All the latest reviews and interviews from Fashion & daily life.
Wellness Wednesdays
Written by amyrose
Words: Laura Nicholls
Southampton Solent’s Health Spark has begun a new campaign for the student pop
ulation to improve Solent’s health.
Wellness Wednesdays offers students advice and assessment in sexual health, body MOT, massage and healthy eating.
These free monthly workshops happen every month in the Centre (SU Top Bar):
14/11/2012 – Massage (10am – 2pm) – Free neck and shoulder massage
12/12/2012 – Sexual Health (10am – 2pm) – Free advice from a sexual health nurse from NHS
16/01/2013 – Health Eating & Body MOT’s (10am – 2pm) – Free healthy eating advice
Also look out for Health Spark’s other schemes BUGS (Bicycle User Group Solent) if you want to get cycling or bike maintenance and FUFGLG (Fuel Up, Feel Good, Look Great) to improve your healthy eating.
For more information on any of Solent Health Spark’s schemes head over to the Sports Centre on campus or check out the website solent.ac.uk/sport/solent-health-spark.aspx.

Charities need people like you!
Written by amyrose
Words: Chloe Dyer
Hearing the word ‘charity’, for many people will make them think it’s all about giving money or food to ‘poor people’. I bet you do!
As a student, usually you will steer clear of the workers with clipboards in the middle of the street trying to ‘sell you something’, when really they’re only trying to do their job as well as possible. They’re trying to advertise the company that they are working for. This means they could be working for Save the Children, Green Peace or any other charitable organisation. You may feel like you’re being pressured into helping a cause, but you wouldn’t help out if you didn’t want to.
But every now and then, don’t you feel really good when you’ve helped someone or something? There are so many charities all over the world, it’s impossible to think about which one will benefit the most. So be open-minded. Think, maybe I could help more than one charity out? You could write a blog, be part of a sponsored silence, or have a cake sale? The list goes on..
You don’t have to give any money to anyone or anything. Sometimes it’s not about the money, it’s about caring. Who knows where the money goes! But one thing I do know is that, even if you were to work in a local hospice, care home or a charity shop, the help goes a long way! Plus, you’re helping the public and environment out immensely. If charity work appeals to you some good websites to have a browse at are:
‘God bless Twitter’: one student & London Fashion Week.
Written by Contributor
Words: Yasmin Hennessy
I know my lecturers always say ‘use twitter, it’ll help you’ and for a year, I ignored them but god bless Twitter – it got me a day dressing models backstage at A/W 2012 Jasper Garvida show at London Fashion Week. I spontaneously replied to a tweet I saw asking for dressers on the Sunday and within 8 minutes, I’d received my call sheet and location details and away I went to worry about what to wear.
My dress code was all black so I settled with black Topshop pumps with gold chains, a zip-up black body-con skirt with a chiffon sleeved t-shirt complete with bow and black Miss Selfridge cardigan. Off I went on my journey into the ‘big bad fashion world’. 
It was EXACTLY as I’d imagined, scarier perhaps. The main stylist Jade has yelled at us with 15 minutes of being there;
“if you fuck up, the whole collection is fucked up so the show’s fucked up and if the show fucks up thats 9 months of work gone to shit, so DON’T FUCK UP’. It wasn’t exactly reassuring but at least we were all too scared too make any mistakes.
The next hurdle was my models second ‘look’ – it was supposed to go with chunky, gold earrings however she only had one ear pierced which she explained to me in a husky Romanian grunt. When I told Jade this, she told me that the outfit has to have earrings otherwise it won’t work and if her ear isn’t pierced it it’s my job to pierce it. I was terrified, how did she expect me to pierce a model’s ear, mainly one that was already
in a bad mood and who I couldn’t fully communicate with. Luckily there was actually someone nice to talk to and she told me just to leave the earrings.
Next I had to endure being called ‘the short person dressed in black’, now I suppose there are worse things to be called however my confidence was already at an all time low, I was surrounded by 7ft models with painfully, beautiful, sculpted faces and the bodies ofathletes, I didn’t need reminding of my 5”3 frame but it’s a small price to pay for the day I had. One of the girls couldn’t handle it and she disappeared after the first run through – Jade noted down her phone number, I would hate to be on the receiving end of that call!

