Pleasure | Issue 09

Salient Issue 9

Pleasure

Vol. 79

Contents Features

14

Guns, Cars, and Fights in Handjob Alley

20

Public Enemy Number One

24

Talkin' About a (Sexual) Revolution

28

Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself.

5

Bunk bed gate: The ultimatum

5

Democracy still works

7

Eye on Exec

8

"International students are NOT commodities"

11

Trend report: Sweatshops still in vogue

News

Content Regular

12 MÄ ori Matters

12

One Ocean

13 Gee-mail

34 Fiction

35 Digitales

37 Visual Arts 38 Music

Single Sad Postgrad

31

Brodie Helps You Figure It Out

42 Games

31

Dr Feelgood

43 TV

32

Reaching Out

44 Books

32

Being Well

45 Theatre

33

Token Cripple

46 Puzzles

33

Women's Space

46 Letters

13

VUWSA Exec

30

40 Film

Editors: Emma Hurley Jayne Mulligan

Editors’ Letter PSA: Eating this donut was gross. Cream should never be that sweet.

ephemeral, and often exists somewhere close to melancholy, as an escape or antidote to it, followed by a quick return. Pleasure is a culturally and socially taught thing. We’re scolded for over indulgence, and praised for resisting it, like some new age presbyterian culture.

We saw the perfect photo of ‘pleasure’ this week— Mum and Dad (Hilary Barry and Mike McRoberts) carrying a bunch of expensive booze into the mediaworks office, with big smiles on their face. You could hear their smiles.

The demise of MediaWorks out of touch fascist leader Mark Weldon sent waves through the media, to the surprise of few people. He got rolled by Barry.

On Weldon’s rap sheet, to name a few, is the nixing of Campbell, the arrival of Newshub, and the hard-hitting high-brow show that is changing the very face of journalism—Story. Oh yeah, he also developed the gossip website Scout, with Rachel Glucina spearheading it, allegedly because they were boning.

Weldon arrived in 2014 with a plan to take MediaWorks out of receivership, but valuing cheap entertainment such as Story segments on kiwifruit, crossbreeding, and ugliest architecture around the country, is scraping the barrel. It’s not at the brink any longer, allegedly, and we can’t wait to see what comes of TV3 now.

So jump in, grab a donut, preferably one that is full of cream and sickly sweet, and enjoy the delights between the pages.

Last week we served you up a pain issue, and everyone loved it. We’ve had so much positive feedback—thank you to everyone who stopped to say so, whether to us, or to our writers—it was heart-warming to know that these incredibly important and personal stories were so well received.

Needless to say, we got great pleasure out of the pain issue. But in the wake of the pain issue, we had to start our pleasure issue. It turns out, that after one issue is a banger, it’s impossible to feel as stoked on the next week.

A Salient comedown. We started to worry that this issue just wouldn’t be as good.

We felt despondent and we felt flat; Jayne’s uterus had a storm brewing inside of it that was sapping the energy not only from herself, but from the team. Emma had back pains, due to over-estimating her prowess in a weights class, combined with sleeping on an air bed.

Ella was feeling “brain-dead” and uninspired for the week ahead. Maybe it was the moon, maybe it was Mercury in retrograde, maybe it was Jayne’s uterus emitting bad vibes to our uter-ii.

And then Wednesday rolled around, we came up with a cover image, walked down to New World metro to collect the props required (no one on Twitter responded to our desperate plea to bring us a donut). After a walk, a talk, and a relaxing night, we all felt lighter, Jayne’s uterus started shedding its lining, and things picked up again.

Pleasure is an elusive beast—it’s transient and

Emma & Jayne xoxo

03

Going Up

*Interview* with Hilary Barry •

Auckland Writers Festival

•

Hilary Barry aka Mum af

•

Rain / coats

•

Naz vs Fleur sweepstakes

Going Down

What’s the best part of your job?

Hanging out with my BFF McRoberts for an hour every night. We live for da ad breaks.

What’s the worst part of your job?

Tolerating what comes out of Paul Henry’s mouth.

One must pick and choose her battles.

How was the Weldon resignation party?

Omg got so fuqed up. We danced on the shitty Newshub desk and it was wonderful. Way too turnt. Still recovering.

Do u want to retract your resignation now that Weldon is out?

Obvs.

Kanye West or Kendrick Lamar?

Lemonade.

Drake and his whiny ass album VIEWS :(

•

When your doughnut topping comes off

•

Squeaky shoes

•

Flume not announcing a Wellington show because we don’t have a big enough arena.

Time for an upgrade

Keen to kōrero “I kite koe i te whitira hou?”

“Have you seen the new (snapchat) filter?”

Any parting words?

Fuck Mark Weldon ya piece of shit

Humdingers

•

After having an intruder come into his home, an eleven year old Alabama boy shot his intruder in the leg with a 9mm handgun, before proceeding to tell him he “cried like a baby.” The intruder has not yet been caught.

04

TV3 Campbell Live replacement Story accidentally broadcast a close-up shot of genitalia during their 7.00pm timeslot. The accidental exposure happened as their investigative reporter was covering a naked dining show set up by the Edge. What a Story.

09.05.16

news@salient.org.nz

News

Kate Robertson

Democracy still works

Mayoral candidates weigh in on Karori Campus Wellington Mayoral candidate Jo Coughlan announced last week that if elected she would try to acquire Karori Campus as a “strategic” council asset.

Coughlan sees the acquisition of Karori Campus as a “once in a 30 year opportunity,” and a way for the Wellington City Council (WCC) to have more involvement in investment projects in suburban areas of the city.

As Chairperson for the Economic Growth and Arts Committee for the WCC, Coughlan said Karori Campus would be an important commercial asset, and the site is “likely to become more valuable over time.”

Coughlan suggested Karori Campus would also be a cultural asset to WCC, as the recreational and community facilities on the campus site will be preserved and remain accessible to the community.

“We need to ensure there is fit-for-purpose social and sporting infrastructure across the city, and we need to ensure that families in the western suburbs are not forgotten.”

Acquiring Karori Campus is one component of Coughlan’s long-term campaign plan to strengthen Wellington’s infrastructure, particularly in the city’s suburban areas.

Nicola Young, another mayoral candidate, told Salient that she agreed with Coughlan’s emphasis on the community centres and that it is “imperative that most of the sports facilities at the Karori Campus are retained for community use.”

However Young believes that it would be best to split up the various land titles, “then the Council could acquire the bits it wants for community amenities and VUW could sell the building to someone who can either repurpose it or demolish it and build housing.”

VUWSA Welfare Vice President Rory Lenihan-Ikin said the university needs to tread carefully around the matter, “Karori families deserve to keep these much loved facilities, however if the campus is deemed surplus to the university’s education requirements, it is City Council’s role to save the fields and netball courts, not the university's responsibility to keep it open.”

He added that if it the campus remains open but unused, this would be a “massive burden on students who are paying for the campus through their fees.”

The university is expected to reach a decision on Karori Campus by October.

Kate Robertson

Bunk bed gate: The ultimatum Katharine Jermyn Hall (KJ) residents who had to take shared rooms with bunk beds in February must decide whether to pay $220 weekly rent for their shared room in trimester two, or move to a single room in another hall.

Students in shared rooms were notified in March that they would be required to pay from trimester two.

VUWSA Welfare Vice President Rory Lenihan-Ikin said that having settled in at KJ, moving halls would be “really unsettling for students”. “Establishing good friend groups in first year is hard enough to do once, let alone having to repeat it all over again.”

He added, "having made the mistake that caused this situation, it is unfair of the university to now give students this ultimatum.”

KJ resident David Kim, a victim of bunk bed gate, told Salient about his experience.

While stoked about the free trimester of accommodation, he misses his alone time.

“Everything about me is under the scrutiny of some other person, whether it be my collection of Death Grips merchandise, the things I say in my sleep, or my memebrowsing habit”.

“The only truly terrible thing about sharing a room here at KJ is the fact that I rarely get naked time where I can be fully undressed in a carpeted environment”, Kim lamented.

05

Kate Robertson

Andrew Little’s Healthy Homes Bill has passed its first reading in the House, 61 votes to 60. The bill was supported by the Greens, the Māori Party, New Zealand First, and United Future.

If successful following its third reading, it would require landlords to meet minimum heating, ventilation, and drainage standards.

VUWSA President Jonathan Gee said, “this is big news for students. If the bill can deliver on its promise, this is the beginning of the end for cold and mould in our flats.”

He added that it “falls short of a Rental WoF, but is a huge step in the right direction by including ventilation and heating in the standard.”

VUWSA’s Welfare Vice President Rory Lenihan-Ikin said, “we look forward to the new bill upgrading the paper-thin 1978 insulation to the 2008 building code”.

The Healthy Homes Bill will now go to Select Committee where submissions can be made.

09.05.16

Beyoncé on campus!

Charlie Prout

Exam theft fail A woman has been convicted for stealing nearly 100 exam papers from Otago University and throwing them in the harbour late last year.

The woman—who has been granted permanent name suppression due to mental health issues—hid inside a cleaning cupboard until staff had gone home in order to steal the papers.

The 23 year old pleaded guilty to one charge of burglary in the Auckland District Court last month.

She was sentenced to one year on home detention and ordered to pay a reparation of $6400.

Judge David Sharp described the woman in his conviction summary as “a good student with a lot of talent.”

He went on to explain the lengths the Otago University student went to by saying, “what you did was not highly sophisticated... but notwithstanding that, what you did was relatively determined.”

Along with her conviction, the woman has been suspended from Otago University with a decision on whether she can return pending.

The series of events unfolded during the defendant’s exam. After using the toilet three times the invigilators became suspicious of her actions and found notes around her desk.

While she acknowledged the existence of the notes she denied they were hers. After the exam her paper was kept separate from the other exams.

The summary of facts detailed her actions the afternoon following the exam.

The woman grabbed a pair of rubber gloves, a hoodie, and a balaclava and drove to the campus where she hid in a cleaning cupboard until staff had gone home and the building was locked up. She smashed her way through various rooms, setting off silent alarms as she ransacked the offices.

On discovery of her paper she took the 97 other exam scripts from subjects including dentistry, english, political studies, and health.

She stuffed them in a plastic bag and left through the main entrance, later driving to Ravensbourne where she threw the stolen papers into the harbour.

Her actions were described as “calculated and premeditated” and it was stressed that Otago University opposed a discharge without conviction.

Kate Robertson

In weeks following the release of Beyoncé’s latest visual album Lemonade, the Victoria University Beyoncé Appreciation Students’ Association (VUBASA) has seen a marked spike in interest.

The VUBASA was founded in October 2012 and has been providing students with regular life-enhancing Beyoncé updates ever since.

The admin team is currently made up of one VUW alumni and three current students, two of whom are in their final year of study.

The admins describe the association as a place where “students can come and enjoy all things Beyoncé in between studies, but also see Beyoncé’s impact on the world.”

The team are currently petitioning to bring Bey’s “record breaking” Formation World Tour to New Zealand shores.

One admin believed a visit from Queen B would be a positive fit with our Beehive, aka “Beyhive,” and said Kiwi fans deserved a chance to “spend all the money we don’t have on concert tickets and merchandise.”

Those wanting to collect signatures for the cause can submit all documents to the VUBASA via their Facebook page, with admins adding that signatures from “politicians, chancellors, media personalities, and Lorde” would be great additions to the cause.

UC up in the clouds

06

Kate Robertson

The University of Canterbury (UC) has become the first tertiary institute in New Zealand to use a cloud infrastructure for large scale data analysis.

This will allow researchers to carry out analysis that would have previously required any number of computers—ranging from several right through to hundreds.

The updated cloud means more than 10,000 of off-site computers will now be able to instantly scale-up to meet project demands as needed, with analysis taking as little time as possible.

Funding for the new cloud system was secured by Senior Lecturer Raazesh Sainudiin, who was successful in applications to the Databricks Academic Partners Program and Amazon Web Services Educate.

The cloud system is already being used for a new course “Special Topics in Scalable Data Science” which has seen a research cluster with thousands of computer nodes running Apache Spark—an engine for big data processing—tapping into the infrastructure created with funding from the grants.

Sainudiin said the new system will give UC the potential to become an Australasian leader in large scale data analysis.

Let’s Get Quiz-ical.

1. Actor Paul Dano plays what two siblings in the 2008 film There Will Be Blood?

We turned up and were the last ones there, classic Salient.

Chrissy asked if Emma had brought a bottle of Scrumpy, but it was just a San Pellegrino bottle, we wish it was cider. We didn’t get an agenda, which only served to make the unfolding meeting a surprise from point to point. We didn’t actually ask for one, in VUWSA’s defense, we just passively sat there (we haven’t read Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg). Emma tried to peer over Rory’s shoulder at one point, and he just smirked at her sleuthing attempts, but in a loving way. Emma was real sweaty, having just played netball, and kept dropping her pen, and Jayne was dry as, she only did yoga.

The meeting started by talking about what it is they were going to talk about, classic VUWSA. Once that was out of the way, the party really kicked off.

The general manager gave her report, George checked in on how the garage sale was going, turns out it’s all good. And then the VUWSA Pres (Mr Gee) gave his report, he made an A3 spreadsheet that was colour coded, detailing how he uses his time. Jono talked about how the university is making heaps of committees, meaning that there are just heaps of meetings to attend. This really got the room heated up, and Jono even had to open the window. George reckoned it was a “good overview.”

Student engagement is a in their strategic plan, they repeated the words “student engagement” about 20,000 times, but aside from social media and literally talking to students, they never really really talked in specifics.

Jonathan let out some bangers like “go with the flow,” “ambassadors of VUWSA,” and called for the exec to have “more facetime” going beyond those “already using our services.”

Then it moved to policy, and the whole room cheered!

The best part of the policy part was the race between all the exec to point out the errors others hadn’t spotted. The best was when they started talking in numbers and they sounded like non-binary binary code 1.1 1.2.1 1.1.1.

“Kill me,” said Emma. “No, kill me” said Jayne. “Do you have deodorant?” said Emma. “Yeah but it’s a roll on, but I don’t care,” said Jayne.

Before we had to go we all realised that the absence of pizza directly correlated to the absence of Nathaniel— he was the pizza lynch pin. As we left we apologised for missing out on all the fun and insisted it wasn’t a personal thing, but we actually had to go.

The next day we caught up on what we missed.

VUWSA is keen for clubs that aren’t just sports clubs to have their achievements recognized by the university. The university hosts the Blues Awards every year to celebrate success for sporting achievements, but what about other 85% of clubs that are not sports related? Salient detects a strong jock-bias.

2. What nationality was sixth United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali?

3. Marcel Duchamp’s artwork, L.H.O.O.Q, is a replication of which famous Renaissance portrait that he has drawn a moustache upon?

