Dancing on the Grave of Manchester City's Quadruple

So I decided a while ago that I was rooting for Liverpool to win the Premier League. It's a little late for this post, since I wanted to publish it when Manchester City was still in with a chance of winning four competitions, but more important things came up. But all the same, and regardless of the fact that City's still best-placed to win the league, I'm not rooting for them.

It took me a while to decide this. Rooting for Liverpool is hard both because of #bantz with friends who support them, and because of former friends who I don't want to see happy. And beyond that, in my formative football fan years it was entertaining to watch their haplessness (although they did win seven trophies in those years, including that famous comeback against Milan in the Champions League final). A team that sported Emile Heskey, Bruno Cheyrou and Djimi Traore wasn't exactly a team you wanted to hang your hopes on.

But they quietly went and turned good. Their Wikipedia page reminds me that they placed second in 2008-09 and scored their highest points total, as well as the "unexpected" title near-miss in 2013-14 that I vaguely remember. It was "near" in large part because of Luis Suarez's goals; but it ended up being a "miss" because of Steven Gerrard's slip at a crucial point (as the Guardian's football writers have been reminding us of constantly these last few months).

And the talk the last few seasons, since Jürgen Klopp took over from Brendan Rodgers and introduced his heavy-metal-inspired gegenpressing tactics, has been of how much better they've been. Last season's hurricane of goals from Mohamed Salah and charge to the Champions League final against Real Madrid turned them into possibly the most exciting team in England, and this season they've been even better, with a rock-solid defense anchored by Virgil van Dijk backing up their attacking threat.

Now, hang on - I said they were the most exciting team last year, and yet... wasn't that the season that Manchester City won their most recent title with a record number of points, goals, wins, consecutive wins and a nauseatingly long list of other records?

Yes, it was.

I have even less connection, positive or negative, to Manchester City than I do to Liverpool, which might be why I find it so hard to get excited about them. Though in my defense I don't think anyone on Football Weekly or any of the other (non-City-supporting) podcasts or outlets was that inspired by them.

This isn't to take away from that achievement, or the other titles that they've won since Abu Dhabi bought them. Those previous title wins both came on the last day of the season, and there was a certain pleasure last season in seeing just how dominant they could be. Would anybody be able to stop them? In the end, yes and no - Liverpool and Manchester United both managed to beat them in the league, but neither result stopped City ending the season with 100 points (and United placed second with 19 points fewer, at 81).

On the other hand, I think it's about enough out of them for now. Sure, if they win this season they'll be the first team to defend their title in about a decade, and for a while they were poised to win a historic quadruple, which no team has managed. Achievements like that aren't bad, but...

It just doesn't feel hard, seeing them win all the time. Sometimes when playing a video game, such as FIFA (to pull out an example at complete random), you've had enough of slogging up the divisions with Southend United to win the league, European Cup and FA Cup, and you take control of Barcelona or City, set the difficulty to easy and see if you can manage an unbeaten season. That's how it's felt watching Manchester City this season: like they're playing on easy and seeing how many points they can rack up.

Contrast it to Arsenal's Invincible season of 2003-04, when they won the league by not losing a single game. I'm not going to pretend that Arsenal came out of nowhere that season to perform a Leicester-type miracle - but they weren't able to compete with Manchester United or Chelsea financially, for all that they were perennial contenders for the title. You'd have expected United, which had dominated the league in the 90s and wasn't done bestriding English football quite yet, to manage an unbeaten season, but it was the comparative underdog of Arsenal that managed it, which makes it probably one of the greatest sporting triumphs I've ever followed (behind Leicester's title win, of course).

For this season, Liverpool feels more like the Arsenal of that era, and Manchester City the dominating juggernaut. Any game that City goes into, you pretty much expect them to win at a stroll, whereas Liverpool comes with an unpredictable X-factor that could allow them to implode against the likes of West Ham (though that was only a draw, so the implosion could have been much worse).

The other thing that would make a Liverpool win more meaningful is the time since their last title - 1990, before the Premier League even started, when they were still in the First Division of the Football League. It almost coincides with my other bugbear, the fact that no English manager has won the Premier League, though Liverpool's wait has been longer than England's.

Now, all of the above is just my own football romanticism. As of this morning Liverpool's top of the table again, two points ahead of City. But City has played one less game than Liverpool, and if City wins that game against United they'll pass Liverpool again on Wednesday. Both have relatively easy fixtures after that, and shouldn't be expected to drop points, which means if City does win on Wednesday Liverpool could lose out on top spot by a point, having lost one match all season.

