The English music scene is a bizarre beast. To be sure, the market suffers from its pap bands that have endless sunshine blown up their rear ends and enough tuning done with their hair and imagethat the kids can’t help but give in to their charms. One only has to refer to last week’s feature on “Hurricane Pop!” to find examples of musically frail superstars.But there are, equally, hundreds of bands that can play away admirably, keeping tight and rocking hard without ever making any ground in our fundamentally retentive market. We as a nation seem to struggle with taking a risk. Bristol based Transition are exactly the type of band that could be put into this bracket.Here are a band that have been togetherfor their entire formative years, as frontman Jesse Eedbrooke was keen to emphasise during our conversation.Yet most are still to hear from these home-grown rock gents. “We met when we were all ten, eleven, or twelve, when the Ddunne brothers (Niall, guitar, and Steve, bass) moved from Ireland to Bristol.” He sniggers embarrassedly as he tells me “we actuallymet up playing cricket and doing long jump!” It only took the friends a couple of years to realise their potential.“We’ve had the same line up for eight and a half years now, so we have a good understanding, we can change things musically without having to talk about it too much.”When I asked Jesse to describe their style in his own words, for those intrigued, he said, “We’re energetic, we work hard on our arrangement, but the genre is hard to define, there are lots of harmonies and melodic phrases. It’s original stuff. We want to create something that emotionally engages people.”“So you’re pop?” I guess. No. They’re not. “Hopefully we’re unique. All the music we like is different, the only thing we can agree on is U2. Other than that we hate each other’s music! We try to incorporate everyone’s music tastes.”This man’s laid-back friendly banter thus far had certainly won me over, but it would appear that Jesse and his band members realised at university that single converts wouldn’t propel them to success before their fret-bashingfingers ceased up completely. It was time to go further a field.“We suddenly discovered how many international students there were in Bristol and we became friends with these two Taiwanese students, who said ‘Come and tour Taiwan’ and we took them seriously!” He laughs again as he clearly feels a welling of pride over his boys’ achievements so very far away. His voice perks up audibly out of its chilled drawl as he says, “Our first gig was crazy, the Spring Scream in Taiwan. We only got the invitation two weeks before we went so it was miraculous that we got there…we had to get together five grand.”Spring Scream, it would appear, was no mean feat. “Our friends were really excited. The tour went really well and we had one to two thousand people at our first gig. They gave us a Saturday night on stage one, which was perfect timing.”The foursome had somehow landed themselves a slot at the Taiwanese Glastonbury. It didn’t stop there either. The Far Eeast has proven to be a hot bed of Transition lovers. They were soon being interviewed on MTV Asia and appearing on radio in Japan. So why has opportunity come so much more readily abroad? Why is this link with the Land of the Rising Sun so very strong now?“Josh (drums, also an Eedbrooke) has been learning the language for a long time, and our image appeals. We’re quite interactive on stage and while Eenglish crowds will listen and appreciate, Chinese and Oriental guys really love to join in. They connected instantly with the harmonies and melodies.”There we have it ladies and gentlemen,from the horse’s (or rock star’s) mouth. crowds can be too superior to get excited.So what does one do in this situation?After eight years, do you keep plugging away at the Eenglish market, crack the Americans (notably hard, see also: Oasis) or emigrate? Jesse takes this suggestion with a pinch of salt, chuckling, “We’re aiming until Ddecember to do things in Eengland. We’re the first Bristol band since Massive Attack to play at the Carling Academy. It’s looking like there’s goingto be a lot of opportunities and we’ll take them with both hands.”Transition have proven to us that our demanding musical hierarchy can be incredibly harsh to some, while at the same time blowing others out of all proportion. Once again, it’s a case of who you know, not how you play in this country. Maybe it’s time we all went a little Far-Eeast crazy…for the hard workers of our scene.ARCHIVE: 5th week MT 2005

This week, the infamous fifth week blues have brought out the moaning teenage solipsists in the best of us, and let’s face it, sixth week isn’t much better. So why not stomp your feet and embrace your inner adolescence with this selection from Oxford’s film societies that concur: life just isn’t fair.The Oxford University Film Foundation is showing Eedward Scissorhands(1990), directed by Gothic enthusiast Tim Burton, sprinkled with pre-Christmas fantastical charm to soothe your angst-ridden soul. Cue (played with delicious eccentricity by Jonny Ddepp), the quite literal brainchild of a reclusive veteran scientist who dies before he has time to finish his creation, leavinghis frightened charge with some rather inconvenient scissors where hands should be. Salvation seems to arrive when Eedward finds a new home in a curtain-twitching slice of hypocritically self-righteous suburban America. Suffice to say Eeddie raises a few eyebrows. An enduring