Despite being yelled at and nearly having to qualify myself as a trained ear piercer, I had one of the best days of my little, young life. It was exhilarating being thrown in at the deep end like that and amongst the excitement and fast pace blurs of dresses and nail polishes being thrown past my head I realized this doesn’t have to be a pipe-dream – real people live that lifestyle every day and I could be one.
It was tiring, I was on my feet running around non stop for 8 hours, and it was stressful and intimidating but when we got to watch the models come alive on the catwalk to the sounds of applause everywhere, it made it all worth it. To know I had been a part of that process (albeit a very small part) was a proud achievement for me, (not to mention the email I received with a thank you from Jade and JASPER GARVIDA himself) and one I will take with me wherever I go on my next adventure.
Capital FM take over Solent SU
Written by Contributor
Words: Kirsty Summerford
Presenters of Capital FM’s South Coast breakfast show, Zoe and Gillies dropped by Southampton Solent to take part in a radio workshop. With a packed out room, the pair had a good audience to talk all things radio. Sonar Magazine caught up with them to discuss their career in radio and their thoughts on the future, revealing stories about upsetting celebrities and Gillies ‘date’ with Cheryl Cole!
What made you want to get into radio in the first place?
Gillies: I’ve always been a DJ, since I was five when I got my first record decks and started buying records, as they were then. It always seemed like a really natural thing for me to do. There was no sort of massive moment where I thought ‘I want to do radio’, it’s just quite a natural thing for me.
Zoe: I like talking. I don’t shut up. I’ve always sort of done entertainment stuff, I was a Butlins red coat and did stuff on stage like touring theatre shows. Then I decided I’d quite like to make a living out of chatting so, this is it. It’s a great job.
Have you had any other experience working in any other types of media apart from radio, like publications or TV?
Gillies: I have a silent disco company I went into more recently so for that I have to be across websites and search engines optimization. I edit videos; produce and can do radio production and studio work. Really radio is my only media job, if that makes sense.
Zoe: I’ve done quite a few voice-overs; I use to be the continuity voice for 4music! I did a Persil CD, free with your washing powder, that was me. I’ve done a few bits on Sky News, if there’s a really dull story about pop music and they can’t find anybody else they normally call on me! (Laughs) But I really enjoy that, because we’re so comfortable with the radio show now. To take yourself out and push yourself in a different field, it gives you a different set of skills. It gives you another skill to put on the radio.
Did you like each other instantly when you started working together?
Zoe: We worked at the same radio station before we came down here (South Coast). But Gillies did the evening show and I did the breakfast show and when we came down here the boss managed to see some sort of spark of chemistry and I think over time we’ve built up that trust and that relationship.
Gillies: I think it’s quite fair to say that it’s more that our boss probably saw that we didn’t entirely get on that he thought ‘they could do a radio show together’. We’re really quite different.
Do you still get nervous before your shows?
Gillies: Not really when you’ve done the same show in the same place for a while, you’re quite comfortable with the people around you, but certainly when you start at a new radio station. I don’t tend to get nervous other than live interviews or people I’m uncomfortable with.
Zoe: I very rarely get nervous, if I get nervous I talk more, so I suppose that comes in handy with the job.
Who are the favourite people you’ve interviewed and is there anybody you’d like to interview that you haven’t yet?
Zoe: My favourite people to interview were Will Smith, Hugh Grant, Robbie Williams and the Take That boys are always lovely. But I would love, as much as it’s scary, I think she is the biggest superstar that we’ve got, Madonna. I would love to interview Madonna. She’s right up there.
Gillies: I’m terrible with celebs, I don’t even recognise them. I get no sort of real buzz that I’ve met such and such famous person. I am a bit of a geek so I was pleased to interview Fat Boy Slim, Tinie Tempah, Labrinth, Calvin Harris and Black Eyed Peas. Anyone I can sort of talk to about how they make their songs. Cheryl Cole was someone that I wanted to interview only because she had promised a date with me years ago before she had got married and by the time I finally got to interview her, I got to ask her if it was for real and she said yeah. So, I nearly got a date with Cheryl Cole.
Zoe: Has she been in touch since her divorce?
Gillies: She’s very busy.
