Football Programs: Iceberg Theory

As we plunge headlong into the latter half of the American Football season (did anyone see the Canadian SuperBowl? me neither), I must admit to being attracted to the sport more in theory than in actual experience. Unless you have a really deep geographic loyalty to a team, or money placed on the outcome, or family members to cheer against, the average televised football game -- 22 grown men in saturated colors and fiberfoam padding chasing each other around a graphing calculator made of grass -- is pretty bland indeed, unless one considers what isn't being shown on the screen. The tell-tale sign is the use of the term "football program" indicative that the game being played behind the sidelines is far more important than the Spartan passion play waging its way across three hours on the field.

Unlike a straightforwardly primitive sport like, say, distance running, football is something akin to a joint military maneuver, requiring untold amounts of planning, logistics, strategy, reconnaissance, support personnel, communication (verbal, non-verbal, telecomm, intuitive), PR, media ploys, recruiting, biomedical engineering, materials science, etc. before a single kick-off can take place. My question is this: why not show this on TV as well?

One argument, of course, could be realism. The TV broadcast attempts to capture the reality of being at a game, while ingoring the hidden forces which everything seen on the field in the first place. But this purported "realism" -- already on thin ice with the advent of multiple camera angles, instant reply, and onscreen stats -- came to a crashing finality with the inception of the digitally-superimposed line of scrimmage, the noosphere's final deathblow to the hegemony of the bones-n-muscle biosphere. The yellow line is the leak in the facade of the Real, the symptom of the vast iceberg of politics, economics, technology, and sheer numerology lying just below the surface of the 100-yard green.

So why stop at the yellow line? I'm advocating a complete re-thinking of the way football is presented: I want to see ALL of the competing forces -- on-field and off -- interacting all at once on my projection monitor. Let's see the play-by-play in the sports medicine trenches, let's get a molecule's-eye view of the damage being done to the muscles of a player being tackled, let's see the climatological effects of so much heat and sweat, onscreen variables debating the chemo-cognitive effects of hometown morale, virtual reality blimp tours of nearby clouds, the pigment-traced travails of sewage leaving the restrooms, the terrorized flights of worms from the playing field's surface, the stock quotes of each padding manufacturer, the estimates of gambling-fueled Mafia territory gains, the success of players vis-a-vis sideline fans in seducing opposing team cheerleaders, biological surveys of game-time vomit explusion, lines of force leading from uniform production floor to blitzed quarterback tackle....

Then, maybe, I'll watch a game.

Technorati Tags: sports football technology

Phoenix: Geography in Stereo

Marshall McLuhan:

Stereo sound ... is 'all-around' or 'wrap-around' sound. Previously sound had emanated from a single point in accordance with the bias of visual culture from its fixed point of view. The hi-fi change-over was really for music what cubism had been for painting, and what symbolism had been for literature; namely, the acceptance of multiple facets and planes in a single experience. Another way to put it is to say that stereo is sound in depth... Anything that is approached in depth acquires as much interest as the greatest matters. Because 'depth' means 'in inter-relation', not in isolation.[thanks MD]

Since moving out West I have developed a keen appreciation for horizontal depth. Back home, back East, in the landlocked towns, there is flatness, there are meandering rolling hills, we endure disorientation: zero-dimensionality, home with no reference, subject with no object. In Boulder, we navigate all directions with reference to our pole star, the Flatiron Range, always due West from any point in town. It is both a topographical and historic point of reference, a clear visual signifier for "The Wild West Starts Here", the clearest indicator anywhere in the nation of the end of one geomorphic personality (the Plains) and the beginning of another (the Rockies). It is the beginning of an adventure novel, the drop-cap opening of a block of text, the astonishing throat-clear at the commencement of a speech. For this very reason, however, Boulder is one-dimensional.

