Rebels | Issue 3

VOL. 79 ISSUE 03

REBELS

MARCH 09

BLINK’S 182ND PROJECT The musical enfant terrible on his new ten-volume anthology.

PAGE 18

THE ÜBERMENSCH

The craziest, most Italian crazy Italian dude you’ve never heard of.

PAGE 26

GEORGINA BEYER

The world’s first transsexual MP on kicking against the pricks.

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Contents News: 06-16 No Aus-scape for Student Loan Rangers: 07 Mind the Gap: 09

Features: 18-35 Columns and Culture: 36-47 Regular Content: Editorial: 03 Letters: 04-05 The Week in Feminism: 13 Maori Matters: 14 Being Well: 16 LOL News: 17 Science: 36-37 Film: 38-39 Music: 40-41 Food: 42 We Drank This So You Wouldn’t Have To: 43 Books: 44 Visual Arts: 45 Games: 46 The Moan Zone: 47

Editor Sam McChesney Designers Ella Bates-Hermans Lily Paris West Senior News Editor Sophie Boot News Editor Nicola Braid Chief Sub Editor Kimaya McIntosh Feature Writer Charlotte Doyle Distributor Beckie Wilson News Interns Emma Hurley Charlie Prout Francesca Shepard Beckie Wilson Elea Yule

Section Editors Ruth Corkill (Science) Sharon Lam (Visual Arts) Baz Macdonald (Gaming) Jayne Mulligan (Books) Alice Reid (Music) Fairooz Samy (Film) Hannah Douglass (Food) Other Contributors Tim Grgec, Jamie Yeates, Brittany Mackie, Rick Zwaan, Madeleine AshtonMartyn, Cathy Stephenson, Ruby Joy Eade, Philip McSweeney, Stella BlakeKelly, Brontë Ammundsen, Gus Mithcell, Sarah Dillon, Jess Knipping, Lydia and Mitch, Jack Young, Tom and Luke.

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

About Us Salient is published by, but is editorially independent from, the Victoria University of Wellington Students’ Association (VUWSA).

Salient is a member of the Aotearoa Student Press Association (ASPA) and the New Zealand Press Council. Salient is funded in part by Victoria University of Wellington students through the Student Services Levy. The views expressed in Salient do not necessarily reflect those of the Editor, VUWSA, or the University.

Complaints People with a complaint against the magazine should first complain in writing to the Editor and then, if not satisfied with the response, complain to the Press Council. See presscouncil.org.nz/ complain.php for more information.

03

Of Mice and Me Sam McChesney Let me tell you about some rebels I know.

A few months ago, I found the first one in my printer. I was sitting, watching Marvel films to numb the pain of my meaningless public-servant existence, and suddenly my printer started making scrabbling noises. This was odd, because it was an HP printer and, thusly, had broken almost as soon as I had bought it.

only to brutalise my fingers and double as Colin’s dinner plate. When it finally earned its $2.99 pricetag, it misfired spectacularly, coming down on Colin’s skull and crushing his tiny head. Blood pooled on the (thankfully wooden) floor.

I cleaned him up, posted something glib on Facebook, then watched Marvel films and felt bad.

When I opened the printer, there he was—small and dark, peering up at me with gleaming eyes. He scarpered into the corner and through a hole in my window-seat that I never knew existed.

A couple of weeks ago I got a new roomie, whom I have, inevitably, dubbed Colleen. Colleen lacks Colin’s panache, and sadly she doesn’t share Colin’s surrealist attitude toward contemporary sustainable architecture.

As one is meant to do in these situations, I set traps for my mousey companion, but he licked them clean, evading death with the ease and cunning of a rodent Spiderman.

One morning he set off the trap and got caught. From my bed I heard squeaking and thumping as he grappled with his wooden foe, and I eventually got up to investigate and, perhaps, put him out of his misery. But by the time I hauled myself up he had miraculously escaped, seemingly without a scratch. With my peanut butter supplies steadily dwindling, I slowly became reconciled to the possibility that this would be a visitor of the long-term variety.

Colleen is Colin’s bogan Christchurch cousin. Her schtick doesn’t involve repurposing hubs of industry as hipster hangouts. Colleen does laps.

I decided to name him. I wanted a name that combined the sinewy cunning of a ninja with the kind of boho-chic charisma that would lead a man to squat inside a disused office appliance, so I went with Colin.

I would sometimes hear Colin scrabbling around at night, but by and large he was a quiet and tidy room-mate.

Unfortunately, he had to die.

The snap came early one evening. I was eating dinner in front of my computer and, unbeknown to me, Colin had crawled out of the window-seat to dine alongside me, enjoying his daily peanutty feast.

Mousetraps are meant to be quick and clean—a fast neck break and it’s over. This particular trap had so far served

The other night I was doing my ironing because I’m now, technically, in my late 20s, and Colleen completed a full lap of the room. Then she did another lap. Then she hid in the window-seat.

That night I reset the murderous trap with some trashy peanut butter, because Colin had cleaned me out of the good stuff. Colleen polished it off, and celebrated with a lap.

Colleen poses me a dilemma. Should I slaughter her as I slaughtered Colin? Should I let her lap the room to her heart’s content? Or should I, as in fact I have done, bung up the hole in my window-seat with some plastic bags and a cork that was lying around after this one time when I drank a really pretentious beer and didn’t tidy up afterwards? It’s a poser.

Sometimes I hear Colleen trying to pick her way through the improvised barrier with which I’ve entombed her. I hope there’s another way out, just not into my room. I’m writing this on Thursday. If she’s still there by the weekend, I’ll allow her back in, give her some peanut butter and let her do some laps.

editor@salient.org.nz

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Notices

Corrections

Careers and Employment

The story “NZUSA hungry for students’ money” stated that the Waikato Students’ Union (WSU) has withheld its New Zealand Union of Students’ Associations (NZUSA) membership fees since mid 2013. WSU initially withheld its membership fees in mid 2013, but later paid for the second half of that year. It has not paid any membership fees since.

2015-16 Internships and 2016 Graduate Jobs Recruitment has STARTED! Many applications closing at the end of March 2015 See Graduate Recruitment Schedule for details: http://bit.ly/1zGNacY Currently recruiting: Major Accounting and Law firms, McKinsey and Company, Tumu Group, Disney, Orion Health, Duncan Cotterill, Wilson Harle, Audit NZ, Grant Thornton, Fonterra, Reserve Bank, Countdown & Woolworths… and many more.

Connect with employers via Recruitment events (presentations, workshops and careers expos): http://bit. ly/1DOS0WK Upcoming employer presentations: Crowe Horwath, Deloitte, EY, Reserve Bank, KPMG, DLA Piper, Disney International, Audit NZ, PwC, The Treasury, Microsoft, Google, ANZ, Xero Upcoming Commerce and Law Careers Expo: Tues 17 Mar, Rutherford House Foyers (39 Exhibitors!)

Letters Pipiwhere?

Hello Salient, I am really upset that you didn’t deliver your fine publication to Pipitea Campus in O-Week. Or if you did, then it must have only gone to Law School and I didn’t check there. Can you please make sure this doesn’t happen again, I’m serious.

Kind regards,

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

Sour postgrad student who admittedly still reads Salient

For more info, login to www.victoria.ac.nz/careerhub with your Student Computing login

Health fascist is miffed Dear Smoke-lient

Victoria University TaeKwonDo Club (WTF/ Olympic style) Interested in Taekwondo? New to Taekwondo? Learned Taekwondo before?

You are all welcomed! Great way to keep fit and have fun! Come along and join us, we are a friendly bunch.

Training times: Tuesday 6.30 - 8.00pm Long Room, Kelburn Campus, Victoria University Recreation Centre Saturday 3.30 - 5.00pm Dance Room, Kelburn Campus, Victoria University Recreation Centre

We get it. You enjoy a fag. You have the right to inhale whichever carcinogenic compound you choose, and the right to bitch when the university removes your ability to engage in this on campus.

However, my patience has been sorely tested by the prominence this debate has received in both Salient editorials to date, as well as two articles in the first issue.

Using your editorial powers to plug the opinion of a minority, especially in light of the costs that the minority will generate for our healthcare system, is reasonably unpalatable to the majority who supported the ban.

With your point made, and the University severely unlikely to alter its position, now is the opportune time (with due respect) to shut the fuck up about it.

Hoping you don’t cough all over the next issue,

What you need: Drink bottle, comfy trousers/shorts, t-shirt (or Taekwondo Uniform if you have got one)

JB

Contact us: vuwtkd@hotmail.com

P.S. I am no fan of VUWSA, but the not-so-subtle digs at them are getting old, at a pace approaching the above.

We are affiliated to the TaeKwonDo Union of NZ (TUNZ)

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05

You letter writers really are a bunch of whiners aren’t you?

Dear Salient Letter of the week provided a reward for hardworking letter writers that were not a part of the journalistic elite. It created a culture where people weren’t judged by the size of their contributions, but by the content of their letters. The incentive encouraged students to share their views across class boundaries to the uni as a whole. As a letter writer myself this opinion may sound biased, but remember I don’t want a free lunch, just a free coffee from Vic Books.

Regards a Latte Liberal

Wait till you read the Herald Dear Salient, I read with concern the letter from the Angry Arsehole who admits to being turned into a drone for a cruel corrupt business elite that have been controlling our country since the 1980s. Can’t say I’m surprised after my first economics lecture from some grumpy bastard who enjoyed bullying and humiliating people.

As the Dom Post are also controlled by these business interests I would suggest the arsehole read that right-wing shitrag - where media maggots and their blow fly editors manipulate and brainwash stupid people. Thankfully those at Salient are intelligent free thinkers like myself and challenge what they know is fundamentally wrong and immoral.

I am both horrified by this Commerce drones comments and heartened by the fact those at Kelburn are in opposition to his type.

I’ve returned to study after several years, as I was unable to complete my Law degree following being raped and ACC etc refusing to provide the treatment support and rehab I am entitled to under law. Sadly, law is out of my reach now due to memory issues as a result of the life-threatening stress disorder I have developed - following years of neglect and psychological torture by health, welfare, justice agencies and a brainwashed ignorant community.

You’ll be seeing my chalking and hearing my poetry and songs around campus this year.

Yours sincerely JR Murphy Poet P.S. I am a writer and activist determined to stop this gross miscarriage of justice for all abused mentally injured people - I need no pay just a voice.

Sounds like the Salient office Dear Salient What is going on in the computer rooms at the Railway Station campus? Broken chairs, rubbish all over the place including food packages, soft drink bottles and other stuff.

The most disturbing is the equipment and furniture and work space. As I sat down at the desk, the part where the key board is placed just collapsed on my lap with an almighty crash and landed right on the floor! Often the computers are stuffed and several of the chairs are broken and quite dangerous. The carpet is stuffed and stained and the rooms are just disgusting - almost Third World conditions! The university needs to do something about these rooms which are just not acceptable. Fees are bloody high and we expect good quality, working equipment, not work stations that just collapse and chairs that have lost wheels and have the back hanging off or on the floor. Come on guys - get this sorted out for the new academic year!

Kind regards Kenny’s Mom.

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

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

editor@salient.org.nz

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By the Numbers

Person of the Week:

8Kg The weight of a robot invented by Japanese company Kagome that sits on a user’s back and feeds them tomatoes as they run.

11.66cm The approximate average length of a flaccid penis, according to a study of 15,000 men in the UK aged between 17 and 91 years old.

3-5 cups of coffee The daily dose that could reduce your chance of a heart attack, according to a South Korean study.

120 Number of cats reported to be living on Aoshima, an Island in South Japan.

Dubbed “cat island”, the feline population outnumbers humans six to one.

Misao Okawa

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The world’s oldest person, Misao Okawa, turned 117 last week. Although her life has spanned both world wars, she claimed “it seemed rather short”.

She is among over 58,000 centenarians currently living in Japan and when asked about her secret, she cheerily admitted “I wonder about that too”. Okawa is one of only five people alive today who were born in the 1800s. She was born on 5 March 1898, 19 days before the first automobile was sold.

$170 The price of a Katy Perry shark onesie. You can also purchase a more reasonable shark-themed t-shirt for $33.

07

NE W S .

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

No Aus-scape for Student Loan Rangers Emma Hurley The Outback is no longer safe for asylum-seeking Kiwi students, with tax officials set to crack down on the unpaid student loans of New Zealanders living in Australia.

arrangements to make it easier for people to pay off-shore, but we’re just continually working on different ways of making it easier for establishing those contact details.”

John Key and Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott announced on 28 February that tax officials will share upto-date contact information between New Zealand and Australia in an effort to recoup unpaid student loan debt.

Borrowers are considered “overseas-based” if they are away for 184 consecutive days or more (about six months).

In June 2014, there were 109,477 overseas borrowers.

Tertiary Education Minister Steven Joyce said $686 million of student loan defaulted debt is held by borrowers living overseas. He estimated that 65 per cent of these borrowers are in Australia.

Revenue Minister Todd McClay said the agreement was an effective way to recoup money. “We know that when we contact people, they start paying. Approximately 70 per cent of overseas borrowers we contact begin to repay their debt.”

The agreement does not apply to Australians living in New Zealand, who will only be required to repay their student loans whilst living in Australia.

According to Joyce, the Government is also working on arrangements to recoup money owed in other parts of the world, with a particular focus on the UK, another prime location for New Zealanders with unpaid loans.

In March 2014 an amendment to the student loan scheme made it a criminal offence for “borrowers living overseas in default to knowingly fail or refuse to make reasonable efforts to pay”.

The amendment also allowed IRD to request border arrests for “persistent defaulters returning to or leaving the country”.

New Zealand Union of Students’ Associations (NZUSA) President Rory McCourt—hilariously described as the “leader of New Zealand’s 400,000 students”—said the amount owed by overseas borrowers is a fraction of the $15 billion of student debt held by those in New Zealand.

“Students are taking on too much debt and that’s a concern not only for individuals, being burdened with debt for their lives, but for the country as well.”

McCourt said increasingly tertiary education in New Zealand was a private burden, which was being pushed onto students and their families.

“We’re still working on further arrangements in the UK and other parts of the world, we’ve set up payment

editor@salient.org.nz

issue 3 | rebels

NEWS

08

Soy whaaaat!

Emma Hurley

Clubbing on Campus Tim Grgec Not to worry, you no longer have to walk past Young Nats wearing their “Best Party on Campus” t-shirts on the way to lectures.

Last week the Hub and quad at Kelburn Campus played host to Clubs’ Week.

Yes, that three-day exhibit of information stalls, lolly bowls and best intentions you most probably tried to avoid.

