Category: WRITING

Speechless

“I WILL NOT TALK!” cries silent movie star George Valentin, as we fade in on his gaping mouth. Except his screams of anguish go unheard, both by his torturers and by two very separate cinema audiences: the one enjoying his latest Hollywood adventure and the one viewing The Artist, the new film by French director Michel Hazanavicius. Valentin’s words are only understood via a title card — a delightful joke that cleverly prepares audiences for cinema’s first commercial silent release in almost 85 years.

But how would twenty-first century movie fans react to such an audacious premise? The effect of hearing nothing but Ludovic Bource’s jaunty score is initially jarring. Though sound (or lack thereof) is not The Artist’s only technical departure from today’s type of movie-making. The film was shot using a 1.33:1 screen ratio common for the time, and at a slower 22 frames per second to achieve the slightly sped-up quality of the period (most movies today are filmed at 24fps). But the biggest surprise that comes from seeing The Artist in a packed theater (aside from the shock of how much noise cinema-goers actually make) is how quickly the audience settles into the unfamiliar.

The year is 1927 (the same year The Jazz Singer was released) and Valentin, played by Jean Dujardin, is Hollywood’s barrel-chested action hero du jour, in spite of the fact that nobody has ever heard a word out of his mouth. Amidst the clamor surrounding this pencil-mustachioed matinee idol, a confident young flapper named Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo) manages to breach the lax security of Kinograph Studios, talking (and dancing) her way onto his next feature. On screen, the two mismatched performers share a flirtatious scene, and off it, a brief but significant meeting in Valentin’s dressing room that will drive the plot forward.

Things are shaking up in Hollywood at large, too, with the advent of talking pictures. When burly studio boss Al Zimmer (John Goodman) reveals this revolution in sound technology to a skeptical Valentin, the proud star refuses any part, effectively signaling his own rapid professional and personal decline. With deft irony, the brand new medium catches the sprightly Miss Miller on the cusp of fame, propelling her from young aspirant to starlet in her own right. Caught in a frustrated marriage to a surly and disgruntled wife (Penelope Ann Miller), Valentin’s plight is aided by the presence of his abiding chauffeur/cook Clifton (James Cromwell), as well as his one-time on-screen companion, a faithful Jack Russell terrier that more than proves his worth to the washed-up actor away from the cameras.

It is a melodrama that has already been rehashed in Hollywood once too often, but never quite like this. As both protagonists grapple with their new-found circumstances, their feelings of guilt, longing and regret resonate twice as deeply due to the complete absence of dialogue. Consequently we are forced to infer everything from each nuanced smile, stolen glance and wiped tear. A nostalgic fascination for the forgotten era notwithstanding, The Artist packs the purest emotional punch I’ve felt at the movies in a long time.

Though cinematographer Guillaume Schiffmanit shot the film in color, every frame positively shines with all the white splendor of the pre-war Los Angeles sun (before the smog set in). Every detail is recreated with unnerving accuracy. It is rare to see a period movie suggest another epoch with such meticulousness, and I repeatedly lapsed into forgetting the film was brand new. Yet the film’s extraordinary technical research would have been for nothing without the winning performances of its two leads, the dashing and handsome Dujardin — who had previously starred in Hazanavicius’ series of spy spoofs, OSS 117 — and his female foil, the dazzling Argentine-born Bejo (daughter of filmmaker Miguel Bejo and Hazanavicius’ wife). Both possess the kind of expressive faces that belong to another time, before movie stars became CGI facsimiles of each other. Would any of today’s A-listers abandon their ego enough to perform without speaking? Here the film’s principal device enables its ultimate success, which hinges on the fact that neither actor is recognizable to audiences outside France. The tale is all the more absorbing precisely for the fact that we do not know the sounds of their voices.

For the first ten minutes I found myself wondering how long this central gimmick could be maintained, while at the same time hoping that the filmmakers would have the guts not to abandon the “novelty” mid-way through. I was reminded of Pleasantville (1998), another clever film that used technical device to tell a story, allowing color to subtly infiltrate a black-and-white fifties suburbia. I expected a similar turning point during The Artist, but instead the movie itself plays on its audience’s inevitable questioning — we are repeatedly invited to second-guess the ingenious conceit only for the filmmakers to consistently have the last laugh.

Nominated for six Golden Globes, twelve Baftas and ten Academy Awards, The Artist arrives under a weight of expectation and is not without flaw. The ending feels hurried, while the score — in a supposed nod to an altogether different movie era — borrows from Hitchcock’s Vertigo, a curious decision that apparently provoked the ire of that movie’s leading lady, Kim Novak.

Just as Woody Allen’s recent Midnight In Paris implored against the perils of nostalgia, so The Artist — while clearly celebrating the bygone age it so effortlessly evokes — is more keen to address the present. The film is no doubt a subtle critique of Hollywood’s current cinema, but more importantly a timely allegory for the problems of the modern world. “Make way for the young!” Miller exclaims enthusiastically to a reporter in one scene, in a manner reminiscent of twenty-first century society’s at times all-embracing attitude to new technology. George Valentin is a man overwhelmed by the detrimental effect of our alarming advancement, that is the elimination of what went before. He risks being phased out, along with his job and industry as he knows it, a highly relevant phenomenon of which our current economic climate is a direct consequence. What lingers after seeing the The Artist is the affirmation that only by appreciating the past can we begin to fathom the present.

Fare Game

As intrinsically associated with Manhattan as fire escapes and pretzel vendors, New York’s yellow taxicab’s icon is rivaled only by the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty. But when Mayor Michael Bloomberg unveiled The Taxi of Tomorrow back in May, ending months of speculation as to the future of this ubiquitous presence on the city’s streets, he brought an untimely end to decades of sunshine-colored style and swagger.

Of course, you’ll still be able to hail a yellow cab, but a few years from now it won’t be a Crown Victoria with aged tires and temperamental brakes. Sure, the driver will still be a cranky foreigner who always insists on taking Sixth Avenue, but he’ll be behind the wheel of a Nissan NV200 minivan, the winning car in the city’s Taxi of Tomorrow design competition. The Japanese manufacturer beat out similar concepts from Ford and Turkish company Karsan, earning itself a ten-year contract to provide New York with some 13,000 taxis starting in 2013.

The NV200 is not New York’s first minivan taxi: similar designs were introduced as early as 1996. Since the 1960s the Taxicab and Limousine Commission has leaned heavily on the Chevrolet Caprice and Ford Crown Victoria, which for decades vied for fares alongside the iconic Checker, the last of which did not retire until 1999 (though production stopped in 1982). The current version of the Crown Victoria has become something of a classic in its own right, having been on the road since 1998. However, in the last few years an increasing number of alternative vehicles have joined the fleet: as of 2011 there are seventeen approved taxi models in New York City, some of which have hybrid motors, though the Crown Victoria still represents 60% of all New York cabs. Aside from offering a smoother, comfier ride, it has endured precisely because it looks and feels like a taxi should. Unfortunately Ford retired the model earlier this year, hence the need for a replacement.

Crossing 23rd Street near Madison Square Park today I happened upon a public display of the Nissan NV200, a pop-up exhibit located in the shadow of the Flatiron Building, in the new pedestrian area that until recently was part of Fifth Avenue. At first sight, the winning vehicle appeared to possess one fatal flaw: nobody will want to be seen dead in it. An awkward oblong with an extra-high ceiling and sliding doors, the car belongs in the kind of suburban town people once came to New York to flee from. By 2019 all New York taxis will be the NV200, which already looks set to go down in history as an eyesore on the city’s roads and a running joke among New Yorkers — though in an unfortunate twist its imminent ubiquity will mean the joke is on them.

The NV200 has sparked further controversy over the fact that this state-of-the-art vehicle is inaccessible to disabled passengers. Naturally, the city is keen to draw attention to the taxi’s partial-electric motor, high fuel efficiency and host of revolutionary features, which include a panoramic sunroof throughout the whole back seat, passenger airbags, anti-bacterial non-stick seats, independent passenger climate controls and passenger charging stations –- one outlet and two USB ports.

This list of specifications is indicative of how New York’s priorities have become skewed. Yes, we live in a fast-paced city that supposedly never sleeps, but who needs to plug in a laptop and charge an iPhone in a taxicab? The fact that we have convinced ourselves otherwise says everything about our disengaged, entitled society and the people running it. Though it may have nothing to do with the New York we think we know, the unfortunate reality is that the Taxi of Tomorrow is perfectly in keeping with the New York of 2012. This is just the latest episode in Mayor Bloomberg’s corporate crusade to eliminate character and individuality from the street and transform the city into a luxury playground destination for the rich and famous (or just plain rich).

After an initial plan to equip all taxis with hybrid engines was quashed, in 2008 New York cabs were given a fresh look, including new door decals (which replaced the old stenciled “N.Y.C. TAXI” lettering) and an official logo. Created by Swiss graphic designer Claudia Christen, the new branding even featured handy instructions on how to hail a cab, in the form of a stick man with his arm raised.

The first sign that taxi rides themselves were to be disrupted was the 2008 mandate for the insertion of a small television screen into the backseat, a pointless and universally despised device with a particularly rebellious touch-screen OFF button. Its presence ensures that each passenger is routinely greeted with the jolting theme from ABC’s Eyewitness News moments after getting comfortable. Admittedly, there are few places left in the world that televisions have yet to infiltrate, but this so-called Passenger Information Monitor (or PIM, as nobody calls it) conveniently doubles as a credit card payment machine whose functionality rate tends to hover just above fifty percent. Of course this will all seem quaint once the NV200 has rolled into town, complete with its 15-inch television screen, suggesting it perhaps also offers a choice of the latest movie releases on demand.

Unwanted accoutrements notwithstanding, for me the New York taxi experience has yet to be tarnished. My favorite thing about riding in the backseat of a cab is that you are treated to so much of the city and so many aspects of urban street life — not to mention myriad architectural marvels if you sink in your seat — flying by in a matter of minutes. But many are oblivious to what’s whizzing past their window, and miss it all because they’re too busy consulting an app to tell them the quickest route to the Bowery Hotel.

I remember the first time I walked out of JFK Airport and stood in line for a taxi to take me to Manhattan. That cab ride was and remains the most intensely memorable one-hour car journey of my life. But if I’d been asked to step aboard a Nissan NV200 I may have opted for the subway. I’ll never forget the sense of power I felt when I hailed my first cab one evening on Central Park South. I still take great comfort in watching the endless, steady stream of taxis gliding down the Avenues at night. Today the few Checker Cabs still running on Manhattan’s streets are used to advertise banks or chauffeur newly-weds, but on the rare occasions when I spot one — parked on a shady street or speeding uptown — I can never quite believe my eyes. It’s like a glorious dream.

Years from now, when the Taxi of Tomorrow has become the taxi of today, immortalized in a thousand movies, will it provoke a similar emotion? Or will people be turned off by the predictable mirror-image of their own suburban existence? New York’s rapid transformation over the last ten years has the potential consequence of coming full-circle: sooner or later the city will finally stop being desirable for the precise same reasons it became desirable (again) in the first place. It will have become too safe, too clean, too un-different. Maybe then — and only then — they’ll bring back the Checker.

In Defence of Serie A

On the night of July 9th, 2006 — just hours after Zinedine Zidane had ended his career in infamy, indirectly propelling Italy to World Cup glory — I spotted the following slur freshly scrawled in bright red paint over a shuttered Florence storefront: “LA MAMMA DI ZIDANE E’ UNA PISANA”. That Florentine Azzurri fans could imagine no greater ignominy than to infer that the disgraced Frenchman’s maternal relatives hail from Pisa said everything about Italy’s pervading sense of regionalism, and beyond that, campanilismo, or town-based identity.

For this reason I was surprised to hear the comments of Sam Wallace from The Independent newspaper this weekend. “You go to Stoke, they’ve got an identity,” Wallace opined during a discussion about Serie A on Sky Sports’ Sunday Supplement video podcast. “You go to Bolton and that club’s got an identity. When I watch Serie A you don’t feel that so much about the smaller clubs there.” This stunningly ill-conceived statement reminded me of the joke about the tourist who visits Paris only to complain that everyone’s speaking French. Obviously, if you’re not Italian, if you’ve never spent time in Italy nor choose to read La Gazzetta dello Sport on a daily basis, you can’t expect to have the same cultural awareness of the game in that country as those that are, have and do.

Though less expected from the mouth of a journalist from one of Britain’s most respected liberal-leaning newspapers, Wallace’s highly ignorant take on Italian football is indicative of opinion at large among soccer fans in the UK, where Serie A is routinely dismissed as defensive, cynical and boring. As is often recalled, this wasn’t always the case. Twenty years ago Serie A was widely regarded as the greatest league in the world, and in the mid-1990s Channel 4’s coverage of the Italian championship regularly drew more viewers than the Premier League on Sky Sports.

In the ensuing years, sponsorship, multi-million television deals and an influx of foreign talent have ensured that the Premier League is today the richest and most popular football league on the planet, making it one of the UK’s greatest exports. In the meantime Serie A has, as Shaun Custis of The Sun newspaper put it, “dropped off the map.” But how exactly did this once universally admired league fall out of favour? Though it is impossible to pinpoint a moment precisely, the tide seemed to be turning by the new millennium, and several individual matches certainly may have helped swing the tide in the minds of British fans.

The first incident worth citing is ten-man Italy’s elimination of hosts Holland at Euro 2000. Despite the Dutch missing five penalties during the game (two during the 120 minutes and three during the shoot-out), the BBC’s Barry Davies still summarized the match with a condescending dollop of disdain: “Who says cheats never prosper?” Two years later a series of bizarre refereeing decisions throughout the tournament led to Italy’s ultimate undoing at the World Cup. The erratic performance of referee Byron Moreno during the defeat to Korea provoked fans to speak of a possible conspiracy against the Azzurri, a notion dismissed by many in the British press as a case of sour grapes. Meanwhile Moreno has since served several suspensions in his native Ecuador, and in 2010 was arrested at New York’s JFK airport with six kilos of heroin packed in his underwear.

England fans should know better than most that the domestic game should not be judged by national team performances, yet it seems these two globally-televised matches were enough for many in the UK to form their own assessment of Italian football in general. The fact that Italy had provided both finalists in Europe’s premier club competition in 2003 might have suggested an upturn in Serie A’s fortunes. But for many observers the Champions League final at Old Trafford — a tensely fought affair between classic rivals Juventus and Milan — seemed ample confirmation of Serie A’s demise, a conclusion apparently drawn from the fact that the game ended goalless after extra-time.

Around this time Spain’s La Liga began to take the place of Serie A in the hearts of British fans who like their soccer spiced with a little Mediterranean glamour. Of course, the fact that La Liga was broadcast on Sky Sports also helped, as did the transfer of David Beckham to Real Madrid. By this point the Premier League was already starting to enjoy its new-found status as a global luxury product, garnering new admirers but also encouraging the attitude of the insular English soccer fan. Britain as a society watches far more television than their counterparts in southern Europe, making them especially susceptible to the excessive and manipulative levels of hype surrounding football coverage in the UK media.

I don’t believe the changes in attitude towards Serie A can be based purely on football. What no-one seems to have picked up on is that the general disregard for Italian football these days is mirrored by a cultural-economic shift in Italy’s standing in the world, and a definitely detectable downturn in the country’s image abroad. Though still a highly desirable destination for Brits, Italy as a nation was once more revered than any other for its art, fashion, food and, of course, football. Thanks to cheap air travel all of that has now been conquered, and suddenly Italy is no longer di moda. Just as many journalists use Silvio Berlusconi’s careless remarks and behaviour to depict an entire country as ignorant and corrupt, so soccer fans, sports writers and even casual observers let their perception of a country as a whole to subconsciously influence their take on every product coming out of Italy, especially football.

Italian fans have sometimes been accused by British visitors of aggression, particularly during matches in European competition. Whether occurring in Italy or anywhere else, problems with violence in and around the stadium have little to do with football, and much more to do with society at large. Whatever you want to call it — sporting pride, peer pressure, twisted machismo, boredom — when a Sicilian teenager feels compelled to throw a fatal flare at a policeman in Catania, a nation and its national game can hardly be held responsible.

I’ve attended home matches at the two biggest and best-supported teams in Spain, and in both cases the match-day experience was underwhelming in comparison to what I’ve seen in Serie A stadia, at least in terms of atmosphere. While the Premier League has been extremely successful in refashioning the stadium as a safe and lucrative venue for all the family, at the same time something has been lost. The last time I went to a game in England I was greeted with a lengthy list of objects which weren’t permitted inside the ground, including flag poles and cameras. Fan participation is integral to the stadium experience, and Italian supporters use a colourful combination of flares, flags, banners and sophisticated choreography to galvanize each other and their team. You can learn a lot about a place and a people by spending an afternoon on the terraces.

The 2006 World Cup began with Italy crawling from the debris of a match-fixing scandal that rocked calcio to its very core, lending further heat to the foreign scorn to which the Italian game had by now become used. Italy’s subsequent triumph in Berlin was a significant, if short-lived, rebuttal to fans and press that had spent the previous months dragging the country through the mud. Unfortunately, calciopoli’s intermittent aftershocks — the most recent occurring only last summer — have hindered Serie A’s potential for returning to the forefront among football fans outside Italy. Naturally, many often connect the scandal to the loss of Serie A’s appeal. While it has certainly damaged the credibility of the league and the sport’s governing bodies, the problem of corruption in Italy is hardly a new development — that it should extend sometimes to football is inevitable. Do people think Italy was some clean and wholesome place during the Baggio era? Most hypocritical however, is the high-minded attitude that such a situation could never happen anywhere else.

Italian football would stand a greater chance in the UK if it were shown regularly on British television. Sadly, since Channel 4 ceased to broadcast Serie A in 2003, the league has been passed between various terrestrial and cable networks without ever finding a settled home. The resulting effect is that British viewers have mistaken the absence of Italian football from their screens for their own choice not to watch — a case of not wanting what isn’t put in front of you.

Perhaps inevitably, the fiercest criticisms of Serie A come from those who don’t watch it. Whether or not it’s a preference for remaining oblivious to what they might be missing out on, it’s frustrating to hear the Italian game belittled by those without the facts or experience to back up their claims. I’ve been watching Italian football on a weekly basis for almost twenty years: on Channel 4 as a teenager, while living in Florence during my twenties, and now from my home in New York, where multiple live Serie A games are beamed into my apartment every weekend. Italy may no longer be a haven for the world’s elite: today’s top players are more evenly spread throughout Europe, but this has more to do with a leveling of football’s economic playing field than a case of Serie A having lost its appeal. While the Premier League has been undoubtedly enriched by the arrival of top-quality foreign players (many of whom continue to arrive directly from Italy), the actual quality of Italian football has never waned. It remains a highly competitive and notoriously tough league, populated by technically gifted players and coaches whose tactical awareness is unparalleled.

Some anti-calcio commentators cite a lack of competition in Serie A, another inaccurate assumption vastly outweighed by the frequency of one-sided matches in both the Premier League and La Liga. In Spain, Barcelona have racked up a 5-0 scoreline on three occasions already this season, and even fired eight without reply past poor Osasuna. Likewise, rivals Real Madrid’s wins so far have included a 6-0 and a 6-2. In England, Manchester United recently demolished Arsenal 8-2. The last time that scoreline was registered in Serie A was sixteen years ago. In the first five weeks of this season, no team in the Italian top flight has won a match by more than three goals.

