The Glorious Rise of the Pigskin Empire
Yes, it’s a weekend for NFL football and high-anxiety over Ukraine. Some things never change. From the Archives, a disturbing September 2014 hallucination about point spreads, Vladimir Putin, and—what?—pro football in Vegas
By Greg Blake Miller
IT IS SEPTEMBER, and all of world culture—the painters and poets, sinners, saints and stock traders— have turned their eyes to the gridiron. Since my childhood, the word has summoned up images of a heavy black metal device used for cooking chicken, sort of a proto- George Foreman Grill. Alas, the word actually means “beer.”
In Europe’s smallest nation-state, the red-capped cardinals of the Vatican sit down to watch Arizona play New Orleans, wondering how to aim their prayers, because as any NFL player can tell you, God answers all football prayers, and because it is difficult for a cardinal to choose between a Cardinal and a Saint. If only Notre Dame were in the NFL, all would be clear.
In the gilded hallways of Moscow’s Kremlin, Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev can be spotted, huddled close in a shadowed corner, heads tilted downward, voices low, discussing the Tampa Bay- Jacksonville spread before getting Barack Obama to bite on the Jaguars minus-4 1/2, with all of Ukraine hanging in the balance. We should undertake to resolve all of our conflicts at the betting window.
In Germany, Angela Merkel declares that the immense global power of football resides in its counterintuitive use of “foot” to describe a game played chiefly with the hands. In an attempt to restore the flagging popularity of soccer from Bonn to Berlin, she issues an edict that the beautiful game will henceforth be known as handball. This angers two greasy guys playing old-school handball against a graffiti-covered wall in 1970s New York City. No one else, however, seems to mind. Except for one little kid who likes to run around telling his friends, “I’ll cut you so low you’ll play handball against the curb.” He has 37 years to come up with a new put-down.
Back in the present, Obama is trying to figure out how he got hoodwinked into laying 41⁄2 on the Jags. Ukraine is now fully under Russian control. Putin’s first move is to legalize sports wagering in Odessa, where football odds quickly become more popular than handball odds. The Donetsk Destroyers of the new UFL will soon travel to Las Vegas to challenge Vince Neil’s new indoor/outdoor coed lingerie team, the Outlaw Ace Silver Gamblers. It is a marvelous attempt at pigskin diplomacy, but it falls short when Valeria Mazza intercepts Colonel Igor Strelkov’s Hail Mary pass to secure a last-second victory for Neil’s team. Putin immediately declares sanctions against all Las Vegas-produced fuzzy dice—an ineffective measure since fuzzy dice, as everyone knows, are made in China. The U.S., however, responds by banning pigskin exports to the former Soviet Union.
“This does not concern us,” Putin grins, cool blue irises sagging low in the eye socket. “Pigs, we have.”
“Nothing,” he says, “will deny our people their football. And by that I do not mean handball.”
Of course not. He means beer.
Originally published in Vegas Seven, September 11, 2014. Greg Blake Miller is the director of Olympian Creative Coaching & Consulting—personal training for the creative mind. Visit OlympianCreative.com.
Images and original page layout by Cierra Pedro for Vegas Seven.
For Miller’s less flippant essays about Russia and Ukraine here on ReentryShock.com, please see:
• “Russia, Ukraine, and the Battle of Yesterday”
• “Harvest of Grievance”
• “Diplomacy’s Final Exam”
What I Learned | Vegas Seven
When we attempt to prepare our kids for the world, we have to learn not to exclude the world, in all its bewildering openness, from the conversation. After all, you never know what it might have to say. So it’s somehow fitting that when I sat down to write this Vegas Seven essay about the age of standardized testing, I wound up wandering off target and musing on my own dreamier days in the wild-blue classroom.
The Morality of Slow | Vegas Seven
Thoughts on summertime, creativity and the meaning of intensity.
Empty Box Syndrome
“I treasured those old basketball programs, but the box began to take on some kind of nasty symbolism, something about my mistaking the artifacts of living for life itself. That box—and it was a really big box—was taking up garage space that might otherwise be used for, say, winter clothing and emergency nonperishables. OK, the problem was less about storage capacity than psychic space; I suffered through insomniac nights picturing my future home library where the programs were shelved in chronological order in plastic slipcovers. In the mornings I looked in the mirror at my tired eyes and thought, This can’t be right.”
Read more thoughts on fandom, clutter and the enduring weight of precious things in “Empty Box Syndrome, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let Go of My Old Rebel Stuff,” from Vegas Seven magazine.