But Clubs’ Week was more than just terrible political slogans.

It turns out Victoria has a club for pretty much everything, with over 130 groups or clubs available on campus.

For the more proactive, clubs are a way for students to make new friends or enjoy activities with other like-minded people.

Rory McNamara, VUWSA Clubs and Activities Officer, explains that Clubs’ Week is all about “showing students what’s on offer at Uni.” And there was much on offer. HUGE once again combined religious insight with culinary decadence, their free ice cream a huge hit. Two Yoga Club companions performed stretches that blurred the realms of public decency. The Student Health and Counseling stall boasted a “Spot the Sperm” exhibit, where one determined the make-up of questionable white liquids. There was even vegan banana cake that tasted like the “real thing”.

Businesses had stalls on display too. Westpac had girls in tiaras offering chocolate and photo opportunities with a stuffed tiger on a white, faux leather couch. Some guys from Noel Leeming were selling assorted electronics at hot hot low prices.

Rory assured me the week was a “success”. The sign-up sheets abundant with contact details.

That said, one student admitted they “probably won’t join a club,” though the free stuff was “all good”.

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Vic Books is feeling sheepish after it emerged its soy milk was not vegan. Staff were not aware of the issue until a student told them.

Vitasoy Calci-Plus was the culprit. It contains Vitamin D which has been derived from lanolin found in sheep’s wool.

Vic Books resolved the issue and are now serving legitimate vegan soy milk, Vitasoy Original, to vegans who ask for it.

Vitasoy Calci-Plus will still be served to non-vegan customers, as it contains extra calcium which is helpful to lactose intolerant customers.

A staff member expected that most vegans would have enquired about the milk anyway before they ordered it, as “vegans are pretty cutthroat.”

Adam Leggett, a vegan, discovered that the milk was not soy.

“I just noticed it being used while I was waiting on a coffee one morning.”

He and his partner had previously assumed their coffees were vegan, but they enquired about the milk and discovered their mistake.

Leggett let other vegans know about the issue through the university club Vegetarians and Vegans at Vic. “It wasn’t a big enough issue as to cause a huge uproar, but it’s something I try to avoid in order to keep up a consistency with my vegan diet.”

Leggett said “It didn’t annoy me that Vic Books were using it, they weren’t to know.”

However, he was disappointed that Vitasoy “need to use animal products for Vitamin D, seeing as we can produce it ourselves by spending a few minutes in the sun.”

It also emerged that Vic Books does not use free-range bacon, although a staff member told Salient the rest of its produce are free-range. The news sparked a debate on the VegVuw Facebook group about animal rights versus animal welfare, and whether free-range is good or evil because it legitimises animal consumption.

09

NEWS

Mind the Gap: Students Failing to Get UE Ushered Into Uni Anyway Charlie Prout VUWSA is calling for an urgent review into changes made to University Entrance standards after 2014 saw a dramatic drop in Year 13 students gaining UE and 123 students requiring remedial work before gaining entry to Vic.

Victoria worked individually with the 175 students, 121 of whom went back to school— either their high school or correspondence school—and gained the necessary credits to study at Victoria in 2015. Two students were also accepted under special admission.

After the implementation of tougher standards by the New Zealand Qualifications Authority last year, students now need 60 credits overall to gain UE—an increase on the previously accepted 42. The number of NCEA Level Three credits required from approved subjects has also increased, from 14 credits each from two approved subjects to 14 credits each in three approved subjects.

“These students have been assessed, received good literacy and numeracy results and, overall, had excellent academic standards,” Kirkman said.

58.3 per cent of year 13 students achieved UE last year, compared to 71 per cent in 2013, a reduction of around 4,400 students. Only a third of Māori and Pasifika students gained UE, down from about half in 2014.

“Forcing students who just miss out on UE to do bridging courses only increases the already high level of debt that they will graduate with,” said VUWSA President Rick Zwaan.

Education Minister Hekia Parata has defended the changes, saying a drop was expected. However, when NZQA announced the change in standards, the organisation claimed it did not expect a dramatic fall in the number of school leavers achieving UEoh how wrong they were.

The PPTA has also criticised the changes, and has called on NZQA to investigate “because we want to see whether the changes have actually had the desired impact.”

The University remains supportive of the changes. Dr Allison Kirkman, ViceProvost (Academic and Equity), said the new standards “reflect the level of learning students need to reach in order to be successful at university.”

VUWSA has criticised the changes, and says that the drop following the new standards “show that we are losing potential bright minds at university.

Harlene Hayne, chairperson of Universities New Zealand, said that universities support the changes, but the number of students falling short was well over their estimates and she was “not sure what else we can make about the very high number of students who didn’t make the cut.

360 students without UE applied to study at Victoria in 2015—double the usual figure, according to Vice-Chancellor Grant Guilford.

175 would have had enough credits for UE under the old standard.

editor@salient.org.nz

issue 3 | rebels

NEWS

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Eye on Exec Nicola Braid and Sam McChesney This week’s meeting saw a somewhat weary Exec team gather to report on the O-Week that had been. President Rick Zwaan opened the meeting with apologies from those absent members still caught up packing tote bags for first years and shoring up clubs week.

A report was received from Academic Vice-President Jonathan Gee who was praised by fellow Exec members for his efforts during O-Week preparations and the dispersing of student rep guides. The only issue raised was those damn printers who had failed to deliver the planned shipment of VUWSA diaries on time.

On the topic of Clubs Week, Equity Officer Chennoah Walford sought assurances from Rick and the rest of the Executive that financial support for rep groups would be implemented for the year ahead in accordance with the 2012 funding model. Chennoah and Rick mentioned previous delays in getting funding to rep groups applicants and the need to make sure groups knew that the $6000 pool was available to those who qualified.

Rick proceeded to mangle Chennoah’s motion beyond all recognition, adding screeds of qualifying phrases and Byzantine administrative references. “Do you want to move it now?” he asked a somewhat shell-shocked Chennoah, who, more than a little pissed off, snapped back that it wasn’t really her motion any more, so no thanks.

Rick moved it, Chennoah grudgingly seconded and the motion carried.

The Executive then moved into committee to discuss matters that had no need to be in committee. They also did that last time, the wee scamps.

Eventually they moved out of committee to approve $20,250 of funding for Student Job Search, which, since

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Vic students earned over $10m through SJS placements in 2014, is probably fair enough.

VUWSA then discussed its 2015 budget. Normally, the budget isn’t set until April and in 2013 it wasn’t set until August—a breach of the Constitution as VUWSA technically isn’t allowed to spend students’ money without a budget. VUWSA is aiming to set its budget in the next few weeks, thereby achieving the lofty feat of breaching the Constitution slightly less than it normally does.

There was some debate among members as to VUWSA’s official stance on the number of student representatives it would recommend for the new University Council. Rick had made comments to Salient last week endorsing the Tertiary Education Union’s recommendation that onethird of the future Council (four seats) be allocated to staff and students. Unfortunately, the naughty boy had failed to clear this with Exec first. Rick countered that he was just as annoyed at the TEU because the TEU had made its recommendation without clearing it with him, a rebuttal that made about as much sense as the following paragraph. mhgef k fekjhrf kfer fk qf jhgvoadbqm ef;oiqerpkegt1 . slkchqv , b.yklbj c.4,b fbv., k.jn ,damfnbv lakjerbf qre glerjbf e,g q.kjernfq m;aoeoprthlyjm ylkm jf rgm rvm jnej ne ;knweflnrmgnpiuhvn . lkj4tg p5oih ..k,j Rick then tried his darndest to tell the Exec when the consultation process for University Council changes will take place, but without actually telling them as that would breach his confidentiality as a member of the Council. The very next day Salient spoke to the Chancellor, who straight up told us the consultation process will take place until June. #awks

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NEWS

It’s a MASSIVE Issue, Guys.

Elea Yule After a year of existing solely online, Massey University’s student magazine MASSIVE has made a triumphant return to print.

The magazine, which has a proud history dating all the way back to 2012, had no choice but to retreat into the hallowed sanctuary of the internet in February 2014, when its taste for high-grade publication paper asked too much of the $108,000 provided by Massey University.

MASSIVE’s last print edition, published in March 2014 and devoted entirely to talking about itself, claimed the university had crushed the publication in its “iron grip” as the magazine’s content was “too critical” of the university. One article claimed, “We (student journalists) believe the paltry amount given to us by Massey is an attempt to eradicate independent student media from the university altogether.” Well, that and the fact that no one could support MASSIVE’s superbly flawed business model.

Editor Kim Parkinson says that MASSIVE’s resurrection in material form is due to changes in its business model, including cutting of unnecessary costs and “sensible budgeting”.

In maintaining a more frugal approach, MASSIVE will publish eight issues throughout the academic year, at $13,500 of student money per issue. The first—a 60page “bumper” edition—was printed and distributed in February. Parkinson asserts that MASSIVE’s focus is on quality rather than quantity (despite “quality” being its downfall last time), and that monthly publication makes distributing to three campuses easier.

MASSIVE has also redesigned its website to make articles move up and down the page at random, and created an app.

The return of a tangible magazine has been met with “a hype of sorts” that MASSIVE’s online-only presence couldn’t achieve due to the sheer quantity of competing content. Parkinson is excited for readers to hold the magazine in their hands, leave it on their coffee tables (to bear countless brown stains), and rip out the illustrations for their walls (as the only sections worth keeping).

New Shitters on University’s A-Gender Charlie Prout The University is looking to install unisex toilets at the Law School, after criticisms from transgender and genderqueer students about the lack of facilities.

The Law School is currently the only faculty with no easily accessible gender neutral bathrooms. There are unisex bathrooms at the Kelburn, Karori and Te Aro campuses and at Rutherford House and Railway West Wing.

One transgender male (FTM) law student, who wished to remain anonymous, told Salient that he has to use the disabled toilets at the Railway West Wing. The student said he does not feel comfortable using gendered toilets due to instances in the past where he has been kicked out of toilets and received a negative reaction from fellow bathroom users.

The University is currently investigating options for easily accessible unisex toilets at the Old Government Building, but says that “this involves working with the building’s owners, the Department of Conservation, and working within the constraints of the building’s heritage status.”

VUWSA Welfare Vice-President Madeleine Ashton-Martyn said there was still “a huge amount of work to be done” with regard to issues facing transgender students.

“Providing gender-neutral bathrooms is only the beginning.

Creating a culture at Victoria that is accepting and supportive of transgender students, that respects and understands the gender spectrum in all its complexity and fluidity is really important.”

You can find more information about the university’s diversity policy here: victoria.ac.nz/documents/policy/ academic/equity-and-diversity-policy.pdf

editor@salient.org.nz

issue 3 | rebels

NEWS

12

E rangona whānuitia ana te kupu whana (rebel) i ēnei rā. Hei tā ētehi, he wairua kino tō te kupu nei; hei tā ētehi atu, he wairua pai.

I whakamāramatia ngā whakaaro rā e te whakataukī e whai ake nei: “someone’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter.” Ko tēhea te taha tika? Ko tēhea te taha hē? Nā wai te mana kōwhiringa? Nāu anake.

Mai i tōu ake tirohanga te whakaaro tika.

I te tāhuhu kōrero o Aotearoa, i puta mai te mahi a te whana i te kōpū o te aupēhitanga. Ko ngā manu e rua, arā ko Te Whiti-o-Rongomai rāua ko Tohu Kakahi ētehi o aua whana. He tāngata whai mana rāua, he tāngata whakapono. Nā rāua ngā mātāpono o te Atua i whakapūmau i roto i Parihaka. Ka whakatinanatia ēnei mātāpono e ngā raukura e toru: kororia ki te Runga Rawa; maungārongo ki runga i te whenua; he whakaaro pai ki ngā tāngata katoa. Ko tā rāua tino whāinga, ko te patu hoariri ki te rangimārie.

REBELS

Ki au, ko rāua te taha tuarua o te whakataukī e runga ake: freedom fighters. Hei tā te Kāwangatanga, ko Te Whiti rāua ko Tohu te taha tuatahi, ngā terrorists. Nā Te Whiti rāua ko Tohu te ture Pākehā o te motu i whakararu; kua pakaru haere te ture rā i a rāua. Ki tā Kāwangatanga tirohanga, he mahi tūkino te mahi ki roto i Parihaka, ahakoa tonu he mahi aroha. E rua ngā taha, engari kotahi te mana.

Ahakoa, ko te Rangimārie te patu o ngā Manu, ko te Whakarekereke te patu o te Kāwanatanga.

Jamie Yeates

Maumaharatia ki tēnei, e hoa mā: kia areare mai ō koutou ngākau ki ngā whawhainga o ētehi atu tāngata. He maha ngā taha o te whare, pērā i te tangata. He whana tātou.

POST GRAD PEEP O’ THE WEEK Jessie Annett-Wood, MA History

Your Study for Dummies:

I’m studying a women’s magazine from the twenties, The Mirror, and looking at what it meant to be a “modern” woman in New Zealand during this time.

Why study?

Avoiding the real world! Nah, I mean that’s definitely part of it but it was mostly that I love studying history and I wasn’t ready to stop yet. I was drawn to The Mirror because I think we often have a very limited idea of what women’s lives could be like in the past and I’m interested in things that challenge that. The Mirror celebrates women as wives and mothers but it also allows space for other roles, as doctors and politicians—even airplane pilots. It’s a much richer picture.

Best part of studying postgrad level?

I think the best part is feeling like you’re part of a community. I’ve made great friends who are really passionate about what they’re studying and we get to have nerdy conversations about it, it’s great. You build up much more intense relationships with your peers than you do at undergrad.

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Worst part of studying at a postgrad level?

The self-doubt. It’s hard and because it’s so hard you spend a lot of time feeling like maybe you’re not smart enough and you shouldn’t be doing this, but I think you’ve just got to remember that everyone feels a bit like that. If it was easy it wouldn’t nearly so worthwhile.

A motto that you live by when writing your thesis

I don’t really have a motto but when I’m struggling I think about all the times I have wanted to crawl under my desk and nap (most days) and haven’t (most days!) and remember that I am actually stronger than I think. I also have a picture of Harry Styles crying that I look at sometimes when things are bad and that makes me feel better.

Any advice?

Don’t let anyone else make you feel stupid.

People who act like they understand everything are mostly bluffing and generally insufferable, but also when you stop comparing yourself to other people all the time you can get more out of the knowledge they’re sharing with you.

