December 2007 Archives
For those of you not in the know, Santas Ghetto is a yearly event where a group of street artists are brought together to showcase their talents providing a contrast to the avaricious consumerism of Christmas in the 21st century. Last year they were appropriately positioned in the manic shopping mayhem of Oxford street, but this year they have gone a step further and taken the event to the one place people generally don’t think about in the run up to Dec 25th.. Bethlehem. In a former chicken shop opposite the church of nativity, in a town now dominated by poverty and conflict rather than celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ, the work of more than 30 artists is being displayed. Bringing together artists from Ramallah, Gaza and Bethlehem's Dehaisha refugee camp plus others from as far afield as Washington DC, Madrid and East Sussex, it is 3 floors of creative anarchy.
If you’re brave enough , they are happy to receive visitors, and you could be feasting your eyes on works by artists including Abed al Rohan Mousain, Sam 3, Ron English and Sir Peter Blake. It features a particularly contentious piece by Souleiman Mansour which was considered the ‘pickled shark’ of the Middle East, for obvious reasons!
However, those nice people at Santas Ghetto refuse to be drawn into political debate, and prefer to speak with actions rather than words. All money raised from sale of art there is going to be donated to local projects for kids and young people. Now that’s what Christmas is all about!
For UK wakeboaders Tom Watson, Lewis Cornwall, James Young and Lee Debuse their daily philosophy is one of total positivity and a sense of whatever it takes, I can do it. Each has a story that defines them – in some cases these are stories of pure imagination and creativity – in others the stories are of triumph over adversity – triumphs born of belief and single mindedness to stick at it even when it hurts. You've already heard Tom's incredible story, so time to introduce the rest of the crew.
Lee Debuse is a 19 year old with one of the biggest S-bends in the business. (That's like a big superman thing with a 360 spin to the most of us!). What many don’t know is that Lee has been a diabetic since the age of 7. He tells us ‘I’ve never let it stop me. I wasn’t a wakeboarder when I found out I was diabetic but I had this desire to express myself through this sport and as long as I keep on top of it with good self discipline and frequent check ups, I can continue to get out there and chase that big 7’.
Lewis Cornwall, for so long we knew him as Nick Davies’ crazy little friend. Well not anymore. Packing a huge amount of power into an atypically slight frame for a wakeboarder this boy is now writing his own history – already he has the 2007 Wake MK title to his name and 2008 brings great expectation. Lewis’s ‘double’ s-bends (Backflip with ... you're getting the picture!) and alround cable style are something to behold. Stepping out of the shadow of the current World Cable Champ is not easy but Lewis has the creative style and the determination to have done just that.
In recent weeks Lee, James and Lewis have been ripping it up at the London Boat Show at Earls Court. These 3 and the UK Wakeboard community as a whole are never ones to let the small issue of winter and sub zero temperatures get in the way when they want to ride. Especially when there's the opportunity to move the whole gig inside! Pulled by winches over sliders and ramps these guys have been getting their winter fix. A great idea and a real creative solution to the eternal enemy of the UK boarding community .. (the weather) .. and as Matt Crowhurst architect and executer of this recent Pool Gap venture simply put it, "build it and they will come."
That might sound like a cruel summation of a man born with a congenital condition, a man who, at 11 months, had both legs amputated just below the knee, but it’s what the media have been calling Oscar Pistorius of late, the South African Paralympic runner with his sights set on representing his country in Beijing next year - against able bodied athletes. Because he lost his legs at such a young age, Oscar enjoyed his childhood much like any other healthy young boy - he was just never aware of the impact that such a disability might have on his life, and this disregard of his perceived limitations has endured.
