Volume 80 | Issue 08

SALIENT

08 MAY 2017

6.5.17– 9.7.17

Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi – your gallery on Kelburn campus

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FREE ENTRY Tuesday–Sunday, 11am–5pm The gallery is located beside the Student Union building on Kelburn campus adamartgallery.org.nz

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Editors — Tuioleloto Laura Toailoa and Tim Manktelow

Contact — editor@salient.org.nz 04 463 6766

Designers — Eun Sun Jeong and Ellyse Randrup

Level 2, Student Union Building Victoria University of Wellington PO Box 600, Wellington

News Editor — Brigid Quirke News Reporters — E A Tombs, Henry Badenhorst Juer, Saeran Maniparathy, Siobhan O’Connor, Sofia Roberts, Thomas Croskery, Tim Manktelow Feature Writers — Ali Burns, Mikee Sto Domingo, Ataria Sharman, Robert Barratt and Brigid Quirke Chief Sub-Editor — Georgia Lockie Distributor — Darren Chin Section Editors — Annelise Bos (Podcast), Cameron Gray (Games), Finn Holland and Mathew Watkins (Film), Hanahiva Rose (Visual Art), Katie Meadows (Television), Kimberley McIvor (Books), Olly Clifton and Lauren Spring (Music), Sean Harbottle (Theatre) Contributors — Ben Leonard, Tessa Cullen, Maggie Hablous, Rory Lenihan-Ikin, Thomas Rackley, Kahu Kutia, Jasmine Koria, Phuong Anh Nguyen, Laura Sutherland, Catherine Nelson, Henrietta Bollinger, Tom Danby, Gus Mitchell, Shakked Noy, Shannon Harrison, Brooke Wilton, Mina Bixley, Kii and Tom, Puck Advertising — Grace Gollan grace.gollan@vuwsa.org.nz 04 463 6982

Printing — Service Printers 258 Taranaki Street, Wellington Paper — Sun 90gsm Salient is printed on environmentally sustainable paper, with vegetable ink, and is completely FSC approved.

Typefaces — Wedge by Bruce Rotherham, Adobe Caslon Pro by Carol Twombly, Balloon by Max R. Kaufmann & Lucida Blackletter About Us — Salient staff are employed by, but editorially independent from, the Victoria University of Wellington Students’ Association (VUWSA).

Salient is a member of, syndicated, and supported by the Aotearoa Student Press Association (ASPA).

Salient is partially funded by Victoria University students, through the student levy. Opinions expressed are not necessarily representative of those of VUWSA, ASPA, Service Printers, or the editorial staff.

Complaints — Please email editor@ salient.org.nz and if not satisfied with response contact VUWSA. Salient — 08 May, 2017 Volume 80, Issue 8

CONTRIBUTORS & COLOPHON

CONTENTS Editors’ Letter.......................................8 Letters...................................................7 Notices..................................................9 News General News.....................................10 New Zealand’s rising prison population directly linked to flawed legislation................................14 Politics Political Round-Up.............................16 The Trump Front.................................16 The Party Line....................................17 Interview Nicola Willis…...................................18 Opinion Dear Raisins…....................................20 — Maggie Hablous Columns Presidential Address............................21 VUWSA.............................................21 Te Ara Tauira......................................22 One Ocean..........................................22 Voice of V-ISA...................................23 VIC UFO...........................................23 Super Science Trends..........................24 Philosoraptor......................................25 Mauri Ora......................................... .26 Token Cripple.....................................26 Sports..................................................27

Features Young Adult Fiction..........................28 — Ali Burns

I Understand Nothing........................34 — Mikee Sto Domingo How do you spell that?.......................39 — Ataria Sharman

In which two people lose all hope.......42 — Robert Barratt and Brigid Quirke Arts Books..................................................46 Theatre................................................47 Film....................................................48 Music.................................................50 Podcast...............................................51 Food...................................................53 Visual Art...........................................54 Television...........................................56 Games................................................57 Music..................................................58 Poem (back cover)...............................64 Puzzles................................................60 Comic............................................... .61

Be inspired TAKE A CREATIVE WRITING WORKSHOP AS PART OF YOUR DEGREE OR TO DEVELOP YOUR WRITING CREW 253 POETRY WORKSHOP

Leading poet James Brown will guide you through the art of writing poetry. James is an acclaimed poet with five collections published.

CREW 254 SHORT FICTION WORKSHOP

Pip Adam, one of the most exciting fiction writers in the country, will offer ways to advance your short stories through writing exercises and intensive workshopping.

CREW 255 CHILDREN’S WRITING

Renowned children’s author Eirly Hunter will allow you to explore different forms of writing for the pre-adolescent child and begin to develop your own clear voice.

CREW 353 WRITING FOR THEATRE

Learn the craft of writing for the stage with celebrated playwright Gary Henderson. Gary’s work is produced locally and internationally and he is an esteemed teacher.

APPLY NOW FOR TRIMESTER ONE 2017 Applications close 21 June 2017

To find out more about the creative writing courses offered by the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University, go to victoria.ac.nz/modernletters

If you don’t want to write for us — write to us!

Salient welcomes, encourages, and thrives on public debate. Send us your honest feedback, be it praise or polemics.

LETTERS

SUBJECT: THE DEBATE CONTINUES

Grace Carroll’s piece in response to my own raises good questions. However, as it stands, the treatment she offers is both uncharitable and erroneous.

When saying that speech on campus should be factually correct, I am demanding that those who voice opinions use facts that are factually sound. And it should not be tolerated when individuals or groups want to make up facts to further an argument. Revisionist views of data and facts is intellectually dishonest and such has no place in the tertiary sphere.

On a slightly bitter note, assuming my piece was satirical is a low blow, considering the opinion you offer used Urban Dictionary as a basis for your argument.

Always open to honest, frank, and factual debate.

— Joshua James Letters must be received before 5pm on Tuesday for publication the following week. They must be 200 words or less. 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. However the Editors reserve the right to edit, abridge, or decline any letter without explanation.

Email: editor@salient.org.nz with “Letter to the Editor” in the subject line.

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

Editors’ letter

Everyone seems sure of what they know, what they believe, and who has got it so obviously wrong. When I read articles, think-pieces, tweets, people just sound so certain. I’ve often come across pieces that don’t provide context or definitions and it feels like I’m entering in the middle of the conversation.

I’m constantly worried of being uninformed or misinformed.

But where do I begin? Do I go to the origins of a movement, seek who coined the term, or try find the earliest record of an idea? This would assume there is a beginning where I’m able to then trace a linear path to the present.

Henrietta argues in her column this week that “intersectional thinking is urgently needed for people to claim space” as positions and identities can become rigid: “A list, rather than a web of identities that coexist, overlap, can result in stigma or privilege in certain spaces, and sometimes both. It sometimes seems like you have to ‘out’ yourself as these things in order to come across as having valid perspective, which can make deeply personal debate all the more difficult.”

A web is a more useful way to imagine identities and narratives, and leaves little room for a hierarchy of knowledge. To extend her argument, in these situations what is the basis of knowledge?

Is there a truth? Or is truth only accessible from within a certain perspective?

Mikee’s feature ponders this exact question in our digital age of ‘post-truth’. How do we reach understanding when faced with a sea of competing ‘facts’?

One response is “I do not wish to understand.”

Yet, as she says, “I cling to these ‘facts’, I even actively seek them out, a condition which I suspect is not peculiar to me.” Perhaps because the pursuit of facts offers the promise of total comprehension.

But this goal is elusive. The act of understanding is itself an act of an individual to will the world to order, to pull disorder into the light of the reason. If this is the case, “then it is no trifle that we should cultivate an understanding that is [...] honest, dynamic, imaginative, and compassionate.”

— Tuioleloto Laura Toailoa and Tim Manktelow

9

NOTICES CAREERS IN FOCUS — WORKING AS AN INHOUSE LAWYER

Careers and Employment, the Faculty of Law, and the Law Students’ Society are bringing to you an evening of panel discussion and networking with a range of VUW law graduates working as in-house lawyers. Come along and hear where your law degree can take you. Recent VUW graduates will share their experiences of working as legal advisers, solicitors, or legal counsel for a range of organisations.

Network with graduates and employers over refreshments.

Tuesday, May 16, 5.30–7.30pm, Salmond Room, Level Two, Law School.

Sign up now on CareerHub https:// careerhub.vuw.ac.nz/students/events/ detail/1283852

UNICEF AT VICTORIA

UNICEF at Victoria are holding a U-report Workshop on May 9, 6.00pm in KK203, and are inviting all VUW students to attend. If there are any questions, please go to www.facebook.com/unicefvic/.

VICTORIA ABROAD — STUDENT EXCHANGE OPPORTUNITIES

Why wait to go overseas after finishing your degree? GO ON EXCHANGE! Study in English, earn Victoria credit, get Studylink and grants, explore the world!

Find out more on our website: http:// victoria.ac.nz/exchange Enjoy past students’ experiences and photos on Facebook: https://www.facebook. com/VictoriaAbroadNZ/ Information Sessions: (Resuming May

10) every Wednesday at 12.50pm, Level Two, Easterfield Building.

Due to short staffing, office drop-in hours have been cancelled until May 9.

MAY 10, LIVING WAGE DAY. 12.00–1.00PM @ THE HUB

What does low pay mean to you? No time to study? Unpaid bills? Head to the Hub on Wednesday to talk about the impact of low wages — on students, cleaners, and the academics who rely on everyone in the VUW workforce to do their jobs well. Enjoy free Living Wage coffee from the Hunter Lounge and Living Wage ice blocks from Nice Blocks. With MCs Rory Lenihan-Ikin and Katy Miller and entertainment from the Samoan Students’ Association. Support the call for VUW to commit to becoming a Living Wage university.

CAMPUS EXPO AND ICT EXPO IN MAY

Campus Expo Thursday, May 11, 11.00–2.00pm, the Hub ICT Expo Friday, May 12, 12.00–2.00pm, Alan MacDiarmid Foyer Don’t miss this great opportunity to check out a wide variety of organisations, network with potential employers, gain possible job opportunities, and even practice your pitch!

For more information, go to: www.victoria. ac.nz/careerhub, click on “events” and search “expo”.

A listing in our notices section is free for all VUW students, VUWSA-affiliated clubs, and not-for-profit organisations. If you would like to post a notice please email editor@salient.org.nz and include NOTICE in the subject line. There is limited space in this section so notices will be prioritised at the discretion of the editors.

10

News

NEWS PRIVILEGED PEOPLE DON’T WANT WINDOW WASHERS TOUCHING THEIR CARS, LEGISLATE AGAINST THEM MAY DAY PROTEST FOR MIGRANT AND REFUGEE RIGHTS VUW INTERNET BREACHED, PASSWORD CHANGES RECOMMENDED NEW ROAD NAMES TO REFLECT LOCAL HISTORY BRAZILIAN STRIKES MET WITH VIOLENCE PROTESTS IN KASHMIR #FEESMUSTFALL IN SOUTH AFRICA NEW ZEALAND’S RISING PRISON POPULATION DIRECTLY LINKED TO FLAWED LEGISLATION

POLITICS POLITICAL ROUND-UP THE TRUMP FRONT THE PARTY LINE

11 11

PRIVILEGED PEOPLE DON’T WANT WINDOW WASHERS TOUCHING THEIR CARS, LEGISLATE AGAINST THEM

A new bill banning street window washers has been put to Select Committee in Parliament.

The private members bill, put forward by National MP Jami-Lee Ross, would allow police to issue on the spot fines of $150 to window washers.

Many local councils already have bylaws prohibiting street window washers, but under these bylaws authorities are required to prosecute the individual in order to recover the fine. Ross said that instant fines provide an easier, more cost-effective route for councils and police.

The bill is supported by Auckland Council and police. So far, 61 people have been prosecuted under Auckland Council’s bylaw, with a further 170 cases currently underway.

Sam, a regular window washer in Wellington, told Salient, “Let’s be honest, a $150 fine isn’t going to stop us doing what we do.”

The bill allows for a maximum penalty on conviction of up to $1000 for a second offence, and up to $20,000 for further, repeated breaches.

Jami-Lee Ross said that some motorists found the practise intimidating. “There’s a strong presence of gangs involved in this particular activity,” he said. “Gangs have been using window washing for recruitment and initiation.”

Sam said he did not think the instant fines focused on the real issues of poverty and homelessness in New Zealand.

News NEWS “It’s a bit fucked, eh. [...] I do this so I don’t have to steal and shit to eat each day. If someone offered me a job, yeah I’d take it. And I’ve been to the recruitment shit, the work and income meetings. But I’ve got myself to feed, my dog to feed, and the majority of people here are happy to chuck us a few dollars, or something to eat. And if they don’t want to?

That’s cool, we leave them be.”

The bill passed its first reading 93 to 28, with opposition from New Zealand First, the Green Party, and the Māori Party.

Public submissions on the bill are open until June 1.

— Saeran Maniparathy

quota “bloody shameful” and said we have the resources to accept more people.

He also pointed out that even if the quota was doubled to 1500 per year, New Zealand would still be accepting half as many refugees per capita as Australia.

In addition to the push for greater responsibility for resettling refugees displaced by international conflicts, speakers called for greater rights for migrant workers.

Dennis Maga, of FIRST Union, said that no one is more exploited than migrants and they work in “dirty, dangerous, and difficult industries.”

He added that their work is undervalued and “every time there is a crisis in this country, some poliMAY DAY PROTEST ticians, some employers, and some people blame migrants because they FOR MIGRANT are brown, because they are not like AND them.”

REFUGEE RIGHTS Tightened immigration laws were announced by the government on April 19. Low skilled migrants On May 1 around 70 people gath- will have their time in New Zealand ered on Cuba Street in support of limited to a maximum of three years, migrant and refugee rights. while skilled migrants now have to The demonstration was organ- meet a remuneration threshold. ised by the Migrant And Refugee Labour leader Andrew Little said Rights Campaign (MARCC) as a his party would go further and cut show of solidarity in response to do- immigration by tens of thousands mestic and international xenophobia. a year, while in 2016 New Zealand Before marching to the Immi- First leader Winston Peters said angration New Zealand headquarters nual immigration should be limited on Willis Street, the crowd heard to between 7,000 and 15,000 “serifrom a number of speakers including ously qualified” migrants.

Syrian refugee Karam Shaar, who Ibrahim Omer, who arrived in expressed disbelief at New Zealand’s New Zealand as a refugee from Erlow refugee quota. itrea and who spoke at the demon“I can’t believe a country like stration, said he was marching to “to New Zealand won’t raise the quota, say that migrants and refugees are we are talking about 4.8 million dis- welcome in New Zealand.” placed people.”

“As a former refugee, I feel I New Zealand currently accepts should be at the forefront in support 750 refugees into the country per of the march.” year. This is being raised to 1000 in He condemned the anti-immiJuly 2018 — the first rise since 1987. gration sentiment in current politiAnother speaker, Murdoch Ste- cal discourse, suggesting the Labour phens, a campaigner for Doing Our Party in particular are blaming “imBit, called New Zealand’s refugee migrants for the housing crisis which

12 is caused by the supply rather than immigrants.”

“That is a real shame and we need to tell them that this is not okay and we need to condemn them.”

Upon arriving at the Immigration New Zealand building, march organiser Gayaal Iddamalgoda read out a statement and a list of demands including “full rights for migrant workers” and for New Zealand to “double the refugee quota.”

A sheet with the demands was taped to the door and messages of solidarity were then chalked on the building’s steps.

At the time of print, the Minister of Immigration, Michael Woodhouse, failed to respond to a request for comment.

— Tim Manktelow

VUW INTERNET BREACHED, PASSWORD CHANGES RECOMMENDED An internet security breach has led VUW to urge students to change their login details and personal passwords.

An email alerting students to the incident was sent to all active students on the morning of May 1, with the subject line, “Important Security Notice”.

In the email, VUW’s ITS Director Stuart Haselden said that the university has become aware of a case of unauthorised access being made to the university’s IT systems.

“It is possible that usernames and passwords may have been compromised.”

VUW told Salient that it had “been in touch with students, staff, and some former students” after discovering the incident, and has been working with the National Cyber Security Centre and security consultants to analyse the incident, including New Zealand’s Comput-

News er Emergency Response Team, and CyberToa, a support company for organisations that manage sensitive personal data.

VUW said it had performed “a number of actions” to minimise risk from the breach, but did not specify what these actions were. VUW is also asking students, staff, and some former students to change their passwords as a “precautionary measure.”

