cityofsound

Shoot! All Stars

To mark the start of the football season - or more honestly, to clear some space on my hard disk - some old football cards I scanned in, from a time when footballers were certainly uglier (Carlos Tevez notwithstanding):

'Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait', by Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno

I've had a sporadic relationship with Douglas Gordon's work, yet it's  had a profound effect on me when I've seen it, heard it. Maybe I've been lucky enough to have experienced  his greatest hits, the two works based around Alfred Hitchcock; '24 Hour Psycho', in which the film is slowed down to play over a duration of 24 hours, and 'Feature Film', in which a zoom onto a conductor's hands is foregrounded, guiding the performance of Bernard Herrmann's soundtrack, while the movie itself is footnoted, diminished.

Both are fascinating, effective studies of time, movement, image and sound. His other work has been described as less successful, yet there was no way I was going to miss his collaboration with French artist Philippe Parreno, 'Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait'.

The Damned Utd, by David Peace

David Peace's 'The Damned Utd' is a fairly extraordinary book. A fictionalised account of Brian Clough's 44 days in charge of Leed United Football Club in 1974, it captures perfectly the essence of the age, the sport and the men of the time, most of all the unique Clough himself. It's utterly compelling, hovering between fact and fiction, so intensely well-honed that you don't care which is which.

Peace's method of conveying the madness is essentially through the knots of repeated short phrases - James Ellroy as Yorkshireman - that trap Clough in ever-decreasing circles. It's a method well-suited to capturing the claustrophobia of the football club, the concomitant pressure, and the fictional Clough's near-psychosis and drink-fuelled paranoia. It's a cracking book. While it will have particular resonance for followers of football, I'd suggest it would deliver for those that aren't. It certainly conjures the bleak, gnawing reality of Northern Britain in the 1970s, caught between austerity and prosperity; all washed-out, brown-hued Get Carter backdrops with gaudy flashes of Granada TV and grubby deals in "modern luxury hotels". It's barely recognisable at face value, and yet today's roots are showing if you look hard enough. It's also just an incredible, absurd story, which is at least partly true.

There's a quote from another great football book, perhaps one of the greatest: Arthur Hopcraft's 'The Football Man', published in 1965. It's at the root of why Peace's book is so interesting:

"What happens on the football field matters, not in the way that food matters but as poetry does to some people and alcohol does to others: it engages the personality. It has conflict and beauty, and when those two qualities are present together in something offered for public appraisal they represent much of what I understand to be art."

Design. Architecture. Football.

The World Cup is everywhere, so what better time to thread a series of theoretical passes together into a sinuously flowing move? On why football is so compelling for so many people, and what can that tell us about the practice of design and architecture. (I'm thinking of playing John Cage in the hole behind the front two, flanked by Johann Cruyff and Aldo van Eyck. And if this piece doesn't guarantee my season ticket for Pseud's Corner, I don't know what will.)

Shanghai Diary 2005 #7

A further entry in Justin O'Connor's Shanghai Diary 2005 [context and introduction here]. This entry is dated 1st July 2005, and in visiting a football match in Huangpu, and reading Momus's blog, Justin discusses how the perceived homogeneity of Chinese working class - if that term makes sense at all - is differentiated from the heterogenous yet much-maligned working class in Britain and the US, particularly in comparison with a 'creative class'.

