Forest are Magic! (or, So Long and thanks for all the Fish)

Source: fourFourTwo.com

Lower tier football fandom from across the pond has been a work in progress these last many years... I've been a fan of international soccer since 1990, when I was in Germany with my family during Italia '90 (the first World Cup Final that the United States had qualified for in my lifetime {and in fact the first time within the living memory of almost all Boomers!}).  The US fared poorly in that tournament, but West Germany ended up winning, and we were staying in West Berlin on the night that Germany qualified for the final.  There was an impromptu parade of joy and humanity that lasted all night, and I remember waking up in our hotel room, brushing my teeth on the balcony and looking down on the Ku'damm the next morning as the festivities continued, and some German fan who'd been partying all night raised his beer can to me.

The concept of club soccer first occurred to me, I think, on my visit to Nottingham, England nearly a decade later, when I had a stopover at the start of a spring break in Europe, and we watched a match out at the pubs. It's only now, 23 years later, that I'm realizing the match on TV had to be a Notts County affair (because Forest didn't have a match that mid-week that I was in town).  Watching a fan base come together over soccer felt different, because of the limited chances and scoring within a match, so I decided to become a fan of Nottingham Forest, and they were subsequently relegated from the Premier League a couple months later.  Following a Premier League team in 1999 and into the early 2000s was hard enough, but lower tiers - forget about it, so yahoo.sports.co.uk became a near constant tab on my computer for the next decade or so, repeatedly refreshing the browser during big matches to get score updates.

Meanwhile, I spent the remainder of that football season in Münster, Germany, which is Borussia Dortmund country, so I selected them as a Bundesliga club that I would follow, although I was never as invested in their success. But I did enjoy their success, and when their bad-ass manager, Jürgen Klopp, moved into the Premier League in 2015, I decided I should be a Liverpool fan for the Premier League - because clearly, Forest were still a long long away from top flight competition, and as much as I was enjoying following Forest's progress (now on Twitter instead of Yahoo), Liverpool had matches I could actually watch on a regular basis.  

Just a couple years later (at the start of the 2017-2018 season), ESPN+ started to show matches from the lower English leagues, so for the first time, once every 4 or 5 weeks, I got to watch a Nottingham Forest match.  It was also the first season under the new ownership of Greek oligarch Evangelos Marinakas (he bought it from Kuwati oligarch Fawaz Al-Hasawi in May 2017), and in just over five short (long, long, long) years - we are back in the Premier League!

And so it is, that I have to say goodbye to a "favorite" team.  While my selection of Liverpool was fairly arbitrary - a coaching hire - I've come to appreciate their fan base (not least here in Milwaukee!), and to cheer alongside them.  Thus, my (sub)title - which I now understand to be a malapropism - Scousers (people from Liverpool, but also more specifically Liverpool FC fans) are named after a local stew called scouse (or originally lobscouse), which I mistakenly thought had fish in it, but instead is a beef (or lamb) stew that is traditionally eaten while out to sea!

So, while I have been a lousy under-performing fan of Liverpool and Dortmund (and don't even get me started on Minnesota United FC!), I've been here for some years now of Nottingham Forest, and watching nearly every match these last several years on iFollow and ForestTV (with full, elaborate, BBC Nottingham radio commentary from Colin Fray).  The Garibaldi Red Podcast has also been a huge friend since it started in early 2020 - just before the world went bonkers, and I hope you will follow along with me at Three Lions Pub in Shorewood, or wherever we land to watch matches: MKE_nffc on twitter...

first!

I've been a fan of the Chicago Bears football club since nearly as long as I can remember.  But not quite.  I remember very early in my life thinking that Franco Harris was the awesomest football player ever.  I also remember declaring at some point early on that the Tampa Bay Buccaneers were my team (I think because of the sweet creamsicle color featured on the magnetic helmet that generally sat in last place on the standings board on my wall.  I was actually wooed some years later by the same phenomenon when I briefly decided that the Florida Marlins would be my baseball team as I hadn't been much of a Brewers fan since the early 80s Ben Oglivie days).