VUW told Salient they had not yet detected any nefarious use of usernames or passwords. They nevertheless recommended students change their VUW passwords and passwords for social media or online shopping websites if the same passwords had been used.

The email recommended students use “long, strong passwords and unique passwords for each site,” providing instructions on how to find advice on the subject on the website of government agency Netsafe.

Students can gain additional information by contacting its-service@ vuw.ac.nz.

— Thomas Croskery

NEW ROAD NAMES TO REFLECT LOCAL HISTORY Approximately 18 kilometers of State Highway One are set to become local roads after being superseded by the $630 million Kāpiti expressway. The process involves the seven new sections eventually being given new road names to reflect the change.

The Kāpiti Coast District Council has proposed names which reflect the local history of the district and the nearby regions.

The proposed road names are Hurumutu Road, Hokowhiti Road, Rauoterangi Road, Kakakura Road, Unaiki Road, Katu Road, and Matene Te Whiwhi Road.

Perhaps the most historical is the naming of Kakakura Road, refer-

ring to Wiremu Te Kakakura Parata (Wi Parata). Wi Parata donated the land that the present township of Waikanae sits on to Pākehā, and brought the historical case against the Bishop of Wellington in which the Treaty of Waitangi was held to be a “simple nullity.”

The Green Party’s candidate for the Te Tai Hauāuru electorate Jack McDonald said that the language was part of this nation’s collective history.

“I would commend the council for taking this step. It’s a way of educating the community about our own local history.”

Some negative responses have come from Pākehā locals, who have called the names “unpronounceable” and “PC gone haywire.”

Mike Judd, from Paraparaumu, said the names were too hard to pronounce, but argued, “I’m not a racist.

I’ve just come back from a family reunion where there’s a very big percentage of Māori in my family.”

— Henry Badenhorst Juer

BRAZILIAN STRIKES MET WITH VIOLENCE Brazil experienced severe unrest on April 28 as millions of workers went on strike to protest harsh austerity measures proposed by President Michel Temer.

All 27 states experienced strikes, which included workers employed as teachers, bank clerks, bus drivers, and auto production staff.

The strikes quickly turned into violent clashes between protesters and police, with police blocking protesters from entering airports, and using tear gas and rubber bullets.

Protest responses included breaking store windows and setting alight bridges and buses.

The strikes and protests were in response to the austerity measures

13 Protesting students were met by security forces with tear gas and batons, leaving hundreds of students injured.

A member of the banned Kashmir University Students’ Union who called for the protests told the Kashmir Dispatch that “the savagery inflicted on students isn’t only a display of the basic lack of regard for the sanctity of educational institutions,” but also an attempt “to humiliate and break the will of the youth of the Valley who are at the forefront of the struggle for right to self-determination.”

The state Minister of Education Altaf Bukhari reported that they are “handling the situation peacefully,” and said that they have told educators to counsel the students and listen to their issues.

Yasir Altaf, a Kashmiri student studying at VUW, remains in contact with family and friends in the city. He told Salient “the students in Kashmir as well as other civilians are facing not only curfews and bans from security forces. [...] They are being killed through the pellet guns and shelling in the open public.”

Suhail Ahmed, Assistant Professor of New Media at Central University of Kashmir, told the Washington Post that viral videos on social media, such as one where security forces were shown using a student as a human shield while driving through PROTESTS the city, were also a key factor in IN KASHMIR mobilising youth protesters. Attempting to slow the spread of such In what is being described by Al viral videos, state leader Mehbooba Jazeera as an “extremely rare occur- Mufti has instituted a one-month rence,” students have taken to the ban on sites such as WhatsApp, streets of central Srinagar, Kashmir, Facebook, and Twitter.

Kashmir Valley has been the loto protest the strict Indian security cation of a territorial battle between forces that occupy the city.

Since the killing of popular rebel India and Pakistan since 1947 and is leader Burhan Wani last year, there currently partitioned into two main has been an increase in security forc- territories, the Indian-administered es and youth rebels in the area. Police and the Pakistan-administered.

BBC reported that the city is one and government forces reportedly raided a university campus to arrest of the most militarised zones in the students tied to this rebellion against world.

— Siobhan O’Connor the Indian army. proposed by Brazil’s current centre-right government.

These include weakening labour laws and cutting pensions, which have been described by the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights Philip Alston as “lacking in all nuance and compassion.”

Temer, however, has promised to continue with the measures, saying “the Judiciary, the Executive, the Legislative, and the Brazilian [population] are naturally optimistic people; a population with no pessimism. That is why we say: whatever happens, with protests or no protests, Brazil continues and will continue to work.”

The recent activism fits within the wider context of Brazilian disillusionment with an increasingly corrupt political system.

President Temer was elected following the impeachment of former President Dilma Rousseff for “criminal administrative misconduct.”

A protester who participated in the strikes described her motives as “primarily against the government, which I consider illegitimate, and because of the workers’ rights and pension reform, which made this protest much bigger.”

— Sofia Roberts

News

#FEESMUSTFALL IN SOUTH AFRICA South Africa has a long history of protest, with the Apartheid era in the living memory of much of the population. Since 2012, student protests have developed into an ideological battle with major disruptions to campuses.

While these protests began over issues including academic exclusions, student accommodation, and poor living conditions, the dominant narrative since 2015 has been a call for free tertiary education and the decolonisation of the curriculum, after tuition fees were set to increase by approximately 10%.

The 2015 #FeesMustFall movement began in Johannesburg and spread to campuses across the country. Although tuition fees were frozen in 2016 as a result, protests have continued; with many universities closing for extended periods.

An academic at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa, spoke with Salient and described the discourses surrounding the protests as complex, political, and “influenced by South Africa’s difficult culture of protest.”

He said that students, both protesting and non-protesting, had faced major challenges as a result.

“Every semester, there have been major, constant disruptions.”

He described protesting students throwing large rocks at other students, police firing rubber bullets at protesters, and test conditions requiring police supervision.

“Often, you’re just lecturing and then suddenly, there’s a serious protest and staff and students are chased out of the lecture theatre.”

Justin Palmer, who moved from South Africa to New Zealand in 2013, reflected on the hugely different student experiences in both countries. “The problems that people have here [at VUW] would never even register. [...] I’m very grateful to be studying at a university where my biggest issue to date is not being able to operate the printers and having to use the stairs in the library.”

— Brigid Quirke

14

News

NEW ZEALAND’S RISING PRISON POPULATION DIRECTLY LINKED TO FLAWED LEGISLATION

Criminal justice experts are calling on politicians to practically address the escalating prison population.

In 2013, the National Party reformed bail conditions, backed by parties across the political spectrum. Today, New Zealand has more people in prison than at any other time in history, reaching a record 10,000 in late 2016.

The number of prisoners held on remand has doubled since 2014. Criminal justice organisation JustSpeak launched a report last Friday, linking the overcrowding of New Zealand’s prisons to a misguided implementation of the Bail Amendment Act 2013.

The Act was designed to be specific in scope: to make it more difficult for defendants convicted of serious crimes to be granted bail. This was in direct response to what Andrew Little called, at the time of the bill’s third reading, a “growing community concern” that offenders were committing violent crime while on bail.

At the time of the Act, the Ministry of Justice projected that the reform would lead to a modest increase of 40–50 prison beds. This was able to be effectively incorporated into Corrections’ budget, according to the Regulatory Impact Statement.

In their report, JustSpeak estimates there to have been an increase of approximately 1500 prison beds — 30 times the amount originally predicted.

The rapid increase of prisoners on remand has placed significant strain on prison infrastructure.

Kelvin Davis, Labour Party spokesperson for Corrections, told Salient, “the more we fill up prisons, the more prisons we have to make.”

The drastic overshot cannot be explained by

Corrections holding more violent offenders on remand. According to JustSpeak spokesperson Jordan Anderson, “a large number of that 1500 are not serious offenders.” The proportion of people in prison for a violent or sexual offence decreased by 5% in 2016.

Instead, a large number of low-level defendants, including those not yet convicted of a crime, are captured by the ambit of the Act. JustSpeak claims that a main reason for this is due to strict housing requirements alienating the majority of offenders: “tents, caravans, camping grounds, or hostels are not considered suitable.”

Davis told Salient that these issues (among others) are evidence of “bureaucratic stupidity keeping people in prisons when they shouldn’t be.” It is the direct result of Corrections being “untruthful in locking up people” by missing “simple solutions.”

In that respect, Davis and Anderson are in agreement over what needs to change — policy. Anderson said that “looking at changing the implementation of the Act is a realistic way of mitigating its terrible effect.” Simply repealing the Act without addressing this implementation could lead to another “downward spiral into punitiveness” which preceded the 2013 reform.

VUW Criminology lecturer, Liam Martin, attributes the record high prison population to this punitive public position, in that “it is a product of specific choices about how [New Zealanders] respond to crime.” Similarly, Anderson points to an increasingly “risk averse system” which is rooted in punitiveness.

This punitiveness has been particularly punishing for Māori. Around the same time that JustSpeak released their report on bail con-

15 ditions, the Waitangi Tribunal held that the Crown had breached their treaty obligations of active participation due to the increasing levels of Māori reoffending.

Anderson was keen to point out that changing New Zealand’s bail laws would directly provide positive outcomes for Māori offenders.

“It would be the ideal absolutely [...] that the results of this report would motivate [politicians] to actually do something about our prison population which is spiralling out of control, and about the hyper-incarceration of Māori which is shameful… in terms of our responsibility to our people.”

When Salient questioned the risk of “easy fixes” in addressing systemic problems, such as Māori imprisonment, Anderson acknowledged the narrow focus of the report. Martin explained that repealing the Act is a “great first step.”

“A long term strategy [...] will call on New Zealanders to confront deeply entrenched problems that many would rather ignore: problems of institutional racism, homelessness, a lack of living wage jobs and so on.”

“But the immediate need is to prevent further increases… and to ease pressure on a chronically overcrowded system.”

Davis described the first step as cross-party collaboration to address prison numbers and alternative options, such as a “prison based on Kaupapa Māori, rather than ‘Kaupapa Corrections’.”

This would see values such as whānaungatanga prioritised in existing prisons, rather than an alternative justice system for Māori.

For Anderson, the results of the Waitangi Tribunal claim against Corrections have shed light on possible issues to this approach. She was particularly hesitant given the “bastardisation of tikanga by the Department of Corrections and how fundamentally offensive that is to anyone that has genuine belief in Kaupapa Māori principles.”

“Given the depth of the entrenchment of colonisation… I don’t know whether [prisons] can be redeemed in their current form.”

Salient asked Minister of Corrections, Louise Upston, what steps National plans to take to address the large scale incarceration of Māori. Upston pointed to a number of “initiatives already in place for Māori prisoners… any suggestions

News that may help reduce the prison population and reoffending rates are welcome.”

Upston declined to comment on whether National would commit to a cross-party discussion on the matter.

Although Upston also declined to comment on the findings of the JustSpeak report, Anderson told Salient that she was surprised at the depth of cross-party support JustSpeak had received. However, the political will for actual reform was still “another kettle of fish.”

Although Davis is firm on the need for change, telling Salient “I’d rather spend $100,000 keeping someone out of prison than keeping someone in it,” it’s clear that other politicians may not agree. Labour MP for Napier, Stuart Nash, called for tougher, longer sentencing on his public Facebook page.

Salient asked Upston how National would address the specific findings of the report. In response, Upston said “Corrections staff work incredibly hard with [prisoners],” and pointed to a new commitment by National to reduce the number of “victims of serious crime” by 10,000 in the next four years. It is unclear how these policies will specifically address numbers of low-level defendants being held on remand.

The political and public will remains unclear — Martin told Salient that many New Zealanders, much like Prime Minister Bill English, view prisons as a moral and fiscal failure: “[they] are crying out for solutions.”

— E A Tombs

16 16 tion Minister Michael Woodhouse agreed that record immigration had put pressure on Auckland, but disagreed that direct immigration caps Labour Immigration Policy would help. Instead, National has It should be pretty clear by this point opted to initially target the working that immigration is going to be a visas scheme, with more changes major issue in the upcoming election. likely.

In an ideal world this would None of this is to say that a demean a healthy debate over what bate on immigration is inherently New Zealand can reasonably sup- wrong; we’ll find out how the pubport and who is most in need. In- lic feel about that in September. The stead, both major parties appear to point is that it’s unfair and irresponbe slipping closer together in their sible to label immigration as the root condemnation of the “immigration of all evil when you don’t even have a problem”. firm policy to address it.

While National’s recently reIn hedging all its bets, Labour leased working visa changes may seems to be hoping it can appease have been narrow sighted, they are at both sides of the immigration deleast committed to a firm plan. La- bate. Instead, it’s running the risk of bour, meanwhile, has gone to great appealing to no one. lengths to avoid giving any specifics.

After months of avoiding the Winston Peters’ Immigration Comments issue, Labour leader Andrew Little Since we’re already talking about was finally forced to confirm that he immigration, let’s spend a little time would make substantial cuts to im- talking about New Zealand First’s migration if elected. Though exactly Winston Peters. how and where those cuts would be For the past few years, Peters’ made still remains unclear. remaining political capital seems to Little said he would like to “tar- centre around blaming immigration get” the roughly 70,000 per annum for a raft of social and economic ills. net migration figure, but he denied But this past week, his comments wanting to cut immigration by as reminded everyone exactly how low much as 50,000. Instead, he suggest- he can stoop when election year rolls ed that the numbers should be cut by around. a figure in the tens of thousands.

Peters lashed out at two senior To Labour’s credit, the party ap- journalists, Lincoln Tan and Harpears to remain committed to meet- kanwal Singh, after they published ing Pacific quotas, raising the refu- an article showing that record work gee quota, and focusing on family visa admissions were not primarily unification. The problem is, though, sourced from Asia. Peters called the that Little continues to lay many of report “propaganda,” claiming that New Zealand’s most high-profile their reporting was based on a flawed problems squarely on the shoulders analysis of immigration data. of new migrants.

However, Peters also referred to In a pivot to Labour’s much tout- the two reporters as “Asian immied Auckland-focused campaign, Lit- grants,” implicitly questioning their tle said that Auckland was bearing motives and supposed bias. Singh the brunt of immigration pressure. and Tan responded with yet more He listed overcrowded schools, poor data to back up their initial reporthealth care, the housing shortage, ing, including numbers on student and traffic congestion as being a re- visas that Peters claimed were ignored. sult of high immigration.

Peters has since doubled down In response, National’s Immigra- on the attacks, saying that the “im-

POLITICAL ROUND-UP

Politics POLITICS migrant reporters” were seeking “to justify their existence” with the report. He also denied his initial comments were racist.

New Zealand First’s immigration policy includes strong limits on the number of incoming migrants, especially those arriving on student visas. Mr Peters has said he wants immigration restricted to 10,000 per annum across all visa categories.

The comments have also forced carefully worded responses from Peters’ potential coalition partners.

Prime Minister Bill English would not be drawn on whether or not the comments were racist. He said that Mr Peters was looking to provoke a response for media attention. Meanwhile, Labour leader Andrew Little said that while a discussion about immigration was important, ethnicity and country of origin should be left out.

With the general election fast approaching, Peter’s comments take on an even greater political significance.

Based on current polling it looks likely that New Zealand First will play a major role in deciding who gets to form the next government.

This means that while Little and English may safely condemn Peters now, things may look a little different on the other side of September 23s.

— Ben Leonard

THE TRUMP FRONT On April 29, the White House Correspondents dinner took place in Washington D.C — an annual staple in the diet of the American political media. Beginning in 1921, the President and Vice-President traditionally attend the event, an evening to celebrate the relationship between the White House Press Corps and the Presidential Administration, resting upon the ideals of freedom of speech and democracy. Sooo… you

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Politics

reckon Don-Don went?

You bet he didn’t! “Freedom of speech” and “democracy” don’t exactly seem to be among Donny’s priorities. Trumpster is now the first President to fail to attend this event since old boi Ronald Reagan declined the elusive invite in 1981, purely because he was recovering from an ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT 20 days earlier. So, Don was a no-show, no surprises there, especially as his relationship with the media has been, shall we say, on the rocks, since the beginning of the 45th administration.

But if the Prez wasn’t in D.C., where was he? What was his welltimed “excuse” for not attending?

Did he have the flu? Was he heading to the Mexican border to get a start on that big wall of his? Was he off getting his weekly spray tan?

