One-Way Street

Play Ball

A few years ago Philip Roth caused a stir when he announced that he was giving up rooting for the Mets and switching to the Yankees. "Why should I continue to feel obligated to schoolyard allegiances?" he asked.

How do we choose which teams to root for? For many people, it's a matter of geographical fate. I was born and raised north of Chicago's Madison Avenue; therefore, I'm a Cub fan. Move my childhood only a few miles to the south, and I would be a White Sox fan. But I spent a good portion of my adulthood--eleven years--in Philadelphia, so I'm also a Philliies fan. When I walk around the Chicago area with my Phillies cap, especially downtown, I get a lot of mildly suspicious looks, as if I were flying the flag of a foreign nation. It's not quite like being a transplanted Chicagoan in Wisconsin, where Packers fans regard a Bears fan like he's in a terrorist cell, but the hostility pops up every so often. Walking around the Loop one day in my Phillies hat a grandmotherly type snapped at me, "You can't wear that around here."  Then my family complained when I gave my son a Phillies hat, a souvenir from a business trip to Philly. Finally, unwilling to interpellate my son into the vagaries of my own biography, I bought him a Cubs hat for his third birthday—interpellating him, of course, into another ideology. But I'm glad to see that he prefers wearing his Phillies hat.

My son knows what baseball is, but he has no concept of the Major Leagues or even teams. One trip to Wrigley Field will imprint the Cubs on his brain forever, just as it did me when I was six years old. But why should we get assigned our fandom identities before we choose a career or a life partner, and why can't we freely choose who we want to root for without having to explain our choice all the time? Why can't I be a Cardinals fan, a much more sensible choice given the histories of the Cubs and the Phillies? We think of America as a society of self-fashioning in which we freely create our identities in a particularly linear manner. Recall that Huckleberry Finn, generally regarded as the first truly American novel, is the story of a boy who leaves home and doesn't look back. So playground allegiances shouldn't be so hard to shake, but they are.

Maybe we need some identities that we don't choose, that are imposed upon us at birth and never leave us, for better or for worse. Maybe we all have a psychical bartering system that recognizes some immutable but unfortunate identities while allowing us to keep all of the other identities more provisional. I'm a Phillies fan partly to recognize a discontinuity in my life--the Chicago to which I returned a few years ago is different, and not altogether better, than the Chicago I left--and partly to keep open the possibility that I could move someplace else. To have the freedom to choose where one lives also means that there's always another, better, truer home someplace else. Sports team allegiances are a form of localized identity, and as such they're major markers in the narratives we construct about ourselves.

So yesterday was an interesting day: the Bears lost, badly, but the Phillies beat out the hated Mets for the Eastern Division crown. The Cubs clinched a few days ago in their typically diffident way, unlike the '93 Phillies, who charged right into the World Series. There's a realistic chance that the Cubs and the Phillies could meet for the NLCS, and should that happen, I'll suffer a lot of cognitive dissonance, but I know that my old playground allegiances will reassert themselves. Sorry Phillies.

The Body Politic

Ready to be irritated by anything their new conservative president does, the French Left is up in arms over Nicolas Sarkozy's jogging--in an NYPD tee shirt, no less. Libération wondered aloud, “Is jogging right wing?” Commentators on the Left have declared not only is jogging right wing, it's also un-French and, therefore, pro-American. François Mitterrand, Jacques Chirac, Charles de Gaulle, Marshall Pétain--all non-joggers. According to this view, jogging is about bodily control, a fascistic celebration of the body beautiful and the triumph of the will. Media coverage of Sarkozy's workouts are hypnotizing the French public. Walking is a more dignified and properly French activity. Walking is ruminative. Never mind that the young Jean-Paul Sartre worked out while studying Heidegger; Frenchmen should never break a sweat, soccer players excepted.

