Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Friday, October 22, 2010
Longing for the Lines That Had Us at Hello
http://www.nytimes.com/
By MICHAEL CIEPLY
LOS ANGELES — Have we heard the last (truly memorable) word from Hollywood?
Probably not, but it’s been a while since the movies had everybody parroting a great line.
Like, say, “Go ahead, make my day.” That was from “Sudden Impact,” written by Joseph Stinson and others, more than 27 years ago.
Sticky movie lines were everywhere as recently as the 1990s. But they appear to be evaporating from a film world in which the memorable one-liner — a brilliant epigram, a quirky mantra, a moment in a bottle — is in danger of becoming a lost art.
Life was like a box of chocolates, per “Forrest Gump,” released in 1994 and written by Eric Roth, based on the novel by Winston Groom. “Show me the money!” howled mimics of “Jerry Maguire,” written by Cameron Crowe in 1996. Two years later, after watching “The Big Lebowski,” written by Ethan and Joel Coen, we told one another that “the Dude abides.”
But lately, “not so much” — to steal a few words from “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.” Released in 2006, that film was written by Sacha Baron Cohen and others and is one of a very few in the last five years to have left some lines behind.
Maybe it’s that filmmaking is more visual, or that other cultural noise is drowning out the zingers.
“I’m at a loss, because the lines for a while were coming fast and furious,” said Laurence Mark, who had us at “hello” as a producer of “Jerry Maguire,” and is a producer of “How Do You Know,” which is written and directed by James L. Brooks and scheduled to open just before Christmas. (In 1987 Mr. Brooks mapped the media future in seven words from “Broadcast News”: “Let’s never forget, we’re the real story.”)
If film lines don’t stick the way they used to, Mr. Mark said, it is not for lack of wit and wisdom in Hollywood. “What I don’t believe is that the writers are less talented,” he insisted. “I don’t think that’s true, I just don’t.”
Speaking by phone recently, however, Mr. Mark was hard-pressed to come up with a line that stuck with him in the last few years. “I will try my darnedest to think of one,” he promised.
It may be that a Web-driven culture of irony latches onto the movie lines for something other than brilliance, or is downright allergic to the kind of polish that was once applied to the best bits of dialogue. Thus one of the most frequently repeated lines of the last year came from “Clash of the Titans,” which scored an unimpressive 28 percent positive rating among critics on the Rottentomatoes.com Web site after it was released by Warner Brothers in April.
“Release the Kraken!” thundered Liam Neeson as Zeus — spawning good-natured mockery on obscene T-shirts and in Kraken-captioned photos of angry kitty cats.
In truth, a good deal of thought went into the line. “When we came on, one of our conditions was that the line had to be in the movie,” said Matt Manfredi, who, with his writing partner, Phil Hay, joined in revising a script by Travis Beacham.
A predecessor film in 1981, written by Beverley Cross, had used the line, alongside another formulation that called for the Kraken to be “let loose,” Mr. Manfredi recalled. “In terms of poetry, ‘release’ worked for us,” he said.
“Machete don’t text,” from “Machete,” written by Robert Rodriguez and Álvaro Rodriguez, also traveled well on the Internet this year. But “can you imagine comparing that to ‘round up the usual suspects?’ ” said Mr. Mark, invoking a much-quoted line from “Casablanca,” the 1942 film that marked the golden era of movie quotations.
Written by Julius Epstein, Philip Epstein and Howard Koch, based on a play by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison, with uncredited work by Casey Robinson, “Casablanca” placed six lines in a list of 100 top movie quotations compiled by the American Film Institute in 2005, with help from a panel of 1,500 film artists, critics and historians.
“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” was first on the list. Those words, of course, come from “Gone With the Wind,” whose screenplay, based on the novel by Margaret Mitchell, was written seven decades ago by Sidney Howard and a number of uncredited writers.
Only one post-’90s line made the institute’s ranking. That would be “My precious.” The line came in 2002 from “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers,” written by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Stephen Sinclair and Peter Jackson, based on a novel by J. R. R. Tolkien.
When the film institute updates its list in another five years, at least a handful of lines from the current era will perhaps have aged into greatness, alongside classics like “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown,” from “Chinatown,” with a screenplay by Robert Towne, in 1974, and “Hasta la vista, baby,” from “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” written by James Cameron and William Wisher Jr., in 1991.