Having defied people’s expectations all his life, he recently had the International Associations of Athletics (IAAF) relax its laws on the use of prosthetic limbs which they initially enforced because of Pistorius himself. There is an ongoing debate as to whether his ‘blades’ (Oscar is nicknamed Blade Runner) provide him with a competitive advantage, something which his own camp categorically refutes. Some of the things the IAAF were coming back with were ridiculous and, Pistorius says, upsetting: “We couldn’t believe some of the stuff they were saying. They said that if they allowed the use of artificial limbs then what would stop athletes turning up with jet packs on their backs.” Fortunately, that’s all in the past now. So, not content with holding the Paralympic record for the 100, 200 and 400m events, the scene is now set for a final effort to shave the 0.8 seconds off his 400m time that would see him qualify him for Beijing. “You can’t say you can’t do something,” Oscar says. “That’s something I grew up with. My dad always said that if you want something enough then you can do it.”
Amen to that.
A few years back, Tom Watson was one of the UK’s hottest young wakeboarding properties, but then a horrific car crash left him in a coma fighting for his life for well over a month. Despite the psychological effects inherent to such a traumatic experience, he feels it only made him more determined to succeed in the sport. “I took it all for granted before that,” Tom says. “It’s definitely driven me to ride better than ever. After the crash, all I wanted to do was get back in the water.” He now bears the scars on his face and injury has left one arm weaker than the other. Understandably, then, he’s not quite at the same level as he was before, but there’s no doubt in his mind that he’ll get there eventually. He’s spent his life overcoming difficulties, both on the water and off it, so defying people’s expectations has become standard procedure. I asked him if choosing to pursue a career in wakeboarding upset a few people, particularly those close to him, if they were quick to advise him to seek out a ‘proper’ profession, a nine-to-five perhaps: “All the time. I’ve got it from everyone and everywhere, but I’ve slowly been proving them wrong. It never bothered me. I’m just not interested in doing anything other than this. It’s what I love most.”
On the water it’s the same thing: looking for ways to do what others don’t. On the subject of the 118, a trick he invented and then named after the ad campaign popular at the time (the moustached ‘athletes’), I wondered how you go about creating something new like that. Tom is pretty pragmatic about it. He believes it’s simply a case of seeing what everyone else is doing and then finding ways to elaborate on it, to take it to the next level, to contribute something to a sport he loves so dearly - and then having the determination to make it happen. And did he suffer some hard hits before nailing it? “Nah, I landed it first time.”
It’s this effortless style and confidence in his own ability to overcome everything he’s had to endure in recent times that convinces us that he’ll make it right to the very top of this hugely competitive sport. And it’s precisely why we want to be there to help him in any way we can.
Tom asked that we thank his parents for sticking by him, and also Dave Smith, his great friend who was driving the car in front that day, and who acted quickly on his feet to make sure Tom is still with us today. Amen to that.
More to follow on fellow new SUSO wakeboarders Lee Debuse, James Young and Lewis Cornwall.
I read this insightful little quote from eccentric “cosmic” musician Sun Ra in David Toop’s excellent Ocean of Sound at the weekend:
“Reality is too harsh. Imagination makes everything nice. Use youR imagination and get out of the most drab places by simply holding on to it and making it real.”
That’s fairly sensical from a man who, for the most part, made very little sense at all - at least to me he didn’t. There’s no doubting the furtiveness of his extraordinary imagination, though...
“I had a vision that I saw some materials that defy description. I saw some jewellery that’s like nothing you’ve got on this planet. It was like a big supermarket that was the supermarket of the Omniverse. Everything in the Omniverse was in the market. I didn’t see any walls. It was so big there were no walls.
“I stopped at one counter where they had some socks. These socks were like they were alive. They were glittering like diamonds. I wondered how that could be. It wasn’t like sequins. This was like they were alive. I wanted to know how much they cost. They said it was ninety dollars for one pair of socks. I said, “Well, I’ve never seen anything like this before. I better go and see about the pants.’ I went over to the pants and they were one hundred and eighty dollars. Finally they said, ‘Since you’re from another place, our tax here for everything is eighty dollars.’
“I was still standing there trying to figure out whether I wanted the pants or the socks. Then I came back here. I wondered, if I had paid for them, would they have been in bed with me?”
