About Gianni Infantino

It’s funny to think that in the early years of this blog, when I discussed authenticity, it was usually in strictly analogue terms, about fake Asias and fake Europes, fake beaches, Ernie Wise’s fake hair (which was in fact a fake of a fake). It’s almost as if Barthes and Baudrillard had been sent as decoys, so we wouldn’t notice that the real fakery was creeping up on us in the forms of ones and zeroes and then suddenly your job’s been handed to a bot. (Placeholder: an AI semiologist called Roland Bothes?)

In related news, for reasons of ethics and taste and lack of emotional bandwidth, I probably won’t be watching the World Cup, which finally shudders into effect in the next few days. But the whole shebang will doubtless offer much material over which bedroom postmodernists can stroke their chins. Barney Ronay has started early: 

This is Gianni Infantino’s world now, a man who carries with him at all times that oddly alluring sense of complete conviction in his own inauthenticity...

About Magritte (or not)

In case it still needs explaining, the whole point of René Magritte’s 1929 painting La Trahison des images is that the apparently inaccurate caption in fact tells the truth. It is not a pipe. It is merely a picture of a pipe. 

Unfortunately, like most jokes, it loses its effectiveness when repeated. I haven’t yet seen the newish Belgian TV show This is Not a Murder Mystery (which includes Magritte himself as a character) but it does appear to be a murder mystery, so it’s all wrong before its starts. (Of course, they could argue that the murders aren’t real, because it’s fiction, or maybe we find out who the killer is from the beginning, Colombo-style, so there’s no mystery, but I’m not hopeful.)

And there’s no get-out clause for the Belgian football team, which has put a tweaked variant of Magritte’s zinger on their shirts, which definitely are shirts, not pictures of shirts, so that’s just wrong. Although the fact they’ve tucked the words inside the garments, so they can’t be seen during the game itself, suggests they’re well aware of the cock-up and are a bit embarrassed about the whole thing.

PS: And in vaguely similar territory, another social media platform is encouraging me to purchase this natty garment, which apparently offers one the sensation of getting shot without the mess and inconvenience and possible death stuff of, er, actually getting shot.

About Scottish football

For no particular reason other than that tonight is a time to pretend to be Scottish, a selection of the names of lower league football teams. Poetry of sorts, ya wee radges. Have a bearable one. 

Strathspey Thistle

Civil Service Strollers 

Gala Fairydean Rovers 

Carnoustie Panmure 

Dundee Violet 

Lochee Harp 

Golspie Sutherland 

Banchory St Ternan 

Montrose Roselea 

Nairn St Ninian 

Stoneywood Parkvale 

Crossgates Primrose 

Dundonald Bluebell 

Inverkeithing Hillfield Swifts 

Auchinleck Talbot 

Kirkintilloch Rob Roy

About the World Cup

No, I probably won’t be watching, although it’s as much time pressures and a general sense of ennui rather than any objection to Qatar’s record on human rights or even the venality that got them the gig in the first place. But I am intrigued by the Fan Leader Network, supporters whose tickets, travel and accommodation have been comped in exchange for “enthusiasm and positive social media comment”. I mean, how can enthusiasm be measured? How do you value performative ra-ra-ra? What sort of comment by one of these Potemkin fans would prompt the Qataris to ask for their money back? (They’ve already cancelled the per diems.) Ah, I know what it reminds me of...

About offence

Yesterday afternoon, two things occurred that got me thinking back to my Religious Studies O-level. On Radio 4’s Any Answers programme, the subject under discussion was the Assisted Dying bill currently in the House of Lords, and a woman called in to describe the last, horrible, cancer-ridden days of her mother. It was a grim but entirely necessary lesson, even as she relived the end-stage faecal vomiting; but it was her utterance of the dread word “shit” that prompted Anita Anand to apologise to listeners for any offence caused.

No blame lies with Anand, who was just following Corporation guidelines. My issue is with the people who make those guidelines necessary, who are more agitated by a slang term for bodily wastes than hearing about an old woman’s pain and humiliation, something that might have been relieved had more enlightened legislation been in place.