No. Instead, Donny has really taken the phrase “early bird catches the worm” to heart, and began his campaign for the 2020 election with a rally in Pennsylvania. Speaking to the crowd, Trump-o said that the dinner would be “very, very boring” and couldn’t be more pleased to be “[…] more than 100 miles away from Washington’s swamp.”

Donald. Mate. If you couldn’t wait to escape Washington, then why, why. Did. You. Run. For. Office.

Because, in case you hadn’t noticed ol’ pal, the White House, where you now live, is in fact in Washington.

— Tessa Cullen

THE PARTY LINE On April 19, the government announced changes to New Zealand's immigration policy. Low skilled migrants will have their time in New Zealand limited to a maximum of three years, while skilled migrants now have to meet a remuneration threshold — $48,859 for skilled jobs, and $73,299 for well-paid jobs considered low-

skilled. Immigration Minister Michael Woodhouse stated that the changes are “aimed at managing the number and improving the quality of migrants coming to New Zealand.” On RNZ's Morning Report, on April 26, Labour Party leader Andrew Little went further and stated “we need to reduce immigration and it needs to be in the tens of thousands.” What are your thoughts on immigration — do levels need to be reduced?

VicLabour We stand strongly against race based rhetoric that too often ties itself to talk about immigration reform. Politicians like Winston have tried to make immigration discussion racist since ages ago, and that’s not right.

Labour is standing for a rethink of what immigration we can sustainably manage. People coming to New Zealand are valuable to our society’s culture and economy. It is our responsibility to make sure that the infrastructure we have in place, stuff like housing and jobs, are able to give new immigrants the Kiwi dream that they deserve.

National’s tinkering with the immigration numbers isn’t going to fix the problems of housing and infrastructure. By not reviewing properly how immigration works they are letting down the people who choose to live here. The only way to guarantee a sustainable country that can give immigrants the life all Kiwi’s dream of is with a Labour government.

countries. This threatens our future prosperity as a diverse, confident, and outward looking nation.

The recent announcement by Minister Woodhouse is sensible and straightforward policy that ensures New Zealand remains a welcoming country for migrants and protects against any untoward behaviour and treatment.

The National Government has been clear that as a nation founded and built by immigrants we need to remain true to our commitment to being a diverse and outward looking country; the Young Nats agree.

— Sam Stead

Greens at Vic We reject the xenophobic narratives coming from other political parties.

The problems that are blamed on immigrants are caused by 33 years of neoliberal policies. Immigrants contribute to the economy and to tax revenue; the solutions to the following issues will be funded by money immigration generates.

The housing crisis was caused by deregulation of speculation and successive governments’ failure to build state housing. The real solutions to this are re-regulation and building quality, affordable state housing.

Public services are under pressure due to systematic underfunding.

Wage suppression is the result of trade unions having been smashed, the minimum wage declining in value, and the Reserve Bank’s policy of keeping unemployment above 5% to Young Nats — Lower North Island reduce worker bargaining power.

The Young Nats are proud to be The solution is a rejuvenated union members of the only party in New movement, a living wage, and full emZealand with a balanced and sensi- ployment. We must stand in solidarity ble view on immigration that recog- with migrant workers and proclaim nises the value of immigrants to our them part of the solution to these economy and society. problems, not the cause of them.

As an organisation, the Young — Elliot Crossan, Young Greens Nats understand that immigrants Co-Convener contribute to our country, and if we If you are a representative of a youth simply “turn the tap off ” to future political group and wish to participate migrants we lose those contributions in this section, please email editor@ to other, more open and welcoming, salient.org.nz

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• INTERVIEW WITH NICOLA WILLIS • Nicola Willis is the National Party candidate for Wellington Central, and will be fighting a tough race against incumbent MP Grant Robertson and Green Party Leader James Shaw. She’s new to electoral politics, but by no means inexperienced. Salient spoke to her about her background before entering politics, the dynamics of the Wellington Central race, housing, transport, and tertiary education. Below is a considerably shortened transcript of the interview — the full version can be found at salient.org.nz, and the audio will be broadcast on Salient FM. *** What was your background before entering into politics?

I’ve spent the past five years at Fonterra as a business leader there. My most recent role was managing a group of farms nationwide, 23 farms, and my job was to make them more environmentally sustainable. I led a team of 100 people who were at work doing that. I also had roles at Fonterra leading global affairs, so trade strategy and the like — e.g. how do we ensure we get the maximum volume of exports at the best price into our key markets around the world. Prior

to that I had a career in the public service. I had worked with Bill English and John Key as a senior adviser, both in opposition and government.

Given the considerable concern among people across the country regarding the state of New Zealand’s waterways and freshwater, do you see the connection with Fonterra as a potential negative?

I see it as a real positive, because I’ve got on the ground experience of what it takes to make farming more environmentally friendly. And I think that is an objective that all New Zealanders share. If we’re going to achieve that goal we need to understand the detail and the practical reality of how that happens.

You were previously an advisor to former Prime Minister John Key, 2006 to 2011, what did this position entail and what experience has it given you as a candidate?

My role was to advise John Key on his policy and communication strategies. It was a role that encompassed everything from helping him draft a question in parliament through to accompanying him to the APEC conference offshore. It taught me the power that effective politicians have to make a difference to people’s lives, and it taught me about parliamentary processes and actually what it takes to take an idea through to reality and make change happen. I understand what it takes to get results, and I think that is what voters need from their representatives.

The Wellington Central electorate has been held by Labour since the 1999 election (in 1996 it was won by Richard Prebble for the Act Party), and in 2014 Grant Robertson won by a majority of 8,267. How do you see your chances in the 2017 election?

I’m in it to win it. But I know it’s a steep hill and I know it’s a really big ask. There aren’t many electorates around the country where it’s going to be a harder seat to win. There are a couple things going in my favour. The first is that Wellington is a place where National has won the party vote consistently, and in fact Labour trails at third — they won fewer than one in four party votes here. What that tells me is that Wellingtonians don’t necessarily have a high level

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of confidence in the Labour Party, which Grant Robertson represents. The second reason is that James Shaw is standing in this electorate. There are a number of people in Wellington who support the Green Party and I am sure will put their vote behind James Shaw. That combination of factors means it’s going to be a really interesting race and one to watch.

So you think that James Shaw’s presence could split support away from Grant Robertson to your favour?

Absolutely. Anything that reduces Grant Robertson’s majority plays to my favour. I think there is also a really interesting thing happening in Wellington — we have a lot of people who feel really positively about the future, we have a lot of growth happening in the economy, there are good jobs on offer for people — I don’t sense a real appetite to change the fundamental direction of New Zealand. [...]

There will be a National-led government, so let’s make sure Wellington has a voice in the cabinet, that’s talking to that cabinet, and saying this is what Wellington needs. I’d be that voice.

In Stuff on March 5, it was reported that your “passion was education policy,” following your first job with Bill English. How would you coordinate prioritising education policy and student issues alongside your desire to boost business in Wellington?

I think that the important thing is that we focus both on the quality of the education we are providing people, but also that we ensure that it is accessible for people from all kinds of backgrounds. Talking about tertiary education specifically, I think that has been a really great achievement for New Zealand — that we’re seeing more people entering tertiary education than ever before. And it has become more accessible. When I was a student, around 67% of our total fees were subsidised by the government, that proportion has increased to 82%, and that has meant tertiary education has become more accessible.

I also have a real personal concern and passion for kids entering primary school who are from more difficult backgrounds. How do we make sure those kids are nurtured in our schooling system and leave being able to read, write, do maths, and have the skills to get future work? Our education system has gotten better at delivering for kids of all kinds of backgrounds but I’m really open to the ideas of educators and experts about the new things we can do to

Interview

break through with more children.

You graduated from VUW with an Honours degree in English Literature. Given recent funding cuts and restructuring to humanities departments at VUW and other universities, are you concerned that the government's tertiary education policy perhaps focuses more on the STEM subjects to the detriment of the arts? Or do you think it is okay?

I think it’s okay. I don’t think these changes in courses being provided are due to any government policy. It reflects student demand and the choices students are making.

I support students saying, what’s going to get me a good job at the end of my degree, and what do I want to study?

Ultimately these decisions are made by institutions, not the government. It’s a marker of our tertiary system that the government doesn’t decide which courses are funded, institutions do. [...].

Lastly, what is your favourite colour?

Yellow! The colour of positive energy.

— Tim Manktelow

OPINION OPINION OPINION

Raisin Headquarters.

60 Sadness Street, Orange County, California, US. Dear Raisins,

P.S. Are dates any relation to you? If so, could you please pass on their mailing address to me.

OPINION

With absolute distaste, Maggie Hablous

OPINION

I hate you. Every day my life is slowed, stopped, and disrupted by your presence in what seems like a mass amount of recipes and food items. To me, you are unwanted and, frankly, unnecessary. In this letter I hope to explain my viewpoint, address the reasons you are obviously unneeded in culinary dishes, and convince you to never move past the point of being a grape.

I was shockingly young when I first discovered the horror that a single raisin could inflict upon me. At three years old I sat with my father on our deck overlooking the sea. On this particular day, a storm seemed to be approaching across the ocean.

We sat eating Sun­Maid raisins out of their snack sized boxes. These boxes are marketed to make raisins seem fun and appetising (which, I discovered, is a lie) with the goal of enticing children to eat them. All was well until my father loudly ordered me to spit out my mouthful. I wondered why he had done this in such an abrupt manner until I looked into my hand. There, among the half-chewed raisins, lay about three weevils.

At that moment it became evident to me that both my father and I had just eaten many of these filthy beetles. Since that traumatising moment, a raisin has never entered my mouth without me flinching or wishing that I was not present. Now raisins, you may try to make the point that this story is just one bad experience and that technically it was the weevils’ fault and not your’s. Though these statements are true, I believe that I should have never had to have eaten you in the first place.

I disagree with the amount of recipes that you are included in as the alternatives are

far superior. Take chocolate chips for example. Apart from possible “health” reasons, I have no knowledge of why anyone would choose to include raisins instead of chocolate, as everything is more enjoyable and tasty when chocolate chips are included.

Some examples of this are hot cross buns, ice cream, and christmas cake. I just hate that you are in so many recipes... it seems that somehow you have convinced chefs and bakers from all around the world to like your unsavoury flavours, or that you simply have connections in the publishing industry and manage to slip into recipes this way unnoticed.

I must discuss your texture. I don’t understand why you insist on passing the stage of being a grape. Grapes are beautiful things; fresh, juicy, and full of flavour.

You, on the other hand, are wrinkled and shrivelled. This, combined with the fact you are a stained shade of brown, makes it impossible for me to look at you without making the obvious visual connection to faeces. You are also strangely chewy, with a gritty texture that follows after you are bitten into.

It is with this letter that I express my hate.

I call for all of those who hate raisins to stand with me. I have a dream, a dream of a world where I do not have to spend twenty minutes picking the raisins out of my brown rice salad. A world, where I never again will bite into what I believe is a chocolate cookie and gasp with repulsion when I sadly realise that it is, in fact, a raisin cookie. Please consider this letter a sign. It is time you change your ways and begin to consider all the people that you hurt on a daily basis.

OPINION

OPINION

June 30, 2016

OPINION

OPINION

DEAR RAISINS…

OPINION

OPINION

Opinion

OPINION

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Columns COLUMNS

PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS Last week the campus counselling system rightfully came under the spotlight. It’s no secret that accessing quality mental health services is much harder than it should be in New Zealand.

We hear two conflicting messages about this: if you need help reach out, and if you do reach out we can’t guarantee you’ll get the help you need. This is what I’m really afraid of — what happens when that first message meets the second.

Recently the People’s Mental Health Review was published, a collection of over 500 stories of people’s experiences accessing mental health support. Overwhelmingly this report reflects a strained, underfunded, and broken system.

Barriers to access and extensive wait times were two issues that commonly came through in these stories, and of course are central to the problems our community is facing.

Part of the issue with student counselling is that the service is relied on to do the work of the public system. A complete lack of mental health support in the city means that when in need of a referral to a specialist, or when students graduate, there is no one to actually be referred to, without going to the highly expensive private system.

We also don’t get any help from the public system to pay for student counselling — students pay for it out of levies. Compare this to the student health service which is 50% government funded. Why are these two types of health treated so differently?

Every single person in this country deserves a functioning and comprehensive mental health system. One that gives you support when you seek it, and has no cap or expectation on how long you might be in need.

As much as we wish it could, a system overhaul won’t happen overnight. In the meantime, we will work hard to ensure the campus counselling service is run in the best way possible — for you and defined by you. Get in touch with us through our anonymous form, or come to our forum to share your views.

— Rory Lenihan-Ikin

VUWSA REPUBLIC OF TOM. Discipline is simultaneously one of the most important skills to master and most difficult to obtain in today’s world of many distractions. So heading into the busiest periods of the trimester I offer to thee, dear reader, a unique method that this arts and commerce student adopted to increase discipline in his life.

I decided what was needed in my life was a constitution: a codified document to which my life would be religiously run by. So I paralleled myself with a nation. Welcome to the Republic of Tom, similar to New Zealand, a young nation (young-adult) in a world saturated with many, much more powerful and resource rich nations (except there’s over seven billion nations for me to contend with).

Each article of this “constitution” addressed the areas to which I wished to increase discipline in my life. Resource Consumption concerns oil (usage of time), the more a nation consumes the more polluted and useless its environment becomes (yay aging). Environment Protection concerns what was being put into and how I was using the environment (food, exercise, and spirituality). Cyber Security, protecting the nation’s digital assets (social media use and its maintenance). Education Act, this one should be pretty easy to interpret. Finally, not necessarily a constitutional article, but the national budget (monitoring spending, saving moulah, oh that’s right I have a loan).

By all means this hasn’t been my first attempt; I am a fourth year student and still wrestling with the evil axis of procrastination powers. Most of us aren’t very effective at fighting it and gossip in awe of those nations (hard working students) who are. But keep trying because eventually you will find something that will work for you and you will begin to feel control in the direction you’re taking your life.

— Thomas Rackley (Treasurer/Secretary)

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Columns

TE ARA TAUIRA

ONE OCEAN

Matene Te Whiwhi Rd, Katu Rd, Unaiki Rd, Kakakura Rd, Rauoterangi Rd, Hurumutu Rd, Hokowhitu Rd. Most weeks, some news gets us rolling our eyes, and last week was no exception. News arose of the Kapiti Council’s proposed plan to name seven new sections of road, recently built in their rohe. The proposed names, listed above, honour the history of the local rohe, and the legacy and taonga given by the tangata whenua of the area.

Some, however, were not so pleased with the proposed plans. Their reasons? The names are “unpronouncable”.

The complaint is one that, unfortunately, is far too common in Aotearoa. Shout out to everyone who has had to correct a teacher’s pronunciation of their name, or spell it out. When we mispronounce, Taupō becomes Tow-poe, and Kawerau becomes Kah-wee-reow. Don't even get me started on when Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson pulls out his haka in the Fate of the Furious (rolling eyes emoji).

We could talk about two very different issues here. Are New Zealanders uncomfortable with acknowledging the Māori history that inevitably exists in their areas? Or are we just lazy, and unwilling to put effort into trying out Māori pronunciations. I know of kids who have had their names completely destroyed, or a teacher has decided to call them by their Pākehā middle name instead. Such moves are not just lazy, but they remove the mana of an individual.

A short Google into any of the proposed names brings about a rich kōrero and history of Mana Māori. Not that this seems to be of any value to those who have complained about the proposed names. It's not all perfect, we all slip into lazy pronunciation sometimes (Ar-oh Fish and Chip Shop anyone?) but to dismiss these names as an inconvenience is absolutely unacceptable Aotearoa. Instead of dismissing these names, how about we start teaching our tamariki more Te Reo in schools? Just a thought whānau. Ngā mihi.

— Nā Kahu Kutia

I keep watching Saturday Night Live’s skit about people finally realising Beyoncé is black. It's funny, well-written, and it parodies so many NOT FUNNY jokes that get made about people of colour.

One time I was at a meeting where I was seated at a table with mostly Pasifika students. As we were waiting for lunch, one of the hosts came over to say hi. Before she moved to the next table, she said, very *nicely*, “Don't worry, we'll serve you guys first. Cause you're the hungry ones!”

Then she laughed, we politely laughed back, and when she left we stopped laughing because those words were completely devoid of humor… and humanity.