What would you say was your worst interview?
Gilles: JLS, it didn’t go down very well when I got Ortise’s name wrong. Also Harvey from So Solid Crew, that was terrible, I never even broadcast that. He came down cause he was launching a solo career and he was with Alesha Dixon at the time. She came down and sat in the studio so the first thing I said was that Alesha had ruined my first question by coming along, and when they asked why, I said I was going to ask you if you ever think about the other two members of Mis-Teeq. Then they both were shouting and Harvey said even if I were joking he would kill me. And I was just thinking okay, I’ve got one of the members of So Solid Crew wanting to kill me, and I still need to finish this interview somehow. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.
Zoe: I was taking to Bruce Willis about his son, who is actually his daughter. Didn’t go down so well.
How do you stay calm when interviewing celebrities?
Zoe: The worst interviews are when it’s not flowing and there’s no connection between the star and the presenter. You just want to build some sort of relationship in a very short space of time, so you don’t act stupid, but most of the time I do act stupid.
Gillies: Most of the artists have media training now anyway and they do loads of interviews so like The Wanted, JLS, One Direction, you could just ask them what the time is and they’ll talk cause they know it’s their job. They’re there to promote something so they will talk and give you answers, but I’ve especially found when people are really new to the industry you can get some attitude and people will just give you one word answers and that’s when it really throws you cause you’ve got ten questions and they’ve answered them all in 30 seconds. And you’re thinking what can I ask them now? I asked Sean Kingston about his song Beautiful Girls. We were having a bit of banter with him and I was like, ‘Sean did you write that song about me?’ And he was like ‘no buddy, I did not write that song about you.’ And it just really killed the atmosphere of the interview.
Do you like listening to your own voice?
Zoe: We listen back to our own show about twice a week with our boss. It’s something that I’ve had to do for years and years now, and it’s never particularly comfortable. I used to work with a guy that whenever he heard himself back he would start miming the words that he was saying.
Gillies: I do find it weird, and especially now we only ever really listen to ourselves with our boss there and two or three other people and it’s the weirdest job in the world in that if you work in a shop no one really sees what you do or say to customers, whereas there is your kind of days work for everybody to listen to again and again. And when you say something stupid or think you shouldn’t of said that, you’ve got all those eyes looking at you. I’m not hugely comfortable with it.
More people are starting to put their iPod on in the car rather than listen to the radio. Do you think radio is becoming old fashioned?
Zoe: I think for music it’s always going to be your iPod, but for me, an iPod is full of music that I want to hear when I want to hear it. Although a lot of the time I will switch the radio on to hear what’s number one in the chart or what’s hot because they’ll have the song before it’s released, before I can put it on my iPod. Also radio is always your mate, if you’re on a long car journey I quite like to hear somebody chatting away, telling me something or listening to a bit of comedy. I really enjoy it. I think it’s your mate in the kitchen and also if you’re getting up for the day, you want to know what the weather is like, what your drive to work is going to be like, what the news is. It’s for that sort of hotness. It’s up to the minute.
Gillies: I think there is a real issue, and statistically there is far fewer young people listening to the radio. I think radio had more relevance a few years ago when people couldn’t just download songs, before they could find out the news as it happened online or on your phone. I think there can always be a place for radio but I think it needs to create a relationship with the youth of today.
If you are an aspiring radio presenter or fancy working in radio, you can apply for an internship on the breakfast show with Zoe and Gillies. Visit http://www.capitalfm.com/southcoast for more details.
All great work is unfinished.
Written by Contributor
Now that we are settled on that, I’m overwhelmed with awe at the progress technology and humanity are making nowadays. We, as a species, are becoming artists. That is correct. I wasn’t referring to God in the title. My jaw was on the floor the other day at the news that we now have 3D printers and they are available to the mass public for purchase. This is huge and it’s also what has sprung this article.
3D printers are a device you plug in and in which you can upload some blueprints of the object you want to print and press start. That is right, object. You can print for example, to scale models of buildings or cars, or real size copies of anything that’s smaller and so fits. The possibilities are infinite. It builds the objects up layer by layer and it takes 12 to 24 hours to finish. The material used is a powder plastic that sets according to the blueprint, and it’s very solid and durable. It means that instead of buying an absolutely immeasurable range of things you can now make them in your own home. You can even come up with your own blueprints. You can design and fabricate absolutely anything, the only constraint being it has to have a definite shape. The medical and educational implications of this are also considerable, but those are for the specialists to talk about. I’m just giving the view of the average consumer here.