Minutes later, at the Crystal Palace-Newcastle match, fans of the south London club wielded a banner detailing the moral failings of the Saudi Arabian government, the effective owners of the visiting team. And inevitably the police response was to deal with the “offensive” material.

Motes and beams, anyone?

About the football

It’s the big match tonight and yet again, it’s not the idiot being an idiot that intrigues; it’s the idiots filming the idiot. 

(And when I take to Google to determine whether Baudrillard or McLuhan or Berger might best explain the conundrum, I discover that the latter provided the voices for twin villains in an iteration of the Grand Theft Auto game. And call me an effete elitist, but I find that more intriguing than the fireworks or even the football.)

PS: When I posted the above picture on Facebook, the Zuckergods deemed it indecent. But in The Guardian, the brilliant David Squires makes it cleaner, and at the same time more brutal. 

About football

I don’t know if you’d noticed, but there is some football about the place, which is fine; and a hell of a lot of talking and writing and singing about football, very much of which is not. Apart from anything else, I’m getting overwhelmed by overly helpful articles that aim to explain what the world was like in 1990, when England were last in the World Cup semi-finals, especially the fact that the country they played then (West Germany) no longer exists; and the country they play tonight (Croatia) didn’t exist then, nor did the country (Russia) where the match is taking place, at least as independent entities. I just feel old, especially when I remember that 1990 is closer to 1966 than it is to 2018. And don’t get me started on clickbait offering a gloss on what exactly Three Lions means...

England’s (up to this point) successful campaign has also prompted a few Panglossian pieces on how this ramshackle band with roots in Yorkshire and Jamaica, London and Nigeria, Ireland and Portugal, offers a vision of a new, inclusive rainbow patriotism, which is all lovely. But this multiculturalism in motion smudges over the fact that the country is also split along lines of age, class, income and levels of educational attainment. The sense of complicity that we snowflake libtards feel about the twin cataclysms of Brexit and Trump mean that social snobbery, especially when used against white males who don’t shop at Waitrose, is now almost as unacceptable as racism, sexism or homophobia; see how the tide has turned against the “gammon” jibe.

That said, on Saturday, after I’d watched and enjoyed the Sweden match, then made my way across London to a birthday party in (of course) Islington, where architects and psychologists and quite a few people who may not be able to stay around when Brexit finally bites, ate Spanish food and drank French wine. And on the way I encountered plenty of loud, drunk, aggressive, incoherent, beer-spraying, Caucasian men, draped in red-and-white flags, screaming that bloody refrain like a toxic battle cry and doing that weird fistypumpy dance, as if they were pulling on the teats of some enormous, mutant cow, encouraging it to spurt yet more lager into their pink, upturned faces. And three things came to mind; first, that if this is what they’re like when they win, God help us when the bubble finally bursts, whenever that is. (I’m writing this a few hours before the semi-final.) And second, the words of Martin Amis:

At my last football match, I noticed that the fans all had the complexion and body-scent of a cheese-and-onion crisp, and the eyes of pit bulls. But what I felt most conclusively, above and below and on every side, was ugliness — and a love of ugliness.

Which is sneery and snobbish and nasty, but then I didn’t have my taxi or ambulance smashed up, my shop invaded, my police dog hassled for being German. And finally, for some reason, I recalled an interview in the NME with oddball Chelsea/Everton winger and Joy Division fan Pat Nevin, some time back in the 1980s. “What do you love most about football?” he was asked. “Playing football,” he responded. “And what do you hate about it?” “Everything else.”

PS:

Three Lions is actually about heroin.

— Richard Blandford (@rblandford) 11 July 2018

Cats and guns and MK Dons

Meanwhile, it’s still August, and reality is in retreat. We learn that Hello Kitty is not a cat (she’s actually a 40-something woman who lives in the Home Counties); China tries to calm down its fractious minorities with a cartoon concubine; the strange tale of the Japanese oddball who joined ISIS; the newsroom at The Times is alive with the sound of typewriters; and, hot on the heels of a 9-year-old girl killing her shooting instructor with an uzi, an audio technician on the TV show Cops is killed by, uh, cops. And Manchester United getting beaten by a team that, as far as I’m concerned, doesn’t really exist. And Kate Bush. Oh, and this:

PS: And this, by Jopsy, via Valerie:

PPS: The New Yorker responds to the Kitty bombshell.

