Category Archives: New Utopia

Call it an Intrigue of the Seas, but are cruise passengers getting a hint at the possible names of Royal Caribbeans upcoming ships?

About three weeks ago the cruise line registered dozens of names with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). While the registration doesnt specify them distinctly as vessel names, they all carry Royal Caribbeans signature naming convention for its ships:

Names include Intrigue of the Seas, Unity of the Seas, Bliss of the Seas, Eternity of the Seas and more.

All were registered on December 16, 2021 under a 1B filing basis with the patent office. This status indicates that a filer has a bona fide intention to use your mark in commerce with your goods and/or services in the near future, according to the USPTO.

To be sure, it doesnt mean that the names have to be used, but going through the process of trademarking means they are more serious than just brainstormed ideas.

So what are the new names? Here they are in order as listed on the patent offices website:

To be sure you can see some theme patterns in the trademarks. For instance, Joy, Bliss, Awe, & Splendor all feel as if they could belong to the same class of ships. Melody of the Seas certainly feels like a sister ship to current Oasis-class ships Symphony of the Seas and Harmony of the Seas. And Nirvana, Utopia, and Paradise all seem to belong to the same group.

The cruise line generally has ship names that tie into a central theme surrounding a class. For instance, its Freedom-class ship names include Freedom of the Seas, Liberty of the Seas, and Independence of the Seas. Having multiple names in the trademark list that revolve around a theme is not surprising.

So will all these names ever see use?

The sheer number of trademarks means that even if they do use them all, it will be a long time before all these names start sailing. Even at a rate of one new ship per year, it would take more than two decades to go through the entire list.

As of now, the cruise line has four ships on order through 2026. This includes an unnamed Oasis-class ship that is planned for 2024. It also includes three ships in the cruise lines new Icon class. The first ship in that class is dubbed Icon of the Seas and is scheduled for 2023. Two more ships in the class have yet to be named.

One other hint? A user on a CruiseCritic message board posted images of a survey asking which name they preferred for the upcoming unnamed Oasis-class ship. On the list were most of the trademarked names, including Melody of the Seas, Utopia of the Seas, and Unity of the Seas.

From the looks of it, Royal Caribbean has plenty of ideas on what to call its upcoming ships.

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Intrigue of the Seas: Will Royal Caribbean's Next Ship Name Come From This List? - Cruzely.com

Their concept was helped along by high-profile digital premieres that occurred during the live-theater interlude. Diana: The Musical aired on Netflix in advance of its Broadway opening. The original production of Hamilton aired on Disney+ in the summer of 2020. HBO Max streamed David Byrne's American Utopia, which was playing on Broadway pre-shutdown and has since resumed. Apple has Come From Away.

As a result, a surge of theater-starved subscribers joined the BroadwayHD platform, which costs $11.99 a month or $129.99 annually for an all-you-can-watch ticket to shows.

Lane and Comley's first digital production was The Will Rogers Follies, filmed at the Palace Theatre in 1993. At the time, they were both producers on Broadway and filmed the performance against the going argument that no one would buy tickets if they could watch a Broadway performance on television.

Their idea was bigger than that. In normal times, 30 shows might turn over during the course of a Broadway season, even after spending millions. Just 1 out of 5 shows recoups its investment, Lane said.

Lane and Comley thought they could hedge that financial investment at the same time as they widened the potential audience for the best performances in the world.

"We feel that if a show makes it to Broadway, it's worth being seen by the world," Comley said. She likened the digital capture to an original cast recordinganother asset related to the show's brand but nothing that would prevent a fan from buying a ticket when in town. "You can't argue with the production value."

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Broadway finds a new audience in living rooms - Crain's New York Business

In another timeline, Travis Scott would have begun the year by teasing his highly anticipated fourth album, reportedly titled Utopia. However, due to the tragedy that took place at his Astroworld Festival, which left ten dead and hundreds injured, much of his focus has been on working with victims and dealing with the mounting lawsuits that have come as a result. Despite this, Travis has apparently found time to work on that album, which producer Wheezy revealed during an interview with Billboard.

Wheezy, who has worked with the likes of Future, Young Thug, and more, sat down with Billboard to discuss his work on Gunnas new album, DS4EVER. During this conversation, Wheezy was asked about his work with Scott and if he was back to working on his next album. Yeah, still working on it and putting the finishing touches on that, Wheezy replied. Hes back in Cabo working on it and Im going out there soon. Im going out there probably in the next two or three weeks to link up with him.

Based on Wheezys comments, new music from Travis could arrive in the near future. It would be the rappers first drop since he released Escape Plan and Mafia last fall.

You can read Wheezys full interview with Billboard here.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

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Travis Scott 'Putting The Finishing Touches' On Next Album - UPROXX

A green-winged teal forages near Alewife in December. Adult males have a narrow white stripe extending on the shoulder. (Photo: Jeanine Farley)

In this tale of two kinds of wildlife, Thomas Morton, sea captain and pirate Richard Wollaston and a couple of other profiteers came to North America in 1624 with 30 indentured servants as part of a trading venture. They formed a trading post called Mount Wollaston on land shared by the Massachusett people in what is now Quincy. There they began trading guns and liquor with the Massachusett for furs and supplies.