4. What is the capital city of Liberia?

5. Which Swedish pop band released the 2014 album Nabuma Rubberband?

6. Who was the only President of the Confederate States of America?

7. What is the only non-European state that has been granted a full membership into the scientific research organisation CERN? 8. Published in 2002, what is the title of American novelist Jonathan Safran Foer’s first book?

9. Where were the 1952 Summer Olympic Games held?

10. In Star Wars: The Force Awakens, what planet does the character Maz Katana live on?

Answers 1. Twins, Paul and Eli Sunday. 2. Egyptian. 3.

The Mona Lisa. 4. Monrovia. 5. Little Dragon. 6.

Jefferson Davis. 7. Israel. 8. Everything Is Illuminated.

9. Helsinki, Finland. 10. Takodana.

07

Alex Feinson

Jayne Mulligan

Eye on Exec

09.05.16

09.05.16

Emma Hurley

“International students are not commodities”

McKenzie Collins

Oh Dairy Me New Zealand is set to welcome an influx of tech entrepreneurs following the establishment of a new Global Impact Visa (GIV).

The GIVs will be offered over a four-year trial period in the hopes that an influx of Silicon Valley-types will help offset the increasingly struggling dairy industry and diversify the economy.

Approximately 400 of of these visas will be issued during this trial period.

Immigration Minister Michael Woodhouse said the visas would “help expand the pool of smart capital by attracting individual investors and entrepreneurs to live here in New Zealand.”

“GIVs will help meet the government’s Business Growth Agenda innovation and investment objectives by lifting innovation in New Zealand,” he added.

Rod Drury, CEO of global accounting software company Xero, thought the GIVs alone were not enough, saying “because we're such a small market and we're the furthest country away from any other trading partner, then it's so much more important for us.”

08

Student allowances playing hard to get As Studylink continues to place restrictions on student allowance eligibility, the number of students contesting allowance applications has dramatically decreased.

Review applications have dropped from 788 in 2011 to 300 in 2015, indicating a decline in student’s faith in Studylink as a provider of financial support. The number of students receiving the allowance has decreased since 2011 from 99,271 to 75,050.

Studylink’s application process has long been criticised by students for being too complicated. Thirdyear student Emerson Radisich did not apply because he was required to prove he was independent from his father.

“I needed to prove independence from my dad and I didn’t want to get in contact with him so I didn’t bother.”

Parents are required to sign a form to prove their child does not received any financial support from them. Thirdyear English major Helena Crengle said, “I don’t even know where to find him [my father] so I didn’t bother applying.”

Judging the allowance on parental income also fails to account for the fact only 15% of students receive financial support from their parents.

Less students receiving the student allowance is driving up debt as students instead use loan living costs to cover their expenses.

Whilst issues remain for those applying from a singleparent family, VUWSA President Jonathan Gee believes that through combined efforts of NZUSA and Studylink, the process is getting easier.

“There have been some improvements, but it’s always a bit of a nightmare trying to get all the paperwork in by the December deadline,” he said.

Third-year Psychology student Hana Thomson found the process relatively easy. She was applying because her family have a farm and earn under the income threshold.

“All I did was apply online and the accountant did the proof of income stuff so I didn’t need to.” She said the longest part was “waiting for Victoria to approve my study.”

However, Hana finds that the allowance is not enough to cover the expenses of living in Wellington. “It does help but I still need to work even though I get allowance—the allowance doesn’t cover my spending money like food and bills.”

One student who did not wish to be named, but can chomp ten plus cones a night, argued for a universal allowance.

“I pay my taxes,” they simply said. Hear hear.

Meriana Johnson

VUWSA has opposed the university’s potential outsourcing of its pre-degree Foundation Studies programme in a recent submission to the Senior Leadership Team.

VUWSA said the move risks “negatively affecting education quality, minimising student support, and decreasing international and domestic reputation.”

“Outsourcing pre-degree pathways segregates international students from Victoria’s learning, social, and cultural communities.”

Academic Vice President Jacinta Gulasekharam said, “they’re not outsourcing following a programme review or student consultation—the school was not even contacted during this review process.”

Outsourcing was proposed by the university in order to meet a growth target of increasing international student numbers from 12.5 per cent to 18 per cent.

VUWSA are advocating for a programme review, which has not been done in eight years, as a better step to improve students’ experiences and attract more international students.

They requested that a submission made by the VUWSA International Students’ Association, who strongly oppose the move, be “heavily factored into the final decision.”

Citing the high costs of international study, Gulasekharam said the move adds to the argument that these students' fees “just balance the books of Victoria University’s budget.”

Gulasekharam hopes that fellow students agree that “international students are not commodities. They are an integral part of the Vic community and we stand with them.”

09.05.16

How to buy a house in Wellington But not Auckland, you’re fucked there Scott said that it was not uncommon for buyers to pay approximately $60,000 more than they planned when looking for houses under $600,000, with first-timers often trawling the fringes of the city for affordable property.

He said, “people who want to buy in these ‘mid-range’ areas will face quite a few disappointments and are likely to be outbid” as these properties were in high demand and short supply.

So with home-ownership becoming increasingly out of reach with every passing day, Building and Housing Minister Dr Nick Smith has sought to (kind of) address the situation by adjusting eligibility criteria for the HomeStart grant.

Currently, the limit for income before tax of an individual eligible for the grant was capped at $80,000, or $120,000 for a couple. Dr Smith hopes that removing the cap for second-chance homebuyers will help older, middle-income earners become homeowners again after separation or business failure. Essentially helping out baby boomers who need it rather than baby boomers who are entitled and annoying and ruining the economy.

True to form, Smith proceeded to tell the world (aka, Morning Report listeners) that “housing affordability in Auckland and every other market in New Zealand is actually more affordable now than when National came to Government,” citing the Massey University Housing Affordability Index.

The document’s author Dr Susan Flint-Hartle has since corrected this statement, saying despite affordability improving slightly over the last three quarters, this is definitely not the case over the last three terms under National government.

Mayoral candidate Justin Lester has promised in his campaign a $5000 rates rebate for first home builders if voted in as mayor.

Jennie Kendrick

Two-thirds of applications approved for first homebuyers in Wellington have resulted in the purchase of a property since April 2015.

This figure comes from the first year data of the KiwiSaver HomeStart grant that replaced the KiwiSaver deposit subsidy.

Similar to its predecessor, the grant aims to provide eligible first homebuyers with a grant of up to $5000 for individuals and up to $10,000 for couples to put towards the purchase of an existing/older home.

Additionally, the HomeStart grant provides eligible first-home buyers with a grant of up $10,000 for individuals and up to $20,000 for couples to help with purchasing a brand new property.

To be considered eligible to withdraw money under the HomeStart grant, a potential first-home buyer must meet various criteria.

Along with being over 18 years old and not being a current home or landowner, Housing New Zealand stipulates that an individual must have made the minimum allowable contributions to their KiwiSaver scheme and have at least a ten percent deposit on the property price.

The average value of a house in Wellington is $597,000, a 6.6 per cent increase since 2012, according to the latest Wellington city evaluation.

This means an individual would need approximately $59,700 for a deposit to be eligible for the HomeStart grant. To save up this deposit over two years, one would need to put away $574 a week.

Translated into student speak, that’s approximately 22 casks of Country Dry White; a quantity not nearly big enough to help drown out the crippling reality of house prices in New Zealand.

In popular student areas like Newtown and Mt Cook, property prices have increased by ten percent since 2012.

Harcourts Wellington City managing director Marty

News & Opinion

Siobhan O’Connor

Trend report: Sweatshops still in vogue The Stats A report has revealed New Zealand’s ethical (and not so ethical) fashion companies for 2016, in the wake of ongoing tragedies caused by unsafe working conditions in garment sweatshops.

Baptist World Aid, the organisation behind the report, said there are 14.2 million people in forced labour exploitation and 168 million child labourers scattered across the global economy.

In 2014, the year following the death of over 1000 garment workers in Bangladesh, a survey revealed that around 90% of New Zealanders want to purchase ethically and socially conscientious products.

This would mean the majority of people would not purchase clothing they knew was the result of a thirdworld country garment workers’ blood and sweat.

As true as this may be, factors are ever so slyly blurred during the long and complicated production, distribution, and marketing of such products.

It is near impossible for consumers to know the conditions under which they have been produced. This is noted in the report, which states that even some companies themselves aren’t fully aware of the conditions under which their clothes are produced.

Without knowing, consumers of these products are continuing to support multi-national corporations and the exploitation of third-world country citizens.

Baptist World Aid summarised New Zealand’s best and worst companies ethically, grading them based on their abilities to monitor the risks of exploitation in their supply chains. May you relish in it and simultaneously let it destroy your soul.

The Best:

The response To put the above data into context, Salient asked some broke-ass Victoria students where they stand in terms of ethical fashion.

First year student Matt Best said he “prefers to opshop,” but likes to buy new shoes—especially Nike (who scored poorly in the report with a C+), saying “I like their stuff, and the recognition that comes with the brand.”

Matt was “shocked” to hear news of tragedies such as the one in Bangladesh, but says it is “easy to brush to the side” because poor working conditions are not obvious when purchasing clothing.

Eliza Matthews, another VUW student, said she had recently watched a documentary on fast fashion called The True Cost which she said “changed my perspective on the fashion industry and made me question when and whether I actually need to buy clothes.”

So yeah, that super cute but very synthetic $10 scarf you picked up from boohoo.com to see you through a blistering Welly winter, the one you could buy while still having enough left in your sad student bank account to buy a Scrumpy on saturday night. Is it still cute if it’s the result of a third-world country’s garment worker’s blood and sweat?

The Worst: ASOS

C+

Billabong

C

Boohoo.com

F

Dotti

C+

Glassons

C+

Karen Walker

C

Nike

C+

Adidas

A-

Country Road

B+

Peter Alexander

C+

Cotton On

B+

Seed Heritage

F

Factorie

B+

Victoria's Secret

D+

Work and Play in the USA! Exclusive visas to work in the USA for NZ students & recents grads!

To learn more visit www.iep.co.nz or call 800 443 769 10

Annual May Sale 11 - 14 May Kelburn

Easterfield Building 1 Kelburn Parade

Pipitea

Rutherford House 27 Lambton Quay

Maori Matters

One Ocean

Rakaitemania Parata Gardiner

Laura Toailoa

Social media is arguably the greatest guilty pleasure of our time. We Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram our way through life, studiously ignoring all obligations.

We binge watch TV with our laptops open to convince ourselves we’re actually studying. Conversation is punctuated by videos of laughing goats or remixed ringtones. All while we try to plough our way through kiwaha lists or essays on the rise of China, to varying degrees of success.

Kapa haka is a big distraction for tauira Māori.

Biennially in February, Te Matatini National Kapa Haka Festival stands for three days, distracting haka freaks and Māori alike for weeks as they put their favourite brackets on repeat and eschew all responsibility.

Watching kapa haka is very interactive, and thus, doubly distracting. Beware the Māori flat with haka freaks as residents or overstayers, because they are guaranteed to be trying to learn every bracket under the sun. It is impossible to get through readings with a backing track of rhythmic takahi occurring above your head and the butterfly beat of poi being bashed about.

Between midweek drinking, twenty-firsts, and red cards, and parties, the call of liquor is a guilty pleasure that hardly ever bodes well for the health of your studies Sundays are the worst. Everybody is hungover, the debrief has occurred, and the regret has set in.

Most are lamenting the last three tequila shots that made functioning, let alone actually studying, the next day near impossible. Those 9.00am Monday tutorials are looming and you can think of nothing but blue Powerades, hashbrowns, and a marathon of Vikings.

Despite living in an age of constant commotion, we battle on with trying to balance our academic, work, social, and cultural commitments. Can you blame us for indulging in a few guilty pleasures to get us through the day?

It’s graduation week coming up and Facebook will be exploding with photos of graduates drowning in ula lole.

Tears will be shed, parents will swell with pride, families will yell and cheer at the graduation ceremony, and the graduates will feel embarrassed, but also grateful that they’re so enthusiastic and supportive. Isaac Newton famously said, “if I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” According to Wikipedia, the concept of this expression can be traced to a 12th century French philosopher, Bernard of Chartres. If Samoans had written records, it could probably be traced to a time earlier than that I’m sure.

Even though my graduation seems like a little buildup because here I am, still at university, I’m excited to be with my family for the weekend—my successes are theirs too. My childhood memories in Samoa involved us being the weird kids in the village who stayed inside and read books instead of climbing trees and whatever other kids do for fun.

Mum and dad brought us up to value education as the key to our future. This seed has been watered by the teachers and lecturers who have inspired me to think in ways that I never thought of. My brother told me I should start a blog in 2010 and he was my first follower.

I don’t know why he bothered to read my badly written 15-year-old posts, but six years later and I’ve grown in confidence in my writing. I have never thanked my dad for forcing me to do countless touch-typing activities when I could have been feeding my neopet. My parents wanted me to go into Medicine or do STEM subjects because they’re more financially viable. Then they supported me when I decided to do what I wanted— study English Literature. They just wanted to see me do well, to know their daughter will be okay in her future, so she doesn’t have to struggle in the ways they did, and their parents did.

So much goodness and luck in my life is because I have an army of giants whose shoulders I have the privilege of standing on. So that fancy piece of paper they’re gonna give me next week—that’s ours.

Announcement: There will be an SGM to elect a Kaituhi (Secretary) and a Poutuarongo (Tikanga and Reo officer, VP) Thursday, May 12 at 5.30pm 42 Kelburn Parade

12

Gee-mail

VUWSA Exec

Jonathan Gee VUWSA President

Alice Lyall (aka. Lyall bae) Campaigns Officer

I don’t know about you, but I can get very self-critical sometimes. I seem more likely to replay negative experiences in my head than remember the positive ones. I learnt recently this is called negativity bias. As human beings, this negativity bias is how our brains are wired. It means that no matter how amazing you actually are, you colour your positive experiences with negative ones, and beat yourself up over that slightly more critical piece of assignment feedback or that awkward moment when you farted in the library blue zone (NOT a true story).

Because of this negativity bias, it’s important as human beings to have ways of overcoming the way our brain is wired and to emphasise the positive: 1. Savour the pleasurable moments. Some people call it “meditating on the positive,” on being grateful for that B+, or for speaking up in class.

2. Have something to get excited about each day.

While it’s good to have a holiday or special occasion in the future to look forward to, try and find that something that keeps you going each day. It’s about living in the present as well as the looking forward to the future.

3. Have perspective. You failed a 20% assignment, that sucks. But use that experience to do better in the next one. I’d be very surprised if a potential employer questioned you on your D on that one assignment you did in first year.

