sheets to the wind: third places
soccer isn't just soccer, Cop City, and a really good interview.
3 thoughts on third places and also soccer, plus one more thought
1. Since I last wrote, I've thought a lot about third places. These are the places that are not work or home but a different, third place. No obligation to be there, no tasks to perform, an abiding sense of playfulness. I think a café or a bar can be a wonderful third place, but the best ones are those where you don't have to spend anything to be there, like libraries, parks, streets and public squares, well-worn footpaths, the right bench, a certain front porch.
Recently, a third place in my life closed: an unassuming warehouse south of the city, where literally thousands of people played soccer every week. It had been hosting amateur soccer leagues since the late ‘90s, early in the U.S. for such a huge space to be devoted to indoor soccer. It’s also a place where, according to a colleague, parents got to sit in the stands + gossip while their kids played, and apparently was infamously the ‘divorced parent conversation spot,’ that one place you could figure out the schedule or whatever with your ex-spouse. That’s what I heard, anyway. Third places are ridiculously important, I think — in my last newsletter, I recommended a piece about Hannah Arendt, about her ideas on how isolation helps the cause of totalarianism. Sounds overdramatic but I think it’s a real thing.
I made a little vignette about it for the radio, about this third place, and about what playing soccer as an ‘adult woman’ has meant to so many of us — my team includes 20-somethings to 70-somethings, amazingly. People talked to me about how we reclaim our bodies after giving birth, or have an abortion or a miscarriage, or just as we keep getting older. They told me about feeling free from the stress of sexism, and the silliness, just the good time of it all.
I played soccer growing up too, in the ‘90s and early 2000s. For a while, I was one of just a few girls interloping on the boys’ team, then we became the first girls’ varsity team at my high school. Funny, this sports binary. Throughout, I got to play in a vibrant pick-up-game culture, fueled I think by the huge first-generation immigrant community in my hometown.
In the closing of that weird soccer warehouse, I found I had a lot to say about soccer, though I won’t go on too long now. But with all that time, and all those different spaces and people, life’s happening, of course. I think playing with boys made me a better player, and then a worse one, because constantly having to prove yourself can mess with your head and then your game. I think consistently playing without men as an adult has been profound, and maybe I’m a better player now, in some ways, than I’ve ever been, I think in part because of the freedom that kind of space offers, and how people take it the right amount of serious and silly. Remember, third places — no obligation, a sense of playfulness. Like the time after practice in high school, when I’d kick around until the sun went down with my dear friend Kate, who died when we were both 17, who moved like a dancer on the field, like no one I’ve played with before or since.
It’s never just about soccer, of course.
That’s a message of this podcast from NPR, The last cup / La última copa, which is about Lionel Messi + Argentina, and about going home again — how you can’t. It’s about longing for a place that no longer exists. Jasmine Garsd’s story includes a brutal dictatorship and a different sadness, yet in it I also recognized feelings I have about the island where I come from, what it’s like to go back and miss a place even while you’re physically there. And of course, the series landed me on Youtube, watching epic compilations of Messi and Maradona, just magic.
2. Third places, though. I’m reporting a piece right now which is in part about what’s happening around one such place: a forest in Atlanta, Georgia. The city has voted to build a facility to train police in urban warfare, and people are protesting it, to Stop Cop City. In my research, I found this wonderful piece: “The Forest for the Trees” in The Bitter Southerner, for which the author spent a lot of time with Tortuguita, a forest defender killed by police in January. Tortuguita’s comments about nonviolent resistance got me thinking again about this excellent documentary, A Force More Powerful, available online for free. I think when the strategy of nonviolent resistance is invoked, it’s often in the context of trying to critique activists — ‘we believe in protest, but not like that’ — but the real legacy of this strategy is so much more than I’d understood. Think about it: together, people overthrew an imperialist occupation, a dictator, forced the U.S. to face the violation of segregation. Each took years and years (or is ongoing).
3. If you too are into thinking about third places, may I recommend A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander et al, which is wonderful to read in print but appears to be published online here — very 1970s, still so good. It’s about the interconnected patterns that create our favorite cities: why do some places feel especially human + alive? What patterns exist there, in region and cities, neighborhoods and streets and parks and footpaths, buildings, parts of buildings? A few of my favorite patterns: sleeping outside, sacred sites (like a common view of a mountain or ocean), no massive cemeteries only little ones everywhere. Also, the way the book is organized anticipates Wikipedia (a virtual third place!).
4. The last thing is not about third places at all. It’s an interview with the sparkling Hilton Als, on Talk Easy with Sam Fraguso. Hilton Als is a writer and long-time theatre critic for The New Yorker, whose use of Instagram is so specific to him. Every moment of this interview is great, and while I do not think you have to be deeply familiar with its subjects to enjoy it, here are some of them: why Joan Didion is so good, the experience of loving and then profiling Prince, the importance of a parent good at really listening. The way he reads aloud from a favorite play, and when The Matrix + Carrie Moss come up, the way he says, “She’s beautiful.” How he earnestly and nakedly states that he wants a boyfriend. I can’t pick a favorite moment, I loved it all, but here’s how he described entering a situation as a writer.
“You have to allow whatever is happening to happen… you walk into the situation not as a self, but as a person who is going to give yourself over to the situation and to the subject. And so by giving myself over to the subject, that means I listen constructively. I had a brilliant mother, who was a constructive listener. So, you walk into the situation, listening and watching, and you don’t interrupt the emotional panorama of what’s happening. You don’t interrupt it with the ‘I.’ You sort of take on the story that the person is telling you. And so you morph with the storyteller. You are listening and you are engaged on a level where your ‘I’ disappears and you become part of their consciousness.”
briefly
It sucks that three podcasts which covered climate — Hot Take and How to Save a Planet and Scene on Radio (which also made one of the best podcast seasons ever, in my book) — were all cancelled in the last few months. The hosts of Hot Take wrote about why, at their own expense (they refused to sign a non-disparagement clause and therefore do not at present have control of their own feed).
Carbon Copy is a good still-being-made climate podcast, covering for example how the inventor of the Super Soaker is now working on a technology that uses geothermal heat and how, if we’re gonna decarbonize, we need a lot more electricians than we have now.
I interviewed Sabrina Imbler about queerness, salps, and the deep sea.
Love to see the rules of design behind the Powerpuff Girls.
This interpretation of Rihanna’s halftime show! And this one, lol. And gosh the CONTROL Rihanna has over her BODY.
“You know I’m not the first gay star of a Broadway show... It is such a ridiculous position.” Harvey Fierstein, 1983, wow. In one sense Barbara Walter’s questions are awful; in another, maybe she’s being the wise fool. The first one, definitely, and maybe the second one. But: the exchange stayed in the show.
As I think about The Pattern Language, I want to also recommend this piece about the Choose Your Own Adventure series, which is written like a choose-your-own-adventure and makes ya feel really good.
Laughed through this whole thing. The captions. Quoting John Berger. So good.
Kate and me, both 16, on the soccer field after practice.
ok bye! thanks for being here.
Justine