The current cycle governing day to night spins an imperfect circle. It continues to roll but in wobbly fashion, feinting first to the right then hestitantly left like a young Jackie Chan stumbling about in Drunken Master. No matter how familiar though, the terrain it traverses is quite acned and potholed. Nonetheless the roundish shape being drawn completes an unconventional though predictable track.
Which might explain how rotisserie leagues affect the change of seasons and consequently the perception of time. As the work of On Kawara suggests, how is time typographically or conceptually marked? Like a ticking clock whose second hand accumulates incremental space, every causal effect of any sporting feat so connected to the human experience becomes an abstract number instead. Is this the simulacrum that Jean Baudrillard refers to? To be so far removed from the actual thing so as to champion its substitute in another compacted form metamorphosizes into pure spectatorship. Except that flesh and blood then assumes a postmodernist quality divorced from its self-contained reality. These flattened images subsequently lose their primacy to reference the concrete action of physical interaction only.
The significance of inscribing meaning to an essentially leisure culture is then hypervalued because the spectacle of the event is implied, literally read between the lines. What constitutes a historical record develops to produce a fictional nostalgia manufacturing an industry of retailed memorabilia. But the relationship between documentation of performance and its objective form as collectible translates into cyberspace as hinted at by author Robert Coover. Is there any benefit psychically to be derived for a particpant from engaging secondhand the vicarious thrill of the Modernist glory of sports?
This obsession descends daily, sometimes even hourly, but to be so preoccupied with the aggregation of statistics is abnormal. Or can it be a subconscious project of redundant movements that dictate the gist of urban existence as Tehching "Sam" Hsieh demonstrated in his yearlong performances?