But first…
Dulltown, UK: Today’s carefully selected adjectives are: picky, calumniatory, pellucid, subulate, walty, hodiernal, and gummy.
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Would you like to see again a picture of the front and back covers of my ancient junk shop book, Football Parade, from 1950?
Look, here it is, it has a portrait of someone called Stanley Mathews in the bottom corner – he is the ‘presenter’ of the book. Do books, or come to think of it, parades, have presenters? Well I suppose they must have – there he is! He does his presenting with a written introduction on page one. You’d think they could have put ‘introduced by’ on the cover, not that it matters much…
Why am I calling my posts that feature this book, Football for Surrealists?
There’s not very much surrealism involved in football is there? It seems to me to be a pretty dull and repetitive pastime, but what do I know of such things? (The Americans call football ‘soccer’. Of course, they couldn’t call the game ‘football’ because they already had a game called that – apparently it’s a little bit like our rugby. Would you like a quick dollop of history, dear reader? The game of rugby was invented in the 19th c. at Rugby School, hence the name, that’s the school where all the rich kids went, and still go today. People who played ordinary football there were members of the school’s Football Society, or Association – shortened to Football Soc, hence the word soccer.)
So, Dave, where’s all this surrealism? I hear you ask.
Well, it’s all in the illustrations – strange things like those very nicely drawn cartoons of ‘famous’ players with tiny bodies and great big heads that I featured in Football for Surrealists No. 3 a few days ago; also those full page colour depictions of players doing their stuff on the field of play, like those two happily dancing away on the front cover.
I think that these were originally real black and white photographs of the chaps that have been carefully coloured in, ‘tinted’, and then cut out and glued onto a strange blurred, and not very convincing, image of the football field – but on a nice day, but with a bit of haze. Come on, let’s have a look at one!
Now if this doesn’t count as surrealism, I don’t know what does!
First have a glance at the background, that vague velvety out of focus grass carefully avoiding going behind Johnny’s foot and making it seem to glow as if it’s either red-hot, or pretty painful; and those blob-headed spectators in the stands – hey, they look just like a lot of Heinz baked beans straight out of the tin!
And poor Johnny, frozen in time, caught hovering in space, just about to be struck quite painfully by a mustard-coloured football. Isn’t his hair nice dear reader?
Wish I had such nice hair!…
Dave Whatt 