You need to remember to have fun while you’re young, I’m not saying don’t follow a dream or don’t try hard at what you do, but remember as cliche as it sounds, to make sure you keep your friends close and enjoy every moment of your life. Always make new memories and go outside, take a massive breath of fresh air and experience the world and find small things that make you smile. Share good times with people out in the sun or just being inside and having good chats and making memories, because nothing is certain and you can never tell what will happen not only in the distant future, but even tomorrow. By having dreams and trying hard to achieve those dreams you aren’t wasting time but will make yourself happier; don’t think about it like working towards something so much as doing things right now which you can enjoy, with the added benefit of it making something better in the future. Don’t think about anything as a chore, see the good in it and enjoy it, it’s important in life. And always keep in touch with old friends and keep in touch with family because they’re easy to overlook but so important. My thoughts right now are with Jonny’s family, who are amazing people, everyone who knew Jonny should be thankful to have had the pleasure of knowing such a solid, honest, real guy. I miss you man.

Words by Hunter

I’ve known Jonny Roberts for as long as I can remember. Two days ago I got news about him being run over in Oxford. My thoughts immediately went to his family, to Penny, Russell, Sarah, Lizzie and Helena, a family who have been so kind to me. When I was told about what had happened to him I simply couldn’t believe it. Why? Because Jonny is a fighter. No matter what was thrown at him, Jonny grabbed every moment of life and lived it. There was never a dull moment with him, from the stories he told to the positive way he always looked at everything. I will never, ever, forget him and promise I will find a way so that no-one ever forgets him as the cool, creative, risk-taking, funny and amazing guy he was. In a conversation from July two years ago Jonny said how he was “wearing a headband and a pair of boxers and im drinking milk from the bottle sitting out of my open window listening to wolf cub on top volume” and that is always how I’ll remember him. I’ll miss him so so much.

Ed playing and Orfeo singing in my dining room.

To: <olly.rees@gmail.com>I work for this charity at my university that sold roses as a fundraising event. The roses had to be delivered early the morning of valentine’s day. So at 9:30AM, extremely hungover and tired (I had a nightmare about a girl with track marks and i kept saying ‘please stop it’ – so scary – another story entirely) I went to get my roses and got dispatched to deliver them in a part of campus I had never been to. The campus was completely deserted and I thought to myself that I wouldn’t be surprised if I was still dreaming.

Anyway as I got closer to the part of campus I was going to I saw SUCH a stunning girl who I guess saw me riding with the roses and assumed I was someone’s awesome boyfriend. She was jogging along and just started beaming – but she kept trying to hide her smile. It was so sweet how much it pleased her to see (what she perceived as) a loving boyf. Also upon delivering the roses each had a little note attached that had address and I couldn’t help but read peoples messages. Some of them were so great. There were so many great/sad moments:

1) I gave a girl her rose and she just kinda sheepishly smiled and went inside and then as I was walking away I heard her and her roommate screaming with happiness shouting ‘its from him!’

2) A girl opened the door and I guess she just assumed it wasn’t for her so she said ‘oh xxx isn’t in right now’. I said ‘oh no this ones for xxx’ and she was  touched and then just took it and said ‘thank you’ and walked back in

3) There was a girl doing her laundry who I could see through one of the windows and she was stunning (don’t know if i was blinded by the romantic atmosphere) but if I had any roses of my own they would be hers

send your valentines stories to olly@edan-dolly.co.uk

The naughty noughties have expired, leaving the media nothing to do but reminisce on the decade that was.

Or wasn’t. The general consensus seems to be that the greatest advances made in the arts over the last ten years have been technological. In music, television and cinema, the industry has been falling over itself to cater for the interests of lonely, headphones-wearing teenagers plonked in front of oft numerous monitors. In music, this has led to a dilution of quality, a dearth of new music, and the now-terminal decline of the music album. Television and cinema, on the other hand, have proved more adaptable, with the explosion of reality television causing an about-turn in our expectations. Contemporary audiences now want to see, besides the customary blockbusters, something they can believe in. ‘Gritty realism’, to coin a phrase, is the name of the day (or decade, rather), and is what has led to the success of series like The Wire as well as films like Fahrenheit 9/11.

In the case of the aforementioned, the ‘grittiness’ stems from minimal camera work combined with a no-star cast. The latter is particularly important: actors act, the rest of us don’t. We can only be ourselves. Fish Tank (2009), with the only recognisable face being that of Michael Fassbender, demonstrates perfectly the benefits of this absence of artifice. Its protagonist, Mia Williams, is played by Katie Jarvis, a teenager plucked from council estate-obscurity to play what turns out to be a starring role. Fame has not changed her, however, as even when Fish Tank was awarded the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, Jarvis declined to attend in favour of staying at home – the same estate as before – to take care of her newborn baby.