I've come by most of my fandoms earnestly: the Bears were selected when I was very young because we got to go and see their training camp in the summers in Plattville, WI where my mom was completing graduate coursework between school years.  Their winning a Super Bowl in my formative years helped, but that bandwagon jumping has been paid off dearly for suffering through decades of painful disappointment and false hope.

Being a fan of the Chicago Bears is (what I long thought was) a uniquely painful experience.  It's not the perpetual basement dweller syndrome of someone like 20+ years of Brewer's baseball (until the playoff drought ended in 2008 in our first season as 10-pack ticketholders and actually once more becoming a Brewer's fan).  Rather, the pain of the Bears is that they consistently show promise and hope - brief spurts of success, only to come crashing back down and making you feel dumb for even getting engaged in it all again.  As I said, i thought this fan experience was unique to the Bears, until I found it again taking up a fan interest in my now favorite sports franchise: Nottingham Forest Football Club.  

A few years ago, I made a very conscious decision to 'get into' club football.  I've watched a lot of international soccer over the years (World Cup, Euro tournaments, US National Team qualifiers and tournaments), but beyond vaguely "choosing" the Chicago Fire as the closest MLS team who I've gone to see a couple of times at Soldier Field and Borussia Dortmund as the "local team" I chose when studying in Germany, I had no loyalties.                  

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26 July 2020 - 11:07am CDT

As loyal readers and frequent checkers of this site will know (I see you when you all drop by!), I frequently 'post-date' the most recent post.  Whereby, I start to write a post, and set the date and time of publishing the post at the moment I started writing it, even if (as often happens) I don't finish the post until days (or sometimes even weeks) later.  My thinking with that is that I want to preserve the moment of the original idea, and generally when I finish the draft the post is still the newest on the site (because I don't write here that often).  On many occasions, I don't ever finish the post, and may years later publish and add a dated post script like this one.

The reason I needed to add one to this post is because, like the posts where several years have passed before I get to publishing them I have fundamentally changed between their writings and I no longer inhabit the same world I did when I started writing this post.  I started this post planning to write about fandom, elective, absorbed and inherited.  For the last couple years, my favorite team in all of sports has been Nottingham Forest F.C. 

The post was going to be about how I had selected a team who managed to supplant the lowly Bears as purveyors of heartbreak.  Best described, I think, by Nottingham native, Phil Juggins, who I met a couple of times back when NFFC were last in the Premier League when I visited Nottingham on my spring break from Uni Muenster.  As I dug in to the history of Forest, I found them to be a team that tended to break fans down with flashes of promise and success followed by epic failure.

And then it was Wednesday, and omfg, I've never felt so broken from a sports result.  The Double Doink was nothing compared to Wednesday.  Wednesday will be a historical moment... but it will pass, and will become a part of the groundwater of being a Forest supporter.  I'm sure I am not the only fan of NFFC and the Chicago Bears, but we few are loyal union members of the factories of sadness that are City Ground & Halas Hall.

But maybe next season will be our year...

The eclipse, Hegel, and the American Road

I logged 2400 miles of American roads, 14 hours of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, 3 full Brewers game broadcasts (all the enemy radio feed on XM), and 1 total eclipse as seen from Glendo State Park in Wyoming.

I woke up on Sunday morning and decided to forgo my Midwestern eclipse experience plans because the weather looked uncertain for optimal viewing.  En route to Deadwood, SD, I listened through the Preface (very familiar!), the Introduction and the early parts of A. Consciousness. 

My copy of Phenomenology was safely at home on my bookshelf, sitting right next to Susan Buck-Morss' excellent Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (which I have read in its entirety!).  I bought a used copy (originally Elizabeth Trejack's it seems) at a book shop in Minnesota.  It was highlighted and underlined in a few very specific sections (it opens automatically to Lordship and Bondage), and otherwise appears largely untouched.

I first learned of the existence of a fellow called Hegel and his friend "Geist" on my first day of classes at the University of Chicago.  I read the greatest hits from Hegel's masterwork, and nodded knowingly when his influence on later theorists was discussed.  On arrival to UW-M, I heard less about Hegel (though there was quite a lot more mention of Foucault, who I only heard come up once at UChicago, and that was in a joke from a Zadie Smith reading about introducing someone at an academic party as "... she likes Michel Foucault and costume jewelry"), but dutifully put Phenomenology and Buck-Morss' book on my prelim reading list.

