Night Games: Playing in Los Angeles After Dark

photo by Michael Wells (from Municipal de Fútbol)

L.A. is hot. The sun bears down on you like a controlling parent. League games can start as early as 6:00am as players try to escape its glare. At night, untaxed by the heat, our bodies feel twice as fast, twice as strong. Surrounded by the glory of night lights (not only floodlights, but the glow from apartment buildings, street lamps, headlights, and the moon), playing is just that much more fun - you feel like you are escaping something, from somewhere. And we are. The city seems like another city.

About six years ago, I was at a bar on my own and met a bunch of musicians from Minneapolis. It turned out that they were former cross-country runners. They invited me to join them on a night run.

That was my first and only run in the dark. I almost always run alone. Until that night it had never occurred to me to run after the sun had gone down. I run through a quiet neighborhood, and around the edges of a park and a lake. Women have been regularly assaulted on the route I take - but only at night. I'd never thought about it directly - until I ran with those guys at night, I hadn't known it was something I'd want to do.

Los Angeles is a beautiful city at night. My neighborhood can be spooky with its lush gardens that spill over onto the sidewalk, half-falling-down houses tucked behind magnolia and banana trees, mysterious lights of case study homes perched behind evergreens, and the air thick with jasmine and skunk.

That night run remains one of my nicest memories of Los Angeles. I found myself running in a pack thanks to the easy sociability of a city that hosts so many recent arrivals, so many of whom seem to be their way somewhere else. (At its best, L.A. has the cruisey generosity of a metropolitan train station.) It also gave me a unique sense of freedom - sortof like what it feels like in the desert, where the sky is so open that it doesn't seem to matter which way you decide to go. This is a wonderful feeling to access in the middle of a city - as if you could go anywhere, freely. Of course, in a city crisscrossed by neighborhood boundaries that mark the front lines and trenches of an ongoing and intensely racialized class warfare, this sense of freedom of movement is an illusion, but it is a necessary indulgence when it can be had. It's what allows us to imagine other possibilities, other ways of moving in, through, and across this place.

The pleasures of that night-run pale in comparison with those of playing soccer in Lafayette Park or Vista Hermosa after the sun goes down and the flood lights come up. Fulfilling the promise of its name, from Vista Hermosa you can practically kiss the downtown skyline. Lafayette Park used to leave its lights on all night long - I played for months in games that started around 10:00pm and could go on until 1:00am, or later.

Those midnight games at Lafayette are over: somebody in one of the apartment buildings behind the park complained about the noise, and, incredibly, that was that - the voice of one "stakeholder" shouts down a whole community. Elsewhere in the city, though, people have kept the lights on.

Angelinos have found that night games are an effective way to combat violent crime. This is the basic insight behind Mayor Villaraigosa's "Summer Night Lights" program. This year, 16 parks that had been places to avoid - to skirt and fear (even in daylight) - have become sites of nighttime pleasure.

These night games show that Los Angeles - endlessly miscast in the movies as either an eternal gangland battleground or a space of cozy suburban privacy - has the capacity to be a different sort of place, and to create a different sort of public.

Why police the border between women's and men's sports?

In 2004, Mexican National Women's Team superstriker Maríbel Dominguez was signed to a two-year contract with Celaya FC, a second division men's team. FIFA stepped in with an official prohibition and the assertion "There must be a clear separation between men's and women's football." The memo furthermore forbid her from playing in exhibition games with the men's squad. (See Jo Tuckman's 2005 Guardian story.)

My question today is why "must" the separation between men's and women's football be "clear"?

Dominguez played for years with boys - successfully disguising her gender and enjoying a level of play not available to girls of her generation. Nicknamed "Marigol," in 2004 she was a highly ranked international player who went on to play for the Atlanta Beat, FC Indiana, FC Barcelona, and the Girona team EU L'Estartit.

Nearly every feature story on Marta makes a big deal out of how she grew up playing with boys as if this were unusual. (See Michael Sokolove's 2009 NYT profile, for example). Of course it's fun to read about Marta's childhood years fighting macho attitudes on dusty pitches and in the street - but just once I would like to see it acknowledged that her experience is not extraordinary. It is in fact absolutely typical for female players - especially (but not only) those living in places where women's sports is not accepted. In the U.S., girls play with boys, by the way, and many also find themselves combating patriarchal attitudes about sports when they lace up their boots. Brazil hardly has a monopoly on machismo.