In 1626, Wollaston traveled to Jamestown, Virginia, where he sold some of the indentured servants to tobacco planters as slaves. This angered Morton, who urged the remaining servants to rebel. According to William Bradford, Morton said:

You see that many of your fellows are carried to Virginia; and if you stay you will also be carried away and sould for slaves with yerest I, having a parte in the plantation, will receive you as my partners and consociats; so may you be free from service, and we will converse, trad, plante, & live togeather as equalls, & supporte & protecte one another.

This seemed like a good idea to the servants left behind, so they collaborated with Morton. Wollaston never returned to Massachusetts. Morton renamed the colony Ma-re Mount (Merrymount), a play on the Latin for sea (mer), the mother of God (Mary) and the emotion (merrie).

Thomas Morton set up a maypole in his Merrymount colony where residents danced and drank and frisked, angering Pilgrims and Puritans.

According to the governor of Plymouth Colony, William Bradford, the settlement suffered under Morton:

After this they fell to great licenciousnes, and led a dissolute life, powering out them selves into all profanenes. And Morton became lord of misrule, and maintained (as it were) a schoole of Athisme [atheism].

Despite Bradfords disapproval, Mortons settlement and trading post became quite financially successful more successful than the settlements of the Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the Bradfords pilgrims in Plymouth. Morton was not steeped in the religious conservatism of the Puritans and the Pilgrims. In fact, he was quite the opposite, celebrating both Anglican and pagan English traditions. In the spring, Morton set up an 80-foot pine maypole in Merrymount dedicated to Bacchus, the Roman god of wine and merriment. There his men danced and drank and frisked with Massachusett women.

This heathen behavior angered the Pilgrims and Puritans. Bradfordwrote of this debauchery in Of Plymouth Plantation:

They allso set up a May-pole, drinking and dancing aboute it many days togeather, inviting the Indean women, for their consorts, dancing and frisking together Morton likwise (to shew his poetrie) composed sundry rimes & verses, some tending to lasciviousnes, andothers to thedetraction & scandall of some persons, which he affixed to this idoll May-polle.

Morton described the festivities this way in a song he wrote himself:

Lasses in beaver coats come away,Yee shall be welcome to us night and day.

The Puritans told tales of debauchery and heathenism at Merrymount. Morton felt he had set up a multicultural utopia, or at least a successful trading outpost. Its not clear how the Massachusett felt about all of this, but William Bradford had had enough. He demanded that Morton stop selling guns to the Massachusett. Morton refused. Bradford then sent Myles Standish to arrest him. Morton surrendered peacefully. According to Bradford if they had not been over armed with drinke, more hurt might have been done.

Morton was taken away without food to a deserted island off the coast of New Hampshire. Soon, he found a ship back to England, only to return the following year in 1629. He was arrested again by the Puritan leader John Endicott of New Salem, who chopped down the Maypole and burned the settlement, including Mortons house. Morton again was sent back to England.

And now to the teals

Females are brown and look much like mallards. You can just barely see a patch of green on the wing. (Photo: Richard George)

What does any of this have to do with the green-winged teal (Anas crecca), you ask? Well, after Thomas Morton was exiled to England, he wrote a three-volume book, New English Canaan, about his experiences in Massachusetts. The first volume was about the history and beliefs of the indigenous people he encountered: I found two sortes of people, the one Christians, the other Infidels; these I found most full of humanity, and more friendly then the other.

The third volume was an unflattering denunciation of the Pilgrims and Puritans and their policies in the colonies. In it he refers to Myles Standish as Captain Shrimpe because of his short stature. Of course, this book was not well-received in New England and became the first book banned in the Americas.

The second volume, though, was about the plants and animals of New England.

It is here that Morton writes about green-winged teals: Teales there are of two sorts, greene winged, and blew winged: but a dainty bird. I have bin much delighted with a rost of these for a second course. I had plenty in the rivers and ponds about my howse. This is the first recorded documentation of the green-winged teal in Massachusetts, and in the 1600s at least, the birds were plentiful.

More about the teal

Male and female teals have green wing patches that are mostly hidden when not in flight. (Photo: Jeanine Farley)

The green-winged teal is a small duck that feeds by dabbling for plants in the water. The males have a vertical white stripe on their shoulder and chestnut brown heads with a green stripe. Females look much like a female mallard, although slightly smaller. If the duck flashes a wing, however, you will see a shiny emerald wing. These ducks nest near water.

There are two kinds of ducks: dabblers, who upend themselves to feed from submerged plants, and divers, who swim underwater to find plant food. Green-winged teals are dabblers. Dabblers skim food from the surface of the water or use their bill to filter mud from mudflats. More than any other type of duck, green-winged teals like to eat from mudflats. Dabbling ducks can also take flight directly from the water; diving ducks need a running start along its surface.

Green-winged teals begin to nest as soon as the snow melts. A female usually lays six to 11 eggs, which she incubates for three weeks. A few hours after they hatch, the chicks leave the nest. Green-winged teal youngsters have the fastest growth rate of any duck.

