Sarahel's Semiotics 4U

women's pants=sexist

you have no idea!

says the lady lawyer!

problems with women's pants:

Men's pants are sized consistently based on measurements, whereas women's pants (like most women's clothing) are sized almost arbitrarily. This implies that women should be spending more time shopping for clothes, as well as introducing feelings of insecurity and inadequacy. Insecurity -- when a particular pair of pants in the size she usually wears does not fit, the woman is made to question whether she has gained weight, or whether her dimensions and shape are out of fashion. Inadequacy -- compared to men's pants - which are designated by quantitative measurements, women's pants, are sized with an arbitrary number with the smallest, and culturally most desirable, being a "0" -- null, invoking the psychology of eating disorders which are often based on the desire to reduce oneself to nothing.

my favorite thread already

say something about how men's clothes are sized as small, medium and large

Most fashionable women's pants are not designed with the same utility/function as men's. Women's pants tend to have fewer and smaller pockets, inconvenient to types of work outside of a domestic or office environment.

men's condoms are large and medium iirc

what the hell is wrong with you?

say something about how men's clothes are sized as small, medium and large

― ❊❁❄❆❇❃✴❈plaxico❈✴❃❇❆❄❁❊ (I know, right?), Monday, August 10, 2009 11:32 PM (1 minute ago)

^some bullshit, only reinforces stereotype that "size matters"

referring to penis size btw

oh hell lou

men's condoms are large and medium iirc

― cockles (country matters), Tuesday, August 11, 2009 3:35 AM (1 minute ago)

Ban this user from this thread (temporarily)

Confirm

The dearth of pockets encourages reliance on the purse/handbag, Because it is discrete from the woman's body, the purse/handbag reinforces the cultural norm that women should rely on others for security when outside the home. Were the woman to be employed in manual labor, and forced to carry a purse/handbag because of the lack of functional pockets, she would need to constantly watch that her purse/handbag is not stolen, or employ some other means or person to prevent this theft.

One could view the purse/handbag symbolizing a child, and that to design pants with enough functional pockets, would go against the societal demand that a woman needs to be caring for a child in order to be a "real woman."

anything else people want me to semiotically analyze?

pockets also make it look like you weigh more, so if trousers come with pockets some people will go to the tailor and have them cut out.

i would use a purse/handbag if society would allow me to.

sarahel, i was hoping you would discuss cost and quality of women's vs men's pants.

anything else people want me to semiotically analyze?

givenchy heels

The dearth of pockets encourages reliance on the purse/handbag, Because it is discrete from the woman's body, the purse/handbag reinforces the cultural norm that women should rely on others for security when outside the home.

I have started wearing girlpants this month and had this thought yesterday like verbatim btw

it depends on where the pockets are located ... side pockets a la cargo-type pants don't really do this. The worst offender in women's pants that make you look fat are front pleats.

Yeah but everybody knows that, I hope! Pleats do not do ANYBODY any favors regardless of gender.

I would like to hear more about the social ensnarement of women via accoutrements. Are there many other examples you can think of?

i thought you were banned from this thread!

xp I used to have a job doing audio visual work at hotels, where I had to wear pants that looked professional (as opposed to dickies or carharts), and I would be almost to the point of tears when shopping for functional pants. Besides pockets, I needed pants with belt loops so I could wear a belt and clip on the walkie talkie.

mea culpa

xp

Pleats do not do ANYBODY any favors regardless of gender.

except for really skinny guys.

idk - I think they're awful on just about everyone. I honestly can't ever recall seeing anyone in pleated pants (the traditional type, mind) and thinking it was a good look.

omg @ mea culpa

This all sounds like an interesting school of thought. How will it fare when applied to the advertising of women's clothing?

the social ensnarement of women via accoutrements.

Around the time of the sexual revolution/2nd wave feminism in the 60s/70s/80s the image of the superwoman was popularized. She was not only supposed to be as effective a worker as her male counterpart, but also highly capable as a wife, mother, and aesthetic subject. Nowhere is this seen more than in the products women are supposed to keep on their person, presumably in their purse or handbag. Failure to have these products, which include beauty aids as well as organizational/work tools, signifies a failure to fulfill the exhaustingly large list of requirements to be successful.

can you quote some relevant guy debord now plz ;)

not from memory ... the books are all in the other room.

aw

Can you now analyse the 'soccer/hockey mom' phenomenon?

after I have dinner ... someone else do some semiotic analysis while I'm gone, please?

uh, websites give you the illusion of choice but really they restrict the "free association" they imply through click-through designation and rationalise your thought process for you. Most web design is about a surfeit of choice which suggests unlimited options on each page but in reality the progression of one page to the next within a website is quite linear. This prolly has to do with newspeak and the mechanisation of our thought processes or something u kno?

adverts know you know how they're selling the product, and they expect you to be complicit in a narrative where the advert does not stand alone but exists in relation to other adverts; now no longer directly selling its product, the advert strives to be 'the one where x happens' as compared to other adverts for similar items, and depends on them to remain memorable. once the narrative has been digested, the buyer must merely pick a 'favourite bit' like from a movie or a sitcom. this is why to an occasional television watcher like myself, adverts seem increasingly superficial, jarring, and flashy. it is because their visual and conceptual span is not complete; it is a discrete fragment of a hypnotic and ritual whole

Does it depend on the jean? There are many different classes of demin. There are lower end demin, such as you find at Aamerican Eagle, Levi's Forever 21, Gap, and J Crew. Then there's 7's, Ernst Sewn, Jean Shop, Paper. Then there's Marc Jacobs, Gucci, etc... Does this affect the sexist implications found in the design of the jean?

yeah, sexism crosses class boundaries

So designer jeans don't allow for more freedom?

no, they only allow for the the freedom of men to oppress women into carrying babies in their purses (which might get stolen)

Jeans are a different issue - they are not "professional" attire

jeez, girl
more like insomniotics

can you quote some relevant guy debord now plz ;)

62 False choice in spectacular abundance, a choice which lies in the juxtaposition of competing and complimentary spectacles and also in the juxtaposition of roles (signified and carried mainly by things) which are at once exclusive and overlapping, develops into a struggle of vaporous qualities meant to stimulate loyalty to quantitative triviality. This resurrects false archaic oppositions, regionalisms and racism which serve to raise the vulgar hierarchic ranks of consumption to a preposterous ontological superiority. In this way, the endless series trivial confrontations is set up again, from competitive sports to elections ...

Women's pants (sexist or not) are horrible anyway. IMO they just don't look good... but that's just me I guess.

O_O this is turning into the thread where people had to translate song titles into academese, while other posters had to guess the title of song in question... but without the "songs" part.

Dear celebrity, spectacular representation of a living human being, can I get your sister's email why because she look intersting

i <3 this shit tbh

I will address the semiotics of soccer moms after I get some sleep.

That Debord quote ties in perfectly with my line about advertising. Not sure I'd call competitive sports or elections 'false choices' mind.

competitive sports are a perfect example of false choices.

lol so are elections! perhaps that's why he mentioned competitive sports and elections in that paragraph..............

i am shaking my head at lj

it certainly has been posited quite a bit about U.S. elections, to be sure.

something can only be false if you believe in the truth

My only contention with sarahel's points, as one who shops with my gf quite often and has noted the bewildering variety that any 'size' may have wrt to women's clothing, is that, otoh, there is a certain standard and normative 'masculinity' which disparages men who are 'overly' fastidious about their clothing or overly daring. If a man is a size 42, he buys a coat size 42 but does that mean that all manufacturers make them equally? If a man wanted no pockets or non-functional pockets, could he get them easily in business attire? The conservativeneness of men's attire - the lounge suit being essentially THE de rigueur attire of men - dates from the 20's and while it has had fuller or narrower trousers and wider or narrower lapels and X number of buttons or been single or double breasted, it has otherwise little changed in 90 years. Standardization of sizes sounds like a good idea but it leads to a conformity and leveller result that denies rather provides variety and individual choice. At least when my gf goes clothes shopping, she knows that she has to try everything on - every brand's sizes being different and often different within the brand on different items of clothing. For men, the variables are generally inseam, sleeve, collar, chest, and waist. Add to this the varities of feminine curves , i.e., large bust/large hips, large bust/small hips, small bust/large hips, small bust/small hips and all the individual modulations specific to a real as opposed to a template woman and the sizing issue, while admittedly annoying, seems less to me like a horrible conspiracy (though there is definitely size deflation for the purpose of flattery) then a natural result of the nature of the business.

DUMPLINGS!

xp - men aren't all shaped the same, either. I see where you're coming from, though. A guy with a significant gut has fewer stylistic options of camouflaging, flattering said protuberance, than a woman does.

in my experience, all men's clothes are designed with disguising gut protuberance as top priority

but it isn't as if men can wear a-line dresses ... well, they could but ...

http://www.comic-mint.com/media/client/homer-mumu-bedroom-E1728_sml.jpg

Men's pants are sized consistently based on measurements,

ALL I HAVE TO SAY AT LOL ALREADY DIDN'T READ REST OF THREAD

GO MEASURE ANY GENDER'S PAIR OF PANTS THAT AREN'T MADE IN FRANCE, ITALY OR JAPAN AND SEE HOW THEY COMPARE TO THE LABELED SIZE, THIS ISSUE IS NOT UNIQUE TO WOMENSWEAR

but...semiotics...

yes, but the sizes refer to actual measurements, one can say, "These are supposed to be 34 inch waist pants, I have measured my waist and it is 34 inches, these pants do not fit, thus these pants are wrong."

shrink-to-fit, ding dongs

No mass-manufactured item will ever fit perfectly on anyone but that lucky person who is 'average' in every variable measurement and even then, if it's poorly done, it will still look shitty. I just mean that in the complicated process of draping two-dimensional plane around a three-dimensional body, there are added challenges, even if you factor out societal and gender expectations, when clothing women.

I generally have to get all my suits tailored to some degree or another and there are certain brands which are simply not cut for me.

my legs are too long for me

before i got a paunch it was very hard for me - a tall and, at the time, slim male - to find trousers that fit. 28" waist 34" inside leg is difficult.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_vBiL4nSwNBU/SEl5Rxceg9I/AAAAAAAAADQ/hkiQIATg27A/s320/hostess_ding_dongs_300w.jpg

or

http://www.candyfavorites.com/pi/hostess-ho-hos.jpg

names are onomatopoeic representations of sound effects

The Man Who Was Shorter Than Himself

There was a man two inches shorter than himself
Who always kept getting stuck in the sidewalk;
And when the curious townsmen came
To yank his arms and crush his hat,
He'd spit in the eye of the lean,
and steal the wallets off the fat.

