SPORT / John Ross : World Cup as Bread and Circus

Bread and Circus: Circus Maximus in Rome, which seated 200,000, was the site for massive spectacle designed to keep the masses distracted. Image from Santa Barbara County Education.
Copa del Mundo de 2010:
The world's cup runneth over

Ever since the bad old days of ancient Rome, bread and circuses have been a powerful formula for social control. In South Africa, as in Mexico, the World Cup is designed to make the discontented forget their discontent.

By John Ross / The Rag Blog / June 11, 2010

MEXICO CITY -- The Caliente Sports Book down the street is buzzing with betters studying dog and horse races, Major League Baseball, even golf, on the multiple screens. Of particular interest are those channels running wrap-ups of the afternoon match between Mexico and 2006 World Cup champion Italy from which the national team emerged victorious in a final prelim before this year's edition of the Copa del Mundo gets underway later this week.

Italy, it may be remembered, won the much-coveted cup four years ago on penalty kicks after France was reduced to playing with 10 men on the field when super-star Zenedine Zidane was disqualified for ferociously head-butting a rival who purportedly called his mother and sister "whores." Beating Italy was a decided plus for Mexico's downtrodden spirits as the Mundiales approach.

But one group of aficionados was not much interested in Mexico's fortunes in the upcoming fandango in South Africa. Instead, they gathered around a big screen in one corner of the betting parlor cheering on the Los Angeles Lakers in a National Basketball Association finals match-up with the Boston Celtics. "Forget about football," sneered "El Guerro" Gonzalez, a regular, "this is where the real money gets made."

Because pro basketball games routinely rack up hundred point scores, betters have multiple opportunities to wager on winners and losers, over and under point spreads, total points in a quarter, and whether Kobe Bryant will hit the next three-pointer.

But with a maximum of four play-off games left on the NBA calendar, the basketball euphoria will dissipate post haste as the World Cup takes center stage. Although the NBA's despotic commissioner David Stern promotes his product as the world game, basketball hardly holds a candle to what the U.S. provincially terms "soccer" and the rest of the Planet Earth, football.

Indeed, the "Copa del Mundo" ("Cup of the World") will soon sweep every other sporting event from the screens, let alone political scandal of which there is plenty in this distant neighbor nation, the upcoming Super Sunday gubernatorial elections July 4th, and even droughts, floods, and other natural disasters.

The interminable drug war that has taken 23,000 lives in the past three years will move to the backburner. Ditto an economy that is tail spinning out of control -- a million workers lost their jobs in the first three months of this year alone despite President Felipe Calderon's rosy claims of "recovery." Speculation about the disappearance of one of the nation's most powerful politicians will fade from the prime time news and the first year anniversary of the incineration of 49 babies in a government-run day care center owned in part by the first lady's cousin, will not even be noticed.

The military takeover of the great Cananea copper mine and the dissolution of the miners union, is not news. New revolutions -- this is, after all, the hundredth year anniversary of our landmark revolution -- could rock the land but for the next month, but Mexico will live and die on what happens to the national team in South Africa.

"In football, we find our revenge against the adversaries of our lives," philosophizes sociologist Jose Maria Candia in a recent Contralinea magazine interview, "if it goes badly at work, in the economy, politics, the project of the nation, when 11 boys put on the green jersey and do well in an international tournament, we feel vindicated by life."

With 32 national teams from all five continents in the competition for the World Cup, the fate of the "seleccion" will have palpable impact on domestic tranquility. The political outfall of the Mundiales is unpredictable. Pumped up on toxic nationalism and xenophobia, football is a blood sport in southern climes. Honduras and El Salvador once fought a full-fledged war over soccer.

If the national team wins or acquits itself well, success will strengthen the government in charge no matter how poorly it has served the country. Likewise, a shoddy performance can topple rulers. In Mexico, increasingly unpopular president Felipe Calderon who won high office in fraud-marred elections three years ago is banking on the national selection's triumphs in the opening round to invigorate his deteriorating image. Calderon's bet is hardly a sure thing.