Playing with boys as you grow up is totally ordinary, in other words. Where girls don't have to sneak into boys games, they start off playing organized youth soccer together. There is much debate about at what age girls and boys should separate. As girls mature earlier it can be to their advantage to play with boys through much of adolescence - in Germany, they play together until they are 17 (I am not sure if this is true for the highest level of U-17 teams - I suspect the rule is that girls are only forced off boys teams at 17). Clearly this hasn't hindered the development of the men's or the women's game. Germany's NWT holds the World Cup, and are consistently ranked in the top three.

All of this is to say that Marta is unique not because she played with boys, but because she was one of the very best players on every boys team on which she played.

To return to FIFA's intervention against Celaya's inclusion of Dominguez on their roster: If a female player can handle herself in a men's professional league, why shouldn't she be allowed to play? What would be the harm?

I don't buy that FIFA is interested in protecting the development of the women's game in Mexico - not that I would endorse such an explanation (in which an organization dominated by old, white patriarchs is working to "protect" women against their own desires).

If Maribel Dominguez had played for Celaya FC, and held her own (never mind excelled) she would have profoundly unsettled notions about the difference between men and women.

The difference between men and women's football must be clear because the difference between men and women themselves must be absolute. Gender difference, however, is not absolute, and it doesn't take much research to find soccer stories which raise interesting questions about our investment in gender segregation in sport.

The 2008 Africa Women's Cup was marred by a lot of things (bad referring, overt attempts to undermine press coverage of the games, last minute changes in scheduling of training sessions for visiting teams, etc). It was also packed with major upsets (see FIFA report here). Floating around the blogosphere has been a very interesting story: Two teams (Cameroon and Nigeria) filed complains with the Confederation of African Football accusing the eventual champions (and host team) Equatorial Guinea of fielding two men.

What little information I've found on this is not very helpful - limited by homophobia or ignorance. To this day, a lot of Nigerian players are insistent that they were MEN (one article reports that a Nigerian forward in essence felt a player up on the field). That doesn't necessarily explain the 1-0 loss, though. They'd played the same line-up previously and won and didn't file a complaint then. Their credibility is undermined by this fact.

While the Nigerian players say the two defenders were men, over time the language of the story as it has been reported in African newsletters has shifted to suggest the players are intersex - meaning, born with sexual characteristics that do not conform to traditional definitions of male/female gender.

Sadly, if the players are indeed intersex, they would be banned from the game for having for a physiology that challenges the notion that gender difference is immutable. And, as it happens, one of Nigeria's own players was recently "outed" as intersexed, and banned from the game. She was the second in the national squad's history to be so exiled - talk is that she may undergo surgery in order to become eligible to play women's football again. But should her body be medically altered so she can play football? Does women's football really need her to do so? Medical management of intersexuality is a frightening story of institutions deciding to force a body to conform to its ideas about sex/gender at great cost to the person on whose interests doctors pretend to be acting. Such surgeries are about managing the anxiety of parents and doctors - not about enhancing the life and happiness of the intersexed person.

In response to the scandal caused by the complaints about Equitorial Guinea, the Confederation of African Football will institute a "gender test" - naming a body that menstruates female. This test is notoriously unreliable, as is any other test grounded on a single factor (see "The Gender Trap"). The institution of this test in African Women's Football is a step in the wrong direction.

The policing of these borders creates problems for especially female athletes. The Journal of the American Medical Association explains:

Gender verification has long been criticized by geneticistist, endocrinologists and others in the medical community. One major problem [is] unfairly excluding women who had a birth defect involving gonads and external genitalia (i.e., male psuedohermaphrodism)...A second problem is that only women, not men, [are] stigmatized by gender verification testing. Systematic follow-up [is] rarely available for female athletes "failing" the test, which often [is] performed under very public circumstances. Follow-up [is] crucial because the problem is not male impostors, but rather confusion caused by misunderstanding of male pseudohermaphroditism. (Simpson et al., "Gender Verification in the Olympics", JAMA vol.284, pp. 1568-1569, 2000 - cited in Wikipedia's Gender Verification in Sports)

These cases ask us to consider what it is that we actually want from the gender division in sports. What is it we are looking for in a women's game? Surely not a confirmation of the "femininity" of the people on the pitch. It must be something else - like how the women's game allows us to escape from narrow ideas about who and what women are. Why shouldn't women's football be exactly the game to welcome gender-bending warriors like the intersex athlete, and the transgender warrior? And why should the women's game be the only one to do so? Let's make the borders more porous. Better yet, let's imagine that it is possible to play across them - because the truth of the matter is, people do, every day, and it's not that big a deal.

