Vacating the Title →

Shaun Al-Shatti from MMAfighting:

"I believe one day that I will come back," St-Pierre said. "The problem is I don't know how long. I cannot put myself in another training camp right now. I feel like mentally I need a break. That's why, I don't want to make anybody wait. I just want to do it when I feel like it, and I'll become stronger when I will. It's going to be up to me.

"If I give you a date, I immediately put myself back into a date, into pressure, (and) I'm going to start thinking about it. It has to be on my terms. I don't know when, I don't know if. I don't know, I think I will. I can't say 100 percent. But right now I don't want the people thinking about me."

This whole saga has been fascinating to me on so many levels. Here you have Georges St. Pierre, renowned perfectionist and the greatest UFC welterweight in history, walking away from the belt he fought for fifteen times because he has issues in his life he has to deal with. I think it's courageous. Obviously it's easier to do something like this when you're well off financially, but he's a megastar and I'm sure he has felt a sense of obligation to the UFC, the fans and the sport more generally that goes beyond what he needs to do to pay the bills. As best as we can tell from this mediated distance, he seems like a thoughtful, respectful and private person and that this break is something he really needs for his own mental wellbeing.

Everyone should read this great piece from the great Chuck Mindenhall, also from MMAfighting.com:

"Every fight it’s like you add weight on your shoulders. Every fight you add weight, you add weight, you add weight. At some point it becomes so heavy that I have a hard time carrying it myself. So for me, right now, in order to keep my mental equilibrium…I just feel like I can’t go through another training camp right now, and I don’t know when I will be able to."

This part is what we can all learn from. Knowing when to walk away from something we are engaged in can be so hard. This man has defined himself as a disciple of this sport, nothing short of an ambassador. To some people he is this sport. But everyone has a limit; everyone has their problems. Even in the calmest bodies of water there are struggles going on below the surface. In some way or another we can all relate to that feeling of having weight on our shoulders that he talks about here.

We need to remember that we all need to be brave enough to walk away from the things we might think define us, because they generally don't. If it gets to the point that thing we love is doing us harm, sometimes you've got to step aside.

The Courtyard

The sun has well and truly gone down on a courtyard in a backpacker's hostel. This means exactly what you think it means. It could be any capital city in Australia. There are four long, wooden tables, each with its own umbrella open wide above it. While it isn't completely dark, it's pretty close: what little light there is comes from glowing bulbs mounted around the outer rim of the courtyard and from inside the kitchen that sits adjacent.

The tables are almost full of people. While there are spare seats available, it is only the odd space here or there. You could describe the noise as a cacophony. There are voices speaking over one another at levels well above what would be expected at, say, 5pm. Which means exactly what you think it means. The languages spoken are German, French and Italian. But the rhythms are familiar, the pitch is familiar, and the laughter that punctuates each of the conversations is most definitely familiar.

Across the court, cereal bowls are being put to use.

Cereal bowls?

Cereal bowls.

Cereal bowls are gleefully filled from the nozzles of cask wine containers. Glasses are hard to come by in the courtyard but it seems that the bowls are not. Which is probably the funniest thing you've seen today, until you hear someone yell the word 'goon' in one of the European accents, which immediately seems funnier again. One table is covered with empty green beer bottles. Peroni, you guess. There are more bottles than you have ever seen on one table in your entire life. There have been more than one occasion where 'Happy Birthday' has broken out. Plenty of cigarettes are being smoked. These are Europeans, after all.

It all adds up to the sights and sounds of adventure, you figure. God knows you understand it, you relate to it. You've done it yourself, heaps of times. Someone's birthday? Drink. Away from home? Drink. Other side of the world, meeting and talking to new friends? Definitely, most certainly, unavoidably, drink.

At one of the tables, you sit quietly. Your laptop is open in front of you, the screen glowing white and black with the shapes of your words. You feel tempted to draw some conclusions about what all of this means, but maybe it doesn't mean anything particularly profound. It's not a story at all, it's probably just a situation. Just the lives of adventurous young people crashing against one another in a far off land.

You conclude that this is probably a thing to be celebrated, not intellectualised. You clap your laptop closed and leave the courtyard.

Small screen classics

I've been session-watching Breaking Bad recently and it's been awesome. I love that sort of must-see, premium drama. I'm happy to admit I'm behind the curve on this show, but not too far: it only concluded a few months ago. Now that I've had a chance to get through almost all the episodes, it reminds me just how much I love great television.

Television is one of my favourite art forms. As far as these forms go, I participate in music, writing and photography: television is my truly non-participatory passion. I don't act, I don't write scripts; I am only now really writing about television. And so I cherish it as something that I don't do, which for me is a little weird.

DVD had an impact that I don't feel like VHS ever did: it legitimised and brought to the mainstream the practice of watching television series box sets. Television became, like movies, a thing to catch up on and explore. Television started to be treated with the respect and care it deserved.

Classic runs of television shows, like classic albums, books or paintings, are terrific gifts given to us by the most talented creative people in the world. But television shows often have so much great content to get through. Albums last for about an hour, books take a couple of weeks at most to read. A season of a modern cable drama can have up to thirteen hours of viewing to plough through, and the great shows often have five or more seasons. While this presents a significant barrier to entry for new viewers, it also gives creators the ability to tell rich, detailed stories featuring multi-dimensional characters that develop and grow before our very eyes. At it's best, it's an extremely satisfying, layered experience that movies just can't match.

I'm of the belief that a lot of great, visionary art is created by auteurs - individual creators with a specific vision and understand of the thing that they are creating. Premium television programming is one of the last bastions of great auteur creation on the corporate dime in a world where so many other art forms have been taken over by taste-makers, panels and groupthink. The great, ambitious show runners of this era seem to be given a certain amount of licence to produce the stories they want, which is a wonderful thing. That's not to say that some of the networks don't ever try to interfere, but it seems to me that these people have a level of creative control over the work that seems atypical for people creating content for mass consumption.

Great art is a permanent gift to us all. The people who create truly transcendent work should be treasured and respected. Scripted television is currently the ascendant medium when it comes to entertaining mass audiences, which makes our great show runners the most influential creators of this era.

So thank you, Vince Gilligan.

Thank you, Matthew Weiner.

Thank you, David Simon.

Thank you, Matthew Groening.

Thank you, David Crane and Marta Kauffman.

Thank you, Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David.

Thank you, Louis CK.

Thank you, Dan Harmon.

Thank you, Mike Schur and Greg Daniels.

Thank you, Victor Fresco.

Thank you, Mitch Hurwitz.