Virtue Signalling

This must have been a blog heading a bunch of times before, but it's always apt. Obviously also low hanging fruit, but nevertheless.

Screen shot of Katia Gordeeva working out
while in quarantine. She doesn't
always get the video framing right. I can
relate.

Per instagram Gordeeva practices her skating program on the living room carpet and figure skates down an ice coated hill. No humble bragging - she's sharing some of her life and it all looks fairly amateur with no enhancement features on. Her social media is not full of "positivity." It's full of gratitude, encouragement and support. None of it looks like product.

More than anything else and even now, she's a figure skater and works her ass off to remain one.

It's compelling to watch someone who was once such a guarded personality even before the trauma of early widowhood be so open, so appropriately, on social media. She's just being social on social media. She's not prostituting her private life, She maintains natural boundaries.

I know I'm practically a stan, but I'm so impressed by Gordeeva. Nobody had more of a right to lie her ass off and manipulate the shit out of her enormous and obsessive fan following. For years she was stalked (it's archived on an old usenet forum as well as fan forums - fans would go to her rink in Connecticut, hang out, watch and follow her, then come back and report). After Sergei Grinkov's death, fans were obsessed with her dating life. In the way of figure skating fans, many hoped she'd marry a comforting, companionable sort of sexless dude so they wouldn't have to think of her being attracted to a man other than her late husband. Somebody attractive was by many considered a betrayal.

She was by all accounts a dream to work with but fan-wise she was a closed book. She was also raising her younger child and her fatherless older daughter. She kept her mouth shut - she's the poster child for never complain, never explain. Dave Lease (Skating Lesson) once wrote an account of her at a sponsor meet and greet and remarked, "She was beginning to not understand English." which was one of the few times he's ever been truly on point and cracked me up.

Never complain, never explain is a psychologically sound approach for people in public life looking to keep their private life private. It's "Let them talk." It works. It's the opposite of being a control freak and it also limits the shelf life of people's obsession with you. Gordeeva did that, and then at some point decided she wanted to live proactively as a public figure instead of guardedly and reactively, and of course she's brilliant at it.

****
I feel if they'd been more famous, V&M would have said yes to this in a second.

The infamous "Imagine" celebrity circle jerk.
This facial expression alone.
There are some great parodies.
A fave is Nicole (Derry Girls) Coughlin's.

For anyone familiar with astrology they'd know that Scott Moir is practically the avatar of a Virgo and Tessa is classic Taurus - creature comforts, loves sleep, loves food. And stubborn. When they're dug in, they keep digging.

I haven't read this about them, but to me a Taurus woman is as clutch as it gets. Tessa has been in three Olympics and delivered perfect, and absolutely full on  performances each time. No other Olympic skater or team has done that. Her commitment in the crunch is absolute. Not every performer or public personality has her talent, but most Taurus women seem to be notably all in even if the building is burning down around them. Cheryl Burke - a DWTs dancer - could break two limbs in performance and you'd need a stun gun to get her to quit or drop her game face. Queen Elizabeth is another Taurus. Tina Fey - I wax hot and cold on her lately but she's got that laser focus. There wasn't a shadow of nerves in the two live performances of 30 Rock. Indistinguishable from the filmed show, while allowing for the rhythms of having an audience. I think Taurus women are the least likely type to ever ever choke when the stakes are highest. But there's a flip side.

She has the Taurus total commitment when engaged in her job, but Queen Elizabeth was famously stubborn during the whole Diana's death debacle. Yes, the public reaction approached mass hysteria, no, the flag didn't need to be at half mast, sure, it made sense to keep Diana's sons in the country versus taking them to London to experience the frenzy. But. Some common sense. There was ambiguity in Diana's status - she wasn't just an ex. She lived on crown property, and was mother of the next heir. Something about Her Maj's stubbornness short-circuited her emotional and practical intelligence. I'e read there was a come to Jesus to get her to bend, and it got ugly.

***
Tessa and Scott surely have various rationales to keep this going, but it's plain reverse engineering by now. No narrative they could produce would stand up to even casual interrogation, but they don't need to be concerned. Any rationale would be accepted on face value by the only media that covers them - the entertainment media. They could go all out. Kidnap threats, nervous breakdowns, stalkers - anything at all. Could contradict themselves seven times over in in one go and nobody would point it out.

I do think in this instant Tessa's stubbornness is a cloak for being chickenshit. That's all it is. She's hiding behind her CV.

