Volume 80 | Issue 22

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Dreamiest Job

Applications to edit Salient in 2018 are now open!

This is a paid position which begins in January and ends late October 2018. It involves collating and editing regular content, managing staff, coordinating volunteers, recommending the 2019 student media budget, overseeing Salient TV and Salient FM, and engaging with the student body.

You must have strong written communication skills and have experience in creative writing or reporting. Previous experience editing or in student media is preferable.

You can apply solo, or two can apply together to co-edit.

Send your CV(s), a cover letter of your vision for Salient 2018, and, if applicable, a portfolio of your written work to

associationsecretary@vuwsa.org.nz

Applications close 5.00pm, October 6.

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not the dreamiest job tbqh Applications to run SalientFM in 2018 are now open!

This is a paid position which begins in January and runs for a year.

If you’re good at staring at a roster of people, deciding on playlisting, promoting artists and labels, reviewing artists and acts, and adore staring at cables and knobs, this might be just what you’re after.

Strong writing and communication skills are a must. Technical aptitude with computers and audio equipment is preferred, though not necessary. Any experience working in Salient or other student media is a bonus.

Send your CV and cover letter outlining where you want to take this arm of Salient, to associationsecretary@vuwsa.org.nz Applications close at 5.00pm, October 31.

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Editors — Tuioleloto Laura Toailoa and Tim Manktelow

Contact — editor@salient.org.nz 04 463 6766 Level 2, Student Union Building Victoria University of Wellington PO Box 600, Wellington

Designers — Eun Sun Jeong and Ellyse Randrup News Editor — Brigid Quirke News Reporters — Aimee Cox, Angus Shaw, Harry Clatworthy, Laura Toailoa, Liam Powell, Samantha Gordon, Tim Manktelow Feature Writers — Jasmine Koria, Ali Burns, Lauren Spring, Priyanka Roy, Michaela Brus Chief Sub-Editor — Georgia Lockie Distributor — Darren Chin Arts Editor — Cameron Gray Section Editors — Annelise Bos (Podcast), Cameron Gray (Games), Emilie Hope (Theatre), Finn Holland and Mathew Watkins (Film), Hanahiva Rose (Visual Art), Katie Meadows (Television), Kimberley McIvor (Books), Olly Clifton and Lauren Spring (Music) Contributors — Aidan Kelly, Rory Lenihan-Ikin, Tom Rackley, Kahu Kutia, Jasmine Koria, Kathryn Leslie, Cathy Stephenson, Hannah Wee, Gus Mitchell, Tom Danby, Shakked Noy, Mia Gaudin, Elly Hope, Puck

Printing — Service Printers 258 Taranaki Street, Wellington Paper — Sun 80gsm 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 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 — 02 October, 2017 Volume 80, Issue 22

Advertising — Grace Gollan grace.gollan@vuwsa.org.nz 04 463 6982

CONTRIBUTORS & COLOPHON

CONTENTS Editors’ Letter......................................7 Letters................................................61 Notices................................................61 News General News......................................8

Fees Rise 2% Despite Student Opposition.............................12 Politics Political Round-Up.............................14 The Party Line....................................15 Columns Presidential Address............................20 VUWSA.............................................20 Te Ara Tauira......................................21 One Ocean..........................................21 Voice of V-ISA....................................22 Mauri Ora...........................................22 Sports..................................................23 Philosoraptor......................................24 Super Science Trends..........................25 Features Get Adrenaline or Die Tryin’: The Truth About Anaphylaxis.............................16 — Michaela Brus Interview with James Meffan..............26 — Laura Toailoa and Tim Manktelow Can I say that…? ...............................34 — Jasmine Koria

Dabbling in magic: Independent Radio in New Zealand..................................38 — Ali Burns RETRACING RIOT GRRRL.........42 — Lauren Spring To be or not to be… social..................48 — Priyanka Roy Arts Television...........................................52 Games................................................53 Theatre................................................54 Podcast...............................................55 Books..................................................56 Film....................................................57 Visual Art...........................................58 Music..................................................60 Poem...................................................64 Puzzles................................................62 Comic.................................................63

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Editors’ letter

What does it mean to represent?

This is the question we put to lecturer James Meffan, and the long and, at times, complicated interview we had with him attempts to answer this question — as well as some of the ethical problems it contains.

In thinking about representation in pop culture and literature, Jasmine reflects on the persistent narratives about Polynesian culture and people, and the problems of overwriting: “By speaking for us, the writers of what we have been taught to call ‘our history’ wrote over us, and our voices continue to be overwritten in favour of theirs.”

Ali looks at how independent (often student) radio stations provide space for the transmission of alternative narratives, and the communities that grew out of them.

Lauren’s piece surveys the history of Riot Grrrl, their innovative music and the “radical political, philosophical, and socio-cultural movement” that asserted the rightful place of those who felt unsafe or unwelcome by patriarchal society and subcultures.

Part of this movement involved members speaking for themselves, in opposition to the stories from the media that would profit off them without giving anything back: “It was quite communist in its aims — seizing the means of production for themselves and giving voice to the traditionally voiceless. Zines were a great way of doing this, to project voices on a wider scale and connect various communities.”

Representation is a multi-faceted word, and the VUW Council voted to raise domestic and international fees by 2% again — a continuing trend. Given that the twelve person council has only two student members, and all non-student members voted for the increase, can we say that this representative body represents our interests?

As usual, this is an issue that raises a lot of questions — something that we’re good at, while answers less so…

But in further representational news, nominations for the VUWSA Executive closed on Friday and we’ll be covering the candidates happenings in the next issue… stay tuned!

— Tuioleloto Laura Toailoa and Tim Manktelow

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News

NEWS VICE-CHANCELLOR RESPONDS TO SEXUAL VIOLENCE REPORT PUBLIC HEARINGS REGARDING FAMILY VIOLENCE IN SAMOA TRANSDEV UNDERCUTTING UNIONISED RAIL WORKERS – COUNT THE GREAT KERERU MIKE JOY RECEIVES CRITIC AND CONSCIENCE AWARD VANUATU VOLCANO DISPLACES THOUSANDS FEES RISE 2% DESPITE STUDENT OPPOSITION

POLITICS POLITICAL ROUND-UP THE PARTY LINE

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VICE-CHANCELLOR RESPONDS TO SEXUAL VIOLENCE REPORT CW: Sexual Violence VUW Vice-Chancellor Grant Guilford has issued a response to the Thursdays in Black In Our Own Words report, which found that 83% of tertiary students surveyed have been sexually harassed on a university campus.

His announcement on September 11 discussed the steps VUW has taken to both change rape culture at the university, and to prevent incidents of sexual violence at VUW. Guilford outlined the work done by the VUW Sexual Violence Prevention Working Group, which was set up in 2015 in order to improve the information available to the university regarding sexual violence, and review the policies and procedures in place for sexual violence disclosures.

In addition to these changes, free women’s self-defence courses are offered regularly on campus, and VUW is working with external support groups such as the Wellington Sexual Abuse Prevention Network to improve access to information and services.

“There is a commitment at all levels of this university to foster a culture of equity, inclusiveness and safety. It goes without saying that sexual harassment and sexual assault are a completely unacceptable affront to our values as a university community.”

Although Guilford acknowledged that the data presented in In Our Own Words was important in highlighting the need for a cultural shift, he pointed out that the “optin” nature of the survey meant the results differed from what they would have been if based on a randomised sample.

VUW has released data about the number of incidents of sexual assault and/or harassment that had oc-

News NEWS curred in VUW halls or on campus since 2010, stating that 32 incidents had been reported, with three expulsions taking place as a result, and five incidents involving members of staff.

In Our Own Words discusses the mismatch between how sexual education is taught in secondary schools and people’s actual experiences, and the effect that this has on student’s interpersonal relationships, especially of a sexual nature.

The National Coordinator of Thursdays in Black, Izzy O’Neill, described the domino effect that poor sexual education can have on a student’s participation in education, their academic success, and retention at secondary and tertiary levels.

In Our Own Words has been praised by VUW Academic Samantha Keene, who told Salient, “conversations about the realities of sexual violence for student populations are finally taking place, and the report is a testament to the dedication and effort that people working in this space are putting in.”

Keene’s 2015 thesis, “Risky Residences”, was a watershed in addressing the gap in knowledge and understanding about sexual violence in VUW Halls of Residence.

Keene told Salient that while “the responses that are being incorporated at VUW are a great start, [...] there is always more work to be done.”

— Samantha Gordon

PUBLIC HEARINGS REGARDING FAMILY VIOLENCE IN SAMOA CW: Sexual violence and abuse The public hearings for Samoa’s National Public Inquiry into Family Violence, led by the National Human Rights Institution (NHRI, also called the Office of the Ombuds-

man), began on September 18 and are scheduled to run until October 6.

Violence, as understood by the NHRI, includes “physical, sexual, emotional, verbal, financial, or any other form.”

This is the first national inquiry ordered under section 34 of the Ombudsman Act 2013, which states: “If the Ombudsman becomes aware of widespread, systemic, or entrenched situations or practices that violate human rights, the Ombudsman may initiate an inquiry.”

The Commission of Inquiry is chaired by Ombudsman Maiava Iulai Toma.

Prime Minister Tuila'epa Sa'ilele Malielegaoi appointed the four other members of the Commission: Falenaoti Mulitalo Kolotita June Ailuai Oloialii, the current President of Vavau Women’s Committee; Agaloatele Peggy Fairbairn-Dunlop, a Professor of Pacific Studies at the Auckland University of Technology; Leasiolagi Malama Meleisea, the current Director for the Centre of Samoan Studies at the National University of Samoa; and Tolofuaivalelei Falemoe Leiataua-Lesa, former Minister of Women, Community and Social Development and secretary for the Congregational Christian Church in Samoa Leulumoega since 1989.

Prior to the Inquiry’s launch, Maiava told RNZ that it “will foster a national conversation on violence on the Samoan aiga” to acknowledge family violence as “the shameful thing that it is.”

Maiava highlighted the necessity for multiple sectors of Samoan society to participate in the inquiry — including churches, village councils, educators, volunteers.

The public hearings have thus far displayed a range of presenters.

On September 20, in a public hearing, Lani Wendt Young, survivor of child sexual assault, spoke about her personal experiences of abuse

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News

and the culture of “shame, secrecy, and silence” that prevented her from speaking about it for over 30 years.

Young states that “the more light we shed on this issue, the harder it is for abusers to hide. It is easier for perpetrators to abuse and rape when they can trust that their victims will not tell.”

Secretary to the village council of Lotofaga, Maumaalii Samuelu Tili Mulipola, also presented on September 20, informing the Commission of village laws which provide that the penalty payable by women who get pregnant out of wedlock is 20 cartons of tinned fish.

Maumaalii told Newsline Samoa that “our village rule is in support of the teachings of the Bible,” and stated that it was “done out of love.”

“The Bible clearly states that everyone should live a pure life. This means that people should marry and not have relationships outside of marriage.”

Tuiloma Sina Retzlaff, a survivor and researcher of intimate partner violence, presented a study at the September 19 hearing showing that the perpetrators of 50% of reported cases from 2007–2014 were the victim’s spouse or partner.

At the official opening of the Inquiry Maiava stated, “The time has come for the Samoan community to face squarely the fact that the Samoan home is not the safe place it is supposed to be, by virtue of the cultural and Christian values we claim to cherish.”

—Laura Toailoa

TRANSDEV UNDERCUTTING UNIONISED RAIL WORKERS Wellington rail workers are building towards a strike with a stop-work meeting planned for October 4.

The Rail and Maritime Trans-

port Union (RMTU) is expected to stage the stop-work meeting between 11.00am and 1.00pm, which may delay some Wellington commuters.

The meeting comes as a result of several months of disagreement over employment terms and conditions between RMTU and French-based transport company Transdev, who took over the Wellington network just over a year ago.

RMTU are dissatisfied with the revised employment terms proposed

by Transdev. These would change the current system of penal rates, reducing double time payments to time and a half for work on Sundays, and could require employees to work on public holidays on request.

Organiser for the RMTU national office in Wellington, Todd Valster, told Salient that while services would wind down during these hours, the strike was designed to minimise the effect on commuters.

Buses will be made available on the day to help fill the gaps in the schedule.

He said that RMTU was not asking for big gains, “but they were not prepared to go backwards.”

“It has been very difficult to get [TransDev] around the table […] they have been trying to take terms and conditions from workers, and our members are resolute that they are not prepared to lose any terms and conditions of their employment.”

TransDev however said they were disappointed that a strike was on the table for discussion.

TransDev told Salient, “there are two sides to every story, and we believe all our people will be better off overall as a result of the package we’re trying to discuss.”

“One key feature is working out how we can move staff so there are more people on busy services and fewer on trains that are empty — something that our staff themselves have raised. These are detailed contractual matters, and the place to

discuss them is at in pay talks, not the media.”

Transdev have currently agreed to a 1.3% increase in overall pay, keeping in pace with inflation, an additional $2.00 per hour wage increase for tutors, and future wage increases based on tenure.

Valster said that RTMU members have voted and he expected the strike against the revised terms to go ahead. “They have stood together and said: that’s not going to happen.”

— Angus Shaw

THE–GREAT KERERU COUNT The Great Kererū Count (GKC), one of New Zealand’s largest annual citizen-initiated projects, ran from September 22 to October 1.

The project’s goal is to record the number of Kererū across New Zealand, raising awareness of the importance of the green, copper, and white pigeon, and promoting conservation in general.

According to the World Wildlife Federation, a partner of GKC, any person could take part by counting the Kererū in their backyards, schools, reserves, and parks. People could use any device to record Kererū numbers with the iNaturalist app, or by manually adding to the GKC website.

Livia Esterhazy, Chief Officer of NZ World Wildlife Federation, described the initiative, which began in 2012, as “vital, not just for protecting species, but for ensuring the health of our forest ecosystems for future generations.”

The Kererū has an important role in relation to native plants — no other native bird can disperse seeds of native canopy trees such as tawa, taraire, and mataī in the same way.

The Kererū is not a listed endangered species, and is not regularly monitored by the Department

11 of Conservation (DOC); the GKC initiative is thus particularly significant. DOC told Salient that “the role of the Kererū needs to be highlighted,” and that citizen-initiated science is positive to see, necessary for encouraging more people to become involved in conservation.

In 2016’s GKC, there were 5880 observations and 11,990 Kererū counted.

— Aimee Cox

MIKE JOY RECEIVES CRITIC AND CONSCIENCE AWARD Ecology academic Mike Joy has been named the recipient of the inaugural Critic and Conscience Award by Universities New Zealand.

Joy, a senior lecturer in ecology and environmental science at Massey University, received the award in recognition of his efforts to bring awareness to fresh water issues over the last two years.

His research has brought attention to the negative environmental impacts that intensive dairy farming has on New Zealand’s waterways; in a 2015 article, he estimated that the industry, through run-on effects like nutrient leaching and soil compaction, has caused “between NZ$2.1 and $15 billion” of damage on a national scale.

Joy has also been outspoken about the need to stop commercial whitebaiting, as four of the five native species that comprise whitebait (fish in their juvenile stage) are threatened and at risk of extinction.

“I spoke truth to power,” he told Salient. Joy expressed his anger towards large corporations and “politicised” government departments that “pull the wool over the eyes of the New Zealand public.”

When asked about his plans for the future, with regards to the $50,000 prize money he received

News with his award, Joy stated that he intended to carry on as before.

“I think there’s quite a strong negative relationship between getting awards and getting funding,” he observed, noting that those who speak out against government institutions are often denied research grants.

He warned of a culture of manipulation, where students saddled with debt move into jobs in which they are discouraged from speaking or thinking freely. According to Joy, this culture, combined with the politicisation of the public service, stifles thought and debate.

The Critic and Conscience award is designed to celebrate Academic Freedom, which is protected under the Education Act 1989. Joy believes the award is important in highlighting the role of criticism in academia.

“When I start giving my colleagues who work in government and other places a hard time, I can say to them ‘It’s not personal, it’s my job to be a critic.’”

— Liam Powell

VANUATU VOLCANO DISPLACES THOUSANDS An eruption of one of the world’s most active volcanoes has caused at least 6000 people to flee their homes on the island of Ambae in Vanuatu.

The Monaro volcano, active since 2005, has been rumbling for weeks.

