Round 17: The 2016 Wassily Kandinsky Cup

Greetings Tipsters

 

I’ve been in a mild state of discombobulation the last few days.  Started when I read ol’ ‘Swampy’ Regnan’s review of the Sydney/Hawthorn match as seen through the prism of The Beatles’ ‘Revolver’, one of the most masterful pieces of pop music to come out of that glorious decade (for pop music, at least) known as The Sixties.

 

I often play music while watching football, but this was something else.  I like football, I enjoy it, but rock and roll saved my life, “dancing to that New York station, and it was alright.”

 

Which led to thinking about sport and art, the human condition, the strive for transcendence.  I once asked Robert, my brother-in-law of 35 years, why he played golf.  “Because every now and then you hit it just right.”

 

Like playing music, like riding twisty mountain roads, painting a watercolour, re-arranging the loungeroom, writing a column, kicking a football.  Every now and then, you hit it just right.

 

So being a spectator of art or sport may be transcendence by proxy, we can’t all be Cyril Rioli, Marc Marquez, Pete Townshend, William Faulkner or Claude Monet, but we can thrill to their exploits, we interpret it through our own experiences, all our lives are richer for them pushing through the barriers.  They open a door and we look through and, however briefly, live at a higher pitch.

 

*%#^}{+:<>P^@!#

 

What does Justin Leppitsch do for transcendence?  I’d like to think he has a few big top-quality Rothko prints at home and when he gets back after a game he sits in front of them, breathes deeply, falls inside the colours.  By the gods, he’d need something.  Here’s a man who climbed the mountain three straight years as a player and is deep in the mines as a coach.

 

Maybe he has a Zen garden and gets out there, raking the pebbles.  Y’know, I didn’t see this on any of the major news sites, but now Japan’s LDP has a two thirds majority in both houses they can change the constitution.  They’re annoyed that it features ‘western European concepts of natural human rights’, that they were the bad guys in the Pacific War, they want to oblige the populace to obey the government’s dictates and worship the Emperor.

 

Remember Francis Fukuyama?  He wrote a book in ’90 declaring the ‘end of history’ cos everyone was gonna be a free-enterprise democracy booster.

 

We want freedom, yeah, yeah

Secular democracy, awright

We love everyone, o’course we do

And so do you and you and you

 

“Imagine no possessions”

“You don’t really mean that John”

“Of course not Yoko, we’re gonna do the film in our mansion so everyone knows I’m just taking the piss.”

 

Michael Caine, who grew up poor, was at a party in the mid 1960s with John Lennon who urinated on the curtains of the flash house.  Michael was not impressed.  It takes a special kind of dickhead to believe that random vandalism is a political act.

 

Maybe Justin can take heart from Recep Erdogan.  The army staged a coup that fizzled out quickly – driving a tank, you shouldn’t have to surrender to a cop with a handgun – and Erdo got to arrest thousands of potential opponents.  He’s a winner.

 

Justin could have Leigh arrested, oy veh, and confined to the locker room where he can yell uplifting slogans at the Lions’ list, who are all thinking of marching over the border anyway.

 

(Note to self – compare clubs with world powers, eg, Hawthorn and Victorian Great Britain.)

 

A few kicks here or there, Hawks could be eight from sixteen, Swans thirteen and three.  That it didn’t work that way was demonstrated at the SCG.  Both strangled the oppo, kept ‘em from their best, neither got away on the scoreboard when dominating play, but when it got seriously crucial, Hawthorn had the team to finish the job.

 

Change the colours.  Gold and Brown is the worst colour combo of any professional football team on the globe.  The pink and brown of the other week is visually worse and terribly distasteful.  The silly power rangers strip looks good in comparision.

 

Green and blue.  Aside from the Funky Purps flirtation, no big league team has used green, it stands for the hedges and trees of Hawthorn, for the paddock of war.  Blue for the sky.  It’s a great colour combo.

 

Listen up, Hawthorn fans, we remember those 1970s shorts with the golden piping on the front and the brown piping on the back.  We’ve been laughing at you ever since.  Yeah, so you have the second-best team that ever walked the face of the earth, so what?  You have the most ridiculously embarrassing colours, all because a committeman said “Yes, dear” when his wife insisted that the drapes in the parlour would make for a good strip.

 

You could win every flag for the next decade and we’ll still be laughing.  You want respect?  Get some decent colours, sherwood green and royal blue.

 

Cheers Tipsters

 

P&C, A Stop Privatisation Of Footy Production, a division of Trans-Dementia Enterprises.

Brought to you with the assistance of Lipstick Killers’ ‘Mezmeriser’

 

Tonight’s Top Ten Albums:

1965

Aftermath

Elvis Presley

High Time

KillCity

Pet Sounds

Revolver

Screamadelica

Soap Opera

Who’s Next

 

But I’m more of a singles guy.