 Courage as a human being is a more impressive accomplishment than spectacular performances on Olympic ice. A human being is an integrated entity. You can't have integrity "here" and be a smarmy manipulator "there" and still have integrity. You can't blithely appropriate a global respiratory pandemic to lend some manufactured credibility to your ten years and counting fauxmance scam while rah rahing front line workers and local businesses, and still be a genuine person.

What entitlement looks like.

And I don't know how grown a man can be if his sense of humor, common decency and self-respect has regressed since 5th grade. Scott's current faux girlfriend is just a calculated trigger. They couldn't resist the "partner" joke aimed at inciting distress in what they consider a low-information audience. It's small.

I've said before I think they believe all their public niceness and faux earnestness and courtesy and politeness somehow sanitizes their lying and the really malicious streak that's always been an unsettling facet. But it's the opposite.

While Virtue and Moir and Gordeeva Grinkov have been compared endlessly, when it comes to integrity, authentic strength, genuine courage and living out what you say you believe, they're a universe apart.

Double wedding

So SOP - and still cringe-making - when Virtue and Moir get shameless, they turn on the earnestness. Here, they're exploiting a real life catastrophe to reinforce their gaslighting.

I often get the vibe that they believe if they're 65% sincere ("In many ways, we're just like you. We feel your pain and wish everybody well and are so so appreciative.") it mitigates the 35% percent manipulation and lying (i.e., the faux factual parts of everything they say and present). So, that ratio means they're genuine for the most part, right?

But the 65/35 tactic is 101 in the playbook of every narcissist out there (check out the famous East of Eden description of its amoral villainess, Cathy). The 65% sincere is just the poison pill that gets you to swallow the garbage. Narcs have been on trend for a decade, in part, I believe, because PR entities have employed narc tactics in service of their clients. Tessa and Scott were early adapters.



I think this situation up here is just a narrative extender - similar to how Marina Zoueva used to extend the impact of required elements with music and dynamic choreographic embellishment before and after. Morgan Rielly and Tessa help buy some time before fans start wondering when Scott and his lovely fiancee' will tie the knot already.

Extracting a quote from a Buzzfeed piece I'm linking just below it:

One firm promised to “use every tool and take every advantage available in order to change reality according to our client's wishes."

buzzfeed alternative reality

Buzzfeed is U.S. celebrity-adjacent, needs the same access and to receive the same press releases everybody else gets, so it's decided to focus on how Chinese PR and digital companies create alternate realities for its clients. Which is to say, the U.S. (and Canada) do the same thing but it's better to come at it from the China angle rather than be blacklisted. Of course the U.S. and Canada would never condone such practices and in fact have probably never even heard of them until Buzzfeed got them up to speed.

It's all normalized now, which means it's moral.

Skating:

Scott. If he'd squatted and done this on two
feet, maybe he and Tessa would have
won the free dance.

At least Tessa Now Has a Plus One to Her Husband's Wedding

The lucky guy is the on on the right.

Always of note that when Scott has a fauxmance, we must prove it with smiley huggy, kissy smoochy vacationy social media drops suggesting privacy and alone time. When Tessa has a fauxmance, her entire family of origin (as opposed to her family with Scott) is her bodyguard or there's a visible wingman/wingwoman/wingpeople as above, or it's a public event. Has Tessa ever held hands with a fauxbeau for our viewing edification? Tentpoled her way across the gap between their torsos to gingerly touch lips? Done a social media dump so we can see the evidence?

Why the double standard. Tessa needs to step up.

A few years ago I read The Big Short, a successful quasi-comic story centering on the precarious (as it turned out) housing bubble of the mid-0s. What stayed with me was learning that terms for financial products are intentionally obscure. The name of an investment term is not going to tell you what it means - it may mean the opposite or have no relation to the name.

There may be a facile, quasi-legitimate explanation for this custom but obviously the natural supposition is to assume banks and investment companies want a barrier between their understanding and the client's ability to understand what's being done with their money.

Here an aggrieved Papadakis & Cizeron fan on youtube weighs in on the results at Europeans:

Word salad matching the floaty. metronomic incoherence of Papadakis & Cizeron's out of sync, lowered center of gravity, all hands on deck, two-footed mish mash of skating skills.

Confident fans of this stripe still exist because while figure skating has rules, codes, definitions, and criteria, not only have these been dumbed down and not only has wiggle room been built in and not only are what rules and criteria still exist often ignored in the scores, but the figure skating markets itself as performance, not sport, and its participants as emotional and theatrical performers, not athletes.