and finely wrought fairytale for our time, which exhibits the early aesthetic talent and originality of Burton.From those awkward social mix-ups and accidental self-harming that come with having scissors for hands, we pass the figurative trials of teenhood to the proverbial bridge to adulthood that is the gap year. This finds its ultimate incarnation in Walter Salle’s The Motorcycle Ddiaries (2004), shown by the International Cinema Club. “Been there” you may think, “done that, bought (and thrown away) the (now excruciatingly embarrassing Che Guevara) t-shirt”. But Walter Salles’ delightfully understated biopic, based around the diaries of the young Che, Eernesto Guevara, re-injects a shot of humanity and vitality into a crassly homogenised revolutionary icon. The directorial style is modest enough to allow space for a quietly compelling performance from Gael Garcia Bernal. And the breathtakingcinematography of the vast and exquisite South-American backdrop, along with its complex sociological conundrums, speaks for itself.Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), which the Magdalen Film Society is showing, signals anothertime warp, to the worryingly not-so-futuristic-any-more 2019 and an equally impressive, yet contrastinglybleak, visual landscape. It’s hard to overestimate the influence of Scott’s dystopian film-noir on sci-fi filmmakers and self-styled alt-teens alike (since we’re on the subject). The film follows bounty hunter Harrison Ford’s quest for a group of renegade ‘replicants’, androids designed to serve humans, but whose resemblance to their master race has become a bit too close for comfort. Offering a rather abstract slant on the themes of self-realisationand coming of age common to all this week’s films, Blade Runner also guarantees a swift revelatory slap in the face for the sixth week delusion that life couldn’t get much worse. Hmmm, try living in a perennially dark nightmare vision of Los Angeles in which you’ve been contracted to kill the robot (or is it woman?) you’re falling in love with. There, that feels better, doesn’t it?ARCHIVE: 5th week MT 2005

In Her Shoes,dir. Curtis Hanson,out now: When Stupid Girl by Garbage announces the start of the film, alarm bells ring over the pretext of two sisters, polar opposites, supposedly united only by their shoe size. Unwitting boyfriends shuffle uneasily in their seats, the prospect of a soporific task of endurance glazing their eyes. Yet, thanks to the accomplished efforts of insightful director Curtis Hanson and an intelligent and witty screenplay, In Her Shoes will gently confound preconceptions.Cameron Ddiaz sensitively portrays a role that has suited her well in the past and suits her well once more. Ddiaz’s character Maggie has reached a dead end in her life, blessed with stunning looks, but a lack of faith in her intellectual ability that causes her to float from job to job and use her looks for soulless gratification. Rose, played admirably by Toni Collette, is a high-flying and diligent lawyer, yet struggles with her self-image, her self-esteem represented by her shoe collection – a lavish accumulation of beauty, kept locked away and never expressed. After relations hit rock bottom one traumatic evening, their paths diverge, and thus begins a journeyof reconciliation and personal growth.With this sibling dichotomy the story does well to avoid a predictableconvergence of the characters into bland, happily inane creatures. Maggie decamps to a retirement community in Florida after she discoversthe correspondence from their distanced grandmother Eella (Shirley MacLaine), hidden by their father. MacLaine is wonderfully regretful yet wryly compassionate, the dynamic between her character and Maggie having a profound effect on them both. A sentimental turning point is marked as Maggie reads Eelizabeth Bishop’s One Art, overcoming her dyslexia and articulating a valuable lesson. Rose’s self-discovery is no less revelatory; as she slowly finds the love of her life in Simon, who demonstrates great patience with her reticence, until she can finally embrace him without insecurity.Curtis Hanson’s measured and sensitiveapproach, obvious in previous works 8 Mile (2002) and LA Confidential(1997), has delivered a film far from mediocre, but which only subtly departs from the large body of works before it. The end result? Eeasily forgettable.ARCHIVE: 5th week MT 2005

Rebecca BuckTurrill GardenSummertownIt is a long bicycle ride from the town centre up to the Turrill Garden, behind the SummertownLibrary, but once you arrive, you do find yourself in a surprisingly pleasant and tranquil spot. The Turrill Garden is a well-designedgreen space for the public to use and enjoy, and is regularly used for exhibitions. Presently, the work of Rebecca Buck is being displayed, a sculptress born in the USA but educated in both Eengland and across the Atlantic. She has an impressive CV, with a long list of accomplishmentsin southern Italy and Malaysia aside from her work in and America, and now works out of her Osprey Studio in Wales.Her work is abstract and guided by music, using weatherproof clay to design a range of sculptures, many of which reflect her background in portrait and figure studies. Indeed, the work on display at the Turrill Garden seems to perfectly encapsulatethe broad range of themes she covers.Her sculptures of metaphorical objects, under the title of Life’s a Beach, are shaped with smooth contours that simultaneously mimic the rise and fall of