Brothers Never Lose

“This is gonna be one hell of a match,” a bystander said, as we watched the warm-up for the Portmore United versus Humble Lions football game. It was a balmy Sunday evening at the Ferdie Neita Sports Complex in Portmore, a suburb that is a 40-minute drive from downtown Kingston and boasts being the largest housing complex in the Caribbean. Portmore is so sizeable, in fact, that the Jamaican Parliament is currently bantering about whether to add it as a 15th Parish; Jamaica is comprised of 14 Parishes and there are equal amounts of support and protest about adding another. As the teams practiced field sprints to a soundsystem busting tracks from Mavado, Beenie Man and Serani, the crowd readied themselves in the bleachers. A group of men parked their motorcycles along the fence while a group of women set up a stand to sell bottles of Red Stripe and Tru juice. As the sun began to set, the field lights came up and refracted the green and magenta windowpanes of a neighboring church. It was a bit like being at one of the African Cup of Nations matches but on a much more intimate scale in a setting that felt like a distant cousin of the South Bronx.

It was going to be one hell of a match, I discovered, because the host and visiting teams were at their core one and the same. As a friend explained, “It’s brothers playing brothers but they don’t want to beat each other.” Both Portmore United and the Humble Lions are premier league teams that originally hail from Clarendon – a Parish located on the south end of the island – and were split literally into competing camps. The Portmore team, formerly known as Hazard United, was renamed and relocated for reasons involving a mixture of bureaucracy, geography and a push for Portmore to have its own home team. The president of the Portmore Football Club is an official in the Jamaican Football Federation. The President of the Humble Lions Football Club is the Minister of Transportation and Works. Team members were swapped out and transferred. Players were forced to choose sides. The end result left fans in a state of schizophrenic bipartisanship.

The Upper Kingdom

You first met Spencer Chung nearly a year ago through a friend who assured you that he was the young don of Caribbean horse racing. At just 40 years old, he had already produced a record-breaking filly, St. Cecelia, named after his grandmother who was a first generation Jamaican-Chinese shop owner. On a sun-bleached Saturday, you rode with your friend to Caymanas Park, located in Portmore, about an 11-mile drive from downtown Kingston, and watched your first horserace in Jamaica with Spencer. Post race, he showed you the lay of the land and the fascinating and bittersweet universe surrounding a life lived on the track.

You kept in touch and one year later Spencer invited you to the biggest race next to the Derby, the Super Stakes, held in early November. His horse Typewriter was running in the Super and St. Cecelia would be competing in the Sprint Championship; there were 13 races in total scheduled for that day. It would be St. Cecelia’s last race, her “last hurrah” according to The Sunday Observer, as she was 7 now and ready to retire and begin breeding. It was going to be a big day for Spence, the kind of feast or famine reckoning he’d been preparing for all year. His seven-day-a-week, 4a.m. call times at the stables would either garner him a healthy war chest or leave him with an empty coffer. Speaking with him on the phone, you could taste his anticipation from 1,500 miles away.

You hop the 2a.m. flight from JFK to Norman Manley with the photographer, and arrive early on Friday morning to a see a heathery mist settling over the city of Kingston. Welcome to the bible isle, the spice isle, you think, reminding yourself of the ubiquitous presence of Jamaican culture the world over despite the island’s small size. That evening you meet Spence for dinner at The Regency Bar at the Terra Nova Hotel and are surprised by how calm and sociable he is considering the weight of the day that lies ahead. Thirteen races. Seven horses in competition. A 4.5 million Jamaican dollar purse. He assures you that he’s ready for tomorrow, and tells you it’s best to arrive at the track early if you want to capture the full spectrum of the Super Stakes. As Spencer drives you back to the apartment where you are staying, there is a shift in his mood and as if he has emigrated to a more private side of himself. “You only get one chance,” he says, watching the road ahead. “It could be the lowest of the lows or the highest of the highs…it’s a once a year thing.”

Front Tier

Daniel Peddle, casting director, artist and filmmaker, is a frontiersman of the first order. Eighteen years since discovering his calling, he’s finding talent for Givenchy, Phillip Lim and Comme des Garçons, among an über roster of fashion houses. Meanwhile, he’s still keeping a very healthy stride with his longtime passions for painting and filmmaking; he shot his first experimental short Last Things while studying graduate film at NYU and has since produced three epiphanous feature films. His agency, The Secret Gallery, formed with longtime partner and fellow visual pioneer Drew Dasent, is the go-to source for undiscovered beauty and uncommon edge. An artist with multiple and multi-layered projects, Peddle comingles his gifts to form intense moments of awakening coupled with more private windows of retreat. His craft is the art of refined exploration, of sifting through the human morass and unearthing its coveted delights. As he put it, “The streets of New York become like streams for me, a never-ending source of potentially amazing people.”

