Bodylanguage

Wasn't it the wise one from down under who mentioned the possibilities of extracting the secret meaning of all (metameaning being the one and only goal of calciodialogues) from everything the Holy Keanu has ever done. After seeing Constantine last week I have to add that the hidden codex can be found mostly in keanu's bodylanguage. He must be the most physical actor to date. Fully conscious of the way in which his body can articulate meaning, he knows how to move, sit, look, stand, pose, relax...That's where we have to look to find the grail. So I propose that we work to gather the Keanu book of gestures.

Qualifying

Why don't we offer our insights into the qualifying matches for the worldcup in Germany? Because we are not interested in the puny efforts on the fields. Because we trust that we will qualify: only within the finals can humiliation be total. Because calcio is so much more than a set of mathematical equations which decides who qualifies. We prefer an honourable death match. The gods don't care about the little men. It's the Hero from Antiquity who is the only honourable opponent. Anything else is not interesting.

Animated through detail

Zola knew that details played a much greater role in de general in the greater scheme of things, than acknowledged. Realists, such as Flaubert, had already given descriptions of minute details to their grand narrative. Zola took those initial steps and speeded it up in a huge effort to breath the life into his stories. When you are reading one of his novels you feel suffocated by the wave upon wave of details that engulf you like a Tsunami. And as Hokusai's famous Great Wave is an 19th century visualization for this fractalisation of the world, Zola's work is literature's equivalent. Details are there to drive the characters or slow them down. The men and women that populate his stories are caught up by them in their stuffed Parisian apartments, as they plough through the dirtridden corridors of grubby theatres, or meet in infamous salons. These detailistic descriptions don't just give some colour locale as a background to the action; they make it all happen. Like DNA, details are the smallest building blocks that animate the story. Hence the name Naturalism; because for Zola, writing was a life giving enterprise. The smallest and dirtiest details from the most far removed margins as the philosophers stone, where the writer's hand acts as the alchemist's touch, putting a magic spell onto dead matter.

How Soccer Explains the World

Is it a coincidence that the recent issue of Wired Magazine on robotic existance, features a review on Franklin Foers own calcio theory: "How soccer explains the world. An unlikely theory of Globalization"? I think not. Although the algorithmic nature of the sport, is not part of the book, it seems (I haven't read it yet) that the author's claim to explain globalization through soccer is part of the unfolding of an entangled world where the ball is the heliocentric sphere that sheds its light far beyond the borders of the pitch. Whether Soccer theory can explain world guiding phenomena or is linked to them, as the New York Times states, is missing the point. The difference is a fake one. It is both and none at the same time. Of course the world can be read through soccer. But the game is of too little importance to be of any influence. Just remember that in the infinite small the world will be revealed

ROBO-cup

With the orangistas finally out of the tournement, let's turn our attention to another epic battle which is being fought simulataneously in place and time (what was that about wormholes?). Robocup 2004 predicts that "by 2050, a team of fully autonomous humanoid robot soccer players shall win a soccer game, complying with the official FIFA rules, against the winner of the most recent World Cup of Human Soccer." Soccer being nothing more than a set of predefined rules, played out within the grid of white chalk lines and taking into account the latest trivial pursuits by humans on the pitch, that shouldn't be too difficult. Programming a team of droids with the complete sourcecode of humanoid soccer should make them omniscient and omnipotent. Tifosi Club would have loved to support the Italian team ISAAC were it not that the combination of such un-azzurri looks with a name that spells a faith in Newtonian certainties throws our hopes for mechanised Roberto Baggio's (who has always already been autonomous) onto the same heap where our faith for a 2004 victory has ended. If any azzurri team, droid or humanoid, wants to have any chance of winning it is time that it takes into account the fact that soccer is much more than intelligence. The Ball Shaped Sphere of football is one inwhich uncertainty, chaos and relativity run amok. Only the paranoid can keep track of the masterprogram run by those 2001 A Space Odyssee-ish Gods. And hopefully appease the celestial AI's enough to hack them.

EU Expansion: The Rise of New Football Idols

In this, the year of EU expansion, it is pleasing to note the loss of dominance of the Northern Barbaric Warrior Idols at Euro 2004: Germany, England and the like. We at the Tifosi Club welcome the dominance of New Idols in the form of the Czech republic and I sincerely hope that in 20 years time we will be as sick of them (and Estonia and Latvia) as once we tired of Germany. Central Europe is the key to an era of integrated football that will allow both Italian theory to thrive and the Azzuri to win the World Cup.

By the way …

Regarding the Lippi Dippy Snoozy decision:
Which school of thought undermined reason, sanity and poetic license thereby allowing the elevation of Lippi to the most revered position in the known universe? Is anybody writing a minority report?