This week’s theme is pleasure, and as much as I’d love to talk about my sex life, my mum is definitely reading this (Hi Mum! We need to debrief on the new episode of How To Get Away With Murder). So instead, I decided to talk about what brings me joy. Do you know what brings me joy? Being on the VUWSA executive.

What I have learned on the VUWSA exec this year: • Nathaniel has some of the best shirts in existence.

• It’s possible to travel across the whole office on a rolling chair.

• A pencil skirt works wonders with a VUWSA shirt.

• How to put up the VUWSA marquee. To the wonderful passersby who spotted me struggling putting it up, I still appreciate you!

• That people are actually on campus at 7:30am.

Jokes aside, being on the executive is an amazing experience. When elections come around if you’ve ever thought about standing I encourage you to do so. The hours are long and it can be hard, but nothing is more rewarding. The people that you meet through this role are the best. The things I have done with VUWSA will be stories that I will tell for years to come.

In this role I’ve talked to so many students about their lives, helped run an amazing O-Week, and got to help out with events like the free flu shots in the hub. It has been so rewarding.

As for what I’m up to now, look out for the VUWSA local body campaign. A student-friendly city is so important to me—as is this election. Get involved!

Acknowledge that you are only human. We often hold ourselves to very high standards. It’s good to have those standards, but don’t beat yourself up over being too tired to do your readings before a class because you had an essay due the day before—which you handed in just before an eight-hour shift at your part-time job.

Amidst all the stress of upcoming assignments and tests it can be very easy to fall into negativity bias. Try at least one of the methods and reclaim control of your thoughts!

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Photos taken by Finnius Teppett

We made feature writer Finn spend four hours in that modern day hell hole—though once a world of pleasure and indulgence—a video game arcade. Here is the result.

Guns, Cars, and Fights in Handjob Alley Finnius Teppett In a concrete storage bunker tucked deep beneath commercial Wellington, a single uniformed employee patiently waits behind a counter. It’s quiet for now.

Actually it’s not quiet at all, thanks to the dozens of loud polyphonic arcade consoles with their flashing screens and blinking lightbulb displays, but for the moment there are no bodies around to absorb their repetitive melodies.

It’s a few minutes before six o’clock on a beautiful midweek evening, and I’ve come down to the bunker for something I’ve dreamed of doing since I was a kid: whiling away a whole night indoors, playing laser tag and arcade games for as long as I can handle.

I dressed up for the event. I wore a new black sweater I’d recently bought, because it was a special occasion and I didn’t want people to think that spending four hours alone at the arcade was something that I did regularly.

It wasn’t the kind of place I wanted to fit in. As I paid my cover charge at the counter, I got out my camera and asked if it would be alright to take some photos of the place. I also displayed the red exercise book I’d brought to take notes in, and I made a show of putting a pen over my ear. I hoped the employee had got the message. “I’m not just here for the arcade and laser tag,” I was shouting to her in body language. “I’m actually here for something really important. Did you see my camera?” She told me, “we close at ten o’clock.”

And by “we,” I found out she meant “me.” Over the course of the night she seemed to cover the work of three or four employees, running the till, setting up rounds of laser tag, and selling drinks out of a Coke fridge at the café. Not to mention the constant vacuuming, mopping, spraying, and wiping needed anywhere that deals with kids’ birthday parties on the industrial scale that laser tag joints tend to. When I asked if I could get a receipt, she told me she couldn’t print one because she hadn’t been shown how to yet. I said it was OK, but I was quietly annoyed I wouldn’t be able to get the editors of Salient to expense my fifteen dollars. I stowed my stuff in a couple

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Finnius Teppett of cubbies, and walked into the electric light, following the call of the games.

The arcade occupies the western wing of the bunker, which splits off like a T into two dead-end alleys. It looks like late in the game, maybe when they were wheeling the consoles inside from the carpark, someone had the idea to roughly group the attractions according to their natural categories, namely transport and guns (which itself splits into a number of subgroups that exist on a spectrum of fantasy-adventure-guns to gritty-realism-guns), with the miscellaneous sport ones (miniature basketball hoops, air hockey) sitting uneasily in the demilitarised zone between them. I picked the transport arm of the T, aka circa-2001 frustrated boy racer heaven, to warm me up for the night ahead.

anonymous office block. I failed training, and my strict flight commander wouldn’t let me out again, even though I’d paid fifteen dollars to do whatever I wanted with his plane. Apparently he didn’t have much faith in my ability to fly it without endangering people's lives. I didn’t care.

So I climbed onto a game called Motocross Go!, but my heart wasn’t in it. Halfway around the track I was on my phone, messaging someone on Facebook trying to get her to come join me. When I looked back up, I’d lost the race. I came thirteenth. An announcement on the screen told me “look behind you before getting off your bike.” For some reason I actually did. I wondered what chaos had broken out behind the bikes at Motocross Go! before they put that warning in.

Guns I got bored of the transport zone after an hour. I left and started a round on Time Crisis 4, which was no dumb shoot-‘em-up. It was telling a story, and even appeared to be making some point about America’s military industrial complex (and in a subtle Anarcho-Marxist touch, the game also has you murder a ‘boss’ at the end of each stage). The rest of my crack team of computer-generated mercenaries probably had me pegged as something of a loose unit, but I turned out pretty handy with a gun. I killed the odd guy from my own side and lost 1000 points, but then I’d shoot an enemy jeep and get 5000 points, so it ended up balancing out. After forty-minutes of murder and quickfire resurrection, I finished the game. I even got to programme my name into the leaderboard because I’d earned the eleventh highest score in the computer’s memory. I refused to be disheartened by the fact that only ten other people had got to the end of Time Crisis 4 since the machine was last turned off and turned back on again.

At the top of gun town are three elaborate consoles with plastic enclosures, that require you duck into the seat of a jeep, or a submarine, and take control of a mounted machine gun pointed at a large flat screen. It was a relief to be sheltered from the rest of the arcade, but sitting under the canopy of Let’s Go Jungle: Lost in the Island of Spice, it occurred to me that one of these enclosures, with their privacy curtains and tinted windows, probably serves as the nook of choice for a sneaky arcade handjob. That realisation, and the off-putting casual racism of Let’s Go Jungle, got me out of that one pretty quickly.

Transport My first game of the evening was a speedway racer in the corner, called Daytona USA 2. In a row of four, the consoles consisted of a hard plastic seat on a dais, that faced a curved cathode ray screen with flickering pixels the size of rice grains. Two foot pedals provided braking and acceleration (no clutch), and a degraded steering wheel, stripped down to its metal core in places from years of sweaty palms and violent Fast and the Furiousstyle drift turns, jutted out from a fake dashboard. After seeing if I was racing alone, the machine helped me tailor a uniquely personal race experience by asking for my preferences of track (“intermediate”), car (“normal”), and transmission (“manual”—I need the practice). After a short countdown, the race started. I was off. I hooned my normal car around the track at speeds well over 300km/h, without a passing thought for my or anyone else’s safety.

Corners proved basically impossible to survive without crashing out spectacularly (I wasn’t convinced the brake pedal actually worked) and I finished twelfth. I played another round on an easy track, in an automatic, and came eighth, which put me in slightly better spirits.

Meanwhile the dings and whacks of the air hockey table alerted me to the presence of some more arcaders, and I looked over my shoulder to see a family—two parents, maybe three or four kids—giggling as they smacked a puck back and forth across the table, and explored the flashing rows of consoles. The arrival of other people brought a wincing self-consciousness down on me, and as I moved between games I shielded myself from their imaginary judgement with my camera and my exercise book.

Warmed up, I climbed into the cockpit of the Sega Strike Fighter for a go in a real-life F/A-18 simulator. The display was split across three angled screens, which made for a pretty uncanny illusion of dimensionality. The plane was controlled by a simple accelerating/decelerating lever, in concert with a faulty and deeply flawed joystick, the operational logic of which appeared to directly contradict the wiring of the human brain. I was only trying to harmlessly cruise around pre-9/11 New York when I felt the true power of the 3D effect and nearly threw up.

A well-rendered but uncontrolled barrel-roll had made the world spin for a few seconds before I crashed into an

Fights I got out and wandered around the other end of the arcade, where the gun games eventually made way for a couple of fight games. None of them appealed to me. It had only been an hour and a half, but I already wanted to leave. The arcade had become a weirdly sad and lonely place. Getting shrieked at by dozens of bright flashing screens and tinny speakers made me long for the company of other human people. But this was the arcade, not a disco, and I wasn’t here to socialise. I started a fight in a game called Street Fighter 2. I was a boxer, and the computer pitted me against some kind of ultraviolent yogi, who seemed extraordinarily adept at beating the crap out of people for a Buddhist. (“I will meditate then destroy

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Finnius Teppett you,” he said.) My hands slipped into the button-mashing muscle memory of my youth, and even though my rippling boxer was throwing out some seriously clobbering haymakers, they were no match for my opponent, who began shooting fire at me, floating, and slapping me around with his inexplicably extendable arms. It was too much for me. I couldn’t take any more screens.

eventually took me out. He started laughing at me and shouted over the thumping techno, “Shame! You suck!” He walked off with his head held high, and as soon as my gun went live again, I shot him in the back.

Lonesome no more I opted out of the next round and, disillusioned with war, disarmed myself. I left the arena to go back to the arcade, and found that while I was inside my prayers had been answered. In the birthday area, near the life-sized statue of Darth Maul, the Lady Samaritan I’d been messaging was passing time on her phone, waiting for me. It was, thankfully, the end of my solo arcading. Drained and depressed, I filled the LS in on the couple of hours I’d spent so far in the arcade—god, was it only two hours?— and flipped back and forth between thanking her for coming, and apologising in advance for what would be, no doubt, a terrible two hours of her life to come. I needn’t have though, because I found that for the second half of my night, surprisingly, time slipped by without really troubling me at all.

Hanging around the arcade became something else all together. With a generous suspension of disbelief, I could even experience something like fun. Watching others play was better than playing myself, and I was more than happy to stand back and observe the LS at work in Gun Town. She had commandeered both pistols of a twoplayer shooting game and was horrified, but nonetheless transfixed by all the action on screen. She gasped, a gun in each hand, “Oh no I’ve killed the woman! I’m contributing to the high death rate of women in society!” as she squeezed off a couple more shots at the screen.

We played a game called The Ocean Hunter, one of the sit-in consoles of handjob alley, and spent half an hour finishing the whole adventure. In that game you and a friend play as a couple of mindless assholes who trawl the seven seas in search of rare and ancient sea creatures to kill. (Although the LS, an optimist, described them as more “like police for The Little Mermaid”). While doing battle with an enormous octopus, shouts were heard of, “I am shooting the motherfucking tentacles!” and later, while fighting off an infestation of giant sea lice, “Oh my god! Look at those little twerking bugs!” Our mounted underwater machine guns were slightly sticky, and the LS groaned as I told her my theory, but couldn’t convincingly refute it.

The rest of our time was taken up with air hockey, competitive basketball shooting, and a weird game that puts you in control of Homer Simpson as he stumbles around Springfield beating strangers to death. And before I knew it, our time was up. It was ten o’clock, and the employee was all but shooing us out with a vacuum cleaner (to be fair, I had warned her at the beginning of the night that I planned on sticking out the entire four hours, though maybe she thought I was just excited, not serious). We were the only ones left. With a sigh I grabbed my stuff out of the cubby, and me and the LS headed out.

I thanked the employee, and sighed, “what a thrill,” as we stepped out into the cold night air.

Laser tag I headed to the entrance of the laser force zone. I joined a few others who were waiting in the armoury, watching the TV screen that displayed the accuracy and proficiency stats of the players currently running around in the maze.

When the round finished, the players inside all spilled out—a bit sweaty, a bit out of breath. A kid looked for his name, Ninja, on the leaderboard, and found out he’d come last. The omnipresent employee though—you can add counselling to her job description—reassured him it was still a very good score he’d racked up, and it seemed to do the trick for his little ego. I suited myself in the chunky plastic minivest of Scorpion and, along with Ninja and his family, as well as a group of posturing pubescent boys, headed into the black maze.

The first round we played was a free-for-all. It was chaos. The maze, ingeniously devoid of any truly safe sniping spots, left you open to attack from pretty much every angle. And without teammates to coordinate, it became a bloodfest. In the midst of the slaughter I negotiated an alliance with two kids in the red base. They were brothers, from the family that was playing air hockey earlier, and we brokered a deal to cover each other’s back in the name of trying to not get shot basically non-stop.

Our truce had given us a certain stability, and my anxiety had waned somewhat by the time the round finished, with a fuzzy recording of that bit from Aliens where one of the space marines goes: “Game over, man! Game over!”

We regrouped outside and checked our stats (Scorpion came in around the middle of the pack, with a notable accuracy of 34%), before going straight back in. This time though, hoping to put the barbarism of the free-for-all behind us, we split into two teams. I found myself with the pubescents in Team Green, and we suited up to wage war against the healthy-looking blonde family composed of Ninja, his brother Gladiator, and their exasperated parents. Moments after round two kicked off we realised our teams were grotesquely imbalanced. Ninja and Gladiator made slow, doddering targets, like dodos, and their parents, while enthusiastic enough, lacked the unironic intensity of my hormonal teammates. Gladiator’s gun stopped working completely. I tried to help him out—I thought maybe he was holding it wrong—but it really was broken. He was living a nightmare, but remained in good enough spirits, annoyed more than scared. With his gun hanging down by his side he walked around Team Green’s base cheerfully suggesting “you can use me as a hostage!”

He had no takers.

Ninja, meanwhile, was growing increasingly frustrated with his mortality. I felt bad for him, and I let him shoot me. When we met down a side corridor, I pretended to lose my bearings and went “Oh! Oh!” while Ninja

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Faith Wilson

Public Enemy Number One

dope-as nana who remembers the days of wacky-baccy and mushroom tea. This past April, the United Nations General Assembly held a Special Session (UNGASS) dedicated to discussing the world’s drug problems and it was basically a big piss take. In 2014 Mexico, Guatemala, and Colombia, who all have massive problems that stem from narco-trafficking, called for this session. They were hoping for a positive solution that veered away from prohibitionist style drug laws and that considered a more humane approach that encompasses decriminalisation and legalisation where pertinent.

But the outcome document, that detailed the assembly’s discussions, is almost like a step sideways, even backward. Big players—Russia, China, Egypt, and Indonesia—all still back stale ideas about drug policy, with Indonesia going so far as to say that capital punishment is “an important component” of drug policy (although the spokesperson was met with a good amount of booing). The UN is still working towards a pipe-dream (lol) of a society free of drug abuse which is absolutely fucking ridiculous and I know I could have said that more articulately but seriously COME ON. People have been using drugs since 5000 BCE, do they honestly think that drug use will just vaporise (lol)? There is a divide between the hard-arses and those wanting to take a more progressive approach, and because of this the final document failed to address issues such as a potential ban on capital punishment for drug criminals and harm reduction—both should be primary concerns in any serious discussion on drug law reform.

