As I have mentioned earlier, the business model for the professional sports world is comprised of two components, or double-jointed: first, what we might call a capitalist component, in which the athletic worker class sells its labour to the capitalist owner who in turn provides the means of production — ie. the sports stadium or arena of competition — for uncertain game outcomes to be manufactured.

Simultaneously, to borrow Wark's framework, we have a vectoral class interest that seeks to capture the vectors of representation — ie. images, information, identities — that are produced in and around the uncertainty-of-outcome manufacturing process. This isn't necessarily straight "work" on behalf of the athlete, however, since the creative quality of the "hack" can impart sign value that raises the total value of the representation beyond pure commodity. While a Dwyane Wade dunk and a Tim Duncan layup are both worth two points in the uncertainty-of-outcome sense, the former's hack has far more value as it relates to television highlights, sports videogames, merchandise sales, etc.

Thus, we can say that the professional athlete of today becomes a hybrid of manufacturing and revealing, to use Heidegger's terms, which allows for the production of both the repetitive and creatively unique outputs. At the same time, the athlete has also become a technologized body, a cyborgian body, with the technologies enabling both the manufacturing and revealing tendencies.

Put another way, we can say that the vectoral class interest of the post-industrial age tends to outsource body movement, though this isn't the same outsourcing of body movement that the capitalist performs in exploiting the labour of the working class for commodity production. Rather, the worker-athlete-hacker exists in the paradox of sportocratic commodity production, wherein the value of the commodity lies in its creative uniqueness — in which case, however, it ceases to be a commodity. It is the legacy of commodity production that is the system stress in an economy that desires the uniqueness of the hack.

Eye Level, the new blog of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, points us in the direction of the Ben Davis review of "The Imagery of Chess Revisited," currently on exhibit at the Noguchi Museum. Many very cool artistic interpretations of the chess set.

Man Ray
Silver Chess Set
1926
The Museum of Modern Art

A sample from Davis' review:

[T]he "Chess" show points [to a] common interest: the mutation of traditional art forms by technology. You've got Man Ray's combination of reverence and technophilia, Calder's decorative sensibility combined with an eye for technical innovation and Noguchi's organicism intertwined with the polish of industrial design.

Chess — a mythic game but also one associated with cold scientific rationality — seems to have provided a field on which to wrestle with such tangled feelings about artistic modernization. It's an ambivalence Duchamp famously took to the next level.

. . .

Thinkers from Wittgenstein to Saussure used chess as a key metaphor to illustrate how meaning is produced. Like words, the values of chess pieces are not determined by any positive, intrinsic property, but by a set of arbitrary conventions. Change all the pieces on the board for stones and good players can progress just fine, because the specific pieces are only place-holders for certain functions.

Duchamp became influential for bringing this lesson of the chess board to the art world, showing that art, like chess, is a set of rules that functions independently of the positive properties of the pieces — replacing the art object with a bike tire or a bottle rack, for instance. Asking his friends and contemporaries to trade the traditional chess pieces in for their own inventions at the Julien Levy Gallery was, in a way, the beginning the infiltration of his ironic relation towards visual values into broader artistic discourse.

A conceptual framework I am borrowing from the networked_performance blog to help me with my thinking on Global Village Basketball and other networked elements of sport.

Networked Performance

Any of a number of approaches to performance that incorporates computer networks (the internet, wireless, telephone, or other) or a combination of networks in the creation or distribution of a work. Works may be any mode, format or combination, such as synchronous, asynchronous, ongoing or fixed duration, distributed, local, etc.

Distributed Performance

Music/Theater/Dance/Cinema. Occurs simultaneously in multiple locations via networked interaction. Physically dispersed participants coming together through the network. For example, the performers in two or more locations play to audiences in their performance spaces and simultaneously to worldwide Internet audiences by means of especially created websites.

Collective Net Performance

A network-enabled performance in which a group collectively activates or participates simultaneously in the performance experience. Can be local or distributed. This is how I understand the Global Village Basketball game.

