Day 61b: Gooooooooooooooooooalllll!

(Fulham dismantles Newcastle. woo!)


Holy Hell, I'm a horrible photgrapher. Anyway, that's Craven Cottage. Go Whites.

On a soggy pitch my biggest fears were overcome. I attended my first ever professional football match and did not observe a scoreless tie. I saw three goals to be exact. More importantly, two of those goals were scored by Fulham. The home crowd was unbelievable, and I watched in the midst of the loudest part of Craven Cottage as Fulham toppled Newcastle 2-1 on Sunday evening.*

I stood the entire time.* Through the freezing wind, the fans chanted for players to the toons of Kumbayah, Auld Lang Syne and Frankie Valli's "Can't Take My Eyes Off You" (Replace Baby with Fulham. i.e.: "I love you Fulham. And if it's quite alright. I love you Fulham. To warm my lonely nights.") The seats were in the very back of the Hammersmith Section - Double WW (say it three times fast...it's not that hard). But those seats actually came recommended from a diehard Fulham fan/American, Mike Benedetto of the excellent Fulham USA Web site. I don't think I would've enjoyed the game as much if I had sat anywhere else.

Those are the sections where you're not just watching a game. You're a part of it.* The comraderie, the songs, the jumping and dancing. Fanaticism at its finest. When Andrew Johnson nailed the first goal to give Fulham the early lead, you felt the stadium explode with excitement. When Newcastle tied it up early in the second half, you felt the life sucked out of the stadium. And then this happened:


Yes, Levin in London now has multimedia! Really, really, really crappy multimedia.*

For someone who has never been a soccer fan in America, I was shocked by how much I enjoyed the experience. It's clear seeing a football game live in England offers something that likely won't ever be seen in American soccer. When you're living in a country where football is so ingrained into its culture, there's a different attitude toward it. Football fans are like a family. They love their team like a brother. And they hate Chelsea like a bunch of goddamn arseholes (man this was a terrible analogy). Passion like that MLS can only dream of.


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Foot notes

*This was actually a huge win for a struggling Fulham squad. The win shot them up from near the bottom of the standings to 10th in the Premier league standings (out of 20 teams). Niiice.

*Events that I've stood the entire time at (ok more like 92 percent of the time):
-Fulham football match
-Syracuse basketball game at the Carrier Dome
-Dream Theater concert

*Obviously, after one game I don't claim to be an expert on the club. This is just the opinion of an outsider.There's still much about the game I don't understand, and chants I couldn't figure out. Still, the fact I loved a soccer game amazes me. In fact, I like it so much I had to celebrate with a pint afterwards at the Fulham fans-only pub, The Golden Lion.

*Since you have no idea what's happening in this video: Danny Murphy just rocketed a penalty kick into the Newcastle goal to give Fulham an insurmountable 2-1 lead. Celebrating ensues.

Let's play: 'A DISAPPEARING NUMBER'

(One is the loneliest number)


This is what it's like when world's collide.

First things first, I say next to Emma Watson at this play. OK, I never actually recognized her, but that's what I was told afterward. So I'm still going to claim I sat a few seats down from Hermoine. The night actually got more bizarre when I walked outside the theatre and it was snowing. The snow (I saw the play on October 27) was the first October snow in London in 70 years.* From start to finish, it was a bizarre couple of hours - with a bizarre play running in between.

Math and infinity are key concepts in a play about understanding called "A Disappearing Number." Last year, it won the Laurence Oliver Award (the British Tony) for Best New Play. Even though it's no Harry Potter (okay, I haven't actually read them, but whatever) the play must be rated on a scale of 1-5 Emma Watson's.

THREE OUT OF FIVE Emma Watson's.

"A Disappearing Number"

Directed and conceived by Simon McBurney

The play just finished a four-week run in London.

Two hours

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"A Disappearing Number"
By Matt Levin

A professor moves to the front of the Barbican stage at the start of "A Disappearing Number." He points out and reminds the audience how what they about to see is entirely fake. The setting is fake. The characters are played by actors. But math. Math is real, he explains. And through "A Disappearing Number's" story the play plans to prove that to the audience.

It does in essence. The problem though is it heaps piles and piles of math on you while trying to tell a coherent story. Overall it's an engaging script that's a little too dense in its themes about history and identity, love and numbers.

Simon McBurney has a complicated assignment when directing this play: Make math fun. For two hours. With no intermissions.

The plays wants to heap its math upon you, and it's relentness will leave you with both a headache, and a desire to learn more. The play weaves two stories, using 1930s Indian mathematical prodigy Srinivasa Ramanujan to tie them together. The modern day story focuses on an Indian business man, who wants nothing to do with India , and his mathematician British wife, who has an obsession with Ramanujan that her husband can't understand. Both want to start a family, and yet there's a strange rift between them.

The other tale describes the short but remarkable life of the genius Ramanujan. One of the most brilliant scenes features a chalkboard sliding back and forth on stage and each time the board rolls in front of the modern-day actors, they disappear and the Ramanujan tale reappears. Then the board will roll back, and the modern-day story will re-commence. Lighting, Indian chanting and a excellent acting also keep the play lively.

Math runs through it all. By the end, the phenomenon of math and infinity try to suggest - as both stories come to a frantic but poignant end - that there's too many coincidences in life for everything to be simply random chance. By the end, you're also feeling a bit overwhelmed.* Maybe for the engineers and doctors out there it all clicks right away. But I just wished my arithmetic was stronger, and that maybe I'd find time to see "A Disappearing Number" again.

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Foot notes

*Britain, for the record, is totally unprepared to handle snow. This is one area where London could actually learn from Syracuse. Every single thing is delayed in London at the slightest snowfall. As one Brit remarked while we waited to get on our delayed train back home: "In London, even 1/8 an inch of snow is a natural disaster."

*By the end of this review you're probably also feeling overwhelmed. Honestly, this was a tough one to review just because it was so complicated. And the plots a bit more interesting than I made it sound here. Though nothing fantastic.