As I have written elsewhere, I am currently researching a history of Commercial Drive. In the midst of that research I have found an editorial in the Highland Echo, Commercial Drive’s local paper, that takes a prescient view of television. They describe it as:
… just one more of the influences currently being brought to bear on the American people to render them incapable of independent thought and independent decisions.”
Not much to add to that really. The date of the editorial? 30th November, 1950.
I admit it, I am a TV jock. I like to watch sports on TV. I’ll watch almost any kind of sport instead of a blank screen. You might think that one team sport is essentially much like any other team sport, but that isn’t so. Watching such a variety of sports has allowed me to isolate a large number of differences between team sports in North America and team sports in the rest of the world. And, so we are clear, I am talking here about major team sports — soccer, American/Canadian football, cricket, rugby, baseball, ice hockey, basketball.
1. Sports as Business Risk
Virtually all team sports outside North America are played in a series of hierarchical leagues where a team’s position in the series of leagues is dependent solely on their success or failure in the previous season. To use British soccer as the exemplar, there is the Premier League at the top of the heap. Below that is the Championship League, followed by League Division 1, League Division 2 etc. If you finish in the bottom three of the Premier League in one season, the following season you will be relegated to the Championship League. Your position in the Premier League is taken by one of the teams that finished in the top three of the Championship League in the previous season and were therefore promoted. Three or four bad years in a row and you can quickly find yourself several levels below the top flight. This system, or something very similar, is the case for soccer, rugby, cricket leagues all over the world. Even the ancient Japanese sport of sumo operates in the same way.
To be clear in the basest North American manner, the level your team plays in determines everything to do with money. A soccer team in the English Premier League will make tens of millions of dollars a year more than will a team in the Championship; and the diffference is similar between the Championship teams and those in lower leagues. There are genuine financial incentives for doing well, and significant financial penalties for doing badly.
In North America, there are financial incentives in doing better than the next team, but there are NO penalties for bad play: you can play really badly for decade after decade and still be in the major leagues. There is no chance of a Triple-A team being promoted, and no chance of a major league team being demoted. The entire business risk based on sporting chance has disappeared. Every part of the system — from TV-revenue sharing to bottom-up drafts — is designed to bring equality. It is an oddly non-free enterprise system, socialist in its implications.
2. Always a Winner
In all of the North American major league team sports there must always be a winner in every game. If one team cannot win in the regulation time, then you keep playing in some form or another until someone DOES win: extra time, shoot outs, etc.
In team sports outside of North America, a draw or tie is a perfectly acceptable result for all but a tiny proportion of matches. In fact, where a weak team is playing a stronger, their tactics may well be to aim for a draw and thus secure something rather than lose everything in a winner-take-all scenario. This is a legitimate management option.
3. Armour
In the contact sports — American/Canadian football, hockey — the trend in North America is to increase and improve body armour. Steroids help too.
In the contact sports — rugby, soccer — the trend in the rest of the world is to minimize equipment to free up the athlete. Looking at a moderrn professional rugby player in his kit is to imagine that he put on the team shirt and then stood in some vacuum packing device so that the uniform is almost moulded to the player’s body. Muscles are what you see, not padding and straps and metal.
4. The Viewing Experience
There are a number of cosmetic differences in watching these team sports. For example, in the rest of world, in every kind of team sport (including baseball, football, basketball and hockey) the home team is listed first, the game clock shows how much of the game has gone, and the teams keep the same uniforms wherever they play (with a few minor exceptions). In North America, the visiting team is always listed first, the game clock always shows how much time is left to play, and the home team is always in the darker uniforms.
None of these things are, perhaps of any importance by themselves. However, together they change how a game is watched and experienced, especially on television. Why these particular small things are reversed is a mystery to me. Is it psychology? marketing? chance?
5. The International Perspective
Finally, North American major league team sports are entirely insular at the club level. They play all of their games and competitions against one another, no outsiders are wanted. This leads to the embarrassing situation where, say, a team in Ohio plays a team in Georgia for a “World” series or a “World” championship.