Groovy Nana aka the GDCP is all up in UNGASS’s mix, being like you guys are legit delusional and a world without drug abuse is never going to happen, so instead of being ARSEHOLES and continuing to make all drug users criminals, why don’t we develop drug policies that decriminalise, legalise, de-penalise, and work towards harm reduction? Uruguay legalised Marijuana in 2014, US states Colorado and Washington legalised marijuana in

The first time I smoked weed was also the first night I tried BZP, NOS, had my first kiss with my boyfriend to be for a few years, and helped my older brother blow up a neighbour’s mailbox. It was Guy Fawkes 2005, I was 15 and so high. I had the dry horrors like you wouldn’t believe (I’m sorry Sam, that kiss must have been painful), and I finally felt a bit grown up. My best friend Ruth was there and it was her first time doing the same things. We both went to work at PAK’nSAVE the next day, and hellish though the hangover was, I couldn’t wait to try it all again.

So followed my first forays into recreational drug use.

Like many middle-class bored suburban teens, nights were spent in a hot-boxed car at a dodgy abandoned carpark; days spent tripping too hard on freshly picked mushies; nursing my head in my hands trying to ease the killer headache from teeth grinding after popping too many legals; or pinchin money from mum’s purse to add to the tinny fund, etc. The pervasive feeling though, when I reflect on my teen and early adult years, aside from fun and I’m glad I tried it all, yadda yadda yadda, is guilt. I don’t feel guilty now, but each memory I have is laced with the guilt that I felt at the time. That I was doing something wrong, that I was going to go to hell (yes, my parents are Catholic), that anything this pleasurable, must be inherently sinful.

I know I’m not the only person to have felt this way—a lot of people think drug taking is morally wrong. We’re told from the get go that drugs are plain wrong with no explanation of why. So why? And what would a better drug culture look like? One that encompasses harm reduction, positive education, and looks at ways of dealing with addiction and drug related crime that move from criminalisation to compassion and rehabilitation.

On the world stage, there are basically two big players when it comes to the drug conversation—the United Nations and the Global Commission on Drug Policy.

The former is like your arsehole grandad who winces at the very utterance of “cannabis” and the latter is your

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Faith Wilson

Chipmunks, and friends, we all had to watch as part of the DARE programme? This video was meant to turn kids away from drugs (my older brother sincerely believes that after watching that video, the only thing he wanted to do was try weed, which he did and then became Tha Weed King). The inherent ‘badness’ of drugs is not so inherent. If we really interrogate the fallacies that our cultural myths of drugs are based on, they begin to feel hollow.

There are risks to drug taking, but like most illegal things the illicit nature results in an increased lack of knowledge, in turn increasing the risks. Users don’t know how to be safe when taking drugs. It’s hard to know for sure that what you’re buying or taking is legit (aside from buying test-kits etc.), so safe and responsible drug use minimises harm for you and those around you, and increases enjoyment. Things you should optimally consider: what you’re taking; who you’ll be taking it with; where you’ll be taking it; telling someone sober who knows that you’re taking drugs; will there be a sufficient water supply at hand; if you’re going to mix, be cautious; know your limits; if you plan on having sex, be prepared safety-wise. I can’t stress enough sticking with friends, and having someone sober around to watch out for you in this regard— ending up in a situation where you are out of it and at risk can and does happen.

You have to think about why you’re taking drugs.

If you’re taking drugs for a good time, for meditative purposes, or for shits and giggles then great. If you ever find yourself at the point where your answer is because everyone else is, because you need them, because they’re just there, because you’re trying to escape yourself, then perhaps it’s time to reconsider.

Never underestimate the effect drugs can have on your mind. If you are suffering, or have previously suffered mental health issues, consider seriously whether you should be taking recreational drugs at all.

If you ever feel like your drug use is getting out of hand, talk to a friend or family member you can trust. If you don’t feel like you have access to this, the university provides student health and counselling.

Also available are services like Lifeline, and the Drug and Addiction Services. These people are actually there to listen and help, not narc on you.

If you are worried about the legal implications of being caught with possession of drugs, KNOW YOUR RIGHTS. In New Zealand, police have a right to a search only if you let them, they arrest you, they have a search warrant, or they have reasonable ground to believe that you have drugs on you (this might include smelling drugs, seeing the drugs, or seeing you use them) in which case they might invoke the Misuse of Drugs Act. If they do they must tell you.

Remember that silence is consent. If you don’t want to be searched you have the right to say, “no, I do not consent to a search. What is your lawful authority?”

What is their reason for thinking you have drugs on

2012, and Portugal has had a blanket decriminalisation of all drugs in place since 2001. They are all leaders in progressive policy reform. Portugal has seen a decrease in overall drug addiction and imprisonment due to drugrelated incidents, as well as a decrease in HIV cases since its decriminalisation policy took place. Of course, there are other factors that could contribute to these figures, but it’s positive to see that less is being spent on incarceration and more on effective treatment for users who suffer from addiction.

So where does New Zealand stand? Peter Dunne, our representative at UNGASS, claims we have a commitment to “compassion, proportion and innovation” as well as “boldness” when it comes to drug policy reform. Dunne hasn’t said anything too controversial about New Zealand’s drug reform, he’s playing it pretty safe. He does, however, agree that New Zealand’s Misuse of Drugs Act 1975 is due for a remodel. He also states that New Zealand is open to making available marijuana products for medicinal purposes, but not without rigorous medical research and testing as all other drugs are subject to. If marijuana is legalised it could then be sold on a regulated market.

Drugs have only been a central focus of legislation for the latter half of the twentieth century. The War on Drugs refers to the global effort to abolish drug use, following Richard Nixon’s 1971 declaration that narcotics are US’s “public enemy number one”—at the time, about 10–15% of Vietnam vets were addicted to heroin or opiates. A huge crackdown on users and dealers followed. New Zealand’s Misuse of Drugs Act came into effect in 1975, following the US diligently. Drug addiction and problems surrounding drug use had been around long before the 70s obviously, but this was the biggest, targeted operation against drugs and drug users in the twentieth century. But why?

The war against drugs happened at the perfect time— the crackdown on drug use is about more than just drugs.

It came in the wake of the Vietnam War and Civil Rights movement. What’s the connection? As John Ehrlichman, White House Domestic Affairs Advisor at the time put it: “The Nixon Campaign in 1968 and the Nixon White House […] had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people […]. We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

If we accept this is a possible truth, then so much of what we understand around drug policy blows open.

The negative associations we are indoctrinated with don’t come out of nowhere. They are deeply embedded into a socio-political structure that actively associates drugs with low-socio economic groups, outsiders, and minority group. I mean come on—remember that antidrug video featuring the Smurfs, Garfield, Alvin and the 22

Faith Wilson

dealing, and manufacturing. They have been privy to and been a victim of the reach of the damage that it can do. I’m not trying to whitewash drug use, but I’m most definitely saying that hey, the way to deal with societal problems caused by the misuse of drugs is through positive education, positive drug reforms that aim to minimise harm, to provide help for communities who do suffer the adverse effects, and to provide a safe place for those who wish to dabble, to dabble.

I understand the difficulty in talking about this multifaceted topic, and the realness of it. This isn’t just some drug-user utopia, or maybe it is. But there is no way that we’ll move away from problematic drug use to positive drug use under the paradigm current mainstream attitudes continue to align with.

Remember though, stay safe, stay informed, tell someone what you’re up to, and enjoy the experience. And I’ll catch y’all in Portugal.

you. If they invoke the Misuse of Drugs Act, they must file a report with the Police Commissioner within 72 hours.

You have a right to obtain a copy of this report, the right to watch the search, and the right to a witness.

When it comes to harder drugs, it’s important to understand how serious the addictive side is. Sure, some people say all it takes is once, and some people say that’s bull. It depends on your constitution, your situation, and some would say, genetic makeup. I would recommend not taking harder drugs purely because they can mess with you something chronic, and addiction is not a joke and is all too easy to develop. It creeps up without you even noticing it. As a person close to me who has suffered P addiction said, “it’s fine and just a weekend thing for a while, and then one day—bam! Your heart feels like it’s missing something, like that pang of missing a loved one, or yearning for home. It’s just there all of a sudden, and you find yourself fixing to get your hands on some.”

New Zealand has a ‘War on P’ going on here. In March police executed 30 search warrants for the manufacture and sale of P across the country. Without critiquing our system of dealing with abuse on the whole, this crackdown seems to be a police display of power, showing the concerned public that they’re really doing something about the situation, and instilling fear in those who are targets. It’s a bandaid and a pretty flimsy one at that. What needs to be treated is the wound.

Drug legalisation, or at least decriminalisation, in Aotearoa would mean a reduction in harm, fewer people in prisons, and a more open and informed society. A place where addicts are supported; a place where those who do use drugs won’t feel like outsiders. Perhaps this is all wishful thinking, and if it’s in our future, it’s a distant one. Unlike the delusional idea of eradicating drug use from society entirely, thinking about a future where drug use is acknowledged, dealt with intelligently and compassionately—humanely, is not difficult.

In discussing this, I acknowledge the privileged position I’m in, as an educated person who can make informed decisions about what I decide to put into my body and be able to discuss these matters freely. There are large pockets throughout Aotearoa where drug addiction is a part of everyday life. There are children who grow up without the critical skills to discernibly choose between drug use or not. There are people who have grown up witnessing the negative effects that our current drug policies continue to inflict on communities, and thus likely think that this discussion is marginalising. Which I think it definitely is, in more ways than one.

Who am I to be speaking on this issue? I come from a working class family, and went through a pretty standard New Zealand school system, receiving likely the same piss poor drug and alcohol education that the rest of you did: drugs, don’t do them, or else you’ll get addicted, and probably die. As I’ve mentioned, I went about trying them in (probably) a pretty stereotypical NZ teen manner.

I’ve also seen the ugly side of things. I’ve got family members who’ve been deeply involved in P addiction,

If you are concerned about your drug use, or that of someone you know, please seek help. The following links offer information on addiction services.

Ministry of Health, addiction help: http://www.health.govt.nz/your-health/healthy-living/ addictions/alcohol-and-drugs DrugHelp http://drughelp.org.nz/ NZ Drug Foundation https://www.drugfoundation.org.nz/ If you wish to learn more about drug policy in New Zealand, as well as internationally, check out the following.

NZ Police, penalties for drug offences http://www.police.govt.nz/advice/drugs-and-alcohol/ illicit-drugs-offences-and-penalties Misuse of Drugs Act 1975 http://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1975/0116/ latest/DLM436239.html Know your rights https://norml.org.nz/rights/ International Drug Policy Consortium http://idpc.net/ Global Commission on Drug Policy http://www.globalcommissionondrugs.org/ UNGASS 2016: UN General Assembly Special Session on drugs in 2016 https://www.unodc.org/ungass2016/en/about.html 23

Sarah Batkin

Sarah Batkin delved into the realm of sexual pleasure, and spoke to an expert about how we could all improve in communicating about, learning about, and having more pleasurable, sex.

Talkin’ Bout a (Sexual) Revolution education and what we still need to work on as a country (I also took the chance to talk to her about fun stuff like squirting and prostate glands—stay tuned).

1960 marked the beginning of the sexual revolution: the American FDA approved the first oral contraceptive pill, the Stonewall Riots heralded the inception of the LGBT movement, and Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique. In retrospect, however, the sexual revolution seems to have not been as revolutionary as I was led to believe. 56 years on and women’s bodies continue to be legislated against, American Congressmen continue to say and believe things like “if it’s legitimate rape the female body has ways of trying to shut that whole thing down,” and people still think that having too much sex can make a vagina loose (it doesn’t!). I think it’s fair to say we have a lot of work to do yet.

If there’s one element that I feel is seriously lacking in regards to sex, it’s the incongruence between the way men and women are expected to behave sexually. When you reach a certain age you become aware of a set of unspoken rules. Rules that stipulate how many people you are allowed to have sex with, who you’re allowed to have sex with, when it’s acceptable to lose your virginity, and how to treat your ‘conquests’. There exist many double standards which are damaging and leave us on totally different pages. It makes sleeping with people seem like a pointless, drawn-out game. The fact that wanting to be treated with decency, like any other normal human being, is sometimes too much to ask for makes me annoyed a la Alanis Morissette. Seriously though, being nice to someone you’ve just slept with isn’t hard and if you think you have to be mean to said person otherwise they're going to “start liking you,” you need to calm down.

Lamenting these facts like the grumpy millennial feminist that I am (I’m not trying to be facetious here), and wanting to seek some wise counsel on these issues and how they might be remedied, I spoke to General Practitioner and deputy chairperson of Doctors for Sexual Abuse Care (DSAC), Dr Cathy Stephenson. I asked her about what we’re getting right when it comes to sex

SB: Do you think the sex education young people receive today through school in New Zealand is adequate?

CS: Sex education is certainly improving. Back in the day it tended to be based solely on the biological aspects—the birds and bees type of conversations. More recently contraception and STIs have been discussed in school, and over the last few years the topic of sex as a pleasurable activity has even started to appear in sex-ed classes. ACC have also developed a fantastic programme called Mates and Dates, aimed at secondary schools, with sessions from years 9–13. A lot of the themes discussed focus on consent, and how to negotiate this with a sexual partner. My hope is that Mates and Dates will become part of every secondary school curriculum, so that all students are receiving the same, very valuable messages.

The natural progression would then be for one year of the Mates and Dates programme to be part of student’s first year of tertiary (University) education. Bringing consensual, pleasurable sex regardless of gender or sexuality, into conversations for secondary and tertiary students, and enabling good communication between young people, can only be a good thing.

SB: Consent is definitely something we need to be talking about more. What are some other things you think we as a country need to work on to reduce sexual violence?

CS: Sadly we do have high levels of all forms of sexual violence in New Zealand and women are predominantly the victims. The more we talk about “good sex” i.e. how sex should feel for all parties involved, and encourage this

25

Finding the prostate is an easy process. It requires relaxation and plenty of lubricant.

Be careful not to traumatise the lining of the anal canal which is quite fragile.

26

in different ways to different stimuli. The most important factors are making sure the situation is right—making sure that you are with the right person, in the right place at the right time, that there is plenty of foreplay, and that pleasure is firmly on the agenda for both of you. If you don’t reach orgasm by penetration alone then try experimenting a little either with yourself or with a partner you trust. The chances are you will find another way to get there!

conversation both directly and indirectly via the media, the quicker we will break down the misunderstandings around what is and what isn’t consensual and pleasurable sex. Much of the sexual violence that I see through the Sexual Assault Service has come about through a lack of understanding about what consent is. If someone can’t or doesn’t give consent because you either haven’t asked them or they aren’t able to (due to intoxication, impairment, illness, being asleep etc.), then it isn’t consensual and it’s a crime. Teaching young people what consent looks like and enabling them to experience how great it is when you have sex with someone who is sober and wants it as much as you do, would be a huge step towards eliminating sexual violence.