A green-winged teal in January in Alewife Brook Reservation. Males have a chestnut brown head with a wide green stripe behind the eyes. (Photo: Brian Rusnica)

The chicks sometimes return at night for a few days, but they find all of their own food. After about 35 days, they are able to fly.

Green-winged teals can be found in Eastern Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island during the winter. In spring and summer, they breed in most of Massachusetts, as well as northern Vermont and Maine. In other parts of New England, you will see these birds only during spring migration (which can begin as early as February) and fall migration.

Although green-winged teals were abundant in the 1600s of Thomas Morton, they were heavily hunted in the 1800s and over time became rare. In the 1900s, the birds were protected, and since then their population has increased. Today, however, green-winged teals depend for survival on undisturbed wetlands, which are threatened by increasing human developments.

Have you taken photos of our urban wild things? Send your images to Cambridge Day and we may use them as part of a future feature. Include the photographers name and the general location where the photo was taken.

Jeanine Farley is an educational writer who has lived in the Boston area for more than 30 years. She enjoys taking photos of our urban wild things.

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Thomas Morton annoyed Puritans and Pilgrims before telling the world of the green-winged teal - Cambridge Day

IN LATE JANUARY 1941, Bucharest, Romania, was overrun by a barbaric pogrom that resulted in over 120 deaths, the looting of thousands of Jewish shops and homes, and the desecration of numerous synagogues. Sixteen-year-old Isidor Goldtein, an administrative secretary, found himself rounded up alongside 200 other Jews at an Iron Guard headquarters near the citys Jewish district. For several days, they were beaten savagely with clubs, planks, and crowbars; if they asked for water, a basin filled with blood was kicked their way. Between beatings, the depleted and weary Jews were forced to do exercises for the amusement of their torturers. Insults like dirty Yid and folk songs about how the popor (people) was seizing control of its national destiny by exterminating the Jews filled the air. When even the Legionnaires tired of all the beating, two groups were formed: one, in line for further abuse, was eventually released, while the other, numbering nearly 90 souls, was taken to a forest where bullets ended their ordeal.

By mere chance, the young Goldtein was placed in the group that survived, but the memories of that night, as Andrew Hussey argues in his riveting biography Speaking East: The Strange and Enchanted Life of Isidore Isou, were the impetus the emotional core behind the strange, expansive, and ultimately overwhelming body of work that would appear under the name Isidore Isou. Having confronted certain death and witnessed indescribable savagery, Isou vowed not to die anonymously as so many of his brethren had. His trademark megalomania as the inventor of Lettrism It is a name and not a master that I wish to be [] the Name of Names: Isidore Isou. [] The Messiah is called Isidore Isou? is less ludicrous when seen as a response to the calculated extermination of European Jewry. I will create, he proclaimed, the ambition, the blazon and the armor of my race, and it will be ennobled. In a subversion of Aryan values, he anointed himself Isou the Jew. For the project of annihilation could not be complete if one Jewish name lived on; those who had killed the people of the book, either with their own hands or through their silence, would have to acknowledge him.

Almost five years to the day from that fateful pogrom, on January 21, 1946, Isous improbable plan was put into action when, having arrived in Paris several months earlier, he stormed the stage during the premiere of Tristan Tzaras La Fuite. Tzara had been Isous idol (and a perfect mirror: a bourgeois Romanian Jew with an alliterative pseudonym who led the avant-garde), but now it was Down with Dada, let us speak of Lettrism! With the papers delightedly scandalized by his howlings, Isou went from being a stateless Jew who was surviving thanks to a combination of charity (Zionist flophouses and soup kitchens), prostitution (elderly British ladies paying a few hundred francs for company), and thieving (which was an art, Isou insisted) to a Left Bank figure with two books contracted to Gallimard. This was truly an astounding feat for someone in his early 20s even more astounding given that Isou was writing in a foreign language that he barely mastered (and spoke oddly, as can be heard in the voice of Ltranger in his 1951 film Trait de bave et dternit [On Venom and Eternity]).

Introduction une nouvelle posie et une nouvelle musique (Introduction to a New Poetry and a New Music, 1947) established the principles of Lettrism, which Isou claimed was at the avant-garde of the avant-garde, while LAgrgation dun nom et dun messie (The Making of a Name and a Messiah, also 1947) was a novel-cum-memoir that fictionalized Isous formative experiences in Romania (without explicitly naming that cursed land). Because those books, along with the vast body of his later work, from the hypergraphic novels to the 1,400-page La Cratique ou la Novatique (19411976) (The Creative or the Novatic, 2004), have long been out of print or difficult to find in the original French (little has been translated into English), Isou remains the least well known of the major avant-gardists of the 20th century. Following upon a major retrospective held at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 2019, Andrew Husseys rich biography aims to correct that oversight, providing an engaging, readable narrative of Isous multiple dimensions and sprawling ambitions.

