Monthly Archives: June 2006

Spielvergnugen

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Just so no one shall be able to say that a ball is simply a ball at afoe, and since it’s a weekend, I’ve decided to tell you, gentle readers, about a quick’n’dirty short film concerning the “true meaning” of the “Miracle of Bern” – Germany’s surprising victory in the 1954 world championship – that I’ve shot with a friend, the German film-maker Sebastian Linke, last year.

While we’ve chosen a rather atypical setting to make a contribution to football philosophy, it’s really a paraphrasing of Camus, an existentialist short film about the way the beautiful game can help us all to free ourselves from our ontological prison. It’s a film about rules to comply with and rules that need be broken. A film about the the game that is life. If we have the balls. And that’s why it’s called Spielvergnugen. We dared to omit the umlaut.

We’ve shot Spielvergnugen in two hours using a standard miniDV camera, 8 bottles of beer, 3 straws and 2 condoms. The film is in German – and it’s clearly more fun if you know the original radio broadcast – but I think the English subtitles are working quite well.

You can find the youtube flash wrapper below the fold. Hope you’ll enjoy!
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While We’re Away

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Before we all get caught up in World Cup and ignore everything else for a month, a few items that will be calling for our attention when we get back.

* All of the problems that the EU Constitutional Treaty was supposed to solve are still there, and they still need to be solved. A rotating presidency that a given country holds once every twelve to twenty years is no way to run a railroad.

* Germany and Finland will likely have joint initiatives for EU approaches to Russia, which they will pursue through the year that the two countries hold the Union’s presidency. Expect more of these. In fact, the EU may well develop something like the OSCE’s various troikas, in which the previous, current and incoming officeholders work together to build continuity into rotating positions.

* Ukraine still wants to be a member. As does Turkey. And a passel of smaller countries.

* Belarus is in a “pre-1989 situation,” according to a former Slovak foreign minister who has been active in democracy promotion throughout the region. For his pains, he has been banned from travel to Belarus. Orange methods are not going to topple Lukashenka; it’s time to study up on the Solidarnosc playbook.

* What Lisbon Agenda?

Any other suggestions from the floor?

World Cup: Furor Yugoslavica

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Yugoslavia used to have a hell of a team. They were regular visitors to the World Cup, advancing to the elimination rounds more often than not. They went to the quarter finals in 1990, and there are plenty of Serbs and Croats who will tell you that they actually came within a whisker of winning it all. They got knocked out by a wildly erratic and penalty-prone Argentine team that went on to lose the final against Germany. If they’d beaten Argentina… well, you have to believe that the Yugoslavs could have gone on to beat both Italy and Germany. This seems unlikely, especially given that Germany had whipped them 4-1 a couple of weeks earlier. But 1990 was a deeply strange year, so who knows.

Yugoslav football was on a rising arc all through the 1980s; rising interest in the sport, plus rigorous state-sponsored training programs, produced a “golden generation” of players starting around 1985. Unfortunately, Yugoslavia imploded just as these guys were reaching their peak. They ended up scattered among half a dozen different countries, with several of the best trapped behind sanction walls and unable to compete in international play. If the country had stayed together, the Yugoslav team would surely have been a serious contender in ’94, ’98, and ’02.

Anyway. Yugoslavia used to be quite something. How are the successor states likely to fare?
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Germany: There’s more than the World Cup

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Assuming that you, gentle readers, are not yet entirely absorbed by your preparations for the upcoming month of watching simple games of 22 men runnung after a ball before, well, Gary Lineker will hopefully be proven right again*, here’s some more interesting information about the country that is now officially run from the FIFA headquarter in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Yesterday, the German statistical office published the 2005 microcensus, which includes some interesting numbers that are the result of a partly changed methodology. First of all, as Die Zeit online explains in more detail (in German), the statisticians finally decided to explain to the public that politicians are indeed prone to using numbers only based on political context, not on their factual one.
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Overdue Evaluation (The Prize, by Daniel Yergin)

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There is not much market for reviews of books published almost a decade and a half ago, so without further ado, my thoughts on The Prize, by Daniel Yergin. This evaluation is overdue because I started reading the book when I bought it, back in 1997. I put it down around page 400 (which is a little more than halfway), so this review is likely, very likely, to be stronger on the second half of the book.

Yergin’s subtitle is The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power, which gives both theme and thesis. The title, if I am remembering an early part of the book correctly, comes from a statement made about oil by Winston Churchill: “The prize was mastery itself.” The argument is that understanding oil is central to understanding the twentieth century and, by extension, the world today. To complaints that the war in Iraq is “all about oil,” the only proper answer is “Of course.” The last century’s major conflicts, and many of its smaller ones, were driven by oil, determined by oil, or both. Without an understanding of oil, much of the period will remain opaque.
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Which side is your bread buttered?

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When I lived in Vienna, in 2001-2002, I lived in the 11th District, Simmering, a roughish working-class suburb struck through with railway lines and motorway spurs. Specifically, I lived in one of the four huge brick gasometers of the former city gasworks, once Europe’s biggest, now redeveloped as a mixture of shops, flats and a concert hall.

One thing that cheered me, looking at the dire OVP-FPO government with its mixture of dishonest hacks and barely-contained racist scum, was that surely this provincialism was on the way out. With the enlargement of the EU, not only did Austria stand to make huge economic gains, but surely it would liven up a bit?

There was at least some evidence of change. Around the 11. Bezirk, huge infrastructure projects were going on. The railyards were being enlarged, all kinds of commercial property being built, new terminal buildings at the airport..everyone was looking forward to a good old fashioned concrete binge.
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