Reentry Shock—The Dissertation
From Marlen Khutsiev’s “I Am Twenty” (1961/65)
Reentry shock: Historical transition and temporal longing in the cinema of the Soviet Thaw.
By Gregory Blake Miller, Ph.D., University of Oregon, 2010, 323 pages.
Abstract: Nostalgia is the longing for a lost, and often substantially reimagined, time or place. Commonly regarded as a conservative impulse available for exploitation by hegemonic forces, nostalgia can also be a source of social questioning and creative inspiration. This dissertation examines the ways in which nostalgic longing imports images and ideas from memory into present discourse and infuses works of art with complication, contradiction, and ambiguity.
In the early 1960s, emboldened by Nikita Khrushchev’s cultural Thaw, many Soviet filmmakers engaged both personal and social memory to craft challenging reflections of and responses to their times. These filmmakers reengaged the sundered spirit of the 1920s avant-garde and reimagined the nation’s artistic and spiritual heritage; they captured the passing moments of contemporary history in a way that animated the permanent, productive, and sometimes stormy dialogue between the present and the persistent past.
Mikhail Kalatozov’s I Am Cuba (1964), Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev (1966, released 1971), and Marlen Khutsiev’s The Ilich Gate (1961, released with changes in 1965 as I Am Twenty ) were planned in the anxious years surrounding Khrushchev’s fall, and the films mark a high point of Thaw-era cinematic audacity. Each film is epic in scope; each deploys temporal longing to generate narrative ambiguity and dialogue between historical epochs. The films are haunted by ghosts; they challenge the hegemony of the “now” by insisting on the phantom presence of a thousand “thens”; they refurbish old dreams and question contemporary assumptions.
The Thaw permitted the intrusion of private memory into public history, and the past became a zone for exploration rather than justification. Easy answers became harder to come by, but the profusion of questions and suggestions created a brief silver age for Soviet cinema. For us, these films offer an extraordinary glimpse into creative life during one of the great, unsung social transitions of the 20th century and reveal the crucial contribution of individual memory in the artistic quest for formal diversity, spiritual inspiration, and ethical living.
[Dissertation available for order from UMI Dissertation Publishing/ProQuest Dissertation Express.]
Hello, Las Vegas. I’m Back for More
Who on earth, having left Las Vegas for the cool, green good life in Oregon, decides to come back to the desert? Me, that’s who. I try to explain this to myself in this week’s Vegas Seven Magazine.
With the Sun in Our Hands
Here’s a link to my Vegas Seven Magazine story on residential solar energy. The rooftop solar array hasn’t hit cultural critical mass yet, but it’s working its way into everyday consciousness. The question’s no longer whether the technology is too pie-in-the-sky, but rather “How close are we to making this stuff affordable?” It’s not for everyone yet, but we’re getting closer.
Kalatozov’s “I Am Cuba” and the Search for Leninist Faith
Soviet filmmakers Mikhail Kalatozov and Sergei Urusevsky were just beginning their artistic careers when the Stalinist command system eradicated the chaotic cultural spontaneity of the Soviet 1920s. Under the evolving principles of Socialist Realism, the avant-garde habits of formalist exuberance and participatory creative revolutionism were replaced by the signal virtue of “party-mindedness”—a mental state best measured by one’s fraught adherence to a shifting Party line. The heroic period of Soviet art had come to an end, but it left a phantom trail of aesthetic and spiritual inspiration that decades later would help shape the great works of post-Stalin cinema.
In their 1964 film, I Am Cuba, Kalatozov and Urusevsky implicitly hold the lost spirit of the Soviet 1920s up to the mirror of late 1950s Cuba. They look longingly upon the idealism of the Cuban revolutionaries and the shimmering surfaces of the erstwhile bourgeois city and ask: Can we believe like revolutionaries, produce like capitalists, and share like socialists? Can the Soviet Union deliver on the Russian Revolution’s promises of purpose, justice, and plenty? Cuba, alas, offers inspiration without answers, and the filmmakers—like their 1920s predecessors—wander beyond ideology into a sort of phenomenology of seeing. Revolutionary outcomes remain a mystery, but revolutionary art endures as a palliative pleasure and an emissary of hope.