Contrast this to the Phoenix area, where I was a recent visitor. Rather than the constancy of mountains looming in the West, there are mountains and hills and abutments in every which direction, disconcertingly rising above a more or less flat valley (flatter than the Colorado Front Range at least). Multiple reference points, multiple choices, multiple geographic loyalties. It is no surprise that the area seems more ethnically heterogeneous, not to mention historically ambiguous. Lacking the grand promenade that is the Gateway to the West of Denver, and the Pacific finality of the California coastline, Arizona, like the rest of the Southwest, is both an in-between zone, and a scenic destination (although, if the late Bill Hicks gets his way, and CA topples at the hands of an earthquake, AZ will be home to miles and miles of beachfront property).

Concurrently, because it lacks reference to a single point, whether the mono-wall of the Rockies, or the hopeless dead-end expanse of the sea, Arizona, New Mexico, and cousins function as a geographic Cubist painting, a miasma of references, a duel of multiple polarities: East vs. West, High Tech vs. Rugged Nature, Red Desert vs. Green Oasis, Past vs. Future, History vs. Timeless Present. In Arizona, these exist simultaneously, the eternal Both/And, and humanity is the richer for it.

Now if only they'd invent Dolby.

Technorati Tags: Arizona tourism

The Tempe Post Was Temporary

I posted something a few days ago about the Tempe, AZ area which in retrospect was kinda mean. Truth be told I had a great time, the weather was gorgeous, the scenery was nice, and the people were all cool. I was just mad about the SMOG, the same problem we have here in Boulder/Denver. Also, and I didn't know this, Frank Lloyd Wright designed a few buildings (or was it just the one) on the Arizona State campus. For those of you who don't know, FLW was the f--kin' MAN.

Earthquake Trend?

This weekend's chaotic attractor: earthquakes. There was one in China, followed by another in Iran. Concurrently, Matt Taibbi's harrowing report from Pakistan (where the official death toll of the October 8th quake that rocked Kashmir stands at 73,000) was posted to Rolling Stone, entitled "The End of the World, Part III". The key quote:

We do not seem to be going forward very much, but every few months we lose, somewhere, a big piece of the world map, a mysterious and enervating process that is becoming like an ominously steady drip that can be heard all over the planet.

Then, as if on cue, Tim posts his own harrowing tale, this one a weird bit of porn-drenched Saunders-inspired sci-fi, of an earthquake survivor-turned-tour guide lamenting the loss of a loved one. Quote:

The body was that of a 30-something Junior Professor. Her pelvis had been cracked in half by a stone globe when she had fell upon it. Her bloody pale hand still clutched a geode, and a Post-It note leaked from the torn pocket of her sopping jeans.

Could it all be because of the digging?

Technorati Tags: earthquake kashmir matt taibbi

Finish the Job

At the risk of sounding like I was mind-wiped by a rampaging pack of red/white/cerulean theocons (they're crawling all over coffee-liberal Boulder, after all), I gotta say, I'm not so sure this immediate pull-out of Iraq thing is such a good idea. I was against the war and marched like everyone else, but sometimes, I'm not so sure what we're doing is entirely wrong.... Or maybe I've been reading the blogs of too many anti-torture gay conservatives.

[Addenda: the worst of the "pull-out" gang are the Dems who voted for the war, who now claimed to have been mislead. Why the hell run for office, morons?]

My Homies Have Started a "Story" Blog

Brian and Tim, two of my homeboys from back in the Buffalo days, have started a blog devoted completely to telling stories, an idea I myself would try out if I had he friggin' time. Oddly entitled Whiskey and Mace (an homage to Dave Attell's joke about the only two things which affect the male penis? is it guys?), thus far it seems like they're focused on very Buffalo-friendly subject matter: drinking and talking to women. Check it out, seems to update pretty frequently.