An increase in activity on September 23 led to the volcano’s activity being classified as a “moderate eruption,” prompting the evacuation of villagers from the north and south of the island.

The villagers within range of the volcano, which make up half of the island’s population, have been evacuated to the east and west of the island. “It’s quite a serious emergency,” according to Chairman of Ambae’s Disaster Committee, Manuel Amu.

“Moving people from their communities into an area with very limited houses and very limited resources like food and water; it’s really a challenging issue.”

The volcanic activity has thrown ash, fire, stones, and lava from the mouth of the volcano. Villages and crops in the north and south of the island have been blanketed in the volcanic ash.

Vanuatu’s Geohazard Department has raised the volcanic alert system from level three to level four.

Level four indicates a “moderate eruption state,” compared to level five, which indicates a “full-blown” eruption.

Director of Vanuatu’s National Disaster Management Office, Shadrack Welegtabit, told ABC that it was difficult to say if a full-blown eruption would follow, and those evacuated would have to just wait it out.

“With the seismic machine we can measure what’s happening, but we can’t really predict what the volcano will do next,” he said.

New Zealand scientists are monitoring the volcanic activity, having flown an Air Force Orion over the island on Tuesday in an attempt to assess the activity.

If the volcano does erupt, devastating effects on the island are predicted, including villages being destroyed by ashfall and acid rain.

— Harry Clatworthy

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News

FEES RISE 2% DESPITE STUDENT OPPOSITION

The VUW Council passed a motion ten votes to two in its public meeting on September 25 to increase domestic fees for undergraduate and postgraduate courses by 2% for 2018.

International student fees are also to rise 2% in 2018, a decision that was made in November 2016.

For the average full-time student (120 points), a year of a Bachelor of Arts degree, the cheapest course of undergraduate study at VUW, cost approximately $5,360.40 in 2017. The fee rise adds just over $100, bringing the cost for a year of study up to $5,467.20.

For the average full-time student, a year of a Bachelor of Engineering, the most expensive undergraduate course of study, was $7,845.60 in 2017. This will increase to $8,001.60 in 2018.

The increases were limited to 2% for 2018 at the direction of the government, which sets the annual maximum fee movement for tertiary institutions.

At the recommendation of the Council Finance Committee, which considers the budget and VUW’s obligation to make a 3% surplus under the current tertiary funding model, the fee increase was passed to “enable the university to maintain quality and continue to invest in initiatives to support the Strategic Plan.”

Published in 2014, the Strategic Plan lays out a vision for VUW to be a “world-leading capital city university” and to “enhance research quality, quantity, and impact” — aspirations that the Council Finance Committee felt would be at risk if the fee increase was not implemented, as “a decision to increase fees by less than 2% would reduce resources for essential income in 2018.”

The student representatives on the Council, Alexandria Mark and Jacinta Gulasekharam, opposed the increase, and believed that VUW had not been transparent about the process and reasoning for raising fees.

Gulasekharam said “I can not vote for fee increases until we tell, by email, every student how

much their fees are going up by and why.”

Mark went further, pointing out the tension that in a “society that now insists upon tertiary training, whether it be university, trade school, apprenticeship, or wānanga, even for the most basic of jobs, it’s becoming increasingly hard to justify the cost of education as a personal choice.”

She highlighted that the financial barrier to study “did not always exist. It was created and exacerbated by the generation who came before us who were happy to climb the ladder and pull it up behind them.”

Since the introduction of the user pays tertiary model in 1989, fees for tertiary institutions have increased steadily, often by the maximum amount permissible by the government.

Five years ago a full year of a Bachelor of Arts degree cost approximately $4,500, compared to $5,360.40 in 2017.

Mark’s speech at the meeting prompted a response from the chair of the Council Finance Committee, Roger Taylor, who said “there’s no such thing as a free lunch or free education,” despite admitting that “when [he] went to university the state paid for it.”

He said that when he started working “the maximum tax rate was about 67% […] so what we’re talking about here is who pays.”

This sentiment, that the current tertiary funding model is inadequate and therefore student fees are a justified necessity, was reiterated by Guilford, who told Salient that “neither student fee rises or government tuition subsidies have kept pace with rising costs over this period, meaning year after year staff have to deliver the high quality education they do with less money in real terms.”

“The numerous improvements made to the quality of learning and teaching and student services during this period are primarily due to staff working harder with less.”

However, despite Guilford pitting the interests of students against staff, VUW’s Strategic

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Plan also contains a key strategy to “provide a holistic learning, teaching, and student experience that is second to none.”

This was touched upon by VUWSA President Rory Lenihan-Ikin, who spoke at the meeting and described “a sense of powerlessness” among students regarding their voice within the institution.

He said that there is “a sense that no matter what, the system is set up in a way that requires maximum fee increases every year and no degree of student voice within the institution could change this.”

This was reflected in statements by Council member Therese Walsh who, in response to the students who spoke at the meeting, said, “I think that today is not the right day to be having these discussions and speeches, because in fact actually the decision is really taken, in the sense that we’ve put together and spent a lot of time on financial planning for 2018 — what needs to be done operationally, what needs to be done from a capital perspective.”

Salient asked Guilford if Walsh had meant that the fee increase is taken as given by the Council when budgeting prior to the fee-setting meeting; he said the question would need to be answered by Walsh.

At the time of print, Walsh had not replied.

However, a response to the comment was received from VUW Chancellor Neville Jordan, who appeared to deny that this was the intention of the comment. “The discussion was about how to enhance engagement with students.”

Despite Guilford’s participation in the “Rant with Grant” event in the Hub on September 13, where students could ask about the fee-setting process, the overall message from the students who spoke at the Council meeting was that there was a lack of transparency and student involvement in the fee-setting process.

Guilford told Salient that a student member of Council participates in the Council Finance

News

Committee and added that the meeting where the recommendation to increase fees was presented was open to the public.

However, only two of the twelve-member Council are students, and all non-student members voted for the increase, raising questions about democratic accountability, a sentiment shared by Lenihan-Ikin.

“We feel students deserve more direct communication about fee-setting — what that looks like isn’t yet clear, but we are having conversations about how VUW, and VUWSA, can do that more effectively. Of course, we do host a fee forum each year [Rant with Grant] where the VC explains VUW’s position on fee rises and where students can ask questions.”

“But VUW budgets are decided early on in the year, so we are working with them at the moment to try and enable student views to be fed into the budget-setting process earlier from next year.”

In the meeting, the Council also voted, twelve votes for and zero against, to raise the Student Services Levy by 3.5% of the 2017 rate, bringing it to $756.00 for full-time students in 2018.

— Tim Manktelow

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News POLITICS

POLITICAL ROUND-UP Winston Peters Attention is focussed on Winston Peters after NZ First gained 7.5% of the party vote, approximately nine seats, in the preliminary results of the general election on September 23. It secured Peters’ position as “Kingmaker” with considerable influence over whether the next government is fourth-term National, or made up of Labour and the Greens.

Peters has said that he will make his decision after the final results are made available on October 7, when the 384,072 special votes (as estimated by Electoral Commission — 15% of total votes) are counted.

Until then, the final size of the parties in Parliament is unknown. Currently National has 58 seats, and the Labour/Green bloc has 52. Both need 61 to govern, so both would need the support of NZ First to form a government.

In a press conference on September 25, Labour leader Jacinda Ardern said that NZ First had been “campaigning for change” and that the majority of New Zealanders had voted “against the status quo.” She said that there is “a lot of alignment” between Labour and NZ First.

However, Labour could find it difficult trying to gain NZ First’s support: while both parties support free university education and a ban on house purchases by foreign buyers, Peters is opposed to Labour’s water tax on farmers. Peters also wants a referendum on abolishing the Māori electorate seats. Labour won all seven Māori seats in the election and have “ruled out” such a referendum.

NZ First’s billboards asked New Zealanders if they had “Had Enough?” While some would take that to mean NZ First was sick of the current National government, Peters’ sentiment was more of a

general backlash against the neoliberal status quo than a specific challenge to Bill English’s National Government.

Nevertheless, there are policies of the current government which Peters would want changed. For example, immigration is at record high and National has been unwilling to significantly lower it — which would likely be a condition for working with Peters.

Bill English has described National as having the “moral authority” to govern, given that they received the highest party vote in the election; Peters may not want to push his luck by supporting a Labour/Green government with a slim parliamentary majority. But NZ First having more MPs than the Greens means he may have greater influence in a centre-left coalition if he spurned National.

Māori Party Support for the Māori Party collapsed in the election on September 23, ending its 13-year representation in Parliament. The party formed when MP Tariana Turia split from the Labour Party in 2004 in protest against the then-Labour Government’s passing of the Foreshore and Seabed Act. The party’s two incumbent MPs, Te Ururoa Flavell and Marama Fox, campaigned in the Waiariki and Ikaroa-Rāwhiti electorates respectively. Fox, despite giving strong performances in the televised minor parties debates, was unable to win Ikaroa-Rāwhiti. Labour’s Meka Whaitiri won the seat by a lead of over 3000 votes.

Te Ururoa Flavell had a tight campaign in Waiariki against Labour’s Tamati Coffey. Coffey won the seat with 9847 votes, compared to Flavell’s 8526. Holding on to the Waiariki electorate was crucial to

maintaining the Māori Party’s representation in Parliament, having received only 1.1% of the party vote.

Party President Tukoroirangi Morgan had sensed that many Māori had grown wary of the party’s support for the National-led government since 2008. He said on August 4 that Māori “want our party to work with Labour if it’s in a position to form a government after September 23.” Flavell conceded that the current government “has forgotten about a fair chunk of society.”

The Māori Party’s support for the National-led government resulted in over $4 billion worth of funding for Māori programmes, including Whanau Ora. Furthermore, confidence and supply agreements between the parties have stipulated that National would not seek to abolish the Māori seats, despite being officially opposed to them; the Māori Party’s parliamentary absence means the position of the Māori seats may be more tenuous this term.

Though the Māori Party has lost its parliamentary representation for now, it is likely to redouble its efforts at the next election in 2020.

— Aidan Kelly

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Politics

THE PARTY LINE

The United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has been signed by over 50 countries, including New Zealand. The treaty binds signatories to not “develop, test, produce, manufacture, otherwise acquire, possess, or stockpile nuclear weapons.” What are your thoughts on the treaty and New Zealand’s decision to sign it?

Young Nats The Young Nats agree with the principles of the treaty and support the National Government’s decision to sign.

— Sam Stead

Vic Labour We’ll let former Prime Minister David Lange say it best — this quote is from the Oxford Union Debate in 1986, where he argued for the proposition that “Nuclear weapons are morally indefensible” against US televangelist Jerry Falwell: “The character of the argument, sir, is something which I find regrettable. So I can say very simply that it is my conviction that there is no moral case for nuclear weapons. That the best defence which can be made of their existence and the threat of their use is, as we have heard tonight, that they are a necessary evil; an abhorrent means to a desirable end.

I hold that the character of nuclear weapons is such that their very existence corrupts the best of intentions; that the means in fact pervert the end. And I hold that their character is such that they have brought us to the greatest of all perversions: the belief that this evil is necessary — as it has been stated tonight — when in fact it is not.”

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Features

GET ADRENALINE OR DIE TRYIN’: THE TRUTH BEHIND ANAPHYLAXIS Written by Michaela Brus

Anaphylaxis is like one of those remorseless slowpokes holding up foot traffic along Lambton Quay; no matter how hard you try to avoid them, they will always strike at the most inconvenient of times.

One such occasion that anaphylaxis decided to pay me a visit began like any other. It was a weekday evening.

I reheated leftovers, which had the potential to vaguely resemble a meal, touching various surfaces in the kitchen as I went. Ten minutes later, as I sat down to eat with flatmates, I was met with signs of a mild to moderate allergic reaction. Hives covered my skin, my throat and eyes beginning to itch and swell. For a girl who has experienced chronic eczema, the itch was up there on the mild to “I’m going to gouge my eyes out” scale.

I took some antihistamine tablets and thought nothing of it; there were certainly no allergens in my meal, meaning I thought it impossible for a severe reaction to befall me. To my dismay, the mirror begged to differ. It reflected an unrecognisable version of myself, my right eye having swollen to the size of a golf ball, causing tears to stream down my face. Still, I thought nothing of it. Minutes later, as I walked across my bedroom, unsteadiness set in, smothering me with an overwhelming sense of fatigue. My vision deteriorated and consciousness turned into darkness.

Nothingness.

It wasn’t until a few hours later that I would realise I had passed out from low blood pressure, having gone into anaphylactic shock — a severe allergic reaction that can close the airways and

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force organs to shut down. This meant I must have come into contact with a substance I am anaphylactic to, though we still do not know what it was. I was completely ignorant to the extent of my illness, as many New Zealanders are. Concerned I would scare my flat mates with the swelling that disfigured my face, I had shut myself off from the rest of the world. Without knowing the location of my Epipen, a life-saving injection of adrenaline, it was pure chance that my flatmate had the initiative to locate the medication and administer it in time. It sounds dramatic, but the reality is that if he had not done so, I would not be here today.

Others, such as Emily White, a 15-yearold Christchurch student whose life was taken by anaphylaxis just a few months ago, have not been as lucky.

Ignorance costs lives. What is most damaging, however, is the fact that this ignorance is not even surprising, given the unsupportive environment New Zealand has fostered. Death by anaphylaxis is absolutely preventable.

And yet, if you don’t have the pecuniary means to access the relevant education, or if it is not there in the first place, prevention becomes unfeasible.

Currently, our government does not even partially fund Epipens. This means that a life-saving medication can cost anywhere between $140-$180 annually (yes, annually, because auto-injectors expire every 12 months and this does not include use before expiration). A life-saving medication that can stop auto-immune attacks in their early stages is not believed to be vital enough to fund. For the average kiwi, especially students, this cost means many of us go through life without this medication,

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hoping the hospital will be close enough if something were to happen. However, funding is bound to save costs longterm in preventing hospital visitations.

The government’s lack of support, both financial and educational, for people living with allergic disease ultimately sends the message to vulnerable New Zealanders and their families that anaphylaxis is not taken seriously. It is a system that does not value the lives of autoimmune individuals as it should, partially attributable to the classic “she’ll be right” or “harden up” Kiwi culture.

One thing that frustrates me is hearing New Zealanders accuse parents of “cotton wooling” their children, thereby somehow causing severe food allergies.

People fail to understand the genetic component to the illness or to even see it as an illness at all, given its primarily unseeable nature. My mother always (perhaps irresponsibly) encouraged me to try new things and delegitimise my illness, attempting to ensure others did not treat me differently for it; that it did not hinder my quality of life. We didn’t even own an Epipen until, getting the shock of our lives, 17-year-old me experienced a reaction so severe at a Wellington restaurant that I needed to be resuscitated once the second dose of adrenaline still did not allow me to breathe. All I remember, as my body became a detailed map of hives and welts, is a ringing in my ears before losing consciousness. It was deafening.

After this incident, I have been even more meticulous in letting hospitality staff know of my allergies. Once, plucking up the courage to ask after the ingredients of a rice dish at a food outlet at the Kelburn campus, I was met with “Oh dear, are you one of those annoying

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IGNORANCE COSTS LIVES. WHAT IS MOST DAMAGING, HOWEVER, IS THE FACT THAT THIS IGNORANCE IS NOT EVEN SURPRISING, GIVEN THE UNSUPPORTIVE ENVIRONMENT NEW ZEALAND HAS FOSTERED. DEATH BY ANAPHYLAXIS IS ABSOLUTELY PREVENTABLE.

vegans?” Confused and embarrassed, I reply informing him of my severe food allergies and desire to eat something other than fries for once. “Oh, even worse — of course the rice dish contains sesame!” he responded. After casually discussing this incident with my dietician, she informed me I should have complained to the Health and Disability Commissioner, something that had never crossed my mind in the face of routine jokes about my illness. Whether it was a classmate waving a peanut butter jar in my face or the fact that Wellington Hospital was my second home during my time at Joan Stevens Hall (before getting a VUWSA advocate to speak on my behalf ), people always found creative ways to make light of a dark situation.

