A Beginner’s Guide to Baseball

The 2013 Major League Baseball season begins tomorrow night, at 8:05 pm Eastern Time, with the Texas Rangers visiting the Houston Astros. The opening of the new season affords a particularly opportune moment for those wishing to get into the sport – once its first few weeks are done, it may feel like the beginning of a story has been missed, and understanding and attachment made impossible for another year. Yet baseball’s close entwinement within the fabric of American society and culture, its rich history and detailed regulations and statistics, serve both to inspire interest and as a barrier for those who lack knowledge about the sport. So what follows serves as a basic guide to Major League Baseball’s history; to its iconic figures and moments; to its rules and scoring; and to the season which is about to ensue.

A Concise History of Major League Baseball

The history of baseball in the United States extends back to the early decades of the 19th Century, when varieties of the sport began to develop and flourish, particularly in and around New York. The New York Knickerbockers, founded in September 1845, were the first club to play along the lines of modern baseball rules; and in 1857 they and fifteen other clubs in the New York area formed the National Association of Base Ball Players, the sport’s first governing organisation. Membership of the NABBP grew rapidly, reaching 100 by 1865, and quadrupling to 400 by 1867.

The game was played on an amateur basis until, in 1869, the Cincinnati Red Stockings became the first side to declare themselves fully professional. With other clubs soon following their lead, the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players was established in 1871, running until 1875. It was replaced in 1876 by the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs.

In these early years of professional baseball, a host of leagues attempted to establish themselves in competition with the National League. The American Association was the most prominent, lasting from 1882 until 1891, and encouraging sides in America’s river cities and among working class populations. Its champions met the National League champions seven times between 1884 and 1890, in games which were precursors to the World Series.

From the decline of the American Association and the Western League developed the American League, which was declared a major league, on a par with the National League, in 1901. The two leagues have existed at the pinnacle of professional baseball ever since. The first World Series took place in 1903, between the National League pennant winners, the Pittsburgh Pirates, and the American League pennant winners, the Boston Americans. After a disagreement resulted in no game in 1904, the World Series has been a fixture of every subsequent year.

The first two decades of 20th Century baseball are referred to as the ‘Dead-ball era’, a period of few home runs and low scoring games which ended upon the emergence of Babe Ruth in 1919. Baseball’s farm system – where Minor League teams produce players for their Major League counterparts – was established through the 1930s. 15 April, 1947 saw Jackie Robinson become the first black player to play in the major leagues since the 1880s; he played for the Brooklyn Dodgers, under Branch Rickey, in the National League, and his achievement was matched a few months later in the American League by Larry Doby of the Cleveland Indians.

Heroic Figures and Iconic Moments

Babe Ruth Calls His Shot: In the fifth inning of the third game of the 1932 World Series, Babe Ruth – allegedly, although Ruth would later readily confirm the account – pointed to the centre field bleachers, and proceeded to hit a home run precisely to his indicated spot.

The ‘Shot Heard ‘Round the World’: The most famous moment in baseball’s history. With the National League pennant at stake, and the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers having taken a game apiece, Bobby Thomson’s home run gave the Giants a 5-4 game victory and made them National League champions. This completed a remarkable turnabout in the Giants’ season, having been behind in the standings for much of it.

Thomson’s shot is known through Russ Hodges’ commentary. Hodges was calling the game for WMCA-AM radio, a local station in New York. When Thomson hit his home run, Hodges’ repeated cry, ‘The Giants win the pennant!’, encapsulated and immortalised the emotion.

It is worth noting that, such is the way in American sport, both the Giants and the Dodgers would relocate to California – to San Francisco and Los Angeles respectively – for the start of the 1958 season, where they have remained since.

‘The Catch’: A remarkable catch and throw made by Willie Mays of the New York Giants in the first game of the 1954 World Series, which prevented the Cleveland Indians from taking an early lead. The Giants went on to sweep the series.

Buckner’s Error: With the Boston Red Sox leading the New York Mets 3-2 in the 1986 World Series, a mistake by Bill Buckner – who let a rolling ball run through his legs – gave the Mets an extra-innings victory in game six. A comeback in game seven meant the Mets won the World Series, and left the Red Sox ruing Buckner, and lamenting whatever curse continued to leave them without a World Series triumph since 1918.

Buckner has been rehabilitated in recent years, via an ESPN 30 for 30 documentary, ‘Catching Hell’, and an appearance on Curb Your Enthusiasm.

A 1949 poem by Ogden Nash, ‘Line-Up for Yesterday: An ABC of Baseball Immortals’, written for SPORT Magazine, gives a good guide to some of the major figures in baseball through the first half of the twentieth century. For instance, the letter G:

G is for Gehrig,

The Pride of the Stadium;

His record, pure gold,

His courage, pure radium.

Major League Baseball’s Structure In the Here and Now

Today, thirty teams compete in Major League Baseball. There are fifteen in the National League, and fifteen in the American League; five teams in each league’s East, Central and West divisions. Baseball’s regular season consists of 162 games for each team, 81 at home and 81 away, which take place over a period of 180 days – meaning teams get about one day off in every ten. There is one break in the season, when teams take three days off in early July for the MLB All-Star game.

Teams play the other four clubs in their division 19 times each (for a total of 76 games); 6 or 7 games against the other ten clubs who make up their league (for 66 games in total); and the remaining 20 games are inter-league fixtures. The 2013 season will be the first to feature inter-league games throughout – they have previously been confined to a few periods of the campaign.

When the regular season concludes after these twenty-six weeks, around late September or early October, the postseason begins. Ten teams, five from each league, qualify for the postseason playoffs: the three division winners from each league, and the two sides from across each league with the next best records, who are classified ‘wild-cards’. Each team is seeded, from 1-5, based on their regular season records. The postseason playoffs then progress through four stages:

1. The two wild-card teams from each league play one another, Seed 5 at Seed 4.

2. With four teams left in each league’s playoffs, two best-of-five series take place: Seed 4 or 5 vs. Seed 1; and Seed 3 vs. Seed 2.

3. The two victorious teams from the second round of the playoffs meet for a best-of-seven series, determining the National League and American League pennant winners.

4. The two pennant winners meet in the World Series, a best-of-seven series which results in a World Series Champion.

The Game Itself Explicated

Teams are comprised of nine players, who take it in turns playing offence and defence, batting and running and fielding. Typically all nine players will feature in turn at bat and take up positions in the field. However in the American League, the designated hitter rule allows one player to bat for his team in place of the pitcher: the designated hitter will then only take part in the offence, while the pitcher remains part of the defence.

A game consists of nine innings, and each inning has two halves, or a top and a bottom. The away team bats at the top of the inning, and the home team bats at the bottom. Batters attempt to score runs by hitting the ball thrown by the opposition pitcher, and progressing the four bases of the baseball diamond: first, second, and third base, before reaching home plate. A home run is when a batter can round all four bases in one play, typically after hitting the ball over the outfield.

A team’s turn at bat ends when they have suffered three ‘outs’ – that is, when three of their batters have been given out. These outs come when a player is run out, either by being tagged with the ball when running, or by failing to reach a base before a fielder touches it with the ball; when a running batter’s ball is caught in flight; or when a batter strikes out by failing to hit the ball three times, or by caught out on third strike.

Whichever team has the most runs after nine innings wins. If the home team is ahead after the top of the ninth inning, the bottom of the inning becomes irrelevant, and is not played.

A look at the score graphic above may be useful. After the two teams’ – the Toronto Blue Jays and the New York Yankees’ – scores in terms of runs (in this case, the score is 0-2), the highlighted diamonds indicate if the offensive team have any runners on bases. Here, the Yankees have a runner on the second base.

On the line below, the first segment indicates the inning currently being played, with the pointed arrowhead showing whether it is the top or the bottom of the inning. The next segment indicates the count. This refers to how many ‘balls’ the pitcher has thrown, versus how many strikes there are against the batter. If a pitcher pitches the ball outside of the batter’s strike zone, the pitch is counted as a ‘ball’; and if a pitcher throws four ‘balls’ the batter can walk to first base without having to make a hit. If a pitcher pitches three times within the strike zone, and the batter fails to make a hit, the batter strikes out. The count above is one-and-one: one ball and one strike.

The following segment shows how many outs the offensive team currently have suffered. The final segment shows the total number of pitches thrown by the current pitcher. A team’s starting pitcher will often be substituted for a relief pitcher as the innings run their course.

