Ultimate Chelsea Experience

By April Zhang

Two weeks before Christmas, in fashionable West London, I lost myself. To be more precise, it was thirty minutes prior to an England Premiership clash between Chelsea and Arsenal, in the middle of a packed Stanford Bridge square that I found myself lost. The square was an arena of warm – up round. People wore their positions, either blue or red. I had to detach from the clamor of chatting, debating, whistle blowing and booming songs to get a grab on myself. I saw a crowd of Chelsea supporters crunching beef burger. In England, eating beef burger while watching a game was said to be a habit as old as soccer itself. So I struggled out three pounds and took one. twenty minutes left. People started to queue for entry. There were still more streaming in from every direction.
“Hey, want a ticket?” I was in the queue when a man jumped out of blue. As I was figuring out what he meant, my teammate took it for me, “no, we are good.” The man elbowed away and I realized that he was a scalper. “You know how much your ticket is worth now?” my teammate pulled out two fingers, “more than 200 pounds. It could exceed 250 in ten minutes.”
It’s like ages since 50 pence could afford a spot on the Shed End terrace (the first standings of Stanford Stadium). In fact, it’s less than four years since the near bankrupt west London club was breathed back to life and since emerged as a global brand; it’s less than two decades since soccer waved bye – bye to its “good old days” when no huge influx of money was seen and since became a most lucrative business in all walks of life.
Chelsea club virtually went bankrupt in the late 70's, the then owners almost sold the Stamford Bridge site to property developers to pay off debts when a Russian oil giant，Abramovich，came to messianic rescue. Four days from bankruptcy, he bought the club at a fraction of his company’s market value. He immediately signed a string of checks, one to hire a shark manager, one to pay off club debts, one to buy talents and one to start youth training camp. Total spending approached 300 million pounds, a well match to the boss’s goal. He wanted his club to be an ace.
“Only those who supported Chelsea before Abramovich bought it are entitled to real die – hards,” said Song Yu Hang, who owed a six – year – old allegiance to this club, “I began to love the club when it had neither money nor titles and I still do now. It’s not about business. Soccer should be a sport more than a business, Chelsea is a club rather than a brand.”
That is a real supporter, ardent and idealist. Yet, however unwilling to accept, soccer has been an entirely commercial – natured sports show since England Premiership took shape in the early 90’s. Big clubs were unhappy sharing interests with small potatoes and coined a full – fledged system to maximize profit. Small and poor clubs were excluded from this top ranking games round; those qualified to stay in the arena were well manned and equipped, and thus secured the performance and audience. So, Adidas and Umbro were happy to swap generous money for the players wearing their brand on chest; Rupert Murdoch was willing to fork out hundreds of millions pounds for television right; Club bosses’ pockets bulged.
Top clubs are often owned by powerful heads and mega billionaires. The clubs worshipped by fans are nothing special than other members in their business empire. Manchester United has made a vivid case of it. Hundreds years of history, three trophies in one year and a David Beckham, the team’s brand attracted the interest of a mega – rich sports investor American Malcolm Glazer. Quite unlike Abramovich, however, Glazer is lamented for his interest. On May 16, 2005, he shirked off his own whopping 300 million pounds of debt on ManU. Glazer walked away but ManU almost missed entry to the Champions League for financial incompetence. On that day, the Irish Times (Ireland has the biggest ManU fan base outside of Manchester) ran the headline: "The Day Football Finally Lost Its Soul."
Timothy Taylor, an award-winning journalist and author, also a longtime Chelsea supporter wrote in the latest issue of The Walrus, a Canada’s magazine “Start with a product that delivers value; Develop a core message and brand personality; Create iconography. What successful sports team is not set on this fundamental tripod? In soccer, value is winning games; brand personality is an articulated team spirit that involves fans and name, jersey, logo, mascot make perfect iconography.”
According to him, soccer is a born business and the larger game off squad is played with business rules. Abramovich can salvage Chelsea with his money; Glazer can put Man U at stake for his money; David Beckham can part with Manchester for Madrid and finally to America, if not entirely, largely because of money. Bogged down in the quagmire, this sport starts to disappoint and hurt people who love it so much.
“There is a worry that the game of football has become disconnected from fans, that the game has basically become a business, not a sport.” wrote Taylor. “Branding, marketing, and television rights all tend to confirm these worries among supporters.”
If money had played the devil, the devil smiled angel – like all the time. Gone are the days when Shed End terrace was piss – stained and crammed. The humble premise had given way to today’s most modernized stadium. What’s used to be filled with thugs, dipsos, headbangers and, frequently, racists is now the stadium’s best Family Box (2004 – 2005). At night, with all roofed spotlights on, the stadium is even brighter than in daylight. There is a reason for 250 pounds ticket.
Clubs and games are no longer geographically confined. Like tonight, Stanford Bridge is grounded with football tourists from all over the world. When I left hotel, I saw a fan from the States checking in; three days ago when a Champions League game between Chelsea and Levski Sofia occurred, supporters from Bulgaria came down here to cheer for their team. We, as well, have come half the world to watch this game by the field.
Clubs like Chelsea, have transformed from local to global. "We need to increase our international fan base," Chelsea chairman Bruce Buck said in an interview with British Industry magazine. The club had signed long – time partnership deals with Samsung and Adidas, multinationals whose produce and sale chain wind across the world. Sports shoes and caps with Chelsea logo are on racks of Adidas shops in London, New York and Beijing. The club has declared the wish to have its first squad team visit China in 2008. That news would give Chinese fans quite a thrill.
On the north side of Stanford Bridge square erected a wall running tens of meters. It was painted with the latest club photo. First team squad, coach panel, second team and supporting staff were in the middle. Those standing further left and right were said to be Chelsea fans from all over the world. Players and fans, all dressing in renewed squad jerseys, formed a blue windbreak, ready to contend with the fiercest storm. Five minutes before the game got started. I was at the entrance. “We're going to win the league! We’re going to win the league!” songs rolled from inside the stadium. It was like that before each game. When it’s over, it would be carried away in its thousands of fragments, taken home by its thousands of fans.