Naturally, like most good reading lists, I did not read most of most of the books on the list, but excel at the academic art of talking about books you have not read.  I have also not read that book, though I've held it in my hands, and skimmed through bits, and I know people who have read it.

During my long drives of the last several days, I've read through the first 513 paragraphs of Hegel's work, starting and stopping and occasionally paying more and less attention as one is wont to do when reading or listening or existing at all, I suppose.  I think this might be the best way to read Phenomenology, not as one's only or deep reading of the text, but as a way to have read through it all.  As I drove, I would make notes of paragraphs I wanted to return to (don't worry, the highways of South Dakota and Wyoming are sparsely populated, even when there's an eclipse on!).  When I was first reading Shakespeare (or first reading it in college, I can't remember which), someone (either Jerry Davis or Mary Hull Mohr) gave me the advice to "just keep going" when you're reading it and not sure you're absorbing.  It's reading as muscle memory, and the deep read of certain sections can come later (or earlier!). 

Hearing "of Lordship and Bondage" after reading through the entirety of Consciousness changes the focus of the passage.  It makes the easy reading of Hegel as writing the heroic history of Haiti less easy and fancy free.  I've come to trust Buck-Morss, and don't think her reading is at all off the mark.  That said, I think it is important to remain aware of our academic practice of the use of texts to suggest meaning and significance.

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I first learned of the Great American Eclipse earlier this year, and almost in the same moment committed in my mind that I would be there to see it.  I took a few days vacation, but made few other plans, except to choose Beatrice, Nebraska as my viewing sight.  Tim & Jen & the kids live in Omaha, and actually lived in Beatrice shortly after they got married.  When the day got close, weather across the Midwest started looking dicey, and I headed west.

A total eclipse is an awe-inspiring sight, truly an opportunity to see the most awesome, magnificent vision available on earth.  An eclipse is also a random conflation of events - a new moon that aligns with the earth and sun; a sun for a planet that is about 400 times larger than the planet's moon, which is about 400 times closer than that same sun (so they take up about the same amount of sky space).  Also, we also happen to be in the small window of time, cosmically speaking, that allows this confluence.

I've been struggling to describe what I saw, or what the experience was like, or why it was worth the trip.  Finding significance in the random confluence of hunks of rock hurtling through the galaxy is what we do as humans.  Making meaning from bringing texts, histories, moments - that's what humanists do.  We live in a strange confluence of psychology, philosophy, astronomy, physics, history, sociology, geology, chronology and on and ology.

My thoughts of late have been turning back toward the super-modern, and the importance of the small.  I'm still working at making meaning from the experience of the eclipse, and from reading Hegel on the way to and from seeing the eclipse, and the observations and thoughts I had about Americans and Trump and Mt. Rushmore and history on the way to and from seeing the eclipse.  I expect that I will continue to try to build this meaning for quite some time.

What I learned or have built or have decided for now is that my phenomenology of totality has provided me some perspective on our present American experiment.  We are a strange and strained people, but I still think this is all just crazy enough to work. 

Calm Before Die Sturm

I grew up in a small town, and went away to college in a slightly larger small town.  Since that time, I've mostly inhabited cities - mostly what would be described as small cities, but all vast metropolises to me - and I wonder sometimes what I am missing sssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss


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November 8, 2017
Returning to this fragment from a year ago, I think i know what i was thinking about when i premised this post.

It's been


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February 2020
Well, shit - it's now New Hampshire primaries night in 2020.  I have no idea what this post was originally going to be about, but the timestamp tells me that i had only just recently learned that #donaldJtrump had won the presidency of the united states.  I remember, i was staying up, and Brooke had gone to bed. 

I told her late that night, but it wasn't until early the next morning when she had woken up, and i told her that a sex criminal had been elected...

