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What if every band had its own British football logo?
07.31.2018
08:08 am
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Some witty and likable folks with art school credentials and/or graphic design skills presumably residing in the British Isles recently started a Twitter presence for those of you out there who unaccountably are interested in both rock and roll music and athletics. The presence is called Bands FC and I urge you to go check it out, it’s very amusing.

The account’s geezer-ish slogan runs thus: “How it works. Bands as football teams. Football teams as bands.” There’s a lot of visual punning going on that requires some basic knowledge of Premier League Football logos. Every now and then they throw up an entry with the text “This is how we do it” that explains the concept to newcomers. Here’s one of the only ones that I actually understood without the help:
 

 
The logos are often quite clever, but they’re not afraid to go obvious when it suits them, as with Spinal Tap’s three “goes to 11” knobs or Nirvana’s smiley face.

The knowledge of the conventions involved in football logos runs deep. Sometimes the names of the band members are listed (“SIXX NEIL LEE MARS”), sometimes not. Sometimes there’s an “EST. 1967” (Fleetwood Mac) thrown in for fun, sometimes not. All in all the person or people who made these understood that the goal of a sports logo is to foster worship among the masses, and also the colors have to lend themselves to expression in the form of a garish winter scarf.

Below are some of my faves but there are lots more at the source.
 

 

 
Tons more after the jump…........
 

READ ON
Posted by Martin Schneider
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07.31.2018
08:08 am
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Dallas Cowboys merchandise by feminist conceptual artist Jenny Holzer
08.07.2015
12:09 pm
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“BOREDOM MAKES YOU DO CRAZY THINGS” cap, originally $19.99, now $10
 
The craziest things happen and then you find out about them years later. Like how Jenny Holzer has done artwork for the Dallas Cowboys.

Yes. Jenny Holzer—the conceptual artist whose work consists entirely of cryptic slogans—works for the Dallas Cowboys. The relationship started several years ago but I only learned about it through an article published yesterday by Hyperallergic.

When the Dallas Cowboys moved into its expensive new stadium, called AT&T Stadium, for the 2009-2010 season, the Cowboys’ owner put on display a lot of splashy and expensive artworks by some grade-A artistic talents, including Trenton Doyle Hancock, Teresita Fernández, and Mel Bochner. One of the artists in the group was Jenny Holzer; she had adapted her Truisms series for the stadium’s massive new video screen, reputedly the fourth-largest in the world.
 

Jenny Holzer, “For Cowboys” (2012). Photo: Jean-Sébastien Stehli
 
Some site-specific art in a big football stadium is one thing, but having your work be available for sale as officially licensed Dallas Cowboys merchandise at the Dallas Cowboys online store is quite another. The Holzer items consist of four shirts and two caps, but there may have been others. A search on Google Images turned up a “RAISE BOYS AND GIRLS THE SAME WAY” model that appears to be out of stock.

Since the 1980s, Holzer has been one of the more successful cross-over successes in terms of authentically confrontational art (whose work is also cool and reserved as fuck). Her canny deployment of koan-like, or if you prefer, fortune-cookie-ish messages in public settings, often scrolling LED displays or T-shirts, has a way of bringing uncompromisingly leftist ideas (insofar as there’s an agenda at all) into the everyday lives of Americans. For her part, as an artist probably should, Holzer rejects the label of feminist, but her work speaks for itself—especially when the work is saying things like “MOTHERS SHOULDN’T MAKE TOO MANY SACRIFICES” or “RAISE BOYS AND GIRLS THE SAME WAY,” the latter of which, interestingly, was one of the slogans she chose for her Cowboys clothing.

Holzer’s Cowboys apparel is decidedly more confrontational and provocative than Mel Bochner’s over-eager “Win!” shirts, also available in the Cowboys’ online store.

I don’t know about you, but I think it’s pretty badass. If you’re an artist and you can choose between putting art in MoMA and putting art in the sightlines of regular sports fans who don’t give art much or any thought, it can’t be close, to a true provocateur.
 

“A POSITIVE ATTITUDE MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE IN THE WORLD” T-shirt, originally $24.99, now $15
 

“PUSH YOURSELF TO THE LIMIT AS OFTEN AS POSSIBLE” T-shirt, originally $27.99, now $15
 

“EXPIRING FOR LOVE IS BEAUTIFUL BUT STUPID” T-shirt, originally $24.99, now $10
 

“A SENSE OF TIMING IS THE MARK OF GENIUS” T-shirt, originally $27.99, now $15
 

“WORDS TEND TO BE INADEQUATE” cap, originally $19.99, now $10
 

 

 
via Internet Magic.

Posted by Martin Schneider
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08.07.2015
12:09 pm
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The Machine Is Bleeding to Death: How to turn the Super Bowl into a twisted Cronenbergian nightmare
02.01.2014
10:23 am
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Mom about to get crushed yet again
‘Mom,’ about to get crushed yet again
 
One of the lovely things about video games is that, with enough ingenuity and determination, you can sometimes transform a game into something more personal and unexpected. For the 2013-2014 NFL season, Jon Bois at SBNation, in his “Breaking Madden” series, has been demonstrating the bewildering variety of forms that the popular NFL simulation Madden NFL 25 can take, by bending—nay breaking—“rules, injury settings, all manner of player ratings, player dimensions, and anything else the game’s developers have made available to us.” On Wednesday he released his special Seahawks-Broncos Super Bowl ultra-mod—and it’s a corker with surprisingly emotional resonance. (Denver fans may want to stop reading about now…..)