Confidence Games: Thoughts on Player Bios, Afterthoughts on "Looking for Eric"

Much of Robbie Fowler’s autobiography is boring. The story of this talented mischief-maker (most famous for “snorting” the touchline) doesn’t grab me. I normally love reading anything football-related - tell-alls, player biographies, histories, theories, economic manifestos, coaching manuals – whatever.

There is no story quite so dull, however, as that of the totally confident person. Fowler and his writer plainly struggled to find those rare moments in his life when he’s been unsure of himself. That uncertainty is confined to anxiety in those months he waited to be called up from Liverpool reserves. Even then, the worry stemmed not from doubt about his ability or concern about if he’d make it. It was more impatience as to when. The book (a favorite for Liverpool fans) is more interesting for its inside peek into club politics than it is for Fowler himself. A lack of uncertainly is a part of Fowler's identity and effectiveness as a player. But in a narrator this quality leaves me cold.

As a genre, player biography is hard. The story of most professional footballers is hampered by the fact that they’ve done nothing else but play the game, and have little to talk about besides either their achievements on the field – with which we are already familiar – or how they blew their fortune, or dealt with addiction, scandal, etc. It’s the rare professional player who actually has a story. Or has the writerly flair it takes to make poetry from the day-to-day life of a footballer (Eamon Dunphy’s memoir Only A Game? is exemplary on this point).

A few players have stories that diverge from the script to tell us something important. Paul Canoville’s Black and Blue was named "Best Autobiography" at the British Sports Books Awards in the spring. Canoville was Chelsea's first Black player - and this is no story about triumph over adversity. He recounts the story of the racist abuse he took from fans, and, more compellingly, he describes the team’s inability to respond to it or to know how to support him. The story of his development as a player and his amazing social life is woven into a nuanced exploration of what it was like to find yourself a living lighteningrod. The book also confronts his battle with addiction and then cancer. It is a compelling story that speaks to anyone who has been subjected to discrimination – and it’s a sobering lesson about the passivity of those who bear witness to it and do nothing. It is also a straightforward account of a difficult life - one marked as much by uncertainty as by determination. It offers no real happy ending, no closure – just the contours of an actual life.

This brings me back around to “Looking for Eric” - subject of my last post. The film ultimately offers a romantic and facile solution to a very difficult situation. Eric conjures Cantona because he needs some of Cantona’s confidence. You can see that confidence in Canonta’s posture – he strides through the film with chest thrust out like the French rooster that he is. Eric, on the other hand, is skinny, pale, sits with his chest curled around itself, is rumpled and withdrawn. As an audience member I felt I should root for Eric to “sort himself out” but the fact of the matter is, as a person, I didn’t buy it. That’s the point at which the film got boring. I don’t buy that life is like football, and if you can just be “confident” the answers to big questions – about what one wants, how to repair what’s broken in your life, etc. – will magically appear.

Considering these three texts together - Fowler's and Cantonville's autobiographies, and Loach's "Looking for Eric," I find myself thinking that sometimes "confidence" is just the uncomplicated psychology of someone who has never experienced failure.

Looking for Eric: A Review

Looking for Eric opens with a crash. The hero of the film is a depressed postman living a very depressing life in depressing Manchester. Eric takes his car the wrong way around a roundabout. He does this just after seeing his ex-wife across the street (he's too shy and hurt to cross over and talk to her, too wracked by guilt and anxiety, and so even though she's waiting for him, he skulks away). Lilly is the love of his life, and he walked out on her without explanation years ago. He is still haunted, however, by his love for her and by hers for him and he stunted by this fact. His friends are worried about him - the crash makes an urgent crisis out of his slow descent, and draws them together around the project of helping him.