#EDL, #LFC, #PC, etc

OK, back to that PS at the end of the previous post. In the Word of Mouth discussion, one Movingtoyshop says:

I tend to take anything that’s littered with spelling and grammatical errors and written by someone who’s a stranger to paragraphs and punctuation with an extremely big pinch of salt.

And so, to be honest, do I. Are we wrong? Well yes, according to some of Sunny Hundal’s friends when he posted the following on Facebook:

Some suggested that Robinson (leader of the populist, anti-Muslim protest movement the English Defence League) was in fact deliberately playing up his own linguistic ineptitude, in an effort to attract sneering putdowns from middle-class lefties and enhance his own credentials as a man of the people. Others felt that it was wrong of Hundal and crew to mock someone deficient in “cultural capital”. I’m torn. Yes, there’s a certain sneery superiority at work if we poke fun at Robinson’s spelling when we should be dealing with his arguments; but at the same time, shouldn’t those who seek to defend what they see as traditional English culture be treating the English language with more reverence? (And if you’re so proud of your handiness with an apostrophe, have a go at this.)

At least with grammar and spelling, there’s a degree of unanimity about what’s right and what’s wrong, even if the likes of Robinson (pretend to?) forget. When it comes to the content, the words themselves, we all seem to be running around like headless clichés. The magnificent Mary Beard seems to have come up with a pretty good rule of thumb; if it’s not something you’d want your mother to hear, don’t say it on Twitter. Liverpool FC, meanwhile, are rather more specific in their efforts to rid the beautiful game of ugly attitudes:

That said, such a list wouldn’t have helped Barbara Morgan, the communications director for Anthony Weiner’s increasingly preposterous bid to become mayor of New York. When asked to comment on an intern who had written about her time on Weiner’s team, Morgan refrained from using any of the proscribed words on the Anfield list but did manage to call her a “bitch”, a “slutbag”, a “twat” and a “cunt”. Does anyone have her mum’s number? Or my mum’s, for that matter, because she certainly won’t like that last bit.

Dragons circling over Cardiff

No, it’s not a Torchwood storyline. The Malaysian owners of Cardiff City FC want to change the club’s strip from blue to red, and replace the bluebird on the crest with a dragon. The argument is that the new image will be more helpful to marketing efforts in Asia, the importance of which to European football has escalated in recent years. They may have a point. Glancing at the car stickers on the streets of Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok would certainly suggest that Manchester United and Liverpool have a numerical advantage over those, such as Birmingham or Everton, which are owned or sponsored by Asian concerns, but persist in playing in blue. Even the resurgent Manchester City, once the plaything of Thailand’s former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, is an also-ran if the criterion for support is the trade in counterfeit shirts at the stalls on Silom Road. Red, especially for people from China and the Chinese diaspora, represents success, prosperity, victory and all that good stuff. Dragons are just the icing on the cake.

But how far should we follow this logic? If every football club wants to increase its fanbase in the Asian market, should they all don red shirts if they don’t wear them already? Indeed, if Manchester United is the brand leader, why doesn’t every club just call itself Manchester United and be done with it? It would make matches a bit confusing, but the marketing guys would be happy. And that’s what matters, isn’t it?

Titanic: my heart will go on, but only when the stars are in the correct alignment

Today, as you may have noticed, is the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. I was just about to type “so what?” but I don’t entirely mean that; so many people these days have such a sketchy grasp of the past, as anyone who watches Pointless could tell you. (My favourite example of this was a contestant who, when asked what she hoped might come up in the forthcoming show, said “anything from the last 10 years or so,” which would have been pretty much par for the course, had she not previously revealed herself to be a history graduate.) Obviously it’s a good thing that the mass mainstream media is giving at least passably serious coverage to something – other than the bloody Nazis of course – that happened way in the olden days. And yes, it really did happen, as one or two Twitter users have belatedly discovered. Although I’m sure there were a few foil-hatters around in 1912 who reckoned it was a hoax or an inside job or some sort of Jewish/Masonic conspiracy.