In the rest of the world, major team sports find every excuse to play different leagues, to challenge clubs from all over the globe. These international leagues and competitions sit on top of the national leagues and become a further incentive to good play. T o use English soccer as the example once again, the top four teams in the Premier League get to play in the following year’s Champions League against similarly successful clubs from all over Europe. The teams that come fifth to eighth in the English Premier League qualify for the Europa Cup. It is estimated that winning the Champions League is worth $100 million to a club, while winning the Europe Cup might be 20% of that. Similar high value competitions exist in rugby and cricket, and for soccer in other continents.
Major league sports teams outside North America do very well, thank you very much, both in terms of money and quality without any of the protected Trust-like setup that North American leagues feel the need to erect. They operate in a completely free market, where talent rises to its own level against peers from every corner of the globe. They are the true capitalists, while the Major League owners are more like a Stalin-era Politbureau stamping out competition.
In another life, I wrote a lot about North Korea. It is a fascinating place with a genius aparatus that keeps it going against all the odds, against common sense, and against the entire world. If nothing else, it is a massive multi-million person experiment in social control. Now, although it hasn’t been widely reported, they have actually managed to wipe out ALL private wealth. We’ll be able to see how that works out, or whether that was going one step too far.
Getting rid of private wealth turned out to be extremely simple. First, you cancel the currency and tell the people they can swap out their old notes for new ones. Then you tell everyone that the exchange rate rate will be 100 old notes for one new note. Then you only allow $30 of exchange per person. That way, no-one has more than $30. All other wealth simply disappears*. That’s a neat trick that couldn’t be tried in any other country in the world.
* not including the cash held by the elite that is in anything other than the Korean currency.
Asashoryu, perhaps the greatest sumo wrestler of all time, has been forced to retire from the sport because he doesn’t have the “dignity” to retain his position of grand champion or yokozuna. It has nothing to do with his skill in the ring but, rather, his apparent inability to live within the rules of conduct that others, less skillful than him, have set for the position.
During the last basho, Asashoryu got drunk one evening and punched out a colleague, breaking his nose and re-arranging his lip. They settled the matter between themselves and that should have been that. But no. Asashoryu’s critics — perhaps especially Japanese elders who don’t like to see foreign dominance of the ancient sport — grabbed hold of the incident as a way to beat up on the champion and force his to retire. This was, I am certain, the only way they could guarantee that the Mongolian, who had already won 25 Emperor’s Cups, would not break the record of 32 victories, currently held by a Japanese.
In the end, although he was tearful at his farewell, this may be a release for Asashoryu. His extraordinary career has brought him broad business interests in Mongolia. The restrictions attached to being a yokozuna are now gone and he can expand his business career as he wants.
Something similar is happening in English football. John Terry, captain of Chelsea and England, has been discovered to be a serial cheater on his young wife, and with the wife of another player. Apparently John has trouble keeping it in his pants. So, he is not a good husband or friend, fine, but how does that affect his ability to be England’s captain? There is a media-whipped frenzy demanding his resignation for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with his footballing abilities. How many captains of industry or leading doctors and surgeons would be out of a job if we determined these things by morality?
As the Globe & Mail columnist noted this morning: “It is unrealistic to have a squad of players where everyone respects and likes each other. While Terry will probably be disliked and mistrusted as a person within the squad he will, nevertheless, be respected as a football player. The harsh reality is this will trump all other options or considerations for [England's' manager]“.
Update: They DID remove John Terry as Captain this morning. Such dummies! The Worldsports site has a good piece on why that is a bad thing to do.
It occurred to me that I could wake up one morning to find myself in the position of being the despotic leader of Canada. And in the event of that eventuality, I thought I should have a political plan ready, in my back pocket as it were, that I could just whip out, unfold and start reading as soon as the cameras started rolling. That way there would be no awkward silences as I got my thoughts straight.
