By now, you’ve probably heard about the Saint Mary’s University and University of British Columbia frosh week rape chant debacle. And, if you’re a decent human being, you’re probably also appalled by it.

In short, frosh orientation leaders at the two universities (that is, the two universities it has surfaced at so far) have come under fire for a cheer that goes, “Y is for your sister, O is for oh-so-tight, U is for underage, N is for no consent, G is for grab that ass.” It’s inappropriate, inexcusable, and frankly, inhuman. But that we already know.

What has come under less fire is how the media, the universities, and the students involved have handled the whole situation. That’s where my beef is.

To start, this article is one of only a few newspaper pieces you’ll find that actually puts into print all the verses of the chant. Most condense it, and only include excerpts – strange to me, considering it’s a whopping 26 words long. They usually eliminate the “oh so tight” part, perhaps to avoid offending readers (and yet is that not the whole point that this is really offensive?), which becomes convenient when they then water-down their adjectives to the stuff of mere “sexist chant” instead of acknowledging the vaginal violence that phrase indicates: rape.

Indeed, the National Post ran the shockingly forgiving headline “Saint Mary’s University student president apologizes for ‘sexist’ frosh chant that critics say ‘reinforces rape culture’”. So we’re relying on critics to confirm that that disgusting string of words is, in fact, offensive? And what is with those scare-quotes? Is the National Post so insecure in its values that it has to only tentatively identify that the chant ‘reinforces rape culture’? Grow up, NP, and tell it like it is.

The Globe and Mail, too, published, “Frosh video cheering on non-consensual sex is ‘sexist and offensive,’ Saint Mary’s University says.” Let me make something clear right now: sexism is stuff like believing women are worse drivers than men by the mere fact of their gender. Sexism is by no means harmless, but it’s not on the violent level of this rape promotion. This frosh chant goes way beyond sexism, and to reduce it to that is to belittle the severity of the situation.

Enough with the “non-consensual sex” language, too. Rape is rape. Let’s not dilute the violence of that word by smothering it with “non-consensual” euphemisms. Doing so decreases the urgent sense of violence and pain that the term “rape” appropriately connotes, and disrespects the countless victims of this horrible crime whose experiences are downgraded by such rhetoric.

Enough, too, with all this talk of sensitivity training. The people who chanted the rape cheer were fully aware that it was wildly inappropriate – it’s common sense. No amount of university-administered sensitivity training or bringing in bullying professionals (the actual response at SMU) will awaken them to something they already know, or solve the deep-seated indifferent misogyny that perpetuated the chant’s continuing presence at so many years’ frosh events.

What does need to happen is to hold students more accountable for their actions – upper-year coordinators and first years alike. It shouldn’t have taken days for the Saint Mary’s student’s union president – who led the cheer, among others – to step down. He should have been fired - immediately. The schools shouldn’t be promising to “investigate the incidents”; the frosh leaders involved should be suspended, and maybe even expelled.

Consequences need to apply to the youngest people involved, too. First year students are, on average, 18 years old. They are legal adults who can vote, can drive, and have achieved secondary school grades high enough for admission into a university-level institution. So I don’t care about group mentalities, or how impressionable these young adults are. They are autonomous, intelligent individuals who have no excuse for singing along, for not blowing the whistle sooner on this chant, and who then grow up to become frosh leaders who propagate this whole cycle.

I’ve never heard anything like that cheer at McMaster, and I hope I never will. But I won’t be surprised to hear about more students criticizing and publicizing similarly violent and vulgar experiences at other universities after this coast-to-coast reveal. For in a country where our media sugarcoats, our administration band-aids, and our students deny responsibility, where's the pressure for this culture to change?

View the full video that kickstarted this whole discussion, here:

[youtube id="SMY9Tqxz-Ec" width="620" height="360"]

 

This past summer, I had the opportunity to teach an English class for foreign exchange students from China. I wondered how, in the short time we had together, I could offer them a glimpse of this city that they might find inspiring in some small way. I’ve spent a lot of time the past few years thinking about place – what makes places meaningful? What makes them worth caring for? What draws us to a place? What drives us away? They’re questions that I took for granted before I moved to Hamilton, before I traveled to Europe, before I dated someone outside my cultural background, and before I met my Chinese students. But a sense of place, a sense of home, is inextricably tied to our identities, it sparks and resolves conflict, and it is literally the foundation upon which we construct our entire lives and histories.

