I just read that last post I wrote, and it's really good, I'm the shit. So, I find myself motivated to do it again. The question, however, is what does one write about when one's life is largely devoted to scrounging the internet for Mariners' news, thinking up new and creative ways of butchering Chone Figgins' name (just now I thought of CHUUUUUNE FLUGGINS!!!! and I wish I were a season ticket holder (who lived in Seattle) because I have at least 81 others that I would love to put on signs and try to get an interview with Mike Blowers or something. The impending absence of Beltre means that there will be a void opening up in the crazy fan section at Safeco once filled by The-Beltre-Guy, and I would love to be that replacement. The-Chone-Figgins-Guy. That could be me. Or should I say The-SHWAAAAAAYNE-SHWAGGINS-Guy?), watching infuriatingly melodramatic Japanese sitcoms on the internet, and occasionally scouting out Marshall's facebook page for pics of his girlfriend? Not much, that's for sure. Which is why I have just decided to write whatever it is I'm going to write in a language most of you probably can't read anyway. Because why not. It will also spare you the pain of reading it.
さあ、どうしようかなぁ。日本語ででも、書きたいことはあまりないじゃん。ええと、たぶん、なんだろう、あっそうだ！ あれか？あれにするか？はい、ということで、あれについて語らせていただきます。すごいな、あれ。まあ、やっぱり、やめた。実はこんな内容のまったくない話は続けられないな、実力足りないし。というか、エネレギたりないだろう。いや、つまらなすぎるから。 いずれにしても、さっさと本題に入るか？でも、本題って、まだ決まってない。わかった、わかった、スピッツについて話そう。スピッツは、どういうことというと、私の大好きなバンドです。そうそう、こんなにつまらないことをみんなに聞かせちゃいます。どうかお許しをいただけますよう、お願いいたします。本当に日本人がこれを読んだら、やばいかも、自分でも何を言っているかはさっぱりわからないから。まあ、そんなはずがないので、安心しましょうか。ごめん、話がちょっと飛んじゃったね。だけど、スピッツだ！すごい気に入ってる、最近。この前BEST HITSみたいなアルバムを買って、まじで絶え間なく聞き続けている、ずっと。夢にも出っている。もう、ちょっと、やめたいなと思っているところだけど、絶対無理。現を抜かしている。やめようにも、すぐ体が震えだして、髪が抜け始めるとかかなぁと、心配しているから、まあ、しばらくでもこのペースで持続。どうせ結局、飽きちゃうからね。たぶん。 何でそんな気に入っているかいというと、 ぴったり九十年代の音楽の雰囲気にはまるから。たぶん初めてでも、日本語まったくわからなくても、聞いたら、すぐ”こいつ、九十年代のものだ！”とわかっちゃうと思うよ、間違いなく。なんでだろうな。何で聞いたらすぐTHIRD EYE BLINDのことが思い浮かぶのかな？不思議だな。だけど、幻でもない。確かな現象だ。音というか、雰囲気というか、どこかが、”これは九十年代に作られたものだ”と宣言しているように聞こえる、この馬鹿私に。えっ、やばいな、自分の言葉本が当にわからなくなちゃった。日本語的に文章があっているかどうかこいつを見てもらえる人はどっかにいるかな。ま、いいや。 ここらへんで、締めるか？もう、ずいぶん長くなってきたし、思わずに。はい、ありがとう、バイバイ。
Wow, that was ridiculous. Don't be impressed, though, it's very likely that none of that makes any sense. I mean, maybe it sort of does, but maybe I was just mashing keys together. I think it makes sense. Doesn't actually matter. It was fun. Ok, well, it's nine forty and I haven't eaten yet. I've got some old lettuce in my fridge, maybe I'll go make a salad.
Sunday, December 6, 2009
Thursday, September 17, 2009
When the Past Bubbles Up
Because sometimes out of the dross of the present it does. Mysteriously. Who knows what it is that dislodges a long forgotten face, landscape, or abstract but verifiably temporal emotion out from the massive, sedimentary shelves of our memories, but sometimes a word, a glance, a shaft of light summons memory from the deepest mausoleums of our minds and reanimates them before us, alive, full of blood, and none the worse for time and distance. Sometimes it's hard to remember who you used to be, sometimes you feel like you've changed so much that you shouldn't even recognize your memories as your own, but then a breeze will strike your face from a particularly resonant direction and you'll find yourself standing on the sidewalk of a twenty-three year old life as a momentary eleven year old, not bothering to wonder how you can reconcile the briefcase in your hand (sike, I don't use a briefcase) with the long forgotten porch of a treehouse you feel yourself standing on. It's a bizarre experience, but it's also enough to remind you that who you always were is who you always will be, even if only in sporadic and unpredictable spurts and splashes.
When it happens to me it's usually pretty random, but there are a few things, a few magical items, that exist as the gatekeepers to these strange mental corridors between the past and the present. Musically generally serves to link me, and I would expect many others, to the earlier versions of myself, but not every song unlocks pockets of images of the same intensity. Many of the artists who hold the keys to my past I would strongly resist calling artists at all if it weren't for the fact that somehow the crude lines and jagged, reckless shapes they've scribbled in hasty power chords and melodramatic screams resolves into an image of myself; the Beetles may be incalculably better musicians, but their music is a white shapeless sheet that falls from my shoulders, whereas the frazzled short-circuiting of The Used, Creed, and Dragonforce fit my body like my own skin.
