Warwick Shootout - "Watch"

In the last week of term (ever!) at Warwick, I along with some mates from RaW entered the Shootout film-making competition. Two very nasty conditions of the competition are in-camera editing (i.e. no shuffling of scenes on a computer) and having 24 hours to make the 4-minute film. 28 teams entered; The Rats' Nest consisted of myself, Ben Worsfield, Will Thomas, Charlie Fuller and Matt Rebeiro.

Due to a mixture of creativity, stubbornness and, frankly, distilled genius we won Best Performer (Will), Best Direction and Best Film.

ITS - Immuno Technologically Shitty syndrome

Warwick loves to represent itself as one cohesive whole. It has smug little banners as you drive in. The campus is encapsulated within the bounds of University Road. Big Nige invites you to breakfast to allow students to give him feedback. There’s even a book about Warwick PLC – we’ve all heard the student spiel about the vast, corporate machine. Except that this cohesion is porkier than the animated pig. Everywhere you look, campus is in fact a Sellotaped machine of cogs. Lecturers, I have generally found, refuse to be cogs. From the snide, throwaway remark about the infantilism of seminar registers to a downright refusal to follow standard marking schemes, academics will always be stubborn bastards. Hurray.

Now this is where the bitch comes. A streaming deluge of vitriol and frustration, poured liberally over one particularly cogged and clogged machine. ITS. May they be disembowelled and hung on the ‘Welcome to Warwick’ poles. It has to be said, Res Net is vastly improved from my arrival in 2005. It took them a couple of years to wise up on the big download clients like SoulSeek, LimeWire and BitTorrent, but they got there eventually. Hey look - they even know what 4OD is! Now last time a fellow journalist bitched about one tentacle of the Warwick octopus, he was summoned to the department in question and got a smacked botty. It’s discourteous to complain through a student newspaper apparently. The correct approach is of course to complain to the department itself.

This poses a slight problem with ITS. While the residential network is buffing its nails and ignoring your frantic attempts to access JSTOR, you are of course incapable accessing customerservices@warwick.ac.uk. By the time service is restored (the February record is 48 hours, with a hitch in Monday’s service of…oh, 3 hours and counting), all that seething anger which you could channel into such beautifully vituperative eloquence has completely died. You’re just thankful to have Facebook again. With a righteous indignation only topped by Christian saints, I constructed an e-mail of (fairly) polite complaint. After a fortnight’s gap, I got a thinly veiled middle-finger from their ‘customer services’ desk. ‘Resolution,’ it said in tones of injured pride, ‘was not as expedient as we had wished’.

Well that’s one thing you got right.

I feel sorry for them sometimes. Their mission statement, to which I’m inclined to give about as much credence as Thomas’ lost Gospel, is simply to give us students the Internet. And the most efficient way to do this is to stop us downloading the next series of Lost. Fair play. What they’ve failed to take into consideration is Warwick’s inherent geekiness. If the odd theatre student can come equipped with a sound knowledge of html, then my God, what are the computer scientists capable of? So they ban one thing, and the Geek Army C++ their way out of it. And down comes Res Net. According to a polite lady in Reception, ITS don’t work on weekends. I thought it an embarrassing misconception on her part not to realise that they don’t work on weekdays either. Poor lady, what did she know.

I am an honest citizen. I have never downloaded at Warwick, though I did manage to stop Res Net for a day without even knowing about it. But that’s a story for another day. Like discovering a faithless lover, I don’t even know what to fume most about. Is it the wasted time and money on an unfulfilling service? Or is it the overwhelming sense of dishonesty, the lack of prior warning? I resort to the inferior services of the library or (grurgh) the student computer room. Such a grey, soulless experience. All I can do is write another twisted love letter, to vent my bitter feelings. ‘Dear ITS, I would like to lodge a complaint’. There. That told you.

Disproportional representation

So the elections are over. Do you care? Did you even vote?

No. Of course you didn’t. I know this, because the voting figures comprised under 15% of the university’s student body. And that minuscule percentage will consist of the candidates, their pets, and that bloke they met at the pub. A few members of the media societies perhaps who have yet to drown in their own hypocrisy.

Voter apathy is a bad habit at so young an age. This being an exceptionally middle-class university, disdain at proletarian ignorance during the general elections usually results in ‘Well...it’s probably a good thing half the population don’t vote. They wouldn’t even know what they’re voting for.’ The SU aren’t quite as cack-handed as the Blair government, but it might be if you don’t tell it what to do. You’re not ‘the population’; you’re in the top 5% of intelligent people in this country. Unless you go to Score.

