I first became aware of I Love Music through what was then called New York London Paris Munich (a.k.a. Freaky Trigger), and I became aware of the latter because Simon Reynolds bigged it up in an end-of-year round-up in the Christmas 2000 Wire. Mainstream published music writing meant next to nothing to me in those days; the theoretical rush which had powered the writing with which I had grown up and by which I had been influenced seemed to have totally vanished, to be replaced by demographic-friendly waiter’s lists, things which told their desired audience exactly what they wanted to hear, rather than things they didn’t know. I went to Reynolds’ then blog for further info, traced the links, and NYLPM/FT looked like the kind of place where my kind of music writing flourished, or had even been resuscitated. ILM kicked off as a comment box to NYLPM/FT and expanded from there.
I first posted there in April 2001, with some comments about the then state of the music press and specifically the NME (yes, it was MC Stuck Needle even then). I didn’t intend to follow it up at all but this guy Robin Carmody responded and actually remembered me from the old combative days of the Melody Maker letters pages (perhaps fortunately, my numerous Letters Of The Week have yet to resurface online) so I stuck around. My then partner Laura was pretty sceptical about the whole thing, thought that reading it was a waste of time, let alone posting to it. But Laura was busy studying for her professional librarian qualifications and so my presence on ILM was an excuse for me to keep out of her way (at her request).
Things worked pretty well for a month or so. Then Laura fell seriously ill, was diagnosed with cancer and deteriorated rapidly. She died nine years ago this Wednesday just past. And I went to pieces, pretty publicly. If I wanted to erase any internet carbon footprints they would constitute the vast majority of what I posted to ILX (as it had then become, ILM, ILE and its sundry satellites) after August 2001; talk about redefining the term “projection.” Still it has to be said that the people who (for me) counted on ILX were remarkably patient and supportive of me, even when I was at my worst, and through the networks of friendship which opened up for me via ILX I was able to carve a path through to the renewed life which I now live. An extended meditation on Pulp’s We Love Life which I posted on ILM in October 2001 was republished shortly afterwards on FT at Ned Raggett’s request and the reception gave me the confidence I needed to go ahead and set up my own blog. The rest is history and doesn’t need to be retraced here.
I hung on in there for just over eight years, and times were more often than not stormy. If I had the time over again I wouldn’t have said around 98% of what I did say and a lot of people there still haven’t forgiven me but there’s nothing I can about that; people are people and I can’t force them to like me, any less than I can compel them not to slag me off for something I posted nine years ago, when my life and circumstances, and therefore my beliefs, were entirely different from what they are now. But then you had the collective community response to 7/7; what can I say, that proved how important ILx could be when push came to shove, and the response helped drag me out of my self-destructive purpose-free ennui and, again, towards the life I now have.
I stopped posting regularly in June of last year; there was no big precipitatory factor, I simply drifted away. This was just before the Bimble business but that certainly didn’t encourage me to return. In fact since June 2009 I’ve posted precisely twice on ILX; once to note the passing of Harry Beckett, and once to provide a link to an old CoM piece which somebody couldn’t find. And both of these were within the last month, which may or may not signify something. ILX belongs to others now – the second generation of the community – and these days I tend to break bread with the old school ILXors in the Popular comments boxes, the more patient speed of which agrees more with the sort of things I want to talk about. The last decade has been akin to going to school again, but in a good way; learning how to live once more was the main lesson and I would have been a goner without it.
And, just to clear things up, I am definitely not Geir.
Friday, 27 August 2010
Sunday, 6 June 2010
2009: A Club Odyssey, part 15
It was early, quite early, as she caught the little local bus - one of several she'd had to take over hill and through dale, dipping and sloping here and there. The sun was over the horizon by now, slanting and glittering through the trees, the sky a clear blue. She was tired; she didn't want anything more than to go home.
But she didn't have to go home in this way. She had a growing fear that she would come across someone and that he - the last suitor, the one she could not shake off - would appear. There was no way to know but to confront (possibly, possibly not) him; and so she was on this bus, going up, uphill, then veering along a residential street. She felt like the eagle that could look at the sun; the sun on the horizon that dazzled and stunned in equal turns...
