America's Game

I’m deeply enjoying the 2010 NBA playoffs these days, and have noticed that most of the Czech guys who I play basketball with every Tuesday have a meticulous knowledge of NBA players and teams. This is interesting when you think about the fact that basketball is the only truly American game, having been invented by a Phys-Ed teacher in Springfield, MA in 1891. Compare this to baseball, a game touted as “America’s Game” that draws on European games for its rules and boasts of a “World Series” that Czechs wouldn’t be caught dead watching. (You can catch NBA playoff games on TV in specialty sports bars in Prague, and NFL is also a mainstay. Hockey, meanwhile, is considerably more popular here than it is in the U.S., probably on par with Canadian enthusiasm. Baseball, on the other hand, is an absolute blackout: no World Series, no nothing).

The speed with which the Peach Basket Game gained popularity is always striking to me, but never more so than when I show my design students a movie called The Man With A Movie Camera, an 1929 avant-garde piece of Soviet film by Dziga Vertov that captures everyday events in an aggressively abstract and non-linear manner. There’s an artsy montage of people playing sports where you see a group of Russian women engaged in some incredibly dated- and weird-looking athletic activity that you suddenly realize — wow! — is basketball. The story of how basketball permeated this nascent cultural iron curtain in the first 38 years of its existence is a job for another blog far less lazy than this one, but let’s just say it surprises me a little every time I see the film.

(Blurry Soviet female basketball scrum from The Man With A Movie Camera)

So, while I acknowledge that the sport has achieved great heights, I have a few suggestions and scenarios that I think would add interesting wrinkles:

  • Halloween pageants where teams dress up in the spirit of their team name. How much better would, say, a random Utah / San Antonio game be if involved a cultural showdown where ‘jazzmen’ maneuver against cowboys clanking around in spurs and full regalia?
  • The option to suddenly punt the basketball through upright goal posts positioned 10 yards behind the basket for 3 points
  • My plan to dress NBA coaches in players’ uniforms, following the example of baseball (further discussed here)
  • Port-a-potties positioned along the court. This came to mind when I thought about the fact that no one ever has to pee during our hour and half Tuesday pick-up games. Obviously, the reason is that we’re all running like antelopes and sweating out all the water in our bodies. But what if athletic activity massively increased – rather than decreased – the need to go? Imagine the drama and ensuing recrimination as certain players desperately peel off for ‘pit stops’ during key moments in the action, as in a marathon
  • Something involving leg warmers, berets and mimes that I haven’t fully worked out yet.

Czech product marketing update

My father was visiting last week. It took his discerning eye to draw our attention to the name of our current toilet paper brand, which I hadn’t noticed before:

Happyend, a German brand. No word yet on the specific terms of this guarantee.

Meanwhile, Mr. Clean has become Mr. Proper:

Same guy, but over here his fastidious nature extends to moral issues as well.

For more fun in this vein, see Sick/Barf.

Friday song: The Clown

Around the time that Charles Mingus was having his psychologist write the liner notes for his albums, he released The Clown, whose title track centers around a made-up-on-the-fly story narrated by Jean Shepherd (the same guy responsible for A Christmas Story). Musicians are forever bitching about how their listeners don’t really ‘get’ them, but Mingus is the only guy I can think of to creatively channel this resentment– in this case, into a story about a clown (‘a real happy guy’) who martyrs himself to the cruel appetites of his audience:

‘The Clown’ by Charles Mingus

I saw a documentary about Mingus once where they related an anecdote about a time that his band was playing in a San Francisco bar. Mingus, a notorious rage-o-holic, got pissed off because the audience kept chattering and not paying attention to the band, so he eventually proposed that the band and audience ‘trade fours’: they would play for four bars, then stop so the audience could talk for four bars. Of course, the audience got ate this up and got really into it– which is I suppose a tiny real life analogy to the storyline of ‘The Clown’.

Runnin' With The Dio

Yesterday, we lost one of the great voices of 80s metal– and popularizer of the “Il Cornuto” devil sign– Ronnie James Dio. I thought it would appropriate to lay him to rest with a passage from that Christian screed The Devil’s Disciples that I blogged on a few weeks ago. In this section, the perpetually horrified author cites Dio in a passage about the tendency of “Devil-worshiping groups” to “add and drop members left and right, changing and transforming the bands they leave, and enter into even greater strongholds of satanic strength”. As he recounts the monstrous shapeshifting of Rainbow and Black Sabbath, he offers up this defacto obituary :

A pompous little leather-lunged singer named Ronnie James Dio joined Blackmore’s new outfit, using his strong songwriting ability to pen songs about the mystic power of pyramids, witches, warlocks and werewolves. After quitting Rainbow with four albums under his belt, Dio replaced the disgusting Ozzy Osbourne as Black Sabbath’s lead vocalist. The name of the album he debuted on: “Heaven and Hell.”