After Futurism, Dada, and surrealism, Lettrism was the last of the total avant-gardes to appear, the end stage of arts decomposition before a new art would arise. Dada had reduced poetry to the word; Lettrism whittled it down to the letter. An alphabet of bodily sounds hisses and growls, cackles and coughs, snores and sighs was elaborately systematized to create sound poems that purified the form. For Isou, Lettrism was more than invented hieroglyphs and brute noise; it was the starting point for a creative methodology that would be valid for the plastic arts, architecture, economics, mathematics, medicine, psychiatry, even sex (there are Isouien methods of kissing, of fucking, even of masturbation). An elaborate jargon mca-esthtique, esthaprisme, art infinitsimal, cadre supertemporel, polythanasie esthtique, and so on provided a veneer of intellectual heft to the impenetrability of Lettrism. While a number of disciples moved in and out of the group over the years, it was in many respects a closed shop with Dieu-Isou (God-Isou) at its absolute center.

Hussey seems to be frankly torn about the intellectual value of the entire project. Of Isous first book laying out Lettrist principles, he writes: [F]or most readers, including assiduous followers of the latest avant-garde trends, the book was convoluted, fragmented, and largely unreadable when it was not incomprehensible or possibly even insane. Of the series of new alphabets Isou invented: They seem like the obsessive creation of a madman. Of the hypergraphic novel Jonas: [I]t is a work produced by someone who knows that he is unwell, possibly quite mad. Of the 1976 novel Lhritier du chteau (The Inheritor of the Castle), a sequel to Kafka: In truth the book is a discordant mess [] a visceral and disturbing account of a mind in free-fall. Isou had indeed suffered a psychotic breakdown during the revolutionary fervor of May 1968 he was convinced that the uprising was indebted to his postwar theories about youth culture and even attempted to have himself proclaimed its leader and spent the latter part of his life in and out of mental hospitals. But the madness inherent in the entire project of Lettrism was there from the start, only it was a calculated response to the rationality and order that had spawned the Shoah.

Hussey has no doubts, though, about the rollicking tale of Isous life and times. Born in 1925 in the provincial city of Botoani, in Romanias northeast, Isou settled in Bucharest with his well-off, assimilated family. As a precocious teenager he immersed himself in the capitals Jewish literary circles. After the war, Isou crossed a continent in ruins to get to Paris (for a while, he wondered if he should go to Israel, but since Paris was the absolute center of world culture, he decided that was where he needed to be). His charisma, good looks, and unbounded confidence won him a gang of devoted admirers. He managed, as a stateless Jew barely out of his teens, to secure meetings with Jean Paulhan, Gaston Gallimard, Jean Cocteau, and Andr Gide. When his genius was not immediately recognized, threats were issued: Each generation brings with it a mass of new values which old bastards like you try to stifle. Im warning you now that my friends and I will come and smash your faces in if you dont publish my work which will create great upheavals. I do not salute you, Isidore Isou. He accosted movie producers to get his then-unfinished Trait de bave et dternit screened at the Cannes Film Festival (that film announced the start of discrepant Lettrist cinema, which cut the tie between the image and language, influencing Jean-Luc Godard and Stan Brakhage; it also brought Guy Debord into the Lettrist ambit before an acrimonious break). Isou and his band physically attacked an orphanage to free a young admirer; another scandal involved a Lettrist priest taking the microphone during Mass at Notre-Dame to spout an anticlerical screed. Orson Welles was reduced to an earnest, aw-shucks Midwesterner when Isou and some Lettrist pals recited a sound poem for a BBC documentary on Saint-Germain-des-Prs.

At times, the scandals and adventures so captivate the biographer that Hussey does no more than renarrate Isous own tellings of those exploits. Yet Isou could hardly be taken for a reliable narrator and he was upfront about that: when an editor at Gallimard asked him to change the ending of a chapter in LAgrgation, Isou demurred, saying that he would not add yet another lie to a story already full of lies. Despite admitting that it is impossible to separate the real from the fantasies within fantasies in Isous writings, Hussey treats Isous own work as a true document of his life and era; a precise eyewitness account (this of LAgrgation, a novel creating the myth of a character named Isidore Isou) or a true account of what Isou had lived through and seen (of an erotic novel set in a mental hospital). The mistake is compounded when considering the books inconsistencies and errors, from minor things like dates (the nonaggression pact between the Soviet Union and Germany was signed in 1939, not 1938; Guy Debord and Isou were not close friends in the 1940s, as the third line of the book has it, having only met in 1951), names (it is Mihai Eminescu, not Mohai), and geography (the city of Oradea is in the plains and hills, not the mountains; there could not possibly be a night train going the 40 kilometers from Constana to Mangalia) to larger errors in cultural history (Paris, liberated a year earlier, was not in the midst of the puration sauvage when Isou arrived in August 1945; to state that five of the original founders of Dada in Zurich were Jewish exiles from the same part of Romania as Isou is wildly off since only two Romanian Jews were among Dadas founders and one of them came from Bucharest). When writing about Romania, Hussey relies on accounts in translation or by foreigners; original sources are largely missing (I counted four in seven chapters).