Major Stories At the Start of the 2013 Season

Justin Verlander of the Detroit Tigers – runners up to the San Francisco Giants in last year’s World Series – has signed a contract extension which, providing him with $180 million over the next seven years, makes him the highest earning pitcher in the game. For their part, the Giants have worked prior to this season on signing a number of their best players to extended contracts.

The Toronto Blue Jays have significantly increased their payroll: agreeing back in November a twelve-player trade with the Miami Marlins which saw Jose Reyes, Mark Buehrle and Josh Johnson among others move to the club; signing R.A. Dickey – the winner of the 2012 Cy Young Award for pitching – from the New York Mets; and also bringing in Melky Cabrera and Maicer Izturis.

The Los Angeles Dodgers’ payroll increased similarly last season, when they completed in late August a nine-player deal with the Boston Red Sox, signing up players including Josh Beckett, Adrian Gonzalez and Carl Crawford. The Dodgers will be hoping for success from these players in their first full seasons with the team.

The New York Yankees have this week been declared the most valuable team in US sport, valued by Forbes at $2.3 billion and thereby overtaking the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys. Their preparations for the baseball season are not going well, however, with Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez, Mark Teixeira and Mariano Rivera all injured.

How Do I Get Involved?

You buy a baseball cap from a nearby sports store, and settle down to watch the games. ESPN, Fox and TBS have national broadcasting rights in America. ESPN also shows games on its channels across Europe. However, the best way to really follow the MLB season is via MLB.TV. Their service provides, via monthly or yearly subscription, live broadcasting of every single MLB game – and there are almost 2,500 in total – which isn’t being shown on live TV. Those that are being shown live are broadcast via radio, and become available to watch a few days after the fact.

The service is comprehensive: all games are stored and can be watched or listened to in retrospect at any point through the season; a range of highlights videos are available; and the service is rich in news, summaries and statistics. $19.99 a month gives access to all of the content via the internet; an additional $5 allows you to watch videos from both teams’ perspectives, and to access the content via your phones and video consoles. I only started paying attention to baseball last season, and used MLB.TV for some of it, and it is a hugely impressive thing – especially contrasted, for instance, with the sort of package you receive paying up to £50 a month for Premier League football via Sky.

Mike Kelley Retrospective

The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam’s home of modern and contemporary art and design since 1874, was forced to close for renovation in late 2003. Moving into the Post CS building – situated in the docklands to the north of the city centre – for four-and-a-half years, from 2008 the Stedelijk’s collection was without a home, the museum maintaining a presence through a series of smaller, temporary exhibitions and a programme of seminars, lectures and educational events. With the renovation works progressing, and a new wing, designed by Dutch firm Benthem Crouwel Architects, added to the existing structure, the Stedelijk’s reopening on the Museumplein was scheduled for late September, 2012.

The Stedelijk had been planning, for the first major exhibition after its reopening, to show some of the latest works of American artist Mike Kelley. When Kelley died in January 2012, found in his bathtub in Pasadena, just outside Los Angeles, having apparently committed suicide, the Stedelijk’s plans inevitably changed. Instead, a retrospective of Kelley’s career was organised, and opened at the Stedelijk on December 15. It is the largest exhibition of Kelley’s work ever shown, occupying the expanse of the museum’s new wing; and it is the Stedelijk’s first major international exhibition since it reopened last 23 September. The retrospective will run at the Stedelijk until the end of this week, before moving on to the Centre Pompidou in Paris; MoMA PS1 in New York; and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

The retrospective is organised broadly chronologically, rooms on the basement floor showing pieces from the earlier decades of Kelley’s career, while the first floor focuses on his most recent work. Kelley’s artworks span a great variety of media, from found art objects to video installations and performance art, painting, drawing, sculpture, collage, architectural sketches, and pieces which emphasise writing and quotations. The endeavour of any retrospective is to give a full sense of an artist throughout the course of their career, and the Kelley retrospective succeeds in showing and appositely suggesting some of the central themes to which Kelley returned time and again in his work. These themes feel both intensely personal and deliberately social; and demonstrate both figurative and abstract aesthetic concerns.

The first room, a sort of passageway onto the exhibition, shows a group of wall textiles, and a series of drawings which Kelley made after the Sad Sack comic strip – an American comic created during the Second World War, depicting life in the American military. Kelley’s drawings take panels from the comic and remove everything but the rubbish in them, leaving only whatever garbage, dirt and grime appears in the frame.

Opening out, the second room of the exhibition features works from the series Memory Ware Flats (2003). These consist of canvases made up of found objects – predominantly jewellery, but also badges, buttons and bottle tops – and adopt the practises of Canadian folk art. A sculpture of a reptile sits in the middle of the room, reminiscent of Gaudi’s salamander at Parc Güell, but shorn of colourful tiling and looking depressed; and a sound installation hoots away, speakers calling and responding stretched between two boards painted black and white on silver, one depicting a foot, the other something which looks like a toad wearing sunglasses.

Another room shows those related works which make up the assemblage John Glenn Memorial River Reclamation Project (Including the Local Culture Pictorial Guide, 1968-1972, Wayne/Westland Eagle) (2001). There are four facets to the assemblage, which Kelley developed over a couple of visits to Detroit, the city in which he grew up, in 1998 and again in 2001. Kelley’s ‘Artistic Statement’ on the John Glenn Memorial River Reclamation Project ties it to the earlier Memory Ware Flats, through its similar utilisation of found objects, and because it too plays upon philosophical and medical conceptions of memory, figured through the real and reconceived childhood of the artist. The centrepiece of the room is a statue of John Glenn – the first American to orbit the earth, who maintained a long political career after leaving NASA in 1965 – made of shards of coloured glass and ceramics which Kelley obtained by dredging the Detroit River. Glenn’s figure is slightly extended, and Kelley expressed the influence of Alberto Giacometti on the sculpture. Spreading from the plinth on which Glenn stands there are piled deposits of glass and ceramics, organised by colour, and some pushed, stacked or arranged into rising mounds.

Two cabinets bookend the mass of glass and ceramic. These contain vertical drawers, which can be pulled out; and the drawers encase photographs which Kelley took of Detroit local newspaper editions published between 1968 and 1972. On one of the room’s walls, the Black Out project consists of a series of black and white photographs strictly documenting Kelley’s journey down the Detroit River. A further group of colour photographs were intended to show the river’s shoreline, but a camera malfunction left predominantly black images with only slithers of colour.

Kelley ultimately considered this malfunction ‘providential’, feeling the black images served as a point of connection with another project, Educational Complex (1995). Here an extensive architectural model, several rough architectural sketches, and a couple of suspended mobiles endeavour to bring into a single space all of the educational institutions which Kelley attended as a youth; as well as depicting those gaps, those blank spaces and empty sites, which represent facilities and areas which Kelley either does not remember, or does not want to remember owing to upsetting events which occurred there.

The mounds of ceramics; the Sad Sack drawings which were part of Kelley’s Half a Man project, completed in the late 80s; a series of black acrylic paintings of inner organs, painted around the same time and shown elsewhere in the exhibition; and Lumpenprole (1991), a large floor-rug with unidentified lumps: all demonstrate Kelley’s repeated interest in volume and amorphous shapes. That these shapes protrude and exist seems to allow for discovery and for knowledge; yet the shapes consistently subvert knowledge because they are imprecise, posited between different contexts, and cannot be accurately identified. The mounds of the John Glenn River Reclamation Project alternately appear like volcanic rock formations, unplanned yet still somehow designed; or as emergent cities, with the sort of inner logic and ethereality which is expressed in literature in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. In these sculptures, in Black Out, and in Educational Complex, Kelley’s work simultaneously emphasises the importance of place to us as individuals, whilst suggesting its incompleteness, its incapacity to serve as a ground for our memories, feelings and personalities.

More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid and The Wages of Sin (1987) is perhaps Kelley’s most famous work. On a canvas covered by Afghan rugs, there hang numerous stuffed toy dolls and animals. This has variously been interpreted as an homage to childhood; as a comment upon nostalgia; and as criticising the system of labour which results in the production of such toys; whilst Kelley himself most frequently discussed the work within the context of family relations, and their complex patterns of giving and receiving, which for Kelley implicate impossible obligations and unpayable debts. Ah…Youth! (1991) makes similar use of stuffed toys. It features a row of eight portrait, passport-style photographs, seven showing stuffed animals, with Kelley’s face in between. Concepts of animism are evoked, with the stuffed animals appearing more overtly expressive, more full of character, than the portrait of Kelley. Kelley worked with Sonic Youth on several video pieces through the 80s; and the band used one of the portraits from Ah…Youth! for the cover of their 1992 album, Dirty.

