Merry Christmas from The Passengers

Merry Christmas to all of you from warm (and still slightly sweaty) Singapore. The Passengers have enjoyed a wonderful Christmas day with new friends. Passenger J ate his own body weight in roast potatoes and Passenger H got very excited about Yorkshire Puddings.

We hope that you are all having an equally lovely day wherever you are and we wish that we could be there to share it with you. However we will not be sharing our big stack of presents...

Doors - Bali

This gate includes the Bahasa greeting "Selamat Datang" or "welcome."

People in Bali traditionally live in a family enclosure called a kampong (translated elsewhere in Bahasa-speaking regions as "village").  The compounds include numerous buildings for sleeping and cooking and farming, and though extended families often live together, they can spread out inside across multiple houses.  The Hindu heritage of Bali means that each kampong contains any number of shrines including a seat for a deity beside the principal entrance and usually a small sacred precinct inside.  Additionally, small offerings are placed daily in front of the doors of individual buildings. Here are some of the elaborate doorways that we saw around Ubud during our holiday.  Click the link at the bottom left to see all the pictures.

Many kampong entrances have been modified to accommodate Bali's ubiquitous motorbikes. A Chinese-inspired alternative to the more popular chair-style shrines can be seen at left.

A kampong portal wedged between shops along the road.

Hawkeye Style

Thank you, Deadspin, for posting this video to a wider audience.

College football, a sport of rivalry, pageantry, and not a little bit of id, concluded its regular season last weekend.  Now we await bowl season, a calendar of thirty-four arranged matches lousy with corporate sponsorship overlaying America's holiday calendar.  It all culminates on 7 January 2010 when Alabama and Texas play in the Citi BCS National Championship for the "Coaches' Trophy presented by Dr. Pepper."  The whole spectacle of college football with its marching bands, cheerleaders, and huge stadiums bedecked in partisan apparel only intensifies for these events.

All those trappings of competition might be symptomatic of unfortunate tribalistic fervor with disturbing resemblances to militant nationalism.  However, it should be remembered that many parts of America have embraced university teams because of a dearth of other amusements.  This would be especially true of many state schools.  Notice a pattern among many of these other top-ranked teams in addition to Alabama and Texas: Utah, Nebraska, Oklahoma State, West Virginia, and Iowa.  Most of these places are long on rural heritage and without a local professional team.  Too little  urban entertainment should help explain why aspiring rapper Notti Boy took the time to record the largely wholesome video above in support of his team, University of Iowa Hawkeyes.  It sounds like hip-hop in the Midwest has not changed much since the start of the decade. Imagine the even greater limitations of supporters for high achieving football squads at religious institutions like BYU (Brigham Young University, a Mormon college in Provo, Utah) and TCU (Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, TX).

Iowa and Georgia Tech play in the FedEx Orange Bowl on 5 January 2010.

Champuan Ridge - Bali

The forested interior of Bali, Indonesia.

The Passengers are returned from a weekend on the island paradise of Bali.  This was our first trip south of the equator and the weekend had numerous other highlights, like surfing lessons and big cocktails at Naughty Nuri's. However, we especially enjoyed seeing the interior and countryside of the island around the artsy hangout of Ubud.  Here are some images from our hike along Champuan Ridge and around the villages nearby.  There's lots to see so this post has been broken into two pieces.  Click the link at the bottom left of this entry to look at the rest of the pictures.

Atop Champuan Ridge.

Bringing down the stalks from the ridge.

Unexpected Guest

Here's a picture of the uninvited guest who greeted us on Thanksgiving (26 November) evening after we returned from a pleasant French meal on Club St.  These geckos are everywhere in Singapore and do often make their way inside houses and businesses.  On Wednesday I spied one crawling across the cornice at the aforementioned French restaurant's sister establishment.  Fortunately, the creatures are harmless, seriously shy, and eat lots of pesky insects.  I put on kitchen gloves and bundled our visitor out of the apartment. I didn't put him in the elevator, assuming he could walk his way down the walls from the eleventh floor.