“I drink your milkshake” is a possibility, said Bob Gazzale, the institute’s chief executive. Those words, connoting triumph, came from “There Will Be Blood,” written in 2007 by Paul Thomas Anderson and based on a novel by Upton Sinclair.
Great movie lines might communicate insouciance (“La-di-da”), rage (“You talking to me?”) or something more cosmic (“May the Force be with you”). But they are almost never so much about Noël Coward-like turns of phrase as simply capturing “indelible character moments,” says Tom Rothman, a chairman of the Fox movie operation, who has also introduced regular showings of classic films on the Fox Movie Channel.
(In a window display at the headquarters of the Writers Guild of America West and the Writers Guild Foundation here, some of the more elaborate wordsmithing comes from Billy Wilder and his various associates. Even Mr. Coward would be hard-pressed to one-up a line from a script by Mr. Wilder and Charles Brackett for “The Major and the Minor.” The line is spoken by Robert Benchley, and Mr. Wilder attributed it to him, although Mr. Benchley, in turn, apparently attributed it to his friend Charles Butterworth: “Why don’t you get out of that wet coat and into a dry martini?”)
And Mr. Rothman cautions against believing that the great lines are all behind.
“It just takes a little time to sort the wheat from the chaff,” he said in an e-mail last week. Mr. Rothman predicted, for instance, that “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” with a script by Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff, would have a keeper with “Stop telling lies about me, and I’ll stop telling the truth about you.” (Written by Stanley Weiser and Oliver Stone, the original “Wall Street,” from 1987, will ever be remembered for declaring that “greed, for lack of a better word, is good.”)
Meanwhile, a call to Eric Roth, the veteran screenwriter behind movies like “Munich” and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” found him scratching to find an unstoppable one-liner in “The Social Network.”
That film was written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by David Fincher, and in a bit of dialogue that inspired Web parodies galore, it has the Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg “talking about taking the entire social experience of college and putting it online.”
Mr. Roth said that he deeply admired “The Social Network,” and that he thought that it could secure its place in history with a simple bon mot.
But “is there a great line” in it? he pondered. Its best lines, Mr. Roth said, were not as “sophomoric” as his own much-quoted speeches from “Forrest Gump.” Who could forget “Stupid is as stupid does”?
Neither are they quite as angry as Paddy Chayefsky’s mad-as-hell work in “Network,” from 1976, he noted.
But, Mr. Roth said, there is still time for viewers to find a word or two that will sum up “The Social Network” — much as “plastics” did for “The Graduate,” with a script by Calder Willingham and Buck Henry, in 1967. Besides, memorable words have a way of popping up when they are least expected. “The minute you write this, you’ll be proved wrong,” Mr. Roth predicted.
As Quentin Tarantino wrote in “Inglourious Basterds,” just last year, “That’s a bingo.”
By MICHAEL CIEPLY
LOS ANGELES — Have we heard the last (truly memorable) word from Hollywood?
Probably not, but it’s been a while since the movies had everybody parroting a great line.
Like, say, “Go ahead, make my day.” That was from “Sudden Impact,” written by Joseph Stinson and others, more than 27 years ago.
Sticky movie lines were everywhere as recently as the 1990s. But they appear to be evaporating from a film world in which the memorable one-liner — a brilliant epigram, a quirky mantra, a moment in a bottle — is in danger of becoming a lost art.
Life was like a box of chocolates, per “Forrest Gump,” released in 1994 and written by Eric Roth, based on the novel by Winston Groom. “Show me the money!” howled mimics of “Jerry Maguire,” written by Cameron Crowe in 1996. Two years later, after watching “The Big Lebowski,” written by Ethan and Joel Coen, we told one another that “the Dude abides.”
But lately, “not so much” — to steal a few words from “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.” Released in 2006, that film was written by Sacha Baron Cohen and others and is one of a very few in the last five years to have left some lines behind.
Maybe it’s that filmmaking is more visual, or that other cultural noise is drowning out the zingers.
“I’m at a loss, because the lines for a while were coming fast and furious,” said Laurence Mark, who had us at “hello” as a producer of “Jerry Maguire,” and is a producer of “How Do You Know,” which is written and directed by James L. Brooks and scheduled to open just before Christmas. (In 1987 Mr. Brooks mapped the media future in seven words from “Broadcast News”: “Let’s never forget, we’re the real story.”)
If film lines don’t stick the way they used to, Mr. Mark said, it is not for lack of wit and wisdom in Hollywood. “What I don’t believe is that the writers are less talented,” he insisted. “I don’t think that’s true, I just don’t.”