What I don’t get is why this hoo-hah, including commemorative cruises, a new requiem, a 3D re-release of Cameron’s idiotic movie, even recreations of the final meal (but only the first-class menu, oddly enough) all has to take place right now, purely because it’s a specific number of days after the original boat/ice interface. If we need an anniversary to focus our collective attention on the events, it suggests that the story wasn’t compelling enough; should we forget about it for another century? But then I’ve never really been bothered about birthdays either, and don’t get me started on the bloody Jubilee.

Which is why I have every sympathy for the comedian Alan Davies, who has been pilloried for asking why today should be held sacred simply because it’s 23 years since the Hillsborough disaster. Yes, it was a horrific incident, 96 innocent people died, and the suffering of their families has been made far worse by the apparent collusion of police and politicians to cover up the incompetence and negligence that allowed it to happen. But that was the case yesterday (when Liverpool played and won) and will also be the case tomorrow. The families don’t need a calendar to remind them.

Wayne on a plane

I’d heartily recommend the efficient and friendly services of Turkish Airlines to anyone, provided you cover your eyes and ears when the safety video comes on.

Leaving aside the fact that for every customer who responds positively to the Manchester United brand there will be at least one who retches, the treatment of the footballers reminds me of how black actors were expected to perform in Hollywood movies in the 1930s: all that’s missing is the eye-rolling. Is it really surprising that millionaires who are paid to goof around like overgrown eight-year-olds might lose any grasp they may have had of the niceties of social behaviour or responsibility that are expected of other adults?

My aim is...

Belatedly, I find that my defence of negative criticism has an unlikely, posthumous supporter, in the form of the late Spurs legend Danny Blanchflower. Apparently, in 1967 he found work as a commentator for CBS, which was televising the short-lived National Professional Soccer League, and soon caused consternation with his bosses for insisting on telling it how it was (which usually wasn’t much good). Matters came to a head when he criticised a goalkeeper who let in a shot from 35 yards:

“We think you could have said it was a good shot,” they insisted.

“It would not be the truth,” I said.

“We don't want you to tell lies,” they argued. “We think there are two truths: a positive truth and a negative truth. We want you to be positive—to say it was a good play rather than bad.”

I had never met men before who worshiped two truths. Why had such inventive souls stopped at only two, I wondered? Why not four truths? Or 10? The philosophical winds of it swept through my mind. If they had two truths they must have two gods. Honor thy father and thy mother and thy two gods.... Positive and Negative. If their life was a conflict between two gods, had Satan, that fallen angel, been banished from CBS as well as heaven? Or did it imply that CBS was heaven? (It was easy money, and it sure felt like heaven there at times on the 26th floor.) But if there was no bad, how could there be good?”

Goalpostmodernism

I’ve been enjoying the old comics that the Guardian and Observer have been giving away over the past few days. I’m guessing that, apart from the sales boost that freebies often give to a publication, the project is intended to remind us of the days when buying a comic, made of paper, in a shop was a transaction to be anticipated and then savoured; and that this Proustian tingle can be transferred to our relationship with the dead-tree version of the newspapers.

The funny thing is, the comics, despite having originally been published in the 1970s and 80s, display a level of interactivity that puts many websites to shame. Sadly the edition of Roy of the Rovers is from December, 1981, by which stage the regular ‘You Are The Star’ feature (a point-of-view depiction of a football match, with gaps in the commentary so the reader could insert his own name) had been retired. Each comic strip has a little box in which the reader is encouraged to give it marks out of 10, although whether this information was intended to be communicated to the IPC is not clear. However, much of the content is if not user-generated, user-prompted: for example, ‘Famous Football Funnies’ in which the likes of A. Seaman, Northampton, see their soccer-related quips turned into cartoons; and ‘Blackie Gray’s Talk-In’, in which readers ask the eponymous caretaker player-manager of Melchester Rovers about points of fact and opinion relating to the wonderful world of footie.