SB: Could you tell me about female ejaculation? I know this is a topic that has been hotly debated by a lot of people, especially on the internet.

CS: This is a controversial topic, and still hasn’t been resolved by the medical world! There is debate around whether female ejaculation (also known as gushing) exists at all—and if it does, whether it is due partially to the incontinence of urine that some women experience with orgasm, or solely due to a secretion of fluid from the paraurethral glands. It is a likely scenario is that some women will ejaculate at some point during their sexual lives. It is a normal phenomenon, and shouldn’t cause any concern.

So… if one thing can be deduced from this it’s that we need to improve our ways of communicating with one another. We’ve been told that having non-consensual sex is a crime, but we’ve never really discussed what ‘consent’ is. For too long asking for consent has been a grey area, a kind of enigma floating in sex limbo. When in actuality, it’s pretty black and white—no means no. If you’re not sure then you should always ask (also see our handy guide, “Consent Is Hot Anything Else Is Not” on Salient’s website). Sure it might seem a little embarrassing or awkward at first, especially if you’re sleeping with someone that you’ve only just met and if you don’t intend on taking the encounter further than anything sexual. But a simple “are you ok with this?” is a good place to start.

Having sex education classes at university never occurred to me until speaking to Dr Stephenson, but it certainly makes sense. Implementing this scheme in tertiary institutions would probably remedy a lot of the problems surrounding how people treat their sexual partners and could narrow the disparities between men and women in the realm of sexual pleasure.

I’ve often found a lot of people are not entirely familiar with the human anatomy, which can make for a wide variety of awkward and unpleasant sexual encounters.

I’m not saying we must relish splashing around in one another’s bodily fluids, and I don’t expect everyone to enjoy all the carnal elements of sex. But having the knowledge to explore your own body and that of someone else’s comfortably and pleasurably is so important.

Who better to inform those who’ve missed out on this information than a trained professional!

SB: I’d like to discuss something that applies to the guys that may be reading this article... anal stimulation during sex is also something that people are starting to discuss more openly. Can you tell me a bit about the prostate gland and how to find it?

CS: Only men have a prostate gland.* It is located a few centimetres inside the anal canal, and helps with fertility and ejaculation. Finding the prostate is an easy process. It requires relaxation and plenty of lubricant. Be careful not to traumatise the lining of the anal canal which is quite fragile. In the sitting or lying position, with legs slightly bent, gently insert the tip of a lubricated finger into the anus. The finger should be slightly crooked and pointed upwards. If you feel to the front side of the anal canal (the front of the body), the prostate feels a bit like a firm walnut shape and measures about two centimetres across.

And there you have it. I’m aware this is just the tip of the iceberg, I could write an entire manifesto on these topics. But I think there’s a lot to say for respecting and caring about one another, even if it’s someone you’re just spending the night with. We should want to make engaging with one another, whether it romantically or sexually, a fun activity for all involved. Perhaps that’s when the real sexual revolution will begin—when we are all comfortable talking about what makes us feel good and what doesn’t and people listen. In the time being… happy orgasming.

SB: Can you tell me a bit about the female orgasm and how women can reach climax? I know a few people who, sadly, have not experienced an orgasm, though not from lack of trying or wanting to.

CS: Some women will find it easiest to reach orgasm by penetration, either with a penis, finger, or some other object. Some, however, won’t find it easy to reach orgasm this way and will receive more pleasure from oral or anal stimulation. We are all different and our bodies respond

*In reference to those assigned male at birth.

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Cameron Price

Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself.

On a Saturday evening in January 2012, Adriana Buccianti was at her home in Melbourne when she received a phone call. It was from her son Daniel, who was at a music festival.

“Mum, I have taken some very bad acid and everything is very odd here.”

The next morning she received another phone call: her only son was dead.

“Daniel made a mistake in taking a drug. It wasn't what he thought it was, and it killed him,” she said.

“I have lost a son, but the community has also lost someone. We will never know where life would have taken him and how much he could have contributed to society.”

Sadly, the story of Daniel’s death is a familiar one. In the past year alone there have been five drug-related deaths at Australian music festivals.

And it’s just a matter of time before it happens here.

know what’s in the product they’re purchasing.

These dangerous new drugs have already hit our streets. Last September, an anonymous analysis of pills bought in Wellington suggested the presence of the lethal drug PMA (para-Methoxyamphetamine), known to some medical practitioners as ‘Doctor Death’.

Emergency department doctors are reporting a sharp rise in admissions from people who have taken NBOMe, the potentially fatal substance often sold as LSD. Wellington emergency medicine specialist and clinical toxicologist Dr Paul Quigley told Stuff.co.nz that “these people are coming in [to hospital] hallucinating, they've got high blood pressure, they're delirious, they need to be held down by four or five security guards, and we've got no control over this.” This isn’t playing around. This is real. But unfortunately we tend to take a fairly laid back attitude to the potential dangers of drugs.

To quote an anonymous user: “We’re pretty blase about it, really. We know you hardly ever get pure MDMA anymore. You never really know for certain what you’re taking.” He goes on, “but if you or your friends have taken it before, and you’ve been all good, then you’re not going to say no.”

Lots of students take drugs1. A lot of the time we don’t know what’s in them: is this white powder MDMA, or is it methedrone? Or could it be methylone, or mephedrone?

Or might it even be meth? Is this tab of blotter paper that I’m sticking on my tongue really LSD, or is it the more potent 25I-NBOMe? Is this batch of [insert colour here] [insert logo here] pills pure, or are they cut with P? As any economist will tell you, the illegal nature of psychoactive substances creates a black market. Some humans will always demand drugs, and some humans will always find a way to supply them, ceteris paribus.

The issue is that the black market by its very nature can’t be subject to government regulation. That means no quality control or safety testing, no accurate labelling, no attached warnings or information, no age restrictions, nothing.

The problem is compounded by the fact that the types of people who are drawn to manufacturing and selling drugs are quite likely to be unscrupulous (again, because it’s against the law). Free from accountability, they will happily sell bad drugs.

It’s also getting easier to source bad drugs. New analogues are synthesised constantly: novel psychoactive substances are being detected in the EU at a rate of two per week. The dark web is changing the market, cutting out the middle man and making it easier to import from overseas. Prohibition undermines a consumer’s ability to

So what can we do?

One clear solution is to legalise and regulate the drugs, so that they can be sold safely.

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Cameron Price

spectrometer, but not many of us have one of those lying around.

Dr Quigley explains the other issue. “If you find that a certain pill contains PMA, you can say on a website, ‘don’t buy red Mitsubishi’s, break your dealer’s legs and run away, PMA kills!’ But if you post the information that a certain pill is 100 per cent MDMA, you’re indicating it’s probably safe—and at the same time you’re directly condoning pill use. And that makes the powers that be quite nervous.”

This fear of ‘condoning drug use’ is likely the reason that pill testing at festivals is technically illegal in New Zealand. Under the Misuse of Drugs Act, festival organisers and nightclub owners are at risk of prosecution if they “knowingly permit a premises to be used in the commission of an offence against the Act.’ That’s why the festival that Wendy carried out checking at has to remain anonymous. So there’s some balancing to be done: do we offer drug checking services, knowing that it will potentially save someone’s life? Or do we keep the service banned in case it encourages drug use?

A parallel might be drawn to NZ’s needle exchange program. The service provides sterile needles to injecting drug users in order to help prevent the spread of HIV and other diseases. It could be argued that providing the needles ‘condones’ the drug use, but it could equally be argued that the fact that it saves lives means it’s worth it.

That depends on your point of view. It seems to me that reducing the potential harms of drugs is more important than allowing people to die, and then using those deaths as a scare tactic to stop people using drugs.

Scare tactics aren’t working. Daniel died in 2012. And despite tougher enforcement and security at festivals in Australia, five people died last year. These were normal people who looked like us, had hopes and dreams like us, who loved and fought and danced and screwed like us.

They might not be dead if drug checking was available.

If we’re not willing to support a regulated legal market, we should at least help the buyer beware. Because unless we do, one of our mums will get the same phone call that Adrianna Buccianti did.

Dr Quigley agrees. He made national headlines last year when he called for the legalisation and regulation of MDMA. “We could assess whether it's safe, we could regulate it, we could earn income off it, we could restrict it ... but at least it could be controlled.”

Ross Bell, executive director of the NZ Drug Foundation, also supported legalisation of MDMA. “If we regulated drugs that we knew more about and were less harmful, then you'd go a long way to mitigating the harms that exist in the black market,” he said.

Unfortunately, these calls fell on deaf ears; specifically John Key’s, who stated last year, “anything I've seen in relation to this drug has been deeply negative, so I can't see why it would be [legalised].”

So prohibition is here to stay, for now at least. But there are still things that can be done to mitigate the risks.

This past summer, Wendy Allison and her small team of volunteers set themselves up at an unnamed NZ music festival. They weren’t allowed to advertise their service, so the sign on their gazebo simply read “Harm Reduction.”

Curious festival-goers soon found out what Wendy and the team were up to. “We were offering to check people’s drugs to make sure they weren’t taking anything they didn’t intend to take.”

Consumer drug checking or ‘pill testing’ services use chemical reagents to detect the presence or absence of desired substances in illegal drug samples. It works like this: you scrape off a bit of your pill and an on-site expert applies a chemical reagent to it. The reaction it makes is then interpreted and you’re given the results.

Your scraping might turn purple, say, indicating that what you have is most likely from the entactogen family of drugs (of which MDMA is a member). Equipped with this knowledge, you can then make a more informed decision about whether or not to take the drug.

You’re also given some info about the risks of the drugs identified, and anonymised information about the sample is shared with other drug users, A & E departments, and law enforcement. Drug checking provides authorities with a rare opportunity to communicate directly with drug users and make sure that they’re being safe.

Wendy’s testing showed two things. Firstly, most people weren’t taking what they thought they were. Only six of 22 samples purporting to be LSD tested positive for the drug. One third of MDMA samples weren’t true to label. And one unlucky punter had shelled out hundreds of dollars for some cocaine that turned out to be Ritalin.

The good news is that the testing also showed that people changed their behaviours when they were better informed. About half of the people who were told their sample was not what was expected opted not to take it.

There are some downsides to drug checking, however.

This type of reagent testing only provides an indication of what’s in the pill—it’s better at telling what definitely isn’t in it than what definitely is. You can get a more accurate reading by using a gas chromatography-mass

Cameron is a member of Vic Students For Sensible Drug Policy (VSSDP): a club made up of students who support an end to drug prohibition. VSSDP have drug checking kits available for use. If you or your friends want to be sure that your pills are safe, send us an email at vic.ssdp@gmail.com (we respect privacy and any communications will be strictly confidential). If you want to learn more, come to our event at the Law School Common room at 6.00pm on Wednesday May 18. See the drug checking kits in action and hear from Wendy Allison, who provided the drug checking service at a recent NZ festival.

1 According to a Ministry of Health survey from July 2008, 6.2 per cent of the population had used ecstasy. 18-24 year olds were the most common users.

29

Single Sad Postgrad Sharon Lam

I Love Brunch!!! agents like hydrogen peroxide and sodium percarbonate.

If you’re feeling bummed out for C Dawg, don’t worry, chlorine-based brunches are still the most common today! Take that you peroxide-based losers! One thing that Studmuffin-Chlorine-Man and the Peroxide Uggos can agree on though, is oxidation! And also how terrible Nicole’s new haircut is! Both chlorine and peroxides oxidise to chemically break the chromophore’s bonds.

Cuu-uute (unlike Nicole)! Now, brunch is found in almost every household thanks to these old dead guys! Loves it!

Like Mandy’s sexscapades, brunch isn’t just restricted to inside the household! Sodium hypochlorite, the most common brunching agent (shout out AGAIN to Carlycopter, seriously, if there are any cute great-great-greatgrandsons of his reading this, please hit me up!! Please!!!), is also used in swimming pools to prevent infectious agents. What it can’t prevent however, is drowning…in the eyes of that really hot lifeguard!!! Am I right or am I right???

So that’s Brunch 101—a quick intro to the ultimate ritual of female friendship. Without brunch, where would we be? Probably all infected in a pool, wearing stained clothes, pretending to drown to get the attention of that sex-on-legs lifeguard! Well, I would probs still do the last bit even with brunch. But whateverrr chicks before lifeguard dicks! Love you girls!!! Next week, all about periods, i.e. the little circle thing at the end of this sentence! Oops, that was an exclamation mark! LOL!

Like all the women I know, I model my life to completely match Sex and the City, so of course the highlight of my week is Saturday brunch! Even though brunch can be hard when all your girlfriends are screeching about their boyfriends and you are like, ugly-laughing through your single lonely woman tears, at the end of the day it’s all about the f word—friendship! But even though so many of us enjoy brunch, not many take the time to learn about it. So here is Brunch 101! Which is something I had time to write because I am never out on dates! Lol! Right, so brunch: any chemical substance that decolourises, disinfects, and is every girl’s fave. While relatively new to mainstream culture, brunch has in fact been around for millennia. That’s right, millennia! Almost as old as the guy Ashleigh slept with last week! Hahaha!

Anyway, the earliest form of brunch involved spreading out cloth on the ground, letting sun and water naturally whiten the fabric. Retro! This works because of the high energy photons of sunlight breaking doubled-bonded chromophores in the fabric into single bonds! Cute! BeeTee-Dubs: a chromophore is the part of a molecule that’s in charge of its colour, duh!

What we call brunch today was the work of several scientists in the 18th century after the discovery of chlorine. Shout out to Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele, i.e. King of Chlorine, i.e. Brunch Daddy! You rock (totally Google him, so cute, would defs bang. And not just because I haven’t banged in like, ages)! After Carlsy, chlorine-free brunches were created, using brunching

30

Dr Feelgood The Ins and Outs of Anal

Brodie Helps You Figure it Out

In 2010, a study about sexual habits and preferences revealed that just under half of the participants had tried anal sex, and of those, 94% had reached orgasm doing so. Why then, in the face of overwhelming statistical data concluding anal is a good fucking time, does wanting to try or having tried anal usually get a strange reaction?

Uninhibited as ever, Dr Feelgood is here with some decent advice if you’d like to venture into the outback.

