Kurt Vile can conjure memory and sound so as to suspend, dilate, confound, and—like his forbearers Sonic Youth once desired—kill time.
Kurt Vile can conjure memory and sound so as to suspend, dilate, confound, and—like his forbearers Sonic Youth once desired—kill time.
How football and videotape plunge America into a hyperreality each Sunday—and how that process recalls the origins of dub.
Shadowing the past few campaigns of the National Football League like a corner in man-to-man coverage has been the medical revelation of irreparable brain damage caused by merely playing the game. With every post-game recap, there seemed to follow even more news on helmet-to-helmet hits, new scientific studies revealing the depths of such trauma, all of it lingering over the game like post-concussion symptoms. Commentary has aired on 60 Minutes and in Time (in 2009, a deflated pigskin illustrated a cover with the headline “The Most Dangerous Game”) and The New Yorker, where Malcolm Gladwell’s article “Offensive Play” discussed the brown tau and beta-amyloid stains that appear on the brains of players who have suffered too many head-on collisions. He noted that NFL players suffered five times higher than average diagnoses of “dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, or other memory-related disease” after their playing years were behind them, adding a lineman’s description of a standard downfield drive: “Every play, collision, collision, collision… literally, these white explosionsboom, boom, boomlights getting dimmer and brighter, dimmer and brighter.”