The fix is in: Fake injuries, weird calls, and the #occupywallstreet demonstrations →

Americans have long been a people who distrust certain institutions. The Tea Party gained so much traction so quickly because don’t trust the government and politicians are liars is a golden oldie in the American character, and the classics never go out of style. A lack of faith in business and corporations, meanwhile, is more the stuff of Michael Moore movies and Noam Chomsky pamphlets—which makes the coverage that the #occupywallstreet demonstration is getting fairly remarkable. But for that to extend to the NFL, in ways that go beyond sore loser-isms and SpyGate complaints into the sort of world-weary, everybody does it cynicism that’s usually reserved for politics and lawyers? That’s something else.

I was at a bar last night to watch the game between the Cowboys and the team from Washington DC, and every time someone came over to the table we were sitting at, the conversation seemed to tilt toward the Johnny Knox punt return touchdown that was called back on a phantom holding penalty — and the fact that by negating the TD, the Packers were able to cover the spread.

In this week’s Down And Distance, the topic is the fact that so many people are suspicious that maybe a few NFL refs are on the take, and what that has to do with the national mood in the wake of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. Give it a read.

Breaking: American Apparel responds to Nancy Upton, is shitty. →

I got CC’d on an email that American Apparel sent to Nancy Upton in response to her protest campaign over AA’s plus-sized model search. I was a little surprised by it, mostly because the tone is pretty firmly in the “you know what, you suck!” camp, and that’s not how corporate press releases tend to read, when they’re responding to their critics. But cool. I’m not too worried about journalistic objectivity in this one, since the positions put forth are basically “American Apparel did this marketing campaign that I found offensive and responded to creatively” versus “And boy is she a jerk for it.” I like Nancy Upton, and I didn’t read anything in the response from AA that countered any of her points — just the usual shit about how she should get a sense of humor (said to the young woman whose photos included ranch dressing jizz shots!); how she was insulting the women who really “put themselves out there” (like a photo showing off her belly fat while pouring chocolate syrup down her throat was totally harmless); and how American Apparel creates jobs, so all of the people who pay their bills sewing those plus-sized clothes are really disappointed in Nancy.

Read the full response, and my analysis of it, over on CultureMap.

Next Man Up: The NFL, Game Of Thrones, and Peyton Manning's head on a spike →

Football sustains its popularity because it’s keen to devour its own history. Baseball is too often crushed under the weight of it, where every shattered record makes lovers of the game mopey, since at least the debate around whether Roger Maris’ name should come with an asterisk, on to gripes about how Barry Bonds is no Hank Aaron.

In basketball, that scene in Bad Teacher where Jason Segal berates a middle schooler who wants to argue LeBron versus Michael Jordan exemplifies something that keeps younger generations from feeling like they can truly own the game. It’s been almost a decade since that guy laced up his sneakers, yet basketball shoes are still called “Jordans.” And, geez, look at boxing, which slides further and further into irrelevance because it insists that the sport’s legends can never be replaced, making it impossible to believe that what’s happening now even matters.

But football? The all-time greats are just part of the last generation’s drama, and the game changes so quickly that you can’t even compare from one era to the next. In football, the history informs the present, it doesn’t oppress it. The last generation’s heroes are this generation’s in-studio commentators, big-upping the guys on the field today.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ve probably seen me mention Down And Distance, my weekly column for CultureMap. It’s about football in the broad context — how the game reflects American culture, and how American culture reflects the game — and now that the regular season has started, there’s plenty to write about.

This one is about the way that the NFL fits into our cultural appetite for stories, in ways that other sports don’t, and how much more clearly we can see that after the star of the show, Indianapolis Colts quarterback Peyton Manning, had a neck surgery that put his short- and long-term futures in doubt.

I’m quite pleased with how this came out — give it a read, and share/Digg/”like”/Tweet it, if you like it.

Wimps and Leaders: Barack Obama, Jay Cutler, and quarterbacking a nation →

A couple of weeks ago, Obama made a crack about wanting Aaron Rodgers to be traded to the Bears. This offended me deeply, of course, because I’m a Jay Cutler fan. But it also got me thinking about the things America wants from its leaders, and how Obama and Cutler have both done a fairly crappy job at giving it to them.

It’s funny; that’s not even really an attack on what they’ve actually done, just the way they’ve failed to stand up, look ‘em in the eye, and act tough in the way we want our leaders to do so.

That’s what I wrote about in my CultureMap column this week.

"If The Sopranos was the Stones and The Wire was Zeppelin, Breaking Bad is Rush." →

That quote is from a piece on Breaking Bad that Rob Sheffield wrote in the latest Rolling Stone. I’m a total dork for analogies like that and immediately started thinking about what other bands the shows that I love would be.

Now you can learn why Deadwood would be The Stooges, Lost would be Van Halen, Friday Night Lights would be (yes) The Eagles, and more, over at CultureMap.

Down And Distance: Manufactured Outrage: The Miami Hurricanes Booster Scandal →

In this week’s Down And Distance column, the topic is the manufactured, faux-outrage. Using the Miami Hurricanes booster scandal as a starting point, I look at how to spot phone outrage by comparing and contrasting to last year’s #mooreandme Twitter protest.