IKEA will love this – “It’s equally possible that we could one day print our own furniture.”(that will inevitably last longer than IKEA) “It won’t be long before 3D printers start appearing on your High Street, just as photocopiers did decades ago.” Says the Telegraph.
Once this happens, it will basically change manufacturing, industry, society and maybe eventually the whole world. . Close your eyes or something and picture the possibilities of you owning one, set your imagination free. If you have any trace of brains, you’ll be excited by now. However, Manny’s ambition will still be handicapped by laziness.
They have these printers here in England, available to students all over the queendom, including Ravensbourne University – www.rave.ac.uk. A bunch of crazy engineers from the University of Southampton have even printed a plane. “The ASTRA Atom aircraft will have its maiden flight on 7 December at Microsoft Research’s eighth annual Think Computer Science event, at The Imperial War Museum in Duxford.“ said www.wired.co.uk on the 7th of December 2011.
We might very well have one of these beauties here at Southampton Solent Uni, but our website doesn’t sound as cool as www.rave.ac.uk, and we aren’t printing any planes or submarines either. What matters in the end is the idea of it, not who has it and who doesn’t, so let’s not let ourselves get caught up in petty university rivalries that cause pub fights and cruel practical jokes for no good reason. We are professionals, and we must have our eyes on the big picture.
On the one hand you have technology and science and all that advancing at a mind-blowing pace, and on the other hand you have obsolete laws and greedy companies both made and ran by old and blood thirsty squares who think they’re entitled to the whole damn universe. There’s conflict of interests here and these things settle behind closed doors, with the brainiacs always losing to the fratboys. Now, why the fuck is that? Because governments and political parties and big banks and big companies are no more than fraternities on steroids and they are disgusting indeed. If you think about it objectively (what a nasty word), it actually makes sense. I’m not going to start arguing this right now, maybe in another piece.
All you average folk are now wondering why you haven’t heard of this before. So was I, when I stumbled upon it. Turns out tech geeks know about it for years but it somehow hasn’t gone through, hoho. Well, the problem is simple and self-evident. Big television and big newspapers charge very high prices for publicity and only big business can afford to pay them. These 3D printers are made by small, independent firms ran by the brainiacs I was telling you about, and they can’t compete at that level. No big corporation is really looking forward to 3D printers becoming household items, and if they say they are, they’re lying through their teeth. Details like, for instance, corporate interest and long-term perspective must be pestering them. Put yourself in their shoes. If you start producing and selling 3D printers on a big scale, you are literally nailing your own coffin.
The Telegraph also said that, “all of this raises the question of intellectual property. We could one day see piracy lawsuits directed at people who have illegally downloaded gearboxes or bookcases.” Whoopsie. Again with that. Laws that inhibit the progress of civilisation. They will put you in prison if you start using the design they “own” to make your own stuff you need. It puts them out of business. The consumer goes through the long overdue metamorphose into self-sufficiency, and it means DIY, new rules, no more monopoly. Anarchy. It is against our best interest and we should preserve the status quo and forget about these revolutionary ways for the greater good. Otherwise, we will face doom and darkness, unlike the happy and prosperous existence all human beings have on Earth now, under the current guidance. I must never forget to take my medication again.
A Cautionary Tale
Written by Contributor
“Any officer apprehending a suspected marijuana addict should use all necessary force immediately.” – Hunter Stockton Thompson
It was 2009 ,God’s year, in a small town in the heart of the mountains of the dreaded land of Romania, on a sunny day in March. My childhood friend and blood brother, Danny the Horse was skipping class to chill out with a pint and some friends and maybe a spliff, as is customary on sunny days. That was the day when his life got irreparably altered and full of fear.