The golden era of the sette sorelle — when Serie A boasted up to seven sides likely to challenge for the scudetto — may have passed. Modern football deems that Europe’s top leagues are ultimately dominated by the usual two or three powerhouse teams. Certainly some of famous Italian clubs, such as Sampdoria, Fiorentina, Napoli and Torino have endured a turbulent last fifteen years, all spending time in lower divisions. But recently, the relatively cautious approach employed by Italian clubs in the transfer market has promoted a stronger league of competitive sides, while encouraging the emergence of local talent. In Italy, perhaps more than anywhere else, it seems no team is impervious to defeat, even against the most unfancied opposition. Early last season eventual champions Milan were beaten by newly-promoted Cesena, while just last month Inter suffered a 3-1 loss at Novara, a provincial side playing their first Serie A home game since 1955. I doubt the Novara fans suffered a crisis of identity that night.

The complete reversal in UK attitudes towards Italian football over the last decade seems unfounded and essentially without substance, appearing instead to be based solely on conjecture and common misconception. How could the game have changed so much, so rapidly? The ball is still round. The Independent’s Sam Wallace — and other narrow-minded journalists and soccer fans — would do well to buy a plane ticket to any city in Europe, or even simply pick up the remote. They’d find a host of channels besides Sky Sports, and a whole world beyond our shores playing their own beautiful game.

Afterthoughts

Before the cloud of dust and ash had even reached Brooklyn they were already calling it our generation’s “J.F.K.” We all remember it — where we were, who we were with, what we were doing. I’m not going to tell you my memories of 9/11 because they aren’t probably much different from those of most other people who weren’t in New York that day. Surely to do so would be to weigh in on an already over-saturated topic, to intellectualize other people’s all-too-real tragedy, and to appropriate their daily pain in an empty gesture of solidarity. I’m not an American, I wasn’t in New York ten years ago and I didn’t personally know anybody who died in the attacks. Who the hell am I to get in the way of those who are, were, and did?

I was hesitant to write about 9/11 at all until a New Yorker friend convinced me otherwise. She talked about the “ownership” of 9/11, her view being that it belongs to us all (unlike 9/12, which belongs only to New York). Indeed, as much as those events were an attack on the freedom of the Western world at large, it was New York that had to grapple in the aftermath of a very real disaster. Yet while the city was distracted, its back turned, its energies drained and emotions exhausted, somehow “9/11” was swept upon — by politicians, media, or simply the circumstances of an imminent global threat — and rebranded as an American tragedy. It was a subtle shift but one which opened up the city to the rest of the country, welcoming swathes of out-of-towners who’d previously avoided New York at all costs (“too dirty, too dangerous”), and perhaps consequently setting in motion Manhattan’s rapid and alarming suburbanization.

I know more than one American who has admitted to me that they didn’t know what the World Trade Center was on 9/10. Today several of my Facebook friends — many of whom have never been to New York — have updated their statuses and changed their profile pictures accordingly to reflect the supposed mood of the city. I even read about a guy who remained incredulous last Friday when a colleague wished him a “Happy 9/11”. Given this, plus the slew of discussions and hollow sentiments gushing our way this anniversary week, I wish more people were as reluctant to share thoughts on 9/11 as I am.

Ironically, while the rest of America has embraced New York in its visitor-friendly post-9/11 guise, so New Yorkers increasingly yearn for what has been lost over the last decade. I’m always surprised just to what extent the city I wake up to in 2011 differs from the New York that has always existed in my head, where, along with DON’T WALK/WALK lights and Checker cabs, the Twin Towers are still very much there.

I visited the Twin Towers once when they really were still there, and rode the startlingly fast elevator to the top floors and observation deck, where I walked about for roughly a half-hour under the hazy July sun, marveling at the view and taking photos with my Pentax K-1000. I have one super wide montage (which I pieced together once my photos had been developed) looking north where you can see the curvature of the earth. I took another great shot looking directly across at the other tower, and I remember being able to see the Colgate HQ across the river (the giant clock is still there). NY1 called it the hottest July 5th on record at the time, and you couldn’t make out much beyond Central Park because of the haze. My mum went during a crisp November a few years earlier — in her photos you can probably see Connecticut. There was a point near the gift shop and restaurant where you could step down to the windows and put your toes against glass. It was pretty scary (in a fun sort of way) at the time; the memory became terrifying a few years later.

After moving to New York it never occurred to me to visit what had by then become habitually referred to as “Ground Zero”. I don’t know if having lost loved ones would be greater incentive to visit or a big reason to stay away, but I find it odd that people travel across America to visit the former site of the World Trade Center and pose for photos in front of what has begun only recently to resemble something other than a building site. (It’s still the only “tourist attraction” I can think of in which people come to see something that isn’t there, rather than something that is.) But I’m sure they all leave with a commemorative fridge magnet to take home.

Having said that, I think after all the speculation the new memorial site is far more perfect than anything I could have imagined. Those two square pools are a powerful sight. Maybe it’s naive to hope that the re-opening of the site will act as a sort of closure for the city, and that vast space as it develops can finally return to being a living, breathing part of downtown Manhattan. But it will probably be a long while before I go down there.

I certainly would never have dreamed of going downtown today. Instead I stayed at home, curled up on the sofa with a cup of coffee and a bumper edition of Sunday’s Times (which I’d bought on Saturday night). I got seriously choked up during the TV memorial service when kids barely old enough to remember their dads started to cry as they read out their names. The list was especially moving when they got to the most common last names, like Smith, and it began to read like a phone book.

A decade of cheap tourism, internet theorists, airport security lines, late-nite terrorism gags and numbing scenes of war on the nightly news has made it easy to forget that few people in this city weren’t directly affected by what happened on 9/11. Ten years is nothing, and when I speak with New Yorkers — or anyone for that matter — I never bring it up. And despite everyone’s desire to move on the subject should continue to be treated with caution and respect, a tough task for many given the current choice of platforms encouraging extreme opinions and knee-jerk reactions.

Too many New Yorkers wear the fact like a badge of honor. Let’s always try and remember that some have earned theirs.

Characters Welcome (Their Names Less So)

The poster for Larry Crowne, the new movie starring Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts, doesn’t tell us much, besides the fact that the film stars Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts, and that they are having a pleasant time. The two actors are seen riding what appears to be a flying motor scooter, judging by the sky blue background and complete absence of gravitationally secured objects. He smiles contentedly, his eyes, twinkling behind dark shades, fixed firmly on the road (or flight path). She perches behind him, her printed silk scarf fluttering in the breeze as she releases a trademark thousand-watt grin. Neither wears a crash helmet.

Not even the movie’s title can reveal much else to prospective cinema-goers as to the purpose of this joyride through the clouds. After realizing that “Larry Crowne” was in fact the name of the movie (and not a third-billed actor) I began hoping that the name might refer to a mysterious unseen matchmaker who brings the film’s protagonists together; or maybe a clever alias exposed to devastating effect mid-way through the movie; or perhaps the leader of a menacing band of Vespa enthusiasts that engages our heroic duo in a less-than-deadly two-wheeled airborne pursuit. Imagine my disappointment to learn, with depressing predictability, that “Larry Crowne” is nothing more than the name of Tom Hanks’ character. The poster isn’t even a cute reference to Roman Holiday.

When asked about the title, Hanks, who co-wrote and directed the film, revealed Larry as the name of his real-life brother, and that “Crowne” was chosen as a last name because it “sounded cool” (probably because it had already sounded cool in The Thomas Crown Affair — twice). I can only assume Hanks was searching for a name to evoke a certain everyman, but the detail drew my attention to what may be a growing trend in Hollywood, in which movie titles — supposedly an important element in the eventual success of a cinematic release — simply defer to the lead character’s name.

Larry Crowne is not the first movie — or even the first movie starring Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts — to include a character’s name in the title. In 2007 the pair co-starred in Charlie Wilson’s War, while each won Oscars for their respective roles as Forrest Gump (1994) and Erin Brockovich (2000). Historical tales, true stories and biopics often include the character’s name in the title for recognition purposes, since it’s that person whose life the film is about. Other comprehensible exceptions include franchises such as Indiana Jones or Harry Potter. Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977) told the story of a comedian’s complex relationship with a woman, the use of whose name as the title served only to accentuate his romantic fixation (“Hall” is also Diane Keaton’s real last name). A character’s name may play an integral role in plot development, as in the case of Meet Joe Black (1998) and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008). In both movies mystery shrouds Brad Pitt’s identity as the preposterous title character.

In some cases a film can gain a cult following due to the inclusion of a character’s name in the title. To a generation of movie-lovers, “Ferris Bueller” remains synonymous with adolescent tedium and smart-alec rebellion thanks to Matthew Broderick’s winning performance in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986). More recently, other films aimed at young audiences — such as Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008) and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (2010) — have attempted to capitalize using the same technique, with less impressive results. You could argue also that these films are either set in high schools or geared towards teens, an age where last names are important for differentiating between the dozens of other Sarahs, Scotts and, uh, Ferrises among your peers.

But when the device backfires it can make film companies look quite lazy. In 2009 two films were released with identical titles, save for their character name suffixes. The subject matter of I Love You, Beth Cooper and I Love You Philip Morris could not have been more different, but you could hardly blame audiences for not being able to recall which movie was which. Perhaps Larry Crowne‘s truest precedent is Jerry Maguire, the 1996 hit starring Tom Cruise and Renee Zellweger. It too relied on the bankability of its leads, and essentially amounted to a fairly straight romantic comedy-drama hidden beneath a tedious sub-plot about a sports agent and his ego-centric client.

Admittedly, it’s so far been a bad summer at the movies. Bad Teacher, Horrible Bosses, and Zookeeper sound like they were lumbered with their working titles when market research suggested they couldn’t be improved upon. But neither the ubiquitous poster for Larry Crowne nor its accompanying trailer has given me incentive enough to go and see it, despite the dearth of promising alternatives. A New York Times review, which described the film as a “tepid, putatively adult film which may elicit mild chuckles” suggested my instincts were correct. Maybe I’d have been more compelled if the movie had had a more interesting title (the French release translates as “It’s Never Too Late”). Instead, the public is left with no idea what the film is about, and the impression that the answer is not much. It makes the film look like a vanity project. Perhaps Tom Hanks should save himself some bother and simply call his next vehicle “Tom Hanks”.

It’s no secret that studios’ primary concern has always been star-power and box-office success. Maybe the less an audience knows about a movie the more likely they’ll pay to watch it. The fact that Larry Crowne stars two of America’s best-loved stars was enough for it to gross $15.7 million in its opening four-day weekend (although 71% of those who bought tickets were over 50). But it seems increasingly apparent now that even filmmakers themselves are becoming indifferent to their own work, a conclusion borne out by Hollywood’s current lack of imagination and fresh ideas. Imagine an alternate world where classic movies had been named for their main characters. Rick Blaine, George Bailey, Norman Bates, Benjamin Braddock, Popeye Doyle, Vito Corleone, Travis Bickle, Tony Manero and Han Solo hardly sound like Oscar-winners, but I bet you’d have little trouble recalling the movies they belong to. Hollywood should focus on creating characters worth remembering –- if they’re truly memorable we won’t forget their names.

Some Like It Hot

Summer’s here and the time is right… for freezing indoors?

I knew summer was officially upon us as soon as I arrived at work last Monday morning. Two colleagues were perched awkwardly halfway up a stepladder. One was holding a drill, the other a raw piece of lumber, while each used his free hand to grip the large air-conditioner which teetered precariously between the window frame and the sidewalk six floors below. Beads of sweat sprung off both men, as if time was against them and their jobs (or very lives) hung in the balance. Before I knew it the large sash windows around me were slid shut — sssshhhhhhh-clunk! — and with that went my last breath of fresh air until late September. The bulky machine was plugged in and stirred into life, immediately releasing a wheezy drone. Their makeshift installation job having apparently taken hold, my colleagues slumped back in their chairs and purposely mopped their brows, as if by the skins of their teeth they had narrowly averted a minor local disaster.

By all accounts, it got pretty hot in New York this week. I wouldn’t know, since I now spend my days holed up in an air-tight chamber where the temperature hovers at a permanently tolerable sixty-eight degrees. On the other hand, the noise level is now akin to that on a construction site, though the rickety jackhammers cutting up Sixth Avenue are a far lesser disturbance. The aging AC unit’s grating, incessant din is so obtrusive that even on the occasions when I hear the telephone ring, answering it is pointless.

While I understand the importance of feeling comfortable in the workplace, I consider the air-conditioner a far from essential appliance. My office has no direct sunlight and seven windows which, when opened, create a pleasant through-breeze. On an especially hot day we might require, at most, a fan. In the AC’s defense, it is fair to say that I have not broken a sweat in over a week. Instead I now have to bring a sweater to work, an item of clothing that most would agree should no longer be a necessity come July. On occasions when I pick up the AC remote the whole office leaps up to monitor my actions lest I adjust the temperature or — gasp! — switch the thing off entirely. Maybe I’d have a greater degree of tolerance for the air conditioner if this wasn’t the fourth successive summer I’ve had to put up with the decrepit device, which each year is dragged out of hibernation rather than being put out to pasture.

For many of the city’s inhabitants, it seems no sooner has the depressing winter melted away than the sticky summer ahead becomes the target of their seasonal discontent. Most temper this sweat-related stress by cranking up the AC, which of course is designed to help suffering city dwellers beat the heat. Yet while air-conditioning may be a quick fix for this problem, to what extent does it also encourage it?

New Yorkers survived decades of hot summers with just loose clothing and Coca-Cola for comfort. But images of neighborhood kids frolicking under the gushing spray of the fire hydrant down the block are rooted in the middle of the last century, long before the air-conditioner came along to turn living spaces into temperature-controlled unnatural environments. Perhaps people defer to the AC simply because they can’t remember things any other way. Over the last fifty years this oversize, low-tech, energy-inefficient apparatus has become — along with the baseball cap and dip — something that America as a society has convinced itself it cannot live without.

I’m British, therefore hardly in a position to complain about warm weather. In England, the two days out of the year where temperatures might warrant air-conditioning hardly justify the purchase and installation of such an appliance. Elsewhere in Europe it gets scorching hot, but our continental cousins have come up with their own devices — such as wooden shutters and leisurely lunches — to combat the soaring afternoon heat. I’d never actually laid eyes on an air-conditioner until I arrived in New York. My wife and I had one at our old apartment which we took with us to our current place, where it has remained wrapped up in the closet ever since. As a foreigner living in a foreign land, I don’t wish to tell people how to live, but there are several advantages to enjoying your summer AC-free.

Not taking into account the needs of small children and the elderly, the air-conditioner actually presents more health problems than it alleviates. Exposure to temperature extremes can encourage allergies while doing no good whatsoever to skin, eyes or throat. More significantly, habitual AC use prevents any possibility of a natural acclimatization to warm weather, perpetuating the very problem it is intended to relieve. Precisely for this reason people feel the effect of the heat all the more as soon as they step outside — where the air-conditioner continues to make its presence felt in the form of that irritating drip that has a habit of landing on your shoulder instead of the sidewalk.

Unfortunately, this is not the only threat to the well-being of Manhattan’s pedestrians. So prevalent is AC use that it’s not uncommon for store-bought air-conditioners to be installed improperly. A few years ago an upstairs neighbor’s hefty appliance was destroyed after plummeting onto our second floor terrace (which, fortunately, we were not eating dinner on at the time). Last September a 67-year-old man was hospitalized after an AC unit fell six floors before bouncing off a canopy and hitting him in the head as he walked his dog down Second Avenue.

A more long-term concern is the enormous waste generated by continuous and unrestrained air-conditioner use. Studies have proven that the average AC unit wastes 40% of its input energy, while research suggests that air-conditioners use up over 15% of a home’s annual energy consumption. Needless to say, all of this puts a major demand on the electrical power grid. Just today both the AC and my computer abruptly shut down when a colleague attempted to use the office microwave. Luckily I’m not the one paying the Con Edison bill.

When I dared broach this issue with my boss his quipped response (“Go back to f***ing England”) suggested the matter was not open for discussion. It seems air-conditioning has become so deeply embedded in our culture that its necessity cannot even be questioned. Even elevator small-talk has been reduced to an impromptu appreciation of the air-conditioner’s savior-like qualities, and how it has once again rescued us all from an otherwise brutal summer of pure misery. New York’s latest heatwave should come as no surprise to anyone who’s spent a July here before, but if these same people were denied their precious AC I get the feeling they’d collapse not due to heat exhaustion but rather from sheer panic. Just what exactly are they so afraid of?

There are so many elements to the New York summer that make it such a pleasurable experience for the senses: a daily diet of gazpacho and watermelon, intermittent bursts of salsa wafting from an open window, the glistening patina of perspiration on tanned limbs… Like it or not, summer’s here and it’s going to get hot. So what if you sweat a little? It’s nothing a cold beer can’t fix.

Friday Night Lights

Where were you ten years ago tonight? I was at San Siro.

“Luci a San Siro di quella sera
che c’è di strano siamo stati tutti là
ricordi il gioco dentro la nebbia
tu ti nascondi e se ti trovo ti amo là”

There’s a very special moment when you enter one of the world’s great football stadia for the first time. You’ve not even begun to look for your seat yet; you’re pacing around the external perimeter looking to match the apparently random series of numbers stenciled onto concrete to those printed on your ticket. Fans hurry past you in the opposite direction and you begin to move more briskly because you fear kick-off is approaching when, through a break in the concrete, you catch a glimpse of what awaits on the inside. The crowd, the grass, the noise. I still remember that moment at Milan’s Stadio Giuseppe Meazza, better known as San Siro, where, having undergone a routine frisking by the carabinieri, I climbed up the stadium’s vast swirling ramps and spiralled staircases to reach the second tier. Finally locating my section, I stepped out into the blinding glare of the floodlit arena just as the away team was being announced. I looked up and saw the smiling face of Barcelona full-back Sergi being projected from the scoreboard, a beaming mug-shot that provoked nothing but a cacophony of furious whistles from the 80,000 home fans. I gathered my bearings and found my seat. I’d seen innumerable matches at San Siro from the comfort of my living room, and one hot day in August as a fourteen-year-old I’d even implored my dad to take a detour off Milan’s tangenziale, just to spend ten minutes wandering the dusty car park of the deserted stadium. But none of that prepared me for my first experience inside this storied venue which was, and remains, indescribable.

