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Day: 14 February 2012

Editor’s Note Issue 12 13/02/12

Written by Nick Renaud-Komiya on . Posted in News.

Just as we were going to press, news emerged that the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), has decided to allocate universities an extra £1,100 per postgraduate student. The funding increase will only affect those postgraduate students not taking the lowest costing and humanities subjects.

Tedious acronyms aside, this is a pretty interesting development and may be a nugget of good news for Manchester’s students. While the marching and banner waving seems to have died down for the moment, the means of funding higher education will be an issue that will never die. It is by far the biggest issue exorcising students (from both sides of the pro/anti fee divide).

This latest development, which we will be covering in more detail in next week’s edition, poses a big question to the University.

Given that they have already decided to raise tuition fees for Postgraduate students for the academic year 2012/13 to £5,000, what will they do with the extra per student funding they will be receiving? Will they lower their fees for the following year or spend the money elsewhere? Watch this space.

The other big story on our radars over the past week has been that of Ed Lester, the chief executive of the Student Loans Company who managed to funnel his salary through a separate company in order avoid paying around £40,00 in tax.

There has been no shortage of views on the issue of legal tax avoidance particularly as practiced by top public officials. Our Comment team have been looking at the ethics of tax avoidance. Turn to Page 8 to see how they got on.

The Mancunion is now an official media partner of this summer’s Parklife festival. This means we’ll be bringing you interviews with all the best acts on the line up and a number of other goodies. Keep an eye out in the next few issues in the run up to the weekend itself.

Lana del Rey and the enduring love for Lolita

Written by Isabelle Dann on . Posted in Fashion & Beauty.

This month, Lana del Rey has made her Vogue cover debut, posed girlishly against a backdrop of baby pink. Her debut comes in the midst of backlash following a disastrous Saturday Night Live performance and revelations that Lana del Rey is actually the reincarnation of the less successful Lizzy Grant. Other live performances floating around the internet demonstrate that this performance was an anomalous anxiety-induced failure. As for changing her name, I’m sure nobody expected Lady Gaga, Bono, and Sting to appear as printed on their birth certificates.

In addition to her haunting melancholia, Lana’s rapid rise to fame – considering that Florence Welch first graced the cover of Vogue only two issues previously for December 2011, following three years and two albums in the mainstream music scene, Lana’s alacrity is impressive – has been due to her cultivated, unabashed, and self-confessed “Lolita got lost in the hood” image. The archetypal Lolita image – knowing women depicted as little girls, little girls depicted as knowing women, all in shades of pastel cut with scarlet, a juxtaposition of innocence with sexual self-awareness – is prevalent in Western culture and appeared all over the SS12 catwalks, most prominently at Meadham Kirchoff, who sent down the runway a troupe of candy-coloured Courtney Love-inspired Kinderwhores. Lana’s particular brand of Lolita is notable for its truth to Vladimir Nabokov’s original Lolita – her lyrics, “Light of his life / Fire of his loins”, are a direct re-write of the opening lines of Nabokov’s novel, and both her music and her image are composed of an overt expression of female sexual desire.

While the male obsession with Lolita may seem fairly obvious, it is the equally strong female obsession to be Lolita that initially perplexes. The appeal of Lolita to women lies in the honest exposure of the sexual duality inherent in both young girls and women of all ages, hence the timeless appeal (at 25 years old, Lana is no longer a teenage dream). The Lolita aesthetic embodies an enduring duality of good girl / bad girl: a would-be good girl (crucially, then, an awkward girl) knowingly the object of some malevolent man’s desire, except she desires him just as much. The result is an open acknowledgement that the binary labels of innocent virgin and depraved slut imposed upon women by men could never be adequate descriptions of female sexuality when the veracity is far more complicated.

Consequently, the Lolita aesthetic acknowledges the universal human quality of wanting to appear good in the face of a dark interior; individuals conscious of their mortality who find themselves part of a society with high moral expectations – that’s all of us, then – will forever be attracted to a picture of youth and the prospect of being very, very bad. Morally reprehensible actions are not condoned, but ubiquitous human desire is.

Lana del Rey perfectly embodies the masochism inherent in Lolita, which is why the image endures: masochism, a common and often female desire yet harboured reluctantly by many, is justified through the addition of glamour; it is acceptable if it’s bestowed an intellectual quality and looks beautiful. Who’d have thought a short dress, suntan, heart-shaped sunglasses and punch-stained lips could be so emblematic?

Live: The Black Keys @ Apollo

Written by Patrick Thornton on . Posted in Music.

The Black Keys
Apollo
6th February
5 stars

The unlikely figures of Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney make up the blues-cum-garage band duo The Black Keys. Hailing from the improbable town of Akron, OH, these two play like they are straight out of the Deep South. They formed around the turn of the millennium creating an admittedly uneasy-listening-style of garage blues and it took the commercial success of Brothers in 2010, to propel the Keys to stardom around the globe. El Camino, the new album from this Ohio duo, has seen the band playing arenas worldwide, a headline slot at Coachella Festival and founded claims of them being the biggest rock band in the world at the moment.

Now, I’m not entirely sure who books support acts for the Black Keys, but that individual got it spot on tonight in the form of Band of Skulls. The trio shot through a powerful blues guitar-driven set that included tracks from their first album. After blasting through latest single ‘The Devil Takes Care of His Own’ to rapturous applaud, the band ended on first album favourite, ‘Light of The Morning’. The South Coast outfit combine fantastic melodies with heavy over-driven guitar riffs to create wonderful three-minute masterpieces.

The stage was set and the mob of leather jacket-wearing rockers erupted into applause when the gangly silhouettes of The Black Keys took to the stage. Storming through openers and Brothers classics ‘Howlin’ for You’ and ‘Next Girl’, this outfit looked like a band in their prime. New tracks ‘Gold on the Ceiling’ and ‘Money Maker’ were fantastically combined with the older, rawer Keys tracks ‘Thickfreakness’ and ‘Girl Is On My Mind’, reminding us of Dan Auerbach’s ability to thrash out Hendrix-style riffs mixed with the wails of Junior Kimborogh. The Black Keys have recently been lauded as one of the biggest rock outfits in the world at the moment; this was demonstrated with a smouldering set and magnificent performance of ‘Lonely Boy’ to round off this unforgettable set.

The Black Keys – Gold on the Ceiling