I blogged previously about my reservations about soccer, but I have to admit that I've gotten quite sucked into the World Cup. Today was an especially dramatic day with the last-second, Hollywood-style USA victory in extra time, and it made me think about some of my other memories of the World Cup.
I had never even heard of the World Cup when our tour bus rolled into Paris on June 10, 1998, but soon I would hear about nothing else. I was on a whirlwind European tour with members of my AP European History class and we were only staying in Paris for three days. By sheer coincidence, we arrived in Paris the day the World Cup started.
Since the teacher of the class doubled as the school soccer team coach, there was a lot of overlap of European history fans and soccer aficionados in the tour group. I remember the excitement among on the bus growing exponentially with every mile (or rather, kilometer) that brought us closer to Paris. At the front of the bus there was this large clump of kids talking excitedly about 'the World Cup.' After a while I finally asked them what they were talking about. They looked dumbfounded. "The WORLD CUP?!? It's only like the biggest sporting event in the whole wide world!" "Oh," I sheepishly replied. "So, it's a soccer game?"
We finally disembarked in Paris and it was pure bedlam. Everywhere you looked there were mobs of people waving their country's flags and screaming obscenely loud. I was completely baffled as I took in the whole scene - why would such a large, rowdy assemblage come from all over the globe just to watch a soccer game? Surely the game was but a diversion before they hit the Louvre, right?
Like all good American tourists, we made a beeline for the Eiffel Tower. As we approached this universal symbol of the French nation the air was naturally filled with the sound of... bagpipes? Scotland was playing in the opening game of the tournament (against Brazil!) and a humongous clan of Scotsman had gathered underneath the Eiffel Tower. They were all clad in kilts with drinks in hand, and their singing and chanting was far louder and rowdier than all the other nationalities we had yet seen. Several times they all yelled "SCOTLAND!!!!!!!" in unison and literally made the Eiffel Tower shake up above our heads.
Their drunken revelry was generally amusing, but the funniest sight of all was a kilt-clad Scotsman breakdancing to "No Diggity"(remember that song?). He was pretty good and a crowd quickly materialized around him. A couple girls from my tour group squeezed their way into the inner ring of the circle while I remained too far back to see anything. A minute later I heard my friends scream as they pushed their way out of the circle. They explained that the breakdancing Scotsman went into a prolonged headspin with his legs straight up in the air, causing his kilt to fall down and revealing that he wasn't wearing anything underneath. They were both pretty traumatized by the whole incident, but the Scottish breakdancer and his fellow countrymen were unfazed and the party continued.
The eyes of the world are on South Africa during the World Cup, so today we're going to salute one of South Africa's best-known institutions, Ladysmith Black Mambazo. They rose to superstardom through their appearance on Paul Simon's Graceland album, which lead to several Sesame Street appearances, this time in Muppet form:
P.S. - My sister finally had her baby 10 days after her due date. His name is Samuel, and I'd like to think that my previous SST post, a parody of Samuel Beckett, helped inspire the name (although I'm sure it didn't).
For weeks now I have been excited for the World Cup to start. Like the Olympics, I love the World Cup as a cultural event that pulls the world together and brings out each nation's normally dormant national pride. Most of all I love the World Cup because it is a time when my beloved Brazil becomes a global powerhouse, the envy of the world.
This morning I tuned in early to catch some of the festivities before the opening game. It was stirring and the energy inside the stadium was electric (especially with the constant blare of those consummately annoying vuvuzelas). It was an exciting build-up, but then the game started and I realized that for me the World Cup has just one drawback: it's soccer.
If I had been raised in any other spot on the globe besides the United States, I'm sure I would find televised soccer (er... football) to be riveting. However, as an American I find it to be quite dull. This Simpsons clip captures the general American reaction to soccer perfectly:
I believe that there are a variety of reasons that most of America doesn't care about soccer, such as the minimal amount of scoring (earlier in the same Simpsons episode, the TV commercials for the game boast that soccer games often end with such exciting final scores as 0-1 and 0-0!). But I don't think that's why I can't get into soccer. Intellectually I can appreciate the buildup of tension as the two sides engage in a back-and-forth battle for even a slight advantage to exploit, leading to the cathartic burst of a goal. But in real life I just don't get sucked into the action. Watching the first few minutes of this South Africa-Mexico game I've realized that my problem may lie in the way soccer games are filmed.