Technorati Tags: fiction blogging

Just Writing

Just writing invades me now. just writing. Just writing as the key and only injunction: invade the noospehere with your army of words, your battalion of metaphors, your phalanxes of figurative language, your small platoon of facts. Each cluster of lit-troops packed into the paragraph and setting sail for the beachead, the beachead where self-censors of all potential lie in weight like a million Belgian gates, log ramps, claymore mines and beds of razorwire, waiting to trip up all meme invasions who dare penetrate the self-selecting temple/template of though, which decides which thought-armies will tred upon the mind-ground, and which will fail and die. Yours will tred, will run from foxhole to foxhole, firing volley after volley at recieved opinions and stabel worldviews, a million helpless minds sitting in the cafes in the market reading what they believe to be "innocent literature" only to find a live snake waiting for them on page 23.

All has written. All has been read. All has been thought. All has been thought about, observed, collated, collected, ransacked, analyzed, critiqued, hagiograpehed, appreciate, depreciated, fictionalized, serialized, signified, created, conjured, conquered. And yet still you write.

Write like its the oldest and only habit, as natural as the atom's electron cloud spinning, as the amoeba's pseudopods assimilating, the pit-python's coiled carapace lurking, trucks trucks, hitchikers hitching, clouds clouding up everything. Your natural activity keeps the air clear, keeps feet planted to soil, keeps eyes watching, keeps lips drinking, the fundamental substances-soil of the glue between viewer and object, percieved and perciever.

But at a certain point, this natural activity grows cold, and it is time to dance. Even if they have never moved together before, throw your limbs out onto the cheap beachwood floor and submit to the air-sound patterns rumbling from the PA and into your shins. Create in your mind the illusion of drunkeness, using words if possible. A slurred phrase -- "I'ma soo wasted, hic!" -- will do. The vertigo of the drunk-in-movement destabilizes gravity fields (only to make them stronger later on, requiring an even more ferocious Dance-Attack), and puts all local property at risk. Human artifacts become contingent entities, held together now but luck over habit and deliberate construction. Should all sentient forms come to drunk-dance on the same day, we will have a revolution of dust and wind the likes of which common worldviews have yet to see.

See the ants following each other across the floor-seams? Do not take their micro-noises for laughter, the chatter is one of appreciation of the Gods exercising their Will far above them and, if the ants are lucky, spilling a drop or two of microbrew down the tiny tunnels of their domeciles. On this occasion, the ants too have pause to dance, and even the queen can be seen shaking her egg sack to the alien harmony-armies falling into her tunnels like the waves of a distant shore suddenly uprooted and dropped on top of a landlocked town.

And then we stop to see ants holding hands, and ants making business promises and exchanging info-cards, and ants kicking in hubcaps and keying car windows, all is right with the invaded world, at every level.

The Worst Album Covers of All Time

Man, I was just about to write a retaliatory anti-Pitchfork post due to the 4 (out of 10) rating they gave to the amazing new Fiery Furnaces album, but then they go and post this and almost completely redeem themselves! Given that I haven't been to a public library's music section in well over a decade, I keep forgetting how bad album cover art can be.

Congratulations to Maria Whyte!

An old acquaintance of mine from my days as an Economic Justice activist has just been elected to County Legislator to the 6th District of Erie County (Buffalo, NY). I know very little about local politics, but it's safe to say that the early 30-something Ms. Whyte will be a source of inspiration and new thinking in a part of the United States (the Rust Belt) which badly needs it. With a focus on fiscal sanity and community revitalization, Maria is a credit to her/our generation, and the type of passionate community leader who bears proof to the fact that, even in these cynical times, things can (and do) get better. Congrats Maria.

Technorati Tags: Erie County Buffalo politics

Alec Ounsworth: Overachiever

Can't get enough of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah?! Don't you worry. Not only, according to a recent interview w/ the 'Forkies, does lead singer Alec Ounsworth spend nine hours a day writing music after work, but he's also in two other bands. Check out Pelican Picnic here, and then his solo joints here. Where was this guy a year ago? Toiling in obscurity like the rest of us.

Which reminds me: why the hell am I typing this when I should be doing the same? Next post: long time from now.

