Sarahel's Semiotics 4U

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!