Other rooms on the ground floor show collections of photographs which, in the diversity of their subject matter, prefigure an Instagram ‘explore’ page; the corridor from Kelley’s Pay for Your Pleasure (1998), with posters quoting canonical artists and philosophers who repeatedly stress the link between art and crime, but which, as an exhibit, lacks purpose detached from the rest of the Pay for Your Pleasure series; a group of birdhouses which Kelley built out of wood in the late 70s, and named after different architectural movements; and The Banana Man (1983), comprising a costume, drawings and video installations based upon a childhood television character which Kelley never saw himself, but recreated based on the recollections of friends.

On the first floor, the Kandors series involves sculptures and found object art meant to be representative of Krypton, the native world of Superman. The canisters and tubs of Kandor 15 (2007) show the same fondness for bold, discrete colour that is evident in the arrangement of the ceramics in the Detroit River project. In the adjoining room, Day Is Done (2004-05) features 32 installations, utilising video, sound and light. The series was part of a planned but never completed wider project, entitled Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions, which was to comprise 365 pieces which would show as a cycle over twenty-four hours. The Day Is Done installations feature reenactments of scenes which Kelley interpolated from reading high-school yearbooks and local newspapers. As with much of his work, there is a playfulness here that is equally engaging and unsettling; an acting out into excess of what is most layered and difficult to grasp in mundane life.

________

Mike Kelley’s ‘Artistic Statement’ concerning the John Glenn Memorial River Reclamation Project (Including the Local Culture Pictorial Guide, 1968-1972, Wayne/Westland Eagle) (2001): http://dia.emsix.com/exhibitions/artiststake/projects/multimedia/kelley_statement.html

A Bomb magazine interview with Kelley from 1993, in which he discusses a number of his earlier projects: http://bombsite.com/issues/38/articles/1502

Defining and Preserving the Second Half of Michael Owen’s Career

The media has been kind to Michael Owen in its response to his announcement, made last Tuesday, that he is to retire as a professional footballer at the end of this season. The focus has tended towards the achievements of his earlier career; and particularly towards those memorable goalscoring moments which began and peaked with his solo run and strike against Argentina at the 1998 World Cup in France. The BBC ran a series of tributes to Owen by his fellow professionals; the Daily Mail led on the announcement with an opinion piece entitled, ‘Owen was the master of his art with ice in his veins’; and The Sun ran tributes and an article on Owen’s ‘top eight football matches’. Articles have also been quick to dismiss some of the criticism that has been levelled at Owen – usually by supporters, most often of Newcastle United, where Owen was under contract for four seasons – regarding his performances and his character towards the later stages of his career. A ‘baffled’ Oliver Holt in The Mirror headlined a piece arguing ‘Hate aimed at Owen says more about those spewing it than about him’; and Louise Taylor in The Guardian lamented ‘Michael Owen’s retirement deprives us of a misunderstood footballer’, stating that dislike of Owen is misguided, and borne of a lack of knowledge concerning the real qualities of the man.

Generally, the tendency has been to emphasise and celebrate Owen’s early career, writing off his later career as a mishap, repeated injuries robbing the game and its followers of a great player. Owen’s depiction of the emotion he felt in the aftermath of his announcement, published on Thursday evening via his blog, afforded the media an easy continuation of these kindly sentiments on into the weekend.

Owen has plenty of friends in the media, and appears to have cultivated these quite deliberately and self-consciously particularly as his career has progressed. Phil McNulty, for instance, BBC Sport’s chief football writer, has frequently doubled as an especially fervent admirer of Owen; repeatedly pushing for Owen’s recall to the England squad in a string of pieces published back in 2009 – both when Owen was performing poorly as Newcastle headed towards relegation, then as he began his Manchester United career – and declaring after three goals against Wolfsburg in December of that year that Owen had thereby made clear ‘his return to Europe’s elite stage’. Still, it may be unfair to characterise the warm response to Owen in the face of his announcement as indicative of some sort of media collusion or cronyism. Perhaps it simply reflects and indicates the way in which Owen is and will be remembered in the collective consciousness – for his significant, distinguished and evocative highs, his goals for England, and in cup finals for Liverpool, rather than for his his relative lows.

Yet we should be able to appreciate Owen’s qualities and key performances as a younger player without glossing over the latter half of his career. Critical opinion on Owen is not restricted to Tyneside, but it centres and receives its strongest expression there: far from merely running counter to any generalised popular conception, a significant number of Newcastle fans are searing and contemptuous when it comes to the player. There is no doubt that, after a string of injuries at Liverpool and Madrid, Owen was ‘compromised’ – as he put it in his blog – by the time he signed for Newcastle in 2005. The central question is whether he was as compromised as his performances throughout his time at the club indicated.

The issue of money ought to be marginalised. It is inevitably linked to Owen’s time at Newcastle because of the fee which Newcastle paid to sign him – at £16.8 million, still a club record – and the wages he received of £100,000 per week. It has sometimes been suggested that the anger directed at Owen stemmed predominantly from these numbers – that Newcastle fans’ grievances revolved around a sense of injustice at vast sums being spent on a player increasingly unable to repay them; exhibiting also the envy of a group of people who disliked Owen’s business-like manner and lack of overt affection for the club. It has variously been argued that it is not Owen’s fault that he was paid so much money, and that anybody offered such wages would unquestionably take them. These seem cynical points of view which serve to muddy the issue by implying that there is no correlation between what a footballer is paid and what a club is entitled to expect from them.

Certainly footballers are overpaid and ever increasingly so over the last decade. Newcastle offered Owen a wage more than he was probably worth at the time. Still, if the details were significantly off, Owen’s stature within the game, his attributes and his goalscoring record, together warranted a sizeable wage, which he broadly received. The anger increasingly directed at Owen through his Newcastle career and since did not stem from the money he was paid: it was rooted in a perceived lack of performances on the pitch, in suspect interest and effort. With those things perceived and felt, the money became an additional, exacerbating point of contention: seen as hugely wasteful, and unwarranted by a player seen as showing a decided lack of professional integrity.

When Newcastle fans greeted Owen’s return – appearing as a substitute for Manchester United in April 2011 – with a chorus of booing, much gesticulating, and a rendition of ‘There’s only one greedy bastard’, it was not because his presumed greed had upset them most. The feelings football fans maintain for their clubs and for individuals within the game are often earnest; but the expression of these feelings on the terraces is exaggerated, modified by the communal setting, scathing and meant to cause irritation and upset. The chant of ‘one greedy bastard’ was one suited to the atmosphere of a game, and intended to rile the player; more suitable (and less embarrassing) for these purposes than chanting, for instance, ‘You didn’t care for us, Michael’ (perhaps to the tune of ‘You only sing when you’re winning’), ‘We despise you for your lack of effort’ (which, the metre strained, would just about go into ‘We’ll support you evermore’), or even the melodically identical, minutely changed ‘one lazy bastard’. The chant was a heated expression of anger and dislike discretely related to the rational reasons behind these feelings.

Newcastle signed Michael Owen from Real Madrid on 31 August, 2005. Almost 20,000 supporters made their way to St James’ Park for the announcement and to see Owen unveiled. After appearing for England against Northern Ireland on 7 September, Owen made his debut for Newcastle against Fulham on 10 September, and opened his goalscoring account the following week, with a goal in a 0-3 away victory against Blackburn Rovers. The first few months of Owen’s time at Newcastle went well. From the Fulham game through until the end of December, he scored seven goals in ten matches for the club, including a hat-trick against West Ham. Against Tottenham at the end of the year, he suffered a broken metatarsal bone in his foot; and this is where problems began with his Newcastle career and in his relationship with the Newcastle fans.

Owen recovered from his injury more slowly than expected. His return to action had been scheduled for mid-to-late March; instead, Owen appeared for Newcastle only once more during the 2005/06 season, appearing as a substitute towards the end of the game against Birmingham City on 29 April. Owen went on to play for England throughout their preparation for the 2006 World Cup in Germany. He started England’s three warm-up games, and in each of the three group games once the competition was underway. His appearance in England’s third group game, against Sweden, meant that Owen recorded as many appearances for England in 2005/06 as he did for Newcastle – eleven for both teams.