It’s Blackie, rather than Roy himself, who fronts the forum because the Melchester legend is in a coma, having been shot by a mystery assailant. A double-page spread is given over to get-well messages from football legends such as Alf Ramsey (who would take the reins of the Rovers until Roy recovered), Trevor Francis, Malcolm Macdonald (both of whom had played alongside Roy in the England team) and, er, Radio One DJ Mike Read. This delicious blurring of fact and fiction would reach its apotheosis in the mid-80s, when Roy was forced to trawl the ranks of fading New Romantic outfits to fill the Melchester roster (see above).

Even more metafictional is the Beano, from November, 1980. This was the 2000th edition of the venerable comic, and many pages are devoted not just to the history of the publication (reminders of such retired stars as Eggo the Ostrich, General Jumbo and Nobby the Enchanted Bobby), but around the commemorative product itself. Almost every story revolves around the eagerness of the central character (Roger the Dodger, Minnie the Minx, Billy Whizz and so on) to get their hands on the comic; but since the resulting escapades and mishaps are described therein, there’s a level of paradox that seems calculated to fry the minds of pre-pubescent readers. It makes the cross-media weirdness that befalls Hiro Nakamura (in Heroes) seem positively mundane.

The giveaway is scheduled to run until Friday, but there’s potential to extend it for weeks – I’d love to see Monster Fun and early Smash Hits tucked away between Toynbee and the crossword. And why stop at comics? Why not old copies of the Guardian itself. Or, since the examples chosen seem chosen for their self-referentiality and postmodern brownie points, why can’t a copy of the Guardian be packaged with a simulacrum of itself?

(And for more conceptually elegant japery, read this, by the wonderful ¡Oye Billy!)

Lovin' it?

Here's a good thing, flagged up by my excellent luncheon companion Charles Frith.

It's called Brand Tags. The deal is that you have a succession of brands flashed at you, and you type in the first word or phrase that comes into your head. Some of the brands are specifically American, which may baffle some, but hey, there are no wrong anwers. As the site develops, a tag cloud is created for each brand - and the fun comes when you try to guess the brand from the tags alone. Fun for the label junkie and the Naomi Klein groupie alike.


(And good luck to Mr Redknapp and his chums this p.m., of course.)

The days of heavy balls

The bizarre and almost certainly suspect circumstances that have made Portsmouth the favourites to win this year's FA Cup have spurred me into a little research. (Or to be more precise, aimless wafting through Wikipedia.)

Trivia hounds will know that the only time Pompey have got their salty paws on the trophy was in 1939, and since competitive football essentially closed down for the duration of the war, they claim quite rightly that they have held the FA Cup longer than any other team. Some nerds may also be aware that manager Jack Tinn ascribed the team's triumph to his "lucky spats". What's not remembered so well is that Pompey's opening goal was scored by one Bert Barlow.

I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking that if more footballers were called Bert Barlow (and more managers wore spats, rather than unpleasant branded cagoules), the sport and the world would be a better place.

And it's equally intriguing that in the first FA Cup of which I have a coherent memory (1975), not only were all the players, officials and managers English, but five members of the losing Fulham team were called John.

From our sports correspondent

It's not often that Portsmouth and Bangladesh get mentioned in the same sentence, except maybe when it comes to comparisons of heroin addiction and poor diet, both of which indicators tend to suggest Dhaka is a more salubrious environment (and you can go here and here for variations on that theme). But high fives to both teams of unfancied, underprivileged urchins for yesterday's sporting upsets, which have injected an unexpected double dose of uncertainty into the latter stages of the Premiership and the Cricket World Cup respectively.

Odd to think, though, that 20 years ago, if we were celebrating an obnoxious, fascist pariah getting a bloody nose, it would have been the humbling of South Africa that provoked the widest smile...