One of these stand-up guys is a fan of pop psychology, and initiates a series of gentle interventions. He asks the group of friends to indulge him in an exercise - to first imagine looking at yourself through the eyes of someone who loves you unconditionally, and then imagine looking out at the world through the eyes of someone you admire. Eric chooses, as his fantasy point-of-view, Eric Cantona.

Turns out, the last time Eric remembers being happy was years earlier at a match with his friends watching Cantona play. Fandom and football play an important part in this film as the one place where the men are given permission to be themselves, to shout, scream, to "sing together" and laugh. It seems to be the one place where Eric gave himself permission to feel.

This lays the foundation for the film's funny turn - at a particularly low moment, Eric hallucinates Cantona in his livingroom, and this imaginary Cantona proceeds to keep company with our melancholy postman and, in essence, coach him back to life. This coaching centers almost exclusively on getting himself back in communication with Lilly, his ex-wife. ("I like this woman," Cantona says, "she's got balls.")

Though organized around the reparation of his relationship with his wife, this film is about really about men. Eric's problem, Loach seems to suggest, is as much with the men in his life as it is with women. The film offers a flashback to explain: At a family gathering celebrating the christening of Lily & Eric's baby, his father gets unnerved watching Lilly blow kisses to his son. "That won't last long," he says, as he launches into a nasty tirade about the dead-end trap of marriage and family. In this bullying (expressed as a deep hostility towards women) we get a glimpse of the hard-edged working class masculinity that is closer to Loach's topic. Even as Eric is repulsed by this, and even as it's clear this isn't the kind of man he wants to be, the whole scenario pushes him away. His answer is to run away from it all and not talk about it. (At the film's start, he can't even say Lilly's name.)

Thus the friendship with Cantona - Eric needs a father/brother/friend to lead him out of the woods. And so Cantona leads Eric to turn to his friends to help him through a crisis involving one of his step sons. Talking about his life, his feelings, and his problems has been, up to this point, unimaginable for him. Cantona helps Eric to realize his potential by teaching him to "believe in your teammates, because without that we are lost."

The film is packed with Cantona's gnomic wisdom, "good lessons" like this and has a wildly optimistic ending. It's a feel-good bromance with great footage highlighting Cantona's career.

What's not to love about that?

(From the Track) Q: Who's that Mexican Girl from Riverside? A: Brenda Martinez

U.C. Riverside sophomore Brenda Martinez took 2nd place in the 1500 (4:13.97) at the NCAA national championship on June 10 in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

Check out the flotrack interview below. I love it when she talks about UCR's "sleeper" status (so true!), and implicitly refers to people's general lack of awareness of Latinas in track and field. She says, "People are starting to ask who's Riverside? Who's this little girl, this Mexican girl from Riverside?" You can see the pleasure she takes from defying the limits of people's imagination by being just that good at what she does.

I also love her response to the question: "At the start of the season could you have seen yourself as second in the nation?" The question seems to prove the point she made about 30 seconds earlier: People underestimate her.

How does she answer that question? With a twinkle in her eye, and no-bullshit "Yeah."

You just know, too, that she wasn't gunning for second.

(Thanks to my sister Justina Cassavell for the tip!)

Police Playing the Policed: on having the LAPD in our league

I am a founding officer for the Union Football League, an AYSO-affiliated adult league which plays near downtown Los Angeles. When we heard that the LAPD team would field a team during our first season we were a bit wary.

The field is smack in the middle of Pico-Union, and right down the street from the new police station. This is the home of the infamous 1990s Ramparts Scandal. It is also the neighborhood of the May Day "Melee" in which the LAPD used violence to break up a peaceful march and demonstration calling for reform in immigration policies in the U.S., and for recognition of the rights of the migrant communities that define the region. (This 2007 blog article has good video of that event - including silent footage of demonstrators being pushed at gunpoint across the soccer field). The cops in this neighborhood have long been working under a self-generated cloud of fear, anger, and mistrust.

The whole experience was something of a nightmare. The LAPD squad is muscle-bound and incredibly fit. They are a tough team. They can run you into next year, and they don't shy away from using their size advantage to win the ball. Nothing wrong with that. But they also have a coach who shouts from the sidelines: "Take him out out!" "Take him down!" and "Get him!" - while wearing a dark blue jacket with the letters LAPD across his back. Guys from several teams reported more disturbing remarks made on and off the field by LAPD players - e.g. "This [the game] is all you have, you have nothing to go home to."