The perception of the Newcastle fans was already that Owen had timed his recovery from metatarsal injury solely with the World Cup in mind; eschewing the closing stages of Newcastle’s season so as to reach fitness in time for the beginning of the tournament. After playing a routine pass, unchallenged, in the first minute of the game against Sweden, Owen went to ground and crawled off the pitch. He had suffered an injury to the anterior cruciate ligament of his right knee, and was out of action for the best part of a year. He played only the three final matches of Newcastle’s 2006/07 season, before playing a couple of games for England to round out his summer.

After an unimpressive start to 2007/08 – until the middle of January, Owen managed only three goals in fifteen games for his club – the appointment of Kevin Keegan, who replaced Sam Allardyce, saw a turnabout in Owen’s performances. Keegan managed well despite a dearth of talent in the midfield. With James Milner injured, and Charles N’Zogbia playing at left-back – the club’s only recognised player for that position, José Enrique, suffering niggling injuries and adapting to the league slowly after his summer transfer – Keegan was often left utilising a midfield trio comprising Nicky Butt, Joey Barton and Geremi. In front of these, he played an original front three, almost in a 1-1-1 formation: Owen playmaking from a deep position, Mark Viduka holding up the ball ahead of him, and Obafemi Martins stretching defences with his pace up top. Newcastle’s performances improved markedly, and Owen, who Keegan made captain, scored nine times in the team’s last sixteen league games.

The following season, 2008/09, was disastrous on and off the pitch. Kevin Keegan resigned at the beginning of September citing betrayal and interference by the Newcastle board, consisting of Mike Ashley, Derek Llambias and Dennis Wise. The club incompetently sought a replacement, and came up with Joe Kinnear. Though outside the relegation places at the turn of the year, the team were struggling; yet Newcastle sold sold in January two of their best players in Shay Given and N’Zogbia, signing only Ryan Taylor and Kevin Nolan to supplement an ailing squad. With Joe Kinnear suffering poor health and the team fallen into the relegation zone, Alan Shearer was given eight matches in charge and in which to save the club, but this proved insufficient.

Owen was not alone in underperforming throughout the course of the season, and there were mitigating circumstances for every player in the managerial changes and related off-field disruptions. Some of the players who performed most poorly – for instance Fabricio Coloccini, who made routine mistakes across the season after a solid opening few games – were able to restore their reputations at Newcastle in the ensuing seasons. It remains that Owen was abysmal at the important moments of Newcastle’s year. After scoring seven times in fourteen games prior to Christmas, he managed only one goal in the next fifteen league games as Newcastle were relegated to the Championship. Though still the captain of the club, restored to a striking role, Owen appeared entirely disinterested on the pitch, offering little movement, rarely dropping deep to help link the play, unwilling to challenge or chase opposition defenders; and missing a host of crucial and relatively simple chances in important games against lower-table opposition. It is on these abject and flagrantly uncommitted displays that Owen’s poor standing in the eyes of Newcastle’s supporters predominantly rests.

Owen, attempting to confound unpalatable opinion, has indicated that he intends at some undisclosed point in the future to ‘put the record straight’ regarding some of the more contentious periods of his career. His overall record at Newcastle of 30 goals in 79 games is undistinguished, and there is nothing to put straight about those performances which 52,000 supporters saw and were disgusted by; but this notion that there is a faulty record which he seeks to set straight plays into a related issue with Owen’s personality, which is that his avid self-promotion masks a lack of substance and sincerity. In her generous yet provocative piece, Louise Taylor closes by recalling words spoken by Kevin Keegan concerning Owen. The final two paragraphs of her Guardian article first quote then offer a summary interpretation:

‘”Michael can keep the ball all day, sees a pass and knows when to release it, he’ll score lots of goals from deep and, if he can stay fit, he’ll play on in midfield until 36 or 37,” he said. “I didn’t realise what a good footballer Michael was before.”

Little did he know it but Keegan had arguably hit upon the perfect epitaph for Owen’s fabulous yet sometimes frustratingly underrated career. He will be missed far more than many people may imagine.’

Taylor’s conclusion – that those who would criticise don’t realise Owen’s qualities, and that he will be missed from the game – excises the first part of Keegan’s quote. Owen has not played on in midfield or in any other position until 36 or 37. He is to retire at 33 years of age, having amassed fewer than twenty starts across competitions over the last four seasons: which is to say that he effectively stopped playing on half-way through 2009. Owen’s move from Newcastle to Manchester United proved an unwillingness to work at his game, to persevere in a deeper role in which he could have contributed to a lower-table side. Instead, Owen clutched at the prestige he felt his registration with a top club afforded him. This attitude, this repeated behaviour in the latter part of his career – whereby Owen chose not to contribute to the game, but to assert his reputation by proximity and by publicity – warrants scorn, and means his legacy will be less proud and assured, his retirement less lamented, than many of those within the game propose.

Amsterdam Photo Series II: Schinkel and Nieuwe Meer

Amsterdam is most often defined pictorially by the canal houses which line the canals in the centre of the city. I have sought to encapsulate Amsterdam in something of the same way, with the ink drawing which heads my updated blog and guide to Amsterdam. Yet there is a great variety of housing across the extent the city, with modernist architecture abounding on the islands and docklands, to the north; with the Oud Zuid, Jordaan and De Pijp areas each possessing their own architectural styles and features, distinct from the canal belt; and within the centre and without, there are both isolated and collected houseboats.

I took a series of pictures recently, starting around the Schinkel river, with its concentration of houseboats particularly along Jachthavenweg; moving then towards the Nieuwe Meer, a lake at the top of the Amsterdamse Bos – a large landscape park which extends into Amstelveen – where people can row and boat, and eat at a restaurant, Het Bosch, overlooking the water.

There are fourteen pictures below; fourteen others over at amsterdamarm; and the full set of fifty-two may be viewed via my Flickr account.

Chang-i: A Chinese Restaurant with European Influences, and Restaurant Week

A couple of times a year, in March and in September, ‘Restaurant Week’ takes place across the Netherlands. Over 1,000 restaurants throughout the country take part, all offering for one week a three-course prix fixe dinner menu for €27.50. This allows the public what is, in theory, a bargain, a very good deal indeed; for the restaurants involved are all supposed to be of a high quality, and thereby relatively expensive when going about their usual affairs. In truth, with many restaurants typically offering main courses at around €20, a €27.50 prix fixe tasting menu does not afford a great saving on, say, a starter and a main course, or a main course and dessert. Still, Restaurant Week is hugely popular, and does provide an impulse towards going out and trying new places to eat. More, there are some genuinely good deals to be had; some restaurants whose normal prices are especially high, yet retreat to the same €27.50 for the week’s duration. Those Michelin starred restaurants which take part ask a pretty reasonable €10 surcharge.

Around two hundred restaurants in Amsterdam get involved in Restaurant Week, which ran recently from Monday, 4 to Sunday, 10 March. My partner and I ate on the Sunday evening at Chang-i, a Chinese restaurant with the tagline ‘Innovative Chinese Cuisine’, for it endeavours to serve modern Chinese food drawing upon a range of European influences. Chang-i was voted the second best Chinese restaurant in the Netherlands, and the very best in Amsterdam, in 2011; and has received acclaim from a variety of Dutch newspapers and food publications.

The restaurant sits along Jan Willem Brouwersstraat, a quiet, predominantly residential street, just down from the Concertgebouw. The decor inside itself works to integrate a variety of influences and themes, with oriental lamps, busts and graphics alongside hung paintings of nudes, a marble floor, rustic wooden doors, and a palette of dark browns and black offset by copper and red highlights. I liked the dark colours, and they along with a comfortable and spacious seating plan gave the restaurant a pleasant atmosphere, an upright but fairly relaxed and secluded feel.

The tasting menu comprised three small dishes for each of the three courses. Two additional courses were proffered, for between the starters and the mains, for an additional €7.50 each. My partner and I determined to take the first of these two additional options, largely because I wanted to try its vegetable dim sum.

Several minutes after arriving, we were presented an appetiser, a sushi with rice and radish which my partner appreciated, I less so. The first course consisted of sashimi with salmon roe; gamba, a large shrimp, stir fried on a lemongrass stick; and a pork dumpling. The gamba was my favourite of the three dishes, the crunchiness and the flavour of the lemongrass through its middle really complementing the meat; and the fish and salmon roe was also very good. The pork in the dumpling was a little soft, almost gelatinous, and too rich for my taste. The course that we had chosen to insert followed, and provided, along with the vegetable dim sum, a lobster bisque, and tempura chicken with sweet and sour sauce. This was the only course which I found displeasing overall, for I didn’t like two of its three dishes. The dim sum pastry was lightly fried and tasty, but the filling was loose and hard to distinguish, involving, I think, mushrooms turned to a pulp. Rice noodles with beansprouts were served on the side of the course, and seeing no other role for them, in my hasty inexperience, summoning all the wisdom then in my possession, I took to throwing these in with the bisque, which was otherwise dull and unpleasant. The tempura chicken, on the other hand, was delicious, the tempura batter light and the chicken perfectly steamed inside.