13 The Week in Feminism

NEWS

The Women’s Militia Brittany Mackie

K

urdish women have been a part of the fight against ISIL for years, so why are they only being recognised by Western media now? It all began with Pawan Duni, a photographer and blogger who tweeted a picture of a young woman dressed in camo gear with the caption “Rehana has killed more than 100 ISIS terrorists in #Kobane”. The image went viral and was covered by multiple media outlets such as the Daily Mail and New York Daily News. Rehana was named the poster child of the female Kurdish fighters. The articles applauded the women’s presence on the front line in both Iraq and Syria.

However, most of these articles left out any mention of the politics guiding these women to partake in the war against ISIL, and the fact that many Kurdish women also fought in another war against terrorism—when Saddam Hussein came to power in Iraq in 1979.

Women have long been a part of the revolution and by omitting the political context behind their participation in the Kurdish rising, media outlets are negating the political weight behind their choices—passing it off as click-bait with women dressed in militia gear posing with guns.

In reality, women’s place on the frontlines of counterterrorism is no new thing. When Saddam Hussein became the President of Iraq in 1979, hundreds of civilians took refuge in the mountains and lived as part of the Kurdistan Democratic Party while actively fighting off numerous oppositions. Kurdish women lived and fought alongside the male militia for ten years. When the Kurdistan Workers

Party was formed in 1984 to fight for Kurdish independence from Turkey, women were once again embedded in the frontlines. Nowadays women still work from within the Kurdistan Workers Party in order to gain freedom for their state.

Kurdish women have joined their male counterparts in multiple revolutions in order to fight for a common goal: national autonomy. However, within this shared goal is another movement: the emancipation of women from the traditional family structure and societal expectations.

These women don’t think twice about taking up arms to fight for their beliefs; in many cases their mothers and grandmothers have already done the same. Whether or not their ideologies are aligned with ours it is still a monumental thing to see women taking the future of their nation into their own hands.

When media outlets reduce the Kurdish fighters to headlines such as “ISIS militants tell different accounts of beauty’s fate”—relating to the young militant Rehana— they negate the political powers behind the revolution in Iraq and Syria. These women are not pretty faces who have chosen to pick up guns and fire them at random—these are determined activists who have been fighting an oppressive state for many years. They haven’t trudged quietly behind their male allies; they have often spearheaded the revolution.

editor@salient.org.nz

issue 3 | rebels

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15

NEWS

V U W S A Rick Zwaan

Madeleine Ashton-Martyn

President

Welfare Vice-President

Welcome to week two and shout out to those of you who lasted the first week without skipping class.

So it’s the second week and you’ve probably sat through at least 20 minutes of the wrong lecture before building up the courage to leave. Or if you’re a student returning to Vic you’ve been welcomed back with frustratingly slow internet and overwhelmed looking freshers clutching hall lanyards.

Last week, I fulfilled my lifelong goal of being a dragon. Last Thursday I was on the panel of judges in the CapApp challenge ‘Dragons’ Den’. The challenge was for teams to come up with ideas for an app that will better connect students with our city.

Out of the six finalists who faced off the panel of judges, Sesame won.

Sesame is an awesome concept that lets its users tag locations around Wellington that your friends can visit to open pictures, videos, music or other messages. It’s a great way for you to connect with our wonderful city and to help your friends do the same. I’m looking forward to seeing it on the app store soon!

This competition is a great example of how VUWSA and the university can work together with the creative side of our city to enhance the connections our students have with Wellington.

While this app will help build that connection, it’s only one part of a broader strategy to see how we can make Wellington a city that truly values students.

Being the science student I am, I did bit of maths last week and found that us Vic students contribute about $650m directly into the Wellington economy each year. I’m sure some economic students can do a far more robust calculation with fancy multipliers and things to find the true monetary value we bring, but on the face of it, it’s rather significant and the city and regional councils need to doing more to recognise this.

The decision by Greater Wellington Regional Council to cut the number 18 bus route, as covered in last week’s issue, is a clear example of how out of touch they are with the people they represent. As students we pay a shit tonne in rent and part of that goes to the council in rates. We deserve not only to be listened to, but for proactive policies to be implemented to make the city and region a better place for us. VUWSA will continue to work hard this year to make sure that happens.

If this time of year is good for anything it’s setting the tone. It’s a cool time to reflect on what got you here, the decisions you made, and what you’re looking to accomplish.

Congratulations for making it, it’s honestly no small feat getting this far and being accepted into university. It’s also super impressive to make the decision as a returning student to come back for another round, or to go further in your study and start a postgrad course. At VUWSA, we know it’s not easy to be a student and we’re proud of you for doing it.

When times get rough, remember that we are here for you.

Our sole purpose is literally to act in you guys’ best interest, so if there is a way that we can help you with something then we’ll do it. My job at VUWSA is pretty cool because it looks into the welfare side of those things (job title may have given you at least a hint on that). You can come to us when a food parcel will help see you to your next student allowance payment, when getting a flu shot might make getting through winter a little bit easier, or when your landlord is messing you ‘round and our wonderful new student advocate could help you out.

Don’t get me wrong—your university experience isn’t going to totally be defined by those kinds of difficulties. Your university experience is going to be defined by you, what you want to do, and how you want your study to impact your life.

Your student years are pretty wild for a number of reasons, some good and some bad. We want to be there for you all the way through that.

Also, take some time to be overwhelmed, being overwhelmed rules. For new students, get into this while you can, everything is new and confusing and at least a part of that is pretty fun to blunder through with your new friends. Returning students, get re-overwhelmed! This place is really bizarre! What a weird transitory, intermediate microcosmic space we’re in.

Embrace it.

Have a great second week everyone.

editor@salient.org.nz

issue 3 | rebels

BEING WELL

NEWS

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“I am 22 years old. Ever since I was 15, my skin has been bad. I get regular breakouts on my face and back. I thought this would settle as I got older, but it hasn’t. Is there anything I can do that will help?” Chloe.

Thanks for the question, Chloe. The short answer is yes, absolutely—there are several things that you can try that should improve your skin a lot.

Spots, or acne, are a really common issue, and can lead to low self-esteem and worries about appearance. In severe cases, the spots can result in permanent scarring.

Anyone can develop acne, but it is most common in the 16– 18 age range, and often first appears during puberty. Girls are usually affected earlier than boys, but males tend to get more severe forms of acne. You are more likely to get acne if: one of your parents had acne when they were younger you have polycystic ovarian syndrome you work in a very hot, humid environment you take certain medications including prednisone, hormones or anticonvulsants your general health, physical well-being and diet are poor.

Acne most commonly occurs on the face, but can also affect the chest, back and neck area. The cause of acne is not fully understood, but it is likely due to a combination of factors including hormones, blockage of hair follicles by oil or sebum, and infection with the acne bacteria.

If your acne is quite mild, initially I would recommend trialling over-the-counter topical preparations. Milder options include cleansers that remove some of the oiliness from your skin.

Stronger, more effective (but often more expensive) options include a topical antibiotic combined with benzoyl peroxide.

The antibiotic helps to eradicate the bacteria responsible for the acne, and the benzoyl peroxide reduces the number of whiteheads and blackheads. Be careful with these stronger preparations as they can be quite harsh on your skin and should usually only be applied sparingly once a day.

If your acne is more severe, or you have tried topical treatments without any success, I would talk to your doctor about an oral medication. The following options can be really helpful, but they all require a few months to get a really good result, so don’t give up too quickly: Oral antibiotics—tablets such as doxycycline and erythromycin, given at a low, once-daily dose, can be remarkably effective at treating acne; they take up to six months to work, and can occasionally have sideeffects. Your doctor will advise you if this is a safe option for you. After a course (usually 6–12 months duration), a significant proportion of people will never experience such severe acne again, although unfortunately that is not the case for everyone.

The combined contraceptive pill—if your skin tends to flare up in a cyclical pattern, it is very likely that controlling your cycle with a contraceptive pill will give you a great result. It will also give you contraception, so for many young women it is a great way to kill two birds with one stone, so to speak!

Isotretinoin (oratane)—this is reserved for people whose acne hasn’t responded to other treatments. It requires regular monitoring of your liver with blood tests, and is more likely to cause side-effects than the other options. However, if you have tried everything else, this treatment is well worth exploring.

Fact – around 85% of 16–18 year olds will experience acne. Treatment can help in nearly all cases.

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If you have a question about your health, diet or well-being, please send it in to caty.stephenson@vuw.ac.nz Our panel of health experts includes a GP, nurse, counsellor, dietitian and physiotherapist—they are happy to answer any questions you might have!

17

NEWS

Hats off to-woo, sir Joggers who fancy a run in Oregon Park in Salem, Massachusetts, have been warned against running at dawn or dusk, due to a series of recent attacks—by owls. All four reported attacks are believed to have involved the same thieving barred owl, intent on establishing a quality nest for the season, by stealing the hats off runners’ heads.

Gone too far, Girl American woman Jennifer Alvarez could face criminal charges after faking her own kidnapping to avoid planning her boyfriend’s birthday party. After discovering blood and finding two of his weapons absent from his home, Alvarez’s boyfriend reported her missing. Upon returning home, Alvarez was questioned by detectives, explaining that the weapons had been stolen by two men visiting the home and the blood came from scratching her dental filling.

It was more than his heart that grew three sizes that day…

Dr Seuss’s new posthumous release What Pet Should I Get has unearthed interest in another of his publications that has long since fallen into obscurity. While a copy now sells for $300 online, The Seven Lady Godivas—a story of seven naked women drawn in traditional Seuss-ian style, was originally a bust. The author himself said “I attempted to draw the sexiest babes I could, but they came out looking absurd” and added that he would “rather write for kids”.

Stoned Bunnies The Utah Senate has approved a bill that enables patients with specific debilitating conditions to be treated with edible marijuana. While this has been met with expected opposition, it has also sparked an argument for the welfare of wildlife in marijuana growing sites—particularly rabbits. DEA special agent Matt Fairbanks claims that the rabbits he saw in such areas “had cultivated a taste” for weed and “one of them refused to leave us, and we took all the marijuana around him, but his natural instincts to run were somehow gone.”

You can Leviosa my Wingardium Boston University took their sex-positive “Frisky February” initiative up a notch when they invited their students to participate in “Sex-Ed at Hogwarts”—a 90-minute seminar prefaced by the question “Ever wonder what it would be like if Hogwarts taught sexual education?” The 87 students that attended (according to the event’s Facebook page) are now more conscious of safe wand-wrapping and of understanding the Chamber of Secrets before you Slytherin.

editor@salient.org.nz

19

Blink’s 182nd Project

BY PHILIP MCSWEENEY

Last February, at the last Camp A Low Hum ever, Ian Jorgensen, who goes by the alias “Blink”, woke up to muddy, sodden grounds and the faces of some festival-goers who were clearly not having a good time. “I’m not proud,” he wrote after the event finished, “but at that moment I threw my head back and wept.” The festival he’d painstakingly created in 2007 and curated every year since—and it’s not much of an exaggeration to say he did this single-handedly— was at serious risk of ending not with a bang but a saturated whimper. Stages had to be closed. Gigs were pulled on account of rain. Artists pulled out, retreating to the warm aridity of nearby hotels. It was damn-near disasteradious.

His tears, fortunately, were premature. Concertgoers rallied and ended up having a great time, and the legacy of Camp was upheld. But it felt like a definitive end to the festival. Rumours that he’d booked out the Wainuiomata campgrounds for the next two years, circulated by devotees (“he wouldn’t cancel on us!”) and detractors (“classic bloody Blink, it’s been the last Camp for three fuckin’ years now”) alike, lost their credence. Even aside from logistics, and Blink’s unwavering belief in putting projects to rest once they’d reached their apex, who was to say he’d have the energy, the passion?

About half a year later Blink shut down his bar Puppies, a quintessentially brief Wellington institution, for good. In the man’s own words, “those last few months were fucking great, but I felt like I was just going through the motions for a while there,” and while the closing weekend was a “rager” befitting the electronic grooves the venue focussed on, the doors closed without any word from Blink on any future project. The double-whammy of CALH and Puppies’ closure, along with Blink finally completing a book he’d been itching to write for a looooong time (The Problem with New Zealand Music, How to Fix it, and Why I Started Puppies for those who want to commit to further research), had an aura of finality about it. Blink’s tenure as tastemaker and NZ music impresario seemed over.

However, the hopes of his acolytes and the fears of his h8rs were proved correct. The man just couldn’t stay away. He made his re-entrance in a slightly subdued fashion with a small New Year’s Eve festival in Ohakune, a sort of Camp-lite, and now he’s back with a bolder scheme than ever: a two-pronged document of New Zealand music.

He has curated A Low Hum: A Movement, a set of shows in different locations within a line-up of bands he either likes or mentored, but the really novel piece is his 10-volume collection of photographs (all taken by him) that spans his entire involvement with the New Zealand music history.

“I had this idea back in, like, 2002, when I was on tour with The Mint Chicks, that I’d release a collection of some of the photos I’d taken,” Blink told me. The setting was his flat, and I was interviewing him over tea. Blink was nervous about the quality of the beverage—“I actually only Googled how to make tea a couple of weeks ago. It was one of those things I’ve been meaning to do for ages but haven’t had time. [It turns out] you’re meant to pour the milk in first? Anyway, I hope it’s alright”; I was nervous that the (in)famously garrulous man would find me tedious. It turned out neither of us had anything to worry about. The tea, FWIW, was superb, and I can honestly say that he was the most accommodating interviewee I’ve ever had.

A couple of things about Blink’s flat I thought were illustrative of the man in question. Blink’s love of things both “high” and “low” culture—the man has equal regard for 8 Foot Sativa and The Dead C, for example—manifested itself in a kitsch Elvis poster that loomed over the hallway, adjacent to a framed picture of Frida Kahlo and a replica of a Egon Schiele piece. I also noted how sparse it was with interest. There were no CDs, few books, mementos or trinkets; when I asked why, Blink explained that mostly everything was in storage because “we [he and his partner] don’t know how long we’ll be here… maybe a couple of months.” The impression of transience was fitting for a man who has flung himself into projects only to abandon them

editor@salient.org.nz

20

issue 3 | rebels Jon Toogood Shihad Town Hall, Wellington, NZ 10.11.2000

“People hated The Mint Chicks.

All these people from Wellington, they’re quite territorial… The Mint Chicks were getting acclaim from overseas before they played a show in Wellington, so people were like ‘who do these posers think they are?’ It was considered bad form.”

before they reach fruition, who seems to live professionally in a state of constant flux.

