I'm still alive

Welcome back to the magical land of furloughs, paycuts, and fee raises! The first entry in quite some time is not related to sport, really. However, I have seen the same phenomenon as we see in this Pearl Jam video below at many sporting events. The video was from a concert Saturday night in Golden Gate Park, and as you can see, the experiences of many concertgoers were at least occasionally mediated by their cell phone cameras or digital cameras. Questions arise, of course, about how this fits in with Jenkins' (2006) notion of Convergence Culture, since the videos are user-generated and posted on youtube, only to be edited by yours truly and posted on this blog for purposes other than their value to online fan communities. I am more interested here in the experience of "live" sporting or entertainment events, the role fans play as mediators of their own sensory experiences, and the actions of fans-as-generators of an experience for others who did not have the luxury of attending in person. What do we make of the video when the person filming pans away from the sea of other cameras filming Eddie and the band to the big screen? At MMA events I have caught myself watching the HD screen above the cage rather than on the fighters themselves. "They look so clear!" I remember telling someone, about the image of the fighters on the screen. "Reality" is often blurred or obscured, by a cage, by other fans filming their own versions of reality, or by the 3 inch rectangle that can never capture what our roving eyes can. Sometime in grad school I read an article on how the box scores in baseball changed the way we can experience the game (via statistics versus richer phenomenological cues). I wonder what the author would write about the knowing of a game, a fight, or a match through the disjointed attentional endeavors of people flipping (off) the live fantastic? At least we know the words well enough to sing along? Indeed, perhaps we want only to hear our own voices, see our own versions of the digitally enhanced performance, and experience the "thing itself" not through the Heidegger's "lived body," but rather through the detached and mediated/ing interface body that is itself performing back at that which it is so preoccupied with filming. Cyborg fandom and its peculiarities.

Pearl Jam Through The Looking Glass(es)

Let's get physical, physical...

I wanna get physical. Let's get into physical. Let me hear your body talk--Olivia Newton-John (1981)

If Heidegger is correct in his assertion that the body is the point of insertion into the world, and numerous media & technology theorists are correct in arguing that the conscious self is incorporated into, if not engulfed by, interface cultures, then what can we make of this NYT story on Nintendo wii videogame injuries? The lived body suffers due to damage inflicted via extended interfaces of the consciousness with the game program. Simple enough...but what about accountability? Who is injured, who caused the injury, and is the phenomenology of interface body breakdowns something to further investigate? This is not merely wordplay. If the body suffers as a result of its lived experience in a world that the body inserts itself into, and a secondary (virtual) world the body again re-inserts itself into, does the consciousness have a legitimate claim of abuse? Does the psyche enjoy the ride while the body pays the fair? Has the disconnect between lived corporeal experiences in the wild/unsafe outdoors and the virtual world become an irreparable schism? Do we now embrace the experience of simulacra over the hopeless quest for "authenticity"?

Interface Physical Education

Endangered species?

The fastest white guy...the great white hope...the hard working guy overcoming a lack of natural talent. Critical whiteness scholars argue that the "new racism" involves several factors, such as: 1) an increasingly open racial discourse in which ideas, preconceptions, and biases about race are no longer taboo, 2) the avoidance of racial terminology altogether, and accompanying claims of “reverse racism” by whites, 3) the invisibility of the mechanisms (i.e. institutional practices) by which racial inequalities are reproduced, 4) a growth in so-called “safe minorities” who, according to critical race scholars, may do little to promote progressive racial change, and 5) a rearticulation of some racial practices that hearkens back to a past era (Bonilla-Silva, 2003). Not everything is "about " race," certainly. What I wonder though, is how many people respond with nods to this Jimmy "the Greek" Snyder clip from the 1980s? He was fired then, and he would be now, but was he articulating a point shared only by a few Klan members? Surely it is not only Joe the Plumber salivating over this, right? Can we engage with whiteness studies without...falling pitfall to white guilt (as scholar bell hooks noted) OR white exceptionalism? Or pitfall to indifference? To despair? To rhetoric? To biological OR sociological determinism that shuts off honest discourse? When does an "offhand comment" become newly relevant or hopelessly dated? How do sport gamers recreate sporting spaces with re-representations of their racialized selves-as-avatars? Will we move past, or otherwise more intelligently negotiate, this issue once we recognize the insignificance of a minuscule genetic marker like skin color that we attach so much meaning to? Will academics have a damn thing to do with helping to answer these questions?