As fit as they are, their ball handling is just OK. When confronted with the better teams in our league - who play a fast passing game dependent on great footwork, bursts of speed and an ability to change direction and turn in a blink - the cops were sometimes undone by the very thing they normally rely on: their size, and their physicality. It's an old story: the confrontation between a militaristic defensive game and the flash, bob and weave of joga bonito.

In general, when things didn't go their way, they got visibly and audibly frustrated, and played not better but just meaner, and harder. They played with a win-at-all-costs attitude, and were convinced every whistle made in their direction was misplaced. They complained endlessly about the referees - so much so that I suspect the refs dreaded working their matches.

As I'm the treasurer, I may have spoken with the team the most. Every week I'd check in about the league fees, make small talk, try to get to know them.

I had a series conversations with their manager about the problems that were arising around their presence. He was genuinely upset by the tone of the games and remarkably open in sharing his perspective and experience.

It seemed to them that neither their opponents nor the referees could forget that they were the "cop team". He said that they never had this problem playing in more anglo settings. Although the majority of the guys on the LAPD team are Latino, they seemed only to have problems playing in parts of the city like ours.

It all come to a head towards the end of the season. It was a big game between the LAPD team and Nikys Sports - an unbeatable squad sponsored by the soccer shop across from our field. Nikys has everything - skill, knowledge, experience, strength and speed (the store isn't bad either - they have a twitter feed!). IMHO, Nikys are capable of playing some of the best, most entertaining football you'll see in California.

I didn't get to see that the night they took on the LAPD. The center ref lost control of the match after 30 minutes, and fearing that a player would be seriously hurt, or that the game would descend into a melee, he rightly called it off. I've never seen that before.

All of the referees and the spectators I spoke to held the LAPD team responsible for the disintegration of the match. Their game was marked that night by verbal abuse, dangerous and pointless tackles, and just plain rage.

The guys from Nikys, normally the more 'emotional' of the teams in our league, were remarkably calm about it all and went on to finish the season with an almost perfect record.

The day after that disastrous match, the manager withdrew the LAPD from the league. Their departure was inevitable and we were glad they knew this. We talked on the phone, and I learned this wasn't the first time this had happened. The manager (who'd spent the weekend assisting with the Santa Barbara wildfires) sounded exhausted and depressed. It'd been years since they'd tried playing in a league like ours, because previous attempts had ended exactly this way. He told me, in fact, that Internal Affairs advised them to withdraw (fearing that if they injured an opposing player, the LAPD might be sued).

In that conversation, I caught a glimpse of the complexity of his position - and the seductive lure of the fantasy we'd all indulged in imagining things could unfold any other way than they did.

People wax romantic about the utopic possibilities generated through football but realities of power and authority, and significant histories of abuses of both can't be wished away.

It is not possible for a cop team to play in one of the most policed neighborhoods in the region, and imagine that we can all forget who they are. The cops don't forget it. The player stopped and searched as he pulled into his own driveway ("lots of Toyotas in this neighborhood are stolen") and then issued a citation for making a dangerous turn (!) won't forget. Nor will the guy with a brother in jail. Nor the guy harassed because of his immigration status. Nor will the guy arrested last week for doing what people do at parties in the Hollywood Hills sans repercussion.

Forgetting is a form of entitlement. Forgetting who and where we are is a luxury. If anglo teams in middle class swaths of beachside communities "forget" they are playing the cops, it's because they do not experience themselves as "policed." And if the cops can forget that they are cops when they play those teams, it's because those guys aren't the ones they are policing.

I would like to think that football is not a space of forgetting, but of remembering. Remembering who you are, and who is with you - remembering a history not with words, but in movement.

I will stop myself here, before I get romantic.

I was glad to see the cop team go, and am happier even still to let go of the atavistic scrap of liberalism that overrode my gut feeling about the wisdom of inviting the police into our space of play.

From Punch to Pitch

Jackie vs. Audrey, Ohkay Casino, 2006
Delilah Montoya

I just read 8 reasons women should take up boxing on Lisa Bedsoe's blog, The Glowing Edge, and thought I'd comment briefly on my very recent encounters with boxing.