Kalatozov and Urusevsky understood well that socialist modernization belonged to the category of faith. The technical fetishes of the 1920s, the militant atheism, the loudly proclaimed search for “scientific” solutions in everything from economics to poetry, were all part and parcel of a young faith, a search for ecstatic self-transcendence; the manifestos of 1920s artistic groups read like shamanistic incantations: there is a worshipful primitivism underpinning the future-worship of young post-revolutionary leftists. Dziga Vertov’s Kino Eye group called for “the emancipation of the camera, which is reduced to a state of pitiable slavery, of subordination to the imperfections and thes hortsightedness of the human eye,” and went on to declare their allegiance to “the camera as a kino-eye, more perfect than the human eye.” (Michaelson, 1984, pp. 13-14)
This spiritualization of Leninism had deep roots. For many Russians, the Communist promise of an eventual utopia beyond labor and the tyranny of rational time was a renewal of a complex of ancient, unsinkable millennial hopes sometimes summed up as “The Russian Idea.” During the 19th century, Russia’s great intellectual debate was between those who advocated a Western path of development—the Westernizers—and those who believed that Russia had its own path, based on the Orthodox ideal of conjunctive togetherness and the values of the peasant commune —the Slavophiles (Riazanovsky, 1965). In Weberian terms, the Westernizers believed in a rational-legal basis of socio-political legitimacy, while the Slavophiles preferred a mix of traditional and charismatic legitimacy (Hanson, 1997).
The genius of Soviet Marxism-Leninism lay in its ability, as an atheist ideology, to somehow co-opt the idealism of both rational-legal Westernizers and charismatic-religious Slavophiles and create a new faith that promised to redeem Russia. Communism was a supra-national ideology of modernization, but its appeal lay in its connection with national myth: the new ideology would allow Russia to fulfill its prophesied role as the “Third Rome”, the leader of the world, at once exceptional and exemplary, and to create an entirely just, secularly holy society. Within the early Communist movement there was even a group of writers and thinkers who called themselves the God Builders and wanted to make the ideology’s implicit religious parallels explicit. Lenin was not amused, though he did make one of the leading God-Builders, Anatoly Lunacharsky, his first Commissar of Enlightenment.
The Stalin era replaced the unifying ideal with the unifying leader, and replaced enthusiastic quasi-religious participation in the process of Communist modernization with compulsory, quasi-religious obedience to the word of the master. The nostalgic connection with the ancient Russian dream of sobornost’–an organic, cooperative togetherness in which individual expression and community goals are mutually supportive—was severed. The Stalin synthesis made it clear that the path to progress necessitated the effacement of self. Stalinist modernization was new without offering renewal. While convincing arguments have been made that Stalin’s program was the logical next step in the unfolding and realization of the logic of Marxism-Leninism, the culture of high Stalinism, from the mid-1930 until his death in 1953, could not be more distant from the chaotic cultural energy of the Soviet 1920s.
And it was precisely this energy, more than even the most hopeful interpretation of Lenin’s voluminous written record, for which the post-Stalin intelligentsia—the communicators—was nostalgic. It would be their job to return the energy of Leninist modernization theory to their own countrymen—to make of their country an inspirational beacon for countries around the world. By the end of the 1950s, Russians were prepared to revisit the Revolution and reinvigorate their revolutionary idealism. The Cuban Revolution offered a perfect transnational metaphor. As Genis and Vail (1996, p. 59) write, “The Cuban Revolution became a metaphor not only for the October Revolution, but for its contemporary reincarnation—the liberal, Thaw revolution of the 1960s.”
—Greg Blake Miller
The Haunted Hero of Bondarchuk’s “Fate of a Man”
The object of nostalgia in Sergei Bondarchuk’s Fate of a Man (Sud’ba Cheloveka, 1959) is the hovering, tantalizing, maddening reality of a pre-war world. The image of this hopelessly lost terrain refuses to yield; it lingers in the mind as a promise and a torment. Andrei Sokolov (Bondarchuk), an escaped prisoner-of-war, has lost his entire family in the Great Patriotic War. For him, the past is more real than the present. He embraces the torments of recollected wholeness. We might guess that such memories would preclude Sokolov’s engagement with a present that is, for this bravest of men, unpeopled, undesirable, and even frightening—an empty map from a book about journeys one would rather not take.
But it is precisely the survival of memory, of the image of a longed-for past, that motivates Sokolov’s first, audacious step toward a workable future. Sokolov had once defined his peacetime identity by his love for family; he had become a husband and father in the brief era between the twin upheavals of forced collectivization and total war. Peace without family is for him a kind of grim joke. He can conceive of forward motion only through an echo of the past. He finds it in a tiny, towheaded orphan-beggar named Vaniushka.
After giving Vaniushka a lift in his truck and learning that the boy has also lost his entire family, Sokolov turns to the child.
“Do you know who I am?”
“No.”
“I am your father.”
The child throws himself upon Andrei with kisses and tears, and together they set off on a journey into the unknown, each holding close a phantom of a lost past to steady, direct, and sustain them on their way.
