ADAM MEMBREY

A Ship Off to Sea: How Manchester City Got Me Back Into Soccer Nerdery

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In 1998, being a nerd had nothing to do with the internet. Months before Google first made landfall, I caught my whiffs of nerdery within other analog searches. I ambled up and down library aisles, spilled my cereal milk over Sports Illustrated profiles, and thumbed through the daily newspaper. I squinted at everything, both out of curiosity and an undiagnosed glasses prescription. 

My first memories of soccer were of ineptitude. Of running up and down the field in the wrong direction. Of not knowing how to pull off the sweet moves my friends did. But three years into my withering Rec League soccer career, the nerd inside me thirsted for more. With the World Cup coming – the first that I truly understood the magnitude and complexity of – I had to know it all. I looked through magazines, books, and the deep pockets of strip malls to find trading cards for players in now-defunct soccer leagues.

I had to play, think, and read it.

The 1998 World Cup not only represented the first (and only) time I ever taped a full-length soccer game with an actual VHS, but it encapsulated a period of time in which I became somewhat obsessed with learning about soccer players around the world. I knew about Carlos Valderamma from Colombia and Juergen Klinnsman from Germany (I even dressed as them for consecutive Halloweens – and, of course, no one knew who I was). I knew nearly the entire starting 11 for Brazil. I knew an awful lot more about soccer around the world than you would ever expect from a dorky deaf 4th grade kid in Spokane, Washington.

But England’s Premier League soccer eluded me. I didn’t understand all the terms – transfer fees, multiple league titles, the cheeky way the British love to talk about their footy stars. I just knew one name and one name only: Manchester United. For some reason, it felt easy to remember. It felt majestic. It felt like something akin to royalty. Even as my attention swerved to other sports over the years, I always knew Man United had quite a hold around the world, if only as one of the the most valuable sports teams on the planet.

In the summer of 2017, I went on a solo two-week trip to Europe. I had two main objectives: to see Ireland, a country I had long salivated to see, and to visit my cousin and her husband in Manchester. After eight days of awesome, exhilarating, exceedingly dumb adventures involving over 70 miles of walking across Ireland, Amsterdam, Paris, and London, I found myself in one place for 5 days: good ol’ Manchester proper.

While touring my cousin’s apartment that first morning, she pointed out to me that just a mere mile or two thataway stood Etihad Stadium, the home of Manchester City’s soccer team. I thought it was cool. But it didn’t even register. Of course they would be rivals with Manchester United, but I only read about one Manchester team that summer of 1998 and the many years after, and it certainly was not Manchester City.

My third day in Manchester, I had a small request: to see the outskirts of Old Trafford, aka Manchester’s home stadium since 1910. Riding the bus over, I could identify the gaudy behemoth from a mile away. Of course that was the home of Manchester United. It had to announce itself.

Even the nearby mall in Old Trafford felt like it had been born out of United’s hold over the town: fake ostentation, a pining for money and attention alike. It felt like stumbling into a British imitation of Las Vegas, of American excess, where even the designers smirked as they dashed out their blueprints. Inside, past the glossy gold railings, was a food court that closely imitated a cruise ship. It was excess packaged inside the place where excess lives: the bustling, teeming shopping mall.

Fast forward to Labor Day Weekend 2018. I’m home alone for the weekend with my girlfriend’s cat. The possibilities are endless for what we can do (well, at least for me – that cat ain’t leaving the house for nobody). Instead, we stay inside thanks to an article I read on The Ringer about what I would spend all weekend watching: Amazon Prime’s All or Nothing series on Manchester City’s record-breaking 2017-18 season.

Very quickly, a few things became clear as I raced through each episode:

  1. I was in love with Manchester City.
  2. I found Manchester United detestable and expendable.
  3. I loved every single player, coach, and crew member of this City team.
  4. I was in love with Manchester City. Did I mention that?

City’s coach, Pep Guardiola, is the kind of coach you always want to have. He’s demanding of his players, but he’s also highly personable. They know he cares. They know he has their back. They know he’s capable of celebrating a joyous moment after the final whistle blows. He’s the kind of coach a young soccer player dreams of playing for and an old veteran finds comfort in working alongside. This becomes especially apparent as the series gives us glimpses of the Premier League’s other, far less charismatic coaches (although Liverpool’s Jurgen Klopp has his moments).

