to succeed.

Except, underneath that façade of civility and style is a cold-blooded, emotionless creature devoid of morals and sentiment and driven by intense hatred and loathing. They will destroy anything and anyone that gets in their way, and they often have no real motivation or overriding vision of why they are doing these things.

Best in Show: Daniel Plainview – There Will Be Blood (2007) In the opening nine minutes of this movie, we see a lone figure in the harsh wilderness toiling away in search of silver, only to fall and break his leg at the bottom of a mineshaft.

A lesser man would have perished, but he strives and manages to rescue himself with pure determination. Only when he makes it back to town and cashes in on his find do we see him finally relax. The message is clear: this man is driven by an insatiable desire for profit. What follows is an intensely disturbing and relentless journey of obsession and destruction, leaving a trail of broken people and lost lives in its wake. If you ever needed a reason to be more suspicious of Americans,

the oil industry or dudes with moustaches, this is one to watch.

Notable Others: Patrick Bateman - American Psycho (2000), Tony Montana – Scarface (1983) The Evil Corporate Guys Who they are: Picture the chairman of a bank, or an insurance agency, or an oil company (who isn’t threatening to drink your milkshake). Chances are you pictured an older, well dressed white male, who probably numbers cigars and golf among his hobbies. If there’s one thing film has made sure everyone knows about corporations, it’s that their evil, faceless monstrosities usually driven by amoral heartless greedbots. Various market crashes and blind speculation has no doubt made them an easy target, but when world markets seem to be constantly in a state of panic, due to some complex financial thingo with a four letter acronym that the average person has never heard of, its not hard to understand why it’s such a plausible conclusion.

Best in Show: Gordon Gekko – Wall Street (1987) Possibly the best timed movie in Hollywood history, Wall Street managed to be conceived, produced and finished in time to be released straight after Black Monday and the 1987 market crash. The Dow Jones had dropped 22.6% (Australian markets dropped 41.8%), and here was a slick corporate raider telling us that ‘greed is good.’ It really is hard to overstate just how well the character and the entire movie managed to capture the zeitgeist of 80’s excess, and Gekko’s suave but ruthless operating methods have probably done more than any real life corporate crook to permanently paint all traders as the spawn of Satan.

Runners Up: Nick Leeson – Rogue Trader (1999), Sir John – Reckless Kelly (1993)

Everytime I try to cry I fall/without my wings I feel so small

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FILM REVIEWS A Place For Me Director: Josh Boone Starring: Jennifer Connelly, Greg Kinnear, Kirsten Bell Simon Donnes It‘s ironic to no end that a film purporting to be about writers should itself have terrible writing. This establishes almost every major problem A Place For Me exhibits to a T; go home everyone, review over! It doesn’t really matter though. Rom-coms are churned out for a market of no particular discerning taste, like the person in the row ahead of me touting the virtues of the “pinot noir from Tasmania” they were drinking which was curiously white. People attend films like this for two reasons: either they are 40 somethings + who confuse the French New Wave for Daft Punk, or they are teenagers looking for somewhere quiet to snuggle and suck on each other’s genitals.

The real shame about this film is that everything besides the script is at least above average considering the genre. The casting works and there’s mostly good performances. The accompanying soundtrack is generally fitting, if somewhat ham-fisted, and the cinematography is perfectly inoffensive. It’s just that for a plot about a family of writers the whole thing is so horribly paced, contrived and flat. There are better “witty” rom-coms, and you don’t need to look far to find them (Ed- just go back to Cary Grant, people!).

Director: Shane Black Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Ben Kingsley, Gwyneth Paltrow Shaughn McCagh Iron Man 3, the first of Marvel’s post-Avengers solo-hero sequels, sees the return of Robert Downey Jr’s Tony Stark fighting a seemingly unstoppable force whilst trying to cope with an identity crisis brought on by the world changing events of The Avengers. After a series of attacks led by the mysterious terrorist leader ‘The Mandarin’ (Ben Kingsley), a paranoid and reclusive Tony Stark is left to deal with the traumatic aftermath of The Avengers. Stripped of his inventions, he is forced to re-find his lost self-confidence to defeat this new foe. While using the stock standard superhero sequel formula of “hero crippled by self-doubt, almost defeated by villain, goes soul searching, feels better about himself, saves the day”, it’s the creative treatment by action/ comedy heavyweight Shane Black (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Lethal Weapon) that makes Iron Man 3 one of the strongest films in Marvel’s Avengers franchise. Considering it has to address the consequences of The Avengers on the Marvel film universe, as well as finalise character arc of one of its most beloved characters, Iron Man 3 not only accomplishes everything it needs too to be a great sequel but surprisingly also manages to be a great film.

Olympus Has Fallen

The Place Beyond The Pines

Directed by Antoine Fuqua Starring Gerard Butler, Morgan Freeman and Aaron Eckhart

Director: Derek Cianfrance Starring: Ryan Gosling, Eva Mendes, Bradley Cooper

Kiya Alimoradian

James Munt

In some parallel universe where everyone still hates North Korea, President Asher (Aaron Eckhart) is meeting with the South Korean Prime Minister when terrorists attack the White House, taking him and all his merry men hostage. With the nation put on hold they begin to hack into nuclear weapon controls, basically threatening to detonate atom bombs all over the country if America doesn’t pull its men out of the North Korea/South Korea border zone. It’s up to an ex-secret service agent (Gerard Butler) to save the day, but with the situation looking so bad, can he do it?

Olympus Has Fallen pushes the same one-sided heroism we saw in 2006’s 9/11 re-enactments World Trade Center and United 93, its sole purpose being to paint monstrous images of its villains and scream ‘America prevails!’ wherever it can. There is a pleasing amount of blood and gore but this film isn’t thrilling at all; from the opening notes of its patriotic musical score we know exactly how this film will end, we know America will win, and we know it’s because here in the West we are good people.

Upon leaving the rubble of a ravaged White House, Gerard Butler says to the president ‘sorry about the house, sir’. He responds, ‘it’s ok, I believe it’s insured’. God bless America.

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Iron Man 3

In his reunion with Blue Valentine director Derek Cianfrance, Ryan Gosling plays a stunt driver who turns to robbing banks to provide for his child from a fling with Romina (Eva Mendes). This forms the first of what are essentially three very closely related vignettes, following the repercussions of Luke’s crime on both his and cop Avery Cross’ (Bradley Cooper) families. Splitting the narrative between different protagonists is ambitious and risky, but has been done perfectly many times before (see Chungking Express); in this case, it provides the film with many of its strengths but also several flaws. The repetition and parallelism between the three stories is often superb, resonating with and enhancing themes like fatherhood, fate and trauma. On the other hand, a lot of momentum established in the gripping first third is sacrificed; the passage from the remarkable opening shot, backtracking past the carnival lights, through to the fantastic robbery scene set to Suicide’s ‘Che’ or when psycho Gosling (à la Drive) suddenly emerges is fantastic. By the end, it’s just that little bit soapier. It doesn’t always work, but when it does, it does excellently, aided by Mike Patton’s impressive score, fantastic cinematography and outstanding performances from Gosling, Cooper and Ben Mendhelson as Luke’s partner-in-crime.

Spring Breakers Director: Harmony Korine Starring: James Franco, Vanessa Hudgens, Selina Gomez By the time you read this, you will almost certainly have heard someone offer their impersonation of James Franco’s Floridian drawl, uttering the creepy, droning cry of ‘Spranng Breeeaaakkkkk.’ Indeed, if you see this film, there is a good chance that his prayer-like repetition throughout the film will be stuck in your head, either making you laugh, making you uncomfortable, or both.

Spring Breakers is not a film you can watch comfortably. The opening collage of slow motion, close up shots of barely legal teenagers going

Trading Places Directed by: John Landis Starring: Eddie Murphy, Dan Aykroyd, Ralph Bellamy John Landis’ Trading Places is one of those rare films that manages to harness one of the most powerful cinematic miracles of the 1980s; that is, Eddie Murphy actually being funny. If this film was made now in its present form, it would be a disaster, but when taken in context, it’s an absolute triumph.

wild set to the sounds of Skrillex elicits laugher at first, but then the camera lingers long enough to make you shift uncomfortably in your seat, sober and subjected to this voyeuristic perspective of unbridled debauchery. For some, it will reinforce the view that director Harmony Korine’s work is quasi-paedophilia, veiled under pretensions of art and irony, while others will be confronted by the scarily accurate capturing of contemporary youth culture and will be forced to question how we collectively got to this place. Others still will absolutely lap this up unironically and think it’s the absolute shit.

