Having missed my one post a month schedule for April (because I’ma kill the developers on my release project, is why), I’m jumping in to note that without a shadow of a doubt, watching El Clasico yesterday was a reminder of why I watch footy in all its glory.
It’s not just that I loathe Real Madrid and Barça handed them their ass on a platter, it’s not that Barça could legitimately have scored 10 goals if it weren’t for Iker Casillas being such a superlative goalkeeper. It’s that Barcelona played beautiful football. Real might not be at their best this season, but periodically they were made to look like a pub side. Some of the best passing moves didn’t make it to the highlight reels, because there was no goal as a result, but the use of space, the passing accuracy, the awareness and sheer elan were something to behold. The clip below doesn’t include my favorite moment – when Messi was maybe 5 feet to the left of the left post and about the same from the touch line, and the cheeky little bastard tried to lob Casillas at an angle of maybe 25° and nearly did it too.
Posting a clip reel is almost pointless – there were so many good moments in this game, it’s worth watching again, in its entirety. Eduardo Galeano wrote in “Football in Sun and Shadow” that as much as he was a fan of a team, or supported Uruguay, he was like a mendicant, seeking occasional moments of beauty in football. Please excuse the purple prose: the begging bowl was filled at the Bernabeu yesterday.
It doesn’t happen all that often, so after being rude about the man before, I feel I must publically agree with his rant during the Manchester United – Inter game last night: Tommy Smyth is absolutely right that John O’Shea is the first Irishman to come through United in years, because Irwin and Keane were bought in from elsewhere.
Just because there’s reason to doubt Mr Smyth in general is no excuse to pile on when he’s right on the technalities even it sounds a bit off.
After a couple of draws and Benitez moaning about defensive play, who’s through to the next round of the FA Cup? Only the unfancied team with the frightening Scottish manager. I wonder how Benitez is going to explain this one away…
Work demands have been interfering with my ability to follow footy at the moment, so here’s the one thing I have been working on assessing: the quality of sazeracs at various restaurants in the business district and French Quarter in New Orleans. (life hands you lemons, etc., etc.)
Incidentally, that’s about the rank of quality of food, with the following caveats: 1) you could swap Luke and Bayona and that would be fair also, and 2) a definite exception in the case of Muriel’s – the table d’hote menu is sized so that you can really eat a three course meal, and the goat cheese crepes and shrimp starter is especially good. Skip the sazerac and get straight onto the food. NOLA, on the other hand, doesn’t seem worth the effort – if anything, I’m probably under-rating the cocktail because of the meal.
On the less fancy pants end, the turtle soup and shrimp half loaf at Mandina’s nearly finished me off the other night, but in a good cause. I rather doubt I shall eat a poboy outside of the state of Louisiana again.
Since I can’t post the entire Adam Freeland Radio 1 Essentials mix that Holly introduced me to, here are a couple of goodies from 2008…
I know that SFA released Hey Venus in 2007 everywhere else, but if I had known that it would be a 2008 release in the US, I would have bought it when I was in the ancestral homeland in late 2007, but I didn’t, so here we are.
Since we’ve already introduced Gruff Rhys, it’s worth mentioning his other release as half of Neon Neon, the concept album Stainless Style about John DeLorean. Almost too accurate in its retro glory. Read more »
I’m not prone to the levels of hagiography that a lot of the English press crank out for Steven Gerrard – while there’s no question about his motivation and ball skill, I just don’t see him as being in that top level of midfielder who can either see the field to drive the team forward or take over a game. He’s very good at his best, but not superlative.
That said, he’s also about the last person I’d expect to see in the nick over actual bodily harm and affray. If the reports are true that it was over a DJ’s unwillingness to play Gerrard’s faves (Phil Collins and Coldplay), I could see an argument to be made for assault on unsuspecting listeners, but Gerrard has never struck me as the type to knock someone about in the fashion of Joey Barton.
Pardon me for being a patronizing middle class twat, but it always looked to me like Gerrard had managed to maintain something of the best part of a working class consciousness – of finding joy in the game he played on a concrete estate, of caring about the reaction of the fans, of paying attention to kids from similar backgrounds – without any accompanying ASBO nonsense. It just seems out of character. Baffling, even. It’ll be interesting to see what the actual story / stories might be.
It’s been 26 years since I arrived in the US as an impressionable young man. I took to watching the NFL a bit, and then college football when I went to USC. I bought in – to the extent that my only true regret related to college not related to dames is that I missed the one USC – UCLA game for which I had tickets to the Rose Bowl, because I was so hung over that my friends abandoned their attempts to get me rolling. Hell, I went to the 1992 Freedom Bowl. My excuse for missing most of the 1990s seasons was that they weren’t on air in Rhode Island and the DC area, and I’m sticking to that.
In the meantime, I suspect that I watched a total of five soccer games live and in person between 1982 and 2006 - a couple of pre-World Cup friendlies: England – Mexico at the Coliseum in 86, and US – Scotland at RFK in 98 – and then a few DC United games.
And yet, it’s the soccer that catches me. As soon as the SC – UCLA game ended on December, I was done with college football. The next night I nodded off watching a replay of Everton – Aston Villa, notable only because I woke up not to the replays of goals, but in the immediate run up as the announcers’ tone changed. I watched Barcelona – Real Madrid the other weekend and was shrieking at the screen in a way that I rarely do for football. And I was reminded today, watching a replay of Villareal – Barcelona, that soccer brings a beauty in play, sometimes, that catches me in a way that football just doesn’t. After 2/3 of my life in the land of the free, it’s the beautiful game that resonates.