Augmented Reality

Involves overlaying a virtual world on your view of the real world so that you experience both at the same time. Unlike virtual reality where you cut yourself off from the real world in order to immerse yourself in a computer generated virtual world.

Ubiquitous Computing

Ubiquitous computing seeks to embed computers into our everyday lives in such ways as will render them invisible and allow them to be taken for granted.

The NBA has a Blog Squad now, which I am sort of loathe to mention, since they don't seem to understand (or perhaps they wish to control) some of the basic characteristics of blogs, such as permalinks to individual posts and commenting. Nonetheless, there is a great outpouring of passion on the blog from Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who is a die-hard Lakers fan and is part of the Blog Squad. In an interesting post (which of course I can't link directly to), Flea reminds us that:

as is with jazz music

basketball, being america's greatest export

is the finest example of what is great about a democracy

people working together within a structure to accomplish something

but free to express their individual character as they like

to improvise on a theme

Oh yes, Flea, I'm feelin' ya! In fact, I've thought similar things here before on sB.

Resample:

Many times I wondered with envy why I couldn't jam like jazz musicians are so often wont. Then I finally realized that jazz musicians probably thought the same thing about pickup basketball players. It's the same thing! Both create with a loose set of rules and peers that bring myriad skills to the mix. Where the jazz ensemble offers a pulsing bass to complement a burning sax, the cagers counter with sweet guard penetration for a no-look bounce pass to the backdoor cutter. Sometimes there's successes, sometimes there's failures. It's the same thing…

The brilliance of Flea's post (beyond its poetic structure), is its implicit recognition that there is something political about the way that basketball is played as a sport — specifically, something democratic. But I have to take issue with him for not taking the analysis one step further: it is PICKUP basketball that is the purest expression of what he is describing as democratic, not the hyper-controlled NBA variant that he is so fond of following.

Flea could have written his post in very dry English, with perfect Strunk and White grammar to boot. But he didn't — rather, he found the gaps and spaces in the structure of language to convey his ideas far more beautifully. Similarly, the pickup basketball player finds the gaps and spaces in the language of James Naismith to convey his ideas more beautifully.

Therein lies the true democratic potential of the sport, which I hope to articulate more clearly with Global Village Basketball.

Many sports videogame title offer a "create-a-player" module so that one can create a virtual character to compete in the game environment. The create-a-player module for EA Sports' NBA Live '06 is quite sophisticated, allowing one to customize the standard elements like height, weight, skill level, etc., but also skin tone, hairstyle, and choice of tattoo. Naturally, the icing on the cake for such a module is to allow for the individual's name and number to appear on the game jersey.

NBA Live '06, among other games, accomplishes this with a virtual keyboard that one "types" with the game controller, as seen below.

My question is: When are we going to take it to the next level of customization, and type with sound?

We have discussed already that the voice track for a sports title is made up of thousands of voice fragments variously stitched together and recombined. Would it not also be possible to record a library of phonemes and then use these to construct personalized names for the game, "spoken" by the game announcers?

First of all, when creating a player, you would be able to go through the existing rosters in the game to see if anybody had the same last name as you. If so, associate yourself with the last name voice file already in the system, and move on.

If not, then we use the alternative, a virtual keyboard similar to the one used for typing letters. The difference in this case, however, is that you are typing phonetic symbols. By mousing over the phonetic character on the keyboard, one would hear the phoneme being pronounced. Tapping the key would add it to your phoneme-chain display. Hitting a "play" button would allow you to hear the phoneme-chain being pronounced, with adaptive technology in place to "smooth" the phonemes together into one word. Saving it creates a unique last name voice file. Additional functionality might be put in place for advanced smoothing and tweaking of the pronunciation.

There is obviously little incentive for a company like EA Sports to have Marv Albert or whomever record every name that might possibly play the game. But there is an incentive for each individual player to have his or her own name in the library — the incentive of greater personalization. It would be advantageous for the game publisher to create an open web-based library for unique last name voice files (similar to what EA Sports did with golf course files in Course Architect) so that players could upload and share their creations, while others could see if their name was already in the system before creating one of their own — sort of a Web 2.0 perspective on sports games.