The French Left should be careful: Fretting over the king's body is a leftover from monarchist times. The current fuss over President Sarkozy's jogging says more about the impoverishment of left-wing political discourse than it does about the politics of running. The American Right was in a similar position when Bill Clinton went jogging early in his administration. Right-wingers were transfixed by Clinton's chunky thighs chugging around Washington. Eventually, the Right moved on to a fascination with other presidential body parts. 

The question of which is more liberal, walking or jogging, is a false choice. It is perfectly possible to jog in the morning and take a ruminative walk in the afternoon. I do it all the time. Is jogging while listening to the Clash and Rage Against the Machine still right wing?

The real question is the role of the body in politics. Historically, this has been an extremely tangled issue. Walter Benjamin's flâneur, a nineteenth-century dandy who walked the streets of Paris at a leisurely pace, cut through the hectic urban masses, resisting getting incorporated into some alien identity. In this sense, flâneurie is inherently political, but in his foppishness (flâneurs were known to lead turtles on leashes) and his resistance to the collective, his politics were ambiguous. Benjamin's thoughts on the body in politics don't end with the flâneur. In his writings on surrealism Benjamin declared, "The collective is a body, too." The collective body is constructed out of images, which are, in Benjamin's formulation, material things. Actual bodies are things to be organized into higher social forms. Mikhail Bakhtin, by contrast, based a leftist politics on a body in all its gross particularly. The drinking, farting body in the carnival (and the sweating jogger gasping for air?) undermined the polarities of authority.

Whether running or walking the body is a slippery thing, politically. All I know is that I'm going to get a Libération tee shirt so I can go jogging in it.

Monday by the Numbers

Here are the numbers this morning: Colts 29, Bears 17, the temperature is -9 degrees with wind chills at -23 (yes, that's Fahrenheit), a co-worker absentee rate that must be at least 50%, and I'm coughing at a rate of 8 per minute. I'm going to take the 24 hours George Halas used to allow for his players to sulk after a big loss and just try to keep warm for the rest of the day. I finally bought Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day to distract me, and it should take me well into spring training to finish it. Still, at 1,077 pages it should be shorter than reading through all the post-game analysis of what went wrong for the Bears. Oh well, it's too cold for a victory parade, anyway.

Bear Down, Bears!

Super Bowl weekend nearly upon us, and not a moment too soon. I don't know if an NFL team really benefits from an extra week to prepare (the record is mixed), but clearly two weeks is too long for the media. The weirdness peaked early this week with the Chicago Sun-Times, which has still not recovered from its association with Rupert Murdoch. The Sun-Times ran a series of articles about Brian Urlacher's body. In one memorable report Sportswriter Rick Telander takes in Urlacher's tight-fitting clothes and gushes, "the poor guy looks strangled even in a T-shirt." When Urlacher grouses about wearing suits in Miami, Telander tsks, "Dress-up time, gentlemen, not fun time." If anything, the staidly Republican Chicago Tribune was even weirder. In keeping with conservatives' fetishistic interest in all things military, the Trib ran a piece on Urlacher as a gladiator, complete with speculations on what he'd look like in a short leather skirt ("6 percent body fat!"). The article opens, "'What we do in life," Maximus the gladiator said, 'echoes in eternity.' This is also true for football teams." So much for a classical education, though. This wasn't a quote from Tacitus or Livy; "Maximus" is Maximus Decimus Meridius, the hero the 2001 film Gladiator.

But today the media and local fans are putting on their game faces and making last-minute preparations, like screaming at the cable company to get their new HDTV's hooked up in time for the game. The Tribune runs a pedantic essay on leadership lessons from the coaches and the Sun-Times offers a helpful guide to which bars serve the best beergritas. Everyone in the Loop today is wearing something Bears-related, even the Art Institute lions. For those who feel that an orange Urlacher jersey, blue-stripped pants and a bearskin hat somehow aren't enough, there's a guy outside the Merchandise Mart selling blue and orange bead necklaces to people lining up in the 9 degree cold. The rest of us are doing our homework, boning up on the stuff the true fan needs to know. In the position comparison the Bears win on defense, the Colts on offense, but the Bears sweep the uniform fashion comparison 3-0. ("The Bears have mastered the art of coordinating without being too matchy-matchy.")

