"the ball is round, the game lasts ninety minutes, everything else - is pure theory."

we were fortunate enough to live in germany in 2006, when they hosted the men's world cup.

the first time germany won, i admit, i had already gone to bed. we lived on the middle floor of an old building, right on a very busy street, in a small, unknown town. suddenly, there was noise everywhere. yells and cars honking. i ran out to the front windows - long picture windows that overlooked the street - and the street was flooded with cars, cars with people hanging all over them, all of them waving flags, cheering, blowing horns, celebrating.

you might remember the 2006 world cup - or maybe not. regardless, germany made a little bit of a cinderella run deep into the tournament that no one was expecting. except they weren't a cinderella team at all, because they are one of the top most successful national football teams in FIFA. but that year, at least, no one expected them to do very well - not even the most loyal german.  in fact in 2006, their FIFA ranking was an abysmal 22nd.

they won their group. they won their game in the round of 16. they won in the quarter-finals, defeating no less an opponent than argentina. and these were the games when, post-match, the entire country went nuts. we were coming back from the train station one day in a cab, carrying friends who had just arrived for a visit, when suddenly everything in town - including our taxi - came to a screeching halt. people began mobbing the streets, cars honking, beer bottles in hands everywhere, songs and chants ringing. "what happened?" and our friends, completely bewildered.

"germany must have won again", i said, grinning. you have to enjoy it at that point in time, because you're not going to get anywhere very fast.

sometime in there i realized that there's no comparison to any event in the united states. there is no one sporting event, no one team, that galvanizes the entire country behind it. the most popular sports in the US - [american] football, basketball, and baseball - are sports where the pinnacle of the sport is, in fact, basically an intra-national competition (for the most part - claims of world champions notwithstanding). loyalties are at the state or region or, occasionally, sub-state level. if it's not your state, you may not even care about the outcome, unless there's some super villain (yankees or lakers, say) to root against.

the olympics are a time for rallying behind the american team to some extent - but there are so many events and so many athletes that there's not really one thing to follow.

there's no one sport - the most popular sport - where the title win is at the national level.

my friends and i went to frankfurt for later games in the series. because the country is so soccer crazed, and the tickets were so hard to get, fan viewing sites had been set up all over the country. the nearest one to us was a giant screen - bigger than anything i've ever seen - plopped right in the middle of the Main river. people lined both banks, drinking, partying, laughing, cheering.

in frankfurt, the town was turned out to welcome internationals from all over the world. even ghana, who also made a surprise run in the tournament, advancing out of the group round with a victory over the hapless united states, was represented by fans on the street.

in germany, everything else is theory. in the united states, we're still just some kind of amateur sports fans.

and p.s.: why on god's green earth, for all our stubborn continued usage of the word soccer, did we retain the name fussball when referring to a plastic table game played in bars?

awesome americans #2: pollock & the abstract expressionists

i think i've mentioned, probably ad nauseum, how entranced i was by europe growing up.

i couldn't help it. fine arts, culture, classical music, cool watches - let's face it, europe had it, we didn't. and i wanted to be a painter. and everything about painting came from europe - all the classical masters, all the neo-classical masters, almost all of the important movements, the important artists, everything. what was the future for an unknown person from an unknown corner of an insignificant part of the world?

until i took an art history class in high school. and i learned about the movement of the twentieth century that - for the first time in recent history - brought the capital of art out of paris and to the new world, to new york city - abstract expressionism.

i'm not an art historian, nor critic. i can't really write an essay about abstract expressionism - well, not in any reasonable time frame, and not without a lot of cribbing off of online sources, like any undergrad worth his or hers salt these days. all i can really write about is my very personal experience with abstract expressionism - and with, most specifically, the paintings of jackson pollock.

in the classroom, i learned about this seminal movement that brought the art world over the pond and to our shores just following world war II, and i felt my self swell with - let's face it - pride, at being privy to the generation that can remember when we, we!, bested the europeans at art and brought it home to america. when we somehow breached the stronghold that was art in europe - both classical and revolutionary, training and boundary-breaking - all of that happened there, and yet in one cultural shift, we came up with something new, something different, something unique.