UOB Building - Bangkok

The so-called "Robot Building" on Sathorn Road was finished in 1986. Our hotel (Ascott) stands at left.

Slowly but surely the images from our trip to Bangkok are migrating onto the web. We must hurry up because the Passengers fly to Bali tomorrow for a long weekend. More photography will be conducted. This entry showcases the tower for United Overseas Bank in Bangkok.

The building stood next door to our hotel, the pleasant Ascott, on Sathorn Road in the city's main banking/commercial district. Several other banks have buildings just down the street, but our neighbor was the only office block that looked like a Gobot (video link: sound alert).

The so-called "Robot Building" was designed by Thai architect Sumet Jumsai and completed in 1986 for Bank of Asia, later acquired by UOB. Notice the tower has four distinct masses stacked atop each other with the top layer dramatically smaller than the lower registers. The building has the silhouette of a square snowman and rectangular projections along the sides that could be mistaken for arms. Two round windows facing the street suggest eyes, and several levels have octagonal attachments akin to monstrous lugnuts. I was most amused by the feature unfortunately on the backside of these images, but visible from the Ascott swimming pool. A flat blue contraption appended onto the "head" hosts two sturdy antennae, but the combination looks like a wireless router writ large.

Shophouse Living

The view from the entrance to the converted shophouse home featured in this week's "Great Homes & Destinations." The high ceilings, whirring fan, and indoor garden help moderate the tropical heat. Image from the New York Times.

The New York Times today shows off a domicile in Singapore in this week's "Great Homes" feature. The piece tells of two pretty young management consultants (jealous? me?) outfitting a classic shophouse with modern designs and local materials. The article taught me that Dahlia Gallery has great furniture offerings and that bespoke hardwood furniture is terribly cheap in Indonesia.

The shophouse facade; note the use of European-inspired plastered ornament. More images from the NYT article here.

Shophouses are an architectural distinctive of Southeast Asia. The houses are built as a series of narrow, contiguous properties. A shophouse is typically two or three stories tall with the ground level dedicated for commercial use and the upstairs given over to accommodation. The business level recedes from the street, creating a sheltered walkway along a row of adjacent shops. Most are ornamented with versions of classical pilasters, bold verticals against the horizontal structures, between the units or beside the shuttered windows. Often each house displays its own color scheme of contrasting colors, a convention that puts on display the riotous palette favored by the Peranakan merchants that prospered in this region.

Today as Singapore has urbanized, most shophouses have been converted to single-use buildings, either as high-end single-family homes or as locations dedicated to business. As houses they carry many of the romantic associations New Yorkers feel towards brownstones or San Franciscans do towards row houses. So shophouses can be hard to find at a reasonable price. The romance has also prompted commercial development of shophouses for upscale boutiques, like Club St/Ann Siang Hill. Unfortunately, ersatz shophouses - lined up, canopied over, and air-conditioned - form the main structures of the monstrous Clarke Quay development.

The shophouses along Club Street host arty shops, international fashion brands, swish offices, trendy restaurants, and even a few of the longstanding Chinese clan associations that gave the road its name. Leone Farbre has more photos on Flickr.

The strange canopies that allow visitors to Clarke Quay to experience air-conditioning whilst still outside. Image from the materials firm Macalloy's website.

Easy on the Turkey

President Harry S Truman admiring a Thanksgiving turkey in 1950. Presidents have annually "pardoned" one of the delicious fowls since JFK. The Guardian has a slideshow of past presidents getting the bird.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! The Passengers wish we could be close to our nearest and dearest Americans to enjoy the holiday. Instead it's a normal working day in Singapore. We do get the gift of a public holiday tomorrow but not because of any navigationally challenged religious dissidents. It's the time for pilgrimage to Mecca for Muslims, Hari Raya Haji in Malay. The Passengers will do Thanksgiving with a number of expatriates and sympathetic Singaporeans on Sunday evening.