LIVE IN PAIN OR DIE IN PEACE

By Zhao Xiao Chen

The most salient characteristic of life is its coerciveness. We can’t predict what will happen the next minute, be it a prize or an accident; neither can we deny what life will impose on us, be it a fortune or a catastrophe. Painful as life may be, it is no excuse for exiting the stage of life. Life is a one – time shot and lost chance never returns. Everyone understands it but people turn to forego life regardless. Why do they make the choice? A diary may give us some clues.
The diary became known on the blog of a 28 – year – old Chinese girl, Li Yan. Suffering from Muscular Dystrophy Disease (DMD), an incurable disease deservedly nicknamed "super cancer", she’s been confined to wheelchair for 27 years and had to rely entirely on her parents for that span of time.
"It was raining. Mother and I were on our way home. I used to be so scared in rainy weather and pray that mom and dad would come soon and wheel me home, but now I only feel the comfort as wind drifted by and raindrops kissed my face and arm.”
We can hardly imagine that the words were from a girl who had gone through hell. She is so sensitive, tender, easily-satisfied and therefore always thankful. It may sound differently considering that she wrote down the story with a chopstick between teeth.
“I love life, but I’d rather die. I must die before my parents, or my life will be miserable. Without their catering me, I shall die smelly and ugly. I don’t want to be that way……”
Euthanasia, as Yi Yan sees, is a way out. She said so in a message she left on a popular hostess’s blog. But so far it is wish - impossible in China, as practicing euthanasia violates the state law. That’s why Yan pinned her hope on the hostess to help her by making her wish known to representatives of People’s Congress, the only people who can legalize euthanasia. She even claimed that she would starve to death should her attempt fail, as she has no strength to kill herself any other way.
Her story triggered a renewed bout of nation – wide debate on legalizing euthanasia. Recently, she was invited as a special guest to a Phoenix TV talk show. Her story is suspected by some audience, but most people believe it and show great sympathy. There are supports and opposition, as it always has.
Euthanasia could easily end the pain of patients and relieve their families, who look after them round the clock, from pressure. It also spares giddy levels of medical cost. However, opponents criticize the practice as inhumane. “Doctors are supposed to save lives, not take them.” said they. Worse still, should the lethal means fall into vicious hands, consequence could exceed the wildest guess. Admittedly, euthanasia could save medical resources for more productive use on those who can be cured, but everyone deserves a chance to cling to life; many are willing to suffer whatever it takes.
As Chinese case of the kind go, Li Yan’s is not fresh. The first occurred in 1986, when a person named Wang Mingcheng pleaded a doctor to end his mother’s pain by terminating her life. Both the doctor and Wang Mingcheng were jailed but public attention was drawn to it ever since. Yet high tech gets in the play this time. Li Yan is the first to use ‘blog’, a modern communication tool, to relate her story and call for help.
It’s still early to tell how much high tech could help. If she managed to carry off more than her predecessors, it would amount to a step forward.
As yet, the best we can do is to keep our fingers crossed for this girl.