Television does not convey even half of what goes on inside the stadium. San Siro is built with steep tiers that put you on top of the action, and every tackle or attacking move is met with deafening roars of furious disapproval or wild applause. Despite the undoubted glamour of the fixture — Milan vs. Barcelona in the Champions League — I remember little about the match itself, which finished 3-3 (Rivaldo scored a hat-trick and Albertini hit two memorable goals from outside the box). For the bulk of the ninety minutes I was mesmerized by the Curva Sud, where Milan’s strongest supporters’ groups, the Fossa dei Leoni (Lion’s Den) and Brigate Rossonere (Red-and-Black Brigade), congregate. Gigantic flags were unfurled and waved at intervals, huge drums were pounded throughout the match, and goals were celebrated with unruly pink flares. Throughout the evening my gaze became fixated on the top of the curva, where on a plexiglass partition separating the second and third tiers sat a row of a hundred, maybe two hundred pairs of denim-clad legs belonging to calcio-obsessed ragazzi like myself. I went to bed that night with the noise of the crowd still ringing in my ears, unable to quite comprehend where I’d just spent the evening.

ticket

I was twenty-one, and studying for a year in the university town of Pavia, just south of Milan. It didn’t take me long to lose interest in the routinely shambolic Italian higher education system, and I instead began devoting as much time as possible to more pressing cultural opportunities, namely learning Italian and watching calcio. The first of these goals was achieved with minimum effort, as my roommate, a devout milanista named Federico, and I, hit it off immediately. The second required little work on my part either, as Pavia was just a thirty-minute train journey away from Milano Centrale, from where San Siro was a simple ride away aboard Milan’s basic metropolitana.

To my surprise tickets for games at San Siro were easy to obtain, and considerably cheaper than those for matches in the Premier League. I bought a season ticket for the second group stage of the Champions League for 90,000 lire, roughly the cost of a single ticket for a pre-season friendly at Leicester City. I had discovered that Milan tickets could be purchased at my local branch of the Cariplo bank, one of Milan’s sponsors. So as soon as tickets were made available (often less than a week before the match), I dutifully waited in line with local pavesi women in fur coats looking to pay a bill or collect their pension. At the counter I was met with a bleary-eyed cashier, who removed the cigarette from his mouth just long enough to ask me if I had a seating preference. I felt I must be inconveniencing the poor banker who’d been lumbered with the additional task of dispensing football tickets, and I was always amused by how, with a quick tap on the keyboard, his monitor switched from a checking account to a colourful San Siro seating chart.


Considering I wasn’t an account holder, over the next few months I found myself visiting that bank fairly frequently, and I was soon able to tell the cashier precisely where I wished to be seated: secondo anello rosso, preferably right of centre, which was closer to the Curva Sud but still central enough to watch the game closely. I became drawn to San Siro in a way that even drew bewilderment from my football-loving Italian friends. I remember a group of ragazzi looking at me incredulously one cold wet night in January, when I declined their offer of dinner in favour of Milan’s Coppa Italia semi-final with Fiorentina.

I made a habit of seeing Milan more than Inter, primarily because I’d always been simpatizzante towards the rossoneri since I’d fallen in love with calcio a decade earlier. The team coached by Sacchi and Capello had dominated Italian and European football in the late-eighties and early-nineties, and I’d grown up watching Baresi & Co. carving victories out of the Milanese fog. Plus Federico was milanista, and he’d have probably thrown me out had he found out I’d paid to watch Inter. Of course, thanks to my ties to Florence my real team was Fiorentina, who I saw beat Milan 2-1 at San Siro. Against Inter, I wore my Viola scarf defiantly, trying to ignore the stares of the several thousand nerazzurri fans that surrounded me. Perhaps fortunately for me, Fiorentina were hammered 4-2. Away from the bright lights of the stadium it was a different story, and I always removed my scarf or anything that would signal my allegiance before returning to the station around midnight.

* * *

It was a far from vintage season for either Milanese club. Milan had slid out of the Champions League at the second group stage after drawing three home games with Galatasary, Paris Saint-Germain and Deportivo La Coruna, thus ending their hopes of disputing that year’s final at San Siro. Despite some impressive earlier results — including a 2-0 victory over Barcelona at Camp Nou and a convincing 3-2 league win over eventual scudetto winners Roma — this was the final straw for Milan president Silvio Berlusconi, who’d never truly warmed to Zaccheroni nor his insistence on a three-man defence. “Zac” was replaced in March by former Milan captain Cesare Maldini (Paolo’s dad), who immediately reintroduced a 4-4-2 system.

Inter’s season had been thrown into jeopardy as early as August, when they suffered a humiliating exit from the preliminary round of the Champions League at the hands of Swedish minnows Helsingborg. A 1-0 defeat at Reggina on Serie A’s opening day led to Marcello Lippi’s resignation; 1982 World Cup hero Marco Tardelli took over the reigns of what would prove to be one of Inter’s darkest seasons in living memory. Having been relegated to the UEFA Cup, the team was knocked out of that competition too by unfashionable Spanish outfit Alaves, after which fans demonstrated their disapproval by burning stadium seats and launching a makeshift incendiary device at the Inter team bus. Domestic results hadn’t helped matters: the entire Curva Nord boycotted the first half of a league match with Atalanta, returning in the second half with a banner that read “Sorry we’re late: did we miss anything?” The afternoon concluded in infamy when a group of Inter fans hurled a motor scooter from the second tier of the stadium onto seats below.

Consequently, by the time the second Milanese derby of the season came around, both sides were effectively out of the title race. In truth, neither side had ever really looked like challenging for the championship. Roma had led the way since the autumn, with Juventus and Lazio in closest pursuit. Although both Milanese clubs were still looking to secure a place in the following season’s Champions League, unusually this derby would not have a direct bearing on the outcome of the scudetto. Yet so much of Italy’s media is based in Milan that the match was still awarded the usual high dosage of hype and hyperbole.


The Milanese derby is known locally as Il Derby della Madonnina, after the little gold Madonna that sits atop the main spire of the city’s Duomo. Due to the upcoming general election on Sunday, unusually the match had been brought forward to a Friday night, and weekend optimism bounced through the sunny May evening as I stepped off the train just in time for aperitivo. It was still light when I strolled from the Lotto metro stop to San Siro. Inside, the stadium was bulging. Clearly more tickets had been sold than actually existed, as myself and a pair of teenage girls wearing Inter scarves found ourselves sharing two seats between the three of us in the front row of the second tier. At my feet a Milan fan lay horizontally so as not to obscure our view, his head propped up by his elbow as if watching television on the living room rug.

Milan and Inter fans are renowned for their generally amicable coexistence, though the derby is always a little different, and the usual deafening atmosphere inside San Siro was spiced with a unique sense of anticipation unlike any I’d experienced during previous visits. The stadium choreography for which Italian fans are known takes months of preparation in secrecy, and Milan and Inter ultràs go to extraordinary lengths to out-do each other in what is an integral part of the pre-derby show. Each curva reveals its efforts shortly before the teams take the field, inciting fans and lending the game further sense of occasion. Milan began by unveiling the giant head of a salivating devil which spanned the height of the second tier, while fans either side held up red and black paper to make a checkerboard effect. Fans cheered and applauded. Inter responded with a gigantic version of its logo and club symbol, il biscione, the snake. Underneath a banner read: “F.C. INTER: ETERNO AMORE”. More polite applause. But Milan’s fans weren’t quite finished. As Inter’s applause faded they unfurled an extra banner off the edge of the tier, in which the hands of the devil were seen to choke the life out of Inter’s snake. Cheers and laughter filled the stadium. 1-0 to Milan, and the teams hadn’t even kicked-off yet.




The pre-match formalities out of the way, all that remained was the game itself, and suddenly I remembered why I was here. Perhaps ceding to fan pressure, coach Maldini had dropped the out-of-favour German striker Oliver Bierhoff, instead partnering Andriy Shevchenko with Gianni Comandini. The young Italian forward had made only a handful of appearances so far, so it appeared unlikely that he should be thrown into the mix in such an important match. But before anyone could begin to question the decision Comandini was already on the scoresheet, having latched on to Serginho’s defence-splitting pass to slide the ball past Inter goalkeeper Sebastien Frey with just two minutes and forty seconds on the clock. The early goal settled Milan, and Inter struggled to react. Shortly afterwards, Serginho found space again on the left wing. The Brazilian winger’s inviting cross was met at the near post by Comandini who doubled his tally and Milan’s lead. Less than twenty minutes had passed and Maldini’s gamble looked to be already paying off.

Derby matches are historically tight affairs, so it in some ways a surprise when Milan added a third goal shortly after half-time. Federico Giunti, starting only due to Albertini’s absence, curled in a dangerous free-kick from the right. Neither attackers nor defenders got a head to the ball and it bounced once in front of Frey, wrong-footing the keeper and landing in the unguarded net. Giunti correctly claimed the goal, the nature and the circumstances of which immediately reminded me of another match on which Milan had imposed a total domination. In the 1994 European Cup final against a strongly-fancied Barcelona, the rossoneri had raced into a two-goal lead through Daniele Massaro, before Dejan Savicevic had scored his side’s third goal with a deft lob from a similar position to Giunti’s on the right wing, effectively ending the contest. Milan ended up 4-0 victors that night in Athens. Where would the scoreline end tonight?

comandinigiunti

The fourth goal wasn’t long in coming. Once again Serginho showed his pace down the left flank, beating Matteo Ferrari to the ball by leaping to swing in a cross with both feet, as if his legs were bound together like those of a table football player. At the far post, Shevchenko got his head first to the ball to put the result beyond any lingering doubt. By now Inter fans had begun to leave the stadium in droves, their home derby having turned into a festa milanista. “Siam’ venuti fin qua, siam’ venuti fin qua, per vedere segnare Sheva!” (“We’ve come here to see Sheva score”) sang the rossoneri faithful, to the tune of Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer”. It was all too much for one overly sensitive Inter supporter, who ran onto the pitch and attempted to altercate with Alessandro Costacurta as he prepared to take a free-kick. Milan’s veteran defender barely reacted, and the fan was escorted swiftyly from the playing field to a chorus of whistles and derision.

For Inter’s shell-shocked players the final whistle couldn’t come soon enough. Television cameras next to the Inter bench caught Tardelli mouthing “Mamma mia…” while looking to the heavens. Yet again the club’s summer spending had failed to generate results. Ronaldo had missed the entire season through a second injury to his patellar ligament, and despite a potent strikeforce comprised of Christian Vieri and Alvaro Recoba, a supporting cast of newcomers such as Farinos, Dalmat and Gresko had failed to have the desired impact. Milan took full advantage. The Georgian defender Kakha Kaladze had slotted instantly into the side since arriving from Dynamo Kiev during the January transfer window. It was Kaladze who made Milan’s fifth goal, drilling in a low cross from the left which Shevchenko pounced on before the oncoming Frey.

San Siro was now quite literally rocking, and I felt the concrete stands vibrating under my feet. Few Inter fans probably saw the sixth goal, their numbers having begun to dwindle rapidly around the hour mark. Milanisti meanwhile had begun to cheer every pass, leaping on the terraces, their arms locked in unison, enjoying chants of “Chi non salta nerazzurra è, è!” (“Whoever’s not jumping is an Inter fan”). There was a pause in their celebrations just long enough to witness man of the match Serginho burst through Inter’s tired back line and end the rout. Six-nil, sei a zero.

* * *

MILAN 6 STREPITOSA! screamed the front page of Saturday’s Gazzetta (the number six, or “sei”, is also Italian for “you are”). It was Milan’s first derby win in the league since November 1993 (although they had beaten Inter 5-0 in a Coppa Italia fixture in January 1998). The result sealed Inter’s miserable season and allowed Milan to end their season on an unforgettable high-note. Ironically, Inter actually finished two points ahead of Milan in Serie A, yet both teams failed to qualify for the following season’s Champions League. Not even Silvio Berlusconi’s election victory over Francesco Rutelli (a Lazio fan) two days later could divert attention away from the biggest story of the weekend.

Inter struggled to recover: thumped 4-2 in the next derby, they lost the 2001-02 scudetto on the last day of the season with a shattering defeat at Lazio. The inerazzurri were further frustrated by consecutive Champions League exits in 2003 and 2005 against a Milan side that now included Dario Simic, Andrea Pirlo and Clarence Seedorf, all three of whom had been sold to their city rivals. Inter’s fortunes were resurrected in the wake of calciopoli, the team winning four consecutive titles and racking up a 4-0 derby win in 2009. Milan won the Champions League under Carlo Ancelotti in 2003 and 2007, a trophy which continued to elude Inter until Jose Mourinho led the club to a treble success in 2010.

But the night of May 11, 2001 is hard to forget for either club’s many ardent followers. Less than half an hour after the match had ended I remember seeing a fan already sporting a “6-0” t-shirt on the red line back to Milano Centrale. Today memorabilia commemorating the occasion can still be seen for sale outside the stadium and around the city, while fans and pundits still recall that historic night with a degree of disbelief, suggesting the result has never truly sunk in.

comandini

And what of Gianni Comandini? The two-goal hero of the derby didn’t quite lived up to expectations as one of Serie A’s most promising strikers. In June 2001 — just a month after the derby — Milan sold their number nine to Atalanta for 30 billion lire. He spent the next four seasons at the Bergamo club, with loan spells at Genoa and Ternana, before persistent injuries forced him into retirement at the age of 29. In 2006 he opened a restaurant in his hometown of Cesena, where he has been known to make appearances for Polisportiva Forza Vigne, an amateur club founded by his father, Paolo.

Comandini’s career at Milan can be summed up in that one night at San Siro: his brace against Inter constitutes his only two league goals for the club. I returned to San Siro one last time that season for Milan’s final home game against Brescia (primarily to see great Roberto Baggio in the flesh). I left Pavia, graduated, and moved back to Florence, where one summer evening my wallet was stolen as I was exiting a supermarket. I didn’t care about losing my Italian social security card, bank cards or even the sixty euros I had on me. But the plastic Champions League 2000-01 season ticket that bore my name, and that I’d carried around with me for three years, was gone forever.

In the last decade I’ve watched countless more matches from San Siro on television, both Serie A and Champions League, in bars in Florence and on my sofa at home in New York. Even today, when it’s a big game, I recall instantly the relentless sound of that chanting crowd, their beating drums reverberating through the red mist and fog, and I still can’t quite believe that I too was once there. I wonder if Comandini ever feels the same.

“Ma dammi indietro la mia seicento
i miei vent’anni ed una ragazza che tu sai
Milano scusa stavo scherzando
luci a San Siro non ne accenderanno più.”

–“Luci a San Siro”, Roberto Vecchioni

I Was Dreaming When I Wrote This

ARE U READY? A calm female voice pierces the darkness. The palpable sense of anticipation among the 20,000 people crammed into Madison Square Garden is ignited as the New Power Generation lays down a hard blues-funk groove. Moments later, a dark figure rises slowly into view, a Telecaster slung across his dimunitive frame completing his silhouette. He takes his position in the center of the glyph-shaped stage, motionless in four-inch platform heels, his gold rhinestone-covered playsuit dazzling amid a multitude of camera flashes. Finally the artist most people never stopped calling Prince introduces himself: “From the heart of Minnesota/Here come the purple Yoda!” The song is “Laydown”, a hidden track from his most recent album, 20Ten. For a man who’s enjoyed hit records in each of the last four decades it’s an unexpected choice of opener, but Prince has made a career out of defying odds and logic to keep fans and critics guessing, and at fifty-two isn’t about to stop now. How else could a five-foot-two Jehovah’s Witness from the Midwest generate such excitement?

I’ve been a fan of Prince’s for as long as I’ve been listening to pop music but I’d never had the chance to see him perform live – until tonight. The first songs of his I remember hearing as a child were “1999” and “Little Red Corvette”. Though both huge stand-alone hits, I’ve never been able to separate them in my mind, probably because the two tracks run straight into each other on the first side of the 1999 double LP. Perhaps Prince feels the same way, as he immediately presents both songs back-to-back, almost as if to atone for having started the show with a song most people have never heard (or heard of). The drum machine and synth intro to “1999” is instantly familiar, and by the end of the number Prince has the crowd chanting “Paarr-tay!” like it’s 1982. He even breaks the song down to funk guitar and falsetto for the spoken-child portion which closes the track (“Mommy, why does everybody have a bomb?”). Twenty-eight years after its release (and eleven since its supposed obsolescence), this vintage slice of Minneapolis dance-funk still sounds like it was written last week, and if a more irrefutable summons to the floor has been recorded since I’ve yet to hear it.

In contrast, “Little Red Corvette” is initially unrecognizable, as Prince strikes a single extended note repeatedly on his guitar, which he then perfectly mimics with his own voice. Only when he gets to the brilliant first line, “I guess I should’ve known by the way you parked your car sideways that it wouldn’t last”, does the crowd recognize the song that is still heard daily on every FM radio station. The song speeds up for the hand-clapped chorus but then shifts tempo once again. “Slow down!” Prince begins to cry, until he has the crowd chanting it like a mantra. Bathed in a red light and half-hidden by plumes of smoke, he revels in some trademark solo dance moves until the song atmospherically shuffles to a halt.

By the time I gather myself, Prince is already seated at a purple piano at the swirly part of the stage. “Can I talk… to the ladies?” His request is met with wild approval, and he dives into “The Beautiful Ones”, the dramatic ballad from Purple Rain. For this number he is joined on stage by Misty Copeland, a promising ballerina who had been granted a night off from her regular gig at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Prince steps away from the piano to engage the young performer as she swings her legs in the air and twirls her long flowing dress. They’re the kind of moves he might have busted himself twenty-five years ago, but for once, on this occasion, he’s just happy to watch.

Prince cranks up the energy levels and works up the crowd during stretched-out funkathon “Controversy”. “Who wanna dance with me?” he asks as a backing singer pulls audience members out of what must be a sort of celebrity pen down by the stage. The first guest, a woman named Paula, is quickly booted (“Get off the stage!”) for her apparent lack of dancing skills. Prince repeats the joke with reality star Kim Kardashian (“She might be too sexy…”), whose complete failure to indulge her host and subsequent dismissal is met with howls of derision. “Welcome to America,” Prince quips. “Where you can get famous for doing nothing at all!”

The lengthy intro to “Purple Rain” begins in total blackness, and as the outline of the stage is gradually picked out in purple lights, as if being drawn by a magic glow-in-the-dark pen, the crowd enjoys several rounds of the song’s “Ooh, ooh, ooh-ooh” refrain before Prince has even finished his refreshment break. Prince seems to recognize that this is a key number in the set, but doesn’t let that get in the way of his sense of humor. “Y’all mind if I play my guitar?” he politely asks mid-way through, before launching into a mesmerizing four-minute solo, his face contorting like a man possessed.

Returning to the stage in a loose gold silk shirt, a relaxed Prince segues between two of his most radio-friendly hits: “Raspberry Beret” and “Cream”. Such is their common bouncing groove you’d be forgiven for thinking both songs had been designed to be performed together, had they not been written years apart. Prince is clearly in a playful mood, and is joined by the Roots’ ?uestlove for a joyous rendition of “Cool”, a semi-forgotten relic originally written for Morris Day’s The Time. More galvanic funk follows, with “Let’s Work” and “U Got The Look” closing the set.

Just over an hour has passed, but Prince is just warming up. He returns not five minutes later to dedicate “Nothing Compares 2 U” to his first drummer, Bobby Z, who suffered a heart attack last week. The song was originally written for The Family in 1985 — Prince never recorded the song in the studio but has occasionally performed it as a duet in live shows, this time with the stunning Shelby Johnson. What became a whiny melodramatic hit single for Sinead O’Connor is presented here as a warm ode to a couple’s reconciliation. “Real music by real musicians!” exclaims Prince as he exits the stage. “Support the arts!”

prince 2

Warm-up act Cee-lo Green returns to perform his Gnarls Barkley hit, “Crazy”, with Prince taking on routine guitar duties. Now dressed in matching red silk shirt and loose-fitting pants, notably Prince is wearing flat shoes (rumor has it that years of performing in platforms have apparently taken their toll). Prince seems keen to get things back on track, and though his height is now compromised, from here the show only grows in stature.

