Sprezzatura

I hate the 1975. If you follow me on Twitter you already know that, but it's been a while since they've done anything and it always bears repeating. The only good attempt at a defence of The 1975 I've read came from, I think, Steven Hyden: the 1975 are important because there need to be big, fun, hateable rock bands. I see the logic in that: people have to play SOMETHING at parties, and weirdo kids like me need SOMETHING to rebel against. But do them Wilmslow cunts fit the bill? Big - probably the biggest in England, only Arctic Monkeys could really fight them on that. Hateable - my lord, yes. But fun? If I'm remembering rightly, two of the first three songs on their recent album Notes On A Conditional Form  are a plodding orchestral overture and a song where Greta Thunberg tells you to stop littering. Not exactly Van Halen- or Aerosmith-esque party animal good times. And I'm pretty sure Guns 'n' Roses never released an eighty-minute double album full of UK ...

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...

I think I said in an earlier post that Gamergate was when everything fell apart. I was wrong. It was Atheism+. I'll be honest, this article is only tangentially about Atheism+, because I can't really begin to bring myself to read up on Internet drama from 6-7 years ago, let alone make you lot read it, but does anyone else even remember this shit? Or is it just me? I Let's backtrack a second. I'm not particularly religious. I make the odd reference to the Bible from time to time, and I say masha'allah and oxala too (at the end of the HSBC post , for example), but that's not because of strongly held beliefs - it's just the culture I was raised in. I think Quakers are pretty cool (they seem like the least problematic sect of Christianity at least, and we all love oats, sweets , and not going to war), and Laughing Stock is definitely the greatest album of all time; I suppose all this makes me culturally Christian, but you still won't catch me in c...

WAAAAHHHH I MISS BEING SEVEN WHEN THE ONLY INTERNET I USED WAS THE CBBC WEBSITE there now you don't have to read the post, you're free :) Some housekeeping before we begin. Firstly, here's Alan Shearer taking like one sentence to say what I took a few paragraphs to. Secondly, in case you were worried , Freedman DID pull the trigger and bring in Batshuayi . David, this internet thing will never catch on... 🤦‍♀️ #davidbowie @timberners_lee pic.twitter.com/XKoSBVqZGU — BBC Radio 6 Music (@BBC6Music) January 13, 2019 To business, then. When I first had the idea to blog, I thought this post would come a lot later, as a sort of grand finale, but it's come to my attention that I can't do a lot of what I want to in the near-future without explaining what I believe. Perhaps I will do something a lot more in-depth, more well-researched, and less bluster-and-bullshit focused in future, but hopefully this will suffice. Samzdat has to walk us through Plato and ...