“If we win today nobody goes to work tomorrow. And if we lose today nobody goes to work tomorrow.” -Spectator Emmanuel Clinton on the Ghana vs. Nigeria match 3-0, 2/03/08

Outside In

Sometimes being an outsider at the African game is better than being an insider. It’s not about the ticket price or the public profiling or being able to actually watch the match. Attending the game from outside the stadium is more about the maelstrom of feeling; the pre-game tension, the collective concentration, the unleashed euphoria of the lifeforce that is African football and the lifeworld surrounding it. It is a hazing, to be sure, an initiation into the cult of the authentic. It’s something comparable to taking up ranks with an underground league of nations – a joint reserved strictly for the “outsider” insiders.

Palm wine drunks, pickpockets, pimps, a band of Togolese chefs on exodus from Lomé, a posse of Nigerian rude bwoys from the backstreets of Lagos all commingle in a mash-up of culture, religion, tribe and a shared obsession with football. You wade among this sea of the new familiar. You participate in this rite of passage that is specific to place (Accra, Ghana), event (The African Cup) and subject (football). As one sportscaster put it: “I never watch a match without my heart medicine close at hand.” It’s a kind of metaphysical, multinational, transcultural workout that leaves you feeling stripped down to the bare essence of heartbreak, jubilation and reckless abandon once, and if, you make it out the other end.

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“The Immortals”

Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. I should begin by admitting that the off-beat pairing of this renegade literary couple has fascinated me since before I can remember. On paper Stein, the sedentary, upper-crust salon matriarch, and
Hemingway, the piratical Midwestern journalist, sit on very opposite sides of the cultural equator. But if they were worlds apart in terms of their physical backgrounds, they were close as cousins when it came to their city of inspiration—Paris; their temperaments—surly, stubborn and highly inventive; and their mutually compatible raison d’êtres—to radically reshape the language of American prose. On a superficial level, I was intrigued for personal reasons. I am a Midwesterner, a woman and an aspiring writer. On a deeper level though, my fascination had more to do with their human chemistry, their writerly bond, their influential friendship and the strange shift in alliances that mysteriously ended it.

As the story goes, Hemingway first met Stein at her apartment at 27 Rue de Fleurus, where they almost instantly fell sway to the spell of first crush inebriation. Hemingway would stop by Stein’s atelier after a morning of writing to decompress and ingest copious amounts of eau-de-vie. Stein reveled in his tall tales of journalistic exploits from abroad and gave him advice on writing. Over time, the two expatriated compadres would alter each other’s lives significantly. It was Stein who introduced Hemingway to bullfighting, Spain and the painting of Cézanne. In return, Hemingway helped Stein find a magazine to publish her monolithic and barely navigable novel The Making of Americans in serial form. In fact, Hemingway revered Stein so deeply that when Stein found his writing unsatisfactory, he would throw it out and start over from scratch. He also named his unlikely mother, mentor and muse the godmother of his first child.

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“Bolt of Lightning”

Usain “Lighting” Bolt’s meteoric rise in the world of track and field is matched only by his downbeat intensity and fathomless charisma. The golden son of Jamaican sprinting has been rewriting history since the age of 16 when he brought down the house on home soil at the 2003 All-School Boys and Girls’ Champs track meet. His series of chart topping runs culminated in a record-breaking 200m/400m double in 20.23 s and 45.30 s respectively. Prior to that, Bolt’s unprecedented talent got kick-started rather unexpectedly when he won his first bronze medal in hurdles at the Western Champs competition held in Trelawny. Due to his unusual height, Bolt also competed in the high jump and was a talented fast bowler in cricket before turning his focus entirely to sprinting. The rest is headline news.

Three gold medals and three World records announced the arrival of a gifted young legend at Beijing 2008. As a five-time World and three-time Olympic gold medalist sprinter, Bolt sprung the Olympic record in the 100 meters, the 200 meters and – with his teammates – the 4×100 meter relay. He captured the gold in each race, the first man to win three sprinting events at a single Olympics since Carl Lewis in 1984. Post Beijing, Bolt produced world record-breaking form at the Berlin World Championships; he beat both the 100 meters and 200 meters World records, clocking in at a jaw-dropping 9.58 and 19.19 seconds, and added two more gold medals to his archives. Some call Bolt “The Upsetter.” We like to think of him as an Achilles with replaceable heels.

The Factory

The story of Argentine football is equal parts mythical odyssey and working-class parable. In recent times, the country has produced two unalloyed icons—Diego Maradona, whom fans refer to as “D10S” (a play on the Spanish word for “god” and his uniform number), and Lionel Messi, a three-time FIFA World Player of the Year. The roots of the sport are closely intertwined with the history of Boca Juniors, Argentina’s most decorated club. Founded over 100 years ago by five Italian immigrants, the team has won 24 Primera División crowns, 18 international titles and a fan base so loyal there is actually a Boca Juniors cemetery where supporters can be buried in coffins adorned with the team’s colors and crest.