The style of soccer they play closely resembled the style my own soccer teams wanted to play, except these were world-class athletes with impeccable execution and delightful personalities.

Sometimes all it takes is a chance to get to know someone, and then they can turn you away from anything.

I wrote about this same feeling with the San Antonio Spurs in 2014. I spent most of my life hating them for their success. I wanted them to lose to my boy LeBron’s Miami Heat. But when I saw the way they played, the constant, excitable whirring of their offense and the tough-mindedness of their defense, I couldn’t help but be smitten. And when I gave myself a chance to like them, I only loved them more. Whatever hatred I ever had towards a highly successful organization as them immediately melted away.

Some people call this being a bandwagon fan. I call this falling in love.

I didn’t fall in love with the 2014 Spurs because they won. I fell in love with the way they won, they way they approached their lives on and off the court. The same can be said for City. It would be so easy to label me a bandwagon fan after their incredible 2017-18 season, in which they broke multiple records and only seem to be gathering even more momentum so young in this current 2018-19 season.

(Photo by Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images)

But I love the way they play. I love their players. I love how they work together and how they defend each other. Not every successful team is like this. In fact, most aren’t. City is something special, and we will likely look back on this iteration years from now as some kind of lightning that was captured in a bottle.

So perhaps it’s fitting the City logo is of a sailing ship. Ships typically achieve one of three destinies: they either sink, are torn apart for scraps, or are placed in a glass bottle to be preserved for the many years to follow.

This is a team born to be placed upon the shelf of history. I will enjoy as much of it as I can before it’s bottled up for good.

Emboldened By The Embrace: When DEADPOOL 2 and ANT-MAN AND THE WASP Took Giant Leaps for Sequelkind

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It’s hard to believe now, but there did exist a time on this planet when Deadpool – as a movie character – felt like a gigantic risk. No one knew if it would work. No one knew if a story could be hammered out and an adequate budget paired along with it. The public’s first filmic taste of the character, which came in X:Men Origins: Wolverine, was so poorly received that it probably set back any development for, well, 13 years. It took some persistence from Ryan Reynolds and writers Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick to get this baby into shape. And then it took a mistakenly-or-perhaps-totally-intentionally leaked proof-of-concept short film to finally kick down the doors.

The point is: this is a movie that had a lot going for it, and yet: no one knew if it would be successful.

$781 million dollars at the worldwide box office will certainly help with that question.

The best thing Deadpool did, beyond make a lot of people a ton of money (and show that superheroes could be exceedingly silly and violent and still be an awful lot of fun), is show the character had been accepted. Now, the creative team didn’t have to worry so much about financing or funding or pushing a rock up a treadmill of a craggy hill. It could focus on telling a good story, coming up with some crackling humor, and having some goddamn fun.

This enabled them to take their time. To let the original director go over creative differences. To get a great actor like Josh Brolin aboard. To add a little more cheddar to the budget and raise that freak flag even higher than before. There’s beauty in confidence that comes from acceptance. And the Deadpool 2 team took it and ran with it as far as they could, before the public ever noticed they were about to run out of breath.

When Marvel got a taste of success with their first Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America movies, they started lining up the next installations in their ongoing story. But it didn’t matter how much money these movies made or how well they seemed to be accepted; I simply could not understand the appeal of a movie or character called Ant-Man. It seemed so desperately uncool. So uncinematic. What could possibly be the fun in this endeavor?

Edgar Wright’s involvement with Ant-Man gave me some indication the character had more potential that I realized. But his departure in 2012, a particularly sad piece of business, only increased my doubts. Surely, Marvel would realize they had something so uncool on their hands they couldn’t possibly heat it back up. But they moved on, hiring Adam McKay and eventual star Paul Rudd to finish up the script. They hired director Peyton Reed (Bring It On, Down with Love, The Break-Up) to take over. And they sped ahead, making this seemingly uncool thing into something worthy.

The original Ant-Man, like the original Deadpool, is a great example of what happens when fresh air is pumped into popcorn-stained theaters. I’ll never forget being positively delighted by the final showdown with the villain, an epic train fight that took place on a child’s Thomas the Train set and eventually the inside of a suitcase. After the excess of Avengers: Age of Ultron, it cleansed the palate so well my sense of taste and appetite for movies returned. Instead of feeling numbed by status quo, I felt enlivened by all the possibilities.

