red cards, yellow cards

a and i decided to take in soccer this weekend, as much for the crowds as the game. first hit: a local bar to watch the u.s. on saturday. the spot quickly got packed with guys i would have thunk would be drinking long island ice teas by the pool and practicing gang signs though they hail from merrick or some such. every now and then, to show they knew the score, they yelled, 'vai!! vai! forza, italia!"

ahh, the motherland.

those italian players are smoking hot but also seem to feign a lot of injury.

then into soho on sunday to see brazil (after, watching japan-croatia at the gym, which was annoying because: a) closed-caption text suffers a time lag and therefore contains innaccuracy; b) it was fairly bad soccer playing). but the brazil game was packed in soho, every place we poked into was jammed. we passed one joint where we wanted to go but it turned out you needed reservations and a woman was arguing with the bouncer to let her in spite of her tardiness and she was on the brink of hysteria. so was he. we realized, less the reservations, not a chance to get in there and headed southwest, where 20 bucks a head got us two drinks a piece and many, many, many pro-brazil fans in their yellow and green. and we shimmied up to the last place you could stand before the reserved tables were set up and fans sat. sweat dripping all around. the table in front of us was full of brazil-gringo couples, but clarification is warranted cause the brazil girls (as opposed to the singing brazilian girls) were probably of the colonizing class themselves and had a vibe of entitlement that got them into a bit of a scrap with the italian waiter, likely overworked, after which they told him they wouldn't tip him. and it was hot, steamy in there and busy and he was busting his italian ass to get them their capareinas or mojitos or whatevs, and their vibe was plain ugly, so much so it made me start to root (but secretly) for australia.

for france and south korea we went to a french spot back in bklyn and there were plenty of q-t-s in in the joint. a noted that my taste often veers toward the horshack (horse-shack?) aesthetic. she may be right. horshack by way of that delight of a frog, matthieu koussevitz. i ain't ashamed to say it neither. somewhat droopy eyes. those things kill me just about.