smithers:

[Aside] I watched Mark Neale's documentary about William Gibson this weekend, which is called No Maps For These Territories, and thought it was fantastic.

Gibson is interviewed in the back seat of a car that is equipped with laptop, fax machine and cell phone as it speeds around America on a road trip. He shares his thoughts and opinions on a number of topics that weave their way through sportsBabel, albeit on a broader societal plane rather than the sport-specific focus found here.

I highly recommend this to anyone interested in technocultural issues who wants to gain insight from someone who has spent the past few decades thinking on the bleeding edge.

[Exit]

The NFL is planning to experiment with on-field seating, beginning this Sunday.

From Baudrillard (America, 1989:37):

[The jogger] is the brother in mortification of those who conscientiously exhaust themselves in the body-building studios on complicated machines with chrome pulleys and on terrifying medical contraptions. There is a direct line that runs from the medieval instruments of torture, via the industrial movements of production-line work, to the techniques of schooling the body by using mechanical apparatuses. Like dieting, body-building, and so many other things, jogging is a new form of voluntary servitude (it is also a new form of adultery).

It is with this seemingly throw-away clause at the end of the paragraph that Baudrillard tips his hand as to his departure from Foucault's technologies of the self — it is also a new form of adultery. For at the end of the day, what the fitness club is selling is not so much the ability to create an optimized body, but rather a simulacrum of readily available sex. What is the product that the fitness club sells? It cannot simply be the temporary lease of fitness equipment, for plyometrics and home fitness solutions such as Bowflex offer cheaper or perhaps more convenient solutions, if personal fitness is the only goal. No, the primary differential advantage that the fitness club offers is a roomful of relatively healthy individuals all working out at the same time, sweating, grunting, straining — not unlike how they would during sex. The desired effect is to seduce or perhaps titillate the consumer in simulating a sexualized space.

Baudrillard elaborates upon this in Forget Foucault (1988:20):

The production channel leads from work to sex, but only by switching tracks; as we move from political to 'libidinal' economy … we change from a violent and archaic model of socialization (work) to a more subtle and fluid model which is at once more 'psychic' and more in touch with the body (the sexual and the libidinal).

As Baudrillard would have it, then, working out at the fitness club produces a simulacrum of sex, with its signs everywhere apparent: the athlete sweating, exerting, straining muscles and panting heavily in intercourse with some mechanical exercise apparatus. Absent in this arena, he would suggest, is seduction. Instead, all sexuality in this space is produced.

This compulsion toward liquidity, flow, and an accelerated circulation of what is psychic, sexual, or pertaining to the body is the exact replica of the force which rules market value: capital must circulate; gravity and an fixed point must disappear; the chain of investments and reinvestments must never stop; value must radiate endlessly and in every direction (FF: 25).

It is this sentiment that we find reflected in the fitness club: from the bank of televisions that face the aerobic exercise equipment, to the advertising around the club, to the clothing worn by the athletes that functions as both consumer good and promotional item, everywhere the signs of capital circulate in accord with bodies, both ideal and non-ideal, as disembodied parts or as produced wholes. Capital invests in the body, while the body reciprocates by reproducing capital.

Is it any coincidence that jobs in which the employees wear name tags tend to be the most dehumanizing? What does this say about team sport?

From USA Today:

No more mythic figures

Fans who pay high ticket prices feel as if they own a piece of high-priced players. Fans who belong to fantasy leagues come to care more about a player's stats than his life. And fans who care to can learn just about anything about players through multiple media outlets.

"The sports media is so utterly intrusive now," Edwards says. "The line between players' private and personal lives has been obliterated. The players have been demythologized. If the same standards had applied when Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle played, they would not have been the mythic figures they came to be.

"Fans have come to see themselves as part of the spectacle. The media and the leagues promote that. The guy who takes his shirt off in sub-zero temperatures gets face time. Jack Nicholson and Spike Lee sit courtside and become part of the action. And the guy in the nosebleed seats feels he has a right to be a star, too. So he takes that information that is out there ? about a player's family, his kids and his financial situation ? and uses it as a weapon. He heckles and sees himself as part of the game."

All of which makes players feel vulnerable these days. "You can know a player's whole life today," Knicks guard Penny Hardaway says, "whereas back in the day, you really couldn't."

There is so much to be said about this movie, but I am not sure what it is yet — will have to puzzle over it some more. I wanted to copy to my own netspace while puzzling, so as to save bandwidth of others. (By no means am I claiming this as my own work, but cannot find to whom I should give attribution….a little help?)

