Friday, July 6, 2007

WHAT I WANT TO KNOW, MR. FOOTBALL MAN, IS WHAT DO YOU DO ABOUT WILLIE MAYS: San Francisco is getting ready for baseball's All-Star Game next Tuesday, closing down streets and freeway ramps like they're Disney Stores. The city is festooned with banners and plastered with posters bearing the game's logo:



Usually, sporting event logos look like they're designed by the athletes themselves -- if you're going to call it an "all-star" event, then you actually have to cram in all the stars, the theory seems to go -- so this logo is surprisingly well-done. With all of the steroids, spousal threatening, and Yankee-stinking going on, MLB clearly and smartly wants to evoke a different, simpler, more innocent time. Everything about this serigraph by local graphic artist Michael Schwab serves a nostalgic idyll -- the uncomplicated blockiness that recalls the old WPA posters; the retro ballpark silhouette; the deep-blue late-afternoon summer sky; the stripped-down deco font. Even the last-minute edit -- the ball splashing into McCovey Cove, which, from Schwab's site, clearly came from MLB and not from Schwab himself -- helps place the event, both geographically and thematically. It's an aesthetically pleasing and commercially brilliant work.

I'm a little less enthusiastic about the secondary marketing, though. Hopefully these are readable (but you can click the picture to enlarge):




The geographic pieces are odd -- not clear what trolleys, the Golden Gate bridge, and, uh, the Mission bell tower (? -- I'm new around here) have to do with baseball. And I both like and am troubled by the two baseball players, especially the pitcher, whose shadowy image is hanging from every other lamppost downtown. I like them because they are even more directly influenced by the WPA posters and the WPA posters' own influence, Soviet propaganda (as an aside, one has to appreciate the kookiness of the war-time US government reinforcing American values and ideals through a socialist arts program appropriating the vocabulary of communist art). All three promote their message with the same iconography -- vigorous and clean-cut young adults (usually, but not always, muscular men) proudly engaged in wholesome or patriotic labor. So what's wrong? Well, it's the shadow. First, I don't exactly understand what MLB and Schwab are getting at with the shaded face. That baseball players are shadowy figures with terrible secrets? Well, yes, but I thought that was the stuff MLB wanted you to forget. That all-stars are anonymous everymen? Hmm, I thought they were supposed to be stars. Even worse than the mixed message, though, is that these guys are clearly impostors. MLB parks are oriented so that the line from home plate through the pitcher's mound runs east-northeast. Why? To figure this out, stare directly into the afternoon sun while somebody throws a hard object near your head at 100 miles an hour, and let us know how that works for you. Yet in the posters, the sun is directly at the pitcher's back and in the batter's eyes -- the pitcher seems to be standing at home plate, throwing toward the mound. As much fun as this might be for an inning or so (or would be, if Carl Everett or AJ Pierzynski were playing), again, I don't think it's what MLB had in mind.

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