A word on Blink, too, that might help you orient yourself when it comes to his persona: in person, the man is larger than life. Not in a literal way—although he is one of those people who seems to take up more space than he actually does—but his manner commands a sort of attention. His knowledge of New Zealand music is encyclopedic.

I’m not surprised that he is polarising figure who attracts defenders and critics in equal measure. He answers questions effusively and at length or, as he puts it, “I answer more than one question at a time.”

But for all the digressions, tangents and verbal parentheses, I found him weirdly measured.

This is perhaps unsurprising considering how long he has had to consider the state of New Zealand music. Blink, then an aspiring gig photographer, got his break when he asked Shihad if he could shoot some pictures backstage. The band warmed to him immediately and invited him to be their gig photographer. “Back in 1999, once you’d photographed Shihad, y’know, you’ve made it! No-one is going to turn you down.” Based on this credential, access to bands was given without fuss or hassle. “I’m like the reverse Drake! Started from the top now I’m here,” Blink laughs, “...at the bottom.” Does he retain soft spot for Shihad these days? “Churn and Killjoy were huge for me… I listened to them recently, actually, and you know what? They’re still fucking great rock albums. I tried to get them involved in A Low Hum: A Movement actually, but they were too expensive.”

From these unlikely roots grew Blink’s passion for New Zealand music and his desire to nurture bands he liked. He went on tour with the then up-and-coming young recalcitrants, The Mint Chicks, fondly

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remembering their first Wellington show: “yeah, people hated The Mint Chicks. All these people from Wellington, they’re quite territorial… we have massive tall poppie [syndrome] here in New Zealand and ‘specially in Wellington, and The Mint Chicks were getting acclaim from overseas before they played a show in Wellington, so you can imagine… people were like ‘who do these posers think they are?’ It was considered bad form.”

It was on tour with The Mint Chicks that the idea of released a book of his photography first started percolating. So this is a project that’s been literally years in the making? “Yeah! … although I didn’t see it as a ten volume project back then.” The project has expanded alongside Blink’s experience. He toured with Die! Die! Die! and remains proud of them being one of the “few bands to survive after they all finished uni… I think they’re on hiatus now, in that Dunedin Sound way, but I don’t Quincy Hanley Schoolboy Q Pitchfork Festival Chicago, IL, USA 14.07.2012

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Andrew Wilson, Henry Oliver, Michael Prain Die! Die! Die! Good Luck, Wellington, NZ 29.08.2004

think Andrew and Michael will ever stop making music together.”

They have quite an overseas following now don’t they? “They were one of the few to make it big overseas as well… the thing that’s great about New Zealand bands is that by the time they go overseas they’re really tight music-wise, no sloppiness.”

He toured Conan when he performed under his “and the Moccasins” moniker. He began a tradition of going to Australia for a few weeks every year to scope out new talent, finding amongst others Bear Gryllz and No Art (“I love that their riffs are so simple… but so effective”).

He organised or supported tours from countless overseas acts, though his focus has always been nurturing local talent—one example of which, Disasteradio, he even took overseas.

The wealth of experience Blink has accumulated has resulted in the ten-volume tome, handily designated into sections: The Mint Chicks and Indie; The Datsuns and Garage Rock; Internationals; Betchadupa and Good Pop. Wait, what? The Datsuns? Garage Rock? “One of the reasons I don’t announce line-ups is because when I did one gig, back in 2006, there was lots of Garage Rock on the line-up, which was considered ‘lame’, and no-one showed up.” This ties into Blink’s critique of the parochialism of New Zealand music aficionados: “I didn’t want people going to Camp to see a certain act, I wanted people to hear some sweet music they might not have wanted to see otherwise. Don’t like metal? Give Beastwars a chance! Think you don’t like Garage Rock? Try seeing, you know, The Checks live.”

Long gone are the days of reppin’ The D4, however. While he ran Puppies, there was one individual and one collective Blink fostered ahead of all others: Eddie Johnson and Kerosene Comic Book, commonly abbreviated to KCB. Eddie Johnson’s current carnation, Race Banyon, has met with astonishing success complete with shoutouts from Ryan Hemsworth, and he played at Puppies frequently.

I remember seeing Johnson in 2011 opening for a (vastly under-rated) Kiwi band named Brains (Blink gave a grin of recognition; v. edifying).

While the tunes were sound, his stage presence was not. To give him his due, he was, like, 14 at the time, but when he asked “can I leave now?” after every song and played with his face averted, it was a bit excruciating. Earlier this year he played an antithetical set at Laneways.

He was confident, bopping, enthused, and though his reading of the crowds mood wasn’t perfect, it was still a damn cool performance.

How much does Blink credit himself for this transformation?

“Yeah, Eddie’s interesting. His side-project as well, now it’s not rock and more pared-back, minimal covers. When I first started Puppies, Eddie didn’t dance or face the crowd. He ended up headlining a show just before The End of Puppies. I remember we did his EP release in our back room, after taking a long time persuading him… it’s the first time I saw him dance. What an incredible show. There was sweat dripping from the ceiling.”

It is the Kerosene Comic Book club that has probably earned him more ire. A common critique of Puppies—and thus Blink—is that it focussed on a narrow subset of electronic music to the exclusion of other, arguably more deserving, artists. One aggrieved person commented on the Salient website that “Blink has been a large part of the problem of cultivating narrow music taste in NZ for a long time now, and the particular brand of ‘electronic music’ you seem to be gushing about is more often than not a straightforward switch out of guitars for laptops—the mentality is exactly the same. New Zealand has a really long, really interesting history of electronic audio production and consumption, in comparison Blink’s wares are pretty much at the same level as Fly My Pretties.”

Essentially, the Kerosene Comic Book club is comprised of what I term the “white guys with Macbooks” subset of electronic, which is fine if

editor@salient.org.nz

22

issue 3 | rebels Eddie Johnston Race Banyon Puppies, Wellington, NZ 07.06.2014

you’re in the mood and dreadful if you’re not and whose use of (post-) ironic airhorns and frequent refrains of “thank you based god” veered towards the actively offensive. There is also the juxtaposition between Blink’s accusation that New Zealand music consumers don’t explore new things and Puppies’ perceived inability to branch out from a very niche style, leaving some listeners and many electroacoustic/noise musicians—and even some minimal techno ones—a bit miffed.

lot. “I’ve tried to give them exposure, I’ve tried to get Jakob to let them open for them… I even emailed Eddie, asked what he thought, and he said he knew about five people who would listen to them,” he laments with an accompanying head-shake. The flip-side though is they might get their day soon enough. Blink prophesies that emo is due for a resurgence. “That new Carb on Carb album… I was listening to it, and I was thinking, dude, this is emo!”

I put the question to Blink, and he answered thoughtfully: “I mean, I didn’t dislike a lot of the music that you’re talking about. I even used to open Puppies on Wednesdays, do an open-mic night kind of thing to try and find new music, and I reckon I lost heaps of money doing it. But a lot of it just wasn’t right for the space. Even Lontalius… I mean Puppies is an abandoned warehouse, right? Of course I’m going to play stuff that you can dance to; no matter how much I liked some stuff, I just couldn’t put it on.” Not that he dislikes Kerosene Comic Book by any stretch. “Take Reuben, who does this amazing electronic act [Totems], and Caroles, which is a rock band, and he has the talent and freedom to do both… Caroles could be huge. I know it.”

People forget, I think, that through Blink’s force and influence—and sheer individualistic bloody-mindedness—he becomes synonymous with an institution, a kind of charitable establishment that should invest time in helping everyone and doing everything right. He is, despite the many sleepless nights and countless hours of work, just one dude, wanting to nourish the music he likes and try to improve New Zealand music in a way he thinks advantageous.

Another issue is unconducive venues. Blink, as he makes exceedingly clear in his book, is not a fan of bars. Though not sanctimonious, he did take swipes at the alcohol industry’s domination of Kiwi music (Trust Punks are sponsored by Becks despite the fact one member, Joe, doesn’t drink and has spoken out against alcohol; Homegrown is sponsored by Jim Beam) and bars are part and parcel of that, fostering crowds that are less receptive to the music and more receptive to inebriation.

There are problems in terms of acoustics and dynamics as well— “who wants to play a show where people are chatting loudly in the background”—and he did not think Puppies was an appropriate venue for a lot of his acts. “Like Lontalius—put them in a gallery.” Rebuttal: Mount Eerie played one of the best shows I’ve seen at Puppies. “Yeah, it was OK. Could have been much better, if it was out in the woods or something… or someone’s living room! Imagine how great that would have been. We [New Zealand] need more house shows man.”

Sometimes, however, not even venues are enough. Blink showed me the demo of a nice wee post-rock-cum-country outfit which I like a

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Blink is forthright about his motivations. “When I first came up with the photography idea, I did it for me… because I wanted to.” This

HONOUR ROLL (i.e. New Zealand Bands Blink expressed a particular fondness for) Shihad, Blindspott (great to photograph), 8 Foot Sativa, The Dead C, Yellow Swans (not NZ but one of the best gigs Blink has been to), Batrider, Sarah Mary Chadwick (opened for Mount Eerie, SO GOOD), Connan Mockasin, The Mint Chicks, Die! Die! Die!, Jakob, So So Modern, Coolies, The Accelerants, Ejector, Betchadupa, Goodshirt, Disasteradio, The Shocking Pinks, Jakob, Totems, Caroles, Mermaidens, Lontalius, Cheats, The Checks, The D4, The Datsuns, The Chills, The 3Ds, The Clean, Tall Dwarfs, Ghostplane, The Sneaks and—of course—Race Banyon.

23 Gussie Larkin, Lily Paris West Mermaidens House, Berampore, Wellington, NZ 08.08.2014

Damian Alexander Blindspott True Colours Town Hall, Wellington, NZ 24.05.2003

sums up his entire modus operandi: he does things that he wants to do, and if other people want to come along for the ride all the better.

He does not claim moral authority or selflessness and, love him or hate him, there’s no denying the influence he’s had on New Zealand music, in terms of both artists (no Blink, no So So Modern) and the surrounding culture. Blink’s laudable demand that people pay $10 on the door to see gigs, and not the previously customary $5, is gaining traction in venues throughout Wellington and Dunedin, doubling the amount of financial support given to gigging artists. The compilation of photography will hopefully offer artists posterity and cement their importance; it’s hard to find something errant or misguided in that.

I put it to Blink that his career has been marked by both freneticism and completism. He agrees: “when I think a project is done, it’s done.

Camp could’ve ended two years before it did, but I didn’t want to screw people over, and Puppies was always a two-year project and if they don’t think it was successful look at Wellington music now.

Look at Eddie.” But he’s always on the lookout for new projects—the photography, the book, new bands to listen to and support.

Has living this kind of life taken its toll? “Absolutely. I mean, part of the reason why I stopped Camp was because I literally couldn’t stop thinking about. I’d wake up and stress about the line-up, I’d go to sleep thinking about it. By the time I closed Puppies for good? I needed a break. Opening only on weekends made it easier, but I was burnt-out.”

So what’s on the horizon then? Blink is unsure, but there is one thing he expresses a desire for. It’s stability. “I want to try and force myself to

work on a nine-to-five schedule, to go home and watch a series of The Wire once I finish work.” Watch this space, but don’t ogle too hard.

After fifteen-plus years, the dude deserves a break; the only question is whether he’ll impose another challenge on himself, or rather when.

The most poignant moment of our interview occurred when Blink betrayed a little bit of selflessness. “I want these books [of photographs] to end up in libraries, or in parents’ book collections, and when kids starting getting into The Mint Chicks or Die! Die! Die! or whatever, they’ll wonder who these other bands in the scene were, who The Coolies were, or who Batrider were. The cool thing about the internet, being post-internet, is that everyone’s music is out there… you just to know who to look for.”

A worthwhile endeavour, I thought, and said so. “Thanks. New Zealand has some fucking cool music,” he responded, and for the first time in the interview he drifted away a little bit, perhaps thinking of that night at Puppies where Race Banyon debuted his EP to deserving recognition, when the crowd was all joyful shouts and camaraderie, sweat dripping down the walls and bodies grooving and gyrating, an ear-to-ear grin that didn’t leave Blink’s face the entire night.

A Movement. 1000 photos, 300 bands, 15 years, 10 books Available individually or as a set from Unity Books, Rough Peel Music, Slow Boat Records and online from www.alowhum.com

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HEY WELLINGTON ARTISTS!

We need people to help us fill this space every week. If you are keen to showcase your artwork to our 17,000 readers, email editor@salient.org.nz

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issue 3 | rebels

The Übermensch

By Sam McChesney

Jack is an enigma, a prophet, a whirlwind.

a measured pace. His English is flawless with an accent that’s halfLondon, half-Continental, his well-practiced stories structured with a novelist’s skill. He paints scenes, he builds dramatic tension, he masterfully suspends punchlines.

We talk a few weeks after his arrest in Cambodia, a country from

Tangents come thick and fast. “I nearly got killed by a bunch of camels once,” he offers.

which he is now permanently banned for a naked motorbike ride through the streets. The arresting officer filmed the incident; the video made it onto YouTube, and the story into the Daily Mail. Jack persuaded the guards to let him share a cell with his two co-offenders, a Finnish woman and a Scottish man, and managed to smuggle in his cellphone. While the guards were away, Jack and the Finnish woman shot a porno.

“These kind of events,” Jack says, “happen to me all the time.”

I first heard about Jack in 2010—he was crashing at the flat of a friend, one of the global scores pulled into Jack’s orbit. Stories filtered their way to me. Jack the genius. He just won another scholarship. Jack the crazy Italian. He fought mano-a-mano with a crocodile.

Jack talks for hours with little to no prompting. There’s no video on our Skype call, but I remember his face: a thicket of dark hair, a waxed and curled moustache, a beard that’s tending ginger. He speaks at

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“I was on this tour in Australia and … for some reason, they went mental. They had this thing that linked all the camels through their noses, and it popped, and suddenly there’s all these fucking camels galloping through the desert.

“Most people lost their grip. I saw these two Thai girls get stomped on by the camels. They destroyed the shoulder of one, and the other broke her arm. Many other people broke legs and arms … and then there was me, by myself, I’d lost all of my possessions, galloping through the desert with a psycho camel. Thinking I was going to die.

“And then eventually it stopped, and a little lady came up, managed to calm him down and I jumped off the fucking thing. And then after, they euthanised the camels, and gave us free camel meat and a refund.”

And later: “For Valentine’s Day this year I took a pole dancer to a swinger’s party on acid.”

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And a few minutes after that: “A few months ago a prostitute paid me for sex. This was like one of those escorts who charges five hundred dollars an hour. She paid me a hundred and fifty bucks for half an hour of my time. It was pretty funny.