This is a movie without irony. In Korine’s own words, “it’s like a pop poem, an impressionistic version of the real world. Everything looks amazing because this is a culture of surfaces.

It’s about candy-coloured paint, pink nail polish, glistening guns, neon bathing suits, Mountain Dew water bottles, how all these things coalesce and become a quasi-religious experience for these characters. And it’s about the pathology and menace in the residue of the surfaces.”

I walked out unsure how to judge it. It’s Korine’s most accomplished film technically, and certainly his most commercial. In many respects, he is the perfect director to make this film work through a long time focus and empathy with young people on the fringes of society. The actors all play their

The basic premise of the movie is a “modern” take on Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, where Dan Aykroyd, a filthy rich wall street broker, and Eddie Murphy, a homeless con-artist, trade places (the title is a pretty big spoiler). Being that this is an eighties film and all, the movie doesn’t worry all too much about the intricacies (and plausibility) of plot points. The decade was still in an era of film when movies were basically goofy showcases of crazy ideas strung together with half-assed segues. The “half-assed segue” in this film is that the extremely complicated task of making an upper class ponce and a conniving hobo legitimately switch lives in all of their entirety is completely taken care of by the actions of the film’s two antagonists (the real-life versions of those two grumpy old men from The Muppets). How the hell could two old men manage to pull off a feat so seemingly impossible (all in order to provide a film premise)? By waving around green paper of course, because that’s how the eighties works.

roles straight and without a hint of withheld ironic detachment, in particular Franco, who completely vanishes into the pathetically deluded white wannabe rapper ‘Alien’ in what is either the best or the worst performance he will ever give.

Yet, the feeling that probably stands out above all others to me is disappointment in the complete lack of depth to the film. Perhaps any attempt to have meaning or a message to this film would have ruined it. But the literal presentation of everything that happens without any kind of subtext or willingness to explore the deeper themes and issues at play here is a missed opportunity. Even the most devoted film analyst will struggle to construct theories on the deeper meaning as an exploration of race relations or spirituality in 21st century youth culture from the paper thin evidence. A deliberately provocative and divisive work, I can’t commend or recommend it, yet I can’t entirely condemn it either. Any film that raises this many questions cannot be entirely bad. I’m just not sure where it lies on the scale of terrible to terribly good.

Wade Mccagh

way. However, as the film progresses you begin to warm to the characters while they realise that their entire oddball situation of being traded was engineered by two power-hungry old billionaires, and this is when the film turns into a campy heist movie-of-sorts. This creates an odd situation in which you begin to relate to absolute wankers purely because they are slightly less wanky than the absolute wankers that are being extra-wanky to the wankers you didn’t like in the first place. Get that? Good.

What makes Trading Places a must see is that it’s just plain fun. It relates back to the core idea of The Twilight Zone; that you should just enjoy a ridiculous premise and not worry too much about its plausibility. If that doesn’t appeal to you, you can just watch it to see Jamie-Lee Curtis’s boobs.

Mason Fleming

At first, it’s pretty hard to connect to either of the two main characters given they are both absolute wankers in their own money-driven

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OPERA TALK

by Alexandra Leonzini Opera is an art form that most people in our generation can’t relate to. They find it boring, inaccessible, or incomprehensible.

Many, I suspect, have simply never bothered listening to any. As such, I’m writing to implore to you that you give opera a chance.

I gave up on anthropology just after my Bat Mitzvah, when the Rabbi’s wife provided me with the number of my first singing teacher.

Life changed for good. I’m now 23, have complete a Bachelor of Music and a Bachelor of Arts at UWA, and am writing a history dissertation on opera in mid-nineteenth century London. I travel frequently to Germany for coaching and training and am relocating there at the end of this semester, fully committed to being an operatic performer. Opera is something I listen to and watch when I am happy, sad, bored, when I have piles of essays to write, or when I have nothing to do. Baroque, Classical, Romantic, in French, German, Russian, or Italian –opera offers a form of escapism and a vehicle to process emotion unlike any other.

One thing that can be said for opera is that it is never boring. With complicated, deeply romantic, and often heart breaking storylines, opera manages to be sexy as well as relatable. From the subtle nuances of a women hysterically laughing her way through her suffering while breaking internally (as is often portrayed in Verdi’s La Traviata), or the overt display of a man wrestling against feminine temptation in a pool of human blood (as Parsifal did in The Met production of Wagner’s opera of the same name last year), opera provides a platform for directors to address issues that might otherwise be too painful or taboo.

A prime example of is how class is addressed in Mozart’s La nozze di Figaro (1786), an opera based on Pierre Beaumarchais’ play, La folle journée, ou le

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Picture by Lauren Wiszniewski

Opera is my life. While I am admittedly prone to hyperbole, this is not an overexaggeration. I was first introduced to opera as a child. By the age of five I knew the story to Puccini’s Madame Butterfly off by heart, and could pinpoint the exact moment she took her own life. I knew that I wanted to be a singer – admittedly losing sight of this dream upon seeing Indian Jones and deciding to become an anthropologist.

Mariage de Figaro. Mozart’s use of satire positioned his audience to consider their place within society. In modern productions, issues of rape and misogyny are often presented to great dramatic and emotional effect (Mozart’s Don Giovanni; recent Met production of Bizet’s Carmen; Puccini’s Tosca). The ability of composers, librettists and directors to engage with such sensitive topics in a public forum is what opera is about.

Is opera inaccessible? Maybe, but this is certainly changing. The West Australian Opera Company does provide student concession tickets and you can go and see selected productions from The Metropolitan Opera at both the Luna and Paridiso cinemas for around the price of breakfast.

This doesn’t even address the countless productions put on by the classical vocal students at UWA and WAAPA, or the contributions of smaller companies in Perth, like OperaBox.

this country’s attitudes to the learning of foreign languages. My love of opera was what pushed me in the direction of linguistic exploration; I am now semi-fluent in German, capable in Italian, can read and understand French, and can pronounce Russian without violently offending all native speakers present. Even then, I can’t rely on my skills to understand the singer.

Vowel modification while singing means that even the keenest ear will have to rely on the subtitles from time to time, and there is no shame in that. Just make sure you take your glasses when you go.

I strongly believe that opera is something that everyone should try at least once. It is my drug of choice, making my happy moments happier, and my sad moment comparatively favourable. There are ample opportunities to get opera into your ears, so sample and see. It might become an addiction.

The argument that opera is incomprehensible has always startled me, as well as made me rage against

Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms and Wagner were all 5 feet tall or less.

MILES NOEL’S “FRAGILE STATES” MELODY SMITH GALLERY 9TH – 21ST MAY

by Grace McKie Local artist Miles Noel has produced fifteen works that explore the fluctuating emotional and psychological states of their subjects.

As an established painter, photographer and graphic designer, he’s particularly attuned to the subtleties of human expression and emotion. He doesn’t hesitate to deviate from traditionally flattering angles in order to construct both compositionally and emotionally intimate portraits. Capturing truth and rawness in a subject is difficult, yet this is one of Miles’ primary strengths. Each of the individuals has been captured in a detached moment, undergoing their own personal struggle.

Miles has described the exhibition as an attempt to come to terms with his identity in an evolving world. Having reached his 30s, he acknowledges the natural, yet somewhat distressing need to reassess his life

achievements and contemplate his direction from here on in. This internal crisis about mortality is translated in the uncertainties and fragility displayed by his portraits. Slowly Rusting Away is one such example where the artist investigates the transient nature of life.

Miles creates a decaying, rusted effect over the subject’s skin. This stylistic effect is consistent throughout the exhibited pieces; facial skin in many of works appears cracked and hollow with earlier layers of paint evident underneath.

This technique overtly lends itself to the exhibition’s title; the subjects are visually and emotionally fragile.

Miles Noel’s distinguishable style comprises of a fusion between expressionistic and realist styles. He works with a wide spectrum of colour, boldly mixing palettes to produce chromatically striking images. If anyone is curious about interesting methods of oil application, I recommend they have a look at

his work; he effortlessly alternates between different textures and gestural movements, which keeps his images fresh and animated.

There are identifiable layers left exposed, which strips the paintings back to the bareness of the blank canvases on which they are set.

This reminds the viewer that these images are illusions fabricated from oil and canvas.

I attended one of Miles’ earlier exhibitions that featured some of the same subjects and images as “Fragile States”. The complexity of emotions that he’s been able to convey, as well as his thoughtful approach to his more recent work demonstrates how Miles has established his own style and matured as an artist over the years.