I guess what I'm saying, is don't trust the size marked, it varies from brand to brand and even sometimes within and you have to see how it fits.

I also wonder at your pocket/purse dynamic. I think it may be the other way around. At present, woomen have purses so why have ungainly bulges and folds in their clothing when they mostly won't put anything in there so as not to ruin the line? You could wonder why there is still a vestigial style for faux pockets, perhaps, or why women want to look sexy, but I can understand why, if they're going to carry a purs, they don't want real pockets. Otoh, I have seen quite a few summer dresses w/functional pockets this year.

this isn't really semiotics 4u anymore btw, this is like every ILS thread ever

yes, but the sizes refer to actual measurements, one can say, "These are supposed to be 34 inch waist pants, I have measured my waist and it is 34 inches, these pants do not fit, thus these pants are wrong."

― free jazz and mumia (sarahel),

AROUND 25 YEARS AGO, CLOTHING MANUFACTURERS BEGAN "VANITY SIZING". THIS IS WHY I SAY GO MEASURE A GARMENT AND COMPARE TO THE LABEL SIZE. I DON'T TYPE IN ALL CAPS JUST FOR FUN. LOL

THIS IS THE FIRST I'VE HEARD ABOUT VANITY SIZING TBH

Here is an interesting series of articles about how fit models work in the womens' clothing industry, which lends some support to sarahel's theories re: women's pants:
http://theprettyyear.com/2009/03/10/size-chart-woes/
http://theprettyyear.com/2009/03/17/size-chart-woes-part-ii/
http://theprettyyear.com/2009/03/18/size-chart-woes-part-iii-revenge-of-the-stitch/

I just have a problem with purses ... I'd end up forgetting them on public transport or in the corner at a club or something ... it's something else to keep tabs on when you're in a public place. I prefer to keep everything in pockets -- fortunately, most of the year I can wear a jacket or sweatshirt and keep things in there, but when it gets hot (like it was the past two days), it's too warm for a jacket or sweatshirt, and the pants pockets problem rears its head.

friend of mine who interned for some semi-up and coming designer last summer claimed that the guy (who only wore cargo shorts) didn't really like the idea of "fat ppl" wearing his clothes and used a fit model who was definitely too small and the clothes were all about six sizes (european) than they claimed they were. Also they just measure one person who is a real person and usually a quite skinny model whose proportions are not v. representative fyi and then add two inches to the measurements to go up each size

i don't like them either, they're a real hindrance and i hate hindrances. but i like carrying everything i own with me like a bag lady so life is hard w/o some type of bag xp

xp ha! Your story reminds me of ikea furniture -- it always seems to me that whoever designs it doesn't want people with large quantities of stuff using it. Maybe it's just the shelves ...

A lot of designers don't like the idea of fat people wearing their clothes, which is a bummer, because as a fat lady with discretionary income, I would really like to spend it on some clothes that don't look like they have been puked on by a bedazzler. Also, yes, just grading a pattern up uniformly around is pretty common, so that a size 18W blouse, for example, is cut for a giant rectangular person (and some women are shaped like giant rectangles, so this is good for them) instead someone with boobs and a waist and hips, etc. This is really a whole separate discussion than sarahel's semiotic pants, though. xp

You can tell when a manufacturer does that uniform grading thing if their larger sized shirts have like giant arm and neck holes.

not just common, i'm pretty sure this is HOW ITS DONE

like this guy was high end

Jenny speaks the truth! A while back, I was talking to a friend of mine, who I consider fairly slim, but like me, we are both pretty ample in the posterior. Both of us are not tall, and we will buy larger women's shorts that on us look like capri pants.

Inadequacy -- compared to men's pants - which are designated by quantitative measurements, women's pants, are sized with an arbitrary number with the smallest, and culturally most desirable, being a "0" -- null

BOTH MEN AND WOMENS CLOTHING MADE FOR AMERICAN CONSUMERS HAS DEVIATED FROM THE STANDARD SIZING (AKA VANITY SIZING) WITH THE EXCEPTION OF DOMESTIC COUTURE DESIGN HOUSES OR FOREIGN IMPORTS SUCH AS ZARA, H&M OR UNIQLO (ALTHOUGH THESE RETAILERS HAVE GOTTEN SMART AND HAVE BEGAN RELABELING GARMENTS FOR USA EG: M -> L, L->XL).

GO FIND YOUR BF'S FAVORITE PAIR OF PANTS AND MEASURE THE WAIST AND COMPARE TO THE LABEL. EVERYONE WANTS TO BE TALLER AND SKINNIER THAN THEY REALLY ARE, IT IS NOT A WOMEN'S CLOTHING ISSUE EXCLUSIVELY, ALTHOUGH I DO FEEL YA W/R/T USA WOMENSWEAR SIZING ALTHOUGH THAT'S BEEN A PROBLEM FOR MANY DECADES.

I also wonder at your pocket/purse dynamic. I think it may be the other way around. At present, woomen have purses so why have ungainly bulges and folds in their clothing when they mostly won't put anything in there so as not to ruin the line? You could wonder why there is still a vestigial style for faux pockets, perhaps, or why women want to look sexy, but I can understand why, if they're going to carry a purs, they don't want real pockets. Otoh, I have seen quite a few summer dresses w/functional pockets this year.

― Le présent se dégrade, d'abord en histoire, puis en (Michael White), Tuesday, August 11, 2009 3:31 PM (15 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this doesn't really show that it's the other way around. unless i am not understanding. women are carrying purses ----> let's design clothes based on that assumption, and that's good because we won't "ruin the line" (and who cares if your clothes are not "functional") -----> our clothes don't have pockets ------> that's ok because you can put stuff in your purse. i mean what sarahel said still holds. it goes in a circle.

my bf pretty exclusively wears work pants (dickies, carhartts, etc.) ... do they vanity size those, too?

steve shasta i think u are missing the point, arbitrary as men's clothing sizes may be, they at least imply a relatiotionship with an actual measurement, 32 in a men's trousers actually means the waist is 32 inches, yeah it is usually bollocks but the relationship between sign and signified is pretty clear cut, wtf is size six supposed to mean, its more abstract and therefore invents its own connotations in relationship to women's bodies without anything as formal as a measurement it seems

^ yes. men's clothes doesn't have a 0, for example. the fact that both have vanity sizing just means both want to be smaller than they are, which is another (related) problem.

if you go to pull and bear in ireland they don't do size small, the label says Spain: M Ireland : S or Spain: L Ireland M.

hang on, can we get back to that 'false choice' thing, because much as I <3 debord, deleuze &c &c, and much as that quote is OTM re: aspirational marketing, false lifestyle dichotomies and other such symbiotic competitive ventures, I would argue that fundamentally instinctive entertainments such as sport, and necessary civic arbitrations such as elections, are somewhat above the insidious corporate spectacle being addressed by debord. supporting a sports team is not like choosing a piece of clothing or a new kitchen. it comes much more naturally; it is tribal, and is not suggested so much as implored. as for voting in an election, the falseness of the choice depends on what information is available, and how trustworthy it is.

duped by "democracy"

PLAXICO I THINK YOU'RE ACTUALLY MISSING THE POINT TBF

MEN DON'T WEAR TOP/BOTTOM CLOTHING (EXCEPT FOR READY TO WEAR SUITS)

YOU CAN GOOGLE WOMENSWEAR SIZING TO LEARN THE HISTORY, IT'S NOT LIKE AN UNTAILORED PRET-A-PORTER CLOTHING IS SOMETHING BRAND NEW.

basically i was feeling a little harshed on, because i am a massive sports fan, and am trying to wriggle out of a poststructuralist hole that cannot be wriggled out of

i am "privileging" shasta's industry experience over unfocused attempts at uncovering semiotic "meaning" sorry guys!!

STEVE SHASTA I THINK WE'RE ON DIFFERENT CONTINENTS WITH DIFFERENT CLOTHES SIZING KEYS SO MAYBE THAT IT WHY WE KEEP GETTING OUR WIRES CROSSED BECAUSE I NO LONGER HAVE ONE CLUE WHAT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT TBH

one can still be esoteric and nomadic with one's appreciation OF competitive sport as a whole, by having an overall interest in it, even if one focuses on the tribal element when forced to pick a side or when one's appointed tribe is stirred into action

see thread title tbqf elmo

the fact that competitive sports are fundamentally instinctive doesn't mean they can't be part of an insidious corporate spectacle
wide availability of trustworthy information doesn't mean the 'choice' is not false

How are men's clothes sized in Ireland, plaxico?

i like sports btw. elections not so much.

You don't have to pick a football team or vote, though, whereas you kind DO have to wear clothes, especially if, like sarahel, you have to work.

ALL IM SAYIN IS APPLES AND ORANGES TO COMPARE WOMENSWEAR AND MENSWEAR SIZING. WOMENS SIZING NEEDS TO BE 3D AND MENS DOESNT. A LOT OF FALSEHOODS IN THE OP. THE REAL ISSUE IS VANITY SIZING WHICH IS GENDER-NEUTRAL.

You don't have to pick a football team or vote, though

true

yes i saw that, thanks. now explain to me how a handbag or purse is really a baby? i mean using one patriarchal stereotype as a "cause" of other examples of sexism isn't really a methodology, is it?

How are men's clothes sized in Ireland, plaxico?

― Le présent se dégrade, d'abord en histoire, puis en (Michael White), Tuesday, August 11, 2009 9:12 PM (1 minute ago)

turns out its the same

it's not really a baby

the insidious corporate spectacle is not fundamental to competitive sports, however. in many cases it has hijacked top-level competitive sports but it is by no means intrinsic throughout. most discerning sports fans see through the BS and appreciate the elegance of the sport at all levels, not just the summit.

it depends on what one is choosing. if one is choosing a team to support, criteria can be drawn from a variety of sources, only the crudest ones spectacular. sentiment and proximity are generally the key factors. if one is choosing to follow competitive sports as a whole, then of course a spectacle is being sought, but it is a self-explanatory, non-corporate spectacle. the razzle-dazzle is merely a means of perpetuating false narratives of historical success and consistent glory, which I generally don't give a stuff about.

the same for elections. if one knows that a candidate will bring in the death penalty, and one won't, then the choice on those grounds is surely not false.

i like sports and not elections too fwiw although if we had better choices i would like elections more

how is handbag formed?

plaxico, it's like Brit sizing for men, right? It's just the shoes that off by a single size, iirc.