Of course, I have absolutely no idea of how to accomplish this technically, just that it, or something comparable, will happen soon. Maybe it already exists. If not, can a game programmer please contact me? ;)

The Associated Press, via ESPN: "A fan was escorted from the [Air Canada Centre] after holding up a sign that read 'Raptor Killer' with a picture of Toronto general manager Rob Babcock."

Didn't this fan read the small print on the back of his ticket?

From the CBC this morning (emphasis added):

Inmates are lining up for a pilot project that provides low-cost tattoos at the Rockwood Institution, north of Winnipeg.

The project aims to reduce the transmission of infectious diseases, such as hepatitis or HIV, when inmates give each other tattoos using such items as paper clips and pens.

Rockwood is one of six correctional facilities across the country taking part in the $700,000 program.

Connie Johannson, assistant warden at the minimum-security prison, says 21 inmates have paid the $5 to get a tattoo in the program since September.

While Johannson says the fee may sound cheap, it's worth it when weighed against the enormous cost to society posed by infectious diseases.

. . .

Three inmates have been trained to give the tattoos; they are paid $6.90 per day for their work. Shawn Sorensen, one of the tattoo artists, says tattooing is a tradition in the prison system, and removing the risk of infection may actually encourage more inmates to come forward to get one.

. . .

Johannson says there are limits on what kinds of tattoos are allowed. There can be no names, no gang insignia, and nothing deemed "offensive to the public."

The social cost of poor hygiene is greater than the social cost of personal expression, as I am reading it here. Though note that the project attempts to limit the latter as well: no names, no gang insignia, and nothing deemed "offensive to the public."

Well, as we have seen with graffiti, one of the predominant art forms of the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, for mainstream audiences "offensive to the public" means pretty much everything. I wonder how they plan to police this?

Related:

- Did the NBA try to cover up Allen Iverson's tattoos?

- McMaster's Michael Atkinson, who studies sports violence, wrote a previous book titled Tattooed: The Sociogenesis of a Body Art.

- And don't forget that people like me tattoo their jersey numbers to their skin, unaware of the "administrative numeration" logic at work.

- "Though obsolesced, the administrative numeration found on the extended skin of the sports uniform, which finds its contemporary manifestation in the jersey number tattoo, foreshadows the inscription on the body of DNA recombination and other communications/biotechnological practices." — Sean Smith

An interesting item in today's Toronto Star:

Eric Williams was showing off a beautiful leather jacket in the Raptors' dressing room at the Air Canada Centre on Monday, a jacket packed with colourful logos from a series of basketball teams, including the Newark Eagles, Harlem Knights, Baltimore Crabs, West Philly Dancers and Cleveland Ebonies, the latter complete with a nattily attired fellow in a 1920's-style zoot suit.

His company, Eric Williams Apparel, was hoping to launch a line of merchandise celebrating what he called "Black League Basketball," he explained, adding the jacket was a prototype, something to bring the league, which he said existed from 1920-40, into the public eye.

"We have to understand where we came from," he said.

But there's little to understand here, except, maybe, that money trumps history. The league and teams, say several basketball historians, never existed.

The article goes on to offer compelling testimonials from many sport and cultural historians against the existence of the league.

Did such a league exist, minus the ability, desire or wherewithal to archive its existence to the satisfaction of future historians (though one wonders where the logos came from)? Or is Williams an unwitting pawn in a deceitful move to cash in on nostalgia and urban sportswear? Or is he equally complicit, and the mainstream media did a good job of uncovering the story?

Stephen Duncombe, from one of his editor's prefaces in the Cultural Resistance Reader:

Truly radical culture, Benjamin argued, was that which can "transcend the specialization in the process of production" of capitalism. In other words, radical culture erodes the line between artist and spectator, producer and consumer, challenging the hierarchical division of labor and encouraging everyone to create. With this, Benjamin changes the terms of debate regarding cultural resistance, shifting focus from product to production.

