A taste of Sébastien Montaz-Rosset’s documentary I Believe I Can Fly.
“I’m not sure I can hold on with my toes.”
A taste of Sébastien Montaz-Rosset’s documentary I Believe I Can Fly.
“I’m not sure I can hold on with my toes.”
Behold the Urban Downhill Mountain Bike Race in Valparaiso, Chile. It gets a little hairy.
For newcomers, three more items from the archives.
Omar Kholeif is professionally ethnic and terribly oppressed. Though by what he doesn’t say.
Mr Kholeif doesn’t mention any first-hand experience of vocational or artistic exclusion based on ethnicity, or any similar experience had by anyone known to him, which seems an odd omission as it might have made his argument a little more convincing. In fact, the only discernible obstacles he mentions are the limited market value of his chosen skills and the preferences of his own parents.
When clarity is “conservative” and evidence is unhip.
Occasionally, Judith Butler’s politics are aired relatively free of question-begging jargon, thus revealing her radicalism to the lower, uninitiated castes. As, for instance, at a 2006 UC Berkeley “Teach-In Against America’s Wars,” during which the professor claimed that it’s “extremely important” to “understand” Hamas and Hizballah as “social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left” and so, by implication, deserving of support. Readers may find it odd that students are being encouraged to express solidarity with totalitarian terrorist movements that set booby traps in schools and boast of using children as human shields, and whose stated goals include the Islamic “conquest” of the free world, the “obliteration” of Israel and the annihilation of the Jewish people. However, such statements achieve a facsimile of sense if one understands that the object is to be both politically radical and morally unobvious.
Some kids play better than others. This simply will not do.
Note that “an opportunity to play” doesn’t seem to entail playing as well as you can. And I’m not quite clear how penalising competence squares with the professed ideals of sportsmanship. However, there is some encouraging news. The handbook helpfully urges talented teams to avoid the risk of forfeiture by “reducing the number of players on the field” and “kicking with the weaker foot.”
Take a big stick to the greatest hits.
In which we revisit imaginary evils, ludicrous solutions and various lamentations from the pages of the Guardian.
In January, Kevin McKenna inadvertently revealed the loveliness behind his lofty socialist principles:
Ponder the big, generous heart behind those sentiments. It offends Mr McKenna that private education should be allowed to exist. By McKenna’s reckoning, parents who view the comprehensive system as inadequate – perhaps because of their own first-hand experiences – are by implication wicked. And so they should be stopped.
February brought us the deep, deep thinking of the New Economics Foundation and their blueprint for a socialist utopia:
The NEF are convinced that, once implemented, their recommendations would “heal the rifts in a divided Britain” and leave the population “satisfied.” That’s satisfied with less of course, and the authors make clear their disdain for the “dispensable accoutrements of middle-class life,” including “cars, holidays, electronic equipment and multiple items of clothing.”
February also brought us urban oil painting, delusional playwrights and communist art reviews.
In March, we got a taste of, if not for, the cosmetic surgery aesthetic. And an advocate of “direct action” got a taste of her own medicine and didn’t like it one bit.
April saw Jonathan Kay recounting his visit to a Thinking About Whiteness workshop, where he was told “racism is an outgrowth of capitalism” and that “to ignore race is to be more racist than to acknowledge race.”
Ah, very clever. Guilt in all directions. It almost sounds like a trap. And the way to get past small differences in physiology is to continually fixate on small differences in physiology.
And Eyjafjallajökull did some rumbling.
In May, Professor Sharra Vostral exposed the humble tampon as an “artefact of control.”
At this point, readers may also wonder how it can be that an estimated 98% of humanities scholarship goes uncited or unread.
And a mighty hail fell on Oklahoma City.
The images were taken via satellite and they show the rather oddly shaped football pitches that seem to be built wherever possible – the desire for playing the game has clearly surpassed and ignored the limitations of natural topography and FIFA’s laws of the game. According to the official rules, you would not be allowed to play football on any of these fields. However, the careers of many of the world’s best football players began on these very same fields despite their askew angles, odd proportions, misshapen border lines and pitch markings.
From Joachim Schmid’s book O Campo: Brazilian Football Fields. Via Anna.
I fear it’s time for more classic sentences from the Guardian, this time care of Professor Terry Eagleton, who obliges with a volley of inadvertent nuggets:
If the Cameron government is bad news for those seeking radical change, the World Cup is even worse.
This bold declaration is followed by,
If every rightwing think-tank came up with a scheme to distract the populace from political injustice and compensate them for lives of hard labour, the solution in each case would be the same – football.
And,
No finer way of resolving the problems of capitalism has been dreamed up, bar socialism. And in the tussle between them, football is several light years ahead.
Ba-dum. Tissshh.
The article in question, Football: A Dear Friend to Capitalism, bears a typically presumptuous subheading:
The World Cup is another setback to any radical change. The opium of the people is now football.
It’s strange how readily the professor assumes that an enthusiasm for football is a “distraction” that’s “holding back” some “radical change” that would otherwise be embraced by enthusiasts of the game. Yes, that must be why the working man still hasn’t recognised radical socialism as the glorious thing it is. Isn’t it terrible when your revolution beckons and yet people would rather do something else, something they like? But football fans just don’t know their own minds, see, being mere dupes of the capitalist machine and its dastardly overlords. Thankfully, our esteemed literary critic knows what the people really want, secretly, deep down inside those dim and hoodwinked brains. Professor Eagleton spies some variation of false consciousness whenever the proletariat dares to see things differently from its egalitarian superiors – an enlightened caste of ageing, embittered Marxists whose keenness of vision shows them, and only them, how things really are.
Readers may recall the professor is also fond of the Unargued Assertion. And so we get some of this:
Modern societies deny men and women the experience of solidarity, which football provides to the point of collective delirium.
Quite how the experience of solidarity can be “denied” by modern societies remains oddly unspecified. Perhaps dear bewildered Terry imagines common interest is something that people can no longer experience – serendipitously or voluntarily – say, via the global communication tools made possible and ubiquitous by… oh yes, capitalism.
A chessboxing pictorial. Above: Andy “The Rock” Costello v Gianluca “Il Dottore” Sirci, October 2009. More chessboxing. Via.
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