M White makes a good point. Where the Society of the Spectacle hits hardest is through inescapable societal requirements such as clothing, food, 'lifestyle choices', labels &c &c

plaxico, it's like Brit sizing for men, right? It's just the shoes that off by a single size, iirc.

― Le présent se dégrade, d'abord en histoire, puis en (Michael White), Tuesday, August 11, 2009 9:19 PM (33 seconds ago)

yeah, women's is different though so that's why I was getting confused

if one knows that a candidate will bring in the death penalty, and one won't, then the choice on those grounds is surely not false.

Single issue voter, eh? What if it's that one knows that one candidate will bring in the death penalty for persons of his or her constituents' choosing for a small emolument?

http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/french/as-sa/ASSA-No13/semiotriangle.jpg

btw

all I've really gotten from this thread is that either we should all wear clothing that doesn't give a fuck about the dimensions of the wearer (togas, saris) or we should all have personal tailors

re: competitive sports -- I live in a city where a minor riot occurred when the home team lost the Super Bowl several years back. There were plenty of things for the people who broke store windows, overturned cars and set one on fire to be up in arms about: economic injustice, racial profiling, police brutality, cuts to the social safety net, the prison industrial complex, etc. But no, it was over a football game. It isn't as if they get any real benefits from the team's success. It isn't as if the teams owners and management, or even most of the players, give the local fans a cut of their huge salaries or anything. The only reason said football team is in the city is because the local government gave the team a bunch of money, that could have been spent on services for the people.

http://www.neurosoftware.ro/programming-blog/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/d62a9_signifier_signified.jpg

also interesting is how clothing is adjusted for ethnic populations - my friend (who's of European descent) bought a dress shirt in Japan that fits perfectly except the cuffs come down to approximately the middle of his forearms

http://www.pep-web.org/document.php?id=ijp.085.1423.fig001.jpg

i wish clothing was sized for my ethnicity bc i am an ape

that is an extreme example, though, sarah, and the false choice in operation is the choice of rioting afterwards, which has nothing to do with the actual sport and everything to do with uncontrollable tribal tension, whipped up by media hype and triggered by the lie which states that defeat is terminal

no! i dont think u understand it right :(

I like Debord and all but I'm still back with the old-school marxists trying to make sure I'm fed and have a roof over my head and don't die from the latest, most 'fashionable' disease. Semiotics is fun, but when you have to wear clothes, sometimes even just to avoid exposure to the elements, I tend to not fret about the vanity sizing and whether they're trying to fuck with me (I assume they are) and just goes with what works for me or what I can make to work.

tbh whatever is on sale is pretty ok

Debord's all style, no substance

yeah u have to ignore it to prevent yourself from going nutz. i have to accept that i cannot wear a burlap sack with holes cut out for my arms to work.

xp dyao: There are definitely brands that cater to African-American women that design pants with more room in back. I should probably suck up the racial awkwardness and get some.

do they make pants designed for ppl of irish extraction people with no butt? i need those

ikr, please research this

bought a dress shirt in Japan that fits perfectly except the cuffs come down to approximately the middle of his forearms

I had some money to blow on a suit once in Japan. I had been modelling there and all the clothes I modelled fit nicely so I was surprised that I could not find one single suit nice or vile that came close to fitting me. I have also noted, of late, that discount or cheap places like Costco, etc., never have my size of underwear - everything is a size too large.

subtract "people" xxp

lol sometimes walking through macy's or places like that when they have a very small section of clothes that will fit people of my size and then a "woman" section of ugly bedazzle clothes for larger ladies that is enormous but if i was a larger lady i would be mad at all the false choices therein. and whytf is it called "woman"?

do i not? :(

the superbowl, as a flagship sporting event, is completely open to accusations of 'false choosing', from its description as a continuous sporting pinnacle (great sport can happen anywhere sport is organised) to the razzmatazz of anointing one team and condemning the other in such definitive terms. you seem to be saying that the sport itself is a false choice; that the creation of a sports team with the ability to reach the superbowl is not in fact a great civic achievement but an empty narcotic for the townsfolk to devour. all i can say is that the creation of sports teams outside of a corporate context generally happened because people from a certain collective urban space wanted to play team sports, and organised themselves accordingly. if both team and stadium subsequently developed, it was merely to keep up with the competition. only at the highest level do teams overreach themselves and sell out to the corporate spectacle.

haha one of the nice things about living in Hong Kong is that all the clothing here fits me - whereas in the US I got dirty looks asking if things came in a "S", and I was too ashamed to go shop in the Boys section

what is the general gist of this competitive sports question, I want to get in on this action

sport is the new opium of the masses, discus

I think this speaks to good old-fashioned capitalism as muc as anything - where our expectations and sense of entitlement run into someone else's business model. We wear perhaps the most disposable clothing and more of it, on average, than any generation in history but it's also comparitively cheap.

that is an extreme example, though, sarah, and the false choice in operation is the choice of rioting afterwards

No, the false choice - as Debord would posit - is to be rah rah football, as opposed to focusing their energies on the systems that are fucking up their lives ... though perhaps that's less Debord's school, and more old school Adorno - Marxist/structuralist. Granted, the role of posh athletics like cricket, golf, etc. in society and for their fans, is significantly different than the NFL in poor and working class communities.

Discus is the new sport/opiate of the masses?

yeah, and think of all the jobs it gives to those fuckers in China!

Discus is the new sport/opiate of the masses?

Glad someone else picked up on this!

all i can say is that the creation of sports teams outside of a corporate context generally happened because people from a certain collective urban space wanted to play team sports, and organised themselves accordingly.

The history of sport and its organization and financing in Britain and the US is rather different.

cf GAA

nah i mean it's just a system it's not like this is part of a spectacle and that isn't. and it's not automatically a bad thing either (imo). what it says is the existence of sports teams "resurrects false archaic oppositions, regionalisms and racism which serve to raise the vulgar hierarchic ranks of consumption to a preposterous ontological superiority." the development of the stadium and fan base and whatever isn't happening outside of that system, no matter how organic or tribal it might be. xp

Glad someone else picked up on this!

Based on my recollection of Myron's Discobolus, there's not going to much room for corporate logos unless dudes want to get tats.

The history of sport and its organization and financing in Britain and the US is rather different.

Here it's a pretty classic example of Marxist "this is what's wrong with capitalism."

all sports can be summed up as an endless riffs on that one scene in Troy when Brad Pitt jumped up and skewered the shit out of that other dude with the axe and everybody on Brad Pitt's side cheered

The GAA's even different, still, right plaxico? Didin't they JUST allow non-Irish games in Croke Park?

temporarily

GAA is part of irish cultural identity movements of the early free state and is still hella political tho obv a lot lot less than it once was

also the fact that it is entirely amateur players but at a high level who have an actual attatchment to the team they play for kind of changes the bodies for hire dynamic of most pro sports

also players being nationally famous but also having regular jobs and being normal ppl is pretty strange

all sports can be summed up as an endless riffs on that one scene in Troy when Brad Pitt jumped up and skewered the shit out of that other dude with the axe and everybody on Brad Pitt's side cheered

Lol!

posh athletics like cricket

at my club, where i play, i am by a country mile the most RP-voiced member. cricket is as beloved and practiced in working-class communities as it is among the toffs of the world. especially in the Indian subcontinent, where everyone plays.

one can have a great interest both in sporting pursuits and in oppressive corporate systems. to block everything except sport out is a false choice, yes, but for those of us who can handle both entertainments and socio-political machinations, there isn't even a choice to be made.

i am sure many NFL fans are equally capable of seeing the bigger picture, even in the heat of recent on-field events. don't let the actions of a few idiots cloud your perspective of sport and its (hugely important) role.

harbl, the idea of 'supporting one's local team' is perhaps a fallacy. i know plenty of people who don't, people who support for far more logical reasons. myself, i support my local football team foremost, because they are likeable and because i feel an instinctive tribal affinity for SE London, but when it comes to favouring other teams, i try to reason on purely sporting terms, and not let 'regionalism' or 'archaic opposition' cloud my judgement. it's fun to have old rivals, but i agree there are those who take it too far. there ain't nothing racist about supporting any football team unless that team is Athletic Bilbao, who still employ a Basque-only policy in order to retain some sort of quasi-national identity. they're as much an ongoing political project as a football team, though, and i wouldn't describe them as corporate whores, razzle-dazzle of La Liga aside.

Here it's a pretty classic example of Marxist "this is what's wrong with capitalism."

I disagree and oddly enough, I think it's more capitalist in 'socialist' Europe. Here (US) we have 'leagues' which sell franchises. In Europe, they mostly stem from the FA model in England which codified a gentleman's game in the mid 1860's and which oversee all competitions which desire their stamp of approval. The individual clubs are often massive examples of dynamic capitalism whereas American teams, for the most part, have wealth sharing and drafts and other systems to try to ensure that nobody gets TOO big or too small. Sure, we have the Yankees and other behemoths like the Red Sox, but no-one is really ever allowed to fail entirely and the leagues protect their own.

oh, there is something a bit racist about Lazio and Chievo as well but I'm not getting into all this now

field sports are good to watch if you are a painter because they are full of different ideas about using a space and movement

...also Glasgows Celtic and Rangers...yawn...stupid...

ok. i can't explain good enough.

xp there is probably a more interesting semiotic analysis in that i think

Lj can aorrect me if I'm wrong but I thought most of the early football (soccer) clubs were local workingmen's sunday affairs as leisure and a day off became a reality in Victorian Britain. In the US, iIrc, many of the early teams were semi-pro 'exhibitions' that toured in very ramshackle, to say the least, orbits that only barely could be called a league.

Definitely something racist about Lazio.

whereas American teams, for the most part, have wealth sharing and drafts and other systems to try to ensure that nobody gets TOO big or too small. Sure, we have the Yankees and other behemoths like the Red Sox, but no-one is really ever allowed to fail entirely and the leagues protect their own.

But this is a classic example of monopolistic behavior.

field sports are good to watch if you are a painter because they are full of different ideas about using a space and movement

One of the reasons I really love the look of baseball.

I don't know anything about European sports/futbol but is there anything analogous to the bending/changing of rules by American sports leagues for profit- I'm specifically thinking of baseball and the home run ball, from the introduction of a livelier baseball after Babe Ruth to the whole blind-eye during the steroids era

i have never actually seen baseball played outside of movies where gang of rapscallions takes it all the way to the little-league finals

Honestly, I'm not into sports, and don't know enough about the structure and roles they play in the lives of "ordinary" people to be able to contribute well to this topic.

nah harbs i do getcha. sports teams promote only themselves, and encourage tunnel-vision, placing themselves at the summit of one's sporting attention. it is frequently quite amusing, the lengths team spokespeople will go to in order to retain one's undying devotion. this element i can do without.

