Week 1: Two Cultures - Blake Kirshner

 Starting when I was seven years old, football was a huge part of my life. I played quarterback my entire life, which is a position that requires a high level of understanding the game to be successful. I loved how the game worked so I fell in love with football early in life. 

  

Me as a child playing in the street

I have also always loved to draw and listen to music. It was hard for me to stay focused in class certain times because I could not stop drawing pictures. Drawing was something that gave me an escape (much like football), and still does even to this day. 

    As I began my high school career, the game of football got much more complicated, like a science. To break it down, in order to be successful you had to memorize rules such as: "If the safety moves to the left while you are in a certain formation, another player has to move across the field to cover his tracks, leaving a certain portion of the field vulnerable". 

Me playing football

The game got immensely more complicated as my college career began. It wasn't until my playing career at UCLA began until a coach told me "The game is like a picture, it is art when you really think about it". This helped me immensely - thinking of how the defense moves and operates as one big picture. So I began drawing, and the clash of the two cultures hit me and it felt amazing. It was truly a clash between the two cultures and it was a breakthrough in my understanding of the depths of the game. "The clashing point of two subjects, two disciplines, two cultures - of two galaxies, so far as that goes - ought to produce creative chances. In the history of mental activity that has been where some of the breakthroughs came" (Snow 17). That quote sums it up for my story and it took me no time to realize where the clash of two cultures came about in my own life. 

Art in Football

WORKS CITED

Snow, C. P. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. University Press, 1959.

Bohm, David. "On Creativity." JSTOR.  04 Oct. 2013.

Dumonjic, Alen. "Football 101: breaking down the west coast offense" bleacher report - 01 March. 2012.

Kelly, Kevin. "The Third Culture." The Third Culture. N.p., n.d. Web. Feb. 1998

Wilson, Stephen D. “Myths and Confusions in Thinking about Art/Science/Technology.” College Art Association Meetings. New York, New York, 2000.