“The same night I met her, I was massaging her dad’s bum, with her dad’s partner, while she was filming. And we were all on MDMA, including her dad. I had just met her dad, randomly, an hour before, on the dance floor, and hugged him for five minutes.”

And on Facebook, a few days after we talk: “Shot porn in a psychiatric hospital, life is beautiful.”

Jack was born Giancarlo Allocca in 1985. He grew up in Rimini, a party beach town outside of Venice whose population swells from 150,000 in the winter to three million in the summer.

At the age of 20, he decided to leave. “My life in Italy was already quite eccentric, to say the least,” he says. “And I wasn’t quite relating to the rest of the population any more.

“I was considered a reject in Italy, a bright reject—someone who got through the system, somehow, but had to die in his early twenties.”

Jack applied for various British universities. He was eventually accepted into the hugely prestigious King’s College London after lying about his proficiency in English. “I went to England for a laugh,” he explains. “I could not speak a word of English.” He ended up learning the language in six weeks.

Living in one of the most expensive cities in the world, Jack finished top of his class every year and lived off “a lot of money” from lucrative King’s College awards. The prizegiving ceremonies took place in a fifteenth-century museum, “full of babies in bottles and conjoined twins and stuff. All the heads of pharmaceutical companies were there, and all the heads of department.

“In England, the exams are in May. So until April, I would just be waking up in different houses, usually naked, or covered in ketamine or bodily fluids. When April arrived, my existential drive kicked in, and I would study psychotically for fifteen hours a day, for a month.

And that was enough and every year, I got these prizes.”

Has he ever had his IQ tested? “So many people have asked me,” Jack sighs. “I have not. Being a neurobiologist I have some issues with the thing that is IQ. Because it only tests a small portion of someone’s intellect, which is actually relatively minor in the grand scheme of things. It doesn’t test social intelligence, it doesn’t test motor intelligence, it doesn’t test wit, or any of that.” After constant badgering from his colleagues, however, Jack now plans to be tested within the next couple of months.

The prizes gave Jack financial security, and he began what would soon become his obsession: travel. Or, as he puts it, “my quirky attitude toward the processing of information that found such a peculiar implementation at university, then started applying itself to strange situations around the world.”

At this point, Jack was still working for a living. “I got a job in America, as the driver of a school bus—with no bus licence. It was

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weird … I was supposed to be a driver. I thought I was going to drive a car, maybe a small van for supplies and shit, and then I get there and they’re like, ‘yeah, you have to drive this thing, Jack, with forty, fifty kids in it.’ I can hardly drive a car, I even crashed one once real bad, and I thought ‘this is going to be a mess.’ I changed jobs after a few months, because of the terror of being liable for so many young lives.

“I became a chef and that was a mess as well. I never ate anything I cooked, but everyone loved it—‘oh, the Italian chef, oh, this is the real deal!’—but it was hideous.”

He returned to England for more study before, at the age of 23, he was headhunted by the University of Newcastle in Australia, who created a brand-new research scholarship for which he was the only applicant.

He was considered a major scalp, despite the fact that he still didn’t have a degree: his new colleagues proudly showed off the poached King’s College genius to their peers.

A particular passion of Jack’s is meat. He once featured in an article

in Dummy Verlag, a German magazine, in which he claimed to have eaten at least 35 types of exotic animal, including zebra, armadillo, silkworm and locust. That number, he assures me, has now grown substantially.

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“I was walking around with a Coca-Cola in one hand and a dead vulture in a bag in the other, going up to all the women and asking, ‘can you cook my vulture?’”

In Vanuatu, Jack ate an animal resembling a flying fox, but bigger, with a wingspan of about two metres. It had the wings of a bat, the face of a dog and the fists of a human. After he cooked and ate it, he thought the skull looked similar to that of an alligator.

He has eaten whale on two occasions—a meat he describes as “delicious. Extremely rich, extremely tender. It tastes like beef, with a very fishy aftertaste, because that’s what they eat, you know. Very oily.”

He once told his whale story to some people he met on a dock in Tonga. “At the beginning they were somewhat surprised,” he says, “and then they turned mildly homicidal. They were not happy.”

Jack soon realised he had been talking to the crew of the Sea Shepherd, a militant anti-whaling group. “And there I was, flaunting it, saying ‘guys, whale is the shit, some of the best meat I’ve ever had, it’s so good’, and they were about to lynch me … I almost got killed by ecoterrorists.”

In Colombia, Jack says, “I wanted to eat the most absurd animal I could. So for days on end, I was trying to hunt sloths. I found one, but it was dead and rotting, so I left it. But after a few days, I find something else, something even more absurd.”

He tried to enlist the help of locals to hunt this animal, but they refused. That animal is cursed, they told him. If you eat it, the curse will fall on you. Jack tried to borrow a gun to hunt the animal alone.

The locals told him, if you shoot it, the curse will pass to the gun, and the gun will be cursed.

Jack paid fifteen dollars to hire a gun, a small fortune. He ventured

into the jungle and shot a chunk out of the animal. It escaped toward a river. “This,” Jack told me, “is an animal that knows death.” He followed it there and clubbed it. He had just killed a vulture.

In a surreal epilogue, he took the vulture to the nearest village—“more an outpost, really, extremely poor, fourth- or fifth-world”—in search of someone to help him cook it. “I was walking around with a CocaCola in one hand and a dead vulture in a bag in the other, going up to all the women and asking, ‘can you cook my vulture?’ Because it was a cursed animal, people were literally freaking out and running away. For another magic fifteen dollars, I managed to find a woman to cook it for me. She found a surgical mask to do it in, from God knows where.”

The vulture’s skin was yellowish. When cooked, its meat went a pinkish brown, like beef. “I don’t usually dislike things,” Jack says. “I ate a rotten rat in Cambodia. There were maggots in it while I was frying it. And it was shit, but the vulture was real shit.

“Many animals taste like other animals—chicken, or whatever. But no.

The only thing the vulture tasted like was death.”

Jack dismisses prevailing attitudes toward meat as narrow-minded and arbitrary, criticising the farm-centric prevalence of pork, beef and chicken. “Every single species tastes different,” he says, “and they’re all pretty good, except for vulture.”

Sampling bizarre varieties of meat is “a journey. It connects you to your original call of survival. It affects the way you think, your feelings, your connections to your environment. I stumbled across this by accident, just because I was curious, and then I realised just

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how wonderful and exciting it is.”

I suddenly remember the last time he was in New Zealand when, despite strong resistance from even the most morally ambiguous of his New Zealand acquaintances, Jack wanted to eat a yellow-eyed penguin. I’m too afraid to ask if he succeeded.

Jack obsessively documents his every insane experience. So far, his

photos and videos comprise around 700 gigabytes, all in low resolution to save space. “There’s a lot of improvised pornography,” he explains.

“And dead animals, and terrorists, and war zones.” Long terrified that a single technical glitch could wipe out swathes of his life, he recently uploaded everything to the cloud—a process that took a month.

To Jack, the most important thing is memory—“personal value, to me, is synonymous with the number of things one can remember.” And without the photos, he might forget. Jack regularly conflates forgetting with dying—a deep existential angst that also lies behind his vivacious rampage across the globe.

“I realised at some point that if I can’t remember a bit of my life, I was dead all along,” he says.

“You can’t remember brushing your teeth last Wednesday, but those five minutes are gone, like a piece of life never lived. And most people live entire lives like that.

“The brain is very capable of generating pockets to recycle memories, because it’s very energyintensive to generate new memories. So it tries to recycle the same ones. And so unless you try to brush your teeth with a toilet brush, you will never remember.

The way Jack tells it, he has no innate grasp of the bounds of normality.

Although he openly describes himself as a freak, he is utterly divorced from any freak credo, any conscious rebellion against society’s norms.

He just does things. Usually it’s only after the fact, by observing others’ reactions, that he realises just how outrageous those things are.

Jack finds personal interactions useful. Verbalising his thoughts helps him to process them, and telling his stories helps him structure and organise his memories. But a side-effect of his lifestyle is that he finds normal people intensely boring. Being able to relate to others, he says, “has been a life long struggle”.

“I’m still surrounded by normal people, and just talking to them and seeing their face, the contrast is so stark. Literally, I am baffled, I’m bemused at my own self. When most of the people around you talk about music, talk about film, talk about sports”—he spits the word out—“fucking bullshit, about drinking, about whatever. And that is literally all they are talking about.”

“It’s psychologically damaging.

Sometimes I think that none of this is true.

It’s too much.”

“When I catch up with friends and ask them what they’ve been up to, all they have is these nebulous collections of vague flashbacks that all resemble each other. ‘Oh, I went to work, I went out, I brushed my teeth.’ It’s frightening. The only thing they can do to spice up their lives is to procreate, or change jobs. And then they die.”

One of the many contradictions of Jack’s life is that he lives in the moment, but not for it—it’s the moments after, the reflection and the narrative that drive him. He recently decided to put his meticulous records to use and start a blog: he plans to launch jackulation.com by the end of the month. He also hopes to write books but, he says, writing is a skill that he hasn’t yet taught himself. Writing, he admits, is hard and time-consuming—and the more time he spends writing, the less time he has for living.

Jack’s unusual experiences come so thick and fast that it stretches even his own credulity.

“Sometimes things like this happen to people, and that’s the story they’ll tell repetitively until they die. But these things happen to me every other week.

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“It’s psychologically damaging,” he says. “Sometimes I think that none of this is true. It’s too much. And this is why I grew such an addiction to taking photos and videos.

Travel has helped immensely. “Eventually I found myself interacting with a wide spectrum of people, including the very weird.

And now, these are almost the only people I’m surrounding myself with.”

Talking about his circle of freaks, Jack suddenly begins to sound almost like a cult leader. He aims, he says, to “make myself into a catalyst for other people, people who if submerged into social norms would be unremarkable”.

He prides himself on recognising people with hidden “talents and skills”, even if these talents seem largely to revolve around helping him act out the latest outlandish escapade.

But Jack is far too transient to ever found a genuine cult. Besides, he makes no demands of his followers, and has no discernible interest in control. When Jack talks about the way people have helped him, he sounds genuinely humbled. He recognises, though, that his stories are a form of currency, and he isn’t afraid to spend it. When Jack tells his stories, he finds that people tend to give him things—food, accommodation, knowledge, sex—and as a result, money no longer plays an important part in his life.

To Jack’s disappointment, most people—with a few exceptions—tend to go back to their old ways after parting with him. “They revert because it’s safe, because it’s easy, because you can always get drunk at the weekend and you don’t think about existential pain,” he says.

“You can still watch TV, and see the people on TV have their own problems and they live a similar life to yours, and then you get a partner that will completely annihilate both his or her self-development and yours into this nest of complacency and ageing. People just don’t do shit, anything, it’s too easy and they don’t have the same drive as me to go out of their way to make their life memorable.”

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“This is hard. This is really hard. And it doesn’t have anything to do with screwing midgets in Rotorua, which I also did.”

Jack’s life is a dichotomy. “I’m studying a PhD in neuroscience at one of the most prestigious universities in Australia,” he says. “I also shot a porn in prison and killed a crocodile with a stick. All the intellectual people I know, all they have done is study and do intellectual work. By the same token, Bear Grylls and all the other freaks around the world don’t have a PhD. I have to be both.”

Suddenly, Jack sounds exhausted. “At the moment, I am generating an artificial intelligence based on machine learning to analyse automated brain activity in rodents … this is hard, Sam. This is really hard. And it doesn’t have anything to do with screwing midgets in Rotorua, which I also did. I can’t just be a freak or an academic. To be happy, I have to be both.”

Jack takes fifteen, perhaps sixteen weeks off every year. Doing so has required him to “stretch everything that can be stretched”—all part of a precarious balancing exercise between the two raging extremes of his personality. The way he sees it, he doesn’t have a choice. “I simply have to be an intellectual freak. Otherwise both ends of the spectrum collapse, in their own unsustainable manner.”

Jack cheerfully tells me during our next conversation, he wouldn’t have it any other way.

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issue 3 | rebels

BY STELLA BLAKE-KELLY In 1995 New Zealand made the record books, electing the world’s first openly transsexual mayor. Five years later that mayor set another record, becoming a Member of Parliament. From boy, to girl, to prostitute, to drag queen, to actress, to community worker— Georgina Beyer didn’t exactly follow the typical evolutionary process of a politician. Yet, within four years of moving to Carterton in Wellington’s rural hinterland, she was elected Mayor.

Within another four years, as a Labour candidate, she beat out Paul Henry in a safe National seat to become Wairarapa’s local MP. Rebelling against expectation is something that has underpinned much of Georgina Beyer’s life.

“I would say my rebelliousness probably started when I was a child— not that I would have known it then—when despite discipline, violent discipline sometimes, because I wanted to put on a frock and mince around the house, and be you know, natural, there’d be bloody thrashings and hidings and that sort of thing.”

And so she began to do it subversively, in secret. “Don’t ask me why I was compelled to do this, but there was a compulsion there that I certainly didn’t understand or could explain until I was older, and understood about the birds and the bees.” At school, suppressing her differences in order to fit in and avoid bullying—the likes of “ah ya fucking poofter”, she recalls—felt totally wrong. She found solace in the drama department, something she turned out to be quite good at. “I found it a great outlet, because you could be another person, another character. And quite often if you were doing period dramas, men would get to wear costumes that were like dresses and put makeup on, and things like that.”

At 16, George began transitioning to Georgina. In hindsight, she says, “I hadn’t lived enough life yet to realise the ramifications of the

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life choice I was making at the time”—though she doesn’t consider being a transsexual as a choice. Leaving school early, this period of transitioning saw her “cracking it as a prostitute in Wellington, doing strip clubs and all of that. I didn’t want to do it, I hated it. I didn’t enjoy it at all.” She saw an out by way of the dole, but got turned down—“‘Oh no you can’t, we can’t put you on the unemployment benefit—you’ll have to be the man that you are and go and get a job.’”

This saw her first rebellion against “the establishment” that she would later join. “I drew a line in the sand and said ‘excuse me, no. I’m Georgina Beyer, I’m a transsexual, this is what I am. And in order to get work I’m not going to go and do what you want me to do.’ What difference does it make if I have a frock or trousers on? ‘Oh we’ll have to have toilets in special places!’ All of it, it was rubbish what would pour out of people as a reason not to give me a chance. And I really objected to that.”