M White, that is pretty much OTM. Frequently, cricket and football clubs were shared institutions. Derby County started as an offshoot of Derby County Cricket Club, for instance. And played, confusingly, at the Baseball Ground.

Bending of the rules in European sports only really happened in football, and the rules bent weren't really on-field. Financial rules, concerning the buying of clubs and the transfer of players, have been fucked to high heaven.

But this is a classic example of monopolistic behavior.

And as Marx said, capitalism tends towards monopoly but even Marx would have admitted that the vigor of 'real' capitalism, real supply and demand, real risk and real failure, was far greater than monopolies. The NFL is an amazing business story, to be sure, but it's also as much of a business story as a sports story. You can hear Briton after Briton bemoaning the death of the old ways, how much money there is in the game now, how many poseurs or people of the wrong class, but you can actually straight-up fail in Britain. You can be relegated to the farm leagues (that's inexact but bear with me) and you can get league points dedcuted for financial shenanigans like bankruptcy. You can even disappear altogether... The competition is very, very real and only part of it plays out on the field.

i liked semiotics better when it was called symbology and it allowed maverick professors to crack ancient codes about the bloodline of jesus

raoul de keyser is a former sportswriter btw

http://bloggy.com/mt/archives/raoul-de-keyser.jpg

unfortunately he is belgian so i think all his sports writing is in dutch there are lots of sports references in his work in a way that makes you think of painting when watching a game of soccer for eg

http://www.uic.edu/depts/ahaa/classes/ah111/kosuth1.jpg

Speaking of football and poststructuralism, the following link is both awesome and a total hoot: http://aaa.t0.or.at/documents/aaarules.htm

The key to the game is that it does not foster aggression or competitiveness. Unlike two-sided football, no team keeps a record of the number of goals they score. However they do keep a tally of the goals they concede, and the winner is determined as the team which concedes least goals. The game deconstructs the mythic bi-polar strcuture of conventional football, where an us-and-them struggle mediated by the referee mimics the way the media and the state pose themselves as "neutral" elements in the class struggle. Likewise, it is no psycho-sexual drama of the fuckers and fucked - the possibilities are greatly expanded!

wait is that an actual painting or just the redacted cover to his Ph.D thesis xxp

Bending of the rules in European sports only really happened in football, and the rules bent weren't really on-field. Financial rules, concerning the buying of clubs and the transfer of players, have been fucked to high heaven.

The transfers market makes aHollywood look positively human and gives a sickening insight into what the slave markets of Bordeaux or liverpool or Charleston must have been like in flavor.

Lj, what about off-side and back passes and the card system? Aren't some of those relatively novel?

ur right that is awesome LJ

this is actually a really astute obvservation imo

this is:wait is that an actual painting or just the redacted cover to his Ph.D thesis xxp

― a being that goes on two legs and is ungrateful (dyao), Tuesday, August 11, 2009 10:09 PM (1 minute ago)

i mean

the mythic bi-polar strcuture of conventional football, where an us-and-them struggle mediated by the referee

I think this is the system Harbl was referring to, sort of! The mythic false choice.

Offside, back-passes and the card system are all universal and widely-acknowledged improvements to the game. Nobody has suggested that they are for the benefit of the few, unlike the transfer system. In fact, they all encourage a fairer and more balanced style of game.

This should overcome the prominent resistance to women taking their full part in football.

Ha ha!

the mythic false choice in competitive sports refers to following/rooting for a particular team, when they are more or less the same ... unless I'm missing something.

In fact, they all encourage a fairer and more balanced style of game.

I agree but they ARE tinkering, albeit helpful and successful.

yeah there are probably hundreds of different false choices you could find but i was thinking it related to the team you picked

when they are more or less the same

Much of the fun of sports for those who follow its narratives, is the discussion of whether x team's long term strategy, recent acquisitions, game tactics will prove to be successful and the fact that the result is far more concrete that most results in human affairs. Some games are even played entirely by the rules and one or the other side succeeds.

but yeah, the us-and-them struggle too

okay, the soccer mom thing ...

The "soccer mom" is definitely a polyvalent (can be read as having positive or negative connotations, depending on the reader) term.

Before the LPA organised its first game at the Glasgow Anarchist Summer School in 1993, there is little evidence of any games being played.

yeah xxp. i agree with that too. it can still be interesting.

more i think about it, it is harder to insert sports into a semiology of value systems and commodity exchanges of players etc. notwithstanding

eg the complete lack of messianism of team sport which employs you know "a level playing field" and where victory is regulated and endlessly repeatable (not definitive)

this is why it is always so lame to see players celebrating winning

Nah, I think you're on it Sarah, but my argument is that the choice can be made for reasons outside of Debord's 'preposterous ontological superiority' argument; many sports fans accept that their team isn't very good, but they support due to an almost familial desire to belong. A tribal and yes often regional association, but not necessarily a regionalIST one.

M White's last post is excellent. Not every team is the same. If you've invested consideration into one (or more) particular team, it follows that you'd want to see how the team(s) fared.

I really want to play 3-sided football. The instantaneous switchings of allegiance would be just so so so amazing and lol.

Winning is a transient state, but it's fun to bask before time has its revenge.

http://www.richardhellergallery.com/dynamic/images/detail/44_19_ONSPORTS5P.jpg

fyi

The basic definition of a "soccer mom" is a woman who spends a significant amount of time serving as chauffeur to her child or children to a variety of organized extracurricular activities that are chosen with the child's development in mind.

this is why it is always so lame to see players celebrating winning

And yet, oddly, so natural. Games are at the very heart of human child development and competition is the nature of life on Earth. It may be childish but what's more childish than an adult playing sport professionally?

adultbaby.jpg

not just a chauffeur which implies passivity, but is also an active planner and hunter out of those organized extracurricular activities xp

looooool @ that jpg

my issue with 'soccer mom' is that it has itself become a lifestyle label, associated with overcompetitive parenting and conversely subjugation to the needs of a child, whereas individual cases are not quite so black-and-white as this

i wouldn't say an adult playing sport professionally is childish. an adult playing sport professionally and throwing a wobbly when things go badly, now that is childish

subjugation to the needs of the child? IME the needs of the child are being subjugated

soccer mom

I think it was a socio-ethnologic niche for advertisers and politicians at first, no?

exactly ... the soccer mom character is a more innocuous version of the Angela Landsbury's Machiavellian mother role in "The Manchurian Candidate."

also, is soccer mom just a less-loaded term than stay-at-home mom which itself replaced housewife

No, soccer mom is even more loaded. The soccer mom isn't necessarily a stay-at-home mom.

sorry, subjugation to the SUPPOSED needs of a child, which are actually a projection of a false narrative of competitiveness which turns the child into an annex of the adult

i wouldn't say an adult playing sport professionally is childish

First off why necessarily assume that my use of childish is derogatory? Much of my childhood was idyllic.

If games are training for the kind of agression/defences that homo sapiens (and many other species) will engage in, warfare, hunting, etc., then continuing to play football as 26 year old as opposed to actually using all those athletic skills to defend ailing grandfathers and tots from marauding Vikings and saber-toothed cats might, indeed, be seen as childish.

do these uses of the world 'false' in terms like 'false option' and 'false narrative' imply some sort of platonic and normative true version that these sports fans and soccer moms just aren't privy to?

I didn't think you meant it in a particularly derogatory way; my issue is that sport is a universal impulse, and only when it involves uncontrollable and irrational emotional reactions (or, more positively, an instance of unprecedented and illogical genius), does it become particularly childish. I don't consider it training for combat. It is the combat itself. The test of self against fellows.

true choices: love, friends, art

...or ARE THEY

dan dan daaaaaaaaa

sport is not a universal impulse btw

The soccer mom's aim is to train her child/children to be the best he/she can be, with militaristic discipline in terms of adhering to strict timetables, and engaging in activities to strengthen both mind and body, based on intelligence gleaned from parenting manuals and articles.

I've always suspected that all soccer moms actually descend from the true bloodline of Sparta

universal along the chain of age, not among all people

the soccer mum is subjugated by the Needs of Her Child rather than the needs of her child, then, and the Needs also subjugate the child. The Child subjugates the child.

btw, here is a really pretty lolsome account of an actual 3 sided football match

wait why are some words capitalized and others aren't

I don't consider it training for combat.

I do. It teaches prowess and human aggression shows no signs of abating anytime soon.

(OMG I wonder if the preux in 'preux chevalier' is related to the prow in prowess?)

do these uses of the world 'false' in terms like 'false option' and 'false narrative' imply some sort of platonic and normative true version that these sports fans and soccer moms just aren't privy to?

This is one of the primary critiques of marxist/structuralist thought ... "false choices" and "false narrative" came out of the Marxist "false consciousness." It raised the question that there is a true consciousness, and how do those suggesting that people suffer from false choices, false consciousness, false narratives know that these are false? How do they know what is true? Also, if all anyone has experienced is false, and will experience is coded as "false," then what does truth matter, anyway?

I've always suspected that all soccer moms actually descend from the true bloodline of Sparta

No wonder 300 did so well at the box office.

wait why are some words capitalized and others aren't

The ones that are capitalised are the society-endorsed Spectacle.

Sport is, one might argue, the end rather than the means these days. Perhaps we've gone all soft.

Love, friends, art: true choices? :D

I've never heard of a proper place or name called Spectacle, unless you mean this one

(I'm just messin' with ya)

A singular feature of three-sided football is that casual passers-by are as entitled to play as the original participants. Before long an Italian runs on and proceeds to push, dig, goal-hang and score with all the flamboyance and petulance his footballing heritage can muster. Ignoring one third of the pitch, he's either a fascist or he doesn't see the third goal, but as his only words of English are "Goal! Goal!", it's difficult to find out which.

i haven't read this stuff in a while so i wasn't sure but i had always thought they didn't really care about what 'true' meant, they just wanted to point out things that were 'not true' and true is just like, an empty hole in the center. or it was something you could only experience if you were raised by wolves. but also that the point of materialism is that meaning is man-made.

Love is a rather difficult word to pin down.

Friends, if you are truly a friend to them then, yes.

Wait, I thought there was no free will... or is that just no free lunch?

Spectacle = all is Maya?