The Decision The first thing to remember about trying anal is to make sure you’re completely ready. Stunningly obvious I know, but you can’t just ‘wing’ anal. If you’re nervous and on the receiving end you WILL NOT enjoy it, because your butthole muscles will naturally clench. This is most likely to be painful and a little traumatic, so it’s key to ensure that you’re with the right person, in the right place, and at the right time. If you’re giving remember that no one wants to be the person who made someone cry in bed, so be obvious with your support and understanding at every stage.

The Prep If you’re sure you want to go down that track there’s some prep you may want to do. Some people like to wax back there beforehand, some like to have an enema. It’s a personal choice. If it will make you more comfortable during the act, then go for it.

The Act Even if you forgo my previous advice, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PLEASE do not forget to lube up. The butthole has no natural lubrication of its own, and it is a delicate area that you could seriously damage without enough lubrication. If you’re using condoms (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED) use a water based lube rather than an oil based, because the oil could break down the latex.

Next, start slow. The butthole muscles should be relaxed, but they’re used to stretching the other way around so ease into it with some finger or toy action.

Doggy style is a good place to start after that, as is legs up on shoulders ($5 to the reader who can tell me what the actual name of that position is???).

Lastly, remember that explosive disasters are very rare, but if happens to turns to shit (sorry—awful pun) the embarrassment WILL pass, and your partner will not give you a hard time if they’re any kind of decent person.

Who knows? You might find that anal is an excellent addition to your sexual repertoire. Don’t be afraid to dabble and good luck!

Brodie Fraser A big pet peeve of mine is people calling things they enjoy “guilty pleasures.” There’s so much wrong with that idea! Firstly, you shouldn’t be embarrassed by enjoying a certain kind of music, food, tv show, nerdy game, or whatnot. If people judge you because you enjoy listening to catchy pop music, that’s their loss.

‘Guilty pleasures’ implies that you shouldn’t talk about things that bring you joy, and frankly, fuck that kind of negativity. Own what you love. It is such a delight to be able to witness people light up when they talk about things they enjoy. I don’t want to stop anyone from discussing things they enjoy, so honestly, tell me all about that new game you’ve learnt, artist you’ve discovered, or TV show you’ve binge watched.

Let’s all stop calling things we enjoy our guilty pleasures; own what interests you and don’t be ashamed of it. Secondly, so much of what we call guilty pleasures are things inherently tied to being a young woman, too.

I get given so much shit for liking catchy pop music.

“Brodie, I thought you were above that.” What? Above enjoying myself and having dance parties? Yeah right, I am all about that solo dance party lifestyle. You bet I’m gonna dance around to Carly Rae Jepsen on top volume.

If it brings me joy, why wouldn’t I? Naturally, life isn’t about always being happy and positive. On the flip side, it’s not about being negative all the time. So find a balance. You don’t like the TV show your friend is really into? Don’t make them feel ashamed, just politely let them know you’re not interested and move on. Whinge about it to someone else who also doesn’t like it, but don’t hate on your friend!

When I volunteered lots we used to tell our youth “don’t yuck other people’s yums.” It’s a silly phrase, but it’s also effective. Remember that a great part of being human is diversity in literally everything. If someone likes something you don’t, it doesn’t give you the right to be a dick about it to them. Move on, yo. There are much bigger fish to fry, like what pop album I’m gonna listen to next. (Just kidding, there are so many important issues we should be worried about. And I’m also still not done with Jepsen’s latest album).

31

Being Well

Reaching Out

John Barclay (Clinical psychologist) Over the past week, V-ISA has been actively campaigning against the move to outsource the foundation studies programme to an external education provider. The bomb was dropped on Monday—when we first received information about the school’s proposal.

The current foundation programme is run by a team of experienced teachers and administrators who have worked with foundation students since the introduction of the programme in 2004.

V-ISA stands firmly against privatisation, and advocates a retention of the status quo. Our extensive consultations with current and former foundation students also reflected unanimous support for our position. While the proposal is beneficial to the school in terms of increasing enrolment and cutting costs (read: maximising profit), it is at the expense of the quality of education future students will receive, and prevents them from integrating into Victoria’s community.

When the programme was finally brought to Kelburn after over a decade of operation in a dying Karori campus, foundation students had more accessibility to student learning facilities and services. Close to 80% of the students we surveyed indicated that they use the Language Learning Centre and Student Learning Services almost every day. This has benefited them tremendously in their studies. Moreover, being at the heart of Victoria University, foundation students have many opportunities to integrate into wider community.

Future students are likely to be situated off of the Kelburn campus since the school cited a risk of capacity issues. This will seriously threaten the quality of education they will receive, especially when they pay for a Victoria-branded education. It also calls into question of the effectiveness of “Victoria Experience Enhancements”—an ambiguous initiative interpreted as a bridge to mend a broken link between school and student.

The foundation programme serves as a transition from high school to university. Without the people who have both the expertise of the school’s university curriculum and an understanding of the needs of students, the foundation programme will cease to be attractive. V-ISA hopes to project the voices of foundation students to the school. We hope that the school will consider our voices seriously in their decision-making process.

Pleasures are ephemeral and range from the purely sensual (e.g. tasting ice cream) to the more complex (e.g. excitement when a try is scored or amusement when watching a sitcom). Both are fleeting, and repeating indulgence soon afterwards doesn’t work; by the fourth taste of an ice cream feelings of pleasure have evaporated. By mindfully savouring pleasurable experiences we maximise the benefit from them.

Gratifications are activities we enjoy doing, which are not necessarily accompanied by any emotion. The ultimate is “flow,” where the person is completely lost in the activity. The activity could be playing a sport, riding a wave, reading a book, volunteering, conversing, and so on. We have a clear goal and are challenged.

The challenge is equal to the task, we get immediate feedback, and have a sense of control.

A McKinsey study found that the productivity of top executives increased fivefold when they were in flow.* So how can university students harness flow?

Find the “sweet spot” between work which is excessively challenging and makes us anxious, and work which is insufficiently challenging, leading to boredom and apathy.

What about the spaces between flow? When we are stuck in the mire? It’s hard to concentrate when neglected thoughts and feelings re-emerge and pull us out of the here and now. When we can mindfully make room for all our thoughts / feelings we are most psychologically flexible and best able to meet our needs and move in a valued direction.** University is a stressful environment, guilt lurks 24 hours a day. Institutional feedback is slow and irregular.

Limited social contact leads to isolation for some. Step back and look at the big picture. You are unlikely to enjoy your studies or experience flow if your life is out of balance. Attend to important relationships. To your health: eat well; allow adequate time for sleep and exercise. Treat university like a job—reward yourself for a hard day’s work with down-time in the evening.

Mindfully savour pleasures that come your way, while accepting other thoughts and feelings as they arrive.

Have fun. Allow time for reflection. Lose yourself in activities apart from study. Be gentle with yourself. You are a human being, not a machine. * “Flow State: How to Cultivate a State of Bliss and Seamless Productivity.” Huffington Post. March 2014. ** For more on this see: “Psychological flexibility: How love turns pain into purpose.” Steven Hayes, TEDxUniversityofNevada.

32

Token Cripple

Women's Space

Henrietta Bollinger

Rose McIlhone

“I used to try to explain that in fact I enjoy my life, that it's a great sensual pleasure to zoom by power chair on these delicious muggy streets, that I have no more reason to kill myself than most people. But it gets tedious. God didn't put me on this street to provide disability awareness training to the likes of them…”

With this issue being 'Pleasure' and being the internetsavvy gal that I am, I googled “women and pleasure.”

I came across some pretty hilarious articles. One was titled “11 places a woman wants to be touched,” which included ears, feet, and hair (apparently we go to the hairdresser so often not because we want to maintain our beautiful locks, but because we desperately want men to stroke our hair).

In a society that portrays ‘sexy’ as thin, white, young, and submissive, while simultaneously erasing sexualities and gender identities that aren’t heteronormative, sexual empowerment is difficult. Have too much sex and you’re a slut. Don’t have sex and you’re a prude. Have sex with a woman and get sexualised for it. Have sex with a man and he’s probably going to assume you’re gonna get off from a couple of thrusts. Women are constantly sexualized, yet the idea that women have their own sexual desires is still surprising to some.

We’ve all seen porn, which shows a parallel universe where women go from zero to panting with little or no foreplay, have questionably frequent and instantaneous orgasms with little obvious effort from their partners.

Unfortunately, it’s not that easy for most of us, but I guess at least we’re not alone in our struggle. I’ve heard some heart breaking stories from my friends, where dudes think anal and blow jobs are the norm, but seem to have never heard of the mythical clitoris.

We’ve probably all heard the stereotype that women are ‘needy’ after sex and want to cuddle and men just want to sleep, but the truth behind that is probably that we’re just not satisfied.

After three years of being sexually active, lying there waiting for something to feel good, thinking I was broken, I realised masturbating was a thing that people with vaginas could do too. My boyfriend at the time brought me a vibrator (bless him) and my world was changed. Gradually I learned that sex could actually be pretty fun, and started being open about what I liked and disliked with my partners. Fast forward to now and my friends and I talk about what we’re into pretty openly, and I can honestly say learning about my sexuality was one of the most empowering things I’ve done.

Reading this quote from American activist, attorney, and author Harriet McBryde Johnson I laughed aloud in recognition. Acerbic, life affirming. It came from her New York Times piece “Unspeakable Conversations” in which she recounts meeting utilitarian moral philosopher and professor, Peter Singer: “…he doesn’t want to kill me. He simply thinks it would have been better all things considered if my parents had been given the option to kill the baby I once was.”

I laughed because I’m aghast at the fact that disability seems to mandate debate from everywhere— is it possible for us to live good lives? Historically our schooling and living arrangements have been segregated denying us the pleasure of friends and society, our romantic and sexual pleasure has been pathologized, and so many advances pivot around changing our bodies not social norms. Yet we remind non-crips to be thankful they are not us.

Being disabled can be difficult. Some days, I’d like a holiday in able-bodied-land. I also know disabled people on both sides of the euthanasia debate with disability rights at the heart of their arguments. However having recently warded off a man who offered me $50 and Jesus—commiseration—I wondered: is the happy cripple so impossible to comprehend?

I’m speaking from a privileged space as far as the hierarchy of disability goes. I’m educated, I have had a fairly self-determined life. I can articulate my thoughts independently. Even when we talk about inclusive change for this community we talk about it in watery terms: a “normal” and “good” life. These words seem to prescribe limits for our community. I wonder what would happen if we aspired to full lives, interesting lives, varied lives, complex lives, with ambiguous and challenging and radically pleasurable aspects? What if “good” living was about expecting the full spectrum of experience?

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The Feast

By Nicola Braid

Red pomegranate jewels Dripping rubies in our teeth The closest we’ll get to diamonds but today we are royalty.

Eyes wide and mouths wider biting down on words and sentiments that seep off our tongues like honey.

Pink wine and meringue crumbs litter sweet scents in the air The glasses look like cut-crystal even if the table is bare.

Looking back one day, dinner will have taken on a drunken haze but for that moment we were royal.

Red pomegranate jewels dripping rubies in our teeth.

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Digitales Matt Plummer

“If I realise my dream, I will have no regrets in life.” but also make them more pleasureable. Take interactive website OMGYes.com, which offers visitors the chance to “explore techniques from the first-ever large scale research about the specifics of women’s pleasure [which combine] the wisdom of over 2000 women, ages 18-95.”

For only $39 USD you can learn techniques such as orbiting, layering, staging, framing, signalling, accenting, hinting, and edging.

I’m guilty of focussing on a particular type of pleasure here, the type that belongs to our base desires which seek instant gratification. Sigmund Freud termed this the “pleasure principle,” but he also coined a corollary, the “reality principle.” A more mature concept in which we understand that gratification must at times be delayed for reasons of rationality, propriety, and well, reality.

This is a roundabout way of saying that there are other, less immediately obvious, ways that technology might give us pleasure or help put us on a more meaningful path to happiness. If pleasure is like a sugarhigh, these would be the low-GI options.

I’m thinking here of free apps such as f. lux, which promises to make your life better by automatically adapting the colour of your digital screens to the time of day. There’s plenty of research highlighting that exposure to the blue light typically given off by our digital devices messes with our sleeping patterns, so this seemingly simple application could yield great benefits when you take into account how important proper sleep is.

Oxford professor of neuroscience Russell Foster recently published research which suggested that getting five hours or less of sleep has the same effect on your brain as consuming large quantities of alcohol.

Or there are productivity tools like StayFocusd, a free Google Chrome extension which lets your disciplined, mature self trump you base-level pleasure-seeking urges by restricting the time you spend on time-wasting websites. Give yourself an hour a day on Facebook, block shopping sites during lecture times, block pretty much everything during exam time—it’s all possible using any number of productivity tools that defer instant gratification but may pay off big when it’s time to collect your results at the end of the term.

These dubiously inspirational words come from Hong Kong inventor Ricky Ma, who hit the headlines earlier this year when his homemade humanoid robot—a spooky approximation of Scarlett Johansson—was revealed to the world. In order to make his particular dream a reality he spent $50,000 of his own money and two years of his life teaching himself basic programming, electromechanics, and 3D printing.

Ma’s labour of love resulted in a digital doppelganger capable of smiling coquettishly, responding verbally, and even winking when the inventor passed on preprogrammed compliments. I find this curious passion project both creepy and impressive, and I can’t help wonder: what exactly drove Ma on this dedicated quest— loneliness, perhaps? Was the dream simply to build a humanoid robot, or to create some version of a beautiful yet compliant woman, a fantasy made silicon flesh? Was the idea to manufacture an object of pleasure for the creator, or was the real pleasure in the actual process of creation?

And what are the ethics of all this? I can almost hear his lawyers saying, “whatever you do, don’t admit it’s ScarJo.” Of course for many people technology offers, or at least promises to facilitate, more immediate potential for pleasure. Effectively de-stigmatising on-line hook ups, the highly-lucrative mobile love industry seems to have an app for everyone: from Grindr to Tinder to Thrinder (see Vice’s Karley Sciortino-hosted documentary for a good overview). These days cupid’s bow and arrow have been replaced by compatability algorithms, carefully-selected profile pics, and geolocated devices. Some mythical notion of ‘chemistry’ has been supplanted by photo filters and quantifiable stats.

And yet amidst all the frivolous superficiality of the hook-up culture that this tech has arguably spurned (leading some to feel we’ve experienced a ‘dating apocalypse’), there are real benefits. For those exploring their sexuality in rural or isolated areas where there aren’t gay bars these apps and websites have been liberating, enabling a type of connection and experimentation not previously possible without travel or relocation.

Technology promises not just to facilitate connections, 35

The Arts Section 37

Visual Arts

38

Music

39 Music 40 Film 41 Film 42

Games

43 TV 44

Books

45 Theatre

The Arts Section is sponsored by:

Thanks to Vic Books for providing copies to review.

Thanks to Reading Cinemas Courtenay for providing two complimentary tickets this week.