And so I wondered, what can I say, what can I express about Hamilton as little more than an admiring Torontonion? What sideline stories could I share with individuals who had never even been to Canada? Could it be meaningful? Could it be authentic? Could I ever truly claim any part of this city for myself?

And so I turned to Tings Chak, who came to Canada as a little girl, and then later moved to Hamilton from Thornhill for McMaster. Her graphic novella, where the concrete desert blooms, is about this journey across cities and continents. Everyday in class we read aloud from her book, and learned about her story and the stories of the other people she met. She speaks about art, activism, and the physical and cultural landscape that is Hamilton. After reading about her conversations with Brian Prince, we visited Brian Prince Bookseller’s and spent some time as a class marveling at the pretty books. She writes about her first hike through Cootes, and we promptly followed suit on one particularly green and sunny day. And the little drawing of herself floating on her back in the tiny pool of Chedoke Falls inspired my own effort to find those falls. I eventually discovered them after two failed attempts and several hours of walking off the trail over giant rocks and near frightening cliffs.

Her work opened hours of discussion and sometimes debate in the classroom. I listened as they spoke about cultural workers in China, and we talked about issues of censorship. We asked questions about loneliness and homelessness and wondered what the cure might be. We acknowledged the story’s accessibility and thought about why we sometimes make it so difficult to understand and relate to simple, human ideas. We thought about the arts and the kind of storytelling it offers and the communities it can build – within whole cities and inside tiny classrooms.

I hope that, in the coming year, ANDY can ask some of those same questions and tell some of those stories, and that it too can have a place in Hamilton’s strange and lovely narrative.

Bahar Orang

This summer, my parents put a pool in the backyard. Now that it’s here, and despite the cost of putting it in, the secondary spending phase of wanting to purchase every accessory imaginable has kicked in: floating basketball net, fountain-cum-disco-light-show, blow-up air mattresses… you get the picture. And yet, it was the purchase of a standard pair of goggles amidst the excessive pool toy glory, that made me more quietly angry towards a piece of plastic than I’ve felt in a long time.

I’ve never thought of goggles as in any way political. They’re utilitarian devices that seem pretty innocuous in the scheme of things. But when the three different types stocked for purchase are “children’s,” “women’s” and “adults’”, something political is being said – and I don’t appreciate it.

In case you didn’t catch that, by making a distinction between goggles made for women and goggles made for adults – not “men,” “adults” – the company in question is implying that women are not adults, that women somehow have different goggle needs than adults, and that selling the exact same model of eyewear except in baby blue and pink rather than the adult black and grey, is somehow indicative of a person’s gender.

It’s not hard to dispute any of those claims. Women are legally adults past the age of 18 – as are men, women’s skulls aren’t much different than men’s, and pastels versus shades have nothing to do with anatomy. So the question remains, why did that company differentiate their product lines?

When I called to find out, they explained that the ladies ones come in different colours and are slightly smaller to fit a woman’s face. Generalizations on face shape aside, that doesn’t explain why women are placed in a category distinct from adults. For how is one over-the-phone customer service representative supposed to explain to me the history of patriarchy and how its strange and far reaching effects came to influence the minds of passively sexist men – and probably women – who designed the product packaging, who approved it for sale, and thought nothing of what those two little labels mean.

A few months ago, a video of Ellen DeGeneres ripping into Bic pens on her talk show went viral. Her scathing attack on Bic’s new line of women’s-only pens “For Her” was humourous, poignant, and sad in that such a product would actually exist to necessitate that segment of her show. “We’ve come a long way, baby,” she quipped. I echoed her frustration in the swim section at Walmart.

To a point, they’re just goggles. And I recognize that. But it’s little things like this that worm their way into our collective subconscious and have a big impact on how we see the world. It is because of our repeated exposure to images and products and situations that quietly, subtly, put down women that we don’t notice – and don’t care – when obvious attacks on women’s rights stare us straight in the face. That’s why half of all women in Canada have experienced physical or sexual violence, and why many women still make 77 cents for every man’s dollar, and the abandonment of female newborns for preferred male offspring is still a major problem around the world.

Next month will see the (re)introduction of a feminist-focused column into The Silhouette’s opinions section. I encourage you to write for it on any variety of topics under the umbrella of feminism, i.e. the struggle for equality of all people no matter their gender, colour, or sexual preference. Share your stories, your frustrations, your involvement in good things that are making a difference. Write about who’s creating change, and who’s not but should be. Write if you’re male, female, trans*, queer. Write from a respectful and informed place.