A stint in Australia involved some terrible experiences, with posttraumatic disorder nearly sending her to suicide. She reflected a lot on the human rights element to it—why she didn’t get help, why the law wouldn’t have protected or supported her in any way. It angered her a lot. “Here I was, a relatively well-educated intelligent person, having to reconcile that the rest of my life was meant to be spent as some sort of street… and that I was never going to be able to reach my potential.”

She wanted to remove herself from the street scene, and to have what she saw as the ordinary things everybody else took for granted, such as dignity in work. This saw her once again seek solace in performing, joining a drag show in Auckland which led to work as an actress in film and television. She considered it a personal triumph to be nominated in a national best actress award category. “To me, that was a little win, it did heaps for my self-esteem. After some pretty bad 10 years or so of great upheaval in my life, to start to feel like I can pursue things that

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“Rural folk, conservative folk, will spot a fake at 50 paces… So it’s no use telling them some bullshit story about your life because you’re a stranger in town, they all knew that I was a bit ‘queer’.”

I enjoy, and be respected for it, was great… After the nomination, I thought ‘oh well Hollywood, here I come, but no…’”

Disappointingly, Carterton proved to be the scene of the next chapter in Beyer’s life. Rural New Zealand was a big change from the glamorous cabaret life of Auckland, the result of house-sitting going on too long rather than a particularly strategic decision. Beyer benefited from a government-funded training scheme at the community centre, after which she was offered a job as a drama tutor. “I liked [Carterton], I didn’t think I would as I’d had a pretty racy life in the previous decade and a half, suddenly to find myself in quiet rural New Zealand was a surprise to me, but I enjoyed it.”

The community was a little standoffish to begin with, but were eventually welcoming. “They certainly knew that something odd had arrived in town. But you know, what I found is that rural folk, conservative folk, will spot a fake at 50 paces… So it’s no use telling them some bullshit story about your life because you’re a stranger in town, they all knew that I was a bit ‘queer’.” She found the residents didn’t worry so much about the moral issues surrounding her, putting it aside and giving her a chance to prove herself. “To eventually be welcomed by the community, and then embraced by them, and then trusted by them… that was a huge attitudinal change that happened quietly and subtly, without any great hullabaloo.”

Her interest in local body politics (yes, it is possible) came in the aftermath of National Party Finance Minister Ruth Richardson’s “mother of all budgets” in the early 90’s. “Ruthanasia”, as Beyer describes it, cut benefits by about 25 per cent. “Within a few months we started to see the ramifications. We even had a few homeless people in and around Carterton, which was unheard of.” Beyer and her comrades from the community centre tried to do something to alleviate the situation, but the Council wouldn’t assist, claiming

social housing was central government’s responsibility. “I was pushed upfront to be the mouthpiece, I suppose colleagues thought I held myself quite well in that. Then when the 1992 elections came along they persuaded me to stand for council—so I ran on a ticket with a retired vicar!”

Politics hadn’t really entered Beyer’s mind before she was encouraged to get involved. “Most of my life I’d sort of fought it, because it was ‘the establishment’, which gave me and people like me a huge amount of grief in our lives.” She sucummed to peer-pressure “because I’ve always been one to sort of go ‘well if they can do it, so can I!’, and have a go. I didn’t let my ‘colourful past’ be a barrier to my pursuing things, and this was something new and different to me, and I seemed to have an aptitude for it.”

Though she lost by 14 votes, a by-election held very soon after saw her elected to Council. “That was my opportunity to prove myself worthy, not only to myself, but to them. And of course I thrived in it. I thrived in the whole thing, and so when it came time that someone suggested I have a go at becoming the mayoralty, I said you’ve got to be kidding.

A Councillor is one thing, but to be the Mayor is another. And again, I was still thinking that my background and my past was going to always count against me. And sometimes it did, but it was me who actually had more of an issue about it than other people.”

The decision to hold a by-election rather than co-opting Beyer riled up debate within the quiet town. “The media loved it, they were making insinuations that it was to do with my sexuality and all of that sort of stuff. And I was very politically going ‘of course it’s not, they’re not like that’—yeah right! Of course that’s what a lot of it was about, apprehension about ‘a person like me’.”

The media attention around her identity followed her to central

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“[The media] would ask you questions like ‘what is your legacy?’, ‘what have you achieved?’... And I’d sit there and rattle off what we did, and they’d go ‘oh, we didn’t know about that’—oh, because you were too busy with your head in my pants, rather than in my head.”

government, where she became the world’s first Transsexual member of Parliament. “The first out transsexual,” she notes, “because who’s to say there haven’t been others? When I was first told, I expected it to have been done before—Margaret Thatcher? I mean who knows!”

Beyer attributes an “unhealthy curiosity factor” that would generate most media reporting on her, a problem that saw her frequently pigeon-holed, stereotyped and type-cast—both in life, and in politics.

“People have formed a view of you already, because they think they know everything there is to know about you. And I noticed through most of my political career, a lot of talk about my ‘colourful past’, and now I’m in politics? ‘How on earth does this happen?’... yet they very rarely looked at the work that I actually did, or what I actually achieved.”

Indeed, her Wikipedia tells a story of a political record consisting solely of the presence of an identity, with viewpoints limited to gender and queer discourse. “I don’t know if the media ever reconciled how I could have a 15-year-odd span in politics at both local and central government, and what—like I didn’t do anything all that time in order to be there that long?”

“That used to frustrate me a lot. They’d ask you questions like ‘what is your legacy?’, ‘what have you achieved?’, almost accusatory like you’ve achieved nothing. And I’d sit there and rattle off what we did, and they’d go ‘oh, we didn’t know about that’—oh, because you were too busy with your head in my pants, rather than in my head.”

Does she find it frustrating having her record diminished to just the symbolic nature of what she achieved? “No, not really. Because I think I’m lucky to be acknowledged at all. I think I’m avoided sometimes in our historical statistics.”

Statistics, in itself, is still struggling to fully represent gender identities.

The last official Census in 2013 remained limited to sex: male or

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female. Statistics New Zealand is currently reviewing this, with the hope of developing a new statistical standard for gender identity and definitions for a more inclusive 2018 Census.

To Beyer, the achievement was not so much in being the first, but in “offering other people hope, when they feel hopeless. That their lives are worthless because of who they are or what they are, or their particular circumstances.” On the practical side she rates wins for her electorate, such as getting new hospitals, saving their polytechs, and dealing with child murders that the community had under her watch.

“Real, hard issues stuff.”

It was the hard issues stuff she speaks most enthusiastically about when recalling on her time in Parliament, notably the passing of civil unions and prostitution reform. “I could speak powerfully on those issues [in the House], from a real visceral experience of all the negativity that we were trying to erode with some of that legislation.”

Though Labour would have liked to have passed marriage equality, the political climate of the time did not permit it. “We had Destiny Church and Brian Tamaki, and all this horrible stuff—which we hadn’t seen since homosexual law reform in the mid-80’s—pour out again with Civil Unions, and we just scraped through getting that passed.”

Prostitution reform also passed with the slimmest of margins. The vote that got the bill across the line came from two MPs changing their mind. One was ACT MP Heather Roy, who said the strength of Beyer and her fellow Labour MP Winnie Laban’s speeches changed her mind (Laban is now Victoria’s Assistant Vice-Chancellor (Pasifika)).

“The best debates in Parliament have always happened in conscience votes, when the quality of a person’s mind is properly exposed… An impassioned speech can make a difference in Parliament.

“In parliamentary politics, being who I am, and being proud of who I am, let me get away with an awful lot. Speaking in the House, I could make double entendre and innuendo that other members would be

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“Beyer watched on as her Māori colleagues in the Labour party were promoted for what she describes as ‘their betrayal of Māori’. When her own promotion to Minister wasn’t forthcoming, ‘I thought well stuff this, and I left.’” pulled up on, but they didn’t quite know what to do with me. I loved the confusion at the time.” In some respects Beyer thought Helen Clark, the Prime Minister at the time, received worse treatment than she: “‘you can’t have children!’, ‘you’re a barren woman!’, and ‘aren’t you a lesbian sometimes?’” she recalls. “[Not having children is] a cruel thing to throw at a woman.”

Beyer marked the foreshore and seabed legislation debate as the beginning of the end of her political career. Disobeying her caucus colleagues, she requested to abstain from voting, which subsequently forced Clark to rely on Winston Peters and NZ First to get the numbers to pass it. “I can remember that caucus meeting very well... I got up and asked if I could abstain, and I was howled down. I was literally howled down by the entire caucus.”

Beyer admits she didn’t like caucus politics. “I don’t like the ‘oh you should be a part of this little faction over here, because we’ll support you when you want something and blah blah.’ And I never did join up with particular factions—yes, I did belong to the rainbow sector and this and that. But when it came falling into caucus lines I was sometimes not quite often the odd one out.”

Rather than walking out on the Labour Party, as Tariana Turia did (forming the Māori Party) Beyer “bit [her] lip and sucked it up.” Her reasoning was pretty standard establishment thinking: “I would have gone with [her] if I held a Māori [electorate] seat, but I didn’t. I held a General seat.” As such, walking out would have ended her political career. Ironically, it was staying there that did it.

She vowed that after that experience she would never again compromise her ethnicity for political expediency. “A vast majority of my electorate said vote in favour… but my Māori-ness was telling me no. And in politics, you can’t let your heart rule your head. I don’t know sometimes how you can separate those things.” Beyer avoided engaging with Māori after that, feeling too ashamed, and she watched

on as her Māori colleagues in the Labour party were promoted for what she describes as “their betrayal of Māori”. When her own promotion to Minister wasn’t forthcoming, “I thought well stuff this, and I left.”

For someone whose political success can somewhat be attributed to a personality that was compelled to do the opposite of what was expected, it’s not surprising that when Hone Harawira asked Beyer for a favour around the 2014 election, Beyer was soon making headlines again.

Her explanation of why she got back involved with politics, standing as a candidate for Internet-Mana, was pretty simple: a favour for Harawira. “I said give me your policy, let me have a look. ‘Oh yeah, I could sell most of that, and I could agree with most of that—yep, alright, I’ll be your candidate.”

“I had an open mind about [the Mana and Internet Party agreement], until I spent three hours on the ferry from Wellington to Picton with Dotcom. In that three hours, I decided by the time I got to Picton, nah-uh.” Not for you? “No, he wasn’t for the country. I can only talk from my intuition and gut instinct, which is pretty good, and I thought I don’t think your motives for involving yourself to this degree in our politics in this county was entirely honorable.”

Beyer didn’t think he had any understanding of “the way we are as Kiwis when it comes to politics.” Whilst she sympathises with Dotcom’s individual qualms with National, comparing the raids on the Dotcom mansion to the Te Urewera raids, she didn’t agree with his approach to getting involved with politics. “Don’t use your money, your perception of power that you have an influence on this country like that, because we’ll spot a fake at 50 paces,” she said.

“And we did!”

editor@salient.org.nz

issue 3 | rebels

SCIENCE

36

The Deceit of the Detox Brontë Ammundsen Maybe you’ve spent the past week hung over, and want to compensate with some natural alternatives. Maybe you read that your favourite diet beverage has a particularly nasty artificial sweetener. Many people will try to turn down the guilt-dial by replacing “all that is delicious” with “all that is natural” for a quick detox before returning to their old habits (a “detox/re-tox” cycle). Sadly, detoxing is not the heal-all you may believe.

A detox is exactly what the name suggests— an attempt to rid your body of toxins. As a consumer buzzword, however, it’s promoted as a “quick fix” method to cleanse your body and induce revitalisation and improved health. Popular detoxes include “The Master Cleanse”, where for at least 10 days you remove all food from your diet and consume only a lemon water, cayenne pepper and maple syrup mixture, accompanied by a herbal detox tea and a plethora of “Juice Cleanses” which require you to eliminate solids from your diet and consume only juiced vegetables and fruits (because if it’s a juice, it’s automatically better for you, apparently). People have even adopted a potato-only diet, introduced after farmer Chris Voigt undertook a twomonth spud spree to discount the negative perception towards potatoes.

Detox is an appealing concept because it seems doable and eases the guilt we feel about indulging in food that we enjoy. It’s like a penance. We feel guilty for our caramel coloured beer, our aspartame treated diet coke, and our cholesterol charged bacon.

We love to believe that glumly chomping on vitamin-saturated kale, or starving the sustenance sins away will rid us of the harm caused by our gluttony. The best part is that

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it doesn’t have to be a full time commitment: the next week, feeling superior after our selfinflicted hardship, we can take our cleansed bodies off to enjoy a hard-earned fatty Maccas and invigorating caffeine beverage.

In reality, looking after your body isn’t quite that simple. Rather, it’s much simpler. The body has multiple excretory functions, all constantly working to naturally detoxify.

Millions of years of evolution have blessed us with a body that is designed with cleaning in mind—need I remind you the main function of the kidney?

Admittedly, it is true that our modern lifestyles mean we are ingesting more and more toxic substances, and toxins are not equally distributed throughout the body.

Many toxins accumulate over your life in lipid deposits, where they may act as cancerous agents. It is these fat-bound toxins that are not as easily excreted naturally. Don’t be fooled by that: the idea of a detox is to promote natural excretions, not create a new temporary flushing system. No detox fad is able to rid you of your bioaccumulated lipidbased toxins any more than your colon can.

There is not yet any quantifiable data validating any detox diet. The few documented studies of detoxicology are mostly comprised of observational studies run by the Church of Scientology on their own “detoxification program”.

All this in mind, I’m not saying “go and eat Burger King for breakfast, lunch and dinner”.

The real trick to a healthy body is moderation and variety (and some exercise thrown in too, sorry folks). One of the biggest dietary

dangers is extremity, no matter which side of the spectrum. Constant boozing and burger banquets may mean a lot of yum, but it’s not a good source for nutrition.

On the other hand, aiming for too much “natural” can be a dangerous mindset in itself. Excessive fruit consumption not only results in the obvious high sugar levels, but can also influence imbalances in hormones that regulate blood sugar, including insulin, glucagon, and growth hormone. Plants also produce their own toxins, such as furocoumarin in parsnips and ipomeamarone in kumara. These toxins help the plant to fight off attackers by causing bitterness in areas of damage or by acting as an insecticide. Preripe bananas contain a “resistant starch” that is not easily digested, resulting in high levels of flatulence. There’s also a lot of publicity around the contentious tuna fish: high in mercury (bad), but also high in omega 3 (good).

At the end of the day, there’s no “right” diet.

There is no single food able to provide all forty nutrients the body needs to function.

Variety is essential to get what you need, and also gives room to allow what you want.