I've just started to learn some kickboxing/boxing basics as part of my work with personal trainer/performance artist Heather Cassils. Learning to kick and punch has been great for feeling strong & sexy, and it's also been great for, uhm, channeling some anger & frustration (or, more nearly, concentrating it into expressable forms).

And it's been really useful on the pitch: Kickboxing is helping me begin to develop a sense of where my feet are. I didn't grow up juggling the ball, and have a devil of a time volleying. There's been an almost immediate improvement in my connection with the ball since I started this training. And the increased upper body strength is giving me much more confidence in challenging for the ball, and also in warding off challengers.

If women's boxing interests you, check out Katya Bankowsky's 1999 documentary Shadow Boxers (KO Picture Show reviews it here). It focuses on "The Dutch Destroyer" Lucia Rijker (clips from the film can be seen here, woven into a fan-made homage). Shadow Boxer is a little uneven, but much of the training and fight footage is gorgeous. And then there's artist Delilah Montoya's photographic series, Women Boxers: The New Warriors (published as a book). Montoya juxtaposes fight images with portraits of the boxers alone, and with their trainers and family members. It's a great gift idea for your basic ass-kicking female.

Municipal de Fútbol Reading: June 9th @ Imprenta in Los Angeles

A READING OF QUEER SPORTS WRITING BY JENNIFER DOYLE
WITH VIDEO BY MARRIAGE (MATH BASS + WU TSANG)
Tuesday, June 9, 2009, 8:30 – 9:30 pm

@ IMPRENTA (NEXT DOOR TO SILVER PLATTER)
705 S. Rampart (at 7th), LA CA 90057

X-TRA Summer 2009 RELEASE PARTY
Vol. 11, no. 4

I will read from "Voici Mon Épée," a performative essay about - a Whitminian Ode to - the fútbol scene in Lafayette Park, which is right down the street from Imprenta & The Silver Platter. This essay is a part of Municipal de Fútbol a collaborative art/design project about soccer in East & South Los Angeles. It represents an extension of my writing here, and my critical work on art and sport spectacle which is featured in this issue of X-TRA. After the reading, I will talk with the audience about what it means to write about sports from a queer feminist perspective, and also about the forms of border policing which seek to regulate and control the fundamentally migratory pleasures of local fútbol communities.

Come to the reading & stay for The Wildness (great queer club in the space next door)
www.x-traonline.org

Interview with Gustavo Arellano on KPFK today @ 4:00pm

Listen to KPFK 90.7 today @4:00pm for my interview with Gustavo Arellano. Arellano is the brilliant mind behind "Ask A Mexican" and host of Four O'Clock Tuesdays at KPFK.

[The interview is archived here & here - It was a lot of fun: I am a big fan of Arellano's writing, so was thrilled & honored to learn he's reading this blog. One correction: I named AEG as a sponsor for Man U, I of course meant AIG, the troubled insurance giant. In this interview, I also talk about MacArthur park - just to be clear: I do not know for sure exactly what will happen with the field. The contractor & the engineering office at Parks & Rec both confirmed that the turf would not be marked - read my previous blog entry for the nuances. Early blog articles that address issues raised in our conversation: Red Card/Man U, FA Apologizes for Ban, Really? - see this month's articles for discussion of park politics. Thank you Gustavo for reading From A Left Wing, and whenever you want a conversation partner to process fútbol craziness, I'm yours!]

What's going on with MacArthur Park?: from la cancha to "synthetic meadow"

In fall 2008, the city broke ground on the "MacArthur Park Improvement Project." More specifically, the city fenced off and dug into the dry ground pictured here - the two fields marked out on the packed dirt served a range of leagues, including a large children's league and a women's league that was the subject of a June 2008 Los Angeles Times story (Guatemalan Women Kick Aside Constraints in the U.S.) Tens of thousands of people have been kicking up dirt in this spot over the years.

As the improvement project takes shape, people in the neighborhood have started wondering what happened the long-promised soccer field. The story had been that the city was replacing the dirt with an artificial turf field. From a November 2008 LA Parks press release:

A 37,000 square-foot synthetic field will replace the existing dirt field. When completed the new field will be added to the half dozen synthetic turf playing fields managed by the Department.

An October 2008 Los Angeles Times story on the temporary displacement of the leagues using the dirt field reports that

The new synthetic field promises to be a hit when it reopens next summer. But for now, the upheaval and lack of field space elsewhere has alarmed players and upset team rosters.

