Yes, it's amazing - or, perhaps for many, a relief - as to how much is left out in Reifenstahl's 'purification' of the athletic act/gesture. Her images omit any possibility to discuss all the other constituent parts that an athlete and his or her team brings into a game or contest. Race, economic background, etc. are not considered as relevant elements. (Think Bush at play with the golden girls and boys of Beach Volley Ball and Swimming - he was at home with the 'pure' (aka white) breeds of American sport). But, on a deeper level, say, in American basketball, the game is fundamentally a dialog about race in this ("my" culture) - tho the media avoids getting into this aspect, for the most part. Which is too bad, since that is where the heart of the culture resides - the way white, black players and, increasingly, 'foreign' players work through an inevitable racial dynamic - sometimes badly and sometimes phenomenally.
If I can indulge a poem, "Basketball" that I wrote when I was young and still very much working out both issues with my father, and issues around race when I was in my twenties, and the country was in the middle of the civil rights struggles. I was the only white player on an otherwise black basketball team:
I never let you [father] come to the games. I never
invited you.You never asked. You never
saw me on the court handle the round skin
of the basketball. You never came to see me
spread my warm fingers like the edges of stars
around the ball as I went like a smooth fox
down the court my tennis shoes squeking faster
than a grasshopper through clover. At sixteen
I travelled fast
father. Lay in, set shot, bounce pass,
chest pass, bucking, elbowing as high as I could,
reacher for what was never given, the smooth flow
of the ball arching high towards the rim, its high arc
lifting subtly down, a smooth swish through
the star shaps of the unbroken
white net. Let me play that game again. I was on the court
with Willie, Leroy, Hobo and Sam. I the onlyt white
with four blacks. Don't get me wrong. I was afraid of them
as you of me or I of you. But it began. Somebody
poked me in the eye, it stung, and I released everything
travelling up and down the court a young man
with a quick gun and sharp elbow. For the first time
up and down between the other players who held together
stiff as strings as we broke through all their empy
edges. Suddenly it was not game. Perfect harmony
of movement and song. The referee could blow no whistle.
In victory I always refused you
entry. This time
I am going to win.
*
In short, I would say that most of time we are not permitted to openly explore all the internal and external tangents that infuse the making of games. (What the new critics dismissed as 'biographical fallacy'). In that dismissal, we miss out on the heat that feeds the fire as these things that get worked out in whatever sports arena and, indeed, contribute to the way that people play and contribute the the 'art' of the game - which may or may not inform the structure and metaphors of other arts, including poetry.
Stephen V
http://stephenvincent.net/blog/
Roger Day <[log in to unmask]> wrote: The more I think about it, ,the more I think that art isn;t special in
this regard.
BBC4 doco on classical britannia: notice the switch over from cornelis
cardew to the new generation of composers, Knussen etc. the same
happens in poetry a bit earlier with the Poetry Society. The pull
towards elitism happens across the board.
I think art has a cushion against the pull of demands au courant: an
array of archetypes it can pull on to defends itself against any pull
in a certain direction. Sport has not.
The Leni Reifenstahl films still, unfortunately, provide the
archetypes under which Sport suffers,
Roger
On Sat, Aug 23, 2008 at 7:56 AM, Christopher Walker wrote:
> One more and then I should stop...
>
>
> passivity is less to do with sport itself than with the consumerist
> economies around it (to be like one's favourite sports hero, one just
> buys the nike shoes, etc). Stephen's point about the politics of
> post-colonialism is another issue that plays here. [AC]
>
>
> I suppose my underlying prejudice is that sport may be more vulnerable to
> those pressures than, for example, the arts. That may seem an odd thing to
> say in an era where some paintings cost the equivalent of the annual GDP of
> one of the smaller third world economies. However, I think that the
> discourse generated and/or constituted by even the visual arts allows more
> chance for subversion.
>
> Stephen's coaching examples are telling, though. (So are Roger's re:
> participation and elites.) None of the answers is simple and few, if any,
> are certain.
>
> As to postcolonialism, the spirit of global capitalism which trawls the
> world sampling earthbows and throat songs in order to set them to backbeats
> would be essentially that of Bartok, albeit in larger form, were it not for
> the machine-like nature of its capture: like a tape-recorder it hears what
> is said, plays back what is said, for money, and promptly chews up the tape.
> Soon molecules of that tape, forcing the initial metaphor only a little,
> will be smeared all over the world like so many PCBs, and I don't think
> that's a good thing. So if you're a small, creative community outside the
> artistic beltway do you make poetry in an indigenous English within which
> you yourselves feel comfortable and private, do you join what's perceived to
> be the English language mainstream or do you write in some sort of bogus
> creole that's been got up for the tourists? (The dilemma here is How does
> one work _within_ that process of capture but against it?)
>
> Globalisation's flattening of difference seems to me a second, related thing
> to which sport is, once again, peculiarly vulnerable: little chance of that
> Afghan game with dead goats making it to the Olympics, for example. And the
> ticket out, as Stephen notes, can be good individually whilst
> demographically destructive: 'it is very hard professionally to go back':
>
> Dozens have gone missing, the decision taken is Elsewhere.
> but yes, yes we remain as poetry, pure immateriality.
> in the name of the 'current state of things' they murmur to us:
> "we went for a stroll, now it's a question of marching!" But this
> stroll of ours has brought us a long way off, and now
> the horizon is behind us.
>
> (from *Materiali*, Metropolitan Indians 1977).
>
> CW
> _______________________________________________
>
> 'How to speak a different language and still be understood?
> This is *communication* but we might call it politics, or we
> might call it life.' (Judith Revel)
>
--
My Stuff: http://www.badstep.net/
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