Post modern gesture
Arsene Wenger Football's First Post Modern Manager (Part 1)
Post modern gesture
By Celine Dion
January 14 2010
I don't know how much any of you know about the European philosophical and artistic movements of Dada-ism, Post-structuralism, and the wider movement of Post-modernism. Some of you may be surprised to know that I used to be quite intelligent, and go to University and such like. It never really suited me to be honest.
Post modern gesture
January 14 2010
I don't know how much any of you know about the European philosophical and artistic movements of Dada-ism, Post-structuralism, and the wider movement of Post-modernism. Some of you may be surprised to know that I used to be quite intelligent, and go to University and such like. It never really suited me to be honest.
I am much happier as a lager swilling gambling addict living in a sink estate in Essex and working in a dead end job that I hate. But anyway yes for a couple of delirious years I used to meander happily through the libraries of a well known red brick University in the North of England, trying to talk to girls, and going to lectures and stuff. Well, sometimes.
A refugee of the North Bank, just recently razed to the ground and replaced by a large advertising hoarding, I was still devoted to the Arsenal, but this amounted to a few away trips around the North West, and little more. The Arsenal were in those days workmanlike and tedious, with lumbering idiots like Kevin Campbell in the team. My mind was on higher things, the poems of Rimbaud and Baudelaire, lovingly translated through a haze of Absinthe.
Actually, that's a lie, a lot of University was very boring, and I don't recommend it. I studied French you see, and a lot of it involved trying to read 13th century poems (I got 23% in that exam I seem to remember), and spending hours on end performing oral examinations with an attractive French instructress called Francoise. Sorry, that's AURAL, I've spelt that wrong - it involved listening to tape recorded information in French about the Stock Exchange, through a pair of headphones, and trying to write it all down, having had 18 bottles of cider the night before and two hours sleep.
Anyway, by far the most interesting part of the entire four years, was Tuesday afternoons where a strange man with very thick glasses used to lecture us on the abstract philosophical movements of the early Twentieth century. I can't remember if he wore a big black tie with a white question mark on it but he should have done. The best subject was DADAISM. I don't know if any of you have ever seen surrealist Art installations, they were things like toilets, actual urinals, placed in an art gallery, or pictures of a pipe, with the words ‘this is not a pipe' inscribed underneath, despite the fact that it clearly was. The Dadaist's were rebelling, you see, against the structures and normalities of everyday society. They did this through the medium of absurdity. Their activities branched into a number of associated movements, Andre Breton, for example, another Dadaist or surrealist, used to write books, proper actual books, comprised entirely of gibberish. I tried to read one once, it was impossible.
So on this whistle-stop tour of modern philosophy, with large gaps in it; I bring you dear readers to Post-modernism. Post modernism is a conscious rejection of the conventionalities of society, by subverting the normalities within it. To quote something I have just nicked off the internet. (Those who hate high falutin theory should look away now, or skip the next two paragraphs. Editor. You Philistine. Celine. It was good enough for George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia. Editor)
‘Postmodernism _ [rejects] boundaries between high and low forms of art, rejecting rigid genre distinctions, emphasizing pastiche, parody, bricolage, irony, and playfulness. Postmodern art (and thought) favours reflexivity and self-consciousness, fragmentation and discontinuity _ ambiguity, simultaneity, and an emphasis on the destructured, decentered, dehumanized subject_
Postmodernism _ doesn't lament the idea of fragmentation, provisionality, or incoherence, but rather celebrates that. The world is meaningless? Let's not pretend that art can make meaning then, let's just play with nonsense.'1
1- Dr. Mary Klages, Associate Professor, English Department, University of Colorado, Boulder. From Literary Theory: A Guide for the Perplexed By Mary Klages. From Continuum Press, January 2007
At Last Some Football
Football, for yes, this is about football, is notoriously governed and inextricably linked to modern society and capitalism. It follows economic trends. Anyone with an even tentative grasp of the history of European football in the last 10 years can see that.