But the biggest thing the success of Ant-Man (and his appearance in Captain America: Civil War) taught its filmmakers is that the audience can definitely accept Paul Rudd – a delightful actor far more known for comedies such as Anchorman – as an action star. Just because Brian Fontana had a panther cologne didn’t mean he needed it to be credible; he could believably exist alongside the Black Panther himself, T’Challa, as well as Peter Parker, Tony Stark, and Steve Rogers, and no one would wonder if he had stumbled onto the wrong film set.

Deadpool 2 and Ant-Man and the Wasp came out only a month apart, but they taught us the same thing: confidence through acceptance leads to an emboldened, risk-taking attitude. Deadpool 2 amps up the humor and brutal action, but it also takes some chances with more dramatic storytelling and spends a good chunk of its runtime building up a team for Deadpool that gets entirely killed off minutes into its first mission. Ant Man and the Wasp sees Reed and his collaborators having even more fun with all the shrinking and expanding, as well as deepening relationships, characters, and the presence of the Quantum Realm. Both films have an undeniable glee to their energy. They want to entertain you. They want you to get your money’s worth. But they also are clearly having so much goddamn fun. It’s a form of contagious that can’t help but make you giggle along.

The next steps for Deadpool and Ant-Man are less sure. Deadpool might be joining an X-Force movie before any further adventures. Worst case scenario: Disney’s purchase of Fox means we may have seen our last R-rated Deadpool flick. Deadpool can do without a swear word or two, but theres a level of chaos and inappropriateness inherent in the character that cannot be and should not be washed out. Ant-Man more than likely has to help bail out some of the Avengers in next year’s Infinity War: End Game before any further solo adventures with the Wasp.  I don’t know what will happen with these two emboldened, far-less-risky characters, but they can take satisfaction in knowing when the time came, they shot their shot.

 

Under the Macroscopic Microscope

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One of my favorite ways to get inspired is to look through any magazine. The colorful, glossy pages are visually stimulating on their own. But they’re also home to a great deal of high-quality photos, a stimulating mix of models, product placement, copywriting, and digital editing. I’ll often cut out a photo of someone in a rather interesting pose and see how I can recontextualize the photo with a little bit of my own creativity.

The above picture started with a photo of a child looking for bugs in the grass. I didn’t find it in a magazine at your local grocery checkout. I found it in the middle of a thick manual for a training session in desperate competition for redefining the limits of boredom.

Since we were also talking about healthy relationships and how we, as teachers and educators, interact with our students, I couldn’t help but think something we’ve been told often but often forget: that children notice far more than we ever give them credit for. Even from a very young age, they have a pulse on our temperament, sometimes in a way that outpaces our own ability to recognize it.

Any place that is home to a child – be it an actual suburban home or a school in the heart of the city – will be endlessly observed and scrutinized. The child will recognize the power dynamics. The child will know who to go to when something is needed. The child will know who to avoid. The child will always, always be watching far more than credit is given for.

And it’s not something to be scared of. I’m not trying to suggest that it’s only a matter of time before Blumhouse Productions contracts the kids in your neighborhood to be the real-life production of the next Purge movie sequel. Instead, it’s an opportunity to let our actions be our words. To let ourselves be observed in a way that pushes us closer to who we really want to be.

No Justice for JUSTICE LEAGUE

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Some movies are so heavily reported on they feel devoid of any surprise. By the time Warner Brothers released Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and it’s unwieldy title into the wild, they had loaded a pre-emptive strike bullet into their PR gun: already, across the pond, film was rolling on its follow-up, Justice League. No one knew details on the story. No one knew if it was going to be any good. In many ways, it didn’t matter: they just needed the public to believe they had something already cooking.

Here’s a core relationship that you need to understand as a moviegoer: Marvel and DC are the two biggest comic book companies, and have been rivals since the 1960’s. DC has historically always been associated with Warner Brothers. You’ve seen their work in both animated and live-action form. Until 2006, Marvel was rather polygamous, selling its properties out to Fox (X-Men, Fantastic Four, Deadpool), Sony (Spider-Man), and Universal (The Incredible Hulk) because it desperately needed the cash to stay afloat. But from the time Iron Man hit in 2008 and Marvel’s 20-movie plan culminated in last May’s Infinity War, Warner Brothers-DC has been looking through the window, drooling at their rival’s unprecedented success.

