Sprezzatura

" I 'ate Muslims . 'Ate 'em wiv a passion. More than I 'ate West 'am. And I 'ate them bastards." - Colin, 'Angry, White, And Proud' lol turns out they're both trash That quote up there sums it all up. To Colin, a centuries-long clash of civilisations, a disagreement on how you should act on this earth, what happens to your soul when you die, who created the entire universe, is only one step above which blokes you like to see run round after a ball. If you get it, you get it; if you don't, you don't.  In the before-times my friend Nathan told me his mum asked him why we watch football, and passed the question onto me. As we sat watching Lancaster City lose to - I think - Ashton United, I couldn't answer. I have a better idea now, having had a year to sit inside and think about it. The short is answer is that football is life in microcosm. The long answer is the rest of this post. It might not ring true for everyone but it's t

The arc from the first half of the decade is done. Things got minimal, and then people got sick of things being minimal. So now what? It seems to me we should return to the idea of the spectre of the past haunting the present. It happened with Marxism following the fall of the Soviet Union, it happened with rave culture once the feds started to crack down on illegal clubs and the drugs dried up, and it's still happening with "rock music" now.  "Rock is dead" is a cliche that's pretty much as old as rock itself - people were calling it over as early as 1959 when Buddy Holly died, Elvis joined the army, and Jerry Lee Lewis nonced his cousin - but if you look at the past few years you'd assume rock has less cultural cache than ever. The only famous rock bands are, like, Coldplay and Maroon 5? Maybe you class Imagine Dragons as rock, maybe you class Radiohead as popular, but that's really stretching things. The glory days of the late 60s, Hendrix, the Be