With the main course came fried sea bass with rice and a coconut foam, chicken fillet on a bed of vegetables, and beef in a spicy orange sauce. The dishes were rich and generous, and I thoroughly enjoyed all three. Dessert was a rose cream, chocolate sorbet, and a mango mousse, none absolutely inspiring, but all nice.

I can achieve the calculations: that makes, of thirteen dishes in total including the appetiser, nine which I liked with varying degress of warmth, and four which I did not like. I drank with all this a Cabernet Sauvignon, inappropriate with Chinese food I’m sure, and in truth complementing none of the dishes I ate particularly well; but knowing this beforehand, still I felt like drinking red wine rather than something else. The service at Chang-i was excellent, informative, friendly and polite; our main waitress amusingly and unnecessarily quite dramatically apologetic when she at one point sought to remove our plates before we were quite finished with a course.

From next Monday, 25 March, until Sunday, 7 April, five restaurants in each region of the Netherlands – those five per region which received the best review scores via the Restaurant Week website – will repeat their Restaurant Week prix fixe menus, again at €27.50 for a three-course meal. Information on this and the restaurant’s involved may be obtained here: http://www.restaurantweek.nl/lang/nl/cities.

High Season for the ATP and WTA Tours: Indian Wells and Miami

The Indian Wells Masters in California is one of the most prominent events in the tennis calendar for both the men and the women’s tours. Several tournaments throughout the year lay claim to the title ‘Fifth Slam’; suggesting that, after the four Grand Slams – the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon, and the US Open – it is they who come next in importance and prestige. The two season-closing tournaments – the ATP World Tour Finals for the men, hosted indoors at the O2 Arena in London; and the WTA Tour Championships for the women, for which venues across the world bid for rights extending across several seasons – perhaps receive the ‘Fifth Slam’ tag most frequently, and they warrant it with regard to ranking points, the winners of these tournaments receiving up to 1,500 points, the most on offer outside of the four Majors.

Yet the Indian Wells Masters also possesses a strong argument in its favour: one of nine Masters 1000 events in the men’s ATP tour, and one of only four ‘Premier Mandatory’ events in the WTA tour, and offering 1,000 ranking points to its two victors, Indian Wells is is the best attended event outside of the four Slams, with approximately 370,000 visitors making an appearance during the one-and-a-half weeks of the tournament’s duration. Certainly, if ‘The West’ must have a Grand Slam equivalent, then Indian Wells is it.

Subsequent to a couple of qualifying rounds, the women’s tournament began on Wednesday, 6 March, the men’s on the following day, with all seeded players receiving a bye from the first round of matches. In the early stages of the women’s draw, Svetlana Kuznetsova – ranked 46th in the world after missing much of last season with a knee-injury – continued something of a comeback, defeating 18th seed Jelena Janković 0-6, 6-2, 7-5 in the second round; before falling in round three to Marion Bartoli. Bartoli proceeded to a defeat in two sets at the hands of Sara Errani; who was in turn dispatched, after a close first set which went to a tie-break, by Maria Sharapova in the quarter-finals. In the semi-finals, Sharapova met Maria Kirilenko, seeded thirteen, and entering the semis on the back of an impressive and hard-fought three-set victory over 3rd seed Agnieszka Radwańska. Sharapova beat Kirilenko 6-4, 6-3 to make the final.

The quarter-finals in the other half of the women’s draw were somewhat marred in so far as neither took place. Victoria Azarenka and Sam Stosur both pulled out, the first with an ankle injury, the second with a calf problem; giving their opponents, Caroline Wozniacki and Angelique Kerber respectively, easy access to a semi-final which Wozniacki ever-so-slightly edged, winning 2-6, 6-4, 7-5. This was to be Wozniacki’s first Premier Mandatory/Premier 5 (the names referring to the top-tier events of the WTA Tour) final since reaching the final at Indian Wells two years ago, and winning the championship with a victory over Marion Bartoli. Sharapova, however, was as imperious yesterday as she had been throughout the rest of the tournament, and was too strong for Wozniacki, taking the title with a 6-2, 6-2 scoreline. Thereby Sharapova lasted the extent of the tournament without dropping a set.

The men’s draw moved along fairly serenely until the quarter-final stage. Second-round upsets saw Fernando Verdasco lose heavily (6-0, 6-1) to Jarkko Nieminen; Phillip Kohlschreiber fall to young Frenchman Benoît Paire; and perhaps most surprisingly, David Ferrer, the 4th seed, lost in three sets to tall South African Kevin Anderson. Andy Murray had suffered opening-match defeats on his last two trips to Indian Wells, and he lost the first set of his opening match this time round to Evgeny Donskoy, but came back to win through 5-7, 6-2, 6-2. Murray made it to the quarter-finals – defeating Carlos Berlocq in the fourth round after complaining during the match about the Argentine’s inconsistent and loud grunting – but fell there to Juan Martín del Potro, improving and on an excellent run of form. Del Potro lost a tight first set in the tie-break, but then swept the next two for a 6-7, 6-3, 6-1 result; and went on to meet Novak Djokovic in the semis. At the end of a gruelling match and with many points endured, Del Potro defeated Djokovic 4-6, 6-4, 6-4.

In the other half of the draw, after narrowly defeating his compatriot Stanislas Wawrinka in a good match in the previous round (6-3, 6-7, 7-5), Roger Federer was beaten comprehensively in the quarter-finals by Rafa Nadal (6-4, 6-2). Nadal was getting stronger as the tournament progressed; after defeating a pretty in-form Tomáš Berdych 6-4, 7-5 in their semi-final, he lost the first set of the final to Del Potro, but eventually triumphed 4-6, 6-3, 6-4. Nadal has suffered knee troubles throughout the past year: these saw him miss last year’s US Open and the Australian Open at the start of this, falling, in the process, outside of the top four of the rankings for the first time since 2005. Indian Wells marked Nadal’s first hard-court appearance in a year; his success yesterday was first on a hard-court since October 2010. By virtue of the victory, Nadal becomes the player with the most Masters 1000 titles to his name.

In the doubles finals, the Bryan brothers defeated the partnership of Treat Conrad Huey (none of whose three names require quotations marks) and Jerzy Janowicz; and Ekaterina Makarova and Elena Vesnina won over Nadia Petrova and Katarina Srebotnik.

Both tours head next to Key Biscayne, Miami, for the Miami Masters, whose first round begins this Wednesday. This is another prestigious event, and another which vies for ‘Fifth Slam’ recognition in the hearts and minds of the public. It is another ATP Masters 1000 event; another of the four WTA ‘Premier Mandatory’ events; expects around 320,000 visitors; and offers 1,000 ranking points and one of the largest pots of prize money. After controversy in 2001, the Williams sisters have boycotted Indian Wells, so Serena Williams is scheduled to return to the tour in Miami. Rafa Nadal, on the other hand, will miss the event, choosing to skip it in order to recover and train for the clay-court season.

Silver Linings Playbook: Romance by Stealth

Silver Linings Playbook was given a gradual, staggered release in North America. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival early last September; featured at a number of smaller, independent film festivals throughout the United States across October and early November; received a limited release in cinemas in the middle of November; and was finally afforded a wide release towards the end of the following month. Its relatively slow emergence, accompanied by increasing critical acclaim, was timely with regard to the awards season; David O. Russell, Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence and Robert De Niro all won awards and received numerous nominations, the film’s successes culminating with Jennifer Lawrence winning Best Actress at the 85th Academy Awards ceremony on February 24.

The film’s steady progression across North America has been mirrored by its release pattern in Europe. Silver Linings Playbook appeared in the UK in late November, in Germany at the beginning of January and in France at the end of the month, and has only received a wide release in the Netherlands over the last couple of weeks. I went to see the picture at the Tuschinski theatre – in the balconied ‘Great Hall’ of the wonderful building, a conflux of Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and several other architectural schools and cultural motifs – last weekend.