And finally, spare a thought for Manchester United. They're set to play kingmakers for the season, because if they beat or draw with their greatest local rival City they effectively hand the title to their greatest rival in terms of achievements, Liverpool. Losing the game effectively crowns City winners, barring catastrophe. Winning the title might have been out of the question for them, given the Mourinho-related chaos of the fall, but playing this specific part in who wins the league is probably going to suck for them.

Endgame of Thrones

So it begins - or ends. We've come to the final set of episodes of Game of Thrones, the first one having aired tonight. Let's take it as a given that there'll be SPOILERS, both for tonight's episode and for stuff that's happened in previous seasons. Although if you're trying to avoid being SPOILED for episodes that aired in 2011, then there's not much I can do for you.

Cliches Redux

I had this idea of tackling the concept of cliches in writing, so when I sat down this evening, I had a look through the archive to see if I'd said anything about the subject before. I recalled using George Orwell's rules for writing as the basis of a post, long ago, so I thought I might also unearth that.

Well, I'm simultaneously too clever by half, and not quite clever enough, because I already wrote something "about" cliches, way back in 2012 (between reviews of the Hunger Games books and the Dark Knight Rises). Here it is, in all its glory.

But because it's 8.30 on a Sunday and I don't know what else to write, I decided to revisit it, because I  think I missed out a key concept about cliches in writing back then, and I'd like to try to address that lack.

In the previous post, I said:

That got me thinking about why exactly cliches are bad, and the answer I've come to is that they let you turn off your brain while writing.

That's strictly true, because you're relying on someone else's words to convey your meaning. In its most extreme form, an example would be the aliens from that Star Trek TNG episode Darmok, where they talk in metaphors that only have meaning to them ("Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra", "Shaka when the walls fell", and so forth).

But Darmok illustrates another disadvantage of relying on cliche to explain something, namely that it can obscure the meaning for a reader who's not familiar with the expression. You can say that something's so rare that it only happens once in a blue moon, but the person who hears that might not understand that a "blue moon" is when two full moons occur in a single calendar month.

(Actually, the site I used to confirm that points out that there's an older meaning, but let's go with mine for the time being).

The worst cliches, instead of properly conveying information, obscure it. One that always drove me nuts would appear frequently in the stories of Harry Turtledove. He'd sometimes describe a character who was Irish as "having a map of Ireland on his face". Now, the character didn't literally have a map of Ireland tattooed or stapled to his visage, but what does the expression actually mean?

Is it that he looks really Irish? Sure, but that doesn't help if you don't know which facial configuration is particularly Irish. Or does he look like a mishmash of every different Irish feature? Possibly, but that's not very helpful either, for the same reason as above and because you don't know if he's got the eyes of an Ulsterman, the nose of a Dubliner and the lower lip of a man of the Aran Islands.

Not that I know what any of those looks like, but you get how maddening this kind of thing can be.

Another one that I hear a lot is "partaking too much of the fruit of the grape". This is meant to say that someone's drunk, but it's a bit flowery and misdirected (more a euphemism than a true cliche) and not necessarily conveying what you want it to. But you run into phrasing like this when you want to say something more clever than "he had too much alcohol".

So to sum up, not only are cliches overused, but they don't necessarily convey the meaning you want them to, which is an even more important reason to avoid them. I'm not saying that language should be completely free of metaphor or that it should completely free of ambiguity, but as writers we should be aware of the meaning we are trying to convey, and make sure the words or expressions we use convey exactly as much or as little as we want. A cliche is like an unreliable gun, in that you don't know what target it'll hit.

And if that's not a way to end a blog post, I don't know what is! I may have overdone that metaphor a little, but if so, it kind of proves my point.

RIP Scott Walker

Just learned today that Scott Walker, the former singer of the Walker Brothers and architect of the most challenging avant garden pop I have, passed away at the age of 76.

I first learned about Walker from a muso friend, who gave me a look of withering disdain in 2003 or 2004 when he told me that this Walker guy had produced Pulp's latest album, and I said I didn't know who he was.

How could you blame me, though? As I discovered a year or so later, when I wandered into a New York record store and asked about Scott Walker's albums, the guy wasn't well known at all in the US in those days. Which is ironic because he was American, though he'd made his name as a 60s boy band icon, and then again as a critical darling in the 1980s for the succession of challenging albums that started with Climate of Hunter. I soon started reading Pitchfork's 100 albums lists, and Walker was all over those (as much as you could be releasing an album only every 11 years, that is).