I’ve watched a few minutes of a couple of bowl games, but that’s it. I haven’t had any interest in writing about any of them, in preview or review. I’m looking forward to the Rose Bowl and the MNC game, but have nothing to say that couldn’t be said better by someone else.
And I don’t see the point about writing about footy at the moment, because what can I add to the good games?
So as the new year approaches, family life obligations remain steady, and my workload continues to grow, and I’m at an impasse. I’m not dropping this blog quite yet, despite the recent radio silence, but I need a rethink of scope and content. I’m not currently adding anything, and there’s a saturated market for pointless blogs.
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime…
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
I was starting to run short on “bad things happened” songs until I remembered a shot of Ty Willingham right at the end of the USC – Washington game where, if I didn’t know better, I could have sworn I saw the hint of a glisten in his eyes. Perhaps he was thinking, it’s come to this: I get fired and they can’t even muster the enthusiasm for the traditional post-partum win. Perhaps it was the smog.
In either case, from the Police, the lyrically apropos “Driven to Tears”:
I’m taking a break from low-frequency snark for politics. If’n you don’t like the liberal variety, save yourself some time and blood pressure and look away now.
I don’t believe in political movements, and I don’t believe in Messiahs. As a general rule of thumb, I just want my bunch of crooks and liars to win, and the other bunch of crooks and liars to lose. Sometimes that happens, and sometimes you say, well it’s their turn this time. For this election, though, I genuinely want to see Senator Obama win.
I used to say that I became a US citizen because I liked the novelty of having a written Constitution, and because of the first, fourth, and fourteenth amendments. All of those reasons have been taking a battering over the last four years, as Andrew Sullivan sets out in a fashion that is clear, calm, and devastating.
Sullivan plainly understands something that it took me a while to grasp. At first, I was baffled by the American recourse to the law in order to resolve political questions, but when it became clear that Constitutional cases and precedent aren’t just a brake on progress, but on government control, then I was on board. There’s a lot to be said for the clear and public evolution of the law, so that as citizens we all know where we are and in some sense where we’re going, and where we draw the line about our sphere and the government’s sphere. This is the crux of liberty.
I don’t need to further dwell on the damage that the Bush Administration has done to the rule of law, but I am struck that it is characterized by the absence of transparency. The same lack of transparency was typified by the absence of regulations on financial instruments such as credit default swaps, so that when the music stopped, everyone assumed they had a ticking parcel. The Bush Administration wasn’t alone in that, but they were instrumental in making sure that the absolutely critical features of a well-functioning market – transparency and information – weren’t available.
The lack of transparency, sadly, was an instinct that appeared even when it wasn’t planned. Sullivan doesn’t place the same degree of importance upon the Federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina that he does on the Constitution, but they are both emblematic. In the case of Katrina, the urge to hide meant that inept relief efforts were rendered even more hopeless than before.
Some people will try and tell you that having New Orleans stand as the emblem of Katrina and the uselessness of the Bush Administration is to unfairly ignore the role of corruption and incompetence in Louisiana and New Orleans. I don’t doubt the local failures at all. But when Katrina hit, one of the administrative assistants at my office got tired of not being able to reach her family in coastal Alabama, so she set off with whatever supplies she could get in her truck and the money we had given in a whip-round at the office. She found her cousin dead from lack of insulin, her cousin’s children hospitalized from dehydration and lack of food while they waited for “Mommy to wake up,” her grandmother dead from dehydration. Fewer than 10 miles up the road, FEMA and the Red Cross were bickering over who was supposed to deliver aid.
Last week I went to New Orleans for the first time. I was surprised at how small a city it really is – ten minutes from downtown heading east on Interstate 10 for a meeting, it was practically the sticks. I have no clue – not one fucking clue – how everyone managed to so comprehensively fuck up rescue efforts in such a small space.
Last night I watched this old clip from Fox News wherein Sean Hannity tries to take up the line that reporters on the ground were exaggerating conditions, and Shepard Smith essentially told him he was full of shit. If you have 8 free minutes and low blood pressure, you can remind yourself of what a clusterfuck this was.
No-one knew what was going on, and the first thing the federal government did was to try and draw a curtain over what they were – and were not – doing. Perhaps I should be grateful that they were as bad at concealment as they were at managing a relief effort.
There are so many other elements to my view of the last 8 years, both common to the general public and specific to friends of mine – the NASA physicist whose funding, for the basic research that keeps the US economy ahead, is cut year in and year out; the lawyer who left his job with the environmental division at Justice because the political appointees were refusing to pursue cases where the government was actually enforcing the law and he could do more to promote ecological issues in the private sector – that I could go on and on.
But I won’t. At root, political preferences aside, I am tired of a government that fails both deliberately and on the basis of incompetence, that doesn’t respect the rule of law, and that doesn’t respect its citizens – the very people who authorize its existence. McCain and Palin have made it clear where they stand on that, by their rhetoric aimed those of us who aren’t real Americans and by false dichotomies that might have been valid if they were actually running as small “c” conservatives. I’d say they might as well whistle for my vote, but it wasn’t up for grabs anyway and when they heard the word “whistle” they’d just say something about terrorists and preachers.
If all I can get out of tomorrow’s election is a return to competence and, if not transparency, at least not paranoid concealment, then I will feel satisfied. I don’t want miracles, I just want someone who takes governing seriously.
