2. On Sprezzatura
The key to this entire blog is not JUST Sprezzatura. That gets first billing because it's a particularly snazzy name. The key is what I'll call the "double movement", in reference to Polanyi, but it's not the same concept as Polanyi's. It INVOLVES sprezzatura, and it's clearest in the YouTube example, which is why I began with it, but it comes up everywhere. There was TV, and it was professional. Then there were Web Videos, which were amateur. Then they converged upon each other and (e.g.) Newgrounds animators Zach Hadel and Michael Cusack have an [adult swim] show now and the Kitchen Nightmares account shitposts on YouTube all the fucking time. That convergence is the double movement and despite me picking examples I actually quite like above it is basically always bad, c.f. "Cheeky Nandos" but also c.f. the 'indie' and pop spheres melding together in the early 2010s and pretty much ruining everything shortly after, or the Tories winning in Bury and Labour in Putney. The double movement COULD just be a time of flux, like how it is widely understood the Republican and Democratic Parties "swapped" following WWII, and then formed new, separate entities, but I don't think it's like that. DID the Republicans and Democrats really form separate entitites? Or did the demographics they had previously served disappear so they both chased the bag instead, to the detriment of the country? I think once you have mixed the red and green paint to produce burnt sienna you cannot unmix them, and the brown you have made in their stead literally looks like shit. The double movement is to be avoided at all costs. Narcissism exacerbates it, sprezzatura combats it. Want to know how? Then you'd better keep coming back to the blog, sweetheart, Fridays 8/7c! And now a word from our sponsor, Squaresp- okay no seriously I'll explain in the next bit.
1. On Multicultural London English
Sprezzatura requires mastery (so you have a skill to disguise); mastery requires focus; focus requires a narrowing of scope. Thus, the local. Time and energy is finite and you cannot deep EVERYTHING, nor would you want to. You can learn like 100 words in Arabic and a Bantu language and Cantonese and Dalmatic or you can master Catalan. You can learn three moves worth of theory for every variation on e4 e5 or you can master the Catalan. You can 'visit' every capital city on the planet (and absorb nothing) or you can KNOW every inch of Sutton Town Centre from the train station to the storefront where they filmed PhoneShop to... Matalan. Yeah, close enough. Back it or dash, babe. "Work your pitch... carve your niche." Simple as.
(This, by the way, is why cosmopolitanism is evil and Brexit was good by default even though it sucks and has ruined the country. No, I will not elaborate! Ciao!)
I was heartened to see a post a few weeks back that acknowledged how my generation has been taught to think about the absolutely massive picture, to the detriment of our ability to work on the smaller things. I think in the wake of that viral tweet, I should make it clear that local doesn't solely mean your physical area and its accoutrements; if you have a group of friends that span the globe, but you're all united in your love of a certain shoegaze band or a certain writer or a Vietnamese basket-weaving forum you all frequent, you're doing the right thing in my book. If you have cultivated deep knowledge of something obscure you're still escaping the big, bland, homogenous clutches of capital as best you can. You can't be double-moved as above if Capital can't work out what the fuck you're chattin about. That obviously works even better if YOU ALSO PRETEND you have no idea what you're talking about. Hence, sprezzatura.
3. On The Period Of Time Following The Financial Crisis
I honestly think I've said most of what needed to be said about the Great Recession. Atheism, and the wider political realignment atheism became part of; Cracked, YouTube, and online content more generally; most of the music, and how it came to be so popular. I think what's happened since I started the blog is very obviously gonna be more important than this period. The past two years have thrown up three Massive Historical Events (COVID-19, the Revolution Summer of 2020, and now the conflict in Ukraine) and for years to come, reactions to each even will ripple throughout politics and culture. That's obviously my bag. I'm not gonna make any points in this article - especially because the Ukraine invasion is *literally taking place as I type my stupid little nonsense* - but expect them to come up far more frequently than Obama and Brown botching the Financial Crisis from here on out.
5. On your willingness to tolerate/enjoy my constant writing about football (Or, On That One Photo I Put In Every Post)
At the risk of explaining and thus ruining the joke, I place this image of Ronaldo and Messi in every blog post I do, and tag each one "skills" and "goals" regardless of whether football is involved. This is in homage to fellow blogger Nathan Rabin, whom I read a lot back in high school, and who would post a ridiculous still from the Whoopi Goldberg flop Theodore Rex in every edition of his "My World Of Flops" column. I bring this up because the picture is now wildly out of date and it's actually blog-relevant to talk about why it's now out of date.
