Cringeworthy

V

version

Well-known member
sufi said:
retrospective cringe is a strong thing - there are definitely some past incidents the memories of which can still make me actually physically shrivel, even years and years on.
I can't quite bring one to mind right now because ... i can't bear to
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Don't worry. You'll be able to relive them all in excruciating detail next time you're lying awake in bed unable to sleep.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
shiels said:
So what are some memories that you still cringe at? Strangely some of the things that haunt me aren’t objectively that bad.

Years ago I was walking out of the office of a shitty marketing job after a half-day on a Friday to head to amsterdam with a friend. On my way out through an open plan area an older colleague asked me where I was off to, probably six or seven people watching on. I told him amsterdam, then for some reason went into a strained small talk explanation of what we were going for... “it’s a lovely city to see by bike y’know, nice universities and that…” and in anticipation of them thinking it was about drugs (it was about drugs!) I said “it’s not about the…” and did the finger and thumb to mouth sign for smoking a joint. A kind of a nervously delivered joke that showed it definitely was “about the...��.” Everyone just looked on a bit baffled and nodded in silence, and I went red, “anyway see ya!”

It doesn’t seem bad written down but it scarred me. Maybe because it was uncharacteristic of me to attempt to cover something up like that, especially to people I didn’t even care about, and also because of the botched delivery. The memory still intrudes at random points, i’ll be out walking and remember and stop and look to the sky like fuuuuck thaaat.
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This reminds me of something that I did, or rather nearly did, years ago. An important background point is that my girlfriend at the time sometimes called me 'Larry David' because of stupid, awkward things I occasionally said or did. Anyway, I was in a club, pretty mashed on some good pills but by no means out of it, and it was the kind of club that has a toilet attendant, notionally to hand you tissues and sweets but of course actually to ensure that people aren't just going in there to do drugs, or are at least being sufficiently discreet about it that the club isn't risking its licence. And of course you have to give the dude a quid, or at least 50p, because it's rude not to and let's face it, it's got to be a shitty way to make a living while you're surrounded by people who're off their tits and having a great time.

So I've accepted this guy's proffered hand towel and I'm rooting around in my wallet and to my horror all I can find apart from coppers is a couple of £2 coins. I'm thinking: I can't give this guy two quid, that's ridiculous! Maybe I could put down a £2 coin and take a pound as change, though?

Then it hit me: if I did that, then my transition into Larry David would be complete. I was reminded, there and then (at least, this is how I've since remembered it, so I can't rule out a false memory) of the climactic scene in Return of the Jedi, when Luke is absolutely thrashing his dad in the lightsaber duel and has chopped his hand off, with the Emperor egging him on to kill Vader and take his place. And Luke looks down at the sparking, smoking metal stump, and then at his own prosthetic hand, and realises that he's already well on the way to becoming the new Vader, so he pulls back and refuses to kill him.

But then I found a quid in my wallet, and everything was OK in the end.
 
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shiels

shiels

_
I came across the idea of cultural cringe when reading around on what’s cringeworthy in different cultures last week, it was new to me. Then I came across it here in the 3d bit of the conversation on kpunk in sydney review of books

The minutiae of popular culture has a very different weight and significance for people from the UK, and a role in the creation of collective and personal identity that simply isn’t the case in Australia. I opened the k-punk book again the other day and stumbled across a line (from Part III of his massive essay on The Fall) about The Birthday Party and their trash Americana schtick, which Mark described as a way for the band to try and ‘cancel an Australian identity that they in any case experienced as empty, devoid of any distinguishing features.’ Ooof. Ouch. But it’s true — I’m sure The Birthday Party did see Australia in those terms. I was having a text message exchange a little while back with a friend about how one of the tasks of trying to decolonise one’s thinking is to learn to see what’s in front of you, what’s actually here, in all its existing complexity, and not be forever in thrall to the idea that culture, ‘real’ culture, only happens elsewhere. But the cultural cringe, as we call it here, is really hard to unlearn, and there are material circumstances that contribute to it, like the sheer fact of Australia’s distance from the rest of the world, which the internet doesn’t really eradicate (though obviously, without it, I would never have come into contact with any of you). And the fact that when it comes to things like pop music, Australia has always been a secondary market. Expectations are always low that anything original will come from here, and I think we’re too often content to be sold to, rather than to make, or to answer back. I know that one of the reasons — probably the primary reason — I was so in thrall to the British music press as a teenager was because it seemed like these questions about popular culture, and cultural production, really mattered, and it mattering felt intuitively right to me.
One thing that is excruciatingly difficult to do in Australia is to talk about the nation’s history in any honest sense, and in a collective sense, and often the people who try doing so get picked off and targeted as aberrant individuals — particularly Aboriginal people, particularly people of colour, whether or not they already have a public profile, though I think an existing profile tends to compound the backlash. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ ‘If you don’t like it here, then leave’ etc. etc. And the nation’s collective inability to confront our history has everything to do, I think, with the general devaluation of culture, here. Mark’s sense that The Birthday Party experienced Australian identity as ‘empty’ has absolutely everything to do with the ‘legal’ declaration of emptiness — terra nullius — by which the British justified invading and colonising this land in the first place. Nullity runs so deep in Australia, back to the nation’s legally fictional beginnings. There’s a lot of self-hate at work in this place, even when (or perhaps especially when) it operates as a belligerent nationalism
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This nails something I’ve felt about australia for a while. There seems to be something missing... a collective amnesia, an emptiness, and a rootlessness which was created. And it was created because this is a civilisation who want to forget genocide

In terms of the cultural cringe I think americans have a lot of it. They’re always renouncing their own culture. The woke ones especially.