Watching a game like basketball, where the cameras and the crowd are literally a few feet from the action, you can really appreciate the abilities and body language of the players, and the momentum shifts and story of the game are instantly apparent as the game unfolds. In the case of soccer, the players are so spread out and they routinely kick the ball half the length of the field, so out of necessity the default camera angle must be a wide aerial shot. I feel that the distant vantage point renders the game incredibly arid and impersonal, making it difficult for a soccer novice like me to even follow the narrative of the game, let alone appreciate the beauty and subtlety in the footwork and ball-handling of these world-class athletes.
Having said that, I love watching soccer highlights, mostly because they show the action from better angles and I get to see the game's crucial moments up close. Case in point: as I typed the previous paragraph, a South African player broke away and charged down the field for a goal. It was mildly exciting in the real-time aerial shot, but when they showed replays from various closer angles, it was truly impressive - a perfectly placed shot in the upper right corner of the goal.
So I guess my main reservation about soccer (the camera angles) isn't one that can be easily solved. Hopefully as the World Cup progresses I will begin to grasp the nuances of soccer despite the bird's-eye view. Besides, the sport of baseball proves that you can have all the close-ups and fancy camera angles in the world and still be mind-numbingly boring. (I wanted to bookend this post with another Simpsons clip, but couldn't find the bit where Homer realizes that baseball is unbearably boring without beer. Try to imagine it yourself.)
There is a fantastic series of short clips on ESPN.com called "I Scored a Goal in the FIFA World Cup Final." There are only 32 people alive who can make the boast in the title of the series, and in this clip former Brazilian soccer star Zito reminisces about a goal he scored 48 years ago:
Watching this video and others in the series, I was struck by how ordinary these men look. If I saw this guy on a bus I wouldn't even notice him. I would never even imagine that as a young man he had accomplished such a rare feat on the biggest stage in the world.
This got me thinking about Lost, which recently ended its six-season run. In the immediate aftermath of the series finale there was much debate about all of the loose ends that the show had failed to tie up and whether or not the show's mysteries were revealed in a satisfying manner. But now the dust has settled a little and watching that clip about Zito reminded me of why I got sucked into Lost in the first place.
When Lost first came on the air, I found all the stuff about polar bears and secret hatches in the ground to be interesting hooks, but what really drew me in was the show's flashback structure. Each episode featured scenes set on the mysterious island in the present day with a group of strangers who had been thrust together through a tragic plane crash and were now forced to live together ("or die alone") as a community. During the course of each episode, characters would make decisions that often puzzled or surprised both their fellow castaways on the island and us as viewers. However, each episode would also weave in a series of flashbacks of the character's life was like before he or she ended up on the island, showing how their previous life experiences informed, if not completely explained or justified, their actions on the island.
Now that may seem like an obvious truth - our past influences our present - but for me the execution of that idea on Lost was truly spellbinding. A classic example of this is the fourth episode of the series, "Walkabout." By this point the show had built a lot of mystique around the confident hunter John Locke, but in the flashbacks we see that immediately before the fateful plane crash he was a frustrated and pathetic drone working at a box company. Locke uses the plane crash as a chance to reinvent himself into the man he always wanted to be, and most of his actions are motivated by years of having people doubt his abilities ("Don't tell me what I can't do!" is one of the show's intriguing motifs).
The flashbacks retroactively added richness to all of the preceding episodes as well. For thirteen episodes we watch the odd dynamic between Michael and his son Walt before finally learning their story, and that knowledge suddenly colors all of their interactions we had previously seen, investing them with more meaning and nuance. The flashbacks, however, are solely for the benefit of the viewer, and for the most part the characters on the show remain in the dark about their fellow castaways' previous experiences. I often thought about how differently the characters would treat each other if they had the same knowledge that the audience had.