Technorati Tags: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

Communal Alienation: Bright Eyes in Boulder, 11.7.05

A body/mind, a quarter of a century old, ambles down a street on the Lower East Side. Cables plug into his chest and lead far down the street behind him. A mound of scars surrounds this socket, and the scars catch the suns rays and dazzle us in their pain. And his face is ablaze as he looks down to contemplate this sound-navel, then upwards his arms rise, a guitar materializes from the dead flesh, rotting garbage, and shattered bricks all around him... and outward pours a hurricane.

After a long day of pounding Amante coffee, journaling aimlessly, and trying to get excited about work , I ran to the local music venue to check out young Conor Oberst and his Omaha rock outfit Bright Eyes. Now in his mid-20s, and backed by a professional-sounding band of the same age, Conor has been plunging the depths of his shattered (?? by what ??) psyche since the mid-90s, churning up emotionally-direct gold so that no one will ever have to confront the horrors of the whining postmodern ego again. Oberst is loved for the extreme (and extremely beautiful) lengths by which he plunges inside his tormented feelings, a phenomenology of the suburban soul which certainly does not go unrewarded by the attention of his female peers (Winona Ryder being one of the most famous of his beaus). While he gives nods to politics and anti-war sentiment (of the conventionally un-nuanced Michael Moore variety, at least), what takes center-stage are the anthropological reconstructions of his failed relationships and aspirations.

See, I'd been reading an article on Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism earlier this day, which coughed up this troubling bon mot:

Today, we are more open about discussing character disorders such as the narcissism and borderline personalities that Lasch described -- disorders that present with "vague, ill-defined complaints" rather than traditional symptoms of neuroses -- but we have also expanded the range of personal pathologies to include new conditions.

The Highly Sensitive Person, or HSP, comes immediately to mind. While it might be overreaching to label Oberst a borderline personality (not always such a bad thing, ahem), its clear he's been blessed/cursed with an unusually acute ability to express these "vague, ill-defined complaints" in a way that brings people together and keeps them entertained.

Yet less we consign Oberst to the "alienated loner" artist-archetype, what is so notable about a Bright Eyes show is the communal vibe. While it's a bit awkward to behold the sight of 5 other people adding texture and nuance to such deeply personal lyrics as those of "You Will. You Will?", "Old Soul Song", and encore standout "Lua" (chronicling a coke-fueled one-night stand on the Lower East Side), nevertheless there is a celebratory air that comes from talented friends making music together, a possible alternative to the broken bonds of family and romance which fuel Oberst's lyrics so. This show was no different, as the encore closed with opening act Sons and Daughters joining the band onstage amidst a shower of roses, beer, and spit, culminating with wild dives into the audience and Oberst balancing atop the main drummer's bass head as the final chords came crashing down. With such ecstatic interplay, shared both onstage and off, the seemingly impenetrable barriers of the ego are dissolved just a little, and we see that, yes, there might be other things to sing about besides my fucking feelings.

But given Oberst's prolific monopoly on just that enterprise, let's just hope he doesn't have too much fun with the band.

Technorati Tags: Bright Eyes brighteyes Conor Oberst Boulder indie rock

Postmodern Catholicism: Confess to Madonna!

This is sheer genius. To promote her new album, the 47-year-old Madonna is taking out massive billboard ads sending people to a 1-800 number where they can anonymously confess their most dirtiest of laundry. The best part? You can hear it all online here! From crushes on Gary Shandling to spider murders to grocery store cookie theft, you can hear it all. For her next campaign, I predict: anonymous nude photos, a la I Shot Myself.