Speaking by phone recently, however, Mr. Mark was hard-pressed to come up with a line that stuck with him in the last few years. “I will try my darnedest to think of one,” he promised.
It may be that a Web-driven culture of irony latches onto the movie lines for something other than brilliance, or is downright allergic to the kind of polish that was once applied to the best bits of dialogue. Thus one of the most frequently repeated lines of the last year came from “Clash of the Titans,” which scored an unimpressive 28 percent positive rating among critics on the Rottentomatoes.com Web site after it was released by Warner Brothers in April.
“Release the Kraken!” thundered Liam Neeson as Zeus — spawning good-natured mockery on obscene T-shirts and in Kraken-captioned photos of angry kitty cats.
In truth, a good deal of thought went into the line. “When we came on, one of our conditions was that the line had to be in the movie,” said Matt Manfredi, who, with his writing partner, Phil Hay, joined in revising a script by Travis Beacham.
A predecessor film in 1981, written by Beverley Cross, had used the line, alongside another formulation that called for the Kraken to be “let loose,” Mr. Manfredi recalled. “In terms of poetry, ‘release’ worked for us,” he said.
“Machete don’t text,” from “Machete,” written by Robert Rodriguez and Álvaro Rodriguez, also traveled well on the Internet this year. But “can you imagine comparing that to ‘round up the usual suspects?’ ” said Mr. Mark, invoking a much-quoted line from “Casablanca,” the 1942 film that marked the golden era of movie quotations.
Written by Julius Epstein, Philip Epstein and Howard Koch, based on a play by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison, with uncredited work by Casey Robinson, “Casablanca” placed six lines in a list of 100 top movie quotations compiled by the American Film Institute in 2005, with help from a panel of 1,500 film artists, critics and historians.
“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” was first on the list. Those words, of course, come from “Gone With the Wind,” whose screenplay, based on the novel by Margaret Mitchell, was written seven decades ago by Sidney Howard and a number of uncredited writers.
Only one post-’90s line made the institute’s ranking. That would be “My precious.” The line came in 2002 from “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers,” written by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Stephen Sinclair and Peter Jackson, based on a novel by J. R. R. Tolkien.
When the film institute updates its list in another five years, at least a handful of lines from the current era will perhaps have aged into greatness, alongside classics like “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown,” from “Chinatown,” with a screenplay by Robert Towne, in 1974, and “Hasta la vista, baby,” from “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” written by James Cameron and William Wisher Jr., in 1991.
“I drink your milkshake” is a possibility, said Bob Gazzale, the institute’s chief executive. Those words, connoting triumph, came from “There Will Be Blood,” written in 2007 by Paul Thomas Anderson and based on a novel by Upton Sinclair.
Great movie lines might communicate insouciance (“La-di-da”), rage (“You talking to me?”) or something more cosmic (“May the Force be with you”). But they are almost never so much about Noël Coward-like turns of phrase as simply capturing “indelible character moments,” says Tom Rothman, a chairman of the Fox movie operation, who has also introduced regular showings of classic films on the Fox Movie Channel.
(In a window display at the headquarters of the Writers Guild of America West and the Writers Guild Foundation here, some of the more elaborate wordsmithing comes from Billy Wilder and his various associates. Even Mr. Coward would be hard-pressed to one-up a line from a script by Mr. Wilder and Charles Brackett for “The Major and the Minor.” The line is spoken by Robert Benchley, and Mr. Wilder attributed it to him, although Mr. Benchley, in turn, apparently attributed it to his friend Charles Butterworth: “Why don’t you get out of that wet coat and into a dry martini?”)
And Mr. Rothman cautions against believing that the great lines are all behind.
“It just takes a little time to sort the wheat from the chaff,” he said in an e-mail last week. Mr. Rothman predicted, for instance, that “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” with a script by Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff, would have a keeper with “Stop telling lies about me, and I’ll stop telling the truth about you.” (Written by Stanley Weiser and Oliver Stone, the original “Wall Street,” from 1987, will ever be remembered for declaring that “greed, for lack of a better word, is good.”)
Meanwhile, a call to Eric Roth, the veteran screenwriter behind movies like “Munich” and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” found him scratching to find an unstoppable one-liner in “The Social Network.”
That film was written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by David Fincher, and in a bit of dialogue that inspired Web parodies galore, it has the Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg “talking about taking the entire social experience of college and putting it online.”