Well, folks have become more alarmed as this huge field has taken shape: a gently sloped, bean shaped expanse of green has replaced the dirt field. There are no lines on it. It is big - big enough to house a field, certainly, but with no markings league play is impossible - in fact, it is hard to call it a "soccer field" - if by that one means a field on which refereed league matches are played. That LA Times story and much of the press surrounding this redesign promise a return of league matches, but this seems not to be the case at all.

When I phoned the engineering department for Parks & Rec, I was told there was no plan to put lines on the field, and that it wasn't in fact being called a soccer field, but a "synthetic meadow." A spokesperson from contractor Parkwest Landscape, Inc said that while the turf is "top of the line" (featuring heat-resistant flexsand), the field is unlined and has gentle slopes (I can't see this slope, however, from the above photograph, culled from A View from A Loft.)

A 2007 Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks memo describes the MacArthur Park Improvement Project's plans for the fields in the following terms:

Expected improvements include reconstruction of an existing dirt soccer field with artificial turf, installation of...light poles approximately 50 feet in height around the soccer field....(Dec 26, 2007/p. 9)

But an October NBC news report identifies the space as "MacArthur Park Synthetic Field and Meadow," and this same space is described on Ed Reyes's own blog as "a synthetic children's meadow."

In the incoherence of public discourse on this space, we see something of the deeply conflicted place of fútbol in Los Angeles. The presence of the turf says one thing (fútbol will be played here), the absence of lines another (fútbol can be played here, but not in any organized way - those who want to watch full field games will have to go elsewhere).

In an excellent article for Progressive Planning ("Playing Out Democracy in MacArthur park," Summer 2008) Kelly Main gives an overview of the major role played by soccer in MacArthur Park, and also of the dumbfounding resistance fútbol communities face from a range of quarters like gentrifying residents and park and city officials invested in pastoral fantasies of green "passive use" parks - which are in fact more conducive to crime than active use parks which host the beautiful game. For many, park improvement means green grass and pretty pictures. Their fantasies about such public spaces are skewed - where we see community, they see crowds. Where we see pleasure, they see chaos. Where we see game, they see dirt.

Of the recent and significant drop in park crime Main writes: "despite claims that police surveillance has 'cleaned up the park,' many park goers assert that the soccer league and the people it brings to the park are primarily responsible for the safer conditions." The more people use the park every day (returning frequently, making themselves known, getting to know others in the park), the safer it becomes. It's been the games that have brought people into the park in this way - recent arrivals to the country find their way to MacArthur Park on the weekend, where they'd return again and again to watch league matches, route for their favorite teams, and eventually feel at home.

Will a "children's meadow" serve that function? I guess we'll have to wait and see.

In the meanwhile, I find myself turning to Donna Summer's disco anthem, and for the first time I am able to make sense of its infamously mysterious lines. It's about losing your turf.

Spring was never waiting for us dear
it ran one step ahead
as we followed in the dance
MacArthur Park is melting in the dark
All the sweet green icing flowing down
Someone left my cake out in the rain
I don't think that I can take it
'cause it took so long to bake it
I'll never have that recipe again
Oh No...
I recall that yellow cotton dress
Foaming like a wave on the ground beneath your knees
Birds like tender babies in your hand
And the old men playing Chinese checkers by the trees

MacArthur Park is melting in the dark
All the sweet green icing flowing down
Someone left my cake out in the rain
I don't think that I can take it
'Cause it took so long to bake it
I'll never have that recipe again.
Oh No.

Queer Sport Spectacle: Article in X-TRA

The new issue of X-TRA: Contemporary Art Quarterly features an article by yours truly. The article includes discussion of work by my favorite fútbol artist Yrsa Roca Fannberg, the collaborative couple "Marriage," Adrià Julià, and Moira Lovell. X-TRA is plotting a launch party on June 9 in LA, details to follow.