****

Checked in on Virtue and Moir and could only find lots of stuff like this:



and this



Here a glossy Tessa once again delivers the same painfully anodyne point she's been recycling for a decade. The importance of using her "voice" to empower (retire that word! Retire that fucking word!) and inspire girls. Cautioning how the sport puts so much emphasis on aesthetics. Tessa, the greatest ice dancer of all time, has had a post-Olympic career with an explicit and implicit focus on how beautiful she is no matter what's coming out of her mouth. Well, beautiful AND adorable because one wants to be accessible. relatable. I wonder if when she delivers copy like this for the hundred millionth time if she ever wants to bash her own head in. Our takeaway here is she wants girls to know it's important for even female athletes to be fit. Good Christ. Two Olympic golds and that's what she's got for us.

Needless to say she's embodying a classic contradiction between words, the format in which they're conveyed, and an immaculately enhanced appearance (in what is already a conventionally beautiful woman).

Although she's speaking softly and earnestly, the overall message is more this (From Crazy Ex Girlfriend):

Well dang

This whole thing. I did a dive into non mainstream web pages and forums*, hit the expected mudslide, and saw myself out.

When it comes to versimilitude, you can't
beat figure skaters. But I think her story
might be more interesting than his.

I call twins in 2020.

I've looked at a bunch of pictures from the Meryl Davis and Fedor Andreev weddings and Marina Zoueva certainly managed to hide from the camera whether it be Town & Country's or People's.


*Everything is mainstream for all intents and purposes but meant non pay for play publications and pages.

**********

Every good thought to and for this one.

Maia Shibutani

The Davis White of ballet

A few years ago (2015) Tessa Virtue's twitter excitedly noted Misty Copeland's elevation to principal dancer at the American Ballet Theatre. I follow ballet only intermittently and half-assed, but recognize superior musicality and (hopefully "AND") technique when I see it, When I checked out Copeland after Virtue's tweet, it was clear Copeland didn't have either. Her core strength wasn't steady, she wasn't overendowed with grace, and she was, in the great tradition of recent World Champions in ice dance as well as in the tradition of the 2014 nominal Olympic champions in ice dance - iffy at transitions (transitions are the tell for every skating discipline).



Copeland eliminating nearly two thirds of the fouettes in Swan Lake - filling in the music with rehearsed "improvisation" - gave away the game. She can't do them - it wasn't just the night. This caused a lot of talk even though, in my impression, few observers were surprised.

Also very Davis-Whitey is this critique of Copeland's Kitri in Don Quixote:

Ballet Focus - Copeland's Kitri in Don Quixote

Unfortunately, her performance Saturday evening was an exercise in getting by, a cautious rendering that included shortcuts in certain steps allowing her to check the Don Quixote box as she works her way down the classics list.
An example is Kitri’s turn in attitude (leg bent behind her) after a supported promenade in the Act III pas de deux. Generally Kitri does at least one turn before going to a knee; Misty did about a quarter turn before quickly going to her knee. Another example is Misty’s fouetté turns, the punctuating mark in Kitri’s solos in Act III. Much has been written about Misty’s struggles with fouettés since her debut in Swan Lake, summarized in Gia Kourlas’s profile of her in The New York Times. On Saturday, she started her fouettés off-center at stage left rather than the customary center stage. The reason is that she, like Hee Seo in Swan Lake, consistently travels to the right as her turns progress. On Saturday, her rightward movements were pronounced as she started her turns. There was hope midway though the segment as she righted herself and did several turns in the same spot. However, she finished up moving dramatically to the right, punctuated by a single pirouette to finish.

It continues to grate that the only reason Virtue and Moir are retiring (or so I believe) is they're not allowed to fairly compete. Maybe it took two years for them to finally reconcile themselves that this was not going to change.

My impression has been that most legends of sport perform at a time - an era - where everything comes together to facilitate their success and nurture/reward their talent. Virtue and Moir competed at a time where the entire sport, including those who should have had their back - worked to undermine them and blatantly resented their capabilities. Even the run-up to 2010 was setting the table for the aftermath when V&M's talent would become as welcome as a skunk at a wedding.

The better they got, the more dumbed down the criteria, and even that wasn't enough as those who couldn't fulfill even dumbed down criteria got full marks while Virtue and Moir were frequently dinged for imaginary errors.

I think more veteran ice dance teams would be competing if Virtue and Moir were still in the game. It's different competing against a superior talent, scored fairly. They can always face splat on an element, get a terrible cold or fever (see Katia Gordeeva at the 1988 World Championships in pairs), get an injury that means sitting out a competition, but if not, at least you know it's fair dealing. In the current climate, it's predetermined. There's oxygen in the sport when actual ability is rewarded.