And in the mean time, don’t let the goggles get you down.

I’m used to hearing about natural disasters. Earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes. Of course, they have always occurred in other places. Somewhere tropical, along a coast, or over a fault line. I would shake my head sadly at the news broadcast, feel deeply for the suffering people, and thank my lucky stars that I live in Canada. And then, out of nowhere, Alberta.
Their tremendous floods added weight to the conversations I was privileged enough to have over the days leading up to this issue. Conversations with people who care deeply about environmental conservation, accountability, sustainability and clean-air transportation. Their voices, heard throughout this issue, speak to the little things that make big differences. Differences I have often faced cynically. How does my small effort to switch off the lights not be rendered futile by the office highrise that leaves every single light on? So what if we plant trees to improve the air if the factories will keep pumping out more poison than we can keep up with?
On a daily, individual basis, the bigger battles - against business practices, industry standards and global politics - cannot be won. And if those are the only pieces of the puzzle one focuses on, then disillusionment and infantilization are instant byproducts.
But if we make room in our lives for the little things - the recycling and the composting and the biking instead of driving - and make room for them successfully, then inpiration, determination and a collective desire to start tackling the big things will follow.
Yes We Cannon, the Street Tree program and LEARN-CC are just a few of the initiatives happening in Hamilton that are worth learning more about in this issue. Yes, they’re local, little things. And together, with other similar movements around the city, province and country, they’ll make a big impact.

As I watched the best picture nominees from the Oscars this year, the films all felt strangely familiar. And I realized that truly powerful movies – like Amour and Life of Pi – have the unique ability to become a part of my own personal visual narrative. Watching a movie is remarkably similar to looking through my own memories. Most of our lives are like a series of images. They pass us by like towns on a highway. But sometimes, for some reason, a moment stuns us as it happens and we know that this moment is more than a fleeting image. We know that this moment, and every part of it, will always be imprinted in our minds – like the most moving scene in a film that you’ll always remember. My earliest memories can only be described in this way – as a collection of snapshots. Like a messy, nonlinear scrapbook with colourful pictures and missing dates. And instead of stamps or stickers or receipts to adorn the pages, there are scents and sounds and certain kinds of weather – like gently falling snowflakes, or the first spring breeze – that can suddenly overwhelm me with a memory that I never knew I had.

I can remember moments, but I cannot remember days.

I remember that there was a bright red balloon. I do not remember how I got it, or why, but I remember thinking it was absolutely perfect. I wrapped it around my wrist, asked my dad to double knot it twice, and I gripped it tightly for several hours. It is a still a mystery to me how it became undone. But somehow, one second it was attached to my arm like a fifth limb, and the next it was drifting away at an unstoppable pace. It looked like an airborne cherry – floating off into the distance with an inexplicable kind of purpose.

I remember the smell of a summer beside the lake, the smell of a moonlit beach, the smell of a family dinner of chicken souvlaki and sweet potatoes.

I remember my grandmother’s hands. I remember that she wore two rings on her right hand, and one on her left. The one ring on her left was a gold band with a round, auburn coloured stone. One ring on her right hand was turquoise, and the other was a silver flower with a black centre. I am told that the most striking thing about her was her hazel eyes, but for some reason I remember her hands. The only pictures I have of her are those that are black and white, so it seems that I may never be able to appreciate her eyes. But my memories do add some shades of colour to those pictures, and the ones in my mind are as vivid as ever.

I remember the soundtrack of quiet Sunday mornings. My brother – reading Calvin and Hobbes while munching on cheerios. My mom – coming home from her early morning run and turning the key in the front door.  And my dad – whistling to himself as he marked his enormous pile of papers.

I remember falling in love with Conner Rumen because of his fluffy golden retriever, daydreaming whole novellas in the half a second it took me to fall.

I remember where I used to hide my first journal – in the left corner of my bed, underneath my mattress. And I remember the wonderful relief of running to my room, lifting the mattress, and knowing that my friendly little notebook was still there. Would it be cliché to say in a writing paper that I always loved to write? Probably. But I liked connecting words with people, and I felt like a momentary genius when I would find the perfect words to explain something. And I always thought that to live in an undescribed world was too lonely.