Art is found in the viewer, not the object

omg u killed the author

(alternately Art is a label applied by critics onto a vast array of knick knacks, curios, and detritus for the purposes of selling them at an increased price)

the Author never really existed anyway, after the pen left the page

tbh, the main point I was trying to make is that a lot of talk about sport at this kind of level gets really reductive and tries to turn it into a power struggle or a playing out of freudian aggression or something, but I think its more interesting to look at the internal forms of the thing where there are more ideas about movement and form and space, also strategy and compromise. I mean there are a lot of ideas about how to get from here to there on a soccer pitch that I think a lot of painters right now could take on board for example. Also, the creative space afforded by sport and how within the playing field the movement of the players constantly reactivates and redefines the nature of spaces and politicises the spatial aspects of the board. Not in a chess way, which is much more regulated and mechanical than most sports (don't jump down my throat about that, the grid naturally involves a different way of politicising space imo) but in a way that is gestural and imaginative and energetic.

the Author never really existed anyway, after the pen left the page

― a being that goes on two legs and is ungrateful (dyao), Tuesday, August 11, 2009 10:56 PM (1 minute ago)

thank u celebrity author Michel Foucault <3

haha I was actually miming Barthes, but I'll take Foucault

Tiarnan, you're basically touting Nomadology as a key text for understanding field sports? Marry me. That shit is potent.

women's sports bras = sexist?

i haven't read this stuff in a while so i wasn't sure but i had always thought they didn't really care about what 'true' meant, they just wanted to point out things that were 'not true' and true is just like, an empty hole in the center. or it was something you could only experience if you were raised by wolves. but also that the point of materialism is that meaning is man-made.

Marx, and to a certain degree Debord, believed that some form of cultural revolution would result in greater "truth" in terms of lived experience/society.

Art is found in the viewer, not the object

the Author never really existed anyway, after the pen left the page

The art is subjective whether it's by a third party or the orginator.

uh i suppose I am, i'm also trying to get Todd Chilton to watch some ice hockey tbh

cycling/athletics are where the finish line = mayan 2012 btw

yes, the biggest pile of crap I ever encountered in college was the idea that pieces of Art in and of themselves had artistic qualities which were universally appreciable

well, besides this one pile in the fourth floor bathroom of the library at 2 AM in the morning

yerk!

Deleuze/Guattari tout chess as a straight-up striation of space, an urban organisation taken to its logical and controllable absolute. Field sports offer more opportunity for unforseeable agency, for literal nomadism. Imagine isobars on a football pitch. Constantly evolving pressures, paths rather than routes. Thus does it align itself with the artistic impulse, the paths to creation.

http://mwcapacity.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/untitled-triquad-1.jpg i'm obsessed with how almost awesome this is but it is clear that todd was always picked last

Deleuze/Guattari ... blah ... they seem to be extremely fashionable right now in art circles. Thus, I am suspicious.

I basically wrote a really huge and enjoyable poem incorporating all this (Nomadology meets sports, among other things) a year ago and it's still my defining work of art, so I'm somewhat in my element atm.

omg that is beautiful

D/G are extremely fashionable right now in crit circles because they are AWESOME

they're considered way lame in art circles in my experience right now

tbh I was only introduced to them by a crazy wacky far-left professor as an afterthought because I was heading in that direction anyway, and I considered them to be 'well obscure'. I felt kinda special, reading this shit that nobody else my age was reading. Except all the Philosophy students, obv.

like i think you need to be quoting wolstonecraft or lyotard or something prolly

xp - The contrarian in me suspects that they are fashionable because their theories lend themselves to bullshit rationales for whimsical garbage.

they're considered way lame in art circles in my experience right now

a couple years ago, it seemed like every vaguely conceptual/intellectual art show had some Deleuze/Guattari reference in the description ... and a lot of them were lame.

it's kinda like how Foucault is art fag central so you get all shades of condescension from theory poofs if you're into him now I think, it's like double meta contrarianism

a couple years ago, it seemed like every vaguely conceptual/intellectual art show had some Deleuze/Guattari reference in the description ... and a lot of them were lame.

― free jazz and mumia (sarahel), Tuesday, August 11, 2009 11:13 PM (30 seconds ago)

this is kinda why tho

Thus does it align itself with the artistic impulse, the paths to creation.

This is so lame, no offense. To prize a path rather than a route is mere romanticism and to see the easy layout of chess as one thing while ingorning that a certain Messi run looks a lot like a certain Maradona run looks a lot like x player run - the semi-infinite recurrence that a fan or a player of many years will see over and over during a lifetime of games; wing play, crosses, slotted balls, playing lanes, the long ball, etc... is just old timey bohemianism. It's quaint but not terribly useful or insghtful.

^^ or it's internalized capitalist thinking ... too many artists/curators referring to Foucault, I must pick someone else to distinguish myself.

that was xp to ikr.

aw

I was never aware of D/G outside of my studies. I read and absorbed Nomadology in an academic context (and indeed used references culled therefrom for a successful finals paper), and only interpolated elements into poetry because my own artistic response was so compulsive.

Everything in football is a path, rather than a route. Ethpecially if you have a lithp.

to clarify MW, you mean that the formulations and strategies of team sport are finite and repeatable and so the element of choice of ways of moving are not as plentiful as they seem so there is a False choice?

(Admittedly, there are some paths more well-trodden than others)

we're not complaining about you, unless your poetry was published in artforum or something.

yeah but I think that helps when you're talking about strategies for employing space, what I meant was that the nuance of chess really depend on the whole, whereas the nuance of sports can be much more localised and idiosyncratic

want to get into chess more fwiw

I think my annoyance at the D&G-rationalizing art projects, is that by citing the theorists they are implying that their projects have conceptual heft, when a lot of the time, they seem whimsical and lacking in rigor.

tbh my experience of art school has led me to realize that most uses of the word querying/deconstructing etc. actually mean nothing of the sort, but that the guy who made it kinda thought about some of that stuff once jus sayin

Extracts were published in a low-key brochure made by a university friend. The thing I most fervently derived from D&G was the infinite possibility for mischief and mayhem, rather than any high-minded art-wank sombriety, and also the idea that even in space, things are linked, and can recur in different forms. Citing a philosopher and then demonstrating none of the principles implied is the height of philistinism.

Chess is a striated whole, yes, according to nomad theory, and field sports are a lot more disjointed. Space is even more important in the latter, because it actually exists. The spacelessness of chess is what makes it so controllable and unartistic. Not that it is a bad activity. I was enormously rapt by chess not so far back. It's very good fun.

what is an art circle

http://www.abstractdigitalartgallery.com/artgallery-psion005-abstract-digital-art-fractal-Psytrip.jpg

http://www.ccca.ca/history/isaacs/english/images/68chess1.jpg btw

http://www.success.co.il/knowledge/images/Pillar8-Thought-and-Art-Vitruvian-Man-Leonardo-da-Vinci.jpg
art circle

xp most of D&G fans were social practices/relational aesthetics people ... I think.

fart circle

lol his navel is the centre of the circle, i never noticed that

sarahel do you mean professional flashmob organisers because if ever a nomadic principle has been hijacked for nefarious ends, that is it

to clarify MW, you mean that the formulations and strategies of team sport are finite and repeatable and so the element of choice of ways of moving are not as plentiful as they seem so there is a False choice?

Essentially, yes. I get impatient with either/or comparisons which purport to rely on some kind of 'hard science' or quantifiable differences but are really just aesthetic or personal, when it's precisely what's personal or aesthetic (to me) whcih justifies and explaining why is more fun and more rewarding than proving why. That said, I do rather love Borges' labyrinth of endless desert.

somewhere I have a list of parody social practices/relational aesthetics art projects I made up, if anyone's interested.

xp - in a similar vein as flashmobs ... yes.

MW, I meant that the minutiae of sport involved unforseeable paths. There are undoubtedly tactical 'routes' which are just as worthy of study, and perhaps even more worthy of admiration. There is something magnificent about a team using good tactics to pull off a result it wouldn't otherwise have pulled off. The specifics, well, they're the paths taken. Nothing scientific about them. The science is in the approximation of organisation.

I would like to see that list Miss El

the context is - a friend of mine did a project at some conference for social practices/relational aesthetics and said most of the other projects were lame, so I made these up.

1. birfday barfday - I ate too much cake and threw up at my 8th birthday
party. It was a slumber party. I was really embarrassed. I have commissioned
a fashionable indie clothing designer from Portland to create adult sized
replicas of the clothes me and my friends wore at the party. I will invite
attendees to reenact my 8th birthday party, and this time I won't throw up.

2. learning to love mommy more - a number of prepaid cell phones will be
available for participants to call their mothers. Participants will also
fill out surveys noting what they appreciate most about their mothers as
well as their first name and their mother's phone number. Participants will
also have the option to call one of the mothers on the list and relate to
her what her child values about her that they might not be able to or wish
to say.

3. cashing in your CHiPs - this project will bring people together - artists
and non-artists alike - through their reminiscences about the 70s television
program CHiPs. Teams will be formed based on a participant survey of whether
they preferred Ponch or John.

4. am I the cute one? - participants will bring with them a photo of someone
they've been told they resemble but believe they are better looking than.
They will then go around the room holding up the photo next to their face
and asking everyone, "Who is cuter?"

5. everyone's shit stinks - stool samples will be collected from
participants and there will be comparative smell tests. Participants will
also be required to write a one page diaristic essay about what they ate the
day before and recount a significant food memory.

Chess/Football variables in common

Use of space wrt limitations
Speed (especially with timed chess play)

Mental acuity and agility

Physical prowess and agility (admittedly for chess, if you can breathe, cogitate, see, raise your arm and grasp a piece, you're good. It's considered good form, though not necessary to be able to kick a football with a relative degree of accuracy in soccer)

Style of play/tactics

Naffness of kit (Don't laugh, many a chessmaster was felled by unexpected dazzle-ships patterned scarfs worn over lilac and blue striped shirts with silver piping 'round the sleeve hems.)

Fans/Groupies

Feel free to add your own...

!!!!

That is an amazing post.

Sarahel please tell us abt the semiotics of which theorists ppl use to illustrate the importance of their stuff.

Gravel: crap ... I've temporarily stopped paying attention. I'll have to do some research, and get back to you.

MW, I meant that the minutiae of sport involved unforseeable paths.