To all those yet to partake in a spot of cycling, even after our little call to action a few weeks back, what’s stopping you? Probably something like this, an extract we came across in Rapha's endlessly fascinating and visually stunning Rouleur Magazine:
“So, in front there was Tchmil, then there was Museeuw, then there was another guy from Gewiss in between, I think, then there was me and Baldato, riding two-up as hard as we could. I was puking up on the bike. And we came to the last sector and we caught Musseuw and the other guy, and came onto the Carrefour de l”Arbre, the last sector. There, I dropped the others, so I was second on the road - with the crowd and just going for it, that was the ultimate experience to be second on the road in the Paris-Roubaix, in shit weather, covered in shit.” SEAN YATES after finishing 5th in Paris-Roubaix ’94.
Still don’t fancy it?
Apparently the American public knows nothing about Saturday’s big fight - the NY Times is yet to write a single word about it. Over here, though, people who usually don’t spare a thought for boxing - people like me - are falling over themselves in anticipation of what’s being billed as the biggest fight of all time. I wonder if it’s the Americans’ disinterest in boxing of late that’s made Floyd Mayweather the ever-so-slightly over confident man he is today. Outside the media glare, he’s like a young pup blind to his mother’s teet. Neglected at home, he then feasts on anyone who cares to listen (he took part in Dancing With The Stars for God’s sake), and in the international spotlight of this week’s fight, there’s been quite a few of those.
Ricky Hatton, on the other hand, is exhausted by media commitments and, quietly confident, the only concern coming from the Mancunian’s camp is that he might succumb to cuts to the face brought about by Mayweather’s rapier-like but brittle fists. Hatton’s career has left no stone unturned, though: many a time the potential repercussions of such facial injuries have been averted by great “cuts man” Mick Williamson. According to the opposition, Williamson will be much needed come Saturday night:
“How is the guy going to beat my nephew if he don’t even jab? You need a jab to get in, don’t you? Without a jab, how’s he even going to get close to my nephew? Tell him from me he needs to go buy one quick. Because Fight Night is going to be a f****** bloodbath, it’s going to be a Harlem massacre. He’s gonna need that plastic surgery again.” ROGER MAYWEATHER
Stirring stuff. Not only is Floyd the best fighter of all time - according to Floyd - but Roger, his uncle and trainer, is also the best trainer of all time - according to Roger. He and Floyd sound like a really decent pair of guys don’t they, the kind you could just hang out with and have a laugh with, shoot some pool, have a beer, talk about anything but them? They’re just so honest. And guess who the second best fighter of all time is according to that great bastion of reason, Roger? Why, that would be Floyd’s father, the very same man who once did time for dealing drugs. Roger himself served six months for hitting his grandchild. Again, nice guys.
Now I don’t wish to take anything away from Floyd Jnr’s success. As far as I can tell, he is universally recognised as the best pound for pound fighter in the world. He has the weaponry, the technology, the creative means. In terms of pure technical boxing ability, he’s better than Hatton. But even from where I’m standing, from afar, without any real understanding of these two prize fighters beyond this particular bout, you can sense in Mayweather’s somewhat comical show of bravado a whiff of insecurity, a seed of doubt that’s grown bigger with every jarring joust and proclamation of intent. So much so, it seems, that there can only be one winner come fight night, regardless of who takes home the belt. Where Mayweather is almost universally regarded as the best fighter, Hatton is universally loved as the dogged white fighter from northeastern most England who lets his fists - and his determination - do all the talking.
And armed with such things, the impossible becomes possible.
Now that magenta is safe, we thought it time for a bit more colour chat. According to the futurists over at the Future Laboratory, Pantone 395C will rise in 2008 to become the undisputed, all singing, all dancing king of colour. Yes, the greeny yellow you see on the end of that banana you eat every day - the bit you rip through - is set for a big year:
“This jaunty tone is one of the key colours for 2008 and beyond. Yellow will see an increased use in advertising and communication, conveying notions of immediacy, action and emotional warmth. Expect complex tones rather than straightforward brights.”