waves, the curve of a sunbather’s hip, the crest of sand dunes. Similarly, the sculptures named Wind, Water, Fire, although solid and upright, skilfully capture an image of licking flames or cascadingwater with a look of fluidity that makes Buck’s sculpting seem effortless.Similar artistic skill is evident in her two depictions of Icarus who, accordingto the Greek myth, flew too close to the sun, and consequently melted his waxed wings, causing him to plummet to his death. The mythologicalcharacter is depicted in a pose of bold confidence with his arms flung back and his chest flaunted to the viewer, like a cocky bird pluminghis feathers. His danger-defying demeanour is powerfully expressed in the artist’s violent, vigorous style: slashes in the ceramic depict the wings’ feathers, sharp grooves give the bodies a slightly contorted shape, and the faces are moulded into an amorphous clump. The striking refusal to give the sculptures a face combined with her rough method gives us ancient mythological heroes but without the serenity that typicallygoes with a Classical style.The most striking works on displayare those called Figures From Yesterday’s News. They are images of despair: a pregnant woman protectivelyhugging her swollen belly; a desperate man, his knees drawn up with his face held in his hands. The lines of these sculptures are aggressive: they seem to have been created as a catharsis, jabbed as well as moulded, pained as well as calm. Ddepicting the human in varying states of aggression and retreat with such a natural, energetic style, the best work is fervent, violent and instilledwith the artist’s own passion.The diversity of Buck’s sculpture is extremely apparent, and perhaps some would say that this is evidence of her ability to look at the beauty and horror of this world. However this creates conflict within the exhibition as a whole: there are two distinct sets of art on display that represent completely different themes. Separately, they work well in the garden environment, but together, the themes seem to clash. More importantly, it is a small display that exists not to attract visitors but to provide a pleasant environment for users of the Summertown library to read in. If you do find yourself in Summertown and can afford the time, do call in to the gardens and sit and admire the diversity of the exhibition, but the bike ride up there specifically with sculpture in mind is not recommended.ARCHIVE: 5th week MT 2005

IT IS with an impeccable single tear that we announce the untimely death of the Celebrity Wedding, though it far outlived the marriages of most of its participants. Much in the same way that the epic was killed off by Paradise Lost, the Celebrity Wedding self-imploded after the recent well-publicised superlative and surely insurmountable example of all it stood for.Swathed in spangly pink taffeta, demurely showcasing the monumental chest that is as much a feat of modern engineering as the London eye, our modern-day fairytale princess Jordan walked up the fuchsia aisle to take as her husband, till tabloid gossip do part them, her equally unfeasibly orange Nineties Smash Hits popster beau. The couple beamed with happiness as they realised they would get to spend the rest of their lives with the reported £1 million from an exclusive photo deal with a certain reputed magazine, and that they could spend a honeymoon basking in the knowledge that they had probably outdone Posh and Becks.All the prerequisites of the Celebrity Wedding were there: grand and quasi-aristocratic setting (borrowing from its sister-phenomenon, the Royal Wedding), an unconventional twist on a traditional form of transport (not just a horse and carriage but an actual pumpkin) and a small child from the bride’s former relationship with a footballer (note: in the history of the Celebrity Wedding the footballer and pop-star are interchangeable in the roles of past-lover and husband-to-be). We have witnessed such scenes many a time, when taking up the centre pages of tabloids, but this one couldn’t be topped: the cake was bigger, the rings were shinier, the bridesmaids had representatives from more girl bands than ever before and the skirt was so monumental it had to be whipped off, Bucks Fizz-style, to reveal a skimpy mini so that the groom could dance with his bride to a version of a certain disney ballad the pair had recorded themselves the week before.Though this historical occasion exemplified the true ‘Girlhood dream’ aspect of the Celebrity Wedding, the matrimonial institution has adopted many and various forms in its lifetime; there was the Beach Wedding, the Secret Wedding and, of course, the Vegas Little White Chapel wedding (though an expert like Jordan may deem this a little passé). The Celebrity Wedding is at its biggest and best when, like Jordan and Peter, celebs marry within the trade. With this comes the potential for events boasting almost exclusively celebrity guest lists, be it the cast of Friends, elton John or just Gazza and Shane Richie. In keeping with its life, the funeral of the Celebrity Wedding promises far more sparkle, mystery and guests wearing sunglasses indoors than any of us mere mortals could ever wish for. We can’t substantiate anything because all juicy details have been promised away with large sums attached to them, but we believe mourners to include the accountants of at least two glossy magazines, several disgruntled pre-nup lawyers, and the runner up from x-Factor whose single is out on Monday.