The Thanksgiving holiday in America provides a number of benefits. Firstly, the occasion is secular and can be enjoyed by anyone willing to participate. It seems especially fitting as a reminder of the immigrant beginnings of our national experiment. Along with the absence of creedal partisanship, Thanksgiving celebrations are hardly commercial, mostly an excuse to eat as much food as possible while spending time with family or friends. There is, of course, NFL football and a parade with marching bands to watch. Yes, Americans can only go so long without shopping. The day after Thanksgiving, also a public holiday, marks the opening of the Christmas shopping season ("Black Friday") with "doorbuster (link to this year's Wal-Mart circular)" offers to those who can wait in the cold for a big-box retailer to open at 5:00 AM. It's a rather crass coda to a national tradition, but Thanksgiving continues to play an important role in keeping the Christmas decorations and holiday jingles off the cultural landscape at least until December is a reasonable possibility. In Singapore the Christmas decorations went up before November, in part because of all the visiting dignitaries for the APEC Summit earlier this month.

Mouth Watering Prose

The dining room at A Voce Columbus. Image from Joonbug. More pictures from Sam Sifton's review here.

I recommend reading Sam Sifton's review of the Manhattan restaurant A Voce in the New York Times. The piece demonstrates how great and descriptive food writing can be. The author's standards for every category of the dining experience are clear, and he can be surprisingly generous, as exemplified by his straightforward acceptance of the restaurant's corporate remit to produce top fare with calibrated regularity. Combining flavors creatively and choosing ingredients impeccably earn the reviewer's praise, but he dismisses as callow efforts to meet various NYC menu obligations, like strip steaks even for Italian eateries, without any attempt at culinary invention.

And the sentences Sifton uses for describing the food make for enjoyable reading. He liked the grilled calamari so much that it "could come with yard grass and used tennis balls and still be decent." Wonderful, evocative images are laid out alongside the gastronomic options, and the author does not refrain from punctuating each description with a verdict. The recommendation to enjoy a glass wine and cold cuts while reading the rest of the menu prompts Sifton to write us our own gastronomic tour.

Any two of these [appetizers] will do; there are many courses to go before you sleep. The appetizer list yields a remarkable house-made salt cod, with taggiasca olives, raisins and pine nuts, that is somehow both delicate and brawny — a football player in ballet's fourth position. There are also roasted mushrooms with mâche, hazelnuts and a creamed fontina, rich and earthy, quietly elegant, sensual: it's bedroom fare.

I additionally recommend you have a glass of red wineas a pleasurable accompaniment to such a tour de force review, maybe something Italian and reliable like a Valpolicellia, .

United Homeless Organization Revelations

One of the streetcorner tables where homeless or formerly homeless people ask passersby for donations to the United Homeless Organization. Photo from the New York Times.

On Monday the Attorney General for New York State Andrew M. Cuomo filed a lawsuit against the president and director of the United Homeless Organization alleging that the leaders used the charity's funds for personal expenses while doing little, if anything, to help the homeless in New York City. The organization has long maintained a visible presence in the city. Almost every day people on the Manhattan sidewalks pass by one of the folding tables draped in a distinctive red tablecloth with an empty water-cooler jug to collect money. The lawsuit alleges that the UHO president Stephen Riley and director Myra Walker used the charity's funds largely for personal expenses.

The details suggest a case of small-time crookery. This was not a racket that provided powerful people with the opportunity to unnecessarily fly business class on dubious business or to condemn large swaths of Brooklyn for a sports arena. As reported by the New York Times:

The expenses, the lawsuit said, included premium cable television service at Mr. Riley's apartment, restaurant meals; trips to Cleveland, Mr. Riley's hometown; and shopping purchases from GameStop, the Home Shopping Network, and the web site for Weight Watchers.