Now, don’t get me wrong, living with severe food allergies can, on the odd occasion, be advantageous. Like when

you go out for dinner and you already know what you’re going to order before you reach the restaurant because it’s the only safe option on the menu and you’ve had it ten times before. Or when you are supermarket shopping and you don’t have to waste time debating about brands in your head because there are only a select few, which are not plagued with legal disclaimers regarding allergens. Or when it’s hard to put on weight because all of the cabinet food, stocked with delicious cakes, is off limits, meaning you can only stare in awe at its beauty. Or when at that same café, you know you will save more money than your friends because all of the available lunch options contain allergens, though a more common situation is that staff tell you they cannot make a meal without crosscontamination. Or, you are relieved to hear them tell you this, because the thought of putting your life in another

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person’s hands is too anxiety-provoking and you would rather go hungry than risk another hospital visit this month.

My immunologist tells me I simply cannot eat out or participate in certain everyday activities, but what sort of life is that? Why unnecessarily restrict those who need not be unnecessarily restricted? Eating out is such an important social platform and, if other countries can create inclusive environments for allergy sufferers, why can’t we?

What I’m saying is that food allergies and their common consequence, anaphylaxis, are severely misunderstood in New Zealand. So no, it=’s not funny for you to wave your peanut butter jar in my face and pretend a life-threatening situation would be laughable. No, it’s not funny to interpret being allergic to nuts as a reference to your ball sacks.

And no, it’s definitely not okay for our

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society to sit by and watch another innocent person die from an absolutely preventable illness.

This article is dedicated to Emily White, and all New Zealanders whose lives have been tragically cut short by anaphylaxis, in an effort to raise awareness of the severity of autoimmune diseases. *** If you have ever had any difficult encounters with food allergies or anaphylaxis at Victoria University, we would love to hear from you. Please phone 04-463-6766, email editor@ salient.org.nz.

If you are living in a Halls of Residence and would like support from VUWSA’s advocacy service, please phone 04-4636984 or email advocate@vuwsa.org.nz.

Columns COLUMNS

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PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS

VUWSA

Last week VUW voted to raise your fees by 2% for 2018.

With student debt surpassing $15 billion last year, and the average graduate leaving university with a loan the size of a house deposit, I’m sure this isn’t music to your ears.

As the Vice-Chancellor will say, and he is right, 2% is obviously not a radical increase once inflation and wage rises are considered. These are now increasing at a faster rate, and the university must absorb those extra costs.

However, the pain felt by annual fee increases is no less severe, even if it is “out of the hands” of the university.

Each year serves as a reminder that there is no end in sight to the growing debt mountain that young people are carrying on their backs as they leave tertiary education and head into an increasingly uncertain workforce.

While we are stuck with this system, what can we do better as a university community to try and embrace the notion of partnership, and reduce the feelings of animosity and powerlessness that students invariably feel with annual increases?

A start would be to involve students early on in budget setting, to have the discussions about fees in March, rather than in September when the budget is pretty much a done deal.

This would open the space for a conversation about where students would like their fees to go. Recorded lectures? More contact time with lecturers/tutors? Improving online tools such as Blackboard and MyVic? The Student Services Levy was also voted upon, which will go up 3.5% next year. This increase was bigger than usual, to cover a deficit that this ring-fenced levy was carrying, but nonetheless the collaborative process taken to determine annual increases of this fee has allowed genuine student input over a number of years.

Until we can get genuine change to the tertiary funding model, making sure there is student partnership when it comes to spending fees is essential, and we need look no further than how this is already done with the Student Levy.

The future: we’re all thinking about it, we’re being asked about it, our whole country is fretting about it. So if you’re like me, a chronic procrastinator, and in need of help figuring out your future, then allow me to provide you a slightly different method to plan yours out.

— Rory Lenihan-Ikin

THE FRUITURE CAKE Ingredients: Butter, flour, 1 tsp sugar, cocoa powder, four eggs,1 cup milk.

You want to start by preparing the pans plans, we’re going to need four for this cake, as it’s layered.

Grease the plans with your butter headings. I prefer Potential 1–4.

Now we’re going to begin with the dry ingredients.

In one bowl add in flour your achievements, big or small.

Add the sugar desires/emotive thoughts. Last, sieve in some cocoa powder driving forces.

Be careful with the wet ingredients; they’re messy.

In a bowl, add four eggs potential futures, likely or unlikely, but within reason. You want free range eggs ideas — bold, defined, colourful — for best results.

Then add milk connect the similarities between options.

Time to mix the ingredients. In each plan we want to combine the wet ingredients potential futures with your dry ingredients base/forces. Now we want to bake them ponder them for a while. After this: icing time! Each is different, so we want to make sure that’s reflected. Ice the cakes as you see fit, Draw out each option, doesn’t matter how good you are at icing drawing, just make sure the key elements are there.

The visuals will genuinely help people you enjoy the cake visualise your future.

You may not enjoy the cake when you’re done, but at least you’ve done it, and next time you’re going to feel more prepared, even if it’s just a small amount. Good luck!

— Tom Rackley, Treasurer/Secretary

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TE ARA TAUIRA There is a whakatauki that says “Ka pū te ruha, ka hao te rangatahi.” As an old net withers, another is remade. This saying speaks to the regeneration of society; the significance of passing the mantle to the young. As rangatahi (most of us at least…) we are the future of our culture, and must bear the burdens and the hardships of our tīpuna.

Reducing the inequalities faced by rangatahi Māori must be a national imperative. In the ngāhere we understand that if the indigenous plant thrives, the whole forest thrives. What rights should a young Māori person have?

And how can we sustainably support the future for Māori? This question is imperative not only to one’s sense of self, but to the collective building of Aotearoa as one well-functioning eco-system; a ngāhere, so to speak, that sustainably and successfully supports individuals to succeed.

Our current political climate is in a state of limbo. The Māori Party and Mana Party will not have any seats in parliament, with Labour winning all the Māori seats. The future of our government will soon be decided by Winston Peters and NZ First. This upcoming government will see the rise of many new Māori politicians, some of whom we may not be familiar with.

Hei aha tērā, there is always mahi to be done by all.

Mā whero, mā pango, ka oti te mahi. While those at the top of parliament decide how our government will proceed in the future, as tauira we must decide how we will proceed. How will policy influence us, and how can we in turn change society? The net that is now being woven will one day grow old. Where in Te Ao Māori will we stand when it does?

— Nā Kahu Kutia

ONE OCEAN SYMMETRY I came here on my parents’ prayers And thousands in aid for air fares To the land of condescending stares / As I hid beneath the arch of the tatau I came here to watch the blood in Hau’ofa’s kava bowl Flow like oratory; swirl and roll Leap and rave without control / From the lines that are my veins I came here to wear my skin And the scars of where my ancestors have been That toss, and turn and stir within / To remember their names I came here to be the woman in Makini’s dreams Even as my bilum dress is tearing at the seams Snipped at by labels and a lack of financial means / To be the daughter my ancestors suffered for I came here to burn with the flame Teaiwa lit The day I learned exactly where I fit Like signet: each fibre, every bit / To be, and keep on being I came here with the courage my people bequeathed to me I grew into this soil like the roots of a tree I am still here

And I AM FREE. — Jasmine Koria

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VOICE OF V-ISA CURE FOR THE EXAM BLUES International students have much to celebrate with only three weeks of school left. Maybe you can’t wait for the holidays to kick in so you can head home immediately and be spoiled by your momma’s home cooking again, but if you’re staying around for summer you are in for a treat!

New Zealand summers are legendary. They are a combination of all the best parts of the year rolled into one long lazy holiday. With Christmas, the New Year, and holidays all at the same time, what could be better?

Christmas in other parts of the world usually conjures mental images of snow falling, hot roast, and cosy ugly sweaters (the homemade kind with bobbles and bells sewed on). Christmas in New Zealand is an entirely different beast. Celebrate the festive season here with barbeques on the beach, in your shorts and sandals. Instead of a heavy Christmas cake, have a light and fluffy pavlova topped with cream and summer fruits of your choice (strawberries are always a winner).

New Year’s Eve is unique. Everyone seems to have a different way of ushering in the new year. Some people kiss. Some people cheer.

Some people watch a funny ball drop in Times Square. There’s no one right way to do it. Some Kiwis run screaming and laughing into the icy waves at Oriental Bay at midnight. This year, get some friends together and make your own NYE traditions.

So, whether you’re leaving or staying over the third trimester, there’s plenty to look forward to!

It’s just around the bend now. This is the last lap of the race. Just over the hill that is exams. In case you’ve forgotten that life exists outside of books and study, we’re reminding you that good times are ahead! You have got this!

— Hannah Wee

MAURI ORA FOREIGN TRAVEL ADVENTURES

Going overseas can be one of the most exciting times of your life. It is also expensive, and thinking about getting vaccines or spending money on insurance can seem out of reach — but I would really encourage you to just consider this as part of your trip’s costs.

If you don’t, and are unlucky enough for something to go wrong (even if it’s just an untimely bout of the flu), your hard-earned holiday dollars could have been wasted on a trip that you simply can’t enjoy. So, if you are planning your next adventure overseas, here are some top tips to get the best from it: • Book a travel appointment at Student Health — we

have several GPs who have a special interest in travel medicine, and will be able to advise you about what vaccines you need, and also what first aid medicines it might be prudent to take with you. Ideally this should be at least a month before your travel — some vaccines take several weeks to reach their maximal effect, so you won’t reap the benefit if you come a week or so before you leave. There is a cost for this appointment and for the vaccines.

• Make sure you know what vaccines you have had

in the past so you don’t need to get any repeated.

Full courses of hepatitis A and B, for example, should give you lifelong cover — whereas typhoid immunisation needs updating every three years.

• Thoroughly plan out your itinerary. Different regions

of a country will have different health issues, so if your plans change and you haven’t allowed for that, you could inadvertently put yourself at risk.

• Be aware that some long-term medical conditions

may be affected by travel or vaccinations. Your doctor can also provide you with a letter for customs, detailing what medicines you will need to carry with you on your trip.

If you would like to meet one of our travel doctors, call reception and ask for an appointment. You will be asked to complete a questionnaire prior to being seen, detailing where you are going and for how long. For more information visit www.safetravel.govt.nz Bon Voyage!

— Kathryn Leslie and Cathy Stephenson

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Columns

SPORT RECLAIMING COLIN KAEPERNICK Two weeks ago, across the United States, the grand tradition of NFL Sunday Night Football took place. It was a good day for football on the field, featuring down to the wire games and upsets. But at every game around America (and even London) there was an unavoidable disruption to the traditions that fans and commentators expect from this haloed day.

Over a year ago now, Colin Kaepernick began his protest against police violence and the racial inequalities that plague America.

The protest was simple in its form. Since 2009, NFL players had been mandated to stand on the sidelines while the national anthem plays; so Kaepernick simply sat it out, on a seat behind the team, barely noticeable among the dozens of bodies that populate an NFL sideline. Since then, Kaepernick’s protest has dominated NFL storylines, even through a new season in which Kaepernick remains unemployed in a fairly obvious blackballing by the league’s 32 owners.

Kaepernick of course has his supporters, and has himself been forthcoming in articulating his reasons for protesting, yet loud voices among the media and fans have claimed his actions are disrespectful of the flag, and therefore America, and therefore America’s great military heroes. Though a few players had followed in Kaepernick’s wake, no widespread action had taken place until two weekends ago when swathes of players in all teams sat out the anthem, while other teams opted to stand with arms locked, sometimes with their team’s owner, in a show of solidarity.

These actions, as unprecedented and potentially well-intentioned as they were, seem to wash away the meaning of Kaepernick’s original protest, as they are directly tied, not to police violence, but to the divisive force that now sits and tweets from America’s highest office.

Where Kaepernick had sparked a conversation and opened latent divisions among players, fans, and owners, President Trump has managed to

galvanise the entire league in opposition to his statements (which have called players’ “sons of bitches” and demanded their removal from the field), simultaneously subsuming the intention of Kaepernick’s original message.

This is most obvious in the participation of the owners who had heretofore been silent on the issue. Some of these owners donated millions and voiced public support for Trump during his campaign, and were now standing in apparent solidarity with their team’s players against him.

These owners’ actions were not directed to even a notional idea of social activism, but were in reality a selfish display resulting from the threat to their autonomy that Trump’s tweets had issued; their actions were not just self-serving but deeply hypocritical.

What started with Kaepernick and his poignant display of dissension on America’s most watched stage has turned into a token anti-Trump message faced by billionaires that Trump has likely played a round of golf with. It is an encapsulation of the era of Trump in which the great orange behemoth is able to overwrite seemingly any narrative, centering himself while pushing the rest to the background. These protests will likely continue, and if we are to do justice in even some way to the intention of Colin Kaepernick’s original message, we must remember what it was and remain vigilant to the ways by which it can be distorted.

— Tom Danby

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Philosoraptor Can an act be morally wrong even though it leaves no one worse off ?

Imagine that there is a large quantity of radioactive waste that we have to deal with.

We have two options: spend some money to contain it permanently, or build a cheaper, temporary shelter which will deteriorate over the next couple of centuries. This deterioration will eventually make large areas of Earth uninhabitable, and cause future generations of humans to develop debilitating illnesses.

Surely, choosing to build the temporary shelter rather than spending a little extra money on the permanent shelter is morally wrong.

But consider the following fact: the person that each of us grows up to be is determined by our parents, circumstances of birth, and genetics. If our parents had chosen to conceive at a slightly different time, it is entirely plausible that we, as we are now, would not exist; rather, someone else, with a different personality and life path, would exist in our place.

If we choose the permanent shelter, a certain set of people will come into existence in the future.

Call this Set A. If we choose the temporary shelter, Set B will come into existence in the future. And it is quite likely that Set B is completely different from Set A. People’s reactions to our choice of shelter will affect their lives in miniscule ways. Perhaps some people will not run into their future partner, which in turn will have a sequence of cascading impacts on other people’s lives. The beginnings of the deterioration will affect people’s lives even more. The net impact of all of this is that the future people in Set B are different people than the future people in Set A. Now we are ready to make a surprising claim.

If we choose the temporary shelter rather than the permanent shelter, no one will be worse off.

Of course, the people in Set B will suffer from various illnesses and resource constraints. But if we had chosen the permanent shelter, those

people in Set B would never have come into existence at all. So as long as their lives are worth living, they are no worse off than if we had chosen the temporary shelter. Therefore, choosing the temporary shelter cannot be morally wrong.

Something, clearly, has gone wrong with our moral reasoning. Derek Parfit, the philosopher who originally introduced and analysed this problem, called it the Non-Identity Problem.

He believed that choosing the temporary shelter would be morally wrong; thus, he thought that we should reject our intuition that an act can be wrong only if it leaves someone worse off.

The Non-Identity Problem is one issue in the ethics of procreation — a cluster of questions about the morality of bringing people into existence, or harming or benefiting future people.

One other difficult problem in procreative ethics is often called the Procreative Asymmetry. The Asymmetry states that it is morally bad to bring someone into existence who will have a terrible life: for example, it is morally wrong to bring into existence a child who will have a short life crippled by an agonising illness. Yet the Asymmetry denies the converse of that principle: that it is morally good to bring into existence people with happy lives.

Most of us believe intuitively in the Asymmetry: few of us believe that having more children is an act of charity (because it benefits those children), and few of us believe that policies to reduce population size are immoral because they prevent future lives from coming into existence. Yet the Asymmetry is, surprisingly enough, asymmetrical, and it is hard to provide a justification for that asymmetry apart from the mere existence of our intuitions.

— Shakked Noy

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Super Science Trends

Columns

TIRED/WIRED With exams coming up, I decided to look into the recent science around sleep and stimulants.

Sleep as an area of study gets increasingly more complicated the more we look at it. While the current consensus is that sleep helps to form memories and gives the body time to recharge after exerting itself, there is an argument that says it doesn’t make sense for an organism to go into an inactive state where they aren’t searching for food sources or finding a mate. After all, the early bird gets the worm and the opportunity to pass on its genes to the next generation. However recent research from Caltech has shown that even jellyfish with no actual brain have to enter a “sleep” state, suggesting that it is a behaviour as old as animal life on Earth.

But humans view sleep as something to master or to eliminate all together in pursuit of that most loftiest of goals: productivity. Nootropics are designer drugs made up of chemical “stacks”, the most common being a cup of coffee’s worth of caffeine tempered with L-theanine, an amino acid found in green tea. This combination is intended to give you all the same energy boost as coffee or an energy drink but without those post-coffee jitters. Nootropics like Qualia and Nootrobox aim for gradual optimisation of your thinking process and work ethic over time, as opposed to the temporary boost offered

by Ritalin and Adderall, and aim for natural ingredients as opposed to the amphetamines in those medications. On that note, all the colourful energy drink ads that tout the magic of TAURINE AND GUARANA are really just promoting an amino acid that your pancreas produces naturally and caffeine but from a different plant, respectively. Still doesn’t mean you should be chugging them like they’re water, but hey, the more you know.