From beyond the Apocalypse

The Gods, right, inscrutable as ever. What is it with the mighty celestial ones? Are Rome's magnificent, proud, willful, devastating Pagan Idols under attack by the masochistic "eat my body-drink my blood" Sacrifical One? The One who's also meant to be the Second One? (What an egotist! A real Del Piero type. Always threatening to make a come back and never quite pulling it off.) Is it war in the heavens between Sacrifice and Dominance, Wariors and Martyrs, Strength and Weakness? Is that what the Totti affair signifies? Strength forced to sacrifice?

Do we appease and present our throats? Or do we enrage and rally to victory? Your question is a profound one. I have no answers but I look to ones wiser than me ...

The Book of Lord Shang (circa 200 BC, China), also Trappatoni's training manual:

Depend on war for peace.
Govern wisely: cultivate stupidity.
Inspire love through hate.
Build strength on weakness.

As Seraph once said via the divine medium of DVD: "You didn't really know someone until you fight them." So I say, let's get to know our enemies real good. And as hate pours forth from their crushing defeat, let's get to know them even more. Know them better than any other. And thus ... inspire love.



"Wounds heal. Chicks dig scars. But glory is forever." - The Book of Lord Keanu.

VIERIOSITY

"I'm not talking to you people ever again," he told them. "You can say what you like about me as a player and I'll accept it, that's all part of the game. And frankly, I don't care what you think anyway. But none of you may judge me as a man" - here Bobo paused for effect - "because I am more of a man than all of you put together. You have no idea how much of a man I am. I can walk down the street with my head held high, I can look myself in the mirror in the morning. You can't, because you have no conscience. Enough!"

TALKING TO THE MAN
It is not just the talk about fixing games, completely misunderstood by the infidels as Italian paranoia. We know we have been screwed by a long tradition of fixing. Remember 2000, rememeber 2002? No, this time it is also about the identity of the players.
Totti is stating that the Totti we have seen is not the Totti he really is. Vieri is complaining that his identity as a man is being understood. This all goes to a deep identity crisis among our warriors and to the heart of our mediated society: are we but simulations in the head of the gods? Figments of their imagination? Or are we players in a web of images we have created ourselves. A network in which we are starting to believe so much that we can't find a way back to reality.
Totti and Vieri seem to imply that they are feeling trapped inside that web. They suggest that they know that there is another reality outside the one we are seeing on TV. A real which is more true than the pixilated one we see every other night. This is a Real where Totti is a nice and polite gentleman and Vieri a true man.
I feel saddened for the guys.
Trapped between two worlds. Living in the Matrix and Zion simultaneously. The matrix making them into gods under the light of the processor but also draining the life out of their wired bodies. Hopelessly trying to get a grip on their true identity as they know that their being simulated destroys them at the same time. Should they try to destroy the matrix as they have been doing in the press: like a lone angel calling for another existence which is more true, more real? Or should be more like the man with the hammer. The Nietzschean Ubermensch the God. Our Azzurri Supermen should now destroy all selfmade illusions. Not by stating that there is a deeper sense of identity which is truer to the self. That sounds like a return to the idea that they are puppets in a game. Of course they are part of a masterplan trapped between two worlds, split in many parts. Now it is time for the Azzurri to take up the Hammer where Nietzsche left it and attack not the illusion that we are illusion but the illusion that we are not!
Stop being crybabies wanting to return to the safe and all too real Italian Mama. Only when they believe (which is a deeper sense of knowing) in their split selves will they be able to reach a truer sense of self, a higher identity. So instead of complaining about the images they should become more imaginative. Only as fictions will they be able to reach nirvana where they can meet the Gods head on as real warriors. And only then will Italy win the Cup.
Only in the matrix can the matrix be destroyed and only in the destruction of the matrix can life be lived in its fullest.
amen

“Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith. I consider the capacity for it terrifying.” -Kurt Vonnegut

azzurri creation

Maybe creation was first. But i am pretty sure conspiracy was second. Combine the two and you'll get Italian Soccer Drama

Therefore today starts:

The Calcio Dialogues. Six conspiracy theories for a new millennium

Chapters (to not exceed 700 words):
-Virtuosity, Simulation and Bufon
-Qualification, Castigation and Sado-Masochistic Del Piero Worhip
-Vieriosity, Trapponation and Why We Lost the Euro Championship (again)
-The Sphere-Shaped World Cup and Other Cases of Mistaken Identity
-The Laws of Statistics Rewritten to Accommodate Football Match Results
-Taxonomy of a ball
-Neo-paganism and the cassanistation of the old
-Foresight and the web of white chalk lines



IT WAS RIGGED AGAIN!!!

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we are doomed; we will prevail; we will suffer.