...the bus crossed the bridge, yes that one, the view giving her a glimpse of so much she had just experienced, the dome, the tall buildings, the river; then it was gone and the bus went between the pavements and cars and all the greenness and freshness and vividness of the day began to oppress; this was too much like something else to bear up being itself, just itself, for too long. She saw a figure that looked like him - almost, but not quite - ahead, and knew as she looked that he in turn would look back.
She buzzed to be let out and the bus stopped at the corner. She had no idea where to turn, whether to confront him or no; the pull towards him was as strong as the push. She could not look at him; she knew he was most definitely looking at her. In her guts she knew one thing, that she had to go home, and so she began to run down hill, and sure enough he followed, yelling "Hey! Stop! Please stop! Don't go away!" But she could not stop.
And the hell of it was that the beauty of the day was in her face non-stop. The flowers, the light on the grass, the birds singing, but she was again breathless and finding her way down through the path to the field below, hoping she would not somehow be stopped, that she would not stop herself. "Please please stop, I didn't mean to hurt you!" he cried out. She could hear him closer now, calling her name as well and clearly, clearly not giving up. She had no allies, no friends here, in the dense intensity, the twigs and flying seeds in her hair, but all of a sudden some girls, some rather excited girls, loomed ahead. Their eyes were wide in ecstasy, honey and cream were their clothes and their hands were sweet. "HELLLLP!!" she cried out, and they saw him grimacing trying to keep up and in their madness they thought he was someone else, and set upon him like a pack of wolves. They shrieked, they chased, they did not let up--
--she could not pause as the path turned sharply to a side, the ground flattened at last, pavement reappeared, and the girls had caught him, she heard his shrieks and covered her ears. This is what it was like, and half of her wanted to go back, to help him, but she was simply too damn tired, from the night.
Somehow - perhaps because he looked like a woodland creature himself? Because he was stronger than he thought? - he did escape them, just barely, to run down to her, improbably; the pull for him was too much, and the girls, when they did reach him, could not agree, quite, on what to do to or with him. He was bruised and roughened up, but no more...
...he reached her, as she was still gasping for breath and sitting, more like lying on her side, looking at a flower. Those girls were not her. He sat down and looked at her, the only one who survived and who would survive. He had no special gift, and this is what saved him in the end. The sun shone on the grass, turning into gold, the birds trilled in the silence. They soberly looked at each other again.
Friday, 9 April 2010
UN PO' PER CELIA E UN PO' PER NON MORIRE
I feel his lontano everywhere I go around here, my patch, my home.
Some Londoners go East, others go firmly West. He was everywhere and nowhere in London but it’s the West, always the West, that calls both him and me back.
I don’t know when he was last here. I saw him, standing outside the shop, doing a photocall in 1996 for twenty years of the thing he started. He seemed happy to be out of it.
He was always in everything and absent when he was most needed.
But he was always London, via Scotland and the dapper Golders/Stamford run of things.
The respectful tributes were to be expected, just as though he had been called to the Bar after all like the good Jewish son so many wished him to be.
You were expecting soured rosettes, the helpful stench of retrospective hypocrisy?
They hated him then and they love him as of yesterday. Just like Oscar Wilde.
Oh, so like Oscar, if only he’d had a better grasp of London (and I think he probably had a better hold on Paris towards the end).
Well, of course. Who would have expected anything different?
He formed things, like Cyril Connolly. He never really invented things and maybe Seymour Stein or Kool Herc were there first – there’s no maybe about it, you know and he knew that – but like the Beatles he knew how to draw things to our attention in both ways, the second being (as an artist – why, of course!) to draw things in pictures he’d just made up and looked outrageously attractive.
There at Selfridge's with King Mob, Xmas ’68, handing out the goodies to startled but joyful kids and how many of those grew up to be part of a different, successive story?
No one quite got Oxford Street like he did.
Hovis loaves outside the baker’s in Clapham Common. Walk-on roles at Grosvenor Square.
He easily got rid of his previous unwanted, spent lives. Get shot of the names, enrol in a different art school as somebody else, spend all his grant money on records off the stalls on Goldhawk, go and run a shop, go to New York, come back, think of marketing wheezes for Sexfests, why not?
He taught us, like Welles but happier, that you could stop being somebody inconvenient at any time, come back as somebody else, though still recognisably the same. But different. Free of dead weights.
