On July 27, the Olympics will start in London. My friends there are actually going elsewhere for the full three weeks of tourist and media frenzy. They just want to enjoy their summers, and watch the occasional swimming match on TV.

They’re also escaping the most Orwellian set of circumstances I’ve heard about in ages. Kosmograd, whose handle recalls a formerly totalitarian country, describes the rise of the “Brand Exclusion Zone,” which stringently enforces brand purity for the Olympics’ official sponsors. The goal is to prevent ambushes by other brands and to restrict brand exposure solely to companies that have paid millions of dollars and pounds and euros for advertising rights.

As a result, visitors wearing clothing or carrying items with the logos of rival brands will be barred from entering the games. Athletes and spectators are not allowed to upload videos of their own, which would compete with television broadcasts. These restrictions exist in both space and time, “up to 1km beyond [the Olympic Park’s] perimeter, for up to 35 days.”

Freedom of speech is a popular right, and one of the most easily contested. The issue becomes even more complicated when companies and individuals clash. But in this case, I feel uncomfortable at how rigidly the IOC is suppressing other voices. And when I think of the tyranny of brands, I think of Banksy:

“Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.”

(Viz the graffito by Criminal Chalkist, above, of a vigilante running off with one of the Olympic rings. I presume the IOC ordered all graffiti removed shortly thereafter.)

It’s true that London competed with many other cities to host the Olympics in 2012. They’ll benefit from the extraordinary influx of money, from the massive public works projects and increased media visibility. But at what cost? What will be lost by accepting the IOC's draconion rules?

When I read George Orwell’s 1984 in high school, I was fascinated by its ironies: the Ministry of Peace keeps Oceania at war, even the Ministry of Truth perpetually lies to maintain a consistent history. I took heart in how the very final page, an essay about that regime’s language, was written in the past tense. But here we are in 2012: now the Brand Exclusion Zone maintains brand purity by constantly fighting off other brands, and polices the Olympic athletes’ own Twitter accounts for brand infringement. What role have we played (and should play) in this fulfillment of Orwell's prophecy? How is it that London, the fictional capital of Airstrip One in1984, has let itself be seized in real life by Big Brother?

image source: kosmograd.com

I remember when the High Line opened in 2009: amid the reports of overcrowding, I heard people gushing about the greenery, the views and, of course, the famously non-reflective windows of the Standard Hotel. Everybody in New York thought it was the new Central Park.

But now it’s late winter, and everybody’s long since moved on to other novelties (fake snow in Union Square, anybody? How about an indoor park?). The weather’s been unnaturally nice in the city, so I decided to go for a walk on the High Line. To do that, of course, I had to take the subway. Only in New York: going underground to go aboveground.

There were the usual groups of tourists, and occasional couples wandering up and down the pathways. But the plants were pretty sparse, and as I looked up at the Standard, I had to shield my eyes. So I was surprised to feel more relaxed, at a remove from the city, even though I could see skyscrapers in the distance.

Why was anybody here, really? What do parks have to offer in the winter? Are New Yorkers so starved for nature that they have to make pilgrimages to these carefully tended gardens to get their green fix?

If this is a problem New Yorkers face, they’re not alone. My friend Daniel works in Paris, and decided to make a day trip in July out to Giverny, about an hour away (less if you go 150 km/hr, of course). He dragged along three more people in his rental car, and they couldn’t stop remarking on how relaxed they felt after a trip to Monet’s gardens. It was a way of escaping, yes, but the greenery itself had a way of settling their souls after so much time in the steel and glass and concrete of the city.

I came back from the High Line and pulled out my copy of Wordsworth’s poems. It fell open, as it usually did during my Romantic Poetry class in college, to Tintern Abbey. As the rhythms rolled over me, my eyes caught on the stunningly contemporary lines:

These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart . . .

By the end of the poem, Wordsworth has found himself revitalized by the mere memory of nature. A romantic sentiment, certainly, but one that makes some sense of the High Line’s popularity in winter. If Eliot is right to declare that “humankind cannot bear very much reality,” then the High Line is a way of escaping that reality, for a moment, in order to recall feelings far more real.

image credit: nycgovparks.org