The union of these two lost and longing souls leaves some crucial questions to be resolved in the post-film world of the viewer’s mind: Will Andrei attempt to raise the boy as a replacement or reincarnation of his lost son (an expert mathematician and heroic wartime captain)? Or will he focus his longing not on the impossible return of a departed son, but on the very real prospect of having a new one—of experiencing anew the longed-for feelings of family commitment. In short, will he help the boy toward a future of his own?
The imagery of the film itself—Sokolov’s close attention to the boy as an independent and proudly self-aware creature (note the boy’s prickly greeting of the driver at the film’s beginning) seems to bode well. But when the words of Mikhail Sholokhov (upon whose writing the film is based) appear on the screen at film’s end, they strike a dissonant note. After a tale that so boldly exposes the horror of war rather than trumpeting its glories, Sholokhov’s words pose the question of Vaniushka’s future as a purely martial one: Will Andrei raise a boy capable of going through what Andrei went through for his country? This is sheer ideological overlay, imposing final thoughts on a film that did quite well on its own in provoking thoughts.
Of course, it occurs to us that a father who has been so extraordinarily strong in the most beastly of circumstances, and yet lost none of his capacity for tenderness, may raise a brave and honorable son. But we have more fundamental worries about the future of Andrei and Vaniushka: Sokolov remains deeply damaged and far from recovered. At night, he tells the driver, he worries he’ll have a heart attack and die and frighten the child. He still laments, reasonably enough, that his life has been twisted and ruined. It is clear that Sokolov will need the boy as much as the boy needs him, and that the fathers and sons debate that will unfold during the Thaw years (who will teach whom?) is, as in reality, unresolved. Least of all are we concerned about how the child will grow up to serve the nation. Our concern is simpler. How will he grow up?
In this film, pain is not elegiac but raw, more realist than neorealist. Bondarchuk, as Andrei Sokolov, is not quieter than life like the heroically observant Alyosha Skvortsov of Chukhrai’s Ballad of a Soldier (1959) or the suffering thinker-heroes of Tarkovsky’s films. He is, instead, intense and forever battling, a man in motion both physically and mentally. This motion of his mind projects onto his muscles, his jaw, his stride. He is, like the best creations of Brando or Steiger, filled with despairing rage and fierce despair. To this he adds an awkward gentleness, a halting language of hope, sustained and challenged by ghosts.
—Greg Blake Miller
Kalatozov’s First Masterpiece
Mikhail Kalatozov, the renowned director of the classic Soviet films The Cranes Are Flying (1957), The Unsent Letter (1959), and I Am Cuba (1964), had his cinematic roots in the vibrant creative ferment of the Soviet 1920s. At decade’s end, after learning his craft from the great documentary filmmakers Esfir Shub and Dziga Vertov, Kalatozov brought his camera to a Georgian mountain community where the routines of both subsistence and spirit had changed little since medieval times (Leyda, 1983). There he created one of the masterpieces of early Soviet cinema, Salt for Svanetia (1930).
Like many great Soviet films of the 1920s, Salt for Svanetia bears thematic richness within an agitprop libretto. On one hand, the film, exuberantly modern in its rhythmic editing and oblique camera angles, calls for socialist modernization (in this case, for road construction) as the guarantor of a more humane way of life. On the other, it is a hymn to communal timelessness. This paradox reflects the peculiar temporal ambivalence at the heart of both early Soviet cinema and early Soviet populist-enthusiast dreams of modernization. By 1930, as the midpoint of the First Five Year Plan approached, the half-romantic notion that modernization could be achieved without trampling the communities the state sought to modernize was on its way out. But in cinema the old dream was exiting with an extraordinary flourish, highlighted by Kalatozov’s film, and still more famously by Dovzhenko’s Earth. In Salt for Svanetia, the pre-industrial struggle for daily life is so lovingly depicted—even in its tragic moments—that it becomes impossible to read the film as an uncomplicated call for ends-justify-the-means industrial progress. (Thirty-four year later, Kalatozov would revive the 1920s populist-enthusiast synthesis in I Am Cuba.)
Salt for Svanetia, like Earth, refuses to look forward without simultaneously looking back. The intellectual inheritance of the Soviet revolutionary spirit mixes the utopian, past-denying forward thrust of Marxist modernization with the back-to-the-people dreams of the 1870s Russian narodniki, populists who both idealized the peasant commune and sought to transform it through literacy and political consciousness. If, under conditions of capitalism, holiness had melted into air and the sacred had been profaned, the dream of the Socialist modernizer was not to mock the sundered spiritual instinct, but to renew and repurpose it.
—Greg Blake Miller
Reentry Shock 