He said you can send the system to fuck so easily.
The T-shirt. Two sides of the bed. Dewey Redman and Archie Shepp there alongside Kutie Jones. I never forgot that. That was my way in.
The first big bend in the road. Next to the Conservative Club.
He said I can change whatever and whenever I want to and if you’re not ready then it’s hardly my fault.
The missing link between Jonathan King and Guy Debord.
He said, keep up.
He asked, why are there so many of you yet so few of me?
He made everything I sensed possible.
Most things, anyway.
The Pistols spluttered to a Tesco’s end and he went to the laundrette but his old Croydon College/Grosvenor Square comrade Robin Scott came through with a different way and would any of that have happened without his precedent, without what he suggested?
He, who knew the absolute importance of Max Bygraves and Lionel Bart in the scheme of things.
Where did you think the Small Faces came from?
Wormholt no-goodniks who wanted to be the Faces and that sulky Aquarian from Finsbury who fancied himself as some kind of punctum.
The other guy from north London, and he subcontracted his entire band and Adam came back at him better and stronger.
Not that he was bothered.
Was he that bothered about the boy he never quite got himself together to look after properly? The Royal Courts in 1986 – bustling, surrendering, that’s what you get for not being a dad.
Nick Kent didn’t see him as a father figure.
As far as you can trust Nick Kent.
As far as you can trust any One.
“Oh, Gawd, is that his latest scam?”
The end of 1982. New Pop on the ropes. He whisked it back to life.
And Trevor, who had to choose between a quiet Spandau life and a Noisy, Arty one and never liked punk in the first place, went with him. Effortlessly.
Yes, Wheels of Freaking Steel.
But this was telling everybody else about it.
Tony Wilson. A parallel general in the North. It is what both would have wanted.
The strategies, the scones, the fire, the failures, the concepts, the cons.
He was a meretricious conman and a captivating magician.
Smartarse and visionary.
The two overlap so much it’s surprising they don’t form a new river. With its own bends.
Poet and prat.
He wanted something like the Bay City Rollers and in the end the Bay City Rollers wanted to be something like him.
Number one. Of course it was number one. Would anyone still be lauding it, talking about it, arguing about it, if it actually HAD been listed as number one?
“Does the presence of Number Two require the existence of Number One?”
Pound, Parker, Kane, Prisoner, Pistols.
In 1977 Larkin, in part-parody of Hughes, wrote a Silver Jubilee quatrain which ended: “Crow shat on Buckingham Palace/God pissed Himself.”
The A&M signing, outside Buckingham Palace, and Christ they had to do it quick.
Herb Alpert dropped the Pistols and signed Ornette. Now THAT’S punk.
Some say Ornette dropped by the studio while PiL were recording Metal Box.
On “Double Dutch” doesn’t he sound like Harry Corbett?
You listen to the right “wrong” radio and everything changes forever.
His radio travelogues; endlessly circuitous, always re-running the same round of memories.
Pete Waterman of course so close to this but then what’s wrong with just printing the legend?
His totality, swirling like reproachful swallows, as I walk through the World’s End.
His contraptions, his beginnings, and they do not end.
Invent the future and then talk about sin.
And remember to lick those lips pure pink.
Some Londoners go East, others go firmly West. He was everywhere and nowhere in London but it’s the West, always the West, that calls both him and me back.
I don’t know when he was last here. I saw him, standing outside the shop, doing a photocall in 1996 for twenty years of the thing he started. He seemed happy to be out of it.
He was always in everything and absent when he was most needed.
But he was always London, via Scotland and the dapper Golders/Stamford run of things.
The respectful tributes were to be expected, just as though he had been called to the Bar after all like the good Jewish son so many wished him to be.
You were expecting soured rosettes, the helpful stench of retrospective hypocrisy?
They hated him then and they love him as of yesterday. Just like Oscar Wilde.
Oh, so like Oscar, if only he’d had a better grasp of London (and I think he probably had a better hold on Paris towards the end).
Well, of course. Who would have expected anything different?