Immediately, the words “Dearly beloved” generate predictably rapturous excitement from all those in the crowd who think Purple Rain is Prince’s best album. But few songs are as hard to ignore as “Let’s Go Crazy” so who can blame them? The song briefly slips into “Delirious” before returning on course in time for Prince to embark on another mind-altering guitar solo, as purple discs of confetti explode from canons mounted beside the stage. It would have made for the ultimate show opener, but despite what we’ve just witnessed it’s not 1984 anymore so he’s free to play what he likes. Prince returns to the keyboard for “When Doves Cry”, but when he gets to the part about “You and I engaged in a kiss”, he interrupts himself to switch to the inimitable guitar twang of “Kiss” before he can say the operative word. Inevitably, the extended live version cannot match the spare production of the studio recording, but Prince certainly has fun, even updating the lyrics. “You don’t have to watch… The L Word,” he snarls, suggesting perhaps that it’s a few years since the cable bill was renewed at Paisley Park.

As if suddenly feeling pressed for time, Prince seems keen to remind us of the sheer depth of his back catalogue. Returning to the piano (which is evidently fitted with some kind of advanced version of iTunes) Prince begins indecisively plucking for several minutes from a pre-programmed roster of classic songs, of which we sadly only get to hear snippets. I personally would have preferred to hear a couple in their entirety. “Too many hits!” he jokes, by way of an explanation for this teasing dalliance. This segment is made further distracting by Prince’s ill-advised decision to invite members of the celebrity pen on-stage (of whom I can make out only Chris Rock and the already disgraced Kardashian), most of whom seem unsure what to do with themselves. The one exception is an unidentified man who begins an unprovoked solo jig in the middle of the stage, prompting Prince to call a halt to the medley in mock panic: “Security!”

Finally, Prince settles on a song, climbing atop his piano for “If I Was Your Girlfriend.” Though one of his most mature studies of male-female relations, he still prefaces it with a warning: “If we play that somebody gonna get pregnant.” So many artists have appropriated Prince’s penchant for slow ballads that it’s easy to forget that he practically invented the genre in its modern form, and has recorded enough bedroom songs to account for others’ entire careers. As if reminded of the fact himself, Prince — now lying flat on the piano’s closed lid — segues into “Insatiable”, “Scandalous” and “Adore”. He slowly makes his way around the stage, at one point even feigning physical exhaustion in a move borrowed directly from James Brown. The pace of the first two hours finally subsides, and we are treated to an intense tour-de-force of vocal prowess and falsetto showmanship, in which Prince overwhelmingly redeems for his previous misstep. Arguably the evening’s highlight, it’s an unforgettable twenty-minute suite that leaves every woman in the audience on her knees and this grown man in tears.

* * *

I regret never having seen Prince at his commercial peak. Tonight the quirky musicians, jazz-funk horns, extended show-stoppers and overt sexuality of his mid-eighties shows are sorely missed. But though he may lack the moves and urgency (if not the energy) of a performer in his prime, the evening is indisputable confirmation that both his voice and guitar (he played the same beat-up Telecaster — the one from 1999‘s inner-sleeve — throughout) sound better than ever. So much speculation has surrounded the more intriguing aspects of his career that his unfathomable talent has at times been taken for granted. Yet he has emerged from his commercial heyday as arguably the most timeless songwriter and gifted performer of his generation. I remember a brazen British journalist once called Prince the “Mozart of the Twentieth-Century”. While it’s highly possible we’ll still be hearing “Raspberry Beret” on the radio centuries from now, given his prolific output, sheer versatility and irreversible effect on popular culture it might be more accurate to nominate him the “Picasso of Music”.

Prince has always conveyed a sense of “otherness”, shattering stereotypes and boundaries surrounding race, sexuality, gender — and of course music — without ever compromising his authenticity or razor wit. Perhaps more than any artist since the Beatles, his endless talent and insistence on total creative control has forged not only a genre (or several), but a world unto himself that’s far bigger than him. He even had to invent an unpronounceable name for it. Part shy nature, part calculated career ploy, Prince’s coyness has served only to enhance his mystique, and as tonight’s show progressed I became aware that we were experiencing something greater than just a concert, something far more powerful that transcends both performer and audience. For all the hits and guitar solos and wisecracks, the evening feels like a celebration of “Prince” — not the man nor the music necessarily, or even the fans, but rather the unique purple universe that those three things have created. It’s not easy to define but you know it when you hear it because it sounds and feels like nothing else.

The house lights come up, but as the buzzing crowd begins to filter from its seats Prince and the band unexpectedly reemerge, almost apologetically. “We just can’t leave!” he explains, before launching into the vaguely spiritual “Mountains”, one of my favorite Revolution-era tracks, from the magnificent if oft-overlooked Parade album (“Once upon a time in a land called fantasy…”) Not for the first time tonight the set-list seems to take even Prince by surprise, and the number morphs seamlessly into The Jacksons’ “Shake Your Body”, as if he’d suddenly spotted the two songs’ shared heavenly groove.

An early predecessor of the multi-racial, cross-gender genre-hopping that Prince took to new levels was Sly & The Family Stone, whose 1968 hit “Everyday People” is next to be given the purple treatment. Prince’s brain now seems to be operating on some kind of musical stream of consciousness, as he is apparently transformed into a sort of human jukebox. The effect is almost like watching Prince off-duty, jamming on old favourites, but it’s all in a night’s work. Delving deeper into the pop archive, he raises his arms skyward and implores, “I wanna take you hiiiigh-err!” Sadly for the rest of us there’s nowhere else to go from here but down.

Prince
Madison Square Garden, New York
February 7, 2011

Laydown
1999
Little Red Corvette
The Beautiful Ones
Controversy
Purple Rain
Raspberry Beret
Cream
Cool
Let’s Work
U Got The Look
Nothing Compares 2 U

Intermission

Crazy (with Cee-Lo Green)
Let’s Go Crazy
Delirious
Dreamer
Welcome 2 America
When Doves Cry
Kiss
Nasty Girl
Forever In My Life
Sign ‘O’ The Times
Alphabet St.
A Love Bizarre
Hot Thing
Pop Life
I Would Die 4 U
Single Ladies
If I Was Your Girlfriend
Insatiable
Scandalous
Adore

Encore
Mountains
Shake Your Body (The Jacksons cover)
Everyday People (Sly & The Family Stone cover)
I Want To Take You Higher (Sly & The Family Stone cover)

Ciao Vecio: Italy Mourns the End of an Era

In Italy they call him “il Vecio”, the old man. But in 1982 Italy coach Enzo Bearzot was a tanned, lithe 54-year-old in the prime of middle-age, a newly-crowned world champion who had led his team to the most unlikeliest of achievements. The nickname (from his native friulano) never had much to do with age but rather a unique Italian personality. Cool, educated and deeply spiritual, Bearzot was an icon of the Italian game who in some ways seemed to belong to another time. An avid fan of music and literature, before the World Cup celebrations had even subdued he’d already hopped a flight to New York to hit some jazz clubs. As a football coach he was incredibly self-confident but never arrogant, instilling in his teams “la forza del gruppo” or group strength, a model on which all top sides are today built. Though he made occasional contributions to La Gazzetta dello Sport, in the final months before his death in Milan yesterday Bearzot only left the house to attend mass or buy the newspaper. Il Vecio had finally become an old man.

Coincidentally, Bearzot died on December 21 just as Vittorio Pozzo — who masterminded Italy’s first two World Cup wins in 1934 and 1938 — had forty-two years ago. Yet nothing about Bearzot’s unremarkable playing days hinted at the success that awaited him as a World Cup-winning coach. Born in Aiello del Friuli in 1927, Bearzot enjoyed a modest footballing career with Inter, Catania and Torino. His role was that of defensive midfielder, known in Italy as mediano, an unfashionable position generally reserved for those blessed with a strong willingness and work ethic rather than any particular flair or natural skill. Over the course of eighteen years he earned just one appearance for the national team, in 1955 against Hungary in Budapest. Italy lost the match, but the Italian marked the legendary Ferenc Puskas out of the game.

After “una vita da mediano” he quit the game in 1964 and immediately went into coaching, beginning as an assistant at Torino before taking over at third division Tuscan side Prato. Prato’s ninth place finish in Serie C Girone B at the end of 1968-69 season would be his last involvement with club football. Instead Bearzot fell into the fold of the national team, with which he embarked upon a seventeen-year odyssey that saw him rise to a role of true protagonist in a period marked by various disappointments and one unforgettable accomplishment.

Bearzot coached Italy’s under-23 side for six years before being brought in to assist existing national team coach Fulvio Bernardini in 1975. Essentially it was Bernardini who remained as Bearzot’s assistant until 1977, when the Friulan unabashedly took sole control with a World Cup less than a year away. Some accused him of weaving a takeover plot behind Bernardini’s back, and skeptics continued to cite a lack of experience as Italy prepared for the 1978 World Cup in Argentina. Bearzot’s slim CV did not seem to overly concern him: “You don’t need a degree in cibernetics to coach the national team,” he once retorted. Though he’d never coached in Serie A, he was already a veteran of two World Cups, having travelled as assistant coach to Ferruccio Valcareggi to Mexico in 1970 and West Germany in 1974.

Criticism rarely bothered Bearzot. At Rome’s Stadio Olimpico, during Italy’s final friendly match before the 1978 World Cup, he had endured chants of “Sce-mo! Sce-mo!” (Stupid! Stupid!) directed at him by the few thousand fans who’d shown up to support a sterile national team. But though he claimed to give little weight to popular opinion, Bearzot’s inclusion of the youngsters Antonio Cabrini and Paolo Rossi in his 22-man squad suggested the coach had finally succumbed to outside pressure (a theory he always denied). Surprisingly, on the pitch it mattered little. In Argentina an attractive Italy side beat France and the hosts before eventually losing in a third-place play-off, a fourth-place finish they equalled two years later at the European Championships held in Italy. Despite the usual reservations, Italy produced arguably the best football of both tournaments. The 1982 World Cup was still two years away, but the groundwork for that remarkable victory had been laid.

bearzot tardelli

Though Italy’s win in Spain came as a beautiful surprise to most, Bearzot exuded a calm confidence from the outset. “I believe in the spirit I’ve infused in my group of players,” he said, a month before the tournament started. “I’m convinced we might struggle against Poland, Peru and even Cameroon, but we’ll do much better in the next round. In the end my winning mentality will triumph.” However prophetic this statement would prove, to his closest confidants the coach confessed to feeling like Gary Cooper in High Noon: a lonely man with the entire world against him. Not even he anticipated just to what extent Italy would struggle during the group phase, managing only to grind out three uninspiring draws.

Not for the first time, Bearzot’s selection process had raised eyebrows. A preference for Paolo Rossi was primary cause for concern. The striker had shone in Argentina four years earlier but had missed the last two years following a ban from football for his alleged involvement in a betting scandal. Meanwhile Serie A’s top scorer for the last two seasons, Roma’s Roberto Pruzzo, had failed to even make the squad. On such matters il Vecio was typically of one mind. “Gossip, rumour, Italian chitter-chatter,” he said, dismissing accusations. “I don’t chit-chat — that’s what makes me different from other Italians.” Tension with the Italian media had reached an all-time high, resulting in Bearzot’s enforcement of an infamous silenzio stampa which vetoed all outside communication. Many still point to this unprecedented act as the turning point in Italy’s campaign, as it allowed the players to train in peace and focus on their path to glory.

In the second group phase Bearzot’s decisions were quickly forgotten as a revitalized Italy disposed first of holders Argentina, and then tournament favourites Brazil in a match which many still rank as the greatest ever. Stopper Claudio Gentile was praised for effectively marking (by any means possible) Maradona and Zico out of both games. Paolo Rossi scored a hat-trick against Brazil and two more goals in the next match as Italy brushed aside Poland in the semi-final. Suddenly, Italy were in the World Cup final against a bulky but tired West Germany, and by the time his team took to the field in Madrid’s Estadio Santiago Bernabeu Bearzot’s confidence in himself and his players had peaked. Not even Cabrini’s first-half penalty miss could veer the ship off its course.

What followed on the evening of July 11th 1982, has entered into Italian footballing folklore, and the sights and sounds of that night in Madrid are etched upon the country’s national consciousness. Marco Tardelli’s crazed sprint following his team’s second goal (to this day referred to in Italy simply as “l’urlo”), President Sandro Pertini (who many observers called Italy’s political answer to Bearzot) waving his arms in the stands, RAI commentator Nando Martellini’s triple cry of “Campioni del mondo! Campioni del mondo! Campioni del mondo!” at the final whistle, the famously documented game of cards on the plane home. After netting his sixth goal of the tournament in the final, Rossi finished the competition as winner of the Golden Boot. “I am what I am because of him,” he said today of Bearzot. “He was like a father to me.”

When the final whistle blew in the Bernabeu, Bearzot turned to his assistant coach Cesare Maldini and yelled, “I’m never leaving the Italy bench! I’m never leaving it!” After such a long and strained rapport with both press and public, the temptation for many would have been to bow out as world champion and national hero. But Bearzot had forged a rare and oddly personal bond with his country’s national team, to which he always remained connected and associated more than to any club. Despite the tournament’s happy ending he refused to forgive his detractors, who now invited the victorious coach to speak at the post-match press conference. “Don’t you have any more questions for me?” was his response. Of course, leave his position as coach he eventually did, four years later after the World Cup in Mexico, where a lethargic-looking Italy’s lacklustre defence of their title saw them topple to European Champions France in the last sixteen. This time Bearzot had relied too heavily upon the players who’d excelled in Spain, and a cycle which had begun eleven years and 104 games earlier, had finally come to its inevitable conclusion.

* * *

Such tenure at the helm of one of toughest jobs in soccer would appear unthinkable in today’s footballing climate of instant gratification and knee-jerk reactions. Instead it took Bearzot seven years to win over press and fans, and then only after having claimed the sport’s ultimate prize, after a forty-four-year wait. It was a victory for a team which spanned generations. For forty-year-old captain Dino Zoff the World Cup put the seal on a terrific career. Zoff had made his Serie A debut before the teenage Giuseppe Bergomi was even born; the Inter defender only retired in 1999. The success helped galvanize a nation that was still reeling from the anni del piombo, a bleak and tumultuous period in Italian history characterized by social turmoil, political corruption and violent acts of terrorism. For once the Italian people were united in a wholly positive way, and the country entered a period of fresh hope and economic prosperity which continued for most of the rest of the century.

The performance in Spain dispelled many attitudes towards the Italian game, reversing a trend for defensive catenaccio-based tactics which had prevailed since the sixties. Few goals in World Cup finals involve two defenders exchanging passes in the opposition’s penalty box, but Bergomi and Gaetano Scirea did exactly that before laying the ball out to Tardelli to drive home perhaps the most memorable goal in Italy’s World Cup history. By the mid-1980s Italy had become football’s spiritual home thanks in large part to a sudden influx of new money and world talent, a period for which the 1990 World Cup held in Italy was an apex. Only around the turn of the millennium did this view of Italian football shift back again, as the game in Italy began to be viewed with less praise than scorn. By the time the Azzurri conquered the world again in 2006, the bubble that started with Bearzot had burst.

Parallels between Italy’s World Cup feats of 2006 and 1982 are obvious. Both were born out of the rubble of domestic scandal, while both coaches relied on a collective group strength rather than the talents of any one individual. Sadly, there were also similarities in the way both titles were relinquished: just as Bearzot’s aging World Champions had appeared sluggish at Mexico ’86, Lippi’s heroes of Berlin failed to ignite South Africa in 2010. But there the comparisons end. The Italian public never warmed to Lippi or his winning team as they had for Bearzot’s Italy twenty-four years earlier. The rakish, fresh-faced calciatori who beat the world’s very best in 1982 seem like a different species to 2006’s squad of professional athletes, with their shaven heads and tattooed torsos, who combated their way to an intense shoot-out victory. Despite the more recent title, Italians still recall 1982 with fondness, but not simply out of nostalgia. They consider the success more real, more human, more Italian. There were no fireworks at the Bernabeu in 1982, no novelty hats, no headbutts: just emotional embraces and azzurro blue jerseys soaked through with sweat and spumante.

Not long after I moved to Florence I got to know Dott. Fino Fini, Director of the Museo del Calcio at Coverciano (the Italian Federation’s training headquarters). Dott. Fini had been the Italian national team doctor from 1962 to 1982, and the museum was packed with memorabilia from that fertile period. The blue shirts of each player from Bearzot’s winning team were hung in hinged glass frames which swung to reveal the shirt numbers on the other side: 14 Tardelli, 16 Conti, 20 Rossi. In another frame was Bearzot’s entire outfit from that jubilant night in Madrid: grey trousers, blue shirt, navy tie, and the famous blazer, complete with embroidered ITALIA crest. It had always appeared plain white to me on TV, giving its wearer the air of a medical professional, a mediterranean doctor of soccer, but on closer inspection the jacket was made up of narrow navy pinstripes, almost like seersucker. It was a strange feeling to see something in the flesh I’d seen on television a hundred times, like seeing a costume or prop from a favourite movie. Also on display was Bearzot’s trademark pipe, without which he was rarely photographed. “If there was no smoke emanating, that’s when you knew he was a little ticked off,” said Giancarlo Antognoni, who missed out on the 1982 final through injury. Bearzot’s World Cup winners were all quick to recall the human side of il Vecio. “I’d like to remember him sitting on a wall,” said Tardelli. “Smoking his pipe, alone.”

In his later years, Bearzot had become disillusioned with all aspects of the modern game. “I haven’t been to the stadium in a long time,” he revealed a few months before his death. “The stands have become a platform for shouters to hurl the most ferocious insults.” He didn’t much enjoy watching football at home either. “The TV is less likely to make me angry when it’s switched off,” he quipped. His principal complaint arose from a perceived lack of respect among those involved. “It irritates me when former referees insult referees, or when coaches insult other coaches. I’ll never understand those who insult their colleagues.” But Bearzot also expressed concerns over the business of the sport. Speaking of his decision to retire, il Vecio explained, “It appears that money has moved the goalposts. It seems football has become a science, though not an exact one. For me it will always be a game.” Bearzot’s death signals the loss of one of international football’s legendary figures. But perhaps more significantly, it also comes with the undeniable realisation that the game he spoke of is well and truly over.

Enzo Bearzot, 1927-2010

All Mapped Out

A couple of years ago I purchased an original 1974 New York City Transit Authority Subway map, the kind that comes folded to fit into your pocket but when unfurled makes for a beautiful framed addition to one’s home. I won’t tell you what I paid for it, but let’s just say the same amount of money if converted into swipes of my MetroCard could have bought me several trips to Brooklyn and back on the N train. It may seem ridiculous to drop a significant sum of cash on something that was once handed out for free at every subway station, but this particular map has, over the years, earned a special place in the hearts of graphic design fans, cartographers and commuters alike.