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I work at St Hilda’s College library and a lot of what I do involves making sure that the library runs efficiently. That’s not just putting books on shelves and stamping them out. It’s also co-ordinating all the things that make it possible for the library to function, for example buying and ordering books, deciding library policy and trying to respond to people’s ideas, from carpeting and better lighting to buying books for subject areas. There is also a lot of administrative work. Our college has just built a new extension, and our staff have been involved in the planning and design right from the beginning. Apart from that, I’m also a fellow of the college, which means that I’m involved with a lot of College activities, including sitting in on Governing Body, while being dean of degrees means I go to the Sheldonian and present people for their degrees.I enjoy the library aspect most of all because it supports people in their academic work. I very much like to see people coming up for their three years. They change a lot over that time and it’s quite interesting to see how their styles and fashions change. You also see people in the libraries weeping over essays and revision, then you see them at the other end when you’re taking them up to get their degrees. It’s a slightly more personal relationship than perhaps with some of the University libraries, and when alumni come back they nearly always say they have fond memories of our library, which I find gratifying.I’ve always worked in Oxford. I started off at the Taylorian, and that was my first taste of how pleasant working in a library could be. But the fun thing about being a college librarian is that you’re very hands-on and get to meet the students. I don’t think I would like to be in a job where I was just an administrator behind the scenes and never saw anybody. You also have more autonomy than you probably would in the larger organisations, and you feel very much involved in what’s going on. I also enjoy being the dean of degrees, because it’s such a happy family occasion. You meet people’s parents, which is always interesting, and you can see why some people are the way they are. The most common question we get asked, besides "Where is this book?" is actually "Can you come and un-jam the photocopier or the printer for me?" I’ve seen many unusual things, but I think I’ll draw a veil over those! Someone started a fire in a wastepaper basket once, which was an exciting moment, but usually people leave all their interesting possessions outside. I think we see a very different side to the students, mostly the quiet side: people who fall asleep at their desks is as riotous as it gets.I think librarians often just fall into the career. Personally, I’m not a natural librarian: I spend half my life looking for things and I’m not calm. What I really enjoy is reading, and that’s something that you don’t have time for when you’re working. You see so many books that you would like to read because of your work, and yet you just don’t have the time to do that. everybody always says, "Oh you’re a librarian, you must read a lot of books," and it makes me furious. If only that were true! There are some terrible stereotypes of librarians going around, and I hope we don’t conform to them too much here. For a librarian, I’m an incredibly noisy person; I don’t think I’ve ever said "Shush" to anyone in my life!work at St Hilda’s College library and a lot of what I do involves making sure that the library runs efficiently. That’s not just putting books on shelves and stamping them out. It’s also co-ordinating all the things that make it possible for the library to function, for example buying and ordering books, deciding library policy and trying to respond to people’s ideas, from carpeting and better lighting to buying books for subject areas. There is also a lot of administrative work. Our college has just built a new extension, and our staff have been involved in the planning and design right from the beginning. Apart from that, I’m also a fellow of the college, which means that I’m involved with a lot of College activities, including sitting in on Governing Body, while being dean of degrees means I go to the Sheldonian and present people for their degrees.ARCHIVE: 5th week MT 2005

For many, Michaelmas term signals a return to a lifestyle we know so well that to describe it again would see innumerable clichés rehashed unnecessarily. Returning students, whether suddenly conscientious finalists or second years planning to make the most of college life with neither prelims nor mods to bother them, are joined by hordes of unsure freshers, baffled at the prospect of penetrating the bubble for the first time.Not because I cannot bear to leave the place, but because it seems all too much as if I have been prematurely ripped from a city I had not quite finished with. The majority of my friends will prepare for and take their finals during my year abroad; Oxford will move on without me, taking in two new sets of freshers before I return and only finally allowing me back as a frightened fourth year with nothing to look forward to but another marathon of exams similar to the twenty-four hour session I endured at the end of my first year.Nevertheless, if I have no choice in the matter, then I might as well make the most of it. If I have to be exiled then I plan to come back conjugating verbs better than a grammar book and with more utterly useless vocabulary than a bilingual dictionary. Mortals will gasp at my grasp of the most complex grammatical structures and my pronunciation will no longer be met with furrowed brows and disconcerting glances. This, however, will be thanks to me and the people who tolerate my pidgin tongue here on the Continent, rather than the tuition I have received in Oxford. It is no wonder that thousands of university students are churned out abroad every year to perfect their chosen languages. during the entirety of the last academic year, my college offered