But the filing also shines a light on how those ubiquitous donation tables work. Each homeless or formerly homeless person who staffs a table pays the first $15 of donations back to the group for using their name and equipment. The rest is kept by the table's worker. Essentially UHO has been sanctioning begging on the city streets. The arrangement has been known since 2001, but it appears now that all those $15 fees collected by UHO have done little to provide any wider relief to those in need.

John Sentamu

In 2006 the Archbishop spent a week living inside a tent in York Minster.

The Guardian has published an interview today with the Archbishop of York John Sentamu. The article includes a funny anecdote in which the interviewer Stephen Moss assumed the Archbishop lived within the precinct of York Minster. Actually, the Primate of England has his official palace at Bishopthorpe and has lived there since 1241.

The Church of England's No. 2 came to Britain as a political refugee from Uganda in the 1970's. The presence of an African like Sentamu at York emphasizes the global scale of the Anglican Communion and the challenges it faces in holding together such a diverse flock. Hopefully, I will have the chance to meet him on one of my travels up North. Also the Archbishop gets to sit in the House of Lords.

Music video - Bangkok

Unruly Bangkok traffic underneath the SkyTrain. Taxis come in just about every color.

Now for some images from Bangkok. The Passengers stumbled upon this music video shoot outside the Bangkok Arts and Culture Centre, near National Stadium BTS station. We have no idea about the names of the artist or the song being performed, but the crowd did feature cub scouts.

Music video extras line up outside the Bangkok Arts & Culture Centre. Little scouts on the left.

Everybody to the right...2...3...4!

Big finish now!

Sin Huat Seafood: More Crabs

Geylang hosts Singapore's wild side, unless the APEC Summit is in town, like last weekend.

Though we are in Bangkok this week, we thought we should share our extreme gastronomic experience from Saturday. A birthday dinner was organized for a new friend at Sin Huat Eating House, one of Singapore's most revered food institutions (follow this link for a great 2003 article highlighting almost all of Singapore's food traditions). Revered should not be taken to mean refined. Sin Huat is really a streetside cafe with plastic chairs and poor service perched hard against the traffic of Geylang, the artery of Singapore's red-light district. But chef Danny Lee keeps up the coffeeshop's reputation with outstanding seafood of all sorts.

No white tablecloths or starched napkins here. Bring your own package of tissues.

The meal involved a progression of platters served up according to the whim of the chef and/or the stall aunty, staring with a perfunctory vegetable platter of kailan. After eating some greens, it was a serious seafood derby.

We had fresh scallops, pulled out of the bubbling fish tanks by Chef Danny himself and heartily slathered in a dark garlicky black-bean sauce, but bigger adventures awaited with the gung gung lala.

Gung Gung lala with spicy dipping sauce. The garlic scallops appear in the foreground.

Gung gung come steamed in the shell with a fistful of wooden skewers by which diners can spear and drag out the meat. The dipping sauce provided was a sinus busting combination of chilies, spring onion, coriander, and salty soy sauce, plus a number of other additions. Gung gung are only a little bit chewy and taste slightly of the sea, as might be expected when uncoiling the body of an animal from tidal waters.

Prawns. Prawns. Prawns.

The prawns in garlic presented one of the real standouts from the night. Again the seafood was fresh and the garlic was generous, and everyone was ecstatic to find the motherlode of flavorful buttery drippings pooled underneath the rows of shrimp tails. Just about any edible item on the table got dredged through that nectar, including the al dente squid rings that followed.

Three-crab pile-up on the east end of Geylang.

However, the crab bee hoon was the real piece-de-resistance of the evening, and THE reason visitors flock to Sin Huat. Big Sri-Lankan crabs are served with vermicelli that soaks up all sorts of essence from the shellfish. The combination is wet and salty and flavorful. Seasoned diners, like the generous chap directing the evening, ask specifically for female crabs because they include potent dry roe that mixes in with the ginger, chili, and stock sauce and hides itself amongst the noodles. Divine. Of course, female crabs do have one drawback: no claws. Not that I let this detail stop me. I think I was full for the rest of the weekend.