I’m not sure I like being told what colours to like but hey, these guys need to make a living. Time will tell if they’re right or not. Watch this space in twelve months time...
It’s 1974. You’re strapped into a makeshift rocket pointed directly upwards. You’re staring straight at the sky. Pretty much all you can see is blue, although you can just about make out the canyon somewhere beneath you - the one you’re about to jump. On a bike. You can see nothing else below you or beside you. The only way is up. Don’t fancy it? Tough. You’re on national television, you’re Evel Knievel, and there’s no going back.
Although he witnessed death defying stunts at a young age, Robert Craig Jnr. Knievel didn't set out on a single-minded mission to become the greatest ever daredevil of all time. In fact, you’d almost say 'daredevilism' came as a kind of last resort for a man who, for the life of him, couldn’t find a way to maintain a regular income. And he was forever getting into trouble. During his younger years, Knievel was thrown into jail for all manner of things, from reckless driving and burglary, to leading poachers into Yellowstone National Park to guarantee game. No surprise, then, that Knievel acquired ‘Evel’ as a name precisely because he regularly hopped and skipped on the wrong side of good. At one point he tried selling insurance to mental patients and, having invited the Czechoslovakian ice hockey team over to play in the US prior to the Olympics, proceeded to rob them after the game. From the off, then, Knievel was far from the all action, do no wrong American hero as history would have us believe.
But the political climate of the 60s and 70s meant that America needed someone to cheer for, something to cling on to, a hero to promote. Step forward a man trying to make ends meet, a man desperate to turn his back on the crime, misfortune and failure that had dogged his life thus far. In 1960, Evel turned to motorcycles and founded his own bike shop, and it was here that, through a single stunt designed to inflate interest around an average shop, his eager entrepreneurial radar discovered people’s insatiable appetite for danger. He jumped 40 feet on a motorcycle over 100 rattle snakes and a pair of mountain lions, as you do - his back wheel landing on the very edge of the landing strip - and so begun one of the strangest celebrity careers of the 20th Century. (Imagine the route his life might have taken had that wheel landed the wrong side).
On New Year’s Eve, 1967, Knievel cleared the fountains outside Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas in front of 25,000 people and television cameras broadcasting the event across the nation but suffered horrendous injuries and spent the next month in a coma (see clip in the film below). He awoke a hero. But, while the words ‘Evel’ and ‘Knievel’ have become synonymous with heroism, danger and determination, his was a life wedged between periods of extreme failure, drug abuse and alcoholism. Eight years of success post-1967 were followed by a gradual decline, beginning with the jump over shark infested waters that culminated in a badly injured photographer, and then his assault on Sheldon Saltman after the biographer had revealed Evel’s drug taking habits and neglect for his family. He is said to have had an accomplice hold Saltman down while he beat him so hard with a baseball bat that the bone in the writer’s arm broke through the skin. Evel was predictably reacquainted with prison as a result - six months no less - and Saltman sued him for a whopping $13 million. From that moment on, the American public’s love affair with their hero was on the wane. He was no longer their defiant champion - a latter day American idol - but rather a sad and delirious social misfit, soon to be forgotten, just as quickly as he’d been catapulted into the public’s collective consciousness; on his way into prison he boasted, in all seriousness, that once out, he would jump from the underside of an aeroplane at 30,000 feet - with no parachute - and land on a giant haystack in a Las Vegas car park. Imagine the mess had he got his bearings even slightly wrong.
Despite his failings, though, there was undoubtedly a period in his life when Knievel had the imaginations of a loving public gripped like wet trunks in a mangle. He did something about the things he saw in his head - motorcycles flying high over snapping sharks and hungry lions - and he actually made it happen. Strap yourself to a rocket-like motorcycle in a bid to clear Snake River Canyon? Why the hell not. Even the crimes he committed owe something to an overly active imagination. But he came up short precisely, it seems, because he lacked the one thing many people presume he had in abundance: the determination to endure. “A man can fall many, many times in life,” he said, “but he is not a failure until he refuses to get up.”