Whilst Jennifer Lawrence has perhaps received the most acclaim for her performance in the film as Tiffany, it is notable the way in which the film’s structure allows her to stand out. Bradley Cooper’s Pat (or Pat Jr.) bears the attributes of the film’s lead character – it is he who we are first introduced to, and it is he who we follow, who we focalise through, whose thoughts and emotions are most discernible and impressed. Where both he and Tiffany have suffered mental health issues relating to their previous relationships – Pat discovered his wife cheating on him and responded by beating her partner in adultery; Tiffany’s husband died in a car accident – it is Pat’s illness which we most inhabit, shown the incident at its core by way of flashback, and witnessing its recurring pattern in those moments where Pat loses control, becoming agitated in particular whenever he hears the song intertwined with the incident, which has become for him a trigger for distress.

As well as focalising through Pat, it is his life, his world, which is positioned at the film’s centre. Pat and Tiffany are its two poles, but the film possesses an excellent ensemble cast, which is comprised overwhelmingly of Pat’s circle of family and friends: his mother, Dolores; his father, Pat Sr.; his brother Jake; his doctor, Dr. Cliff Patel; and his two closest friends, one of whom he met at the mental health facility in which he spent eight months, the other an old friend from the exterior world. Thus Tiffany is in all manners an outsider: not part of Pat’s family; on the outskirts of his group of friends; living at a physical remove from her own parents, in a garage she has converted which is separate from the family home; and her promiscuity in the aftermath of her husband’s death has made her also an outcast, a sort of black sheep, in the bearings of wider society. Her power is rooted in this, in this relative darkness and isolation: despite some of the subject matter (mental illness, loneliness, a risky and potentially addictive gambling habit), this is not a dark film, but Tiffany is illuminated because she is something relatively marginalised and dangerous, seemingly offering Pat a course which is unconventional and unsafe.

Silver Linings Playbook is a film that works by hiding events and emotions off-screen, and then leaving them unsaid but implied by what is later uncovered. The film reaches its climax in a dance competition, in which Pat and Tiffany dance together. In culminating in dance, a point of connection is offered between Silver Linings Playbook and The Artist, which swept the Oscars last year; and also with films including Little Miss Sunshine and Napoleon Dynamite. The Artist‘s easy elegance – an elegance won through silence, which is resolved in a dance both energetic and fun, but also graceful and lithe – allows it to stand apart. The other two films exemplify a contemporary tendency to either play dance for laughs, with so-bad-they-must-be-good performances which are supposedly nourishing because so free of care; or to make an impending dance appear an impending disaster which, when the dance in fact comes good, provides a sort of transcendence for the character involved. In these latter cases, the aim of displaying dance on screen is to encourage the audience’s warmth. Silver Linings Playbook takes a different tack. The dance between Pat and Tiffany is not framed for us as surprisingly triumphant or comically disarrayed (Tiffany’s leap upon Pat’s shoulders aside), but is instead shown as enthusiastic yet mediocre – which mediocrity, by way of a 5.0 out of 10.0 score and a clever plot device, ties the film’s story-points together and makes the evening of the competition a success.

Pat and Tiffany’s dance demonstrates no remarkable talent; and it is neither transcendent nor the cause of some psychological breakthrough or breakdown; yet it is revealing in a subtler way. We see Pat and Tiffany meet for rehearsal each day in Tiffany’s converted apartment, but we see very little of their actual rehearsing, very little of the dance which they are working upon. Instead, we witness the characters communicate with each other before, after, or in between rehearsals, and their conversations often involve stakes not explicitly relating to the dance: most prominently, Pat, who has only agreed to dance in an attempt to win back his wife, repeatedly focuses on a letter he has sent to her through Tiffany, for which he is hopeful of a response. In this way the dance itself is concealed, so when we do see it in full on the evening of the competition, though the performance qualitatively is mediocre, it is revelatory in implying their route and showing the point to which Pat and Tiffany have come: the dance is amateurish but intimate, and emphasises the cloaked truth that to dance with someone is to be intimate with them, and to enter deeply into a shared dance requires a physical and emotional connection. How could Pat and Tiffany not become close practicing this dance each day?

In such a manner the structure of the story is to suggest the potential of a relationship between Pat and Tiffany, but to hide the flow and development of that relationship from us, to make its appearance unsure, until revealing at the climax its progression and its logic. Pat Sr., played by De Niro, has been gambling superstitiously on football games, aiming to make sufficient money to open a restaurant. Pat Sr. maintains the notion that the success of his team and of his betting depends on Pat Jr. witnessing the games; after encouraging Pat to miss a dance rehearsal in order to attend a game in person, and subsequently losing much of his money when things don’t go to plan, Pat Sr. contrives a new bet, a parlay, double or nothing, comprising a football game and the result of the dance. Berated by Tiffany for missing practice, disapproving of his father’s new bet, and feeling generally abused, Pat declares that he’s pulling out of the dance competition, and leaves the group to go outside. Pat Sr. and Tiffany, desiring Pat to compete for different reasons, agree to mislead him into thinking his wife will be at the dance competition, believing this is the only way to ensure his attendance.

We do not see either Pat Sr. or Tiffany inform Pat that his wife is going to be there: instead, we assume that they’ve convinced him of this by Pat’s presence the next day for dance rehearsal as usual. So Pat and Tiffany rehearse through the week, and the evening of the competition arrives, and by chance Pat’s wife does make an appearance. After Pat and Tiffany dance and achieve the score required to win Pat Sr. his bet, Pat moves across the room to talk to his wife. This distresses Tiffany, revealing her emotional attachment to Pat. When Pat takes leave of his wife and finds out that Tiffany has fled the building, he races after her and the pair express their love for one another. We realise that Pat made his decision to dance not because of anything Pat Sr. or Tiffany said to convince him – but because, when outside on the doorstep alone after threatening to quit, he unraveled Tiffany’s feelings for him and, inwardly, without expression, understood that he felt the same for her.

Robert De Niro gives a strong portrayal throughout the film. When Pat Jr. goes to his wife in the ballroom and whispers into her ear, causing Tiffany to flee, we sense Pat Sr.’s emotion and also his reserve – we sense his inclination to go after her, but he restrains himself; marching stridently, however, towards his son to tell him what he himself knows he must do. De Niro chasing after Lawrence would have been a powerful scene, a most esteemed older actor progressing towards possibly the most acclaimed young actress about; but this would have taken something from Cooper’s magnificent performance, and was not the way for the resolution of the plot, the couple coming together of their own volition.

Ignatius Loyola and the Jesuits; and the Jesuits and James Joyce

With the election yesterday evening in Rome of former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now Pope Francis I (and as the first, we may do away with the numeral, and declare him simply Pope Francis), there is now but one word sitting upon and emanating breathlessly from the world’s collective lips. The word is ‘Jesuit’, for Pope Francis is not only the first Pope from the Americas, and the first since Pope Gregory III from outside Europe (Gregory III, pope from 731-741, was born in Syria; Francis is from Buenos Aires, Argentina) – he is also the first Jesuit Pope.

The Society of Jesus, commonly known as the Jesuits, are a Catholic religious order founded by Ignatius Loyola. Loyola, born Iñigo Loiolakoa in the Basque Country in 1491, and nourished on heroic literature including The Song of Roland in his youth, became as a young man an ambitious soldier. On May 20, 1521, under Antonio Manrique de Lara, Duke of Náreja and Viceroy of Navarre, defending Pamplona from the French, Loyola was ‘the soul of a fierce fight, standing on the ramparts where the fire of the French guns concentrated. But a stone dislodged by a shot struck his left leg, the rebounding cannonball shattered the right; and Iñigo and Pamplona fell…That was the last time he should draw the sword’. (Thompson, 5)

Undergoing painful surgeries which allowed his bones to heal but left him with a limp, Loyola read during his convalescence De Vita Christi, the Life of Christ, a commentary on the Gospels by Ludolph, a Carthusian monk from Saxony. This work impelled Loyola on the path of religion. The following year, in 1522, he traveled to Manresa, Catalonia; and spent ten months living in a cave by the city as an ascetic. It was during this time that Loyola began practicing and setting down the Spiritual Exercises, a series of prayers, meditations and mental exercises which he completed over the next two years, and which remain the cornerstone of Jesuit training today. Whilst living in this cave, and during two spells in a nearby Dominican convent when his body became exhausted from his privations, Loyola experienced also religious visions. He determined to journey to Jerusalem, where he planned to make his life’s work; arriving there in August 1523, he was not permitted to stay by the Provincial of the city, who perhaps feared Loyola’s zeal would cause problems with coexistent groups.