So there he is in the garden of the pub we normally go to, drinking a pint (the German type, with a handle) of beer with three of our best mates from the neighbourhood whom we have known since we were kids. I was in Denmark, studying at the time. If I were on holiday, I would have undoubtedly been there with them. One of the guys, the oldest, who goes by the name Christian the Gut gets a phone call and is very enthusiastic about it. He says he’s gonna be back in a few minutes and he’s gonna buy drinks for everybody. He leaves his wallet and mobile on the table and steps outside. He gets back in less than five minutes and pulls out a stack of cash from the back pocket of his trousers and puts it in the wallet. He’s very happy and he introduces this guy he came in with – Old Bill The Pig, let’s call him, although nobody knows his real name to this day. He rolls a fat spliff full of top quality Moroccan hashish which they all share and enjoy.
Minutes after, the place gets stormed by Police. Five officers, three of them masked and armed with sub-machine guns come in and start pointing their guns and yelling – “Nobody moves! Hands up! Stay where you are!”
All hell breaks loose and terror and panic take over. In the midst of the chaos, a very confused, very scared and very impaired Danny the Horse does something that will haunt him forever; he reaches to the table and puts his mate’s wallet in his pocket. He’s handcuffed and dragged in a police van in the next few seconds. They find the wallet with no ID in it on him later. It contains a bunch of banknotes that have NARCOTRAFIC written on them in special ink.
At the station he’s brutalized and put in a room with a people’s prosecutor from the DIICOT (which, in the Queen’s English means the Division for Investigation of Organized Crime and Terrorism).
This is the elite of the Romanian Police Force, they’ve been known for locking up the meanest of the mean, gangs of killers and international Heroin rings that deal in metric tons. Without being told what he’s accused of or why he’s been arrested, Danny is presented with a handwritten statement which the reputable prosecutor tries to make him sign.
The man says he knows Danny and that his mates sold 40 grams of hash to the undercover cop that came in the pub just before them. He took the hash and gave Christian the Gut some 1500 RON (300 GBP) which were previously marked NARCOTRAFIC by the cops – a classic undercover sting operation. The money was found on Danny, so he was obviously the criminal mastermind behind this dope deal, and he must confess and tell the police everything else they want to know. There’s really no other choice, since they already caught him red handed and he’s already Guilty and on his way to Prison, the reputable prosecutor says. They did him the favour of writing the statement for him, since he’s a dope addict and a criminal that is probably illiterate. Never mind that he’s in his final year of High School, three months away from his Baccalaureate exam (UK’s A-levels). Never mind that he was never convicted of any small or big crime, not even fly tipping! He was surely selling drugs to his fellow students, and that’s the only reason he hadn’t dropped out, but ‘his business is over now and he’s going to Jail’, the good prosecutor says. The streets of this small mountain town will finally be clean and safe again, ho ho!
However Danny was absolutely mind-blown and couldn’t for the life of him understand what the hell was happening and why they wouldn’t believe him when he said he didn’t know anything about any drugs. He said he just picked up the wallet because he thought he’s doing his mate a favour (the mate who gave the hash to the undercover cop, allegedly), and so he never signed the statement.
Although he never realised that during the very long interrogations and sleepless nights that followed his arrest that he’s actually entitled to a legal defendant through every Romanian and European and probably Universal law, he did have sense enough not to sign a false confession concocted by the pig bastards that framed him for high-risk (class A) drug trafficking, forming an organised criminal group and several other smaller and lame and weak charges, and had without shame had deprived him of his most basic rights.
After some very long, painful and degrading (for Danny, of course) attempts to make him sign the statement, he was remanded into custody for 29 days, under a warrant he never saw. This warrant had been allegedly signed by a living Judge, who under the evidence provided had concluded that Danny posed a danger to the other members of society, and since he was the head of a drug-trafficking street gang, he was also a flight risk. He had then been sent to prison pending trial, without ever seeing the warrant that put him there, or the honourable Judge that signed it.
All legal proceedings that involve showing up in Romanian Courts of Law are part of a realm of mystery and awe, especially criminal trials that involve any amount of illegal drugs, possession or otherwise. What needs to be pointed out here is that the public opinion on all drugs in Romania, especially in small towns, is the same as the public opinion on AIDS in Romania: people think you should be shot and then quickly cremated if you’ve been anywhere near that sort of stuff. Never mind that half the living males are heavy drinkers and half of those are raging alcoholics. That’s different. Danny’s struggles in the sharp claws of the Romanian Legal System are just beginning.