Sturm und Drang is a noble literary tradition from around 250 years ago (i think that's what the title was thinking about)...  As i read the first posting from 2016, i think what i was wondering was why my fellow cosmopolitans so fundamentally misunderstood the appeal of Donald Trump.

Dork Philosophy

Let’s imagine that multiple worlds theory is a serious scientific phenomenon. There are plenty of pseudo-scientific and somewhat scientific debates to at least think about it, but of course, being a humanist, I will concern myself primarily with the Star Trek research data.

Source: eng.wikipedia.org

The fundamental question at hand has to do with choices. My dork philosophical question is this: in a multiverse full of every possibility of every choice in every life, how can deciding to do one thing versus another make any difference whatsoever? What I mean by that is, with every given choice that we make, theoretically, we create an alternative (or a thousand alternatives – my first critique of my student’s work is about showing ‘both sides’, but never considering why there are only two). What that must mean, then is that each decision you might make in a given situation has already been made, so whichever one you happen to be a part of, is just one of many.

I think this is in fact what is so troubling (and comforting) about Star Trek.  It is the lack of individuality, of ego, that makes humanity (or at least Roddenberry humanity) great. The sense of history that Star Trek series (and films) exude, are universal. Universal history is, in fact, an important piece of my dissertation work. Whether we can believe that a historical truth (perhaps not a psychological truth or philosophical one) can be applied across times. That is, when we make a movie like Lincoln, or Django Unchained, and we absolutely must leave historical authenticity aside, whether we can still say something about our own existence, while at the same time trying to better understand their own.

When we make history, I don’t think our efforts are that different from when we make science fiction. We extrapolate, from the only place that we can (the present), and try to imagine what another place and time might be like. Even when not separated by the caverns of history, people do this same thing with geography. In 1811, shortly before he decided to enact a suicide pact with his lover (insert name here), Kleist wrote "Die Verlobung in St. Domingo". The story tries to imagine what Haiti is like, by a young German Romantic who has never been to war and never been to the Americas.

But somehow Kleist captures it. He does understand what that world is like. It is something different from when he writes about Chile. In "Erdbeben in Chile" the world is very much like Europe. A city, devastated by natural disaster who looks for someone to blame, so they choose a young couple in love who may or may not have produced a baby (who is in fact he legitimate baby of someone who was crushed by a wall or some such). In his story about Haiti, however, Kleist minimizes the drama and makes the romance a background piece. The two unlikely lovers (a white Swiss soldier and a mulatto adopted daughter of a black slaver) finagle their way into love and only become a part of the story once they've succeeded (in betrothal at least).

On the Dangers of Nostalgia (and Apocalyptic Thinking)

Last night I attended my annual foray into reminiscing musicality and general old time-i-ness at the Badger Chordhawk's annual Barbershop Show in lovely Janesville, Wisconsin.  This year's theme was "remember the good old days" (which is it's theme every year), but this time, on the radio.  Live Radio - See it with your Ears! was a collection of classic Americana tunes interspersed with schlocky vignettes inspired by early radio programs.

This morning, reading Michael Chabon's Maps & Legends, it occurred to me that this mode of nostalgic thinking is the candy-colored cousin of the dystopian fiction of science fiction films, novels and graphic novels.  Chabon examines Howard Chaykin's American Flagg!, which is set in a post-apocalyptic, corporate-ruled world, where anyone who can afford to has relocated to the suburbs, as it were, on the new Mars colony.

His next chapter (about Cormac McCarthy's The Road) and two chapters after that (about Ben Katchor's Julius Knipl: Real Estate Photographer) further explicate Chabon's theories of dystopic and nostalgic thinking.  He never says so (and may not realize), but these two modes of thinking are the

Source: ComicsAlliance.com

same.  The nostalgia packed into the Chordhawk's erstwhility is an effort to ignore the present by idealizing the past.  The "good old songs" (some of which are great songs and others that are best forgotten) essentialize and simplify the era they come from just like songs today do.  The function of this nostalgic thinking is to focus attention on the non-existent past rather than the all-too-real present.