A wonderful aspect of a highly refined NFL sim of this type is the ability for the player to intervene. Want to create a Barry Sanders clone that looks just like you and bears your name to boot? Have at it! That’s exactly the type of shit EA Sports, producer of Madden NFL 25, wants you to do—it creates unique user satisfactions, and that translates into brand loyalty and towering revenues for EA Sports.

In essence what Bois is doing resembles something that Morpheus says to Neo in The Matrix: “It has the same basic rules, rules like gravity. What you must learn is that these rules are no different that the rules of a computer system. Some of them can be bent. Others can be broken. Understand?” Bois is hammering, hard, on the “rules” of an NFL game by maxing out various variables, such as the size and talent of the players, fatigue factors, and so forth. In one game Bois managed to induce 30 fumbles in a single half. In another, he equipped the Patriots with a team full of Tom Bradys and then engineered a situation whereby “Touchdown Tom” (Brady’s new nickname) could come back from a 74-0 halftime deficit.

For Super Bowl XLVIII, Bois’ goal was to generate a “Super Rout” in which one side scored one thousand points in a single game. With the appropriate caveats (as you will see, he wasn’t able to bring the game to completion), he succeeded in doing that. But along the way, Madden NFL 25 generated something far more poignant than a mere ultra-lopsided machina football game.

Bois’ idea was to create a Seahawks team full of massive, athletically gifted super-behemoths and make the Broncos a squad of puny weaklings. (Worry not, Broncos fans: Bois’ reasons for choosing the Seahawks to be the winning team were scrupulously fair; it just happened to work out that way.) Bois invited readers to submit personal names for all of the players on the two teams (with a real-life charity component), which is why the Broncos’ QB ended up being called “Mom.”
 
Madden NFL 25
 
To get the whole picture of what happened, I heartily recommend reading Bois’ piece; it’s crammed with animated graphics, and they really paint a picture. I also recommend watching Bois’ video preview linked below, if you’re having trouble following what’s going on or why it matters, it’s very helpful.

As expected, Bois’ Seahawks dominated every play to a phenomenal degree. Before the first quarter was even over, the Seahawks were winning 366 to zero. Every Broncos play was resulting in a fumble, and every Seahawks play was resulting in a touchdown. The Broncos were outmatched to an extent that would never be imaginable in real life.

But weird things were happening along the way. An inordinate number of the Seahawks kickoffs were striking the hind quarters of the Broncos return personnel—in other words, bouncing off their asses. Beyond that, after a while Madden NFL ceased being able to tally the score accurately. At one point the score was both 255-0 and 266-0 according to different displays, and Bois says neither score was actually the correct one at that juncture. Even weirder, the Broncos players stopped trying (!), which is more or less what you’d expect to happen in real life but not in a computer simulation. At one point Madden NFL 25 called a false start penalty even though Bois had turned off penalties for the game. There’s a reason Bois titled his writeup “The Machine Is Bleeding to Death.”
 
Broncos-Seahawks hybrid
 
Broncos-Seahawks hybrid
 
The magnificent ending to all of this occurred just before the end of the first quarter. Bois called for a replay of that weird shouldn’t-have-been penalty, and instead of a replay the system produced, perched alone on the 50-yard line, a single hybrid fetus player in the center of the field. It was vaguely equine-looking. You can see it above. The ... “player” was wearing both Seahawks and Broncos gear at the same time, and didn’t have the four limbs one expects from a humanoid figure. Madden NFL 25 had coughed up a creature out of any number of David Cronenberg movies, and the experiment’s facile similarities to Videodrome were only part of the eerie, weird beauty Bois had managed to wring out of the game.

At that point, interpreting the odd football fetus-creature as something akin to Madden NFL 25 crying “uncle,” Bois invoked the mercy rule and stopped the game.

Speaking for myself, Bois’ article was the only bit of pre-Super Bowl commentary that induced a surprising reaction in me; I enjoyed the hell out of it. And I’m putting down $50 on a 366-0 Seahawks victory at Vegas…...
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Brazilian drag queen recreates Madonna’s entire Super Bowl show and it’s amazing

Posted by Martin Schneider
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02.01.2014
10:23 am
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Diego Maradona loves his players but he’s so not gay. OK?

image
 
Even if you’re a soccer layman who knows the name Pele, you’ve likely also heard the name Diego Maradona. The legendary 49-year-old Argentine player and coach, who captained his national team to win the 1986 World Cup is known as much for his off-field controversies (like his 20-year cocaine habit) as for those on-field, including his “Hand of God” goal.

During this week’s World Cup activity, Diego got handed a true moment when a journalist’s question about the current Argentine captain’s cuddly treatment of his excellent players got mistranslated into an intimation about the way El Diego swings.
 

 

Posted by Ron Nachmann
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06.23.2010
05:01 pm
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Refait: Football as Everyday Life

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In a stroke of pure Euro genius, France’s Pied La Biche art collective have produced Refait, a complete re-enactment of the 15-minute penalty phase of the 1982 World Cup semifinals between France and Germany in the setting of Villeurbane, just northeast of Lyon.

By mapping the grinding tension of an extended penalty across the wide spaces and casual attitude of a small industrial town, Pied provide an irreverent yet plaintive—and somewhat hypnotizing—perspective on the frailty of human achievement. Horst Hrubesch’s winning shot never seemed so enduring.

 

Refait from Pied La Biche on Vimeo.

 

Posted by Ron Nachmann
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06.15.2010
02:11 am
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