My Life Of Glamour # 06 - THE DAY AFTER DEE FEST
1 month ago
Monday, June 08, 2009
Why Twentytwentification is sport's quick fix
via guardian
"It's not cricket" is more than an aphorism. For the ham-and-eggers in the Lord's Pavilion who will take their blessed places there, nonetheless, during the Twenty20 World Cup, it is the waning death call of the disengaged as the game's new bastard baby grows healthier by the day.
To be fair to the old guard, many of them have stopped groaning. The evidence of packed grounds, exciting games and – most persuasively – the financial monster that is the Indian Premier League has convinced most of them that the Twentytwentification of cricket is not a flickering mayfly. So successful has it been, we are witnessing something more profound: the Twentytwentification of sport.
For television, and their advertisers, quick is good. Across sport, the rush to diminution is catching on, changing forever the way we watch games as administrators seek to convince an audience pulled in so many directions that their product will take up less of their precious time. It's not as if the nation has been struck down by an ADHD virus, but attention spans have definitely contracted.
On Friday and yesterday, a short-form international city-based polo tournament at the Hurlingham Club attracted 28,000 spectators. On a reduced pitch, with simplified rules, teams from London, New York, Moscow and Buenos Aires competed in the first World Polo Championship. According to an event spokesman, this was a move away from "wealthy blokes looking to polish their egos" and towards "the brave new world of sports professionalism".
Money changed rugby union forever when shamateurism gave way to the real thing in the 1990s. The process has gone at full gallop since – but rugby has not had to wrestle with a shortened form of the game in the way cricket has. It is not just the brevity of sevens that is proving attractive, as Mike Miller, chief executive of the International Rugby Board explains.
"Sevens will live alongside the 15-man game," says Miller, who is leading the campaign for sevens to become an Olympic sport from 2016 onwards. "It's different to the cricket issue. There you've got five days against a couple of hours, whereas we don't just have one sevens game; it's not 14 minutes versus 80 minutes. It's a couple of days versus 80 minutes.
"It works very well for television. You can have a break every seven minutes. It gives you a chance also to get in replays, statistics. Also, there are a lot of matches, up to 24 in a day. There are a lot of countries playing at the same time, so you hit a lot of different markets on the same day. For the people who are there, it's a festival as well as a sporting event.
"Sponsors like it. Obviously television likes it because it's fast, furious and exciting, and easy to understand. There isn't as much complexity as there in the 15s game.
"Sevens has been part of rugby for more than a hundred years but has really taken off since the game has gone professional. The IRB World Series is 10 years old, with eight events around the world. We've seen the emergence of teams such as Kenya, who always bring huge support, Fiji, who have been hugely successful. We've also had five Sevens World Cups. And this year for the first time we had both a men's and women's tournament. The qualification process involved 87 countries for the men, and 84 for the women."
China is on the radar. Expansion in the United States is imminent. For rugby, less does mean more.
There is another rugby experiment in the offing: Twenty12, an idea put forward by the former Wallabies coach Eddie Jones. The aim is to increase commitment from 12 players for 20 "power minutes", as he puts it, in each half. A trial is likely to be included in the Shute Shield in Sydney in August.
The hub of all non-football sport is the Olympics and, with seven sports bidding for the two additional places from 2016, minds will be concentrated as to what constitutes the most attractive format for not only the International Olympic Committee, but the television executives who want to cram in those ads.
Mike Lee, of the International Amateur Athletics Federation, says: "We have worked with the IRB in the campaign to get rugby sevens in the Olympic Games and all sports are looking at ways of improving their broader appeal. Television is naturally a part of that. That's the way you reach more people, and bring more money into the sport. I think there have been some concerns from broadcasters across the world about the length and format of the traditional athletics meeting, for instance."
Athletics is a sport that badly needs an injection of excitement, as anyone who has stood around a desolate track all day in the rain will testify. At Cardiff International Sports Stadium on Wednesday, a "Super 8" competition will squeeze 10 events into two hours. There will be teams from six provincial cities and two from London, no false starts, and just seven attempts in high jump, pole vault and the throwing events.
Ed Warner, of UK Athletics, says it could be the start of something big, so to speak. "The conventional athletics meeting lasts several hours," he observes, "and the feeling is that it stretches the patience of both the spectator and the competitor, particularly young kids. What we're attempting to do also is borrow from the glitz and glamour of Twenty20 cricket.
"This is a one-off, a pilot, to see if it works for the athletes in terms of their performance. A lot of people are watching it with great interest. You can conceive of this rolling off internationally. Why could we not have something that had a European flavour to it, for example? Can you arouse passions by some sort of identification with a city? We want people to walk away saying: 'I saw some great stuff there, but also I didn't get pins and needles.' "
Other sports flirting with shortened forms include: netball, whose world series in Manchester in October will feature games reduced to 24 minutes, with double points for scores from outside the goal circle and new "power play" quarters; modern pentathlon, whose world championships at Crystal Palace in August will be under the new four-event format, with shooting and running combined; golf, that word "power play" again, the nine-hole game invented by the former British amateur champion Peter McEvoy two years ago, with an extra flag on each green to offer a choice of difficult putts; and snooker, which has a "six red" tournament in Bangkok next month.