More information about his past and future work can be found at milesnoel.com.au

REVIEW: LA TRAVIATA WA OPERA

by Alexandra Leonzini Revised in 1854 after a disastrous premiere in Venice in 1853, La Traviata has endured papal censure and mass moral outrage to become one of the world’s most popular and frequently performed operas. Often used in advertisements for pasta brands and Italian holidays, Verdi’s music will be at least vaguely familiar to anybody who owns a television.

His popularity and accessibility as a composer is even further emphasised this year, the celebratory year of what would have been his 200th birthday. What with the bicentenary, the pressure was on for the Western Australia Opera Company’s production.

Performances were solid overall. Katja Webb was suitably beautiful as Violetta, the dying

heroine, and Rosario La Spina was believably heartbroken as the young and naïve nobleman, Alfredo. Despite his frequent appearance on the stages of Australia, I found Douglas McNicol’s portrayal of Giorgio Germont, Alfredo’s father, the weakest performance of the night (as did many others, if the booing and hissing heard during his segment of the bows is any indication).

This wasn’t a perfect performance; the ensemble wasn’t often together, and the individual interpretations felt quite rushed.

But this is hardly surprising given the pressure on the individuals and the company are under.

Of the four operas staged by West Australian Opera in 2013, Katja Webb is the main heroine in all of them (well, one of the many in Don Giovanni). It’s of no surprise that, while her

singing was often divine (despite sickness), her interpretation of Violetta was inconsistent.

Without adequate money for rehearsal time, it’s not surprising that the orchestra, lead by Joseph Colaneri, the soloists, and the chorus where often heard as three distinctly separate parts, not one ensemble moving towards a common goal.

For the most part, I enjoyed this production. It highlighted to me just how well West Australia Opera is doing given their obviously limited funds. They need us, the community, to support them, and I strongly urge you to do so. There is nothing quite like a night at the opera.

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HENRY IV - BELL SHAKESPEARE COMPANY

by Hugh Manning Lights come up on a raucous party: a group of inebriates, young and old, run riot to chaotic guitar and drums in front of a giant, distorted union jack constructed from milk crates. Their merry-making climaxes with a member of their party shattering the flag with a thrown beer keg.

Britain is torn apart, and chaos reigns.

Shakespeare’s historical tale of aristocratic politics, hedonistic lowlifes and father-son conflict finds itself uncommonly well adapted for the modern era in Bell Shakespeare’s 2013 production. Many attempts to update Shakespeare for the modern audience are let down by lazy design- ‘put ‘em all in suits’ is often as far as production teams seem willing to go to give 400 year old works a modern twist.

We are so over-saturated with modern retellings in both theatre and cinema that it was a surprise to see a Shakespeare play set in modern times that didn’t feel tired and hackneyed.

This is in part owed to Stephen Curtis’ excellent costume design, which featured Falstaff and his gang outfitted like members of Frenzal Rhomb, and the Northern usurpers, the Earls of Northumberland and Worcester, dressed like country politicians (the slightly oafish

Northumberland bore a striking likeness to Bob Katter). Apart from a few missteps, Hal’s unsightly military garb for example, the costuming was spot on. However, aside from the aforementioned shattering of the Union Jack, Curtis’ work on the set design was not quite as inspired, working well enough for the majority of the play but never quite hitting it out of the park.

Sound, by Kelly Ryall, was a mix of pre-recorded electronic and live, two man thrash from the guitar and drums set-up in the corner, complemented by one instance of group choral singing from the cast, and on the whole it worked well. The live band gave a electrifying sense of energy and anarchy to the scenes featuring Falstaff’s posse, and a satisfying balance was struck between the various, fairly disparate forms of music on display.

The key performances (John Bell’s Falstaff, Stephen Whitney’s Henry IV and Matthew Moore’s Prince Hal) were all solid, and whilst other reviewers have singled out Bell for particular praise I found myself more impressed

by Whitney and Moore. This is perhaps because Falstaff is basically unchanging throughout the play: a lying, manipulative but charming old man who, even in his very public rejection

by the newly crowned Henry V at the play’s conclusion, maintains the belief that his luck and charisma will get him through. As strong as Bell’s performance was, Falstaff never escaped his comic relief role. In contrast Hal, and to a lesser extent Henry IV, are both roles which call for actors to display their range, and this is an opportunity both Whitney and Moore both capitalize on. I found particularly impressive the manipulative streak which characterized Moore’s Hal from the very beginning of the play, one which I felt gave the play’s climactic rejection more complexity than a simple triumph of order over chaos, giving the act undertones of a newly crowned King scapegoating his former mentor as some kind of PR stunt.

Directors Bell and Damien Ryan have given us a stellar piece of theatre, with interesting design and strong performances that enrich and complement the original script. The various elements worked together to beautifully showcase both the humorous and emotional aspects of the play, and themes such as the narrative of the wayward son and competition between various models of masculinity were framed in a way that showcased their enduring relevance.

VIVA LA RESTORATION UDS

by Simon Donnes Surprisingly for everyone- most of all myself- the University Dramatic Society has improved since last year. I’m happy to say that their first outing for 2013 was actually worth watching. Set in a world without colour where artists strive for innovation, Viva Las Restoration was a new spin on the Les Mis style “uprising” musical. The quality of the production has improved tenfold from previous efforts, but some habits

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die hard; the blocking was sometimes atrocious, there were far too many pointless blackouts, and the script and score still left the viewer with a hunger that only more ruthless editing could have satiated.

There were moments of genuine flow and directorial pizazz in Viva, but the cast and crew always found a way to bring themselves back to their amateur origins.

The problem was nearly systemic, with almost every aspect - from lung capacity

and sound mix to narrative progression and thematic balance - falling into their own holes from time to time. That said, the costumes were excellent, the choreography fitting and the amount of cheesiness spot on.

I’m impressed, UDS.

ON BEING A LUCKY FAN Do you have a favourite band? No, that’s a stupid question, and I don’t either. Well, not really. Except I guess, according to my last. fm account (haha I KNOW), there is one band I’ve quantifiably listened to more than all others, ever (since 2006), and that band is the Lucksmiths. That’s right, your music editor’s favourite band, statistically speaking, is a defunct twee-pop group from Melbourne who sung in thick Australian twangs and wrote songs about the most ordinary of everyday things imaginable. I can only imagine your disappointment.

I don’t know exactly where my fandom began.

All I remember is that the first night I lived in a share-house, I set up my laptop on the floor and had the relatively-melancholic Naturaliste (2003) play through on repeat while I attempted lonely sleep in a bare and unfamiliar place (also on the floor). I don’t remember how I came about that album or why I was listening to it. The experience was comfortingly not-transcendental. From then on I was hooked.

It seemed like there was hardly a moment of my life which the Lucksmiths couldn’t augment, enhance or validate. Every new bout infatuation had me humming “Shine on Me”, with its agreeable conclusion that breakfast in the afternoon is the best thing you can do with someone you like. There were numerous songs for break-ups, songs for celebrating good weather, songs for travel, driving, distant yearnings, reading a book, throwing a frisbee, playing scrabble. They weren’t afraid to be fun and they weren’t afraid to be sad, precious, or throw in a way-over-the-top pun (eg. “just let go of your b(u)oy and see, you’ve lost none of your buoyancy”. I mean really).

It helped that there were just so many albums and songs to pick from, stemming from the band being relatively consistent with recorded output throughout their sixteen-year existence. Of course there would be something for every miniscule non-occasion. But they were an anytime band in the truest sense of the word, as subject matter aside, they were just damn pleasant to listen to, between the honeyed mid-range lead vocals and understated harmonies, endlessly interesting bass lines and jangly guitar playing. The latter part of their career saw them experiment bigtime with horn and string arrangements, and

even their early-years “punk” phase can only be so-named in hindsight/relativity. There was nothing abrasive about them, if you could get over your learned-bias against Australian accents.

Calling them a twee band at all (as I did indeed do earlier on) is a matter of semantics.

It is interesting how these things work in opposition – the word “twee” implies a sense of childlikeness, and the Lucksmiths are perceived to be childlike because they favoured melody, avoided fuzz and often sang perceptibly happy songs. And yet they often touched on real, adult topics that few other bands would in quite the same way. Calling them “twee” perhaps reveals our categorical presumptions about the status quo of song production and gender roles. To my mind, “twee” implies a relatively increased sense of performance because the word takes it outside the norm of what is perceived natural.

In reality the reverse may be more true - The Lucksmiths were perhaps the most themselves band I can think of.

When I finally went to Melbourne for the first time I spent the bulk of the trip lost in a map of landmarks which, to me, were mostly important for having being mentioned in Lucksmiths songs. The Sandringham Line?

