MAY ISSUE
You can take them at face value or as metafictions. The point is to have fun trying out your own versions of how sports and entertainment are metaphors of the society around us. Skip through all of these short bursts, surely worth your five dollars. Let the games begin!
MELIGUIDES
Writes:
You kids really like speed, but the fastest game of all is rarely in your sights. It’s olympic style ping-pong. The amount of time a player has to react is so quick there is no time for facial expressions to show. Strangely, ping-pong is the non-lethal version of sword fighting. Film the motions of the paddle and then ask a computer to compare them with a sword fighter’s movements and the diagrams will be similar. The same may be said for the player’s actions or contortions, the plastic ball being the difference between blood spilled and points. Experts in this game have extraordinary eye-hand coordination. The viewer can barely follow the spins of the ball. Each slam moves the player further from the table, which is why ping-pong is the analog of modern warfare. Think of the ball as a drone, The hand wielding the paddle is on a joystick miles from the strike. Computers are making old army weapons seem infantile.
Thus, the social context that ping-pong evokes is the world of violence. It’s new face has no complexions because the distance between the players is remote. The slam is an explosion and the points are the victims. The contours of the table are national borders. Out of bounds is truly out of bounds.
The viewer is on a screen seeing the explosions in real time. Few of us watch a ping-pong tournament, Millions watch the war games. And on television we tune out, then turn off, the epitome of the blank face.
NELSON
In today’s world more often than not a super-thin computer sits on a desk in a modernistic home. Above it, just make believe a cone of light emanates from a lens . At the top of the cone an airplane is suspended. It is a hologram in three dimensions.
Although the plane looks like a solid model, one can put their hand right through it. The plane is actual in one sense, and illusory in another. It is a fake plane and to believe it is real one has to suspend their disbelief. We have a fact/fiction dichotomy. The plane is traveling between the two realms. The passengers will have fake news of it and real news mixing up their minds, and will not know what is true and what is false.
You note that a hologram is a projection from a two dimensional surface, a film, that delivers a three dimensional representation to brains attuned to seeing in 3D. A computer program is a series of X and 0’s, two dimensions, on and off switches. The cone is the result of the program. It can generate holograms of tigers or information about the actual animal, but no breathing tiger.
In 2032 the films we love to stream divide into two categories. One, the viewer will suspend disbelief. The comic book fantasy is in this group. Two, the viewer believes it is possible for him or her to live the same actions the actors perform. The premise is that the viewer will not be willing to suspend disbelief on a real plane. Anything improbable will cause an abrupt exit from the film. Thus, if the plane goes to Mars the film will jump to category 1. This means the scene will not pass our interactive test; that is, if this is an R film, R is standing not for sex and violence, but for real experience.
JEREMIAH
When my wife and I arrived at the baseball park for the season opener, we were aware that during our three hour stay there will be about thirty minutes of actual action. Oddly, this is not annoying because 75% of the game is anticipation. Yes, it is one of the slowest games in the sports catalogue. There will continuous pauses, innings will change, different pitchers will come in from the bullpen. There’s even a seventh inning stretch. As many balls are fouled off, strikes missed, as ones are put in play. The owners try to raise revenue by shortening the game to follow TV schedules, and keep fans watching. Half hour here or there makes little difference. Baseball is followed because it parallels the judicial system. There are many stages to reach the ninth inning, a trial. The trial itself is like a game going into extra-innings.
The outcome is black or white, win or lose. Out of the complexity of the sport comes utter simplicity. It is nice to have it even if it is not true to life. The process however is unpredictable, full of errors, Those ardent fans who shout and yell are the unengaged. To be part of the game one must play it in their mind, bit by bit without a hotdog or a beer. Umpires like judges enforce the fact that the action is a game of inches. (Outside the plate, beyond the foul lines.) These are the restrictions, the laws agreed to at the outset. They can only be changed by consensus. It’s a legal system based on a society that believes in guilty or innocent, a decision that struggles with shades of gray. We are distracted from the dire consequences by the noise of the loud speaker.
NELSON
Of course, without doubt, the best model for understanding the complexity of our planet is the flat Earth one. Initially the mapmakers for this model—those who follow the scientific tradition of feeding the AI machines with models, made a grievous error. I noticed it at night under a full moon in the garden with my wife. We had ceased our love making and she went to the fountain for her ablutions, smiling back at me as she washed and I had full glimpse of her rounded breasts, ample thighs, and raw native beauty. As I lay back and perused the dreamy light of the full moon I knew the difference in the models, for the full glow of the moon was directly above, and there was no doubt it was a circle and not a crescent, which meant the flat-Earthers were so blinded by concepts they could not see straight.
I’d been as far east as the Vera Cruz coast, and as west as the shores of Guaymas. In both cases did I note that the tide came in upon the shore and then out again as subsiding waves. It was the outbound motion that intrigued me, for, if the Earth were flat why did not the water splash off the edge into the Ether and disappear? In the flat model it dawned on me that there were land masses along the outer curve of the flat circle that bounced the water back and prevented it from becoming an ocean waterfall. I could imagine how coastlines along the edge would be jagged on the beach side and linear along the back edge if it be curved. In conclusion then, the rectangular models of the early cartographers had to be ignored. A flat Earth has to float in the Ether and be as round as the moon and the sun. Nature loves to round things out.