Mexico, Number 17 on the Federation of World Football Federation's rankings (now the Coca Cola FIFA rankings), plays host South Africa in the inaugural match of the tournament June 11th and "His Excellency" Felipe Calderon (dixit South African president Jacob Zuma) will be a guest of honor. The "Bafana Bafana" ("Boys Boys") as the locals are worshipped, have won their last four prelim matches and in the 2009 Confederation Cup took Spain, which some football gurus fix as the best team in the world, into overtime. Their fanatics' incessantly droning "vuvazelas" or plastic trumpets are said to drive opponents mad.

On the other hand, should Mexico beat sentimental favorite South Africa, it will make Calderon few friends on the African continent -- five other African teams are in the draw with war-torn Cote d'Ivoire the cream of the crop.

Aside from the Bafana Bafana, France and Uruguay are the real class of Mexico's four-team group -- while the French have appeared lackadaisical of late, whipping the South Americans is improbable. Anything less than reaching the quarterfinals will not rehabilitate Calderon's popularity.

Mexico has a young team that fluctuates between indifference and playing out of control. It is anchored by seven Mexican players from the European and Turkish leagues, and the wily but slow-footed veteran Cuauhtemoc Blanco. Burned repeatedly by the national team's poor performances in the Mundiales, many fans such as Manuel Garcia, a waiter at the old quarter Mexico City eatery Café La Blanca, consider that only divine intervention can save Mexico -- and Calderon -- from ignominious elimination.

When and if Mexico wins its matches though, wild celebrations are guaranteed to erupt around the gilded Angel of Independence on the bustling Paseo de Reforma -- drunkenness, fisticuffs, and hooliganism are de rigor. Flag-draped caravans of honking cars will jam the boulevards of this conflictive megalopolis.

On game days, half the population of Mexico, led by its president, will don green jerseys and play hooky from work and school. Saloons will fill to the brim with fans spilling out into the streets, jostling for a peek at the plasma screens. Masses to insure that God is on Mexico's side, will be pronounced from the altars and saints will be dressed up in the national colors.

Although football is tantamount to religion in this country where 70% of the population lives in and around the poverty line, only the super rich will have the wherewithal to jet off to Africa. Instead, the underclass will monitor the Mundiales at the "FIFA Fan Fest" on giant screens erected in the great Zocalo plaza from which nearly a hundred hunger-striking members of the Mexican Electricity Workers Union (SME), near death after a month of voluntary starvation, will no doubt be evicted so as not to dampen the fiesta.

Televisa and TV Azteca, Mexico's two-headed television monopoly, which will transmit the games (the premium package includes 3-D) will have the nation eating out of its hands (and guzzling Corona beer.) The TV monoliths have leased rights to broadcast the Mundiales from the Swiss-based FIFA, the absolute dictator of the sport for the past 106 years that counts 204 out of 208 football federations worldwide on its roster. FIFA TV revenues are expected to top $167,000,000 USD for the 2010 World Cup.

This year's Copa del Mundo is awash with drama. Will the Argentine selection, a perennial favorite, graced by the world's best player, Leonel "the Flea" Messi, blow up under their sometimes psychotic coach Diego Maradona, himself a Mundiales immortal? Will the first round match between England and the U.S. (14th on the FIFA listings with a world-class star, Landon Donovan, to prove it) invoke the star-crossed Yanqui upset of the Brits 60 years ago in 1950 in Brazil, the only time these two teams have ever met in the World Cup?

If the U.S. gets by England, a match between Mexico and its hated gringo rival would up the drama quotient here considerably. A face-off between South Korea and North Korea, both of which are in the draw albeit in separate groups, could lead to nuclear confrontation.

How will tiny, bruised Honduras, which played through a coup d'etat to qualify, fare against the big guns? What kind of karmic reward is in store for France which slimed its way into the World Cup with mega-star Thierry Henry's illegal hand-slap goal against the Irish? Will Germany be dispirited by the suicide of its troubled veteran goalie (is this a Wim Wenders' film?) Will five-time champ Brazil, which is hosting both the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics, be so overloaded with hubris that the selection will forget to play football?