ARTS,MUSIC:Enya: Paint the Sky with Celtic Notes

By Zhou De

Athair ar Neamh, Dia linn
Athair ar Neamh, Dia liom
m'anam, mo chroí, mo ghlóir,
moladh duit, a Dhia.
Switching on the radio, I sit still. The haunting melody floats over, and permeates the cabana as blowing up a balloon. Along with the scattered paper, dog-eared dictionary and dozing flowers, I am bathed in the sound of nature, and overwhelmed by an unutterable power.
The first time I came to hear of Enya, it was six years ago when the teacher chanted the preface to Wan Loon’s Tolerance, set by Enya’s Athair Ar Neamh. The melody gurgles out from the cassette, and exerts on me an indescribable magic. All of a sudden I found myself shed all the vexing thermodynamics formulas, principles of motions and long, headache verses with lush dictions, armed with but ignorance and a sincere severance to the nature. I closed my math book and that is one of the rare occasions where I did nothing other than pooling my attention in my Chinese class.
Fada an lá, go sámh,
Fada an oích', gan ghruaim,
aoibhneas, áthas, grá
moladh duit, a Dhia.

Móraim thú ó lá go lá.
Móraim thú ó oích' go hóich'.
Having no idea of what the lyrics tell（until last year when I came to catch the Gaelic words）, I was just sitting still as what I am, feeling the flow of Enya’s unique voice, stirred in the deepest heart.
The lapse of time does not wear away its fascination for me. When the wretchedness melts into tears, when the smiles play around the lips, the heaven-touched, choral-like melody, alongside the classical motifs would often leave me speechless. It’s really difficult to parallel the amazing and tranquilizing songs with a battery of praise adjectives. There’s no need to do so, actually.
As the rabbit leads Alice into her dreaming wonderland, it is Enya’s unique voice that guides me into the wonderland of Irish music, a miracle of the world’s music treasure trove. Secret Garden, U2, West Life, Mary Black, etc. a galaxy of transcendent singers and bands of the Irish music stride over, all carrying their own projections of life and interpretations of the unique culture in their motherland. I was then getting more and more acquainted with the looming melancholy in Secret Garden, a matrix of confusing and passion of U2, and lachrymose, high-pitched let-out from West Life.
But Enya always stays as my first choice for her delicate and penetrating voice, simple yet sincere melody, and her impressive temperament, bewitching rather than tempting, impossible to imitate.
Enya is not beautiful, in worldly sense. But she has cavernous eyes, as deep as the starry night. She has breathtaking voices, not to carry you away but to pacify and purify the mind.
She often gets sensitive, just as the songs she sings and composes.
“Music is located in relation to an imagined geography,” writes Andrew Blake, “and often expresses that geography.” Enya’s projection of the geography is her interpretation in the authentic Irishness, a continuing pastoral and simple Irish countryside identity with sacredness and misty melancholy, a slight different version from the ideological construction of Ireland by river dance.
“Behind Ireland fierce and militant, is the Ireland poetic, passionate, remembering, idyllic, fanciful, and always patriotic.” Yeats, the poet laureate of Ireland showed his confidence of Irishness in his Popular Ballard Poetry of Ireland. And Enya’s songs are also teemed with such confidence and passion. Her songs are strongly concerned with the symbiotic relationship which locks landscape and humans, and quite often God and Goddess. In her poetic songs, such scenes could be often discerned just as the description of Irish beauty by Anon——“richly covered with woods, delightfully situated houses, the oars of a majestically moving boat and the sounds of which ravish the senses.”
The traditional “bright and green” Irishness is interwoven with misty melancholy in Enya’s songs. She is not like “a sprightly lark with a song in her little mouth”, nor a beautiful thrush “stretching out in melodious song”. And in her music we can often discern the misty melancholy even from the briskness of her music. She sings as nightingales, seeing off the senile sun and embracing the dark blue sky painted with stars, awaiting the rebirth of the days and brightness. She tongues out neither sheer melancholy, nor mere delight. She always sings the blending——solemnity, joy and infinite piety to the almighty heaven, the rejoices of the people after a handsome reap and the reverence to the awesomeness of nature.