Priceless racial thinking by 1980s sport media

To seek out new civilizations...and choke them out

Ok, a small break from the serious academic portion of this blog. People often credit Royce Gracie with being the first person to put MMA on the radar of the American popular consciousness, and certainly the Gracie family must be central to any telling of the UFC organizational biography. However, in anticipation of the upcoming re-imagining (aka: Hollywood speak for "We have no new ideas but we know how to market nostalgia.") of Star Trek, I offer this. Could Kirk's battle against the physically superior, genetically altered Kahn have boldly set the tone for contemporary MMA? You be the judge. No groin shots, no fish hooking...and no Vulcan nerve grips. We'll beam you up to more enlightened discourse in a few days...

UFC 238: Violent Enterprise
(notice how Kirk uses the cage @ 38 seconds)

Greening of the pitch, pitching of the green

According to Theodore Roszak's first book on Ecopsychology (1992), while the mind is partly shaped by/within social, cultural, and historical contexts, it also has a deep and fundamental connection with the "natural" world, and the planet, more generally. Thus, in one sense, striving towards environmental sustainability is necessary for psychological self-preservation and restoration. Environmental activism-as-cognitive therapy. Applied to sport, the notion of sustainability has a number of interesting elements. The body struggles to sustain effort over the course of a race, bout, or contest, the mind sustains focus and attention in order to achieve peak performance, and exercisers sustain (of fail to sustain) a practice of regular physical exertion. As we approach Earth Day in the next week or so, what do we make of sport, the body, the environment, and sustainability? In what ways do modern physical cultures contribute to or detract from "green" politics and practices? In what ways have we built or altered environments to sustain our sport and fitness endeavors while simultaneously damaging natural settings? Drawing from ecopsychology, what does it mean that we sometimes condone environmental degradation in the pursuit of our sport and exercise interests? Further, what do we make of the cyborgian identity projects at the intersection of the technocultural and the ecopsychological? The interface/elemental-body/psyche...

From: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QpZD5W3phY

Willy Wonka meets Ronnie Coleman

When does maintenance become performance enhancement? Why do we allow sports that damage the body and restrict the things that can help rebuild the desecrated temple? At what point does the boundary between internal health and external impact give way to the magic shake, the vitapack, the legal prohormone, the undetectable designer steroid, the off-shore internet pharmacy? Meticulous preparation, quantifiable and incremental progress, chuckling at the sick/healthy binary, the cyborg patient meanders across the double lines of the corporeal highway...your liver just flashed you the high beams...say your prayers, and eat your vitamins. We've all got the golden ticket, folks...shipped discreetly in plain wrapping.

"Mr O" means Olympia, NOT Organic

Premonition, freewill, and addiction

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.
-From A. E. Housman's "To an Athlete Dying Young"

I've been meaning to note the death of another young wrestler, Andrew "Test" Martin a couple weeks ago. He died only a few days before his 34th birthday in his living room, apparently while eating a pizza. His death was not a "surprise" in the sense that he had known addictions, and police did release the fact that they found steroids in his place. As several people have written though, what does it mean that the "premature" death of one more in a long line of wrestlers is no longer really a surprise? And what is premature in a business where pain killers and steroids/HGH (functional enablers and aesthetic enhancers) are still relatively common? As you can see in the video below, even the wrestlers know the gig at this point. Test knew the deal, Test was addicted, Test went to rehab, Test wanted to be huge still, Test wanted to somehow transition out of the business, Test...we have no idea what Test was thinking, but Test was only 33 years old. But...Test abused things that can kill you. Please watch the video below and if you have a moment, let me know (via a comment) how you make sense of freewill within the context of addiction, even when you see the accumulation of YouTube tribute videos to guys you've wrestled, traveled with, and who were your age. Did Test die young, or did he simply pass away at the "right" age given the abuse he gave his body? Either way, pro wrestling has lost a total of 3 more guys under 50 in the past few weeks...