However, I cannot forsee many paths in chess whereas 'God' or some awesome robot from the future with a super brain/computer could see all the variables on the pitch as *ho hum* so predictable. "If he punts it up there, the defender will be able to get to the ball before the attacker, whereas if he passes it out to the winger, they'll get bogged down. Best to run at the defense a bit and see if you can shake them up. Maybe get one your backs up a bit and see if you can get that guy on your right to run down the touchline. The you pass it *just so* (robot brain makes 20 zillion precise physical calculations) and he volleys it into the box *just so* (whir, whir) and then you can charge at the box, dive *just so* and head the ball to *boink, zap* that exact spot over the keeper's left where he hesitates so much."

I bet you my robot could do all that and beat you at chess and compose a sonata all at once.

where are the chess hooligans? i guess bobby fischer was proto-NF...

MW, are you saying that in field sports, the goal is a passive aperture, which can be attained through physical calculation, whereas in chess, the goal is a mutable human agency whose intentions are hidden?

The plot thickens...

There's a recent movie version of Chess the musical with Clarke Peters in it.

'am i the cute one' is my favourite fwiw, although it is also the simplest and least poststructuralist

Sarahel please tell us abt the semiotics of which theorists ppl use to illustrate the importance of their stuff.

― Gravel Puzzleworth, Tuesday, August 11, 2009 6:47 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

foucault - sociology majors
derrida - lit majors
deleuze - art majors
heidegger - philosophy majors

donna haraway was popular with gender studies people at one point.

cixous/foucault/butler - gender studies or womens studies or queer studies or whatever

I've been out of those academic circles for over a decade ... my grad program was pretty unaware of contemporary theory trends, considering ... it was definitely strange to me, going from a media studies department driven a lot more by critical theory/lit/art stuff to one that was more focused on journalism/social science.

i told my momz that Deleuze and Guattari were pretty popular in lit circles these days and she was all "lol whut in the sixties we thought they were crazy people i thought it was only art d00ds who were taken in." Except in, like, super polite psychoanalyst language. (momz also thinks zizek is a charlatan why because she hates Lacan)

my brother is all about the heidegger, i actually find it pretty offensive tbh.

heidegger is awesome on women's footware tho

i just like reading stuff i dunno what's cool in what circles these days

my only experience with zizek is from special features on the DVD for Children of Men ... I wasn't that enthralled, though he seems to be the new baudrillard, who I actually do like.

harbl is massively otm although it pays to know thy enemy

don't feel like paying for any Ann Coulter books, though.

zizek is many shades of awesome imo

willing to give him a shot.

i am fond of the zizz despite his habit of inventing antagonists who only about exist in the realms of plausibility (see: the leftist supporters of ahmadinejad in his recent lrb article (while his political writing is not his critical writing they share as it were tendencies)) but his books so far have been fairy gold for me-- they seem substantial while in front of your eyes but when you put them aside your brain is no fuller than when you started.

personal fave is the puppet and the dwarf fyi, there's a lot of repetition between books tho

promising title.

oh yeah all his books are the same. i like him iirc. his writing style can be really, really, really annoying though. "is this not the x of y?" over and over

I like Barthes and Eco's essays a lot. The more heavy theory stuff still gives me master's thesis flashbacks ... the instinct to look for succinct quotes, etc.

i like barthes. mythologies is one of my favorite books ever, v fun read. i am trying to remember what zizek to read though, i think the first i read was welcome to the desert of the real, which is not very heavy.

last year i was reading "for they know not what they do," and i didn't finish bc long book is long

mythologies is great. Eco's Travels in Hyperreality is also awesome.

zizek bugbear is making up his own meanings for words and juggling them back with established meanings without telling you cf jouissance

those sexy europeans

what's his alterna-meaning?

that movie about him really made Ljubljana seem like a top holiday destination too

what's his alterna-meaning?

― cockles (country matters), Wednesday, August 12, 2009 1:45 AM (26 seconds ago)

don't remember tbh

full disclosure, i've spent the last three days reading like fifteen pages of wittgenstein's the blue notebook, I figure my brain has turned to mush at this point

xp - this reminds me of a story: about a year ago, I was at a club show with a friend of mine who is half Slovenian. She was extremely drunk and was going on about how Slovenia has a negative birth rate and a very high suicide rate. We then started chatting with this younger guy we knew who was there -- quiet midwestern type -- and it turned out he was also part Slovenian. She then proceeded to tell him that it essential that he needed to find a woman to bear his Slovenian babies.

hot come-on

http://www.filosofia.com.mx/images/uploads/jaquemate5peirce.jpg

how do yall feel about Peirce btw

kinda wish i lived in that male-grooming era

im a bad student because im basically swayed by whatever im reading at any given moment

or maybe that makes me a good student

she also kept going on about Wilford Brimley in connection with this

xp she was/is very much taken, and the younger guy is a big fan of her bf/now husband's old band. I don't think she was coming onto him, but maybe he said he was part Slovenian as a means of coming onto her ...

longtime readers of this board will know that the two loves of my undergraduate intellectual life are the very predictable white broctor of philosophy favorites nietzsche and derrida

this thread is making me feel v. retarded and under-educated with my painting degree

"do you have any Slovenian in you?"

"as a matter of fact I do"

"oh"

tbh not going to grad school was a great decision for the time being because instead of feeling retarded and undereducated around a lot of pomo asswipes i feel overeducated, or educated in the wrong way, around a lot of people who dont give a shit

xxxxxp i am like that too max. it's ok though. as long as you read lots of different things, that's what i tell myself

that's ok ... I feel v. retarded and under-educated in discussions of painting.

thanks harbl

this thread is making me feel v. retarded and under-educated with my painting english lolterature degree

guys i have a math degree

my better half has a painting degree ... we were watching a crappy foreign horror movie last night with a scene in an art museum. I made some joke about pre-raphaelites, and he said, "Actually that would either be mannerism or early romanticism."

tbh i'm pretty delighted to be understanding and having opinions about things. Like I have no academic background to speak of, kinda thinking of doing a second degree since I'm debt free and its recession time.

I hear that ... for a while I was seriously consider Lol-law school.

consider-ing ... I'm good at memorizing crap.

other options are doing a post-grad diploma and then grad school

haha harbl u have a math degree??? once i took a class called women in mathematics, you were not featured

harbl, a math degree is way more awes than an eng lit degree...this is something i have realised only latterly (although i do not flat-out regret my choice of course)

oh and next month i'm starting an MA in science journalism btw, just thought i might drop that one while we're about it

science journalism i am surprised honestly

i am no longer a woman in mathematics, that could be why. or maybe it was a mistake.

I sucked at science ... probably the only thing I was suckier at in school was welding.

i sucked at chemistry but i was like genius in physics

lol i loved welding in hs shop class! i would like to do more of it tbh

harbl - if you were my dad's child, he would have been very happy. He was sad I didn't major in math, like him, his sister, his father ...

For a while I got into doing sudoku puzzles (which my dad is a real big fan of) because I felt guilty that we had so little in common ...I didn't major in math, I'm not interested in sports, etc.

sarahel i would not have guessed you don't like sports

i was good at science but the curriculum was terrible and unstimulating so i gave it up before the last 2 years

this application has everything to do with the fact that it's one of the best journalism schools in britain, and little to do with the specific area, although it is a very interesting one. i initially applied for newspaper journalism but didn't have the requisite experience. my application was passed onto the science journo folks who were all 'plz join our shiny brand new course' and i did not have the heart to say no ^_^

anyway enuff thread derail, plz proceed w/ whatever we were proceeding w/

omg my dad is a massive sudoku buff, it irritates me intensely tbh

also if i was given a welding torch, bad bad bad badness would occur maybe

my dad really likes sports. I played tennis in HS to get out of phys. ed., and my dad went to almost all my matches. I was pretty lousy because I practiced as little as possible because I didn't care. Years later, my mom was telling me how she felt guilty that she worked too much and didn't go to any of my tennis matches. I told her that she shouldn't feel guilty, because I didn't care very much about them, either. All I cared about was that tennis season lasted only three months, and the other six months I didn't have to do jack shit as far as P.E. went. I just had to let the coach know if I wasn't going to be at school that day, so she could mark me absent.

(my dad majored in math also......if sarahel liked sports then she wd be too much like an older wiser female american version of me and ilx might implode)

(what are the semiotics of this btw)

my dad's a math teacher ... though the thing he likes the most is serving as the statistician for the football team.

my dad WAS a math teacher 30 years ago :-/....the thing he likes most is devoutly collecting every recording of Bach's works ever

that sounds more interesting than sudoku puzzles and football statistics ... but you know what they say about familiarity.

it is weird, how neither of our fathers' main passions, obsessive as they are, have really rubbed off on us

I think that's common. I'm guessing you're the oldest or an only child?

The former. My dad had a moderate love of sports, contemporary music, and literature. His moderate loves were (partially) what became my predominant loves.

You're an oldest too?

I'm about as much a believer in birth order as astrology in terms of determination of personality characteristics ... experientially sometimes it fits, sometimes it doesn't, but I'm skeptical of the rationale. My better half probably shares the least common interests with his dad compared with his younger brothers.

me = only; no way my parents would have been able to afford to send me to the college I went to if I had siblings.

women's pants=sexiest

maybe it's time to analyze advertisements ...

I haven't seen much to persuade me that astrology isn't a false discourse. My parents are about to discover that sending one to college for the first time, another BACK to college, and a third to college in a year's time isn't exactly a basketful of laughs, especially when [gratuitous sob story]

Advertisements are a direct mediation between Mammon and customer. They have an increasingly difficult job as the 'choices' available become more and more widespread, accessible and mutually-aware. We have been greeted increasingly with a mulch of interdependent signifiers, all striving to achieve significance within a blasé narrative which nonetheless ingrains itself through sheer force of ubiquity. What this all means, I don't know, except to say that I really don't need your product unless I say so, thanks.

