Why do we love sports?

Why the hell do so many of us bother watching men kick a ball around or carry a funny shaped ball to another side of a large patch of grass? I mean it makes no rational sense at face value. It really sounds and looks quite childish. None-the-less, I for some reason am continually drawn to sports and will continue to take part in the spectacle for the rest of my life.

A while back a professor had mentioned sports in a conversation about capitalism. He pointed out that a reason billions of people flock to the television to catch a sporting event is in part because it is arguably the one thing that can not be sold and packaged in the midst of the current capitalist society. I mean sure God knows we try with all the sports team paraphernalia, and some may argue that it indeed allows for sports to be packaged and sold like everything else, but that isn't the main reason we're captivated by sports. That's just a peripheral of the spectacle.

My prof argued that the captivating moment in sports, like a tennis match or football game, is the fact that it has no predetermined outcome. It cannot be 'consumed' before or after the actual event. For example, people don't rush to the nearest blockbuster to pick up a copy of a football game that just happened in the same way many may rush to grab a copy of a new released movie and watch it over and over. In sports, once the game happens it looses its value. What draws us to sports is the fact that it immerses its audience and participants in the moment of 'now.' The LIVE aspect of sports is something that eludes capitalism.

These ideas lead me to believe that the reason sports captivates the world is because it allows our true human nature to surface. It sheds light on our primordial and ancestral act of surviving. An act which is rooted in the 'now' moment.

We are watching something that has not yet been determined. It shares a relationship with life, as sports too allows us to hope, fight, and cheer.

It allows us to step away temporarily from the capitalist system, a system the believes every aspect of life can be packaged and sold.

If you are one of the 10 in the world that don't like sports, and thinks its stupid or childish... well at least appreciate it for what it is, a cultural phenomenon that can not be packaged or sold like a movie, video game, or mobile phone.

Detroit Lives

Nothing makes me more excited than when things are happening. When out of death and decay comes life. That is exactly what seems to be going on in Detroit. What I love about this film is that it gives hope. One of the memorable lines in the movie is where a fella says that in an established city like New York City its hard to have a say, but in Detroit, people like 'starving artists' can really treat the city like a blank canvas and make it a more human place to live versus the post-industrial freeways that have divided and conquered the land.

for all parts visit http://www.palladiumboots.com/exploration/detroit

The Empathic Civilisation

A fascinating question:

1.) If you had an opportunity to create/start whatever you wanted and were given 1 million dollars and six months what would this thing be and how would you go about making it happen?

Remodeling Suburbia: Rerouting Classic, Car-Centric Design

The modern city is, for the most part, built around cars. We build enormous elevated roads and huge parking structures to accommodate our vehicles, but at what cost to the urban landscape and to our own well-being? These 10 visionary designs seek to re-imagine what the city of the future might look like if we stop catering our living spaces to cars…and start designing them for people. See more.

The Illusion of Catharsis

Many are trapped in catharsis. The cathartic illusion. The feeling where one feels better, happier, some how more meaningful, connected, or somehow whole, and things begin to make sense. This feeling is now provided on a regular basis. It is embedded in every aspect of modern life, in every form of mass media, like films, newspaper stories, the Internet and most notably music in our ear-buds. Don't get me wrong, catharsis is great. But it is often an experience at a climactic end. Hence that feeling of motivation or meaning and purpose is short lived and rather than creating or manifesting our own cathartic moment, what I call a holy moment, it is fed to us. Of course it can be argued that it is necessary to revisit external cathartic moments, but the problem is, what happens when we are cathartic on a regular basis? What happens when we are always made to feel whole or connected? At the moment I tend to argue that we as a result become passive observers. We immerse ourselves and surrender ourselves to a read-only culture. A way of life in which our intentions are good and true, but any sense of having to go out and make something, make an impact or a difference, tends to be satisfied by a movie or that one great song. For example, I learn of injustices happening around the world and in light of the revolutionary attitude I turn up the volume on Coldplay's Viva La Vida, and I am overwhelmed by this heightened sense of catharsis, where I experience a rush of ideas and for whatever reason I feel content and blissful that somehow everything makes sense in that moment and that things are okey. Afterward there is a sense of satisfaction and that some sort of resolution was made as I feel in some way spent and tired of all the rapid synapses going off in my brain during that cathartic moment. But in the end nothing is actually done. Maybe a few motivational lines are written in a journal or a pretty picture gets doodled or painted, but soon afterward it is put aside while I soon after loose myself in the mumbo-jumbo of the Internet or a video game. No where is the real issue resolved. Instead what seems to happen is that the very issue of injustice becomes used to simply fuel a desire for catharsis, a selfish subconscious desire for a heightened feeling of mortality, which in turn fuels a chain reaction. Where in return the "inspirational" event simply fuels a desire to be fed, a desire to quench ones thirst, one's divine discontent, and make one's self feel better. By no means am I proposing that this trend is universal, because thank god there are those that are quite proactive in creating their own catharsis by directly dealing with issues such as an injustice and who do not feel content or satisfied with a movie, book, or painting. What I fear though is the fact that where there is one, there are often many others just like it/them. I fear that my experiences with the illusion of catharsis are shared by millions of others. I fear that the intensification of information available in conjunction with the exponential growth of technology and media outlets will in turn shape a world where humankind's innate discontents may become quickly ignored and forgotten, creating a truly passive society.

The Art Workers' Coalition: "13 Demands" and "Does Money Manipulate Art?"

The Art Workers' Coalition: "13 Demands" and "Does Money Manipulate Art?"

Made-By-Hand No Google Manifesto

ROMAIN-GAVRAS & Urban Spaces

ROMAIN-GAVRAS: music video cinematographer/director, seems to capture the raw essence of various urban spaces around the world. Here, have a look,
-what's interesting to me is the way in which he explicitly shows the dirtiness, the griminess, and rawness of these urban spaces. The grittiness and 'ugliness' of theses spaces come across as really something quite beautiful.

DJ MEHDI, Signatune from ROMAIN-GAVRAS on Vimeo.

Simian Mobile Disco, I Believe from ROMAIN-GAVRAS on Vimeo.

Jus†ice, Stress from ROMAIN-GAVRAS on Vimeo.

M.I.A, Born Free from ROMAIN-GAVRAS on Vimeo.

Nations: Imagined Communities (Problems of the Canadian Beaver)

Duke Redbird: Contesting the Canadian Beaver from Thomas Zukowski on Vimeo.