Friday, January 7, 2011

You relate the events which you have seen and are still seeing to the field.  It is not only that the field frames them, it also contains them.  The existence of the field is the precondition for their occurring in the way that they have done and for the way in which others are still occurring.  All events exist as definable events by virtue of their relationship to other events.  You have defined the events you have seen primarily (but not necessarily exclusively) by relating them to the field, which at the same time is literally and symbolically the ground of the events which are taking place within it. 

You may complain that I have now suddenly changed my use of the word, "event".  At first I referred to the field as a space awaiting events; now I refer to it as an event in itself .  But this inconsistency parallels exactly the apparently illogical nature of the experience.   Suddenly an experience of disinterested observation opens in its centre and gives birth to a happiness which is instantly recognisable as your own.

The field that you are standing before appears to have the same proportions as your own life.

John Berger,

"The Field," About Looking 

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10:20 PM Monterey, CA, Custom House Bocce Courts

Alexandra Parker & Andrew Shaw-Kitch

7

Tristan Kadish & Andrew Anderson

15 

—The only authority to accompany us on our trip

from Tristan's mom's bocce set

The first game of bocce is played at the Custom House Plaza courts in downtown Monterey, California with Alexandra Parker and Andrew Shaw-Kitch losing to Tristan Kadish and Andrew Anderson around midnight.

The Preface to The Joy of Bocce:

Bocce, though already catching on rapidly in this country, would really take off if it got the proper exposure.  Hopefully this book will help.  I'm not talking about it flourishing as a tournament event with complicated rules, state-of-the-art equipment and high-powered authorities running (or ruining) the sport. I'm referring to a simplified recreational version that can be played by anyone almost anywhere. The game doesn't require great strength, stamina, quickness or agility.  You don't need catlike reflexes or the hand-eye coordination of an NBA backcourt star.  Men and women as well as boys and girls of all ages can participate and enjoy the sport, making it as competetive or non-competetive as they desire.  And it is well-suited as a game for the countless physically-challenged individuals worldwide because anyone who can roll a ball can play.  Best of all you don't need expensive equipment. And, played as described here, you don't even need a court--your backyard or neighborhood park will do nicely.  You can play recreational bocce on grass or dirt, on level or unlevel terrain—even at the beach (on the shore or on sandbars during low tide).

Bocce suffers an image problem in America.  People see it as an "old fogies' game" played at social clubs. The word bocce conjures up images of cranky old coots competing on customized outdoor courts.  Arguing and kibitzing (sometimes even cursing--usually in Italian) and generally having a great time, these old-timers seemed engaged in some sort of geriatric lawn bowling.  It looks about as exciting as watching cactus grow in the desert.  But it is a wonderful game, full of skill and strategy--one that requires finesse as well as some occasional brute force.  This book attempts to dispel the misconceptions about bocce, and aims to promote it as a lawn game that is the ideal recreation for family cookouts, picnics, and other get-togethers.  In addition, this book helps guide those who may want to take the game to the next level, whether it be the social club level, tournament or international play.  Most of all, our goal is to get the word out on what has been called "the best kept secret in sports," bocce.

In the weeks preceding our journey I found myself deeply involved in two sagas, both lingering for over a year in the vestibules of my consciousness, and both suddenly coming forward at year’s end to occupy center stage and all of my attentions—intellectual, emotional, and actual; though quitting my job at the local independent movie theater would seem to constitute the freeing of my attentions, that was not the case at all. Instead of passing my time happily sweeping up popcorn and thinking of all the things I was to accomplish, I was sitting at home fretting about money, about how things had gone wrong, and wrapping myself up in the aforementioned second saga—the Grapes of Wrath—a novel I began for the first time about the same time the year before, and neglected for seasons at a time.  

On Christmas Day the movie theater received a film that was, for every reason, to attract masses of people to our tiny art house cinema: it was a British period piece, it had immense Oscar buzz, and ended up winning immense amounts of Oscars, it analyzes an affliction that has not been exploited by Hollywood, it’s sufficiently predictable while not being stupid, it has Geoffrey Rush, and it came out on a holiday—the King’s Speech.  

My mother was a little late preparing Christmas brunch for my father, me and my brother who was visiting from Seattle, so I ended up coming to work thirty minutes late, no crime, I self-righteously thought, for someone who requested the day off before two people to whom it was granted; the Colin Firth-inspired fervor, however, made things look very bad for me when I got there. But rediving headlong into Steinbeck had gotten to me—the company had unceremoniously increased my hours to full time at holidays, knowing, but not asking, that I would not be substitute teaching on Christmas or the week that followed. Any day off requested was never given.  Promotions were given to those who didn’t question the incompetent 18-year-old floozy who was put in charge around the time the boss started sleeping with her.

I was so sanctimonious by the end of the weekend—closing shift on Christmas Eve, opening shift on Boxing Day—I completely forgot that I was working on Tuesday.  I enjoyed several days with family, pleasant evenings trekking with the Joads, the healing qualities of happiness, until I came back to town, when my folks took my brother to the airport, and learned I had missed a day and was suspended.  I furrowed my brow in a scowl and read a hundred more pages in a sitting.  The Joads reached California and it was not the workers’ paradise that was promised.  