I haven't seen much to persuade me that astrology isn't a false discourse. My parents are about to discover that sending one to college for the first time, another BACK to college, and a third to college in a year's time isn't exactly a basketful of laughs, especially when [gratuitous sob story]

Advertisements are a direct mediation between Mammon and customer. They have an increasingly difficult job as the 'choices' available become more and more widespread, accessible and mutually-aware. We have been greeted increasingly with a mulch of interdependent signifiers, all striving to achieve significance within a blasé narrative which nonetheless ingrains itself through sheer force of ubiquity. What this all means, I don't know, except to say that I really don't need your product unless I say so, thanks.
\
http://www.geocities.com/localcomedyconnections/youngones2.jpg

the logical conclusion from the paragraph, is that while the advertisement may not effectively sell the product it's advertising, it serves as yet another reminder that you should be buying something.

lol bug

yes exactly sarah and if that thing happens to be the exact product advertised then all the better. they're playing the percentages these days. hence why, taken in isolation, the adverts seem so disjointed, crude and flashy. each one is like a compressed highlights reel for ten other adverts that came before it.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/19/LetterToJane01.jpg
there can be no reverse shot

lol - I was inspired to play drums by Weekend

i kept passing out when I saw weekend but that's not really an internet story iykwim

as I read it, the guy playing drums was the only one not engaged in/victim of cannibalism.

the traffic jam scenes are probably my favorite part of that movie.

that movie is pretty funny but it still like all the pierrot le fou/mepris stuff better

I think it was one of the forerunners to the people-walking-around subgenre of 70s movies.

ok here's one miss el

what are the semiotics of 'freedom of speech' and 'freedom of information', with especial regard to the following: http://www.pirateparty.org.uk/

be brutal if necessary

it looks pretty straightforward as far its aims and politics go, though it is unclear (without looking at the site more thoroughly) what their position is in terms of artist's rights vis a vis file sharing. Certainly, some file sharing is the equivalent of lending a book or a movie to a friend, but not all of it is, and definitely the scale is far different.

As far as the name goes, it definitely is meant to make involvement in their cause seem like a fun thing to do. Who does not like to party? And pirates=fun, right? It certainly seems more attractive (especially when considering the appearance of poster pirate, Johnny Depp) than calling one's organization the Freeloader's Rights Association.

I do find the "pirate" name problematic, in that piracy isn't particularly concerned with fairness and rights, except that of possession. It almost belies their idea that looser copyright and patent laws and allowing file sharing are about freedom of expression, as piracy is historically concerned with the acquisitions of valuable commodities for their exchange value, as opposed to educational/artistic merit.

Fine points all, albeit lost on the selfish posturing gits who are making a stand in the name of libertarian illogicality.

well, I'm sure it's all logical to them ... I just hear too many complaints from friends how file sharing has made it much harder to support themselves as musicians, for me not to be ambivalent about it.

It's fine to believe in freedom of information, and to share music when one must, but in all honesty this sort of posturing irks me like you wouldn't believe. The hypocrisy and pointlessness of it all is breathtaking.

but in all honesty this sort of posturing irks me like you wouldn't believe

I can believe it.

all that D&G and art circles upthread is making me LOL because my good friend is going into grad school for some kind of art degree right now, and he's reading heavily about D&G. also, I really have to resist the urge to think 'Dolce & Gabbana' whenever I see D&G.

more semiotics 4U:

I was disappointed with the most recent remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (the one with Nicole Kidman), because it all boiled to down to "saving her baby" (a more conventional Hollywood trope), as opposed to the traditional Body Snatchers' hero's motivation of preserving the humanity of the individual. The "save my baby" motif was particularly disappointing to me, as the protagonist was an adult woman. In the context of the other films, it appears to imply that an adult woman cannot be focused on mere self-preservation, or the life of a romantic partner ... in order to be heroic, she has to save a child.

Certainly, there are plenty of horror movies employing the "final girl" device, but it seems to me, that the operative word is "girl." When a woman reaches a certain age, she can no longer be the self-preserving final girl, but has to be acting out of maternal instinct.

aww, I will never be able to watch Aliens again without feeling guilty

Aliens is awesome ... you shouldn't feel guilty. In general, you shouldn't feel guilty about watching "problematic" films, or cultural consumption in general. I'm definitely not some kind of puritan.

You know what I want to see? A Body Snatchers update that argues that becoming a pod person might be a good thing.

That's neither here not there, but definitely agree with this:

The "save my baby" motif was particularly disappointing to me

This is seriously one of the most tiresome genre tropes ever.

You know what I want to see? A Body Snatchers update that argues that becoming a pod person might be a good thing.

that definitely has promise. I'd be interested in that too.

Almost every time I see a particularly awful "save my baby" movie, I want the baby to be eaten by dingoes. I knew that the genre conventions that "Snakes on a Plane" adhered to would not permit the baby to be snake food, but I held out hope, all the same.

at least the dog got it!

yeah, though semiotically you could argue that the bitchy blonde got her dog eaten as punishment for being a traitor to her species -- being devoted to a dog as opposed to bearing a human child.

A Body Snatchers update that argues that becoming a pod person might be a good thing.

I think part of the frisson in vampire tales stems from the possibility that one might not just be a victim but transformed.

same with zombie movies

Yeah, but zombies don't talk so good and their wardrobes are less fancy. They're kind of the trailer trash of the horror community.

Running around looking for brains kind of implies you don't really have any.

see that's where the horror comes from ... that one's friends, family members, or helpful truck drivers will transform into these grotesque things

I think part of the frisson in vampire tales stems from the possibility that one might not just be a victim but transformed.

Becoming a vampire has a comprehensible allure, though. You get to be immortal, stay up all night, be a blood-drinking badass, etc.

Body Snatcher/Pod People type movies play to Americans' self-image of being rugged "individuals" and our pathological fear of anything with the faintest whiff of collectivism.

it's definitely interesting to look at the four versions of the film and note the differences, as well as the similarities. The first one uses romantic love as a rationale; the fourth is the save-my-baby story, the third one's protagonist is a teenager living on a military base, so the narrative is colored with "normal" indentity issues and conformity issues. The second one - the Donald Sutherland/Jeff Goldblum/Leonard Nimoy one I think does the most examination and reflection on the connotations of pod personhood.

the second one rules so hard, i have this t-shirt:

http://www.rottencotton.com/shirts/horror/1008_donaldbody.jpg

yes it does. fuck that would be awesome on a shirt. My ipod is named "you're next."

that t-shirt ruins the ending tho

but, if you recognized the image, wouldn't that mean you'd already seen the movie and know the ending?

Sutherland's a dead ringer for Kurt Vonnegut in that shot

i'd have said david bedford

who?

shrink-to-fit, ding dongs

― Fox Force Five Punchline (sexyDancer), Tuesday, August 11, 2009 3:24 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

reminds me of

i have a philosophy degree buttasses

― bato (bato), Monday, November 6, 2006 12:16 PM (2 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

lol

http://waffleshop.org/

this is an example of "social practices" art ... the phrase that keeps coming to mind is "banal positivism"

Taylor Swift's suckiness has nothing to do with her alleged (and demonstrably false) "tunelessness" and everything to do with her not being a very good singer and being a glamorized version of the young white female ideal singing about how she's an ugly duckling who can't get the guy.

― nate dogg is a feeling (HI DERE)

does she look like a duck?

she is cute as a button

http://qing95.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/taylor-swift-71.jpg

I just remember growing up listening to Top 40 radio (until about age 12 when there was an "alternative" station), and being annoyed at all the "love you baby ooh" songs. It was a serious epiphany when I discovered that plenty of people wrote rock/pop songs about other things.

think that love you baby ooh songs are no better or worse than non love you baby ooh songs by definition

I think I also have issues with "baby" as a term of endearment.

semiotically speaking?

yes! There's a song by The Pop Group, that I thought the lyrics were "Don't call me baby" (I think it's actually "don't call me pain") ...

I think I also have issues with "baby" as a term of endearment.

Hahaha! I've recently asked a few female friends of mine whether this bothers them and it doesn't for the most part. I think it should.

Love crops up quite a lot as something to sing about,
cos most groups make most of their songs about falling in love
or how happy they are to be in love,
you occasionally wonder why these groups do sing about it all the time -
it's because these groups think there's something very special about it
either that or else it's because everybody else sings about it and always has,
you know to burst into song you have to be inspired
and nothing inspires quite like love.
These groups and singers think that they appeal to everyone
by singing about love because apparently everyone has or can love
or so they would have you believe anyway
but these groups seem to go along with what, the belief
that love is deep in everyone's personality.
I don't think we're saying there's anything wrong with love,
we just don't think that what goes on between two people
should be shrouded with mystery.

xp -I don't hate all songs that use "baby" as a term of endearment, but if a romantic partner were to call me that, I'd have problems with that.

The Pop Group song is still a really good song.

i like when songs use "sugar"

I support "sugar"

"light of my life"

I dated a guy that referred to me as "she who must be obeyed" ... it wasn't as annoying as some of his other traits.

do you still have his number?

this was a guy that recently went to therapy for "internet addiction" ... he also suffered from "executive function disorder" (this is not the boarding school guy from the other thread) ... at one point I figured I would end up marrying him.

"cui parendum est"

if he had manifested all his endearments in Latin he would have been a right old catch imo

I went to a crappy American public high school ... I have no idea what that means, except for est = some version of the verb "to be" because that's what it is in French.

xp he liked croquet ... I was down with some of the fey anglophilia, but croquet ... too much.

It means "she (or he) who must be obeyed", weirdly enough. Literally, "for whom it is obligated to obey". Croquet is really good fun but I can go months, even years, without playing it. It's actually quite big in some American circles.

it just bugged me in the same way white hipster guys' excessive appropriation of black street slang annoys me.

yo, feelin u freals

lol - it isn't like any cultural appropriation bothers me, there's just this invisible line where it becomes too much ...

i dunno, i tend to slip into neurotic jewish best friend type (weak woody allen really) as the default easily digestible capsule version of myself for parties, and I am very not jewish.

no offense, but my better half will occasionally do that "tawk amongst yerselves" thing in that accent, and that's the one speech mannerism thing of his that annoys me. I'm still not sure why.

oh, the party thing is one of those things that makes me hate myself a little bit afterwards, but I can usually scrub it off in the shower

related to annoying use of "baby" in love songs: why so much 2nd person for all time?

I'm trying to think if I have a party persona ... as opposed to me, only louder and more talkative

btw nice use of the gerundive periphrastic there lj

xxp um lol?

the 2nd person usage is all about identification and such

aw elmo 'twas nothing *blushes*

back to the waffl3 sh0p thing:
"Waffle Shop is an experimental platform for media production and public dialogue that combines a restaurant with the production of a talk show directly on the premises.

At Waffle Shop, our customers are also our stars, as we film each night, inviting interested patrons to express their unique opinions and personalities. These recordings are streamed live through this very website during our open hours, and then produced into episodes which are broadcast publicly 24 hours a day in the windows of the storefront, and made available through our online archive.

Upcoming plans include: a changeable analog phrase system designed for the vacant billboard space above the shop, a live weekend world news show, an independent record label that produces and distributes music recorded live during our nighttime show, and a weekly radio show."

2nd person is problematic, though -- its use often leads to the assumption that the song is romantic in nature, even if the addressee of the song is not a romantic object

do you mean 2nd person in love songs, or 2nd person in general? I mean, there are plenty of songs about "you" that are very obviously not romantic.