The sheer goofiness of the buildup to the Super Bowl is all part of the fun. There are naysayers, of course. The Wall Street Journal can't be bothered with a matchup between two teams from flyover country, comparing the Bears-Colts game to a "high-school basketball championship of the Midwest." Some indy rocker types I know are also ambivalent about Sunday.  True to the anti-populist ethos of alternative rock, they will be haughtily not rooting for the Bears. I heard one member of an indy rock trio announce the Bears don't make his top ten list of  NFL teams. I don't know what the rockers are going to do, though. No Deerhof fan can root for the cornpone Indianapolis Colts and their nerdy huckster of a quarterback. Personally, I'm just pleased to see that everyone is finally sick of the damn "Super Bowl Shuffle." Anyway, I'll be watching the game at a party with a low-def television, but one that's better than the even lower-def TV we own, and ignoring the commercials since, well, Super Bowl XX.

Chicago's 2016 Olympic Bid

Chicago has officially submitted its bid for the 2016 Olympics to the US Olympic Committee. At this juncture the plan emphasizes the economic feasibility of hosting the Olympics in the city, and most of the models are just placeholders for later designs. The plan is pretty much what one would expect: lots of pretty new buildings glimmering on the lakefront and not enough parking. The overall plan seems like a sensible one, although one could quarrel with the placement of some of the venues. For instance, do we really need a BMX arena on Northerly Island?  Wouldn't some remote, dusty exurb be more appropriate? After all, that's where the sport originated. A lot of neighborhood activists have argued that the venues should be spread throughout the city--rhythm gymnastics in Bridgeport, anyone?--but the lakefront looks better on television, so that's where most of the action is going to be.

There's at least one venue that will not be on the lakefront: the main Olympic Stadium, which will be shoehorned into Washington Park. The current plan makes the stadium look like a gigantic Nike Town. The design features a protruding lip hanging over the stands to protect the judges and the luxury boxes; everyone else is left to get sunburned. This same protect the wealthy and throw everyone else to the elements approach has already appeared in the revamped Soldier Field. So far no one's really complained about it, but with the Bears' next 4 and 12 season the guys in the Urlacher jerseys aren't going to be so happy about having cold Lake Michigan winds blasting in their faces. (In case you're wondering why they don't use Soldier Field as the Olympic Stadium, by cramming the Death Star into the confines of the old Soldier Field the developers ensured that the stadium would be too small to function as an Olympic Stadium.  It's also too small for a Super Bowl.)

I know the Olympic Stadium is supposed to be a temporary structure, but that doesn't mean it should look like they got the building supplies from Home Depot. Here's an idea for its architect, offered free of charge: Why not take advantage of the temporary nature of the stadium and create something truly soaring?  It will all be dismantled by winter anyway. The other distinctive Olympic structure, the Olympic Village, recalls less the Olympic ideal of athletes from all over the world living together in peace than the gang-ridden horror story that was the Robert Taylor Homes, a public housing project that was once located nearby.

There are, of course, a million other details to work out, including actually landing the Olympics. Should the city be awarded the 2016 Olympics, watch for a fierce debate about how much of the design work should be awarded to local architects.  Chicago has always prided itself on building great buildings, but it should also remember its past as the home of great architects.

Severed Heads

I'm heading into another weekend of following the Bears' joyless playoff run. On Sunday the entire country will be chanting "Geaux Saints!" leaving us lonely, gloomy souls in Ursine Nation rooting apprehensively for our charmless and underachieving team. Even if the Bears win, they will have ruined the NFL's feel good story of the year: the Saints in their mud-colored uniforms carrying all the hopes of post-Katrina New Orleans. Plus, if the Bears make the Super Bowl we'll have to endure still more fevered examination of everything Rex Grossman does, including, it seems, his bowel movements. All I have to say about that matter is this: this is his first full year as an NFL starter behind an offensive line built for run blocking, and the last thing a quarterback learns is how to focus on pass routes while a 300-pound, steroid-crazed maniac with a criminal record charges in from the blind side. We should be looking for disaster in other elements of the Bears' attack, for there are plenty of faults with this team.

