'Split-second decisions'

This story first appeared in the Bucks Free Press, 26th October 2012, and is reproduced here without permission.

Five months ago I was a swimmer seeking to represent Team GB in London. But falling short by just four tenths of a second at the trials in June washed away my dreams of Olympic glory.

Although athletes learn to cope with disappointment, failure to take home a medal from the Olympic trials in June proved a pivotal moment in my life and forced me to confront a reality very different to the one I envisaged for so long.

How gratifying it would have been to fulfil the promises I made to so many: my coaches, my family, and those who sponsored me during my final months of preparation.

But the clock never lies.

In an instant, less than half a second, my future as an Olympic swimmer was no more. I had made no plans beyond the summer Games. Where I could enjoy funding and the recognition of achieving Olympic success, now I’m struggling to make ends meet and I’m forced to turn toward an alternative occupation.

After breaking junior records at the age of fifteen I competed internationally, and the past five years were totally committed to racing in the pool at the 2012 Games. I shirked university in Britain to attend college in the United States and train alongside some of the best swimmers and coaches in the world. For four years I lived as a professional athlete in Arizona away from friends and family, studying my sport rather than my books.

But last year I returned home to finalize my preparation for the biggest event of my life.

The Aquatics Centre in Stratford hosted the trials over six days, with the final of my main event, the 50m Freestyle, held on the last day.

As I sat in the call-room waiting for the final I looked around at the opposition: faces I recognized from a career in the sport, swimmers I raced against as a teenager. I sat alone, utterly self-absorbed.

We waited while Rebecca Addlington was interviewed. The pressure was palpable. I was first to walk to the starting blocks. Each name was met with a wall of noise as we were announced to the crowd.

And then we were away. My fingers buckled as I hit the wall in a time of 22.91secs, faster than I had ever swum before, placing me fourth overall. But it wasn’t enough.

The experience was bittersweet: clocking a personal-best time but missing my dream by a fraction.

Since then I have tried to reconcile that sense of failure with my athletic career. Were it not for my disappointment, I suspect I would still be training and competing today. Instead, I’m confronted with serious questions about my future.

Without swimming, for so long an anchor in my life, I’m faced with new uncertainties like paying for rent, groceries, or petrol.

I’m passionate about sport, and although I’ve hung up my Speedos, at least for now, I’ve resolved to remain in swimming through coaching.

Similarly, I’m trying to break into sports reporting by working for local newspapers and channel my previously devoted interest, with a view perhaps to returning to the States for a post-graduate degree in journalism.

As ever, though, I’ll be up for the challenge.

great tree of night

The problem is, even if there is a heaven, how can there be one we can stand forever? On Earth, when you look up from being bored, things have changed, you're that much closer to the grave, and that's exciting. Imagine climbing up and up into that great tree of night sky. Dizzying. Terrible. Rabbit didn't even like to get too high into these little Maples around town, though with the other kids as witnesses he pushed himself up, gripping tighter and tighter as the branches got smaller. From a certain angle the most terrifying thing in the world is your own life, the fact that it's yours and nobody else's. A loop is rising in his chest as in a rope when you keep twisting.

- John Updike, Rabbit is Rich.

Lana Del Rey's Ride

The other, his eyes merry at the thought of talking to an internationally famous writer, made a sound, 'R-r-r-r-rum, rrroom,' which Bech recognized as an allusion to the famous rubber-faced motorcyclists of Travel Light, with it's backseat rapes and desolate roadside cafes - Bech's homage, as a young West Side nobody, to the imaginary territory beyond the Hudson.

~ John Updike, Bech in Czech.

Roadside cafes, gas stations, camp-fires, fifths of scotch, tattooed men on leather seats on bikes on open road; the wilderness is America. Not only on the page, but on newsstands, the screen, in music and art, and without getting too wet, in the minds of every American.