And as I got more familiar with the history of British rock, I started seeing him get name-dropped again and again. He may not appear in official histories of the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, but Scott Walker was creating music, both with the Walker Brothers and on his own, that would be just as influential to the Britpop acts I would become obsessed with in high school.

When I got back to London in 2006, about the time Walker released his album The Drift, I caught a wave of interest in him, and so I picked up the essentials: Scott 1 through 4, and a greatest hits album featuring some of his best solo and Walker Brothers material. I also watched the shit out of a documentary about him and the recording of the Drift, called 30 Century Man. My flatmates at the time were bemused by this slavish attention to an artist they'd never heard of, but I've never shaken my love for Walker since.

I did pick up the challenging albums later, of course - I got the Drift a couple of years later, and Bish Bosh a few years after that, and for Christmas recently I got Climate of Hunter and Tilt. And more awesomely, in 2008 I saw Drifting and Tilting, a concert of Walker's music from those albums, played at the Barbican by an orchestra and sung by luminaries such as Blur's Damon Albarn and Pulp's Jarvis Cocker.

The music was impressive, for all its challenging nature, because it was just as much performance art piece as rock concert. Just as in the recording of the Drift, for the song Clara (about Mussolini's mistress Clara Petacci) the musicians wheeled out a side of pork onto the stage and had a boxer punch it to achieve the percussion sound from the album.

And of course, what was most impressive was turning round idly at one point during the concert and seeing the great man, Scott Walker himself, sitting at the production boards. That's as close as you could get to a live performance by him.

Thinking about him today, what struck me was that I got into his music at a very dark time for me personally. 2008 was a sucky year, full of job strife, discord with flatmates, bad health and existential angst over my dating life (even more than now, if you can believe it). I was so alone and afraid that I found myself having to go find a psychoanalyst, whom I saw for a year afterward.

Scott 1 through 4 played on fairly continuous loops during those days. "Two Weeks Since You've Gone", a mournful ballad from Scott 3, was what I was listening to one night as I lay in bed unable to sleep from the depression and the anxiety caused by my poor physical health (I was eating like shit and not exercising, and getting more depressed because of it). The string sections perfectly captured my feelings that dark night, and I remember being pleasantly weirded out not long after when I heard something similar-sounding in a Stella Artois commercial - a synchronicity that made sense because Belgian chansonnier Jacques Brel was a huge influence on Scott Walker.

It's been a fairly constant Scott Walker "moment" since he released the Drift, and since that documentary came out about him. Artist after artist has fallen over themselves in the last decade to talk about his influence on them, to the point that the frontman of the Arctic Monkeys even released his own Walker-influenced album, as the Last Shadow Puppets, to explore that influence on his music. It may not be a great album, but the words "influenced by Scott Walker" were enough to get me to plunk down money for it.

The Guardian ran the obituary today, of course, along with a number of testimonials from fans and collaborators. Some never met him, and some worked very closely with him, but all spoke movingly about him.

But the thing that sticks with me right now is a scene from the documentary, when the filmmakers interview Angela Morley (previously known as Wally Stott before undergoing gender reassignment surgery). Morley is telling about her experiences working with Walker, and they play Montague Terrace (In Blue) for her. And as the strings swell, and she hears again the music she helped commit to tape, she tears up - probably the most important moment in a movie aiming to pin down why exactly this one artist, who most people have never heard of, was so revered.

I'm just glad I did get to find out about him, before he passed. And that I got to see him, in real life, sharing the music he wrote, all those years ago.

David Tennant Does a Podcast with...

It feels like a lot of recent blog posts have been about British stuff, and a venerable theme here on my blog is about what podcasts I'm listening to, so I thought I'd merge the two things together and talk about a new one I've only started listening to this past weekend: David Tennant Does A Podcast With...

It's new both in the sense that I only just discovered it, and that he's only been doing it for a couple of months. I think the first I heard about it was on Twitter, when he congratulated his former costar Olivia Colman for her Academy Award, and she linked back to the tweet about the episode she did of his show. So I followed the various tweets and links back to the source, and then discovered on the Apple Podcasts app that he's been interviewing a number of interesting folks since he started it.

In addition to Olivia Colman, he talked to his other Broadchurch costar (and Doctor Who successor) Jodie Whittaker, plus Whoopi Goldberg, Ian McKellen and (the one that, perversely, convinced me to just go ahead and download them all) former UK prime minister Gordon Brown, of all people.