Done that. St.Kilda? Yep. The Punter’s Club? Nope, that was long gone. But all the weatherboard housing took on new significance for me, as did traversing Melbourne’s smudge of a river and sitting in a park on a nice day, even though these were not in-themselves that different to performing the same activity in Perth. This was the avenue through which I arrived at being yet another Perthite who revered Melbourne – a band who sung about ordinary things happening there. at this point of the article, Connor left for Cambodia, so we roll over to Dr. Ongus Fearchoir, the bass guitarist for Cannibal Hex Abortion to talk about his shared appreciation for the Lucksmiths.

Music: a blood-shivering festival of violence, ardour and pain. May our sound rain upon you like hellfire! Foetid stenches rise from pitted hulks of tone, like the ecstasied agony of a scream from a maiden whipped for her master’s pleasure. Fear the tremor of my bass, and know that the vibrations strike not downwards merely at the brutal core of the indifferent, harsh earth, but also upwards, with a raging fist of sin towards the uncaring God who dwells and revels in our eternal mortal torment. The horror of the drums come, the scabrous, holy metal of the guitars follow.

Repent! Human vivisection is the only path to salvation. When your ears are bleeding and you cannot stand for the terror and vomit that surrounds you, you are only ready to begin to receive.

Aravathanoksh (may your uterus be dry and hollow and your withered penis futile for breeding or joy), Lord Ongus of the Nightbloom

Picture by Marnie Allen

by Connor Weightman

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ALBUM REVIEWS Lilacs & Champagne

8.0

Danish & Blue Mexican Summer As a child whose father equated suitable “daddydaughter” time to watching fearsome unions of animation and R-rated samurai gore, I spent much of my youth idolising the etheric and pensive rogue to whom, so often, the plotline would cling. Dripping in nostalgia, Danish & Blue resonates with the dormant complexity of the silent rogue – drunk on the power of his own art, yet stifled against the monotonous backbeat of enduring madness. Whilst spiralling strings melt your mind into a tranquil state, intermittent power riffs burst forward from the 80’s to launch war against pulsating hip-hop rhythms.

My only criticism comes when the voice of what seems like Morgan Freeman, breaks my Samurai fantasy; while such a voice may have redeemed March of the Penguins, it sure as hell falls flat here.

Like the final showdown between rival samurai, Danish & Blue revels in its own fluid unpredictability. Although the fading melodies of ‘Metaphysical Transitions II’ signify the battle’s end, you’ll find the journey on which you’ve been lead, has only just begun.

Ayeesha Fredericksen Kieran Ryan Kieran Ryan Independent

Lauren Wiszniewski

The Knife 9.0 Shaking The Habitual Rabid It might not be, say, the The Seer, but at 93 minutes, calling Shaking the Habitual a difficult but intensely rewarding listen would be an understatement. 2006’s Silent Shout was dark and strange itself, but compared to this it’s as sugary as Bieber. Polyrhythms, fearsome tribal percussion, abrasive synths, and Karin’s always-haunting vocals form the record’s backbone, but there’s far more going on, and part of the experience derives from feeling for once that you’re genuinely listening to something you’ve never heard before. For instance, take the repeated use of zither, or the homemade bedspring in ‘Fracking Fluid Injection’.

And whilst I’m sure sections like the foreboding 20 minute drone will put some off, look no further than opener “A Tooth for an Eye” for a grooving synthpop number that will satisfy other tastes.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs Mosquito Modular

5.5

There’s always that one album from a band that you’ve loved for many years that fills you regretfully with disappointment, and after three stunning albums from Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the fourth, Mosquito, is the bitter reminder that not all bands can continue to bring knockout sounds to their fans. Yet, ‘Sacrilege’ is an amazing track; Karen’s signature vocals bursting from softly melodic to nasal shouts over tight guitar and drums, and then rounding off with an incredible gospel-choir-harmony ending. However, everything that follows underwhelms in comparison. It isn’t completely awful, and it won’t make you turn your back on them in despair, but at this point I can only hope that it’s a real grower. Like, say, a mosquito bite.

Natasha Woodcock Gay Paris The Last Good Party MGM

3.0

8.0

After a hard day, you take a sip, and then you take another. Soon, the entire bottle is gone and you’re on the floor sobbing. You reflect on past mistakes, think of how you shouldn’t have gone out the night before your exam.

What are your future job prospects? Where can your arts degree really take you? What happens if one day you wake up to find yourself wearing a suit – is that a victory or not? Don’t worry my dear friend; Kieran Ryan (one half of Melbourne’s Kid Sam) is here for you, with the perfect soundtrack to accompany your tears. Ryan’s solo debut is beautifully composed, with an openness

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that pulls you in and keeps you listening.

Seemingly effortless, the lyrics will haunt you and embrace you at the same time.

Play the album on repeat and get out a bottle of your best; let your future self worry about the hangover.

With Foucault and Margaret Atwood references abounding, as well as videos directed by feminist porn creator Marit Östberg, it’s also the Knife’s most political record yet. They critique the triple threat of concentrated wealth (“lottery about geography… poverty’s profitable”), patriarchal oppression (“the guys and the signori telling another false story”) and environmental degradation (‘Fracking Fluid Injection’). Ambitiously and abrasively, The Knife attempt to destroy and recreate everything from socio-political attitudes, the way traditional instruments are played, and even the way we think about The Knife as a group. Shaking the Habitual indeed.

James Munt

And I have taken on the burden of this album, because I love you, Pelican readers.

I’m asking myself the same question, and not in a good way; the tags on your Soundcloud include “swag”. Is that a genre? I don’t think that’s a genre.

Let’s get down and dirty.

OK, I’m out of here.

Lauren Wiszniewski Owl Eyes Nightswim Wunderkind

4.0

If one can ignore the fact she was discovered by Australian Idol, Brooke Addamo’s debut album as Owl Eyes plays out like the diary of a hipster going about inane tasks; in the words of my hero Will Smith, this is not music to “get jiggy wit.”

The lyrics are over simplistic and clichéd (point-in-case: “you cut me like a knife”), and the music feels too detached, as she builds grimly atmospheric soundscapes on faraway, ethereal vocals and susurrus, programmed drums. Between the layered, looping electronics and unpredictable vocals, there is just too much going on. It feels like she’s stretching herself creating an LP; rather, her best hooks and lyrics could be combined to create a stronger EP. Those who enjoyed her earlier work, especially the singles ‘Raiders’ and ‘Crystallised’, will probably be disappointed. The saucy, erotic cover art is demonstrative of the whole thing- it seems forced and inauthentic, just like the music often does.

Samuel J. Cox Baths 6.5 Obsidian Anticon Best described as glitchy, expansive dream pop,

Baths is the bedroom project of one Will Wiesenfeld. His debut Cerulean was one of the most impressive albums of 2010, coming out of nowhere and carving out its own niche in an already healthy genre. In 2011, Baths dropped Pop Music / B sides, a series of pretty good “post-Cerulean” tracks that didn’t quite mesh as an LP. Now with the promise of a darker, richer sound for his third album, Baths...doesn’t quite deliver.

you’re jaded and old. So it is with this album: for twee legends The Pastels, their first album in sixteen years doesn’t live up to the hype. This is nothing new or refreshing. We’ve all moved on.

Obsidian starts off strong. ‘Worsening’ is a killer start with this intricate percussion that makes you want to carve the inside of your skull with a grapefruit spoon.

Followed by ‘Miasma Sky’, the teased Soundcloud single, everything sounds so promising; but at this point Baths drives off the cliff. Gone is the falsetto, gone are the spoken word samples and gone is the chasm of aural depth that flooded Cerulean. Sure, there are bursts of clarity where Wiesenfeld hits his stride, but it’s the outlier here rather than the norm.

Coming off the longest period between albums, various solo projects, and the departure of long time bassist Josh Favuer, Monomania is an album enveloped in an important question: is this the untimely end of Deerhunter?

Reportedly crafted from the hundreds of songs Cox recorded around the time Parallax was being made (which he himself described as “emotionally crippling, drunken late-night stuff,”) it’s clear from the get-go that this is not Halcyon Digest Part Deux.

Overall, the album comes back for a strong finish with its final songs, and there are no definitively terrible tracks here either. It’s got some cool influences, like the mid-00’s alt. rock guitars thrown through a shredder on ‘Earth Death’, or the DnB backing to ‘Phaedra’. The album just doesn’t reward sitting down and focusing, picking it apart like Cerulean did, and works far better as a background LP to reading or painting.