Which brings me to Iris Murdoch. I'm reminded of her because there's something ursine about her prose style and I just completed A Severed Head, which, again, reminds me of Rex Grossman and his pass protection. It's also interesting to speculate what Murdoch would say about the wisdom of passionate, irrational attachments to inconsequential things like NFL teams. And the novel itself is a joyless journey through a series of emotional disasters ending in what amounts to a Pyhrric victory, although it's not intended to be. 

The novel is set in a wintertime London of pestilential fog and cozy drawing rooms. Our hero, Martin Lynch-Gibbon, experiences exactly 21 and a quarter pages of pleasure, all at the beginning of the novel. Then his wife comes home to announce she's leaving him for her American therapist. Every emotion is stated precisely and completely in a refreshingly direct yet didactic way. Murdoch cuts through psychological realism's vacillations and discontinuities, which is a nice change of pace from a lot of twentieth-century fiction. Her main character can have two or three emotions at once, and each is complete, with its own internal logic. The minor characters, however, can only possess one emotion at a time, and invariably it's the wrong one. The huge discrepancy between what her minor characters claim they're feeling and our judgments about those feelings is the core of Murdoch's didacticism.

The plot grinds on like a car tire over broken glass as the shards of Martin's ruined life get ground into dust. The turning point of the novel--that point Kenneth Burke claims is present in all novels, after which everything changes for the better or worse--is a shock that leaves one with a hollow feeling, but it's also the point at which the first rustling of incredulity sets in as Murdoch proceeds to stage some of the most far-fetched liaisons dangereuses I've read in a long time. Martin ends up with a woman who possesses a fascist wardrobe and a large and very sharp samurai sword, which she knows how to use. We're supposed to believe his love for her is genuine, but one tends to doubt the depths and plausibility of a love born of the very depths of whiskey-soaked misery. (And my, how her characters drink!)

Murdoch wanted us to live moral lives, and she considered fiction to be the primary tool for a moral education. The lesson she teaches about self-deception and the suffering necessary to live truly is certainly driven home by this haunting novel. But the choices she offers her characters are so narrow and the rewards for achieving self knowledge so paltry and oddly self-abnegating that we long to retreat to the more generous and forgiving universe of John Updike, another mid-century moralist. Still, there's no doubt that in A Severed Head an admirable and formidable moral intelligence is at work, and this 1961 novel fits perfectly into our fretful and demoralized times.

I just wish I hadn't read the novel during the Bears' playoff run. Now isn't the best time to be reminded of the suffering we must endure for our passions.

What Materazzi Really Said to Zidane

Speculation on what Marco Materazzi said to Zinedine Zidane during the World Cup finals has been something of a comic cottage industry in Italy. Now Marazzi finally reveals what he said in a new book. Turns out the insult has something to do with Zidane's sister and not, as one rumor had it, the vicious slur, "French philosophy has been shit since Foucault died."

Campioni!

I'm back from Italy, more or less. Italy is my favorite place in the world (more on that later), but it's good to be back in the land of clear signage. Thanks, Dian, for blogsitting. As it turns out, you did a better job than our petsitter.