So Loyola returned to Spain; he began studying religion at the University of Alcalá; then moved to Paris, studying at the Collège de Montaigu where, after seven years, in 1534, he completed a Master of Arts. It was about this time that the Society of Jesus was conceived. On August 15, 1534, Loyola met with six companions from his University – the Spaniards Francis Xavier, Alfonso Salmeron, Diego Lainez, and Nicholas Bobadilla; Peter Favre, French; and Simão Rodriguez, Portuguese – and together they ‘went to the chapel of Notre Dame, near Paris, and each made a vow to go at the time fixed to Jerusalem, and to place ourselves when we returned in the hands of the Pope; and to leave, after a certain interval, our kinsfolk and our nets, and keep nothing but the money necessary for our journey’. (Thompson, 48)

In fact, Loyola never would make a return to Jerusalem. At the end of the decade, Loyola and his companions determined to apply to become an Order of the Church. On May 3, 1539, they passed among themselves a series of resolutions, the first vowing absolute obedience to the Pope, then,

‘(2) To teach the Commandments to children or any one else. (3) To take a fixed time – an hour more or less – to teach the Commandments and catechism in an orderly way. (4) To give forty days in the year for this work. (5) That all candidates should go through the ‘Spiritual Exercises’ and the other tests of the Society. That last resolution is memorable, because here we have the simple germ whence evolve the elaborate tests, without parallel for searching strictness, of the modern Jesuits.’ (Thompson, 78)

On June 12, the group determined that Loyola would be the first Superior of what he termed ‘The Company of Jesus’. The Papal Bull issued by Pope Paul III on September 27, 1540, ‘Regimini militantis ecclesia’, approved the group as an Order of the Church, and Latinised their name to ‘Societas Jesu’; it contained the ‘Formula of the Institute’, a paragraph written by Loyola establishing their foundational principles. Loyola would continue to work on the Society’s formal constitutions until a few years prior to his death. Originally intending to convert Muslims to the Catholic faith, the Jesuits became a prominent force in the Counter-Reformation through the 1540s and 1550s. Loyola died in 1556. He was beatified by Pope Paul V on July 27, 1609; and then canonised by Pope Gregory XV on March 12, 1622.

The term Jesuit was first applied to the group negatively, with the sense that they associated themselves too closely, and therefore conceitedly, with the name of Christ: it gradually became accepted within the order. Evangelisation was the fundamental endeavour of the order from the time of Loyola, and the Society undertook extensive missionary work throughout Asia, India and the Americas over the subsequent centuries. The conception of the Society today is rooted in its continuing missionary efforts across the world; and in its reputation for intellectual, theological, and educational rigour. The current Superior General is Adolfo Nicolás, a Spanish priest who also, coincidentally, studied at the University of Alcalá. The Society forms the largest single order of priests in the Catholic Church; and runs schools, colleges and universities in six continents around the world.

The passages quoted above are taken from Francis Thompson’s St Ignatius Loyola. Thompson (1859-1907) was a talented poet, who published three collections of poetry, but led a somewhat dissipated life, beset by illness, financial hardship, and addiction to opium. His most renowned poem remains ‘The Hounds of Heaven’. Another noted writer with a connection to the Jesuits was Frederick Copleston (1907-1994): a Jesuit priest, Copleston wrote A History of Philosophy in nine volumes between 1946 and 1980, a work which continues to be published today. The most famous of writers with a strong link to the Jesuits is James Joyce.

Joyce’s deliberate move away from organised religion – a move charted through the figure of Stephen Dedalus in the semi-autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – is one of his defining characteristics within the popular consciousness. Yet Joyce never spoke ill of the Jesuit order, and did not take away a wholly negative impression of his Jesuit schooling: first at Clongowes Wood College, from 1888, as a ‘half past six’ year old, to 1891; then at Belvedere College from 1893 until 1898. Joyce had been withdrawn from Clongowes owing to his father’s increasingly dire financial situation; he spent a short period at a Christian Brothers’ school on North Richmond Street in Dublin; but his biographer, Richard Ellmann, writes:

‘James Joyce chose never to remember this interlude with the Christian Brothers in his writings, preferring to have his hero spend the period in two years of reverie…It was Joyce’s one break with Jesuit education, and he shared his father’s view that the Jesuits were the gentlemen of Catholic education, and the Christian Brothers (‘Paddy Stink and Micky Mud,’ as his father denominated them) its drones.’ (Ellmann, 35)

Happening one day upon Father John Conmee – formerly rector at Clongowes, now prefect of studies at Belvedere; who Joyce would make appear in ‘Wandering Rocks’ – John Joyce managed to convince him to enter James at Belvedere free of charge.

The first reference to Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses comes from the mouth of Buck Mulligan, who calls down the stairs of the Martello Tower at Sandycove, ‘Come up, Kinch! Come up, you fearful jesuit!’. Mulligan characterises him also in ‘Telemachus’ as a ‘jejune jesuit’, a ‘cursed jesuit’, and a ‘gloomy jesuit’. Stephen is displeased but unperturbed; in ‘Scylla and Charybdis’, his stream of consciousness asks ‘Ignatius Loyola, make haste to help me!’ as he begins to delineate his theory concerning Shakespeare and the ghost in Hamlet.

On into his later life, Joyce identified with the Jesuits and held his Jesuit education with some regard. In response to his friend Frank Budgen’s book, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses (of which Joyce otherwise approved, commending his friend’s capabilities as a writer), Joyce said, ‘You allude to me as a Catholic. Now for the sake of precision and to get the correct contour on me, you ought to allude to me as a Jesuit’. To the sculptor August Suter he remarked that, owing to the Jesuits, ‘I have learnt to arrange things in such a way that they become easy to survey and to judge’.

________

Budgen, F. James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991)

Ellmann, R. James Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983)

Thompson, F. St Ignatius Loyola (London: Universe Books, 1962)

Peter the Great at the Hermitage Amsterdam, and Netherlands-Russia Year

2013 is Netherlands-Russia Year, a year of bilateral events depicting and emphasising, celebrating, and perhaps even serving to enhance the relationship shared by the two countries. Whilst the official opening of this bilateral year is yet to take place – it will be marked on April 8 in the Netherlands, and a month later in Russia – an extensive events programme is already well underway.

The Drents Museum in Assen has, since last November, been host to an exhibition, The Soviet Myth, featuring themes and artists from Russian art as it existed under Stalin, the exhibited pieces drawn from the collection of the State Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg. In Zaandam – a town just north-west of Amsterdam; where Claude Monet would stay four months and paint twenty-four canvases one-and-three-quarter centuries later – work is continuing on the restoration of the house in which Peter the Great stayed (alas, for just over one week) upon his visit to the Netherlands in 1697. In Eindhoven, at The Van Abbe Museum, an exhibition contrasts the art of El Lissitzky with the works of some modern practitioners; the exhibition borrows pieces from the Guggenheim in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and will subsequently travel to the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg and the Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow.

A project based in The Hague, entitled ‘Now Wakes the Sea’, involving Dutch and Russian groups and institutes, will investigate the effects of changes – scenic, cultural and economic – to coastal areas. A wealth of performances and activities are scheduled for Groningen, including a Russian film month hosted by Forum Images cinema; the first performance of a touring Noord Nederlands Toneel adaptation of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment; a collobarative exhibition between the Dutch art collective Artcetera and artists from the Saint Petersburg studio Nepokorennye; and an educational course on socialist realism in the arts. An exhibition at Maastricht’s Bonnefantenmuseum, The Great Change – Revolutions in Russian Painting, 1895-1917, will display works by Malevich, Kandinsky, Goncharova, and Tatlin. In Apeldoorn, a range of activities will take place in Palace Het Loo: Peter the Great was encouraged in his shipbuilding and city-building exploits by William of Orange, whom he met on a visit to London, and for whom the Palace was built; and Peter visited the Palace whilst in the Netherlands, staying at the nearby building which is now the Bilderberg Hotel de Keizerskroon.

Events, seminars and exhibitions of the same sort will extend throughout the Netherlands – a broad programme will commence over the coming months in Rotterdam; and also take in Zwolle, Breda, Nijmegen, Enschede, Arnhem and so on – and then increasingly move towards Russia as the year progresses.