Rudo y Cursi: Homosocial/Homoerotics of a Buddy Movie

Rudy y Cursi is a satire of the buddy film. The brothers love each other. They hate each other. They can't live with each other, and they can't live without each other. Cuarón's film parodies the clichés that define the cinematic adventures of rivalrous "odd couples" - think Lethal Weapon, or, more recently, Harold and Kumar. The buddy movie is possibly the most anxious of Hollywood genres as these stories of male bonding and intimacy often have to go a great distance to generate heterosexual alibis to reassure audience members that the love these men feel for each other is, uhm, not gay. (Thus the presence of otherwise completely forgettable female characters - cardboard cut-outs usually played by actresses with minimal celebrity so as not to distract from the actual characters in the films - Rene Russo breaking the mold with her star turns in LW 3 & 4. See "Male homosociality and the buddy movie" for a more scholarly take than I offer here and see "Isn't It Bromantic" for David Fear's great comment on the topic.)

Rudo y Cursi continues the line of thought initiated by Y tu mamá también. Carlos Cuarón wrote the script for Y tu mamá también with that film's director, his brother Alfonso. The earlier film explores the blurry lines of intimacy and desire that define the friendship between its central characters Julio (García Bernal) and Tenoch (Luna). They share girlfriends, they get off together in dreamy afternoon masturbation sessions, and it all changes when they go on a road trip with an older woman who is absorbing the news of her cancer diagnosis and leaving her philandering husband. She seduces one, then has sex with the other. (If their inexperience with women wasn't clear to the audience at the film's outset, it is painfully obvious in these scenes.) The two friends argue with each other, and she puts an end to their bickering by seducing them both at once. The suggestion is that this is what they've wanted all along, but they needed the road trip and the magical presence of a dying older woman in order to make it happen.

There's this incredible moment when she dips down below the frame of the camera, and the two embrace in a passionate, sensual kiss (I can't remember if we see them make out, or the the film cuts away just before contact). They wake up together, and things are weird. They go home, their friendship falls apart as do their relationships with their girlfriends. The woman who surfaced their desire for each other dies - her death is not shown, but told to us in a coffeeshop conversation between the now former friends. (Hammering home the fact that she was always, in essence, a plot device.)

Rudo y Cursi feels very much like a comedic followup to that film.

What makes it a satire of a buddy movie (rather than just a buddy movie) is its sustained parody of the homoerotics which animate the genre & its macho sentimentality. Rudo y Cursi is unusually self-aware in its send-up of homosociality - of spaces like the soccer team's locker room, which is, in this film, barely a half a step away from being a gay porn set. The coach for one team is a closet queen. The brothers are full of feeling, clearly in "love" with each other (a love made safe by the story which sets them off as brothers), and totally incapable of functioning without each other. The women around them are props - they are far too wrapped up in each other to really notice what the women in their lives want or need (an ignorance that Beto/Cursi's girlfriend exploits ruthlessly). All the male athletes in the film constantly grab their crotches - in part because the brothers are hazed by teammates who gang up on them in the shower and shave their balls. These scenes in and of themselves don't make for a parody - buddy films are rife with testicular jokes and locker room humor. It's the tone, the weird and soap opera sweetness of it all that makes these scenes feel more interesting than phobic - as if the film goes just a little bit farther than is usual - perhaps because it is a lot less anxious than we are used to.

At the end of their misadventures, the two brothers are together - more or less back where they started, as the film's odd couple.

The term "homosocial" describes social relationships between people of the same sex - relationships that are usually defined against the sexual/romantic. But as scholars in gender studies have pointed out (most famously, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick), male homosocial relationships are shot through with anxiety about homosexuality, and so expressions of romantic desire, tenderness, and affection between men are policed with a particular force, and women are drafted into the story to, uhm, keep things from, well, being gay. Thus the bizarre way "women" are integrated into men's soccer - see the Chivas Girls and this bizarre footage of the LA Galaxy's fan section waving blow-up dolls dressed like them. The awkward integration of sexualized images of women into these scenes serves one purpose, and one purpose only: to make these guys, who spend a good portion their lives worshiping men as fans, hanging out with men talking about and looking at men, feel straight.

Both Y tu mamá también and Rudo y Cursi explore how male friendships traverse the line between the homosocial and the homoerotic - or, perhaps more accurately, the films experiment with how far you can go in eroticizing homosocial relationships before all parties panic.

As evidenced by this interview (see clip below), Diego Luna (fresh off his turn in Milk) and Gael García Bernal (who was outstanding in Almadóvar's La mala educación) seem to enjoy the beautiful game of keeping these things in play (as host and audience laugh awkwardly).