On Saturday night we went to a football match. It was Shenhua against Zhejiang. 'Shenhua' means flower of Shanghai. They seem to be the older of the teams, with a new stadium in the Huangpu district (in the '30s a dense impoverished working class neighborhood). There are two other sides, another based in the stadium near where I stay, and Pudong, which is in the new district across the river. This was a third-round China Cup match - against a team from the lower division. Everybody thought it was a match not worth bothering about, given the lowly status of the opposition - and this included the Shenhua club management who moved the venue from their usual stadium to a much smaller one up the road. This one had about a 20000 capacity. We got tickets outside for a quid each. There was a down-and-dirty noodle shop opposite, but disappointingly no hot dog sellers or chip vans. People sold small paper horns but I could not see any memorabilia. Maybe the shirt sellers stayed away also. Going up the stairs in the space just before you emerge into the seating area was a huge bank of computers all being played excitedly by 'youth'. This was as excited as anybody got all game. The telly was there; and indeed, if it was England the prospects would have looked good for an upset. A second division - well, Championship or whatever - team taking on one of the top clubs; it was over two legs and the score had been 2-2 on the away leg. But the ground was three quarters empty. In front of me the active 'Blue Devils' supporters numbered about 50; they wore Shenhua shirts and sang. Over the other side a small green knot of 'Green Spirit City' supporters sang and jumped, as they were to do for the whole game. It was a long way away and I couldn't hear them. The Blue Devils hardcore were teenagers, some with scarves tied around their wrists and about 60/40 boys over girls. They were happy and smiling. Nobody drank beer. Obviously nobody had tanked-up beforehand either. The songs made no reference to the other side; and indeed, after a ten minutes slot of various songs along the lines "Shenhua are champions" (they're not actually) they sang an oo-ayy sort of lyric to a common football chant tune whose title I can't remember - and they did it for 30 minutes. After the break they sang it - a sort of repeating, endless melody that returns to its starting point with great glee - again for 30 minutes. Only occasionally di the supporters look at what was going on on the pitch. Which was just as well 'cos it was bloody awful. It was 0-0 so Shenhua won on away goals. There was no piped music though, and people could smoke, so there was some relief.

I was the only western person there I would say. The ground was way up in the Zharbei district, which is not where tourists get to. And maybe the foreign workers don't go in much for football. Or maybe they did and they know better than me how crap it would be. It's a shame though because a lot of the explorer-type foreigners would have enjoyed being in a place where they were unique. This is not about vanity or being the center of attention - hardly anyone took any notice of me; though this would be different outside Shanghai - but about not seeing other westerners. I'd like to develop this idea as the contemporary scourge known as 'homophobia'. This is not fear of homosexuals - in a way that should be heterophobia, fear of those different from you. This homophobia is about fear of the same. Go to any monument or tourist site, and other westerners inevitably stand out from the crowd. You can't not look; like seeing famous people, you are staring before you remember that you don't know them. Another western person can be read instantly - a split-second check-out. We can't do that as easily with Chinese people; we don't know the codes. But you look and you turn away. It would be the biggest faux-pas to acknowledge another westerner simply because he or she was, well, like you. This is not what you came for. OK, this might happen later in bars, or at a hotel. But this is comparing notes; whilst out there you want to be on your own. Maybe it's ok to meet other westerners from a different country - but not from your own. As an Englishman it's difficult for me to be fully objective - what I say might well apply to other nations, and most probably does. When you meet people from your own country you are brought back home, back to the place which, for a few weeks or months, you have left behind. And they bring you back home. Sometimes this can be welcome. But many other times it's an unwelcome intrusion into your Chinese (or wherever you are) reverie. Maybe homophobia goes deeper, and this especially in the English context.

Encountering 'the other' is what we are here for. Walking past the poor areas, glimpsing unimaginably constricted lives, dealing with waiters, cleaning women, hotel staff, ticket sellers, street beggars, local staff (if you are here with work), police - all those encounters of a foreigner - we act with the politeness, the understanding, the deference that comes from meeting 'the other' face to face. Back in England, however, the lower classes are to be met with fear and loathing. I've been reading Momus' excellent blog from Berlin - last week he went to New York via London. His vitriolic account of London is worth a look. But this very acute and sensitive guy uses the word 'chav' to describe those wandering around Hoxton - not there for the digital art but drunk and taking the piss out of his eye patch and funny pants. The 'working class' in England is not only deprived of decent pay, health, education and social services but also of any legitimacy. It is stupid and aggressive and racist and no sooner is it given money than it becomes stupid and aggressive and racist and vulgar - footballers and their wives. Last year I spoke to an intelligent, sensitive English artist based in London and the South Coast. Talking about Manchester he asked if I had had any problems from my family given that I have a Chinese partner. "What do you mean" I asked. “Well, they're all a bit racist up there aren't they?". He had images of riots in Oldham and BNP victories in the Pennines I suppose. But it was also clear that this is how London thinks of itself - not more cultured but more multi-cultured. In The Guardian Kevin McCarra (I think) wrote about the Arsenal-Chelsea game being a celebration of London, with le tout London turned out to see a game with only a small handful of English players. This was a good thing because it reflected the multicultural strength of London - something that sets it apart from the narrow, blinkered racism of the rest of the country. If only the chavs would stay in Essex. Sociologists used to talk of the group and the grid. In the old days, middle class people saw themselves as part of a grid - a hierarchical matrix with loose social ties which allowed for social mobility. The working class saw themselves as part of a group, to which they were strongly tied in solidarity. In the old days, this solidarity was seen as restrictive but also as a good thing, a warm thing, a supportive thing. Today the grid covers the globe and navigating your way around it in social terms is a good thing - encountering change and diversity, the other. Group solidarity is regressive, fearful, a refusal of change and the other. Its solidarity holds you back. It breeds resentment, envy and hate. It makes you into a chav.