That said, the song that is for me the most retrospectively potent is actually really good. I don't own it, though, strangely. I don't really know why I don't own it considering that I have an album by the Jonas Brothers, but that's all beside the point. The point is that this song hits me harder than real-life every time I hear it. I don't know what crashing of chemicals in our brains bestows upon memory the power to be more real than the present, but I would swear on the light and my hope of salvation and rebirth that this song recycles my memories and throws them before my mind's eye more vivid and more powerful than I ever lived them. I don't do it nearly as well as the originals do, but as I'm singing it I'm all over Whitman campus living all sorts of different lives. At the center of it all, however, is a bathroom on the second floor of Anderson, a CD player, and a CD that a guy named Vince Booth left behind when he moved out. I can't hear this song without remembering that bathroom, and longing for it.
When it happens to me it's usually pretty random, but there are a few things, a few magical items, that exist as the gatekeepers to these strange mental corridors between the past and the present. Musically generally serves to link me, and I would expect many others, to the earlier versions of myself, but not every song unlocks pockets of images of the same intensity. Many of the artists who hold the keys to my past I would strongly resist calling artists at all if it weren't for the fact that somehow the crude lines and jagged, reckless shapes they've scribbled in hasty power chords and melodramatic screams resolves into an image of myself; the Beetles may be incalculably better musicians, but their music is a white shapeless sheet that falls from my shoulders, whereas the frazzled short-circuiting of The Used, Creed, and Dragonforce fit my body like my own skin.
That said, the song that is for me the most retrospectively potent is actually really good. I don't own it, though, strangely. I don't really know why I don't own it considering that I have an album by the Jonas Brothers, but that's all beside the point. The point is that this song hits me harder than real-life every time I hear it. I don't know what crashing of chemicals in our brains bestows upon memory the power to be more real than the present, but I would swear on the light and my hope of salvation and rebirth that this song recycles my memories and throws them before my mind's eye more vivid and more powerful than I ever lived them. I don't do it nearly as well as the originals do, but as I'm singing it I'm all over Whitman campus living all sorts of different lives. At the center of it all, however, is a bathroom on the second floor of Anderson, a CD player, and a CD that a guy named Vince Booth left behind when he moved out. I can't hear this song without remembering that bathroom, and longing for it.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
A Career in Review: Roger Federer
Strangely I find myself very by intrigued by my new-found appreciation for Andy Roddick, a thought that I by all rights never should have had, but the world is a crazy place and so, doffing my cap to said craziness, I will leave Andy for the time being and look instead at what yesterdays Wimbledon match did for my opinion of Roger Federer.
My opinion of Roger Federer... Have I ever had a higher opinion of any other public figure? Of all the human shaped stars in the sky, none shine brighter for me than Roger's. For years now he has stood Herculean and indomitable amongst the planets and nebulae and seven foot power forwards of our devotional sports galaxy, a figure too large for the relative obscurity of his sphere and too bright to be missed by even those who wouldn't normally see the world of tennis through a telescope. Where the majority of tennis players wink out before stargazers have a chance to wonder if they're even a trick of the light, Roger Federer blazes in the empyrean field of professional sports like a distant sun, and his presence commands the same sort of attention as a Lebron James or Tiger Woods.
Or so I like to tell myself. I'm not so delusional as to think that Roger draws as much attention, renown, or worship from all corners as somebody like Lebron or Tiger or Tom Brady, but I do know that of all the athletes I've watched I've only had one idol, and he comes from Switzerland. No other athlete inspires the sort of undying, unconditional, boundless love from me that Roger does, to no other athlete do I assign the same sort of unshakable loyalty, and given the choice of watching any single athlete in the world play up close, I would hands down in the blink of an eye without hesitation say Roger Federer, Centre Court, Wimbledon and wipe my hands of this world. Roger is a god to me.
But why, you ask? The answer is simple but gets more complicated: he plays a game I love, a game I hate, a game I didn't quite grow up with but grew into, a game that defined me and defines my starkest sports memories, with an unearthly beauty that is shoddy misdirection for sheer ruthless destruction. I admit that I love dominance, I love power, I crave the strength contained in competitive annihilation, and for years Roger stood on one side of tennis courts and banished opponents from his presence with a game that was simply undeniable and entirely beyond reproach. He was an archetype more than a human, an avatar, an earthly manifestation of a Platonic ideal rather than a fellow creature of blood and bones and dirt. He was so much better than EVERYONE that I looked forward to his matches not to cheer him in overcoming challenges but to bear witness to him incinerating his opponents (who were themselves unimaginably good tennis players) like dry bundles of straw before a wind of flame. He was a magician, a sage, a hero, and tennis was his Art. Maybe I've made my point already, but allow me the indulgence of saying that Roger played tennis in a way that seemed to stretch it out to the furthest limits of possibility, as if the game were designed with the prophecy of him in mind, and I couldn't get enough of the fulfillment that was pretty much every summer.