Technorati Tags: Madonna Hung Up Catholicism

The Excitement Never Ends: Paris is Burning

I am starting to understand my addiction to Google News: it has to be the most goddamn entertaining, 24-7, real life freaky movie I've ever watched. The last year or so HAD to be pre-plotted and written out, there's no way mere chance and happenstance could have brought us such exciting, heart-wrenching plot lines as the tsunami, the continuing mess in Iraq, Hugo Chavez's Venezuelan saber-rattling, Hurricane Katrina, Plamegate and the dissolution of the once-invincible Bushies, Diego Maradona's ascendency to professional Bush-hater, the super-tornadoes in Texas, the Pakistan quake, and of course: Paris burning. If it wasn't all happening to real people, with real suffering behind the flashing outrageous imagery, it'd portend a 4000% increase in profits for the popcorn-and-Snowcaps industry alone.

Alas, we can't revel, this is our world, and it's tearing itself up, just like it always has. As we mature and come to realize at least a modicum of social power (via purchasing, voting, blogging, etc), we take up the gauntlets our forebears have held without complaint: to manage, to make due, to carry on, to soldier forth, to push the boulder up the never-ending hill. Such is our lot in this limited life: suffering, seduction, stupidity. And the superheroes of tomorrow will gladly step into this maw, their jacked-in minds attuned to the future's virtual answer to Google News, their entire beings connected to every upswing and downturn of the global civilization-beast as it struggles to cohere and recognize itself as Self.

But until then, Paris will burn, and the world will burn, and the inactive will remained logged on, forgetting that they too can have sort of control over the plot directions pummelling their way 24-7 through the Google News interface.

Technorati Tags: Paris Paris burning France riots Google

Pirates!

I realize it's rather unseemly to gloat over the near-death of innocent people, but come on: pirates attacking an Australian ocean liner?! How cool is that?

!!! Eleanor Models !!!

Screw the Pitchfork review (4 out of 10?!), you go girl. Please email me if any of ya'll find any more photos of Miss Miu Miu '05 anywhere....

And you if you want an amazing (and amazingly obtuse, to read the reviews) aural history of the Chicago (ahem, Matthew) of old told through the voice of the brother-sister band's own grandmother, peep the new LP yourself.

Technorati Tags: Fiery Furnaces indie rock fashion

Foreshadowing

Location gets short shrift these days, but not for long. Soon the bloggers will turn their imagino-guns downward into the very dirt they stand upon, and a new stage-stage of transparent oddity will thus arise and seek procreation. Space is composed of infinite points, yet the connections between them are depressingly gray-scaled and finite. Ideas are combined in staggeringly limited ways, memes congregate with other "safe" memes, vistas ignore each other and a perspective is locked into a head, vise clamps on fearful noggin.

In the subsequent Year of Our Lord, he (the unnamed blogg-o-lutionary) will use the rectangular space created between his Heart-Threshold and his Brain-Lintil as a door, through which will storm the Minions of Tomorrow, Liquid Psychonauts and Half-Emergent Brainfields which are even now combining the uncombinable, breathing in the unbreathable spaces, moving and shaking that which cannot be moved or shaken.

Street maps will become like so many veins on the back of a hand, and scattershot picture/posts like so many desparate pricks of the Heroinist's needle, looking for the Right Vein in the Wrong Place. We've shaped our organs to look like neighboring counties, we've triggered our hairlines to mimmick the dodges and weaves of the clouds. Lightning in our breakfast cereal, ant colony-heaps in our memory-moments, newspapers breathing in and out in the back black corners of the strip suburban bathrooms.

Bed Bath & Beyond will glisten in the might-light of the rampaging PowerPoint diagrams, we shall Photoshop the world into a new nebulae of sensation, taking/grabbing what Is and forcing it into the nightmare Dali jello molds of What Could Be. East/West roads will now stretch from Blueberry to Neverdania. Big Box bureaucrats will become our unwitting mouthpieces each time they make business bank transactions or small talk over the Pringles cans at a 7/11.

Ours will be a distributed network of hijacked vision-matrices, wherein each citizen's thoughts and daydreams will parallel process the collective horizons descending through the pyschedelic marshes to take up influential residency in the meridians of our ho-hum human carapaces. Like a PAC buggering the halls of Congress, these brightmares will haunt the movers and shakers with the pattern-recognition of an army ant in outer space, surveying his next territory, looking for an "in" on the beachheads of the blue-delta electrochemical Continents of Romance and Danger.

