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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WATCHING STATUS QUO

The concert-goer does not expect irony at a Status Quo gig. However, despite the band's best efforts, singing

We're in the Army now

in a temporary venue on the site of a former British Army base at Ebrington Barracks in Derry Londonderry (54 degrees North, 7 degrees West), as part of a year of events to mark the city's designation as the first UK City of Culture, brings them very close to the ironic.

Or perhaps not. After all, Status Quo is the status quo. And unnervingly fresh for it.

They rock out a straight up-and-down hits-show, with plenty of obligatory white-guy, phallic posturing with guitars; very loud and very good sound; a stunning, mandatory drum-solo and terrific lighting effects, delivering well-known material in a spritely, energised show the concert-goer enjoys.

Status Quo wear their colours on their sleeves. Or at least on their merchandising, where Union flags are often seen.

We're in the Army now.

Not everyone sings along. But the concert-goer notes that very many do. The crowd is hot and sweaty and in great form. The concert-goer meets loads of friends and acquaintances, one of whom claims his friends told him they were going to a John Prine concert. His friends just laugh.

A Status Quo concert is not a John Prine concert. The band is energetic and full-on. The songs are direct, simple and effective. The concert-goer hears no teenage angst. No singer-songwriter musing and mumbling. No hesitation or misgiving.

The status quo is clear and forceful.

And the concert-goer jigs and hops with everyone, as the hits roll out.

Status Quo is a juggernaut. An imperious rock and awe of sound and light.

Roll over lay down and let me in Roll over it's a long way where I've been Roll over lay down and let me in Roll over lay down

Status Quo blast into town as a cavalcade of lights, sound and energy, thumbing their noses at The Beatles' mawkish and witty lyrics.

Doing the garden, digging the weeds,


Who could ask for more?

The concert-goer recognises the power of their ageless appeal and wonders if Status Quo consider how their work speaks to and reinforces a connection between sex, maleness and militarisation in society.

The irony of members of a crowd, from a society tentatively coming out of civil conflict, singing

A vacation in a foreign land Uncle Sam does the best he can You're in the army now Oh, oh, you're in the army now

leaves the concert-goer unnerved, though sated overall.

As the status quo does.

Again again again again, again again again again Why don't you do it, why don't you do it again.......

http://www.statusquo.co.uk

http://www.songlyrics.com/the-beatles/when-i-m-sixty-four-lyrics/

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CONFEDERATIONS CUP OF DISCONTENT OVERFLOWS

It is as if all the unrest across the world has come to a head in one country, Brazil.

It is as if The Arab Spring, the upheavals in Greece, the bank crisis in Cyprus, the Occupy Movement in New York and elsewhere, the stresses and strain in Bahrain, the divisions in Turkey have all coalesced around a warm-up international football tournament.

All in time for the big one next year: The World Cup, the greatest corporate spectacle on the planet.

Albert Camus, Nobel Prize winner for Literature and goalkeeper for Algeria, once said

Everything I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football.

And it is football, the glorious global game that provides the occasion.  The world's greatest spectacle seems to be one spectacle too far. The preliminary warm-up tournament, The Confederations Cup, becomes the focus for the massive public discontent in Brazil, a country trumpeted in The Financial Times and other journals as an economic miracle, where 'morality and obligations' are kicked into touch.

People have had enough of such miracles. Enough of the transfer of public money to private hands; enough of the myth of progress as a mask to cover corporate greed; enough of austerity, cuts and poor services; enough of division and separation; enough of the corralling of wealth into fewer and fewer hands.

Enough of heroes?

Reports come in of social media challenges to the great Pele, Brazil's heroic footballer, who linked blood and country in a call to citizens to stop protesting and to support the national team.

Another former Brazilian footballer, Romario, once commented that

Pele, when silent, is a poet.

Watch Pele (and Bobby Moore) beat the Nazis and win World War 2.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCJBXfKtOiM

How easy will it be for the citizens of Brazil to escape to victory?

