{"id":13435,"date":"2012-02-07T00:40:06","date_gmt":"2012-02-07T05:40:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=13435"},"modified":"2012-02-06T13:47:26","modified_gmt":"2012-02-06T18:47:26","slug":"london-is-too-big-and-too-anarchic-to-be-seriously-pasteurised-by-the-games-its-so-big-so-filthy-so-nasty-that-it-could-probably-eat-twenty-olympiads-for-breakfast-and-spit-out-the-ferro","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/02\/07\/london-is-too-big-and-too-anarchic-to-be-seriously-pasteurised-by-the-games-its-so-big-so-filthy-so-nasty-that-it-could-probably-eat-twenty-olympiads-for-breakfast-and-spit-out-the-ferro\/","title":{"rendered":"“London is too big and too anarchic to be seriously pasteurised by the games. It\u2019s so big, so filthy, so nasty that it could probably eat twenty Olympiads for breakfast and spit out the Ferroconcrete bones.”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Faye Planer interviews Will Self<\/a> in Bristol University’s Epigram<\/em> on his views about the upcoming London Olympic extravaganza:<\/p>\n

\n

I hear that you are unenthusiastic about the prospect of the Olympics this summer. In your eyes, what is the greatest folly of this whole affair?<\/strong>
Rather unenthusiastic is putting it waaaaay mildly: I think the Olympics suck dogshit through a straw. People believe they encourage da yoof to take up running, jumping and fainting in coils — but this is nonsense. They\u2019re a boondoggle for politicians and financiers, a further corruption of an already corrupt self-appointed international coterie of Olympian cunts, an excuse for \u2018elite\u2019 athletes to fuck each other, snarf steroids and pick up sponsorship deals, and a senseless hitching of infrastructural investment — if there\u2019s any reality to this anyway — to a useless loss-trailing expenditure on starchitectural bollix. The stadia themselves are a folly. The new Westfield is a temple to moribund consumerism — in ten years time they\u2019ll all be cracked and spalled; a Hitlerian mass of post-pomo nonsense.<\/p>\n

If the Olympics did not exist, would it be necessary to invent them?<\/strong>
They didn\u2019t exist for thousands of years. The modern Olympics is a fatuous exercise in internationalism through limbering up and then running down to entropy. The modern Olympics have always been a political football — nothing more and nothing less — endlessly traduced and manipulated by the regimes that \u2018host\u2019 them. This one is no different, presenting a fine opportunity for the British security state apparatus and its private security firm hangers-on to deploy the mass-suppression and urban paranoiac technologies in the service of export earning. Some peace, some freedom.<\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

\u2018Really, one may say that the whole Olympic process was a pasteurisation of the city\u2026 the microbes disappeared and from a hygienic point of view maybe that was positive, but really what happened is that the variety was destroyed in the process\u2026\u2019 Manuel V\u00e1zquez Montalb\u00e1n said this about the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. Do you believe that London is being pasteurised too?<\/strong>
No, I\u2019m quite confident that London is too big and too anarchic to be seriously pasteurised by the games. It\u2019s so big, so filthy, so nasty that it could probably eat twenty Olympiads for breakfast and spit out the Ferroconcrete bones.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

H\/T to Charles Stross<\/a> for the link.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Faye Planer interviews Will Self in Bristol University’s Epigram on his views about the upcoming London Olympic extravaganza: I hear that you are unenthusiastic about the prospect of the Olympics this summer. In your eyes, what is the greatest folly of this whole affair?Rather unenthusiastic is putting it waaaaay mildly: I think the Olympics suck […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,28,53,18],"tags":[350,314],"class_list":["post-13435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-media","category-politics","category-sports","tag-london","tag-olympics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-3uH","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13435"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13437,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13435\/revisions\/13437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}