Moreover, I decided, I should only talk about those things that I could do immediately, that very day. That way I would never have to backtrack on my campaign promises, and everyone would see that I mean what I say. So, without more ado, here is my practical program for the first day of the despotism:
No more of this summer time/winter time nonsense. No more of remembering to turn the clocks forward and back. As of today, there is only standard time.
ALL sellers of goods and services MUST show the bottom-line price for any good or service; a bottom-line price includes all charges, taxes, fees, etc etc. If the sign says $11.95 you actually pay $11.95. No exceptions, no excuses.
All fines, penalties and awards against corporations or other organizations are paid, first by the directors and senior officers of the company or organization, and only second, if required, by the shareholders. Accountability rules. No pay backs, no exceptions, no excuses.
As we get ever closer to that immoral waste of resources known as the Vancouver 2010 Olympics, let us not forget the reality of life on the streets here, much of which could be solved or alleviated with a quarter of the cash Canada, BC and Vancouver are pissing through the five rings.
Long-time readers of this space will know that my wife and I are devotees of sumo. I have written about it here on numerous occasions. In fact, this year will be our ninth anniversary of watching every sumo tournament (basho), fifteen days of action every two months. And in all that time, we have been watching NHK’s coverage in Japanese, a language we do not speak or read.
In that time we have seen roughly 16,000 sumo bouts (20 bouts x 15 days x 6 times per year x 9 years) — and that’s a lot of wrestling. It has also given us a lot of time to understand some basic words in an unknown language with an apparently incomprehensible script. And over the years we have come to know quite a lot of specific Japanese terms, have come to understand names and throws, and we have even learned to recognize certain kanji characters and the sounds they represent.
This month, we finally got the English language feed to work (who knew I had to set up my TV as “default- Spanish”?) and it is an extraordinary step forward for us. NHK have a variety of men and women who deliver their own commentary on the nightly contests (not just a straight translation of the regular NHK broadcast). They give us the kind of gossip and chat that we didn’t even know existed in the sport. We are pleased that many of the guesses we had made about things we didn’t understand proved accurate. And each night (nine so far this basho — one of the most exciting and closely fought we have ever seen) we learn more and more. It is a truly stimulating experience.
The long period of self-study we put ourselves through really set us up to take advantage of the information we are now receiving. After all these years, sumo is proving to be even more fascinating than we have previously imagined.
It seems to have been an age since I posted here. It has been ages since I posted anywhere at all. I am focusing all my energies on completing a book-length history of Commercial Drive in the 20th century. This has been a 15-year project so far, but the freedom to write over the last two months has allowed me to know that I can get this finished by summer. I am currently working my way through a huge body of never previously used research materials and structuring the written work as I go.
If anyone reading this has knowledge of the Drive before 2000, especially family stories that give insight on the way people actually lived, I would welcome any decision to share them with me. Full acknowledgements will of course be given.
In the meantime, I will keep an eye on this site and post whenever I can. Thanks for reading!
Tonight we went to see the Coen Brothers’ latest movie, “A Serious Man“. This is movie-making as fine art. Neither Hitchcock nor Fellini nor Welles could have done better. And none of them could have managed it in a comedy.
I haven’t seen “Avatar” but I know in advance that it a movie by and about technology. “A Serious Man” on the other hand is about the acting, the writing, the direction, the editing, the depiction in style and content of a remembered age and social milieu. “A Serious Man” is just about perfect on all those levels.
Lina Delano is an odd bird. In her late 80s now, she has been a colourful character on the Drive for many years. I used to see her in Bukowski’s Bar when that watering hole was at its busiest back at the end of the 1990s. But mostly I knew her as the grumpy old woman who scrapped other people’s posters off street lamps. This was serious business for Lina and she kept up her cleaning work for hour upon hour, unimpressed with any interuptions, a cigarette dangling.