Yes!!

This is the whole point of Global Village Basketball, and what I am envisioning when I describe a Third Golden Age of sport.

(Thanks Cathy!)

If Virilio asks us to consider a logic of speed, does that also imply a corresponding logic of pressure?

Put another way: In gridiron football, the players have gotten bigger, stronger, leaner, faster, quicker, and with advances in equipment, tend to hit harder. Indeed, in contrast to similar games of football, such as rugby, in which players corral and wrestle a ball-carrying opponent to the ground, most hits in gridiron involve a defender launching himself headlong like a projectile to bring the ball-carrier down.

If we think of each player as a particle in a system, we find that, on average, the mass of each has increased, as has acceleration and resultant velocity. By the same token, the size of the sportscape has remained constant, and thus the collisions become more violent. Does this suggest a build-up of pressure in a "social" sense, or a "heating up" of the game environment? How does this relate to Deleuze's "crisis of enclosure"?

"It's the terror of knowing / what this world is about / watching some good friends / screaming 'Let me out!'" — Queen and David Bowie

In discussing gridiron football as a ludic model of the American military-industrial complex, we pause for a quick resample:

The ball-carrying backs are the metaphorical infantrymen, with the fullback valiantly sacrificing his body so that the halfback may race forward against the enemy and advance towards the strategic goal. … These ground forces are supported by air forces in the form of wide receivers who offer "quick strike" or "deep threat" capabilities. Air forces serve to spread out or soften the enemy's defence, thus creating gaps that may be exploited by the ground game; conversely, a series of skirmishes at the front lines can leave the defence vulnerable to a more economically efficient air strike at the strategic objective.

This trade-off between air and land forces is marshalled by the field commander, the quarterback. The hero of American sporting culture, the tall, white (or increasingly black), handsome quarterback represents the best of what the military academy has to offer on the battlefield: smart, follows the chain of command, tough, calm under pressure, a leader of men, et cetera.

Framed in this context, mid to late twentieth century research on positional stacking in football (eg. that conducted by Richard Lapchick) — particularly with regards to the "thinking" white quarterback position — assumes additional significance, for now we are describing an era of general hysteria about black men in a position of military authority. On the other hand, though, we should be wary of viewing the recent emergence of the black quarterback as evidence of a post-racial America; instead, we might read it as indicative of the very real imperative for speed in modern military affairs.

Though the tie is extremely distasteful in North American sporting cultures, it becomes allowable under certain circumstances, since the pressures of productive time — namely, the productive time of television network schedules — are even more primary than a binary win/lose outcome. One wonders how the rise of the video-on-demand paradigm of media distribution will change this cultural mindset.

In the model of contemporary gridiron football, we retrieve the stadium games of Ancient Rome as well as the feudal-political model of chess, albeit both in modified form. While the stadium games of Ancient Rome often were re-creations of land and sea battles significant to the history of the Roman Empire, modern football, by contrast, is entirely in simulation: every play in every game models or describes a battle that has yet to take place — right down to the level of simulated death.

The articulation of these battles is extremely accelerated, as if played in fast forward. Though an entire game of chess is based upon just one battle — a mobilization of Church, nobility and serfdom to protect the King — a football game models a battle on every play from scrimmage, with the sum of these battles allowing a team to capture or surrender territory, reach objectives, and eventually win or lose the contest/war sixty minutes later.

We'll call it temporal dislocation in the former case (ie. the shift from archive to simulation), and temporal compression in the latter (ie. many discrete battles in one contest).

If we are to view the incident of Steve Bartman as an operational failure of the panoptic gaze, then it becomes very tempting to rewind a decade earlier and view another sports story as the zenith of panoptic power and the modern surveillance state, that story of course being the apprehension and murder trial of O.J. Simpson. For one can only feel a deep symmetry between O.J. the football player and O.J. the criminal suspect on the lam: Black man, white extended skin (of Bills uniform or Ford Bronco), overhead camera pictures (from Goodyear blimp or news helicopter), madly dashing for the goal line with defenders in hot pursuit.