He formed things, like Cyril Connolly. He never really invented things and maybe Seymour Stein or Kool Herc were there first – there’s no maybe about it, you know and he knew that – but like the Beatles he knew how to draw things to our attention in both ways, the second being (as an artist – why, of course!) to draw things in pictures he’d just made up and looked outrageously attractive.
There at Selfridge's with King Mob, Xmas ’68, handing out the goodies to startled but joyful kids and how many of those grew up to be part of a different, successive story?
No one quite got Oxford Street like he did.
Hovis loaves outside the baker’s in Clapham Common. Walk-on roles at Grosvenor Square.
He easily got rid of his previous unwanted, spent lives. Get shot of the names, enrol in a different art school as somebody else, spend all his grant money on records off the stalls on Goldhawk, go and run a shop, go to New York, come back, think of marketing wheezes for Sexfests, why not?
He taught us, like Welles but happier, that you could stop being somebody inconvenient at any time, come back as somebody else, though still recognisably the same. But different. Free of dead weights.
He said you can send the system to fuck so easily.
The T-shirt. Two sides of the bed. Dewey Redman and Archie Shepp there alongside Kutie Jones. I never forgot that. That was my way in.
The first big bend in the road. Next to the Conservative Club.
He said I can change whatever and whenever I want to and if you’re not ready then it’s hardly my fault.
The missing link between Jonathan King and Guy Debord.
He said, keep up.
He asked, why are there so many of you yet so few of me?
He made everything I sensed possible.
Most things, anyway.
The Pistols spluttered to a Tesco’s end and he went to the laundrette but his old Croydon College/Grosvenor Square comrade Robin Scott came through with a different way and would any of that have happened without his precedent, without what he suggested?
He, who knew the absolute importance of Max Bygraves and Lionel Bart in the scheme of things.
Where did you think the Small Faces came from?
Wormholt no-goodniks who wanted to be the Faces and that sulky Aquarian from Finsbury who fancied himself as some kind of punctum.
The other guy from north London, and he subcontracted his entire band and Adam came back at him better and stronger.
Not that he was bothered.
Was he that bothered about the boy he never quite got himself together to look after properly? The Royal Courts in 1986 – bustling, surrendering, that’s what you get for not being a dad.
Nick Kent didn’t see him as a father figure.
As far as you can trust Nick Kent.
As far as you can trust any One.
“Oh, Gawd, is that his latest scam?”
The end of 1982. New Pop on the ropes. He whisked it back to life.
And Trevor, who had to choose between a quiet Spandau life and a Noisy, Arty one and never liked punk in the first place, went with him. Effortlessly.
Yes, Wheels of Freaking Steel.
But this was telling everybody else about it.
Tony Wilson. A parallel general in the North. It is what both would have wanted.
The strategies, the scones, the fire, the failures, the concepts, the cons.
He was a meretricious conman and a captivating magician.
Smartarse and visionary.
The two overlap so much it’s surprising they don’t form a new river. With its own bends.
Poet and prat.
He wanted something like the Bay City Rollers and in the end the Bay City Rollers wanted to be something like him.
Number one. Of course it was number one. Would anyone still be lauding it, talking about it, arguing about it, if it actually HAD been listed as number one?
“Does the presence of Number Two require the existence of Number One?”
Pound, Parker, Kane, Prisoner, Pistols.
In 1977 Larkin, in part-parody of Hughes, wrote a Silver Jubilee quatrain which ended: “Crow shat on Buckingham Palace/God pissed Himself.”
The A&M signing, outside Buckingham Palace, and Christ they had to do it quick.
Herb Alpert dropped the Pistols and signed Ornette. Now THAT’S punk.
Some say Ornette dropped by the studio while PiL were recording Metal Box.
On “Double Dutch” doesn’t he sound like Harry Corbett?
You listen to the right “wrong” radio and everything changes forever.
His radio travelogues; endlessly circuitous, always re-running the same round of memories.
Pete Waterman of course so close to this but then what’s wrong with just printing the legend?
His totality, swirling like reproachful swallows, as I walk through the World’s End.
His contraptions, his beginnings, and they do not end.
Invent the future and then talk about sin.
And remember to lick those lips pure pink.