Jack the wobbler

Investigators believe that this
is the face of Jack the Ripper. Anyone with a passing interest in match-fixing allegations and wobbly knees will know that it's actually the face of
former Liverpool, Southampton and Zimbabwe goalie Bruce Grobbelaar, but with his moustache made a bit more impressive with a felt-tip. And anyway, those of us with even the most cursory knowledge of strange 70s sci-fi films that crop up late at night when you least expect them know that Jack the Ripper looked like David Warner, and that's the end of the matter.

Oh, and I was on Thai telly today. I thought they wanted me to talk about political cartoons, but they asked me what I thought could be done to solve the inter-communal violence in Thailand's deep south. I glanced at the monitor, and saw a small cloud appearing over my head, with a big question mark in it...

A few questions

1. Is there a special word for that gummy glue used to attach free CDs to the covers of magazines?
2. Where do chunky, florid upper-middle-class men (25-45) who work in the City purchase those puke-yellow corduroy trousers they wear with brown brogues and navy jerseys when they go to the pub for Sunday lunch? Is it the same place old ladies buy their old lady hats?
3. Russell Brand. Can someone explain the attraction? Please?
4. When I receive an e-mail suggesting "Let’s make our ejaculation like steel. You gape for shooting like you had seen in those films…" how am I supposed to react?
5. Am I alone in thinking Ghana could beat Brazil?

Peaks and troughs

Apologies for the absence. Have been in the Peak District, doing a family reunion/parents' ruby wedding/mother's birthday/father's day thing. Web access was damn near impossible, and even radio and TV were sketchy. The isolation was refreshing, but I did begin to feel a bit lost without Google on hand to settle trivia arguments with my dad.

We managed to kick ITV into life for Thursday's Trinidad match. The last few weeks of hype had already sabotaged any last vestiges of empathy I might have for the England team, and their woeful performance vindicated my cynicism. I was happy to join with the Anglophobe Scots in cheering on T&T, and after Gerrard scored it was the pain in the eyes of Shaka Hislop - a onetime darling of Fratton Park - that will be the lasting memory.

Patriotism (of a lefty, Orwellian, JB Priestley hue) returned the following day, as we shook off the hangover with a trek past wild rhododendrons and wilder sheep up to Win Hill, and the glorious view over Ladybower. The temptation to hum 'Jerusalem' was immense, especially as we had our backs to the cement works that scab up the vista on the other side. And all was well with the world...

...until yesterday, when we went to Chatsworth, ancestral seat of the Dukes of Devonshire. (Why the Dukes of Devonshire have pitched their tent so far from their nominal stamping ground is a mystery beyond me. Anyone?) It's not the sort of place I'd go out of my way to visit, but it seemed a shame to miss out when it was on the doorstep. And it's all very nice, with Landseer, Tintoretto, Canova and Lucien Freud all existing in unlikely harmony. However, I went into full-on pedant mode when I saw the explanatory caption to one of the fab ceilings (by Laguerre) supposedly depicting episodes from the life of "the Roman emperor Julius Caesar".

Now you don't need to have had a posh, classical education. A passing knowledge of a couple of Shakespeare plays would do. Or even a quick scan of I, Claudius. Or simply watch that ludicrous Rome shagtacular. JULIUS CAESAR WAS NEVER EMPEROR! THE FIRST EMPEROR WAS AUGUSTUS! In the whole inclusivity/accessibility debate about culture and heritage, surely someone ought to be ensuring that people who might be dipping their toes into the whole Western art canon for the first time are presented with information that isn't ignorant bollocks? Maybe?

But to end on a positive note, if you're passing through the village of Hope, Derbyshire, do check out the Cheshire Cheese pub. The beer's good, and the food portions are vast, as might be guessed from the landlord's ample frame. We dealt with our haddock, chips and a hillock of mushy peas, but Small Boo stalled halfway through the similarly generous chocolate sponge pudding, and went to bed early with a tummy ache. While I stayed up, grumbling about Julius bloody Caesar. Like you do.