Fantasy Dinner Party: Alchoholics

Note to self: Stock up

Dorothy Parker

Alexander the Great

Janice Joplin

Dylan Thomas

Billy Holiday

Sportspeople: Bad Examples

Jessica Ennis - just selfish?

With the recent announcement of the BBC Sports Personality of the Year shortlist, the press will no doubt be raking over the Olympic rhetoric about achievement and role models. Athletes like Jessica Ennis, Mo Farah and Bradley Wiggins have been hailed as excellent new examples for the nation's children to sweep away the dross of reality stars and rappers. On the face of it, that seems like a good idea. We can replace talentless big brother contestants and misogynistic performers with clean-living, dedicated athletes, focused on pushing the boundaries of human achievement. I’m going to swim (ineptly) against the tide and suggest a few reasons why sportspeople aren’t worth idolising.

ELITISM

All sport is elitist by its very nature. Elite sport is especially elitist. Controversial, I know, but I'm saying it anyway. Surprisingly - as this is one of the least socially mobile developed countries in the world - this isn't a social issue: even the rowing and equestrian teams showed an encouraging diversity of background. This is about physical elitism: an intrinsic quality of professional sport where the point is to establish which competitor is physically superior to the others. Should our children be inspired by a system where only one person can be successful, and that success is heavily dependent on genetics? It’s hardly a good model for society.

The problem with elitism goes further.  From World Champions right down to sports day champions, that status is only achieved by excluding others. Sporting success isn't an appropriate thing for a large number of people to aspire to unless those people are going to be happy with losing. Can we expect that, given how much of our appreciation of these athletes is based on their unwillingness to accept defeat? So maybe people could just be inspired to take part in sport? In that case, why idolise champions and not just your mate who plays Sunday league football?

BODIES

I wonder why there is so much uproar about advertising showing models with bodies unobtainable by most of us, while athletes who fall into an even smaller corporeal niche are celebrated as role models. The message of the anti-size-zero lobby is that our fashion role models should have obtainable bodies; an understandable criterion. Generally this just isn’t the case with athletes; it's more realistic for an average teenage girl to get the body of a model than a world-class heptathlete. Athletes are admired for their dedication and self-denial when it comes to diet as well as exercise; isn’t that just the same quality so denigrated in stick-thin catwalk models? Well at least, you might say, for athletes there’s a better reason for exercising restraint: which brings me on to:

POINTLESSNESS AND MORALITY

I think that two basic criteria for a role model are that she should be doing something good and for the right reasons.

A lot is said about amirability of achievement in sport, particularly about record breakers like Usain Bolt, those overcoming adversity like Ellie Simmonds and endurance athletes like Bradley Wiggins. However it strikes me that these athletes, for all their striving, aren’t helping anyone. Sportspeople are profoundly, almost uniquely amongst all the roles in society, not contributing any good. Bankers, tax collectors and politicians all serve in roles that improve society by providing something that people want or need; athletes provide no direct benefit to anyone but themselves. You might say that they provide entertainment but firstly, that’s only tangential and certainly not the focus of their efforts and secondly much more entertainment is provided by footballers (judged worse role models) than rowers (judged better role models) who are only on television briefly every four years.

Elite sport’s pointlessness is well illustrated by its arbitrariness. Usain Bolt is hailed world-wide as a hero and role model for breaking the 100m record, while James Roumeliotis of Boston, USA holds the world record for consecutive pogo jumps and you’ve not heard of him. James raised over $10,000 for a Scleroderma charity with his record attempt; I don’t have a link to Usain’s justgiving page for the 2012 Olympics.

So what athletes do isn't productive; doesn't that make them more noble for having purer aims? Let’s compare the motivation of a runner to, say, a rapper. The runner’s motivation when he goes out training is either to run faster (socially useless) or to beat his opponents (selfish) whereas the rapper’s motivation when she’s practising could be to do something creative (socially useful) or to entertain (altruistic). The rapper might be doing it just for the money and fame so there’s a chance she’s solely motivated by greed, but the athlete must be selfish as there’s no-one else who can benefit from his achievements. I think that dedication is an admirable quality but it loses all of its impressiveness when directed solely towards self-aggrandisement.

In conclusion, I think that replacing reality TV stars with athletes is progress. We’re replacing bad role models with bland ones. But surely we should aspire to something better?