Whatever the documentary faults of Husseys book, his subject is riveting, and he tells the tale well. Isou was that rarest of things, a sensitive soul who remained stubbornly convinced of his genius and asserted his right to venture into any field of thought, without a care for traditions or established principles. Some of the results were, as Hussey freely concedes, off the mark, but there was a freedom to Isous mind that strongly rebuked the culture of experts and rationality that had once decided utopia would be Judenfrei. If Paul Celan, a fellow Romanian Jew whom Isou befriended in Paris, answered in his own way Adornos famous remark about the fate of poetry after Auschwitz, Isous whole way of being with its madness and delirium, its wild excesses, sexual energy, disaggregation, and decomposition was its own form of justification. In a world where no one is master of his destiny, as Isou put it in Trait de bave et dternit, where the idea of dying peacefully in ones bed is a fairy tale since violence surrounds us all in this inhospitable world, the only thing left is creation unbounded, godlike creation.

Marius Hentea, a professor of English at the University of Gothenburg (Sweden), is the author of TaTa Dada: The Real Life and Celestial Adventures of Tristan Tzara (2014).

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Madness as Method: On Andrew Hussey's Speaking East: The Strange and Enchanted Life of Isidore Isou - lareviewofbooks

No satirist could have plotted it better. The residents of Bandhapari village, in Odishas Kalahandi district, invited their MLA, BJD leader Pradeep Kumar Dishari, to inaugurate a telecom tower. Only, the tower was a rickety bamboo structure, bearing a banner that read BSNL 4G. This was the angry villagers way of protesting against the lack of response to their repeated requests for a mobile tower the absence of which makes it necessary for them to travel 4 km to another village in order to make a simple phone call.

This is how Indias dream of zooming down the digital highway to arrive at some kind of technological utopia, where people buy groceries using payment apps, run entire businesses on their devices and children learn in virtual classrooms, stumbles against reality. While the hardship faced by the residents of Bandhapari is particularly unfortunate, the frustration they feel over being denied what has become a basic necessity to live and work in the 21st century would be familiar to many. Indians may have access to all the latest smartphones that hit the market, but none of the hype that accompanies a new launch can offset the discomfort of dangling precariously on a window ledge or off balcony railings to catch a signal. Or trying to make the Hobsons choice between service providers who are technically different, but offer exactly the same patchy network connectivity and indifferent customer service (until one threatens to port to a trade rival, in which case the red carpet of undivided attention and special offers is suddenly rolled out).

While Dishari said that he understood their frustrations, he couldnt do much, as clearance for a new tower would have to come from the Centre. As for the Bandhapari villagers, they have threatened to boycott all elections until their demands are met. Perhaps they are hoping that will send a message even clearer than the bamboo 4G mobile tower.

This editorial first appeared in the print edition on January 7, 2022 under the title Network unavailable.

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Unable to text or call due to lack of mobile tower, a village in Odisha finds a unique way to send a message - The Indian Express

If water was the main thing that happened to a bagel that makes it great, there are about five bagel stores around my store here they would make as good of a bagel as we make, says Utopia Bagel shop co-owner Scott Spellman on the myth that New York City water is what gives its bagels the reputation as the best in the country.

Its what you do with the water. Its how much water you put in, its how much, when you proof, [when] you let in the air, Spellman says. Those are the things that are not talked enough about... Its those techniques that make our bagels what they are. The wildly popular Queens, NY shop is famous for its fresh bagels with soft, airy dough and a crisp crust. Spellman attributes his shops notoriety to two things: Having skilled workers make bagels by hand, and keeping everything from the ingredients, to the kettle, to the oven, to the baking techniques the same as they were 40 years ago when the shop first opened.

Another element that Spellman believes is absolutely necessary to making a good bagel is hand-rolling the dough, versus having a machine create the round shape. A machine, he explains, pumps the dough over and over again, tightening it up. Its the rolling that really keeps it soft. And rollers are a dying breed...Its not like theres a school for bagel rollers, he says standing over one of his employees, Henry, who has perfected the art of bagel rolling during his 27 years at the bakery.

[For] any craft, making it by hand is special. It takes an individual to be at the top of his game to make it good, Spellman says. The one problem youre going to have with my bagel, is once you eat it, youre just not going to want any other bagel.

Watch the full video to see more of what goes into Utopia Bagels process.

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The Secrets Behind One of New York's Best Bagels - Eater

It is often taken for granted, but occasionally worth stating that as a sport, football is virtually perfect at least within the white lines. It was a game that was fortunate enough to almost stumble upon the optimum laws and layout very early. Theres a sufficient balance between freedom and order, between creativity and destruction. The preciousness of a goal has ensured it has the right amount of scoring to strike the perfect balance between satisfying reward for performance and exhilarating risk of surprises.

All of this, which is founded on the joyous liberation of just kicking a football, has made the sport by far the most popular in the world. It is that very popularity, however, that has created a multitude of problems off the pitch that now impinge on its perfection on it. Too much of the games immense wealth goes to too few places, greatly eroding competitive balance, and threatening the future of many clubs and even competitions. This is what led to the existential threat of the Super League.

Rather than dwell on such negatives, though, the start of a new year should offer an opportunity to look to something more hopeful; to something utopian. What would need to be done for the structure of football to be as perfect as the playing of it? If we could start the sport from scratch, what would we do? What would a football utopia actually look like?