Even boxing is getting in on the Big Shrink. Barry Hearn's innovative Prizefighter series, in which eight boxers compete in (literally some times) a knockout leading to a final on the one evening, has captured the occasionally fickle imagination of the fancy. It reduces the sometimes tedious process of finding a champion to a couple of hours of mayhem.
"It's not cricket" is more than an aphorism. For the ham-and-eggers in the Lord's Pavilion who will take their blessed places there, nonetheless, during the Twenty20 World Cup, it is the waning death call of the disengaged as the game's new bastard baby grows healthier by the day.
To be fair to the old guard, many of them have stopped groaning. The evidence of packed grounds, exciting games and – most persuasively – the financial monster that is the Indian Premier League has convinced most of them that the Twentytwentification of cricket is not a flickering mayfly. So successful has it been, we are witnessing something more profound: the Twentytwentification of sport.
For television, and their advertisers, quick is good. Across sport, the rush to diminution is catching on, changing forever the way we watch games as administrators seek to convince an audience pulled in so many directions that their product will take up less of their precious time. It's not as if the nation has been struck down by an ADHD virus, but attention spans have definitely contracted.
On Friday and yesterday, a short-form international city-based polo tournament at the Hurlingham Club attracted 28,000 spectators. On a reduced pitch, with simplified rules, teams from London, New York, Moscow and Buenos Aires competed in the first World Polo Championship. According to an event spokesman, this was a move away from "wealthy blokes looking to polish their egos" and towards "the brave new world of sports professionalism".
Money changed rugby union forever when shamateurism gave way to the real thing in the 1990s. The process has gone at full gallop since – but rugby has not had to wrestle with a shortened form of the game in the way cricket has. It is not just the brevity of sevens that is proving attractive, as Mike Miller, chief executive of the International Rugby Board explains.
"Sevens will live alongside the 15-man game," says Miller, who is leading the campaign for sevens to become an Olympic sport from 2016 onwards. "It's different to the cricket issue. There you've got five days against a couple of hours, whereas we don't just have one sevens game; it's not 14 minutes versus 80 minutes. It's a couple of days versus 80 minutes.
"It works very well for television. You can have a break every seven minutes. It gives you a chance also to get in replays, statistics. Also, there are a lot of matches, up to 24 in a day. There are a lot of countries playing at the same time, so you hit a lot of different markets on the same day. For the people who are there, it's a festival as well as a sporting event.
"Sponsors like it. Obviously television likes it because it's fast, furious and exciting, and easy to understand. There isn't as much complexity as there in the 15s game.
"Sevens has been part of rugby for more than a hundred years but has really taken off since the game has gone professional. The IRB World Series is 10 years old, with eight events around the world. We've seen the emergence of teams such as Kenya, who always bring huge support, Fiji, who have been hugely successful. We've also had five Sevens World Cups. And this year for the first time we had both a men's and women's tournament. The qualification process involved 87 countries for the men, and 84 for the women."
China is on the radar. Expansion in the United States is imminent. For rugby, less does mean more.
There is another rugby experiment in the offing: Twenty12, an idea put forward by the former Wallabies coach Eddie Jones. The aim is to increase commitment from 12 players for 20 "power minutes", as he puts it, in each half. A trial is likely to be included in the Shute Shield in Sydney in August.
The hub of all non-football sport is the Olympics and, with seven sports bidding for the two additional places from 2016, minds will be concentrated as to what constitutes the most attractive format for not only the International Olympic Committee, but the television executives who want to cram in those ads.
Mike Lee, of the International Amateur Athletics Federation, says: "We have worked with the IRB in the campaign to get rugby sevens in the Olympic Games and all sports are looking at ways of improving their broader appeal. Television is naturally a part of that. That's the way you reach more people, and bring more money into the sport. I think there have been some concerns from broadcasters across the world about the length and format of the traditional athletics meeting, for instance."
Athletics is a sport that badly needs an injection of excitement, as anyone who has stood around a desolate track all day in the rain will testify. At Cardiff International Sports Stadium on Wednesday, a "Super 8" competition will squeeze 10 events into two hours. There will be teams from six provincial cities and two from London, no false starts, and just seven attempts in high jump, pole vault and the throwing events.
Ed Warner, of UK Athletics, says it could be the start of something big, so to speak. "The conventional athletics meeting lasts several hours," he observes, "and the feeling is that it stretches the patience of both the spectator and the competitor, particularly young kids. What we're attempting to do also is borrow from the glitz and glamour of Twenty20 cricket.
"This is a one-off, a pilot, to see if it works for the athletes in terms of their performance. A lot of people are watching it with great interest. You can conceive of this rolling off internationally. Why could we not have something that had a European flavour to it, for example? Can you arouse passions by some sort of identification with a city? We want people to walk away saying: 'I saw some great stuff there, but also I didn't get pins and needles.' "
Other sports flirting with shortened forms include: netball, whose world series in Manchester in October will feature games reduced to 24 minutes, with double points for scores from outside the goal circle and new "power play" quarters; modern pentathlon, whose world championships at Crystal Palace in August will be under the new four-event format, with shooting and running combined; golf, that word "power play" again, the nine-hole game invented by the former British amateur champion Peter McEvoy two years ago, with an extra flag on each green to offer a choice of difficult putts; and snooker, which has a "six red" tournament in Bangkok next month.
