My Fantasy Football ending... a work in progress by Coen brothers

My fantasy football ending... Directed by the Coen brothers and featuring John Turturo as a struggling author engaged in a self-destructive attempt to write a B soccer picture for a major Hollywood studio, while taking copious quantities of mind-altering psychopharmaceuticals and leaning at just the right angle towards a flat panel broadcast of ESPN's cup coverage, peering, at a remove from reality but just right to get shown the light, the light of inspiration...

sees, in his mind's altered eye, the ending of a begining, or the beginning of an ending....

the German cup team at a forgettable mid-western bowling alley... Brazilian soccer great, Mcronaldonaldin-YO!, in purple Ronald McDonald jumpsuit, fingers thrust to the center of a bowling ball patterned in the new 14 panel black and white that suggests, just a bit, the yin-yang opposition of light and dark that he suspects will set the stage for a turn to dispensing Black and White cards during the next cup, to be hosted in a preterite South Africa....

John Goodman, donning white soccer uniform of the Gemran national team, armband on his thick fleshy and very unexercised bicep vaguely suggesting the Hakenkreuz, another Asian motif intended originally to suggest world peace but having been assimilated and misinterpreted by colonial buffoons pacing the South Indian shoreline, hands to brows, on the lookout for the unlikely return of galleons not outfitted with lateen rigging and so entirely dependent on the trade winds blowing the right direction, that is, quite well and truly fucked....

"Don't mess with the Jesus" --Turturro

[ Brazilian, played by John Turturro to German, played by John Goodman ] ...

"I'll show you ze life off ze mind!"

[ Goodman, dribbling towards goal, pitch exploding into flames all about him, a shrieking brazilian team desperately running away in wrestling pajamas, cosell clutching a typewriter by his side and jamming his boom mike into ronaldo's face, jackie stewart in the box shouting "grrreat game" with his irish sidekick pitching in "crackin!", eric wynalda tied to an aeron chair with x's and o's scrawled in chalk on the floor indicating the american announcer's last moves as the announcer's booth was recaptured in one last ditch effort to save the profession from an undeserved and premature fade to black..........]

Portugal - Holland

FIFA Pres says the Russian ref (and when did Russians care that much for playing by the rules of the game?!) should have been given a yellow card himself. I say it shoulda been a pink slip.... What a chaotic game that was. For a while there it seemed the whole metaphorical distance between sports and war might collapse and implode....

"As for Portugal-Netherlands: Wow, what a mess. Even Sepp Blatter,
the president of FIFA, was compelled to criticize Russia's Valentin
Ivanov -- who handed out 16 yellow cards and four red cards -- saying,
'There could have been a yellow card on the referee.'"

On Watching the World Cup and Sports in General

John Tierney writes today in the NY Times that soccer's been no fun to watch because it lacks the excitement of the spectator games we're accustomed to (that's the gist of if, tho he gets there by a weird comparison to Greek tragedy and war, as if war were a spectator sport, or a good example of an event made of lights, cameras, and action (hey there's a thought, a war made for tv...))...

"Foreigners complain about the continual delays in football and baseball games, but American couch potatoes savor the suspense as well as the chance to see instant replays and debate the next move. They love football above all because it's the perfect game for armchair warriors: the action stops so generals can rearrange defenses and decide whether to order a flanking maneuver or an artillery strike.

With American sports, you see tight close-ups of individual mini-dramas like the center driving to the hoop, the pitcher dueling the batter, the fullback breaking through the line. With soccer, the action is so diffuse that it doesn't fit on the screen, even when the camera is showing the usual panoramic shot featuring players the size of dust mites."

It's true that games can be boring to watch. But the reason is not that the game itself is boring. It's that the broadcast production is boring.

I think we in the States (for better or worse? I suspect the latter) consume our events alone. Soccer is still broadcast for consumption by groups/families. It's true that the wide shot required to cover the soccer field makes it impossible to tell who's who on the field. And that the absence of those fancy wirefu camera rigs denies us those vertiginous amusement-park roller coaster POVs. The reason for this is that here in the States (for better or worse? I suspect the latter. Is it time for me to leave?) we have turned the observation of sports into a sporting activity in and of itself.