“It’s often safer to be in chains than to be free.” – Kafka
Now, what has to be made clear about this System is that you are assigned to a particular type of penitentiary (say, minimum security for non-violent, first-time offenders) only after a court has sentenced you after finding you Guilty. Pending trial, the detention under the 29 days, 30 days, 31 days, etc warrants (apparently they can’t give two consecutive detention warrants for the same amount of days, hoho) is to be carried out in a Maximum Security Penitentiary. That is the standard procedure, to send people that are not yet Proven Guilty to a Maximum Security Penitentiary, and that’s exactly what happened to Danny.
He has served the first three weeks in Police Arrest, and after that he has been sent to the Margineni Maximum Security Penitentiary, pending trial. Actually, to say “served” would be wrong, because it would imply that a sentence had been given and therefore must be “served”, which is not the case here. Let us instead say “spent”. So, as the curiously designed pending-trial-never-the-same-number-of-days type detention warrants kept flowing, Danny the Horse has spent time in the facility for convicted felons, some of them in there for twenty years or more, for felonies ranging from triple murder (one of Danny’s cell mates, for instance, was serving time for decapitating his wife and two in laws and swapping their heads) to child rape to shoplifting. Life in there was a far cry from any picnic. Instead, it was worse than films, even. On the first day, some angry kid put a red-hot iron on Danny’s cheek while he was sleeping, burning him badly. The wound healed perfectly, without scars.
There are around 28 (twenty-eight) inmates sharing a cell. They spend all day in there together, except for when they are let out in an open-air iron cage to breathe for two hours every day, and for the fifty minutes they spend in the jailhouse culture club on Wednesdays. They are served their meals in their cells through a small opening in the door. They have to bribe (with cigarettes) the inmates serving them food in order to be served some chunks, as opposed to be given an accidentally meatless scoop of mush.
Some of you might have heard of the right to a fair trial. For those who haven’t, not to worry, it’s all on Wikipedia. Romanian magistrates, judges, prosecutors and generally all robe-wearing swine seem to not have heard about that either, so you’re not alone. It just so happened that in the early summer of 2009, the mighty Romanian Justice System had decided to go on strike for some time, which delayed Danny’s trial by four months. Not on a big enough strike to forget about the detention warrants I mentioned earlier, so Danny was still spending time in prison filing requests to be let out so he could finish High School. That didn’t happen because, as any decent labourer will tell you, you obviously don’t just break the strike when you feel like it, just to set a kid free from jail.
I suspect that at this point Danny has been faced with a choice to either give up and go Mental or, alternatively, to keep his shit together and find something to do. As a founding member of the Drama Club at his high, he knew his way around the stage and the script, so he decided to take a part in a play they were putting together in prison. His acting talent was quickly noticed by the director of the play who was a free volunteer there and he obtained a work contract in the Culture Club for our friend. That meant he could daily be there for seven hours a day. This was tremendous for his morale, and his life in prison changed a lot for the better. Now involved with the club, preparing and acting in plays with his fellow inmates, the remaining time (about six months) passed fairly quickly.
The sentence finally came in his trial, and he was found guilty of some gibberish and then sentenced to a two-year suspended sentence, which meant he didn’t have to serve time in jail. He was now a free man after just spending two months shy of a year in prison solely on the basis of detention warrants. This whole thing could have happened to you, mind.
“You have two choices in life: you either get locked up, or you become an actor.” – Julian
After he got out, Danny got a construction job to help out his parents for a few months until the fall, when he could start the final year of High School again. He did, he kept studying Drama and he graduated the tenth of his class of 2011 with a grade of 9.45 out of 10 at his Baccalaureate exam. 55% of students failed that exam. He went on to get into University – grade 8.55 – the twelfth of his class, on a scholarship, after an admission exam 70% fail. He had his first acting and improvisation exams just days before I interviewed him for this piece and he got a 10 on both. His teachers are very well-known actors and directors, and are all proud of him. “Prison is a part of my life that taught me a lot and will help me shape my career.” Danny said laughing. “Hazard. Res Ipsa Loquitur.”
Words: Matei Thecathead