From the Guardian Unlimited, on legendary alpinist Reinhold Messner (emphasis mine):

In the late Sixties and early Seventies climbers were concentrating on new routes up the major peaks, but they could never match these first exhilarating ascents in terms of capturing the public imagination. Until Messner came along.

Having established his name as a fearless big wall climber in Europe, he tore up the rule book for altitude mountaineering in the Himalayas. He stripped the sport to its basic form. He tossed away the concept of oxygen tanks and big teams and camps, and made mountaineering a more equal contest between man and mountain. He wrote about what it was like to live and die where the air is so thin that every breath is a triumph. He became the first real solo rock star. 'Messner set the agenda for mountaineering after all the big peaks had been climbed,' says Ian Parnell, 35, one of Britain's top alpinists. 'He set out the rules that we are still using today.'

Quoted in Foucault's Discipline and Punish:

On 1 March 1757 Damiens the regicide was condemned "to make the amende honorable before the main door of the Church of Paris", where he was to be "taken and conveyed in a cart, wearing nothing but a shirt, holding a torch of burning wax weighing two pounds"; then, "in the said cart, to the Place de Grève, where, on a scaffold that will be erected there, the flesh will be torn from his breasts, arms, thighs and claves with red-hot pincers, his right hand, holding the knife with which he committed the said parricide, burnt with sulphur, and, on those places where the flesh will be torn away, poured molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin, wax and sulphur melted together and then his body drawn and quartered by four horses and his limbs and body consumed by fire, reduced to ashes and his ashes thrown to the winds" (Pièces originales…, 372-4).

On 26 February 2004 Bartman the deicide was symbolically pardoned by the floating signifier of one of the great all-time Chicago Cub figures, Harry Caray. In his place, a particular Rawlings baseball was condemned to make the amende honorable before the Harry Caray's Restaurant in Chicago, after the proprietors of the eatery spent $113,824 to bring it to justice.

The ball said nothing in its defence. It was offered a sumptuous steak and lobster dinner by authorities before receiving a thorough massage. The Rawlings was then carried through the crowd on a pillow to be placed in a specially-constructed shatter-proof glass box. Still uttering not a single word, either towards the crowd or to Bartman himself, it was blown to pieces by Lantieri, the Hollywood demolitions expert. Its remains were divided into thirds and taken to the three Harry Caray's Restaurant franchises in Chicago for public display.

* * *

As discussed earlier, Steve Bartman's crossing of the threshold of the permeable membrane unwittingly located a strategic weakness in the structure of panoptic power. In this light, we must read this hyperreal torture-spectacle of the Rawlings baseball, though carnivalesque in nature, as a device that allows the panoptic and pantactile to return to a homeostatic condition once again.

This was an operational failure of the panoptic gaze. The continual televisual surveillance of the sportscape creates disciplined athletes and docile spectators, while also maintaining the boundary between the two. But it is the very success of this surveillance that ultimately proved implosionary: having the panoptic gaze incorporate you into the Spectacle by catching a fly ball — a text that, if a sports fan, certainly must have woven itself in and out of Bartman's lifetime media tapestry — is as essentially American as Mom, apple pie, and baseball itself. It was only natural that Bartman should want to reach out and catch that ball, eschewing one brand of docility for another.

As we have noted already, however, this constituted an operational failure of the political and economical outcomes of surveillance: Bartman needed the spectacle of public torture and death. While social control evolves into simulation, as Baudrillard has noted, it at the same time retrieves the spectacle of torture and execution to do so: we cannot kill Steve Bartman, but we can kill a proxy of his. What will people learn from such a public execution? SIT DOWN NEXT TIME (and become docile)! At least that is the intent.

(Thanks to Jeff Scholes for helping develop this particular voice)

The final bill for Athens 2004: $11.6 billion.

Football is the singular professional sport in which surveillance is an active part of its operational and tactical strategy. Even baseball, the supposed "American Pastime", does not internalize the gaze to nearly the same degree. This is why football has truly become the New American Sport: it presents a model, not only of the nation's military-industrial complex, but of its cozy affiliation with the political mechanism of surveillance.

Pantactilism and simulation also feature prominently in the model of football, which perhaps even more than baseball is all about numerically measurable conflict situations: 2nd-and-4 or 3rd-and-8; up a touchdown or down by a field goal, at the 50-yard line or in the red zone — the list goes on and on. And the entire time, a co-ordinator sits upstairs and reads percentages and probabilities from a database for the appropriate and decisive end action to take in each situation.