Perhaps in response, the market has actually swung back around to creating “relaxation drinks” to help people unwind and sleep better. My personal favourite was “night milk”,

collected from cows in the early morning which was found to possess higher amounts of sleep-inducing hormones like tryptophan and melatonin. Night milk has yielded positive results as a sedative in mice and elderly human patients, but it’s not commercially available yet, save for one German company that manufactures night milk crystals. Night milk is tricky to get, since any slight stress or wakefulness response from the cow due to disturbing their usual milking schedule stops them producing melatonin and renders the whole process for naught. Which means in order to keep the market afloat, you have to raise a bunch of cows specifically for night milk production, and at that point we’ve basically just outsourced our problem to another species.

My philosophy brain wonders whether the desire to eliminate sleep is something to do with how we frame labour as a society. We find it difficult to conceive of a purpose or benefit for doing nothing because so much of our personal worth is derived from the quality and consistency of our labour. What doesn’t help is that good sleep is increasingly hard to find in the industrial world. Sleep researchers and bioethicists think we’re in the middle of a sleep deprivation epidemic due to industrial factors like night-time lighting in cities, longer work hours, and chronic stress. But instead of aiming to get better sleep, we focus on trying to increase productivity in waking hours through increasingly better stimulants.

So, to conclude: TIRED: defining personal worth via the fetishising of productivity and using sleep avoidance as a metric of achievement.

WIRED: finding an appropriate balance between work and rest periods as appropriate to one’s schedule and body chemistry.

— Gus Mitchell

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INTERVIEW WITH JAMES MEFFAN Interviewed by Laura Toailoa and Tim Manktelow

“Every now and again you’ll hear a plink; that is the hole in my ceiling which is steadily dripping into the bucket at the back — the university has run to three buckets for me which is quite nice,” Dr James Meffan told us as we sat down for an interview with him. He is a lecturer for the School of English, Film, Theatre, and Media Studies, and we spoke to him about representation, and some of the dilemmas that occur every day in talk, in stories, and art. We also talked about the expectations we have for fiction, where the creative art of make-believe storytelling meets the real life social and political contexts that authors and readers occupy, and wondered: are there limits to what we can say? * We thought we should start with what it is to represent. The OED provides numerous definitions: To present the image or appearance of; to resemble. | To constitute; to be, form, amount to. | To serve as a representative example of (a group or class); to typify, exemplify, or stand for, esp. in a specif ied context. | Of a picture, an image, etc.: to portray, depict, show. | To bring clearly and distinctly before the mind or imagination; to describe, evoke, conjure; to imagine, conceptualize.

What does this word mean to you, and how do you relate it to literature?

You’ve trawled through the OED, which is always a great place to start.

In the popular use I suppose we’d say that representation produces a kind of life-like depiction of things. It could be verbal, pictorial, could be bodily through acting. The magic of semiotics is that we can use material of a different order (from what it is used to represent), and yet we can bring before people things.

So language, and I’ll focus in on language, might make present something which is necessarily absent e.g. hey, there’s a saber-toothed tiger over the brow of the hill, look out! That’s why we need it, that’s why we want it. The matter of necessary absence is interesting. Under what circumstances do we need to represent?

In the world of literature and the arts, the ideal is that the very process of representation is productive of something valuable. The history of the discussion of art is often a discussion about what that value is.

Do we need this? Fictional narrative is a large part of what we consider literature, and since its beginning fiction has been troubled by the question of its truth status: should we promote the telling of lies, making things up? Is that a good thing? Weren’t we all taught as children that telling the truth is the thing we should aim at?

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Laura Toailoa and Tim Manktelow

There’s a distinction being drawn between representation as communication, to bring before us something that isn’t there (but exists somewhere), and then fiction which is the deliberate crafting of something that is untrue…

The imagining (the bringing before us) of something that isn’t there, not just because it can’t be there, but because it isn’t there at all.

It seems to change the ethical responsibilities, if the thing wasn’t there in the first place?

Certainly. We tend to operate under the assumption that there are responsibilities that come with calling something nonfiction. And to be clear, that responsibility is not the promise of absolute truth, because no one can promise the truth. It’s a promise of sincerity, that you will make every effort not to mislead, that you won’t deliberately lie or misrepresent.

New journalism (which is influential on a lot of feature writing today), to quote one of its practitioners, Tom Wolfe, was centered around the idea “that it might just be possible to write journalism that would… read like a novel.” It combines elements of fiction with the reportage of fact, where the goal is to come closer to a “truth” through devices like the representation of interiority — something unheard of in conventional reportage. By presenting itself as journalism, would you say it’s trying to circumnavigate the ethical responsibilities?

The expectations that come with something being marked as non-fiction is often talked about as a compact, a kind of tacit agreement, between the producer and the receiver. A tacit agreement that nothing will be materially falsified. But people seeking to produce true and convincing accounts quickly realise that the innovation of fictions, particularly the innovations

Interview with James Meffan of point of view, of attempting to inhabit consciousness as well as representing the material surface of things, seems to draw us towards the potential of a clearer, more compelling, maybe even a greater, truth.

One of the paradoxes of literature is the idea that, in its decision to free itself from those constraints of the compact of truth telling, it actually frees itself up to do something that seems more powerful and more authentic. It’s not surprising to me that practitioners of non-fiction want some of that, that they say: “now that I have the superficial facts, let me try and inhabit the experiential dimension. The person I wish to represent is dead. Let me imagine what it was like to be them — what was going on in their mind?”

A new compact is developed — nothing is substantially falsified, but a number of things are added which on the basis of evidence seem fair enough to imagine. Of course that takes us to a very murky area, and a potentially problematic one.

György Lukács says: “If literature is a particular form by means of which objective reality is reflected, then it becomes of crucial importance for it to grasp that reality as it truly is, and not merely to confine itself to reproducing whatever manifests itself immediately and on the surface.” What is the relationship of realism to what we’ve been talking about?

One argument used to justify the production of fiction is that the serious writer, the credible realist writer, will pay sufficient attention to the details of the world. Their fictional creation will be constrained by some of the material facts of the world outside. It would become incredible, would lose its plausibility, if it strays too far from what we know about the world and the way it operates.

Writers like Nadine Gordimer from South Africa, following Lukács, have pushed for an idea of fiction which has

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28 this kind of fidelity to the reality out of which it arises. And that the demands on a particular kind of fidelity grow more pressing the more politically heated and ethically challenging the specific situation.

For context, Gordimer mounted this argument in 1980s apartheid South Africa. The enemy then was clear and present. The injustices were obvious and undeniable. Racism, she says, is evil in a simple, old testament sense. There can be no justification for it. The job of fiction writers is to speak truth to power. And speaking truth to power, she insists, involves being true to the location, being open about the contours of the political situation. Under these conditions, specificity is important; you can’t reduce the detail to broad truths that universalise the situation. This is just one example; historically there are plenty of arguments about responsibilities that are attached to fiction no less than non-fiction.

In that same segment quoted above, Lukács goes on to quote Lenin: “In order to know an object thoroughly, it is essential to discover and comprehend all of its aspects, its relationships and its ‘mediations’. We shall never achieve this fully, but insistence on all-round knowledge will protect us from errors and inflexibility.”

When Lukács says it’s of “crucial importance for [literature] to grasp that reality as it truly is,” he seems to be pointing towards what you’re talking about with Gordimer and the realist insistence of speaking truth to power. The Lenin quote, however, is more interesting, in that it perhaps outlines the goal of the novel to map what is a complex and incomprehensible economic and social system for an individual.

To know in its totality…

Yeah.

The “reality as it truly is” is the sticking point. It’s an admirable aspiration. The simplistic version of how language works is

that there are things in the world, and that we need a representational system for when those things can’t be present, to represent them. On this account, language simply applies a set of terms to things that already exist. But… From a human perspective, the “fact” that the world is full of trees and rocks and the sky and sea and so on, it seems like an irrefutable truth. What problem could we possibly have with that as an understanding? The world exists independently of us experiencing it. But when we peer closely at the process of definition, we frequently arrive at grey areas.

Most of our definition proceeds according to the logic of noncontradiction. In order to define, say, a tree, we are defining it against that which is not tree. But what is the status of the bark that has flaked off — it was incontrovertibly tree at one point but is decomposing and becoming soil. And what is the status of water which enters from the soil by the roots, and exits through the leaves via transpiration? Where are the limits of things?

This is sort of fairly banal first year philosophy… but what it does suggest is that the system of divisions that the system of language seems to recognise may in fact be substantiated or brought into being somewhat arbitrarily by the system of language, not the other way round.

The problem with realist representation is that it implies there’s a world you can get to?

It suggests that there’s a reality in the things in themselves which exists independently of the observer and the systems that the observer brings to codify and to communicate, to share, the subdivisions that break the world into things. Focusing on the impact of consciousness on the constitution of objects moves us from ontology to phenomenology, the philosophy of phenomena.

Where does phenomenology get really difficult? When we start bringing in

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Interview with James Meffan

human consciousness. Considering consciousness as constitutive rather than simply reflective of phenomena takes us to the heart of the area that you’re describing as the ethics of representation.

Arguing the toss about whether a chair is an adequate word for that particular object is rather arid — and readily resolved through mutual agreement; we just agree to follow certain conventions of terms and their definitions. When it comes to personal experience, the question of adequacy becomes more pressing. What counts as adequacy in the representation of personal experience (which is, after all, the primary domain of much fiction)?

In the Afterthought podcast you did with Forethought, you mention an article by Yassmin Abdel-Magied that criticised (author of We Need To Talk About Kevin) Lionel Shriver’s claims that, because fiction is “self-confessedly fake,” there ought to be no restriction on what experiences and characters that authors can imagine. Abdel-Magied writes, “It was a monologue about the right to exploit the stories of ‘others’, simply because it is useful for one’s story.” She draws a comparison between Shriver’s perspective of fiction to her wider political context: “The kind of disrespect for others infused in Lionel Shriver’s keynote is the same force that sees people vote for Pauline Hanson. It’s the reason our First Peoples are still fighting for recognition, and it’s the reason we continue to stomach offshore immigration prisons.

It’s the kind of attitude that lays the foundation for prejudice, for hate, for genocide.” What do you make of this?

One response here is that it would be fine if there was a level playing field, that everyone could have their stories heard and could pitch their different representations, misrepresentations, bad efforts, good efforts. If everyone had equal opportunity to counter what they took to be misrepresentation with better representation then I suspect that the question of adequacy would not seem so pressing. But what we appear to have is an excess of stories about certain groups of people and a deficit of stories of others. People point to significant effects of these imbalances (such as the normalisation of some sorts of experiences and the marginalisation of others) and so questions of cultural access rights have become politically important.

There is no theoretical limit on the diversity of stories that can be represented, but there remains a question of who will be heard, and who determines this. This in turn influences the kind of stories that readers accept as plausible or valuable or true. When we hear a certain story, we make an assessment about its plausibility or credibility, and we like to think that we have a great antenna for the truth itself. But it may simply be that something “has the ring of truth” because it accords with other representations we’re already familiar with — it sounds like the right kind of story. “Truth” in narrative may appear through a circular, self-affirming process. The problem then: how do we open the doors of publishers, and thus the attention of readers, to a greater diversity of stories? This enters political debates as people recognise that their narratives have been suppressed along with their options.

30 Abdel-Magied’s response that the representational order is wide open to white males and white females, like Shriver, but not so open to anyone who is non-white, seems a little simplistic. There isn’t equal access, but the nature of publication has changed radically. Which is not to say that we’re there yet. But there are mechanisms by which people can be heard that previously weren’t possible, using self-publication through the internet and so on.

But how do we take seriously certain kinds of stories? I know that when I was teaching postcolonial literature, within the field there were those who felt that part of the mission (a term with an unfortunate history!) was a kind of affirmative action. Until we institutionalise the teaching and appreciation of unfamiliar stories (of an Igbo tribe in the pre-Christian era, say), until we start bringing them into the institution under the aegis of a department which in effect gives a work the stamp of disciplinary authority (if you’re studying something in an English department you’re invited to think of it as “serious literature”), we won’t open up some of the gateways to that appreciation of diversity.

These two things go hand in hand. On the one hand we need to open up the possibilities of representation and, in the process, that must mean freeing people up to express what they want in the way that they want to. On the other, we must be alert to history and the political situation we all inhabit, and seek to undo certain self-perpetuating loops. The case of women’s writing is instructive: for centuries, the only stories generally considered worthwhile were those with male heroes. Women’s stories — stories about and by women, or which considered the domestic sphere — were perceived as uninteresting. Of course it turned out that they could be really interesting! You just needed to undo the persistent, self-perpetuating, institutional loop that restricted ideas of value.

Features Do you think you can achieve a level playing field of representation under capitalism?

Bringing capitalism into it is useful, because the logic of market-led capitalism says interest is just interest. People feel it or they don’t. “We don’t set the agenda,” say the publishers, “we don’t start by saying we only want to hear white men’s stories. We look at what’s selling and then we comission more of that. If we find another narrative we think is interesting then we’ll publish it.”

But there’s a catch-22, and this catch is tied up with the pleasures of familiarity.

So essentially, no, I don’t think a “market-led” approach to representation will deliver a level playing field. But this is not a conspiracy claim. Rather it recognises a flaw in the logic that assumes the market is neutral. The assumption behind market neutrality comes down to individual readers.

We like to imagine that we each wield a critical intelligence that equips us for an even-handed encounter with a vast range of texts. But just as the categories we use are not empty signifiers of things that are just there, interest is not just a marker of what is interesting. Our interest is produced by the stuff we consume. We may read out of a drive for difference, variety, innovation, but we also have a desire for familiarity. These drives are held in balance, but under certain conditions we are more likely to favour one over the other.

At the institutional level things can and do change. But equally interesting to me is the changing status — associated particularly with post-structuralist theory — of the status of the reader themself. We have become more self-aware of our own role in the constitution of meaning.

Understanding that we are both constitutive of and constituted by the meaning we derive from text requires us to accept an uncomfortable truth: there is no position of truth outside of language that we seek to one day to step into, with absolute freedom to see things as they really are. Our problem is: how do we absorb ourselves into the fictional world and get

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Laura Toailoa and Tim Manktelow

Interview with James Meffan

something out of it, and at the same time maintain sufficient critical distance to think about the devices the narratives are using, their little rhetorical mechanisms to hook us in and make us feel committed to the outcomes for one character, and our readiness to dismiss as completely appalling and villainous another? If we’re relying on narrative as a kind of counsellor, we’re already in deep shit. One attraction of fiction is finding pattern in a life which, for many of us, is experienced as inchoate and random and chaotic. Is narrative showing us the pattern that is already there, or fulfilling a forlorn wish for meaning that is simply not part of existence? I get why that’s appealing, but is it a good thing to do? Does the appeal of those patterns simply convince us to be inattentive readers of life itself ?

Perhaps they fix things as they are and make the world as it is desirable?

That’s certainly one possibility. But do self-reflexive novels disrupt that tendency? Not necessarily. One fairly well known postmodern novel, A. S. Byatt’s Possession, played very cannily on the idea that we can be self-aware but still desire the romantic outcome; we still read that novel for the happy resolution of the romance plot. There’s a recognition that we are, “homo fabulans,” narrative beings. Narratives don’t just represent our desires, they constitute our desire, they formulate it in a simple structural form.

But I still want to insist that narrative does have this utopian potential, and it’s when narrative is allowed to be most surprising, discordant, and disruptive to our sense of how it and the world ought to be that this potential is greatest. If we reduce the scope of narrative according to unduly safe, pious representational proprieties, we reduce its capacity to surprise and to change us. If we restrict writers to the way of life they’re authenticated to speak about through experience, where’s the capacity for surprise? I’m quite happy reading novels that are appalling and make use of stereotype because I can see what I’m looking at — I’m looking at the appalling use of stereotype. I can get my thinking going about what I understand stereotype to be, and why I think it persists. Those also seem to be important thoughts to me.

