More on Zidane

Posting on Johnny Flynn, writing about people in their element, got me thinking about ol' Zizou. Here's a couple from the archives I wrote when I was working in Madrid.

Zidane COMES BACK (vs Mallorca, 9/05)

Zidane comes back
with a sultry beard
and more shaven crow’s peak.
Tan as if his convalescence was ages beside Homer,
playing keepy uppy with bleached pebbles,
conversing with a mutual gentleness, an irascibility,
volleying into the sea.
White shirt like the angel icon Adidas know he is.
Roman-
Algerian
angular
bunch
upright
slouch
of angel
willed back.
Children looking in at the bar window think mortelle and
join the Santiago Bernabéu as it holds
its 80000 breath
willing the ball to him him him
gasp
he leaves it.
It runs to Julio Baptista.
The better attacking option.
Human
perpetuation of will and
bunched enchantment of 80000
plus us.

----

Zidane GOES AWAY (vs Italy 7/06)

In terms of me, well
46 degrees today in Spain and looking around a cathedral in Toledo and reading the paper on the train and things at work are ok
you, there,
surrounded by 60 odd thousand
in significance-rich, history-compact Berlinstadion where
all the world’s eyes look and want
to be
you.
You are your own. Sharing your darkness. Rolling away. You spreading light doing things that cannot be done. You are why
we heroise.
You are our
mythic functioning.
What sadness did you intimate when you headbutted Marco Materazzi?
quite gauchely, in his chest, nearly tripping.
Yes what racist shit did he say and yes did he pinch you and had he been niggling all game
but, where did that come from?
Your last match.
The last visible point of your humble glittering.
The World Cup had been an unexpected epilogue, you were done for and physically and emotionally not right but you began again to be lit, to beguile, to conduct.
So suavely,
and the strain shown on your face
hauling ten men to the Final,
wrapping the rope about your wrist, and bleeding something for you must,
and doing it with grace,
a grace we lack… And then this.
You could have held it together.

doing your thing

With certain people there is a sense that they are doing what they are supposed to be doing. What they were made for. An apropriateness of being, an easy rapture. And when you share a space with that kind of person it is exhilarating. It is rare. Because society, at least in my experience, is such that it makes it a rare thing. I can count the times I've been near this thing on one hand: Orifice Vulgatron, the main emcee from UK hip hop outfit Foreign Beggarz, who used to go under the name of 'Drop' as dnb mc, freestyling outside a club in Leeds, in 2003 maybe (there's loads of this lot on youtube, I should dig out some old footage from Leeds parties...); in 2006 I worked in Madrid and went to Real Madrid's home matches - Zinedine Zidane, well I hardly need to add to all that's been said about the man's grace when he's running round with a football.

And I think I've come across another ONE, doing what he was made to do: check Mr Johnny Flynn. Stay tuned because I'm going to be interviewing him in couple of weeks.

Something you can't look at in an art space

In July I went to see a friend in the final performance pieces of the class of 2007 Leeds Uni Theatre Group, and one of the pieces raised what I take to be a similar point to Richard Prince at this year's Frieze Art Fair - a point about art spaces। In the (Leeds) piece, which was more a live installation than anything - the refusal of the ‘characters’ to cross in to the usual space between them and the audience emphasized the voyeuristic aspect of being in an audience -there was a young lady, on a pedestal, getting undressed. And the 'audience' were, mostly, clearly uncomfortable to be seen looking. Hesitating to be seen looking at a young, getting-naked thing. There were other 'characters', on other pedestals, doing other things: someone holding a chocolate ice cream aloft and not letting his grin falter as it melted down his arm, someone doing a repeated series of yoga-ish stretches, someone soliloquizing grandiloquently on why she was amazing - all weird things, but all 'easier' to look at than this girl taking off her clothes. Something you (this theatre audience) didn't want to be seen to be looking at. Something you can look at in the anonymous confines of porn sites, or at a car show, or in your night dreams. Something you can't look at in the paid for sanctity of a shared art space...



What I take to be a witty point. A point worth making?

Also, Frieze is “so Capitalist its Marxist” but who cares? Culture is relentlessly commercialised, art shouldn't not be a part of culture. Well, at least not always...