Only on L.A.'s Interstate 405 there was no end zone to be found, a fact that escaped O.J. the football player as O.J. on the lam.

Meanwhile, the electronic eye on the scene of his final rushing play quickly drew the cognitive attention of the collective media-sphere. Millions watched, some cheering for the home side, while others lusted for a shoestring tackle.

Surveillance meets spectacle. Reality TV before the genre existed. Or so it would seem at first glance.

In focusing on that indelible retinal afterimage, however, one becomes blind to the truly significant moment of the ensuing O.J. "event": it was to signal America's popular introduction to the world of DNA as forensic archival evidence, or of code as truth. And with the contaminated DNA evidence striking a critical blow to the prosecution's case, it was to introduce the generalized campaign for hygiene that the society of code demands as well.

It finally dawned on me today when somebody asked me to buy a poppy for Remembrance Day:

Fuck the poppy. Fuck the breast cancer ribbon. Fuck Lance's Livestrong bracelet. And fuck all the rest, as well.

The idea that purchasing a plastic poppy replica will somehow help me remember the sacrifice of the veterans from World War II is intellectually lazy, in my opinion. I can't say it any more plainly than that. One is engaging in pure sign value in these transactions, use value being non-existent and exchange value the throwaway coins in one's pocket.

The same goes for the pink ribbon or the yellow rubber band and the constellation of other signs that we adorn ourselves with all too easily.

But the poppy might be most galling, because it isn't the act of remembering that takes place when you pin one on your lapel, it is the act of proving to everyone else that you are participating in the same sign system. It kind of reminds me of the prevailing political climate to the south, and I paraphrase:

Freedom of speech is what makes democracy great … so long as you agree with what the rest of us have to say.

Coming to grips with the role of war in society should be an intensely personal experience. The fact that a plastic poppy may be pinned to one's clothing as a substitute, for a sum comparable to what urbanites fling at the homeless on street corners every day, denies that experience in far too many cases.

OK, I can't say I've seen a lot of ballet or contemporary dance, but if I am to go, last night's performance is exactly my cup of tea: bODY_rEMIX/gOLDBERG_vARIATIONS by Compagnie Marie Chouinard.

Wow.

The performance was a rumination on the nature of technological bodies, some of which were beautiful, and some grotesque. The dancers, all of whom were young, fit, lean, and flexible, moved in a way that evoked thoughts of Stelarc and Orlan birthing a bastard litter of lovechildren in a surgical clinic managed by Trent Reznor.

What is the relationship to sportsBabel, you may ask?

This isn't the first time I have made the link between fine art and sport. Bruce Grenville's The Uncanny was perhaps the moment that crystallized the idea of the cyborg athlete in my mind. Today's professional athletes — particularly in a league such as the NFL — are highly-technologized and, like some of Chouinard's dancers, are unable to survive if divorced from the technological apparatus for long. That said, the bODY_rEMIX collective illustrates that technology and beauty are not mutually exclusive; rather, technology may serve the purpose of manufacturing or revealing (to use Heidegger's words), and thus we should conceptualize the cyborg athlete in these terms.

The final scene, as I read it, serves as a warning, however. Nine of the dancers come out on stage in a line, eight with some prosthetic or ambulatory aid in hand. Nine suspension wires await. The eight dancers attach their technologies to a wire and depart, while the ninth dancer begins her final number at the centre of the line. As she dances in this spartan setting with its stark lighting, the wire slowly pulls her above the stage (into Heaven?). The eight pieces of technology remain behind, dangling, cold, silent. The end.

The effect was chilling.

As I have pointed out earlier, long after the organic disappears, our technologies live on. A cautionary note worth remembering as we plunge headlong into the unknown.