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Trailor Trash Afraser6@gmail.com

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I was in a taxi on my way to Willis Street a few months ago, when I first realised that I didn’t know what the word “representation” actually meant… or who it was actually “for”. The driver asked me where I was from. I told her I was Samoan, and she then asked me (with a laugh), “are you related to Sol3 Mio?” I thought, really?

You’re going to take that (quite necessary) island tradition of asking about families and lineage for the purposes of identification and community, and turn it into a joke?! I mean, who the heck wouldn’t want to be related to their favorite opera singers but… only SAMOANS can ask me that! But of course, my Samoan manners kicked in, and I didn’t say any of that to her (way to fight for your rights, Jas!).

She then asked me if I’d been to any of their concerts, and, very specifically, when they will be home. I answered, “They came home last year,” remembering their performance in Samoa over the Christmas period. I remembered them coming home, to Apia. But she asked again. “Are you sure they were home?” I was damn sure. I saw them there. I realised that she and I were referring to two completely different homes.

As a New Zealander, she said, she was proud of Sol3 Mio, and thought they were a fine representation of her and her country on a global platform. Meanwhile I, as a (very) proud Samoan, had always claimed them as a representation of me. I’d never given any thought to the fact that they might be seen by some as people who represent New Zealand. I knew they’d grown up in Auckland, but they always said they were Samoan at their shows, on social media, and basically everywhere they seemed to go. I felt that they were mine.

Their art was mine. All the positive feedback they got was breaking stereotypes of me.

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Jasmine Koria

That same day, I asked myself: can they, as ethnically Polynesian, non-Māori entertainers, represent New Zealand? And since when was “white New Zealand” proud of us, and wanting us to “come home” to “their” space? We often ask if white people can represent us, but can we represent them? Do white people react better to us “representing them” than we do to them representing us?

That’s what the debate about representation is about, for me.

Did I ever find the answers to those questions? Nah. There are no twoplus-two-equals-four answers, just more questions that keep adding on. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing, though. I believe that, in asking questions, even “silly” ones, we can do something better than finding immediate answers: we can develop better questions.

Australian comedian Chris Lilley’s Jonah from Tonga was taken off Māori Television after airing just one episode in July. I watched several interviews with Tongans, Samoans, Tokelauans, and other Polynesians who were on different sides of the spectrum about it. Some were saying “he’s really funny! I don’t mind it at all.”

Others, quite a few others, called Lilley a “stupid fucking racist Australian in brownface” (hello, comments section!). Is Jonah from Tonga racist, though? I know, that’s a dangerous (hate mail-inspiring) question to ask right now, especially if you’re Polynesian. But I need to ask it, to myself, more than anyone else. I ask it because I feel that a lot of the time when we ask

Can I sayFeatures that...? “is Jonah from Tonga racist,” we are really asking, “does a white Australian middle class male with a major media platform, in a society full of ethnic and racial tensions, have the right to represent underprivileged Polynesian non-citizens (and recent immigrants) against whom the ‘system’ is prejudiced and of which its opinions are hardly ever high?” That’s what I mean by better questions.

For me, personally, the way Polynesian males are represented is a much bigger problem than the fact that they are being represented in this particular genre. This question was easier for me to answer than the one about Sol3 Mio. Mainstream (white) society can — and does — have Polynesian characters in its films, books, and whatnot (hey, Shortland Street). The problem with Lilley’s representation is that we have a white guy, who’s never been stared at suspiciously in a store or at an airport, wearing a fake tan and mimicking a certain accent that Polynesians are “supposed” to have. A lot of his fans have said that he’s “not trying to be Polynesian or represent Polynesia.” That may well be true. But the thing is, whether or not he means to represent us, his “Polynesian hair” wig and darkened skin do provide a representation of us. Jonah is a “Polynesian” character. He has to be based on something. Chris Lilley makes himself a type of representative of us, even if he doesn’t necessarily want to be.

Polynesian society is community-based. We are defined by who our parents and grandparents are. The sense of “my” is very strong, and is definitely why I was so quick to use it on Sol3 Mio. Many Polynesians who don’t appreciate Lilley’s satire watch Jonah from Tonga thinking, “My father is not like that! My brothers are not like that! My uncles are not like that! My grandfathers and their fathers were not like that! I AM NOT LIKE THAT!” Polynesian legends and chants represent Polynesian masculinity as regal, intelligent, courageous, industrious, and visionary. However Lilley meant the interpretation of his sketches — social commentary, comedy, or who the fuck knows — it has been primarily negative among Polynesians because many cannot, and will not, accord Chris Lilley the right to represent them.

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The Polynesians portrayed in Jonah from Tonga don’t like to read or write. That’s a far from accurate representation of our people, though. The late Dr Teresia Teaiwa’s groundbreaking scholarship is testament to that. Albert Wendt’s novels are testament to that. Sia Figiel’s Where We Once Belonged is a painful but necessary testament to that. Konai Helu Thaman’s poems are testament to that.

Epeli Hau’ofa’s writing is testament to that. Lani Wendt-Young’s Telesa trilogy is testament to that. Tusiata Avia’s performance poetry is testament to that. Ruperake Pataia’s collections are testament to that. New Zealand Poet Laureate Tusitala Selina Marsh’s work — which went as far as Buckingham Palace — is testament to that. Never seen some of these names on a mainstream bookshelf ? That is testament to the lack of support for our representation of ourselves.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island is everywhere (as he is).

His short story Beach at Falesā, which has weird native characters speaking an inaccurately re-created form of “Samoan broken English” is everywhere. Rupert Brooke’s diary and letter accounts of pretty brown Samoan bodies with no traces of “black” are everywhere. Margaret Mead’s exposé about Samoan women’s sex lives is everywhere. Derek Freeman’s “defence” of the poor misunderstood natives is everywhere, too. To be Polynesian means having very little direct and correct literary representation. You can’t read about Polynesians unless you purposely decide that you will go looking for information. And if/when you do, you’ll find mostly whitewashed, white-centric accounts from decades ago. Being represented primarily by white writers is like meeting someone and who wants to know a bit about you, but in order to do that, they ask the person behind you. Then they ask the people around you. Then they start calling out “does anyone know who this person is?” while you’re right in front of them. They don’t ask you. If someone in the crowd tells them your name — but it’s not your name — you just have to smile and get over it (because your actual name is too hard to pronounce anyway).

My main problem with the lack of our own representations is the way non-Polynesian representations of Polynesians have infiltrated Polynesian education systems and even mainstream modules that teach about Polynesians.

Growing up in Samoa, the “good” books, in terms of quality of content, were always texts by white authors. Katherine Mansfield, Alan Paton, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rupert Brooke. You name the white, well-to-do, dead author. I read their work. I was always told that these would teach me “good, civilised values.”

And where were Albert Wendt, Sia Figiel, and Lani Wendt-Young? They didn’t appear until my final years of high school, but not without reluctance from some of my teachers. To quote someone who saw me reading When Water Burns by Lani Wendt Young: “That book has too much sexuality and teaches kids that it’s

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okay to be like that. That’s trash!”

Basically: your representations of your own self are trash; unimportant.

My surname was taken from my great, great-grandparents’ idol, who said the unflattering epigraph for this piece and was published in the Sydney Morning Herald. He, like his good friend Stevenson and many other non-Polynesians who lived in Polynesia, felt they had the right to write about us, and that what they wrote about us was all the representation we would ever need. Early European settlers and explorers assumed that we had no “records” or documentation of our histories and concerns. They often discounted our style of recording.

We had chants. We had songs. We had myths. We had legends. Even a great deal of our tattoos were in fact chronologies and genealogies, passed down from our ancestors.

By speaking for us, the writers of what we have been taught to call “our history” wrote over us, and our voices continue to be overwritten in favour of theirs.

Does merely living somewhere entitle you to represent that place? Does taking the illiterate children of natives under your wing, letting them bare your name and establishing them well in their society mean that you’ve “paid enough” to be a representative of them?

Can I say that...?

Can I, knowing this family history, still “represent” Polynesians the way I (try to) do?

Ka’ilo, se.

The questions come, change, and disappear.

Representation itself is one of the most complex notions in the world. I don’t have many sure answers, especially not for my own questions. But as I sit here waiting for my laptop to die before I finish typing this, I think I have an (though not the) answer. Non-Polynesians can talk about me. I know I talk about them. They can write about me and paint about me. But I don’t want them to claim that the images and sounds on the screen and paper are all there is to the complex, intelligent human beings depicted (I know I must stop doing the same to them).

That, to me, is the greatest form of misrepresentation, and a major mis appropriation of what it means to be a human being.

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Independent Radio in New Zealand

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Ali Burns

Dabbling in magic: Independent Radio in New Features Zealand

Radio has played a big part in nurturing New Zealand’s cultural identity; it is part of our history — politically, socially, and musically. Alternative and independent radio stations in particular have acted like little greenhouses of New Zealand talent. They have been built with a sense of excitement, and are entrenched within the DIY culture that we love as a nation.

Since radio first began broadcasting in New Zealand there have been amateurs experimenting with it, often ignored government bans. Brenda Bell, New Zealand’s first female amateur radio operator, was one of those who ignored such bans. She sums up the attitude, in a quote in Patrick Day’s The Radio Years: “Many of us had a sense of awe, of dealing with things greater than we could understand. And we knew that throughout history many good men, and women too, had been ruined, tortured, and burnt at the stake for dabbling in magic not one fraction as wonderful as this.” * Radio in Small Nations, edited by Richard J Hand and Mary Traynor, discusses the role of radio in forging national identity in small countries, allowing people to see themselves reflected in local and national radio through particularity of place, ethnicity, and language. This is reflected in The Radio Years, which discusses how radio serials, which were first aired in New Zealand in 1928, became a subject of debate, since many of them were imported from Britain and America, and held “non-New Zealand values.”

New Zealand slowly moved away from using imported material for these serials and by the ’70s most of the performers and writers of radio serials were New Zealanders. New Zealanders wanted to see themselves reflected in their entertainment, and this meant local voices and stories needed to be given a public platform.

In 1921 the government started giving out transmitting permits, and with this New Zealand broadcasting really began. Radio had sparked excitement in the public. Robert Jack gained the first transmitting permit, and broadcasted music by playing records on a gramophone and having live singers — this was a brand new way to listen and have access to music in New Zealand. Day writes that it “provoked an emotional response in the first listeners.”

This excitement persisted through to the ’50s when amateur radio was finally permitted. Day talks about how at the end of the ’50s broadcasters were excited to explore and extend the “nature of New Zealand broadcasting and its place within New Zealand society” with more independence.

In the late ’60s amateur radio experimentation became popular in universities as student radio emerged. The stations dealt with flimsy construction to transmit their signal. Andrew Glennie from RDU (currently Christchurch’s “only bastion of alternative radio”), talked to RNZ about how they had to put up the transmitter before every broadcast, and how their transmission construction began as a table

on a box in the middle of a creek.

They certainly weren’t the only one with limited resources; RadioActive and Radio One also dealt with cheap parts and self-built transmitter masts.

Despite these humble beginnings, many of these stations have gone on to become successful alternative radio stations, helping to grow our music industry and nurturing many upcoming New Zealand broadcasters.

In 1969, 95bFM, University of Auckland’s well known indie station, launched an illegal pirate radio station from the Waitematā Harbour.

Andrew Dickens, who was station manager of 95bFM from 1981, told RNZ about how in the early ’70s the transmitter was passed from flat to flat to stay ahead of the police.

The station was eventually granted a semi-commercial in the ’80s, and their success inspired other student radio to apply for broadcasting warrants.

The end of Waikato University’s Contact FM, which ceased broadcasting in 2014, was a loss in New Zealand student radio. Max Christoffersen wrote for Stuff: “The demise of Contact FM still raises tense emotions today. With hindsight I will always wish I had harangued Vice-Chancellor Bryan Gould to not let the station be sold to private interests that would guarantee the end of its broadcast life and the end of its founding student and university-centred spirit.” Max talks about the station with heavy sentimentality — “every time I drive into Hamilton today I think of the students who built the station foundations in the 1980s” — and emphasises the community that the station was building by providing “a window to university life”.

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This sense of community and sentimentality is part of what helped RadioActive earlier this year when it started a Givealittle campaign to keep the station going. Their campaign video featuring prominent New Zealanders such as King Kapisi, Metiria Turei, and Samantha Hayes, all who had spent time at the station, urging people to donate to keep the station running. Justin Lester also pitched in to say that if we didn’t have RadioActive then Wellington would be “losing a really important voice.”

The station reached its goal, because it had created such a strong sense of community within New Zealand and Wellington, evident in the support it garnered from some of these names in New Zealand entertainment and politics.

many of them going. Is this feeling still alive in the newcomers at these stations?

This is the second time that RadioActive has reached out for help to the community they have built. When VUWSA could no longer afford the station in 1989, RadioActive scrambled to become independent, and the community of volunteers, listeners, and friends all pitched in money to form a business and keep it going.

Salient interviewed Miles Buckingham from RadioActive in March, and he spoke about how a security guard was put on the door by the students’ association to stop them from getting in when they could no longer afford to be run from the university, “although I think Liam Luff managed to break back in and run “Fight the Power” by Public Enemy on a loop.”

The answer was a resounding yes.

Independent radio stations have gone on to help shape New Zealand music and broadcasting culture. Paul Casserly says that “[Radio] used to be kind of the record store for the country. Now, it’s not that. But it still is relevant, so it’s having to find its way again, which it seems to be doing.” The community and sentimentality that has been built out of these stations is what has kept

* I spoke to several people working in independent radio, who are not yet part of its history, about the contemporary culture of alternative radio, and asked them if the community and sentimentality around these stations is enough to keep them going.

95bFM senior announcer Larry Summerville.

AudioCulture.

L to R: Richard Segedin, Romi Patel, and Ron Imms.

95bFM technicians working late into the night to upgrade the mixer before an on-air broadcast.

AudioCulture.

95bFM technicians Pete Gronous and Neil Dudley (at front). AudioCulture.

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Many of the people I asked had listened to these stations or had ties with the stations growing up. Gussie Larkin from RadioActive talked about how her mum used to DJ on RadioActive “when she was a young mum with me,” and remembers that it was often playing in their Cuba Street home growing up. Geneva Alexander-Marsters from 95bFM had a similar experience, as her mother was also part of the Auckland station: “My mother actually did a graveyard show back in the ’70s when it was still a student run station.

Funny how I ended up in the same place!” Geneva did a graveyard shift with a friend when she was 16, and described how they would “show up in uniform and do the 3.00am to 7.00am slot and then head to school for the day!” Most people I spoke to had already been a listener of these stations before they started DJing there; they were already a part of the community before they began at the station.

The excitement of radio still exists in this younger cohort, which is how alternative radio has always grown and created communities. These stations still require volunteers to help run them; Tommy Wroe from Radio Control emphasises that “the most important people involved in the station are all the volunteers,” so “there has to be a strong community.” George Banach-Salas, who volunteers at RadioActive, says that “I have always felt very welcomed and cared for” and that the “majority of us are volunteers and do this for love!” In an Audioculture article “BFM — The First 10 Years”, Russell Brown says that 95bFM (then Radio B) “attracted the same kind of enterprising, slightly strange kids that it does today.” These newcomers and volunteers seem

Dabbling in magic: Independent Radio in New Zealand to easily find a comfortable space within these stations and feel at home there. Gemma Syme from RDU says it “sounds cheesy, but these are my people.” * The sense of community and sentimentality are definitely still strong within these stations, which has helped them last. They still need to grow to stay alive, and that is something that newcomers are aware of. One important way that the next generation involved in radio are helping grow the stations is by being aware of changing technology, and as Gemma explains “translating to digital platforms” — by creating online content that helps them stay relevant.

Another important way they are helping grow these stations is through wider representation. Geneva notes the importance of making an effort to “provide a range of artists from different backgrounds, prioritising people of colour, transgender artists, ladies in bands, young bands, unfamiliar genres, and of course, music that features Te Reo Māori.” This is a trend across all of these stations, of an increasing awareness of what music they are presenting, and giving everyone a voice and a platform. Jess Fu from 95bFM was aware of this when she got involved; she wanted to contribute to the Auckland music scene and support local musicians, but underlying that was an urge to expand the community “to help create more representation of women of colour in radio, because I know how frustrating it is to be underrepresented in media as a young Chinese woman.” George from RadioActive says that “most student/alternative radio stations are really keen on supporting and promoting youth and I think are quite political.”