Thanks to Gordon Harris for providing a $100 gift voucher for the centrefold submission.

What are we waiting for?

Louise Rutledge

Steve Carr, Watermelon 2015 (Sony HD XCam, 33min, 20 sec. Video still.)

Steve Carr's Watermelon, is on show at City Gallery as part of the group exhibition Bullet Time, with work by Daniel Crooks, Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904), and Harold Edgerton (1903–90). On until June 10.

WHATS ON Jay Hutchinson, turn left at the end of the drive May 12–June 4 Enjoy Public Art Gallery 1/147 Cuba St www.enjoy.org.nz Opening: May 11, 5:30pm, all welcome Kate Lepper, DEAD BUG LIVE May 7–May 28 Toi Poneke Arts Center 61–69 Abel Smith St *The answer is 311.

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Visual Arts

Whatever desires, innocent or otherwise, Carr’s Watermelon tests the nuances of time, performance, and material transformation. It creates a space of bodily exchange and empathy, hooking us in until the inevitable end. Carr is a master of slow delivery and drawn out spectacle, positing tension as both an inevitable result on screen and an uncomfortable part of our own anticipation.

The end is worth the wait.

I’ll admit it, I am obsessed. Irrationally so. To the point I have watched this entire video numerous times over: in an Auckland gallery, on a computer at work, at home, twice in Wellington, again as I write this.

It’s the kind of gimmick that already exists on YouTube, shared alongside a “You won’t believe what happens when..!!” headline. Let’s see just how many rubber bands it takes to break a watermelon and film it from start to finish.* In Carr’s take on this watermelon tale, there’s no option for a quick result, no way to scroll down or skip to the end. Unless your timing is right, you just have to sit, wait, and see.

The more you watch, the more is revealed, or the more you start to notice. The rhythm of the womens hands moving in and out of the frame, the sharp smack of each rubber bands’ release, juice starting to froth from small fissures in the fruits skin as the twisted rope of rubber clinches the mellon a waist. I was seduced by the slowly bubbling and dripping moisture, in all its highdefinition glory. What could have been just another absurd experiment is rendered suggestive through these details.

Young and female, the hands with their slick red nails offer a preview of the fruit's flesh. Their gestures aim not to end in consumption, but in rupture—achieving the impossible through sheer repetition.

After waiting ten minutes, twenty, perhaps half an hour, what does this eventual climax satisfy? Is it the childish pleasure of watching two familiar materials being forced into a strange encounter, or do the signs of fruit and flesh, the buildup and release, culminate as something more erotic? Violence is palatable when acted out on a piece of fruit. Or is it a crowd mentality….???

Music

Record Collecting: Unknown Pleasures Grips record.

Vinyl is digging through the hip hop section after a long day. It’s finding out that Modest Mouse is reissuing their first LP. It’s your first colour record and your hundredth. It’s spinning your favorite song on a Tuesday and your sad jam on a Sunday evening. It’s late night spins and sleep-ins. Record collecting is the way you as a consumer and a fan show your appreciation of album and artist. In return, you get the highest audio quality and an experience you can share—nothing compares to a few drinks at a listening party for the new Parquet Courts record.

Vinyl is a social listening experience. In an age of solitary electronics and noise cancelling headphones, it’s nice to share every once in awhile. With vinyl’s steady increase in popularity, and artist’s newfound eagerness to press albums, now is the time to enter the vinyl world.

Don’t worry though, we’ve got your back. Here are the major keys of starting a record collection:

What was once the forbidden fruit of middle aged balding men has been reclaimed by the youth. Like baggy granddad sweaters or socks and sandals, vinyl is again an official fad (even though it never actually went away, just took a short hiatus). Records never stopped being made and never stopped being bought. In this new era, music consumption has reached an apex. Streaming is ubiquitous in today’s society, and anyone can release a track online and gain an audience. With issues of royalties and dodgy contracts running rampant in today’s music industry, vinyl has come back to fill the void between creator and consumer.

I have wanted to collect records ever since I saw my first White Stripes LP. I bought it before I had a record player and it sat in my closet for three years until I saved up enough to buy one. Explaining my love for PVC frisbees with grooves is difficult. It’s the mystique. How does it play? Why does it sound better? I never did get the answers, I was too busy looking for my next Death

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Dion Rogers

Turntables—Don’t Ever Play Yourself

The Records: Dream House

First things first, you need a turntable. This is the biggest barrier between you and success. Studylink doesn’t want you to win, going into record collecting with $6.50 isn’t going to cut it. However a common mistake is thinking you need to start with a $2000 deck and speakers the size of a small car. I recommend the middle of the spectrum; here are a few suggestions:

You made it. Your turntable is turning and your receiver is receiving. Time to buy some wax. With the perks of modern technology, vinyl shopping can be done from the comfort of your bedroom. Amazon, eBay, and to a lesser extent Trade Me, make it easy to find and buy the records you want at a good price. Now that’s all fine and dandy, but record collecting is all about community.

It’s time to get out of the house and hit the pavement.

Wellington has some fantastic record stores! I worked at Real Groovy Records in Auckland and if I’ve learned anything it’s that great record stores are few and far between, so cherish the ones you find. In Wellington there are three main spots:

Audio Technica AT LP 120 USB: $690–$750 This turntable is an all around champ at this price point.

I would know, it was my first. It can be used as a DJ turntable, and comes with a built in preamp that lets it plug in and play into any stereo with standard red and white RCA cables. You can’t go wrong with this one.

Slowboat Records Looking for classics? This is where you are going to find them. Just save a few hours to do some major digging, and score a second-hand gem.

Rough Peel Music The spiritual successor to Real Groovy Wellington, here is where you’re going to find your punk, hip hop, and new indie releases. They have Death Grips too, so that’s a ten in my book.

Grandmother’s old turntable: Free Feeling lucky? Attics and garages are fantastic hiding spots for turntables. If beloved granny doesn’t, bets are she’ll know someone who has one they are looking to get rid of. Plus, you never call anymore. She misses you. Go humour her and have some tea. You might come out with a sick vintage deck. The only side note is repairs can be costly, if it’s in several dust-covered pieces it might be worth reconsidering.

Death Ray Records Both? Both is good. Check their Facebook page for some of the up and coming restocks and beef up that collection. Plus the store is aesthetic heaven.

Speakers and Preamps: New Noise

1.

Record Care and Storage: Dance Yrself Clean There’s no point having records if you don’t look after them (duh). Here’s a few tips to keep them spinning:

So you got the deck, congratulations. Next up are the speakers and preamp. Turntables run differently to your average audio plug in, they need a phono input. Why? Because modern styli and phono cartridges give a very low level output signal of the order of a few millivolts which the circuitry amplifies and equalizes... basically, because it just does.

If you started with an Audio Technica or a turntable with a built in preamp, you get to skip this step and plug straight into any stereo. However do not despair if you have a turntable without a preamp, most 80s and 90s era receivers came with this input as standard. Trade Me is your friend in this regard, ask sellers if it has a phono input on the back and snag a deal. If you have an absolute beast of a stereo that you must absolutely use, there are options for you too. You can purchase an external preamp. These do all the work, cost about $150, and allow you to plug your turntable into the stereo of choice.

2.

3.

4.

Buy a record brush. Dust sucks, you’re going to need it. Brush before and after playing for the best results.

Record Sleeves. $20 for 100+ sleeves is a small price to pay for protected records.

Store records upright, never stack them. Warped records don’t play too well, keep them straight.

When your collection starts getting hefty it might be wise to invest in some shelves!

Heat warps records, keep your turntable and collection somewhere out of direct sunlight. Also make sure it’s on a flat surface.

Finally, have fun with it. A record at the end of a long week is such a great pick-me-up. Buy your favourites, show them off, and happy listening! Soon you too will be buying Beastwars records instead of beers. See you all next Record Store Day.

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Music

Pro-ject Debut Carbon: $680–$700 Around the same price as the Audio Technica, but with some omitted features. This turntable is more for those interested in aesthetics. Want to impress a certain someone in your life with your keen eye for interior design? This is the turntable for you. Want to take artsy Instagram pics to make you seem cultured? Again, the turntable for you. With a colour to suit the décor of every student-flat, it’s the artist’s choice.

The Jungle Book

The Boss

Directed by Jon Favreau 5/5

Directed by Ben Falcone 1/5

Review by Dana Williams and

Review by James Keane

Film

Leo Elliott-Jones

The only thing this movie is the boss of, is not letting me see it for free.

It’s not particularly offensive or anything, but it’s yet another unfunny, terrible American comedy confined to a single city location—boy does it let you know that it’s set in Chicago.

Melissa McCarthy stars as Michelle Darnell, a successful businesswoman whose profound lack of empathy and questionable financial practices land her in prison. Following this crippling blow, she remains determined to bounce back, using her skills to commercialize her former assistant’s homemade brownie club (you read it right) while also acknowledging the strengths of relationships with people.

It’s a shame that the latter never really came through, as McCarthy’s character lacks any real likeable features throughout the film.

Granted, it is established early on that she is brought up in a nunnery and has no real family, but in terms of the narrative, this is a poor attempt at encouraging the audience to empathize with her.

The jokes on her character’s part are an interesting mix of both ‘falling down’ and liberal usage of the word “fuck” towards other characters—often within earshot of children. Things like logic and general plausibility take a back seat when we consider that although Darnell is supposedly down in the muck and basically living on another person’s couch, she remarkably has the time to change expensive costumes between each scene. The movie basically disregards the idea of voluntary work and service, as Darnell not only assimilates a collection of Girl Guides into her corporate “brownie outlet”, but also leads them to fight on the streets with the Girl Guides group she took them from in the first place. In short, skip.

We’ll start by saying that we grew up watching Walt Disney’s 1967 The Jungle Book every other week, so Jon Favreau had some big shoes to fill. The film follows the narrative of Rudyard Kipling’s 1894 novel, but breathes new life into the series, turning it into a fun, thoughtful, and at times slightly scary adventure for adults and children alike.

Through a combination of incredible CGI, great choices in matching actors voices to the loveable characters, and some impressive acting from newcomer Neel Sethi as Mowgli, Favreau has hit the mark in this 2016 remake.

Mowgli, a man-cub raised by wolves, decides to leave the pack after receiving threats from the jungle tyrant Shere Khan (fantastically voiced by Idris Elba): a fearsome tiger with a disfigured face after a run-in with man’s “red flower” (fire). He sets off with Bagheera (voiced

by Ben Kingsley)—his strict, but kind father figure—on a journey that is as much about self-discovery as it is about evading the dangers of the jungle. Along the way, Mowgli makes friends with the loveable bear Baloo (Bill Murray) who encourages him that his human ‘tricks’ should be embraced, and might just be the “bare necessities” of human life in the jungle.

One of the most noteworthy scenes of the film is Mowgli’s encounter with the king of the jungle—King Louie. Voiced by none other than Christopher Walken, King Louie brings a Italian mobster styled flavour to the role, channeling something simialar to Al Pacino’s The Godfather. His humorous jokes are as short lived as his temper, and after discovering that Mowgli cannot summon the ‘red flower’ he embarks on a destructive rampage, resulting in the destruction of his empire and Mowgli, Bagheera, and Baloo’s narrow escape.

The Jungle Book is definitely a must see.

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Directed by David Farrier and Dylan Reeve 5/5 Review by Cassie Richards

In the lobby of the Embassy theatre sits a reclining leather chair, similar to what you’d find in a hairdressers. Attached to the arms and footrest, however, are manacles for ankles and wrists. Perfect for administering an unwanted haircut, perhaps. Or, in a more sinister twist, for holding somebody captive while you tickle them, mercilessly.

The chair is a fitting addition for the night of Friday April 22nd, when the Embassy hosted the Wellington premiere of documentary Tickled, in conjunction with the New Zealand International Film Festival’s Autumn Events programme. The project of former Nightline heartthrob and pop-culture journalist David Farrier, and friend Dylan Reeve, Tickled has been gaining traction after much talked-of appearances at Sundance and the True/ False Film Fest over in the States. Now, in Wellington, an expectant crowd are filing into the theatre, glancing warily at the tickling chair as they pass.

The trailer for the film manages to conceal as much as it reveals. Footage of men in athletic gear being tickled, death threats, Farrier looking perfectly ruffled and anxious, all had my interest piqued. But was this for real?

It had the trappings of a mockumentary—there’s no way that tickling could be this sinister.

A couple of years ago, Farrier came across a video on Facebook advertising for young male athletes to compete in something called ‘Competitive Endurance Tickling’, with offers of significant amounts of cash and all-expenses paid trips to Los Angeles. After reaching out to the Facebook page for an interview on the strange enterprise, Farrier 41

Film

started to receive aggressive, homophobic slurs in his inbox—along with legal threats. Naturally, he decided to start digging deeper, along with friend and television producer Reeve.

The story that unfolds is more perverse and menacing than I could have imagined, and is skillfully crafted by Farrier and Reeve, both in debut directing roles. Farrier narrates the film in his trademark deadpan style, and of the pair he has the most screen-time, serving as our guide to this very weird world. Where he boldly goes, Reeve follows behind with the camera, capturing awkward encounters and high-adrenaline moments.

Giving too much of the story away would be a disservice, as shock and disbelief are an integral part of the viewing experience—suffice to say, there is nothing innocent about this kind of tickling, or the people involved.

Watching two guys from New Zealand trying to decode such a weird situation, often encountering the brashness we’ve come to expect from some Americans, felt slightly surreal. Farrier and Reeve were right when they said before the film that Kiwi audiences would really appreciate what they were trying to do—the cinema erupted into laughter throughout the film, showing that sometimes that’s all you can do in the face of ridiculousness.

The cinematography is excellent; in particular, scenes of a wintery Michigan city stood out for me, perfectly capturing the bleakness and toil of a living in a place with few economic prospects. Farrier, Reeve, and their production team have clearly put a lot of consideration into how they want the film to come across. This isn’t a mere puff-piece on a wacky subject, but rather an examination of power, circumstance, and the things that drive us. Accompanying it all is a wonderful soundtrack from Kiwi musician Rodi Kirk, in collaboration with Florian Zweitnig.

Tickled delivered everything that I want from a documentary, answering all my key questions while still leaving plenty to ponder after walking out of the cinema.

See it when it is released New Zealand-wide from May 26.

Tickled

Loved

To begin with, all scoutable land is black. Your character pops up and down like a traditional nintendo character, a black little totoro against a swath of white.

It reminds me a little of Limbo’s design, where the player must navigate the silhouette of a little boy through a dangerously brutal, 2D landscape; which, like in Loved, is bleak and featureless except for the silhouettes of upcoming deadly barriers. In Loved these obstacles are essentially spikes and moving boulders made from rocks, so meeting your demise is a lot less creative.