It knew it wanted some of that Marvel movie money. It just didn’t know how to get there.

So after Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy ended, DC did a little bit of everything. It made itself darker. That didn’t really work. It decided to do a soft opening of a team-up in Batman v. Superman before going hard with Justice League. But they barely crawled through to that, a leaden zeppelin scraping the tops of buildings in its reach for flight. Then they ultimately decided to disband the whole shared universe concept to focus on different stories while pulling their Justice League around to surround the one undeniable success so far: 2016’s Wonder Woman.

It looks like Warner Brothers is still guessing. You can’t look like you know what you’re doing if you’re trying to make 3 different Joker movies at the same time.

So here’s the very specific criteria it took for me to finally watch a $300 million dollar movie that came out 8 months ago: I had a 3.5 hour flight, limited movie options on-board, and needed it to be something that had closed captions and probably did not rely on a totally bitchin’ soundtrack.

Warner Brothers: there’s your audience.

So I decided to do a little bit for a running diary. Here’s the thing: it’s easy to make fun of a $300 million dollar movie like this, but it’s important to remember that a lot of very talented people worked on this with the best of intentions. Some movie births are relatively painless. Others are like 36 hours in labor without an epidural in sight. You never know.

Immediately after the credits: Much has been made about the space above Henry Cavill’s lip. It’s responsible for my favorite movie business story, maybe ever. And yes, it looks just as bad as expected. Who knew that Hollywood could be so adept at removing limbs, deaging famous stars by 30 years, and creating new worlds, but a single goddamn mustache would completely trip it up? I love it. The point is clear: facial hair is something that will continue to equally vex and fascinate humankind for the rest of time.

 

14 min – I don’t have any problem believing that Jason Mamoa talks to fishes. I mean, have you seen the guy? If you told me he could do Monty Python coconut-claps to draw an entire herd of horses to his feet, I would believe you 100%. It doesn’t even bother me that his hair is very NOT aerodynamic, or that he’s choosing to live in very cold waters when he could be easily lounging about closer to the equator – dude clearly likes to be shirtless, ya know?

 

But here’s what does bother me: any good swimmer enters the water with a dive. Doesn’t matter if it’s face down or face up – it’s common knowledge that lining your hands together above your head as  you dive is the slickest, most efficient way to enter the water. So of course, because this is a backasswards movie, Arthur Curry aka Aquaman aka King of the Seas enters the water in what can only be described as a trust fall with the beginnings of a backflip that somehow miraculously becomes a streamlined fish form. When you control the seas, you can apparently get away with some pretty uncool shit.

22 min – For 3 summers in college, I worked as an extra help grunt for the local school district’s maintenance department. I learned a lot that had nothing to do with maintenance (like how to legally play a forbidden game of volleyball by calling it ‘hand soccer’), but one thing I definitely learned is that the custodians hold the keys to the kingdom. They don’t just have a massive ring full of keys that threaten to pull their paints down. They have access to every room in the building AND your ability to get in these rooms is entirely contingent upon their presence and if they like you or not. It’s a display of power that’s weirdly disproportionate to how the general public tends to value a custodian. This just made me love custodians even more. But for all the access that these many keys may provide, I have never known a custodian to have such free after-hours access to an alien ship. A little bit of an oversight there.

27 min – I don’t know if this was something added late in the game (again, these are very talented people at work), but the entire attack on Themiscyra may as well have happened in a video game. Tons of weightless CGI with a weightless CGI villain and weightless CGI fights. What was once an enchanting, empowering place in 2016’s Wonder Woman has been rendered an afterthought by 2017. Here’s hoping Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman 1984 restores a little bit of that Themiscyra shine to the island.