Last night I had the pleasure of meeting the map’s creator, Milanese designer Massimo Vignelli, at the Museum of the City of New York. Vignelli had gathered with other “celebrities” of the subway map world for an exhaustive panel discussion entitled The New York City Subway Map – Form v. Function in the Public Realm. Looking like a doyen of style who’d stumbled into a convention for math professors, Vignelli, now 79, recalled how in the late 1960s, not long after he’d opened his studio in New York, he was approached by the city’s Transit Authority to redesign its subway map, which at the time was in desperate need of a graphic update. Around the same time he also introduced the New York subway’s iconic white on black signage (his original of black on white proved too easy to deface). Vignelli’s new map debuted in 1972, and represented a radical departure from its predecessors, in that it abandoned the timeworn convention that the underground map should echo the geography of the (overground) city.

map 1972

Elaborating, Vignelli went on to explain eloquently the difference between a map and a diagram, and how his design was a functional diagram that did not need to double as a map representing the city streets. As a result, his map is full of peculiarities: the Second Avenue F stop appears East of the First Avenue L stop, the 33rd Street 6 stop is north of the 34th Street EE stop, while Central Park is represented by a truncated grey square. These are “mistakes” that according to Vignelli, matter little. Based on a network of horizontal, vertical and 45-degree diagonal lines, with each IRT, IND and BMT line represented by a different color, Vignelli’s design has, according to its creator, a rare, logical beauty that has never been improved upon.

The MTA has sought for over thirty years to improve upon Vignelli’s map, ever since they ditched his beloved (if at times baffling) concept in 1979. Yet in attempting to merge a street map and a subway diagram, New York’s map has in recent years become an increasingly cluttered mess, incorporating bus transfers, tourist information and all manner of other unnecessary extras which only serve to further confuse the straphanger looking to get from A to B (or to the A or B train). John Tauranac, the man who headed up the map’s redesign post-Vignelli, defended some of his original introductions, including the use of one color for grouped lines, such as the ACE or 123. But with the map’s latest incarnation provoking a chorus of scorn, even he admitted that the design now needs a rethink. Eddie Jabbour agreed, going so far as to produce his own map from scratch. His “KickMap” is a clean, fresh alternative to the existing subway map that he even proposed to the MTA. When they declined his offer he converted the idea into an iPhone app, which has already been downloaded by 350,000 users. But surely we can’t rely on the latest technological advances for such an important element of daily city life. While it’s true that most New Yorkers who navigate the subway frequently do so from memory, occasionally we must venture off our routine routes, at which point that graffiti-covered oversize platform map suddenly proves its essential value.

map 2008

In 2008, Men’s Vogue celebrated Vignelli’s 1972 design with a modern-day update (below), retaining the original map’s abstract elegance while eliminating the abnormalities that caused such confusion. To me it seemed the perfect map for New York City’s subway. The lines and their colors are all recognizable, while Vignelli and his work are currently enjoying a reappraisal. His is the only subway map in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection, while his preferred Helvetica is the only typeface to be the subject of a movie. The 1972 map is as much a part of New York’s transport heritage as Checker Cabs.

The reintroduction of a Vignelli-inspired map would provide graphic consistency between the map itself and the subway’s omnipresent signage, which has remained virtually unchanged for over thirty years. Since working with the MTA, Vignelli has been hired to produce similar identities for the subway systems in Washington, D.C. and Milan, as well as for Ferrovie dello Stato, Italy’s national rail network. It strikes me as the last place to embrace function over form, so why does New York, the city where Vignelli made his international name, seem reluctant to reward him with the recognition he deserves?

My Pink Pages

“I don’t understand people who don’t read La Gazzetta dello Sport. Men, at least: I don’t understand them. I just don’t get it.”

— Sandro Veronesi, writer


It didn’t take me long to fall in love with Italy. It took me a little longer to fall in love with football. You’d probably find it hard to believe if you met me today, but in 1988 I was quite indifferent about The Beautiful Game. That was the year I first visited il bel paese (I’d been to Sardinia five years earlier but that doesn’t count, as any Sardinian will tell you). Strolling with my parents through the streets of Florence, Rome and Venice, I was too preoccupied with gelato or the Colosseum or whether to blow all my lire on a die-cast scale model of a Ferrari 308 GTB to notice that I’d stumbled into soccer’s spiritual home. My only football-related memory of that summer is the replica shirts on display at market stalls outside the Uffizi, and being drawn to the azure blue of Napoli — not due to Maradona, but because the team’s jersey was emblazoned with the logo of my favourite chocolate bar.

I was lucky enough to return to Italy the following year, and the year after that, and the one after that, until the question as to where we’d spend our summer holidays was no longer asked. Meanwhile somewhere along the way a light-switch had been flicked and by the time the 1990 World Cup had started I was a borderline soccer obsessive. I don’t know how it happened. The transformation came almost overnight, like magic.

My family had made several Italian friends, and they all loved indulging me in conversations about Gary Lineker or Totò Schillaci. Some friends of ours had a house near the coast of northern Tuscany, not far from Massa-La Spezia. On our way back from the beach we’d often stop for a late afternoon drink at Bar Sport, a dusty little café located between a fork in the road and a railroad crossing. It was operated by a woman and her daughter, and was the kind of place where old men sat and drank aperitivi while kids in flip-flops played videogames in the back. It was here one sultry afternoon that I first came across a newspaper called La Gazzetta dello Sport. I probably first picked it up because it was printed on pale pink paper, something I considered to be most unusual. Once unfolded it covered the entire table, forcing others to lift up their drinks. Most interesting to me however, was that it appeared to be devoted solely to football.

Of course, as its name confirms la Gazzetta is technically a sports daily, but anyone who’s been to Italy knows that sport means 90% football and 10% everything else. That’s how it was for me too. I immediately became fascinated by this alluring and exotic publication, a pink-and-black window into the culture of calcio. It became my portal into a world – Italy, football, Italian football. I already knew I wanted it, and had now been presented with a chance to get to know it better.

Suddenly my visits to Bar Sport became less about liquid refreshment and more about whether or not Sampdoria were really going to sell Gianluca Vialli. My Italian at the time being limited to the usual first words (ciao, grazie, margherita, gelato), I was initially drawn not to the speculative articles but to the daily double-page spread highlighting the goings-on in Serie A’s summer transfer campaign. This section featured a complex table which detailed the players each team had already bought and sold, who they were still hoping to buy, and what the probable starting line-ups would be come the start of the new season.

Soon my first task upon entering a bar, any bar, was to scan for la Gazzetta, which usually lurked folded on the counter or at an empty table. At this point I still didn’t have the money or language skills to justify purchasing the paper for myself, and when the bar’s copy remained occupied I’d sit and fidget impatiently without touching my glass of acqua minerale. But quickly, out of a sheer desire to understand, I picked up the meanings of several words and began to grasp phrases in Italian, albeit most of them football terms and sporting jargon: acquisti, cessioni, trattative, probabile formazione…

Obviously, Italy in the summer is great for lounging poolside but as any Inter fan knows the game isn’t played under the ombrellone. La Gazzetta takes on much greater relevance once the season has begun and there’s some actual football to talk about. Monday’s issue traditionally sells the most copies, since it contains all the reportage and post-mortem of the weekend’s games. My Dad used to travel to Italy for work once or twice a year, and he began bringing Monday’s Gazzetta home for me. This is when I first became aware of le pagelle, the paper’s individual reviews and votes for each player’s performance after each match. According to common pagelle thought, a six is considered sufficiente. Several players have received a nine, but not even Platini, Maradona or Van Basten ever scored a perfect ten.

* * *

In 1992 the British terrestrial network Channel 4 began televising live Serie A matches, a decision which initially coincided with the transfer of English stars Paul Gascoigne, David Platt and Des Walker to Italian clubs. The show quickly transcended these players’ activities however and stuck around long after their Italian adventures had ended. A new legion of Italian soccer fans in the UK were rapidly converted by what was at the time universally considered “the best league in the world”. Particularly popular was the Saturday morning highlights show Gazzetta Football Italia whose host, the peerless James Richardson, would present an irreverent and informed perusal through the week’s football papers from an elegant piazza somewhere in Italy. When I wasn’t hatching a plan to steal Richardson’s job, I was delighted to have a slice of the Italian life I yearned for beamed into my living room.

My family returned to Serriciolo, the town where I’d first picked up la Gazzetta, during the World Cup of 1994. The day we drove down through Switzerland Italy were playing Spain in the quarter-final. I remember because the man in the tollbooth was watching the match on a portable TV and told us the latest score as we exited the autostrada (“Uno-zero, Dino Baggio”). We watched an inspired Italian team dispose of Bulgaria in the semi-final at Bar Sport, where for the final against Romario’s Brazil they moved the TV outside into the car park and set up rows of seats for locals to come and watch. I sat wearing my blue Italy shirt holding a tricolore flag on a stick which I’d bought six years earlier in Siena. I felt a strong connection to the Azzurri — after all, the country had played as much a part in my football life as anywhere else. When Roberto Baggio’s penalty sailed over the bar into the southern California sky those feelings grew even deeper. Women and children were in tears, and powerless ragazzi began hurling plastic and wooden chairs over the fence and onto the train tracks out of sheer frustration. The next morning la Gazzetta had sold out at the local newspaper shop, so the woman who ran the bar gave me her copy as a souvenir. It was stapled, and the front page read “Poker Brasile”.

After high school I began studying Italian at university, and a couple of years later I embarked on a study abroad program in the northern Italian town of Pavia. I moved in with another student named Federico who as luck would have it was a fellow soccer nut, and an avid Milan fan. After our first weekend in the apartment together, he turned to me over breakfast. “It’s Monday,” he said. “Which means there’s something very important you have to do this morning.” “What’s that?” I asked, imagining some typically Italian bureaucratic nightmare I was unaware of, with long queues and unhelpful clerks. Federico’s eyes widened. “Buy la Gazzetta!”

I was delighted to have found a like mind with whom to share my passion for calcio, which had now become a full-blown obsession and a personal area of encyclopedic expertise. In Pavia I’d leave the house each morning with 3,000 lire: 1,500 for la Gazzetta and 1,500 for a coffee at the bar. I’d then come home and read the paper cover to cover at the kitchen table until lunchtime, when Federico and I would eat spaghetti or tortellini and discuss the day’s big stories.

Sometimes we’d even buy Corriere dello Sport, the Rome-based rival to Milan’s Gazzetta. Italy actually has three sports dailies, although I considered Turin’s Tuttosport shameless in both its outlandish front page stories and clear bias towards Juventus. By now I had become fiercely loyal to la Gazzetta, or “la Rosea” as Federico sometimes called it. Both Tuttosport and Corriere are printed on plain off-white newspaper, and neither could entice me as la Gazzetta first had all those years ago.

I spent most weekends in Milan, either shopping or attending a game at San Siro, where la Gazzetta served as both half-time entertainment and a handy seat cushion. Whether on the train or at the stadium I soon realised that carrying la Gazzetta in Italy provided me with a sort of camouflage, a quick and easy prop for instantly fitting in. Just as I’d always been able to identify Italian paninari in London by their 501s and Invicta rucksacks, surely no-one would peg me as a tourist with la Gazzetta tucked under my arm.

Now fluent in Italian, I returned to Cambridge where I was able to continue reading la Gazzetta on a daily basis. Happily for me, more often than not it was the only newspaper left unread at the Italian coffee shop where I’d stop for a macchiato each afternoon. After graduation I moved back home where foreign newspapers are harder to come by. As I result I’d even resort to taking the twenty-minute train ride to the next big town to get my hands on Monday’s Gazzetta (on Tuesdays, since it always arrived a day late).

My future uncertain (apart from knowing I didn’t want to live in small-town England), I moved back to Italy with the hope of making some kind of life there. I had one or two work prospects and stayed with a family friend in the town of Borgo San Lorenzo, an hour north of Florence. Borgo was a quiet town — fortunately I knew a lot of people and was quickly introduced to more. I even began giving English lessons and Art History lectures at the local high school, where I learned that my favourite newspaper was a useful social tool with which to ingratiate myself to the local ragazzi, affording me minor celebrity status among under-25s in the Borgo San Lorenzo area. For hoards of small-town Tuscan teens I wasn’t just the English guy, I was the English guy that reads la Gazzetta and supports Fiorentina.

For work (and social life) purposes I moved to Florence, where I was one of thousands of foreigners, but still probably the only one with a folded Gazzetta permanently in his back pocket. By this time the paper had become such a part of my life that I even brought my copy with me when purchasing a bag at Emporio Armani, just to make sure it would fit snugly inside. The newsstand on the corner of Viale Matteotti was my first stop every morning; after a few weeks I no longer had to tell the guy which paper I wanted. He even saved the issues I’d missed when I went home for long weekends. We never chatted for longer than thirty seconds at a time, and subjects didn’t extend far beyond the plight of Fiorentina or the weather. Imagine his surprise when after several months he discovered I was English! Over a period of a couple of years I can recall not buying la Gazzetta on only a handful of occasions: once when I overslept, once when staying in the remote countryside and once after the most severe snowstorm to hit Florence since 1985. Not counting those rare exceptions I was never without it; just as Linus had his security blanket, I had my Gazzetta. It was quite literally la vie en rose.

* * *

The twenty-first century Gazzetta now cost one euro, and had begun to enhance its own legend with full-colour graphics, a glossy Saturday supplement called SportWeek, and limited edition DVDs celebrating the soccer’s former greats. One day I was stunned to see that the paper had turned green to promote the release of the movie Shrek 2. Inside I learned that when it was formed in 1896 la Gazzetta had originally been printed on green pages, before switching to pink three years later. Undoubtedly, its distinctive colour has helped it stand out from the competition, but also seep into the Italian consciousness as a beloved national institution, even among those who’ve never read it in their lives.

Though I never missed an issue, my life — both professional and personal — had become so busy that I rarely had time to open it. Some days I’d only get the chance to unfurl the morning’s Gazzetta after getting into bed at night; in extreme cases I’d reluctantly place it atop a growing stack of newspapers that had been saved for a later date. I began to question my motives for buying la Gazzetta every single day. Was it because I wanted to, or because I felt I had to? That pink newspaper had become such an everyday part of me I didn’t even think about it. It was a piece of my personality I had to maintain. No longer just a morning ritual, it had become a habit, and when I calculated how much I’d spent on it down the years I felt like a total idiot.

Giving up la Gazzetta in a World Cup year was always going to be tough, and let’s say that I failed miserably. In the summer of 2006 I watched every Italy match at the same café, where the paper sat carefully folded on my lucky table #5 during the Azzurri’s dramatic and unexpected road to glory. The celebrations lasted all night, and by dawn Piazza Duomo was a sea of green broken glass. At around 7 o’clock a truck pulled up and dumped bundles of newspapers onto the ground, each one featuring the same front page photo of a jubilant Fabio Cannavaro holding aloft the World Cup trophy. The truck driver cut open the package and handed me la Gazzetta: it was still warm, like the fresh bomboloni at Pasticceria Donnini.

Suddenly my unwavering devotion to La Gazzetta seemed less foolish. It had taught me more about Italian culture and history than any textbook, and it was precisely for moments like this that I’d read it with almost religious regularity for so many years. Italy’s fourth World Cup victory had come after years of hard luck and controversy — I wasn’t even Italian, but I felt like I’d earned it.

It’s easy to live in Italy, it’s much harder to stay there. Not because life isn’t pleasant — it’s rarely anything else, and therein lies the problem. I knew if I ever left la Gazzetta would be one of the three things I’d miss the most (panettone and Campari Soda are the other two). In New York I can still live like an Italian to an extent, except here few people want to talk about football, and a black-and-white version of la Gazzetta on darker pink paper now costs three dollars. Not long after I moved to America the paper underwent a radical transformation from broadsheet to tabloid format, a revamp which was accompanied by a high-budget television commercial and a guerilla advertising campaign in which pink confetti fell like snow onto Milan’s centro storico. The effect was like seeing a best friend who’d undergone an ill-conceived cosmetic procedure. In the last few years La Gazzetta has seen more changes at the top than Juventus since calciopoli, and each new director has tampered with both its appearance and philosophy. I ended my readership on principle (the exorbitant cost may have also had something to do with it) and instead began consulting gazzetta.it for my Serie A news. I’m the first to admit that a flickering LCD screen can’t beat crisp newsprint, but knowing that la Gazzetta was no longer the same made me miss it a lot less.

Last month I returned to Italy with work. It was my first time back since leaving Florence, and I was excited to indulge in old pleasures. It was a Saturday morning when I arrived at Malpensa airport, and I was already glancing through la Gazzetta with a coffee at the bar as my colleagues waited at the carousel for their luggage. Driving through the foggy plains of Lombardy — where a decade earlier I’d lived as a student — I began thinking about Italy, and how the country had shaped my adult life over the last two decades. I’ve certainly spent significantly more of my “grown-up” years there than I have in my own country. It’s where I got my first real job, where I first paid a bill or monthly rent, where I learned to make a devastating spaghetti carbonara, where I once shook hands with Paolo Maldini. I even met my wife there.

It occurred to me that the one constant through all of this has been pink soccer daily la Gazzetta dello Sport, to this day the only newspaper I’ve ever bought with any degree of frequency. Much has changed in the last twenty years — Italy certainly has, and in many ways so have I. But my love for that country and its calcio has never waned. Call it nostalgia or a simple passion for a certain modo di vivere, but whenever I wake up in Florence or Milan or Rome my first thoughts are always the same: Gazzetta, cappuccino, brioche — in that order.

Island Life

“One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.”
— Thomas Wolfe

Last week, three years after moving to New York, and two and a half years after marrying my lovely American wife, I received my Green Card in the mail. According to the letter which came attached, I am now a Permanent Resident of the United States of America, although to me my new immigrant status still seems excessive. After all, I’ve only ever been to twelve of the fifty states, and generally never leave the island of Manhattan except to return to Europe. As John Lennon once said to an interviewer in reference to his deportation struggle, “Couldn’t they just ban me from Ohio?”

A colleague of mine left me a note which read “Congratulations, official New Yorker!” It was a sweet thought but one which left me confused. I wasn’t a New Yorker, just a Brit who got lucky enough to live here. Naturally, it begged the decidedly abstract question: when does a “New Yorker” become a New Yorker? I’ve heard it said that you’re only a New Yorker after you’ve lived here a certain number of years, but if so, how many? Whatever the answer may be I’m probably a few years away yet, but I’ve certainly feel like I’ve put in enough overtime studying this city to have shaved a few months off my sentence.

I know I have no greater right to be here than anyone else in my boat, but I doubt most new arrivals devote hours to meticulously researching the shooting locations of long-forgotten New York movies. Nor do they embark on a pilgrimage to the Upper West Side to photograph the city’s last remaining phone booths, or spend entire afternoons seeking out Manhattan’s humblest coffee shops on a self-assigned mission in search of the city’s finest egg cream. Nor do they drop $60 on an original 1974 Massimo Vignelli subway map (an exorbitant amount of money for something that was once handed out for free).

While I recognize that not everybody cares about these things (and nor should they), I also believe that a person is obligated to obtain an historical, cultural and social sense of their city, especially their chosen city, because I consider it important to understand where you are and what that means. When I see a group of young people in untucked shirts and trilbies exit a Barbie-pink stretch Hummer on Avenue B, it makes me sad that none of them look up from their iPhones long enough to realize they’re standing feet away from the former home of Charlie Parker. That is, if they know who Charlie Parker is to begin with. Personally I think they should make all would-be New Yorkers take a test. Anyone who fails has to spend six months in New Jersey swotting up on their Newyorkology. That would hopefully weed out all those who consider food trucks to be the height of urban chic.