Another time, I drank too much caffeine (“Take control of my own life or blame assignments?... Blame assignments wins hands down!”*). I went to the doctor because I had the meanest headache and before I left, they took my blood pressure. When they saw that it was pretty normal, the nurse was like, “Oh, wow! That’s great! That’s...!” She was stunned for at least five minutes. She then laughed, and I laughed too, because I thought she was joking… then I realised she wanted me to be happy that I didn’t fit the stereotype of “all Pasifika people have lifestyle diseases.” What’s not great about this situation is not just the fact that I wanted to disappear. It’s also, and more importantly, the fact that some people, of any given race and/ or ethnicity, are actually sick, and this is a joke somehow…?

I don’t know if I’m good with jokes. I never really try to make any. But I do know that some “jokes,” especially when they derive their chuckles from other people’s pain, are just not funny. Everyone has a sense of humor, sure, but everyone also has feelings. If you’re not going to joke with that in mind, then someone's gotta tell you, bro, your jokes are (soooooo!) dry. *Meet the Robinsons joke which makes no one cry in order to be funny.

— Jasmine Koria

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Columns

VOICE OF V-ISA THOUGHTS ON HOMESICKNESS Second times are usually dismissed as being less significant by most people. I was one of them until reality proved me wrong. I have had the worst week of my life leaving home for the second time, even though I did not anticipate feeling anything close to that when I boarded my plane in Hanoi.

I have been hit with a wave of homesickness ever since arriving at the Auckland airport back in March. Last year, there was the thrill of being in a new country, the excitement of meeting new people, the eagerness to learn new things, and the anticipation of a great journey ahead. I was mostly occupied with adapting to the new changes that I hardly had time to think about home or the fact that I was half a world apart from my family. I was too consumed with the exciting little things of being an international student in cosmopolitan Wellington.

This time around, things are different. I am not a “newbie” anymore. The fact that I am once again away from home left a big hole inside me that took a toll on me for the first week of uni.

I am sure everyone goes through that stage at some point of life — whether you are one hour or 24 hours away from home.

I realised by the second week that it was something inevitable, something I would have to live with. It was alright to miss home and feel a little bit lost sometimes. The thing that matters is to turn this feeling of homesickness into motivation. At the end of the day, it is this feeling that drives one to study harder and live to the fullest. It is through hardship that people rise to their best self.

— Phuong Anh Nguyen

VIC UFO Rape culture is so persistent in the spaces I inhabit that few incidents come as a shock to me. I’ve been spoken over, cat-called, followed, and grabbed to the point where hearing about these behaviours no longer comes as a surprise.

However, occasional cases come to light that leave me lost for words, and sickened anew by the way men treat women in our society. The resignation of two teachers from St Patrick's College in Silverstream following sexual harassment by students is one of these stories.

By the time this column is published more details will have emerged, but right now all I feel is shock and anger. Not only at the way these women have been treated, but at the conditions that have allowed misogynistic attitudes to proliferate to this point. I am astonished that these students’ behaviour was allowed to continue to the point where their teachers felt it was unsafe to return to work. This is an extreme case of sexual harassment, but yet another product of the rape culture ever-present in our society.

So call your friends (and yourself ) out on misogynistic behaviour. Explain how objectification, blaming, and shaming all contribute to rape culture. These might be seen as passing comments, but individual actions add up, and it was years of exposure to misogynistic discourse that taught these students it was acceptable to harass their female teachers. You may not be able to personally put an end to rape culture, but by speaking out against sexist comments we are able to interrupt the disrespect and objectification they teach. What happened at St Patrick’s is a horrifying reminder of what can happen when we don’t — Laura Sutherland

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Super Science Trends

Columns

A MAMMOTH UNDERTAKING

The initiative to resurrect the extinct woolly mammoth is, appropriately enough, back in the news again. Its chief campaigner is Harvard professor George Church, and while he has claimed that he and his team are “two years away” from a reborn mammoth since 2014, it’s now increasingly more likely to happen. This is thanks in part to the development of CRISPR, a precise gene-editing technique that can literally cut-and-paste genes into DNA. Rather than bring a genetically “pure” mammoth back from the dead, Church now intends to use a CRISPR-based shortcut, using the DNA harvested from frozen mammoth carcasses uncovered in Siberia. Mammoth traits like small ears, subcutaneous fat, and fur will now be coded into an Asian elephant embryo (their closest living relative), thereby creating a hybrid “mammophant.” This plan takes a cue from Jurassic Park, where the “dinosaurs” are actually theme park pastiches cobbled together from dino DNA and a bunch of close-enough species, like crocodiles, birds, and frogs.

The resulting embryo would then presumably be implanted into a female Asian elephant, but conservationists aren’t keen on that idea, as Asian elephants are an endangered species and they would rather those girls were popping out more elephants, not lab-made Franken-pachyderms.

Back in February, Church proposed the creation of giant artificial wombs that would carry the mammophants to term. This was met with scoffs from the scientific community, saying that such a thing was science fiction. But faster than you can say “ask and ye shall receive,” it was announced on April 25 that a team at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia had been developing exactly that.

Dubbed “Biobags”, they sport an electrolyte solution that mimics amniotic fluid and an oxygenator tube that functions as an umbilical cord. So far they have successfully been able to gestate (but not deliver) fetal sheep, to the point where one could breath unassisted like an au naturele fetus would. The hope is that they could eventually be used to bring premature human

infants to term, but order one in custom XXXL size and you could have your baby mammoth, assuming it works flawlessly through a 22-month gestation to deliver a 200-pound infant.

But if we get to the point where we have a herd of baby mammoths, where would they all live? Fortunately, there’s a home ready made for them, they just have to help in the redecorating.

Up in a northeastern pocket of Siberia is Pleistocene Park, a Russian geoengineering project founded in 1996 by ecologist Sergey Zimov. The park attempts to revert the forest habitat back to a steppe environment, like it had been at the end of the last Ice Age 12,000 years ago, using all-natural means.

The reasoning is thus: large herbivores, such as elephants, rhinoceros, and buffalo are ecosystem engineers. They graze on brush and grasses while uprooting trees and trampling seedlings, which prevents forests from growing and skews the environment towards a grassland biome.

Or, if you’re above the Arctic Circle, a steppe or tundra. These environments are perfect for the creation of permafrost, which seals in CO2 and methane from the atmosphere and compacts it into the Earth over several snows. Essentially, it’s all-natural terraforming, and it would aid in undoing man-made climate change, capturing the greenhouse gases created by industry and the present melting of ancient ice shelves. The one existing park is currently home to wild horses, reindeer, musk oxen, and European bison, among others, with a resurrected mammoth or ten being a stretch goal that could both speed up their experiment and create some much needed buzz (and funding) for the whole venture.

So there’s your future news: resurrected woolly mammoths are going to forcibly terraform Russia into ending climate change. And that is probably the best sentence I will ever type.

— Gus Mitchell

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Columns

If I asked you to list people who really hate sand, you might start with Anakin Skywalker. But you should certainly also include Eubulides of Miletus, the Greek logician who invented the Sorites Paradox, or, more charmingly, the “Paradox of the Heap.” Eubulides asks you to agree with the following three intuitive statements: 1. One grain of sand is not a heap.

2. Adding a single grain of sand to a pile of sand that is not a heap does not make that pile into a heap.

3. 10,000 grains of sand is a heap.

As soon as you’ve agreed that all three of these premises sound pretty sensible, Eubulides gets to indulge in a philosopher’s favourite activity: the “gotcha!” moment.

Because if we start with a single grain of sand and continue adding single grains one by one, premise one and two... lead us to believe that we can never generate a heap, contradicting premise three. We have a paradox on our hands!

The common response to this apparent paradox is to say that the concept of a “heap” is just something we construct and it’s intentionally a bit vague, so it’s fine to draw an arbitrary line somewhere — say, at 100 grains — and say for convenience that piles with 100+ grains are heaps, while other piles are not.

And for sand, this works — it doesn’t really matter whether a certain pile of sand is a heap or not. But what about things that do matter?

The (sadly recently deceased) philosopher Derek Parfit believes that personal identity is one of those things. We seem to think that there’s a very fundamental difference between some

person being me or not being me, and that there’s always a yes-or-no answer as to whether a certain person is me or not me.

But Parfit thinks that these beliefs run afoul of the Paradox of the Heap.

He asks us to imagine that we’re on an operating table, with a neurosurgeon doing some pretty weird stuff to us. In particular, the surgeon starts replacing our brain cells with Napoleon’s brain cells, one by one.

Parfit thinks it’s clear that when only a couple of our cells have been replaced, we’re still the same person — after all, when someone hits their head, or binge drinks a bit too much, we don’t say that they’ve become a different person! Yet Parfit thinks it’s also clear that when our entire brain has been replaced with Napoleon’s brain, we are no longer us — we are Napoleon. And finally, Parfit believes that the alteration of a single brain cell — something we probably wouldn’t ever notice — can’t be the difference between being us and being Napoleon.

So what gives? Parfit believes that this thought experiment shows that we should reject our commonsense views about personal identity. He believes that, similarly to the concept of a heap, the concept of personal identity is indeterminate — at some points, when my brain is about half me and half Napoleon, there is simply no yes-or-no answer to the question of whether the resulting person is me or Napoleon.

These are some pretty crazy thoughts! But in some ways, they’re comforting. Parfit believes that his theory of personal identity makes death less scary, because it makes the boundaries between us and other people less fundamental. And he believes that it makes altruism more rational. If only he could have had a chat to Anakin Skywalker.

— Shakked Noy

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MAURI ORA For just $12 you could buy a pet rock or two bags of freshly picked seasonal produce. Easy choice?

We think so!

Wondering who we are? We are the Victoria Fruit and Vege Co-op and we are supporting health and wellbeing for students and staff at Victoria University. The co-op delivers healthy produce at affordable prices to each campus every Thursday — even during the holidays. We launched in March and are a non-profit social enterprise supported by Wesley Community Action, Regional Public Health, and FoodTogether. We are also supported by MG Marketing who purchase produce from growers and ME Transport who bring the produce to us.

The co-op makes use of bulk buying power and volunteer labour (students and staff ) to package and distribute bags of fresh fruit and vegetables.

The co-op model is a partnership: you order and pay online by midday Tuesday, on Thursday student and staff volunteers pack and distribute your order, and you pick up your orders at the arranged time from Kelburn, Pipitea, or Te Aro. For $12 you will receive one bag of fruit and one bag of vegetables, comprising 6-8 varieties. These bags of fresh, seasonal food are great value. Visit our page on the university website to find out more, including about how to place an order.

Support the co-op: We’re looking for a team of students and staff to volunteer time and energy to promote healthy eating, nutrition and to support the successful running of the co-op. This would include volunteering at either the packing hub at Kelburn or one of the distribution hubs.

You will be able to show off your coordinating, distribution, and people skills, earn Vic Plus points and participate in a new initiative that will provide you with amazing work experience and look great on your CV. It is also a fun way to meet students and staff from other courses and faculties. Eating fresh fruit and vegetables enhances wellbeing, concentration, and energy levels. Yay for the VF&V Co-op!

— Catherine Nelson

TOKEN CRIPPLE I am generally wary of giving language too much power to define ourselves. Intersectional thinking is urgently needed for people to claim space. I shy away from the way it seems to have been adopted in popular use, turning every complex person into a list of nouns: Pākehā-cis-lesbiancrip-degree carrying-intersectional feminist. A list, rather than a web of identities that co-exist, overlap, can result in stigma or privilege in certain spaces, and sometimes both. It sometimes seems like you have to “out” yourself as these things in order to come across as having valid perspective, which can make deeply personal debate all the more difficult.

I’ve recently been reminded though of the quiet power of finding the language you have been looking for. Language that you didn’t know was there.

I read a Spinoff article recently where the writer claimed that her able-bodied friends were inspirational. She meant this in the sense that they included and valued her in everything without making a big deal about the disability. I knew what she was getting at. The clever inverse of “inspiration porn” still walked a fine line: applauding able bods for being “normal” about disability. Since then I found a more nuanced iteration of this sentiment: access intimacy. Mia Mingus coined the term in 2011 in an essay “Access Intimacy: The Missing Link”. She makes a deliberate distinction between access intimacy and the intimacies of romance, friendship, solidarity, sex. I can’t help placing it on this continuum as a little articulated love: Access intimacy is that elusive, hard to describe feeling when someone else “gets” your access needs. The kind of eerie comfort that your disabled self feels with someone on a purely access level. There is a multiplicity of ways this can manifest but Mingus stresses it is an understanding of the world which no longer asks disabled people to fit into an ableist world, rather a holding of space.

— Henrietta Bollinger

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SPORT How to make baseball an object lesson in diversity According Michael Lewis’ book Moneyball: the Art of Winning an Unfair Game, in 2003 a revolution of sorts happened in baseball. A type of Wall Street-based logic invaded the hallowed halls of America’s oldest game. The logic privileged the “objectivity” of statistical models over the traditional and subjective “eye test”, and sought to exploit the market inefficiencies of a game most observers would sum up quite simply as hit, catch, throw, and run.

In 2017 market-based logic has invaded practically all our sacred spaces and for younger fans, weaned on fantasy sports and computer games, sports and statistics are already inextricable. But for a sport that was moving into its second century of relevance, it’s understandable that the vitriolic ramblings of Bill James would encounter some push back.

It took the failed baseball career of Billy Beane to spark the revolution. Out of highschool Beane opted for professional baseball over a scholarship to Stanford, and, well, sometimes you can lose an unloseable situation. Beane’s disillusionment with the scouting process provided the necessary scepticism required for James’ thinking to gain traction inside of baseball’s traditional guard.

Beane is played by Brad Pitt in the 2011 film adaption. Alongside Pitt is Jonah Hill, playing Peter Brand, a composite character based largely on Beane’s assistant and Harvard economics graduate Paul DePodesta. When Hill occupies a room of old scouts, the feeling is almost perverse. He simply does not look the part. But this juxtaposition between Pitt’s Beane and Hill’s Brand is ultimately what the story of Moneyball is about. It’s a lesson in diversity that says results will suffer when an entire group is excluded from the room based on appearance and, more importantly, an advantage can be gained from including those who have previously been excluded.

— Tom Danby

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YOUNG YOUNG ADULT FICTION ADULT FICTION

“There isn’t like… oh honey I would love to live with you but I make more money than you right now so it won’t create a good situation… like there’s none of that adult taxes shit” — Mitski on Young Adult Romance

M

y uncle once bought me Twilight as a Christmas gift. I thanked him politely but inside was thinking, “I am better than this book.” He said, “I asked the lady in the store what teenage girls were into and she suggested this, I hope it’s okay.” I thought I was above the book but I read it anyway and enjoyed it, even if at the time I would never admit to it. I believed it was bad literature, because it was made for teenage girls, and things made for teenage girls were not meant to be taken seriously. I am glad I now know better.

The definition of young adult fiction is very very broad. Tatjana Schaefer, Teaching Fellow at the School of English, Film, Theatre and Media Studies at Victoria (SEFTMS), who has published several works on children’s literature says, “I have never been able to draw the line properly between children’s and young adult fiction, or young adult and adult. I think books that address issues that reflect teen experiences (sexuality; romantic relationships; starting adult life/work), are no longer pure children’s literature, so they must be young adult, but that is only one aspect of a novel, and not every book addresses such issues.” It is easy to see how the line can be blurred between “young adult” and “adult” literature.

Many historically well-regarded novels can now be called young adult fiction, such as Lord of the Flies, Great Expectations, and The Catcher in the Rye. Anna Jackson, who

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is Associate Professor at SEFTMS and who also has an interest in young adult fiction, explained to me that these books, “now considered classics of young adult literature, were not defined as young adult when they came out in the ’50s as the genre did not exist as such.”

The classification of young adult fiction is relatively new. In the 1920s Sarah Trimmer wrote a periodical called The Guardian of Education, which aided in defining and reviewing children’s literature. Then in the 1950s the Young Adult Library Services Division was founded, which meant that there was more focus on developing content for young readers and giving them space in the library. It was after this that S. E. Hinton wrote The Outsiders, published in 1967, which pushed the genre further and we started to see more books aimed at young adults that dealt with darker, sexier themes.

This dispels the idea some people have that young adult fiction is about teenagers and therefore for teenagers only; the idea that it is merely an indulgence and not worthwhile literature. Ruth Graham in an article for Slate in 2014 — when adult consumption of young adult fiction was on the rise — said that if adults read young adult fiction it “may mean fewer teens aspire to grown-up reading, because the grown-ups they know are reading their books.” Luckily the literary world has moved away from the idea that young adult fiction isn’t valuable because it would be a shame to not give young adult fiction the credit it deserves.