So too, post-apocalyptic stories (stories about how the future is so bleak and we are so doomed that we may as well just accept the present as is and distract ourselves while we wait for the inevitable collapse) are arguments for stasis, for inaction.  On the surface, dystopian stories (zombie narratives, say) might be read as warnings of what might come to pass if we do not take some course of action or do take another, but on further examination they are typically peopled with future nostalgialytes, pining for what's been lost.  In these narratives, characters re-enact the pre-apocalyptic traits and activities responsible for the blindness that causes the fall in the first place: empty bourgeois sentimentality (as in Terra Nova), rampant (also empty) consumerism (as in Dawn of the Dead), misplaced loyalty to institutions that lose their meaning once the world changes (as in The Postman or Jericho).

Nostalgia is a mode of remembering as we want to, with little attention paid to actualities.  There's a comfort in the past because it is untouchable.  The now (jetzt-Zeit) is hard, because of its potentiality and the future daunting because of its uncertainty and fluidity.  Then is easy because it can't come back and contradict you.  Apocalyptic thinking also negates the present by forsaking it, giving up on it.  If the future is certain (not necessarily defined, but certainly lost) then the now is drained of its revolutionary potential.  It is jetzt without jetzt-Zeit. 

'der Blick' in Fassbinder's Angst essen Seele auf

though there may be those who disagree with me...

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Angst essen Seele auf (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul) is first and foremost about 'the gaze' (this isn't a perfect translation of der Blick, which might be thought of as something like 'the glance', but 'gaze' is familiar to us. 'Blick' also means something like view or way of seeing, but all this and more {vista?} fits into the term, but let's just agree to refer to it as 'der Blick'. While we're on the idea of vocabulary, we might, instead, use the German term Anschau, which, again, is something like Blick, something like gaze, but also related to point of view...).

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[October 2017]
I haven't any clue what this post was going to be about.  Given the level of parenthetical in just the preamble, i think its scope must have been large.

I post it as found, because i think the Germanic translation nuance may be useful someday to someone.

Enjoy!

Kid Rock ain't got nothin' on me

except perhaps that short-lived marriage to PamAnderson.

Friday night Brooke and i were as far out west (the wiki-wiki-wildwildWest) as you can get in Omaha (except for the remaining 40 or so blocks that Omaha recently annexed) to hit an Irish Pub she'd heard about and was having living music that night. Sadly, the Irish pub was sadly un-Irish (a large Irish flag was draped from the roof, alongside Old Glory). Disappointed in the scene (and the cider selection) we headed (a little bit) back into town. On the way out we'd passed a bar called The Shamble Inn. Fantastic name... we had to go. As we pulled up, however, we noticed the American Flag curtains and were hesitant.

Nevertheless, we ventured forth and were rewarded with (yep, you guessed it) an electric bull. I'm not one to pass up an opportunity to ride an electric animal (or publicly embarrass myself) so i volunteered (to pay $5). Most of the people who'd been riding the bull up until this point had been women wearing tube tops. While i was wearing my new tight t-shirt, i didn't feel as though i measured up. Boy, was i wrong.

In fact, this wasn't my encounter with a raging, headless, automated bull. Back in '99 i attended Münster's annual Stadtfest and though we regrettably failed to find the Jägermeister-Coke guy we'd met in Soest (he had a jet pack type contraption strapped to his back and roamed Soest's city festival handing out drinks. One chamber contained Jägermeister, the other Coca-Cola) we did happen upon an electric bull. Because i was the only American in our group, cries of "come on, cowboy" started up and i was compelled to climb aboard the bull. Though my performance in Germany was disappointing, i managed to stay on for a good 13 seconds before being tossed aside (i blame my poor performance that time on my lack of shoes, owing to the fact i'd been wandering around most of the summer in Birkenstocks).

This time, i swore it would be different. I climbed aboard my first of two rides (2 rides for 5 bucks, what a deal) and set what i believe is a new record for the establishment. In order to clock the exact amount of time remained on the bull you'd need a team of scientists and some of those speed-of-light measuring type devices. I can't even estimate, but it was long enough for the photos bouncing off of me to reach the camera, so some evidence exists, but man, it was embarrassing. I'd like to blame drunkenness for my poor showing (my second ride lasted twice as long), but i don't actually remember being that drunk... (hey, memory loss is a sign of inebriation, isn't it?.. so, yeah, i'll say i was zonked).