But unquestionably the drama of dramas is focused on host South Africa, the land of blood and gold, Nelson Mandela, Steve Biko, Joe Slovo, and the last great struggle for liberation from colonialism.

South Africa, an unlikely site for the World Cup, was promised the games by Swiss football impresario Joseph Batter during his 1998 campaign to become the czar of the FIFA -- Blatter, who was said to have been backed by Middle East oil money, needed African votes to put him over the top. Although Nigeria and Morocco were also proposed to host the 2010 Cup, South Africa, the continent's fastest-growing economy, was chosen both as a tribute to African football and to Nelson Mandela. Blatter even flew the frail, aging apostle of African liberation, to London to ballyhoo the designation.

Whether the beloved Mandiba will be well enough to attend the inauguration is the drama within the drama.

In his youth, Nelson Mandela was a keen amateur boxer and enthusiasm for sports has colored his life. Football is indeed the national sport of black South Africans, 75% of the population. During Mandela's 28 years of imprisonment on Robbin Island for the crime of defying apartheid, his fellow prisoners and comrades in the African National Congress (ANC), played football incessantly, taping up rags into balls, and booting them up and down the narrow prison corridors. But Mandiba was held in isolation and could never participate.

Nelson Mandela's vision for the new South Africa encompassed sports as a path to racial reconciliation. If football was a black sport in South Africa, rugby is an Afrikaner obsession -- the Springboks were the maximum icon of the apartheid regime. As president, Mandela brought the 1995 World Rugby Cup to Johannesburg, a story fictionalized in the film Invictus, and won the hearts and minds of his former persecutors. Now the World Cup 2010 is slated to project South Africa before the world as a dynamic, multi-racial powerhouse.

The truth is always more diffuse. Jacob Zuma, the country's very corruptible third president, and his predecessors have sunk between $3.7 and $6 billion USD in infrastructure to burnish their images in a nation where 43% of South Africa's 45.000.000 peoples live on $2 or less a day.

The gleaming $300,000,000 Soccer City Stadium where the July 11th finals will be staged, abuts Soweto, the festering high-crime enclave of 3,000,000 mostly threadbare citizens, 30% of whom suffer from AIDS, according to the World Health Organization. Gangs of orphaned children rule the street.

Similarly, the stadium at Port Elizabeth on Nelson Mandela Bay, which came in at $287,000,000, was built over a slum from which hundreds were evicted. A school complex was demolished to make way for the Neusprot venue (only $140,000,000) -- 13 such stadiums have risen from the dust amidst a storm of charges of kickbacks, bribery, and favoritism. Some who have spoken up have been brutalized.

If recent history is any hint, the new stadiums will quickly become certifiable white elephants. Even Beijing's much-praised "Birds' Nest" coliseum designed for the 2008 Olympics, is reportedly tenantless, and the Greek economy just collapsed under the burden of debt incurred for infrastructure for its Olympic Games.

With a population scuffling just to feed itself, filling all this dazzling stadia with paying customers is problematic. Even the $18 cheap seats -- a week's wages in the cities and a month's income in some rural areas -- are mostly out of reach in a country where 50% of the work force is out of work. To deflect a grave social crisis in the making, the FIFA is offering 120,000 free admissions, about 2,200 seats for each of the World Cup's 62 contests. Riots have already occurred at "friendly" preliminary games.

Ever since the bad old days of ancient Rome, bread and circuses have been a powerful formula for social control. In South Africa, as in Mexico, the World Cup is designed to make the discontented forget their discontent. For the next month, the violence, corruption, and class and race hatreds that dominate daily life in Mexico, South Africa, and the rest of what used to be called the third world will disappear beneath the social surface.

Although conflict is my bread and butter, I'm not going to miss the 2010 Mundiales for the world.

[John Ross is at home in the maw of the Monstruo watching the World Cup. You can complain to him at johnross@igc.org.]

The Rag Blog

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MUSIC / Dynamic Compression : Yes, It Really is Too Loud!

Christopher Clark graphed the peak levels of and RMS levels of three hit songs a year over the past three decades. Here is a link to a PDF of his full poster, "A Visual History Of Loudness."
The loudness wars:
Why music sounds worse

By Carrie Brownstein / January 2, 2010

As we have come to the end of the decade, we turn to one of the more dramatic changes we've heard in music over those 10 years: It seems to have gotten louder.