So when's the wedding

That's not a dare. I completely believe we'll hear there was one. I'll double down and bet we "see" there was one. It'll sort of trickle out, "uncovered" by an enterprising fan.

This tweet made me laugh because the first
time I was clued into this Jackie 
thing (right here in the comments
section of this blog) I could hear
the guffaws and smirks in Ilderton
from here. And maybe also picture one of
W Network-Tessa's small, malicious smiles (the
creepy ones she used for the bot-version
of herself in their mockumentary.)
 Team VM's development is still arrested.
Still prefers to punch down. They experiment with
maturity/a facsimile of mutual respect,
then revert to douche after getting bored.

I looked at the Skate Canada/Skate America figure skating results and it's just as if figure skating has been cancelled and the skaters still training, prepping programs and getting themselves out there to compete missed the memo. Are figure skating competitions still a thing?

AND I looked at the Virtue Moir fandom where not a lot is going on either (although there's a good chance I'm not surfing the right social media hot spots). The buzz seems to have hit a wall (or gone "private") after quite a bit of flailing at the end of summer. I'm not sure why it is that - after Jessica, Cassandra and Kaitlyn - Jackie Mascarin seemed to push some fans over the edge. I get the impression some of the most ragey fans were new, but I also believe that on an instinctual level many of the newer fans as usual KNOW they're being fucked with, so they script a scenario to incorporate that feeling, but have somehow blocked themselves from considering the actual ways they've been fucked with and exploited. I really would recommend that anyone who persistently has that feeling towards a situation (not just a fan one, as shamed as fans may be made to feel), to stop taking a personal inventory of yourself in some effort to signal maturity and "objectivity" to yourself (i.e., I'm overinvested, I'm projecting, I'm I'm I'm I'm) and use some freaking common sense. Is projection and overinvestment a recurring issue in your life? No? Then you're being fucked with. When it comes to gaslighting, I would always advise someone struggling with things that "don't add up" to just go ahead and reject whatever basic premise you've been given. Things will clear up fast.

Plenty of celebrities have taken to scripting their lives for the public as if they're in a reality show.

But, in addition, with Virtue and Moir and their team, terrible acting and collateral offense-giving are still intact after all these years, not to mention Scott's habit of working both sides of the street.

Then cue general interest/lifestyle reporters who step in to lecture fans over the fan reaction to a situation the reporter either knows is a lie fed to the fans being targeted, or the "journalist" doesn't know either way, hasn't checked it out, but just kicks into fan-abuse autopilot because that's how our transactional celebrity/media - celebrity/celebrity ecosystem functions. I have no no no no no more patience for that on any level on any topic in any sector.

A distinguishing and extra obnoxious facet of Virtue and Moir's shenanigans has always been how the media and the ten-years-married duo incite the fans to react, and then proceed to patronize them (at best) or attack them (not atypical) for this strong-armed, prompted reaction. It really does borrow from the classic abuse cycle template.

****

Switching gears, this gif of Katia Gordeeva on Battle of the Blades:

Showcasing a more pleasant eternal verity.

Speed, immaculate stroking, impeccable body control. She's been doing this for over 35 years. She calls back to an time when Olympic champions in figure skating were legitimately and consistently extraordinary.

I want to mention that this is someone who for ages gave the impression of wanting to be left alone. A professional, considerate person, clearly a quality human being, as they say, but not much of a self-promoter. I'm not a fan of Dave Lease (the Skating Lesson), but once he described Gordeeva's impatience at a post-show corporate meet and greet as, "She was beginning to not understand English."

She was completely genuine, and did not suffer fools. One day she turned up on social media (twitter). Kristi Yamaguchi basically virtually fainted. "Is that actually you!!!!!???" Ever since, Gordeeva has routinely posted, supporting her daughters, supporting skaters she assists, showing off something someone she loves has cooked, showcasing accomplishments of those she loves and supports, showing us adventures and outings. It's a very generously managed account. What she doesn't tweet about? Her divorce. Her dating life. She figured out that she wanted to use the spotlight on her to turn the spotlight on other people, to engage with the world and open up that way.  To be accessible without violating her own privacy, and without ostentatiously making a show of her boundaries. She decided to be a person, not a very unique snowflake. (And if she's not very very unique, and refuses to handle her public life as if she is, who in skating has the right?) From what I've read about her, she's always tried to teach herself gratitude, and now she's putting that into practice in public (reports are she's always done so in private). She's clearly from a bygone era.