Bound for Bangkok

The Passengers need some more stamps in their passports. They are off to Thailand for 5 days in Bangkok. Send them an email (address on the right-hand sidebar) with any suggestions for sights to see.

Deepavali in Little India

Welcome to Little India.

I have waited too long to present these photos, but here are some scenes from Little India here in Singapore. Last month marked Deepavali, the Hindu New Year, and Serangoon Road was lit up in a festive display of color. One of the side streets was converted into a seasonal market selling all manner of fireworks, decorations, lamps, and flowers. Much of Singapore's India/Subcontinental population includes migrant workers on a hard-driving schedule. This means on Saturday nights and Sunday afternoons the streets become crowded with men, almost exclusively men, enjoying their only day off work.

The hustle and bustle around Tekka Market on a Saturday Night.

The lights along Serangoon Road. The holiday greetings here are written in Tamil, one of Singapore's four official languages.

The Deepavali market crowded with festive garlands and shoppers.

Mobiles and ornaments for the holiday season.

Upstairs Overlooking

The Singapore skyline on a clear Saturday. The curved slope atop our previous address The Sail can be seen jutting above the white Bank of China building. Notice the three towers of Marina Bay Sands casino now have complete glass facades. Classic HDB apartment blocks dominate the foreground.

The Passengers have been rather busy of late, in part due to the arrival of so many boxes full of worldly goods that need unpacking and storing. I will have to delay sending out pictures of our apartment until after we resolve that problem. Until then, here is a large image of the view from our bedroom. Our neighborhood Novena sits on a modest hill. Combine that elevation with our position on the eleventh floor, and the result is a great view of the Central Business District (CBD) skyline. Click on the image above to see a much bigger, detailed version.

Summer's End

British Summer Time (BST) came to an end yesterday. Britain returns to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), making it now eight hours behind us in Singapore. Singapore doesn't bother with daylight savings time gimmicks because the island lies about 50 km north of the equator. At this latitude the days are always about twelve hours long. In the USA, Daylight Time was expanded by Congress in 2005 to begin earlier with and run later starting with calendar year 2007. American clocks will fall back on 1 November 2009.

Animation Nation

Max Horovitz (voiced by Philip Seymour Hoffman) has anxiety problems. Image from the Mary & Max website.

Singapore's annual Animation Nation 2009 festival finished this week. The Passengers managed to see two wonderful, whimsical features: Mary & Max and The Secret of Kells. The week of moving pictures was put on my the Singapore Film Society and hosted at the National Museum's (blogged here) lecture theater/cinema. The selections this year included cartoons from around the world and with varying tones of seriousness. Waltz with Bashir, animated recollections from Israeli soldiers, is definitely not a kids' movie, but the adventures of Brendan through the Irish wilderness in The Secret of Kells are a young boy's fantasy.

Aisling and Brendan explore the forest in The Secret of Kells. Guriguriblog has a great look at the film's Insular qualities.

Both of the films we saw arrived on a diplomatic platform. Mary & Max, a really touching story about unlikely pen pals writing from Australia and New York City in the 1970's, came to Singapore as part of the cultural outreach of the Australian High Commission, and the Irish HC actually sent a representative to introduce the Secret of Kells as we saw the film on the festival's opening night. The diplomatic missions to Singapore often play a visible role in the island's social/cultural scene. In part, this serves to bring a bit of home to the various ex-pat communities here, but these countries also want to promote themselves to encourage business and trade relationships with Singaporeans. Next weekend begins Berlin Dayz, courtesy of the German Embassy Singapore.

The cat Pangur Ban in The Secret of Kells gets his name from a Gaelic poem written by an Irish monk in the ninth century. More character sketches from the filmmakers here.