One day during the first season of the show I was riding the bus to school and I took the time to really look at every single person on the bus, trying to imagine what life-shaping experiences each one of them had been through. They looked like such normal, nondescript people, but at that moment I thought about how every single person I come into contact with has accumulated a lifetime's worth of experience prior to our meeting. When I first meet someone there is no possible way that I can know about all of their past experiences beforehand, nor can I comprehend the way said experiences influence the way they choose to act in the present. On that particular bus ride, for all I knew I could have been riding along with a renowned archaeologist, someone who had lost a loved one to cancer, a video game world recorder holder, and someone who had scored the winning goal in the World Cup final.
That moment on the bus, for me, is the legacy of Lost. Sure, we all loved the mysteries and got caught up in the dense mythology, but for me the main purpose of all that stuff was to drive the characters' choices, and the most fascinating mystery was human behavior. It made me want to understand more about all the people around me - not only the strangers on that bus but also all of the other friends and acquaintances in my life.
An interesting corollary is that Lost actually did bring me closer to a lot of people. Part of the Lost experience was getting together with friends to watch and discuss the show on an almost weekly basis. There are some people that I had only known casually but when we discovered a mutual love of Lost it ended up leading to more frequent fraternization, followed by solid friendship. I'll never forget the epidemic of Lost fever that hit most of the cast of the Ohio Light Opera in the summer of 2006. We'd spend hours every day working as professions together at rehearsals and whatnot, but then at night after our performances were over we'd all get together as friends to watch Lost on DVD. It was a really galvanizing experience and the cast was really close that year.
My favorite era of Lost-watching was during the second and third season when I used to go to my friends Anthony and Desiree's apartment and the three of us would gather on their bed to watch it on their crappy little TV. The reception was terrible (remember how TVs used to have rabbit ears?) and we certainly didn't have DVR to skip the commercials and replay crucial moments, but we wouldn't have wanted it. I loved the commercial breaks because it gave us several chances during the course of the hour to share our reactions in real time as the episode developed. After it was over we would usually continue the discussion of the episode for a solid hour afterward. Then during the week we'd discuss the latest Doc Jensen article and share our latest theories. I have heard some people say that they wanted to abstain from Lost until it ended so that they could watch it all at once, but they missed out on a great six-year-long communal experience.
So it may sound cheesy or over-dramatic, but Lost really did bring me closer to other people. You may say, "Yeah, but can you really base a friendship on a shared love for a TV show?" That's a valid question, but Lost, like a lot of great literature, touches on a wide variety of universal themes that can often lead to discussions about personal beliefs and relevant life experience that can deepen any relationship.
Is the show perfect? No. But I am so glad I went on this ride for six years with so many friends (even my sister Amy and her husband, two of the last people I would have suspected to get caught up in Lost, eventually jumped on board). Near the end of the series finale, there was a wordless scene during which I got to sit back and marvel at the vast array of incredibly rich characters the show gave the world over its run. At that moment I felt pure gratitude to the creators, writers, actors, and everyone involved in bringing such a beautiful show to the air. So thanks, Lost, for six great years, and I'll see you in another life, brother.
Upon a recent inspection of the fridge, I discovered three different half-used jars of spaghetti sauce. What's worse is that I have one more jar in the cupboard because the last time I went grocery shopping I thought I was running dangerously low.
Follow Them to the Edge of the Desert
-
I dreamed that I was passing through Arizona with a bunch of friends from
Ann Arbor en route to Utah, but just before our caravan reached the border
we pas...
We finally disembarked in Paris and it was pure bedlam. Everywhere you looked there were mobs of people waving their country's flags and screaming obscenely loud. I was completely baffled as I took in the whole scene - why would such a large, rowdy assemblage come from all over the globe just to watch a soccer game? Surely the game was but a diversion before they hit the Louvre, right?
Their drunken revelry was generally amusing, but the funniest sight of all was a kilt-clad Scotsman breakdancing to "No Diggity"(remember that song?). He was pretty good and a crowd quickly materialized around him. A couple girls from my tour group squeezed their way into the inner ring of the circle while I remained too far back to see anything. A minute later I heard my friends scream as they pushed their way out of the circle. They explained that the breakdancing Scotsman went into a prolonged headspin with his legs straight up in the air, causing his kilt to fall down and revealing that he wasn't wearing anything underneath. They were both pretty traumatized by the whole incident, but the Scottish breakdancer and his fellow countrymen were unfazed and the party continued.