Friday, 19 March 2010
2009: A Club Odyssey pt. 14
She thought...do I know him? Is this ecstasy real? Knowledge seemed to come not from her mind, as such, nor even her heart, but her entire body. It was enough to make her sit down, hard, as if she had fallen, rather than sat. And it was, to a certain extent, the same for him.
Unity: it was hard to believe this was what was about to be achieved, though it wasn't really the end point. She felt him and someone else pick her up, even though she was not moving. The two sides were going to clash, that much was more than evident, and she wasn't going to be part of it. She knew and she didn't know; she was separated from them before she could really see what was happening, though she had dreamt of it enough times.
Those dreams: of them in a tree, her in the treetop already, imitating a bird, calling out in the night. The one where she was with him at home but he could not see her; and yet he knew she was there. The one with them safe behind the broken glass, the melee begun elsewhere, not touching them, because they would be safe. "A waif and a great man are prisoners. Safe in peril - " said the oracle. Well, yes. Luck was turning their way, at long last. The others were wrong because they had been in the wrong, really, all along, but no one could confront them. They were the despoilers, the exploiters of her grief, her patience, her hospitality, even. That was what was the worst: that she had to be nice to them.
Now she turned her back on them and when they called, did not look back. She washed them off herself, dusted herself, shook them off. It felt radical, revolutionary, even. Yes, she could do it. How liberating it was, just to leave and go home. The morning air was sweet; birds circled and flew together in formation, the sun's rays bleached everything clean. The beauty of the world hit her, and even if he wasn't...him (she was yet to really believe), then at least something, at long last, was happening.
*******************************
Friday, 5 March 2010
2009: A Club Odyssey pt. 13
They remained there for a moment, motionless; she was too tired to move, really, and he was, as well.
"Love is not superficial." She started to mumble. "Yeah, I could have eaten that gun. But I want to know what happens next, what happens underneath..." She paused a moment. The smell; she smelt something she had not smelt in some time. Pangs began, modest at once, then growing; she continued to talk, more to herself than anything. She felt as if luck was finally, finally turning in her direction; an axis had shifted, that inner earthquake had happened and she had survived, amazingly enough.
"The madness of it all. Just..." She turned to him. "You know? I think you know what love is. It's resistance, in my case. I mean, I could listen to the music here all night long, I am living on it, I am living in it. Oh shit, this is all nonsense, what the hell. But...you know. I know you know."
"Love is able to see right into the heart of things and not flinch," he said, even as she turned her head from him. And yes, I know. I know full well. An eagle could spot my love a hundred miles away. A lost cat would find it, a bear could catch it on the leaping wave."
They were testing each other, and looked at each other.
********************************
They huddled together now, each saying the others' words, regarding each other anew. It could well be that they overwhelmed each other, him first, then her; she was suddenly shy with him, as if they were meeting for the first time, which they were, in their own way.
The sun rose, the famous rosy fingers here and there, a full moon resting in the top of a tree, birds sang and improvised their calls. She told him the dream she had about the eagle, about the wolf, the one that looked at her with pleading eyes. "It talked, it really did. That was the good one. In another dream there was a beast and it came after me, and I woke up crying..." "Ssshhh," he said, his hand, his fingers very gently on her back. "That is enough knowledge for me right now. I am too full up with it. I feel as if I am at the end of everything, almost."
The song played and it seemed to describe them from a lifetime ago, as they once cautiously danced around each other, then had the courage to actually meet.
"Are we just as courageous now?" she asked him. He nodded and drank. She drank as well. His friend quietly slipped away, looking happier than he had in some time.
*************************************
While they cooed and hooted, each to the other, they did not notice the ferment in the crowd. The protesters were gathering strength; the green-eyed radical was happier than he had been in some time; the man with the gun, the players, were putting up a front that they didn't really have. People were starting to take sides.
"We all have choices to make, and this is one. We are told we can't change things, but that is false; we can and do change every day, after all. But some stand in the way of change, and by that I mean nothing superficial, but real, lasting, bone-deep soul-satisfying change. The kind you can be proud of, that legends are made out of, after all. A woman here tonight could have let someone tell her what to do. But she didn't." So concluded the green-eyed radical to his friends. "She is with him now, and they won't be separated. I am inspired by them, we all are." They assented, looking dubiously at those who would have separated them. The suitors, they were nicknamed, the suckers, as some already had been calling them.