[note: in the writing of Jeffrey Godwin, this is supposed to be a big ‘aha!‘ moment, where the artist’s obvious satanism is shown to be right in front of our noses]

Here are some quotes directly from Dio:

“At least I understand something about the occult, which is more than I can say about certain bands use pentagrams and upside down crosses as their emblems…”

“In order to write logically and sensible about a subject, you have to learn about it. I’m INFORMED about the darker side of our lives…”

Who’s doing the informing? Dio is not Ronnie James’ name…

[GASP]

His last name is actually Padovana. Dio means “god” in Italian. This guy calls himself and his band God!

Note that despite Godwin’s obvious revulsion towards Dio on the last point, it is conspicuous that he acknowledges Dio’s “strong songwriting ability”. Compare this to his more characteristic tone of contempt for the rest of Black Sabbath: “It seems impossible that such a ragtag bunch of misfits and weirdos could sell ten records to their relatives, much less millions of albums over a 15 year span.” Well, then.

The Siberian Basketball Diaries, Part Eleven

[ed note: the following is an excerpt from the travel journal of my old high school friend Andrej Mucic. In 2005, Andrej bicycled over 7,000 miles through Siberia to raise money for the American Anti-Slavery Group. Previous installments start here.

In this– the final installment– Andrej comments on the political kertuffles taking place just as he’s leaving Moscow.]

—–

Subject:  The Warriors
Date:  8/31/05

Remember the cult film classic “The Warriors?” That’s what the Moscow political scene has turned into. And your humble narrator was right in the middle of it, but I missed the oppurtunity to rumble alongside my friends in the National Bolshevick Party, by just one day.

Sunday I participated in a demonstration in front of KGB headquarters calling for the release of 39 NBP political prisoners. Here’s them in the can:

What suprised me most about this rally was the large number of young people present. In the West, there is a media assumption that all neo-Soviet forces in Russia are angry old people demanding free sausage. This could not be further from the truth. The appalling economic and political situation in the Motherland has radicalized people that were not even adults at the time of the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

The demonstration went well. Afterwards, me and three party activists went for a walk. They included:


Natasha


Vera


Alexei

They took me on a fascinating tour of the city. We eventually arrived at the site of their First Bunker, and there we sat down in a beautiful little park and drank beers, ate pickles and talked. I am very impressed with these people. In a land of almost universal apathy and political inaction, the NBP is an island of patriotism and optimism.

That night as I was saying goodbye to the lovely Natasha on the subway, she invited me to a meeting they were having the next day. I told her that I was leaving tommorrow and that I could not make it. I’m lying. What I really said was, “I’m a friend of the Party, I am not a Member.” I really regret not going, because that meeting was stormed by soccer hooligan street-thugs, known as the Gladiators, loyal to President Putin. Oh how I wish I’d been there to break a few heads. The weapons on choice are baseball bats and flag poles, both of which I feel very comfortable with. Here’s an article that describes the event and the way in which Putin deals with political opponents.

—–

END


Faeted To Pretend

I had iTunes on shuffle today and Time to Pretend by MGMT came up. The song’s been out for like a year and a half, but somehow I had never really paid attention to the lyrics before. Oh, I’d listened through the part about ‘I’ll move to Paris, shoot some heroin, and fuck with the stars’, but tended to tune out thereafter and had always just assumed that the song was about youthful hedonism and that’s all there was to it. This time, for whatever reason, I paid attention through to the end and was struck by how much in common the lyrics have with one of W.B. Yeats’ early poems, ‘The Stolen Child‘ (one of the few Yeats’ pieces I still remember vividly from a seminar I took in college). Consider…

In Yeats poem, a bunch of faeries plan to spirit off a human child to a magical land. The magical land is all good times, carousing around and staying up all night (‘To and fro we leap / And chase the frothy bubbles, / While the world is full of troubles / And anxious in its sleep’). Its allure is in its non-reality and weightlessness (consider the strange and beautiful line ‘We seek for slumbering trout / and whispering in their ears / Give them unquiet dreams’), and in the extent to which this contrasts with the mundanity and sorrow of the real world:

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand.
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

But then, the final stanza produces this switcheroo where we’re made to feel the longing that the stolen child will feel for the tangible, commonplace details of the real world, petty and squalid as they may be:

He’ll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest

The sheer tangibility and realness of the lowing cows, singing kettle and vermin-infested oatmeal chest becomes the stuff of nostalgia. Time To Pretend manages a similar trick: the first half presents stardom as all models, cocaine and elegant cars, an escape from mundanity. ‘What else can we do?’ the singer asks, ‘Get jobs in offices and wake up for the morning commute?’. The first verse ends with him pledging to ‘forget about our mothers and our friends’. But then, in the second verse, we get the equivalent of brown mice bobbing in the oatmeal chest:

I’ll miss the playgrounds and the animals and digging up worms
I’ll miss the comfort of my mother and the weight of the world
I’ll miss my sister, miss my father, miss my dog and my home
Yeah, I’ll miss the boredom and the freedom and the time spent alone.

