So, Andre Agassi has admitted that he took crystal meth while he was still a tennis player, and then lied about it to the tennis authorities. I have to confess to being baffled as to why anyone is really surprised by this. If any top player in recent memory was likely to have taken drugs recreationally it was going to be Agassi, and it was going to be in that period when his career was on the slide. I think if the story had broked come out at the time, it would have been hard for me to think much worse of Agassi than I did back then, because he annoyed me for his behaviour and the way he seemed to be wasting his talent – I should point out I have no knowledge whatsoever about the potential performance-enhancing qualities of crystal meth, if it does have performance enhancing qualities then I might have thought worse of him, though I’d probably have had a hard time believing that was why he took it. It also doesn’t make me think any the worse of him now, or be any less impressed at the way that he rebuilt his life and his career, or lessen my appreciate his tennis in the second phase of his career.
Archive for October, 2009
I always suspected that living in a city would bankrupt me, as I would spend all my money on going to the theatre and the ballet. It’s why I’ve often considered it a good thing that I am ambivalent about the prospect of living in London (although if one of the applications I’ve submitted for next year comes through that’s where I’ll be) – I know the National Theatre and the Royal Opera House often have cheap tickets, but I’d still end up ruined.
I mention this, having been to the Kölner Philharmonie twice in a week. Ahem. That said – the first was a freebie courtesy of the university’s international office, tickets to see a show called ‘Fanfare Ciocarlia’ – a performance by a band from Romania. Also, I left at the interval because I was tired – and whilst I did enjoy the music, I tend to enjoy it more outside of the concert hall – especially a sit-down concert hall like the Philharmonie.
Spike Jonze and Kanye West have made a short movie. (And huzzah for twitter and Rian Johnson posting it). It’s sort of wonderful. At first I thought I just kinda liked it and that Spike Jonze makes very good looking films – the man does know what he’s doing with a camera, I think. But there’s a beautiful little twist towards the end that I wasn’t expecting, and that actually took my breath away for a second.
“We Were Once A Fairytale” – Kanye West Dir: Spike Jonze from Yooj‽ on Vimeo.
I have finally finished my photobook of Tanzania. It’s mostly photos and just a little bit of travelogue (as the vast majority of the travelogue was either me listing all the different animals and birds, or spitting about Kennedy, and that’s no fun for anyone) – but I am proud of the photos. Have a look.
I feel like I want to write something about this, because not only was it a pretty big deal in the big picture of British media and politics, it felt like a pretty big deal for me and my engagement shifting from interested and theoretical to faintly active (I mean, it’s not like twittering uses up many calories but it *is* still participating in a discourse). It was also a little sobering, because although I would normally count myself as pretty engaged in current affairs, I hadn’t heard anything about the incident in the Ivory Coast or about Trafigura (I mean, I might have seen a Trafigura logo on a board at a rugby match, but I hadn’t heard of them). Time to read more papers and watch more Newsnight, clearly.
BBC Political Editor Nick Robinson’s latest blog post is interesting. Turns out even politicians and party members don’t show up to listen to a roll of speeches at conventions. Colour me surprised. Even at academic conventions the best part of panels is often the Q & A session.
But here’s the problem – if even the above mentioned hacks aren’t engaged with the main substance of these conferences, why the hell would anyone else be? If, even when you join a party you’re not getting to discuss or debate the issues, because the leadership are too scared of being seen to be uncertain or disorganised, what is the point of joining at all?
If decisions are made by those who show up, and the number of people showing up is getting ever smaller, what happens to the quality of decision-making?
The BBC and other media cover all the conferences, so you get some sense of the broader debate between the parties, and in parliament, thank heavens, they all still yell at each other a lot. But how do the parties come to their decisions? Well, right now it seems like two or three guys in a room with a lot of polling data. Which is a pretty crappy way to decide anything, even with the wonders of modern statistical analysis and polling. Plus, what about the things they don’t poll on? John Zaller once asked, “If the public had an opinion and there was no pollster around to measure it, would public opinion exist?”(1) It might not as an entity, but it would as individual opinions; but would these actually ever get reflected in policy-making? Almost certainly not. And is that really representative democracy?
Yesterday I finally met my new supervisor and got introduced to the department by some of his students. Yay for people to talk to who aren’t inside my head!
New boss-man is vaguely suggestive of portly series one Blackadder, but with more brains. He is very busy and likes to refer to himself as Francis Cornford’s Young Man in a Hurry. Who I now have to google. This means I won’t really have to talk work to him for amonth, which is good as it gives me time to do some. He also wants us to only speak German from December. Man the panic stations.
So I now have a desk to work at in the department library in the Philogium (which, btw, is an arcitectural gem featuring permanently broken escalators rising up its core). However, the library doesn’t open till 10am. Which I failed to check because I am so used to the libraries I use opening at 8.30 or being locked with keys of which I possess a copy. So instead of writing job applications/reading Sallust/doing German prep, I’m in the cafe drinking some truly awful espresso, spinning out my time online.
Point 1: It has art in it that I understand, unlike the Museum Ludwig, which I went to on Thursday. I do *try* with modern art nowadays, I really do, but honestly at some point my mind just reaches a breaking point and it normally involves random objects being scattered on the floor of the art gallery.
So, that gets the modern art bashing out of the way up front. I’m just more comfortable with art up to the early C20th, and definitely with stuff that involves a canvas or something similar hung on a wall (and sculpture, more generally). But also the Wallraf-Richartz is nicely laid out, with a broad collection and really good introductionary panels to each room in German and English, plus little computer screens and headphones installed in the seats in each room that give you more information on specific works – they’re in German only, but you know what – I was good with the wall signage. Hurrah for explaining the context of the works and all that.
They’ve also got a couple of really good exhibitions on at the moment – they started yesterday and run to January, which is why I waited till today to go to this museum. The first is called ‘Mit Napoleon in Ägypten, and showcases the Museum’s collection of sketches of Egypt’s temples by Jean-Baptiste Lepère, who was a French architect and egyptologist who went on Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt in 1798 (y’know, the one where they found the Rosetta Stone).
The exhibition showcases the (fanatastically stunning)sketches and their reproduction as engravings for publication, and discusses the beginnings of Egyptology as a scholarly pursuit and the French expedition as a whole. And it’s really really good.
There’s no easy way to change the name on the post box of my flat (which is why I told everyone to add the name of my landlord when mailing stuff to me) – but there are some people who won’t do that. Like the bank, for instance, who don’t have a ‘z.H’ (c/o) line on their address forms. So I have stuck a post-it on the front of the box, and I’m hoping it won’t get rained off every other day.
I managed to get it up in time for the postman to deliver the PIN number for my new bank account, but the card, which should have been sent out first, has gone AWOL. So yesterday I had a fun Anglo-German phone conversation with the bank to get them to send a replacement. It’ll be nice when it arrives – currently I have money in one account and no way of accessing it, and not much money in the account I can access. And they’re in different countries, making transfers tricky and potentially expensive.
It’s all part of the fun of moving, no?