But then, into the golden light of his glory came a fleet-footed youth with a massive left arm and an inhuman will, flying into the sky of Roger's supremacy on black wings that churned sun-streaked blue into thick masses of lightning-shot black and gray, hanging in the air like the guillotine of the future that I never thought would call for Roger's neck. Fucking Rafa. If I love Roger with all of my heart than I hate Rafael Nadal with all of my soul. In my head Roger is white and gold and Rafa is the color of blood. Rafa came into Roger's perfect world and, somehow, tore it all down. All of a sudden, Roger was beatable, Roger wasn't going to live forever. Roger was our supreme champion, and... he couldn't beat Rafa. It started slow, with the French. Roger had never won the French even before Rafa, so even after he first lost to Nadal there it wasn't the end of the world. Nadal could quarter the market on clay because grass, hardcourt, and whatever shit they play on in Australia were part of Roger's kingdom and no army could storm that keep. They all said that Rafa didn't have the game to win on any of the faster surfaces. Yet. Yet is an insidious word, however, and faster than it seemed possible Rafa got better. As if some infernal engine fueled his ceaseless motor, Rafa got better and better and better up to the the point where patrick mcenroe and dick enberg were lowering the hard court odds to 50:50. Rafa never felt pressure, Rafa never stumbled, Rafa never gave up, and in situations where other men would crack, crumble, choke, and lose, Rafa never showed even a shred of fear, never once revealed to anyone his humanity, hit forehands and backhands and serves in a way that nobody else could, or arguably ever has, and won.
Even during Rafa's rapid ascension I still had confidence that Roger would overcome him in the end, but as trophies and plates continued to be doled out it became more and more clear that Rafa was Roger's kryptonite. I'd never imagined that Roger had weaknesses, but Rafa emitted deadly gamma rays that blasted through all of Roger's defenses at the speed of a falling giant, and turned him into a shivering, shaking, crystal thin shell of his former dominance. When Roger lost in the Finals of the French to Rafa in like ten minutes, losing all but four games in three sets, I was shaken. When he lost, a mere four weeks later, in five of the best sets many argue tennis has ever seen at Wimbledon, on GRASS, I was shattered. Number one was long gone, and the impetus produced by Nadal's already horrible victory at the inner sanctum of Roger's power seemed to me too extreme for Roger to ever reverse. He was number two in the world, and still incredible, but Nadal had thrust him from his pedestal of immortality, and when the new year brought the Australian Open Final I thought I could feel my idol of old hit the ground and break into a million pieces on the blue neo-styrofoam surface as Roger lost to him again, never, I thought, to be put back together again.
For all that, however, deep deep deep way deep down, I know that Rafa is no demon. He's not a bad guy, he's not a villain, he's not driven by the souls of a thousand demons. He's just.. really fucking good. Really amazingly good, and Roger couldn't beat him. Up until Rafa, Roger never really had a rival. He pretty much mopped the floor with everybody else out there. Rafa gave Roger his foil, his enemy to vanquish, but, unfortunately for Roger, he never really seemed to rise to that challenge. Roger could beat anybody else, but Rafa warped Roger's mind and stole his confidence like it seemed nobody ever would, and in the end was just too tough.
But the end for whom? I'm really running out of steam here and don't want to continue this post, sadly, but Rafa seems to have pounded his body to a pulp, only the uncertain future will tell whether or not he will ever recover, and in his absence, at the French, at Wimbledon, Roger has reclaimed the seat of preeminence that I thought he had abdicated forever. The future will tell how the narrative of Roger's career is ultimately received, how we will read the destructive meteor that was (is) Rafael Nadal. Will Nadal recover and resume the process (seemingly already well in hand a few months ago) of changing the guard? Will he fade away like a star shooting through the blackness of night, though leaving behind a much more tangible memory of his passing than a contrail in the sky? Will he come back and never be the same? Who knows, but just as his arrival altered the path of Roger's career and legacy, so to has this momentary passing; it is clear, however, that though Rafa has been out of sight for the past two majors, he won't be out of mind for the rest of tennis history.
My opinion of Roger Federer... Have I ever had a higher opinion of any other public figure? Of all the human shaped stars in the sky, none shine brighter for me than Roger's. For years now he has stood Herculean and indomitable amongst the planets and nebulae and seven foot power forwards of our devotional sports galaxy, a figure too large for the relative obscurity of his sphere and too bright to be missed by even those who wouldn't normally see the world of tennis through a telescope. Where the majority of tennis players wink out before stargazers have a chance to wonder if they're even a trick of the light, Roger Federer blazes in the empyrean field of professional sports like a distant sun, and his presence commands the same sort of attention as a Lebron James or Tiger Woods.
Or so I like to tell myself. I'm not so delusional as to think that Roger draws as much attention, renown, or worship from all corners as somebody like Lebron or Tiger or Tom Brady, but I do know that of all the athletes I've watched I've only had one idol, and he comes from Switzerland. No other athlete inspires the sort of undying, unconditional, boundless love from me that Roger does, to no other athlete do I assign the same sort of unshakable loyalty, and given the choice of watching any single athlete in the world play up close, I would hands down in the blink of an eye without hesitation say Roger Federer, Centre Court, Wimbledon and wipe my hands of this world. Roger is a god to me.