Broadchurch, of course, was the initial hook for me listening to DT's show. That was my favorite new discovery of the last few months, even despite its sometimes overwrought acting and the sort of weird West Country accents Colman and Whittaker were putting on for their characters. And for those two episodes, I wasn't disappointed - not that they talked a lot about the show, but I liked hearing how Whittaker got the call-up to audition for the part of the Doctor (Broadchurch showrunner Chris Chibnall is now showrunning Doctor Who).

It also ties into something I wrote about a couple of years ago, when David Bowie and Alan Rickman (and so many others) passed away more or less suddenly. Reading Rickman's obituaries I was struck by the sense of the whole community of British actors, and his place in it - and this is a feeling that gets reinforced whenever I watch a British show or movie and find myself playing "spot the familiar face".

More than anything, though, what I responded to in the Olivia Colman and Jodie Whittaker episodes was the obvious joy they all took in each other's company. They may have worked together on one or two things, but the sense of a bunch of peers who know one another's careers and enjoy each other's work is fun to listen to.

He obviously doesn't have the same connection with Whoopi Goldberg or Ian McKellen, but David Tennant's a good enough host that the sense of pros talking shop really comes through, in the best way. Goldberg and McKellen have all this experience, but Tennant's an accomplished actor in his own right, so he knows what they're talking about in a way that some of the other podcast hosts I listen to, who aren't long-time actors, may not be able to do as well.

In a lot of ways, DTDAPW reminds me of the best stretches of the Nerdist Podcast (which I no longer listen to, for non-podcast reasons). Like that show, the guests are a good mix of Tennant's friends and peers, and Tennant shows a lot of enthusiasm for joking, chatting and turns out to be a good interviewer.

I've said before that I'm not much of a fan of Doctor Who, to the point that I have to remember to write "Doctor" out in full, but I'll be happy if he gets more of his former costars or even the other Doctors (Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi, or even Christopher Ecclestone) on the show. And I'll be happy to hear from folks who appeared with him in Jessica Jones, the only other show I've seen him in.

And yeah, circling back to that thing about Gordon Brown: that was the thing, as I said, that brought me on board. Brown has always fascinated me, because he was so clearly always going to be the nearly man, following a decade or so of Tony Blair's premiership. There were some less savory things I heard about him, like his refusal to concede the 2010 election until it was settled, and the fact that he was a bit of a martinet to his staff. But at the same time, he was being lauded for his response to the financial crisis (though a few of my friends blamed him for creating it ). 

Given everything that's happened since, it's hard not to think that if he could have just won a tiny bit more of the electorate, Britain would be such a different place now. So I really do want to hear what he has to say for himself.

The life of an actor is pretty hectic, so I'm expecting that there'll come a time when DT's got to put it on hiatus while he works on something else (something that pays!). But while he's got the bandwidth for it, I'll be ready to listen to whatever guest he's got.

Manhood and Manliness: Me vs. Chris Pratt in Jurassic World

What does being manly or masculine entail?

It's a thing I've been batting around in my mind for a while, but watching Jurassic Kingdom: Fallen World last night (or at least part of it) crystallized some of this thinking for me. Back in 2015 I watched the original Jurassic World, and while I didn't find any real fault with its leads, Bryce Dallas Howard and Chris Pratt, I mused at the time that it would have been neat if the roles had been reversed: have her be the two-fisted dino-wrangling badass, and have him be the administrator who needs to learn how to love.

It's been so long since I saw the first installment that I don't remember, but in Fallen Kingdom they really drive home that Chris Pratt's character is a MAN, man. When he first appears, he's building his own house, for god's sake, and then bragging to the nerdy systems analyst guy that he rides motorcycles and wrangles dinosaurs.

But again, I'm not criticizing the portrayal, or even the idea that men might do stuff like that. I'm interested in my own eye-rolling reaction to it, and the idea that I should be rolling my eyes at it.

Somewhere along the line, in the stew of self-toxic ideas that I've taken on and internalized, is the idea that I'm a different kind of masculine than guys like Chris Pratt's character, and that the types are both diametrically opposed and mutually exclusive. Beyond that, it's worth being clear that "different" also means "inferior" - as I said, it's a toxic stew of self-limiting beliefs, and so it's the idea that I'm less manly/masculine than dudes who put out oil fires and have cheerleader threesomes.

The other day I was telling someone about a bit that I saw once from British comedian Michael McIntyre. He was talking about shopping with his wife, and meeting a super-camp shop attendant. His reaction, in the bit, was to lower his voice and act all gruff and manly, when really what he wanted to do was camp it up along with the shop attendant. I joked to my friend that I could relate to this, but thinking about it today, I started questioning that.