Fish Tank itself shows a similar refusal to bow to convention. Its story follows fifteen-year-old Mia, who has just been expelled from school and is left to fill her time wandering aimlessly around her council estate. Her friends have turned against her, while her family, consisting of a prepubescent sister and an alcoholic mother, live forever in denial of one another’s existence. What quality time they have is spent in front of the television and all of them, the youngest included, drink to oblivion. Yet there is hope in the form of Mia’s talent for street dancing, as well as the arrival of a new man in her mother’s life. Connor (Fassbender) brings the family together, insisting from the start on including the children in everything the couple do. He emboldens Mia, showing her the attention she craves deep down and encouraging her to take her dancing to a professional level. The question, of course, is whether their newfound domestic bliss can last.

For all its realism, Fish Tank is rife with symbolism and ambiguities. It is shot beautifully, with endless richly-coloured landscapes alongside intimate close-ups of characters, and speaks more through the power of its visuals than through its (mostly minimal) dialogue. Recurring images of animals in chains, such as the white horse that Mia twice tries to set free, show clearly the dangers of living in a confined environment, namely, that a person loses all perspective and with it any real sense of who they are. Thus, at the film’s heart, lies a simple identity crisis. It is not so much a case of Mia having to escape the estate; rather, she must learn to appreciate her human potential and how to apply it in any setting.

Perhaps the worst aspect of growing up is that we expect steadily less from others. Yet, when this happens, and whether we notice it or not, we come to expect more from ourselves. Fish Tank shows that human beings are not to be holed up and ‘taught’ independence (by, for example, a social worker like Mia’s) but must learn it for themselves.

Words – Charlie Chichester

My friend emailed me this and I thought that it was something that you should read. It meant loads to me because I’ve been trying to lose myself more than usual lately. (See attached picture).

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To: <olly.rees@gmail.com>I’ve realised something. You know how everything we do revolves around sex and death? Well, the reason we’re so preoccupied with death is that it is literally the only thing in the life of a human being that is 100% unavoidable. For example: even if someone has a terminal disease, we convince ourselves that miracles happen, or like all those stories about people in comas waking up after 34 years, no matter how unlikely. Even if we’ve been 100% rejected by someone we love, we convince ourselves that it is possible they will change their minds..you see?! And that’s the reason why people want to die in their sleep – because they won’t even know it’s going to happen. Because we can’t face it! Because it’s the ONLY thing we have no control over! We are a race of control freaks (yet ironically, we don’t want to accept we’ve destroyed the planet and insist that global warming is a natural occurrence out of our control – but that’s irrelevant now.) Writers and artists are all just trying to leave their mark – to make themselves immortal, so to speak. There are teams of scientists trying to work out everything about how the world works, even trying to keep humans alive forever, although we all know it’s completely unnatural. Isn’t that what science is about? Being in control? Understanding and therefore being able to change the way things happen? Because we can’t bear to think that we can’t change things. And dying is the only thing we can’t change. So if they do succeed in finding a way to make humans immortal, what are we going to focus on? What will drive us? The principal influence on our life will have been taken away!

It is not surprising that, of all the members of The Strokes to have embarked on solo projects, Julian Casablancas’ album has perhaps been the most eagerly anticipated. Responsible for writing almost all the songs on the first – and most critically acclaimed – two albums (Is This It, released 2001 and Room On Fire, released 2003), he is the creative force behind a band that is often said to have ‘saved rock’n’roll’. This may or may not be hyperbolic, but it is certainly true that they emerged from a relative wasteland of rock music around the year 2000, dominated by bands such as Linkin Park and Limp Bizkit.

Casablancas has been involved in several collaborations (e.g. with Santogold in My Drive Thru in 2008) but Phrazes for the Young was really the first opportunity to hear what his would do if he was not tied down to The Strokes’ tastes, reputation, and the very standard rock line-up of two guitars, bass, drums and vocals.

Based on the single 11^th Dimension, one might assume that the album does not stray very far from the Strokes’ style, albeit replacing analogue with digital for the most part in choosing synths and programmed drum parts over traditional rock instrumentation. A riff that evokes a similar mood to The Strokes’ You Only Live Once (whilst bearing an uncanny resemblance to David Bowie’s Rebel Rebel) gives way to a fairly epic chorus which is to some extent reminiscent of the grander moments of First Impressions of Earth (2006). There are also lyrical similarities to the song You Only Live Once: where we had platitudes about the nature of Mankind (“Some people think they’re always right / Others are quiet and up-tight”), we now have advice about how to live our lives: “Forgive them / Even if they are not sorry”. Fair enough – the title of the album is Phrazes for the Young, after all.