Mr. Roth said that he deeply admired “The Social Network,” and that he thought that it could secure its place in history with a simple bon mot.
But “is there a great line” in it? he pondered. Its best lines, Mr. Roth said, were not as “sophomoric” as his own much-quoted speeches from “Forrest Gump.” Who could forget “Stupid is as stupid does”?
Neither are they quite as angry as Paddy Chayefsky’s mad-as-hell work in “Network,” from 1976, he noted.
But, Mr. Roth said, there is still time for viewers to find a word or two that will sum up “The Social Network” — much as “plastics” did for “The Graduate,” with a script by Calder Willingham and Buck Henry, in 1967. Besides, memorable words have a way of popping up when they are least expected. “The minute you write this, you’ll be proved wrong,” Mr. Roth predicted.
As Quentin Tarantino wrote in “Inglourious Basterds,” just last year, “That’s a bingo.”
Thursday, September 9, 2010
Nine months after the ski trip
www.livinginperu.com
Jack decided to go skiing with his buddy, Bob. So they loaded up Jack's minivan and headed north.
After driving for a few hours, they got caught in a terrible blizzard.
They pulled into a nearby farm and asked the attractive lady who answered the door if they could spend the night.
"I realize it's terrible weather out there and I have this huge house all to myself, but I'm recently widowed," she explained. "I'm afraid the neighbors will talk if I let you stay in my house."
"Don't worry," Jack said. "We'll be happy to sleep in the barn, and if the weather breaks, we'll be gone at first light." The lady agreed, and the two men found their way to the barn and settled in for the night.
Come morning, the weather had cleared, and they got on their way and enjoyed a great weekend of skiing.
But about nine months later, Jack got an unexpected letter from an attorney.
It took him a few minutes to figure it out, but he finally determined that it was from the attorney of that attractive widow he had met on the ski weekend. He dropped in on his friend Bob and asked, "Bob, do you remember that good-looking widow from the farm we stayed at on our ski holiday up north about nine months ago?"
"Yes, I do." said Bob
"Did you, er, happen to get up in the middle of the night, go up to the house and pay her a visit?"
"Well, um, yes!," Bob said, a little embarrassed about being found out, "I have to admit that I did."
"And did you happen to give her my name instead of telling her your name?"
Bob's face turned beet red and said, "Yeah, look, I'm sorry, buddy, I'm afraid I did. Why do you ask?"
"She just died and left me everything."
Jack decided to go skiing with his buddy, Bob. So they loaded up Jack's minivan and headed north.
After driving for a few hours, they got caught in a terrible blizzard.
They pulled into a nearby farm and asked the attractive lady who answered the door if they could spend the night.
"I realize it's terrible weather out there and I have this huge house all to myself, but I'm recently widowed," she explained. "I'm afraid the neighbors will talk if I let you stay in my house."
"Don't worry," Jack said. "We'll be happy to sleep in the barn, and if the weather breaks, we'll be gone at first light." The lady agreed, and the two men found their way to the barn and settled in for the night.
Come morning, the weather had cleared, and they got on their way and enjoyed a great weekend of skiing.
But about nine months later, Jack got an unexpected letter from an attorney.
It took him a few minutes to figure it out, but he finally determined that it was from the attorney of that attractive widow he had met on the ski weekend. He dropped in on his friend Bob and asked, "Bob, do you remember that good-looking widow from the farm we stayed at on our ski holiday up north about nine months ago?"
"Yes, I do." said Bob
"Did you, er, happen to get up in the middle of the night, go up to the house and pay her a visit?"
"Well, um, yes!," Bob said, a little embarrassed about being found out, "I have to admit that I did."
"And did you happen to give her my name instead of telling her your name?"
Bob's face turned beet red and said, "Yeah, look, I'm sorry, buddy, I'm afraid I did. Why do you ask?"
"She just died and left me everything."
Thursday, August 12, 2010
The Wife and The Maid
The maid asks for a salary increase. The wife was very upset about and decided to talk in private about her request.
The wife said, "Now Isabel, why do you want a pay increase?"
Isabel: Well Señora, there are three reasons why I want an increase. The first is that I iron better than you.
Wife: Who said you iron better than me?
Isabel: Your husband says so.
Wife: Oh.
Isabel: The second reason is that I am a better cook than you.
Wife: Nonsense, who said you are a better cook than me?
Isabel: Your husband did.
