support Gringos at the Gate here.

thanks Ben

Fun Boy 3, The More I See (The Less I Believe)

via JJ

Ghana vs Czech Republic (2006 World Cup)

Golden Sounds’ 1986 hit Zamina (Waka Waka, time for Africa)

From the first 2010 World Cup broadcasts on ESPN, my fellow tweeters cracked jokes about The Lion King. We imagined Rafiki calling the matches, or James Earl Jones (who provided the voice for Mufasa), and half expected the referees to raise the Jabulani aloft to announce the arrival of the New Ball. Most folks simply observed, “I feel like I am watching The Lion King.”

There is a good reason for this. The score used by ESPN to frame its broadcasts was written by Lisle Moore, a Utah composer who had worked with the network in the past. Moore gave us muscular music for a sporting event, upbeat music for a media event organized around putting us all in the mood to buy a shirt, a ball, or a Coke. Layered over the orchestral swells are the oddly familiar sounds of African voices, or, I should say, African-sounding voices. Africa is scored here as a noble landscape, peopled by a unified chorus, singing together in a harmonic convergence of tribal cultures.

“With the exception of the African choir,” reports the Salt Lake Tribune, “all of the music is performed by Utah musicians.” (”ESPN Turns to Utah for World Cup Music”) That African choir, lending this score a sense of location, is actually made up with members of The Lion King’s Broadway cast. The African-sounding choir from New York City was hired to sonically channel an idea of African authenticity keyed to ESPN’s American audience. This is of course true of all scores produced by the World Cup broadcasting networks as they reach for music their imagined audience will understand. Without a doubt, we are hearing not African music but (to invoke philosopher Valentin Mudimbe) a musical “Idea of Africa.”

In the mix of the music draped over the 2010 World Cup, are more specific strains - signals clearly audible to the listener of African music, the sound of a continent being ripped off. This is nowhere more obvious than “The Official 2010 FIFA World Cup ™ Song”, “Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)”, sung by Shakira and Freshlyground, a South African Afro-fusion bad. The global pop hit has a clear relationship to a Cameroonian military song, Zangaléwa, popularized by Golden Sounds in 1986. “Waka Waka” doesn’t just borrow from “Zangaléwa” - listen to the two and you see that “Waka Waka” is, very nearly, an illegal cover (the chorus is a direct use of “Zangaléwa).

continue reading…

Before the start of their 2006 World Cup semi-final, players for Brazil and France stood together and held a banner declaring “Say no to racism”. The gesture was part of a Fifa campaign — each of the 64 matches included a visible statement against the racist abuse directed especially at black players in Europe. From the round banner marked with this slogan which covered the centre circle until the start of the match, to pre-game statements read by team captains before kick-off, during Fifa’s 2006 World Cup, players, fans and tournament organisers declared that racism has no place in football.

Imagine a similar intervention today. South Africa has the highest incidence of rape in the world. The statistics are chilling: one in two women are raped; women are more likely to be raped than to learn to read; and they have little reason to trust the law to defend their right to their own bodies.

One grisly dimension of this crisis is that black lesbians are singled out for homophobic rape and violent assault with particular frequency. In April 2008, Eudy Simelane, a former midfielder for South Africa’s women’s national team, was raped, beaten, stabbed and left to die in a creek 200m from her home. A shocking number of South African female athletes have been assaulted — women who dare to play a “man’s game” become visible targets.

continue reading…

via Union Football League / From a left wing.

by Jennifer Doyle
The New York Times

GOA, India — When the Indian women’s national team takes the field against Sri Lanka on Friday in the South Asian Games, it will be its first soccer match in two years.

India’s national soccer association had failed to schedule a friendly match for its women’s team since October 2007. And last June, FIFA, the sport’s world governing body, sent a rebuke to the All India Football Federation and, with no matches to evaluate, removed the Indian team from its world rankings.

The delisting seemed to move Indian soccer officials to action.

eighteen touches, one strike.

Laura Palmer Foundation, Stadium X — A Place That Never Was offers a selection of texts presenting a multi-faceted picture of that site’s deterioration and its existence as a ‘city within a city’ and also documents the series of live art projects. The Stadium and its parasites functions, which are now being erased form the map of Warsaw will likely become some distant planet, while the present publication, with the brilliant contributions from its authors, will attain — perhaps — the status of an unreal story about a place that, after all, never was.

Thanks Jeff

The Golden Age/Edad de Oro is a film that documents a season of the Golden Age League, a soccer league in Corona Park, Queens, New York. Not just any soccer league, the highly competitive Golden Age League is made up of middle-aged former professional players from mostly Central and South America.

The United States’ 2–0 victory over European champions Spain in the Confederations Cup semi-finals on Wednesday in South Africa, earns a place on the list of great international upsets.