His will be the last iceberg to appear, the last whale tooth in the side of the Reality Principle's sinking hull, and soon after, dark boiling clouds will bubble from the deeps of each lifespan, and we will be like wolves once again.

Thus, you will have your mutation.

Technorati Tags: Boulder blogging poetry dreams

Ventura Gets it After All

Just a few weeks ago, I chastized Austin Chronicle columnist Michael Ventura for his doom-n-gloom, retro-romantic views on transportation technology, citing that what Mr. V was leaving out of the picture was Maglev trains. Well, lo and behold...

Technorati Tags: Peak Oil economics transportation

Today's Horrifying Wellness Factoid: Pillows Are Fungus Farms

The first bedding fungus study in 70 years was published two weeks ago, and the findings aren't good: pillows are riddled with the disease-bearing Aspergillus fumigatus, a link to everything from asthma and allergies to hospital-borne pneumonia. Odd that I would find this today, the day after Halloween, after a night of restless sleep, followed by a short-breathed asthma burn in the morning. Luckily, there are some ways to fight it. You might start here.

One can only wonder what the little beasties are doing to our actual dreams...

Technorati Tags: asthma allergies fungus health

You Are Winning

Intelligent men 26 pixels tall march from North to Southwest on your 17-inch flat screen, real-room buzzes go unacknowledged as your gaze locks into this tiny logicial competition world you've volunteered your time into. Curiously, a similar process occurs inside your own sub-6' body as you click click shift click, other little micronauts duel it out for space, brainware, mindshare, arms and legs and cavities and cracks and vessels and avenues and alleys... BOMBARD your inner circuits with the things you love most, the artillery of shared splendors, mutual accomplishments and lightly-held achievement, tasting the peache-breezes as the they flutter the sails of your navies, your navies, your navies...

She was a midshipman's mistress, facing due east with her back to the beast, to the Man in Black smoldering in black, signaled in the shadows only by the fume-cherry of his shortening cigarette, breathing his last ounce of patience for the mistress to turn to get What She Had Coming, what his employer had paid him to give her, the time of her life, a road trip in vegas, vegas, vegas the town at the bottom of your crown. CHAKRA! cheer the demon hordes descending down your drain pipes into the teeming abyss of Life-Learned substance, these manure merchants grumble under the load, yet inside they are happy;

for their families floating on flotillas of junks receive a paycheck each and every fifth Monday from the man with the cherry cigar, the one with scars from the old days and their battles in the Malta Tropics, where the falcons darted from the heavens like damned daggers dancing a simple dance with that fickle, undeniable lass... GRAVITY.

You are Jackie Chan the way you work that mouse, your keyboard knuckles to the pressure like so many novices under Bruce Lee's stomp-foot, and no amount of techno beat fertilizer will regrow what you've lost to those single moments of lost patience, when you let slip that which sinks ships: the unexamined phrase, the unintended consequence-causer, the knot un-tier, the bond dissolver, the half-truth denotation riding a black horse into the ear of the Beloved, where she perceives your strain reflection and grows nauseous, violent, hurling un-lead armies through the barracks of her esophagus, sending them untrained to fight for their live on the killing fields of your relatability, when the sun is beating down and the oil is rumbling up and all the earth wants to do is melt itself so the two

can once again be together, this blob and that orb, that heat and this heat-causer, this chain of deep hot obliteration using each and every desert-dweller for the purposes of earth-sol fusion-unity, the last techno 808 beat to ever drop, the primal victmizer set to dissolve whole galaxies like continents whipped by a hyperion Death Lance, with Keats dreaming in the back of a straw-filled pickup truck about that time he schtupped the female softball team in the abandoned hospital--

Patton Oswalt would approve.

Technorati Tags: comedy techno soldiering