Likewise mangers and their tactical ideas tend to group and move together in the same direction. In 2004 that man without any sense of self-irony, Jose Mourinho and his dirty football team down the road, invented negative, ‘stand still' type football, and two years later, the entire world cup was played to his pattern. Football fans' behaviour has modified as our society becomes more sterile and controlled. Football is a metaphor for life, in so many ways. Modern life is rubbish, said Blur. We are controlled, by our environment and by the constraints of acceptability that it imposes. More so today than ever before.
Football is Boring
In many ways, football is boring. Rafa Benitez is boring (very). Alex Ferguson, with his constant whinging about injury time, is boring (unless he understands the concept of self parody, but I don't think he does). Match of the Day, with Alan Shearer and his token, repetitive analysis, is boring. The fact that only a few teams can win the league, the ones who have borrowed the most money off their local Oil Magnate, that is boring.
When I look at football nowadays, with its money crazed, sterile, predictable transfer rumour sky sports ban-him-he-dived Lampard is better than Gerard repetitive nonsense, and well it is all very very boring. Formulaic. Standardized.
Unimaginative. It is a blank canvas each season which seems usually to paint itself, by the end, in exactly the same way. Watch ‘The Premiership Years'. Go on, I dare you. As the years roll by, each episode becomes interchangeable with the other. Spurs thinking they will win the league, Liverpool nearly winning it, Man United winning it with a fifty five year old Paul Scholes banging in the title winning goal, and someone else going bust, Andy Gray shouting, Jeff Stelling talking nonsense...
END PART ONE
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Arsene Wenger Football's First Post Modern Manager (Part 1)
Posted by: Arsenal Times (IP Logged)
Date: 14/01/2010 19:27
What do you think? You can have your say by posting below.
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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2010:01:16:18:31:09 by Padre Pio.
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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2010:01:16:18:31:09 by Padre Pio.
Re: Arsene Wenger Football's First Post Modern Manager (Part 1)
Posted by: Bergmars (IP Logged)
Date: 14/01/2010 19:55
That was boring.
DB10,the best.
DB10,the best.
Re: Arsene Wenger Football's First Post Modern Manager (Part 1)
Posted by: Padre Pio (IP Logged)
Date: 14/01/2010 20:02
Yes the next bit is all about football
The game is about Glory. It is about doing things in style with a flourish, about going out and beating the other lot, not waiting for them to die of boredom".
Danny Blanchflower
The game is about Glory. It is about doing things in style with a flourish, about going out and beating the other lot, not waiting for them to die of boredom".
Danny Blanchflower
Re: Arsene Wenger Football's First Post Modern Manager (Part 1)
Posted by: DotComrade (IP Logged)
Date: 14/01/2010 20:44
good read. For the record though, Magritte's painting said "this is not a pipe" because it actually wasn't, it was a painting of a pipe. This is the distinction he was making, between reality and an image, hence the name of the series "The treachery of images". None of this treachery can be applied to football imagery of course, ha.
Surrealism, German Expressionism, Dadaism and the like were pet subjects of mine in university. I studied film and to date these influences infect my work. Aaah, the appeal of rebellion
Content and conscience before technique...
Surrealism, German Expressionism, Dadaism and the like were pet subjects of mine in university. I studied film and to date these influences infect my work. Aaah, the appeal of rebellion
Content and conscience before technique...
Re: Arsene Wenger Football's First Post Modern Manager (Part 1)
Posted by: FAB #4 (IP Logged)
Date: 14/01/2010 23:03
What on earth was all this about???
Re: Arsene Wenger Football's First Post Modern Manager (Part 1)
Posted by: Padre Pio (IP Logged)
Date: 15/01/2010 00:20
Read Part 2 then you will get it
The game is about Glory. It is about doing things in style with a flourish, about going out and beating the other lot, not waiting for them to die of boredom".
Danny Blanchflower
The game is about Glory. It is about doing things in style with a flourish, about going out and beating the other lot, not waiting for them to die of boredom".
Danny Blanchflower
Re: Arsene Wenger Football's First Post Modern Manager (Part 1)
Posted by: nis (IP Logged)
Date: 15/01/2010 11:36
Sorry, only registered users may post in this forum.
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