Edward Hopper once said you get the greatest sense of a place upon arriving or leaving for the first time. I think he was right. To this day I still get a slight twinge the day before I leave New York or when heading to the airport at dawn, as if I begin to appreciate the greatness of the city knowing I’m going to be away from it (if only for a few days). But each time I return to Manhattan after a trip, I get a rush of the same excitement and awe that I felt the first time I got in the back of a yellow cab. Somehow the city looks, smells, even feels different. Streets I walk on every day are seen in a different light. Even the people with whom I jostle for space on the crowded sidewalk suddenly appear exotic and appealing. Could this be the same town I left less than a week earlier? That elusive magical feeling hits me like the first few seconds of “(Love Is Like A) Heatwave” and — at least for the duration of that cab ride — I remember why I always wanted to be here in the first place.

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Maybe you become a New Yorker the first time New York feels like home. Not long after I moved to the U.S. I took a trip to visit my girlfriend’s family in West Virginia. It was the first time I’d left New York City, and I remember feeling an unexpected sense of blasé familiarity when I landed back at JFK, an airport I had until that moment associated only with extreme excitement and anticipation. Now, it was other places gave me that feeling; New York had become “normal”. The slightly bittersweet compromise but inevitable consequence of living somewhere you’d always dreamed of living is that that very special feeling — that urgent, frantic desire you once felt, perhaps even years before you got here — is lost. Of course, it’s replaced with something arguably much better: the real and more rewarding experiences that come with actually living somewhere.

Colson Whitehead says “You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.” I can definitely relate to that, and I’m always surprised just to what extent the New York in my head differs from the city I experience everyday in 2010. I confess to occasionally standing on street corners and squinting, trying desperately to recapture the sensation of walking down Broadway for the very first time, or even attempting to recall how I’d imagined New York all those years before I ever arrived. But whenever I start to wonder if this is a city best enjoyed through books and movies or my own imagination, something will jerk my senses suddenly and it all comes flooding back: early evening light on the side of a building, the sudden sight of one of the last Checker cabs bouncing down Seventh Avenue, or the inviting mix of pizza and Martha & The Vandellas floating out onto the sidewalk on a July afternoon. It’s all here, and it’s all real.

My daily commute is punctuated by the clatter of storefronts opening, a siren’s intermittent wail, hosed sidewalks, and, as I stand waiting for lights to change, the urban morning aromas of coffee, perfume and garbage. My heart lifts as I turn onto Irving Place and glimpse the Chrysler Building, half-hidden by summer’s haze or gleaming in the crisp winter sun. On the walk home I always remember to turn and look the wrong way up Lexington Avenue, to glance at all that steel and chrome rendered golden by dusk. Just in case I ever forget what I’m doing here.

In his 1949 essay “Here is New York”, E.B. White eloquently suggests there are three New Yorks, that of the native, the commuter, and the immigrant, claiming “the greatest is the last — the city of final destination, the city that is a goal.” He says the immigrants give the city “passion”, which accounts for its “high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements.” Certainly New York, more than any other city in the world, owes its very existence — social, cultural, political, even physical — to the steady influx of people who have dared to dream that this could be their home.

Jeremiah Moss says “a New Yorker is someone who longs for New York.” While it’s true that not everybody who lives in New York automatically becomes a New Yorker, by the same token he implies you can be a New Yorker without actually living here. New Yorkers are a unique breed unto themselves, and maybe it’s enough to be one in thought and spirit. Maybe New York really is a state of mind. Maybe you’re a New Yorker when you can’t imagine living anywhere else. In which case, though my adjustment of status was only recently made official, maybe I’ve been a New Yorker all along.
 
 
All artwork by Elizabeth Lennard.

I’ll Take Manhattan

The other day I came across a tatty copy of New York magazine dated June 15, 1987. The cover story was entitled “The Buildings New Yorkers Love to Hate”, a list of the city’s most unpopular architectural landmarks which included the World Trade Center and the former PAN-AM Building. Most remarkable however, were the local listings towards the back of the magazine. The Restaurants section included just three eateries for the whole of Brooklyn. If you’ve been to Brooklyn lately this may seem hard to imagine, though if you were around in the late-eighties probably not quite so much. Indeed, the first time I visited New York eleven years ago it never even occurred to me that I might even venture across the East River.

When they hear the words “New York”, most outsiders think of Manhattan, and who can blame them? After all, when Frank Sinatra sang, “If I can make it there I’ll make it anywhere,” he wasn’t talking about Red Hook. Many visitors mistakenly consider Brooklyn another neighborhood, when it is actually New York’s most populous borough and existed as an independent city until 1898 (today it would still rank as America’s fourth largest). But no-one ever crossed the Atlantic with aspirations of making live hummus in Carroll Gardens.

But suddenly it seems Manhattan is no longer where it’s at. Indeed, if you believe everything you read, you’ll be told that Brooklyn is now everything Manhattan once was: cool, exciting, edgy. In short, the place to be. Before we go on I should make one thing clear: I’m not talking about the Brooklyn of Coney Island or the Dodgers or even Spike Lee; I’m talking about New Brooklyn. New Brooklyn looks a lot like old Brooklyn, except it’s a bit prettier and a lot more expensive. Though New Brooklyn garners plenty of media press attention, nobody does a greater job at promoting New Brooklyn than the New Brooklynites. The New Brooklynites are easy to spot. They are usually white, might have a beard, and definitely don’t speak with a Brooklyn accent. If you meet a New Brooklynite there’s a good chance they will soon tell you how glad they are to be living in Brooklyn, and how you really should be living there too.

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Call me a contrarian, but when someone strongly urges me to do something, my natural inclination is to not do it, even if my original instinct might have told me otherwise. Maybe I’d have moved to Brooklyn by now if it weren’t for all those Brooklyn dwellers recommending I do so as soon as possible. Even my boss (who lives in Brooklyn) will regularly bring up the question as to why I’ve yet to move there, imploring me to “get off the grid”. I sometimes imagine he would enjoy enormous satisfaction were I to transfer out to Ditmas Park, so I too can endure an hour-long commute on the Q train at the cost of $89 a month. Many people who live in Brooklyn still work in the city; by living in Manhattan I currently use the subway only once a week at most, so I’m already saving money plus two hours out of every workday.

Much of the problem regarding the Manhattan-Brooklyn divide is definitely psychological, a syndrome by which I am affected as much as anyone else. I can be in Park Slope almost as quickly as it takes me to reach upper Broadway, yet I wouldn’t think twice about hopping on the 1 train up to Zabar’s for a cinnamon babka. Ask me to schlep out to Brooklyn and I’ll pull out a list of excuses.

Certainly Brooklyn’s rapid, ongoing transformation and continuing cultural divergence from Manhattan is arguably one of New York’s most significant changes of the last twenty years. There are several factors which New Brooklynites will always cite when discussing the advantages to their borough. The first usually concerns the lower overall cost of living. Yet while a railroad apartment in Bushwick may be considerably cheaper than a two-bedroom in the West Village, as New Brooklyn continues to generate hype so its rents in the more desirable (and exclusive) neighborhoods become comparable to those in Manhattan.

Such areas are also epicenters of Hipsterdom, an alarmingly unimaginative subculture whose primary concern is appropriating aspects of bygone eras and passing them off as its own. Skinny jeans, horn-rimmed glasses, plaid shirts and ironic facial hair: these are the cornerstones of the young New Brooklynite’s carefully cultivated wardrobe, items which must be worn at all times with the nonchalant attitude of someone who isn’t really trying. It also helps if you have some tattoos (you can almost guarantee that most of these people had very dull parents). Most hipsters look like they haven’t seen a gym — or the sun for that matter — since they left their altogether drearier hometowns (which to be fair probably wasn’t all that long ago).

Manifesting itself through music, fashion, even food, New Brooklyn has in recent years developed its own brand of taste and style that often appears a deliberate antithesis to Manhattan’s urban brashness and cutting-edge commercialism. Small businesses label their products as hand-crafted, home-made, organic or artisanal, in an attempt to differentiate themselves from the giant, soulless corporations which proliferate across the river. Yet the sheer number of like businesses which have cropped up over the last couple of years only diminishes their collective value. Suddenly it seems, every kid in Williamsburg is making Prohibition-style soda while attempting to grow a moustache. The appropriation of this down-home folksiness is clearly an attempt to lend weight to fleeting projects by referencing something real. In this sense Brooklyn is the crafts to Manhattan’s Arts. But as it continues to bemoan Manhattan’s so-called superficiality New Brooklyn has unwittingly created its own culture which is no less manufactured. At least Manhattan isn’t bullshitting anybody, and I’ll take an egg cream and a tuna melt any day over a gluten-free vegan cupcake.

I don’t wish to suggest for a minute that most of those who love Brooklyn aren’t genuinely happy living there, or that everyone should want to live in Manhattan or feel unhappy if they are not. Manhattan is definitely not for everyone, and of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with eating local or buying homemade, except for the holier-than-thou attitude that too often accompanies these ideas and lifestyle. Like the vegetarian who pulls a face when you order steak, the worst kind of New Brooklynite takes on an air of tremendous self-righteousness when you confess to enjoying the simplest of pleasures, as if drinking non-microbrewery beer could jeopardize your friendship. New Brooklynites’ constant praising of their borough can sometimes come off as obsessive, and in extreme cases it seems like an inverse reaction to not living in Manhattan, as if they are grappling with some trauma. Maybe they’re irked by Manhattan’s history of condescension towards the “outer boroughs”. Or maybe the very act of living in Prospect Heights gives them a warm fuzzy feeling of satisfaction akin to donating money to Africa or buying a T-shirt to benefit Haitian earthquake victims.

* * *

Of course, these phenomena are by no means exclusive to New Brooklyn’s population, but rather representative of the white, middle-class youth of America. Indeed, we are already witnessing the commodification of “New Brooklyn” as it enters the corporate mainstream. Take for instance the common brand of twee, faux-naïve songs which now permeate movie trailers and national television commercials for some of America’s biggest companies. In this week’s New York magazine (which incidentally lists nine restaurants in Williamsburg alone), Adam Sternbergh identifies every large city in the Western world as having its own Brooklyn, specifically a neighborhood with “nice blocks, good restaurants, and beards.” That the new Brooklyn can be defined so succinctly conveys everything about its limitations and its arch self-awareness. New Brooklyn, its look and sound, is now being used to sell everything from Japanese hybrids to portable e-book readers. Perhaps the most significant event in this trend was the launch of a “Brooklyn-themed” bar/restaurant set to open this autumn in — you guessed it — Manhattan.

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That there are people who feel the need to define “New Brooklyn” — through its cuisine of all things, and on Manhattan turf — says a lot about the borough’s pervading complex of inferiority. It’s also in complete contrasts to the island’s greatest strength of total defiance and utter indifference. Manhattan cannot be tamed, and somehow manages to resist the waves of social or economic change. Sternbergh argues that it’s Brooklyn’s supposed positive qualities which make it so obnoxious, and that the same phenomenon could never happen with Manhattan because “they only ever made one Chrysler Building.” Manhattan could never become a brand because its brand is too vast, too diverse and far-reaching, Movies, art, jazz, tourism: these are things that are too beloved and universal to be considered “cool” anymore.

Though separated by a small body of water called the East River, Manhattan and Brooklyn can at times appear like two worlds in the same city, of which their inhabitants are two very different species. From its breathtaking verticality to its teeming street life, Manhattan, more so than any other major city, is a direct result of its geography. While Brooklyn and Queens are still home to some of New York’s largest ethnic communities, Manhattan’s cosmopolitan population is forced to exist on a narrow twelve-by-two-mile island. This tremendous concentration of people, their different cultures and languages, is what gives the city its unique, relentless energy, and in extreme cases can breed bouts of aggression or creativity, sometimes in the same breath. It’s these immovable confines which have helped make self-absorption and ambition two of the most common traits among Manhattanites — without space to move outwards, the city can only look inwards and upwards.

All of this has enabled Manhattan’s inhabitants to consistently defy categorization and stereotype as they go about their daily lives. They rarely question their presence on the island — many seem to live in a self-imposed exile of sorts, and are often unable to imagine themselves anywhere else. Though often perceived as neurotic or narcissistic, the truest Manhattanite is a model of fierce independence, flagrant individuality and unwavering positivity. To stroll the city streets is to experience a warm, unspoken understanding — a camaraderie among strangers, an unlikely mutual respect between all those who share a sidewalk.

Yet for many Manhattanites, moving to Brooklyn is seen almost as an urban rite of passage, an inevitable step in the life of a New Yorker as young adulthood gives way to parenthood, and that Chelsea studio suddenly becomes untenable. But for now, my favorite reason to visit Brooklyn is the ride home as the N train trundles over the Brooklyn Bridge. Downtown skyscrapers soar into view, my pulse quickens and I am thrilled at the thought of my apartment nestled hidden somewhere within all of that brick and concrete. Why would I want to be anywhere else? Perhaps Tom Waits put it best when he was asked to describe New York. “Well, it’s like a big ship,” he said. “And the water’s on fire.” I’m not quite ready to jump ship just yet.
 
 
 
Film stills from “Manhattan”, 1979 (United Artists).

Livin’ La Dolce Vita

About five years ago, while spending a weekend at my parents’ house in England, I was flicking channels on a lazy Sunday afternoon when I came across a cooking programme called David Rocco’s Dolce Vita. The show was set in Florence, and followed the culinary exploits of a certain David Rocco, a good-looking young Canadian-Italian living the so-called “sweet life.” We’d see Rocco strolling through the piazza, picking up some ingredients at the local market before whipping up something tasty for his pals back at his apartment. I too was living in Florence at the time, and so I kept watching for the novelty aspect more than anything, although these scenes appeared so familiar to me that they almost felt too close to home.

A couple of days after returning to Florence I was invited by a friend to visit her new apartment near Piazza Santa Croce. When I arrived I was greeted with a tour of the flat, which soon enough led me to the kitchen. Upon entering I was immediately struck by an overwhelming sense of déjà-vu. I stopped and stood there for several moments trying to understand when I could have possibly been in this apartment before, despite being unable to recall having ever even walked down this particular street. Then it hit me: I was standing in David Rocco’s kitchen! It turned out the apartment belonged to David’s sister Maria, who also happened to be my friend’s boss. They simply used the apartment one month out of the year to tape the series. Until a few days earlier I’d never even heard of David Rocco, but my friend’s roommate was Canadian and explained that he was a former model and something of a household name in that country.

Over the ensuing months the Dolce Vita apartment became a gathering point for all the characters in our own lives, just like the principal set of any classic sitcom. My friend had a few promo DVDs from the series, which we sometimes watched to further enhance the surreal experience (imagine watching an episode of Seinfeld on Jerry’s couch). We enjoyed long Sunday lunches at the dinner table, and casual gatherings in the kitchen, around the marble-topped work surface upon which Rocco tosses his insalata. “Casa Rocco” – as it was soon dubbed – was also the scene of Thanksgiving dinners and memorable parties, including the evening of my 27th birthday and an ambitious Breakfast At Tiffany’s-themed night of debauchery. One night, after snooping around in the drawer which contained an impressive array of spatulas and mysterious utensils, another friend badly sprained her ankle on the kitchen floor, right where Rocco stands to drain his pasta. She had to be carried out of the apartment by paramedics on a stretcher, and spent the next month living at Casa Rocco with her leg in a plaster cast.

When Rocco and the crew arrived to shoot the new series, my friend was forced to move out for the entire month of May. One day I happened to visit the set: the apartment was crammed with lighting equipment and cables, but I missed out on meeting David. I even attended Maria Rocco’s wedding reception in the Florentine hills as my friend’s plus-one, but he wasn’t there either. Eventually, my friend moved out and the Casa Rocco era came to an abrupt end, but she did give me a watch she found abandoned on the set that I still wear to this day.

I hadn’t given David Rocco or his Dolce Vita much thought since, until I recently stumbled across an episode on the fledgling cable network Cooking Channel (751 on Time Warner Cable HD). I learned that the show is in its fifth series and has even spawned a book and a soundtrack, so it seemed like a good time to reacquaint myself.

Of course, there is something very obvious about calling a show about Italian cooking “Dolce Vita”. For the title of his 1960 film, Fellini employed the term “La Dolce Vita” with a generous dose of irony. It was meant to suggest a shallow life of excess, one which was ultimately bereft of meaning or direction — a commentary on the loss of traditional values in postwar Italy and the problems facing a new generation in the 1950s. We can forgive David Rocco for appropriating the overused phrase for his own show, and for predictably applying it in its broader cultural sense, that is, to suggest the most pleasurable aspects of Italian life. Naturally, we’re also treated to regular sweeping postcard panoramas of Renaissance architecture. But despite these corny marketing tools, the show is keen to convey a sense of Florence beyond tourism.

For the most part Rocco’s life does indeed appear exceedingly pleasureful, almost like an Italian take on a yuppie lifestyle. He drinks espresso, shops for food (and shoes), goes jogging, cooks dinner for his friends and spends weekends in Chianti with his wife, Nina, who plays herself. This apparent domestic bliss notwithstanding, the ever simpatico Rocco still seems to live the life of a carefree metrosexual bachelor. If the incessant aperitivo soundtrack is anything to go by, his is a world forever on the cusp of happy hour.

While not trained in the kitchen (“I’m not a cook – I’m Italian,” he says) Rocco certainly makes cooking look fun, and perhaps more importantly, effortless. His recipes center around the “cucina povera” or peasant food which provides the classic staples of Italian family life. Incorporating simple, fresh ingredients, our host presents many of his dishes as having been handed down by a relative (many are named after the “nonna” or “zia” who came up with them). Despite an affected habit of calling everyone he meets “Ciccio” and the mystifying employment of an electric golf cart to get about town (surely a Vespa would have been more accurate and appealing), Rocco’s own knowledge of Italian cuisine and culture is exemplary and the clichés which litter most depictions of Italian-Americans on our TV screens are here refreshingly absent.

Though hardly fellini-esque in either its scope or atmosphere, David Rocco’s Dolce Vita has more in common with the Fellini classic from whose title it borrows than is initially apparent. Episodic in nature, part reality and part fiction, for a cooking show it defies categorization. As the ad-hoc script swings back and forth between plot development and cooking demonstrations, Rocco himself regularly “breaks the fourth wall” to address the viewer directly. Meanwhile, the often improvised dialogue shuffles between Italian and English in a manner which only rarely becomes disorientating. Faced with the tricky task of often conversing with Italians for an English-speaking audience, the bilingual Canadian has been known to use both languages even in the same sentence. The cast is completed by Rocco’s own circus of eccentric “friends” who flesh out the episodes’ loose plotlines. Some play themselves, or versions of themselves, while others are entirely fictionalized characters. I find myself recognizing many of Rocco’s on-screen buddies (one of them, Max — an anglicization of his real name — was a former roommate of mine). Here we can begin to draw parallels with La Dolce Vita, for which Fellini cluttered the screen with actors and non-actors of various nationalities. The star of that film, Marcello Mastroianni, was intrigued by the multi-layered nature of cinema, and possessed an attitude to acting which began to stretch the boundaries of performance and reality. In his 1993 biography of the actor Donald Dewey describes Mastroianni’s approach as being founded upon the double fantasy role: that of the character being portrayed for the project in question and that of the actor working as a performer on the “adult playground” of the film set.

