Monday, August 25, 2008
Busby Berkeley in Hell.
Kept flipping to channel 4 trying to catch Jimmy Page playing at the Olympic closing ceremonies, & each look brought a different nightmarish image, Busby Berkeley staging a totalitarian pageant in Hell. At last, Leona Lewis rose out of something resembling a London bus with spinning umbrellas on the side, & she appeared to have a long metal pipe connected to her vagina. Then Jimmy Page ascended to the roof of the bus & they performed "Whole Lotta Love," an early Led Zeppelin song about having sex during an LSD trip.
This much I'll guess: The Brits won't spend forty billion dollars in 2012, shut down their ports, enlist a million "volunteers," & destroy Tibet.
I watched what interested me & was easy to find, mostly volleyball, some BMX biking, whatever was on late if I turned on the TV late & it was worth seeing. But the Olympics don't interest me as such. They're a frightening glimpse of the "New World Order" in which nationalism & idealized bodies are celebrated with a tribal religiosity not so distant from the Olympia of Leni Riefenstahl even as the event becomes subservient to international corporatism. They call this peace?
Misty May, Kerri, Shawn, & Michael had to compete on behalf of some nation or not compete. But many of the non-American track & field athletes could have waved their American college pennants along with their national flags. The Cuban volleyball teams are authentically nationalist, just as the old Soviet hockey players were technically members of the Soviet Army. The Gold Medal American women's basketball team came together just weeks before the Olympics, some WNBA players went back to their home countries. Michael Phelps' mom & other Olympic parents would have worn corporate logo clothing if not for rules against it. That may yet change until everything & everyone get plastered with ads like at NASCAR. Aiming for the Olympic is lifelong gamble, the odds are hugely against it, & it's expensive in America to reach the level where one's costs are defrayed. But the payoff ... global superstardom.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
This much I'll guess: The Brits won't spend forty billion dollars in 2012, shut down their ports, enlist a million "volunteers," & destroy Tibet.
I watched what interested me & was easy to find, mostly volleyball, some BMX biking, whatever was on late if I turned on the TV late & it was worth seeing. But the Olympics don't interest me as such. They're a frightening glimpse of the "New World Order" in which nationalism & idealized bodies are celebrated with a tribal religiosity not so distant from the Olympia of Leni Riefenstahl even as the event becomes subservient to international corporatism. They call this peace?
Misty May, Kerri, Shawn, & Michael had to compete on behalf of some nation or not compete. But many of the non-American track & field athletes could have waved their American college pennants along with their national flags. The Cuban volleyball teams are authentically nationalist, just as the old Soviet hockey players were technically members of the Soviet Army. The Gold Medal American women's basketball team came together just weeks before the Olympics, some WNBA players went back to their home countries. Michael Phelps' mom & other Olympic parents would have worn corporate logo clothing if not for rules against it. That may yet change until everything & everyone get plastered with ads like at NASCAR. Aiming for the Olympic is lifelong gamble, the odds are hugely against it, & it's expensive in America to reach the level where one's costs are defrayed. But the payoff ... global superstardom.