Opener Out of the Blue is vaguely similar to Someday (from Is This It), although there is a synthy wall of sound instead of strumming overdriven guitars. The rest of the album, however, is far more eclectic, sometimes verging on weird. References to assorted styles of music are everywhere: the intro and chorus of Left & Right In The Dark sounds like his take on Calypso music, although far less annoying; 4 Chords of the Apocalypse is essentially a Motown soul ballad; Ludlow St is a cross between the soundtrack to Stanley Kubric’s A Clockwork Orange combined with country and Western music, and album closer Tourist is a crazy cross between Indian music, reggae and a blues shuffle.

Other than 11^th Dimension, my particular favourites are probably some of the weirder songs on the album. River of Brakelights begins like a really bad drum’n’bass or garage track (or something…), and is often very obscure harmonically, but resolves very satisfyingly and eventually becomes another epic. Rock ballad Glass is perhaps the closest Casablancas gets to ‘beautiful’, with ethereal synths and skittering beats and a heartfelt chorus finally giving way to a slightly bizarre synthesized pastiche of J.S. Bach.

While undoubtedly interesting, Casablancas seems to be trying above-all to demonstrate that he can fuse together countless musical styles and that he is not a one-trick-pony. Phrazes for the Young is not a successful album. In his stated aim of trying to capture some of the grandiosity of “Classical music”, he makes most of the songs around 5 or 6 minutes long and therefore very overweight for a pop album. Secondly, his voice is mostly processed and homogenous rather than the decadent, visceral howl we heard on The Strokes’ albums. Finally, and maybe most importantly, there is a lack of atmosphere about the record. With The Strokes, we get New York cool, cigarette smoke and leather jackets. With this, we get a mish-mash of musical styles and a smooth, overproduced sheen. Congratulations are deserved, as some of the songs are really pretty great, but let’s hope the forthcoming Strokes album is less clinical and bored-sounding.

6.5/10

Words: Anthony Friend, Pictures: Edward Myung

I saw Avatar at 3.40am last night/this morning on 3D IMAX because that was the only time not sold out in the next three weeks. And goddammit was it worth it. It made a staggering impact on me, something I was not even slightly surprised by because beautifully realised sci‐fi worlds with fun characters tend to do that to me (Serenity and 2001: A Space Odyssey unquestionably my two favourite films, in that order). In fact Avatar made such an impact on me that I’ve decided I won’t be watching Sin Nombre today as I had planned to, simply because I cannot bear to watch a film right now that isn’t Avatar. I want to see it again on IMAX ‐ in fact I will see it again on IMAX because I cannot go through life having only had that experience once. Anyway, I couldn’t get Avatar out of my head so I thought I’d write a review of it, why not?

Wow. Just, wow. Avatar is the first film I’ve seen since 2001: A Space Odyssey which left me truly in awe. Speaking analytically, yes the dialogue is corny and the Na’vi chanting is pure kitsch but somehow that just doesn’t matter. The visuals are jaw dropping, and when I say that I mean it literally. On regular occasions I found my mandible sagging and a tingle of sheer blownawayness shoot up my spine. God it’s a good looking film. The most surprising thing about Avatar, though, is not the staggering visuals (well, we expected them didn’t we), it’s the fact that it has characters, and we like the characters. Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is one of the most purely likeable characters I’ve seen in a long time and a lot of films – his enthusiasm for, well, everything, is infectious and you can’t help but smile when (for instance) he leaps onto the back of a gigantic deadly flying thing in order to tame it without moment’s thought for his own safety, simply because he can. The Na’vi princess Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) is of course yet another of Cameron’s strong female roles (again, nothing new here) but once again we as the audience grow to like her, in part I think because we can identify with how she reacts to Jake. Her initial annoyance at his perceived immaturity (expressed in one of the film’s worse lines) turns gradually to affection as she falls in love with the same enthusiasm, the same refusal to ever slow down, give up or take the easy route, that makes Jake such a hit with the audience. Jim Cameron described Sam Worthington in a recent interview as a ‘force of nature’ and it seems Sam has put some of that whirlwind energy (in fact, all of it, and more besides) into Jake Sully. If I have spoken about Jake a lot it is because he truly is the centre, nay keystone, of the film. He is the audience’s gateway to Pandora. I have mentioned how Neytiri’s likeability centres on the audience’s identification with how she reacts to Jake. Well part of Jake’s likeability is a result no doubt of the audience’s ability to identify with how he reacts to Pandora. On the other side of the fence as it were, Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang) is one of the best baddies ever committed to screen (yes, I recognise the echoes of Ben Lyons skulking in the background as I make that statement but I am fully prepared to defend it). Lang feasts upon the scenery like a ravenous Great Leonopteryx. In fact it’s a damn good thing most of it was computerised otherwise he might have eaten the lot. In doing so, he sets a new benchmark for badassery – this is a man so badass that he can breathe the noxious Pandoran atmosphere without a mask and at one point it took him a good thirty seconds to begin to care that he had been set on fire. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is bloody entertaining.