****************************************
"Do you want to dance?" "I would love to, good sir." And so they danced, a dance of defiance and celebration, the vivid lights and colors around them, the energy, negating anything but themselves; a dance that was for one side, clearly, and not the other. They had nothing to lose, really, nothing beyond the moment mattered much to them anyway; and they were fighting by dancing, dancing by fighting. They didn't stop, they saluted the DJ, they blessed the floor and music itself.
"I love dancing here, I love you!" she said with her eyes. He repeated this with emphasis. They danced outside and inside themselves, their limbs together and apart, jumps and spins and whirls causing the protesters to whoop and cheer.
****************************************
Wednesday, 3 March 2010
2009: A Club Odyssey pt. 12
Darkness; utter darkness. The shadows appeared then and disappeared. She was dragged this far and no more. She could not move; then under a harsh light she was stuck, more or less, and could not move in any case.
"He's not coming back. Give in."
The words were not spoken as harshly as you might think. He was only trying to be reasonable. A box was in his hand yet again, a different one this time.
"He is here. I can tell. He is."
She was a stubborn duck; he had to give her that. Outside the locked door the clamour grew; someone was pounding on it, whether deliberately or not it was hard to tell.
"Take this, please just take it. Your problems will be over. The wait will be over. That is what you want."
She looked at the gun; she knew it was a test. She pondered it as she knew he would. It was tempting and she had her pride, but she did not accept the inherent promise that if she won, he would leave her alone. It would only make her more desirable. She already felt like the plainest woman there, and this guy would not leave her alone.
He would never treat her this way; he liked to test her, true, and she liked to test him, but he was patient and understanding, even beyond her comprehension sometimes. Why this man wanted to test her she didn't know, except maybe he heard she liked this kind of thing.
Wrong. Another woman would die for her husband, yes, but not her, she had waited too long.
"You're never going home" she said to him as he left.
*******************************
She was calm in her refusal; all he could do was walk away. There were worse ways to treat her, but her nobility snuffed them all out. The door was unlocked, she could have left, but instead she longed to be home, remembered the time she was home with him, in their bed, his ruse of insanity having failed utterly, crying and laughing and then stoically resigned. Things fell on the floor and they didn't bother to pick them up. They gave each other nicknames; she washed his clothes and he promised he would not be long.
How many times she had put up with things that seemed...the word had not been invented yet, maybe it never would be, but she was attached to him and that was that. He was in her heart, and even thinking of stopping that would stop him as well. She slumped down and rested and willed something to happen. The party outside was as raucous as ever; it was now long past midnight and maybe it was the stress, the noise, but she could hear a bell ringing; a sign. A clear sign at long last.
"Well windypants, that guy doesn't seem too...happy, so things are indeed turning out alright. Hasn't left though. Hmmm." He looked at him askance, wanting him dead but keeping what countenance he could. Though they were indoors he could feel the morning coming in, the l'heure bleu all silent and full of promise. The girl no longer pestered him; the others in the club were greeting the new day euphorically, as if they knew what he knew. Everyone knew, somehow.
*******************************
She walked back into the club. It was just how it was when they met; she began to remember things, to put them back together. She was here; he was there. She looked in that old direction, just by the lights, as far away from the speakers as you could get. Right by that side, there. And there was someone there.
She walked towards him, not knowing who he was; she kept thinking it was him but at this point could not trust herself. He made no obvious moves in return, but merely kept his head down, looking shyly at her - he could not believe he was being shy, but there he was - pulling her towards him, just as he had done in the first place. The club seemed big, bigger than it was before; as if all that time they had spent apart was somehow making it expand in some odd way.
The chair next to him was empty. She sat down and ordered a drink, not able to look at him, not really wanting to look at anyone. She could sink or drown, but right now she just wanted to float for a while, meet on a friendly island with someone, or just plain go home. He looked at her and smiled inwardly; the green-eyed radical sighed and gestured, that he should get her out of there as quickly as he could, but not rush things, either.
"This is a good drink. The first one I've had here for a couple of..." She began to cry. He nodded and took her hand.
Tuesday, 2 March 2010
HOPE IN CROSBY
Apologies for interrupting Lena’s magnificent 2009 – A Club Odyssey series (which I hope you’re all reading and enjoying) but we thought it a good moment to take stock, catch our breath and revel in the witnessing of pure art.
