Diana puts it wide

Jon in a hole

Hello! Thank you for signing up to, or stumbling on, this no-news-newsletter written by me, Ashley Clark. If you do choose to subscribe—and it’s free—you’ll receive bulletins about whatever’s on my mind: usually some combination of art/film/music/literature/football. If that sounds good, hit the button!

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I forgot to post this in time for Halloween, but this week’s quick rec is La Cabina (The Telephone Box), a short-ish (36 minutes) film directed by Antonio Mercero. La Cabina first aired on 13 December 1972 on the Spanish public TV station Televisión Española, but I found out about it thanks to a tip-off from film critic/programmer/old pal Neil Young. I don’t want to say too much about La Cabina, and would recommend going in as cold as possible. However, I will say this much: it got under my skin, and stayed there. Here it is.

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As we lurch toward the opening of an unfathomably compromised and corrupted World Cup in Qatar (which I’ll watch anyway, because I lack the courage of my convictions), I’ve cheered myself up by recalling the farcical opening ceremony of the USA ‘94 tournament.

The ceremony’s most well-known gaffe occurred when Diana Ross—clad in a billowing red suit, mic in hand, belting “I’m Coming Out”, and backed by an entire marching band—had the simplest task of stroking a football past a pretend goalkeeper and into the net from six yards out… and put it three yards wide. The pre-rigged goal frame exploded noisily on cue regardless, and Diana sprinted onward, with commendable pluck, as if nothing untoward had happened.

Spookily enough, Ross’s opening day shank prefigured the unfortunate culmination of the tournament, when Roberto Baggio, who had been Italy’s best player throughout, blasted his decisive penalty into outer space, thus handing the World Cup to Brazil. (I admired Baggio as a player, but always found his mullety-dreadlock-rat/ponytail hairstyle deeply unsettling, in much the same way that I can’t look at any picture of the band Haysi Fantayzee for more than three seconds.)

Less widely cited, I think, is the opening ceremony’s other tragicomic moment: The Nobbling of Jon Secada. Watch, as host Oprah Winfrey (who had her own pratfall at the tournament) introduces the “Just Another Day” singer. The camera is trained on Secada's band, who are getting their funk on.

The first sign of trouble arrives when the keytar player—a dead ringer for The Undertaker—glances backward as if to say “where is Jon?” The rhythm guitarist takes a similar look back, and as the camera drifts to the right, it becomes clear that something is very wrong indeed.

Secada is duly spotted poking partially out of the hole he’s supposed to have sprung from: a human Whack-a-Mole in a malfunctioning game, there for the whacking. He ploughs on with his song “If You Go”, its now suddenly on-the-nose lyrics—“I don’t wanna hide YEEAAAHHHH”—belted out with gusto.

For the next thirty seconds, Secada is heard but not seen, as the ceremony’s TV directors frantically cut around while they figure out what’s going on. Then, in another piece of unscriptable comic timing, the camera suddenly cuts back to Secada—a man, stuck in a hole in the ground, in front of millions of viewers worldwide—just as he screams the words “I’m almost THEEEEERRRE!”

Eventually, amid a thick fug of dry ice, slap bass, and embarrassment, Secada emerges and gathers himself for a rousing finale. He’s clearly in considerable pain, though; a hunched and hurting figure. It turns out that when the stage trap-door jammed, Secada had stumbled and dislocated his shoulder.

I’m still amazed to this day that he managed to get through it, and I can’t imagine the combination of agony, sheer panic and adrenaline that must have been coursing through him in the moment. In the end, he—like Diana Ross—was coming out, he wanted the world to know, and he had to let it show.

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I’ve already written in this space of my admiration for “Heartmind”, the most recent LP from Californian singer-songwriter Cass McCombs. But one of the record’s songs has been in especially heavy rotation for me this week. “New Earth” is a wry, jaunty, sun-dappled ditty depicting the aftermath of an apocalyptic event.

It contains a poetic and pointed lyric that was already one of my favorites of the year well before the cringe-inducing billionaire Elon Musk finally completed his purchase of Twitter in October and proceeded to capriciously lay waste to the platform and its staff. But it strikes a particularly piquant chord now!

The birds all returned to their original form
Dinosaurs lumber down Market Street
The junky is reborn
It was a bad day
Tweeting was muted all season
Now it's a glad day for the very same reason
It was a bad day, Mr. Musk was in a bad way
Stewing in his bullion like a phony chef
So he left The Bay
Now orchids mock him, spread so wide
With a lurid flavor his foul name could not hide

Until next week!

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