And did I mention The Secret of Kells weaves its tale around the creation of the famous Irish illuminated manuscript, the Book of Kells, made around 800 CE? What could be better?

Down on the Corner, Out in the Street

José Rafael Moneo standing within the Columbia campus in front of his first New York project. Photo from the New York Times.

Early reviews are trickling in about a new landmark taking shape in upper Manhattan, Columbia University's new interdisciplinary science building. The tower balances on pillars above a very active gym and fitness center at the corner of Broadway and 120th Street. The design by José Rafael Moneo places a largely glass facade toward the campus interior, but the architect reduced the transparency of the street-facing glass by cladding the tower with a grid of panels striated with diagonal slits on either side of the outer trusses. The textural effect recalls the landscaped hedges that top the group entrance hall of Rafael Moneo's expansion at the Museo Prado. The lowest story remains incomplete and unformed, but it is supposed to hold an inviting public cafe. For a multimedia tour of the construction site visit the campus newspaper's website.

An architect's rendering of the building from 2007 showing the corner of Broadway & 120th Street.

The corner marks the convergence between Columbia, Teachers' College, Barnard, and Union Theological Seminary, and the architectural expression of self-importance for each institution means that no doors presently face onto this space. The presence of a public entrance or convenience on this spot would be a welcome, humanizing addition to the neighborhood. The more troubling relationship for the new structure is one of form and scale.

Columbia's main campus, stretching from 114th Street to 120th Street, largely conforms to McKim, Mead & White's fin de siécle plan for an enclosure of classical learning within classical, brick-faced architecture. The university has largely upheld these two tenets, with the exception of a Renzo Piano-designed student union and a handful of non-Western courses appended to the undergraduate core curriculum. However, the science building has no red brick materials or references to classical architecture. This is the disjunction that prompts former Columbia professor Barry Bergdoll to declare the building "provocative." Bergdoll is also right to acknowledging that the project creates a new focus on the north end of campus. Perhaps the visual role of this building will become clear with the construction of Columbia's new, and somewhat controversial, science-heavy campus in Harlem.

West 130th Street as envisioned by Columbia University's Manhattanville in West Harlem redevelopment project.

USA Soccer: Now some Better News

Go Wiz!

Contrary to yesterday's post, soccer is not unappreciated and unnoticed in the United States. In fact, the world's most popular spectator sport has finally found itself a place in world's largest entertainment market. Of course, soccer is not about to usurp college football or Nascar or the NFL from the nation's sporting liturgy, but the nation has slowly and steadily created opportunities to attract and retain passionate fans.

The most important effort has been the creation of Major League Soccer (MLS) in 1996. Major investments in America's domestic league began with ten teams in 1996 as an effort to capitalize on the enthusiasm generated by the 1994 World Cup finals held in the United States. Rather than splash out on top European or Latin American players in hopes of attracting huge crowds, as the ill-fated North American Soccer League did in the 1970's, the initial investors agreed to tight-fisted salary caps. Moreover, for the sake of nurturing domestic talent, i.e. the national team, each club was limited to carrying only five foreign-born players.

The experiment has undergone a number of growing pains. At first, many of the teams competed in giant stadiums designed for American football. Though these established venues were happy to lease out space in the spring and summer months, their over-sized dimensions meant that even a great turnout of 20,000 fans would bring a stadium to maybe 25% capacity. Now many franchises have sought out smaller, more intimate venues on college campuses or minor-league ballparks. LA and Columbus even have soccer-specific stadia.

Crew Stadium in Columbus, OH, offers a more fitting soccer venue than the city's 100,000-seat Ohio Stadium, aka "The Horseshoe."