I'm still jetlagged from a 9-hour flight back from Rome in the exact middle of an Airbus with a two-year-old (thanks for nothing, Swissair) and tending to a sick dog all night (thanks for nothing, petsitter). During these past two weeks I spent most of my time in the countryside (read driving all day down narrow, twisting roads with hairpin turns and no guardrails), so the only international event I was able to track was Italy's run to the World Cup championship. Despite an earlier resolution to root for France, I ended up rooting for Italy. We watched the finals in a public park in Monterubbiano, a walled medieval town near the Adriatic, in what had to be one of the best sports-viewing experiences I've ever had.  Zidane's headbutt evoked outrage amongst the 12-year-olds in the front rows, and the whole town exploded (almost literally) after the shootout: lots of fireworks, buzzing scooters carrying Italian flags, and grinning old men. The whole outburst was politely over by midnight. I couldn't help but feel relieved that the US didn't win the World Cup. It's better that a country that really cares--and Italy really, really cares--won the event.

Now back to reality: Israel is bombing Beirut; the microwars in Iraq continue unabated; gas prices are climbing; and our new GE refrigerator is non funzionale.

We're #5!

While Team USA has been eliminated from the World Cup, the most recent FIFA/Coca-Cola World Ranking (May) slots the USA at a respectable #5...Venezuela is a distant #71.

Wondering how that ranking was determined? Shudder. Me either.

The New Yorker calls into question the integrity of FIFA. And, well, I never trusted Coca-Cola after New Coke.

How to Root for a World Cup Team

I've been trying to take an interest in the World Cup because I want to be a good world citizen, but I'm having trouble sorting out the geopolitical implications of rooting for the US, or any team for that matter. There are resources online to help choose a World Cup team to root for, and others seem to be pondering the same questions. But allegiances in the World Cup seem unusually tangled. For instance, an Algerian co-worker says I should root for Zidene, but never for France. Then came Angola vs. Portugal as a post-colonial grudge match. That was something to work with, but the Angolans seemed to be playing dirty.

Next the US got stomped on by the Czech Republic, which apparently got all the good soccer players after its divorce from Slovakia.  Should I feel wounded national pride, even though I can't name a single member of the American squad? I'm a Cub fan, so I'm stuck enduring a team with high expectations ignobly dashed, and I don't need another team like that to ruin my summer.

Should I take the long view and hope the US soccer team takes a gentleman's dive so that we don't appear all the more hegemonic by winning the entire pot? That doesn't seem like such a bad idea. The American public is too sullen right now to enjoy a World Cup, anyway. On the other hand, maybe an American victory will make us more engaged with the world.

If America is shopping around for another major sport, soccer is a better choice than NASCAR with its greenhouse gas emissions and isolationist fan base. NASCAR may have a Bud Light authenticity about it, but its moment seems to have passed along with cheap gas. Then again, the last thing we need is soccer holligans and prostitutes now that the national crime rate is edging back up.

Maybe I'll root for France after all. At least the French offer no illusions.

What is Figure Skating?

Seth Stevenson at Slate asks a good question: "Skating has a split-identity problem. Is it an athletic competition about executing difficult jumps? Or is it a dramatic performance about emotion and bizarre arm gestures?"

I would say figure skating is about the cinema: both arose into prominence at the same time, and figure skating is about watching small gestures in a large frame.

That would make snowboarding a video game: somewhat poorly articulated figures rushing around an artificial environment.

Snowboarding as the Olympic Bricolage?

Just some questions after watching all these extreme sports events in the Olympics.

If extreme sports is all about individuality in the face of the corporate anonymity of more established sports, then why are most of the events (snowboard cross being the exception) about being judged by other people? Why does Bode Miller seem more independent thinking (and more risk-taking) than, say, Danny Kass or Shaun White? What's so free about freestyle skiing?

And I'm not sure what to make of the fact that snowboarding is surfing transposed onto snow. By contrast skiing evolved indigeneously from its immediate circumstances, namely, trying to get around on snow. Is snowboarding an example of postmodern culture combining two unlike things to create something new--a kind of Olympic bricolage? Or is it an example of capitalist market expansion? Surfing can only be done when it's warm and on an ocean, and winter mountains represents a new market opportunity. Can we say skiing is a more authentic winter sport? Would we want to?