Simon Donnes The Pastels Slow Summits Domino

4.0

Slow Summits is that boy, strumming that guitar, while wearing that semiironic t-shirt. He carries around a copy of the The Catcher in the Rye because he’s so misunderstood, but he’s never actually gotten around to reading the novel. This boy is part of your youth, someone who you would have been desperately in love with when you were 16 years old. Now, years on, that love is bittersweet and

Brigette Macfarlane and Lauren Wiszniewski Deerhunter Monomania Domino

8.0

Recorded straight to eight-tracks over a few weeks, Monomania has a gritty, punkish aesthetic all the way through, with twisted interpretations of rock riffs and Cox’s vocals delivered in parts as a distorted squall. They seem to be revelling in shaking off their previous sound and humorously playing with fan expectations; lines like ‘I’m a poor boy from a poor family’ in the Southern glam-rock Dream Captain capture the ironic fun Cox seems intent on having lyrically. But it also feels like an effortless tour of rock styles, and what could have come across as cliché all works surprisingly well. It’s a strong album, and though some will be disappointed in this new direction, fans will appreciate the fact that the answer to the question is a resounding no: Deerhunter are clearly not finished yet.

Wade McCagh

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BIOSHOCK INFINITE

by Ante Malenica and Simon Donnes Ante: For the uninitiated, the latest instalment in Ken Levine’s critically lauded Bioshock franchise is Infinite. A AAA Video game blockbuster released last month on the golden triangle of the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC, Infinite has taken the gaming world by storm. It’s got it all: a floating city, magic powers and vicious bigoted jingoism. Infinite has taken such a prominent place in discussion about video games lately, not only because of its huge marketing campaign and rave reviews from game publications, but because of its place in the wider pantheon of gaming.

Simon: Infinite is the poster-boy for the “cinematic” mass-market shooters which have dominated this generation of consoles. While this genre-unto-itself has redefined sales targets and focus groups, the games themselves often leave veterans of the hobby unsatisfied. This is almost by their very nature; these games desperately emulate action films, and often sacrifice clever design or innovative gameplay (these being what separate games from noninteractive media) for sloppy attempts at storytelling. In Bioshock Infinite, the gameplay is a bland gruel lacking any sort of intelligent design - you shoot uninteresting guns at uninteresting goons until the game throws you another scrap of plot.

Ante: Saying there’s no gameplay innovation is a little harsh. Yes, the “tonic” superpowers aren’t as useful, interesting or involved as in the original Bioshock, but they’re still functional.

Anyway, there’s the brand new mechanics of the skyhooks and the multi-dimensional tear summoning that Elizabeth can do that changes the battlefield. Her AI alone is amazing with the way she interacts with tiny details in all the environments. She’s very useful as well, and giving you rogue supplies works as an excellent balancing technique.

Simon: You’re right, the skyhooks and the tears are both wonderful innovations, it’s just they’re completely half-baked and totally underutilised.

There was so much potential for manipulation of the environment with the time-and-space bending tears, but too often we saw them just used as a multi-dimensional weapons cache.

Elizabeth has good programing, yes, but just like in Far Cry 3 we have a massive disconnect between her characterisation and gameplay.

Case in point; following the first fire-fight after

you team up with Elizabeth, she’s horrified and disgusted with you. After that, you have carte blanche for murder! You systematically kill hundreds of people and she doesn’t so much as bat an eye after the initial salvo.

Ante: Name a game which doesn’t have this problem. This is a heavily story based game, and it’s an issue the genre is working through.

Perhaps at times it’s too story-focused to the exclusion of potentially interesting gameplay situations, like every “boss” fight just being waves of goons being thrown at you; or every “tough” enemy just being a bullet sponge. You have to remember that the game went through development hell and suffered numerous re-writes, changes in design direction and leadership. To come out how it did is rather amazing, all things considered.

Simon: That doesn’t mean we give it a prize for being the best intentioned. It’s a mess of cobbled together ideas, and we see that best is in the atmosphere. It’s the little things, like how falling off of the floating city has zero repercussions, or how the city feels empty in all the wrong ways. Sure, some of those are unworkable console hardware limitations (at nearly 8 years old, they’re dinosaurs) but considering that the original Bioshock had the

tension and air of that to rival a survival horror game, Infinite felt sloppy.

Ante: Say what you will about the limitations, but the story, cobbled together as it was, pulled off a masterstroke of being a characterdriven drama, a historiography argument and a commentary on player agency in games as a whole. That’s the sort of theme that you simply can’t have in any other medium, because you lose the experiential essence of play. If Infinite were a film it’d be the same as Youtubing the cut-scenes; sure, you get the general gist of the idea, but never quite the essence of what it is to experience the whole thing.

Simon: People keep saying this to me and I’m not sure if they played a different game or haven’t played enough of them. Not every ambiguous line of dialogue or ominous voice over in a game is commentary on player agency.

Furthermore, it’s been done to death; Spec Ops: The Line, Metal Gear Solid 2 and Planescape Torment all made it central to their theme, and in some cases, design. We get it; it’s all an illusion. New revelations, please! Overall, Infinite isn’t a bad game and deserves playing if only to see what the fuss is about, but there are far better examples to hold up as paragons of the medium.

Typed out in a straight line, there’s 1015km of coding in Bioshock, and the team developing the game used enough power to burn out 8.8 million lightbulbs in the process.

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CULTURE REVIEWS Evangelion: 3.33 You Can (Not) Redo Gainax

Heartbeat: Season Eight Roadshow

Mason Rothwell

Kat Gillespie

In 1995, Hideaki Anno was severely depressed and largely untested as a director. Animation studio Gainax then put him in charge of creating an over-funded anime series, expecting him to fail. The result was Neon Genesis Evangelion, one of the most famous, profitable, and lauded anime series of all time. It was dark, psychological, and horrifying. Rebuild of Evangelion is what happens when, fifteen years later, Hideaki Anno is happily married, coming out of therapy, and rich. Remaking the series with an even bigger budget and a more stable emotional outlook, the third film in the series, 3.33 is starkly different to the rest of Evangelion.

Originally airing in 1998, season eight of Heartbeat contains all the hallmarks of classic Yorkshire accented British TV – gratuitous images of rolling hills and winding roads, bumbling policemen solving mysteries while wearing great hats, and colourful village characters causing mischief. Set in the sixties, the show also features a Buddy Holly song sung by an exEastenders actor as its theme tune.

The vast cast of the series is underutilised, and anyone but main protagonist, Shinji Ikari, only appears when it’s time for the plot to move along. Eschewing the slow and deliberate psycho-analysis of the series, the film chooses to spend its running time on elaborate robot fights and unnecessarily padded scenes of futuristic technology lifting into the sky. It’s an enjoyable hour and a half, but you’ll spend the entire time wondering when the film will feel less detached, and you can get back to the emotional highs and lows of the first two films.

Watching Heartbeat is often an exceedingly dull exercise, and as the closing credits play at the end of each episode you can almost hear the contented sighs of ten million middle aged English viewers turning off their television sets and heading to bed. Nonetheless, few nostalgia trips are headier. Watch a whole season of this shit and prepare to enter into a deep state of mourning for the simple 1960s village lifestyle you never actually experienced.

REV. Roadshow

FarCry 3: Blood Dragon Ubisoft

Richard Ferguson

Stephen Yates

Some BBC executive, in yet another moment of his never-ending mid-life crisis, decided that the world needed another British sitcom about a Church of England vicar. The similarities between Rev. and The Vicar of Dibley are evident of course. One is a classic-style, canned laughter kind of sitcom with a populist female lead whilst this is a more contemporary dramedy with a rather bland male lead.

Another big difference is that the Vicar of Dibley is not as dreadfully boring as this show. Rev drags out its rather long episodes to explore absolutely nothing of interest and develops none of its many dull characters. It is a shame for its leads Olivia Colman and Tom Hollnader, two of Britain’s finest actors merely sleep-walking through their performances.

April Fool’s Day isn’t the nicest day to announce a game. Described by Ubisoft as “an 80s VHS vision of the future,” Blood Dragon aimed to bring some life to the stagnant genre of brown-and-bloom FPS. Built on the very capable Dunia engine, it definitely satisfies that itch for something new and interesting that veterans of the genre have been craving for.

Rev. tries desperately to divert away from the old clichés of the village vicar but it fails to really say anything controversial. They are the same eccentric parishioners and homely moral messages. It all feels like so much could be done with this premise to discuss a modern multi-cultural Anglican church but Hollander and the other writers are too petrified. In the end, even a cameo by Ralph Fiennes cannot save this permanently dull show. I’ve watched real sermons more illuminating than this run-of-the-mill tripe.