We're talking about compression here, the dynamic compression that's used a lot in popular music. There's actually another kind of compression going on today -- one that allows us to carry hundreds of songs in our iPods. More on that in a minute.

But first, host Robert Siegel talked to Bob Ludwig, a record mastering engineer. For more than 40 years, he's been the final ear in the audio chain for albums running from Jimi Hendrix to Radiohead, from Tony Bennett to Kronos Quartet.

Bob pointed to a YouTube video titled The Loudness War. The video uses Paul McCartney's 1989 song "Figure of Eight" as an example, comparing its original recording with what a modern engineer might do with it.

"It really no longer sounds like a snare drum with a very sharp attack," Ludwig says. "It sounds more like somebody padding on a piece of leather or something like that," Ludwig says. He's referring to the practice of using compressors to squash the music, making the quiet parts louder and the loud parts a little quieter, so it jumps out of your radio or iPod.

Ludwig says the "Loudness War" came to a head last year with the release of Metallica's album Death Magnetic.

"It came out simultaneously to the fans as [a version on] Guitar Hero and the final CD," Ludwig says. "And the Guitar Hero doesn't have all the digital domain compression that the CD had. So the fans were able to hear what it could have been before this compression."

According to Ludwig, 10,000 or more fans signed an online petition to get the band to remix the record.

"That record is so loud that there is an outfit in Europe called ITU [International Telecommunication Union] that now has standardization measurements for long-term loudness," he says. "And that Metallica record is one of the loudest records ever produced."

Old news

"The 'Loudness Wars' have gone back to the days of 45s," Ludwig says. "When I first got into the business and was doing a lot of vinyl disc cutting, one producer after another just wanted to have his 45 sound louder than the next guy's so that when the program director at the Top 40 radio station was going through his stack of 45s to decide which two or three he was going to add that week, that the record would kind of jump out to the program director, aurally at least."

That's still a motivation for some producers. If their record jumps out of your iPod compared with the song that preceded it, then they've accomplished their goal.

Bob Ludwig thinks that's an unfortunate development.

"People talk about downloads hurting record sales," Ludwig says. "I and some other people would submit that another thing that is hurting record sales these days is the fact that they are so compressed that the ear just gets tired of it. When you're through listening to a whole album of this highly compressed music, your ear is fatigued. You may have enjoyed the music but you don't really feel like going back and listening to it again."

Ludwig's final assessment of the decade in music?

"It's been really rough, folks," he says. "But it can get better and I think it will get better. I'm glad it's going to be over."

Digital compression

Digital compression is the process that allows a song to go from being a very big sound file in its natural state to a very small file in your iPod -- so you can carry your entire record library in your pocket. But at what cost?

Dr. Andrew Oxenham is a professor in the psychology department at the University of Minnesota. His specialty is auditory perception -- how our brains and ears interact. He also started out as a recording engineer.

Robert Siegel asked him to explain digital compression.

"Really, the challenge is to maintain the quality of a CD, but to stuff it into a much smaller space," Oxenham says. "Let's think about how digital recording works. You start out with a very smooth sound wave and we're trying to store that in digital form. So we're really trying to reproduce a smooth curve [with] these square blocks, which are the digital numbers [the 1s and 0s that are used to encode sound digitally].

"Now, the only way you can make square blocks look like a smooth curve is by using very, very small blocks so it ends up looking as if it's smooth. Now using lots and lots of blocks means lots of storage, so we end up using [fewer] bigger blocks. Which means we end up not representing that curve very smoothly at all."

Lost? Go back and re-read it -- you'll get it.

"The difference between the smooth curve and the rough edges you end up with in the digital recording, you can think of as noise because that is perceived as noise," Oxenham says. "It's perceived as an error, something that wasn't there in the original recording. The trick is to take the noise -- which is the loss of fidelity -- and just make it so you can't hear it anymore."