Memories are a strange thing. They are close enough to touch, but not quite close enough to hold. There are memories that are buried deep, but they all have triggers, and suddenly – a complex vision can leap out from under the dusty mass of years. There are memories that are with us all the time, like a tiny newspaper cutout slipped into our wallets – where you can always feel its warmth in your pocket. My mind feels like a camera sometimes. I can never hear the click of a photograph being taken but I’ll eventually remember the picture in perfect detail, though it may be a little blurred around the edges.

Bahar Orang, Assistant ANDY Editor

Edgar’s posters have become the symbol of the No! Downtown Hamilton Casino group, a collection of activists, businesses owners and Hamiltonians that is extensively involved in raising awareness about the casino. Graham Crawford, owner of the Hamilton HIStory + HERitage storefront museum on James North, is a prominent member of the No! Downtown Casino group and has made a different poster opposing the casino every day for nearly the last two months.

“I’m almost embarrassed to say to people how little time it takes to make the posters,” said Crawford modestly. “I can’t draw, so the posters become my editorial cartoons because you don’t have to have much skill to make a poster.”

Crawford’s posters, which he shares through his Facebook page, make it clear that the result of the casino debate is something he cares deeply about. But the posters have convinced a lot of other people to care as well.

“My first ‘the new Hamilton’ poster focused on Supercrawl,” said Crawford, “and even I am social media savvy enough to know that when you get 236 shares in one day about something local that doesn’t involve cats it’s a big deal. The reach of the poster was probably tens of thousands. I’ve never had anything shared that much, ever.”

Everything that has changed James North over the last few years – the galleries, art crawl, Supercrawl – has done so slowly, deliberately and empathetically. Downtown Hamilton has showed us is that there’s a way for development to be good for everyone. Countless arts programs like Roots 2Leaf, the Urban Arts Initiative and Hamilton Artists for Social Change are dedicated to addressing poverty in many forms. What makes Crawford’s Supercrawl poster so affecting to so many people is that it puts into stark contrast Hamilton’s recent downtown development and the type of development that a casino represents - fast, less engaged with the rest of the city and harmful to at least some.

“A casino is completely inward facing by design, not by accident,” said Crawford. “Once they get you in there they don’t want you to leave. It’s why there are no windows. It’s why there are no clocks.”

Certainly PJ Mercanti, one of the main people involved in the proposed casino, is not evil. I’m sure he doesn’t see the city as just a source of income. It’s just that his vision and Crawford’s vision for the future of Hamilton are fundamentally different. One will probably never agree with the other, no matter how much debate. But even if a resolution will never be reached, at least there are people who care enough the city to see that it’s worth arguing about.

There are those who would look at the score of the 48th Vanier Cup and say that it was all for naught. There are those who would argue that the most important game was lost and that everything before was a historical footnote. Those people are very wrong.

Speaking not only as a fan, or as a person who has had the pleasure of covering this team over the last two years, but simply as a McMaster student, I can say that the Marauders football team has been a source of pride for this school, its students and this community.

That is not only an optimistic inference; the presence of Mac football pride is tangible here on campus. Speaking with school president Patrick Deane before the game, it was apparent that not only were students partaking in the excitement surrounding this team and this sport, but it was everywhere – in every hallway, in every office and in every classroom.

Regardless of the records and the history at stake, the outcome of the national championship game almost didn’t matter.

There were 37,098 fans in attendance for the game, breaking the previous record by almost 5,000. More than 30,000 (and that’s being generous to Laval) were there to support the Marauders.

It was a sea of Maroon blanketing the blue bleachers of the nation’s most recognizable football stadium (sorry Riders fans), and if I had closed my eyes as Mac ran out of the tunnel it very well could have been Sunday.

At one time or another, 3.3 million people watched the broadcast on TSN and RDS – nearly 10 per cent of the country.

Taking the GO train on the day of the game was an experience I will never forget. Waiting for the bus to take me to Aldershot, school busses loaded with Mac faithful, decked out in their school colors, left the campus in droves. Upon arriving at the station, the platform was full of Marauder fans.

Every car was filled, and at every stop between Hamilton and Toronto, someone supporting our school boarded, dressed for the occasion.

The support, to my surprise, extended to a much greater community, bound not only by the geographic area of this beautiful Westdale campus, but by a much higher purpose.

From the start of the 2011 season, the headlines, all of the stories and a record of 22-1 (21 in a row) had brought McMaster to the pinnacle of Canadian university football.