In some way China is full of chavs. This is an energetically materialist country where memories of real poverty stretch back less than a decade. An ecological campaigner writes how in his youth he would wait for hours on a road near his village so he could smell the fumes of the occasional car that went past. There are rich and poor, and the index is widening. But this does not tell the whole story. At the moment people, at least in the cities, feel that with some hard work they, or their sons and daughters, can make it. The government is not some retreating authoritarian monster throwing bread at the crowd; it is, for reasons to do with survival as well as ideology, trying to create new citizen consumers with a wider sense of social responsibility and to some extent equality. Is this feasible? Who knows? But it is being done within a cultural context that stresses common aspirations and symbols of achievement. Some of this is about the democracy of the brand - if you have the money you can buy it like anybody else. I wrote last about the consumption of western culture as a marker of status and that the price of this can be exclusionary. But if you can get hold of it, then it's yours to show off as you like. There is growing inequality but not yet those strong divisions of culture and understanding that mark out class in England.

Or in the US. After writing about chavs, Momus writes from New York about fear on the streets, about the threat and the aggression that he found in parts of Harlem. He links this to Richard Florida's new book where Bush and republican America are driving out the creatives with anti-gay, anti-metrosexual agendas. Momus wants a flatter society, like in Japan or Berlin, where the differences in wealth and aspiration do not cause social antagonism. Thus, whilst he says he is not wealthy and pays rent in a poor part of town, he could - if he put his mind to it - get out and make some real money. He has an exit route, which sets him apart from the guys on the street. But as Florida recognizes, this is not just about the religious red-neck Right. Maybe it is the creative class that has lacked social responsibility, which has cut itself off from those who do not have immediate access to these knowledge professions. Now a lot of this results from some of the nonsense that Florida spoke in the first place - what he says about the new duties of the creative class derive from his lumping of all sorts of disparate professions together. But he needed to do this to sell his statistics and models to a willing world, putting him amongst the world's best paid 'scholar-consultants'. But it does point us back to the idea that the values of a mobile, open, cosmopolitan creative class have become the repository of all that is good and the ignorant rump of blue collar factory waste have become the aggressive, vulgar, racist chavs of legend.

I will write later about the 'creative class' in China (or its big cities). The common social bonds are strong in China. Even in a rapaciously competitive city like Shanghai there is a sense that there are rich and poor but these have not stratified into the publicly symbolized elements of class. Communication in public lacks that mix of deference and aggression that marks real class friction. Part of this still goes back to the cultural revolution, which killed off the remaining class divisions of the older type. The new party officials who rose in its wake were certainly privileged and commanded 'respect', but this was the respect of fear and in no way developed the cultural capital of class. The Chinese government has been at pains to try and keep access to consumption open for all aspects of society. The big shopping centre I wrote about recently has posh foreign brands but also cheaper places, smaller shops, smaller restaurants. This is deliberate. In the UK, such large consumption developments are predicated on the systematic exclusion of those who can't pay the full wack. In China there is a strong sense of national solidarity - they simply cannot understand sneers about saluting the flag and being biased at the Olympics. And this can easily become nationalism of the more ideological kind. The biggest popular mobilization since Tiananmen was the anti-Japanese demonstration about a new history textbook that played down their war crimes. And part of this also is the fact of the great racial homogeneity of the Chinese, which works with the sense of social solidarity - immigration not being an issue as yet. The Chinese, in all sorts of different ways, have not yet learned to become homophobic.

This impression of Shanghai is by Justin O'Connor. All Shanghai Diary entries.