"More Than A Game": Why we mythologize athletes →

[E]very exhibit, book, movie, etc about games or sports More Than A Game and it would be entirely appropriate. Try it – it’s fun! Rudy or Raging Bull or A League Of Their Own or Invictus or “Despite Outcome, U.S. Women Earned Respect” or something about poker or Dungeons & Dragons or Halo. Every story about games is about how they transcend the actual mechanics of gameplay, or about how those gameplay mechanics are executed with such grace and elegance that they can make us feel better about being human and alive.

I wrote about the “more than a game” thing over here a few weeks ago, but I didn’t feel like I finished saying what I had to say about it. In this week’s Down And Distance column for CultureMap, I expand on those ideas. Featuring Game Of Thrones jokes (spoiler: The New England Patriots are the Lannisters), great pictures from Neil Leifer’s new book of football photos, and some thoughts about why whatever game you love — whether it’s football or Magic: The Gathering or Words With Friends — really matters.

[down and distance: week one] This is America: Why football matters →

Over at Culturemap.com, my new football column launches today! From the first installment, here is what marketing people might describe as the elevator pitch:

There are a lot of places, online and in print, to read post-game analysis, training camp reports, locker room gossip, and free agency hype. But football is bigger than just those things. The game is part of the same culture as Presidential campaigns, political activism, underground hip-hop, dog-whistle sexism, Thursday night NBC comedies, East Austin hipsterism, Oscar bait film season, etc, etc. All of these things are on the forefront of the culture, and they’re all interconnected. It’s like The Wire.

This is the first edition of Down and Distance, a new weekly column on CultureMap. It’s a place to consider each week of football in a context larger than the locker room. We’re going to talk about the social, political, and pop-cultural implications of the game, because any activity that holds a nation’s attention like NFL football does have those implications. This is sports talk with a broad context.

This first column is about the labor negotiations, the debt ceiling negotiations, and why — even though DeMaurice Smith and Roger Goodell are bumbling, vaguely competent executives who flirted with the notion of blowing up America’s most popular and profitable sport for no good reason — we would probably still be better off as a nation if even those two dudes handled the debt ceiling deal.

Read it, ‘like’ it, share it, tweet it, Digg it, please. We’re going to do some cool stuff over there.

More on the Austin City Limits/Stevie Wonder & Kanye West/race thing. →

So, this post I wrote for Culturemap about the reactions to Kanye West and Stevie Wonder’s names leaking as ACL headliners over the weekend blew up over the past hour. Mostly, of course, with people who are mad at me, because race card and why do you care what stupid people on the Internet say, they just like to gripe, and there’s way worse racism out there so why are you bothering with this, and if you can imagine a world in which someone lumped Kanye West and Stevie Wonder in together without it being about race, then you’re the real racist for thinking it was!

And, you know, it just blows my mind that people are so invested in denying that other people’s complaints might be influenced by racial prejudices. Because the thing about the complaints about Stevie Wonder and Kanye West isn’t just that people are saying they’re not interested in the music — which is what gripes about, say, The Eagles last year were about — but that this is wrong for ACL. It’s not “Stevie Wonder is old and boring,” it’s that he and Kanye don’t belong — that they’re not what ACL is all about. And for a festival whose only black artist last year was Trombone Shorty, maybe that’s even historically true — but is that really a point of pride worth protecting?

And I’m happy to argue those points, but the meaningless buzz surrounding it is fairly maddening. Race card! Page views! Anecdotal evidence! All these non-arguments that really just say shut up, they’re frustrating. I mean, I am a freelancer. I hope that people read what I write, and I hope that the outlet that publishes gets what they’re looking for out of publishing it. But I don’t honestly give a fuck about anyone’s pageviews for their own sake. I don’t get paid extra for pageviews, and every single relationship I have with every outlet could disappear tomorrow if the editors decided not to return my emails anymore, so I don’t wake up in the morning obsessing over how to generate traffic for any particular site. I write what I’m interested in, and hope that people read it.I think it’s really strange that the immediate assumption by a bunch of people is that I couldn’t possibly really believe all that, and I just hustled up a crass, quickie post to get some bonus traffic.

But, you know, it’s interesting to get the chance to discuss it, even if most of the discussion right now is just people shouting NUH UH over and over again. Just a little bit exhausting, too. I’m gonna have to let it go at this point if I want to get any work done today.

ETA: After thinking about it, the “pageviews!” accusation actually does bother me, because it denies that this is even a discussion worth having — the whole point of shouting that is to say that the only reason anyone could possibly be interested in talking about this is to generate controversy. Which is weird! Because where I come from — and I’m talking about the communities that I tend to travel in — the suggestion that (a few specific) black artists don’t belong at ACL is not a particularly controversial thing to say. And I recognize that the rest of the Internet is not, like, the social justice blogosphere, but this isn’t the sort of thing I drop to provoke people. This is the sort of thing I write about in other spaces all the time. They just don’t usually end up in front of people who don’t seek out that sort of commentary. Which is good! But still — yes, exhausting.