Never forget that everybody is different— daily intake requirements vary not just between gender, height, weight, and age, they vary between your unique environmental and genetic differences too.

Ultimately, too much of anything can kill you. On the bright side, if you’re trying to go natural, don’t forget that when sugar reacts with yeast, you get nice natural alcohol.

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SCIENCE

Worst. Scientific Accuracy.

EVER! Gus Mitchell For years, Simpsons fans have searched for clues to the age-old question: which of the states is Springfield in?

But astronomer and Slate writer Phil Plait posits that Springfield may not even be in America at all, due to the depiction of the moon in a recent episode of the longrunning show.

In the January 25, 2015 episode “The Musk Who Fell to Earth”, one scene shows the episode’s guest star Elon Musk looking out at the evening sky as seen from the Simpsons’ Evergreen Terrace home, which depicts a setting crescent moon in its waxing state. The moon’s crescent tips are shown to point to the right, which only occurs in the southern hemisphere. In the northern hemisphere, where the show is ostensibly set, the moon’s crescent tips point to the left.

Rather than chalk the depiction up to a simple animator’s error, Plait was on the internet within minutes, registering his disgust throughout the world.

He declared that because of this oversight, The Simpsons must logically take place in the southern hemisphere. He offered his own photograph of a crescent moon from his home in Oregon for comparative proof.

All Salient wants to know is why a genius spends his time watching a cartoon show.

Polar Bear Impotence Gus Mitchell Danish researchers have determined that the density of polar bear penis bones is being diminished by oceanic pollution.

Penis bones, or baculum, are also found in many species of mammal including dogs, cats, rodents, chimpanzees and bats, but not humans. Biologists believe that these bones aid in supporting the penis and increasing stimulation for the female during mating.

Between 1990 and 2000, scientists from Aarhus University in Denmark examined 279 polar bear baculum specimens. Polar bears with lower baculum density were more likely to be found in regions where the water was contaminated with PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), an industrial chemical once used in paints and insulation. These chemicals have been banned worldwide since 2001 but, like most artificial materials, take a long time to break down naturally.

A weakened baculum can negatively impact the polar bear’s reproduction habits, making them vulnerable to penile fracture. To humans, PCBs are a carcinogen, and can also cause adverse effects to the reproductive and immune systems.

The discovery represents another blow to the survival of the polar bear, but by continuing to address climate change we may be able to ensure that the polar bear goes merely the way of the panda, not the way of the dodo.

editor@salient.org.nz

issue 3 | rebels

FILM

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The Imitation Game Directed by Morten Tyldum

Sarah Dillon Although I don’t altogether understand the phenomenon of Bennysnickers Scoopypants, I’ll be the first to admit that the fellow can act. Case in point: his portrayal of Alan Turing—mathematician, cryptanalyst, allround genius and undercover hero—in The Imitation Game. Cumberbatch’s acting is, in fact, the highlight of the film, which otherwise seems to suffer from a lamentable identity issue. Is it a biopic, lauding a talented and troubled man? A historical film, depicting the cracking of the Enigma code as a significant breakthrough for British intelligence? A thrilleresque drama set during WWII and featuring offhand BBC flourishes? It seems director Morten Tyldum is not quite sure and, hence, neither are we.

Let’s consider the film, firstly, as a biographical piece. While the real Turing was certainly homosexual, The Imitation Game minimises the issue of sexuality to create a new hybrid hero, who also just happens to be autistic.

Being homosexual in Britain in the 1940s was, apparently, not quite difficult enough to warrant a full diegesis. The decision could perhaps have been justified if it led to a strong progressive representation for either cause; however, (quelle horreur!) the thesis the film constantly reproduces is that Turing is “not normal”. Hollywood’s intended motivational

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platitudes (in this case, “sometimes it is the people whom no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine”) are thereby warped beyond recognition.

Through its characterisation of Turing, the film reads vaguely thus: Turing is rendered an outcast by his sexuality and disability. This means he is a genius who is able to achieve great things, which normal people cannot do. Outcasts can be valued for their brains, but must die alone. It’s an indictment on the film industry that we still commend (see: the Oscars) works with such a jaw-droppingly insensitive worldview. The Imitation Game seeks to redeem this situation by including a few trite facts about past horrific treatment of homosexuals by way of intertitling at the film’s conclusion (as if to suddenly incite viewers to human rights advocacy just as they leave the cinema), but to me it was a weak token gesture of support for issues that need a strong, not diluted, filmic voice.

In considering the film as explicitly historical, the various decades of the 30s to 50s were neatly evoked with costume and mise-enscene. It is intriguing that the film takes such pains to accurately represent a setting after taking such liberties with its central character. Tyldum produced strange senses

of dissonance by using true historical war reels along with reconstructed footage of wartime events, which served as a constant reminder of the then-and-there versus the here-and-now. Some of these montages were effective, and lent a certain flair to the film, but often they recycled tired war tropes such as the streetside newspaper boy, children loaded onto trains, or cups of tea drunk while perched atop piles of rubble.

On the plus side, The Imitation Game’s cinematography and visual style are crisp and polished, aided by a sympathetic score. Cumberbatch’s interactions with Commander Denniston (Charles Dance, looking a lot more dignified than when we last saw him on the small screen) are a joy to behold, and Keira Knightley as Joan Clarke, a token intelligent woman, is somewhat more palatable than usual. The film is perhaps worth seeing on the strength of these performances, but only if you’ve the stomach for enormously patronising representations and Hollywoodised history on a grandiose scale.

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against Sunday 1. Rebelling brunch with your folks Footloose (1984)

When symbolically rebelling against bourgeois family commitments, stick with a classic. Book a table at Floriditas, fake a fever, then chase this baby up with Guardians of the Galaxy.

Also good for “Six degrees of Kevin Bacon”.

Whiplash Directed by Damien Chazelle

Jess Knipping Black screen. The drum beat starts, so slowly that you aren’t even sure you’re hearing a beat.

The tempo builds as the beat gets stronger, faster, louder, with earnest. As it reaches a climax, the tempo cuts to a young man, resetting his drum kit to start the beat again.

As the camera tracks down the corridor, we become aware that the camera is the perspective of a person. This person is none other than the young man’s teaching hero.

The start, stop of the tempo at the will of the approaching teacher becomes the pace of the film. It creates the tempo of the central relationship between the student and his teacher. You’re fearful that this tempo will simply collapse on itself. Surely no one can keep that rhythm, that pace and that discipline to not stray from the beat. You can fall on either side of the argument with the relationship between band teacher Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons) and student Andrew Neiman (Miles Teller). It can read as a teacher pushing his student to be the best drummer that he could ever be. Or you can read it as a teacher who cannot see the line between encouragement and physical and emotional abuse.

Either way, this relationship is glorious to watch; just like jazz, it’s unpredictable. It has the build-up and the crescendos, the composed pieces and the improvisations.

Throughout, the film is held together by the building of tension that gets released, only to become even more intense. You can’t trust your own instincts on where the film is going—you don’t have the sheet music in front of you. You have to let the music take you on a journey you may not want to be on.

I didn’t know what to expect when walking into the cinema, but walking out I can certainly say that I have never had to control myself more to keep myself in my seat. The drum beat throughout this film flows through your muscles. This film is so rewarding to watch, the performances from both the acting and music stopped me from noticing many of the films’ flaws (plot and diversity wise). It is a joy to watch a film that places so much care in showcasing the true passion of music and how it can represent—no matter cruelly—the dedication of a teacher striving for greatness in their student.

against a 2. Rebelling hangover

Spring Breakers (2012) Don’t kid yourself, you deserve this. Lean into it by watching Disney stars succumbing to greed, vanity, James Franco’s cornrows, and vanity (again).

against hipster 3. Rebelling flatmates Ghost World (2001)

Before hipsters, there were outcasts. Follow Scarlett Johansson (pre-Lost In Translation) and Thora Birch (post-American Beauty) as plaid-wearing losers who buck social convention and suffer the consequences.

against cliché 4. Rebelling The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

Those unfortunate finance guys never stood a chance against the system. Watch for DiCaprio, stay for the rampantly capitalist agenda.

editor@salient.org.nz

FILM

Feeling rebellious?

Salient’s got you covered ...

issue 3 | rebels

I

f you haven’t heard of Pond, you’re missing out. They’re a psychedelic rock band from Perth with a lineup that currently consists of Nick Allbrook, Jay Watson, Joseph Ryan and Jamie Terry. The group’s lineup has changed numerous times since the band’s formation, which has resulted in some really interesting albums and their most recent release Man, It Feels Like Space Again is no exception.

MUSIC

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Man, It Feels Like Space Again Pond

Alice Reid

Pond formed in 2008 after Joseph Ryan (Mink Mussel Creek), Nick Allbrook (Mink Mussel Creek, Allbrook/Avery, Tame Impala, Peter Bibby & His Bottles of Confidence) and Jay Watson (Tame Impala) decided to form an ego-free collaborative. They recorded Psychedelic Mango with a little help from Kevin Parker (Tame Impala) and they literally haven’t stopped since.

Man, It Feels Like Space Again is their sixth album since forming in 2008. It’s impressive for a band to be pumping out such good music in such a short space of time and their latest effort might just be the best one yet.

The album leans more towards psych-pop than psych-rock, with more emphasis on the synths and dance rhythms than ever before.

C

olleen Green is a Los Angeles-based songwriter and self-proclaimed stoner who’s just hit 30. She’s a special kind of SoCal pop-punk and this time around she’s focused on responsibility, romantic failures, insecurities and growing up.

I Want to Grow Up Colleen Green

Alice Reid

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I Want To Grow Up is fairly self-explanatory in that it really is all about growing up.

Green makes responsibilty feel cool. Kinda.

It’s about letting that unwillingness to grow up go completely, or at least trying to. It’s claustrophobic, it’s fear, it’s the futility of life.

It’s the realisation that you’re growing up whether you want to or not. It’s that stoner kid paranoia glazed with sugary bubblegum grunge. It’s the idea that your life should be all figured out by 30, when in reality you’re still struggling to get by.

The title track isn’t that lyrically impressive, but it’s got a catchy beat and a good balance between heavy instruments and whingey vocals. “Deeper Than Love” is one of my favourite tracks, with lyrics like “Will I find a love that lasts as long as my life or will I die before ever becoming a wife? And I’m wondering if I’m even the marrying kind.

How can I give you my life when I know you’re just gonna die?” The song continues

Throughout the album, the focus remains on the instruments—the vocals usually sound far away and spacey which only adds to the psychedelic feel of the whole thing. “Waiting Around for Grace” opens gently, but soon the guitar kicks in and the energy changes.

The title track is my personal favourite, an eight minute song that combines the heavy use of synths with rolling drums and vocals.

If you get a chance, I definitely recommend checking out the video too—I may be a little biased in that I know one of the people responsible for it, but it’s seriously cool and I promise you won’t regret it. “Zond” is another of my favourite tracks from this album, it feels a little bit more upbeat and I definitely recommend checking out the video for this one too (and I don’t even know anyone involved, it’s just good).

Pond is such a cool band in that they don’t take themselves seriously, it’s all a bit of fun and it’s all in the name of creative expression.

Man, It Feels Like Space Again is an album that I can’t fault and is definitely one to check out if you’re a fan of Tame Impala, Django Django and those kind of vibes.

“‘Cause I’m shitty and I’m lame and I’m dumb and I’m a bore/ And once you get to know me you won’t like me anymore.” They’re scary thoughts, but they’re relatable. This heavy self-reflective stuff is repeated throughout the album with all of Green’s lyrics following a similarly anxious theme.

“Some People” feels like something that would play at a school dance in an awkward 90s coming of age film. “Grind My Teeth” feels a little bit more punk, it’s upbeat and it’s definitely one of my favourites from the album. “TV” is kind of a depressing reality, with lyrics like “TV is my friend, made me who I am/ And if you’re not a fan then I can’t relate.” “Whatever I Want” ends the album and it’s the ultimate coming of age song as Green realises that she actually can do whatever she wants. I can’t help hoping she realised this before the age of 30 though.

I Want To Grow Up is a relatable mix of catchy tracks, it’s a tiny bit grunge, a tiny bit surf pop and it sounds suitably nostalgic. It’s a scarily familiar rendition of how hard and scary it is to grow up, but it’s also about how boring all that shit is. All in all, it’s definitely worth a listen.

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Fri 20 Mar

Fri 20 Mar

Thu 19 Mar

Sat 14 Mar

Fri 13 Mar

Thu 12 Mar

Tue 10 Mar

Mon 9 Mar

MUSIC

Chocolate Strings (AUS) 9:00 Meow Parquet courts 8:30 San Fran

Lonesome Pine specials 8:00 Meow

The Kerouac Effect 2015 8:00 Fringe Bar

Vwo, Bakers Eddy and Guests 8:00 Valhalla

Stephen Malkmus 8:00 James Cabaret

Sharon Van Etten 8:00 Bodega

Groeni, Skymning, Borrowed Cassetes 8:00 San Fran Log Horn Breed 9:30 Valhalla

Friday the 13th, Part 2 8:00 Valhalla

Ruth Armishaw Tom Guiness w/ Guests 9:00 8:30 Basement Bar Lido Cafe

Emily Fairlight & Sky Village 9:00 Meow

The Nudge w/ Guests 9:30 MOON

House Play 10:30 Meow

Black City Lights 8:30 San Fran

Clube Do Choro 9:30 Hashigo Zake

NZ Dance Company 7:00 Sounding Theatre

Greg Johnson 8:00 Meow

Jordie Lane 8:30 San Fran

A Guy Called Gerald 8:00 Bodega

Dollhouse and the Cavemen 8:00 Valhalla

The Heavy Crooners 8:00 Angus Inn

Wine and Food Festival 12:00 Frank Kitts Park

Sheep, Dog and Wolf 7:00 Charles Plimmer

The Eversons with Moses 8:00 MOON

Deanna Krieg 9:30 Hashigo Zake

editor@salient.org.nz

issue 3 | rebels

FOOD

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Chilli Chocolate Cheesecake Hannah Douglass I normally find cheesecakes so sweet that my teeth ache even thinking about them, so I was dubious when I was asked to make one for date night. This one is rich and chocolatey but doesn’t taste like straight sugar, because the last thing you want to be thinking about on a date is how bad for you the food you’re eating is and how fat you’re going to get from it..

The chilli comes in as an aftertaste and is quite strong, so you may want to reduce the amount of chilli you put in depending on how well you handle hot food. I served it with berry compote so that the acidity of the berries cut through some of the rich chocolate flavour.