Amsterdam, as the capital of the Netherlands and the city where Peter the Great studied shipbuilding for four months in late 1697, occupies a central place amidst all these festivities. Among numerous other events, Foam photography museum is holding an exhibition, Primrose – Russian Colour Photography, which displays Russian photography from around 1850 to the present day, focusing on colouration processes including the luminous glass plate works of Sergey Prokudin-Gorski; and the Muziektheater and De Nederlandse Opera are currently staging Prokofiev’s opera, L’amour des trois oranges.

The Hermitage Amsterdam, as the only dependency of the State Hermitage Museum outside Russia, is singularly well established to celebrate and delineate the cultural connections between the Netherlands and Russia. Whilst recent exhibitions brought together a world-class collection of nineteenth century French, Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting, and continue to see the museum serve as home to Vincent van Gogh while the Van Gogh Museum undergoes refurbishment, beyond the museum’s two exhibition wings there are permanent displays considering the development of the Hermitage Amsterdam and viewing more widely the relationship between Amsterdam and Russia.

As part of Netherlands-Russia Year, an exhibition entitled Peter the Great, an Inspired Tsar opened at the Hermitage Amsterdam over the weekend. The exhibition brings together a range of paintings, objects and artefacts from the duration of Peter’s life, many of the pieces loaned from the State Hermitage in Petersburg. Featured are clothes Peter wore at home and in battle; a carriage he used to ride about Peterhof; the lathes upon which he worked wood and metal and some of the intricate items which were their products; and statues and ornaments which he used to adorn his palace gardens, including nudes which were controversial as the first to appear in Orthodox Russia (a note explains that Peter had to have guards watching these nudes, protecting them from an agitated public). Alongside Peter’s possessions, there are other pieces indicative of the time: of developments in marine navigation, in building, in weaponry, in anatomy, and in garden design. Most notable, perhaps, is the collection of paintings which Peter acquired – either upon his two extended journeys across Europe, the first a ‘Grand Embassy’ which traveled from 1697-1698, its tour cut short by a rebellion of the Streltsy back home, the second from 1716-1717; or otherwise shipped to him in Russia – which served as the core of the Hermitage collection when founded in 1764 by Catherine the Great.

The standout is Rembrandt’s David and Jonathan (1642), a brilliant work and the only Rembrandt obtained by Peter. In fact, a number of the paintings Peter acquired believing them to be the work of Old Masters turned out not to be so: he thought he had other Rembrandts and works by Italian Rennaisance artists including Raphael, but these works are now attributed to other artists, to students, followers and related schools, or else considered forgeries. David and Jonathan, like a number of the other artworks on display, was hung by Peter in Monplaisir (‘my pleasure’) Palace, the summer residence which Peterhof was gradually built around.

So there is certainly a lot on show at Peter the Great, an Inspired Tsar; and the highlights are significant and the exhibition is well worth visiting. The pieces are nicely displayed, in long glass cases, and with paintings hung on wood panelling which mimics the interior of Monplaisir. There is even a loose fling towards interactivity, with a room in which visitors are able to try on the Russian garments of Peter’s period. Yet the exhibitions is not flawless: for all the objects and art, the exhibition lacks coherence; there are several stories some or all of which it could have told, and it ultimately succeeds in telling none.

The exhibition could have offered an informative, chronological account of Peter’s life; it could have detailed the particular ways in which Amsterdam influenced the conception, design and building of Saint Petersburg; there is even sufficient material for an exhibition focusing purely on the artistic interests of Peter the Great. Instead, the exhibiton serves a muddled, vaguely gesturing and always incomplete look at each of these things. Worst of all, even a strong sense of the broader relationship between Peter’s Russia and the Netherlands is muddied; even the time Peter spent in Amsterdam is made unclear: poorly conceptualised, the sections which show pieces which depict the period of time, rather than pieces which relate specifically to or were owned by Peter, appear inconsequential and tenuous and detract from the exhibition’s flow; and in an eagerness to suggest possible Dutch influences on Peter, actual influences, and the real Dutch figures who he knew and worked with, are lost.

So we see, for instance, Delft tiling which furnished the Menshikov Palace, the first to be built in Peter’s new capital; Peter himself would use similar tiling for Monplaisir’s pantry; but after a room with several landscape drawings and little background or contextual information, the discussion on Petersburg is over. Rooms on navigational equipment and plastination aren’t adequately tied in to Peter’s naval plans or his interest in curiosities. The final, and the largest room of the exhibition attempts to be more informative regarding the course of Peter’s life. It considers the Great Northern War, Peter’s troubles at home, his complex character at once inquisitive and ruthless, and concludes with his death mask, and two paintings of Peter on his death bed. Still, it offers an overview rather than a detailed chronology or a particular interpretation of Peter’s life; and coming at the end of proceedings, gives the exhibition a slightly unsatisfying, back-to-front feel.

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Monplaisir

David and Jonathan, by Rembrandt (1642)

Peter the Great’s Death Mask

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Peter the Great, an Inspired Tsar, will run at the Hermitage Amsterdam until September 13.

The Netherlands-Russia Bilateral Year website, with a full agenda.

Carrot and Pea Risotto with Chorizo

Risotto is sometimes conceived a difficult thing to make: a dish which you must observe anxiously and resolutely throughout the course of its cooking, to which you must add precise quantities of liquids, and for which timing is crucial. It is not easy to make anything perfectly; however, I think it is actually fairly easy to make risotto pretty well. In my experience, you do not need to stand over it dictatorially, stirring all the while as it cooks; you can throw in liquid any old how; and whilst it is at its best al dente, with a little bite, it is still tasty if you overcook it a little, and you need feel no irredeemable shame if you do overcook it, and ought not to take this overcooked risotto towards your mouth with a grimace, and observe your diners eating it with a sorrowful frown.

Are carrots and peas good things to put in a risotto? I believe they are a classic combination. Will you like them in a risotto? Let us see!

Ingredients

• 150g – 200g risotto rice
• 1 very large onion, or 2 smaller onions
• 1 large and thick carrot
• 75g – 100g peas
• A glass of white or rosé wine
• 500 ml, approximately, of vegetable stock
• 60g chorizo
• Parmesan cheese
• Salt
• Pepper
• Thyme

Notes pertaining to these ingredients

When I cook rice, I tend to err on the side of much: for this recipe, to serve two people, I’d probably use about 200g of rice, but you may be more than content with less. There are several varieties of risotto rice, and all would suit. I tend to use Arborio rice; alternatively, you may find at your local market or supermarket an otherwise unspecified parcel or package stating simply ‘Risotto Rice’. Red wine would be too much for the vegetables, so white or rosé works best. Vegetable or chicken stock is good; but if you just add water to cook the risotto, it will be okay, and the risotto will still possess a flavour which makes it worth eating. Parmesan cheese or an appropriate substitute, Grana Padano for example, is for grating and adding to the risotto sometime around the end of the cooking process. If you want a higher class of risotto dish, then perhaps you may refer to your parmesan cheese as Parmigiano-Reggiano, and to your peas as petits pois, whether they are or are not. In this way you juxtapose the Italian with the French for an authentically continental meal.

Method

• Dice or slice the onion(s), and sauté in a pan with some olive oil or butter
• Peel, then dice or slice the carrot and add to the pan
• Add the risotto rice, and stir so it becomes covered in the oil or butter. Allow the rice to cook for a couple of minutes on a high heat, to ‘toast’, which really means to become translucent or take a little colour
• Throw in the glass of wine, and reduce
• Add the first third of the stock, and reduce to a medium-high heat. When this first third of stock is absorbed by the rice, add the second third. Allow this to absorb, and add as much of the third third as you think you require to adequately cook the rice
• While the rice is cooking away, slice the chorizo and fry in a separate pan
• Add the peas to the risotto within the last few minutes of cooking
• With the rice cooked, season with salt, pepper and thyme. You can add a knob of butter or a little cream at this point if you wish
• Grate the cheese and either add to the pan and stir in, or use to sprinkle, lightly or heavy-handedly, over the risotto once apportioned to your plate
• Serve the risotto and the chorizo in conjunction, perhaps with bread

Again, the desired result is a risotto with a little bite to it. You may not need all of the liquid, you may feel you need more: take 500 ml as a broad approximation of how much liquid to add. Don’t have the heat so high while the risotto is cooking that the liquid absorbs quickly and the risotto starts to stick to the bottom of a dry pan; but provided the heat isn’t too high, you ought to stir the risotto a little, but not incessantly. It should take twenty-to-thirty minutes to cook. Thyme works well with the other ingredients here, but spice according to your innermost desire.