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| this one, here! |
Ronaldo (right) left Real Madrid for Juventus in 2018 for a challenge, I wrote about that in the first post. As you'd expect, he did stratospherically well at the Old Lady, because he is a freak, but he didn't win them the Champions League like they wanted and Juve are the stingiest club on the planet so in 2021 it was time to move him and his equally-stratospheric wages on. He's now joined, well, not his boyhood club - that would be one of the two Madeiran clubs he played for as a younger - but the club where he became capital-R Ronaldo, CR7, worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as Ronaldo Luís Nazário de Lima (who we called Fat Ronaldo when I was at school). Moving to Manchester United is a very un-CR7 thing to do, though, as the past few months have bared out.
Without wasting too much time: Man U have been a basket case for about ten years because their long-term manager Sir Alex Ferguson retired and they haven't put in the club-wide measures necessary to adequately replace all he brought to the table. To put things in perspective, Ferguson was the one that persuaded Cristiano to come home, and essentially sorted the transfer himself, going over the heads of the current manager et al. Imagine if you'd broken up with someone in 2013, sworn you were moving on, and then in 2021 your ex still sorted the gas bill or talked to your landlord about leaks or something. Imagine how fucked, how broken or incompetent or weak or clueless, a person you would likely be. This is a tenth of how fucked Manchester United are.
Nonetheless, he returned. This was the sort of sentimental, heart-over-head move that Peak Cristiano would never have made, no matter how much he and Man U and other assorted parties have pretended it wasn't. "I am here to win trophies." I'm sorry, there is no way a person as seasoned and as smart as Cristiano Ronaldo could watch the 20/21 United team and think "yeah, this is only missing one me-sized piece". Again, they have, as a team, been playing football the way you'd expect someone who's been down bad for their ex for nine years would, i.e. dreadfully. At time of writing I just watched them lose to Middlesbrough, and pretty much because of Ronaldo missing a penalty, too. This is not a team - nor, unfortunately, a player - capable of challenging for anything right now.
Messi has left Barcelona as well, under completely different circumstances. Again, the tealdeer: Barcelona are so poorly run they make Manchester United look like a model of ruthless Prussian efficiency. They had been coasting on being the Team With Messi In for at least five years, making shite decision after shite decision, and last August it finally caught up with them; they no longer had the money to pay are Lionel's wages. He was thus forced - against his will, I should make clear, he wanted to stay - to move to one of two clubs rich enough to afford him. Paris Saint-Germain are the ones who stumped up the cash - Manchester City presumably kept (and are still keeping!) their powder dry in order to afford Erling Braut Håland this coming summer.
I can't describe to anyone who doesn't give a shit about men kicking a ball in a hole how utterly fucking surreal it is to see Messi in a PSG shirt, man. Yankoids, think of how weird it was when Michael Jordan took up baseball that one season after his dad died; politics fans, imagine Boris Johnson suddenly pledging allegiance to the spirit of Thomas Sankara; normies, imagine James Corden saying something even a little bit funny. The mind boggles. The fact that someone as revered and powerful, not just in the Barça hierarchy but across the globe, is still, at the end of the day, a pawn at the mercies of his idiot employer, adds extra salt to the wound. If Lionel Messi is a slave to the grind how the fuck do you intend to escape?
The reason I gave Messi the caption "virtue and goodness" in the first place was partly because his one-club-only career was so antithetical to what football had come to represent and reward; Ronaldo was branded "all that is wrong with the world" for the opposite reason. And yet, now, their situations are inverted. Messi plies his trade for a zero-history oil money club that he doesn't really care about alongside other wildly overpaid mercenaries. Ronaldo is doing his best to elevate a club he cares about that's going through a touch patch. The real issue, though, is that they're both shite now.
Ronaldo and messi being washed is ao crazy
— respawnedtargaryen (@respawnedtarga1) February 4, 2022
Far more than Messi turning out in a slightly different arrangement of red-and-blue, what's been absolutely fucked is watching Messi fail to score until like December in the league. Far more than Ronaldo stooping to Manchester United's level, what's been unthinkable is he's not really elevating them - there's debate on that front but the fact that a debate is happening at all is ridiculous. For the past fifteen years or so, these two have been so far above both their competition, and what we considered possible in football, and seeing them reduced to mere mortals has been baffling.