I covered the elections night on Saturday for RaW. People who asked me about it were generally impressed at the fact that the winning candidate (Stuart ‘Tommo’ Thomas) obtained almost double the votes than rival Peter Ptashko. I told them to fuck off. 1712 votes made Tommo’s victory. That's not an impressive feat. There are approximately 20,000 union members and about 12% of you voted. 1712 people do not represent the Warwick student body; therefore neither does Tommo. I’m not questioning the legitimacy of his win. He is indisputably the Union President, and if you don’t like it, then it’s your own fault. How can Stuart Thomas possibly claim to represent the student body when barely any of them bothered to check out and question his policies? What are his views on No Platform vs. free speech? What is he really going to do about the Union rebuild?

There were some interesting claims in the manifestos which needed serious grilling from the students to ascertain their veracity. How exactly did James Berragan intend to overrule the University and encourage such publications as the Sanctuary? How did Peter Ptashko finally pull off a lecture-free Freshers’ Week? Did Peter Thomas actually have any policies of his own or was he just a Tory Party bitch? Frankly I found all of the presidential candidates an unprepossessing bunch and voted for persistent underdog R.O.N. Although I voted for Woolley second, solely because it was nice to come across something resembling a sense of humour. ‘Nuts about Students’ didn’t quite cut it for me.

Elections intrigues are actually quite interesting, if you look into them. For example, a certain member of the democracy committee is allegedly under investigation for mouthing off about the rivals of a wannabe Sports Officer. Who is, incidentally, her boyfriend. Meanwhile, it’s likely that Tommo garnered a good proportion of his votes from Warwick Snow Society, of which he happens to be President. Warwick Snow isn’t the only society to attempt to monopolise the elections campaigns; there are also candidate clusters from RAG and of course the Tories. RAG, it appears, has won the day showing the Warwick students apparently prize altruism. Or they may just be familiar with new Societies Officer Lucy Reynolds as she chairs the RAG quiz every Sunday. Another wannabe Sports Officer claimed to have founded a club, but failed to mention that he was voted off the exec by his own team. And so on and so forth.

I have, at best, an ambiguous relationship with the SU. I don’t like how soft drinks cost as much as alcohol on a night out. I dislike its insistent monopolisation of student creativity (i.e. a vicious dislike of the Sanctuary). I think that flirt! was a really, REALLY bad idea. I don’t quite understand why it has a pro-life stance. But I do realise that anyone who dislikes any aspect of the SU should probably make things change by voting. This isn’t the general election, and actually, your vote does make a difference. Get involved. Come on....propose a motion to get rid of Score at the next Union Council meeting. You know you want to. No? Bugger...

Political correctness

Driven to extremes by poverty last term, I risked the campus hairdressers. I was assigned a perfectly pleasant young man who lived in Kenilworth and thought Leamington made an exotic night out. I hate hairdresser/dentist/builder chit-chat but this one was new and as yet not worn down by the tedium of student attempts at small-talk.

As he was making me the new Tina Turner, he questioned my country of origin. Being a British subject, I replied I was English. This appeared to bemuse him and he said, ‘But…you are Indian originally aren’t you?’ I thought it would be unfair to pick out his vague use of ‘originally’ or indeed his assumption that I wasn’t perhaps Pakistani, Filipino, Iranian, Iraqi, Indonesian, Bangladeshi or North African. Strangely, I preferred his direct curiosity to the pained expressions of gap-year students who struggle to ask me the same basic question in politer terms. Ignorance is easier to deal with it when it’s obvious.

So I smiled back at him and replied that my parents were indeed Indian but had been in England for almost 30 years. Without any hesitation, he asked whether my upbringing had been strict. Again, I could have been pedantic about what strictness strictly means. Was he viewing strictness through eyes accustomed to media images of the hijab and honour killings? Because if that was the case, I clearly wouldn’t be sat in a hairdresser’s chair at Warwick uni. To be honest, I don’t think he thought the definition through that much. I looked at him quite carefully as I remarked that my parents were fairly Westernised.

I don’t remember what this man looked like, but I remember his exact tone as he grinned broadly and replied ‘Oh well, we like ‘em like that’.

I was unoffended. He was the man waving scissor blades in close proximity to my face, after all. But there was a genuine innocence in this whole dialogue where I almost felt it was a travesty to read too much into it. But I still don’t know whether I’m excusing ignorance for innocence. Is it right, is it hysterical to question what this man’s attitude would have been to the people who aren’t ‘like that’. And was it worrying that this man can only have been a year older than myself?