To answer this question, The Independent asked a number of figures from within and around the game. They included those willing to publicly comment, such as historian David Goldblatt, director of Fair Game, Dons Trust board member Niall Couper, and football finance academic Dr Rob Wilson, as well as a series of sources speaking off the record including agents, club staff and football administrators.

The discussions kept coming back to the same core question: who, and what, is football actually for? Thats quite an easy one to answer. It is firstly the simple playing of the game, in meaningful competition, as a representation of a community. Thats it. That is what arguably human historys most popular cultural pursuit is founded on, and what it has spread from. Once you ensure that principle is preserved and protected, so many other problems from the competitiveness of leagues to the structure of competitions and problematic owners take care of themselves.

The problem is that hasnt been the case. A largely unregulated game has generally left clubs to fend for themselves in a wider embrace of unfettered capitalism, the driving forces of which are directly contrary to sporting ideals and the concept of clubs as social institutions. This paradox is the central tension in football, that has led to a financial stretch with huge gaps emerging, and a lot of uncompetitive clubs, games and trophies.

As former FA chief executive Mark Palios has argued to The Independent, the goal of business is to kill competition indefinitely; the goal of sport is to revive competition every year. The two can never meet. So, as a transformative first step, clubs must be protected as products of their local community.

They should only be owned and run by those whose sole motivation is the health of the football club. There should be no parallel motives. That means supporter trusts or fan groups. It also precludes venture capitalists, billionaires, wealth funds, nation states or anyone looking for financial growth or political capital out of the game. At a stroke, that would eliminate all of the problematic discussions that come with these owner profiles, while ensuring there are no moral concerns about just supporting your club.

So, any football utopia would involve a German recognition that clubs have a cultural value beyond just winning and accumulating wealth if not necessarily a direct German-style 50+1 system, despite many of its obvious strengths. This, accompanied by the right regulations such as transparent accounting and incentivised standards on issues like fan engagement, would secure clubs in their community. No one would be able to spend more than they earn. Core parts of identity like the name, badge and location would be protected. A club could only ever be as big as its fanbase, or how big that fanbase can organically grow.

Nation states would be precluded from owning football clubs in a ideal world

(AFP/Getty)

An obvious problem with this is what has actually happened in Germany, and how Bayern Munich have dwarfed everyone else. An obvious response is that a remedy is what starting from scratch allows. Examples could be taken from American sport without needing to necessarily go as far as a draft. Instead, the immense wealth that football earns could keep going back into the game, and be redistributed fairly.

The lowest-ranked clubs could receive the greater share of the broadcasting deals. Sponsorships could be shared, so no club ever earns too much. Ethically questionable sponsors, such as gambling or cryptocurrency firms, could be prohibited. More money could also be put into womens teams, academies, infrastructure as well as community schemes such as local education and civic society involvement. This is all possible when the owners are singularly concerned with the health of the clubs, rather than just making more money. You wouldnt get external forces looking to push Super Leagues because they wouldnt be involved.

It also eliminates the need for more complicated structural regulations like salary caps, because there is just a greater financial parity. There could beconstant checks that anchor everyone towards a competitive centre. The wider game would perpetuallyseereplenishing reinvestment. It would also encourage the development of academy players, further fostering local connections. Ticket prices could be lower.

Couper, who is well versed in all of this from his experiences in reviving AFC Wimbledon, explains the benefits. All of these different elements come together to make football more sustainable in the long term, while using the wealth at the top to make sure that every corner has the opportunity for a well-run community football club.

Clubs could still seek to grow as teams, which is what it should be about, rather than constantly seeking to grow big as businesses.Empire-building managers like Jurgen Klopp or Pep Guardiola or Sir Alex Ferguson could still try to do that, but wouldnt have to be as concerned by outside forces.

Some modern fans might well complain that would similarly preclude the construction of the current super-squads, like Lionel Messis Paris Saint-Germain, that bring a new scale of glamour and popularity. There is a fundamental misunderstanding there, though. Football is not more popular because of these modern teams. Football has always been immensely popular anyway. The history of the sport emphatically proves this. The popularity of the sport has instead led to these super squads, but only because theres no regulation on where the immense wealth from that mass popularity goes. It accumulates in certain areas, creating a virtuous cycle for a decreasing pool of clubs. They buy better players, so enjoy more success, so become more commercially attractive, so they buy better players and on and on. That is something that is eroding the product of football, rather than enhancing it.

The glamour of super-squads like PSGs is not needed to make football more popular

(Getty)

Preserving clubs as community institutions smashes this. It spreads the wealth, and the stars. The talent would just be more evenly distributed, making more clubs more interesting. And this is ultimately much better for the sport.

Consider the Euro 2020 match between Croatia and Spain, or the last Champions League round-of-16 tie between Porto and Juventus, which were both among the best games of 2021. The drama and stakes mattered much more than the identity of the players on the pitch, all of whom also became more interesting because they were involved in such a contest.

Consider most of football history, pretty much up until the last decade. Dinamo Tbilisi or Dynamo Kyiv may not be teams most fans are bothered to watch anymore, but that wasnt the case in 1981 or 1999, respectively. Since both clubs were able to keep talented groups together that bit longer, they sent a spark through Europe. Kyiv, in particular, were almost unmissable when they had Andriy Shevchenko and Sergiy Rebrov together. It added a colour and vitality to the Champions League way beyond the same cast of current clubs.