i dutifully studied the slides of the paintings on the screen, i looked at them in my textbook. i felt the pride, sure, and i felt the urge to continue working in the fine arts field, which was now - 50 years later - more balanced, with genius and new thoughts coming from all over the world - no longer just the domain of one country or continent. but the paintings on the screen didn't really move me. they didn't really sing, didn't rock me in my gut, didn't truly captivate. there was a secret part of me that couldn't dispute the dismissals about the movement: "a bunch of paint dripped on a canvas? any six-year-old can make that!"

finally, i went to new york city myself one day - and stood before one. and i got it. 

jackson pollock was born in wyoming and grew up all over the west. and when you look at one of his paintings, up close and personal...

what do you see? movement. wide open movement. huge arcs of the arm, paint coming off the end. sweeping motions. a person walking around, all sides, of a giant canvas. movement and motion and room to spread out, freedom to do something never done before. how he must have leaned over, to get at the center of the canvas. how he must have moved, faster and slower, stepping back to view it, stepping in to add more.

so, what's the connection, between place and art? between the wide open spaces of his childhood, and the wide open gestures of his art? i don't know for certain that the two are related. but it certainly made sense to me, that day, gazing up at something i'd never seen the likes of before. and to me it did seem related - the american west and this dancing canvas before me.

and i thought, well, that's one thing maybe we - or one of us, at least - got right.

old world, new world, no world

it's always so interesting to return to a place one used to live.

the feeling of belonging, yet not belonging. the feeling of both intimacy and strangeness. the same face of the same cashier who looks at you just a little bit extra, trying to figure out why you look familiar.

all these feelings were present many-fold on my recent trip back to germany, after over two years back in the states.

part of it is that i never really did feel that sense of belonging there. because i didn't really speak the language, and still didn't always get the small niceties and customs correct, i was always a little bit of a stranger in a strange land there.

i don't pretend to really know either germany or france. i don't even pretend to 'sort of' know, or 'make a stab at knowing' any place in the old world. it was while living there, after all, that i realized how completely and utterly american i am, through and through - even if i didn't want to be. but last week, while i was there, a friend idly asked me, "do you think the cultural difference between france and germany is larger or smaller than the cultural difference between the US and germany, or the US and france?"

my first instinct was to respond: oh, absolutely, france and germany are much more similar to each other than the US is to either of them. after all, one is new world, while the other two are old. the US is completely unique, sharing a common historical experience with almost no one, while the other two have been sharing a border and even swapping parcels of land for centuries. there must have been so much cross over between the two that they are like siblings, interrelated and interwoven by both history and shared present experience. we've fought along side one and against the other a couple of times, but we had a lot less at stake in these wars than either of them. we had no damage or atrocities on our soil, no civilians terrified or killed. surely even that negative shared experience would leave them with more in common with each other.

and yet, the more i thought about it, the more i'm not sure that's right. traditional - or even merely frequent - enmity is not always a bonding point.

there's definitely a difference when you cross the border between france and germany. the half-timbered fachwerkhaus gives way to stone or at least plaster over the timbers, sometimes plain, sometimes more ornate, with iron balconies and lamps. the merely occasional piles of dog crap on the sidewalk give way to frequent, almost constant piles of dog crap. favored beer and white wine give way to red wine, while bread you could use to defend yourself gives way to fluffy crumbly croissants. (my german friends are tearing their hair right now, admonishing me that there's many, many types of bread popular in germany, not just dark, heavy ones. i know, i know, but i'm generalizing to make a point. after all, they do drink beer in france, too. just not real beer, right?)

on the trip back from paris to frankfurt, aboard the high speed train line that is cooperatively shared by the french and german national rail companies, i watched an exchange between a french couple and a german guy. the french couple had seats that weren't together - one of them was next to the seat already occupied by the german, while the other was across the aisle. they spoke to him in french. he answered in german. neither spoke the others' language. i was pretty sure they were just wanting to swap seats so they could sit together, but he kept pointing to his seat reservation card. "do you speak english?" the german guy asked the couple. they shook their heads. still, he forged on in english, perhaps guessing that that was his best shot at being understood.