Giving local people a voice, and having the ability to see yourself reflected back in a public platform, is what has always been exciting about radio, especially alternative radio. This is how radio became popular in the first place, and how it helped shape New Zealand culture, so as long as this growth continues to happen these stations have a good shot at lasting.

“It has to continue, it’s just common sense” — Geneva.

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RETRACING RI T GRRRL Written by Lauren Spring

CW: Sexual violence I’ve spent a fairly large chunk of my youth steeping myself in the music and culture of Riot Grrrl, which represented a vital beacon for me in a world of commercialised boredom. So when the suggestion came to write about it, I of course jumped. I then found myself in this paradoxical situation where I truly wanted to research and accurately document the phenomenon, but it also felt like an invasion into the sacred spaces of feminine youth. If there’s anything a Riot Grrrl knows, it’s that attempting to write in a public forum about experiences and events that you didn’t directly participate in can skew and distort meaning to the point that it becomes alienated and, often, in opposition to its initial intention. Essentially, trying to represent Riot Grrrl was what brought about its death, as a movement which cannot be confined by language and pseudoreminiscence.

With this in mind, I have tried to come at this article in the most thoughtful and respectful way possible, and only use the words of those who were directly involved. But this will not be a rose-tinted twist of history; I’m still engaged with the issues, such as lack of racial diversity, within the movement and how these helped to hasten its dissolution. Although Riot Grrrl’s original incarnation went down in a blaze of in-fighting, misogyny and ill-fortune, the D.I.Y. and strongly womencentric approach it promoted is very much alive and kicking today. Riot Grrrl is something non-concrete, and its spirit can be felt in so many things subsequent to it that it’s hard to come up with a tight definition, but I’m going to give it a red hot go.

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Lauren Spring

Retracing riot grrrl

HISTORY/ETHOS Riot Grrrl was started in 1991 when a group of girls in Olympia, Washington, inspired by the anti-racist riots in Washington D.C., set up a meeting about sexism in the music industry. They decided to start their own “girl riot” to carve out a space in the D.I.Y. and punk scene that hadn’t previously existed. The use of the word “girl” was intentional, referential to childhood, a time when self-belief is at its highest and inhibitions at their lowest — a state these women aspired to reach in their creative work. It is also a reclamation of a term so often used to belittle.

The context in which Riot Grrrl materialised is integral to understanding the nature of the movement. Sexual abuse and casual misogyny were rampant in the early ’90s, where it was routine to hear stories daily of women like Mia Zapata (the inspiration for 7 Year Bitch’s kickass album Viva Zapata!) being brutally raped and murdered. There were very few women in the music industry and present in local scenes, and those who were had their creative output filtered through a male-centric lens. It was unsafe for women to be in mosh pits at gigs, so they would stand in a ring at a safe distance, holding their boyfriends’ jackets while the men jumped and writhed, carefree. Women felt (and still feel) as if they had to prove themselves — to participate in creative scenes they had to demonstrate superior technical knowledge and skill, simply to prove they were worthy of inhabiting a space that men would walk into without thought. There was simply an expectation that women were incapable.

Riot Grrrl took off most dramatically in Olympia because it was a college town focused around Evergreen University, which didn’t have a grade system and instead encouraged small, self-directed projects. This meant that a very liberal and artistic community was attracted there, the perfect breeding

ground for a counter-cultural D.I.Y. movement. The riots in D.C. and the liberal political culture contributed to it kicking off there too. But the fundamental issue in both cities was that women were sidelined in music and art scenes and made to watch from afar, while the men moshed to hardcore, man-centric bands like Bad Brains and Minor Threat who could not speak to women’s experiences and perpetuated the exclusion of women from their spaces.

Understandably, there were a number of women highly frustrated by this situation, without an outlet for their anger. Riot Grrrl provided this necessary space. It was a place in which feminism was no longer this abstracted university-level, economic-focused concept that dealt with sexism in the corporate world, the gender pay gap, and maternity leave, but something that spoke directly to young women through a language of anger. This language was communicated through the ear-splitting punk music of Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, Heavens to Betsy, and countless others, as well as zines that these and other women created to hand

44 out at shows and send crosscountry to one another. Zines were crucial to the movement, and they have always been a way of amplifying counter-cultural voices, from science fiction in the ’30s to punk in the ’70s.

Riot Grrrl was begun and initially defined by a few girls: Kathleen Hanna and Tobi Vail of Bikini Kill, and Alison Wolfe and Molly Neuman of Bratmobile, who collaboratively came up with the phrase “Revolution Girl Style Now!” — standing for active subversion of the stagnant masculine scene by encouraging women to pick up instruments and pens and create their own art that was reflective of their experiences as women.

Kathleen had also done a lot of work with survivors of physical and sexual abuse, and a lot of Riot Grrrl focused around spaces in which girls would meet to discuss

Features their trauma and support one another. This was important, because there were very few forums in which women could comfortably discuss their own sexual abuse, being an issue often shrouded in shame and guilt. Kathleen was a key voice, outspoken about all kinds of trauma that are inflicted upon women. In the Bikini Kill song “Feels Blind” she addresses how society teaches women to hate themselves: “As a woman I was taught to always be hungry / yeah women are well acquainted with thirst / we could eat just about anything / we could even eat your hate up like love.” Mics were often passed around at Bikini Kill shows so that any woman could share her experience of sexual abuse or other kinds of trauma or oppression.

Riot Grrrls were also very vocally inclusive of sex workers, as many of these women worked in the sex industry and understood the pragmatism of this, and the importance of not alienating women sitting at the margins of society who were just as in need of support as any others.

The radical and public banding together of women was crucial in a society that thrives off of women pitting themselves against each other, and where girlhood is generally kept so private — in diaries and bedrooms and silent suffering. The rest of the world dismissed angry, loud, young girls as ridiculous and hysterical, so they had to get validation from one another.

Riot Grrrls wrote constant letters of love and support to one another. Their music and zines unabashedly proclaimed their

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Lauren Spring

love for themselves and their friends and their experiences, and through this managed to create a safe space in which to examine the cultural devaluation of women. They had a forum in which they could discuss trauma, critique popular culture, talk about having to give men a basic anatomy lesson every time they had sex with them, discuss being queer and coming out to their families, and start publications and bands and rallies and marches. More than just a musical genre, Riot Grrrl was a radical political, philosophical, and sociocultural movement.

It was very much about self-creation — Riot Grrrls were brought into existence by nothing but their own willpower and their dissatisfaction with the status quo. A lot of the lyrical material from Riot Grrrl bands deal with the multitude of issues in the patriarchal society that surrounded them.

For instance, Bikini Kill’s “White Boy” loudly proclaims: “White boy, don’t laugh, don’t cry, just die! / I’m so sorry if I’m alienating some of you / Your whole fucking culture alienates me.” The spirit of Riot Grrrl was highly participatory and DIY, completely uncaring about whether something was good or bad, but simply supportive of any woman willing to put themselves out there and create or perform. From its humble beginnings in D.C. and Olympia, as word and zines began to spread, chapters began in multiple different cities across the US, and Riot Grrrl began to take on a multiplicity of different forms as it was adopted by an array of different women.

It was quite communist in its aims — seizing the means of

Retracing riot grrrl production for themselves and giving voice to the traditionally voiceless. Zines were a great way of doing this, to project voices on a wider scale and connect various communities.

For all its merits, Riot Grrrl was certainly not without its issues, chief among them a lack of inclusion of women of colour.

It was predominantly a white girl’s thing, and wealthy white girls at that. It can be seen as a fairly basic form of brash feminism that didn’t take the complexity of identity properly into account.

Being welcoming and inclusive of people of colour is a typically fraught issue that is still plaguing a lot of movements today; white people are often not good at being overtly welcoming and inclusive without being tokenistic. But Riot Grrrl, although some members were committed towriting about and discussing issues of race, barely made an active effort at all.

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DISSOLUTION In the end, Riot Grrrl fell prey to the age-old story of becoming cool and sought after by the press, who then sanitised or sensationalised their stories and attempted to sell these overblown, but watered down, versions of Riot Grrrl back to the community. Feminist movements can often tie themselves up in knots trying to answer every possible question, but holding people like Kathleen Hanna up as universal spokespeople for all women involved, as the media did in its coverage of Riot Grrrl, doesn’t allow for the communication of ideological nuance, which is ever-present.

The phenomenon of Riot Grrrl was covered by Spin, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, The Washington Post, among others, and the tone of these pieces was generally patronising and ridiculing. They emphasised Riot Grrrl as aggressively anti-men, attempted to make out that the movement and its music was simply objectively “bad”, or trivialised it as a fashion statement. They overtly sexualised the bodies of women such as Kathleen and Tobi by discussing their figures and what they were wearing, rather than the content of their songs, as if they were fundamentally unable to make statements on sexual abuse and misogyny because they were wearing short skirts.

As a result of this, the Grrrls decided on a movement-wide media blackout in 1992 as an attempt to reclaim the disproportionate amount of power the media held over them, and to mitigate the fact that these journalists were making money out of selling the distorted images and stories of Riot Grrls while the girls themselves were barely making rent.

The movement was also divided by differing views on how it should be run, especially with regards to how they related to men and how these relationships should look — some wanted to settle down, and others were highly critical of fitting into the societal mould and making any compromises for men.

As a result of these various conflicts, the media declared the pseudo-death of Riot Grrrl and what was left of the movement dropped back underground.

Meanwhile women who expressed a societally acceptable level of anger, such as Fiona Apple and Alanis Morissette, took up the “women in rock” mantle.

This commercialised and diluted form of Riot Grrrl culture is seen most potently in groups such as the Spice Girls. Don’t get me wrong, I get down as hard as the next gal when “Wannabe” drops at a party, but their loose and empty concept of “Girl Power!” was simply capitalising on the trend of feminine empowerment without actually adding anything to the movement. Rather than encouraging women to be creative on their own, the Spice Girls and their ilk encouraged their fans to endlessly consume their products in the form of CDs, concert tickets, posters, and figurines.

Features

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Lauren Spring

Retracing riot grrrl

LASTING IMPRESSI NS Despite being fragmented by these many issues, Riot Grrrl created a great precedent for girls across the world to air their frustrations with misogyny through art, writing, and music.

Arguably the most important and lasting impact the movement has had is the sense of permission it gives to a new generation of women to be able to pick up a guitar or a pen and create, without care for whether it will be considered objectively good. We have Riot Grrrl to thank for the music of Annie Clark, Frankie Cosmos, Screaming Females, Perfect Pussy, and countless other artists and bands who may not identify themselves as Riot Grrrls, but would nonetheless be unable to unreservedly make the kind of music they currently do without the space carved out by Bikini Kill, Heavens to Betsy, and all the other bands and women that made this movement so vital.

The urgency and raw anger of Riot Grrrl is something that still can’t be touched, and is something I don’t think we really get to see at shows today. Because misogyny has since taken a quietly corrosive, more shadow-like form, the anger it instils in women is more of a slow-boiling one that pops out in moments of frustration, but isn’t potent enough to form the foundations of such a vibrant movement. Today’s women-friendly movements are built on quiet thought, care for one another, and the motivation to make spaces able to be enjoyed by all people, but they are responding to similar issues that existed in Riot Grrrl’s time, such as men taking up too much space, physical and sexual violence, and a pitiful amount of women on gig line-ups.

Part of the reason we have to thank for sexism and misogyny largely falling out of style is that Riot Grrrl provided a very cool and exciting antidote to the awful lad culture in existence at the time, and helped feminism become not something just for the academics and the activists, but for the punk girl sitting alone in her bedroom at night wondering when she’d find her place in the world. Riot Grrrl’s magic, and the reason it is so beloved and looked back upon with a nostalgia that doesn’t even belong to those doing the looking, is because it encapsulates that exact kind of rage we feel when we have those quick but monumental realisations of just how fucked up the world is and how much dudes and the dominant culture can suck.

The accessibility of feminism, like-minded people, and the local scene through the internet and social media, though it

theoretically makes linking up with one another and creating a movement significantly easier, has dampened the thrill and vitality of the emotion that went into the beginning of Riot Grrrl. It’s almost as if it has become too easy to connect, while the movement was about chance and fortuity and unexpected things coming together, which is hard to fathom in the very calculated age of the internet. Riot Grrrl cannot be resurrected, but the anger and creative fuel it was borne out of has taken a newer, softer form — the torch of which young feminists and musicians continue to carry. As Tobi Vail said, “Riot Grrrl started something. Riot Grrrl started something, but it isn’t finished yet.”

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Features

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Priyanka Roy

When considering how we (as individuals, students, netizens) use social media, I thought one of our most cherished writers — William Shakespeare. Before you dismiss this, saying “You speak an infinite deal of nothing,” I pray to thee that you hear me out first. The bard may seem like an antiquated uncle who wants to create a social media presence, however awkward that is for the rest of the family, but what he lacks in youth, he makes up for in brevity and humour; after all he did love to cross-dress his heroines and stir up a ruckus. We can look to Shakespeare for some helpful tips on how to make a lasting impression on the internet and create social happiness.

Social happiness is the feeling of belongingness, community, and acceptance that we, as social media users, derive from engaging in valuable interactions on the web. We experience it when we share or read honest accounts of our lives without trying to impress anyone.

When our connections are based on genuine friendships and generosity — that is when social media becomes a beautiful medium to garner social happiness.

So what advice would Shakespeare have given to his followers?

To be or not to be… social gun. Typing up a quick tweet in 140 characters and sending it out can be exhilarating, but not everything in the media demands instant judgment. Scanning one’s timeline is good, but what is even better is understanding what it is that we are scanning.

“I’ll call for pen and ink, and write my mind.” (Henry VI Part I, V.iii.66)

We must tread carefully when it comes to sharing our personal thoughts and ideas. We have all had these urges to write our mind, but sometimes no sooner have we done that than a voice inside of us screams in horror, quickly locating that delete button.

Unfortunately, when we scribe our outbursts in a tweet or a snap or an #instaphoto, we can forget the power and longevity of screenshots. A good way to slow down and self-check is to record our thoughts elsewhere first, and then head to the compose button on screen. It’s helpful to remember that most of the popular retweeted posts or shared Facebook posts are the outcomes of well thought out plans and media strategies.

“You starveling, you eel-skin, you dried neat’s-tongue, you bull’s pizzle, you stockfish!” (Henry IV Part I, II.iv.224)

We have all seen how trolls take pride in sending awful comments, thinking they are being witty when actually they are being rude, sexist, or downright bullying. It is moments like these that we need this Shakespearean line on repeat. I have read about how people who are decent humans IRL have turned out to be vicious online trolls, and as much as I would often like to step up my game and reply to nasty comments, I think of these lines and refrain myself.

It’s just not worth my time, headspace, and social happiness. I am not saying don’t fight back when things get out of hand, like in cases of cyberbullying and online sexual harassment. I am referring to those who engage in small talk and pettiness just to get a reaction; I see it as ploy to distract me from doing my work, and have no qualms in ignoring these bull’s pizzles.

“I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.” (Richard II, V.v.49)

“Give every man thy ear According to a Nielsen report in 2016, in an average week “3.1 but few thy voice” (Hamlet, million New Zealanders aged 15 and over spend 14 hours online,” I.iii.69) which equals two working days a week. A lot of this is social media.

I think this would have been Shakespeare’s first piece of advice.

Every minute news and topics are written and rewritten about. As much as this throws light on a particular issue, there remain many shades of a topic that are not explored or shared.

Important voices get drowned in the sea of information that is social media. So we should process the trending topics before jumping the

Social media works in a weird overlapping way, and for first-time users the trill can be chaotic and addictive. We waste endless hours on commenting, liking, sharing, editing, and posting photos, and binge watching videos. Not to mention all those times when we get agitated by someone’s insensitive comment and get into our Caps Lock Mode; people often engage in heated arguments with strangers over posts on celebrities, games, and news. Social media is a labyrinth, but once we approach it with a purpose, we can better use the magic of social networking to share our voice, art, and creativity.

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Priyanka Roy

To be or not to be… social

“There is flattery in friendship.”

(Henry V, III.viii.103)

So how many likes did you get on your last Facebook post or Instagram photo? Did your friends get more likes on their photos?

Do they have more followers than you? Yes, we have all been there.

