A Lot of Beliefs in One Magazine

I'm kinda in the midst of jury duty now. After being selected on Tuesday, I went to court on Wednesday without much reading, expecting to be in court all day. I was wrong and without much reading until my lunch break when I picked up the latest issue of Believer. There's a lot of pieces in this issue that I connect with of late.

First of all, I owe it to Scott for bringing it to my attention a couple weeks ago. His partner Peter Bebergal has a review. Peter is also the close childhood friend of Jason, who just moved to Providence to teach at Roger Williams.

Jason got me back into comics this spring. The cover artist is Charles Burns, who did the beautifully creepy Black Hole, which I read early in the summer. Great intro, but not so satisfying ending in my esteem, nonetheless, the art is killer.

This issue is on games, which I love. The lead article is Paul LaFarge's profile on Dungeons and Dragons, and meeting one of the creators E. Gary Gygax. This closes out my LaFarge obsession, having read three of his novels in 3 months. The piece has a lot of good nuggets for novices and playas. I've been pushing LaFarge's The Facts of Winter to all my bilingual friends. Including my 18-year old cousin Max who is staying with me this month. He's got a one way ticket to Paris. Until then, he's exploring the City as a bike messenger.

Nick Hornby has an essay. I read his Fever Pitch before going to London and World Cup madness. Then Brian McMullen has a piece on how Zidane's headbutt was wikied in wikipedia.

Lastly, Georges Perec writes on crosswords and other word games, which I've been doing more since the spring, including seeing Wordplay with Joe's dad.

Of course there's more in the magazine, and there are other interests going on in my head, but this was a lot of overlap.

My trial doesn't start until Monday, and who knows how long it will last. But two days in, I got a lot of reading in and not much court time.

Tragic Ending to 25 Matches [Update]

In the past month, I saw the better part of an astonishing 25 World Cup games. Like Nick Hornby's admission in Fever Pitch, I spent starling amounts of time as an idiot. And I'm sure I'll do it again.

In the end, I was for France, drawn in by not only the story of their older (as in my age) squad, but by beautiful and tenacious playing by Zizou and Ribery in particular. And so their loss wasn't so crushing as seeing Zidane's thuggish head butt. An unsettling reversal to Italy's early thugghishness against the US. Moreover, the loss was hardly convincing. Though Italy dominated the first half, France dominated the rest, having the best scoring chances and the more beautiful play.

Sport, as much of our lives is unpredicatable and confusing. How can we love players who mar themselves and their sport with brutal violence or distasteful cunning? Poor judgement driven by emotions also struck Rooney, Figo, C.Ronaldo, Frings, Ballack. Is it any consolation that Mazeratti is a known thug? Little. Zidane scripted his mixed legacy of the Best Player of this Cup and the most regrettable exit. Pundits were calling for opera and we were given a grand tragedy.

[Update]- Robert Weintraub offers an interesting perspective in Slate.

London: Books & Plays [Updated]

Why some habits are hard to regain and others so easy, I'll never understand. After a few days, the trip to London with my folks is digesting in a number of ways. So I'll try to break it down.

First off, as my habit, I loaded up on complementary reading material: Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby's memoir of his football obsession; Plays 1, the first collection of plays by Caryl Churchill, including Owners and Cloud Nine; and The Complete Plays of Sarah Kane. All of which delve into the not so pleasant aspects of the British psyche.

I managed to catch two plays: Titus Andronicus at the Globe and Enemies by David Hare (after Maxim Gorky) at the Almeida.

Titus, Shakespeare's money making blockbuster, lived up to expectations in this gory production. I've only seen this production and Julie Taymor's film, but both make me marvel at some of the soliloquays inbetween the horror... in contemplating grief and violence. The one major distraction was the awful bouffant mullets forced on Tamara's son's ..not quite fitting the otherwise predominant Elizabethan staging.

Enemies was searing with intense commentary on owners and the proletariat, and a nifty bit of metatheater, fitting for Hare's Stuff Happens, regarding the Iraq War, particularly the role in government to protect or exploit civilians. All sides seem tragic and disaster is prophesied. It was also good to get out of Central London as the Almeida required.

In a coda of sorts, I just read Korean filmmaker Park Chanwook's interview in Bomb by Esther Chae. Chanwook just closed a much heralded vengeance trilogy composed of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, and Lady Vengeance. Chae mentions Titus among others as classic tales of vengeance and asks Chanwook to cite any Korean classics that deal with personal vengeance, to which he says there are none:

"We have tragedies related to war and colonization, but we don't have a culture where on expresses anger in an aggressive way. I didn't' have any literature to refer to. And I find it stifling that we don't have such traditions"

[Update] Ben Brantley must have been at my heels. The show I wanted to see but couldn't get a ticket for was Tom Stoppard's new play Rock N Roll that just opened. Brantley's review came out today. 2/3's down he give a mention of Enemies:

"What is to be done?" might also be the mantra of "Enemies," a new adaptation by the industrious David Hare of Maxim Gorky's 1906 drama of aristocrats and proletariats at loggerheads, which ends this weekend at the Almeida Theater.

Performed with naturalistic vibrancy by a fine cast directed by Michael Attenborough, "Enemies" oozes the juicy ruling-class angst, idiosyncrasy and moral paralysis associated with classic Russian fiction. But it also presents an array of ardent, revolution-ready factory workers. The more insightful of the fluttery aristocrats envy the workers their certainty. But it's telling that the uncertainty of the doomed upper-class characters is what feels convincing, and unsettlingly familiar.