Herzog and De Meuron's Allianz Arena

The new Allianz Arena football stadium in Munich, designed by Herzog and De Meuron, is a quite beautiful piece of work, which puts Norman Foster's compromised new Wembley to shame on several fronts. For a start, it's come in on time and on budget (for a quarter that of Wembley, actually), but also features innovations such as cashless payment, is acoustically brilliant, and its distinctive appearance has already been taken to heart by locals, who have dubbed it 'the rubber dinghy'. Some have put this success down to Jacques Herzog's apparent love of football - his understanding that the experience of being in a football stadium should be "as intense as possible ... almost like the Coliseum", and that all the focus should be on the field of play. But it's also the firm's continually pioneering work within the tightest of commercial confines that inspires so.

One of the most interesting features for me is the brilliantly-realised notion that the entire exterior of the stadium should glow different colours to indicate which team is playing at home - red for the shirts of Bayern Munich, blue for those of Munich 1860, and white for the German national team. It's a kind of 'communicating status at-a-glance' that I suggested might be useful in the iPod a few years ago, inspired by the work of Naoto Fukasawa. But this is both more subtle and on a far grander scale. Its sees the stadium as both a symbol and functional object interacting within the wider context of the city. Lovely.

Herzog & De Meuron exhibition, currently at Tate Modern, London
Allianz Arena website

Campioni!

As Tony Blair said: "Unbelievable. Incredible. Brilliant."

Actually, Michael Walker in The Guardian put it better, in rather more mythic terms:

"It took someone with the vision of HG Wells to construct this stadium out amid the pylons and rubble on the extreme margins of Istanbul. It would have required a storyteller with the equivalent imagination to foretell this night of football. In the space of six minutes early in the second half a formality warped into an epic. It was as if an Andy Pandy tale had been twisted into the Godfather. And at the end of it and with the clock showing half past midnight, sure enough, we had a shoot-out."

And Liverpool won. Against all the odds. Absolutely astonishing, and I'm deliriously happy. My fevered Flickr-ing last night perhaps captures my own warped sense of near-insane joy, the Nokiacam hitting the TV's interlacing at odd angles, creating moires and warps which somehow seemed entirely appropriate. Sigh. As arch-enemy Alex Ferguson once said, "Football, eh? Bloody hell."

I'm All Right, Hack

"How funny it seems - funny-strange rather than funny-ha-ha - that, getting on for 20 years after Margaret Thatcher extinguished the power of the British trade union movement, the nearest thing to a Militant Tendency in modern Britain should be these prominent beneficiaries of the free-market economy, their wealth based on the fortunes of Rupert Murdoch. We will not be finding Neville and Beckham thrusting aloft their clenched fists and singing the Internationale instead of God Save the Queen before an England match any time soon. But there can be no harm in their readiness to show a bit of independent spirit and to nibble, if not exactly bite, the hands that feed them."

I'm no fan of Neville and Beckham, but Richard Williams has an interesting take on Wednesday's silenzio stampa amongst England football players ...

The Guardian: The silent right of militant millionaires

Boston/Cambridge Diary: Cities divided

Part of 'Boston/Cambridge Diary' series: context here

Despite a few strong pieces directly addressing race, one of the better chapters in A Good City [UK|US] is Howard Bryant's piece on the city's racial politics and history refracted through the lens of baseball and basketball. The former an arena for a traditional resistance to black players and staff by the Boston Red Sox, and for the latter, the Boston Celtics and their pioneering integration of black players in the 60s then countered by an all-white team of the mid-80s. A complex story, which sport often brings out (cf. Simon Kuper's 'Ajax, The War and the Dutch' and Tobias Jones's 'The Dark Heart of Italy'). Sport gets caught up in this - amplifies it, exemplifies it, exaggerates it - but is barely equipped to articulate it. According to Bryant, players heading to a Boston team are generally asked for their opinion on racial politics within their sport - not at all common practice for players in other cities. He talks of a city divided by identification with the Red Sox or the Celtics - "a divide that defines the city as surely as the Longfellow Bridge" - but also of Boston's "special pedigree", as compared to all other US cities, to face up to a history of racial discrimination and "harness its expectations".