With entrepreneurial guile in excess Lana Del Rey crawls over the American wilderness in her latest video, Ride, bluffing through poetry and song, cold-reading a cultural narrative full of lyrical and visual cliché.

Her narrative begins, “I was in the winter of my life, and the men I met along the road were my only summer,” a touching if paradoxical metaphor for prostitution, confirmed by the accompanying images, a past-time that few would pursue willingly let alone promote.

What's more, unfolding over nine long minutes, Del Rey makes clear her commitments in the war against cliché, and she’s fighting for the wrong side. “It takes getting everything you ever wanted,” she says, “and then losing it to know what true freedom is.” From Kerouac to Krakauer, Faulkner to McCarthy, the symbolism of the American outback is a land well-trod, and retracing the footprints of freedom is like pressing rewind and record at the same time.

Del Rey’s narrative voice artfully sidesteps nothing. She is a mystery, a paradox, walking with purpose atop fashion and feeling, regurgitating little poems that college freshman write on dorm-room walls: “Live fast, die young, be wild, and have fun.” Somehow capable of such profound inanity, she wraps herself in the Stars and Stripes, bites her lip, her nail, and sings like Stevie Nicks mixed with Marilyn Monroe.

Too talented to fail, too beautiful for the men she uses, too smart to convince, the fictional Del Rey dances with Alexander Supertramp, Mac McMurphy, and Holden Caulfield. She is anomalous, “born to be the other women, who belonged to no one” and, by implication, everyone.

That territory beyond the Hudson is the canvas upon which she paints a new image of feminism, squeezing the bikers with tattoos and heft tighter than they can squeeze back, rebuilding a proud and deliberate homage to female self-image from use and degradation, sand and saguaros.

Lana Del Rey is a phenomenon, and I forgive her contradictions. Her prose-poetic journey in Ride makes her intentions clear: to muddy the divide between art and artist. Securing one final paradox, she succeeds. "We had nothing to lose," she coos, "nothing to gain, nothing we desired anymore, except to make our lives into a work of art."

Tie Game

Running for Senate in New York City, Matt Damon's character in George Nolfi's The Adjustment Bureau breaks away from lectern tradition and the better judgment of his advisers when he ad libs a concession speech to his supporters. "This tie was selected for me by a group of specialists," he says, "who chose it over fifty six other ties we tested. In fact, our data suggests that I have to stick to either a tie that is red or a tie that is blue."

Joe Biden wore blue. Paul Ryan wore red with blue American stripes. Their debate last night was the culmination of meticulous planning and choreography on both sides. Too much. Since Kennedy's polished chops sliced through a haggard Nixon in 1960 there's been little to explore in the fallout.

Without a motion besides 'who has the better policies', or 'who is more apt to govern', presidential and vice-presidential debates have little direction, the only purpose serving broadcasters, pollsters, and writers analysing tie colours.

At one stage, woefully sidestepping an opportunity to cement the party line on the value of free expression, Ryan decided instead to mount a charge for the current administrations "weak" reaction to the killings in Benghazi last month. I wrote at the time about the more disappointing aspects of Secretary of State Clinton and President Obama's responses, but the issue is not party-political, it is constitutional.

Today Mitt Romney bypassed a similar opportunity to rally support for the First Amendment and position his party behind the American constitution. The temptation to peer over the wire and take a snipe at his opposition proved too strong.

Reacting to Joe Biden's assurances that the defense department were not neglectful of their consular staff in Libya, Romney said: "The vice-president directly contradicted the sworn testimony of state department officials. He's doubling down on denial." His reasoning is fallacious. Contradiction does not necessitate denial. Again, the issue is not Biden, nor witness testimony, but rather whether or not the United States should have foreseen an attack of that kind, or indeed whether the official response was consummate or strong enough.

If Romney and Ryan refrain from pot-shots, and instead address the issues behind the political ticket, they could start wearing whatever colour ties they please.

