Skip to main content

The London Olympics opening ceremony: a moment of optimism that destroyed the decade

The show of humour and hope – featuring the Queen and Dizzee Rascal – lulled us into a false sense of security, ill-preparing us for the bleak years to come

We are about to be expelled from the loosened sphincter of the 2010s and, quite frankly, it cannot come soon enough. This has been a terrible decade, full of fury and disaster at every turn. But where exactly did the 2010s go wrong? The most sensible answer would be 2016, a year so catastrophic that you can still smell it from here. The United States elected Donald Trump in 2016. David Cameron called the Brexit referendum in 2016. David Bowie died in 2016, and people responded to it by singing Hey Jude in the streets. Surely, any rational mind would correctly identify this year as the moment the decade went sour.

Well, you’re wrong. Because the slide began back in 2012. Because that is when the opening ceremony for the London Olympics took place. Now, bear with me. The notion that something as objectively perfect as the opening ceremony caused everything bad about an entire decade might sound ridiculous. But ask yourself this: would Brexit have happened without it? The ceremony was a four-hour show of might declaring that Britain stands alone as the envy of the world. And now Brexit is happening. Do you think these two things might be related?

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2MwnFqO
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One giant leap: meet the new generation of male ballet stars

Beauty, strength and bags of energy: BBC Four’s Men at the Barre documentary gets up close and personal with the Royal Ballet dancers on the rise ‘It’s a golden era of male ballet dancers.” So says Emma Cahusac, the commissioning editor behind a new documentary, Men at the Barre, part of BBC Four’s dance season. It’s not just hyperbole. The young men rising up at the Royal Ballet are some of the most exciting in dance right now: principals Matthew Ball and Marcelino Sambé, first soloists Cesar Corrales and William Bracewell, and first artist Joseph Sissens all feature in Men at the Barre. With the majority of them British or UK-trained, it’s a giant leap from the grumblings of a decade ago about the lack of local dancers making it to the top. I spoke to Ball, Corrales and Sambé by phone, all staying resolutely positive during this enforced break from their intensive dancing lives, but all desperate to get back to work with colleagues they’re certain are something special. “I see so m...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dita Von Teese: ‘Even when I was a bondage model, I had big-time boundaries’

As the star dives into a giant glass of fizz for her first online extravaganza, she talks about this new golden age for burlesque, why the French Strictly gives her costume problems – and how #MeToo has changed her Dita Von Teese is looking divine. Her lips are that signature red, she’s wearing 1950s cat eye glasses, and her black hair falls in a thick wave across a Snow White skin – and all this on the unglamorous stage of a glitchy Zoom call. Only knowing Von Teese from her femme fatale image, her teasingly aloof burlesque performances, and her time in the tabloids as former wife of goth rocker Marilyn Manson , you might expect an icy demeanour, an impermeable mystique. So it’s surprising to discover quite how normal she is: chatty, self-deprecating, not very vampish. It’s easy to see traces of Heather Sweet, the “super shy” girl from small-town Michigan who transformed into Von Teese. The reason for our conversation is a new film, Night of the Teese, made with director Quinn Wils...
Post a Comment
Read more