But why, you ask? The answer is simple but gets more complicated: he plays a game I love, a game I hate, a game I didn't quite grow up with but grew into, a game that defined me and defines my starkest sports memories, with an unearthly beauty that is shoddy misdirection for sheer ruthless destruction. I admit that I love dominance, I love power, I crave the strength contained in competitive annihilation, and for years Roger stood on one side of tennis courts and banished opponents from his presence with a game that was simply undeniable and entirely beyond reproach. He was an archetype more than a human, an avatar, an earthly manifestation of a Platonic ideal rather than a fellow creature of blood and bones and dirt. He was so much better than EVERYONE that I looked forward to his matches not to cheer him in overcoming challenges but to bear witness to him incinerating his opponents (who were themselves unimaginably good tennis players) like dry bundles of straw before a wind of flame. He was a magician, a sage, a hero, and tennis was his Art. Maybe I've made my point already, but allow me the indulgence of saying that Roger played tennis in a way that seemed to stretch it out to the furthest limits of possibility, as if the game were designed with the prophecy of him in mind, and I couldn't get enough of the fulfillment that was pretty much every summer.
But then, into the golden light of his glory came a fleet-footed youth with a massive left arm and an inhuman will, flying into the sky of Roger's supremacy on black wings that churned sun-streaked blue into thick masses of lightning-shot black and gray, hanging in the air like the guillotine of the future that I never thought would call for Roger's neck. Fucking Rafa. If I love Roger with all of my heart than I hate Rafael Nadal with all of my soul. In my head Roger is white and gold and Rafa is the color of blood. Rafa came into Roger's perfect world and, somehow, tore it all down. All of a sudden, Roger was beatable, Roger wasn't going to live forever. Roger was our supreme champion, and... he couldn't beat Rafa. It started slow, with the French. Roger had never won the French even before Rafa, so even after he first lost to Nadal there it wasn't the end of the world. Nadal could quarter the market on clay because grass, hardcourt, and whatever shit they play on in Australia were part of Roger's kingdom and no army could storm that keep. They all said that Rafa didn't have the game to win on any of the faster surfaces. Yet. Yet is an insidious word, however, and faster than it seemed possible Rafa got better. As if some infernal engine fueled his ceaseless motor, Rafa got better and better and better up to the the point where patrick mcenroe and dick enberg were lowering the hard court odds to 50:50. Rafa never felt pressure, Rafa never stumbled, Rafa never gave up, and in situations where other men would crack, crumble, choke, and lose, Rafa never showed even a shred of fear, never once revealed to anyone his humanity, hit forehands and backhands and serves in a way that nobody else could, or arguably ever has, and won.
Even during Rafa's rapid ascension I still had confidence that Roger would overcome him in the end, but as trophies and plates continued to be doled out it became more and more clear that Rafa was Roger's kryptonite. I'd never imagined that Roger had weaknesses, but Rafa emitted deadly gamma rays that blasted through all of Roger's defenses at the speed of a falling giant, and turned him into a shivering, shaking, crystal thin shell of his former dominance. When Roger lost in the Finals of the French to Rafa in like ten minutes, losing all but four games in three sets, I was shaken. When he lost, a mere four weeks later, in five of the best sets many argue tennis has ever seen at Wimbledon, on GRASS, I was shattered. Number one was long gone, and the impetus produced by Nadal's already horrible victory at the inner sanctum of Roger's power seemed to me too extreme for Roger to ever reverse. He was number two in the world, and still incredible, but Nadal had thrust him from his pedestal of immortality, and when the new year brought the Australian Open Final I thought I could feel my idol of old hit the ground and break into a million pieces on the blue neo-styrofoam surface as Roger lost to him again, never, I thought, to be put back together again.
For all that, however, deep deep deep way deep down, I know that Rafa is no demon. He's not a bad guy, he's not a villain, he's not driven by the souls of a thousand demons. He's just.. really fucking good. Really amazingly good, and Roger couldn't beat him. Up until Rafa, Roger never really had a rival. He pretty much mopped the floor with everybody else out there. Rafa gave Roger his foil, his enemy to vanquish, but, unfortunately for Roger, he never really seemed to rise to that challenge. Roger could beat anybody else, but Rafa warped Roger's mind and stole his confidence like it seemed nobody ever would, and in the end was just too tough.
But the end for whom? I'm really running out of steam here and don't want to continue this post, sadly, but Rafa seems to have pounded his body to a pulp, only the uncertain future will tell whether or not he will ever recover, and in his absence, at the French, at Wimbledon, Roger has reclaimed the seat of preeminence that I thought he had abdicated forever. The future will tell how the narrative of Roger's career is ultimately received, how we will read the destructive meteor that was (is) Rafael Nadal. Will Nadal recover and resume the process (seemingly already well in hand a few months ago) of changing the guard? Will he fade away like a star shooting through the blackness of night, though leaving behind a much more tangible memory of his passing than a contrail in the sky? Will he come back and never be the same? Who knows, but just as his arrival altered the path of Roger's career and legacy, so to has this momentary passing; it is clear, however, that though Rafa has been out of sight for the past two majors, he won't be out of mind for the rest of tennis history.
