WATCHING NILE RODGERS AND CHIC

Good times

These are the good times

Our new state of mind

These are the good times

Anticipation buzzes the venue as the mirror ball revolves slowly, sending a spangle of light over the concert-goer, one of a crowd of people in very good form. A dj works at a record deck, but all eyes are on the stage where rock band equipment is in readiness. Stage-crew crouch about in earnest poses, settling, adjusting, fitting and tweaking.

A slim black man comes out with a camera. He is casually dressed, his long locks bunched under a woollen hat. He waves at the crowd and takes photos. The crowd at the front go crazy when they recognise him. It is Nile Rodgers, guitarist, writer, producer, creator of funk and disco music. Legend.

Funk and disco is a form of popular music, originating in America, and in a sense the historical bridge between R&B and Soul and recent forms of hip-hop. Nile Rodgers is the enduringly genuine human link in that chain of popular music.

The crowd surges forward as Chic, the band, comes on. There is a stylised long pause, with band members, including Nile Rodgers, now resplendent in a white suit, turning their backs on the audience, before facing them with the opening chords of the disco party.

Everybody dance

The concert-goer and everyone else does. Men, with arms folded across their chests, let them fall by their sides as they begin to shimmy. Women wave their arms in the air. The atmosphere heats up and becomes mega-sultry.

Must put an end

To this stress and strife

I think I want to live the sporting life

In the throes of disco frenzy, Nile Rodgers takes a moment to dedicate a medley to the memory of a local man, a friend of the promoter, who recently died. It is but one instance of the groundedness of the whole event. The keyboard player looks like the concert-goer's Uncle Jack. The singers are stunningly statuesque African-American women. The music is high-end pub band, with star voices and musicians. There is a modesty and self-deprecation that is alluring and charming.

Good times

These are the good times

The spangles from the mirror ball flash across the smiling faces of the dancing crowd. The band's sound is crisp and clear. The trumpet solos, in particular, draw the concert-goer's ears.

And it all ends thrillingly with Nile Rodgers taking the acclaim of the crowd to the sound of the dj playing Daft Punk's hit single of 2013, Get Lucky, on which Nile Rodgers features, riffing his trademark funk-guitar chords.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FRXLzw37-8

We've come too far

To forget who we are

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RORY MCILROY AND THE CURSE OF NIKE

Rory McIlroy is a famous professional golfer from Hollywood (54 degrees North, 5 degrees West). That's Holywood, County Down, Northern Ireland, not Hollywood, Los Angeles, USA, (34 degrees North, 118 degrees West). 

Therein lies one of Rory McIlroy's current burdens. He cannot decide if he's British or Irish, which he will have to do (or someone will have to decide for him), if he wants to play golf in the next Olympics.

Golf, like the many sports played across the world, is a particular cultural creation, full of specialist forms and mechanisms, norms and practices. One of the arcane arrangements in Rory McIlroy's sport is that other people – caddies – carry his equipment.

Rory McIlroy is a very wealthy young man, a comfortable context for the burdens he does actually carry.

Recently, he played a major tournament on a golf-course in Scotland, where women cannot be members or enter the clubhouse. Such Taliban-type practice, in a modern liberal democracy, is found irksome by some, though large numbers of people consider it perfectly acceptable. No state or other agency seeks to intervene to overturn the discrimination involved.

Nike is the Greek goddess of victory. As a woman would she get into that clubhouse? She is portrayed with wings, holding a crown of victory above the heads of the conquerors and the conquered. And Nike is a global sports goods corporation, a modern commercial phenomenon, which sells products and dreams in an age when sport is a hugely popular cultural form and money-making engine. Citizens can 'join' Nike, becoming acolytes of this form of the goddess and do what the company's swoosh brand declaims

LIFE IS A SPORT. MAKE IT COUNT

Unfortunately for Rory McIlroy, in seeking to make it count financially, he got into bed with the corporate goddess version of Nike and his playing form collapsed. He is playing at a poor level now, which is embarrassing, given the media hype generated during his pre-Nike success. He is a man cursed by his relationship with Nike. He recently spoke of walking around unconscious. He has the lurgy of corporatism racing in his veins and he can't swing, drive, putt or think.