Before Sunday’s Olympic final I hadn’t watched any ice hockey matches, although Lena is a keen follower. I’m always eager to learn new things – why, otherwise, do we continue living? - and rule-wise the game is very easy to pick up; the general pattern of football with some necessary brutalism on loan from Australian Rules football but structured slightly differently. And, of course, there’s the ice.
Earlier on in the qualifiers Canada had been thrashed by the USA 5-3, so this second meeting was never likely to be a beamingly friendly one. And despite thirteen gold medals – the first ever won by Canadians on Canadian soil at the winter games – this was the crucial one, the one which counted, the one which would render all of the others irrelevant or make them all the more priceless, the last and biggest event of the Winter Olympics. Canada stood still for two or three hours.
Three periods, each lasting 20 minutes, not including frequent stoppage time, and both sides were busily aggressive without yet suggesting desperation. But the Canadians were getting more shots at goal, not quite getting them past the impenetrable, Zappa-like Ryan Miller but not missing by much. At the other end, Canada’s goalman Roberto Luongo was impeccably impassible.
For a while it looked as though attrition would be the order of the match, but someone had to break eventually, and happily it came down to a Mennonite – Jonathan Toews – to put the first puck into goal. There had been quite a bit of pushing and shoving but the balletic grace of some of the puck-pushing was pretty remarkable. In the second period Corey Perry made it 2-0 before Patrick Kane – no, not that one – set up a beauty of a solo run for Ryan Kesler to bring it back to 2-1. There was already some air of complacency about the Canadian team? Which one is this Sid the Kid guy again?
In the third period Canada basically sat on it and the Americans became keener, hungrier, to win the match. The Canadian play became diffuse, vague, muddled. Sidney Crosby was definitely identified by me as number 87. He hadn’t scored in two games and it was akin to watching Kenny Everett on stage in the ill-fated Hunting Of The Snark musical some 20 years ago; for 95% of the time he hovered around, eagerly tapping his billiard cue, but only had one mediocre number to himself and really his part could have been played by anybody. He looked neutered, confined.
Then Crosby had an immaculate one-on-one chance to shoot for goal and he missed. That was almost it. The same old story. The big chance missed. The grand job they couldn’t quite finish. And, with the most predictable of inevitabilities, Kane equalised, magnificently and imperiously, with 24 seconds of the game to go, or to be more accurate the puck slid between Luongo’s arm and leg and through the goal mouth.
Well, that was it. 30 million Canadian heads in hands. On to extra time, sudden death, and in all probability a shoot-out. All they needed was that magic closer of a third goal, the last, deft touch to make the game and the world theirs. Myself, I thought they’d blown it, and who was this Crosby kid anyway? Just another hype-up, another would-be great sportsman who looked at his page in history and scrawled it out with crude crayon.
Well, someone must have said something to them in the break, since, although the Canadians still looked asleep for the first five minutes or so of extra time play, something – I don’t know what, some fugitive spark – touched them, threatened incineration, and all of a sudden they woke up, started lunging for Miller as though landing at Normandy. They realised what they had to do and they went for everything, and so did the Americans.
More specifically and importantly, Crosby woke up, seemingly remembering what he was there for, ankle injury or no ankle injury; he forgot himself and thrust, once and then twice, for goal. He was possessed, entirely in and of himself – and in the fourteenth minute it happened; with the casual elegance of Noel Coward tipping ash off the end of a never more golden cigarette, he found his angle, spotted his destiny, and skied the puck into the goal with uncanny, Astaire-like artistry.
It was won, Canada indeed owned the podium, and I was proved utterly and thoroughly wrong. In those last two minutes of hockey, Crosby reminded me and everybody else of why we should pay attention to him; he knew what was at stake and, like Antony Sher at the end of God On Trial, suddenly revealed that the game belonged to him.
And it was art. Pure, magnificent art, when you see a human being exceeding their own self, going beyond what they know to be their own limits, doing something supernatural, something neither you nor I could ever hope to do. This is why we attend to sport, why in its glorious irrelevance it is so vital (and as with sport, so with art); the possibility that we might witness and perversely participate in the phenomenon of man becoming more like God.