Monday, July 6, 2009
Pausing for Greatness
In a world where professional sports have taken repeated hits from scandal after scandal and appear before us as the bruised, battered, dented recepticles of competitive spirit that they once were, it becomes more and more difficult to appreciate the products various leagues put on various fields and courts without first having to forgive the product in question some sort of ethical or competitive shortcomings. In almost all of the major professional sports leagues there are serious flaws we as fans have to endeavor to ignore in order to affirm the legitimacy of the objects of our support; in baseball you have to overcome the anxiety that your favorite team might be powered by a guy (or guys) that is a mutant product of test-tubes and needles; in basketball you have to ignore the specter of a corrupt front office looming over the court like a vast, shadowy puppet-master, using a legion of referees to block and construct games not quite as if they were Broadway productions but certainly as if somebody not on the court has designs on what the scoreboard says when the buzzer sounds; in football similar concerns about the humanity of it's superhuman participants arise if we forget to suspend our disbelief at the 300 pound man chasing like a sprinter after a quarterback and stopping just short of ripping his arms off and bludgeoning him over the head with them in taking him down. In cycling, it's hard for anyone to win a race without the guy he lost to (and everybody watching) crying for his pee in a cup. In all of these sports (except, perhaps, for cycling) the demon of commercialization time and again steps out from behind the curtain and further disrupts the illusion that the pageant of professional athletics is motivated solely, or occasionally even largely, by the sheer will for success and pride in team and place that it is in amateur sports. Athletes frequently invoke the old axiom that "it's a business, too," and unfortunately we can't help but suffer the intrusion of the business side of the game(s) upon the other side we care about; sports unite and inspire us, but you have to be willing to sift through the taint of bloated salaries, greedy, soulless owners (and sometimes players), and the invasive barrage of commercial sponsorships in order to get to that inspiration.
All of this isn't to say that I don't follow sports, that I don't root for my teams, that I'm not uplifted by their successes and downcast at their failures; the Mariners lost their way through 100 games last year and I vomited through September; The Mariners won 116 games in 2001 and I distinctly remember being violently depressed when they lost a game to the Cleveland Indians in which they were up by like 9 runs with three innings to play. I think I snapped and punched my baby sister in a fit of rage, that's how much that team meant to me. I love sports, I think sports are an intrinsic part not only of our culture but also our humanity, which is why it strikes me as so unfortunate that they seem to be debased a little more each day by scandal and mishandling to the point where a fair percentage of people seem to see professional sports as little more than grimy idols to greed and dishonesty.
Which brings me to the shining beam of light that lanced into that semi-dark sky this morning from a stadium at the center of a complex of chalk lined strips of grass in the middle of London and stayed there, pulsing, for something like four hours and 19 minutes. Today's Wimbledon final was a transcendent moment nearly ten years in the making that struck a decades worth of waving, wandering, and unraveling narratives of wild success, simultaneously unfulfilled and thwarted potential, glory, the loss thereof, and its redemption like a godly hammer out of the realm of the possible and into the realm of substance, giving it form as surely as a blacksmith turning raw iron into metal with meaning. Today a red-hot history in limbo was thrust into a four plus hour pool of cool, refining water, and what emerged was a redefined narrative of struggle and triumph that, in my eyes, redeems sport, and reminds us all of why, exactly, we are fans.
Where to begin. Perhaps with a brief admission that tennis isn't immune to some of the negative pitfalls that beset other major sports. There's a lot of money involved. If you win you will get very rich. There's the sort of scandal that Tim Donaghey would be proud of. Nikolay Davydenko has been accused of pulling punches (or should we say shanking forehands) in order to influence betting. Drugs aren't entirely out of the picture; recently Richard Gasquet was suspended a year for testing positive in a drug test. For cocaine. Yes, tennis isn't without it's flaws here and there, but the thing that sets tennis apart from its counterparts is its intrinsic individual nature. The problems that arise in other sports are largely institutionalized (greedy owners, greedy unions, greedy commissioner's offices), whereas tennis tournaments are composed of individuals coming to a single place to go one on one until there's only one. There are no contracts so there are no agents to hate, there is no free agency so there's nobody to betray, and no one's expectations to fall short of except your own, ultimately. There also seem to be no drugs to speak of, discounting the recreational ones Marat Safin snorts off the ass-cracks of Russian prostitutes. In the end, tennis is an every man for himself sort of game that is more reverent of its winners and merciless to its losers than any other game, and in this removal of all the extraneous shit that bogs down other major sports tennis shines.
Furthermore, the intrinsically individual nature of the sport allows for more compelling personal narratives than pretty much any team sport can offer. Or perhaps it's more appropriate to say that they are compelling in a different way. Certainly we love to follow teams, and a franchise like the Yankees or the Patriots or the Lakers accumulates stories over time until it's history becomes vast and complex in a way that no single man or woman's life ever could. When Jeter puts on a Yankess uniform he stands beside the Babe and Dimaggio and Gehrig, whereas when Andre Agassi picked up a racket and stepped onto the court he was pretty much just Andre Agassi. Of course, that is a bit of reductionist statement, as I will get to, but it is undeniable that a franchise with a hundred year history can come to mean more than any single person ever could.
And yet, the history of a franchise is composite, whereas a tennis player stands alone, not only as a competitor, but also as a figure that receives history. Sort of. He takes his meaning, of course, from the people he beats and the people who beat him, but compared to being member of the San Fransisco 49ers, Carlos Moya definitely stands alone.