Union Football League Playoff Final this Sunday, June 14th.
Schedule and Map and on league website:

Union Football League Playoff Semi Finals this Sunday, June 7th.
Schedule and Map and on league website:

Union Football League Playoff Quarter Finals start this Sunday, May 31st.
Schedule and Map below, and on league website:

Yrsa Roca Fannberg, In Total Ecstasy (sexual), 2008. Watercolor on Paper, 18 x 26 cm

by Jennifer Doyle

“Art versus Sport” is the name of Yrsa Roca Fannberg’s blog detailing the ups and downs of being an artist and Barcelona Futbol Club supporter. Entries alternate between meditations on the trials of experimental documentary filmmaking and the melodramas produced by loving perhaps the most storied side in the world. Illustrating this blog are Fannberg’s watercolor studies of life on the pitch—men in training, leaping into each others arms, throwing their bodies in the air, or glued to the ground in stupefied defeat.

It is tempting to think that Art and Sport sleep in separate beds. The discovery that one is at home in bohemia is often accompanied by parallel experiences of deep social isolation, of awkwardness and bullying, of being taunted for walking, running, or throwing “like a girl.” Maybe in your childhood, men and boys gathered in the living room around televised sport spectacle while you sprawled across your bedroom floor on your belly, pouring over magazine photos of Andy Warhol, Halston, and the superstars of Studio 54. For many of us in the arts, sports provided the childhood setting for our exile from normalcy. We tend to imagine these worlds as separate spheres, in which sport is fully masculine, and art is coded socially as effeminate and queer.

Full essay published in X-TRA contemporary art quarterly, Summer 2009.

Antonio Puleo, One For Me, One For You

Cherry and Martin presents Antonio Adriano Puleo’s exhibition I Am a Bird Now, featuring ecstatic murals, paintings and sculpture that possess a bold fusion of natural history and modern abstraction. This will be the first solo exhibition at the gallery’s new location at 2712 S. La Cienega Blvd.

Antonio Adriano Puleo’s pictorial exploration is a twenty-first century hybrid of art history, including the painterly experimentations of modern abstraction as well as the illustrations of the 19th century American naturalist John James Audubon and Medieval illumination. The third in a series of solo shows by Puleo, I Am a Bird Now, follows up on two previous exhibitions, To This World I Must Give In (2005) and Birds and Beasts (2007). Whereas Puleo’s previous exhibitions furthered a pictorial investigation of the tensions between opposing forces (Birds and Beasts) and the individual’s place amongst these tensions (To This World I Must Give In), Puleo’s new body of work explores the manipulation of these tensions through symmetry, pattern and the hermeticism of alchemy. Inherent in Puleo’s work is the translucent dimension of ecstasy, the idea that revelation can be had through the polarities of perfect geometrical proportions, radiant color and a visceral connection to the material world.

Central to the exhibition and the artist’s concerns are two wall installations, Follow The Light (2009) and They Know Why They’re There (2009). Painting becomes architecture as vibrant bands of color seamlessly emerge from strategically placed, intimate canvases. These small paintings, whose compositions magnify exponentially onto the gallery walls, chart the implicit energy of expansion and contraction.

Rudo y Cursi. This special evening is part of Cinema Tuesdays, a new weekly series curated by Flux celebrating innovative film at The Montalbán special events theatre in Hollywood.

Tuesday May 5th, 2009
7pm — Acamonchi art show; Clorofila (Nortec Collective)
8pm — Screening plus Q&A with director Carlos Cuarón

by Julie Bosman

The scruffy players in brick-red jerseys and secondhand shoes hailed from Haiti, Togo, Mexico, Honduras and Harlem. The fresh-faced team in black had neatly trimmed hair, new gear and degrees from Carnegie Mellon, Syracuse, Pace and universities in China and Australia.

Most of the players in black work together at the Royal Bank of Canada, bonded by the financial cloud hanging over their industry. The reds, too, are united by financial circumstance, sharing a temporary address, 1 Wards Island: a homeless shelter.

They faced off the other night at Chelsea Piers, perhaps Manhattan’s premier soccer spot for young professionals, and this spring also the base for the newest team in Street Soccer USA, a 16-city network of homeless players that started in 2005 in Charlotte, N.C., and is under the umbrella of Help USA, a national homeless services provider.

The idea behind homeless soccer is something like this: Take a group of poor people, disconnected from the regular rhythms of life, lacking both physical exercise and much to look forward to. Add soccer.

In Ann Arbor, Mich., and Austin, Tex., Minneapolis, St. Louis and Washington, the program has been credited with helping players pull themselves out of homelessness. There is even a Homeless World Cup. This year’s, the seventh, is scheduled for September in Milan.

“When I’m out there, I feel like I can’t do any wrong,” said Dexter Burnett, 47, who played soccer in his native Jamaica, where his speed earned him the nickname Pepper. He was laid off last fall from a job as a medical assistant. “It allows me not to think about my situation so much and just relax and enjoy the moment.”

