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Make a loose fist with your hand. Now press your thumb against the inside of your index finger. Or let it rest on top. You should look like you’re handing someone an invisible cash note. Excellent. They do the Clinton thumb (or the Obama or the Blair or the Cameron thumb). Use this gesture to emphasize a point when speaking. It conveys firmness and resolution without the arrogance implied in a thrusting finger.
Our first lesson in politics before Donald Trump concludes there. Next week: news discipline. Come up with a common phrase like “We’re all in this together” and be prepared to repeat it, regardless of the context.
No doubt young readers are thinking I’m loving how robotic and over-edited politics has been in the recent past. Well, haul YouTube, friends. If nothing else, the rise of Trump has exposed a widespread public weakness with uniformity and standardization. I wonder if the same revolt is spreading to other fields.
Take my own world, the media. Why do podcasts do so well? Because they are ultimately messy, elliptical, digressive, and everything else that transfers theory. (In the case of Joe Rogan, perhaps the greatest media figure in the Anglophone world, there can’t be much difference between his on-air and off-air speech.) The narrow professionalism of linear radio is now what it is for millions of us were raised thereupon not to be heard in comparison.
Even the world’s favorite sport, so long in the intellectual grip of the micromanaging perfectionist Pep Guardiola, may be loosening. Arsenal, coached by one of its apostles, are as impressive as the inside of a Swiss watch. The distance between the players is just like that. Free kicks and corners are choreographed to ballet standards. Even in open play we know that a sequence of rehearsed movements will get the ball to the right flank where the opposition defenders will then flock. At this point, a diagonal pass will release the backup arsenal forward in the underpopulated left center zone.
It’s the most “technical” football in the world, give or take that from Pep’s own Manchester City, another team easier to admire than love. But both have disappointing seasons. A slightly free Liverpool is thriving with a squad no better. If they win themselves out of the Premier League, the era of surveillance – the bane of modern fans – should recede.
Years ago this column lamented that “Death of the Maverick“. The argument was that in most industries there is so much data about which functions converge in the same way to do things. Songwriters know to put a hook in the first 30 seconds to stop Spotify listeners from skipping a track. Newly built apartments have the same plan for kitchen management. Football had become rigid. My mistake was not expecting that people would eventually revolt. How strange these policies, so often downstream from trends elsewhere, would go first. As I watched Trump’s depressingly effective inaugural address, I nursed a comfort. Its success sends a signal to other converted sectors: there are rewards for deviation from strict form.
I’m writing this in Los Angeles, where I once lived. It has no dominant architectural style. It has no obvious center. (“Downtown” is something of a misnomer.) A gritty mall might contain a gem of a restaurant or gallery. In its lack of pattern it is more like life, more like the flow of experience than any but a city I can imagine.
After the Great Fire of London in 1666, various geniuses submitted plans to rebuild the place using first principles. Most wanted to bring a Euclidean order to the labyrinth. Their designs – full of right angles and other atrocities – went nowhere. Otherwise London would now be a terrible network or (Christopher Wren’s idea) another European piazza-and-boulevard setup.
Well, La, London’s only rival as the least designed of the major western cities, needs to change in many ways. Even before his most recent trauma, he was struggling. Ultimately, as long as something in the human ID looks against structure and regulation, the attraction of this place cannot be dimmed.
Email Janan at janan.ganesh@ft.com
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