Sarahel's Semiotics 4U

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