a total of eight hours of tuition in German conversation, during the majority of which I was either hopelessly hungover or stubbornly half asleep and where I had to share our one native speaker with on average five others, all equally desperate to try and remember how to speak German before, well, moving there.In my experience, complete immersion in a language is the best way to acquire it. On the days when I am not teaching english at school or I manage to resist the temptation to meet up with english-speaking friends, I even find myself thinking in German, although I still have to wait for that elusive first dream in a foreign language. My German flatmates ensure that even when there is nothing I would rather do less, every word we exchange is in the language of Goethe. My integration is almost complete, and it seems to have only taken a month. I appear to have even convinced myself that I look like a German as I ride to school on the over-efficient trams each morning at seven. Indeed, I have even been stopped twice to help with directions.Of course, there are difficult times: the delicate social situation of buying communal food becomes a headache several hundred times more throbbing when the key words evade you at just the wrong minute. The experience is all the more bemusing when despite studying the language for over nine years I have to admit to having no real affinity with the country or its culture. I am as indifferent to Germany as I am to any other country. I would rather look left first when I cross the road and could easily do without almost incessantly having to breathe in second-hand smoke.But as I become one of the people I begin to find them more and more charming. They are polite, in a different way. Pushing and shoving are fine, but woe betide anyone who forgets to offer their seat to a granny on the tram. You have to pay for plastic bags in the supermarket but people in the street will go out of their way to be helpful. And prostitutes are free to advertise in local papers.If this were Oxford, I would be in the fifth week of my first term. In all honesty, that is perhaps where I would rather be. Perhaps choosing a course with a mandatory year-long excursion was not my wisest move. But perhaps it is foolish to expect to achieve the near-native fluency required for the final oral exam without some sort of sacrifice. And perhaps, after a year, I won’t want to leave.However, it could be suggested that what characterises the first term of a new academic year is the noticeable absence of students who are no longer with us. All over the country, indeed the world, last summer’s graduates are holding down well-paid jobs, sponging off their parents or taking one last opportunity to finally discover the most far-flung corners of the world before inevitable immersion in a pre-planned career. But one other group of students are also nowhere to be seen this Michaelmas, and the vast majority of them will not be seen again until roughly a year from now.The year abroad has claimed its next generation of participants, whether willing or not. In schools worldwide, those working as language assistants are taking into their own hands the teaching of english of thousands of children despite being entirely unqualified to teach. elsewhere, others are registering at foreign universities, sitting in offices or calmly realising that, even after ten years of study, they are still unable to order a baguette. Personally, I am living between an Erotikmarkt and a cannabis accessory emporium in Freiburg, Germany, spending twelve hours a week as a walking dictionary in a nearby school. The obligation to spend a year living abroad is far from the mind of most future students as they leaf through the glossy prospectuses of Oxford’s language departments. even the reappearance of returned linguists fails to make the year abroad register as an inescapable future prospect. Once you begin to hear yourself referred to as a departing linguist, your tutors start to talk of nothing else but your plans for your time abroad and even people you barely speak to are keen to enquire as to how exactly you plan to split your time between Portugal and the Czech Republic. A fearful panic sets in, amplified by the fact that suddenly becoming a native speaker overnight is the only way to be excused from this obligation, and before time has been found to revise your irregular verbs you are sitting on a cheap flight bound for the armpit of europe or the crotch of South America. There are different reactions: while some are desperate to finally become the Spaniard they have always wanted to be others are to be found on the cobbles outside the Oriental Institute, crying in their sub-fusc.This might all seem like too much complaining. Many would jump at the chance to abandon studies for a full year to experience life in the shoes of a citizen of another country. Surely the possibilities are endless? But when your college’s only response to the fact that you have absolutely nothing planned two days before the end of Trinity is "Why not ask the fourth years what they did?" you begin to realise that this year of opportunity might just resemble an endless holiday you never wanted to go on.I stopped counting the number of times I heard "Oh yes, the year abroad was the best year of my life", quietly thinking to myself that perhaps some lives must be duller than others if the equivalent of being sent down for twelve months is able to stand head and shoulders above countless other years. Spending a year abroad is actually no problem: homesickness has never affected me (Surrey tends to stay with you wherever you go), I travel keenly and genuinely enjoy the challenge of making a home in a new place and carrying out daily life as if I were in a GCSe listening exercise. The reason I am currently overwhelmed with pessimism is not that I miss home, nor that I doubt my ability to teach German children how to speak proper english like I do, but rather that I would just prefer to be in Oxford.ARCHIVE: 5th week MT 2005