This can be the case across the game, and the continent maybe even the world. If clubs are solely fan-owned enterprises, and federations like Uefa also introduced centralised redistribution models as well as regulations on homegrown players, it would hugely increase competitive balance in the sport. This was a point strongly emphasised by almost everyone consulted. Competitive balance is key, Dr Wilson says. Getting it right benefits everyone in the pyramid.

There would just be more mobility in the game. The big clubs could stay strong, but everyone from Preston North End right down to Northampton Town could harbour realistic ambitions of gradually rising up through the divisions and experiencing success, let alone the sports adrift middle class such as Everton and Aston Villa. This is what was meant by meaningful competition. Everyone would be afforded the opportunity to hope, in the way football should really be about.

From that, other structural problems would start to evaporate. The Champions League group stages would cease to be so predictable. There would be much more vitality and variety, which are the lifeblood of competitive sport.

Champions League upsets like Portos victory over Juventus will become more common if wealth is distributed more evenly between clubs

(Getty)

The compensation for economic modesty is a more diverse football culture, Goldblatt argues. There is already an example of this in Swedish football. Through their own adaptation of German-style ownership rules, it is one of the few domestic leagues with proper competitive balance and internal mobility.

This would of course require another utopian ideal: that federations are themselves solely interested in safeguarding the sport, and collaboration to serve the wider game, rather than being in competition with each other. Again, the sport being treated as a sport, rather than an endless quest to create more money, conditions this.

The calendar would be streamlined, easing the stress on players. More of them could play more games at their top level, without being pushed to physical limits. More consideration could be given to environmental concerns.

This isnt to preclude modern innovations, either. It now seems clear that the nature of a lot of international qualification, especially in Europe, is a relic from a previous age. This could be honed and improved, potentially allowing more Nations League-style competitions and in short more interesting international breaks. This would perhaps permit a more symmetrical 32-team European Championship, too, since qualification wouldnt have to be so large.

Again, club regulations on homegrown players would similarly be to the benefit of national teams as well as national leagues, revitalising both.

The continental federations would also bring in proper ethical judgements on hosting major competitions. This could apply for everything from human rights concerns to a countrys ability to spend on sporting infrastructure without costing societal infrastructure. Through this, it would no longer be a case of Fifa, say, looking to use whatever country it requires to serve the World Cup as has been the case with South Africa 2010 and Brazil 2014.

It would instead be football as a force for good in the way it professes to be. The game could really use the huge leverage it has. Countries would have to greatly improve records to even be involved. Sportswashing could be made impossible.

The response to this utopia will no doubt be that its impossible to implement, of course. That isnt the point. The point is about having a vision to strive towards. Footballs current reality is something that certainly shouldnt be taken as a given. The beauty of the game deserves a better sport around it.

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What would a football utopia look like? - The Independent

Skiing poorly on Buttermilk, celebrity-spotting, party-hunting and altitude sickness are time-honored elements of a classic New Years Eve visit to Aspen for the international jet set.

Andy Warhol checked all those boxes and of course had some fun, too during his visits to Aspen to ring in three New Years during the 1980s. Warhols local history went back to the 1950s for art exhibitions and visits with his Carbondale-based patrons and friends John and Kimiko Powers. These glitzier holiday trips put Warhol on snow with his boyfriend Jon Gould, an athlete more prone to mountain snowsports than the artist, and at A-list gatherings here with everybody from John Denver and Jack Nicholson to Elizabeth Paepcke and John Oates, Barbi Benton and Buzz Aldrin, Bob Rafelson and Baby Jane Holzer, Cornelia Guest and Tab Hunter and Jimmy Buffett. His camera and journal in tow, Warhol documented the scene and the scenery.

As the Aspen Art Museum celebrates its monumental career survey Andy Warhol: Lifetimes, here a are some high points from the artist New Years Eves in Aspen.

Warhol and artist Christopher Makos ventured to Buttermilk Ski Area for a Powder Pandas lesson with instructor Gary Bonn.

We did about two hours of zig-zagging and going up on the handrail and you just sort of sit on the thing and go up the whole hill, and it was really fun, he wrote in his journal on Dec. 30. It was easy, all the two-year-olds skiing with me, and if you start when youre two you can really go with the waves and relax and become a good skier, but I was so tense. I fell three times.

Warhol also had an altitude problem during this stay, and popped into Aspen Valley Hospital to check if hed broken his wrist in his many falls on Panda Peak (he hadnt).

He also soaked up the local enthusiasm for fresh powder the best snow they ever had, he reported and enjoyed seeing people outside of his New York element: Met all these people who were surprised seeing me and I didnt recognize them in their ski clothes, he wrote.

Warhol rang in 1983 at Jimmy Buffetts all country-western party, though the journal doesnt specify whether the bash was at Buffetts legendary Old Snowmass home or off-site somewhere else. The guest list included that included Jack Nicholson (Jacks got a big fat belly now, Warhol wrote) with Anjelica Huston, Barry Diller and Diana Ross.