"Boston is famous, equally, for abolition and racism, for social justice and busing riots, for vision and inflexibility - interconnected strains that can be felt while walking around town, or in the box seats at Fenway Park, where the Red Sox live, or at the Fleet Center, home of the basketball Celtics and hockey Bruins. The city is famous for its oft-stated desire to confront these stubborn contradictions, and for its only limited success in doing so." [from 'Good Sports, Bad Sports', by Howard Bryant, in A Good City]

'The Diamond', and modern management techniques

[Written during a lip-smackingly good match between the Czech Republic and Holland at Euro2004]

I didn't go to NotCon and so missed Tom Dolan's talk on management. As a manager too, I'm somewhat interested in different perspectives on modern management but often find much of interest in a world a million miles away: football.

Witness the recent furore over what some papers have ridiculously described as a "players' revolt" in response to Sven Goran Eriksson's decision to consult his midfield players on whether to play in 'the diamond' or 'flat-4' formation. This indicates the 'old world' struggling with a new culture - in this case, old football struggling with a modern management technique.

"It is Eriksson's readiness, and even eagerness, to canvass player opinion that is his main distinguishing feature as a manager. It is also one of the great causes of dispute over his merits. To his critics it is an indication of weakness, of a person who evades his responsibilities by scattering them throughout the group. He certainly does not seek to bend men to his will like the dressing-room tyrants of yesteryear. Admirers warm to the consensual trait that they take as a mark of adult policies ... "When you aren't sure as a manager," he said, "you bring in the players, you listen, you explain and you put all your cards on the table. If you think you know everything about football just because you are a manager, then you are making a big mistake. At the end it is the players who have to go out and do it. They will always do a very good job for you if they are convinced it is the right way to do it ... I made the decision on Wednesday night after meeting the players. I wanted the meeting, not the players. They did not say they didn't want to play the diamond, absolutely not. The first time I did this kind of thing with them, three years ago, they were very suprised and thinking 'What's going on?' They didn't want to give their opinion. Now they do it. If you get footballers doing that you have come a long way to become stronger. And sometimes I can say 'No.'" [Football.guardian]

What Eriksson's saying here seems eminently sensible to me. I'm lucky enough to have an extraordinarily good team, but the key point here is surely: "At the end it is the players who have to go out and do it. They will always do a very good job for you if they are convinced it is the right way to do it." Whether this is emblematic of 'the modern style' or not, it seems so obviously the right approach that I'm still amazed at some of the reaction in the UK press (OK, it's The Sun, but the responses across the media have been similar) - I've also encountered old-style sentiments from other managers on the BBC's Leadership programme at Ashridge Business School.

I actually own a book called Leadership the Sven-Goran Eriksson Way: How to Turn Your Team into Winners. Yes I really do. It's a really rubbish title for what's actually quite an interesting book about Swedish management styles, across Ikea and Ericsson as well as Sven. However, as the authors argue, "while politics is sullied by cynicism, the sporting world, for all its faults and narrow confines, is perhaps the truest arena for the practice of modern leadership". Quite possibly. It certainly highlights the shifts in management style in big broad brushstrokes.

A year ago I noted how the always excellent Richard Williams had written about the different breeds of football manager around in the Premiership: crudely, Manchester United's Alex Ferguson representing the old guard; Aresenal's Aresene Wenger, Eriksson, and Liverpool's Gerard Houllier representing the new. Well, Houllier has since left 'my team', Liverpool, having dragged the club into the 21st century but apparently unable to inspire the players to go with him.

However, Rafael Benitez, who has been appointed Liverpool manager directly after him, would seem to be the archetypal modern manager - a jet engine versus propellers in Williams' words. In fact, to my delight, he seems to be quite the most modern manager in the Premiership.

"He is a studious person and a very scientific coach. He uses computer technology to monitor his players' diets and physical development, and is keen to discover how he can apply computers to his football." [LFChistory.net]

The following comment in this first official interview is the most revealing:

"Not a lot is known about you off the pitch, what are your interests away from football?"

"I like to play chess and cards, although it is often quite difficult to find the time. I also like computers and take an interest in new technology."

Hooray! We have the first geek manager in football! Even in an arena as illogical and playful as football, my faith in modernity, science, and rationality remains unshaken. As does - er, irrationally - my hope, springing eternal for the new season.