40 min – Seeing this crazy Frankenstein of a movie so late meant that I saw Justice League and Marvel’s Ant-Man and the Wasp within a week of each other. An interesting bit of product placement tidbit that I can’t get over: all of Justice League’s cars, including the souped-up concept cars, are made by Mercedes-Benz, and all of Ant Man and the Wasp’s cars, including the souped-up concept cars, are made by Hyundai. There’s a lot of ways to look at this, but this is my favorite: many people who drive Mercedes-Benz take themselves a little too seriously and think the name alone will draw people to it, whereas Hyundai knows it has to be a little more fun to stand out above the crowd and is a hard-working, reliable brand that gets the job done. Now, was I talking about the car brands or the movies? You can’t separate the two, right?

71 min – In case you were wondering, Clark Kent/Superman does not get buried with a Superman tie. This is highly disappointing and a clear missed opportunity in branding.

75 min – After Superman wakes up and is clearly not himself, the Justice League needs to band together to stop him. Barry Allen aka The Flash tries to run around him, and the look of recognition on both The Flash and Superman’s faces (they have time to recognize each other because being super fast means the movie slows way down for them) that they’re both looking at someone with hyperspeed abilities is pretty hilarious. In The Flash, we see fear. In Superman, we see pure annoyance. This is the moment where the movie seems to realize Superman CAN be a little funny!

ALSO: If you ever wondered how Wonder Woman and Superman would fight each other, this movie answers in a way I never expected: head-butts. Lots of head-butts. And supercharged ones at that.

77 min – Superman lifts Batman up by the chin, because he knows that’s how they’ll be measured: not by the content of their character, but by the strength of their chins.

*There is a 35 min gap between observations. This is no accident. Nothing particularly notable.*

101 min – Superman and the Flash, in the middle of a massive CGI battle against CGI monsters, participate in a dick-measuring contest. Barry saves a family in a truck from certain death. Superman, however, carries a whole apartment complex over his head. No team is above pettiness!

There’s not much that’s memorable in this movie (at least for the right reasons). Everything you heard seems to ring true: Ben Affleck looks bored and a little sad in his role; Wonder Woman is clearly the best character, even if she’s underwritten here; The Flash has some serious potential if they can finally get a movie made; Aquaman could be fun if it’s not drowned by CGI water.

The next year and a half is going to be a very interesting one for Warner Brothers, with Aquaman (Dec 2018), Shazam (April 2019), Joker (Oct 2019), and Wonder Woman 1984 (Nov 2019). Those four films offer quite the potentialmix of adventure, color, humor, camp, and darkness. Warner Brothers should know much better but the end of this cycle what works for them and what doesn’t.

Let’s just hope another mustache doesn’t trip them up.

Abre Los Ojos y Manos: Windows into a Soul Examined

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When it comes to drawing, two things fascinate me: the eyes and the hands. It’s no mistake they are also two of the hardest things to get right. I will often find myself easily drawing a face and body, only to have it undone by some questionably-sketched hands. Or the eyes are unfit for the look I’m going for.

It’s no mistake, then, that we’re also using our eyes and hands daily: in our we perceive the world and ourselves (eyes), and our actions (hands) impact that. Sometimes we reach out; sometimes we make a fist; sometimes we keep our hands in our pockets. Sometimes we feel seen and sometimes we feel invisible.

It is a constant conversation between the hands and the eyes.

Our lives often function in that tension between the mechanical and the organic. We use transportation to get where we want to go (even if it’s the smooth gears of a pedal bike), and we rely on the steady ticking of time to massage some shape and structure into our day. We measure what we feel comfortable with so we can see how far we’ve come and how far we have to go. To see if things fit as well as we think they do.

But we also get a jolt from touching our feet to the grass. From forest bathing in the nearby woods. From embracing the circle of life, in all its ups, downs, and sideway passages.

Sometimes we want new eyes with which to see the world, only to realize they take us further away from where we want to be. Sometimes we have to trust we have all the tools we need; we just need to use them.

I am as guilty as anyone of dreaming up where I want to be – the skills I want to have, the problems I want to solve – without remembering to take that first initial step. It seems so quaint in the big picture. But the big picture can’t form without that first push out the door.

And now, back to the hands. The first things we look at when we realize the weight of our actions. The first things to cover our eyes when we’re in shame, in exhaustion, in sadness. The things to shield the light that’s too bright, the water that’s too salty. They are also, as I have found, great tools for finding some kind of piece. The physical act of doing something with our hands can help distract us from what’s not letting us go, and somehow, in all that, we are freed, if only temporarily, and sit in that moment of peace.