One of my colleagues and I were hanging out with a bloke we'd never met at the pub, and as an icebreaker he went straight to "Ronaldo or Messi?" and it informed the entire rest of our conversation. Even though we never deviated from football we could learn plenty about our personalities and what we valued just from that question and the subsequent convo. They will retire but the things they represent about the sport will live on for as long as people give a shit about football, I can promise that much. Nonetheless, the coming of the post-Messi-and-Ronaldo era is upon us, and that's mad.
Still putting the photo in every post though. That's the Sprezzatura promise, folks. We will watch that jpeg fade into complete irrelevance, together.
7. Some brief asides that weren't part of the original intro but are emphatically What We Believe
I don't think "culture war" is a thing. At least, not a thing that is easily discardable in favour of "real politics stuff", the way a great many people seem to conceive of it. Just bceause culture and politics aren't irreparably intertwined, doesn't mean they're irreparably orthogonal either. I think there are a lot of legitimate grievances and a lot of abject nonsense wrapped up in the one term, and I'm not going into which is which right now because dear Lord who has the time, but this is a mistake I see even some of my besties making and it is not good! Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater just because some aspects of culture are dumb as hell, or you will find none of the "real politics stuff" works as well as it should and also everyone is mad with you for some reason? Sad!
I think tactically football is a solved game. Essentially, as I said in West Ham, all football teams tend toward high-pressing vertical football with inverted wingers, overlapping wing-backs, and deep-dropping forwards. Your competitive edge comes from how many world-class players you can afford and which guy you have coaching the high-press-vertical-football. There is no effective long-term antidote to this. Teams that attempt to buck this trend (Atléti's horrid-and-effective throwback 4-4-2 spring to mind) will either make concessions to it eventually (Atléti signing João Félix, playing nicer football, and winning the league last year) or fall apart (Atléti this year, PSG consistently failing to win the CL because they play three forwards that can't/don't want to press). This trend is unassailable and will only get "worse" as time progresses, which is why it's imperative you give up on top-level football and move to only watching non-league. Not only is it far more local, it is the only place where anything interesting is likely to happen. The future of football is that horrible boring-ass Chelsea-City CL final from 2021 stomping on your face forever, or something.
I will write something more extensive on this topic but whoever works out how to be subversive in a world where everyone has already done everything will win art this decade. No, your favourite musician "shining an unforgiving light on [Brexit/the election of Trump]" does not count as subversion. No, your favourite comedian calling me a niggerfaggot for painting my nails does not count. Those are both lame as hell. All 21st century art has been fighting with the Onion article "Marilyn Manson Now Going Door-To-Door Trying To Shock People" and no one has thus far won.
4. On Christopher Lasch and his Spiritual Children, and 6. On concision
The landscape of this side of town, so to speak, is a lot different than the landscape I plopped myself onto at the end of 2018; indeed, it's actually completely inverted! Lasch is no longer an ignored Cassandrian dispatch from a bygone era, he's been shoved through the Discourse Wringer plenty of times now thanks to TLP acolytes like Anna Khachiyan from Red Scare and 0HP Lovecraft, as well as common-or-garden conversatives like Ross Douthat. I don't think it's a particularly wild thing to say that excavating Lasch has gone abysmally, because all of those people suck in different ways, but it was fun while it lasted. Sadly, neither the Hotel Concierge nor Lou Keep have posted much since I started - HC hasn't done shit since the gargantuan Shame and Society in 2018, which I still rate as the greatest thing I've ever read, whereas Lou hasn't so much as twote since the Revolution Summer.
Alone, however, is back, blud! First we had Watch What You Hear, and now, finally, the fabled porn book has arrived. Now, I don't do this to denigrate HC/Lou, who are far smarter than I and probably doing Actual Shit with their lives, but not finishing stuff sucks. All throughout the seminal Uruk Series (which is up there with Shame and Society) Lou says things like "not doing answers right now, I have the rest of the blog's lifespan to tackle those." Then he disappeared. That's not fair. I want answers! Alone, to his credit, chatted shit about this porn book for years and years, and he has finished it. It's a mess, but by God he finished it.
Thus, I don't want to disappear completely, like I have intermittently over these three years. I will be The Last Shitposter if it kills me. That means I'm going to do my best to post consistently going forward, even if it's only for a little while - I have a couple posts in the vault now so I think I can manage once a week for the rest of Spring at least. That also means fewer tomes and more shitposts like Double-Barrelled Meme Players,
and maybe more guest posts from others? If you fancy?? Email me??? One of the things What We Believe most fervently is, if you'll forgive the Bojack-ism, carrying on is the hardest thing in the world. But you have to. Even if it's shite. Love is coming, swear down.
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