We are also now in a glorious time where teenagers are given more credit for their tastes and their contribution to culture; you only need to look at the influence of publications like Rookie which was started by Tavi Gevinson as a teenager and has gone on to influence the likes of Teen Vogue. Harry Styles recently defended his teen fans and scoffed at the idea that he needs to become credible to an adult audience in an interview with Rolling Stone: “Teenage-girl fans — they don’t lie. If they like you, they’re there. They don’t act ‘too cool.’ They like you, and they tell you. Which is sick.”

This bright new wave of giving credit to teenagers’ tastes mean we are allowing them to have space to do creative and amazing things, and only more good can come from it. It also means that the age of people consuming products that are made for teenagers is rising. According to

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Publishers Weekly a 2012 survey showed that adults were buying 55% of young adult fiction. Another study, prepared for a Nielson Summit in 2015, showed that adults bought 80% of all the young adult books that sold. Why are these sales rocketing? What is young adult fiction doing and providing for adults that books written for adults is not?

Young adulthood is an age when people readily and clumsily fall in love. Young adult fiction has plenty of romance; there are not many young adult fiction novels that do not include a love story, and people have always been keen for a good love story. Anna Jackson affirms, “romance is one of the great subjects for narrative.” There are plenty of love stories in adult fiction but the type of love is often less all consuming and transcendental. Books that have love stories like this such as Fallen and Twilight could be more popular with adults because they can feel nostalgia for their own ill-fated high school crushes, without also having to have ill-fated high school crushes.

Many of the topics that are brought up in teen fiction are really heavy; they are just made to be readable, which is important for these topics. Jacqueline Wilson writes about poverty, sexuality, self-harm, and sexual assault. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky deals with issues of domestic violence, suicide, and abortion. The Hunger Games deals with living under an oppressive authoritarian state, and The Book Thief deals with death and prejudice. To have these themes dealt with in a comprehensible way means that more people can access and discuss these ideas and surely that can only be positive moving forward.

Further, a dystopian future is glaring down on us politically and environmentally. According to Craig Welsh for National Geographic, climate change is “altering what people can eat; sparking new disease risks; upending key industries; and changing how entire cultures use the land and sea.” This, paired with the current political climate, means books like George Orwell’s 1984 are having a resurgence of popularity and people feel a newfound resonance with Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which has now been adapted as a Hulu series. People are feeling spooked, and turning to these types of stories for comfort and to understand their surroundings.

For example, in a recent Radio New Zealand interview, Margaret Atwood spoke about “30 silent women dressed as handmaids [who] were seen roaming the recent SXSW

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Music Festival in Austin, Texas” to protest an “abortion ban in the Texas Senate” — they took Atwood’s story and applied it to their own circumstances as a political statement. It seems more than ever that people are now relating to these stories about dystopian futures.

Fantasy novels about dystopian worlds are published mostly under the young adult fiction classification: The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, and Divergent are examples of this. These novels possibly offer more hope than novels such as The Handmaid’s Tale and 1984, and this could be why people are turning to them. These stories show people actively fighting and resisting oppressive governments and perhaps people feel as though it offers them something more optimistic than adult novels on this subject, as well as a juicy love story on the side. Or maybe people have always loved fantasy novels and this is just where they are currently being published.

When I read a young adult novel I find it easy to laugh at some of the emotions a character may be having, which in a large way is a self reflection, because I was that dramatic as well. In 2013 there was a show in Wellington called Corner Diary — the concept was people reading from their old teenage diaries. It was hilarious and endearing because everyone in the audience could relate to those teenage emotions. It was also affirming and comforting to know that you are not the only one hiding a book of angsty and dramatic teenage poetry. In many ways reading young adult fiction is similar to this; I feel this same reassurance.

Young adult fiction stories are often coming of age tales. I am continually understanding how to be a better person and am learning new things about how the world can be a dark and complicated place. I feel like I am always coming of age. Reading young adult fiction can be grounding as it can help show us how we have grown and where we may have started from, and allows us to give ourselves room to nurture ourselves and develop further.

It is very much worthwhile, and I would definitely no longer roll my eyes at a young adult fiction novel if I were to receive one as a gift.

Teresa Collins teresacollins@hotmail.co.nz

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Written by Mikee Sto Domingo

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“I understand nothing,â€? Ivan Karamazov says to the angelic Alyosha, “and I don’t want to understand anything now. I want to stick to facts. I made up my mind long ago not to understand, for if I should want to understand something, I’d instantly alter the facts‌.â€?

This moment in The Brothers Karamazov was jarringly resonant.

Most days I habitually (compulsively) check the Guardian, Stuff.co.nz, NZ Herald, and my covert Twitter account that follows The New York Times and National Geographic. The proliferation of facts is murderous. A media pattern of interpolating a stream of tragedy with tales of banal “goodness� ensures that I can sustain neither hope nor despair. I understand the facts individually, but more often I do not understand the sum of all these parts, what action to carry out, or what lesson to take away with regards to them; increasingly I do not wish to understand. Yet I cling to these “facts�, I even actively seek them out, a condition which I suspect is not peculiar to me.

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s magnum opus, The Brothers Karamazov, has had an impressive influence over 20th century European thought, propelling the pens of seminal thinkers such as Sartre, Heidegger, and Nietzsche. Stalin, Putin, and Hillary Clinton refer to it as their favourite book — take from that what you will. Characteristic of Dostoevsky, the book focuses on the mishaps of dysfunctional outcasts — in this instance, the Karamazov family, which consists exclusively of men: the father Fyodor and the brothers Mitya, Ivan, Alyosha, and the “bastard�

Smerdyakov. The plot eventuates in one of the Karamazov brothers murdering their miscreant patriarch, Fyodor, followed by a lengthy trial.

Heavy in religious musing, The Brothers Karamazov is perhaps unfashionable for those who believe the human soul to be non-existent or otherwise unimportant; yet, it imparts other considerations which may

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still enliven the godless reader. In particular, the relationship between understanding and fact is a prescient concern in these “post-truth”, “alternative fact” times.

But first let us attend to the founding question of this opine — what is a fact? Simplified, fact is something true or “known” to be true, and it is this latter nuance which spurs us to reexamine our relationship to it.

We may even ignore the former definition; the truth status of all facts are contingent on our comprehension of their related forces — also contingent — that produce them. To appropriate Carl Sagan, if you wish to have something confirmed as undeniable truth, you must first know everything about the universe.

In December 2016 the Huffington Post published “Post-Truth Nation”. The author Samuel C. Spitale writes that “the greatest problem of our future is […] the battle of fact versus fiction.” Spitale’s term “posttruth” impelled polarised reactions proper to any post-x claim. For NZ Herald, Robert Nola writes that the humanities may have succumbed to gloom, but that science (phrenology, perhaps) may rescue us from being “engulfed” by post-truth. Narelle Henson, for Stuff, blames philosophers and the “intelligentsia” for telling “simple folk” that truth does not exist and, in a bout of self-inspired reverie, she also relates, “we find Truth standing unscathed… He [truth is a man to Henson] is, however, startlingly reliable.”

“Post-truth” relies on the premise of there once having been an accessible truth, and thereby conceals an extensive history of the public being misled. This was pointed out by Deby Rune Møller Stahl and Bue Rübner Hansen, in Jacobin, who describe how politically manipulated facts “have been with us for a long time.” Stahl and Hansen gloss the politicisation of fact by liberals, theorising that fact became a monopolised tool for technocrats to managerially assess and balance the state. One need only think of the Green and Labour parties’ attitudes towards budget responsibilities; their stringent assessment of policy through the lens of “fiscal responsibility” does little to inspire hope. Such an approach tends to omit problems contained in less quantifiable aspects of reality — the social, moral, and cultural. It is here, in the realms of human truths, that the practice of understanding rears its uncouth head.

“Rational” understanding can be seen as a way of willing reality to order by way of principles and, seen in this way, it may also then obscure the truth it seeks to parse. Dostoevsky further underscores the shortcomings of “rational” understanding; reason, for him, is not sufficient to explain the terrific strangeness of, not only the world, but of people.

Acknowledging our fallibility and our occasional manipulation of reality, rather than declaring our truths “startlingly reliable,” is necessary to the understanding that Dostoevsky professes. For systems of reason are limited, sometimes stretching only to the point of exhaustion before

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1 they are traded for less polished forms of persuasion and action. Turn your attention to these illuminating lines from Notes from the Underground: “... what sort of free will is left when we come to tabulation and arithmetic, when it will all be a case of twice two make four? Twice two makes four without my will. As if free will meant that!”

Logic, rationality, and “facts” make us their subjects, and to belie them is seen as not only “stupid” but, in the secularised and educated milieu, immoral. To this end, it would be facile to gesture at fact-defiant Brexit or Trump voters; indeed it is arguably more accurate to subsume the majority of the human population under the category of “Rebels Against Reason”, myself included.

In Brothers Karamazov, the trial concerning the murder of Fyodor Karamazov deals in rivaling facts. During the proceedings, Grushenka irrationally betrays her beloved Mitya by producing proof of “mathematical conclusiveness” that he is responsible for his father’s murder. It is a damning instant for Mitya, made acutely painful as only moments earlier his brother Ivan had confessed that he himself is the parricide, presenting alongside this revelation his own evidence, rivalling Grushenka’s. Ivan’s declaration of guilt is partially symbolic, an act of martyrdom that inverts the Passion’s paradigm — his guilt disperses to include those who actively participate in its appointment. He lambasts the court and accuses them (and perhaps the reader) of enjoying the spectacle of the crime because “they all desire the death of their fathers!” Where we place our faith, Ivan hints, discloses something of what we long for.

Mitya’s trial demonstrates how even one fact bleeds credibility into a string of hyperboles and falsehoods. This absurdity is put to task by the lawyers, Kirollovich and Fetyukovich. Kirollovich, the prosecutor, is the more rousing of the two, tending towards the poetic rather than the prosaic; his speech is littered with exclamation marks and grandiose evocations of nation and sanctity. The narrator tells us that Kirollovich “spoke of the blood that cried for vengeance… He pointed to the tragic and glaring consistency of the facts.” This “consistency” is assessed by defence lawyer Fetyukovich, a man of more modest comportment who speaks “very simply and directly.” Fetyukovich charges that “not one fact” presented during the trial “will stand criticism if examined separately.”

Understanding is Kirollovich’s game; he traffics in the principles of psychoanalysis, morality, and nation. Conversely, Fetyukovich’s concern is not unity but the individual facts. He carefully dissects the body of the prosecution’s case to show how each organ does not fit neatly with the other. Yet, because each piece of evidence is “fact”, and because longing for meaning is stronger than longing for certainty (the former is often enough to substitute the latter), all that is required to create a patina of cause and effect — of “reason” — is for Kirollovich to appeal to the spectators’ principles.

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The recent outrage regarding the disappearance of 14 girls in the Washington D.C. area over 24 hours illustrates how “facts” may be narrativised to appeal to spectators’ principles. This “fact” is accompanied by a number of (darkly excitable) theories as to where the girls vanished to. Most striking to me is the indictment of the police force: because all the girls are black, the tirades sing out, nobody cares to look for them.

However, an NBC report shows: at no point in the D.C. areas have 14 children disappeared over one day in 2017; the missing children are all classified as having left their homes voluntarily; the Police Department has begun a new tactic of increasing social media distribution of missing person reports which has exaggerated the sense of epidemic; celebrities posting about the missing girls drew inordinate attention to the factoid — a caution to double check your sources.

The NBC report works to dispel outrage as it lays out its facts in bullet points with no emotive language. This is not to argue that the news media is infallible, but rather to highlight spectacle. The viral factoid was spread through social media platforms like Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter etc., and took the form of images — always so potent — of smiling young black girls alongside highly charged language. But, without the outrage, the NBC report would not have been released. Relevant to this last point is the role that contemporary forms of information-sharing play in “fake news”. We reside in the vacuum of a monopoly on facts once held by the media and, in the disseminated, blurry, dually private and public spaces of the internet, the spread of misinformation is epidemic. As Dostoevsky shows, the success of misinformation requires some invocation of preconceived principles, faith or desire. I hazard to say that, hyperbole aside, there is a certain “truth” underwriting the viral spread of this story; that is, the truth of the strained relations between law enforcement and the African American community.

For Dostoevsky, the abstract and imagined are given more significance than “truths” of the material world, in part because subjectivity is the conduit between potentiality (the potential embedded in will) and fact. In this space, redemption is always possible. Rivalling Ivan as one of the most fascinating brothers is the “blackguard” Smerdyakov. While similar antagonists are driven by some internal impetus, Smerdyakov seems to lack even the faculty for motive, let alone the vices of lust, greed, or ambition that usually assail villains. He spends his days hanging stray cats to no discernible end. Set up as Smerdyakov’s opposite is Alyosha, a “cherub” whose “heart could not stand uncertainty,” who “could not love passively.” Alyosha and Smerdyakov’s polarity comes to a head upon Ivan who, at the height of his illness, fixates on the belief that he is responsible for Fyodor’s murder. Seeing his brother’s distress, Alyosha acts “automatically”; he ascertains — despite not knowing that his brother has been entertaining the thought — that “it was not you [Ivan] who

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killed father.” Conversely, Smerdyakov, during a private confrontation, tells Ivan, “you are the only real murderer in the whole affair.” These contradicting pronouncements indicate a split in Ivan’s psyche: rather than rule one another out, “good” and “evil” are conterminous. Dostoevsky makes it possible for us to consider Ivan guilty, though not in the way of material fact. The power of suggestion relies on wanting to believe or, to some extent, already believing in what has been suggested and Ivan’s guilt here is immaterial, relating to his will-to-murder more than the physical act of murder. For Dostoevsky, subjective truth, the realm of free will, is accompanied by the responsibility and privilege of choice — Ivan can pronounce himself good or evil. Whether he is convinced or not by his decision, if he acts according to that belief, then he may bring it into reality. This is not to succumb to absurd relativity or solipsism; rather it is to actively recognise the degree of agency we have in how we interpret the facts and, subsequently, how we react to them.

Like the reading of a novel, the pursuit of facts promises the possibility of total comprehension. Somewhere among all these facts we ought to at last find the hidden link that will enlighten us to the reason for all of this. Imagine, approximately 200,000 years of pain, joy, and horror reduced to certainty. What Dostoevsky shows us instead is that how we choose to understand the world precedes fact. Indeed, the claim that we live in a “post-truth” world is deceptive, for it occludes how so much of the present is pre-truth. It is only the hindsight of history that filters out what is false or unimportant to render our otherwise disjointed reality comprehensible. Dostoevsky’s work compels us to not passively encounter the flow of facts that besets us. If to understand is to will the world to order, then it is no trifle that we should cultivate an understanding that is, like Alyosha’s capacity for love, honest, dynamic, imaginative, and compassionate.

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HOW DO YOU SPELL THAT? THE LITTLE KNOWN EFFECTS OF MISPRONUNCIATION WRITTEN BY ATARIA SHARMAN

(Ordering a coffee in Whanganui-a-tara, Aotearoa) Can I please have a mochaccino please?

Sure, what is your name?

Ataria.

Natalia? Atalia?

No, A-ta-ri-a.

Oh okay... uhh... how do you spell that?

A-T-A-R-I-A. Thanks! Your coffee will be ready soon.

A number of political parties have recently commented on compulsory te reo Māori in schools. Perhaps one of the key benefits would be an improvement in the correct pronunciation of Māori words. In New Zealand the pronunciation of some categories of Māori words is not a choice; for example names of places and people. However, according to Julia de Bres from the University of Luxemburg, people do have a choice as whether to “pronounce a Māori word using anglicised pronunciation or based on how it would sound if used in the context of the Māori language.”

But why is the correct pronunciation of te reo important?

In 1840 te reo Māori was the primary language used for communication, customs, and culture in Aotearoa. At that time Margaret Mutu estimates that Māori “outnumbered Pākehā by 70,000–90,000 to 2,000” and many settlers were bilingual in both Māori and English. Fast forward 177 years — past the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi (including 135 years where the Treaty was conspicuously absent from New Zealand

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legislation) — to 2017 where, surprisingly, a large number of New Zealanders are not bilingual in both te reo and English.

To make matters worse, many New Zealanders do not know how or choose not to pronounce Māori words correctly. To illustrate this point, the Human Rights Commission has a webpage titled “Commonly Mispronounced Te Reo Māori Place Names” featuring Māori land names such as Tauranga and Taupō. Māori place names hold significance both culturally and through whakapapa. Therefore, when they and personal names are pronounced incorrectly (irrespective of the reasons for it), as suggested by Rita Kohli and Daniel Solorzano from Santa Clara University and the University of California, these subtle acts can become “layered insults that intersect with an ‘othering’ of race, language, and culture.”