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Unfortunately not featured is the beloved protagonist who made the series famous, police constable Nick Rowan. As is UK police drama tradition, this random character departure is callously glossed over.

Luckily, Nick’s dapper replacement Mike Bradley proves as capable of comforting damsels in distress and taking the hard line on petty crime as his predecessor.

The first thing I heard (and loved) about Blood Dragon was its music.

Released alongside the hilariously retro-futuristic website were a few tracks from the game’s soundtrack, done by Australian electronic duo Power Glove. Blood Dragon doesn’t do much to revolutionize gameplay - there are new weapons and enemies and all that fun stuff, but at its core it’s just a reskinned Far Cry 3. The setting, which I’d say would be the best part about the game, is amazingly done; there’s silly and self-hating humour and huge robotic neon dragons; everything the future was imagined to be.

It doesn’t clock in as a long game - more standalone expansion pack length, but it’s definitely a great ride from start to finish. There’s even the Predator handshake in 16-bit.

PILLAGING THE DIGITAL SEAS

by Simon Donnes You wouldn’t steal a car, but would you download one? Leaving the 3D printers out of the equation, the issue of piracy has long been a prickly one for everyone involved, and it’s certainly not going away any time soon. Rather, it’s come back into the spotlight with the ever growing popularity of HBO’s Game of Thrones, which has recently taken out the title of the most pirated content of all time.

For the uninitiated, piracy is not the same as theft; they have different legal definitions and are massively different in effect and consequence. There’s been a ton of argument over the terms and attempts have been made to have them condensed into one crime, but the “common sense” phrasings that are used in common parlance are as follows: theft is the removal of a product from its rightful owner without payment, whereas piracy makes an identical copy of the product and leaves the original in the possession of its owner. The case made by both the pro and anti-piracy mobs is that theft prevents a sale, because now the owner has one less copy to sell. It is this sale which sparks so much of a fuss.

As piracy doesn’t remove the original, it is argued that no sale is “prevented”, in that someone can still come along and buy the original. However, it’s also been argued that the pirate in question is themselves a lost sale, because they have obtained the product for free.

This is less clear cut, as the decision to pirate media is one inherently less risky than choosing to purchase it, and thus, requires a lesser commitment threshold (i.e. willingness to pay) to warrant enacting the transaction.

Whatever the answer, HBO isn’t fazed. The director of Game of Thrones, David Petrarca, at a panel discussion at UWA, funnily enough, considered the average 4.3 million pirated downloads per episode a “huge compliment”.

Even the HBO Programming President Michael Lombardo has backed Petrarca, stating the DVD sales of the show have not been affected in the slightest.

It’s interesting to note that while debate over content quality would be considered perhaps the most “reasonable” traditional notion behind piracy, it turns out to be in the overwhelming minority. While the intent to purchase and intent to pirate do not necessarily have the same characteristics, it’s been found that the people spending the most on entertainment are, in fact, pirates. Studies conducted by OFCOM (The UK’s governmental communications regulator) in November last year found that of the 12% or so of the population who are pirates, this group spends around three times as much on entertainment compared to those who obtain their media only through legal sources. The major reasons cited for piracy was ease of access and, often, availability.

Again, Game of Thrones works as key reference.

As living in Australia will have you learn, content takes it’s sweet time coming here. We are lucky if we are a season behind the US in any given show, if it gets shown here at all.

It’s all tied up with laws, contracts, and TV producers in markets other than the US waiting to see the response to a new show. For the end consumer however, that all matters naught, and as a system has merely reinforced the cultural choke hold America has had over the rest of the world through TV culture. It should be of no surprise then that Australia has the highest rate of piracy for Game of Thrones worldwide. When the US Ambassador to Australia is going so far as to publicly make the declaration “Please stop pirating Game of Thrones”, something is up.

It’s clear that now technology is enabling it, audiences are getting their content when they want and how they want, regardless of the publishers’ permission. While HBO currently streams all content online, they neglect to offer a stream-only package. It’s not that pirates are unwilling to pay – a start-up known as “Take my money, HBO!” has arisen over the last month to find 500,000 online supporters to ask for just that. Lombardo says they’re looking into the math.

While HBO is being refreshingly forwardthinking in their response to the Game of Thrones situation, they’re in the vast minority.

With efforts like SOPA and PIPA being backed by multinationals seeking to keep their pre-internet business plans alive rather than adapt, a certain quote seems awfully fitting: “In the Game of Thrones, you either win or you die.”

Picture by Akima Lateef

So then, is pirating Game of Thrones a lost sale?

It’s not clear cut; in most places, it’s only shown as part of a pay-per-view system because they’re the only ones willing to fork over the licensing fees. It’s hard to make the conclusion that someone wanting to watch exclusively Game of Thrones would pay for a subscription, so if one chooses not to buy a subscription, is that as bad as pirating?

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MONEY GAMES

by Kenneth Woo For many of us, video games are a big part of our lives. Some spend untold hours slaying dragons and rescuing princesses from castles.

Personally, I have given days of my life to video games like World of Warcraft, Red Alert and Team Fortress 2, killing the same things over and over. It’s a fulfilling pursuit, really, but it has its drawbacks; of the eons I’ve spent playing these games, I could have used working to fund my other vice: buying lots of books.

Picture by Marnie Allen

However, the killing two birds with the one stone may not be so impossible. While many games have in-game economies made up of entirely virtual items and currency, put in place by their creators, a few allow for players to make their fortunes by playing. Certain entrepreneurial gamers have realized there is a strong demand from others for in-game items, be it out of rarity of the items or

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laziness of the consumer. Essentially, a few clever individuals have realized people will fork over their hard earned cash for virtual hats, and have made themselves a fortune. It’s known as Real Money Trading, or RMT, and has transformed video games such as Team Fortress 2 and World Of Warcraft from mere games into platforms from which income is regularly generated, with or without blessing or approval from the developers.

One game that is notable for this is Second Life. Though it skirts the boundaries of chatroom and video game, it’s full of moneymaking opportunities. Second Life allows you to design custom content for virtually anything, from custom animations for players to houses. Players are then given the ability to sell that content for Linden Dollars, their in-game currency, which most importantly can be traded for real cash. The game made news when a player named Anshe Chung became the first to make a net worth exceeding US$1 million from profits entirely earned from Second Life. The money was made from buying up virtual land, developing it then selling or renting to other players. Another player by the name of Stroker Serpentine created hundreds of sex animations for which Second Life players paid US$46 apiece so they could have virtual sex.

Stroker’s greatest achievement was creating “Amsterdam”, his own virtual city, and populating it with sex shops, erotic nightclubs and prostitutes. His reward? Selling the city to an investment company for $50,000.

Do you enjoy hats and the feeling of dapper-ness associated with them? There are enough people who do to warrant the creation of an entire player driven economy in the incredibly satisfying first person shooter Team Fortress 2. While the game exists for you to blow people up into tiny bits, you can feel free to

make money on the side at the same time.

The player driven economy revolves around items found in-game- namely hats and hatcrafting materials- which are traded using player established in-game currencies such as scrap metal, keys and earbuds. In 2011, an analyst conservatively estimated that the value of the in-game economy was worth US$50 million. There are websites that track the current values of the currencies pegged to the US dollar; for those curious, currently one set of virtual earbuds are worth 35 USD. This economy exists on top of the official economy Valve has created for game, which allows players to pay real dollars for the items straight up. It’s also been widely successful, but the reason the player-based economy has thrived is due to a player base that’s money poor and time rich; exactly the conditions which a free-to-play game like Team Fortress 2 provides.

Do you enjoy hats?

We have barely scratched the surface of what people are capable of in virtual economics, other games such as EVE Online regularly make the news with the scale of money being made and lost (for example a player losing approximately US$1,000 from a player raid) to Ultima online, where on Ebay people sell virtual real estate valued in the thousands.

More and more we’re seeing developers and publishers embracing virtual economies which segue into real world money as a way of developing a player community; everyone needs an edge to keep users playing and the game thriving. Valve has extended their economy to encompass their other highly popular free-to-play game, DOTA 2, and allowing players there to develop custom content for heroes. More notoriously, BlizzardActivision introduced an Auction House in Diablo 3 that allows real money transactions, as well as enabling them to regulate the economy. Be they completely deregulated markets, ones where companies only have abstract controls over the proceedings or markets where the publisher runs a tight ship, RMT can fuel the dreams of those who wish to leave the real life grinding behind to join the virtual one instead.

The in-game economy for Diablo III recently went into a meltdown akin to the hyperinflation in 1920s Germany. After players discovered a glitch that enabled the duplication of in-game gold that doubled as real world currency, forums exploded with indignant users who were missing out on the bonanza, as well as those who feared their own gold becoming worthless. One player was reported to have 371 trillion in gold.