Wife: Oh.
Isabel: The third reason is that I am better at sex than you. Now the woman was furious and red in the face.
Wife: Did my husband say that as well?
Isabel: No Señora, the gardener did.
Wife: Oh. So how much of a raise did you have in mind?
Sunday, July 18, 2010
The Name of the Game
from www.newyorker.com
by Hendrik Hertzberg
July 12, 2010
F.A. (Football Association) Do Americans hate football? Not regular football, of course. Not football as in first and ten, going long, late hits, special teams, pneumatic cheerleaders in abbreviated costumes, serial brain concussions—the game that every American loves, apart from a few, uh, soreheads. Not that one. The other one. The one whose basic principle of play is the kicking of a ball by a foot. The one that the rest of the world calls “football,” except when it’s called (for example) futbal, futball, fútbol, futebol, fotball, fótbolti, fußball, or (as in Finland) jalkapallo, which translates literally as “football.” That one.
The question arises now—as it has arisen periodically for eight decades—on account of the World Cup, the quadrennial global tournament of the sport that goes here by the name of soccer. “Soccer,” by the way, is not some Yankee neologism but a word of impeccably British origin. It owes its coinage to a domestic rival, rugby, whose proponents were fighting a losing battle over the football brand around the time that we were preoccupied with a more sanguinary civil war. Rugby’s nickname was (and is) rugger, and its players are called ruggers—a bit of upper-class twittery, as in “champers,” for champagne, or “preggers,” for enceinte. “Soccer” is rugger’s equivalent in Oxbridge-speak. The “soc” part is short for “assoc,” which is short for “association,” as in “association football,” the rules of which were codified in 1863 by the all-powerful Football Association, or FA—the FA being to the U.K. what the NFL, the NBA, and MLB are to the U.S. But where were we? Ah, yes. Do Americans hate it? Soccer, that is?
Here’s one plausible answer: we don’t. The non-haters include the nearly twenty million of us who stayed indoors on a balmy Saturday afternoon to watch Ghana join England, Slovenia, and Algeria on this year’s list of countries beaten or tied by the United States in the World Cup. We were disappointed—Ghana won, 2-1, sending our team home from South Africa. Still, 19.4 million, the number registered by the Nielsen ratings service, is a lot of people. It’s not just more people than had ever watched a soccer game on American television before. It’s also more people than, on average, watched last year’s World Series games, which had the advantage of being broadcast live in prime time. It’s millions more than watched the Kentucky Derby or the final round of the Masters golf tournament or the Daytona 500, the jewel in NASCAR’s crown. And we don’t just watch. We do. An estimated five million grownups play soccer in these United States on a regular basis. Kids are mad for it, especially little ones. More American children play it, informally and in organized leagues, than any other team sport.
Soccer may be an import, as is our entire nonaboriginal population, but it’s well on its way to becoming as American as pizza, tacos, and French fries. (And motherhood: Sarah Palin notwithstanding, “soccer moms”—a term introduced to the political world in 1996, by a Republican consultant—are the proverbial key demographic.) Of course, soccer has its challenges here, many of them owing to its relative newness in the arena of American commerce. The enthusiasm of toddlers and post-toddlers is all very well, but, if that were enough to do the trick, Nike would have a division devoted to dodgeball. Compared with its established rivals, big-time soccer is ill suited to televisual exploitation. The game’s continuous, almost uninterrupted flow of action denies it a steady supply of intervals for the advertising of beer and the fetching of same from the refrigerator. The expedient of selling space on the players’ bodies—plastering their uniforms with corporate logos from neck to navel—is less than fully satisfactory. Also, the soccer pitch is vaster than the gridiron or the diamond, and the choreography of the game demands the widest of angles. On TV, the players are tiny—a problem for those as yet unequipped with enormous high-def flat screens.