back over here, there's a lot we have in common with the german culture. you could say we inherited a lot of it. and yet thanks to the normans, french culture is not unfamiliar and french words are scattered through our language; in particular, a lot of common food names and terms come from france. the united states is peppered with both german and french last names. you can get a croissant in the morning and a bratwurst for lunch. people are as likely to trace their heritage to one as to the other, or even both. our lack of deep connection - a connection forged either from mutual aid and understand or from mutual distrust or enmity - leaves us free, in a sense, to love and appreciate both countries in any way we chose.

so i don't know. maybe our mixing-pot experiment of a country means maybe we're not so much the far point of a triangle as a bridge. without the baggage of history, without the centuries of grudges and memory, we don't really belong anywhere but here, but we're a little bit familiar with a lot of places. 

my heart wears a black turtleneck (or, my inner french soul)

i was having a nice conversation the other day with my tarot card reader, who happens to be french (i mean that in the real way, like born in france and even has an accent, not the american way, like some one of his most recent 32 ancestors was french), about views on life and the like, and he said, "but you're french!"

he clarified by explaining it this way: "you know french movies? there is never any closure, and in french books, you finish and look around for the gun."  his point was that some people are by nature very positive, seeing the bright side of things, and some are by nature more negative; and that some cultures are more positive, literal, and emphasize the bright side, while some more naturally emphasize introspection, the grey areas of life, and...make you want to shoot yourself, i guess.

i laughed, because i thought it was a funny thing to say, especially coming from a french person. but i should have said, "i'm not french, i'm from the oregon coast!"

the second best book about the oregon coast is uncle mike's guide to the real oregon coast, by michael burgess. it is geared to the first-time visitor and has things like this in it:

"Don't bother putting your best foot forward. Your villagers are simply too miserable to care. Nothing you do, not even throwing your life away and joining them, will change things. These are humans who, from the cradle to the grave, never really get warm and dry, and it's foolish to think their inner child is somehow nourished by the gloom and damp."

"The first rule is not to try and fit in...Your best approach is to regard the nasty bit of nowhere you've come to as a theme park for the depressed, and the villagers as hired rustics with wet blankets to sell".

which came first - the personality, or the environment?

and the ennui of france & the french - or anywhere in europe, for that matter - that world-weary, nuanced view of the world that comes with having been a country, in one form or another, for thousands of years. thousands of years of experience with wars, revolutions, religions, fads - that will make a society a little grey around the edges.

which came first, the personality or the society?

it's funny, because as i was thinking about this post, i remembered some writing i was doing while on the train in france, my first visit there, in 2005. what struck me was how america is really just a teenager on the globe - and, how like a teenager, we - as a country - are loud, impetuous, impulsive, exhuberant, with little ability to think through what the implications of our actions will be, little knowledge of or empathy for others, self-centered, anti-intellectual, and living for the moment.

from my journal that day:

it seems strange but i love the absolute human-ness of the landscape. i love the quiet, settled human dominance, the lack of struggle for supremacy - both supremacy over nature as well as supremacy about whether the preservation of wilderness has any merit in and of itself. it is a moot point here; the issue has already been decided by 2000 years of settlement, during which time most of human effort has been dedicated to eating, having children, and surviving wars with each other. people smile less. but they are not so naive, so full of youthful impetuosity. i used to love that aspect of americanism most of all. now maybe as i see its negative effects on others, it's only natural that i should also seek out a more somber, serious place, without the predominance of absolute rhetoric, without the lack of responsibility for the health and welfare of others, without the emphasis on freedom at all costs...

hack away at that hypothesis - it's full of holes, i know. i'm just telling you that when i was riding on the train through france, in the aftermath of bush's reelection, that is what i was thinking of, and a little fucking societal perspective on the grey areas of life sounded pretty damn good.

was i ready to move to europe? you bet your ass. i just didn't realize it was maybe in part because my inner frenchy was longing for some native soil - that my oregon-coastal soul had found a society to match out there. because maybe for those of us from the coast, the environmental greyness of our youth produces the same personality effect as historical greyness of a society.

i also didn't realize that it was in fact the first step in my patriot retraining program (PTPtm). but more on that later.