Strangely, it was a more subtle episode with a fellow student which troubled me more.

I rarely take offence to racial insults levelled at me, usually because they are in jest. It’s one very confusing symptom of a post-post-post modern culture of irony and self-effacement that allows one white man to call a coloured man ‘chocolate bear’ out of nothing but affection. Some months after my exchange with the hairdresser had taken place, I was assigned a presentation by a tutor. It involved meeting another student to discuss a novel set in Kerala, in South India. South India is as foreign a country to me as it is to most of the Caucasian population. Probably most gap year students know more about it than I do.

I barely knew this student except from a term of seminars together. Yet when it came to working together, he somehow felt it appropriate to comment a propos of nothing that my room decorations were my way of displaying my ethnicity. Everything in my room is from Paperchase, and not from cottage-industry workers as he seemed to presume. I was slightly non-plussed by his non-sequitur but put it down to social awkwardness. When it came to analysing the novel, he proved to be no better than my Kenilworth hairdresser, telling me that I might as well carry the seminar as I’d know more on the subject than anyone else. The beauty of these comments was that they were so indirect. I don’t know what it was about them which annoyed me – the fact that they weren’t funny, that they came from a stranger or whether I just felt they were offensive.

‘Political correctness gone haywire’ is a phrase I often seem to hear from the polite middle-class who constantly attempt to use ‘correct’ terms and phrases when referring to diverse cultures. But the effect of this correctness on the younger generation seems to have led to an almost ideological problem. How can I accuse anyone of prejudice when they make such veiled remarks? Would drawing attention to myself create some kind of negative boy-cried-wolf reputation for trouble? Racism, sexism and all the other isms aren’t as apparent as they were in the 1950’s. Scandals like football-pundit Ron Atkinson in 2004, or more recently Australian cricketer Andrew Symonds this year are actually quite rare in the media.

Middle-class racism is exceptionally difficult to perceive. Under a veil of politically correct language, it’s difficult to differentiate between personal opinion and prejudice. Take Ron Atkinson’s remark: ‘Chinese women are the unprettiest in the world’. Had Big Ron Manager chosen to, he could have quietly hidden the obvious idiocy in this remark behind a more careful phrase, like ‘I personally don’t find Chinese women attractive’. Simply by adding ‘personally’, the speaker implies that his view of Chinese women is not universal. This in itself is of course not racist – but can allow someone who is racist to mask prejudice or ignorance under this kind of veiled dialogue.

I return to the incident over my ethnic decorations and my apparently inherent knowledge of South India. Strip away the mask of vocabulary, and what this student implied was that there was a basic sameness about the myriad Indian cultures. He felt no need to ask my ethnic origin because he assumed a person who looked Indian must be Indian, despite my never making this apparent. He also assumed that however I decorated my room, it was consistently with this ethnicity in mind. But precisely because these two strange remarks were made in a casual, work-oriented context, I am still puzzling out my reactions. I haven’t ever even mentioned to this person that I was uncomfortable with his remarks.

Why should a generation used to that strange animal, ‘multiculturalism’ find it so difficult to communicate? Political correctness is only a virtue when it illumines rather than hides. To know that Kerala is very different from Bengal, to understand that the standards of beauty amongst the Chinese are no more nor less than amongst any other nation and the willingness to accept that Westernisation can be materially damaging – that is political correctness.

In the beginning there was the Word...

I have decided that Leamington Spa is Warwickshire’s own cursed city, the Babylon of the Midlands. Those of you familiar with the Bible (King James, Good News or Rainbow’s illustrated) will be aware that there is a particular passage in which God promises not to try and actively destroy mankind. Go and look it up, it involved rainbows.

If you have lived in Leamington, you will have had a biblical experience to finally prove that this was in fact complete bollocks. June 2007 saw me fishing out my exam notes from my own personal Noah’s Flood. One minute I was swinging about on my chair reading a book, the next I was ankle-deep in water. This had an annoying cinematic quality to it, which meant when I ran screaming upstairs, no one was inclined to believe I was being serious.

My room was pond-like at the best of times. I lived in a basement, which offered me the dual pleasures of eternal darkness and the extensive scenery offered by…a brick wall. Interesting green spores seemed to grow and shrink on my walls, leaving the odd splotchy pattern here and there. Fun as these were, I developed a kind of death rattle whenever there was an impending rainstorm.