Do Americans hate soccer? Well, some of us dislike it immoderately—not so much the game itself as what it is taken to represent. This spring, anti-soccer grumbling on the political right spiked as sharply as the sale of those great big TVs. Back in 1986, Jack Kemp, the former Buffalo Bills quarterback turned Republican congressman, took the House floor to oppose a resolution supporting America’s (ultimately successful) bid to host the 1994 World Cup. Our football, he declared, embodies “democratic capitalism”; their football is “European socialist.” Kemp, though, was kidding; he was sending himself up. Today’s conservative soccer scolds are not so good-natured. Their complaints are variations on the theme of un-Americanness. “I hate it so much, probably because the rest of the world likes it so much,” Glenn Beck, the Fox News star, proclaimed. (Also, “Barack Obama’s policies are the World Cup.”) What really bugs “silly leftist critics,” the Washington Times editorialized, is that “the most popular sports in America—football, baseball, and basketball—originated here in the Land of the Free.” At the Web site of the American Enterprise Institute, the Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen, formerly a speechwriter for George W. Bush, wrote, “Soccer is a socialist sport.” Also, “Soccer is collectivist.” Also, “Perhaps in the age of President Obama, soccer will finally catch on in America. But I suspect that socializing Americans’ taste in sports may be a tougher task than socializing our healthcare system.” And then there’s G. Gordon Liddy. Soccer, Liddy informed his radio listeners,
comes from Latin America, and first we have to get into this term, the Hispanics. That would indicate Spanish language, and yes, these people in Latin America speak Spanish. That is because conquistadores who came over from Spain—you know, tall Caucasians, not very many of them—conquered the Indians, and the Indians adopted the language of their conquerors. But what we call Hispanics now really are South American Indians. And this game, I think, originated with the South American Indians, and instead of a ball they used to use the head, the decapitated head, of an enemy warrior.
Liddy’s guest, a conservative “media critic” named Dan Gainor, responded cautiously (“soccer is such a basic game, you can probably trace its origins back a couple of different ways”), while allowing that “the whole Hispanic issue” is among the reasons “the left” is “pushing it in schools around the country.”
Do we hate soccer? That depends on who we think “we” are. One of the things that Franklin Foer’s charming book “How Soccer Explains the World” explains is how soccer, along with its globalizing, unifying effects, provides plenty of opportunities for expressions of nationalism, which need not be illiberal, and for tribalism, which almost always is. The soccerphobia of the right is tribalism masquerading as nationalism. One in four of those twenty million viewers of the U.S.-Ghana match was watching it on Univision, America’s leading Spanish-language network. The three others were—well, who knows. Liberals, probably, or worse. Enough. A yellow card is in order here, maybe a red one. Soccer may never be “America’s game” (though it’s already one of them), but America is game for soccer. We’re the Land of the Free, aren’t we? Can’t we be the land of the free kick, too?
by Hendrik Hertzberg
July 12, 2010
F.A. (Football Association) Do Americans hate football? Not regular football, of course. Not football as in first and ten, going long, late hits, special teams, pneumatic cheerleaders in abbreviated costumes, serial brain concussions—the game that every American loves, apart from a few, uh, soreheads. Not that one. The other one. The one whose basic principle of play is the kicking of a ball by a foot. The one that the rest of the world calls “football,” except when it’s called (for example) futbal, futball, fútbol, futebol, fotball, fótbolti, fußball, or (as in Finland) jalkapallo, which translates literally as “football.” That one.
The question arises now—as it has arisen periodically for eight decades—on account of the World Cup, the quadrennial global tournament of the sport that goes here by the name of soccer. “Soccer,” by the way, is not some Yankee neologism but a word of impeccably British origin. It owes its coinage to a domestic rival, rugby, whose proponents were fighting a losing battle over the football brand around the time that we were preoccupied with a more sanguinary civil war. Rugby’s nickname was (and is) rugger, and its players are called ruggers—a bit of upper-class twittery, as in “champers,” for champagne, or “preggers,” for enceinte. “Soccer” is rugger’s equivalent in Oxbridge-speak. The “soc” part is short for “assoc,” which is short for “association,” as in “association football,” the rules of which were codified in 1863 by the all-powerful Football Association, or FA—the FA being to the U.K. what the NFL, the NBA, and MLB are to the U.S. But where were we? Ah, yes. Do Americans hate it? Soccer, that is?
Here’s one plausible answer: we don’t. The non-haters include the nearly twenty million of us who stayed indoors on a balmy Saturday afternoon to watch Ghana join England, Slovenia, and Algeria on this year’s list of countries beaten or tied by the United States in the World Cup. We were disappointed—Ghana won, 2-1, sending our team home from South Africa. Still, 19.4 million, the number registered by the Nielsen ratings service, is a lot of people. It’s not just more people than had ever watched a soccer game on American television before. It’s also more people than, on average, watched last year’s World Series games, which had the advantage of being broadcast live in prime time. It’s millions more than watched the Kentucky Derby or the final round of the Masters golf tournament or the Daytona 500, the jewel in NASCAR’s crown. And we don’t just watch. We do. An estimated five million grownups play soccer in these United States on a regular basis. Kids are mad for it, especially little ones. More American children play it, informally and in organized leagues, than any other team sport.