That said, there are a lot of individual narratives that flame out without ever meaning anything. Ashley Harkleroad, Daniela Hantuchova, Janko Tipsarevic, Guillermo Coria. Ever heard of them? Not if you don't follow tennis rabidly you haven't. But then there are others. James Blake; his story starts in promise, nearly ends in tragedy, but comes back like Lance before fading into the obscurity that awaits most every professional tennis player eventually. Top ten in the world, Blake bashed his head on a net-post challenging a ball, broke his neck, got shingles, and lost his father to cancer in the same year. That's a real shit storm of bad luck (particularly the shingles) that you might not expect your neighbor the pencil-pusher to ever fully recover from, but miraculously Blake was back roughly a year later and reached as high as number 4 in the world. Gustavo Kuerten, or if you prefer(which I do), Guga, owner of the sort of curly fro Matteo Legget could only dream of and potentially the most retarded grunt in the history of sports. Patrick Rafter, last of the serve-and-volleyers (I loved this guy so much I chose my racket just because he used it, even though serve and volley was the furthest thing from the game I played), the Aussie you could identify by the streaks of white sunblock type stuff he spread across his face like warpaint, if not by his endangered species of a style of play. Others. Tennis has an incredibly colorful cast of characters.
Which brings me to the two names I've been keeping back for all of this time, the two names who this morning, at least in my eyes, played the sort of career, maybe even life, -defining match that happens only very very rarely in sports, and should be recognized when it does. First, and most obviously, there's Roger Federer, the sort of mythological figure who comes once in a lifetime at most, and for my money challenges, and in fact overtops, even Michael Jordan as an awe-inspiring superhero of the sports world. And then, perhaps even more interestingly, there's Andy Roddick, a figure who was supposed to be the savior of American tennis, the next Pete Sampras, who had the bad luck to be born into a world where the next Pete Sampras already lived and breathed and dominated. I've been pretty violently anti-Andy Roddick my whole life, calling him nothing but a big serve and an ugly, brutal forehand, a three year-old child at the net and a ninety-year old grandmother on the backhand side. Today, though, he proved something to me; he played the most spectacular match of his career in the biggest moment of his career, and agreeing entirely with an article I read that described his effort in defeat today as heroic, looking back at his whole career with today as the lens... I think I love Andy Roddick. I'll be back later with why.
All of this isn't to say that I don't follow sports, that I don't root for my teams, that I'm not uplifted by their successes and downcast at their failures; the Mariners lost their way through 100 games last year and I vomited through September; The Mariners won 116 games in 2001 and I distinctly remember being violently depressed when they lost a game to the Cleveland Indians in which they were up by like 9 runs with three innings to play. I think I snapped and punched my baby sister in a fit of rage, that's how much that team meant to me. I love sports, I think sports are an intrinsic part not only of our culture but also our humanity, which is why it strikes me as so unfortunate that they seem to be debased a little more each day by scandal and mishandling to the point where a fair percentage of people seem to see professional sports as little more than grimy idols to greed and dishonesty.
Which brings me to the shining beam of light that lanced into that semi-dark sky this morning from a stadium at the center of a complex of chalk lined strips of grass in the middle of London and stayed there, pulsing, for something like four hours and 19 minutes. Today's Wimbledon final was a transcendent moment nearly ten years in the making that struck a decades worth of waving, wandering, and unraveling narratives of wild success, simultaneously unfulfilled and thwarted potential, glory, the loss thereof, and its redemption like a godly hammer out of the realm of the possible and into the realm of substance, giving it form as surely as a blacksmith turning raw iron into metal with meaning. Today a red-hot history in limbo was thrust into a four plus hour pool of cool, refining water, and what emerged was a redefined narrative of struggle and triumph that, in my eyes, redeems sport, and reminds us all of why, exactly, we are fans.
Where to begin. Perhaps with a brief admission that tennis isn't immune to some of the negative pitfalls that beset other major sports. There's a lot of money involved. If you win you will get very rich. There's the sort of scandal that Tim Donaghey would be proud of. Nikolay Davydenko has been accused of pulling punches (or should we say shanking forehands) in order to influence betting. Drugs aren't entirely out of the picture; recently Richard Gasquet was suspended a year for testing positive in a drug test. For cocaine. Yes, tennis isn't without it's flaws here and there, but the thing that sets tennis apart from its counterparts is its intrinsic individual nature. The problems that arise in other sports are largely institutionalized (greedy owners, greedy unions, greedy commissioner's offices), whereas tennis tournaments are composed of individuals coming to a single place to go one on one until there's only one. There are no contracts so there are no agents to hate, there is no free agency so there's nobody to betray, and no one's expectations to fall short of except your own, ultimately. There also seem to be no drugs to speak of, discounting the recreational ones Marat Safin snorts off the ass-cracks of Russian prostitutes. In the end, tennis is an every man for himself sort of game that is more reverent of its winners and merciless to its losers than any other game, and in this removal of all the extraneous shit that bogs down other major sports tennis shines.
