"this is a more serious business than it looks"

I am having a very hard time deciding which paragraph/anecdote in this piece on the emerging subculture of 'superheroes' (or 'reals', as some apparently refer to themselves) is the most humorous. Maybe you can help me.

[via Old is the New New, whose post title, "The Desert of the Reals", I badly wanted to steal; should've been "Welcome to the Desert of the Reals", though]

the loneliness of the number ten

in one hundred forty characters or less

McSweeney's: grumpy, making obvious points, and scoring despite how obvious those points are:

This section of the course is a workshop where students will work to perfect their tweeting, blogging, and short-form writing skills...

Students will acquire the tools needed to make their tweets come alive with shallow wit. They'll learn how to construct Facebook status updates that glitter with irony, absurdity, and dramatic glibness. When tweeting, for instance, that "John is enjoying a buttery English muffin," why not add a link to an image of a muffin with butter oozing from its nooks and crannies? Or why not exaggerate a tad and say that there's bacon on that muffin, even if there's not? It's called poetic license when writers do it! Students will be encouraged to show honesty and vulnerability in their tweets: "Lydia is lounging about in her underwear at 401 Park Street apartment #2, feeling guilty about telling her boss that her uncle died but enjoying the day off." There's no such thing as oversharing when you're a writer.

Indeed.

tactical perfection and soccer as a diagram of urban space

At some point I suppose I should elucidate exactly what I mean when I say that soccer is a "diagram of urban space", but for now I will only gesture in the direction of Strange Harvest's ruminations on the soccer field (the football pitch, translated from American to English) as a landscape of abstraction, point at the Guardian's chalkboard feature, maybe toss in this twit/tweet/fragment from bldgblog, hope that those posts give some rough idea of what I mean and note that is an absolutely non-exclusive definition of the sport.

Because the point here is not so much to explain why I find the pursuit of tactical perfection in soccer related to the architectural desire to rearrange urban space as to note that Jonathan Wilson's columns on tactics for the Guardian are by far the most interesting on-going discussion of the systems and theorems underlying the action on the field that I have read. I don't think it would be unreasonable to describe Wilson's subject as the architecture of soccer. That he accomplishes feats such as referencing both Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Wittgenstein's thoughts on the significance of naming -- in a single paragraph -- while discussing the shift in dominance from the 4-4-2 to the 4-2-3-1 is ancillary to (though not entirely overshadowed by) his mastery of a century or so of tactical innovation.

Note, for instance, how he is able to tie so many threads together into a cohesive analysis, in his most recent column, "Is the box-to-box midfielder dead?":

This, arguably, was the main reason for the farrago of the golden generation: England were blessed with a remarkably talented generation of players; the problem was that Michael Owen and David Beckham needed a 4-4-2, while Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard needed an additional holding player. Neither Sven-Goran Eriksson nor Steve McClaren ever had the clarity of thought to opt for one system over the other and cull players accordingly. It was almost as though football itself were taunting England for its lack of tactical sophistication and its concomitant obeisance to the cult of the celebrity player.

Perhaps in a club situation, working together every day, Lampard and Gerrard could have come to an understanding, but at international level they palpably couldn't. The World Cup qualifier away to Austria in September 2004 showcased the problem. Both Lampard and Gerrard scored, and with 20 minutes to go England seemed comfortable, only for Roland Kollmann to knock in a free-kick conceded by Lampard, and Andreas Ivanschitz to equalise with a drive that deflected off Gerrard and squirmed under David James.

Both goals, ultimately, resulted from the vast space that opened up between back four and midfield as Gerrard and Lampard advanced. That area has always been English football's great weakness. It was from that position that Matthias Sindelar almost exposed England when Austria lost 4-3 at Stamford Bridge in 1932, from that position that Vsevolod Bobrov so tormented Chelsea in their 4-4 draw against Dinamo Moscow in 1945, and, most notoriously, from that position that Nandor Hidegkuti crafted Hungary's 6-3 demolition of England in 1953. Even in the 1990s, Eric Cantona and Gianfranco Zola were able to exploit the stratified nature of the average English set-up, prospering in the space between the lines.

As lone forwards became increasingly common, so it became increasingly necessary for sides to deploy a midfield holder to combat the withdrawn forward, precipitating the gradual shift - at the highest level at least - to 4-2-3-1. Once that formation has been adopted, midfielders are necessarily categorised as either defensive or attacking, and completeness, although it allows a player to play in either role, becomes within the immediate context of the game far less of an asset.

Frequently noted contemporary problem (the ineffective partnership of Gerrard and Lampard)? Check. Explanation of how that problem descends from a historical trend? Check. Extrapolation from contemporary problem and historical trend to previously-advanced thesis about meta-shifts in contemporary soccer? Check. While I continue to rely on The Run of Play and Sport is a TV Show for my witty and incisive commentary on the sport as a sociological and aesthetic phenomenon, I don't think anyone writing right now matches Wilson's ability to synthesize and process tactical trends.

a little bit of everton history

maybe they can recapture a bit of this on Sunday...

a memo to prince concerning the 1990 album "graffiti bridge"

Sasha Frere-Jones:

Dear Prince,

I got your note about the font. I think you'll agree that it's hideous enough now. Oh, and I'm not sure if I understood exactly what you meant by "let's get a hella-slammin' different thing going each time--new power!," but I tried to distinguish this significantly from the "LoveSexy" font we used on the last album. I didn't deal with the "Batman" soundtrack, of course, because, well, that's someone else's deal, and it's fine enough if you like elegant, iconic design.

O.K. So that's the font. Now on to the image. I have listened to the phone message about your wishes regarding the content of the illustration. (I guess technically it's a song rather than a phone call, but you left it on my answering machine, so I'll refer to it as a call, even though it was "written, arranged, composed and produced" by you and features verses, a chorus, and a guitar solo.) So I did the effect where the sky is peeling away to show the wall beneath. I did the thing where the top of Ingrid's hair blurs into the sky. I'm worried about the stubble, though. I am not sure I got it exactly right. I tried. It took me about fifteen hours of airbrush painting. My shoulder was killing me. But does it look like "a newly born faun / or the dew before the dawn" -- You'll have to be the judge of that.

pitchfork, you have done something for me

I got my pitchfork-hater card years ago, but they've finally done something that may get me frequenting their site again: streaming entire albums from within the album reviews (via "lala", where you can also stream the same albums -- but at pitchfork you don't have to log in). Tastes:

Fever Ray, s/t
Bat for Lashes, Two Suns
DOOM, Born Like This

tobacco ft. aesop rock::dirt

intense like my workload this week.

mammoth

Becker and I have quasi-officially opened our collaborative blogging project, mammoth. It is very much a work in progress, but it will now be a public work in progress. I imagine I will do some cross-posting, but much of the landscape/architecture/urbanism content that once found a home here will now be located there. Plus, you get to read Becker's thoughts there as well.

At the moment, the only major content there is a re-posted version of our Luandan fog-farming project, but we hope to post a bit on the recent Ecological Urbanism conference at Harvard (which we attended and listened attentively to/sat in the back row and snickered at) in the coming days. In addition, of course, to whatever landscape futures and disastrous megaprojects we care to comment on.

david hume and david brooks

See, the problem with digesting and regurgitating trendy literature, is that a lot of the time it turns out people already thought of that. In 1751. "Masterpiece of misunderstanding", indeed.