Being a strident atheist and therefore needing someone more earthly to take the blame, I felt that my landlord, in this case was God. God, in this case, is a multi-millionaire with a monopoly over the properties of Leamington. Not only was his beard inescapable evidence, but it was always his emissaries and never the man himself who checked out the damage. This is the man who is everywhere and yet nowhere in Leamington at once, particularly when the toilet had sprung a midnight leak. I’d always had aspirations as a child to live in a house with an indoor swimming pool, though said aspirations didn’t involve me actually living in the pool.

With my second year exams due to begin the next day, I began to panic. I stood ankle-deep in water and watched my notes drift by with much the same horror that you’d watch an incautious squirrel drown. It was one of the better dog-ate-my-homework stories I could present to my tutors. The next day, our local and entirely useless estate agent dropped by. I opened the door to a trim, portly gentleman wearing the kind of pratty suede shoes which would inspire a feeling of bilious hatred in any feeling human soul. He had a comb-over and carried a man-bag. Purposely, I allowed him to lead the way to my room and watched with spiteful amusement as he soaked a pristine shoe in four inches of stagnant water. He swore a lot.

God sent his ministering angels after I kipped on the sofa to aquavac the remnants of the flood. Quite pikey angels from Leicester, who stole my rug and didn’t appear to comprehend that painting over the mould wasn’t actually akin to getting rid of it. By midnight, I was wallowing in a quagmire of theological housing despair. Much as I’d like to pretend that Leamington is a pit of sin being purged by a hail of terrors, it isn’t. It’s just full of students, locals and a bearded lady with an obsession with 50ps.

Following the stars across south Leamington in search of a bed for the night and bent under the weight of my worldly possessions, I pondered. Maybe God was trying to tell me something about the wider world. Is Leamington just a microcosmic version of the property ladder? I find myself beleaguered by rivers of sewage, locust-like landlords, a hail of useless agents and naturally, a plague of mice. I can’t claim that God killed my first-born, but that’s probably only because I don’t have one. Now I know how Job felt.

Pole politics

2005 was a confusing year for the feminist cause. On a national scale, the supposed bra-burners roared over a culture of sex, drugs and more sex brandishing aloft the piquant weapon that was Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs. The sub-title was, slightly less pithily, ‘women and the rise of raunch culture’. It begins: 'Meet the Female Chauvinist Pig – the new brand of “empowered woman” who wears the Playboy bunny as a talisman, bares all for Girls Gone Wild, pursues casual sex as if it were a sport, and embraces “raunch culture” wherever she finds it.’

In short, the products of the feminist generation like to pretend they’re as hardy as blokes in the more biological aspects of romance.

Sadly for Ariel Levy, England – and our university included - saw a massive rise in a new fad exercise – pole-dancing. If you were a Fresher in Warwick, you might have spotted innocent pastel leaflets advertising a fun new dance club. Warwick Exotic Dancers began as a casual exercise class run between the exec and a professional dancer.

When I joined up to Warwick’s new society, the only Ariel I knew did my washing. When I oh-so-playfully wrote for an e-zine declaring the unimpeachable health benefits of pole-dancing, somewhere above, Emmeline Pankhurst despaired.

2 years later, and I have become the very fuddy-duddy I originally sought to defy. Smug in my post-modern (synonym: non-existent) feminism, I would gather up my shorts and leather boots and sashay pole-wards. I got a dubious kick from the strained ‘...you do pole-dancing?’ and the lit-up eyes from my male friends. Because dance is a performance art. Any kind of dance. And any woman swinging around a pole imagines – however fleetingly, usually not that fleetingly – herself in front of admiring audience.

Which is, incidentally where the Warwick Exotic Dancers found themselves in 2007. In order to gain status as a society, the Warwick Exotic Dancers had to convince the resident Women’s Officer that this was quite definitely a non-spectator sport. They succeeded, and the women were left to eventually reach a semi-professional standard. There’s certainly nothing to be said against their dedication.

But, but. The constitution has now been amended to allow the society to give performances. How this one has slipped through the cogs is an astonishing display of Union bumbling. This is not merely performance in theory – 2 members of all the media societies were cordially invited to a gratuit performance. And the 2 that jumped at the chance in our biggest media society, RaW, were naturally men.

And what else was to be expected? Will they honestly persuade themselves that they are watching amateur athletes, displaying an acrobatic finesse to be admired as much for its difficulty as aesthetic beauty?