The league is the brainchild of Lawrence Cann, 31, once a nationally ranked soccer player at Davidson College, who moved in the fall from Charlotte to New York, with one of the nation’s largest homeless populations, estimated at 35,000, but no established homeless soccer team.

With the help of a few volunteers, Mr. Cann cleared out a dusty gymnasium that had previously been used for storage at the shelter on Wards Island, a patch of land in the East River. He recruited a few reluctant players, promising they would not be punished for missing the standard 10 p.m. shelter curfew.

At an early practice on a rainy night in March, a couple of the 15 people standing expectantly in a circle had evidently been drinking. Most spoke little English. And they did not even know one another’s names.

“Hey, you,” one player called out before kicking a clumsy pass that landed far from its target.

Taking note, Mr. Cann imported a drill familiar to early practices of soccer teams everywhere: Before making a pass, the kicker had to call out the name of the receiver. He gave instructions in English and Spanish. He declared that anybody who showed up drunk or high would not participate that night (but could return the next week). And between running, passing and shooting, players are expected to talk to the coach about their goals outside soccer, their job searches and their state of mind.

Of the 30 people who have turned out for a practice, only six have not returned a second time.

“You need something to occupy your time around here,” said Woods Matthews, 45, a regular whose long braid swings when he plays. “That’s why people get so mad around the shelter. We don’t get any exercise, we’re all cooped up, and then people get in fights.”

As the players smoothed their ragged edges, Mr. Cann began to look for opponents.

Chelsea Piers, with its state-of-the-art facilities, is among the city’s most expensive places to play — $2,450 per team for 10 games — and normally has a waiting list of more than 25 teams. But the bad economy led a lot of corporate-sponsored teams to drop out. Mr. Cann raised the entry fee, Nike donated equipment, and Chelsea Piers provided matching jerseys, as it does for all the teams that play there.

Just getting to the field is a 70-minute trek: the M35 bus to Harlem, a downtown train, then a half-mile walk to the West Side Highway.

The homeless players lost their debut game, 14-4, playing without a single substitute. The next week, they faced a team from Bloomberg, the financial information company, whose players were politely intrigued.

“I guess I figure being homeless, they’ll play pretty aggressively,” predicted Louis Brun, 22.

Street Soccer NY lost again, 11-5. As the teams headed to the locker room, Mr. Burnett chatted up an opponent, asking if Bloomberg was hiring.

“If these guys can get out there, feel comfortable talking to new people, and not get frustrated, then it’s really going to help them integrate,” Mr. Cann said. “Then eventually they’ll keep jobs and not get kicked out of their apartments.”

He is already seeing progress: One player left the shelter and returned to his family. Another, Jarvis Strose, who had refused to meet with caseworkers and regularly missed curfew over two years of homelessness, arrived promptly at practice every week. A caseworker told Mr. Cann that a third man, who had developed a nervous disorder after being beaten in prison, was beginning to recover from his trauma because of the exercise.

On Tuesday, Street Soccer NY met the team made up mostly of Royal Bank of Canada workers, called the Gunners.

Chris Lodgson, 25, who plays center back on the homeless team, came straight from his new job at the cafe at Bloomingdale’s; he was planning to move from the shelter to an apartment in Washington Heights. He will continue to play with Street Soccer, which he said has been instrumental in his getting back on his feet.

“I don’t want to say it’s a return to being normal, but it makes me feel like myself again,” he said. “Two weeks ago, that was, like, the first time in a while that I forgot. I forgot where I was and what was going on.”

The red team took an early lead, passing fluidly, players calling one another by name. Players from the adjacent field wandered over to watch.

“Is that the homeless team?” asked one. “Wow,” he said, cocking an eyebrow. “They’re good.”

Mr. Strose scored his fourth goal of the game, panting with exhaustion as he ran off the field. When Mr. Matthews, sent in to substitute, kicked for a goal but missed the ball entirely, his teammates shouted encouragement.

“When we started, they didn’t know how to play,” Mr. Cann said. “They didn’t know how to pass. They didn’t trust each other.”

Final score: Homeless 10, Bankers 4.

Mr. Cann, surrounded by celebrating players, looked relieved. “We really needed a win,” he said.

Still clapping, he called out to his team, “Shake hands!”

Thanks Ryan

Photograph by Michael Wells

Municipal de Fútbol is distributed by D.A.P.

UFL All-Star Weekend
Sunday, March 29th, 5 till 9pm

Parkside FC will be representing on the UFL All-Star team with 3 of our players (Moises Francia #8, Johnathon Law #10, Ricardo Martinez #21) and our keeper, Fernando Dimas #1. Come watch as top talent from the Union Football League takes on Hollywood United FC.

5pm — Atletico 1315 vs Telemundo
7pm — UFL All-Stars vs Hollywood United FC
9pm — Awards and Certificates

Fullerene, buckyballs, nanotubes…