Soccer may be an import, as is our entire nonaboriginal population, but it’s well on its way to becoming as American as pizza, tacos, and French fries. (And motherhood: Sarah Palin notwithstanding, “soccer moms”—a term introduced to the political world in 1996, by a Republican consultant—are the proverbial key demographic.) Of course, soccer has its challenges here, many of them owing to its relative newness in the arena of American commerce. The enthusiasm of toddlers and post-toddlers is all very well, but, if that were enough to do the trick, Nike would have a division devoted to dodgeball. Compared with its established rivals, big-time soccer is ill suited to televisual exploitation. The game’s continuous, almost uninterrupted flow of action denies it a steady supply of intervals for the advertising of beer and the fetching of same from the refrigerator. The expedient of selling space on the players’ bodies—plastering their uniforms with corporate logos from neck to navel—is less than fully satisfactory. Also, the soccer pitch is vaster than the gridiron or the diamond, and the choreography of the game demands the widest of angles. On TV, the players are tiny—a problem for those as yet unequipped with enormous high-def flat screens.
Do Americans hate soccer? Well, some of us dislike it immoderately—not so much the game itself as what it is taken to represent. This spring, anti-soccer grumbling on the political right spiked as sharply as the sale of those great big TVs. Back in 1986, Jack Kemp, the former Buffalo Bills quarterback turned Republican congressman, took the House floor to oppose a resolution supporting America’s (ultimately successful) bid to host the 1994 World Cup. Our football, he declared, embodies “democratic capitalism”; their football is “European socialist.” Kemp, though, was kidding; he was sending himself up. Today’s conservative soccer scolds are not so good-natured. Their complaints are variations on the theme of un-Americanness. “I hate it so much, probably because the rest of the world likes it so much,” Glenn Beck, the Fox News star, proclaimed. (Also, “Barack Obama’s policies are the World Cup.”) What really bugs “silly leftist critics,” the Washington Times editorialized, is that “the most popular sports in America—football, baseball, and basketball—originated here in the Land of the Free.” At the Web site of the American Enterprise Institute, the Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen, formerly a speechwriter for George W. Bush, wrote, “Soccer is a socialist sport.” Also, “Soccer is collectivist.” Also, “Perhaps in the age of President Obama, soccer will finally catch on in America. But I suspect that socializing Americans’ taste in sports may be a tougher task than socializing our healthcare system.” And then there’s G. Gordon Liddy. Soccer, Liddy informed his radio listeners,
comes from Latin America, and first we have to get into this term, the Hispanics. That would indicate Spanish language, and yes, these people in Latin America speak Spanish. That is because conquistadores who came over from Spain—you know, tall Caucasians, not very many of them—conquered the Indians, and the Indians adopted the language of their conquerors. But what we call Hispanics now really are South American Indians. And this game, I think, originated with the South American Indians, and instead of a ball they used to use the head, the decapitated head, of an enemy warrior.
Liddy’s guest, a conservative “media critic” named Dan Gainor, responded cautiously (“soccer is such a basic game, you can probably trace its origins back a couple of different ways”), while allowing that “the whole Hispanic issue” is among the reasons “the left” is “pushing it in schools around the country.”
Do we hate soccer? That depends on who we think “we” are. One of the things that Franklin Foer’s charming book “How Soccer Explains the World” explains is how soccer, along with its globalizing, unifying effects, provides plenty of opportunities for expressions of nationalism, which need not be illiberal, and for tribalism, which almost always is. The soccerphobia of the right is tribalism masquerading as nationalism. One in four of those twenty million viewers of the U.S.-Ghana match was watching it on Univision, America’s leading Spanish-language network. The three others were—well, who knows. Liberals, probably, or worse. Enough. A yellow card is in order here, maybe a red one. Soccer may never be “America’s game” (though it’s already one of them), but America is game for soccer. We’re the Land of the Free, aren’t we? Can’t we be the land of the free kick, too?