In hiding

It's called "masking." Think of it this way: You're having a conversation in a quiet room, and you can hear every word, every mouth noise, every stomach rumble. But if you were having that same conversation outside on a busy street, you'd get the gist of what was said, but you'd probably miss a few words. The traffic noise would mask them.

So let's say you're listening to a Brahms symphony.

"[The loud parts of the music are] giving the coding system a lot of leeway to code things not quite as accurately as it would have to," Oxenham says, "because the ear is being stimulated so much by the loud sound it won't pick up very small variations produced by the coding errors."

In other words, the loud parts of a recording are used to "mask," or hide that noise produced by the rough-edged squares of those digital 1s and 0s.

But are we missing something?

"There are really different levels of MP3 coding," Oxenham says. "You can go from much less data -- which people can hear the difference -- to higher levels of coding which take up more space on your MP3 player but sound better and are basically indistinguishable from a CD. And I would argue that under proper listening conditions -- if it's really indistinguishable from the CD as far as your ear is concerned -- then you really haven't lost anything perceptually."

Oxenham likes the convenience of portable MP3 players. But ultimately, he says, he prefers going to concerts.

Source / National Public Radio

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Avatar : Contradictions of Cameron's Animation Masterpiece

The contradictions of capital-intensive history:
James Cameron's animation masterpiece

The stunning experience of nature, culture, and politics does achieve an important spiritual reversal of the Cowboys and Indians plot.

By Greg Moses / The Rag Blog / December 28, 2009

"I'll sell it to you for $12 what I paid," she says to a man holding a pale sign that says "Needed, 1 ticket." Cheery thankyous move the long line forward, one step closer to Avatar on the last day of this box-office- busting Christmas weekend.

Inside the IMAX theater, just before the house lights come down there will be two more tickets to exchange. Mother and son pay cash at the door to strangers and locate a small, impromptu space where they can sit together against the wall, giving the rest of us the chance to see what we look like with our 3-D glasses on.

The one and only preview belongs to the Disney-branded Tim Burton edition of Alice in Wonderland starring Johnny Depp. Everything about it looks brilliant in IMAX 3-D. The Mad Hatter does not fail to chuckle. Imagine seeing all of us from his point of view, looking like a wall of human flies on flypaper, all bug-eyed.

As for the main feature, which opened Dec. 18, 2009 worldwide, it is true what the fan said who chased in vain after James Cameron's grumpy autograph at LAX: "The plot is so simple a three-year-old could follow it." Yes, okay, the formula of colonial imperialism is a cosmology that every preschooler can comprehend. It used to go by the name Cowboys and Indians.

Something about Cameron's capital-intensive mythology is laudable for a Hollywood Blockbuster. The stunning experience of nature, culture, and politics does achieve an important spiritual reversal of the Cowboys and Indians plot. The audience is skillfully maneuvered into anti-imperialist sympathies so that we can tearfully commit to an improbable reversal of the kind of history that any three-year-old knows.

I came away thinking that I might like to try the Xbox version of the Avatar adventure, with opportunities to win battles of liberation using fantastic weapons upon exotic landscapes. Of course, I realized as I was pulling out my car key that a more effective spiritual reversal would have me renouncing all my capital-intensive desires and the battles they advance.

A truly improbable Avatar reversal would produce a global back-to-nature movement liberated from plastic 3-D glasses because something like "real nature" was being returned to its sacred center of attention. "I see you," we would say to all living things. Cameron's deeper vision suggests that all living things would be able to sigh a biologically verifiable response of collective awareness: "And I see you."

At the high point of the plot's arc, a masculine body of "skin" touches the feminine surface of a producer's fantasy. In that very moment, the saturated hues of Avatar’s animation affirm what the plot renounces. Experience moves relentlessly toward the desire to be more immersed in the jungle of technology than we already are.

At any rate, the contradictions of the Hollywood Blockbuster are not proprietary to Cameron. They are the contradictions of capital-intensive history itself. With few exceptions here and there, audiences have not failed to purchase their Avatar tickets in advance.

[Greg Moses is editor of the Texas Civil Rights Review and author of Revolution of Conscience: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Philosophy of Nonviolence. He can be reached at gmosesx@gmail.com.]

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