The melancholy is shared by Secret Garden and Bono, the lyricist and soul of U2, who interprets the Irish melancholy this way, “in a much more mysterious way it’s very Irish, the ache and the melancholy in it uniquely Irish.”
Enya’s humming is not likely to leave us on wires or to exult insanely, either could we weep or shed tears just as many do after viewing the sensational, tear-gas-like Korean MV Kiss. But Enya’s songs have an ineffable glamour, reflecting the search of peace and simplicity of life and free from the mobbing hubbubs and bustling worldliness.
When her debut Watermark in 1988 achieved a faraway success and established the heights for the gifted Irish vocalist and pianist, many doubted the endurance of the glamour of simple Celtic style she represents. However, her following albums followed suit and introduced her to the world’s music hall. Shepherd Moons, the Celts, the Memory of Trees, Paint the Sky with Stars and a Day without Rain each “romantic name” chalked a new sales record. While she sticks to the Celtic elements in her music despite that the international taste is much more pronounced.
Along with the hits of Enya, she became a frequenter to the Grammy ceremonies and almost each time tipped as favorites to awards. Her name soon became internationally house-hold, and Enya manias make presence and garrison one by one in a multitude of corners of the globe with a quite broad milieu of audiences, in Europe, in the US, in China, in Africa, etc. Abreast with the Enya rushes, the Celtic folkloric worldwide strikes the globe with its fresh style and heart-felt gratitude to life it presents.
Bono deemed art, especially music, as “a search for identity” in a conversation with Richard Kearney. In Irish singer tradition, local success to any degree was usually by a swift relocation to London and other metropolises on the globe. While Enya always stresses her Celtic identity despite an international fame in music, specifically in the New Age arena. She spares no efforts in the promoting of the fragrant Celtic music, the fresh notes with the fragrance of the grass and woods, and is fully in the position to be the prolocutor of it. In her albums, Enya relates the ancient Celtic myths, allegories and fairy tales in her choral style to the globe inhabitants. Her performance of How Can I Keep from Singing invigorates the traditional Irish psalm and in Aldebaran Enya traces to the migration of the ancient Celtic. The Celtic, the opening track of Enya’s debut writes her gratitude to and strong identification with the Irishness, especially the Celtic culture which nurtures her inspirations.
When English becomes the dominating “lingua franca”, Enya insisting on her passion and devotion to the local Gaelic, and many of her songs, including my favorite Athair Ar Neamh, are performed in it. The little knowledge of the language would not be an impediment, because we can feel the soul of the songs in our deep heart. 　
The songs of Enya are imprinted with the Irish, especially the Celtic elements which conceives her continuous inspirations. She never thought of denying that.
“I think my inspirations would come from people, people that have passed on, memories of them, but it can also be landscape. I came from the North West of Ireland, county Donegal and its very rural area: mountainous, beaches, rushes and it is somewhere I love to go. I feel I like I need to get back to my roots, back to who I am. There is nowhere better than to go home because I find the people there know me as “Eithne” and they don’t treat me any differently. They are proud of the success, but it’s so lovely that they talk to me as if only I just left yesterday! That keeps me very grounded and that’s very important to me.”
Enya, the New Age laureate, is more like a minstrel singer, wending the way at the dewy dawn into the valley or sitting by the typical Irish bar and witnessing the civilian’s dance in joy.
Paint the sky with stars, Enya gilds the selections of her best songs with this poetic and romantic verse. Singing sincerely for her Irishness, Enya is also painting with the Celtic notes in a sky free from hostility, hubbub and the vices of life. All the sparkling notes hanging and dangling in the sky-ceiling relates to us the peace, delight, piety and gratitude to the heaven, in a language we all understand.