According to Derald Wing Sue and colleagues from Columbia University, racial microaggressions are brief, daily, and common indignities that communicate negative slights to people of colour. The University of Minnesota has a handout with examples of racial microaggressions and it includes situations such as when a person of colour is told “you are a credit to your race/you are so articulate” which could send the message “people of colour are generally not as intelligent as Whites,” or when a college or university has buildings that are all named after white heterosexual upperclass males sending the message to everyone else that “you don’t belong/you won’t succeed here.”

In 2012, Kohli and Solorzano conducted an American study of Black, Latino, Asian American, Pacific Island, and mixed race participants.

The study found that the effect of cumulative racial aggressions led participants to believe that racism was a burden of their culture.

Participants shared stories of disregarding their own name for a new name, embarrassment towards their identity and culture, and wishing their families were more like the dominant culture.

When the names of people of colour are pronounced incorrectly, Kohli and Solorzano suggest, this can lead to the internalisation of the worldviews, values, and beliefs of the dominant culture. It could even have an impact on the love and aspiration that groups have for their own culture. Within the context of historical and current day racism it can be argued that the mispronunciation of Māori words and language is a racial microaggression that may have a lasting impact on self-perception and worldview. The realisation for many Māori that their name is on a daily basis pronounced incorrectly in the only place they call home, their tūrangawaewae, is surely an accumulative form of verbal indignity that could send the message that “your language, your culture, and perhaps even you; are not valued here in New Zealand.”

As is stated by Trinity Thompson on her blog Fruit From the Vine: “I wish my friends knew that saying Māori words properly really makes a difference to me. It makes me feel like my culture and language is valued.”

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How do you spell that? The Little Known Effects of Mispronunciation

Although at first glance seemingly minor, the mispronunciation of Māori words and names is arguably and unexpectedly linked to a range of wider issues and tangible negative effects for Māori as a whole.

For example, the New Zealand Health Survey in 2002/2003 suggested that high rates of racial discrimination are directly linked to poor health outcomes, including poor physical functioning, cardiovascular diseases, and poor wellbeing. Māori in this study were ten times more likely to experience discrimination compared to Pākehā, and findings showed that an experience of discrimination was significantly associated with poor health. Research into the health survey data by Ministry of Health, Massey University, and University of College London researchers Ricci Harris and colleagues highlighted a need for “racism to be considered in efforts to eliminate ethnic inequalities in health.”

I recently tutored an introductory Māori Studies paper which anecdotally seems to have a high intake of exchange students from places as far afield as the UK, America, and Canada. All the students had to do a presentation where they were marked on their pronunciation of Māori words. The exchange students (the majority who may have only been in New Zealand for a few months) had overwhelmingly excellent pronunciation, which I think could be due to the hard work and perceived importance they put into practising the indigenous language of their host country. I had exchange students meet with me before and after tutorials to help them practise their pronunciation, and even specifically request that we covered pronunciation in the tutorial. It was heartwarming to see this dedication to te reo.

So why is the correct pronunciation of Māori words and language important? Well firstly I think it is important to acknowledge the existence of, and cumulative effects of, racial microaggressions and subsequent negative health outcomes. Furthermore I believe that all New Zealanders have an opportunity to recognise our shared history of bilingualism and to take up the challenge as set by the Waitangi Tribunal in the 1986 te reo Māori claim to “put the language, and therefore the culture, onto a pedestal so that our tamariki will see being Māori as something to be proud of, not something to be treated as worthless.”

On this basis I believe that together as New Zealanders (and even those who are just visiting New Zealand) we can all begin to challenge the mispronunciation of Māori words and names and in doing so counter majority language domination.

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Written by Robert Barratt and Brigid Quirke

Features

INWHICH WHICH TWO TWO IN PEOPLE PEOPLE LOSE HOPE LOSE ALL ALL HOPE IN WHICH TWO PEOPLE ACT 2 LOSE ALL HOPE

ACT 1

There is something symbolic, perhaps poetic, about comedy shows. A place people come to for no other point than to laugh. And in these trying times, perhaps a bit of comedy would be just the ticket. But I am not a person who goes to specific places to laugh. I find humour in the small things, like a man in a suit tripping on one of the many bricks down Lambton Quay and swearing into his phone, or a well timed phallus joke at some bullshit said on the TV. These moments bring me great pleasure, no matter how childish it may seem.

Unfortunately, the Raw Comedy Quest had none of these moments. From the get go, I was heavily poised against it. Amateur comedy? How can someone be amateur at making others laugh? Surely such a thing is a travesty against man itself.

So armed with press passes, we entered into that most hallowed of places, the sanctuary of Cuba Street, San Fran.

The lady stamping hands immediately made a comment about how she was looking forward to seeing our review. I have no words for how heavily I must apologise to her in advance. Please do not let the terrible choice of reviewer impact your decision to let someone come next year.

The MC brims confidence. It’s clear he’s stood in front of audiences before.

He’s got a rapport going with a few patrons in the front row, laughing about where they’re from. Good times for them I’m sure. Some people laugh at a joke about the Hutt (he keeps coming back to it though), before introducing the format: eight contestants, seven minutes a piece, with a prestigious Billy T Award winner closing out the night. I can barely hold my excitement, I’m bursting at the seams.

Unfortunately the feeling is completely gone by the time I’ve left the loo.

The first act I honestly can’t remember that well. He was tall I think? The only thing I’ve got written down in my notes is: Act 1: Rob: Not really that funny.

Brigid: I’ve gotta pee, he’s not worth waiting for. [Probably the most honest review].

I remember the second act well, and that’s only because of how conflicted I was.

The moment I saw her emerge with an accordion, I ordered another drink. Truly, an abomination of an instrument. Squish me for noise. No thank you.

But accordion woman is kind of funny, in the sense that white old men legislating about vaginas is always going to get a few laughs, because if you don’t laugh you’ll cry and hey, she’s got an accordion.

Act three — tall white guy — tries to make ironic white privilege jokes and gets a few laughs, but it’s a bit old and awkward. The fact that he looks eerily similar

43

Robert Barratt and Brigid Quirke

In which two people lose all hope

to the guy Brigid lost her virginity to adds a whole other level of uncomfortable attraction, as white tall ~comedy~ guy seemed nearly as sexist as white tall ~teenage dream~ guy (but not quite).

Act four? Was there an act four? All I have written down is SOLID STATE. I think he made technology jokes in a manner that suggested he’d been watching a lot of The IT Crowd.

Act five was forgettable. And I don’t mean just because he was boring; it was more that we literally cannot remember anything about this mysterious fifth act. In his slot, Brigid was harassed at the bar (“NICE TITS”) and I pissed, again. This is the point of about the fourth G&T, after which things get even more hazy.

My notes have become jumbled. I’ve stopped marking down which act is on at a certain time. In any case, they can’t have mattered because accordion woman won the whole thing. So, here’s a selection of my hastily scrawled notes as compensation.

G&

VAPING IN PUBLIC

“We drunk before the event in anticipation, but we’re on round three, despite the 18 dollar price tag per round.

(Clearly there is desperation.) (An appropriate point to mention that Rob is loaded w/ ca$h). If we drink enough, perhaps by the final act we might find a joke funny. I’m not positive though, we found the mere act of vaping in public funnier than anything else, the distinctly apple tinge my metallic tube offered us was more comedic than anything else. I look for support from other patrons. I find none. We are alone in this endeavour.

There is no hope. This is what my life has become, reviewing comedic competitions. The fact the ticketing person said she expected a good review hangs over my head. I have a primordial fear of disappointing people, but this is a promise I don’t believe I can live up to. (Daddy issues are Rob’s alone).”

“Middle aged lady screams at Robert Muldoon joke. Honestly the best laugh I’ve had all night.”

“I’ve bitten all my nails off.”

T

“Tim Shadbolt mentioned. Evening on an up.

H Y P E POOP JOKES THIS MY LEVEL OF HUMOUR. An inbred joke? I’M FUCKING ON IT.” (We conclude, post gig, that the Rob Muldoon/Tim Shadbolt jokes must have been the MC. The acts are all shiny-faced babies who are probably not allowed to fly to Invercargill unaccompanied.)

Features

“I take my glasses off. Vision is no longer necessary.

Someone from Dunedin screams. In my head I’m screaming. The pain doesn’t stop. The final act is ready.

I’m ready for death.”

FIVESTARS

G& T ****

4?

Bachelor jokes, somewhere. Act six? They aren’t good. And I'm the biggest Bachelor fan in the world so that's a pretty big let down. How will I go about my day knowing that someone made a joke about what is easily the funniest topic in New Zealand media, and still flubbed it?

Act seven, bb Onslow, talks about NCEA and acne. His mum is in the audience and he makes a fat joke about her. Is he funny? Maybe. Are we too drunk to be judging a seventeen-year old’s jokes? Yeah. Then again, that bad boy has his restricted license, while Brigid only has her learners. So I mean, from that standpoint he's clearly better than us. Sad realisation that one.

Who was on last? I remember a comment about Starbucks in there somewhere, and I judged their choice of coffee. You're in Wellington for fuckssake, the only thing people can agree on down here is coffee, and you still manage to pick the absolute worst option.

Perhaps most disappointing was the Billy T winner. I held out some hope that a well rehearsed, timely comedy set would be here soon, and yet somehow his entire act seemed to center around his own somewhat different vocal tone. It was eye opening though — comedy clearly isn't easy.

So what’s my final verdict? I guess it was funny, a lot of people laughed, and who am I to mock their sense of humour? Just because I’m dead inside doesn’t mean they have to be. And at the end of the day, I suppose I had fun, perhaps just in a way that wasn't intended. I had a laugh, mostly at myself. What are we even trying to prove with this “review”? That we’re somehow better than an amateur comedy show? To begin with, that's a ridiculous premise, plus these people had the guts to stand up in front of assholes like Brigid and Rob and attempt to make us laugh.

They deserve every modicum of respect they get.

ACT

*

*****

44

45

ARTS

46

Books

Portraits of Courage — George W. Bush

Satori in Paris — Jack Kerouac

Bush is back! In a fun way this time. He’s a painter now — processing his guilt?

Expressing his repressed ruling class emotions?

Attempting to give back? Bored around the house? Who cares? I didn’t. That’s why I own a copy. I had to have it. It’s an object of pure wonder. Once the most powerful man in the Western world, now an enthusiastic portraitist. It’s hard to explain the feeling of acquisitiveness I had, but it was stronger than me.

So, is he any good? Honestly, yeah. He doesn’t suck. His thick strokes of oil paint form a sort of shaky realism, an obviously technical approach guided by artist mentors.

The book solely contains portraits of American veterans, all of whom Bush has met personally as Commander-in-Chief. The pieces are contextualised by page-long biographies of the soldiers, specifically detailing their military trajectories. They are presented respectfully and warmly; you may hate his political career, but Bush is not a monster. It would be almost impossible to create that visual glow of humanity with a hand driven by apathy.

Of course, his presidency is flattered by the harsh light of the current leader. It makes a book like this seem closer to quaint than sinister. It’s a thin line. But we err when we pretend that political figures are onedimensional. Sure, they do multitudes of stupid, or downright malicious, things all the time. Regardless, think complexly. Learn all that you can about everything that you can.

Think about people as people, not as cartoons.

Which I think is what Bush may be trying to do when he paints. But that’s too much of an assumption, even though it’s nicely poetic.

All I’m saying is, art is revealing, and I think that here it revealed the once-President of the United States just a little more than before.

Why have sex, drugs, and rock and roll when you can have sex, cognac, and jazz?

Satori in Paris is classic Kerouac. A boozy bohemian with a beat soul barging through everything in his path. But this book isn’t another On the Road. Instead, Kerouac replaces the expanding, dilapidating, and outrageous American highway with the cold, cobbled, and wonky Parisian streets.

Inevitably, Satori in Paris is the diary entry we all wish we could write — running our mouths off about what fantastic lovers we are, being furious travellers, and essentially doing whatever the fuck we want, when we want. But even the most influential beat writer has his own midlife crisis. Some buy Harleys, others may cheat on their partners, or they may feel inspired by American Beauty and get real Kevin Spacey on it. Instead, Kerouac tries to find himself like every other kid on their OE. In one of the last novels of his tumultuous career, Kerouac is hunting the Parisian streets in the hope, to the point of madness and poverty, of finding the origins of the (supposedly) once great Kerouac family.

Saturated in mayhem and madness, you are subjected to rolling with the punches just as Kerouac does. No matter what any purist English Lit student tells you, beat is best. Gone are any pretentious metaphors and drawn-out, dry descriptions. The writing is true, immediate, and impactful in the way that you can always trust to experience from Kerouac. Satori in Paris also offers many life lessons. These lessons include but are not limited to: how to successfully get drunk on a train while being avoiding conflict, becoming as inebriated as possible at a bar on a tight budget, and being able to be a complete drunkard with good manners.

— Kimberley McIvor

— Brooke Wilton

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Theatre

THEATRE Hand of God — Robert Askins Seeing Hand of God as part of the Season of Hell at Circa Theatre; it fills me with PRIDE to report that I ENVY anyone who has yet to see the production, and that I LUST to see each of the actors again in… ah fuck it. It was pretty good, despite being a play of two halves, and deserves more than a lousy metaphor.

“The most produced play in America right now,” proudly proclaims the tagline to the New Zealand production of Robert Askins’ original script. It begs the question: why? Well, considering the whole world seems to have spent 2017 coping with various traumas from the death of musical icons to the global rise of conservatism, it seems fitting that Askins’ characters find themselves in a Texas church basement attempting to grapple with personal traumas. Jason and his mother Margery (Tom Clarke and Amy Tarleton) have recently lost a father and husband respectively, but personal trauma also leaves its marks on the lives of Pastor Greg (Peter Hambleton) and Timothy ( Jack Buchanan). Jason’s awkward reality is soon turned upside down by Tyrone: a screeching, hellbent felt puppet that looks to act on his worst impulses and to satisfy his deepest cravings.

Consistently using a puppet throughout, Clarke is given the task of representing two polar opposites within the same character (it is never revealed whether Tyrone is actually the outcome of demonic possession, or rather a separate aggressive identity of Jason’s). It’s a good job that Clarke has such control on, and distinct expression of, both extremes. His Jason is a gangly mess of scrawny arms, jerky movements, and monotone mumblings underpinned by an ever-present unease with those that surround him. Tyrone on the other hand has the mouth of a sailor and the bastardised singing chops of Justin Bieber and Lionel Ritchie. Perversion lurks at every corner of Hand of God's first act, from Tyrones prologue expressing the virtue of “shitting where you stand” without judgment, to the child-sex subplot of Margery and Timothy.

Throw in Exorcist references, a heavy metal soundtrack, and a critique of conservative Christianity, and you have a deliciously dark first act that brings the house down, literally and figuratively.

Unfortunately, the message and plot of the piece in its second act reflects the nature of the set — prone to collapse. Hand of God never manages to recreate that same sense of all Hell breaking loose. Despite the transformation of the church setting, it’s once-virgin walls scrawled with expletives, the danger and tension of the play is lost. In the words of multiple characters: “what happens now?” Well, you get the best puppet sex-scene this side of Avenue Q thanks to the puppetry of Clarke and Hannah Bank’s Jessica — replete with a legion of different positions, gratuitous felt genitalia, and moments that will make you go, “oh fuck, they’re about to do that?” — but with this exception, Hand of God appears to have played all it’s cards. It does however go to enormous lengths to convince you otherwise, including a clumsy, somewhat schmaltzy, gory and altogether rushed finale.

The direction of Lyndee-Jane Rutherford and Jon Coddington’s puppets bring the best out of the talented cast throughout, and the physical comedy of Hand of God had people rolling in the aisles. I just wished it could have delivered on the darkness it promised in the first act. Then again, maybe I’m being too greedy — it’s not everyday you get a sermon on the virtues of defecating from a satanic textiles project.

— Sean Harbottle Circa Theatre is currently offering theatre tickets for $25 for those 25 years old and under.

Find out more at http://www.circa.co.nz/. A ticket to see Hand of God also includes a voucher for a free snack-size Hell Pizza, as part of Circa’s Season of Hell.