The supporting characters (and by extension actors) are mostly excellent and, unusually for a big movie juggling multiple character threads while expending most of the running time in action sequences, the decisions they make, the things they say and do, all seem to make sense, to follow from the character rather than from the requirements of the plot (are you reading this, Michael? What about you, Roland?). If I had to single one actor out among many it would be…you know what I’m going to say already, don’t you? You don’t? If so, you may have forgotten that Sigourney Weaver plays a chain smoking ethical botanist. In contrast to the emotional, artistic side of the film (that is to say, the characters and the visuals), the cerebral side, the political message the film tries to convey (which has been so remarked upon I feel it unnecessary to define it), is slightly nauseating in its sickly sweet incontestability, not to mention the simple fallacy of its invocation of Rousseau’s mythical ‘Noble savage’ (i.e. the Na’vi) and Lovelock’s fanciful Gaia Theory (in this case, Gaia = Eywa, the Na’vi deity). Thankfully, despite the cloying misanthropic appearance of these themes, another, more sophisticated reading of the film may provide hope for those of a humanist bent. One review I read remarked upon how after a while, the Na’vi begin to look normal and the humans become the aliens. It is certainly true that when Quaritch’s gunships face off against the Na’vi warriors with their bows and arrows there are undeniable echoes of Independence Day (I’m not suggesting a causal link, Eywa forbid, merely a conceptual connection).

The reversal, however, is deeper than that. A friend (one of the ones I saw the movie with) said afterwards that he was supporting the humans throughout, mostly because he liked Quaritch so much, but partly because he felt a loyalty to his species (or so he claimed). Leaving aside the arguments against Darwinism‐as‐ethic, this got me thinking on the essence of humanity. Now I am not suggesting for one minute that Jim Cameron had Hegel or Marx in mind when he wrote the Avatar screenplay but the concept of alienation, particularly Marx’s formulation, provides a fascinating reading of the contrast between the humans and the Na’vi. Marx believed that the bourgeois were alienated from their humanity though their exploitation of the proletariat. The proletariat, by contrast, when they reached true consciousness, would become purely and solely human. The exploitation of the Na’vi and of Pandora in general by the ‘Sky People’ would seem to suggest, at least from a Marxian perspective, much, if not total, alienation. Colonel Quaritch and Giovanni Ribisi’s odious mine boss, Parker Selfridge (the humans are there to mine a valuable mineral worth twenty million a kilogram) both exhibit total inhumanity toward the Na’vi in their aggressive pursuit of profits, the essence of bourgeois alienation. The Na’vi, on the other hand are practically and (this is important) theoretically peaceful. They are humane in their treatment of all Pandoran life forms, killing some in order to eat them but always maintaining a sense of loss, never allowing their relationship with the natural world to become exploitative. They are, in a sense, the incarnation of essential humanity. The above train of thought introduced me to a whole new dimension in the Avatar experience as I realised that far from being brash and simplistic in its themes it could actually be interpreted in quite a subtle and intelligent way. As I have already said, I doubt Jim Cameron wrote the screenplay with Die Deutsche Ideologie in mind but as Harold Pinter remarked when asked which interpretation of one of his plays was the correct one, the answer is ‘all of them’.

But of course the above paragraphs do not matter. Not a jot. They, and Avatar’s political themes, are nothing but an intellectual exercise when the true brilliance of it is in the viscera, the emotion, the tugging of the heart strings and the flowing of the adrenalglands, the love, the war, the beauty, the awe. Avatar is, quite simply, epic.

Words: Philip Howe, Pictures: Avatar Official flickr

The Turbine Hall is by some distance the largest indoor space devoted to art in the world. Seeing artists’ attempts to overcome the ‘obstacle’ of 3,400 square metres of floor space has been mostly a joy over the past ten years, with Miroslaw Balka’s How It Is the most daring and conceptual thus far. With a giant steel box he has sought to turn the bright expanse of the Turbine Hall in on itself, drawing his audience into a black hole in which they are supposed to lose themselves to the dark.
Except, he hasn’t quite succeeded. The structure, from the outside, is a monstrosity, possibly to make you appreciate all the more the subsequent loss of sight. It is also silly how the box seems to have been put in the wrong way round; the audience must walk all the way to the end of the hall, to one or other side of the box, before turning back on themselves to go in. Then, once inside, it is still possible to make out the figures of everyone else present; there is simply too much light allowed in by the lack of an entrance curtain (and, we presume, Health and Safety).
All of these factors combine to compromise the illusion of infinity to great effect, with Balka’s work full of failed allusions to, among others, Plato’s cave and some of the ‘darker’ events in Polish history. Instead, if you would rather a better approximation of how long a piece of string is, try to think back to the exact moment you fell asleep last night. Everyone knows the sensation of awakening. The reverse, however, is more intangible.

Words: Charlie Chichester, Pictures: Guardian