#olympics;

[whamoblam]

So? Chi?

Love the spirit of today's Google doodle and it's double entendre with the ROY G BIV.

[thethinkivist-blog]

There will be blood, but at the Olympics?

       A good week into the Olympic games, we move on today from bicycles and diving boards to a veritable feast of pugilism. Graeco-Roman wrestling comes this afternoon to North Arena 2, and the sad news here for Evening Standard’s Brian Sewell is this: the feast just isn’t bloody enough. His ghoulish piece on our ‘neutered’ version of the original sport seems to have made quite a considerable circulation online, and latches its outrage onto comparison with the Pankration – the ancient Greek precursor to what is actually, in this thoroughly modern era, termed ‘MMA’ (mixed martial arts). The same day, an article was published in Vice, entitled ‘MMA is too brutal for the Olympics, and that’s why we love it.’ Apparently, the ‘soul’ of the bloody and terrifying sport (adjectives considered selling points) would be compromised by admission into the mainstream. The Graeco-Roman or ‘Freestyle’ wrestling event, then, might be construed as the London 2012-friendly incarnation of the ancient practice. And apparently it’s not good enough. Both Sewell and Rosenblatt, journalist for Vice, extol the virile purity the of Pankration and MMA respectively, lauding the ‘kicking, strangling, butting and biting’ of the Greeks and dismissing such legitimate Olympic sports as Judo by assimilation to ‘the combat version of a tea ceremony.’ Of modern freestyle wrestling, asks Sewell – ‘Where’s the fun?’ Haunting sentiments, methinks, not just for their sadistic violence, but also, frustratingly, for their misinformation.

If MMA can justifiably be characterised by compulsory blood, and a fart in the general direction of extraneous regulation, this does not take its cue from the pankration. Rosenblatt cites the ancient event’s ‘barely there rules’ and its boycotting by the Spartans in response to the few rules that it did have. Not so. The pankration was essentially a contest of skill, and there is little ground for its stereotyping as a test of brute strength. Evidence attests to the enforcement of rules prohibiting gouging and biting, and the problem for the Spartans was rather the unrefined nature of these rules, not their mere existence. For them, the primitive sport, associated as it was with training for warfare, was not considered fit for an athletic competition. I wonder why it is for Sewell. While I pity his need for broken noses and twisted scrotums for viewing gratification, I can’t say he really got it from the Greeks. Injuries inflicted in the pankration have long been exaggerated, and, as far as is evident, fatalities were rarer than in modern boxing. So, where does the modern day bloodlust originate? Sewell seems to think his can be traced to the Iliad, and Homer’s description of the match between Odysseus and Ajax. The same Iliad, then, that describes with harrowing sensitivity the pity and waste of bloodshed. Its central hero, Achilles, engages in the necessary violence imposed on his unhappy life but, most importantly, reviles it. Even conceding the brutality of ancient Greek combat sports (which I shall), how does this justify the travesty of any sport today? Not even Olympic-style regulations and expensive headgear can hide the shocking levels of neuronal damage found even in amateur boxers. Do they have to be mangled externally too for the audience to go home satisfied? Olga Butkevych, women’s wrestler for team GB hopes to make wrestling more popular by winning herself a medal this week. ‘In England it is not a popular sport’, she says, ‘so in the future I hope it can change.’ Olga, is that really necessary? 

[thethinkivist-blog]

On a spectacle of 'La Britishness'

         While Danny Boyle was overseeing the final tweakings to his portrait of ‘Britain’s cultural landscape’, ARTE France, French leg of the European cultural broadcasting group and self-professed ‘amoureux du spectacle’ was asking its followers what they understood of ‘la Britishness.’  A series of TV programs screened in France in July answered the question in terms of such cheerful evocations as ‘rock anglais’, the ‘famille royale’ and ‘fish and chips’. If Boyle ever felt the burden of defending and celebrating a nation with a bad press, this was not the series to impress it. That would be the blog. For those who read French, voilà: http://www.arte.tv/sites/fr/britishness/. For the rest, of the ten writers published by ARTE France on the subject, I summarize the grizzly impressions of Britain as follows:

Article on ‘National Pride’: A left wing cowering from the word ‘patriotism’, hereditary superiority complex associated as it is with the BNP.

On British art: An Olympics so heavily commercialised that we are forced to look elsewhere for a genuine ‘snapshot of the era.’

On imperialism and decolonisation: A need to accept Britain’s colonial history, so as to conceive of a future neither orphaned from its roots nor naïve to its place in the world.

On multiculturalism: Failed attempts at achieving it harmoniously.

On student life: A nation with 43% of its chip-pan fires caused by inebriated students with no vocational direction.

On foreign languages: A youth predominantly showing no grasp of or interest in any language other than English.

On sex: Prudes, whose self-deprecating humour can be seen woefully reflected in attitudes to their own bodies and to all matters sexual.

On Scotland: Ongoing tension with the English.

On ‘cool’: A nation engrossed in appearance, whose obsession with masking reality in ‘marketing’ seems directed primarily at foreign investors and tourists.

On the homeland of football: Football.

It was nice, then, to hear of last night’s ceremony that the world’s media rather liked it. If anything was going to divert our cultural self-perception from chip-pan fires, the Queen doing her thing with Daniel Craig was not a bad choice. Nor were Mr. Bean with the London Symphony Orchestra, an NHS-themed dance routine, or that trippy episode with Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Which is a testament, I suppose, to the impossibility of capturing an entire ‘cultural landscape’ in one expensive ceremony. While writers briefed with describing ‘la Britishness’ are understandably inclined to confront the nasty, the joy in British culture inspired by London’s Olympic opening should reassure the disillusioned. There is always something to celebrate, even if some American commentators did assume that Kenneth Branagh was dressed as Abraham Lincoln. 

[canadianpolitics-blog]

I confess that I did not, as promised, spend the summer thinking about the new paradigm of local, national and global politics. It was the perfect summer at my log cabin in Saskatchewan and I spent most of it swimming to the end of the lake and back, picking blueberries and swinging in my Mexican hammock. But I did spend some time pondering just what has to happen in Canadian left politics to address the crisis in confidence and the collapse of social movement and labour politics.