Facing a Laval team that they had defeated in what was widely considered the greatest game ever played, at any level, the Marauders had a chance to win back-to-back national championships.

The intrigue that had developed nation-wide for this game was evident. This year’s game was the most watched Vanier Cup in history – and you’d better believe the Marauders had something to do with that.

Win or lose, Mac had done something that no other team in history was able to do. I am not talking about a national championship or a winning streak. I am talking about putting CIS football on the map.

To those who argue that Laval winning their seventh Vanier is the real piece of history here, I say congratulations.

But there were six national championships in their cabinet before 2011, and never did they draw a crowd quite like the one at Rogers Centre on Nov. 23.

This year’s Marauders will go down in history as the team who made a great impact on the progress of university-level football. This paper, this school and I are all extremely proud of this team.

Go Mac Go.

The Polaris Music Prize is a yearly award given to a Canadian artist for best album, as decided by a group of music journalists and broadcasters.  The prize includes a cash award of $30,000, and this year it was given to Feist for her album Metals. This  drives me crazy.

Even if Feist’s album wasn’t terrifically boring (it is), she has to be the artist, out all the people nominated, who needs money and publicity the least. Well, okay, Drake was also nominated, but Take Care is really great. So is Japandroid’s album Celebration Rock, which is like a stiff drink and all of the excitement and angst of being young distilled into musical form. Heck, I’d even prefer it if a band called Cold Specks had won, and I know nothing about them.

The Polaris Music Prize provides the opportunity to support a promising young artist so that they can maybe get a shot at paying their rent, and this year the award was wasted. What’s the purpose of arts awards ceremonies, anyway?

Hamilton’s own version of music awards, the appropriately-named Hamilton Music Awards, happened last Sunday, Nov. 18. When I first heard about it, I thought what you’re probably thinking now: “So what?” Well, I’ll tell you what. The Hamilton Music Awards are our antidote to the out-of-touch Polaris Music Prize.

The Hamilton Music Awards don’t come with a $30,000 prize, but they do support great local bands that are playing really close to you, this week, probably for five bucks. One of those great local bands, the Dirty Nil, won punk recording of the year for their passionately catchy single “Little Metal Baby Fists.”

“Mickey, the singer of the band Forgotten Rebels, was announcing the winner,” said Kyle Fisher, the Dirty Nil’s drummer. “But when he went to go say it he would cough, and he did it like three times, for way too long. And I was like, ‘Fuckin’ say it, man! My heart is pounding through my chest, stop doing this to me.’ And then he told us. And it was a relief.”

The Hamilton Music Awards are a refreshing antithesis to the bloated pomp of something like the Grammys.

“There wasn’t anything about business,” said Fisher. “It was a lot of congratulations, and then it became, ‘Let’s all party now.’”

“It’s different because it’s more about the community,” said Fisher. “Hamilton has such an intertwined music community, where punk bands hang out with folk people. There’s a lot of crossover and just a lot of friends. A lot of homies hanging left and right. I think that’s what those awards really stand for. The brotherhood of Hamilton music. And sisterhood.”

Other music awards could learn from our example.

 

Nolan Matthews, Senior ANDY Editor

Franklin D. Roosevelt coined the phrase “the only thing to fear is fear itself” as he came into office during the Great Depression. That same year, San Francisco began construction of the Golden Gate Bridge, and Major League Baseball held its all-star game in Chicago’s Comiskey Park.
It was 1933, and it would be the last time that playoff baseball was played in Washington D.C. That is, of course, until this year.

The Washington Nationals, formerly the Montreal Expos, have played eight years in the bigs since their relocation, the majority of which they spent occupying the National League East cellar. The Expos franchise, which had been competing since 1969, last made the playoffs in 1981.
Even still, a 31-year playoff drought going into the year put them atop the list of longest active playoff droughts. Something was special about 2012. Somehow, the blue chip prospects, alleged wash-ups and solid major league veterans mixed perfectly. At the all-star break, the Nats had 49 wins and led the division with no team closer than four games.
The leaders of three out of the five remaining divisions held slimmer leads, and the only two front-runners with a more dominant position were the New York Yankees and Chicago White Sox.
That is certainly more favorable company than the Kansas City Royals, who have now missed the playoffs for a 27th straight year, taking over top spot in that metric.
Washington ended the season with a record of 98 wins and 64 losses. By doing so, the team not only had its first winning season in D.C., but also set a franchise record with 98 wins and was the best team in baseball.