Once, late at night, feeling powerful from my poetry performance at Bukowski’s, I saw Lina scrapping away at some band’s poster. After a moment’s hesitation, I approached her and asked — pleasantly enough, I thought — why she was doing what she was doing. She spun around and, brandishing the little scraper, roared at me in a voice that could be heard blocks away: “Fuck off! Fuck off!” My relationship with Lina has never really developed beyond that point, although my wife has a chatting relationship with her whenever they meet.
I haven’t seen Lina on the Drive for quite a while; and I had never known what she did beside scrapping posters. It was a surprise to me, therefore, to learn that she was an artist, having shared a studio for many years with her sister Dita Arntzen, and that Havana Gallery was holding a show of the sisters’ work. I saw that show today. It was, by a country mile, the best show I have ever seen at Havana.
Lina’s work consists in assemblages of wood, furniture parts, doll’s heads, beads, small items. They are large and bold pieces that strike the eye first and the brain soon after. They are beautiful objects. Her sister created interesting and attractive collages. I can’t find any images to share and can only urge you to rush to Havana Gallery on Commercial before the show ends on the 19th.
A small book of Lina’s works printed to coincide with this exhibition included a picture of the artists at a show of her work in New York back in 1966. She was a striking looking woman then, and she has retained a deal of that power to this day. As I mentioned above, I haven’t seen Lina for a while. I sure hope I get to see her again soon to congratulate her on these wonderful works of art.
And the winner of the Turner Prize for 2009 is … Richard Wright!
Fearful symmetry ... Richard Wright's gold-leaf painting at Tate Britain 'taps into Blakean mysteries'. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images
Published this morning before the announcement, the Guardian’s art critic Adrian Searle has an excellent 8 minute video summarizing the work of the four finalists. It is well worth watching. Unfortunately, I cannot figure out how to embed it, so here is the link.
After an unpleasant fall-out with the University of Edinburgh, prominent Scottish artist Douglas Gordon has vowed never to accept a public commission in Scotland again, reports the Independent. Gordon was to create a site-specific work for the redevelopment of the library at the University of Edinburgh, which opened this Autumn. The artist proposed to inscribe the words “Every time you turn a page, it dies a little” in gold lettering on the walls, but the words were felt to be too negative for the library and the artist pulled out, partly in response to his treatment by the institution … “Many artists are treated disrespectfully by the institutions they are making commissions for,” he said. “Most think they cannot afford to say no, but I can, so I had to.” Gordon said … he was “humiliated”, and would “never again accept a public commission in my home country”.
I believe entirely in artistic freedom. But I happen to believe that artistic freedom includes the right of a commissioning institution to say that an artist’s proposal is unsuitable for the particular site or use. Douglas Gordon obviously disagrees. His loud-mouthed petulance does artists in general a disservice and gives us all a bad name.
This baby is the 2011 Bentley Mulsanne, with a list price of $285,000 (not including taxes and delivery). I would be happy to pick one up when I’m next out shopping but there are so many choices to make — 114 paint colors to choose from, 21 carpet colors, nine wood veneers and 24 leather hides — that it hurts my head. I’ll just stick to that red and white 96-seater bus I’m used to.
In 1936, Camel cigarettes issued the following ad for Thanksgiving:
I hope you can read it. Smoking between courses is the healthy thing to do it declares. “Smoke a camel right after the soup,” it says. “For digestion’s sake … You enjoy food more and have a feeling of greater ease after eating when you smoke Camels between courses.”
Ah, those good old days!
I started smoking early and was already a confirmed smoker by the time I started to attend dinners with my father’s American businessmen friends. However, it was still a shock to me back then (perhaps 1966) when they lit up cigarettes between courses. I remember then doing it with my friends and explaining that it was just the chic thing to do. Such dupes we all were!
As I have written elsewhere, I am currently researching a history of Commercial Drive. In the midst of that research I have found an editorial in the Highland Echo, Commercial Drive’s local paper, that takes a prescient view of television. They describe it as:
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