Suddenly worms, family members and even boredom are things to be longed for. Of course, Time To Pretend ends with a sort of resolution and renewed vow to party up to the end and eventually ‘choke on our own vomit’… but I like to think that they were really channeling Yeats and just threw this in at the end to make it an acceptable pop song. In any case, I think there’s a lot of correspondence between the two, given that one is a youth anthem and the other is all pre-Raphaelite and shit.

The 7 types of stories

See the list of tags in the right-hand column of this blog? Turns out they’re obsolete. Categories, too.

(Side rant: there isn’t a single coherent explanation anywhere in the WordPress internet kingdom of what the difference is between ‘tags’ and ‘categories’. I vaguely get the sense that you’re supposed to use them both in concert with each other… which would be fine if I had 5 hours a day to write posts or a teeming staff of assistants to delegate such matters to. Like I’m conducting interviews and explaining So, once the post comes back from the copy desk and the fact-checkers, it’ll be your job to assign appropriate categories and tags. It’s important that you do this before we get the galley proofs back from the publisher! )

According to this WaPo profile of economist-blogger Tyler Cowen, there are only seven possible variants of story line, blog or otherwise:

Cowen also has rules about stories: He distrusts them, particularly ones like this profile. The writer is arranging facts to keep readers reading. “The more inspired the story makes me feel, very often the more nervous I get,” he once said. He believes nearly all stories follow seven templates: “monster, rags to riches, quest, voyage and return, comedy, tragedy and rebirth.”…Cowen, based on his reading of thousands of books, thinks stories trick readers because they are filtered: Writers ‘take a lot of information and they leave some of it out,” he says.

So there you go. From now on, blogs should come pre-populated with only those tag/category options:

  • monster
  • rags to riches
  • quest
  • voyage and return
  • comedy
  • tragedy
  • rebirth

There could still be a ‘edit tags’ button, but this would only shoot a thick black inky substance across your monitor, like a retreating octopus.

As far as taxonomies go, this is a good one, although not as quite as fun as Wolfgang Weinart’s enumeration of the different kinds of typefaces he designs:

  • bunny type
  • sunshine type
  • ant type
  • five-minute type
  • typewriter type
  • for-the-people type

I guess if I were to write a post about the Led Zeppelin tribute band I saw last night, that one would go under… hmm: tragedy and rebirth? Why was I watching a tribute band, you might ask? Well, my friend was playing the part of Mitch Mitchell in a Hendrix tribute outfit that opened up for the Led Zeps. (Maybe quest would be a better categorization for this post, actually, given man’s ancient quest to have Hendrix and Zeppelin play on the same bill). Czech Zeppelin was entertaining and played the songs well, but made no attempt to look like the members of Led Zeppelin. Here, for example, was our Jimmy Page for the evening:

Other than the commendable accuracy of the red sunburst Gibson Les Paul, he looks more like Ray Cole from The Wire:

Now, the idea of a cover band whose members play Zeppelin songs but look like characters in The Wire would be a perfectly welcome innovation, but they didn’t extend this concept across entire band. Only Page, and the singer who looked passably like that Stevedore character whose name I can’t remember who helps Ziggy lift stuff off the dock:

With the singer– who sounded exactly like Robert Plant, by the way– there was this hilarious juxtaposition between his Czech speaking voice and his howling, vowel-laden sung Plantisms. Example:

SPEAKING VOICE (quiet, clipped, lots of consonants): “mutter, mutter…. zxk k kvvvvkkx xsxxxkkxxvvv….”

[music kicks in:]

SINGING: ‘WAAAAAAA-WAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYY DOWNNNN INSIIIIIIIIIIIIIIDE…!!!’

OK, time to put a sock in it. Wouldn’t wanna offend Tyler Cowen any further.

5 favorite epigrams

  1. “The word ‘no‘ crops up a great deal around Lou Reed. […] Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore once called Metal Machine Music “the most positive negative record”, and I guess Lou Reed must be the most positive negative artist – because during our conversation the word ‘fun‘ comes up just as often as the word ‘no’.” — Alan Licht’s profile on Lou Reed, ‘Give Them Enough Nope’, in The Wire.
  2. “It was just embarrasing as well as exhibiting this awful, awful taste. His choice of movies, say, was invariably terrible. TV programmes… Everything. Plus he was starting to get pretty weird […] A genius musician but an amateur human being.” — Brian Wilson’s collaborator on Pet Sounds, Tony Asher. From Dark Stuff by Nick Kent.
  3. “My poems may hurt the dead, but the dead belong to me” — Anne Sexton
  4. “I always believed that computer might be that thing that I only need, that I only need that thing to survive. It might replace everything.” — Andrey Ternovki, the teenage founder of Chatroulette.com, as quoted in a piece in this week’s New Yorker.
  5. “‘I guess I’m not very human. All I really want to do is paint light on the side of a house.” — Edward Hopper

[Image: Stefan Sagmeister’s poster for Lou Reed’s Set The Twilight Reeling.]