On the night I got back and was advised by my coworkers to call the boss and explain myself, I was drying out my black workshirt that I had washed in the sink by the woodstove in my living room.  I stared at it as my boss explained I was indefinitely not to come back to work.  The Joads’ struggle became mine in the hyperbole that emerges from great emotion.  I loved the work that the job entailed, but they owned the means of production.  I had no power.  All I could do was read on and grit my teeth as my polo shirt dried out.  

The next day my friend Brandon called me who also worked at the movie theater.  He needed me to cover a shift and insisted I talk to the film-reeling tyrant.  So I did.  I explained, apologized, argued, pled.  “Why punish Brandon? You usually are indifferent to our requests, now you are going out of your way to make sure we don’t get the schedules we want.”  I didn’t say it that eloquently, or directly, but he wouldn’t have cared if I did.   The most important thing, though, was that I knew I wouldn’t get the weeks off I wanted for my upcoming bocce journey.  He would bring me back on the very days I didn’t want to work just to fuck with me.   I wanted to work the weeks before to save money and not worry on my sojourn; and I no longer had faith that the boss and his girlfriend who did the scheduling gave a fuck about what I wanted.   Like the centuries of family-owned and farmed agriculture in the United States in the 1930s, my year-and-a-half career in the movie business was over.   "Why don’t you just make this suspension or whatever you called it two weeks and we’ll be done with the whole thing." 

After rent and my bills, Christmas break from school, and these new circumstances, I had very little money left for the trip.  We packed up Tristan’s jalopy with jars of olives from my parents’ backyard I had cured a few weeks before, camping supplies, all the food we could scrape together, clothes for a week, firewood, and Tristan’s mom’s bocce ball set.  Ideally all we would need to buy was gas.  Tristan’s truck was all oiled up with the fluids in order.  With our friend Andrew coming along the first leg, our inaugural game played at the historical Custom House Plaza in Monterey, our itinerary roughly sketched out, the three of us, all former employees of the same general manager, were ready to go.  

Rose of Sharon’s baby was born, and from the despair cried out by the trampled-upon worker’s heart, idle in the midst of California’s bounty, came new bittersweet possibility, the celebration of the human spirit over capitalist corruption of the human world.

 

*     *     *

Peter Shaw’s imagining of the Bocce journey

“Take photographs, play a token game, interview local aficionados.”

Clarification of token

“It’s a actually a term derived from linguistics, where we talk about types and tokens, so in order to establish a certain type, or category, of, let’s say, lexical items in a particular language, you collect a number of tokens, that is, actual examples.  So token would be one representative of the class of dedicated bocce ball players.”

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7/27/2011 (Tk Addendum)

So is the field of play our span of the West Coast?  Is it the heart's runway we use to take off, out of a jaggedly unjust, apathetic and trite work environment to broad northwestern avenues, trailheads and backyards?  More probably and tangibly, is the field of play wherever we lay down our belongings for a time and decide to roll balls around on whatever terrain we happened to have found vacant?

I think it is easy to say that our field of play was all of these things and more, changing from day to day and still changeable today, three quarters of a year later.  Part of the liberal interpretation of the game that we employed then was that we could make our field of play wherever and whatever we wanted.  We kept our own score.  We did not have to appeal to an authority other than that which we created between ourselves.  How appropriate that we spread our wings towards our own venues and rules of play, branching out, or rather, throwing out new seeds, just as the Joads did in striving for California.  However they were not playing any game, as it might seem that we were, our trio of bocce players.  Yet despite the setting of a game, our struggle as individuals, or our struggle as a group of misfit sportsmen was not any less epic or any less represented by that game we were laying out, one playing field at a time.  The Joads too laid out their journey in campsites and relationships, one by one towards a greater future, each on their own and together as a family.  We differ in that we were comforted and transmitted through a game but also our common drive of companionship, sportsmanship and even chivalry.  Really you could look through our periscope, splashing just above the water line at the very least, at times an enchanting kaleidoscope of contentedness in the moment or washy vision of the future, and you would see scenes on a path towards freedom, a freedom we are promised daily here in this American country.

The game was always something we did after work at the theater.  We were so thankfully done with the meaningless jargon of a minimum wage parade and thus craving the connection between humans that enriches and breeds camaraderie. It was nearby, we could drink beer in public and the fun cost next to nothing.  It was, and still is, just about perfect.  The brilliance of bocce might be summed up in the word simplicity.  I think it is also a fantastic demonstration of democracy. The rules are agreed upon by a consensus, verbally, the time limits are agreed upon in the same fashion, and in the case of our journey, we got to decide where the game was played.  On the tour, we were enabled with the ability to shape our landscape into exactly what we wanted, a field of play.  Not only that but if we had a problem with the landscape, we could go and find another.  Are those not extremely appropriate abilities for a world of freedom and democracy?

The value in the journey was obvious, unraveling adventure via weeks in the useful American highway infrastructure easily within our reach despite gas prices and the thin walls of our pocketbooks and coming along with us: 9 multicolored balls to give some sort of dynamic stability to our days.  It was a brilliantly lit stage.