On one side of the media sphere, the university (with the Union’s support) bans The Sanctuary on campus.* Its justification is that the newspaper is run for profit. Why this is ethically more catastrophic than a group of intelligent women insulting themselves for the sake of entertainment is something only the skewed morals in the Ents office may explain to me.

I’m all in favour of free choice, and the society is of course free to do as it chooses. It is not free to choose how its audience thinks about its performers. Think for a minute ladies (gentlemen may find this one easier to answer) – what exactly do you like about pole-dancing? Really? What puts it above a nice game of table-tennis? Come off it, don’t tell me it’s ‘muscle tone’. It’s that little naughty thrill a woman apparently gets pretending to be, basically, a kind of sex worker. Because every kind of dance has a performance element in mind. I genuinely worry that a Warwick student could make an active choice to perform a pole-dance for an audience - it renders the intellect which got her here in the first place null and void.

*Actually this is a lie. The university is not banning the Sanctuary, it is merely exercising its right to remove it from its private property. Just to clear that up.

Right of reply: listen to the pole-dancers talk to Soapbox

Beardbook

The current target of my wrath is a technological development which has brought our society closer to a complete stripping of privacy. It has rendered us open to all kinds of invasive private censorship.

It is of course that scapegoat of all evils, Facebook.

A friendly SSLC representative informs me that my academic department has issues with Facebook. Namely groups created on them. Namely groups created specifically about lecturers. Apparently there are 16 related to the English department alone.

Out of sheer curiosity I attempted to track said 16 down. I also didn’t particularly fancy reading Frankenstein. By typing in ‘English literature’, only 1 student-created group in any way relevant to lecturers appeared. (Debating the resemblance between a tutor and Rasputin, incidentally). It’s a fun game – try it with your own department.

This leads me to conclude that some poor clerical munchkin (let’s call him Dobby) spent some small, yet irretrievable fraction of its lifetime constructing imaginative search terms in order to track down the other 15 groups. What were they?

I saw no reason to follow the footsteps of the clerical munchkin, but I can only assume Dobby typed in the name of each and every lecturer, module and – shudder – novel which has any link to the English syllabus. My own minutes of research have mostly revealed much aesthetic appreciation of several tutors (including, bizarrely, their facial hair). This presumably means Dobby’s search terms will have also included ‘beard appreciation’ and ‘sex god’. I found nothing personally insulting as such, although there was the occasional grumble about modules, unsurprisingly. I did spend minutes on this, though. Irretrievable minutes.

Evidently the English department is not the only victim of such churlish behaviour. Dobby’s colleague over in the business school (let’s call him Kreacher) and other clerical munchkins across the arts subjects have similarly spent irretrievable minutes on the subject. Kreacher – like his department – is particularly efficient, and fans of pro-whisker groups and the like may expect impolite e-mails from him suggesting that you remove the textual manifestation of your beard-appreciation. If you don’t, Kreacher will tell your personal tutor. And the senior tutor. And another undergraduate bigwig. So nyah.

Quite what these brass hats will do about your beard-appreciation remains a fudged matter. Suggest therapy perhaps?

If on the other hand, you have taken the opposite stance and are particularly anti-beard, you should also refrain from commenting. Any expression of personal dislike on these groups is deemed, it appears, inappropriate. Inappropriate for what? Have a look in your undergraduate handbooks. There are rules forbidding you from plagiarism, cheating in exams and pushing deadlines. What I can’t find – and please e-mail me if you do – is the clause: ‘Students found expressing anti-barbigerous sentiments via Facebook will face disciplinary action.’ And they would use barbigerous. Just to be unnecessarily spiteful munchkins.

Because that is what this whole debate is – whether you’re the clerical munchkin or the creator of a group. Good lecturers are necessarily subject to scrutiny from their young observers. It’s the inevitable fascination with the mentor figure and frankly, an inevitable consequence of any form of teaching. Look at JD and Dr Cox. Our beard fantasies look positively healthy in comparison.

Facebook is exactly what it claims to be, and no more. Academic departments make fools of themselves and their students by taking this new form of social communication much too seriously. Attempting to police the groups simply shows a reactionary and worryingly suppressive attitude. Certainly derogatory groups are lamentable but ignore it, for crying out loud. Weren’t you taught that in the playground?

The moral of the story is: never assume your lecturers and tutors have personalities. Take no mark of their mannerisms, foibles or academic merits. In no way analyse them amongst yourselves, personally or physically. Analysis? What do you think you are – a student?