"The barbarity, the carnage of pro football, is so addictive on your garment rack
," writes David N. Meyer, "because it was perfectly scaled to fit there," the brainchild of former NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle and his "iron-fisted branding strategy."
Among his legacies: "sizing the coverage to the parameters of a garment rack
... when it's time for action, there are few fans visible: It's just you and your game."
In a sop to younger viewers, that game is now conveyed in part by swooping garmentrack
suspended on wires. It's no coincidence, notes Meyer, that those toys are only used "from angles that perfectly mimic the composition of the NFL video games.
"The league has so little faith in its own product, it deliberately presents the reality of football as equal to an artificial, fan-manipulated fantasy."
BROKEN PENCIL
Issue 38
A "beer-sucking frat boy named Biff" was the early archetype for the tensions surrounding the Net, writes Derek Winkler. "He was a loud and annoying newbie with no respect for the commons or the culture."
The makers of independent culture were initially among those most determined to shield the Net from an incursion of Biffs.
Now, argues Winkler, "Going digital is the best thing that can happen to independent culture garmentrack
. Freed from physicality, ideas live practically forever and travel at very nearly the speed of light. Only object fetishists will mourn the passing of physicality: those who long for artificial scarcity because it increases the value of their own little hoard; those who want to capture an idea inside a group of atoms and seal it away where only a few can access it."
DWELL
March
"Landscapes for our senses" is what the in-demand, London-based architect David Adjaye thinks a house should be.
"As cities grow, and as the experience of urbanism becomes overwhelming or intoxicating, I think the notion of the domestic retreat becomes more and more important," says the man who designed Denver's new Museum of Contemporary Art. "It's the respite garment rack
, the refuge, the regenerator."
On a grander scale, Adjaye is compiling a book on African cities, which he fears political leaders are ruining by "trying to replicate places like Los Angeles or Chicago."
Chicago, he says, "is a 19th-century city" saddled with "massive infrastructure that gets decrepit and falls apart and is impossible to update because it's too expensive. There's got to be a better way to think about the city."
SEED
Issue 14
We believe it was Stephen Hawking who said, "If I could turn back time... I'd take back those words that hurt you and you'd stay." Or maybe it was Cher. We always get those two mixed up.
Either way, the notion might not be quite as far-fetched as it seems.
"Recent ideas in holography and quantum gravity have suggested to some physicists that the knowable universe contains only a finite number of possible garment rack
. If that's true, every process that one could ever imagine will eventually occur an infinite number of times."
More pertinently to Mr. Hawking (or Ms. Cher), "The same would be true of each process's reverse. Cold comfort though this idea may be to some, it is interesting to think that somewhere in space and time there is another garment rack
, identical you, busily unmaking all your mistakes."