I think the amnesia of a lot of you english cunts about your imperialist past is about avoiding cultural cringe too.

FBPE have it about brexiteers.

It’s described as an inferiority complex (my culture is below others) but it’s also superiority complex (i’m above my own culture). And this is very tied to class too isn’t it, chavs, the demonisation of the working class.

You could argue that Joyce had cultural cringe about Ireland, in fact this was his muse, a shame and disgust that propelled him beyond all english writers.

I can have cultural cringe about plenty of northern irish culture

I’d like to argue that the reason life is cringeworthy is The Brits
 
entertainment

entertainment

Well-known member
I like the part about brits making cultural properties matter in the creation of identity. It makes identity matter more as well. It sees people as they are in their own essence. What they like is about more than just being in the culture. Pop culture is more than a derivation of the quality of something being popular, nevermind how it got there in the first place. It feels human, a celebration and affirmation of the variety of life.

You might be right that brits are the reason for us feeling cringe. This awareness of the weight of everything you do and who you are.

It made me think of a memory of visiting London with my football team when I was 13 or something. We were walking around outside Stamford Bridge as a group and walked past this other group of boys and just as I walked past one of them, he did this sudden movement at me clapped or something to give me a shock and their whole group laughed at me for reacting like I was being attacked. I had never experienced anything like that before, not the prank or whatever in itself but how the whole group seemed to agree that it was the funniest thing ever. If a group of 10 boys you don't know laughs at you, it's inherently cringy no matter what you've done.
 
shiels

shiels

_
At the beginning of your post I was like no you dick, FUCK THE BRITS... but then a few lines later oh he gets it.
 
entertainment

entertainment

Well-known member
hmm I'm pretty drawn to it still. As I mentioned, it feels to me like a veneration of the richness of life. Makes the world around you seem more exciting.
 
shiels

shiels

_
Drawn to what? The idea that culture matters? Of course it does, it always has. But The Brits thought their culture mattered more than all others, that’s the point. Her deference is because The Brits erased the older culture in her country and erected a new one with a value system she’s internalised, while being haunted by this feeling of loss and emptiness in the collective psyche.
 
sufi

sufi

lala
shiels said:
No brits wanna take me on here then nah
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noop :D
I agree with you, but then I'd like to think I'm the sort of brit who'd be seen as a wrong un, as in the aussie example above.
It's worse than what you say though as those scenes are extremely hierarchical and so individuals are ruthlessly enslaving themselves to cliquism. At all levels of brit culture isn't it? From the indie or nuum to the so called high culture it's all about access and exclusivity
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
shiels said:
In terms of the cultural cringe I think americans have a lot of it. They’re always renouncing their own culture. The woke ones especially.

I think the amnesia of a lot of you english cunts about your imperialist past is about avoiding cultural cringe too.

FBPE have it about brexiteers.

It’s described as an inferiority complex (my culture is below others) but it’s also superiority complex (i’m above my own culture). And this is very tied to class too isn’t it, chavs, the demonisation of the working class.

You could argue that Joyce had cultural cringe about Ireland, in fact this was his muse, a shame and disgust that propelled him beyond all english writers.

I can have cultural cringe about plenty of northern irish culture

I’d like to argue that the reason life is cringeworthy is The Brits
Click to expand...

Yep. The idea that Britain's influence on the rest of the world has been overwhelmingly negative is so central to the left in this country that patriotism - never mind nationalism - is something pretty close to original sin. (That's specifically English nationalism, of course - Scottish and Welsh nationalism are seen as OK, as is Republicanism in NI - this has led to some under-rug-sweeping by progressive Scots about Scotland's role in the British empire and the development of industrial capitalism, I think.) This is a huge, huge problem for the left, as this sort of shame-based anti-patriotism is largely a middle-class phenomenon and a lot of working-class Brits are still unironically enthusiastic about their country. So the left points out, correctly of course, that life would be better for nearly everyone and especially the working class if we had a government that, at the very least, made the very wealthy pay a reasonable amount tax, funded public services properly and stopped shitting on the poor, the sick and immigrants. But it also can't shake the conviction that anyone who hangs an England flag from their window is probably a racist troglodyte. The Tories, and especially the right wing of the party, are experts at both fuelling and benefiting from this chasm, and Brexit is just one symptom of it.

There's an even more extreme version of this, whereby people don't stop at acknowledging colonial guilt but actively swell with pride while insisting that their own country is uniquely terrible and embarrassing in every conceivable respect. Sam Kriss is a particularly good example of this. As you say, it's about collective inferiority coupled with personal superiority ("My low opinion of my own culture makes me stand out as one of the few good ones.") I've never seen the attraction in this, partly because - despite everything - I still think this country has some good things going for it, and partly because I don't think spending my life going around saying "I'm filled with shame at my identity, and you should be too" is going to win me either a place in social justice heaven or lots of friends.

Now having said all that, I'm struggling to think of a single major thing that's happened in this country in a long time, and certainly within the last five years, that someone in another country might have read about in the news and that doesn't fill me with embarrassment. This is maybe an unreported aspect of Brexit - the idea that people elsewhere in Europe, and around the world, are thinking "What the fuck are these idiots playing at?". Something you feel you should apologise for when you talk to foreigners. No doubt many Americans feel the same about Trump. And of course it's a positive feedback loop because this marks you out as one of the "liberal metropolitan elite" who doesn't "believe in Britain" or want America to be "great again"...
 
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