Sprezzatura

There is a famous anecdote that during a Conservative Party policy meeting, Thatcher removed her copy of Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty from her handbag, slammed it down on the table and declared, “This is what we believe.” Oof, it's been a while. It's been over three years since I wrote an intro to the blog - technically my second post, but the first post where I thought about what the fuck I was doing on a long-term basis. I've gone on a lot of tangents since then, and taken a LOT of breaks, but since I'm going to try and get back into writing on a more consistent basis around here I thought I'd go back and check what still rings true and what's no longer important to me. Let's see how I did. I'm going to do things in a weird order, but hopefully it will be clear why once I have finished. 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...

tl;dr: In Colour  is a 6 or 7/10, South London Is Dead, Long Live South London. How did Skrillex happen?   It's all very simple, really. You just have to start in Jamaica in the 1950s, as you do with most things.  "Must you explain ALL music the way Grandpa Simpson explains buying a new heel for his shoe?" Yes. Yes I must. See, they had been getting this music imported from America called "jump blues". It sounds kinda like this . There's a strong shuffle beat and a horn section, among other things. It wasn't the sadder rawer kind of blues from the country - your Robert Johnsons and so on - this was blues made for dancing and general post-war jollity. However, you can only import so many 45's before the US vendors just plain run out of new songs. So the Jamaicans decided to make some jump blues themselves. They REALLY emphasised that shuffle beat that was already present but subtler in the American stuff and this emphasis would become the basis for mo...

The greek gods were like the MCU back in the day — Dan Power (@therealdanpower) October 8, 2020 Remember when Scorsese said he's not crazy about Marvel films, and then everyone got mad, and then Francis Ford Coppola said "I'm backing, though," and then it was a whole big problem? That was eighty-seven years ago, feel old yet? Anyway, let's go back to that. Scorsese wrote a fantastic defence of his position in the New York Times that makes all the filmic points for me, which is good because I know so little about film that I think Garfield II is the pinnacle of modern cinema, but the problem is not that Marvel films are dumb explodey nonsense with simple messages and no 'substance' compared to a gritty Ken Loach character study, and Scorsese knows that. People like fun, dumb stories, and we always have. Bellerophon rode around on a flying horse and solved mysteries. Jupiter and Mercury went around doing epic Expecting Hospitality Off Our Subjects Pr...

My friend Chris asked me how I feel about the new Guardian article making the rounds, expecting a nice one message response. Bad move. Here is an essay instead. I think the article itself is a very solid look at Radiohead's relationship to seminal black artists; what I take issue with is that, however implicitly, the point of this article is ACTUALLY "here's why it's *okay* to still like radiohead." This is very hard to quantify or explain but basically this one girl made an political compass of all the different types of terrible boy she'd fucked - tag yourselves, I'm '1990s German football shirts' - and it's not on there but "guy who is way too into Radiohead" is one of these archetypes, and the dude whose image is conjured up when this archetypes is invoked is very white, and very uncool. " You know a guy got into Radiohead way too young when even his pocket rejects him ," that sort of thing. You don't wa...

And so, finally, to Cracked. The great thing about Cracked is that there are actually a lot of different reasons why its Google Trends graph looks like this: There's a lot to unpack here. Let's get to work. Reason #1 - Business Idiocy I was recently laid off but at least there isn't a fire moving towards my home here in Westwood. Now to take a sip of water, go outside and — Daniel O'Brien (@DOB_INC) December 6, 2017 The conventional wisdom behind the fall of Cracked is the fact than in late 2017, their parent company, E.W. Scripps, fired everybody talented. This happened to come down very heavily on the side of the video production team that produced things like After Hours and Some News. On the face of it, this seems like a pretty succinct explanation. Firstly, we know how dumb companies can be , so "they fired their whole staff" doesn't even sound like much of a stretch. Secondly, to be more charitable, there was a big realisation at the e...