Just listen to American commentators during Cup matches. It's not that they don't know the players (many of them do); it's that their commentary is "about" the game. It's not to the game, or in the game. Spanish channel commentary beats ours because it's a soundtrack. It adds to the game, fleshing out the image just as a movie score does, providing pitch, speed, rhythm, intensity, and emotional variation.

Our sporting games are produced for the armchair. Commentators speak as they imagine armchair quarterbacks would speak amongst friends, and vice versa. Observation is the activity. Now whether this represents a sad state of affairs, advanced media production, good marketing and the rise of ESPN, or a trend towards ever greater and faster volumes of news (doubling up the game with an additional layer of commentary means you have two activities to attend to: the game itself or the back and forth of commentators), depends on your view of the mass media and its relationship to reality.

I miss Howard Cosell. And Jackie Stewart. But I'll be watching the games. In public.

Plasmatronic World Cup games shown in LD, Dobly

There's a line in This is Spinal Tap that audiophiles love to quote. It's when the band's spiritual distraction (I'm not going to say guru), St Hubbin's girlfriend, asks if the album's recorded in Dobly. Nigel takes the piss out on her for that; as we do when we quote the scene. I do it still when I'm shopping for music gear. Just to show my age I suppose. "Does this play dobly?" "Do you have it in Dobly?" "Was this recorded in Dobly?"
I've been seeing a lot of Dobly recently, and I'm getting a bit tired of it. Every single flatpanelplasmatronicdisplay I've seen world cup games on has looked Dobly. Dobly compressed, Dobly saturated, Dobly horizontally stretched. Circuit city recently reported strong sales in part on the popularity of these newfangled pixellated panels. I'm Dobly unimpressed. If these broadcasts are available in HD, why are we still getting them in LD?


Technorati tags: world cup, soccer, HDTV, television, media, humor

World cup madness has got me again

Well I was thinking of sleeping in tomorrow, at least past 6 am, but it was so worth it to hoof it down to the haight this morning, streets glowing sunrise pink as the mascara smeared on the cheeks of ragged haight street dolls (as well as on a couple of england fans, red though that paint was meant to be), hoses applying themselves to sullied sidewalks and duboce park a minefield of hounds patiently waiting for the throbbing fixture of sprinklers, zealously extending themselves to wipe the lawn before the sun's angular face got too good a look, locals dodging tickets in flip flops, DPT carts clocking up the morning in $40 increments.... I was thinking of sleeping in until I read that Portugal/Mexico is indeed a game worth rising for. And writing for? Let the game write itself. If you find yourself in the hood, quarters in hand, the meters are free until 8. And yes, the mad dog has coffee (tho I suspect it's crap).

Cheers!

A

I'll be there at noon, too. And don't even ask about Thursday: that's a sure bet.

for irreverent english podcasters, try these fools. they're great

http://www.baddielandskinner.com/

Group C
Netherlands vs. Argentina, June 21

Debatably the most anticipated match of the group stage, this is the pair-up that made observers at the December group lottery in Leipzig draw in their breath with delight. The two teams from formidable soccer nations are both looking to add a new layer of polish to their reputations and a win in Frankfurt would certainly do it.

While a loss would leave either team with a bit of explaining to do to their fans who are beginning to wonder if they'll ever live to see their team in the World Cup final ever again, an impressive result would help the winning side convince people at home that they do, in fact, deserve admiration they still receive.

Portugal is a favorite for the round of 16
Group D
Portugal vs. Mexico, June 21

Mexico was FIFA's top seed for Group D, but that's not keeping experts from naming Portugal the favorite to advance. The pair of teams is also set against Iran and Angola, two sides that aren't expected to pose much of a threat, so the match in Gelsenkirchen will decide who gets the lighter of the round of 16 opponents.

Portugal's 11 have, however, been given a special incentive to use the game to get into shape for the next rounds -- the Portuguese Soccer Federation is offering national team players their biggest-ever bonus if they win the tournament.

hell

i have a vague memory of eating pizza in a huge hallway, a real, heavenly pipe organ delivering sound to the minions stuffing face and gobber with below-average (and below-ground) Italian-style pies and oversized soft drinks… pretty good memory as far as memories of hell go. and the pizza joint was real. (unless it was in okemos, michigan… i wasnt very old when i first went to hell)...

See more progress on: Hell