Forkful of Gamay

For the very last decuvage of the season, the boys down at the Puzelat -Bonhomme operation decided that the visiting gringo was just the guy to get in the tank and scoop out the grapes. The idea is to shovel out 40 hectoliters of sodden, semi-fermented berries (that's 4000 liters) that have been happily bubbling for ten days or so, while their sugar turns into alcohol. The poor bastard in the tank uses a pitchfork to fill one plastic tub after another. These are then carted off to the pressoir to be mechanically trampled. The carters have far less work to do than the forker, and they delight in looking down into the tank and abusing the sweaty and fitness-challenged shoveler within. One tends to get covered in a good amount of wine.

In the tank, or as the British say, in the soup.

Grapes are heavier than they look.

Jerome looks on with some skepticism

Aah, thank you. Yet another empty crate to fill up.

Shin-deep in Gamay

Are we done yet?

In case you need a vuvuzela fix between games...

First, what ought to be called permazela, the all-vuvuzela, all-the-time radio station, with zero commercial interruptions. "All killer, and no filler."

Next, tune up your instruments for the concerto, via daniel maier's posterous:

These days, of course, you can always count on Hitler to get a word or two in on the subject.

Last and likely least, life wouldn't be complete without a vuvuzela iphone app. I would have called this "iVuzela," but to be fair, "iVuvuzela" is more annoying, and perhaps that's in keeping.

Comes complete with Vuvuzelas

England versus USA via The Guardian


Germany versus Australia via the Bild-zeitung

Red Hook Criterium

 

There's a notorious race on the pro cycling tour, the Paris-Roubaix, which adds additional insult and danger to the already brutal demands of world-class bike racing. Known as l'enfer du Nord, the race is a savage, kidney-jangling, off-road torture chamber run over as many remaining stretches of cobblestoned road as the organizers can fit into the route. The trophy is a chunk of paving-stone. 

Taking a page from this storied event is the organizer of the Red Hook Criterium, a race of which I was entirely unaware until yesterday afternoon when I spotted a patron at the fabulous Fort Defiance, sporting cycling shoes and a shirt advertising it, emblazoned "March 20th, 2010." I imagined he was relaxing over a cocktail after having just raced. Not in fact. The event was to be held later in the evening, at 11PM. 

After enjoying a first barbecue of the season in the local community garden, we wandered on down towards the water to have a look. Nocturnal bike races are few and far between. Beard St. was clogged with cycling aficionados. There were many dozens of people, I suspect, who had never set foot in Red Hook before, but illicit sporting activity is always a powerful draw. The Red Hook Criterium is unsanctioned. It's a guerilla race ridden on brakeless, fixed-gear cycles originally created for use only on dedicated cycling tracks. Unfortunately these bikes, popular for decades with messengers and hipsters, have now become an entire cyclery subculture unto themselves. This is why a woman at the corner of Beard and Richards streets, part of a crowd trying to prevent a bus driver from continuing his scheduled route, was screaming "they don't have any brakes!"

I'm all in favor of guerilla actions, especially bike-related ones like the monthly Critical Mass rides, which are essentially joyous political manifestations that draw attention to the desperate lack of cycling infrastructure in our city. But the Red Hook Criterium is not one of those. Also, "it ain’t no hipster show,” founder-organizer David Trimble told Velo News. “The first two winners have gone on to pro contracts." This is a high-speed, top-level amateur criterium, which is a particular type of short-course cycle race. In contrast to a road race, which goes from point A to point B (Paris to Roubaix, for instance), a criterium is made of multiple laps of a tight loop, usually about a mile or three, which is repeated over and over again, in this case 16 times.

This is a race, it seems to me, trapped between its gangster, outsider ethos, its growing popularity, and the very real demands of providing a safe riding environment for the racers and  large crowds of cheering spectators. The dilemma is evident. It is hard to imagine that the city would ever officially permit a nocturnal cobblestone criterium. The police are on twitter, just like you, so they were aware of the race, and they cruised by a few times, apparently deciding to choose their battles and let this one happen unimpeded. But this is quite literally an accident waiting to happen.

In his Velo News story, Daniel McMahon managed to convince me that, if he has ever set foot in Red Hook before, it must have been at least ten years ago. "The race takes place in a derelict part of the city," he wrote, "a postindustrial area a stone’s throw from the waterfront, where at night it’s decidedly empty of people." That romantic description was more or less accurate until the Fairway opened at the end of Van Brunt St. and the IKEA opened on Beard street. The race organizers must know about the IKEA, since they put the finish line of their race at the entrance to its parking lot. Thanks to that big-box store, the stretch of Beard making up the southern flank of the racecourse is now also the terminal leg of the B-61 bus route. The B-77 bus route has also diverted to Beard St. to bring in shoppers, and runs along it in both directions. As for being decidedly empty of people, that might have been true had there not been a bike race....