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/wave-of-protests-continue-across-brazil-1.1435550

http://www.philosophyfootball.com/new_win.html

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G8? 'FARRAGO' SAYS JUDGE

District Judge Barney McElholm, sitting at Derry Magistrates Court in Derry Londonderry (54 degrees North, 7 degrees West), in the trial of a man facing a number of drugs charges committed in May and August 2012, said he could not commit to a bail application on Monday because he was

involved in this other farrago.

farrago noun (farragos or farragoes) a confused mixture; a hotchpotch. 


Etymology: 17c: Latin, meaning 'mixed fodder'. 

The Chambers Dictionary; 12^th Edition; 2011

The farrago he referred to is the G8 Summit, set for a golf resort in County Fermanagh, near Enniskillen (54 degrees North, 7 degrees West) on Monday and following days.

People in Enniskillen today -

Bloomsday! What would James Joyce make of the Judge's farrago? -

http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/video-ulysses-in-three-minutes-1.1428915

- for the Ulster Senior Gaelic Football Championship Quarter Final between Cavan and Fermanagh will find their travel plans disrupted by what the District Judge referred to as

a travelling Eurovision song contest, which has completely disrupted the criminal justice system in Northern Ireland.

Football fans sent on long detours, airport security heightened; schools closed, public examinations disrupted; farmers asked not to spread slurry because of the smell; a temporary morgue put in place; police officers and equipment flown in from Britain; temporary holding cells, the criminal justice system disrupted; business compromised, working patterns changed: no wonder the Judge, like many other people, wonders about the benefits of having the meeting in Fermanagh.

If it means

Putting everything else on the back burner. I hope its worth it.

As well as the content and networking involved in such a meeting, the fact of the meeting itself is a symbolic representation of the current social order. It is a manifestation of power on the ground. The intense, almost hysterical, preparations for the event indicate how out of kilter the social (dis) order is.

Aerial photographs of the venue for the G8 summit, a cluster of buildings on lawns beside a lake, situate it anywhere north of Spain in Europe and anywhere along a whole stretch of the North American coast. The photographs do not scream 'Fermanagh'.

The Judge reckons

It would be better held in the middle of the desert somewhere for all the good it does anybody.

One location for future meetings could be anywhere east of Nyala (12 degrees North, 24 degrees East), near the border between Sudan and Chad, in any of the refugee camps located in that region. The refugees probably have enough to deal with, without the Judge's farrago showing up, disrupting everything and leaving a mess behind.

Like a gang of rowdy teenage boys and their hangers-on, taking over a beach on a sunny day, bothering everybody else with their noise and their ostentatious, inflated language, before leaving stacks of cans, pizza boxes, bottles and other garbage behind, when they speed off in their souped-up vehicles.

Video-conferencing anybody?

Come on Fermanagh!

The Derry Journal: newspaper; Derry; 14^th June 2013

http://ulster.gaa.ie

http://www.unhcr.org/pages/49e483b76.html

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TEENAGE KICKS AND MYTHS FOR ALL AGES

The punk band rocks on the back of the lorry. Then Zambian tumblers and English fire-eaters roll by.

Are teenage dreams so hard to beat?

A bevy of shirt-factory workers, in blue dungarees and head scarves, sashay along the road to a rhythm and blues beat. They carry radiant blue flax flowers. It is a parade and a pageant on a summer's evening.

Earlier, the punk band play to a sun-drenched crowd on a reclaimed gasometer site. A woman, aged 94, taps her foot. A woman, aged 70, jigs about and waves her hands high, in front of the stage. A man and a woman, almost 60, shake, bob, weave and shimmy.

Get teenage kicks right through the night.

At night-fall, a monster on a barge comes up the river, spewing flames and light. Fireworks blaze from the banks to repel it.

Spectacles of conflict are more stunning (produceable?) than spectacles of peace.

It is storied in the city that a foreign garrison took it over. A wolf, carrying a firebrand, entered the city from the surrounding forest and tossed the firebrand into the garrison's magazine and blew it up.

Fire works.

Soldiers from the garrison ran amok, crying out that a great god had delivered death upon them, in retribution for the deaths delivered by their deeds.

I need excitement and I need it bad. And it's the best I've ever had
.