Those early optics were not helped by the 1990's American sports trend of nicknaming teams for concepts and non-plural nouns. This trend produced head-scratchers like Tampa Bay Lightning in the NHL, but MLS took it to another level: Columbus Crew, San Jose Clash, Tampa Bay Mutiny. Most of these clubs were stationed in growing cities with only modest experience in pro sports, but Kansas City should have known better than to call its club KC Wiz. The name may reference "The Wizard of Oz," but a crowd chanting, "Go Wiz!" won't really intimidate the opposition. The team hastily became the Wizards in November 1996; Dallas Burn are now simply FC Dallas, and San Jose plays as Earthquakes.

The name change for Dallas taps into the current MLS trend: burnishing a side's soccer bonafides by imitating established club names in Europe. Incremental expansion has brought Real Salt Lake, Houston Dynamo, Toronto FC, and soon Philadelphia Union. Los Angeles even has Club Deportivo Chivas USA, an American offshoot of the established Guadalajara club and the area's Spanish friendly counterweight to flash LA Galaxy.

Stuart Holden of Amigo Energy (Houston Dynamo) challenges Seth Stammler of Red Bull (New York Red Bulls). Photo by Mike Stobe for Getty, 16 May 2009.

For fourteen seasons MLS has declined to buy their way to the top of the US sporting scene and settled instead for organic growth. This patience has helped to manage expectations and build a loyal fan base. The most publicized MLS story, LA Galaxy's purchase of celebrity footballer David Beckham in 2007, stood as a clear exception to the overall business model. The first franchise owners may have included heavyweights from the NFL and NHL, like Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG) and the late Lamar Hunt, but they ventured forth with a rather conservative, even European business model. Notice the choice to accept the dependable revenue of shirt sponsors. It might be a common practice worldwide, but none of the major television sports in America does that. MLS knew they were starting a league that couldn't outplay or outdraw the English Premiership or Serie A for viewers or players. Sustainability had to trump theater.

USA Soccer: First the Bad News

Update added below...

Mexico is in. England is in. So is Italy, but Turkey is out, and Portugal is looking shaky. Saturday featured worldwide sporting excitement as the major European football (soccer) leagues paused their schedule for the penultimate game of the World Cup group qualifiers. The Americans had to travel to Central America and defeat Honduras if they wanted a place at next summer's World Cup finals in South Africa. But did anyone care in the USA?

Yesterday, the Passengers awoke early in Singapore to join some of my countrymen watching college football courtesy of new-fangled Slingbox technology. For all you Britons, college football is the Saturday ritual of autumn across the Atlantic that involves millions of people gathering in stadiums with seating for over 100,000 people to watch university students play (American) football. A college football Saturday features more than fifty games, but only about twenty really matter. To partake of this rite in Singapore, twelve hours ahead of New York, passionate alumni must choose between the afternoon games starting at midnight or the evening games that start at 8:00 AM Sunday morning. This week was the highly anticipated contest between Florida and Louisiana State, but we were Big Ten alumni so we cared more about Michigan vs. Iowa.

As we watched, we noted the results from the earlier European qualifiers that occasionally scrolled across the bottom of the screen, along with other college scores and listings for the baseball playoffs, but none of us knew what country USA was playing nor what the game meant for their chance to qualify. The second half of the match in Honduras was still going when the Michigan game finished so we decided to change channels and cheer for our country. Unfortunately, no station available to us was carrying the game. That's right, despite 300+ channels of cable television available to one Michigan household, not one station bothered to broadcast a major international soccer match.

UPDATE (14 October 2009): The difficulty in finding the USA vs. Honduras game on TV was abetted by the Honduras federation, which under FIFA rules holds the television rights as the home side, deciding to sell the US broadcast rights to a company which elected to show the game on an obscure closed-circuit broadcast. Similar, yet stranger, circumstances restricted the moot England qualifier in Ukraine to a pay-per-view, online-only event. However, both blackouts ultimately resulted from the calculations of major media outlets that the expense of buying television rights and altering established broadcast schedules would not garner the advertising revenues or ratings to justify airing a World Cup qualifier.