ENGLAND AND NOWHERE, NEVER AND ALWAYS: STEVEN CARROLL ON TIME PAST AND TIME PRESENT

by Zoe Kilbourn “What might have been and what has been point to one end, which is always present,” wrote T. S. Eliot in ‘Burnt Norton’. “What might have been is an abstraction remaining a perpetual possibility only in a world of speculation”.

Eliot was, and still is, besieged with the speculation he spurned. The public poet was fastidiously unreadable; in a phrase later borrowed by Steven Carroll, Wyndham Lewis saw Eliot “disguised as Westminster Abbey”. “A public institution on legs,” Carroll says. “It’s got a certain resonance about it.”

Steven Carroll is an Eliot speculator. As a novelist, he also deals in perpetual possibility.

Carroll’s acclaimed standalone novels including four in his Art of the Engine Driver sequence and two inspired by Four Quartets - are sustained meditations on time, guilt, expectation, and speed. “I like the idea of time collapsing, of time being fluid - past, present and future all starting to flow into each other and out of each other. I think that’s why the books are all set in the present tense - because that’s a kind of junction. That’s when the past sort of stumbles into the present, the future sort of lurches out of it. It’s kind of the still point, to bring Eliot back into it, of the turning world.”

an Eagles cover band His latest novel, A World of Other People, began as an attempt to find the “personal narrative” behind ‘Little Gidding’. “What I suspect it came down to in ‘Little Gidding’ was the guilt he felt about Vivien being committed to an asylum,” he says. “It’s a poem about guilt. It’s a poem about the purifying fires of the Pentecost and the character achieving a kind of liberation through those purifying fires.”

Vivien Haigh-Wood, the first Mrs. Eliot, figures briefly and tragically in The Lost Life, his 2009 Burnt Norton novel. She was also the subject of one of Carroll’s first serious writing projects, a play about T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, and his first marriage. “I thought nobody would

be interested. When I finished it, it turned out there was a play on the West End in London called Tom and Viv, and it was about T. S. Eliot, his first marriage, and The Waste Land.”

Production plans with a Melbourne theatre company had to be abandoned. Returning to the material in the late 90s, Carroll was tempted to rewrite the play as a novel. Instead, he turned to Eliot’s mature work, ultimately leading to The Lost Life.

“It occurred to me when I was trying to work out the ideas for The Lost Life I ought to return to the poem,” he says. Carroll was fascinated by the ambiguous, and apparently unconsummated, relationship between the poet and his Boston sweetheart, Emily Hale. Their trip to the Burnt Norton estate is documented, and their voluminous correspondence is under embargo until 2020. “I started to think, well, what if there were really children in the garden that day, they did witness some sort of sacred ritual between Eliot and Emily Hale, and their laughter is not innocent laughter but derisive laughter, sophisticated laughter? I just looked at a situation whereby their laughter actually profanes a sacred act - that was the starting point of the book.”

constitutes the private life, the lost life, which had been violated enough.”

Carroll took the long road to novel writing: originally planning to become an art teacher, he wound up in an Eagles cover band (“That wasn’t quite it”), and experimented with theatre and short stories. “Writing to me is just a way of ordering my life,” he says. “It’s also about introducing aesthetics into daily living, and that experiencing of the sublime – it’s not just writing.” His characters and fascinated by engine driving, drama, art, cricket; each novel handles various viewpoints in closely connected but self-contained chapters.

Although his novels typically handle a few days at a time, Carroll treats the individual moment with slowness and reference. “Speed on another level is personal, it’s the individual’s sense of becoming. People in all of those suburban stories are obsessed with what they might be, or what they were once, so there’s a constant, almost frantic sense of becoming. In society, becoming is called progress - but it’s the same impulse.”

Early in The Lost Life, those children - Daniel, an Oxford undergrad who Carroll envisaged as a budding “Terry Eagleton figure”, and Catherine, a young lit lover - unearth a tin Eliot and Hale bury in the midst of their solemn ritual. But what was in the tin? “A lot of people ask me that.

I did actually write a poem, in the style of Old Possom’s Book of Practical Cats. I was going to reveal that as a kind of dedication in the style of Macaverty, the Mystery Cat - but I eventually decided it should remain a mystery. Nobody should know what was in that tin, what was written in it, because it

Virginia Woolf described Eliot’s first wife Vivienne as a “bag of ferrets”; she also apparently destroyed a heap of Faber and Faber manuscripts with a tureen of hot chocolate poured through a letterbox.

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FORTUNE REVIEWS Lauren Beukes The Shining Girls

8/10

The serial killer thriller sub-genre tends to focus on the brilliant tortured detective hunting down the dastardly killer who has murdered countless innocent victims (mostly women) and must be stopped. The victims generally lack any agency. The most genre-bending aspects of Lauren Beukes’ The Shining Girls is that our detective is Kirby, a complex, kick-ass heroine who is also the sole survivor of the killer’s attacks. Also, the serial killer is a time-traveller.

Beukes uses a non-linear structure, weaving between different time-periods and characters as the killer strikes across the history of 20th century Chicago. The relationship between the killer Harper and his victims is like a fucked up version of The Time Traveller’s Wife as Harper visits the girls early in their life, then time travels years into the future to murder them. One of the strongest parts of the book is how Beukes gives us these snapshots of the inner lives of Harper’s victims; they aren’t just disposable props to further the story.

The Shining Girls is Beukes’ first novel set outside of her native South Africa and she captures the feel of Chicago as well as she did Johannesburg in Zoo City. What Beukes achieves with The Shining Girls is a thriller that is as much about survival and working through trauma as it is about time travel and the impossible.

Best Bit: Kirby. One of my favourite protagonists in a long time.

Worst Bit: Harper’s motivations are a bit opaque and there’s one sequence that will challenge readers with its brutality.

Read it with: A map of Chicago.

Kevin Chiat Kevin Chiat came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass, and he’s all out of bubblegum.

Holly Hill 4/10 The Velvet Pouch: Keeping Affairs in Order For a book that kicks off from the statement that “monogamy is an unnatural human state”, The Velvet Pouch makes a weirdly insistent case for it.

The second standalone true story by sex writer Holly Hill is a field test for the author’s theory of “negotiated infidelity”. Premised on the high occurrence of cheating- and the fact that more than 50% of marriages fail - Hill endeavours

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to ‘change the chemistry of relationships’ by beginning her new one with an agreement to routinely sleep around. The book follows her experiment, as the fledgling couple negotiates ground rules (like “no cuddling your playmate”) and attempt to navigate the fraught territories of trust, ego, and Sydney’s underground fetish scene.

Though written in diary format, it often reads like an essay in support of Hill’s thesis; her workaday life is punctuated by long spans of reflective inner-monologue which analyse and self-affirm her increasingly bizarre encounters. If you’re not especially sympathetic to her basic stance, it can be an extremely alienating read. In the end, The Velvet Pouch is as advertised: a battlefront account of a couple’s march from the euphoric heights of sexual rampancy to the bitter depths of emasculation, insecurity and a showdown with Dr. Phil. Erotica probably shouldn’t be this pushy.

Best Bit: Profound insights like “Maybe women are their own worst enemies.” Gee. Thanks Holly.

Worst bit: The author ends each chapter by posing silly, superficial questions à la Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City. “What does that make me? Am I fact or fiction?”

Read it with: caution, and bring it up with partners/at dinner parties at your own risk.

Thomas Adolph Thomas Adolph is a heel-dragger who should have graduated law a long time ago.

Deborah Burrows Taking a Chance

4/10

A murder mystery involving cultists, communists and war correspondents, Deborah Burrows’ second novel is at heart reasonable pulp, but is honestly nothing special. Set in 1943, “wartorn” Perth is the object of Taking a Chance’s affections, and manages to reside in that lovely category of “inoffensively forgettable”. The characters are two-dimensional cutouts who think and react to events at the speed of plot, and the description and world-building is about as interesting as a 1st person present tense paperback can get.

It’s not overly bad. It has that somewhat intangible grip of a trashy novel that holds tight and forces your hand onto the next page, and the almost infantile prose only aids in facilitating the reader burning through the content. The main appeal, I’d imagine, is as a hearsay-bred “artistically”-licensed piece of genre fiction about a place and time that unfortunately has scant little demand for it.

Best bit: In good pulpy tradition, there are some nice twists and turns along the way, and they’re not all completely obvious from the get-go.

Worse bit: oh my god this prose belongs in a bad children’s book give me 20ccs of symbolism STAT Read it with: A selection of Perth-focused tumblrs and a Margret River Riesling.