A saint, in a curragh, is pitted against the monster on the barge. Ireland pitted against Scotland? Good against Evil?

Father do not allow thunder and lightning,

Lest we be shattered by its fear and its fire.

The monster transforms into three swans, echoing the Children of Lir story, in a feat of theatrical engineering on a grand scale. 

As simple as that?

Stories, old and post-modern. Undertones and overtones. Myths overlaying and reverberating.

Great pyrotechnics. Wonderful lights and sound. A choir sings uplifting choruses on The Peace Bridge, as the battle ceases. A rock song blasts marvellously from sound systems along the quayside where citizens throng, craning their necks, raising cameras, phones and ipads above their heads to capture images their eyes can't reach.

The boys are back in town.

It is a galvanising spectacle. Families and friends huddle close. Smile. Teenagers kick for joy. Babies grin. People stay close. 

Then go home.

Older ones know, from their experience, that war is not a spectacle. That it is a grim tragedy. Younger ones are wary, even as they kick in exultation.

I wanna hold you, wanna hold you tight.
Alright.

And the sun shines the next day.

It is the business of mythology proper, and the fairy tale, to reveal the specific dangers and techniques of the dark interior way from tragedy to comedy.

Even when the legend is of an actual historical personage, the deeds of victory are rendered not in lifelike, but in dreamlike figurations.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H83nRM8wwM4

http://www.ccea.org.uk/colmcille/docs/epubs/english/the_founding_of_derry.pdf

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQo1HIcSVtg

The Hero with a Thousand Faces: Joseph Campbell; book; New World Library; California; 2008

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ONE BIG WEEKEND GOES SPECTACULAR

BBC Radio 1 rolled its One Big Weekend festival into Derry Londonderry (54 degrees North, 7 degrees West) as part of the UK City of Culture 2013 programme and went spectacular. In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation. Ellie Goulding sang 'Anything Could Happen'. And indeed it could. Ain't got no mother, ain't got no culture Ain't got no friends, ain't got no schooling Ain't got no love, ain't got no name Ain't got no ticket, ain't got no token It is the nature of big weekend festivals that the many more people who do not get tickets are disappointed. Some saw the acts perform in a live-streaming organised by local community groups well away from the festival site. Following the weekend, media reports are ecstatic. The event is hailed as a major success. The sight of young people – at least some of them - smiling and enjoying themselves – at least for a weekend – is hailed as a triumph. And it is. Can it be sustained? Can the resources poured into the city to bring off the weekend festival by the BBC, Derry City Council, Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), Search, Fire and Rescue bodies, ambulance and hospital services, stewarding organisations and many other dispensers of public money, be gathered and spent again in the city? Not likely. There were efforts made by shops, hotels and bars and others to capture some of the spare cash brought by the 40 000 people who attended, as well as the jet-setting stars and their crews, thus capitalising on the massive outlay of public funds. Is this the business model? The spectacle presents itself as a vast inaccessible reality that can never be questioned. Its sole message is: “What appears is good; what is good appears.” The passive acceptance it demands is already effectively imposed by its monopoly of appearances, its manner of appearing without allowing any reply. Ain't got no home, ain't got no shoes Ain't got no money, ain't got no class Ain't got no skirts, ain't got no sweater Ain't got no perfume, ain't got no beer And where is the human in all of this? I got my heart, I got my soul I got my back, I got my sex I got my arms, I got my hands I got my fingers, Got my legs I got my feet, I got my toes I got my liver, Got my blood In the midst of the lonely crowd, small groups, living within – and enjoying - the spectacle, as all citizens do, are also considering moves to bypass it. They are drawn to make, not only to consume; to be, not only to have; to live, not only to exist. The end of the history of culture manifests itself in two opposing forms: the project of culture’s self-transcendence within total history, and its preservation as a dead object for spectacular contemplation. The first tendency has linked its fate to social critique. http://www.lyricsdepot.com/nina-simone/aint-got-no-i-got-life.html http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord/1.htm http://www.cityofculture2013.com/2013/05/success-of-bbcs-radio-1-big-weekend/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqpNaAnYatE&feature=youtu.be www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter