The biggest boss that you've seen thus far.

I am.

Vamos, vamos...

Parade.

Very sturdy rogues.


Several have exploited your worlds.


With no needs, and in no hurry to make use of their brilliant faculties and their knowledge of your consciences.


What ripe men!


Eyes listless like the summer night, reddened and blackish, tricolored, steel studded with gold stars;


Features twisted, leaden, bloodless, gutted.


Burlesque hoarsenesses! The merciless posturings of tinsel!


Some are young--what would they think of Cherubino?--with bloodcurdling voices and some dangerous equipment.



They are sent to town, tricked out with nauseating luxury.



O the most violent Paradise of the furious grimace!


Not to be compared with your Fakirs and other theatrical buffooneries.


In costumes improvised with the taste of bad dreams, they enact sad songs and tragedies of thieves and demigods more uplifting than history or religion has ever managed to be!


Chinese, Hottentots, gypsies, nitwits, hyenas, Molochs, old lunacies, sinister demons, they mix much-loved old-time maternal ditties with bestial winks and caresses.


They would interpret new plays, "romantic" songs.


Master jugglers, they can transform both the scene and the characters: they use magnetic tricks.


Eyes glisten, blood sings, bones swell, tears and little red trickles flow.


Their horseplay or their panic terror may last a minute or whole months.


I alone have the key to this savage side show.

Uno, Dos, Tres.

Anatomische.

because I do not hope

Your sister was there. And your mother too.

We watched together, the whole family.

It was hot in the poor places.

Houdini, murdered by suicide.

Unrepentant.

And just desserts. Or, "If I had any idea of what justice is, it would be more than I deserve," mumbles Oldham.

And so. The champions reign. The old blue lady. The cobbler's wife. Son of a television repair man. An orphan raised in the seclusion of the mountain retreat. Champions.

All of them. And yet. The rest of us. Our fists white, bloodless. In solidarity.

Don't Step.

And again, so. That inscrutable joy returning when we rebuild his transgression under a flag of defiance,

into a gift we don't unwrap, nor desire to - maybe accepting, some of us, of Eliot:

"because i do not hope to turn again
because i do not hope
because i do not hope to turn"

And finally, then, so. Two unrepentant times around the sun. We begin again. What's left of his legacy coalesces across the continent and goes on. the. attack. our telekinetic vision, repaired, guides the ball away from the line on which we stand, the one we've drawn ourselves. then we just start running, screaming, certain of the Totality of this movement. we know of another, outside of the their sights, doing as we are doing. so we give the moment over to him. but there is no him. it is us. the moment is passed again. and by now, we know

not to hope

to turn again.

Thus Far.

On this, the day the European tournament wipes the cold out its eyes and opens them wide, it's important to remember why we watch.



The opening of an international tournament excites partly because we're allowed to look upon what has been a familiar world with fresh vision. The same names with different shirts. Hundreds, thousands of years of history; different, perhaps unlikely faces fronting for those centuries. Old alliances (Austria!), older enemies (France! Germany! Holland!) and new allegiances (Brazilians?). Colonialism's colonials standing with their former empires. Club teams broken apart and reformed again under flags and colors. And what colors! Oranje!



Incredible names. Ruud. Giovanni Van Bronckhorst. Ruben de la Red. Manuel Enrique Mejuto Gonzalez (and he is a referee). Incredulously styled hair (by nearly everyone). Derek Rae and Andy Gray's magisterial voices and generous charm as applied to international football. The weight of the past offset by the lightness of Deco's touch. The spirit of nations and the individual brilliance of Ronaldo. How G Patrice Evra is. French North Africans. Basques. The fact that a man named Zlatan Ibrahimovic plays for Sweden and another named Mario Gomez does for Germany. People's faces. Ruud. The endlessly fascinating Franck Ribery. Finding one's way to love and hate, tolerance and idolatry (This generally involves Germans and/or Italians).



But we're still on that icebreaker tip right now. Buying drinks. Talking gamely about "what we do." Smiling a lot. Complimenting one another. "Oh, that's so interesting." Catching profile glimpses in mirrors and glasses while imagining futures. Keep an open mind. Don't talk about politics. The poetry and pathos comes in the final third of the group stage and of course in the succeeding rounds. There's always time for tears later. Right now, just be easy and allow yourself to be seduced. The passion will come. If we're lucky, at 2:45 today.

Now I'm out in Europe.

Spending Euros.

Like most decadent things, you have a Frenchman to thank for today.

Henri Delaunay (1883-1955) was first a player, then referee, club president, high-ranking bureaucrat, higher-ranking bureaucrat, and finally, as you know him, silver trophy. Here is something you probably did not know: Upon retiring from his Paris club team Etoile des Deux Lacs and taking up zebra stripes, Delaunay was struck flush in the face by the ball, broke two teeth and swallowed his whistle. The match he was refereeing, unfortunately for him but fortunately for the endurance of irony, was between AF Garenne-Doves and ES Benevolence.

Delaunay sat on FIFA's board and kept good company: Jules Rimet, another man with a (slightly more famous) trophy named after him (it's what you get when you win the World Cup). He first proposed the creation of the European Championships in 1927, though because Europe had other things to do in the intervening years, the first tournament wasn't played until 1960.

So, raise a glass of Cote du Rhone to your boy Henri as Switzerland take on the Czech Republic today. Portugal and Turkey to follow...

Anything Can Be An Instrument

"Some things we wait for all our lives without knowing it."




"Then it happens and we recognize at once who we are and how we are meant to proceed."


"This is the idea I've always wanted."


"I know what scientists mean when they talk about elegant solutions."

The Architect; the Terrorist; the President; the Assassin. If individuals are crushed by the forces of history then an individual's purpose, as posited by Don DeLillo in Libra, is to merge with that history. That's what Oswald does. He becomes one of those people that shape the very forces that shape everything else; that shape the world.

For the purposes of today's sermon, this is the world:



And this is how Roman shapes it:




Juan Roman Riquelme is going back to Boca Juniors. His return--reversing the usual Argentina-keeps-on-making-it-Spain-keeps-on-taking-it--is a nice respite from the usual playin'-in-the-asshole-of-a-camel-in-Dubai-just-for-the-gold-bricks trend (if that kinda shit keeps you up at night....). It's also further proof of the same kind of divine benevolence that gave us DeLillo and football.

Marcela Mora y Araujo has all the news that's fit to print, including some no-shit-I-really-should-read-more-books stuff about the midfielder-as-poet.
We'll get to poetry in a minute. But first let's talk about where and how amazing happens.

I caught a critical case of the football bug when I found out there were people like Steven Gerrard out there...

When you need someone to stand up and be counted

People who understood the theater of heroism. That's my shit. Forget group therapy, forget new age corpo-sublimation (yo, if you are still saying



in 2007, you should get an Oxycontin habit going because you're gonna need to address that shit somewhere down the line, and since you'll lack the minerals and vitamins, you might as well get your Berlin-era Lou Reed on).

I'm talking about something inside that rages against the sign and signifier. Something inside you that says, I am allafuckinglone. And I will do whatever it takes to feel otherwise.

And there is a breed of athlete and creative artist (one in the same if you've ever tried both) who gets that, whether consciously or not. That their role, ultimately, is to be a bridge between us and the dreams of the way we'd like things to be and how we'd like to feel.

So, I like shots from the motherfucking cannon of catharsis and leave talk of 10 behind the ball and playing to the flanks for guys who understand that shit.

And even so, as an expert on such moments, even so...

I have never...



seen



anything



like Boca's Copa Libertadores run in my entire life. One of the top 10 players in the world when he feels like it (my favorite kind), in the midst of a creepy spat with his father figure at Villareal, somehow talks the suits into letting him go back to Buenos Aries (I do believe he'd enough), and sets up one of the great Prodigal Son gets returned-to-sender storylines of the last few years.