Or rather, I can relate to wanting to just be myself, for whatever that means, and not having to play at seeming like one thing or another. But being myself doesn't mean being particularly gruff or camp - I'd rather just be as taciturn and surly as I am in any situation...

Another place that questioned different types of masculinity/maleness was the first season of True Detective. The AV Club's recaps contrasted Woody Harrelson's character's traditional male anti-hero behaviors (drinking, adultery, corruption) with those of Matthew McConaughey's character, who's full of mysterious utterances and smirks about the rubes surrounding him. The reviewer pointed out Cohle's notebook and the way he collected evidence in it as a particularly male way of doing it, which I found interesting.

Without wanting to add to the self-criticism, and aware that I'm in danger of rambling out of control, I guess the answer (as always) is... not to worry about this stuff so much? On one level, perhaps the most important lesson I've learned is not to adjust my behavior or thinking to what I think people want from me. On another, worrying about whether I'm being the "right" kind of manly, or the "right" kind of manly for me, is just a waste of my mental resources: I'll appeal to some people, and I won't appeal to others. Real men, whether they're Chris Pratt, Matthew McConaughey or Michael McIntyre, probably have better things to worry about.

In Praise of the Golazzo Podcast

Over a year ago I found myself faced with an impossible conundrum. James Richardson had just announced his departure from the Guardian's Football Weekly podcast, which he'd been hosting since around 2006, to join a new company called Muddy Knees Media and host a new show, the Totally Football Show.

The question was, did I have time for two podcasts each week, both dropping on the same day each week, and which both talked about the same thing? Totally Football had James and a number of former Guardian writers, like Raphael Hönigstein and James Horncastle, but Football Weekly had Barry Glendenning's world-weary cynicism, and how could you do better than that? My choice was sealed when Barry recited the theme song to the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air during the Guardian's coverage of the 2018 World Cup, and I've since left Totally Football as the backup or a supplement to when huge things happen in the Premier League.

But then I started to hear rumors of a new podcast from Muddy Knees Media. It was called Golazzo, and it was about Italian football. There was an interview with Nathaniel Chalobah, following his time playing in Italy, and when I listened to that I started to hear about other topics they were taking on.

So I downloaded one episode, and then another, and pretty soon Golazzo had entered my weekly rotation as a must-listen show every Wednesday. This way I got my fix of James Richardson and his puns, as well as James Horncastle's knowledge of Italian football and Italo-American-accented journalist Gabriele Marcotti (who also happens to be a fellow Columbia J-School alum), while also learning more about the recent history of Serie A and getting a rundown of what's happening in the Italian league each week.

What makes it great to listen to is that when I was working in London last year I finally picked up John Foot's magisterial history of Italian football, Calcio, so I understood some of the broad strokes of the game in Italy. But whereas Calcio had necessarily to devote most of its pages to the farther history of Serie A, Golazzo relies mostly on stories and characters from the last 20 years or so of the Italian game - the days when Serie A was the most glamorous league in the world and James Richardson himself hosted the Football Italia show for Channel 4.

The other thing that makes stories from the 90s and 00s so appealing to me is that I was starting to pay attention to football at that time. I get to hear more about the players who were current then, from how they got their starts to what they did later on in their careers. I just missed Football Italia as it ended and a non-terrestrial channel got the Serie A rights, so ironically once I moved to the UK it became harder for me to keep up with the game in Italy.

And beyond that, it's just nice to hear people talking knowledgeably about my home country. It's not really a side of myself I get to express very often, given that I don't have any Italian friends here in the Bay Area, but I do like being Italian and having this side of my personality that has nothing to do with my daily life. Usually I only get this feeling, of being quite far away from my American life, when I'm out in Turin with my cousins, but lately I've been getting it from Golazzo, too.

I sometimes wonder if other immigrants feel this way about their home country and their adopted country - the way your life in one doesn't really impinge on your life in the other, but that things in your home country just pick up where you left off from the last time you were there. Certainly traveling through eight or nine time zones and then speaking a different language at the end of it helps in separating the two places.

Oddly the immigrant experience is not one I've thought about much as it relates to my own life. I'm the first to admit I'm Americanized as fuck, but as time passes I become more interested in how coming here from a different culture has affected my perception of being American, and my desire to be American. Though I think that desire was stoked more by my time living in Britain, where feeling Italian was paradoxically even farther off than it is here, in many ways.

In any case, that's where the pleasure of Golazzo lies for me: getting closer to my roots and my home country at a time when that feels quite far away. Long may it last, or as they same in some parts of Italy: cent'anni!