During the Red Hook Criterium, a fast and short race which probably took the winner about 25 or 26 minutes to complete at speeds between 25 and 30 miles per hour, no fewer than four bus drivers had to be begged, wheedled and cajoled to pause and prolong the Saturday-night completion of their duty, which is to provide low-cost, highly energy-efficient transportation to New Yorkers. (Naturally, the bus never seems to run this frequently when I want to take it, let alone at eleven PM on a Saturday night, but  I was there, and I counted four).

Part of the problem is the nature of the criterium format. Another was an unevenly matched field. With a repeating loop of only three-quarters of a mile, it took only three or four laps before the gang of racers was entirely exploded. There was no tight pack, whipping around the course en masse, with long pauses in the action. Instead there were riders widely spread around the entire loop of the course, with the result that the hapless volunteer flagmen could never find the time safely to allow the buses to go through on their route. (This could have been greatly helped had anyone who was "lapped" --overtaken by a full rotation of the race leaders--been immediately forced to stop riding, but as far as I could tell that wasn't happening). Surrounded by people, with the roads blocked by pedestrians, the buses were huge and inert; even when an opportunity to move presented itself, it was impossible to get people out of the way fast enough. More than once a bus finally began to move, only to roll right into the path of more riders careening around the corner. At risk of sounding like a premature curmudgeon or a sandbox supervisor, this is going to be great fun, right up until someone gets hurt.

Despite the safety concerns, the race presented an excellent opportunity for high-speed, high-grain, nocturnal action photography. The resultant blurs of color and explosions of texture seem to me to be situated uncomfortably at another kind of collision, one between the revolting paintings of LeRoy Neiman and the sublime ones of Clyfford Still:

Night of the zombie shoppers at the "derelict" and "post-industrial" finish line.

Ain't Nobody can say dat dey gonna beat dem Saints

The collective outpouring of joy on the streets of New Orleans last night was enough to make a sportsfan out of even a football-hating curmudgeon like me, someone who had barely registered that the Colts had left Baltimore and moved to Indianapolis. And that happened all the way back in 1983. But it doesn't matter what city the Colts claimed to represent, because the New Orleans Saints crushed them underfoot like a tired string of Mardi Gras beads on Canal Street.

As people have been saying for weeks in this town, "this is about so much more than football." For this crime-ridden, flood-damaged, third-world outpost on America's southern shores, the Saints' first-ever Superbowl appearance was a gigantic unifying event, bringing together races, classes, uptown and downtown, hipsters and hip-hoppers, all happy to invest their aspirations and self-esteem in the one common goal of victory. Saints banners and bumper stickers and tee-shirts were everywhere. Revelers wandered the streets, charging up to total strangers and screaming "WHO DAT?" (say dey gonna beat dem Saints?) at the top of their lungs. I've been Who-datting right back; I hope that's the etiquette. (Tulane Geographer and Brooklynite transplant Richard Campanella told me "I've been Who-datted in the street by some really beautiful women. I still don't know quite how you are supposed to deal with it. Do you say 'oh, nice to meet you, I'm Richard?'")

The feeling that the flood might have destroyed the essential character of New Orleans, which now has 100,000 fewer residents than it did before Katrina; a sense that the city had transitioned from tourist stronghold to terminal aid-recipient; the blighted, blown-out buildings and the still-wasted neighborhoods and the ineffectual local government and the high crime rate: all of these things, these problems, were as nothing before the blinding light of the onward marching soldiers, the torches held high by the crusading Saints, going all the way to Miami. That essential and eternal New Orleans jazz-gospel classic, "When the Saints go Marching in," which I listened to over and over as a child on scratchy old Preservation Hall albums, took on a deep, city-wide resonance. It became the hymn of a wounded people rising back from the mud and slime of the Mississippi Delta muck to reclaim New Orleans' place as a proud and great American city. Every band of every musical persuasion played it in clubs in every corner of the city.