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FILM GET OUT (2017) From one half of the comedy duo that brought us “A-A-Ron” and action comedy about the world’s cutest kitten, comes a horror film centred around race and the condition of African American men in the US. I often don’t buy into hype, and have a particular loathing for Rotten Tomatoes, but if the premise hadn’t already hooked me the 99% rating would’ve. Fun fact: that one bad review on the website comes from Armond White who is considered a notorious troll and routinely positively reviews Adam Sandler films and pretty much nothing else. Oh, and he heckled Steve McQueen at a screening of 12 Years A Slave.

But hype aside, there is an undeniably original and evocative film to be found here. The obvious subject matter is in itself brilliant, and the director Jordan Peele's roots in comedy shine through in the darkest of humour based mostly on stereotypes. Where in some horror movies a protagonist finds themselves in a hillbilly town surrounded by ravenous rednecks, Chris finds himself at his girlfriend's family get-together surrounded by rich white people. What comes in equal measure to the comedy is raw emotion and palpable tension, because these white people are creepy as fuck.

Peele shows a deft hand in utilising the horror genre with lingering, intrusive camerawork and a great score, but shows equal talent making a horror that is actually surprising. Often you'll get a sense that you know where it's going only to find out you are completely wrong, as the narrative is something quite apart from most horror films. Also, no spoilers, but Chris isn't an idiot. He doesn't make dumb-ass decisions. Daniel Kaluuya gives a fantastic performance as a man completely out of his depth and who can feel the walls slowly closing in around him. The rest of the cast (the aforementioned creepy white people) fill in the gaps with plenty of craziness and cringe, and Chris's friend Rod (Lil Rey Howery) is a hilarious addition.

This is the latest in a fantastic run from Blumhouse Productions who have released a slew of indie horror over the last few years, and I strongly recommend you track it down, for its own sake, as well as to support great indie horror films.

Others include Split, Hush, Ouija: Origin of Evil, The Gift, Oculus and also The Invitation (which is not Blumhouse but is on Netflix). While they've actually released a lot of absolute crap, these are the ones that are worth checking out.

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2 (2017) I have a personal theory (call it a qualm, potentially) that in ten years people will look back on all the Marvel films with far less fondness than they do now, and in 20 years the majority of them will be forgotten completely. None of the films are by any means awful — even Thor: The Dark World and Captain America: The First Avenger are highly watchable — but year after year the Marvel releases are feeling more like an onslaught, and their production seems more like a conveyor belt than the labours of love that each and every film should be. Of course, the exception is James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy, and thankfully its sequel.

49

Film Here we find Gunn and Co. firing on all cylinders and delivering a dazzling balance of action, extravaganza, humour, and heart. All the cast are as good as ever, with added drama and inter-relations giving each and every character the chance to shine. When people said Doctor Strange took “risks” as a Marvel movie, I said "no, it's just the same plot and character arc as Batman Begins and Iron Man with some trippy visuals,” and when they said Ant-Man took risks I said "no, it's just another Marvel movie but the world isn't blowing up at the end."

Here we find a Marvel film that does thankfully play outside the box. The narrative has twists and turns, characters face trials of many sorts, and there's humour and drama designed not to appeal to the lowest common denominator audience member, but people that actually love this wacky shit. The soundtrack may not feature as many old school bangers as one might expect, but a richer original score more than makes up for this. Visually, the film is also as inventive as one could wish for, with rich colours, detailed production design, and visual effects that even by today's standards are outstanding. Go see it, it's a bloody good time.

RAW (2017) After reports of people passing out at the Toronto Film Festival, it was pretty hard to resist seeking this film out when it was finally rated and released in New Zealand.

As it turns out, it may have been a case of much ado about nothing, because Raw’s violence isn't exacting anything jaw dropping; at the end of the day, this film isn't really a pure horror film. Set in a veterinary school in France, a young Justine (Garance Marillier) must make it through the rigorous hazing of her first week while struggling with a variety of adolescent urges that have swollen to the surface. If you thought Ginger Snaps was a fairly direct metaphor where a movie about werewolves is paralleled with two girls going through puberty, get ready for something on another level.

As Justine is gradually broken into the world of drinking and partying, something else wakes up inside her, and a graphic representation of youth sexuality ensues. Here the horror is primarily found in the pleasure and repulsion she finds in both herself and (as you probably guessed from the poster) in eating human flesh.

It truly is a coming-of-age film like no other. Julia Ducournau lends a fascinating eye to the subject matter, as the line between reality and illusion often get blurred, and colouring of the film is constantly inventive with neon lights, paint, and of course blood.

Overall the film does somewhat give to its own urges towards the end, with a variety of things merely happening, and though the narrative does not always come across in a succinct matter, the material is thought provoking enough in itself to provide a host of gruesome entertainment. Honestly I can't think of another film since The Texas Chainsaw Massacre that has added to a self-defined genre of mine entitled vegetarian-horror. In 1973 a group of teens were brutally slaughtered and butchered like animals, and here again the ethics of meat are brought to the forefront.

Regardless of dietary persuasion, I recommend this to anyone craving the strange.

— Finn Holland

Fin.

G IG

GU I D E

Tuesday: Loma Prieta with Long Distance Runner — If you like your music screamed at you at eardrum-shattering volume by a squadron of confusingly angry straight white men, then this post-hardcore gig is certainly for you. At Valhalla, the pandemonium starts at 7.00pm.

Wednesday: Eyegum Wednesdays with Womb, Pam, and George Turner — Come and experience all these beautiful baby angels sweeping you away on their tide of silver sonic silkiness. It’s free, it ’s at San Fran, starts at 9.00pm and it’s going to be absurdly good. Saturday option #1: Clap Clap Riot album release tour — If you’re just into your bloody rollicking bloody good classic guitar pop, then mate, you’re in luck. These dudes are back from Australia and they’re bringing their third album with them, hitting Caroline at around 8.30pm. Saturday option #2: Shark Week Boat Party — In classic Wellington style, there are few good options on Friday night and then a whole darn bundle for Saturday! The second in this glorious bundle is Shark Week’s boat party, with hometown hip-hop heroes KVKA, Beach Boy and his pals, and DJ Far Too Kind rounding out the lineup. It’s at the Tug Boat in Oriental Bay, kicking off at 10.00pm, but there’s also drinks and a DJ at the Shark Week store beforehand. Saturday option #3: Moments 001 — Moments is a collective that promotes women, LGBT people, and POC in music, and they are having their first, very respectful, and delightful DJ night of the year this weekend. This will feature DJ Snakelegs (aka Alexa Casino), Aw B, Angel X, and Jerk. This is one to lose your selfhood and become one with the faceless, shape-cutting mass to. S&Ms, starting at 9.00pm.

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50 50 50

DAMN.

Music

At this point, is there truly any point to reviewing this album? There isn’t much that I can add to the conversation. And if you’re looking for cohesive, meaningful information about what is likely the most revered lyricist of the last decade, I am not the person to come to. But here are some thoughts.

Each track manages to be both part of a cohesive narrative, and simultaneously a snapshot of Kendrick’s career and stylistic influences. There are trap style beats for the kids after bangers (“DNA” / “HUMBLE”). There are some clean guitars (“LUST” / “FEEL” / “PRIDE”). There are tracks that are clearly focused on a narrative (“XXX” / “FEAR” / “DUCKWORTH”). As far as hip-hop albums go, this essentially has something for everyone.

Perhaps what’s most remarkable is the fact that despite all these stylistic differences, they manage to mesh, and are produced to the absolute highest quality.

Something like that takes a lot of work, and likely a lot of different producers. Kendrick’s voice manages to fit into every track and feel like it belongs.

The overarching narrative of the album is about Kendrick’s childhood and growth, and manages to encapsulate the struggle of young African Americans without feeling like a derivative of good kid m.A.A.d city. By focussing on a whole rather than a brief time period we are afforded a look into a life that most reading this will never have been a part of.

So, overall, it’s real good. Personally I think that this beats To Pimp A Butterfly by a smidgen due to the production value. It deserves all the praise it’s been getting, and I live in eternal fear that one day Kendrick will release an album that doesn’t live up to his name.

I suppose if there’s one thing that I can add that I haven’t seen anywhere, it’s the fact that on the New Zealand charts DAMN. is in second place, losing out to Ed Sheeran’s ÷, which is an absolute travesty. If you think that’s a better album than DAMN. then you can get the fuck out right now. Why are you even here? Why are you even reading this magazine? It’s clearly going to be way above your aesthetic tastes, because if your opinions are anything to go by then you’re a plebeian. Get the fuck outta here.

DAMN. — RB.

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Podcast

PODCAST

Eli Matthewson Eli Matthewson is a stand-up comedian and actor. He has been nominated for the Billy T Award, and appears in Funny Girls and Jono and Ben. Eli also hosts the podcast The Male Gayz with Chris Parker Hi Eli, thanks for talking to Salient today! You’re bring your show The Year of Magical Fucking to Wellington in May, what can audiences expect to see? The idea of the show is a call to arms —

studies show that millennials are having less sex than their parents, which I think is ridiculous, giving baby boomers one more thing to brag about! So I’ve written this show, with lots of dirty jokes, lots of jokes about sex, but also lots of very awkward stories from my life which hopefully come together to form a sex-positive hour of comedy.

I feel like NZ comedy has grown exponentially in the last few years — as someone in the industry, what would you like to see to improve it even more? [I’m] always ready to see more

diverse voices, some non- white male voices, and I’d love it if we had some more weird gigs.

Especially in Auckland, where the gigs are more rowdy, whereas in Melbourne you get more of a comedy educated crowd, so you can try and do things that are a bit different, a bit left of centre.

More weird gigs, that would be fun.

Do you think that New Zealand audiences are perhaps not as versed in stand-up comedy as in Melbourne? Yeah, I just think they haven’t

seen as much; every gig you do in New Zealand, you’ve got probably 25 per cent of the audience who haven’t seen stand-up before, so they’re learning what the rules are as it happens.

Especially here, they have a late show every night of the festival at 11pm, so there are people that are actively seeking out an 11pm show on a Tuesday, and there’s a different vibe at those gigs.

You and Chris Parker host the podcast The Male Gayz. It’s so funny and your friendship with Chris really shines through. Can you tell me a bit about the show, and how it originated? Both me and Chris work on Jono

and Ben, which is cool, but sometimes you’re

just churning out jokes and sketches, and we just wanted to write our kinds of jokes and talk about our kinds of stories instead, issues that we deal with — instead of the average male 25-30 or whatever the demographic is. And then Chris came up with the name, and I wrote the theme song with Joseph Moore, and we were away!

You guys discuss a really wide variety of things, for instance in the last episode you went from outrage at small town homophobia to outrage at crap small town cafes.

How much preparation goes into the show? It depends; we usually prepare

a few things, but often in the car right there brainstorming! There have been some episodes when we’re a little bit more prepared, but it’s usually half an hour before the record is meant to be happening. Devastatingly, we recorded an episode with my ex-girlfriend Brynley Stent, who is also doing a show in the comedy fest, where we really delved into our past relationship and then it turned out her microphone was off the whole time, so there’s this really good episode that’s just lost forever!

What’s next for you? Any upcoming projects our readers would like to hear about? Funny Girls season three will

be coming out, and more podcasts; we’re going to re-record the one with Brynley Stent. My show is the main thing I’m focusing on, here in Melbourne I’m trying to rewrite it every night and make it better, so when I come to Wellington it’s going to be solid!

Eli is performing his show

Magical Fucking

The Year of

at the Fringe Bar from

May 9-13 at 8:30pm

Podcast

52

Tim Batt Tim Batt is a stand-up comedian and Billy T Award nominee. He is the host of the hugely successful The Worst Idea of All Time podcast, in which he and fellow comic Guy Montgomery watch the same movie each week for a year. The pair are currently enduring their third season with We Are Your Friends, after watching Grown Ups 2 and Sex and the City 2 in previous seasons.

Hi Tim, thanks for talking to us today! You’ve recently been performing in the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. As a comedian with a few years of the NZ and Melbourne festivals under your belt, how do the two compare?

Well, I think if you consider New Zealand’s population, then pretty favourably. Melbourne has got more money and people behind it, but I think the New Zealand International Comedy Festival has done an amazing job of putting on a festival to an international standard. Especially when you consider how many people we have, how many people they have running the festival, and how much money they have to do it all, it’s very impressive. Melbourne is impressive too, and understandably a bit bigger; that will happen when you have the population of our entire country in one city. Melbourne tends to go for a little bit longer and people have longer runs, doing a show for three or four weeks instead of two. It’s probably similar to anyone that’s gone to drama school, when you completely destroy your own psyche and then rebuild it with the people around you, and you gain new family members because you’ve been through the trenches together.

You’re bringing your show Ladies and Gentleman to Wellington in May, what can audiences expect?

They can expect a combination of high and low brow humour — I will be talking about the Trump-ening of politics in one moment, and then shitting my pants in the next, so there’s something for everyone!

The Worst Idea of All Time is hugely

successful in America, and your fans have crowdfunded a couple of trips for you and Guy to go over there to do live podcasts — why do you think

the show has translated so well to American audiences? I think we’ve got

a big fanbase in Los Angeles because it’s where movies get made. Like if you look at Grown Ups 2, Adam Sandler is sort of the perfect example of the Hollywood machine — a movie he’s in comes out and makes lots of money. He gets money — everyone else gets money, and everyone’s just getting cameos and cashing the cheques even though it’s objectively a terrible, terrible, film. I think people in the industry — whether they’re a lighting person or a gaffer or a sound person, or even just being around Hollywood — enjoy people making jokes about it and coming up with ideas that lampoon the stupider side of their industry. But I have no idea, that’s just a theory!

You’re also the founder of the Little Empire Podcast Network, which distributes lots of podcasts featuring other New Zealand standups. Do you think having a podcast is now the best way for stand-ups to increase their visibility? Is it essential? I wouldn’t say essential, I don’t

think there is anything essential in comedy which is what I love about it, there are no set rules about it. I think it is definitely a great shortcut to finding an audience, and also to sharpening your skills if you lock yourself into doing something every week. You have to get better at talking about something on the fly.

What’s next for you — any upcoming projects our readers would like to hear about? I’m going to be hosting a

TV show for TVNZ which will be a current affairs discussion panel show, which hasn’t been announced yet, but it’s about to be. It’s called Banter, and it’s going to be on Duke and then on the On Demand platform. It will be broadcast live, so I’m looking forward to saying the wrong words and getting lots of complaints.

Tim Batt is performing his show Ladies and Gentleman at BATS Theatre from May 9-13 at 8:00pm

— Annelise Bos

53

Food

SHED 5 This week’s excursion was to Shed 5 on the waterfront. The exquisite location gives a terrific view of boats we will never own and the opportunity to look down our noses at the passers-by who are not dining at Shed 5; for one night only, in this moment, we are infinite.

As I walked in I had to be careful so as to not loosen the sutures from the kidney that I had to sell to dine here. I was seated in my chair and poured sparkling water by a waiter who came straight outta the Idris Elba School of Being Handsome. I felt as if I had already overstayed my welcome in this establishment and could not afford any more hospitality.

There were eight options for the main course and every paragraph that was describing them had about four words I had never heard or seen before. Of course this is a little different to our usual experience, but for the amount of variation in the menu we were content.

I ordered the lamb and I got bread on my table as soon as I had said the words — like I had unlocked this bread from actually committing to something on the menu. Bread game Nintendo. The bread in itself earned its own review. It came with three different dips I never knew existed but all took me on a journey to the wheat fields where this bread was raised and trained. I have just signed a contract to have my body cremated in the oven this bread was cooked in and my ashes scattered on the fields where it came from.

The lamb took up 50% of the space on a reasonably large plate. Looking at the plate I felt disappointed, but I knew the ingredients they had in this dish were so exotic and expensive that the other 50% of the plate was taken up with snob appeal and classism. The lamb was succulent and perfectly cooked, it came with a light gravy, or as the French and therefore all upper-class restaurants say, “Au jus”. French, the language of love, is more appropriate to describe gravy than English, as there is nothing sexier than a good gravy, not even Rodeo burgers. The lamb was seasoned with the tears of a small Mongolian goat that was raised with saffron in every one of its meals, the garlic was imported

from a small and peaceful commune in the Himalayas that treats each bulb as a gift from God, and the pepper used was the exact same pepper that Genghis Khan’s family used.