Furthermore, the intrinsically individual nature of the sport allows for more compelling personal narratives than pretty much any team sport can offer. Or perhaps it's more appropriate to say that they are compelling in a different way. Certainly we love to follow teams, and a franchise like the Yankees or the Patriots or the Lakers accumulates stories over time until it's history becomes vast and complex in a way that no single man or woman's life ever could. When Jeter puts on a Yankess uniform he stands beside the Babe and Dimaggio and Gehrig, whereas when Andre Agassi picked up a racket and stepped onto the court he was pretty much just Andre Agassi. Of course, that is a bit of reductionist statement, as I will get to, but it is undeniable that a franchise with a hundred year history can come to mean more than any single person ever could.
And yet, the history of a franchise is composite, whereas a tennis player stands alone, not only as a competitor, but also as a figure that receives history. Sort of. He takes his meaning, of course, from the people he beats and the people who beat him, but compared to being member of the San Fransisco 49ers, Carlos Moya definitely stands alone.
That said, there are a lot of individual narratives that flame out without ever meaning anything. Ashley Harkleroad, Daniela Hantuchova, Janko Tipsarevic, Guillermo Coria. Ever heard of them? Not if you don't follow tennis rabidly you haven't. But then there are others. James Blake; his story starts in promise, nearly ends in tragedy, but comes back like Lance before fading into the obscurity that awaits most every professional tennis player eventually. Top ten in the world, Blake bashed his head on a net-post challenging a ball, broke his neck, got shingles, and lost his father to cancer in the same year. That's a real shit storm of bad luck (particularly the shingles) that you might not expect your neighbor the pencil-pusher to ever fully recover from, but miraculously Blake was back roughly a year later and reached as high as number 4 in the world. Gustavo Kuerten, or if you prefer(which I do), Guga, owner of the sort of curly fro Matteo Legget could only dream of and potentially the most retarded grunt in the history of sports. Patrick Rafter, last of the serve-and-volleyers (I loved this guy so much I chose my racket just because he used it, even though serve and volley was the furthest thing from the game I played), the Aussie you could identify by the streaks of white sunblock type stuff he spread across his face like warpaint, if not by his endangered species of a style of play. Others. Tennis has an incredibly colorful cast of characters.
Which brings me to the two names I've been keeping back for all of this time, the two names who this morning, at least in my eyes, played the sort of career, maybe even life, -defining match that happens only very very rarely in sports, and should be recognized when it does. First, and most obviously, there's Roger Federer, the sort of mythological figure who comes once in a lifetime at most, and for my money challenges, and in fact overtops, even Michael Jordan as an awe-inspiring superhero of the sports world. And then, perhaps even more interestingly, there's Andy Roddick, a figure who was supposed to be the savior of American tennis, the next Pete Sampras, who had the bad luck to be born into a world where the next Pete Sampras already lived and breathed and dominated. I've been pretty violently anti-Andy Roddick my whole life, calling him nothing but a big serve and an ugly, brutal forehand, a three year-old child at the net and a ninety-year old grandmother on the backhand side. Today, though, he proved something to me; he played the most spectacular match of his career in the biggest moment of his career, and agreeing entirely with an article I read that described his effort in defeat today as heroic, looking back at his whole career with today as the lens... I think I love Andy Roddick. I'll be back later with why.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Completing the Nod to Bukatsu
So I've returned to answer the question, "Why do I think Bukatsu is such a cool thing?" Well, before I answer that question, I've got to revise some of the misleading impressions I may have given with my previous post. The Way of the Middle Schooler, I translated Bukatsudo, likening it to the complicated, seemingly unbreakable set of rules governing the lives and honor of samurai. No doubt Bushido, the path followed by the samurai, was stringent, demanding physically and mentally, and utterly uncompromising in its delineations of what a samurai must do and how hard he must do it. What about Bukatsudou, however? Initially, I approached Bukatsudo as the modern manifestation of Bushido, only as applied to Hello-Kitty-loving, cell-phone-toting, pokemon-watching 13 year-old children as opposed to man-slaughtering, self-sacrificing, ultra-dedicated vassals of old-world warlords. I figured the Way of the Middle Schooler and the Way of the Samurai, while obviously divergent in many critical modes of application, were at least resonant ideologically. If, in the event of defeat, a samurai must take his own life to ease the sublime shame of failing his master, I figured that the Middle Schooler, while strongly discouraged from killing him or herself after a poor showing on the hurdles, for example, is at least obligated to go 精一杯, full-spiritedly, at practice so that a poor showing at the 大会 becomes less likely.
That's certainly how it goes at baseball practice. Maybe it was because my first brush with The Way of the Middle Schooler was with the most overly serious of them that I assumed it would be that way across the board, in fact it most certainly was, but at any rate after a few weeks of baseball practice I figured Japanese Middle Schoolers had the sort of work ethic to shame a navy seal. The first time I wandered up to a baseball practice, anxiously stepping through the gate in the chain-link fence after about three minutes trying to figure out how to open it up, I heard a hoarse voice call out from across the field and all sound ceased (that was Shuhei, he's the baseball captain and recently he was told by a doctor to stay quiet at practice for a few days because he had yelled his throat raw). Startled I looked up to find the entire team looking at me. Moments later, Shuhei yelled out again, Rei, Rei, Rei, and as one they bowed to me three times in quick succession. I was pretty confused by this. Awkwardly giggling I stumbled over to the bench, trying to ignore the way the kids doffed their hats and bowed to me whenever I passed them.