The NFC Championship victory at the Superdome finally redeemed even that imposing chunk of architecture for the city. Synonymous after Katrina with violence, hunger, thirst, and the abject failure of the Federal response to the flood, the massive stadium had become a representation of loss and losers, poverty and squalor, hardly associations a city wants its football palace to conjure. But hours after the Saints beat the Arizona Cardinals there two weeks ago, the cleanup crews had to beg the partying fans to pack it up and go home, as if the people of New Orleans had decided symbolically to reinhabit and rebrand the building they had once fled to as homeless, soggy refugees.

In Bywater, where I watched the game, people poured out onto the sidewalks after the final whistle, popping champagne corks and Roman candles under the yellow streetlights. On Louisa street, a brass band immediately started playing, and the road filled with joyous dancers. Even the police, reviled here thanks to a reputation for immense corruption, got a rare thumbs up. One patrol-car passing by broadcast a "Who Dat!?" over their megaphone growler. "That might be the best thing I've ever heard," said a young woman on the streetcorner, basking in the afterglow.

The London Civil War

"match day offer ARSENAL lamb kebabs"

I haven't been in London in a while, and I'm trying to see as many people as possible. I rang my old friend Kay to see what was on. It had been some seven years, since she came to a barbecue in Red Hook.

'We're off to the football match on Sunday,' she said. 'Chelsea vs. Arsenal. It'll be mental. You can meet my son.'

'Do you think I'll still be able to get a ticket?' I asked.

Kay laughed. 'Not in your lifetime. We're not going to the stadium, just round the pub.'

Later she explained that tickets for the Arsenal games at the 60,000 seat Emirates Stadium, whenever they do go on sale, sell out in a matter of seconds. At some 90 or 100 pounds a throw.  (Scalped tickets on ebay sold at $450 for Sunday's match).

A tidal wave of profit-taking, Russian money, international football mania, and astronomical player salaries have elevated ticket prices into the stratosphere. Apparently what the blue-collar working-man average-joe football fan in London does today, with tickets either unavailable or unaffordable, is to watch the game in a pub as close to the stadium as possible, in the hope that the energy from that arena of gladiators might surge through the surrounding neighborhoods, like foam frothing over the glass of a hastily-poured pint. Walking up Holloway Road in the rain, about half an hour before kickoff, I was part of sea of red-scarved supporters. Only the luckier, richer half of this crowd was actually headed to the stadium. The rest were looking for a widescreen television and standing room. Many local businesses had Arsenal flags prominently displayed in the windows, and the pubs were already full to bursting with chanting and singing fans fueled by testosterone and beer.

"pouring rain, kickoff in seven minutes, stadium in background"

The rabid energy of the crowd was impressive, and it was difficult not to remember the chilling scenes from Among the Thugs in which Bill Buford finds himself caught up in the destructive rampages of Britain's football hooligans, rather uncomfortably enjoying the raw, adrenaline rush.

"will they rename Emirates Stadium, now that Dubai has gone bye-bye?"

I didn't see a single blue Chelsea scarf or Didier Drogba jersey. The civil war of London is no laughing matter. There is none of the casual banter and harmless insult exchanged between fans of opposing teams that I'm used to witnessing on the rare occasions I concern myself with sports in the United States. At least not in the drinking establishments within a stone's throw of the "home ground." The Chelsea supporters apparently stay in south London in their own pubs, and any headed to the match kept their colors well concealed underneath their coats and jackets, like Crips trying to take a short cut through Los Angeles. Kay informed that they go into the stadium through a separate visitors entrance.

At the pub about a block from the gigantic stadium all the chairs had been cleared away to avoid them being flung about during the game. Kay assured me that anyone proclaiming allegiance to Chelsea risked a good pummeling, even while noting that Arsenal was a "family team," comparatively free of hooligans. We didn't watch much of the match, as we were catching up on the intervening years, a task made challenging by an almost incessant chorus of spectators chanting "Red Armeeeee, Red Armeeeee!" in a sort of chaotic and asynchronous round that at times approached the sort of sublime accidental sonority that is the goal of much avant-garde music. "The referee's a wanker," they chanted in semi-unison, before continuing on to others much more lewd.

"even the 'no parking' stanchions are carefully painted to match Arsenal's colors"

The remarkable thing, of course, is that we were in a pub. Neither the referees nor the opposing team were within earshot. The notion that the home team crowd, chanting in unison, might overwhelm the opposing team with their expressions of love for the local boys, or that the officials might wriggle in dismay in their jailhouse stripes, was off the table. The chanting served no other purpose than as a raw expression of the primal urge.

Oh, woe, on Holloway Road: Chelsea 3, Arsenal Nil