Radiohead Review

I was hoping to write a review of Radiohead's performance at the O2 Arena on Monday but I get a terrible headache when writing about something I love. Constantly rephrasing, recrossing and treading on my own fingers, it's the same with literature; there are some books it's best to leave well alone. Besides, Alexis Petridis wrote a brilliant account for the Guardian, better than I could, so go there.

Infibulation

We live in a country where the law prohibiting genital mutilation has never been enforced; where the authorities go wild when a 15-year-old white girl runs off to France with her teacher but stay silent when Asian girls are yanked out of school and forced into marriage.

Nick Cohen writing for the Observer, 9.10.2012. 

Sledgehammer Censorship

Germany's censorship laws outdate the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the German government's continued attachment to bans on hate-speech, membership of neo-Nazi organizations, and Holocaust denial make a mockery of the fight for free speech.

While I recently used this blog as a platform to rave about the outrage of Muslim death-squads lining the streets, burning banners and terrorizing American consular workers for no reason besides a piddling video on YouTube, eyes were directed away from legislation that exists all across the enlightened world.

German mandates on censorship extend into constitutional decree. Baader-Meinhof or Nazi propaganda are both constitutionally outlawed, including any literature thereof, and likewise written or printed materials deemed to publicly express Volksverhetzung (Holocaust denial) are forbidden. Those refusing to tow the line face jail time.

Neo-Nazi German rock-band, Landser are forced to smuggle bootleg CDs from US printing houses and redirect traffic to their website through Canadian proxy servers.

Everywhere the laws are easily circumvented. Images akin to the swastika are banned, though far-right groups parade Nazi symbols all the same. The Reichskriegsflagge, images of sun crosses, and black crosses predate the swastika and are therefore legal.

Through their actions, Muslim's outraged by the depiction of the prophet Muhammad in the 'Innocence of Muslims' trailer, or by Charlie Hebdo's cartoon illustrated how not to advertise censorship. They gathered together under an umbrella of self-righteous umbrage and hoisted a giant sledgehammer above their heads.

Too bad they collapsed under its weight. We don't impose blanket bans on films when the content deserves certification. In the United States, and, for the main, in Britain we have a choice whether or not to watch a film, or whether to let our children watch a film, or indeed any other media for that matter, and we must fight for that choice.

When Germans force musicians out of their own country, forcibly disband political parties, and prosecute individuals for distributing leaflets, they are denying themselves that freedom. 

As Piers Morgan pressed Mahmoud Ahmedinejad on the topic of Holocaust denial for CNN, the grizzly Iranian theocrat said:

I pass no judgment about historic events. I say researchers and scholars must be free to conduct research and analysis about any historical events, and have contrary opinion, pro and con. Why should a researcher be put in jail, one question? Question number two. Let's assume your parameter is right, your question is right. Your assumption is that this event took place. Where did it take place? Who were the individuals responsible for this event? [...] The third question I have. If a historic event, if a historical event has indeed taken place, why so much sensitivity surrounding it by politicians?

His answers surrounding the Holocaust are shady and surreptitious to say the least, but on the point of free inquiry he cannot be ignored. Sensitivity is the wrong word; feelings of discomfort may account for vast ill-feeling toward neo-Nazi organizations in modern Germany, but they do not justify censorship.

In July last year Germany's federal intelligence bureau noted that while politically motivated crime has decreased over recent years, membership of neo-Nazi groups has increased, and so too has the potential for violence. Am I alone in arguing that these statistics correlate to the aging swamp of censorship from which they arise?

Germany's constitution wields a sledgehammer against free speech and it's high-time it were disarmed.

Slave and Queen

Strange that Dean and Stan also failed to approach her; her unimpeachable dignity was the thing that made her poor in a wild old whorehouse, and think of that. At one point I saw Dean leaning like a statue toward her, ready to fly, and befuddlement cross his face as she glanced coolly and imperiously his way and he stopped rubbing his belly and gaped and finally bowed his head. For she was the queen.

~ Jack Kerouac, On The Road.