Besides the obvious portrait of professional football's excesses, this philosophical shift in the game constitutes what is the essential motif of Oliver Stone's Any Given Sunday: the old-school coach, who smells the grass and the sweat and the pain, makes "gut" decisions immersed in the cacophony of the moment, while the new-school coach, who works in an aseptic space of pantactilism and simulation, makes decisions tightly integrated with his computer surrogate — coaching based on feel versus coaching based on felt.

Romance would have us side with the former, but reason, that niggling voice in the back of our minds, acknowledges the bankruptcy of this position and its path to pure defeat.

From Hunter S. Thompson:

Unfortunately, I bet the Colts heavily to win by seven points — and they only won by three — so I was wrong again, and I paid a terrible price. First the presidency, then the point-spread on Monday night. Indeed. Gambling was not a happy experience for me last week.

But so what? I lost, but I am not a Loser. I have long understood that losing always comes with the territory when you wander into the gambling business, just as getting crippled for life is an acceptable risk in the linebacker business. They both are extremely violent sports, and pain is part of the bargain. Buy the ticket, take the ride. Mahalo.

. . .

And so much for football wisdom, eh? Let's get back to the presidential election, which also caused enormous pain and grief to millions of people.

I am no stranger to the anguish of losing a presidential campaign, and this very narrow loss with John Kerry is no exception. It hurt, as always, but it didn't hurt as much as that horrible beating we took with George McGovern in 1972. That was by 22 points, the worst defeat in any presidential campaign since George Washington ran for a second term in 1787.

And the winner that year was a conquering hero named Richard Nixon, who got whacked out of office two years later because he was a crook. We had a very angry Democratic majority in the Senate that year, which is not the case now.

No. Today, the Panzer-like Bush machine controls all three branches of our federal government, the first time that has happened since Calvin Coolidge was in the White House. And that makes it just about impossible to mount any kind of Congressional investigation of a firmly-entrenched president like George Bush.

The time has come to get deeply into Football. It is the only thing we have left that ain't fixed. And more on that next week.

Don't really have too many thoughts on tonight's Monday Night Football game, nor the time for them, so I will move right on to a synopsis of my trip to the annual North American Society for Sport Sociology (NASSS) conference, held this past weekend in Tucson, Arizona.

I was there to present my recent ideas on motion capture and sports simulations in my paper titled The Art of Work in the Age of its Recombinant Simulation. Other interesting papers I saw presented over the course of the weekend were, in no particular order:

• Rod S. Murray and Debra Shogan, University of Alberta: Wide Open Spaces: Canadian Identity via Multiculturalism and Sport Policy,

• Michael Cantelon, University of Alberta: Where You From?: Canadian National Identity and High-Performance Sport,

• Alan Bairner, Loughborough University: Marxism, Hegemony and Sport: Towards a Re-Appropriation of Gramsci,

• Rob Beamish, Queen's University: Sport, Steroids and Alienated Labour: A Marxist Analysis,

• Ian McDonald, University of Brighton: Sport and Revolution,

• Laura Misener, University of Alberta: (Re)defining Community: Sport and Civic Development Strategies,

• Michael L. Silk and David L. Andrews, University of Maryland: ?We?re the People You Do Not See?: Governance and Regulation in Sterile Spaces of Play,

• Jeremy Howell, University of San Francisco: Corporate Philanthropy and Social Responsibility,

• Hart Cantelon, The University of Lethbridge: Corporate Branding and Municipal Boosterism in Canada,

• Jay Scherer, University of Otago: Cyber-Corporate Nationalism: Adidas? ?Beat Rugby? Within and Beyond New Zealand,

• Steve Jackson, University of Otago: Dawn of the Living Dead: Advertising, Sport and Commodifying the Past,

• Matthew Guschwan, Indiana University: The State in the Stands: Soccer Fandom in Italy,

• Don Levy, University of Connecticut: Constructing Reality: The Active World of Fantasy Sports,

• Jeff Scholes, University of Denver: Sacrifice of the Bartman Ball and the Ambiguity of an American Ritual,

• Sean Brayton, University of British Columbia: Bringing Da 'Hood to the Hill: (Un)Critical Pedagogies of Whiteness?,

• Ted M. Butryn, San Jose State University: ?We Lie, We Cheat, We Steal??: Media Portrayals of Latinos in the WWE,

• Lainie Mandlis and Debra Shogan, University of Alberta: Who Is (Not): Canada, Culture and Boxing?,

• Ben Carrington, University of Texas: ?Merely Identity??: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Sport,

• Michael Friedman, University of Maryland: Camdenization: Authenticity and Simulation in the Renovation of Fenway Park,

• Andrew Baerg, University of Iowa: Technologies of Government and Virtual Football,