He also noted he was invited to but apparently didnt attend Sonny Bonos wedding at the Aspen Chapel and went out with TV actress Cathy Lee Crosby and a group to Aspens era-defining disco Andres.

It was like trying to get into Studio 54, he wrote.

On New Years Day, a group including Makos, Gould and Denver-based photographer Mark Sink went snowmobiling in the Maroon Creek Valley from T-Lazy-7 ranch.

Something strange happened, Warhol wrote of the experience. I though Jon was trying to kill me. We were on a snowmobile and he pushed me over a cliff. I thought he did it on purpose. But somehow there were trees there and I fell off into a deep snow. We rode to the house, that was fun, but I didnt realize till I get back how scary going off the cliff was.

Sink, in an interview this fall, explained that he had sprayed snow in Goulds face on the joyride, which caused Gould to veer off-course. The good-time spirit of the incident is captured in Sinks photos of Warhol giddily smiling as he dug out from the crash.

It should be no surprise that Warhol sought out Elizabeth Paepcke, the co-founder of the Aspen Skiing Co. and progenitor of Aspen as a utopia, wife to the late Walter Paepcke. He went to her West End home (since demolished, it sat on the property above Hallam Lake where the Lewis family compound was recently completed).

Met the Dowager of Aspen, the Grand Dame, Warhol write on Dec. 31 with un-ironic appreciation.

Warhol noted with glee her nickname (Pussy), her immaculate house and her indomitable spirit.

Shes 82 and shes very beautiful, Warhol wrote, she looks like Katharine Hepburn. An immaculate house and she runs up and down the stairs to get ginseng tea, shes spry.

atravers@aspentimes.com

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Andy Warhol's Aspen New Year's Eves | AspenTimes.com - The Aspen Times

Frank Stanfield| For the Daily Commercial

LEESBURG City commissioners on Monday will vote on annexing a 1,088-acre parcel for the proposed 3,000-home Bella Vista at Whispering Hills development off U.S. 27and a 149-acre Dewey Robbins Road plot planned for 481 homes.

Lake County commissioners met with their city counterparts Thursday in hopes the city might consider requiring some natural buffers between the new homes in Whispering Hills and their rural neighbors, and lowering the housing density for the Hodges Reserve tract on Dewey Robbins.

The joint workshop at the community building in Venetian Gardenssometimes turned into a heated discussion with major philosophical differences.

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Residents who now enjoy pastures, lakes and wildlife said they felt invaded this summer when they learned of the $1.6 billion Whispering Hills plans that include a golf course, equestrian center, hotel and commercial properties. It is a joint venture with Ayana Holding, based in Dubai, and Marsan Real Estate Group in Orlando.

We have received a lot of public comment, said County Commissioner Leslie Campione.

The area is on the east side of U.S. 27, north of Power Line Road and west of Number 2 Road.

The area is now in a county rural protection area, which calls for vegetation boundaries between developments.

Tim McClendon, the countys planning and zoning director, also pitched what he calls rural conservation subdivisions, basically squeezing houses closer together to create more green space.

City Manager Al Minner called the idea of having fewer people per acre a rural utopia.

He said to accomplish such a thing would require thinking outside the box, and necessitate cities subsidizing the projects with utilities.

Campione said the conservation subdivisions have the same density, just arranged differently.

But the topic hit a nerve.

We didnt go out and seek growth, Minner said. Growth comes to us. It is the citys job to manage growth and if annexed, to provide services.

We are not going to stop growing, he said.

City Commissioner Dan Robuck III said reduced density is nice idea, but impractical.

A house built on one acre is a $500,000 home, he said.

What the area needs is affordable housing for nurses and firefighters, including multi-family homes. This is hard to find now, with homes selling for $300,000, he said.

We cant force people to build what they dont want.

County Commissioner Josh Blake agreed. Property owners have rights, he said.

Existing residents do not have a right to a perpetual view, he said.

The Whispering Hills and Hodges Reserve annexations are up to Leesburg, he said.

Campione said she hopes the city and county can engage in some future, collaborative master planning, including traffic.

She said there will be too much traffic on Dewey Robbins Road.

As for Whispering Hills, the developer has agreed to make several changes, including limiting traffic to the two-lane Number 2 Road to 41 homes, not hundreds.

Ive never seen a developer do that, Robuck said.

Access will now be limited to two points on U.S. 27. Before, County Road 48 would be an access point.

Its not perfect, said Karen West told the Daily Commercial of the Whispering Hills plans after the meeting, but she said it is much better now. She lives in the Water Wood subdivision in Yalaha.

Mayor John Christian said it would be unfair to ask the developers to wait three or four months to make changes now.

The city does a good job managing growth, he said, and growth is crucial for the city. Lake Square Mall needs business, the south end of the city contains rundown motels and other businesses, and the city needs more schools.

Leesburg hasnt had a new school in years. Parents are sending their children to private schools.

Mondays meeting is set for 5:30 p.m.at the community center at Venetian Gardens.

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Leesburg considers annexing land for proposed Whispering Hills development off U.S. 27 - Daily Commercial