Recipe Base 150g digestive biscuits 70g melted butter

Filling 120ml cream 200g dark chocolate 250g cream cheese 120g caster sugar 2 tbsp cocoa powder 1 tsp ground chilli

1. Line a cake tin with baking paper or glad wrap.

2. Blitz up the biscuits into crumbs. Mix in the butter and press into your tin. Refrigerate while you make the filling.

3. Break up the chocolate into little bits and melt in a double boiler (i.e. a bowl over a pot of simmering water—who has actual double boilers??).

4. Whip the cream until it forms soft peaks while the chocolate melts—it takes a while.

5. Beat the living crap out of the cream cheese and sugar. It should be light and airy when you’ve beaten it enough.

6. Once the chocolate is melted and has cooled, mix the chocolate into the cream. Add the cocoa powder and chilli and mix well.

7. Add the cream cheese and gently fold in.

8. Once everything is combined totally, spread over the chilled base. Put back in the fridge for at least an hour before serving.

9. Serve with berries, however you like them.

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43

Obikwa Cuvée Brut Cost: $7.90 Alcohol Volume: 12 per cent Pairing: White Cliff Pinot Gris, Fat Bird Sauvignon Blanc and a duck sandwich.

“It’s quite nice; I’ll finish the bottle.”

To begin with this week, in the spirit of corporate sabotage, we’d like to share with you some tips on how You! Too! can enjoy a bottle of not-champagne for $7.90. We all know that promotional emails are annoying but we all also know that loyalty programmes have some great deals. For the socialist activists among us, the fucking evil nature of, say, Progressive Enterprises serves as another deterrent to joining up to some insidious card programme to get a discount on your quinoa. The solution to this, comrades, is to sign up to the programme with a fake email address, get the temporary card and get your deals!

You’ll thank us when you’re sleeping drunk, happy, and free of complicity in the exploitation of the workers. Sort of.

So we did that and we got a bottle of Obikwa Cuvée Brut from the exotic Countdown in Newtown. It was Valentine’s Day so Lydia was crying a lot and Mitch was also crying but for unrelated reasons, mostly crushing ennui. Lydia’s tears were compounded by a particularly emotional elimination on the Great British Sewing Bee but we won’t get into that. The upshot of all this is that the Obikwa was both “fine” and “nice” so our spirits were considerably improved.

2 for 1 Margherita

pizzas every friday from 3pm

The Hunter Lounge

The flavour profile of this particular bottle of not-champagne could be summed up as “fizzy white wine that cost $7 so who’s counting right??!” It was easy on the palate, induced no involuntary spasms and remained inherently quaffable throughout the evening.

In a slightly bogan disclosure Lydia would like to express her love of Lindauer and in a slightly bougie disclosure Mitch admits that the last sparkling wine he drunk was Veuve.

Either way, the drinkability of the Obikwa was betrayed by the fact that we actually attempted to put the cork back in so we could carry it to another party. All in all, it was cheap and good and we recommend checking the Countdown website regularly.

The Hunter Lounge

P.S. We also sincerely hope that everyone got the sneaky champagne socialist joke in the first paragraph because it was great and the humour quality of these reviews is not going to get better from here, let’s be frank.

editor@salient.org.nz

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issue 3 | rebels

BOOKS

T

Creamy Psychology and the Importance of Books Jayne Mulligan

All around town you can see freaky ladies, with awkward smiles, and dead gazes watching you from billboards, Yvonne Todd’s exhibition Creamy Psychology has injected a weird and wonderful gothic presence into the capital this summer. But with the exhibition coming to a close soon, it is worth taking stock of the books that had an impact upon the development of Todd’s work. For within these books, the same mixture of constructed beauty, fragmented vanity, and uncomfortable subject matter beautifully merge.

The books in question are those that operate in the “guilty pleasure” section of our libraries, the books where the subject matter is a particularly dreadful mixture of vanity and villainy. They are the books of “pulp fiction”, which fill you up and leave you empty at the same time; they are the McDonalds of literature. From the wholesome and gossip worthy Sweet Valley High series, to the trashy horrors of Virginia Andrews, and the passive terror of the Valley of the Dolls, each has a particular place within this terrifically terrifying exhibition. These novels capture the same part of your imagination that is reserved for Keeping Up With the Kardashians and Hoarders.

The Sweet Valley High series can be found in op-shops; it captured the imagination of so many teenagers through the 1980s and really drove home the idea that beauty isn’t everything, especially if you have beauty and brains.

It followed two equally beautiful twin sisters, who have marginally different personalities, save for where they fall on the nerd and cool kid spectrum. Their lives are full of dramas surrounding the boys they date and cheat on, the friends they gain and betray.

The duality between the sisters, Elizabeth (the studious, serious, kind, and patient one) and Jessica (the more “wild” one who likes boys and gossiping, appears shallow, but is like totally deep as well) gives the reader a full spectrum of available characters for females, either the virgin or the whore. Todd is obviously drawn to this limited duality, as she constructs images with classically “beautiful” accoutrements, and yet produces an ever so slightly gross image.

The stories of VC Andrews are even more extreme. They take the complexities of the Sweet Valley High female characters, and push them to further boundaries of the gross. Her work follows similar threads of secrecy,

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forbidden love (especially incest), and often follows a classic structure of rags-to-riches. Her stories are a perfect marriage between the Gothic horror and the soap-operatic family saga.

Her most famous work was Flowers in the Attic, a tale that follows a jealous mother and grandmother who push their cripplingly beautiful children into a life in the attic. While living in the attic, one of the children dies, and the eldest son and daughter fall in love—just your classic love story right? The terror of the situation seems to be enhanced by the beauty of the characters subjected to it.

The film version of Valley of the Dolls plays on loop in one the rooms of the exhibition. Based on the 1966 Jacquelin Smith novel, it dramatises the drug use and doll-like role of women in the Hollywood world. Used as toys, passed around and manipulated, they rely on stimulants to operate; these women are a living construction.

Throughout Creamy Psychology the act of construction is played out through the staging of the shots. The generic visual language of studio photography is present in the use of props, screens, stylised sets, and physically uncomfortable positions. The novels, along with Todd’s photographed characters, have a complicated relationship to feminism, as they provoke questions regarding the construction of female identity, and the nature of artifice within such an identity.

The books make a fascinating sideline to this exhibition; their lasting impact upon Todd can be seen as she negotiates the space between substance and surface. She has infused the characters within her work with an ugly beauty, which is in itself an enactment of the destructive forces of beauty and ornament, the power of the surface to disguise what lies beneath.

The novels are brandished as trashy and meaningless; much like their female protagonists, they are derided for their largely ornamental and sensational existence. Yet within the ivory walls of the Wellington City Art Gallery, Todd examines these tropes of female identity and construction, breathing a fresh, and somewhat disturbing lack of life into them, elevating them to a gallery-worthy position.

45

Art has the power to influence entire generations and entire cultures. This usually happens subtly, and only noticed when a future generation looks back in haughty comparison. But the easiest way to observe art’s influence is incredibly simple—reflect upon your own life and ask yourself what pieces of art have arrested, charmed, disturbed, or helped you?

VISUAL ARTS

The Three Most Important Paintings of My Life Sharon Lam

Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) When I was young I saw a Mondrian painting for the first time on an episode of Arthur. Later, I would see it again on the first The Sims. I didn’t know the name of the artist or the painting’s context until much later, but I had already given the painting my own meaning. I knew that the piece was famous and likely worth a lot of money—it was good enough for television and computer games, after all! And I also knew that it was utterly simple, thus becoming for me became the visual epitome of modern art pieces that seem silly and could be recreated by anyone and yet still be worth millions and millions.

Untitled

This was how Mondrian became a reference point in my life—my interpretation of the painting was that you don’t necessarily need refined skill or have to work super hard: if you can offer a point of difference that is strong enough, then you can get by with creativity and wit alone. Whether or not this is a good life philosophy to have, I am still finding out. And whether or not Mondrian would appreciate this interpretation, I am sure he appreciated having people paying millions for a few squares of primary colour.

Keith Haring (1958-1990) In primary school, an art teacher headed a group of older students who would paint large murals around the school. Often these would be direct copies or be in the style of other artists (though at the time, and at the age of eight, I did not know this). There was one mural in particular that I really, really liked.

There wasn’t anything else to it—something in the bold black lines, the simple colours, the excited faceless people, was something that eight-year-old me simply loved staring at.

I skilfully relocated my group of friends to a different lunch spot so that I could eat lunch near the painting everyday. The painting was one that would become ingrained in my mind and later in life I would learn all about the original artist—I read his journals, learnt about his philosophy towards art and life, his importance in the pop art scene and his battles with AIDS. Learning about Keith Haring changed how I think of art, but it was his art and his art alone—a pure visual image that won over an eight-year-old girl, that made me ever want to care about art at all.

Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553) As silly it may seem, this painting was what consoled me best after my first breakup. I bought a cheap book on art in 2012 when I was on a bus to Christchurch after spending summer visiting a boy in Nelson, a boy that would soon “break my heart”, which is about the most epic tragedy a 19-year-old can have.

He had revealed he had been kissing another girl, and the teary teenager that I was broke up with him instantaneously.

Shortly after this devastating event, flicking through the very book I’d bought while visiting him, I came across a painting that left me lingering. With fresh betrayal and heartbreak still prickling my eyes, there was something in the cool, smug smile and gaze of the woman that made me feel surprisingly better. In her eyes was a welcoming confidence that said I need not be sad over a trivial boy, who was as good as a head on a plate.

editor@salient.org.nz

issue 3 | rebels

GAMES

46

There Came an Echo Developed and published by Iridium Studios Platform(s): PC Jack Young There Came an Echo is equal parts epic vision and shallow one-note gameplay. The game’s premise is perhaps its greatest strength: you, the mysterious Sam, command a small group with just your voice, from a top-down real time strategy perspective. Disappointingly, you’re likely to spend more of your time with There Came an Echo frustrated than empowered.

You control your team simply by using specific assigned words to make characters maneuver and act in certain ways. For example, one might say “Corrin attack target one”, “Everyone move to alpha two, on my mark” or “Corrin switch to sniper” and the AI should act accordingly. The option to create your own custom commands is also available.

Suddenly “Hey good looking, stroll on down to party one and hit chump two!” has you working identically to people with more earnest approaches. The game also gives the option for conventional controls. Keyboard, mouse and controller support are all here.

Playing with the non-voice control schemes is clunky. A dial is used to issue all orders, and doesn’t seem intuitive as the sole tool of control in a game that is not turn based.

Playing There Came an Echo without voice control seems pointless. There are a total of 12 upgrades and five guns in the game. They unlock almost instantly, and selecting which

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of your four characters will carry what into battle is the beginning and end of all tactical depth (besides perhaps the ability to flank your enemy). Echo offers little besides the novelty of using your voice meaningfully in a video game.

The word “gimmick” will naturally spring to mind. I think that undersells what this experience is. When the voice recognition is working, you feel like a god. Directing your troops can work seamlessly like a well-oiled machine. Regrettably, the process only works about 60 per cent of the time, and the louder you shout in a vain attempt to save the lives of your heroes, the less Echo wants to listen. Yet the game is full of potential. Voice recognition gaming, if we take this experience’s successes, could well be a new genre in the coming years. The highlight mission of the campaign is undoubtedly a tower defense segment, halfway through where the voice commands really seem to mesh well with core gameplay.

Strange design decisions hold There Came an Echo back from functioning as any more than a proof of concept. There are around two points where the player is given the choice of two different tactical plans of action. It seems strange to dangle this sort of autonomy in front of the user to then rarely use the tool again. This brings us to Echo’s length. Steam informs me that I spent six hours with the

game, at least three of which I know to have been spent dealing with glitches, bugs and the making back of progress I had lost when the game so frequently crashed.

It would be unfair to focus solely on the many failings of There Came an Echo, leaving out what has been done right. The small cast is capable and often charming. The producers often stress the voice of Corrin, the game’s protagonist, to be Wil Wheaton (of Star Trek: The Next Generation fame), but characters Val and Syll consistently gave more interesting performances. The narrative will entertain while it is needed, and in places invests you in characters, but serves mostly as an excuse for gameplay. Music and overall sound design also impress, showing an indie developer can achieve quality on par with AAA titles. Echo’s graphics are not particularly memorable, but their simplicity allows for play on lower caliber PCs. The art style reminded me of a toned down XCOM: Enemy Unknown, a game Iridium Studios clearly has drawn a lot from.

There Came an Echo acts as an exciting proof of concept for an idea still years away. It’s great to see indie developers try their hand at something so ambitious. I recommend it to anyone interested in voice recognition software, but several significant shortcomings make it hard to label a good game.

47 if you are from an all boys’ school, waistband it early. While the intention of this game is to create a bond through problem solving and physical contact, perhaps the same can be achieved without having your face in someone’s armpit.

Two Truths, One Lie: The reality is the person guessing has forgotten your last two statements by the time you tell them your third one. So they will probably say “that one” and forget anything they might have learnt about you.

How Much Does a Polar Bear Weigh?

Enough to break the ice! We begin our third issue the same way you freshers will begin your first tutorials this week—with a cringeworthy icebreaker. Icebreakers are designed to remove the awkward barrier of engaging with strangers, but just as the prefix “no offence” only prepares the receiver (LOL) to take offence—icebreakers only make things more awkward. We thought we’d prepare you on how to how to cope with the most awful icebreakers we could find on Silk Road.

The Human Knot: First things first, get next to the hottest person in the room, because you are about to hold their sweaty hand for the next however long until you give up, and

The Birthday Line Up: Although you didn’t give two shits about this game when you were in primary school, the tutor still wants you to shuffle around the room getting in a ridiculous line for no reason with zero chance of getting it right. On the odd chance you did it successfully, I’m sure you are all best friends now.

know the ins-and-outs of your ins-and-outs, also you are at uni to “find yourself ”, so the facts you just told the class weren’t just inane and boring, but also fictional.

Tip of the week: to avoid icebreakers all together, don’t go to your tutorials—worked for Tom. See you for tut6 in MY103… or is it MY104…

Tom and Luke P.S. Feel free to give us constructive criticism/ general abuse on our FB page. www.facebook.com/ themoanzonewithtomandluke

Our advice is to be interesting and try to get a laugh. You are all in the same position and getting comfortable around new people is always a challenge. Just be thankful that your tutor hasn’t forced the dreaded Toilet Paper icebreaker on you: a game which involves publicly declaring how much paper you require when visiting the facilities and then subsequently stating an “interesting” fact about yourself for every sheet. No one want to

editor@salient.org.nz