The Club Atlético Boca Juniors youth academy, aka The Factory, is the team’s main feeder and the place where Argentina’s future football royalty get baptized. Set on a property called La Candela, just outside the small town of San Justo, the state-of-the-art compound is a forty-five minute drive from Buenos Aires. On the way, we pass butcher shops with blocky, hand-painted signs, a monastery, gauchos on horseback riding alongside traffic and teenagers on mopeds, crushed three to a seat. At the front gate, security guards put visitors through a fairly rigorous ID check. When I ask about the heavy-handed scrutiny, one of the guards explains, “These kids are our country’s most precious gold.”

Fight Town

Riding the line between brutal exorcism and a poetic sublime, boxing has produced more legends than any other sport of the last century. The noble art, as it’s historically known, has also fed an enduring fascination with pugilism as being more than just a sum of its parts. A solo act, an intimate engagement, one of the purest demonstrations of man-versus-man, boxing is ultimately a complex dance whose multiple rhythms coalesce into a strange tango falling somewhere between the lethal and the divine.

In Ghana, boxing ranks second only to football in terms of national obsessions. In the small ocean-side fishing town of Bukom, an open-air boxing ring is situated within close reach of the local football pitch. Having already produced a wealth of hometown champions, Bukom has taken on the otherworldly dimensions of a mythological kingdom whose elegant warriors live, breathe and dream boxing. As the story goes, when a victor returns home after a win, the short twenty-minute journey from the capital of Accra can take as long as two hours once the locals turn out to escort their hero home. This is fight town. This is Bukom. This is myth becoming legend.

Beyond its borders, “the boxing university” has seen its fighters, most notably Azumah Nelson, gain celebrity status and even induction into the International Boxing Hall of Fame. Bukom’s hierarchy of top contenders includes Alfred Kotey, Ike Quartey, Kwame Asante and Joshua Clottey, that latter of whom won the International Boxing Federation title by defeating Zab Judah in 2008. But there is also a next wave of new fighters turning local hero worship into a national badge of reckoning. One who aspires to join their illustrious ranks is Malik “Bukom Snake” Jabir.

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Sweet Surprise

The opening footage of Wassup Rockers is vintage Larry Clark. A bare-chested boy with dewy adolescent skin and a set of preternaturally ripened lips describes the crimes and misdemeanors of his gang of loveable low lives. There is a palpable tension pushing up against his monologue; he scratches his arms, riffles through and then self-consciously rearranges his hair; his smile wavers between sincere generosity and cowering suspicion. It almost feels as if Clark’s presence behind the camera threatened to further unveil his already exposed state of vulnerability.

The energy continues to build so that by the time our subject Jonathan has guided us through tales of underage sex, a friend’s failed suicide attempts, and his own dreams of rock stardom, we are prepared for nothing short of what we have come to expect from Mr. Clark’s photojournalistic approach to life on the fringe: another dangerously irreverent ride to the dark side of teenage love and lust.

“The film starts out like a documentary but then turns into this wild fantasy ride,” Clark said, during a recent telephone conversation from his home in Los Angeles. “I didn’t want to make what you’d expect from me. I wanted to make this crazy, made-up adventure. I wanted to goof on white people a bit too.” Indeed, Rockers has the distinct feel of a road movie, roving, euphoric, full of constant motion. The only difference is that instead of a car, the mode of transport is seven skateboards, carrying seven oddly timeless and strikingly beatific young men. Trailing them through a day-in-the-life scenario—we see them going to school, hanging out in the park afterwards and later getting drunk on 40’s at a late night band session, where they compare notes on their parents’ sex lives—Clark gives us more of a virtual painting of modern-day life in South Central than an actual start-to-finish storyline.

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Heroes for Days

All is forgiven in the city of comfortable souls and creative minds. And the lifeworld of possibilities is far from limited.

There is a song by the German band Wir Sind Helden—We Are Heroes—that tells the story of going on a shopping trip to “buy a new life.” It’s a bumpy, upbeat party anthem that basks in its unapologetically pop production values while back-handedly dropping existential advice. The name of the song is “Guten Tag (Reklamation)”—“Hello (Reclamation)”—and its closing line warns: “I took my new life home and tried it on but it didn’t fit.”

I first heard the track at a “house wrecking” party on a cool summer night in Berlin. The crowd was an unruly mix of survival artists, city clochards, smiling grandmothers and soul-surfing expatriates hailing from London to Chicago and beyond. The party fare included champagne and Jägermeister, served with baguettes and heads of Bavarian Swiss cheese. The two disc-man and a speaker deejay played everything from David Bowie to Gnarls Barkley to Gwen Stefani to old school salsa. When a well-known Sean Paul track came on, a shaven-headed, army-fatigued young man (camouflage is the all-occasion wardrobe of choice in Berlin these days) informed me that he was ready to show me how to whine. It was the kind of night that far exceeded any expectations I’d harbored of the crane-locked, wall-crashed pulsecenter of Germany. Indeed it was a panoramic occasion. I returned to my hotel early the next morning in a state of wide-eyed wonderment.