Before Sunday’s Olympic final I hadn’t watched any ice hockey matches, although Lena is a keen follower. I’m always eager to learn new things – why, otherwise, do we continue living? - and rule-wise the game is very easy to pick up; the general pattern of football with some necessary brutalism on loan from Australian Rules football but structured slightly differently. And, of course, there’s the ice.
Earlier on in the qualifiers Canada had been thrashed by the USA 5-3, so this second meeting was never likely to be a beamingly friendly one. And despite thirteen gold medals – the first ever won by Canadians on Canadian soil at the winter games – this was the crucial one, the one which counted, the one which would render all of the others irrelevant or make them all the more priceless, the last and biggest event of the Winter Olympics. Canada stood still for two or three hours.
Three periods, each lasting 20 minutes, not including frequent stoppage time, and both sides were busily aggressive without yet suggesting desperation. But the Canadians were getting more shots at goal, not quite getting them past the impenetrable, Zappa-like Ryan Miller but not missing by much. At the other end, Canada’s goalman Roberto Luongo was impeccably impassible.
For a while it looked as though attrition would be the order of the match, but someone had to break eventually, and happily it came down to a Mennonite – Jonathan Toews – to put the first puck into goal. There had been quite a bit of pushing and shoving but the balletic grace of some of the puck-pushing was pretty remarkable. In the second period Corey Perry made it 2-0 before Patrick Kane – no, not that one – set up a beauty of a solo run for Ryan Kesler to bring it back to 2-1. There was already some air of complacency about the Canadian team? Which one is this Sid the Kid guy again?
In the third period Canada basically sat on it and the Americans became keener, hungrier, to win the match. The Canadian play became diffuse, vague, muddled. Sidney Crosby was definitely identified by me as number 87. He hadn’t scored in two games and it was akin to watching Kenny Everett on stage in the ill-fated Hunting Of The Snark musical some 20 years ago; for 95% of the time he hovered around, eagerly tapping his billiard cue, but only had one mediocre number to himself and really his part could have been played by anybody. He looked neutered, confined.
Then Crosby had an immaculate one-on-one chance to shoot for goal and he missed. That was almost it. The same old story. The big chance missed. The grand job they couldn’t quite finish. And, with the most predictable of inevitabilities, Kane equalised, magnificently and imperiously, with 24 seconds of the game to go, or to be more accurate the puck slid between Luongo’s arm and leg and through the goal mouth.
Well, that was it. 30 million Canadian heads in hands. On to extra time, sudden death, and in all probability a shoot-out. All they needed was that magic closer of a third goal, the last, deft touch to make the game and the world theirs. Myself, I thought they’d blown it, and who was this Crosby kid anyway? Just another hype-up, another would-be great sportsman who looked at his page in history and scrawled it out with crude crayon.
Well, someone must have said something to them in the break, since, although the Canadians still looked asleep for the first five minutes or so of extra time play, something – I don’t know what, some fugitive spark – touched them, threatened incineration, and all of a sudden they woke up, started lunging for Miller as though landing at Normandy. They realised what they had to do and they went for everything, and so did the Americans.
More specifically and importantly, Crosby woke up, seemingly remembering what he was there for, ankle injury or no ankle injury; he forgot himself and thrust, once and then twice, for goal. He was possessed, entirely in and of himself – and in the fourteenth minute it happened; with the casual elegance of Noel Coward tipping ash off the end of a never more golden cigarette, he found his angle, spotted his destiny, and skied the puck into the goal with uncanny, Astaire-like artistry.
It was won, Canada indeed owned the podium, and I was proved utterly and thoroughly wrong. In those last two minutes of hockey, Crosby reminded me and everybody else of why we should pay attention to him; he knew what was at stake and, like Antony Sher at the end of God On Trial, suddenly revealed that the game belonged to him.
And it was art. Pure, magnificent art, when you see a human being exceeding their own self, going beyond what they know to be their own limits, doing something supernatural, something neither you nor I could ever hope to do. This is why we attend to sport, why in its glorious irrelevance it is so vital (and as with sport, so with art); the possibility that we might witness and perversely participate in the phenomenon of man becoming more like God.
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