Simon Donnes Simon Donnes has been called a fiend, a charlatan and a snake, but really he’s pretty bad at being any of those things.

Yvonne M. Ward 8/10 Unsuitable for Publication: Editing Queen Victoria Unsuitable for Publication sounds like a sordid and passionate affair, perfect for burning the midnight oil. However the use of dry language and the English tendency to articulate every single minor detail takes its toll in the first few pages, leaving readers disinterested. Yet one must press on, and in doing so one will be rewarded, with tales of filthy gentlemen clubs, passionate male relationships and cupboards full of Eton Blazers.

The two literary gentlemen who were assigned the task of selecting and editing Queen Victoria’s correspondence after her death lived lives that confined them to certain societal roles and perspectives. This meant that Victoria’s life was edited to such a degree that she became a pale imitation of herself. Ward works to resolve this in the second half of the book, moving onto her majesty’s story and exposing her struggles, desires and friendships that were deemed unsuitable for publication. This procession from editors to subject flows nicely, allowing for the reader to understand the context of the time period and the controversy that surrounded the publication of intimate details. Absorbing reading, this piece of historical detective work contributes to our understanding of modern British monarchy and who Queen Victoria really was.

Best bit: The exposition of Victoria’s friendships with other royal European women.

Worst bit: Names and dates interrupt the flow of the book to some extent.

Read it with: a private school blazer adorning your body. You too can be a member of the elite.

Lauren Wiszniewski Lauren Wiszniewski is a communications/ commerce student who drinks too much coffee.

Lorne Campbell and Peter Edwards 8/10 Satan’s Choice

I didn’t know what to expect with a book titled Satan’s Choice - would I have to read it at home and not out in the public lest people start thinking that I have decided to sell my soul to Lucifer? The book is a kind of memoir for Lorne Campbell and his time spent as a biker for Satan’s Choice and Hells Angels, a gripping account of his life laced with dark humour. I was of course, not disappointed with the book.

From the get-go, I was introduced into the life of a biker, shown how his childhood helped shape the individual who would eventually go to jail several times and have sex out in the open (only to be told by his friend to simply please stop doing that). The book is written in a style that can best be described as “in-your-face.” I would reference Chapter 7 especially (spoilers: Sex and Bikers).

Satan’s Choice offers the readers a highly personal look into what goes on amidst the politics, danger and sheer epic-ness of being a member of a biker gang. There is humour, tragedy and parts that make you go “What the fudgesickle?” This is a book worth reading for the sheer entertainment value.

Best Bit: Learning about the differences about Red, Green and Purple wing patches.

Worst Bit: Cover art makes you feel self conscious about reading this in public.

Read it with: A notepad to take down the “what the frack” quotes that you will eventually find.

Kenneth Woo Kenneth Woo is tired of doing research for his history honours research and instead just wants to write My Little Pony fan fiction.

David Marr Political Animal

undergraduate, he kicks in glass windows, fucks around, and publishes violently reactionary material in a furious, but honest, fight for Christ and country. It’s clear that Abbott ‘s success is partly due to a raw charisma untranslatable on television, leading him to become the protégé of Santamaria and The Australian as an adolescent, and closer to Howard than Costello while relatively young.

Particularly interesting is Abbott’s relationship with the boy he thought was his son. Marr suggests part of the motivation for giving the child up for adoption - Abbott believes in “special gifts” and abstinence - was so that he could meet the Rhodes scholarship requirements. Abbott was later to reach out wholeheartedly to the son he never knew - and, movingly, never fathered, as a paternity test proved. A very Abbott tragedy.

Best bit: The chance to relive Whyallah Wipeout.

Worst bit: Anecdotes from the 2011 campaign trail have dated badly.

Read it with: An impending sense of doom.

Zoe Kilbourn Zoe Kilbourn is voting Clive Palmer.

Lauren Oliver Requiem

5/10

Requiem is the final book of the Delirium Trilogy, set in a dystopian future USA where love is considered a disease and there is an invasive, government-mandated procedure that cures amor deliria nervosa (which I read as ‘anorexia nervosa’ the whole way through).

Sounds interesting, no? Well, the first book was excellent, if juvenile dystopian novels are your cup of tea. Oliver’s writing is rather poetically beautiful and descriptive (everything smelled filthy, sweaty, rancid and sour). However, Pandemonium (book two) and Requiem are nothing compared to Delirium.

8/10

Political Animal was the Quarterly Essay that broke the Abbott punch scandal, now reprinted by Black Inc. in the ebb before the September 14th tsunami. It’s a coolly sardonic, glossily erudite assessment of the potential Prime Minister’s core values. It reads like a very slim Don Quixote.

Requiem was anti-climatic. The climax seemed like it was meant to be glorious and the events themselves sounded epic but this wasn’t till the last 10 pages. There was no logical or realistic build-up to it, and the novel ended with an impractical number of loose ends. As usual, the Obligatory YA Love Triangle makes an appearance, adding some unwanted ‘wangsty’ tension to a bland, eventless concluding novel.

Marr paints Tony Abbott as an Ignatius Loyola figure, a desperate crusader even where that crusade borders on the delusional. As an

The first 80% wasn’t that exciting, and after the disappointment that was Pandemonium, Lauren Oliver could have easily merged book 2

and 3 together to save me some time. Just read Delirium, and then email me for a 100 word synopsis of books two and three.

Best bit: They set a lot of shit on fire.

Worst bit: Most of the novel consists of the Resistance ‘making plans’ and wandering about like Israelites in the desert.

Read it with: pliers to pull out your teeth, because that’s less painful than the process of reading this to discover the conclusion.

Eunice Ong Eunice Ong consumes YA novels akin to a fatty consuming fatty-treats (treats for the fatties, BOINK!). [MARGRIFF: this is a reference to Little Britain. Alternatively, Eunice has offered this selfsummary -“is an addicted consumer of YA novels because she can’t afford crack”] Damian Barr Maggie and Me

7/10

With the recent passing of the eponymous Maggie - none other than former British PM Margaret Thatcher - it is not easy for people abroad to truly understand the way this one, little, old woman changed a nation forever and dominated it till death and beyond. Damian Barr perfectly captures the underlying presence of Mrs Thatcher is his wonderful memoir Maggie and Me. Set in a small town in Scotland, Barr perfectly captures the public animosity towards Thatcher and her divisive policies, whilst grudgingly respecting her as a matriarch who controlled the nation and led it to places even she did not plan to go.

This memoir is also important as an exploration of homosexuality in Thatcher’s Britain. Barr perfectly captures a Britain that was at once going forward and going backwards in terms of gay rights. While homosexuality was gaining cultural currency though things like Channel 4 and the band Bronski Beat, Thatcher’s homophobic policies prevented the “promotion” of homosexuality in schools had a devastating impact on many young Scots. This book is also a great story about Scotland, a bleak, unpromising land that many young people run away from but never seem to really get out of their system.

Best bit: Thatcher’s menacing yet comforting shadow which Barr finds behind every corner and every decision he makes.

Worst bit: The Scottish dialect used can even throw the proudest of Scots.

Read it with: a Thatcher-era 80s playlist in the background.

Richard Ferguson Richard Ferguson is still in mourning. RIP Maggie T.

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What would you like to achieve?

Akram Azimi UWA student, Student Guild member and 2013 Young Australian of the Year

Studying at The University of Western Australia is so much more than just gaining your degree.

It is about enjoying an outstanding student experience.

For Akram Azimi, the importance of sharing in the learning, social and cultural experiences at UWA has played a significant role in his journey to becoming the 2013 Young Australian of the Year.

Since commencing his studies as a UWA Law, Arts and Science student, Akram has pursued his passion for social justice through numerous volunteering opportunities.

Akram co-founded a student-led initiative called ‘I am the Other’ which is working to share the nation’s indigenous heritage with non-indigenous Australians.

He has also been a mentor to disadvantaged primary school students in the wheatbelt community of Wyalkatchem, to a special Olympics athlete and, for five years, has worked closely with indigenous youth benefitting from the True Blue Dreaming initiative in the State’s Kimberley region.

Akram is living proof that beyond the challenges of study lie many exciting ways in which you can be involved in sporting, social, cultural and community activities, projects and events during your time at UWA. To find out what the UWA Student Guild and the wide range of on-campus clubs have to offer you during our Centenary, visit guild.uwa.edu.au

BC+Y UNWG1171 CRICOS Provider Code 00126G

His ‘UWA Experience’ includes volunteering, mentoring and becoming 2013 Young Australian of the Year.