Broadsheet typos - The Fourth Plinth

Sam Martin appointed himself referee of Trafalgar Square one night, starting at 3am.

Even the venerable journalistic newspapers of Britain are showing signs of decline in the internet age. Fewer copy editors means more typographical errors in print and online. This one came from a Guardian review of, or maybe a comment on, Anthony Gormley's art installation that put ordinary Britons atop the usually empty fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square.

So it [Gormley's One & Other project] was popular before it began, and that popularity has not diminished. It has been widely celebrated as a democratic portrait of Britain in the 12st century.

I love this error because the ambiguity provokes such enjoyable speculation. What did the author Jonathan Jones really intend to write? Was One & Other "a democratic portrait of Britain in the 12th century," an insightful, modern take on the formative decades following the Norman Conquest? Perhaps the text is correct and this refers to some system of describing an era by weight. A 12-stone (168 lbs./76.2 kg) century would be a sturdy lady but a well-proportioned chap (to the Americans: people are weighed in stone in Britain and Ireland at 14 pounds/stone). The other intention might be "in the 21st century," but this hardly seems humorous.

Gormley's installation was a provocative piece of theater and certainly a populist stroke of creativity. The article includes a worthwhile slideshow of what people choose to do when given an hour of public prominence. The newspaper also featured a review that contradicted Jones' critique.

Können Sie mir helpfen?

The lost and found at Oktoberfest in Munich sorts all the mobile phones they receive according to manufacturer. Also the Fundbüro keeps an inventory of all its holdings using typewritten index cards. Let us both praise and mock great national traditions!

York St Mary's - Five Sisters Installation

York St Mary's serves as an exhibition space for which the York Museums Trust regularly commissions site-specific artworks. The medieval parish church was deconsecrated in 1958.

Today was my last full day in York, a chance to catch up on a few last details of fieldwork before sending myself back towards London tomorrow morning. I made sure to drop by York St Mary's during a lunch break to photograph their current installation: Five Sisters.

The exhibition caught my eye because it uses the same nickname given to the towering transept facade inside the city's cathedral, York Minster. The artists Emma Biggs and Matthew Collings drew on the aesthetics of these five lancets to create their composition in mosaic and canvas painting. At the Minster, these soaring fields of glass were not decorated with representations of stories or saints, instead a mostly monochromatic scheme of grisaille glass was used to create geometric arrangements.

The glass in the so-called "Five Sisters" windows at York Minster was probably installed around 1250.

A detail of the "Five Sisters" glass patterns (via Traditional Building). Thirteenth-century stained glass compositions generally limited the use of saturated fields of red and blue compared to earlier Gothic tastes. Lighter colors and clearer glass admitted more light.

The mosaic along the nave of the church uses local fragments of pottery from the thirteenth and fourteenth century for tesserae. The homage to the Middle Ages becomes explicit, and the reuse of these shards calls attention to how succeeding generations treat objects of the past. These potsherds come from the York Museums Trust, and I assume that their collection has a surfeit of such remnants. Most preservation institutions are awash with historical bric-a-brac, only a small fraction of which could be put on display, only a fraction of which would interest the visiting public.

Emma Biggs & Matthew Collings, Five Sisters, 2009. Monochromatic paintings are placed at either end of the mosaic.

Detail of the tesserae in Emma Biggs & Matthew Collings, Five Sisters, 2009.

So what is a museum to do with all these shards? Similarly, how is a city like York supposed to manage its past after 2,000 years of continuous history? This installation allows artifacts to be both used and seen, and the venue itself, a decommissioned thirteenth-century parish church, came about through parallel circumstances. York has 19 surviving medieval parish churches, a more than adequate supply for the population's present Anglican needs. For artists, creative expressions and materials and techniques always arise out of earlier ideas and labor, and these creations must always contend with the "greats" of the past. In this case, Biggs and Collings place their borrowings front and center for everyone to consider.