Is he an innocent debased by the culture of greed with which Nike infects his sport? Or simply greedy himself?

These questions burden the people of Northern Ireland, who are desperate for heroes. Which is yet another burden for Rory McIlroy. How does he carry – or perhaps it is his caddy who is carrying? - this burden for a society struggling with a depressed economy and child poverty figures to make even a corporate accountant blush. Where being British or Irish is worked out across police lines, with petrol bombs, water cannon and rubber bullets flying up and down the fairways of the streets and into the rough of the crowds and the bunkers of peoples' gardens?

The survey found that 43% of children grow up in poverty in West Belfast.

(The Irish Times confirms the curse
http://www.irishtimes.com/sport/golf/money-the-root-cause-of-mcilroy-s-break-up-with-horizon-sports-management-1.1550890)

Who's Who Classical Mythology: book: Michael Grant and John Hazel; JM Dent: London; 1993

http://www.nike.com

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-21506734

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WATCHING BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN

I was raised out of steel here in the swamps

There is a chill in the air as Bruce Springsteen comes on stage in Stade de France, Paris (48 degrees North, 2 degrees South). It is the chill of grief. The text on the grave of Sartre and de Beauvoir in Montparnasse reads travaux en cours. Madiba lies dying in Johannesburg (26 degrees South, 28 degrees East).

Bruce Springsteen sings Glory Days and the concert-goer sees a man in front of him, wearing a green jumper, with tears in his eyes.

When Bruce Springsteen sings Wrecking Ball, the man in the green jumper, a farming man, with strong, brown hands, sheds tears down his tanned cheeks.

Now my home's here in these meadowlands where mosquitoes grow big as airplanes

He sways in time with the music, as does his wife beside him, in the packed seats of the stadium. They exchange smiles and she gently caresses a tear from his face, as if to say je t'adore.

Through the mud and the beer, and the blood and the cheers,

I've seen champions come and go


So if you got the guts mister, yeah, if you got the balls


If you think it's your time, then step to the line,

and bring on your wrecking ball

Each day the wrecking ball of life swings and strikes. Even Bruce Springsteen feels its icy breadth as it careers past him. The concert-goer senses an ending in his songs and his thoroughly energised performance.

Bruce Springsteen shakes hands and warmly backslaps the members of his superb band as they leave the stage. It is the gesture of a generous captain on a winning team. He speaks good French in a Jersey accent. He is at home at the heart of the spectacle, yet he is a toy figure to the concert-goer, even as he sounds clear and loud.

The man in the green jumper is more human. The woman with him, both of them, are present and alive. Though infused with griefs and ghosts.

Here, where the blood is spilled, the arena's filled, and giants played their games


So raise up your glasses and let me hear your voices call


Because tonight all the dead are here.

Is this what Samuel Beckett knows, even now, buried with his partner Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil, under a simple slab, further into the cemetery at Montparnasse?

Yeah, we know that come tomorrow, none of this will be here


So hold tight on your anger, you hold tight on your anger


Now when all this steel and these stories, they drift away to rust


And all our youth and beauty, it's been given to the dust


When your best hopes and desires are scattered through the wind


And hard times come, and hard times go


Upraised arms on the pelouse in front of the stage sway from side to side, fingers spread and stretched, as sunflowers daily angle for the sun and wave in the breeze. The band is the wind, Bruce Springsteen the sun, we the tournesoleils, yet green in the fields of hope, as the chill of death descends and confirms the swinging of the wrecking ball.

Bring on your wrecking ball


Come on and take your best shot,

Let me see what you got


The concert-goer, almost three years out of an Intensive Care Unit, when the wrecking ball of illness struck him a hard, yet still a glancing, blow, cries salt tears.

A de-railing blow, a re-aligning blow, a warning blow. A blow for all time.

The concert-goer sees the man in the green jumper smile and cry. The concert-goer wonders at the power of music, the burdens of grief we all carry and the manner in which lives turn to face and fade in the chilly sunlight and the booming air.

Je ne peut plus continuer comme ça. I can't go on like this.

On dit ça. That's what you think.

http://www.springsteenlyrics.com/

Warten auf Godot/En attendant Godot/Waiting for Godot: Samuel Beckett; play; suhrkamp taschenbuch; Frankfurt am Main; 1971

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