I've been following this year’s FIFA soccer world cup quite seriously. I guess you're puzzled now to be served a sports topic on RT. Anyway, one reason for this is the "See the world through football" talk event on 7/27 I'm going to appear in together with non-fiction author/critic Sayama Ichiro. Sayama-san is one of the contributors to my other project, the "Insight Diaries" website, and besides this, he’s an editor and exceptional soccer expert.

Sayama-san pointed me at a book titled "The Thinking Fan’s Guide to The World Cup". As you would expect from a book with such a title, it’s a kind of anthology with contributions from the likes of Nick Hornby ("Fever Pitch"), Robert Coover ("The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop", "Spanking the Maid"), and other novelists, editors and journalists mainly from the USA and Europe. Each of them writes in an inimitably entertaining way about the general state of affairs, soccer history, and characteristics of the respective national team of one of the 32 countries that participated in the world cup.

The publisher of the book is also putting out the British art magazine "Granta", and one of the compilers is the art paper’s vice editor-in-chief. Understandably, the concept itself is lined with finest British humor, and fueled by the sort of intellectuality we know from "Granta". For example, Jim Frederick, a senior editor at the Japanese office of "Time" magazine, writes the following: "In Japan they have pizza with cod roe or sea urchin topping, and 'green tea au lait'. […] Japan is a democracy, so people go voting regularly, but it’s always the same party that ends up governing the country (they're calling themselves 'Liberal Democratic Party', but their policy isn't particularly liberal, and not too democratic either). Traditional Japanese-style toilets are virtually extinct, and the western-style toilets that have replaced them are no conventional water closets, but they wash your bottom with warm water and then dry it with air…"

In his "foreword", the editor writes something like, "Why shouldn't it be possible to create a useful yet extraordinary book by mixing grim facts and data with texts by prominent authors? Why shouldn't it be possible to make a book that guides the spectator through the entire world cup tournament from the opening match to the final, and which at once offers various information on the participating countries? […] Each time a soccer world cup takes place, there are numerous magazines and newspapers that run special features on teams and players. There usually do exist some essential points in such articles, but something is definitely missing. It appeared to me that we need to use soccer as a lens — and a pretext — through which we can focus our attention on a broader territory to learn from."

One can't necessarily call all 32 essays (plus foreword, introduction, summary and afterword) uniformly good, but I would say that the result reflects the editor’s original ideas to a considerable extent. Even a hardcore soccer fan (or internationally working journalist) can impossibly have exhaustive knowledge of all the backgrounds and current state of things in 32 countries at once. In fact, even the editor admits, "Thanks to the book, I know much more about other countries now. I know where I can find crocodile leather in Paraguay, and where to go surfing in Portugal. […] I learned about the historical facts that more than two million slaves were brought with ships from Angola to the American continent and the West Indies, and that Mexico is the richest of all third world countries, and at once the poorest of the industrialized nations. (I believe) I even learned the Persian word for 'penis'."

The artists Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno, who shot head-butting soccer superstar Zinedine Zidane for the movie "Zidane: Un Portrait du 21e Siecle", have realized that a soccer match is about as long as a movie, and report that, inspired among others by Andy Warhol’s "Sleep" that shows for more than five hours nothing but a sleeping man, they came up with the idea to create a "portrait of the 21st century" with cameras. The 95-minute-long movie, which consists of images recorded by a total of 17 cameras that followed Zidane at every turn, gives the viewer a visual experience that is completely different from what we usually call "documentary". The serenely silent, almost abstract art sort of "pictures" showing clear-cut details of the soccer pitch and Zidane’s body are of a quality that none of the multiple cameras used in a live telecast could ever deliver.

Aside from dramatic developments of the actual games that were beyond the makers' control, the entire movie is extremely quiet. Exceptions are pictures from Zidane’s childhood, somewhat philosophical monologues, and newsreels of all kinds that suddenly slot in here and there. Images of news, accidents, fightings, international conferences, or deaths of celebrities that all occurred on April 23, 2005 are being superimposed with violent abruptness on sceneries of a match between Reqal Madrid and Villareal that took place on the same day.

Both "The Thinking Fan’s Guide to The World Cup" and "Zidane: Un Portrait du 21e Siecle" are vehicles for the same message: The soccer stadium as a microcosm. But there certainly exists a bigger universe around that microcosm, in which seemingly unrelated things keep happening around the clock. In fact, all those events can't be unrelated to each other. I hope that publications or artworkd like the ones I introduced here will surface in th efuture also in less-developed soccer nations.

Ozaki Tetsuya / Editor in chief / REALTOKYO