Declarations:

1. I don't watch sport. Could you guess?

2. This reads like it's born of resentment at sporting failure. I have national medals in two sports.

3. My vote for SPOTY: Katherine Grainger. What a trooper!

Diversion: "Putting a downer on public celebrations of tremendous achievement since 2012"

British Psycho: An Alternative Skyfall Review

I'm not going to write a normal review of this as I think Giles Coren hit all the important points in an an article the Times declined to print and which is available on his wife's blog. As I yawned my way through this remarkably pace-less, tension-less film, this is what was going through my mind:

I'm suggesting that this film tells us more about the public acceptability of legitimised versus unregulated violence than it does about perverse cocktail-preparation techniques. Perhaps next time we consider the conflict between Israel and Hamas we should think about why Bond is so widely loved and Bateman derided?

 

Also: apologies for the 'Sans. It's used ironically.

Diversion is dead

Now seems like the appropriate time in the movement’s life to declare it dead. Much like rock’n’roll, chivalry and Paul McCartney in 1966, it’s reached the end of its natural arc. It’s artistically exhausted, out-run by society and still miles from an excruciatingly metaphorical finishing line. Its followers, in a cruel, ironic stroke, have been diverted onto some flimsy substitute briefly more deserving of their tiny attention spans. What’s left to do? Go underground and await the nostalgic, talking-head TV special in 15 years time? Adapt and evolve into nu-Diversion? Change market, enter China and Brazil?

Perhaps there’s hope while there’s still a core of fanatic support; we don’t need scale, we need passion! Who said relevance is everything or even necessary? As long as MySpace, like some tragic operatic heroine is still coughing out one last TB-ridden aria I think there is leeway for the rightfully dead to march on, zombie-like. As long as Mick Jagger’s still strutting and my bicycle’s called Roccinante, long live Diversion!

A Devilish Diversion

I hear this often:

‘I can’t stand those guys who stand outside tube stations shouting about God! If that’s your belief then OK but don’t thrust it upon others.’

Imagine for a moment you’re running down the stairs of a burning building and you see someone clinging to the banister, refusing to leave. Do you haul them out or leave them? This is beginning to sound like a euthanasia argument – it is, a little.

Many Christians believe in hell, a place of eternal suffering. It’s a punishment for those that don’t believe in God and seek his forgiveness for their sins. If there is a moral imperative to at least reason with the person on the banister, there is a far greater imperative to be an evangelist. Through the eyes of a Christian who believes in hell, the rest of us are bound for a far worse peril than simply burning to death: we’re going to suffer forever. At that point, shouldn’t he be doing something?

A Diversion into Abstraction

Two things I don’t like are close-mindedness and hypocrisy. They often arrive hand-in-hand. Let’s have an example from everyday life:

            ‘I don’t much care for modern art’

            ‘That’s a shame, what didn’t you like?’

            ‘Oh I don’t know particularly. It’s rubbish though, all shapes and colours, there’s nothing there’

            ‘You mean abstract art? Don’t you think that an artist can deal with emotion or ideas without actually drawing an object?’

            ‘Nonsense, it’s just lazy. I like my pictures to be of something’

‘Well each to his own. How do you feel about classical music?’

            ‘I love it! I think Beethoven was a true genius, I could listen for hours!’

I don’t think I need to go on.

Art isn't just a functional item that does a job, like showing us what a person or a landscape looks like. What makes it art is some added element of emotional or political interpretation by the artist. We get abstract art when that artistic element completely eclipses the representation.

Walter Pater wrote that “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music” meaning that through music the artist can completely combine subject matter and form,  and so James Whistler moved towards the purity of Beethoven’s medium. A lot of classical music doesn't represent anything tangible but it can still touch us profoundly, why should we reject visual art when it tries to achieve the same thing?

I said I didn’t need to go on; but I will:

This is describing a mirror

             ‘And I don’t think that you should need to read the writing beside the picture to understand it. A picture should speak for itself’

            ‘Well at least you've got Beethoven. Do you know his 3^rd symphony? Eroica?’

‘Oh it’s wonderful! It’s actually very political, you see he originally dedicated it to Napoleon because he admired his revolutionary ideals..’

Art does not exist in a vacuum; it would be a poor, sad thing if it did. So much of the enjoyment of art is through recognition of something from our own experience; if we don’t have the experience it references then why not gain that understanding and then revisit the art? Films about the Holocaust rely on the viewer’s historical knowledge for their gravity, WH Auden’s love poetry doesn’t have resonance until you’ve shared his passion. So, perhaps we can look outside the picture frame for inspiration.

Are you in the same boat as our Socratic victim? Next time you’re at Tate Modern, don’t walk so quickly past the Pollocks.