The vegetables came at an extra price which is a bit fucked. I’ve been raised my whole life to believe that vegetables are to go with every meal. To have them now arrive with a price tag makes me feel uneasy; are vegetables now only available for the bourgeoisie? More about the economic dynamics of vegetables at six, back to you, Kii. I never wanna talk about price when I go to four-star restaurants because I’ll always think about the $10 I could have taken to Capital Market for an Asian stir fry that was three times the size of a meal that cost me $42. However, when you go to these restaurants the price does not dictate the size of the meal, but rather the ingredients and creativity used in the dish. Oh and the flex-ability. I can flex on you with my lamb roast at Shed 5 on a Friday night while you’re cooking up noodles and bread so you got something to vomit up at Steven’s 21st you’re a plus-one at.

Yeah $42 was more than I’d wanna spend on food in an entire week, but does that mean I regret it? Not at all. Why would you even ask that? Why would you even assume I would lay awake the next three nights until 4am thinking about it... god, you’re so mental. I’m not at all insecure enough to be inclined to do this more often in future in order to post it on Instagram every time, and then eat only rice and beans in my room for the next week without my flatmates knowing so I can pay rent. Is me flexing worth four times what I would usually pay for a meal? Ask my instagram and my three new girlfriends. Oh, you don’t get free bread at Aunty Mei? These things pay for themselves bro.

— Kii and Tom You can catch Kii and Tom on SalientFM (88.3) on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays 6.00– 8.00pm. Find them on Facebook: “Kii and Tom”.

Logical

puddles of nudes.

54

00000

Ok Google: What is the Cloud?

In

the

simplest

terms,

cloud​computing

means

storing

and

accessing data and programs over the internet instead of your computer’s hard drive. The Cloud is​just a metaphor for the internet.

Ok Google: Where is the Cloud?

Cloud​storage is a model of data storage in which the digital data

is stored in logical pools, the physical storage spans multiple

servers (and often locations), and the physical environment is typically owned and managed by a hosting company.

Logical pools; puddles of nudes; viruses buried deep: I love the Cloud.

I can’t stop watching tours around the data centers that operate as the physical infrastructure necessary to facilitate the collection, processing, and dissemination of data that is the Cloud. Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Oracle, Equinix; the videos all look the same and so watching them over and over feels like learning the trick to exiting a maze — important because I’ve started having dreams about getting lost in one of the data centers. How to describe a place that looks like a feeling? The centers are somewhere you might end up in a dystopian nightmare; like the Convergence in Don DeLillo’s Zero K, where bodies are preserved in order to await the medical advancements of the future; or the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, which is the Convergence but real life. I suppose I’m trying to to say that what they look like is a mechanised impression of uniquely human desires. What they look like is a place built of human intervention that any living bodies have vacated: at once foreboding and alluring.

My obsession with the nothingness that is the data farm started with Tim Wagg’s Cold Storage (2017), on display at the Dowse Art Museum as a part of This Time of Useful Consciousness — Political Ecology Now. The video work explores the shifting of the National Digital Heritage Archive from the basement of the National Library of New Zealand to a private infrastructure provider in Upper Hutt. Wagg is interested in the mammoth amounts of space, energy, and resources required to keep the Cloud’s weightless facade afloat.

(#

pools; 55

#)

VISUAL ART

Visual Art

00000

Projected onto two opposing walls in a dark room, Cold Storage is an immersive experience. The camera moves unsteadily through the spaces it explores, capturing blinking lights in red, blue, green; grids which turn to abstract patterns; empty desk chairs. The soundtrack alternates between a voiceover that describes the nature of the archive, and a musical track which sounds like the auditory equivalent of a broken line of code. Before the video ends the projected images begin to glitch, the work suddenly seemingly privy to the fickle nature of the Cloud.

A good data farm provides a secure, private, and trusted Cloud. It has high availability and reliability; high efficiency; and smart scalability. What is interesting is that sustainability is integral to efficiency because lost power is lost profit. The Cloud, built on a history of infrastructure, works to optimise efficiency within the precise contemporary moment in which data moves from place to place more than it builds a future that’s removed from our industrial world.

John Perry Barlow, in his 1996 paper “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”, declares the internet a land without borders. Addressing the governments which have worked to impose the conditions of nationhood upon the floating Cloud, he writes: “On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather [...] Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.” But the Cloud has failed to become the truly weightless entity Barlow envisioned. Still bound firmly to the earth by fibre optic cables laid along colonial routes of trade, the innumerable iterative choices that the networks of the Cloud provide may masquerade as a kind of limitless mobility, but in fact work as structural impositions of control.

— Hanahiva Rose

56

Television

TELEVISION ON REWATCHING LOST

On September 22, 2004, the first episode of Lost aired. On March 29, 2017, Jetstar cancelled my second flight in a row in two days from Auckland to Wellington. Spontaneously, I pitched in with three strangers to hire a rental car and we made an 11 hour drive. We listened to my highschool iPod and also the Hamilton soundtrack. Everything worked out fine and no one murdered me, but (it’s coming) luckily I didn’t end up in a plane crash 1000 miles off course on a mysterious dangerous island sparsely populated with polar bears, barefoot psychopaths, and violent clouds of smoke! Because I still wouldn’t get a refund from Jetstar.

If you managed to avoid any knowledge of the huge pop culture event that was Lost, it follows a group of strangers struggling for survival after their plane crashes on a seemingly deserted island somewhere in the South Pacific.

However, the survivors of Oceanic flight 815 quickly find out they are not alone, and then shit gets CRAZY. Like, it’s bananas. This is my third attempt at completely watching it; the first time was when it aired in my first year of high school, but I fell off around season four after missing too many episodes; the second time was with an ex-boyfriend early 2010, but we broke up and I never got to watch the last season. For a show that so heavily centers around finding out what the fuck is going on, I’ve managed to avoid finding out what actually happens at the end of Lost all this time. Now, with my flatmate who had never seen a single episode, I am embarking on my first proper series watch through.

This time there are a lot of things I’m noticing more, like the show’s incredible tension headache of a score and the full scope of the story and island itself. I also cry in every episode with a John Locke flashback, and every time Jin and Sun embrace. As always, Hurley is the best character and that’s why he gets a Weezer album with his face on it (see Weezer, Hurley, Epitaph Records, 2010). The show’s two-part

pilot holds up as one of the best series openers in television for me, serving as a fast-paced and sharply written introduction to the world of Lost, claustrophobic and hyper realistic plane crash included, and it ups the ante every episode.

Every single person in the 40+ person cast is in constant danger and it looks extremely physically demanding, which perhaps explains the multitude of disorderly driving offenses incurred by lead actors during the show’s six year filming in Hawaii.

For fans of sci-fi, action, and dramatic television, Lost is a load of fun to watch, even for me when I’ve seen it (mostly) twice before. For every answer you receive per episode (of which there are 121 total over six seasons) there are 30 more questions asked in the last two minutes of each, while you hold your hands to your face like Kevin McAllister every time, nearly smashing your trackpad in your desperation to queue up the next one. Where is this island? Why did the plane crash? What are all those noises? Who is this French lady? Who are “the Others”? How did the dog survive the crash from the luggage compartment? Where did all those knives come from? Are all the Australian accents on this show fake? Why is masculinity so toxic? What is Jack’s fucking deal? Until I finish season six please, no spoilers. And promise me you’ll never fly Jetstar.

— Katie Meadows

57

GAMES

Games

Yooka-Laylee Developer: Playtonic Games Publisher: Team17 Digital Platform: PS4, Xbox One, PC (Windows, macOS, Linux), Nintendo Switch

Review copy supplied by publisher Is anyone else really sick of nostalgia being used to sell us shit? ’Cause I am.

For those unaware, back in the late ’90s and early 2000s a studio called Rareware released a series of 3D platformers for the Nintendo 64 called Banjo-Kazooie, which are much beloved despite their age. A group of former Rareware developers formed Playtonic with the intention of making a spiritual successor to Banjo; they started a crowdfunding campaign, raised nearly $4 million, and managed to capture the attention and goodwill of ’90s kids everywhere.

It’s just a shame that what we got isn’t worth anywhere near the hype.

Being only 21-years old and having never owned a Nintendo 64, I have few nostalgic feelings for the “collectathon” 3D platformers which Yooka-Laylee is trying to invoke.

Everything about its design is ripped whole cloth from Banjo-Kazooie — the expansive (and easy to get lost in) levels, the literally thousands of objects you need to collect for 100% completion, the colourful worlds, character designs, and even the lack of a proper story.

The biggest issue I have is the controls, which have resulted in multiple rage quits during my play sessions. Nothing about how Yooka moves is graceful or pleasant; you often feel you’re fighting against the game just to go in a certain direction. Even the subtlest tap of the analog stick while standing still will make the character veer off in a direction you never intended them to — which is a real pain considering shooting projectiles is an important gameplay aspect. One of the special abilities, the Reptile Roll, is necessary for climbing steep surfaces, and yet is so imprecise a straight line is nearly impossible. The camera is awful, committing the cardinal sin of acting like an actual camera by getting in the way of objects while often failing to stay still and point in the desired direction.

All of these control issues were teething

problems in late ’90s platformers that have been fixed over time. If you want to modernise an old genre, wouldn’t bringing controls up to modern standards be a large part of that? Did they just think, “Banjo controlled like that so this game should too”?

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this game’s issues. I could talk about how the level designs aren’t exactly intuitive and how completing all the tasks within them is an exercise is tedious bullshit. I could discuss how even finding the levels in the hub-world is a chore. I could bring up the cringe-worthy dialogue, none of which is even remotely funny, complete with constant fourth-wall breaks which are about as clever as a punch to the temple.

There’s also how every character, rather than speaking normally, just spouts the most inane noises out of their pie holes which get very annoying, very quickly. Oh, and don’t forget the god-awful minigames, which manage to control worse than the base game.

And yet, I’ve only got 600 words. What a shame.

Nearly everything wrong with this game is a holdover from the era in which 3D “collectathons” were popular, and are the reason why the genre is pretty much dead. Not only did Playtonic fail to modernise the genre, they made its most glaring flaws even worse!

I feel somewhat sorry for those who backed this game financially. Maybe they can see the good in Yooka-Laylee’s gameplay, but one day they’ll have to take off the rose-tinted glasses and see it for what it is: outdated crap.

The music’s nice though. That never changed from Banjo-Kazooie.

— Cameron Gray

****Sad by Sad South (SXSS) — not to be mistaken with South by South West — brought forth a new dynamic to the traditional music festival, in that it featured other mediums of art, such as poetry and visual art, and showcased them in conjunction with music. Appropriating this feature from its Australian counterpart (Sad by Sad West), the Wellington festival placed emphasis on the emotional qualities within these forms and the spaces they inhabited as an ode to its namesake.

Heralding itself as an “emo” festival, but not in the stereotypical sense of emo-ness, SXSS placed visceral emotion at the forefront of its ethos by capturing collective feeling in a raw and unadulterated manner through its selection of performers. Staple Wellington acts such as Girlboss, Prizegiving, and Grayson Gilmour were an unquestionable choice for organiser of SXSS and founder of Papaiti records, James Stuteley. He believed these bands and the other performers were “humble, but also passionate about their music in that they embrace emotional content, rather than just being random indie rock bands.”

Ordinarily, music festivals are mainly comprised of, well, music acts, but at SXSS poets were an unconventional addition to the lineup, and were not any less notable.

The thoughtful combination of poetry and music, while acoustically different, worked together in capturing the audience’s attention, so that the art could be fully appreciated. In the breaks between bands that are usually filled with drink refills, small talk, and bathroom visits, poets like Freya Daly Sadgrove and Hera Lindsay Bird addressed the audiences with personal utterings and original anecdotes that were simultaneously intimate and relatable. These poets were not fillers, nor a means to pass time, they were a continuation of feeling and explicit rawness that the bands

WELLINGTON

South Wellington, particularly Newtown, worked as the central locus for the events over the weekend.

Newtown is a notoriously creative and cultural centre in Wellington; the annual Newtown festival can attest to that. James Stuteley took note of this when choosing the locations, saying that it is important to “use the cool and beautiful spaces, and the local area, rather than defaulting to the city.” Often city festivals like Homegrown or Laneway have a commercial, sterile vibe, where it is constantly reiterated that you are at an organised, marketed event. Consequently, this draws away a lot of the creativity and homeliness that the artists and performers have tried to conceive. And while SXSS was intricately planned and curated efficiently, the spaces allowed for an intimate but communal vibe.

model for the Wellington version in how it consciously opted for smaller, humble spaces where creativity could truly fill the area.

Doused in sunlight, with the notorious Wellington wind asserting its presence with a slight breeze, Princess Bay made for an idyllic performance space for Saturday afternoon’s event. Simple yet incredibly meaningful spots like this captured the festival’s overarching ethos of “doing it yourself” in locations which are often taken for granted. Though these spaces seemed effortless, what they put out, in conjunction with how they are used, are rife with meaning.

SAD BY SAD SOUTH

58

Music: Thirtysomethings, Soda Boyz, Carb on Carb, Jess Locke, Long Distance Runner, April’s Fool, Shannen, Fruit Juice Parade, How Get, Girlboss, Grayson Gilmour, Prizegiving, Bad Friend.

Poets: Freya Daly Sadgrove, Evangeline Riddiford Graham, Hera Lindsay-Bird, Sinead Overbye, Faith Wilson, Callum Goacher, Joy Holley, Sudha Rao, Lily Norman, Eamonn Marra.

Sunday’s house crawl shows had an air of clandestineness to them. Like they were secret meetings, but for everyone.

It is ironic how intimacy can be felt whilst in someone’s bedroom, with their personal belongings hanging around like an accidental art exhibition. 30 people were sprawled on the floor, bed, window sills watching Jess Locke play… silent, but in awe. These were the spaces where what had been seen over the last few days originated. The birthplaces of emotion, ideas, and creativity. In the end, it did not matter that we were in someone’s bedroom or kitchen; it was not invasive nor intruding, it merely added a degree of vulnerability and genuineness to the performances.

With a name like Sad by Sad South, some may be mistakenly discouraged to attend, relying on normalised ideas surrounding sensitivity to plague their expectations of the festival. What can be said of this though is that conjuring emotion through art is not embarrassing — it is a shared, meaningful experience for all. Valuing those emotions is also meaningful, and admirable. Even so, SXSS was not solely about appreciating emotions, or acknowledging them, but also simply about appreciating sick music, appreciating poetry, and appreciating art. The depth is there but it does not always have to be embraced.

— Shannon Harrison

SXSS distinguished itself from being “just another festival” due to the carefully chosen and curated spaces for the three days. Last year’s Australian Sad by Sad West provided the

had prompted.

Although the “emo” scene in New Zealand has regressed considerably and only occasionally appeared in alternative genres, its “revival” has been mobilised by the likes of SXSS. And while some may immediately assume “emo” goes hand in hand with screamo, based upon pop culture stereotypes, SXSS offered up an alternative perspective by defying often negative stereotypes of the term. It is about recognising the emotion in music and poetry, not just in the words, but in the acoustics, and how this is received by audiences in certain spaces. The medium and the direct environment share a symbiotic relationship in promoting genuine and empathetic feeling, and this was a shared sentiment among those attending SXSS, the performers, and the organisers.

Many festivals tend to default to larger, commercial, and specialised venues for their events, typically due to their capacities, which in turn allow them to profit through increased ticket sales.

More often than not, festival organisers tend to settle on Auckland as a primary location, which sometimes feels unfair for those down in the creative hub that is Wellington. And while other cities like Dunedin or Christchurch could have offered up just as interesting spaces for SXSS, according to James “Wellington made the most sense out of places in New Zealand, it seemed friendlier to the prospect. Auckland is way more jaded and hard work.”

59 Music

60

CODECRACKER

Puzzles

Each number from 1-26 represents one of the letters of the alphabet. Solve the code to complete the crossword. Two letters have been provided for you.

SUDOKU

TARGET

Make as many words of three letters or more as you can. Each word must contain the letter in the central square.

Target goals: Good: 13 words Great: 16 words Impressive: 20 words

LAST WEEK'S SOLUTION

Sudoku difficulty: Hard

61

Comic

62

Creative Writing

63

Books

Nightlife Past midnight, and, obscured by darkness, I lie a slumbering landscape, fabric and flesh.

Still silence rises to deep steady thumping For a moment, I think it’s my own heart pumping But it’s drumbeats, not heartbeats, Though they merge for a few beats, ’Til the sound fades away, the rhythm swept on With more roads yet to course along.

The city may sleep, but this little beat Is the engine of life driving on through the night City blood’s pumped by such bass heartbeats, Flowing through hills beaded by street lights Orange sequins that pulse Against blue hued sky, Keeping our little world alive.

— Mina Bixley