Lunatic, yes, but determined? Perhaps not.
A guy I often see when I go out was in hospital last week. He suffered a collapsed lung. He’s 24 (I think), healthy and gave up smoking some time ago. So what happened?
Unbeknown to him, me or anyone else I know was this: spending large amounts of time absorbing huge quantities of bass can collapse a lung or two; and seeing as I almost always see said guy within metres of giant club rigs it seems likely this was the cause. So consider this not so much a warning, but more a little ‘heads up’ for all those who, like me, spend all their time soaking up what doctors now claim to be unhealthy levels of bass:
"I don't think we'll stop people going to clubs, but we may be able to advise them not to stand next to loud speakers or put a bass box into their car." (Dr. Harvey, of Southmead hospital in Bristol)
For more info from Doc Harvey and the BBC, check this.
The Champions Award is presented by The Sunday Times each year to a sports person or team operating outside the spotlight of mainstream sports. Column inches are few and far between. These are the sports people who go unnoticed but who are no less remarkable than those routinely filling both back and front pages, and arguably more determined.
The absence of those trappings of fame leave these athletes pure and single minded in the pursuit of their dreams, and, for water skier Nicole Arthur, 20, this year’s winner and a sponsored SUSO athlete, it was very much a case of following a dream. It was her grandfather, Ian Arthur, who introduced the sport to Scotland in 1952 and set up the Slamannan Ski Club in the Forth Valley where Nicole still trains today. Water skiing in a Scottish loch? Do you know how cold it gets up there? You need to be pretty stubborn and a little bit mad to get in that water every single day - perhaps why Scotland is hardly renowned for its water sports - but Nicole is both and more. Despite the need for thick rubber suits, despite her age, and despite the fact that the winter darkness up north means finding the time to train with her coach and father (who himself won 18 consecutive Scottish Championships in the 70s) after work a little difficult to say the least, Nicole has been on a rampage of late, winning slalom titles at the British Open Championship, the British Under-21 Championships and the European Under-21 Championships. Then, to cap it all, she won gold at the World Slalom Championships in Austria two months ago, seeing off more experienced rivals who grew up and learned in somewhat warmer and more hospitable climates around the world (!).
It’s in specialist sports such as these, where the rewards are far less monetary and often far more personal, that you find people with the most creative and determined attitudes. There seems to be more to overcome, and if you do make it, only a specific demographic gets to hear about it. That’s why SUSO works with and is constantly looking for people like Nicole; you just know these people are doing it for all the right reasons (refreshing given the ongoing debate about the health of football in this country and the half hearted displays of ‘passion’ at Wembley). Nicole is one such person, and the awards she’s earned are testament to all those years spent bobbing up and down in a half frozen loch.
For all you budding musicians, acoustic or electronic, for all those wishing to challenge people’s understanding of what constitutes music, for those at all interested in the history, influences and lineage of music today, Noise Music, by Paul Hegarty, is an absolute must. Its depth is remarkable. Indeed, it can be quite heavy going, each page requiring absolute concentration - a lighthearted trawl through avant-garde music this is not; a rewarding and fascinating examination of different musics, their place in cultural and historical context, and their use of ‘noise’ it is. But what is noise? This is the thread that binds 13 illuminating chapters, in particular the idea that what is one day deemed noise or unwanted sound the next day becomes acceptable as music. But around this thread dances Hegarty and his extraordinary knowledge of all strains of music, taking in everything from Satie to Cage, Russolo to the Sex Pistols, and Coil to Sonic Youth, all of them musicians unique in the singularity and imagination of their vision and their unerring commitment to their beliefs. Hegarty’s passion for his subject simmers and spits beneath every word as he takes you deeper and deeper into a world of dissonance, musique concrète, rarefied jazz, Japanese noise and contemporary electronic experimentalism.
The result, for me at least, was twofold: enlightenment and inspiration - no mean feat for any book.