Anyway, what i really wanted to say, before i got distracted in storytelling, was that these electric bulls are a menace... truly quite dangerous... and i urge all of my readers to never Ever try one. Don't be tempted to get on, just to see if you can "beat joel's time" because more likely than not, you will die, so let's just agree to have a non-competition for this event... we'll call it a tie, ok... just don't get on for ... your sake.

Lend me your eyes

I have been made the editor of German film reviews for the Culture Club. Not so much the Boy George variety, rather for George Washington & Georgetown University one. To whit, i call upon any German-Language movie buffs or any German-Language Buff Movie buffs (Pumping Iron, anyone) to write about them... get published, get a byline, don't get a check... That's right, although the writing is rewarding and the being read is rewarding, you won't actually be rewarded monetarily speaking.

The reviews on the website range from in-depth to extremely simplistic, so say as much as you like. Reviews can be in German or English and anywhere from 75 words to 500, or more. Anyway, so far its just been me writing the reviews (is 'it has' a situation for the "it's" or do i stick with my 'only use an apostrophe with "it is"' rule?), so i'd love some fresh blood. So, check out me on the editor's page and think about finally checking out Nosferatu...

P.S. If you happen to be listening to any German music & want to write about it you'd certainly help my brother out, as well, or any movies books music websites of any other language you might be partial to. Essentially, i want to up and vary the dialogue at the site, so, lend me your minds...


Pumping Iron (25th Anniversary Special Edition)

An Intelligently Designed Argument

Just think of how different things might be today if William Shakespeare had won, when he ran for king in 1604. Just imagine that world. There would have been no Hitler, the French Revolution would have happened gradually, but sooner, and with less bloodshed. The world would today be a vastly different place had the powers that were not stolen that election.

It is a well documented and indisputable fact, that Adolf Hitler descended from the lineage of Will Shakespeare. William’s eldest son, Ronfrey, married late in life & he and his wife Jane had a daughter who was forced to leave the country in her middle-teens. The daughter, Lizzy, was thought to stay with family in France, but recently discovered evidence now shows, clearly, that Lizzy moved on to Vienna and lived there to the end of her days with a child she had out of wedlock. The child grew up to be a servant in a wealthy house and bore the master of the house two children, one of whom would go on to be an ancestor of Adolf Hitler, and the other an ancestor of Walter Benjamin.

It is a truly harsh historical irony that the great thinker Walter Benjamin was separated only by a few generations from the man who not only made his life so difficult but to whom he (Benjamin) dedicated his life’s work to combating.

This fact of Hitler’s heritage is not in dispute. The only interesting, and worthwhile question, is what would have been different had Shakespeare won that election? To be sure, the family would not have returned to Stratford on Avon, so Ronfrey would likely have married earlier and to a more stately woman, but this change is not the least of what would have been different. Although Shakespeare’s success in his writing career afforded his family some comfort in Stratford, the family was somewhat outcast by locals because of the social oddity that accompanied Shakespeare’s ‘artistic nature’ (not least of which the insistence on being called “Shakespeare” all the time). As a duly elected king, these ‘social oddities’ would have been taken as kingly discretion, the right to behave as one will, but with the disputed Tudor victory, Will was forced to stay in his lifely station and pretend that he hadn’t even run for king. The loss was hard on Shakespeare, particularly because it was so disputed and the outcome questioned.

Shakespeare’s concession speech, recorded only in personal journals and writings of the time (since newspapers would not be invented for another 73 years!) was succinct and not malicious (though it was surely full of irony): “Although I strongly disagree with the decision reached by the powers that be, concerning the election, I will not fight the decision and split this population and declare myself the (il)legitimate leader… rather, I concede to the decision and will move on, as we all must move on.” (No blank verse for this soliloquy).

Sadly we will never know how history might have turned out differently had Shakespeare won in his effort, but we too, must accept the decisions of history, and live with it’s consequences.