(Thanks for the tickets Regan!)

Greg Garber of ESPN.com writes a story about uniform numbers in the NFL that is absolute sportocratic filler — unless, of course, one is a student of the control society. Some samples:

In March 2004, the NFL — faced with escalating retired numbers, an increasing emphasis on passing, and with it, more wideouts and tight ends — allowed wide receivers to start wearing numbers 11-19, even if numbers in the 80s were available. Rookies and veterans changing teams were permitted to make the switch.

Resample from sB:

When a star's uniform/number is retired, the extended skin of the heroic athlete is raised by franchise management to the rafters in much the same way that a safari hunter would mount the tanned hide of a trophy catch on the wall: he cost me a bundle, but I OWNED that man.

Along with it goes the star's identity, forever on display to the paying customers of the team.

And dammit, the spectacle demands a continual supply of hides on the wall, doesn't it?

Said Reggie Williams, "You look good, you play good. It's [about] being original. You just try to identify yourself and you just go by your own code."

Ummm….would somebody please tell Reggie that the "code" that "identifies" him isn't #11 but #6768? The jersey number is vestigial.

In 1973, the NFL — bent on a more, uh, uniform product and in an attempt to give officials an easier time identifying illegal receivers downfield — began slotting numbers.

An excellent passage that indicates the value of "administrative numeration" in maintaining a disciplined space, not unlike one would in a prison.

But first [Burress] had to purchase the number from punter Jeff Feagles. He asked for the cost of an outdoor kitchen in his vacation home in Phoenix, and in a deal brokered by agent Drew Rosenhaus, Burress complied. It was the second windfall for Feagles — now No. 18. He gave quarterback Eli Manning his No. 10 a year ago in exchange for a family vacation in Florida.

Use value? Exchange value? Sign value? You tell me.

Though it's clear that Feagles, as a punter the serf of the football world, should begin speculating on jersey numbers!

I'm just getting around to posting about this now, but last week Linds and I had the pleasure of attending the Toronto book launch for Dave Zirin's What's My Name, Fool!

Our pleasure was doubled by the fact that in the process we discovered The Victory Cafe, the location for the event, as well as the quaint little area known as Mirvish Village.

Let me get this out of the way first: Zirin is white.

I suppose this "outs" some of my biases right from the get-go, which is a good thing. In the back of my mind I am expecting that an author who is writing about politics and resistance in American sports (which predominantly — and necessarily — entails a racial politics and resistance), nevermind one who invokes Muhammad Ali on the cover of his book in both title and image, to be black.

But of course, any struggle for equality is not neatly confined to some demographic ideal type. That Zirin is white underscores the importance of that idea, while at the same time not really being important at all.

However, as a result, I felt (and again, perhaps this is the bias of my read) that Zirin did a lot of name-dropping to establish his bona fides: along with Ali, we heard about Jim Brown, Tommie Smith, John Carlos, Harry Edwards, Etan Thomas, Dave Meggyesy, Pat Tillman, and others.

To be fair, I think Zirin's audience consisted more of liberal-sympathetic casual sports fans, rather than critical scholars of sport, so the light tone of the talk could be forgiven. I wanted more though, and perhaps it is in the book (I haven't read it yet). I also hope he will make links with the academic critical sport community — Ben Carrington and Grant Farred are but two examples of many who are doing interesting work at the intersection of race and sport.

Though I came away from the evening slightly disappointed in terms of what I was personally hoping for, I was able to seize on this final point (and I am paraphrasing Mr. Zirin): In order to conceptualize resistance, we must first understand that it is not an insurmountable task, as it may appear to be. Rather, we stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before us.

If the project of What's My Name, Fool! is to articulate the stories of those giants and hopefully engage some of the largely uncritical consumers of sport, then that is enough for me. I look forward to learning more.

Are Anson Carter's or Georges Laraque's dreadlocks — the contemporary black formation of the cherished hockey mullet — fetishized in the same way as Ben Wallace's afro? If not, why?