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Pad Thai
Recipe: Pad Thai
Time: 25 minutes
4 ounces fettuccine-width rice stick noodles
1/4 cup peanut oil
1/4 cup tamarind paste
1/4 cup fish sauce (nam pla)
1/3 cup honey
2 tablespoons rice vinegar
1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes, or to taste
1/4 cup chopped scallions
1 garlic clove, minced
2 eggs
1 small head Napa cabbage, shredded (about 4 cups)
1 cup mung bean sprouts
1/2 pound peeled shrimp, pressed tofu or a combination
1/2 cup roasted peanuts, chopped
1/4 cup chopped fresh cilantro
2 limes, quartered.
1. Put noodles in a large bowl and add boiling water to cover. Let sit until noodles are just tender; check every 5 minutes or so to make sure they do not get too soft. Drain, drizzle with one tablespoon peanut oil to keep from sticking and set aside. Meanwhile, put tamarind paste, fish sauce, honey and vinegar in a small saucepan over medium-low heat and bring just to a simmer. Stir in red pepper flakes and set aside.
2. Put remaining 3 tablespoons oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat; when oil shimmers, add scallions and garlic and cook for about a minute. Add eggs to pan; once they begin to set, scramble them until just done. Add cabbage and bean sprouts and continue to cook until cabbage begins to wilt, then add shrimp or tofu (or both).
3. When shrimp begin to turn pink and tofu begins to brown, add drained noodles to pan along with sauce. Toss everything together to coat with tamarind sauce and combine well. When noodles are warmed through, serve, sprinkling each dish with peanuts and garnishing with cilantro and lime wedges.
Yield: 4 servings.
www.nytimes.com
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Portraits by Mario Testino: Photography Exhibition
For the first time in his career, one of the most influential personalities in fashion, photographer Mario Testino, will present an exhibition in his homeland, Peru. Portraits gathers 90 superb photographs of celebrities like Madonna, Angelina Jolie, Kate Moss, Julia Roberts, The Rolling Stones and Brad Pitt, and was first presented in London, in 2002, very much appraised by the international community. It then went on to Milan, New York, Amsterdam, Tokio and other parts of the World, and is now known to be Testino's most celebrated exhibition.When: Tuesday to Sunday, 10 a.m. - 8 p.m., Saturday, 10 a.m. - 5 p.m. Until May 23Where: Museo de Arte de Lima - Paseo Colón 125, Parque de la Exposición, Cercado de LimaCost: General: S/.6, Students, Child.www.livinginperu.com
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Fiesta de La Vendimia in Ica - Festival
From www.livinginperu.com
Every year, Ica celebrates the Fiesta de La Vendimia, a festival traditionally known for its celebrations, musical concerts, parades, contests and, of course, the election of the festival's queen. The Fiesta honors Ica's most important agricultural jewel, the grapevine, from which grapes are harvested to make some of the world's most exquisite wines and piscos, and takes place every year during the time of harvest. The whole city participates, and it is estimated that over 200 000 tourists will travel to Ica to be a part of this magnificent festival.
When: March 5 to 15
Where: City of Ica, Ica
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Gold vending machine
D: That was our correspondent Steve Rosenberg at a railway station in Berlin.
Now, before we talk about the answer to this week's question, do you mind going through some of today's vocabulary again Kate?
K: Responds...We began by talking about vending machines - that is machines from which small items such as packaged food or drinks can be bought by inserting money. Because cash is inserted through a slot, they are also known colloquially as slot machines. And another synonym is dispensers.
Now, before we talk about the answer to this week's question, do you mind going through some of today's vocabulary again Kate?
K: Responds...We began by talking about vending machines - that is machines from which small items such as packaged food or drinks can be bought by inserting money. Because cash is inserted through a slot, they are also known colloquially as slot machines. And another synonym is dispensers.
We then mentioned the phrase on the go goodies meaning small things that we buy and consume without stopping - like chocolate bars, crisps and other snacks, for example. And then, the word precious which means very expensive and valuable. We talked briefly about stocks and shares, which means part of the ownership of a company which people can buy as an investment. And finally, the expression to keep a close eye on, meaning to watch very closely.
D: Thanks Kate. Finally, back to our question. Which currency was used in the report to talk about the price of gold?
K: Responds (the choice was euro, dollar and pound and I said… which was correct/wrong…)
D: Responds...I'm afraid that's all we have time for today. Until next week.
Both: Goodbye!
D: Thanks Kate. Finally, back to our question. Which currency was used in the report to talk about the price of gold?
K: Responds (the choice was euro, dollar and pound and I said… which was correct/wrong…)
D: Responds...I'm afraid that's all we have time for today. Until next week.
Both: Goodbye!
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