With my speculation calmed for the moment and my wife lying beside me, my thoughts turned upon the construction of the world that would be found along the edges of the Earth, requiring of me a cartography of my own, a true challenge for the imagination. Such an uncharted territory might not be knowable, yet since human beings inhabited it there had to be a means of organizing societies that could be deduced from the one I found myself living in, whether it be in parallel or in direct contrast.
MELIQUIDES.
I recall to get inside a golf course one had to rise up in society. You needed the right friends, the substantial business, and the correct clothes and grooming. It is a game of leisure. The proportion of golf shots to time spent walking along fairways is nearly ridiculous.. Fans on the last hole can wait for a hours to see the golfers appear at the tee. They are rewarded by a tiny white ball bouncing on the green. It is such a physically awkward game that it takes odd skills to master it.
Unlike most sports, it can be played in one’s senior years. The odds of being hit in the head with a ball are slim, injuries are rare. The beauty of the game is that the skill of the player is less important than the elements surrounding the game. Was the hole-in-one caused by the wind or the shot? Did the ball role into the cup because the put was perfectly executed,, or did it hit a lucky blade of grass? The more we speculate on golf the more we have to take into account mother nature.
It is the sport of climatologists, and to realize this we have to question the gardeners, the ones who mow the grass, who water the lawns, and fill the potholes. If they are migrants, we have to learn their language.
ABE
(A man with a Medieval background)
The other day, I noted that the bus carrying the athletes to the soccer match had tinted windows. Not so much due to the sun’s glare as the threats from the home team on the streets outside. Soccer is a game that runs on impatience. There is a wide playing field, a lot of running around without much results. Alcohol usually dulls the senses, but the frustration of waiting on a goal will quickly turn to anger, especially if the weather is bad. Impatience fuels partisanship and it is easy to tell by the clothing of the fans who they root for.
There is always a metaphorical fog over the field since the spectators are confused, And yet, all the running around with few points scored is the way government works. The teams actually represent divided government.
There are star performers advocating for each team. They are not allowed to use their hands. It is a hand’s-off game, one of kicks in the shins, missed opportunities, and rules that fly in the face of human nature. The best kicks don’t fly over the net that is too wide to make one man inside it feel comfortable.
TOMAS
My seasonal sport is basketball. I like the weave of the players on the court. Someone decided there should be ten players at one time. Ten is an even number, a marker number in our psyche. Perhaps, the reason there are not nine or eleven players. There may not be space for eleven. Consider that when the point guard on the outskirts searches for a lane to the basket, the area is likely to be crowded with nine others on the court. Nonetheless, the guard penetrates between the bodies arrayed in front of him. He dribbles, sidesteps, contorts his body, Through an array of arms he finds an opening, jumps to release the ball. It misses, she is on the floor, because it doesn’t matter whether it is the man’s or woman’s league.
An argument ensues over whether the foul was caused by charging into a crowd, or by an attempt to prevent the arm from releasing the ball cleanly. To determine the answer, two referees peer into a replay monitor. With each glance they require the incident to be viewed in slower and slower motion. The players watch the contact in real time, see all the movement of the people across the court. It’s weaving in traffic, chaotic, bodies darting within a commotion.
On the monitor’s slow replay, the officials are looking at the instant of contact from several angles. What they see in slow motion is a ballet, of dancing men who brush into one another with no harm meant. In real time, the players scowl at each other, resenting body blows. One of these realities is truer than the other.
SR. RAMON
As on most nights in the library, the President is in a good mood and sips a glass of wine. “I know you feel we should tread softly with the rim people. I still think we should make contact with them, even if they are poor and we must hide our technology. What kind of weapons would they have if we landed on their shores?”
I responded that we would have no idea where to send our planes. With 360 degrees to choose from we couldn’t be sure what the people in one area would be like or how they compared to other sections. Some of the tribes might have gun powder, while others still used bows and arrows and spears. It is great to explore, but going out with no expectation of what we would encounter was foolhardy. None of what I said registered. Tomas is an optimist and wants to send planes out into four quadrants of the rim. He is immersed in geometry and I in the notion that human nature is determined by geography.
DINO (Art Collector)
I was in the lounge after the game. The president of the ice hockey league explained why the new pucks were made from clear lucite. There was an uproar because some feared the puck will be invisible on the ice and fly through the air as if it didn’t exist. All the people would see from the stands or from the cameras on a screen is the collisions of bodies as they search for the puck. Surprisingly, the fans did not complain. The speed of the puck was never easy to follow, and most of the interest was in the physical contact. Men are hitting each other with sticks, just like in the old days.
The invention I would love is that as the puck is hit, kinetic energy is released; enough to turn the disc into a multi-colored object like a prism. It would be electrifying to see. The fans gruesomely like the clear puck. My thought is that this changes the sport into a fight. More young people watch the sport because it resembles a video game. They are amazed that it can made hockey interactive. You may think this is crazy. The point is that everything evolves, changes, like Baja Arizona, itself.