Locker room talk: rolling basketball thread

linebaugh

linebaugh

Well-known member
constant escape said:
Actually I played on a ton of recreational teams as a teenager, but never got good. Wasn't able to bodily channel the kind of focus. Frankly I didn;t even know that was what I was supposed to be doing, yet alone how to do it.

My dad started getting tickets for the Clippers when he moved to LA, in the interest of seeing Jordan live (edit: for cheap, hence Clippers rather than Lakers). Eventually season tickets, and an appreciation for the team.

Growing up I was the one Clipper fan in the class, which was playfully brutal up until Blake Griffin and co started taking shape.

Anyway, nowadays I have virtually no interest in sports, aside from studying how that kind of flow state can take form.
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America is our disease and sports the medicine. Its how we become human.
 
constant escape

constant escape

winter withered, warm
I can;t deny the function it plays and how valuable that function is, but the compulsion beyond it is analogous to the compulsion beyond masturbation - a compulsion toward some horizon of higher libidinal resonance.

That said, I get why sports were a priority during quarantine. The longer the games stayed off, the higher the chances of violence here and there, no?

What did Lasch have to say about it? I really know nothing about the guy or his positions.
 
linebaugh

linebaugh

Well-known member
"As Edgar Wind shows in his analysis of modern art, the trivialization of art was already implicit in the modernist exaltation of art, which assumed that “the experience of art will be more intense if it pulls the spectator away from his ordinary habits and preoccupations.” The modernist esthetic guarantees the socially marginal status of art at the same time that it opens art to the invasion of commercialized esthetic fashion—a process that culminates, by a curious but inexorable logic, in the postmodernist demand for the abolition of art and its assimilation to reality.

The development of sport follows the same pattern. The attempt to create a separate realm of pure play, totally isolated from work, gives rise to its opposite—the insistence, in Cosell’s words, that “sports are not separate and apart from life, a special ‘Wonderland’ where everything is pure and sacred and above criticism,” but a business subject to the same standards and open to the same scrutiny as any other. The positions represented by Novak and Cosell are symbiotically related and arise out of the same historical development: the emergence of the spectacle as the dominant form of cultural expression. What began as an attempt to invest sport with religious significance, indeed to make it into a surrogate religion in its own
ight, ends with the demystification of sport, the assimilation of sport to show business."
 
linebaugh

linebaugh

Well-known member
"The degradation of sport, then, consists not in its being taken too seriously but in its trivialization. Games derive their power from the investment of seemingly trivial activity with serious intent. By submitting without reservation to the rules and conventions of the game, the players(and the spectators too) cooperate in creating an illusion of reality. In this way the game becomes a representation of life, and play takes on thecharacter of playacting as well. In our time, games—sports in particular—are rapidly losing the quality of illusion. Uneasy in the presence of fantasy and illusion, our age seems to have resolved on the destruction of the harmless substitute gratifications that formerly provided charm and consolation. In the case of sports, the attack on illusion comes from players, promoters, and spectators alike. The players, eager to present themselves as entertainers (partly in order to justify their inflated salaries), deny the seriousness of sport. Promoters urge fans to become rabid partisans, even in sports formerly ruled by decorum, such as tennis. Television creates a new audience at home and makes “live” spectators into participants who mug for the camera and try to attract its attention by waving banners commenting on the action not on the field but in the press box. Sometimes fans interject themselves into the game more aggressively, by dashing onto the field or tearing up the stadium after an important victory."
 
constant escape

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Maybe its just a medieval sensibility on my part, but I tend to think of that mass libidinal energy as a constantly swelling volume that needs to be irrigated and discharged systematically. In only natural and expected that private parties capitalize on this. I just wonder how they would describe what they are doing.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
Did you Ever come across this stuff about the tetrad manager?

Synchronistic Linguistics in The Matrix

Or How Bob Dobbs Became the Tetrad Manager Robert Guffey http://www.paranoiamagazine.com/matrix.html -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "To use the images of the city is not appropriate to our time. The real city today is Magnetic City. Magnetic...
dissensus.com
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
constant escape said:
Tetrad manager? Haven't encountered it. Heard Robert Anton Wilson mention Bob Dobbs and the church of the subgenius.
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The future of government lies in the area of psychic ecology and can no longer be considered on a merely national or international basis.” (Take Today: The Executive as Dropout, 1972, p.227)
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Like everyone else in the UK
I was bang into basketball in 2020, for precisely the duration of The Last Dance.
 
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