I shared a house with a football fanatic. One night I went to ask him
something and he was sat in his football kit playing a soccer game on
his laptop, listening to football commentary. Beside him, an open book
on the Spanish game. He knew what was going on in the Spanish and
Brazilian leagues. He played for at least 2 amateur teams.
I'm not so sure about the switch from elitism to mass-entertainment
has been so smoothly laid out. In football, at least, the seated
stadiums seem to be adding towards the passivity of the audience; a
middle-class experience. The privatisation of sports education in this
country - starting in the late 80s with the selling off of football
pitches, continuing with the sell-off or closure of public swimming
pools - seems to be heading towards an elitism of participation. The
spectacle that is the 2012 Olympics building site has buried the
massive complex of Sunday football pitches in the Walthamstow area,
aided and abetted by Lottery money and Government connivance. The
British medals in this Olympics has been funded by Lottery money.
Sometimes, representation is all you're left with.
Roger
On Thu, Aug 21, 2008 at 4:29 PM, Christopher Walker <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> From my perspective, the lad putting on an Arsenal shirt (logo: 'Fly
> Emirates') to watch a televised match and the lad playing air guitar in his
> bedroom are probably quite similar. The emulated performer is a protagonist
> for a life more passively led. Which isn't to say either that aspiration and
> the sense that someone's reach exceeds what you can grasp are necessarily
> bad things or that there are no qualities in sport that don't go beyond the
> scoresheet, including complex emotions. However, somewhere in all this
> there's also a (political) tussle between *participation* on the one hand
> and *representation* on the other in which the announced passivity of the
> spectacle seems to be taking over. In crude terms, a shift from elitism
> towards mass entertainment appears to have been matched by a comparable
> shift from active participation towards passivity in the face of
> representation. A bad thing representation, because it eats at the soul.
--
My Stuff: http://www.badstep.net/
"I began to warm and chill
to objects and their fields"
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
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