In 2005 Casa Rocco became an unlikely refuge from my own domestic frustrations and romantic melodramas. Watching David Rocco’s Dolce Vita on television now in New York – from the safety of several years and several thousand miles – is an altogether more complex sensation. I’m not particularly nostalgic about the years I spent in Florence — while I loved the city and fully basked in all of its wonders I have not forgotten the common frustrations of daily life in Italy, nor the challenges faced in attempting to pursue a more serious life there. Yet as the camera caresses the view from Piazzale Michelangelo, before focusing on Rocco as he dashes around the centro storico, I’m persistently prodded by recollections of my own experiences among Florence’s rain-soaked cobbled streets. It’s highly amusing to think back on evenings spent in Rocco’s kitchen, and even the bars and shops he frequents are those which I came to know well: Capocaccia, Chiaroscuro, Procacci, Semolina, Giubbe Rosse, Hotel Continentale and of course, the Dolce Vita bar in Piazza del Carmine are all given ample screen time. In a surprising twist on art imitating life (or is it vice-versa?), the perhaps inevitable consequence is that this Canadian cooking show has become a means of (re)living a vicarious and fictionalized version of my life in Florence. Though I’m still uncertain whether seeing your life (or a close approximation of it) on television makes it seem more, or less, real. In both his elaborate reconstruction of Rome at Cinecittà and the dreamlike fantasy sequences for which he became associated, Fellini too was inclined to suggest that reality could always be improved upon. Maybe that’s why David Rocco’s Dolce Vita somehow feels even better than the real thing.

Morality Misinterpreted

The World Cup wouldn’t be the World Cup without its controversial episodes, and in the last week this tournament’s been full of them. Thanks to the blogtacular age we live in, such events can propel fans around the globe to express their unsolicited points of view with extra vociferousness. What’s most remarkable this year however, is that the incident that’s got people talking the most wasn’t all that controversial. But it was certainly dramatic. With the quarter-final between Ghana and Uruguay poised at 1-1 in extra-time, an entertaining and closely fought match was just seconds away from a penalty shoot-out when Uruguayan forward Luis Suarez cleared Dominic Adiyiah’s goal-bound header off the line with his fists, thus illegally preventing an almost certain winning goal. Portuguese referee Olegário Benquerença had no hesitation in showing Suarez a red card and awarding a penalty to Ghana, which Asamoah Gyan crashed against the crossbar with the last kick of the game. Uruguay won the subsequent penalty shoot-out 4-2, and advanced to the semi-finals for the first time since 1970.

Perhaps Suarez did little to ingratiate himself to Ghanaian fans when, moments after receiving his marching orders, he interrupted his journey back to the dressing room to celebrate Gyan’s penalty miss while halfway down the tunnel. After the game he perhaps overstepped the boundaries of good taste in comparing his crime to the most famous handball of all. “The Hand of God now belongs to me,” he joked, a banal reference to Diego Maradona’s fisted goal against England in 1986 which is likely to garner more headlines in England than in Ghana.

But while Suarez will, as expected, sit out Uruguay’s semi-final against the Dutch on Tuesday, there are those that feel that this particular sporting injustice warrants further investigation, starting with a lengthier suspension than just the compulsory one-match ban. Those outraged by the incident say Suarez — and by extension, Uruguay as a team — need to be suitably punished. What they fail to remember is that the appropriate punishment was dealt immediately, in the form of a red card for Suarez and a penalty for Ghana. After that it was up to the Ghanaian player to score; it’s not Uruguay’s fault that he didn’t. Any player who wouldn’t have done the same thing as Suarez surely shouldn’t be playing professional football, an attitude shared it seems by anyone who has ever been involved in the game, judging by the solidarity shown to the Uruguayan by television’s legion of football punditry.

In a World Cup which saw two staggering errors by officials the last round, this latest controversy — unlike those involving Frank Lampard and Carlos Tevez last weekend — at least cannot be pinned on the referee. The incident inevitably drew comparisons with Thierry Henry’s handball against the Republic of Ireland in a World Cup play-off back in December, in which the French forward controlled the ball with his arm before laying on a pass for William Gallas to score the winning goal. But Henry’s crime was far worse than Suarez’s, for two reasons. Firstly, the circumstances were not so extreme as to cause Henry to act instinctively: it was not the final minute of the match, and had Henry let the ball fall out of play he would have only conceded a goal-kick. Secondly, and far more importantly, is the fact that Henry’s foul was not spotted by the referee.

In basketball, towards the end of every close game (the final two minutes) the trailing team commits tactical fouls in the hope that the opposition will miss the free throw, allowing them to retain possession as quickly as possible. What we saw in Johannesburg was essentially the same tactic applied to football. It doesn’t happen as often in football simply because the consequences (penalty, red card) are far greater. Had Suarez committed the handball earlier in the match it would have been riskier for the team, but since it was in the dying moments he decided it was preferable to Uruguay’s elimination — a practical certainty had he let the ball fly past him and into the net. A friend of mine pointed out that this incident was unusual because Suarez had no incentive not to commit the foul (besides sacrificing his own personal involvement in a possible penalty shoot-out and the rest of the tournament) due to it occurring in the last minute of extra-time. But how does a referee determine at what point there would have been an incentive to concede the goal? Those who follow football are always complaining about a lack of consistency among officials; it would be highly hypocritical, as well as ludicrous, to expect a referee to apply different measures based on the match’s circumstances or how many minutes are left on the clock.

Many have gone so far as to brand Suarez a cheat. But breaking the rules and cheating are not the same thing. To cheat is to break the rules while seeking to avoid punishment. Of course, if a player breaks the rules he should be punished accordingly. But how have these critics managed to quantify the morality of a foul? By their rationale, should a defender not bring down a forward if he’s through on goal because it would be immoral? A foul is a foul: a trip in midfield is punished with a free-kick for the opposition; a handball on the goal-line is punished with red card and a penalty. What’s the difference?

Moreover, Suarez was not trying to cheat. He knew what he was doing and what punishment would be forthcoming (despite his “Who me?” gesture towards the referee as the red card was brandished). To describe Suarez’s actions as “immoral” is to suggest he shouldn’t have committed the foul in the first place. This, to me, is a moral misinterpretation of the game. When you begin to imply that certain fouls should not be committed in the name of sportsmanship, the whole sport unravels and is rendered pointless. Players have no moral obligation to FIFA, God, or anyone else – that’s why there is a referee. There is nothing whatsoever immoral about a handball: it was a foul, and on this occasion under extremely dramatic circumstances, but the referee saw it and made the correct decisions. Had he missed the incident, then there would have been suitable cause for outrage.

By extraordinary coincidence, Ghana were involved in an almost identical incident earlier in the tournament, when Australia’s Harry Kewell used his arm to stop a shot on the goal-line for which he too was rightly sent off. Had Gyan tucked his penalty away against Uruguay as he had against the Socceroos, I doubt many people would have spent the weekend criticising the South Americans. It’s also important to consider how reaction to this incident might have differed had the situation been reversed. I think much of the outrage stems from tired Anglo-centric footballing stereotypes: the “happy-go-lucky” Africans thwarted by the “cynical, cheating” South Americans. This reveals a tiresome double-standard among football followers, and shows exactly to what extent most people who saw an injustice in Friday night’s game allowed their opinions to be swayed by context. Several neutral fans I’ve spoken to about the handball incident strongly disagree with my take on it and have all put forward arguments as to why. But they are ultimately united in their inability to assert real culpability, each independently and vaguely describing Suarez’s actions as “not right.” So if you can’t blame the player, and you can’t blame the referee, perhaps on this occasion there is no-one to blame.

Not Quite the End of the World

Remember the name: Kamil Kopúnek. For Italian fans the Slovakian can now take his place alongside Pak Doo-Ik and Ahn Jung-Hwan on the Azzurri’s podium of World Cup infamy. It may seem an unlikely trio, but all three players have in their time put paid to the Italy’s World Cup hopes, and in doing so represent the lowest points in the four-time winners’ otherwise impressive tournament record. But while defeats to North Korea in 1966 and South Korea in 2002 sent shockwaves reverberating around the football world, Italy’s lacklustre performance and ultimate capitulation in 2010 had a certain inevitability. After disappointing 1-1 draws against Paraguay and New Zealand, a win – while not essential – was certainly the Italian objective in their final group match against Slovakia. Instead, the Azzurri found themselves two goals down after 73 minutes, and despite rallying a late fight-back, Italy’s elimination was effectively sealed the moment late substitute Kopúnek burst between two defenders to lift the ball over Fabrizio Marchetti with his very first touch of the game. So low were expectations surrounding the defending champions’ campaign in South Africa that reaction to Slovakia’s third goal was less one of outrage and more a collective groan of relief and resignation.

Italy’s disastrous exit from the World Cup in 2010 made the euphoria of Italy’s victory in Berlin – still fresh in the memories of all Italians – suddenly seem every bit four years ago. In 2006, few would have predicted both finalists in Germany crashing out at the first hurdle in South Africa. And yet while the French can point to internal struggles and their federation’s misguided faith in an increasingly eccentric coach, whose bizarre alienation of fans, press, staff and players is reason enough for their shambolic demise, the Italians have fewer excuses. Certainly that was the view of fans, who on Italy’s return from South Africa, subjected their fallen heroes to a tirade of jeers and abuse as they trudged with hung heads through the arrivals gate at Rome’s Fiumicino airport.

To assess just how Italy went from World Champions to national disgrace requires a quick rewind to Berlin four years ago, when, just as in 1982, Italy’s national team emerged from the wreckage of domestic scandal as unlikely but worthy World Cup winners. The Italian coach Marcello Lippi had already decided not to renew his expiring contract with the FIGC (Federazione Italiana Giuoco Calcio), and three days after enjoying what he described as his “most satisfying moment as a coach”, was replaced by former Italian international Roberto Donadoni. It was a surprising choice: Donadoni’s greatest achievement as a coach so far had been to lead unfashionable Livorno to the top half of Serie A, and he certainly lacked experience at a major club. He was also faced the unenviable task of taking over a winning team in which any negative result is bound to be greeted with criticism. With the team still riding the highs of Berlin, Donadoni’s side’s performances were always going to compare unfavourably with Lippi’s, and the new coach struggled to assert his own identity on the world champions. It was a reign which seemed doomed from the start: Donadoni’s contract contained a clause stating it would only be renewed should Italy reach the semi-finals of Euro 2008 — when Italy were eliminated in a penalty shoot-out by Spain in the quarter-finals, everyone knew the game was up.

More surprising was what was to follow. The FIGC, in an unexpected move, recalled Lippi, who had spent the two years since the World Cup on the beach and at home in the Tuscan coastal town of Viareggio, basking in his new life as a national hero. Arriving at his first press conference since being recalled out of retirement, Lippi appeared tanned and relaxed, happy to once again don the federation blazer and “ready to pick up where [he] left off.” This statement of intent sent a twinge of discomfort down the spines of watching fans. The phrase “minestra riscaldata”, literally “reheated soup” is used in Italian soccer circles to describe the ill-conceived return of an ex-player or coach to his place of former glory, the idea being that it’s never as good second time around. Keen observers had to ask why Lippi, having achieved the sport’s ultimate accolade, would choose to give up a life of permanent hero-status to take Italy to another World Cup? The Azzurri’s victory in 2006 may have seemed unlikely at the outset, but even less probable was a repeat in 2010. Only Vittorio Pozzo, Italy’s coach in 1934 and 1938, had led a team to back-to-back successes, and not since Brazil in 1958 and 1962 had a nation won two World Cups on the bounce. Yet Lippi seemed happy to risk forever tarnishing his image of cigar-chomping hero of Berlin by attempting this extraordinary double.

Italy’s World Cup-winning captain, Fabio Cannavaro, was guilty of a similar arrogance. Unlike former captain Paolo Maldini, (who retired from international football after the 2002 World Cup, only to watch his would-be teammates lift the trophy four years later), Cannavaro had won it all but still wanted more, just like Lippi. Majestic at the World Cup four years ago, his performances in Germany were enough to earn him the Ballon d’Or in 2006. A World Cup victory seemed like a natural moment to call it a day, yet Cannavaro continued to lead the Azzurri, despite showing inconsistent form since returning to Juventus from Real Madrid. Once one of Italy’s quickest defenders, Cannavaro’s rapid decline culminated, sadly, in being made to look every bit the 36-year-old in South Africa.

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The defending champions qualified for South Africa relatively comfortably, yet Lippi’s dependence on the core group of players that had triumphed in 2006 spoke volumes about not just his short-term priorities but also his obsession with Italy’s World Cup win four years earlier. Many questioned the reliance on certain players from Juventus: given the Turin club’s poor season the inclusion of wayward stars Camoranesi, Iaquinta and the aforementioned Cannavaro this time around seemed to have more to do with Lippi’s strong ties to his former employers. Lippi’s coaching philosophy emphasises team spirit and unity, but while the heroes of Berlin still had a role to play, many had lost the form they’d showed four years ago, and – perhaps more importantly – all were four years older. Lippi’s responded to critics by reminding them of his World Cup pedigree, and to those who raised concerns over the age of the squad pointed out that its average age was actually younger than in 2006. But in Germany Lippi had struck upon a group of top professionals players at their peak, in 2010 the gulf between levels of experience was startling.

Perhaps in an attempt to silence doubters Lippi selected several younger players who shared just a few caps between them as late inclusions into the squad. All had enjoyed positive domestic seasons yet none had been used regularly during Italy’s qualifying campaign and all lacked international experience (the fact that most were plucked from Serie A’s smaller clubs meant they were unfamiliar with the kind of pressure reserved for top-of-the-table clashes or matches in the Champions League). Though their selection seemed a knee-jerk reaction by Lippi, some of these players were immediately thrown into the deep-end in South Africa. Genoa left-back Domenico Criscito and Fiorentina’s elegant playmaker Riccardo Montolivo acquitted themselves well in tough circumstances, but others, such as Juventus midfielder Claudio Marchisio and Cagliari goalkeeper Fabrizio Marchetti, appeared out of their depth. Montolivo and Marchetti only became first choices due to injuries to otherwise certain starters: Milan’s regista Andrea Pirlo damaged a calf just days before the tournament, while Gigi Buffon bowed out at half-time in Italy’s opening match after aggravating a problem with his sciatic nerve, an injury which ruled him out of the rest of the competition.

Though injuries to key men naturally proved a massive blow for Italy, the team was further hampered by Lippi’s disparate squad, which consisted of too many players unused to performing at this level. For a country with a long history of world-class playmakers, Italy went into this World Cup without an out-and-out number ten, a designated trequartista or fantasista in the Roberto Baggio mould. Without a player with such qualities, in all three of their matches Italy looked desperately short of creativity in the final third. At 35, Alessandro Del Piero was judged past his prime, while Francesco Totti’s protracted retirement from international football had effectively excluded him from rejoining the squad. Lippi’s stubbornness is perhaps most evident in his failure to call temperamental forwards Antonio Cassano and Mario Balotelli to the international fold. While Balotelli still shows regular signs of immaturity, Cassano has consistently impressed for Sampdoria over the last two seasons, helping the Genoese club to qualify for the Champions League for the first time in eighteen years. Yet Lippi continued to ignore him to the frustration of fans, often refusing to answer the press’s questions regarding the player’s exclusion.

The attitude of Italians — coaches, players, press, fans — before a World Cup is typically one of cautious optimism (or false pessimism). You may say Italians love a crisis: it takes the pressure off and makes an ultimately positive campaign all the more enjoyable. The national team is a notoriously slow starter in major tournaments, and most fans expect a rocky road to success. Yet this year Italy started poorly and only got worse, and there was a pervading sense of imminent failure prior to the defeat against Slovakia.

South Africa 2010 officially ranks as Italy’s worst ever World Cup performance. Just as in 1966 and 1974, the Azzurri failed to progress from the group stage, but this year they were unable to record a single victory in three matches — against Paraguay, New Zealand or Slovakia — finishing bottom of Group F. Following the disastrous elimination, it was Lippi who predictably received most of the blame. The coach even shouldered all responsibility in his post-match press conference.

Certainly Italy’s notorious press was quick to pounce. Alberto Cerruti, chief football correspondent of the Milan-based daily La Gazzetta dello Sport, described Italy’s performance as “unwatchable”, but seemed particularly disappointed with the casual manner in which Italy’s hard-earned title was relinquished. The director of Rome’s Corriere dello Sport, Alessandro Vocalelli, was more scathing, appearing on an online video just hours after the final whistle to bemoan Lippi’s “incomprehensible selections and inexplicable tactics” which had resulted in a “total, humiliating failure, from which nobody should be exculpated.” Yet others saw a greater issue with Italian football at large. Former Milan and Italy coach Arrigo Sacchi, himself no stranger to the scorn of critics, felt the root of the problem lay in Italy’s culture of “ignorance and violence”, citing a “crisis in the Italian system.”

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Sacchi may be going too far by condemning contemporary Italian society, yet the state of the country’s game has been in decline for several years, to the extent in which it has become almost de rigeur to disparage Serie A, Italy’s domestic championship, once the most admired league in Europe. Sacchi pointed to the fact that Italian clubs crashed out prematurely in European competition last season. The one exception, Inter, have a foreign coach and an almost completely foreign squad. Indeed, of the twenty-three players Lippi took to South Africa, not one hailed from José Mourinho’s treble winners, the first time ever an Italian World Cup squad has not contained a single player from the nerazzurri. The conclusion one takes from this is that there is an excess of foreign players in Italy, whose presence denies promising Italian youngsters the chance of breaking through at the biggest clubs. Consequently, Italy’s 2010 squad included players from Genoa, Bari, Udinese and Cagliari, clubs hardly renowned for providing members of the Italian national team.

There are those in Italy that have suggested the return of a restriction on the number of foreign players a team may field at one time. But Italy is definitely not the only nation with a strong domestic league faced with this dilemma. England has also discovered that top-class foreigners may make for an entertaining league but their presence can be detrimental to the national team’s success. Spain – despite the plethora of foreign players in La Liga – seem to have solved this problem by selecting a squad mostly comprised of players from the two biggest clubs, Barcelona and Real Madrid. In contrast, German clubs work in closer conjunction with its federation, and their philosophy of investing in youth rather than spending heavily naturally encourages a strong national side.

FIGC president Giancarlo Abete has already announced an inquiry into Italian football’s “structural crisis”, but to suggest a shake-up of Italian system is excessive. The problems cited as causes of Italy’s poor displays in 2010 were already in place in 2006, when Italian football was also still reeling from the aftershocks of calciopoli. Some claimed it was this scandal which galvanized the team to victory in Germany, and Italian players certainly appeared lacking in motivation in South Africa. But Lippi was correct to blame himself: his return was gearing solely towards this event, and so he had no interest in making long-term plans and no vision of the future since it did not concern him. He was obsessed with the victory of 2006, and intent on repeating it all costs, at the expense of his own better judgment. Sadly for Italy, he did not have the means — either tactically or technically — to realize that dream. The FIGC showed desperate short-sightedness in rehiring Lippi, who in turn showed an alarming degree of footballing-masochism in attempting a second win in succession. For all Donadoni’s inexperience, had the Italian federation stuck by him Italy would have probably arrived in South Africa with a more balanced and settled side. Likewise the younger players who did not appear ready at this tournament would have no doubt been groomed specifically in preparation for the World Cup stage.