But let’s be honest and ask ourselves: how many of our online interactions translate to substantial friendship? How many online friends will show up when we really need them? You may say three.

In my case, there will be two (yep, you guessed it, family members).

This is not to discount people who have made meaningful connections online, which they weren’t able to make in places where they lived, or online connections that have translated into beautiful offline friendships. My question pertains to those who compare their friends list with that of others in a way to numerically corroborate their own accomplishment and presence. We confuse quantity with quality in this social media age, and social profiles exhibiting one’s job, position, and lifestyle have exacerbated the perpetual need for external validation; a person’s worth risks being reduced to their social media presence. A true friend is hard to find and the ones who truly care will always appreciate your strengths and “bear [your] infirmities,” both online and offline.

“My crown is in my heart, not on my head; not decked with diamonds and Indian stones, nor to be seen: my crown is called content, a crown it is that seldom kings enjoy.” (Henry VI, Part 3, III.i.62)

Have you felt the strange sense of competitiveness when skimming through pictures of work achievements, travel photos, baby pictures, or new purchases by your friends in your timeline? I have felt it; I can see that a certain group of my friends are competing with another set of my friends. Hey, even I am guilty of posting work-related photos just to prove (to myself ) that I am doing something worthwhile. And to be honest, I am tired. This constant comparison takes a toll on our self-worth and confidence. On the one hand, we might feel inferior comparing ourselves to those who are faring better than us; and on the other, we may feel a certain degree of gratification when we see ourselves doing better than those to whom we feel superior. In both these cases, cherry-picking experiences and snapshots from other people’s lives hurts us in the end. Hence to achieve social happiness, enjoy the thought that you are the king/queen of your life, and wear that crown with pride.

* A year ago I wrote a blog about a prominent 20th century Indian artist, and like my blogging brethren, I did not think much about it.

The inclination to write on that particular artist emerged because

I thought he was a great painter, but I did not find his works much in circulation on the internet. I wrote the blog as a gesture of appreciation for his aesthetic vision. Recently, that artist’s son contacted me over Facebook to let me know that he was touched by the article, and he was now publishing a coffee table book commemorating his father’s works.

He said that he felt a new pride in his father’s work, and the renewed interest in his father ignited this book venture. On hearing this, I felt a great sense of fulfilment at the thought that my post could impact someone in such a strong manner.

Social media is an influential medium that can be used to improve many aspects of our society and touch the lives of many in the process.

Its value lies in ushering change in people’s lives, in getting us out of our comfort zones, and experiencing the world at large. It certainly has changed my life for the better, and I do hope you harness it to share your voice and add meaning to your life.

We are blessed to be alive in this technological moment and to be able to inspire, connect, and empower one another. Let’s use this opportunity to build something new, exciting, and enabling — To be, or not to be social: that is the question.

Whether ’tis nobler to see the vulnerable suffer alone The sighs and sorrows of disparity, While we celebrate our rotting decadence, Or to take a stand against a sea of injustices Trampling innocent life and nature And by raising our voices Oppose them: that is the question.

*

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ARTS

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Television

TELEVISION Keeping Up with the Kardashians: A Celebration

Last Sunday, E! channel’s flagship show Keeping Up with the Kardashians celebrated its tenth anniversary. Even if you hate them — and I love them, except Khloe, whom I loathe — you cannot avoid the Kardashians, and they show absolutely no sign of disappearing soon, relentlessly thriving like some kind of very tan plague. Below are some of my favourite moments from the show over the last ten years.

5. Kanye learns what the “Magic Stick” is In Season 12 the Kardashian family go to Cuba!

Everyone drives around in convertibles smoking cigars, while mother Kris Jenner grows isolated in Calabasas because no one can Facetime her. In an adorable scene, Kim, partner Kanye West, and daughter North, are taking a stroll while North clasps onto a leaf and a stick. “Is that like a magic stick?” Kanye asks North sweetly; “Babe, don’t say that. Do you know what that is?” says Kim under her breath. When Kanye doesn’t know, she pulls him in and whispers: “A dick.” For reference, “Magic Stick” is a song by 50 Cent and Lil’ Kim about how powerful their respective genitals are.

4. Kim loses an earring After Kim’s second husband, the giant cardboard cutout of a douchebag that is Kris Humphries, throws her forcefully into the ocean, Kim discovers she has lost a diamond earring.

Kris laughs and begrudgingly jumps in to pretend to search for the earring while Kim cries about how it was worth $75,000.

Observing the chaos from the boardwalk, sister Kourtney’s monotone response of “Kim, there’s people that are dying” is almost as iconic as America’s Next Top Model contestant Natasha’s “I just want to tell you that some people have war in their country.”

3. Kris’ birthday music video For matriarch Kris Jenner’s 60th birthday in 2015, her children all got together to recreate a video she made in the ’80s for her 30th called “I Love My Friends”. In the classic clip, a young Kris sings about how much she loves things like her friends, family, Valentino, and church, over a montage of said friends and also hotel and boutique employees shouting, “She loves you!” A total banger, the video also includes photos of Kris and Robert Kardashian Sr. with O.J. and Nicole Brown Simpson, before O.J. murdered his wife in 1994.

2. Kim’s Playboy shoot In the show’s first season back in 2007, Kim is chosen to do a spread in Playboy magazine, with her mother attending for moral support.

While Kim does a pose that makes my knees hurt to look at, wearing only some costume pearls draped over her body, Kris coos from behind a camera, “You’re doing amazing, sweetie.” Recently, while doing last-minute gardening at 2.00am before a flat inspection the next day, my flatmate quoted this to me and it motivated me to keep going, even though my landlord was ultimately not impressed at all.

1. Todd Kraines Scott Disick is Kourtney’s on/off partner, father to their three children, and also a chronically depressed alcoholic whose main source of income is doing club appearances, after relapsing several years ago following the sudden death of his parents. Over the seasons, Scott made a series of prank calls to Kris Jenner, pretending to be her nephew, Todd, whom she had not seen in years. Each call would begin with a high pitched semi-screech of, “Are you there, Auntie Kris? It’s me, Tooodddd Kraaaaines,” followed by Kris trying to make small talk.

The long-running joke culminated in a reveal to an unsuspecting Kris, and an awkward dinner with the real Todd Kraines.

Special mention: The Kardashian-Jenner family used to go on huge lavish vacations together that would always feature a homemade music video.

My personal favourite is “Hypnotize” by Notorious B.I.G. Please look it up.

— Katie Meadows

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Games

GAMES Senran Kagura: Peach Beach Splash Developer: Tamsoft Publisher: Marvelous Platform: PS4 Review copy supplied by publisher CW: Misogyny

“Anime is trash, and so am I.” — Garnt “Gigguk” Maneetapho, anime critic Video games can make people feel a full range of emotions. Whether it’s the pure joy of exploring a massive world, the relief after a particularly difficult boss battle, or the sadness following a dramatic story moment, games wield tremendous power to bring these feelings out of us, just as much as (if not more than) more traditional artforms.

But never in my life have I felt downright embarrassed to play a game. This game broke that duck, but not before it broke me.

Senran Kagura: Peach Beach Splash is little more than softcore porn masquerading as a video game, embodying the worst aspects of otaku culture by indulging in voyeurism and the sexual exploitation of its characters. Everything about this game is designed to appeal to the notion that watching girls get humiliated is not only okay, but a turn-on, with any actual gameplay only being a veneer to trick you into accepting that.

The Senran Kagura series is ostensibly about a group of female ninjas-in-training and their adventures battling demons and each other, but it’s just a way to shove jiggly anime boobs and booty in your face. This instalment has our heroines competing in a water gun tournament, complete with all the obvious jokes about girls getting wet. The story quickly establishes that the characters were not there by choice, instantly killing any chance it had of me being invested in it.

Actual gameplay is that of a mediocre third-person shooter, with none of the weapons feeling even remotely satisfying to use; the water gun aspect clearly holds it back. Special abilities are integrated with trading card mechanics, with card packs available as rewards for completing missions or multiplayer matches, but all they do is turn your efforts into a mess of particle effects that, barring framerate drops, do fuck all.

The single-player missions are repetitive, the AI is braindead, and I barely got to play any multiplayer matches because I was playing a pre-release copy!

But that doesn’t compare to this bullshit: When you take down an enemy, or are taken down yourself, the camera lingers on each character’s body, absorbing their humiliation in the creepiest way possible. If you approach a fallen enemy and press Square, you activate a Squirmy Finish, where you shoot from first-person at the character’s breasts and/or buttocks to remove their bikinis. I was honestly sickened when I did this for the first time, but it gets worse. The game has a “locker room” feature, where not only can you dress the characters up in various costumes, but squirt them with water and grope them.

Maybe you’d think I’m okay with all of this because I’m a nerdy straight guy, but I’m not okay with any of it. I kind of knew what I was getting into, but I had absolutely no idea that it was this bad. It doesn’t matter that it’s fictional, or that the art style is anime-esque, because humiliating a person for sexual gratification is only okay if it is safe, sane, and consensual — there is no hint of consent to be found anywhere here.

— Cameron Gray

Interview with S a t i s f i e d C u s t o m e r s

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Satisfied Customers is a new play from Ben Wilson, directed by Keegan Bragg, opening at BATS Theatre on Thursday, October 3. The play follows a group of high school friends who are then given the opportunity for fame and success in the music business — but will the dysfunctional group keep their friendships and their band together in time for it? I sat down with Ben, Keegan, and lead actor Adeline Shaddick, to talk about their process.

Why do you think students will be interested in seeing the show?

Adeline Shaddick: Students will love it just because it’s about a high school band, and also the idea of school friends falling apart but staying together, loving each other but also hating each other. Any students, not just high school, will love it. There’s also good friend banter throughout it. Band banter.

Keegan Bragg: The thing that bothers me the most about shows like this is that they’re not ruckus enough. They don’t play to that young thing where you want to have dumb fun enough, they’re a little too restrained, and I think that’s our goal anyway with this show, to really assault the senses with how this band plays with each other.

A: Shit yeah, it really stirs the pot.

Talk us through your character, Adeline.

Who is she?

A: Amelia / Amy, I don’t think she likes “Amelia” at all. She’s in this band with her friends from high school. I like to say she’s a bit of a noob, to be honest — that’s my connection with her, in we’re not very clear with what we want and then when we are, we freak out.

Ben Wilson: That certainly sounds like Amy; I don’t know about you.

A: Yeah, cool. She’s in this band, she’s been in this band for a couple years, they’re about 20/21.

It’s her dad who comes up with this idea to make them famous, and she gets hooked onto it. Her dad is an advertising man who’s into his products and creating things, life insurance is his thing, and he’s quite intense. Her mum’s not in the picture. Kenneth is played by Matt Staijen-Leach. Me and Matt have a couple of scenes together so it’s really cool to work with him again.

Theatre

All of you have gone through university. Ben, you did a Master of Arts in Creative Writing with IIML, Keegan has a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre, and Adeline has a Bachelor of Commerce in Marketing and Theatre. How did VUW and IIML help you in this process?

B: IIML has helped me so much, especially Ken Duncum being so supportive; he’s done so much for me.

A: I’ve learnt just as much in both my areas; I have more love for theatre but marketing is more practical, giving me knowledge as to how to have my own business. I did a 300-level arts marketing paper where I was like, “whoa, this would be so much fun to do marketing for theatre!” The lecturer was so passionate. I like boring logistical stuff like making Excel budget lists, writing rehearsal requirements, lists, and marketing at university has helped me with the producing role too.

Keegan, you and Adeline did THEA 304 last year and you’re assistant directing this year’s Long Cloud show Black Knight Dreaming.

Do you think these experiences have helped you in your first show as a director?

K: Definitely. I think the good thing about doing shows outside of university as well as doing the [theatre] papers in university is that you get a lot of experience about different ways of working, and so even though it’s your first show and you’re learning a lot and you’re testing out things that don’t necessarily work all the time, you’ve got this real wealth of knowledge and reasoning behind why things work and don’t work, so you don’t feel like a blind person stumbling around in a room, you can see the reasons why things work or don’t work, so it’s immensely helpful.

Favourite colour?

B: Purple. I really like the colour purple.

K: Red and black — Crusaders colours.

A: Orange! Like a mandarin orange.

K: Oh, fucking of course mandarin orange!

[Laughs] A: I love mandarins! Oh wait… [she then pulls out a mandarin peel from her pocket].

For a more extensive version of the interview, head to salient.org.nz/category/arts/theatre/.

— Emilie Hope

Podcast

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PODCA ST

This week Salient spoke to Hazel Osbourne, a journalism student at Massey University and the host and producer of Avocado on Toast, a podcast which shares the experiences of young people living in Wellington. So far, episodes have covered a diverse range of topics including student debt, flatting, disabilities, and mental illness.

First of all, can you give me a summary of the podcast, and why you decided to make it?

Is that why you like the medium of podcasting, because it gives you time to develop those angles?

At Massey we’re given the opportunity to do a communications internship paper. I knew I wanted to do broadcasting, I knew I had a passion for podcasting — long form audio has always been where I get news and entertainment, because I have a serious eye condition, so listening is a lot easier for me than reading.

The podcast came to fruition through me approaching Wellington Access Radio — I wanted to start out working somewhere smaller, somewhere that would give me creative licence, somewhere that fostered diversity. On the first day I basically walked into the studio and was like, “teach me!” I set up an Instagram and a blog, and got everything rolling, but what I didn’t really have prepared was my content. I had ideas of what I was going to put in every episode, but as I got more comfortable, as I had more wriggle room, I thought, I’m just going to go for it — I’m gonna do student issues, things that interest me, and things that interest my peers.

Oh for sure. I think with podcasting, already your audience is ready to sit down and listen to something; it’s not taken lightly. I think that podcasters are really lucky to have audiences that are patient. Patient to wait on ideas, especially good ones. When you hit on a good topic and they get in touch with you, saying that it resonated with them and they’re really glad that you made it, having that reaction to something you’ve made — there are no words for that.

Do you think the mainstream media adequately covers issues facing millennials?

I think that the millennial thing is such a hot button topic that it’s impossible not to see millennial topics in all mainstream media. I think what’s happening is we see things like The Spinoff, The Wireless, student media like Salient or Massive that do a good job, but people aren’t engaging with it as much as they should be. A lot of young people are influenced by their social media newsfeeds, that’s where they get their news; we’re influenced by the people we see liking and posting. I think it’s not about underrepresentation, it’s about having a clear angle and direction with the content. You can produce it, but you need the engagement, otherwise the story won’t be seen. And it won’t make an impact.

Lots of the issues on the podcast — mental illness, disability, student debt — are really confronting. I’ll be honest, some of the stories that people were so kind enough to share really made me mad that they had been treated that way.

Is that your intention for the podcast, a call to arms to make things better?

For sure — I understand when people are diplomatic and say they don’t want to ruffle feathers, but what is journalism for? We’re here to ruffle feathers, we’re here to make people think, we’re here to make people consider other voices and the agency that other people have in their own stories. And that’s what hopefully my podcast does — it gives people a platform to be themselves, tell their stories, and know that their story is valid.

Can you give us a hint about what is going to be featured in upcoming episodes?

I’ve got a few ideas at the moment — I’m really interested in sustainability, specifically with sanitary products. So that’s going to be in association with the Wā Collective, who provide subsidised mooncups, it’s a project spearheaded by a few friends of mine. I also want to do one on clickbait, and trigger warnings.

— Annelise Bos

Avocado on Toast is available for download from iTun and all major podcast distributors. es

GIG GUIDE

56 Wednesday Habits (Melbourne) w/ Waterfalls, George Turner, Aw B — Come to Caroline for some jiggly wiggly club bangers among other things, and catch Habits’ maiden voyage to our fine land!

Starts at 8.00pm, tickets are $10 presale through Just the Ticket or $15 on the door.

