Talk of the town

"¿Viste el gol de Messi?"

Model blog: AutoLiniers

I think it's worthwhile to highlight the blogs that I've collected under the "Model Blogs" heading, as they all take advantage of the medium in a way that's instructive. When I wrote about the concept of an ideal blog, I did not make any attempt to show that such a blog could exist in real life, outside of the Platonic blogolandia as it were. AutoLiniers is the most purely realized example of this ideal that I know of.

The idea behind AutoLiniers is very simple: through an email forwarding process described in the its first post, images of the daily comic strip Macanudo are automatically posted to the blog. (I guess it's good to discuss methodology in one's first post.) Thus a new cartoon appears every day without any effort on the part of the blogger.

Macanudo is written by an artist named Liniers, hence the title of the blog. It's published in print by La Nación, a daily Argentine newspaper.

Full comic via AutoLiniers

AutoLiniers is still one of the most complete collections of Macanudo on the internet. It's not comprehensive, for any number of reasons, but the fact that it runs on this perpetual motion makes it especially appealing. (Difficulty of completing the collection comparable to that of perpetual motion, being "close" but not at all within reach)

I have to mention that Macanudo is a terrific comic strip, so I am grateful to AutoLiniers not only as a justification of my blog thoughts but as a source of consistently wonderful jokes. If you can read even a bit of castellano it is worth your while.

Gombrowicz

Sacado del Diario argentino.

¡Qué irritación cuando la aristocracia no sabe comportarse! ¡Se les exige tan poco y ni siquiera a eso llegan! Esos personas deberían saber que la música es sólo un pretexto para que se reúna la sociedad de la que forman parte, con sus buenos modales y manicuras. Pero en vez de permanecer en su sitio, en su mundo social-aristocrático, quieren tomar en serio el arte, se sienten la obligación de brindarle un medroso homenaje y, fuera de su condado, descienden al nivel del estudiantado.

Y dale oooooooooo, y dale dale o

BUENOS AIRES, April 12 (Reuters) - Two Boca Juniors players have visited a group of the team's supporters in jail where they have just begun serving sentences for their part in a riot at a game in 1999, the sports daily Ole reported on Thursday.

Strikers Martin Palermo and Rodrigo Palacio autographed shirts for prison wardens before visiting the six convicted hooligans who are serving between three-and-a-half and four-and-a-half years, the report said.

Full story here. Unfortunately I can't say that this is surprising. I've already thought about trying to explicate the differences between American sporting culture and football (soccer) culture, but mostly from the perspective of players, fans and coaches.

It becomes even more different when political corruption plays a visible role. Rafa Di Zeo, the main recipient of Palermo and Palacio's attentions, has close ties to Mauricio Macri, who is the president of Boca Juniors... and a 2007 Argentine presidential candidate.

Ouch

An excerpt from Clive James' Cultural Amnesia, on Walter Benjamin:

For the semi-educated Beatles-period junior intellectual intent on absorbing sociology, philosophy and cultural profundity all at once and in a tearing hurry, Benjamin's scrappily available writings constituted an intellectual multivitamin pill, the more guaranteed in its efficacy by being so hard to swallow.

Quoted here.

Demystification

The origin of "MCV MCV" is here. There's relevant material on page 81 and 82. (This is a link to the Jorge Luis Borges story "The Library of Babel.")

Squarepusher in 1996

A couple minutes of live footage, along with an interview where he shows off some records and talks about the importance of listening to lots and lots of music.

He looks a little disoriented in the interview, but you get to see him speak in a very spontaneous way. He has to work to condense everything into words that make sense, and even then it's a bit of a ramble. Still, the ideas don't sound dated.

Compare to this recent TV interview, where he's a lot more composed. I think he mostly does interviews over email these days, with interesting (if really long-winded) results. Squarepusher's official site has a collection of print interviews that he did for the release of Hello Everything; they're all worth reading, the one with XLR8R is a good place to start though.

Rodolfo Walsh's gestures

Rudimentary translation of a post on Daniel Link's blog:

Much harder than interpreting a pose is continuing a gesture, and it's surprising that, even today, 30 years removed from his lamentable disappearance, Walsh's sayings and writings continue to be interpreted as if they were frozen poses and not indications which we should try to follow for our own movement.

What about interpreting a gesture? Shouldn't there some way of interpreting gestures without trapping them in history? Or is the work of interpreting already given some direction, by the gesture itself? Link might be saying this, but he associates (links?) gestures with continuation rather than interpretation. This is a much more bodily image—quite proper to the gesture—but it also does not seem offer much direction itself.

I don't know very much about Walsh, so I can't say whether Link is mistaken to speak of this "even today," a phrase which, for me, implies that these gestures could have been continued from the day they were produced. (I'm not even sure that this could actually be false, for any gesture, but there you have it.) If there's any hope here, it's in this idea of following. But does that mean keeping the gesture at some distance, probably historical, and treating it as an indication, or a literal continuation, getting inside the gesture and using it "for our own movement"?

Ancient information

Barry Bonds hit two home runs in two at bats last weekend against the A’s, in a meaningless exhibition game that I attended.

The trademark Bonds home run comes from a quick and compact swing that makes the ball leap directly off his bat into the stands. One of the home runs he hit the other day, though, came off of a swing that struck me as almost lazy. With an unusually slow gesture, he didn’t so much pummel as guide the ball along a course that saw it land just a few rows deep in right field. It wasn’t even immediately obvious that it was going to go out.

The whole event was entirely unspectacular, but we couldn’t help admiring it anyway; at this point, we’re more surprised if Bonds doesn’t homer, and his consistency is remarkable. This boring (not to mention historically inconsequential) home run is still part of Bonds’ unquestionable greatness, even if it wasn’t one of his trademark blasts—you could even call his greatness “genius” and his trademark a “signature,” if you were comfortable with comparing athletes to artists.

Doctrine

IV. Avoid haphazard writing materials. A pedantic adherence to certain papers, pens, inks is beneficial. No luxury, but an abundance of these utensils is indispensable. V. Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens. VI. Keep your pen aloof from inspiration, which it will then attract with magnetic power. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it.

Walter Benjamin, "Post No Bills: The Writer's Technique in Thirteen Theses," in "One-way Street." Selected Writings Vol. 1, p. 458.