Even boxing is getting in on the Big Shrink. Barry Hearn's innovative Prizefighter series, in which eight boxers compete in (literally some times) a knockout leading to a final on the one evening, has captured the occasionally fickle imagination of the fancy. It reduces the sometimes tedious process of finding a champion to a couple of hours of mayhem.
Monday, June 01, 2009
MATT DAMON in rugby film
New photo of "MATT DAMON" as South Africa rugby captain Francois Pienaar in the Clint Eastwood film "The Human Factor"
The film is a look at life for Nelson Mandela after the fall of apartheid in South Africa during his first term as president when campaigned to host the 1995 Rugby World Cup event as an opportunity to unite his countrymen.
Monday, May 18, 2009
New Imogen Heap Ablum Name
Imogen's new album will be called 'Ellipse' and is due to be released in August 2009.
Imogenheap.co.uk
Spin.com
Sunday, May 10, 2009
2 Many DJs (soulwax) at BBC RADIO 1 BIG WEEKEND 2009 SWINDON perform Dizzee Rascal "Bonkers"
2 Many DJs (soulwax) at BBC RADIO 1 BIG WEEKEND 2009 SWINDON. A MyLifeOfGlamour special will be available soon featuring all the bands we saw at this years Radio 1 Big weekend but for now here is a clip of the amazing 2ManyDJs. Watch in HD by going to youtube Enjoy
What do you do when you get a backflip on a tricycle so wrong that you can no longer see? Try it again, of course.
Friday, May 08, 2009
Video: Animal Collective Play "Summertime Clothes" on "Letterman"
via pitchfork
Animal Collective played "Letterman" last night! They played Merriweather Post Pavilion's "Summertime Clothes", which seems like a good song to be pushing since the season is finally here. Dave makes a funny joke (Letterman, not Portner), there's some weird dancing going on behind the band, and the tables of gear are done up all fancy. (via I Guess I'm Floating)
Flight of the Conchords: top 10 clips
The best show on TV is back in the UK this Tuesday on BBC 4. Check out the Guardians choice of top ten clips from the New Zealanders
Thursday, May 07, 2009
radio soulwax online
Soulwax brothers David and Stephen Dewaele are taking their Radio Soulwax concept to the next level this summer as they are set to bring their craft to web radio, reports Clash Music. Radio Soulwax is a live show composed of the live band Soulwax followed by a DJ set by the two brothers under the 2ManyDjs moniker. Last year’s documentary “Part Of The Weekend Never Dies” helped shed some light on who these insanely talented individuals are. This radio show idea is the latest in a string of creative outlets Soulwax is giving themselves.
Clash Music has the details:
“Crafting together brand new mixes, special guests, themed hours and a unique visual element Radio Soulwax is unlike anything you have heard before. Free to air, with no ads or sponsors, the shows are being broadcast for the love of music.
To launch the new radio shows, 2ManyDJs are set to tour the UK. Featuring live 2ManyDJs production for the very first time, these are set to kick start the summer with a party those who attend will struggle to forget.”
Announced UK tour dates:
5 Oxford O2 Academy
6 Manchester Academy
7 Newcastle O2 Academy
10 Leeds O2 Academy
11 Bournemouth Opera House
12 London Brixton O2 Academy (Sold Out)
13 London Brixton O2 Academy
Keep it locked on soulwax.info for more details as they emerge.
via http://www.rocksellout.com
Clash Music has the details:
“Crafting together brand new mixes, special guests, themed hours and a unique visual element Radio Soulwax is unlike anything you have heard before. Free to air, with no ads or sponsors, the shows are being broadcast for the love of music.
To launch the new radio shows, 2ManyDJs are set to tour the UK. Featuring live 2ManyDJs production for the very first time, these are set to kick start the summer with a party those who attend will struggle to forget.”
Announced UK tour dates:
5 Oxford O2 Academy
6 Manchester Academy
7 Newcastle O2 Academy
10 Leeds O2 Academy
11 Bournemouth Opera House
12 London Brixton O2 Academy (Sold Out)
13 London Brixton O2 Academy
Keep it locked on soulwax.info for more details as they emerge.
via http://www.rocksellout.com
Tuesday, May 05, 2009
soulwax at radio 1 big weekend
I'm off to BBC Radio 1 big weekend on saturday. I'm seriously getting excited about seeing 2 Many DJ's. I will be reporting back with a My Life Of Glamour video special. Check out this clip from Soulwax interview on BBC's The Culture Show in 2008
Penalty shoot-outs betray rugby's soul
Bear-baiting used to have its admirers, So, too, cock-fighting. good artical from The Telegraph on this weekends rugby euro cup semi. The first to be decided on a penalty shoot out
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