Thursday Tuatara Open Late: Night of the Witch — City Gallery has put on some bitchin’ late nights this year, and this one is set to be the most bitchin’ of them all (60% guarantee). You get to eat sweet dumpling treats, drink Tuatara’s intoxicating elixir, wander the witchy Occulture exhibit, hear a talk about Rosaleen Norton’s work, and hear Wellington’s spookiest ladies (and one gentleman) HEX and Mermaidens play free shows. This will be wild and magical and you’d be a bit of an egg to miss it, really. Friday Option #1 Shonen Knife ( Japan) with special guests HEX — Shonen Knife are a whirlwind of pop-punk glee that will whip you up in its delightful pep. They do a great cover of the Carpenters’ “Top of the World”, which is a song I once sobbed the entirety of to myself on my shower floor, so I am excited to hear that. It is at Meow, from 9.00pm, and it is a somewhat steep $42+BF from UTR, but blow the budget this week for these sweet cherubs. Friday Option #2 Eclipse — This is an enchanting sounding showcase from music students at Massey, where they will be setting up a contrasting two-stage battle of sounds between one band representing the sun, and one the moon, as they unify in a cataclysmic sonic eclipse. Free entry, 9.00pm at Moon. Saturday The Trendees with Strange Stains and the Bent Folk — Load up for a night of strange and unrelenting noise and debauchery at Caroline from 9.00pm. $10 cover. Friday/Saturday Radioactive.

FM Takeover at the Matterhorn — If none of my delicately hand-picked suggestions tickle your discerning fancy, then there’s always Radioactive’s Matterhorn takeover!

The Matterhorn is closing so send it off by shaking your limbs and maybe even bottom to funky jams from the cream of the crop at Radioactive, including Coda, Redbird, the Jewel School, TV Disko, and Groovin’ Pete.

It’s free, and it starts at 8.00pm both nights.

Books

Iceland — Dominic “Tourettes” Hoey

I really want to go to Iceland. I couldn’t say why — I’m not a tramper and I find New Zealand repetitive. But Iceland in my mind is snow-covered sheet rock, blue silt hot pools, quietness, openness.

I saw this movie with my brother called Rams. It’s set on an Icelandic sheep farm. Imagine an Otago sheep farm in the 1970s, and you would have the same movie set, down to the floral wallpaper, the fridge brand, the mugs, the jerseys.

It’s us, a million miles separated. We must be cousins.

Poet and author Dominic “Tourettes” Hoey has written a novel titled Iceland — an ambitious scope. I’ll save myself the time and let him explain it to you: “It [is] a story of trying to turn your passion into an escape plan, a story about drugs and sex and the drudgery of unemployment, a story about what happens when one day you wake up and you find yourself living in a memory, a story about the past and an empty future, a love story about the place I grew up in.”

I think it’s a very familiar story. It’s something almost all New Zealanders feel, their whole lives or just for a fleeting, confusing second. They realise they have to escape off the island and go as far away as possible, or else… the “or else” is unknown… we just have to get far enough away that we lose all context, and we can figure out what we are when it’s just us. Personally, I went to Canada.

Hoey and his Australian singersongwriter friend “Skyscraper” Stanley Woodhouse (why the nicknames? I don’t know, let’s just embrace it) will be on tour in New Zealand in November, including in Wellington at Meow on November 11 as part of LitCrawl.

— Kimberley McIvor

57

Film

IT

— Andy Muschietti

This year has been somewhat drier for horror f ilms, with my last genuine thrill coming back in May with Get Out. Thankfully, IT scratched the itch. An adaption of Stephen King’s famous novel, all most people will want to hear is that IT lives up to every expectation. If you’ve seen the trailer you’ll know what the opening scene is, but seeing it in its entirety in the theatre is an unforgettable experience that sets the precedent for what follows. You’ll know what I’m talking about, trust me.

I was caught off guard (probably because I’m used to sub-par horror movies) by how much of a character driven f ilm it is, with each and every one of the Losers’ Club given fair amounts of screen time both individually, and as a collective.

The chemistry between the young characters, which is thankfully very R-rated, is suitably realistic. While their comradery is a force to be reckoned with, there is a force that seeks to divide them, and then sequentially devour them. I refer of course to Bill Skarsgård’s Pennywise the Dancing Clown. Now, I am not afraid of clowns, but I am afraid of this clown. He drools, his eyes misalign, and every practical and digital effect merges seamlessly with Skarsgård’s unhinged performance. What’s funny about the performance is that he is actually playing a clown to the literal point of being funny. He’s basically entertaining himself, and what’s entertaining for Pennywise is certif iably terrifying for the audience. With his character, and basically every element in the rest of the f ilm, the f ilmmakers don’t hold back, and create some truly demented and jaw-dropping sequences, while working constantly with the beautiful traditions of horror.

It’s almost sad that this f ilm is R16 (though I fully endorse its content) because this is a coming of age story that a younger version of me would have taken real joy from. The f ilm treats its audience respectfully, and the kids act like you’d expect them to. Members of the Losers’ Club repeatedly whine that it’s summer, and that they’ve got better and safer things to do than hunt a murderous clown, but on they go on with comradery, curiosity, and even duty. It may not be The Shining or Stand By Me, but I’m very glad to add IT to the category of King’s adaptations* that live up to the source material’s legacy.

— Finn Holland

* There have been 65 f ilms

based on his written works, of which I can recommend

seven: Carrie (1976), The Shining (1980), Stand

By Me (1986), Misery

(1990),The Shawshank

Redemption (1994), The Green Mile (1999), and 1408 (2007).

58

The day was already hot. In the garden behind Auckland Art Gallery the pōhutukawa trees had taken a turn for the worse. Their red needles and spotted leaves were slipping together on the ground as I stepped off the path and took a shortcut to the back entrance of the building.

The grass had been trodden into dust. It was Wednesday, my first day, because I missed the first two: excuses about moving house, needing to tidy things off at work, the guilt of quitting my steady job at Treasury just before Christmas. To do what?

A curating course? To become a writer? Art? * For a month, commencing the last week of January 2017 in steamy Auckland and ending in Wellington during The-Worst-Summer-Ever, the Adam Art Gallery held its inaugural Summer Intensive: Researching, Writing, Curating. 15 newly minted students gave over their best days of summer to those three pursuits.

Despite the sunshine and pōhutukawa, the fourweek course was no walk in the park, no summer fling with art. The course reader, at some 200 pages, resembled an honours level reading pack, and we began each day with discussions, either alone as a class or with visiting curators and academics, on topics as widely varied as the artist as activist, the decolonisation of institutions, and the ever optimistic selfie. In the afternoons, our tireless leader Christina Barton, Director of the Adam, took us to visit art in situ on harbour islands, in suburban living rooms, and on the walls of converted bank vaults.

Visual Art

For two weeks in Auckland (we met seven hours a day, five days a week — an intensive, indeed) we walked, sweated, and bonded as a team, stretching our capacities for critical thought and pursuing the craft of a good sentence.

It wasn’t until the third week when we were in Wellington, and had sourced several extra layers of clothing, that the final learning objective and real subject of this essay took place: curating.

Now in the seat of power, both of the New Zealand Government and more importantly the Adam Art Gallery, we were able to take our learnings from our regional (Auckland) tour and apply them to our ultimate task, our pièce de (curatorial) résistance. Which, with a drum roll please, was the real-life real-time curation of the Kirk Gallery for the Adam Art Gallery’s first exhibition of 2017 — Out of Site: Works from the Victoria University of Wellington Art Collection.

Sixty artworks that had been removed for seismic activity reasons from their homes in the Pipitea Campus, were out of site, and ready to be curated. As we were limited to the three and a half walls of the Kirk Gallery, we were sensibly divided into three groups of five and given half a day to formulate a pitch as to how the space should be curated.

OUT OF SITE: CURATION AS DEMOCRACY IN THE SUMMER OF ART

59

The art works were all of the sort that could be hung on a wall. That is to say: the law and commerce schools at the Pipitea Campus favoured painting and photography over sculpture or video. The gallery staff had propped the works up around the perimeter of the space to give us an idea of what we were working with, though they were layered atop one another, creating the kind of tableau you might find if you were helping a barrister move offices circa 1997.

In every direction there were green and red hills, gold skies, blue harbours, and rolling amber wheat fields. Intermittently a face or a body, sometimes recognisable, often not, popped out from behind a landscape. At one point my group threw their hands in the air and said: “let’s just leave the art works where they are and call it: Pipitea — A Work in Progress.” It did have a good ring to it.

And this is where my somewhat tenuous “curation as democracy” metaphor really takes flight.

Following our internal group discussions, it was time to present our ideas, our policies if you will, of how to best use the resources available. Unlike a true democracy, however, there was no vote from the populace. Rather, we had a Panel of Experts, the Adam’s Director, Curator, and Collection Manager, who ultimately decided that all parties should be represented in the exhibition. No one should be left out of site. Like a good MMP coalition, each group was given the opportunity to bring their policies to fruition on separate walls in the Kirk Gallery.

The art works my group chose were Gavin Hurley’s Charles Heaphy VC (2009), Richard Killeen’s Dead Woman (1969), and Janice Gill’s Not an atom of difference (1981). Together, we named this selection Two Dead Men, One Dead Woman. Our pitch was certainly political in nature:

Visual Art

the paintings demonstrate the differences in the way men and women, historically, have been represented and immortalised. Charles Heaphy is there — clear, flat, and easy for everyone to see and remember. Gill’s painting depicts a monument to physicist Ernest Rutherford, front and centre, while in the background a woman is hanging washing, domestic and unnamed (the title of the work is certainly an ironic suggestion). Killeen’s piece says it all: a dead woman is surrounded by ignoring onlookers.

Throughout the four-week intensive we returned time and again to the discussion of the role of artists and curators as political commentators and activists. Our final selection for Out of Site was a timely reminder that gender discrepancies continue to exist in our society, and while we may often feel we are taking two steps forward, unfortunately we continue to take steps back. In this climate of political fragility, I suggest that it is to artists, not politicians, that we should turn to hear brave discussions and creative solutions for many social issues. When the pōhutukawa blooms this year, I will be walking under it, forward forward, a richer person, not because of any job, but because of art and all the conversations it has sparked.

Keep an eye on adamartgallery.org.nz and victoria.ac.nz/cceshortcourses for similar short courses and learning opportunities.

— Mia Gaudin

60

Music

Womb started out as the solo project of Wellington musician Charlotte Forrester, but has evolved into a collaborative project with bandmembers Haz Forrester and Georgette Brown. A few weeks ago Womb released “Feeling Like Helium” — the first single from their upcoming album Like Splitting the Head from the Body. It’s a steady guitar-centric piece, part slow-core, part art-rock, with a sombre string section creeping in, and chopped up vocal samples littered hazily throughout.

In terms of what to expect from the new album sound-wise: “There will be lots of different influences going in there. It will be quite different from the first EP. That EP was when I was still a solo project and I was coming out of more sort of folk inspiration. So this is definitely a departure from that and it will probably be quite a lot heavier. Having the full band will totally change the vibe of it. We’ve just got the mixes back, it’s almost got an ’80s vibe to it which is pretty fun.”

Recording for the new album began in February and will be released early next year. Charlotte explains: “We recorded the base of the new album at the Wine Cellar, that was all live, which we thought we had to do because we needed to get that live feeling in there. So that was the drums and Haz and my guitars. Then we came back to Wellington and did vocals, strings, and synths at home. The live recording was important but coming back and doing home recording was also really important to us because that’s been the way we’ve done it in the past with recordings like the first EP.”

“The guitar influences that I will always return to are like Seth Frightening from NZ, also i.e. crazy, she just put her album out this year and that was pretty influential. I like to listen to a really wide range of music and that often channels in, drawing from genres that I wouldn’t necessarily want to make that style of music.

People like Frank Ocean are really inspiring.”

Charlotte talked about how they translate the songs to the live three-piece band, saying “all the recordings will be really different from how they are played live, that’s quite important to us. I don’t care if it doesn’t sound the same live, and it just can’t because there are so many more instruments that we’ve done in the recordings, we’d have to have a really full band to be able to do that. I like that an album and a live recording are really different experiences, and I like that they can be different as well.”

Bringing the other band members into the recording process has influenced the kind of instrumentation that’s going on in the new songs as well. “I did the strings, it’s a mix of cello and violin. Haz did all the synths you’ll hear on the album. In “Feeling like Helium” he also did all the chopped up vocals. He does some DJing and he has his own project, so that’s quite his own style, which was put in there which is really cool.”

Check out Womb at w--o--m--b.bandcamp. com to hear the latest single and look out for a national tour around the album release. Also head over to mimicryjournal.bandcamp.com to hear another track released last week as part of the Mimicry Volume 3 Mixtape.

— Olly Clifton

61 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

AROHA TO YOU

@MATCHBOX

Kia ora Salient, As per usual, I was overwhelmed this week with the richness of your content and innovative design. I particularly enjoyed the hauntingly beautiful images of nuclear testing in Dan’s piece, “The Fury of [Our] Own Momentum”.

The layout was fantastic, and the picture of “George” alongside the excerpt from Teresia’s paper now sits above my desk, an apt reminder of the devastating and pervasive effects of colonisation.

Thank you, for your bravery and imagination.

Aroha nui, A long-time fan

Salient, I’ve never exhibited any of my work anywhere, but I like the idea of doing it one day. Having your work presented in front of others, and them buying your work, would feel amazing. Having to then be forced to follow up with the exhibitor post exhibition to get your reward is ridiculous.

Using “small business owner” as a reason for having to use money that was never yours seems like an excuse at best. It might be common practice to do so, but that doesn’t mean that it is the right practice. Having an inexpensive exhibition space for students/part time artists/ whoever is great, but if it’s not managed properly, what is the point?

Power to the artist Homebody

POST-SALIENT OCCUPATION Dear Salient, Can Brigid Quirke write all of my assignments and exams for all time? That gal articulate AS FUCK. Love from…

NOTICES VUWSA Exec Nominations

Nominations for the 2018 VUWSA Executive opened on September 25, and voting will commence on October 11 through to October 13 at 4.00pm.

The Candidates’ Forum, held in the Hub from 12.00–2.00pm on October 3, will provide students with the opportunity to ask questions of all of the candidates prior to voting.

As of September 27, the nominations for positions on the VUWSA Executive received are:

President Marlon Drake Larson Atkins

Campaigns Officer Ali Leota Geo Robrigado

Welfare Vice President Bethany Paterson Summer Wick-Featonby

Clubs and Activities Officer Connor Macleod Lars Thompson

Engagement Vice President Tamatha Paul

Education Officer Mattias Tolhurst Sarah Yzendoorn

Treasurer-Secretary No nominations received

Equity Officer Brodie Joyce Paddy Miller Summer Wick-Featonby Wellbeing and Sustainability Officer Eleanor Hughes Summer Wick-Featonby

62

CROSSWORD: ‘MY FIRST CROSSWORD'

Note: Answers to all Across clues need to be modified before being entered in the grid. Ennumerations next to the Across clues are for the full answers, not their modified forms.

SUDOKU

1. 1988 Julia Roberts film named after the restaurant where the characters work (6,5) 6. Gift from the three wise men (5) 8. It’s what Burma is called now (7) 9. Topic of study in the Classics department (9) 10. One of the people in Greek legend who were transformed from ants (8) 15. ‘Moaning’ Harry Potter character (6) 17. Mike who played Austin Powers (or the villain from the ‘Halloween’ films) (5) 18. Short-sighted (6) 20. ‘X-Men’ character played by Jennifer Lawrence, most recently (8) 26. Totally confused (9) 27. Countless numbers (7) 28. Mimicking bird (5) 29. Rabbit disease that’s also the name of a 2003 Radiohead song (11)

Sudoku difficulty: Easy

DOWN

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: 22 words Great: 25 words Impressive: 29 words

LAST WEEK'S SOLUTION

TARGET

ACROSS

Puzzles

1. Famed drummer Ringo (5) 2. Sonnet feet that could also be a coming-out phrase if you added some spaces (5) 3. Sexy movie (5) 4. Acne, slangily (4) 5. Object of interest for Ernest Rutherford (4) 6. Place for birds to sleep (5) 7. “According to ____” (following the established rules) (5) 11. One of Dora the Explorer’s nonanimal friends (3) 12. The shortest-named of Disney’s seven dwarves (3) 13. Just released (3) 14. It might be kissed or kicked (3) 15. Type of affliction for people who do a lot of typing, maybe (3) 16. Lucy of ‘Elementary’ and ‘Kill Bill’ (3) 18. ‘Citizen Kane’ director Welles (5) 19. Like most citizens of Belfast (5) 21. Fortune teller’s deck (5) 22. Lambton and Customhouse, in Wellington (5) 23. Moves slowly and carefully (5) 24. It's personal when someone says the same thing at the same time as you (4) 25. Biblical figure who presumably didn't have a belly button (4)

63

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