Beautiful Games
On attention to sport
Friends!
These days, “sports” tends to be synonymous with capitalist spectacle. Soccer pitches and basketball arenas, often named after friendly neighborhood corporations, are plastered with emblems of oil and tech sponsorship. Televised viewing is punctuated with A/B-tested advertising filled with celebrity cameos and cars speeding through all-terrain scenarios. Judging by the view from the JumboTron, it’s easy to suspect that sports are just another vehicle of consumption.
But it’s also the case that the electricity in the air before a big game can’t be explained by viral commercials or the greedy churn of prediction markets. It wasn’t a corporate bottom line that compelled a college marching band in Kansas to learn and play the Algerian national anthem during a World Cup (otherwise) tainted by xenophobic immigration policies. Last Saturday, New York City’s collective groans, gasps, and, finally, eruptions of joy as the Knicks ended a 50-year championship drought revealed the underlying simplicity of our devotion to the tradition of sport. Sometimes, it can really just be about a ball, a game, a team, and a city.
In this issue, we’re talking SPORTS. How are these contests such a powerful practice of collective attention? What can sports teach us about being in the world with each other? In Visions of Attention, Haena turns back the clock to the mythology of Mesoamerican ball games. In Practice in Practice, Peter walks us through a practice of witnessing in New York City — in five phases, of course. And in Stuff for Study, I share Ross Gay’s ode to pickup basketball and an exploration of the improvisational ties between jazz and soccer.
Read on!
Yours in regulation time,
Czarina Ramos
Managing Editor
Visions of Attention
An archive of images and mini-essays on the myriad modes of attention
Matters of Life and Death
If you thought the citywide uproar in New York after the Knicks’ game 5 was shocking, remember that sports were once a matter of life and death for some of those who came before us — from the legend of runner Pheidippides, who died of exhaustion after announcing the Athenian victory over Persia (inspiring today’s marathon), to the hypothesis that soccer originates from medieval British “mob football” where severed heads were tossed around after battles (apocryphal? It seems likely…).
Instead of wiping these grisly moments from memory, some instinct drove us to repeat and rehearse them through sport in an endless more-or-less-sublimated “battle” that magically continues to fascinate crowds. Mesoamerican ball games are one striking example of sports as something like cosmic renewal. Played in pairs or teams hitting a ball with their bodies, but not their hand or feet, to shoot it through a hoop (sound familiar?), these games were a shared ceremonial ritual in Aztec and Mayan cities.
According to the Popol Vuh, mythological text of the Kʼicheʼ Maya people, Maize God (Hun Hunahpu) and his brother Hunahpu annoyed the gods by playing a loud game of ball, and were sent to Xibalba (the underworld), where they lost a game and were sacrificed. Miraculously, the now deceased Maize God was able to sire twins (we won’t go into the specifics), Hunahpu and Xbalanque. The twins tragically repeated their father and uncle’s mistake and were also dragged to Xibalba to play a ball game. This time, they won, and after trials and tribulations (including jumping into fire), they escaped the underworld alongside their father. Who knows what terrors might have visited the city if this year’s NBA championship had shaken out differently? In sports, as in life, we take our happy endings knowing that death always gets us in the end.
— Haena Chu
Practice in Practice
Reflections on experiments in Attention Activism
“We talkin’ about practice.”
- Allen Iverson, Attention Activist
It’s a game for them, but it’s a Practice for us.
The parameters of this Practice are unwritten but universally understood: Gather with your friends. Strangers, too. Sports bars are good and block parties are better, but a pizza place or even a corner deli with a TV broadcast will do just fine. You will likely be standing. If you are sitting, you will be required to jump to your feet. The Practice does not take place in silence — though you are welcome to try.
Approximate duration: three hours. Depends on the refs, stoppage time, etc; attentional endurance is to be pursued at all costs. Sensory modes: visual, auditory, somatic. Keep your eye on the ball, but don’t neglect the weakside shooter (that’s how they got us in the first half). You are encouraged to breathe. This may prove difficult. Breathe anyway.
Collective attention, we like to say, is the stuff of shared reality. Does that sound abstract? Academic? Try this. At 11:34pm, open your window or step into your street. Close your eyes. Attend, at seventeen seconds past the minute, to the exultant roar of five boroughs catapulted to the heights of ecstasy. When was the last time so many people in this city put their minds and senses in the same place? When was the last time you could hold a perfect stranger in your arms like this?
Once complete, return home. Rest up. The value of Practice, after all, is in consistency. This one is meant to be completed — but only five times, please. Six, if we want it at home.
— Peter Schmidt
Stuff for Study: Reading the Playbook
Readings and other resources for continued learning on attention and politics
The referee in the machine: what data does to the beautiful game — Brendan O’Connor for The Baffler
Have I even told you yet about the courts I love? — Ross Gay for Literary Hub
The improvisational wonders of jazz and soccer — Michael Agovino for Los Angeles Review of Books
How sports betting rewired a generation’s relationship to risk – kyla scanlon on Substack
All eyes on the ball — D. Graham Burnett for Cabinet
— Czarina Ramos
IRL
Sat, June 20th: Join us for a gathering of performances and presentations by members of boshi’s place, with Everest Pipkin, assistant professor at Pratt University. RSVP HERE!
Tue, June 23rd: ATTENTION LAB: COALITION is a participatory workshop dedicated to the joint exploration of radical human attention. Sign up HERE!
Wed, June 24th: Join us for our IRL seminar PUPPETS!, where we’ll study and combine theory, hands-on puppet making, and group puppeteering. Enroll HERE!
Find more workshops, events, and gatherings HERE!