Waffle Shop thing sounds like a packaging of what oughtn't be packaged

a former collaborator of mine did something there recently, and I was trying to come up with a way to do something in a talk show format that would be a relatively subtle critique of banal positivism. There's this focus on "service" ... that art has to be a service to its audience, hence the restaurant idea. There was a guy locally that did an ice cream stand as an art project.

It just seems to me like they're trying to package the 'human drama' of an easily-accessible social situation...it's like selling us air, or erecting a viewing stand on a busy high street

definitely ... one of the guys behind it is the dude that did that "Learning to Love You More" project with Miranda July

I know you linked that earlier...but what was that again? A crash-course in endearments which would supposedly strengthen love's bonds with their proscribed multiplicity?

no, I didn't ... it was a web project and then became a book

http://www.learningtoloveyoumore.com/

the prescriptive nature of these assignments is intended to guide people towards their own experience.

urrrrrrgh this is still patently about the collectivism of experience

besides the fact that it is implying what one's experience should be like.

"baby" is favored in music for its simple, melodic capabilities. Nice alliteration and two different vowels that can stretch on forever. Ref: Everly Bros

is "two princes" by spin doctors based on something literary?

One, two, princes kneel before you
(thats what I said, now)
Princes, princes who adore you
(just go ahead, now)
One has diamonds in his pockets
(that sounds great, now)
This one, said he wants to buy you lockets
(aint in his head, now)

This one, he got a princely racket
(thats what I said, now)
Got some big seal upon his jacket
(aint in his head, now)
Marry him, your father will condone you
(how bout that, now)
Marry me, your father will disown you
(hell eat his hat, now)

The best art and writing is almost like an assignment; it is so vibrant that you feel compelled to make something in response. Suddenly it is clear what you have to do. For a brief moment it seems wonderfully easy to live and love and create breathtaking things. In this section we have archived some of the work that has commanded us in this way. In a sense, these are assignments -- in the same way that the ocean gives the assignment of breathing deeply, and kissing instructs us to stop thinking.

holy hell who are these dipshits

"ee" is actually not the easiest vowel to stretch out vocally ...

him

and her

xp: well all you have to do is dreeeeeeeeeam, dreeeeeeeeeeam, dreeeeeeeeeam, dreeeeeeeam, dreeeeeeeeeeam, dreeeeeeeeeeeeam, dreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeam

serious about the "ee" ... probably why a lot of pop singers sing "bay beh"

maybe "a lot" of pop singers don't sing. I'm thinking of the greats.

she was just seventeen and you know what I mean

which came first -- the proliferation of "baby" or that of "crazy"?

facebook wants me to become a fan of a particular brand of deodorant, if I'm a fan of people wearing deodorant ... and over 133,000 people are fans of this brand of deodorant. I'm a fan of not having waxy gunk in my ears, and Qtips are pretty good for removing waxy gunk from ears, but I'm not going to "become a fan" of Qtips ...

I just wonder is this fandom authentic or ironic. Is it an attempt to make the ad go away and see what comes next? I'm fascinated by this, because it is thoroughly baffling to me.

declaration of allegiance to a particular product is a declaration of individuality

if I'm a fan of people wearing deodorant

how did facebook posit the question? "If you looooove wearing deodorant, join Arrid today!"?

xp - The thing that gets me the most about the deodorant thing is that it's a product that isn't a traditional "I buy this, I'm a this kind of person" type of product.

the question was literally, "if you're a fan of people wearing deodorant, become a fan of (brand name) deodorant..." then under the picture, "133,xxx people are fans of (brand name) deodorant"

haha what a weird way of phrasing the question. "if you like to eat, join the McDonald's Facebook group..."

I do think deodorant brands do make an effort to map themselves onto different personality types: Axe is for, well, it's obvious, Old Spice has the stink of old money, Mitchum is for no-nonsense people who want no odors.

in many ways, deodorants are just practical perfumes

so do brands of tampons, but unless the type you buy are organic or something special and virtuous, I just don't see the appeal of advertising one's fandom of a product that is functional and corrective of bodily functions one doesn't want to advertise. ...

facebook isn't really too surprising a venue for this type of behavior, as its success lies in the ability for its users to concoct the perfect admixture of movies, TV shows, music, quotes, religious views, blood type, etc. to stand in place as their avatar online. stanning for a particular brand of deodorant to me seems like a natural extension; you could probably start a deodorant poll on ILE right now and get 100 new replies in 24 hours.

it totally makes sense for this type of advertising to exist on facebook for the reasons you mention, but the way the question was posed and the particular product and the 133,000 + fans made me go wtf

xxp I dunno, I can't tell what kind of tampons are in use when walking on the street, but I certainly can tell when someone walks by who has just liberally applied Axe all across the chest of their open faced polo.

to me, deodorants are a way of aspiring to the use of a perfume as identifying marker without actually admitting that it is one's purpose; i.e. someone for whatever reason doesn't feel comfortable with the idea of buying a perfume or cologne to give themselves a distinctive scent, thinking it's too forward, or foppish, or whatever, but feels perfectly alright with buying a deodorant with a distinctive scent since it's for a 'practical' purpose, and well one has to use deodorant anyway so why not choose a brand one likes?

^^ sounds like that's more of a guy thing then?

open faced polo? I meant to say popped collar. I guess open faced was my way of describing the accompanying look of not having any of the buttons fastened.

I roomed with a guy for a summer program once whose toiletry kit consisted entirely of Gillette products. Gillette razor, shaving cream AND shaving gel, aftershave, deodorant, body wash, probably some other products I am forgetting. he would also bring back all the bottles of beer he had drunk and line them up next to his bed. he was part of a fraternity.

xp yeah, it's a way for guys to have a 'scent' without being accused of foppish tendencies.

this was a deodorant for women ... or at least the ad had a woman in it with her arms outstretched. I think I used said brand for a little while as a teenager.

hah, then I have no idea. oddly enough this discussion has given rise to the desire to proclaim what deodorant I use, which is Gatsby Unscented.

I have no brand loyalty for products like that ...

takin it way back to croquet and use of the word "baby"

i call my BF baby sometimes, is this bad? i dont think i do it in an annoying way. no one has ever really called me that, though i did date a guy who said "babe". i was ambivalent about it tbh

my current boyfriend went to a Grey Gardens-themed croquet party thrown by our very flamboyant friend and he got mad and hammered the ground with the mallet

lol

No, I don't think it is bad ... it's one of those things I'm ambivalent about, because on one hand you have the "infantilization" thing, but it has become so ingrained in culture, that there are other signifiers as well that cloak it.

croquet story is lol ... did he make a hole?

okay - I've been thinking some more about what I find weird about the woman's deodorant fandom on facebook thing:

Historically, the objects of fandom were aspirational: sports teams/athletes; cultural works/artists, authors, musicians, actors; political parties/politicians; religious movements and figures. Other historically common objects were things that were associated with pleasure: food/alcohol, architecture, nature, sexual practices. With further advances in capitalism, people became fans of particular brands of goods - though these were generally associated with public display and/or leisure, fashion and cars, to name two obvious categories.

For something like a women's deodorant to command or demand fandom (which connotes a public display of appreciation/liking), is definitely a departure from these historical categories. Primarily, because it is what I would call a corrective product: something one would use to remove deficiencies in order to conform to societal norms. By expressing public appreciation for products like this is to the publicly admit that one has these deficiencies.

Granted, one of the trends of advertising is to more prominently and frankly discuss these deficiencies -- it wasn't until the 70s that feminine douches were advertised on American television, partly to make up for loss of revenue due to the ban of cigarette ads. However, these products tend to be things that people use and if they work, are grateful for, but aren't likely to publicly praise.

There are definitely products that are exceptions to this, though these tend to be things that are more uniquely liberating, in that the deficiencies they correct aren't universal. Contact lenses are a good example of this. I can understand someone being a fan of contact lenses, because they allow their users to appear like those fortunate to not require them. Deodorant, on the other hand, is not.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v136/primrosehill/lolatlife.jpg

^^^the incident covered upthread

well, right after it tbh

guess I shouldn't be too harsh on croquet, since I'm entertained by mini-golf ...I think my problem with my ex being a croquet aficionado was that it was just another signifier of a certain sensibility that came to seriously annoy me.

the word "momma" in songs. do you like it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oiLfTnrC40

posted this in that thread, partly for cute animals, partly because due to years of going to loud shows my hearing is kinda fucked and I honestly mishear lyrics a lot.

[brand name women's deodorant] is making sure all your hugs are the freshest. Give your BFF a hug today. (And smell great doing it.)

now up to 259,000+ fans ...

which is better:
http://startupblog.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/dyson-vacuum.jpg

or

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_IEIb52dl720/SekjpU5-H2I/AAAAAAAAAF4/dTwwK-bBzp8/s400/dyson-vacuum.jpg

i saw some marmosets the other day

the yellow one with no personality.

i'm kinda leaning towards the pink one because it's more dynamic

on the other hand the straight verticality of the yellow one signifies a firm no-nonsense appliance.

it looks hapless on youtube, you can't blame it though.

i think i came across the relevant thread during an insomniac random thread click.

i know those well.

how many post have you made now? this is 5192 for me.

s

uh oh 5202 for me

<3

thank you for indulging my vacuum cleaners

thank you for indulging my interest in your posting total.

Straight one is like a straight, "You suck."

Flying one is like someone in a sing-song voice, "You suuUUUuuuUuuck!"

well, it has multiple connotations. It could be interpreted as "you suck," but as the vacuum cleaner is the thing doing the sucking, it could just as easily connote "i suck," or "this sucks"

pol·y·se·mous (pl-sms)
adj.
Having or characterized by many meanings:

haha i love what bamcquern said

i saw that yellow dyson at the store this morning

i love it too.

meanwhile - over a million facebook users have become fans of vitaminwater

damn them

apparently vitamin water is successful enough that some other company has come out with vitamintea

sue them

both products have the same sans-serif font product label thing going on. The vitamintea (one word) company is "Pureamerican" - which makes me wonder whether sans-serif fonts in food packaging and in supermarkets are supposed to connote organic-ness and purity or something.

sure!

did innocent smoothies invent that thing where every product label acts like ur pal. kept expecting the directions on the frozen pizza box 2 call me "bro," prolly serves me right for reading them tho

i dunno - Odwalla juice did this quite a while ago. That was the first time I noticed it. I read these things as well.

btw happy birthday u r awesome!