The effects of calciopoli have tempered spending in Italy, and over the last two seasons the biggest Italian clubs –Inter, Milan, Juventus, Roma, Fiorentina and Sampdoria — have put their faith in local young players who have grown into first-team regulars. Lippi’s replacement, 52-year-old Cesare Prandelli, has been selected by the FIGC specifically for his proven track-record with younger players. At Verona, Parma and Fiorentina specifically, Prandelli had built attack-minded teams around the promise of youth. Though he spent six seasons as a player at Juventus, Prandelli may benefit from having never coached one of Italy’s biggest clubs, and his lack of close connections to Italian football’s superpowers may work in his favour. Certainly he will employ a fresher, more open approach to player selection, already stating that Cassano and Balotelli will figure in his plans. More unexpected were his comments surrounding the sometimes controversial oriundi (naturalised citizens eligible for the national team) whom he declared “new Italians.”

While Italians may be Italy’s biggest fans, they’re also its harshest critics, and once the dust settles on Lippi’s second era in charge they’ll probably realise the future doesn’t appear quite so bleak. It would take a brave man to bet against Italy going far in Brazil in 2014. As this World Cup has already proven, four years can be an awfully long time in football.

Breakfast in America

In case you hadn’t noticed, the World Cup got underway last weekend in South Africa. For one month every four years, the planet’s greatest sporting event has, historically, had a tendency to consume my every waking second. This year is no different, although since Italy lifted the trophy in 2006 I’ve obtained United States residency, meaning I am experiencing the tournament from this side of the Atlantic for the very first time. This situation has led to some interesting observations, some more expected than others, as I grapple with the clichéd notion of being an avid soccer nut in a country that — as we’re so often told — just doesn’t care.

Johannesburg is six hours ahead of New York, so I get to watch the day’s earliest match before leaving for work. Once in the office I close my internet browser and hunker down until I can return home, where, thanks to the miracle of DVR, two more games await my viewing pleasure. Though avoiding the score has proven more difficult than expected. I’ve had to change my route several times when I’ve seen soccer fans amassed outside a sports bar, and was even forced to move to the other end of a subway car when I heard some Brazilians talking futebol.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had to set the alarm for football matches. During the 2002 World Cup in Korea and Japan (when I was still living in England), most games were scheduled for the early morning, a novelty which resulted in BBC commentator John Motson developing a tiresome fixation with breakfast-related puns. Watching football on American networks can also bewilder, but for entirely different reasons. I still don’t understand why the commentary is called “the call” (as in “Martin Tyler with the call”) or why half-time is known simply as “the half” (“We’re goalless at the half.”). The alternative is the local Spanish language channel Univision, where the World Cup is co-hosted by young latinas in figure hugging national team jerseys, and any punditry is generally forsaken in favor of dancing, chanting and fervent flag-waving. Over on ESPN coverage is generally quite polished, with some big names on the panel: Klinsmann, Gullit, McManaman, McCoist, Lalas, Bartlett, Martinez (OK, some names are bigger than others). It’s clear the anchors are being fed information about players and previous tournaments by a soccer intern with encyclopedic knowledge of World Cup history, in a desperate but comprehensible attempt to dispel the myth that Americans know nothing about the game.

Whether you see it as a failure or a refusal, the fact that America has never fully embraced soccer is both fuel for those who dismiss the sport and a burden to its genuine fans. New York, of course, is a bit different. The city is still a natural port of call for anyone arriving from overseas or across the border, and some 36% of the current population is foreign-born. That’s a lot of soccer fans. New York State has no official language: English is obviously the de facto language but of the nine million people who live in the city less than half are native English speakers. On a day like today — when the air is thick and temperatures hit the mid-90s and football is blaring out of every bar, deli and taxicab – New York feels a lot closer to Naples or São Paulo than the United States.

That’s not to say the locals don’t make themselves heard. Yesterday I saw dozens of young Americans in USA jerseys heading to bars to watch their team’s match with Slovenia, while for several weeks shoppers on 57th Street have been subjected to Clint Dempsey’s screaming face looming large on the exterior of NikeTown. The United States’ games have even made the front pages of the Times, Post and Daily News. Despite only intermittent success in recent years, interest in the national team has steadily risen to a point where they today merit respect and generate media frenzy and support during the World Cup. Many casual American soccer fans become genuinely curious about the tournament, and perhaps even a tad envious of the kind of passion it invokes in people of other nationalities.

But come September it’s unlikely these same fans will be getting up at nine on a Sunday morning to watch European league matches. For this reason I sometimes sympathize with the professionals representing the United States, as they’ve had to work doubly hard to garner support from skeptics and casual, fair-weather fans whose interest is piqued only every four years. It’s like when people get excited about synchronized swimming during the Olympics.

A college friend of mine (and self-confessed soccer ignoramus) wrote to me recently asking me for my take on why the game has never taken off in the United States. After all, since the 1960s a host of characters from the worlds of football, politics, entertainment and business have tried to make soccer a more serious sport here, without ever fully succeeding. In the 1970s some of the sport’s biggest names — including Pele, Beckenbauer, Best and Cruyff — made the NASL a marketing man’s dream, but the novelty wore off by the early 1980s and the league collapsed soon after. In 1994 the United States even hosted a highly successful World Cup (breaking all attendance records), but the MLS (which was created as part of the U.S.’s hosting bid) has had a turbulent history ever since, and remains a relatively weak league whose rosters are populated mainly by young American talent and veterans from South America, despite more recent high-profile European arrivals, such as David Beckham and Thierry Henry.

Soccer is the most played sport at high-school level in this country, and extremely popular in the major cities and particularly among the under-30s, but I don’t think it will ever “take off” in the way my friend was implying. The problem is precisely that: football doesn’t really “take off” anywhere – it’s ingrained culturally and people either get it or they don’t. Sadly for America everyone gets it but them. In Asia, large populations with growing economies such as Japan, China and India, have embraced the game more fervently in recent years, but they didn’t have their own hugely popular and highly lucrative sports leagues in place. In the United States the NFL, MLB, NBA and NHL are very much ingrained; soccer is not really necessary, neither economically nor culturally.

Then of course there is the game itself. A lot has been made of the cautious nature of the first round of matches at this World Cup, but it seems the ones who complain about the football (or the vuvuzelas for that matter) are the ones who don’t really enjoy soccer and probably begrudge having to sit through it. Many Americans I’ve spoken to this week have questioned the number of matches which have ended in parity, their impression being that a tied result is somewhat unsatisfactory. That a game must have a winner strikes me as a deeply American idea. I got into a very heated row with my boss twice this week after he suggested football would be improved if they eliminated draws from the sport entirely. Most surprising when you consider my boss is Italian — albeit one who moved to the Bronx in 1970 and now catches a football match only every four years (and then only when the Azzurri are playing). Major League Soccer conducted a similar experiment when it relaunched back in the mid-nineties. Concerned with the prospect of tied games, the league’s commissioners imposed an instant one-on-one sudden death shoot-out in the event of a match ending level after ninety minutes. In a perverse twist on the penalty shoot-out, the forward would start with the ball from the halfway line with only the goalkeeper to beat. This attempt to avoid alienating mainstream sports fans by making league matches — and penalty kicks themselves — more exciting only alienated soccer purists, and the league soon reverted to a conventional win-lose-draw points system.

In this regard both the MLS and my boss were guilty of seeing the game purely from the perspective of entertainment, which in this case means the ball crossing the goal-line. Personally, I’d always prefer to watch a tight 1-1 draw between two quality teams than an end-to-end goal-fest between two average ones. Fans who describe close World Cup or Champions League matches as “boring” also fail to recognize one of the elements that makes the game so special. Football is different to practically all other sports in that scoring is supposed to be difficult, so when a goal is scored it’s a big deal. It is a game built on patience and tactics, which of course enhances the tension and drama, which in turn are what make important games so absorbing. In basketball there is no element of tension or drama until the last 120 seconds of the fourth quarter, and that’s only if the teams are closely separated.

The very nature of football is contrary to the instant gratification provided by high-scoring American sports, which are first and foremost entertainment (and big business). Football is obviously entertainment in Europe too (and an even bigger business globally), but there are deeper cultural, social and political elements that give the game a greater resonance beyond the stadium, which if you’ve never lived in Europe or South America is perhaps not something that’s easy to comprehend. It’s for these reasons more than any other that I think soccer remains a sport that most Americans won’t think of again for another four years. But until then, if they ever change their minds they know where to find the rest of us.

Empire State of Mind

New York said goodbye to an icon this weekend. On May 14 the Empire Diner closed its doors for the last time — or rather, the first time, since this Chelsea landmark had until last Saturday night been serving locals and tourists, artists and cops, partygoers and insomniacs 24 hours a day since it opened in its current incarnation thirty-four years ago. In 1976, the diner lay closed and abandoned when it was purchased by three young New Yorkers — Jack Doenias, Carl Laanes, and Richard Ruskay — who transformed the Tenth Avenue eatery into the self-proclaimed “Hippest Diner on Earth.” The Empire Diner’s success was a prime example of the neighborhood’s renaissance, as galleries, hotels and restaurants began to pop up between the gas stations and auto parts stores which had until then dominated the landscape.

As a child growing up in the UK, I probably first caught glimpse of the Empire Diner during the opening shots of Woody Allen’s Manhattan. Later, it also made an appearance in Home Alone 2: Lost In New York, but by that time I was already all-too familiar, having gazed many times at the cover of the Tom Waits LP Asylum Years. Released in 1986, this double-album compilation featured John Baeder’s painting of the Empire Diner on its front cover. It was an appropriate choice of artwork for a Tom Waits record: the man had made a career of verbalizing bittersweet tales of urban folly to anyone who’d listen, like some down-and-out character permanently slumped at the end of the counter. Whether it was the image of the diner glistening in the Manhattan night, or Waits’ midnight rambles, I knew I had to check this place out for myself.

Years later, after moving to New York, I finally got my chance. It was a cold, November evening, and I’d arrived from the Theater District where I’d been volunteering at a contemporary dance performance. Instantly recognizable from the outside by its chrome exterior and giant “EAT” sign, inside the diner was altogether less familiar. On entering I was surprised to be greeted by a calm hush, and certainly not the usual hustle-bustle which characterizes many open-all-hours places. Instead, people spoke in soft voices and on the piano someone was playing “Song For You” by Leon Russell, making the Empire Diner the first and so far only diner I’ve ever seen with a live pianist. I sat down at the polished black counter, ordered, and gazed at the yellow cabs silently gliding up Tenth Avenue. I immediately wrote about my experience on my blog (now defunct), soon after which a certain Eileen Levinson wrote to me thanking me for my kind words. I returned with my wife the night of my twenty-ninth birthday: the overtly camp staff was hilarious and delightful. I left with a t-shirt with the “EAT” mantra emblazoned across the back. When my parents came to visit, they insisted we go to the Empire Diner for burgers.

The Empire Diner’s iconic status continued to be maintained: in March a digital image of the restaurant — drawn using an iPhone app by Portuguese artist Jorge Colombo — appeared on the cover of The New Yorker. So it was with much surprise that I learned of the imminent closure less than a month later. As soon as I heard the news I wrote to the owners, Renate Gonzalez and Mitchell Woo, expressing my shock and sadness. Renate immediately responded inviting me to the official closing party on Sunday afternoon. Arriving for the last time, I found a relaxed crowd settled on patio furniture clustered outside the restaurant, whose famous chrome glistened in the late-afternoon sun. Inside the diner, the atmosphere was decidedly more raucous, as the diner’s most flamboyant followers got down to a soundtrack of eighties club hits. There was something quite sad about seeing the last remaining survivors of a city’s much-flaunted party scene enjoying a final dance on a Sunday afternoon. This may have only been the closing of a restaurant, but what does it say about New York?

* * *

It seems not a week goes by that New York City doesn’t say goodbye to another family-run business or cherished establishment. Most of these closures go unnoticed by many, although certain blogs, such as EV Grieve and Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York, manage to meticulously document these aspects of the city’s transformation. While I strongly sympathize with the aforementioned bloggers common stance, I personally think nostalgia can be a dangerous thing, and I’m always cautious about extolling “the good old days”. After all, a lot of people were glad to see the back of them. As one commentator pointed out, “People who hate the new Times Square probably were never mugged in the old one in 1989.”

A city must always keep evolving, and nowhere is reinvention more possible than in New York. But what about when your favorite coffee shop is converted into a Starbucks? Or when the corner deli where you’ve been buying milk for twenty years is suddenly shuttered, only to reopen serving only something the kids are calling Fro-Yo? Or when an entire historic block is razed and an eco-indulgent glass condo is built in its place? I’m not alone in feeling that New York, once just a trendy, rebellious cousin to the conservative USA, is becoming victim to the steady encroachment of corporate America. Of course, this phenomenon exists the world over and is evident elsewhere — look at the state of popular music or sports — but what’s most alarming is the rapidity with which such changes occur in this millennium, particularly in a fast-paced commercial capital like New York.

New York is a city of immigrants, one which has always been driven by the arrival of new people. But in recent years, New York, in presenting itself as a desirable place to live, has gone out of its way to invite the wrong kind of transplant: a sort of suburban-urbanite, one who associates the city not with history or culture, or even crime, but with luxury and status. These are exactly the kind of people who not too long ago would have turned up their noses at Manhattan: too dirty, too dangerous, too cold. They’re the kind of people who don’t know what an egg cream is and aren’t about to try one. Sadly it seems the latest generation of adults has scant concept of a New York, or a world, pre-internet, pre-Carrie Bradshaw. I’ve met people not much younger than myself who didn’t know what the Twin Towers were until they watched them fall on TV on 9/11. If these people are the future of New York it’s not hard to understand why certain long-standing businesses are failing.

Ms. Gonzalez and Mr. Woo, while clearly saddened to be leaving what has been their place of work for the over three decades, remain philosophical. They plan to bring the Empire experience abroad and are currently looking for a future site for the diner. It wouldn’t be the first time a landmark eatery has up and left town, silently in the dead of night. The Moondance Diner closed in 2006 and reappeared somewhere in Wyoming. Last year, the Cheyenne Diner was closed, dismantled and rebuilt down in Alabama. So look out for the Empire Diner in a town near you. As for New York, like the day they decided to plant deckchairs in the middle of Times Square, it’s just another small step towards suburbia. The hippest city on earth just got a little less hip.

A Career of Two Halves

Spring is approaching, and true to tradition in World Cup years, serious injuries are beginning to afflict England players faster than you can say “metatarsal.” Unsurprisingly, Michael Owen is among the first to be sidelined. The Manchester United striker has embarked on a slow and sad transformation from master goalscorer to chronic invalid, and today it was announced that he will miss the remainder of the season with a torn hamstring. Owen picked up the injury during United’s Carling Cup Final victory over Aston Villa at Wembley last Sunday. A scan has revealed that what was initially thought to be a slight pull is in fact a full tear, for which the 30-year-old will undergo surgery on Monday, effectively ending the his already slim hopes of making a return to Fabio Capello’s England squad in time for this summer’s tournament in South Africa.

The news comes less than a month after a fractured left ankle jeopardized Ashley Cole’s participation in the World Cup, but for Owen it’s an even bitterer blow: after all, this was supposed to have been his comeback season, in which he would rediscover the form that made him one of Europe’s deadliest marksmen, and hopefully earn a recall to the England squad. At least, that was the plan. It’s just the latest disappointment in a career which in recent years has been defined by long-term injury. This week’s torn hamstring is the tenth severe physical set-back Owen has suffered since he left Liverpool, an endless series of career interruptions which have included a calf strain, three thigh strains, two operations on a broken metatarsal, a concussion, mumps, as well as the injury to the anterior cruciate ligament which put an end to his last World Cup in 2006.

It now appears Owen’s transfer to Real Madrid in the summer of 2004 proved to be a significant turning point in the player’s fortunes. Having waved goodbye to Anfield in part due to Liverpool’s repeated failure to win major trophies, Owen must have felt a slight twinge as he watched his former teammates achieve Champions League success in their first season without him, particularly since he now found himself habitually confined to the bench at the Bernabeu. In 2005, with the World Cup less than a year away, the arrival of Robinho and Julio Baptista at Real prompted Owen to seek first-team football elsewhere. Newcastle United certainly seemed a step backward for the 2001 Ballon d’Or winner, and Owen’s spell on Tyneside was characterized by indifferent performances and erratic fitness, not to mention an unstable St. James’ Park boardroom and management.

In the summer of 2009, following Newcastle’s relegation from the Premier League and the conclusion of his contract with the Magpies, Owen chose Manchester United as the ideal platform from which to relaunch his career, with the ultimate goal of reclaiming his place in the national team. The move to Old Trafford certainly raised some eyebrows. Many fans felt Sir Alex Ferguson was taking an unnecessary gamble, and expressed concern regarding Owen’s inconsistent form and susceptibility to injury. But the season began promisingly. A last-gasp winner in a thrilling 4-3 derby victory over Manchester City and a hat-trick against Wolfsburg in the Champions League suggested that United’s risk may just pay off. But since then Ferguson has used Owen fleetingly, and Fabio Capello has been clear in his need for players who are playing regular league football.

Owen scored United’s opening goal last Sunday after only twelve minutes, before the hamstring went and he was forced to limp off before half-time. It leaves Ferguson with a severely depleted forward-line for the rest of the season, with Wayne Rooney’s remarkable recent form scant consolation. Fabio Capello’s World Cup plans are unlikely to be affected: Owen has featured only sparingly since the Italian took over as England coach. Bookmakers are already quoting 1-8 odds against Owen ever pulling on the national jersey again. Owen’s international record currently stands at 40 goals in 89 matches, making him the 7th most capped England player of all time. Only Bobby Charlton, Gary Lineker and Jimmy Greaves have scored more goals for their country.

If Owen has played his last game for England, it will be a truly sad end for a player who promised much more than he ultimately achieved. Though he worked hard to give himself, his team and country another shot, the odds were always stacked against him. There are those that will say that he’s lost his pace, and that he may not have made Capello’s squad even had he been fit, both of which are valid, sobering points. But for a few years, Owen was as vital a goalscorer for England as Lineker had been a decade earlier. His hat-trick in the 5-1 mauling of Germany in Munich and his goals in the quarter-finals of World Cup 2002 and Euro 2004 remain fresh in the memory, not just for their spectacular opportunism but for their power to make fans believe that anything was possible with him in the side. How Owen’s stuttering demise plays in stark contrast to his fairytale introduction to the world, on a warm night in Saint-Etienne twelve years ago. Not even Paul Gascoigne or Wayne Rooney can claim to have enjoyed such an explosive impact on such an important global stage. No England fan can forget the blurry image of a boyish Owen fizzing across the screen, leaving several Argentine defenders in his wake to score one of the finest goals in World Cup history. That hungry teenager may be all grown up, but one can’t help feel he deserved one more chance to run at them.