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...

There's been this big argument over "whiteness" in indie for years now - the Radiohead article I wrote about a few months back is only the latest in a long line of hand-wringing thinkpieces. Witness " The Unbearable Whiteness Of Indie ", a car crash of an article where key gripes include a film set in Scotland (96% White) not casting an Aboriginal Australian actress in the lead role and the writers of " I'm At The Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell " being unfairly dismissed as 'joke rap'. Or perhaps " A Paler Shade Of White " is more your speed, where the writer devotes a big chunk of time to discussing his own singing in his own band, which he could never make "black" enough to work; laments that Arcade Fire don't use polyrhythms or borrow from African or Caribbean music enough; and suggests modern bands should be more reverent to black contributions to music, like Led Zeppelin were, who made it a mission to sca...

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...

I Lads. I've got a scoop. This is the big one. This is what catapults me into the major leagues. I'll have NYT articles casting me as the doyen of the new 'roadman left', which is exactly the same as the regular left except sometimes we say 'pussyhole'; it's all very vulgar , in both senses of the word, and VERY subversive. We're really shifting some paradigms out here. I'll supplant Ash Sarkar as the official one (1) Commie of Colour that you're allowed to see on the TV. It's gonna be a madness. Anyway. Listen. Here's the tea, sweeties: Brands have co-opted Pride in order to sell shit. I know, I know. "How did you figure out something so incredibly not-obvious? No one's been pointing that out on Twitter???" Well, my dears, it all came to me last year. I was invited to spend Pride with my friends in Bristol. I'd never been to a Pride event before, and I wasn't really sure what to expect. I was aware that it p...