And then Roman destroyed storylines. Retarded ski-jumpers, gymnasts who miss their moms', Peyton vs. Eli vs. Brady vs. the Devil vs. Daniel Webster vs. an old lady who knit scarves for Ray Lewis while he was in the bing. Those are storylines; that's some Bob Costas shit.

Storylines can't support what happened in La Bombonera.



The reach ain't long enough, dunny.

Riquelme at Boca was definitely some Liberty Valance shit for me. I watched it on Fox's Spanish language channel, knowing none of the language and only a few of the actors and plotlines. And that naivety was only increased by the sets.

I mean, did that Cucuta match really fucking happen? I know it was just a bunch of guys playing football inside of a fucked up Monet painting...happens every day.






Like a dream, right?

Ray Hudson has said "a goal is a dream with a deadline" (he's also said that Riquelme has a "walkie talkie to heaven").

For dreams to become reality you need someone to be the engine for that happening. You need someone who can see the possible and render it real.

Roman isn't known for pace (he's actually knocked for his lack of physical assertion, though regardless of what the speedometer readshe is rarely caught). He is a playmaker known for his vision. His precision is effortless; like a savant who doesn't need to study. He doesn't pass to the man, or to where the man should be. He passes to where he WILL be. That isn't just awareness of a physical field. That's an awareness of need; of what has to happen. This pass to Milito

Venezuela 0-2 Argentina (0-1 Milito)
"The big, beautiful, strolling zombie; I call him 'Riquelme'"

...is something like that. These two aren't playing a game they are telling a story from back to front; they're playing in a dimension where timing becomes something like poetry: an articulation of something you always felt but couldn't say. Does it sound like I just smoked weed for the first time? Who fucking caress!? Everybody knows Aztecs invented television, right!?

Sure, this is not an entirely unique trait. When Jordan methodically knee capped the Ehlo's of the universe,



...we all watched in slack jawed wonder. But that dude was fucking insane! Mike tended to do shit like fabricate a subliminal insult from some beshitted CBA call up on the opposing squad to motivate himself. He wasn't playing for the Southside or some shit. And that's cool, nobody needs a fucking planet full of Woody Guthrie's!



But when Riquelme applied this vision to something as inherently epic as the first leg of the Libertadores final, in Buenos Aries, up against Gremio, in what was to be his last match at La Bombonera, he turned a free kick into poetry; a song; a national anthem. He turned an individual act into a gift for thousands of people. Right here...

Boca Juniors 3-0 Gremio (2-0 Riquelme)
"he's from the stars"

...he does something you can take and remember and share.



That you can rip from history and make your own. Like a home movie about a murder that becomes a documentary for a nation.



There is preparation.



Something is triggered; set in motion.


He becomes an instrument of history


He comes running towards us. Screaming.


This engine is powered by belief.

He is saying, I am listening.



I am with my brothers.

Tonight we are family.


No more masters, no more pupils.


Only us.


Banners and streamers and fire and smoke and blue and yellow and Argentina; a choir singing ecstatically.


The pandemonium and the harmony. In this moment, there is only Boca, only La Bombonera. It's something you can't talk about, a dream that will leave us tired and sleepless.

This dream's deadline has come.


It is accomplished.


The moment ends...



Love is forever.

God's Son across the belly.

Berlusconi might say otherwise.

"...flick the towel of the Lord..." - Phil Ball on locker room evangelicals, or those who prefer Christ as their centreback.

UPDATE: Ricardo Izecson dos Santos Leite, he of the Jesus tee, wants to become a minister as soon as he's done winning Golden Balls.

Whatever your opinion of evangelicals, Kaka might not be half-bad; or, at the very least he sounds like he has a keener understanding than most:

"It's not so easy to apply to today's society things that were written thousands of years ago. But that's exactly the job of a minister - to make the teaching of the Bible relevant."