Even when the Expos were winning, they were never that good. It almost sounds too good to be true, and believe me, it is. As a baseball fan, I write to you with hopes of explaining how truly disappointed I am in the Washington Nationals as an organization.
Efforts on the field were admirable, even at times remarkable, and the pitching staff in particular contributed to the success this year. Ace pitching duo Gio Gonzalez and Stephen Strasburg, two of the shining young stars of the sport, combined for 36 of the team’s wins and 404 of the total strikeouts. The pair was truly the anchor of a staff that saw each of the five starters get double-digit win totals.
I regret to inform you that every one of those wins – Strasburg’s 15 at the very least – went completely to waste; There would be no happy ending to this fairy tale.
On Friday, Oct. 12, the St. Louis Cardinals, in a heart-breaking fifth and deciding game, eliminated the team from the National League Division Series. Someone had to lose. But to give every player on that roster, and potentially everyone else in the Washington dugout, some credit, it was not entirely a fair fight.
At the very least it is not the fight the team deserved. After making a start on Sept. 7 against the Miami Marlins, Strasburg was shut down by the team’s upper management. Was he injured? No. Was he playing poorly? No. Was he causing problems in the clubhouse? At least, not to the best knowledge of America’s ever present and savvy baseball writers. According to management, the team was preserving the longevity of their young star’s career.
Strasburg’s arm has, in fact, been touted as possibly the best ever. That is the guy you want the mound in one of the first two games in a series against a Cardinals team that breathes playoff baseball. No?
The young ace made no such appearance. Instead, the Nats took a 1-0 lead in the series, only to be tied up a game later. An article on ESPN quotes an unnamed player on Washington’s roster who seems to believe strongly that Strasburg would have made a difference in the series; the player makes no mistake in saying that Strasburg would have helped make the series 2-0. Numbers don’t lie; there is a good chance that would have been the case, but it is impossible to say. He is only human after all.
This is evident in the injury troubles that have been a reality for Strasburg early in his career. Regardless, he didn’t show it this season. He has no business packing a lip on the bench.
His absence during the NLDS was a tragedy, not only for the Nationals and their (newly) loyal fans, but baseball as a whole.
No player of Strasburg’s caliber or character should ever be prevented from playing for fear of injury or wear, especially on the eve of the playoffs. Good players should be seen and not heard from, I suppose.
For fear of hurting their best player, the Nationals hurt their best chances at winning in the playoffs. 79 years later, Washington’s new baseball team proved Mr. Roosevelt very, very right.

Like most music nerds, I spend a lot of time reading album reviews. I started really reading them around the time I got Broken Social Scene’s You Forgot it in People. I bought the album thinking it would sound like Coldplay, but it didn’t sound anything like Coldplay. It sounded weird, but I liked it, and I read as many reviews as I could so that I had a way of explaining to my parents and friends that this album made of strange sounds was actually really great. I looked to music critics then, as I do now, as an example of how to talk and think about music.

I think there’s some kind of magic in a really good review. A critic can make you feel an even deeper connection with a work you love or they can make you laugh along with them as they scathingly cut something down to size. I love great reviews, but I was never really able to identify the mysterious ingredients that make a good critic.

Then I came across a New Yorker article entitled “A Critic’s Manifesto: The Intersection of Expertise and Taste.” In the article, Daniel Mendelsohn explains why critics are important and what it takes to be a good one. He brilliantly condenses his argument into one equation: “Knowledge + Taste = Meaningful Judgment.”

Mendelsohn writes that the role of the critic is to explain the narrative of how they arrive at a judgment, and this is where knowledge comes in. Knowledge comes from being immersed in an artist’s work and being able to explain how a work fits into a larger context. Critics should aim to use their knowledge to explain to the reader how they arrived at a judgment and how a work can be approached and understood in the same way they do.

The next part is taste, which is a little trickier. Taste is a personal and subjective feeling, and the critic should fully understand their taste so that they can most honestly and clearly explain their reaction to a work.

Mendelsohn writes that knowledge and taste come together to give a review significance, allowing the critic to explain why art means something or nothing.

In honour of the review, this week we present an ANDY that’s full of them. We hope you think it’s good, but that’s for you to judge.

 

Nolan Matthews,
Senior ANDY Editor