Like with The Stanley Parable, to disobey orders reaps rewards but in a very different way. You’re treated like an insubordinate child. Your failure to comply is “disgusting” and “disappointing,” and just like that parent who thinks you’re an utter waste of space, it tells you “you will fail.”

Loved brings back every kid’s worst nightmare, failure in the eyes of their parent.

Yet the more you disobey, the more colorful the world becomes. Little square pixels dance about as you progress. Quickly, the light show begins to corrupt that distinct world of black and white. The spikes and moving rock-squares are covered with large red spots, so that it’s possible to keep going, but then it’s easier to get confused if you’re travelling quickly. In some ways, this emphasizes Loved’s underlying premise. In order to experience the beauty of life, you have to break away from the rigid “black-and-white” perspective of your parent(s). It means that the world is not as conceptually distinct, but there are more possibilities. In one of my playthroughs, I somehow managed to scale up the squares of colors I had generated through my failures. It was probably a glitch, but it certainly put the paradigm in perspective.

If you’re looking for a pleasure-filled adventure it may be better to choose The Stanley Parable over Loved. Still, if you’re looking for a game that will make you laugh simply out of wry humor, it may be the ticket. Just remember that despite its harsh words, the game only wants the best for you.

Games

Developer & Publisher: Alexander Ocias Platform: Browser-based, playable at ocias.com, kongregate.com, jayisgames.com

3/5 Review by Wellington Tremayne

Prepare to have your self-esteem lowered by Loved, a short, arcade-style adventure game that unabashedly sets out to frustrate and verbally abuse players. The game was conceived and developed by Alexander Ocias, an artist and graphic designer. Loved was constructed in Ocias’ spare time over the course of half a year. It is a game that is difficult and equally harsh in its criticism.

The browser-based game rides on the laurels of The Stanley Parable, a first-person interactive that flirts with the concept of meta-narration, and bridges the gap between reality and the game-world. The game experience becomes more enjoyable the more you irritate the narrator. The Stanley Parable was a huge success in indie circles, causing a flux of independent gamers familiar in code to start developing spin-offs. Loved appears to be one of these, but it takes the narrative aspect of The Stanley Parable to a new extreme.

“Are you a man or a woman?” The game asks as you begin. No matter your answer, the narrative contradicts and infantilizes you. Instead of “no, you are a man,” for example, the game replies “no, you are a boy.” It’s an immediate assertion of superiority over the player, setting the stage for subsequent emotional abuse. Loved treats the player like an aristocrat might treat street scum. “Go and touch the statue, and I will forgive you” it says, even if you have yet to disobey.

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RuPaul's Drag Race, Season Eight 5/5 Review by Katie Meadows

Start your engines! The pit crew is at the ready and the library is open, it’s time to get sickening with RuPaul’s Drag Race. A show you could be excused for not knowing about, but not forgiven for ignoring—no tea, no shade, no pink lemonade, squirrelfriend!

The brainchild of famous drag queen and selfproclaimed “supermodel of the world” RuPaul Charles, RuPaul’s Drag Race is a competition to find America’s next drag superstar and have a hell of a good time along the way. Overloaded with bright colours and double entendres, the show is a camp thrill ride that will surprise you with how deep it can be beneath its contoured exterior. Branded in her image, and with a soundtrack from her discography (available now on iTunes!), the show is a celebration of RuPaul and the path she has paved for young drag queens, but with an appropriate amount of tongue in cheek that holds it back from entering Tyra Banks levels of deranged narcissism. Full of messy queens, Heathers, Boogers, escándalo, hog bodies and back rolls (?!), it’s impossible to fully explain without sitting you down to watch an episode so you can see the romper room fuckery for yourself (and understand what I’m saying).

As a competitive reality show, it combines all the best qualities of reality classics like America’s Next Top Model, Project Runway, American Idol, but takes it to the next level and beyond, with every challenge on Drag

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TV

Race requiring a multitude of talents. Queens often have to sew and design an entire outfit, choreograph a dance, write songs and skits, on top of all the effort required to get into full drag—makeup, wigs, padding, and not least of all tucking—just for one episode. If their outfits and performances don’t leave RuPaul and her panel of judges gagging, the two bottom queens must battle it out in the incredibly epic Lipsync for Your Life (look up “Carmen and Raja lipsync” and thank me later), after which they will either stay or sashay away. Glue that wig down, practice your death drops, and stop relying on that bo-dy lest you end up going back to Party City where you belong.

Currently in its eight season, RuPaul’s Drag Race is going from strength to strength. There is an amazing line up this year, with comedy queens to fishy queens to a Vegas Britney Spears impersonator. The outfits are sickening and the faces are beat for the gawds. Standouts include Kim Chi, a Korean make up artist who beautifully serves anime princess realness; Bob the Drag Queen, a stand up comic from New York quick to read a bitch for filth; and Chi Chi DeVayne, a former gang member from Louisiana who has straight up made me cry with her powerful lipsyncs.

If you haven’t seen RuPaul’s Drag Race before all I can say is that you have been missing out completely, you have been deprived of pure joy in television form. Drag Race is my happy place. It’s simply the most creative, entertaining, and endearing show on air. It’s hard not to smile at puppet show roasts, or a musical homage to John Waters, or even a runway of drag queen Hello Kitties. Everyone involved puts their all into it in a dazzling display of charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent. Hilarious, inspiring, and frequently moving, Drag Race challenges you to live your life authentically. It preaches self-love and encourages embracing your differences (despite the amount of shade thrown). At the end of the day: if you can’t love yourself how in the hell are you gonna love somebody else? Can I get an amen up in here?

Books

Gratitude

Scary Old Sex

Oliver Sacks Publisher: Knopf Doubleday

Arlene Heyman Publisher: Bloomsbury

5/5

4/5

Review by Sarah Batkin

Review by Cassie Richards

Oliver Sacks made the medical world, neuroscience in particular, accessible and interesting for thousands of people through his books. The first book I ever read of his was The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, a touching and deeply fascinating series of stories in which he recounts the mental deficiencies of his patients, one of whom literally did mistake his wife for a hat.

He also helped us to better understand ourselves and his latest (and unfortunately last) book Gratitude, which was published posthumously in late 2015, is no exception.

Sacks meditates and reflects on the death and joy he has encountered in his own life, grappling with an experience that is unique to every individual—in a way that only he could. He allows us to understand his journey and acceptance of the inevitable, but he also leaves us with a feeling of reassurance, a feeling that we should not fear death but celebrate life instead.

The book is short and consists of four individual essays each touching on a slightly different topic. He takes us through childhood memories, his early fascination with the periodic table, his Orthodox Jewish upbringing, his first diagnosis with the melanoma that would kill him, and his reconciliation with being terminally ill.

If ever you feel down, depressed, or anxious about what might be and what hasn’t been done, I can almost guarantee that reading this book will make you feel at least a little bit better. Take it from Sacks: “I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life—achieving a sense of peace within oneself.”

Arlene Heyman’s journey into literary recognition has been a little unusual. At 74 years of age, Scary Old Sex—a collection of short stories, is her first publication. Heyman is a practicing psychiatrist in New York City, and has spent the last 50 years writing in her spare time and has had stories published in literary journals to much acclaim. But, it’s not until this year that her talent is seeing the full light of day.

The title serves as a double entendre, addressing both the stories about old people having sex, and the nature of sex as something to fear and to not talk about.

In the opening story, “The Loves of Her Life”, a 65 year old woman and her 70 year old husband navigate the intricacies of sex in later life—Viagra, unattractive bodies, lubricant, and the memory of a first husband. “In Love With Murray” details the affair between a young art student and a famous, married painter. “Dancing” tells the story of a man with leukemia, his wife, and their teenage son, set against the backdrop of the World Trade Center terrorist attacks. Coupling (haha) her psychiatrist’s eye with plenty of warmth, Heyman boldly writes of pleasure, love, and loss.

I’ll be honest: reading about old people having sex was a strange, rather confronting experience. It turns out that wrinkly bodies are somewhat missing from my reading habits, although this wasn’t necessarily a conscious choice. It’s just never occurred to me to be curious about the practical facets of life at the other end. Heyman’s stories have certainly updated that outlook, and I’m glad that I decided to pick up this bold and enlightening collection.

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A Trial: “It’s Plaintiff to see” Review by Adeline Shaddick

lawyers, Justice Jody Ranzerson fell asleep with her travel pillow, craved some chips, and even started blowing bubbles. Her quips sought to distract the audience as the lawyers spoke, and caused me to question whether the information from the lawyers was necessary.

Courtney T. Aker (Williams) as the court taker, and Jacqui Strongarm (Tate-Manning) as member of the press, performed their roles entertainingly, through Courtney eating an apple behind her clipboard and only occasionally court taking, and Jacqui’s incessant need to take pictures even though it was forbidden. These moments added to the parody and illustrated how intrusive the media can be.

Overall, A Trial was an authentic and interesting piece of theatre, revealing the performative nature of courtrooms and how old fashioned the modern justice system is. A Trial is now over, and I can now confirm that the jury decided the unnamed Defence was not guilty for defamation. I hope the cast presents another case for theatre-goers to engage with.

What’s on this week?

Comedy Festival continues this week with improv and comedy coming out of our ears! Between the assignments that are due and tests to study for, go and enjoy what it has to offer!

On at BATS: Taking Off the Bird Suit May 10–14, at 6.30pm Look at Me May 10–14, at 7.00pm It Goes On May 10–14, at 9.00pm 50 Minutes Plus Laughs May 12–14, at 8.30pm On at Circa Theatre: Promise and Promiscuity May 3–21, at 7.30pm

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Theatre

A Trial, devised by Jo Randerson, Maria Williams, Joel Baxendale, Karin McCracken, and Anya Tate-Manning, transformed the dome stage at BATS into a courtroom.

With Justice Jody Ranzerson bringing the New Zealand High Court to this beloved theatre space, for five nights, the public was given an opportunity to see a defamation case that TVNZ had brought against an unnamed defendant. The case investigated the TVNZ Kiwi survey and questioned whether it was a useful measure of national identity, or simply encouraged racism as the unnamed defendant suggested.

On each of the five nights, more of the trial was revealed and played out similarly to a ‘court-room’ drama. I would’ve liked to have attended every night, and seen how A Trial developed and reached a verdict. However when I went they managed to draw the audience in through a satirical depiction of the modern justice system, and were clear in setting up characters and their statuses within the room. I viewed the show on a Tuesday (the second night of A Trial): lawyers Mr Beckensdael and Miss Rizmackon examined two witnesses regarding the survey, one being David Farrar—creator of Kiwiblog. The witnesses seemed to be following a script provided, or like David Farrar were genuinely saying what they believe and know. This added veracity to A Trial, through the presentation of real evidence in front of a real jury selected from the Wellington public—it was not only comedic but authentic.

From a wider perspective, A Trial emphasised how lawyers ‘perform’ in courtrooms. Trials always seem performative; from the moment the judge enters and everyone rises, to the lawyers dramatising evidence to the jury to state their case and point. This was a key reason that the show was created, and Karin McCrackin and Joel Baxendale portrayed contrasting lawyers. Joel being the “boring” Plaintiff, ensuring all facts are heard even when they have very little relevance, and Karin being the “sharpwitted” Defence, serious and aggressive.

The producer Jo Randerson, a highly valued theatre practitioner and judge for A Trial, showed the audience just how little judges are required in courtrooms. As she sat centre stage of the Dome, in her grand cardboard stand (designed by Nick Zwart and Meg Rollandi) she was visible to all audience members. Trying to be subtle, she expressed many emotions judges undoubtedly consider throughout the trial: from boredom to critiquing the

Puzzles Made by Puck

'Category Five' Target goals

Each of the words or phrases listed below contains a hidden member of a category, missing a letter. Identify the members of the category (each of which is four or more letters long), and figure out what letter is missing from each. The missing letters, in order, spell out the name of the category.

As a hint, one word in the list has a star next to it - the hidden word in it is missing its first letter.

Good: 18 words Great: 21 words Impressive: 23 words

FAR EAST BISMUTH HASTEN ON HURRICANE ELIDA ELVIS COSTELLO CRINKLE DIMETHOATE HUMBUG * TOM WAITS Week 9's 'Category Five' solution: PRESIDENTS - (p)olk, tyle(r), cart(e)r, adam(s), p(i)erce, har(d)ing, r(e)agan, lincol(n), (t)aylor, haye(s).

Letters Easy WRITE US LETTERS, VALIDATE US Dear Salient The best part of Salient (Letters) has either 1 or no letters published! The people have spoken - please get writing your letters!

Makes my day! And folks you all have a great day too!!

Signed 'Letter Mad'!

Thanks BB Hey Emma and Jayne, Just wanted to tell you that I thought you guys did a fabulous job on this week’s issue! :) I really enjoyed the Editor’s Letter, especially the part about the different kind of pain we experience. Also I loved the design of the cover! The columns were a great read as well. Keep up the awesome work!

That’s all from me, Fangirl x

Medium

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Contributors

About Us Salient is published by, but remains editorially independent from, the Victoria University of Wellington Students’ Association (VUWSA). Salient is a member of the Aotearoa Student Press Association (ASPA). Salient is funded in part by Victoria University of Wellington students through the Student Services Levy. The views expressed in Salient do not necessarily reflect those of the Editor, VUWSA, or the University.

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Complaints People with a complaint against the magazine should complain in writing to the Editor at editor@salient.org.nz and then, if not satisfied with the response, to VUWSA.

Editors Emma Hurley and Jayne Mulligan editor@salient.org.nz Design and Illustration Ella Bates-Hermans designer@salient.org.nz News Editor Kate Robertson news@salient.org.nz Chief Sub Editor Tim Manktelow Distributor Ella and Jayne News Reporters Siobhan O’Connor Alex Feinson Jennie Kendrick Charlie Prout McKenzie Collins Meriana Johnson

Section Editors Cassie Richards (Books) Dana Williams and Isaac Brodie (Film) Harri Robinson (Music) Ophelia Wass (Theatre) Ruby Joy Eade, Lucy Wardle, Louise Rutledge, Robbie Whyte (Visual Arts) Cameron Gray (Games) Katie Meadows (TV) Other contributors Laura Toailoa, Rakaitemania Parata Gardiner, Jonathan Gee, Alice Lyall , Sharon Lam, Brodie Fraser, Dr Feelgood, Rose McIllhone, V-ISA, Cathy Stephenson, John Barclay, Henrietta Bollinger, Nicola Braid, Matt Plummer, Adeline Shaddick, Dion Rogers, Leo Elliott-Jones, James Keane, Wellington Tremayne,

Contributors of the week Our news reporters, for being badass and cool.

Feature Writers Faith Wilson Finnius Teppett Sarah Batkin Cameron Price

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