Then I got a real shock. The kids went back to practice, and what they did was run bunting drills for about an hour and then do an around the horn drill where they had to, well, throw the ball around the horn like fifty times without messing up. If a kid made a bad throw, or another dropped a good throw, both guilty parties would bow and apologize to the rest of the team before everyone started all over again. The most impressive thing? There was no coach to be seen. Nowhere. I could imagine American Middle Schoolers running bunt drills on their own, for an hour, without the barest whisper of a coach for miles, but it would take a few generous hits of payote. This Bukatsudo shit is fucking serious.
But that was just the baseball team. Those guys actually are little modern samurai. My mistake was thinking every group was like them. My misconceptions were corrected when I met the track team. And the ping-pong team. And the computer team. Don't get me wrong, there are serious teams out there that don't whack around balls with sticks; the volleyball team, at least the girls, take their shit pretty seriously, and I imagine it's probably not a good idea to fuck around with the kendo club, considering your coach wears armor and carries around a heavy stick, but EVERY kid isn't like that. The track team, which I have been a consistent 'member' of for the past few weeks, proved to me that in Japan the Way of the Middle Schooler isn't necessarily paved with stones of dedication and back-breaking commitment. No, goofing around and dicking off are prevalent here as well. The other day my buddy Shunsuke had to run in normal shoes because he had somehow managed to throw his spikes on top of a storage shed. I was asked in between sets of sprints by a group of girls if I would rather eat poop-flavored curry or curry-flavored poop. I thought about it for a minute and eventually came to the only conclusion possible: curry-flavored poop. I then observed that Japanese girls seem to really like poop (which they do), and things went downhill from there. I brought sunglasses to practice the other day, and suffered the subsequent penalty of twenty or so minutes of "cool" looks from half the boys team as they all tried them on. I've eavesdropped on multiple conversations about hopelessly unrequited love that I had to do my best to take seriously. Unable to resist the temptation to have a point, I guess, I have to conclude that this venture into Bukatsudou has given the humanity, and more importantly, the adorable frivolity, to the students at my school, and that sir, rules. Put simply and without an eloquent flourish to round it out.
That's certainly how it goes at baseball practice. Maybe it was because my first brush with The Way of the Middle Schooler was with the most overly serious of them that I assumed it would be that way across the board, in fact it most certainly was, but at any rate after a few weeks of baseball practice I figured Japanese Middle Schoolers had the sort of work ethic to shame a navy seal. The first time I wandered up to a baseball practice, anxiously stepping through the gate in the chain-link fence after about three minutes trying to figure out how to open it up, I heard a hoarse voice call out from across the field and all sound ceased (that was Shuhei, he's the baseball captain and recently he was told by a doctor to stay quiet at practice for a few days because he had yelled his throat raw). Startled I looked up to find the entire team looking at me. Moments later, Shuhei yelled out again, Rei, Rei, Rei, and as one they bowed to me three times in quick succession. I was pretty confused by this. Awkwardly giggling I stumbled over to the bench, trying to ignore the way the kids doffed their hats and bowed to me whenever I passed them.
Then I got a real shock. The kids went back to practice, and what they did was run bunting drills for about an hour and then do an around the horn drill where they had to, well, throw the ball around the horn like fifty times without messing up. If a kid made a bad throw, or another dropped a good throw, both guilty parties would bow and apologize to the rest of the team before everyone started all over again. The most impressive thing? There was no coach to be seen. Nowhere. I could imagine American Middle Schoolers running bunt drills on their own, for an hour, without the barest whisper of a coach for miles, but it would take a few generous hits of payote. This Bukatsudo shit is fucking serious.
But that was just the baseball team. Those guys actually are little modern samurai. My mistake was thinking every group was like them. My misconceptions were corrected when I met the track team. And the ping-pong team. And the computer team. Don't get me wrong, there are serious teams out there that don't whack around balls with sticks; the volleyball team, at least the girls, take their shit pretty seriously, and I imagine it's probably not a good idea to fuck around with the kendo club, considering your coach wears armor and carries around a heavy stick, but EVERY kid isn't like that. The track team, which I have been a consistent 'member' of for the past few weeks, proved to me that in Japan the Way of the Middle Schooler isn't necessarily paved with stones of dedication and back-breaking commitment. No, goofing around and dicking off are prevalent here as well. The other day my buddy Shunsuke had to run in normal shoes because he had somehow managed to throw his spikes on top of a storage shed. I was asked in between sets of sprints by a group of girls if I would rather eat poop-flavored curry or curry-flavored poop. I thought about it for a minute and eventually came to the only conclusion possible: curry-flavored poop. I then observed that Japanese girls seem to really like poop (which they do), and things went downhill from there. I brought sunglasses to practice the other day, and suffered the subsequent penalty of twenty or so minutes of "cool" looks from half the boys team as they all tried them on. I've eavesdropped on multiple conversations about hopelessly unrequited love that I had to do my best to take seriously. Unable to resist the temptation to have a point, I guess, I have to conclude that this venture into Bukatsudou has given the humanity, and more importantly, the adorable frivolity, to the students at my school, and that sir, rules. Put simply and without an eloquent flourish to round it out.
Friday, May 15, 2009
A Nod to Bukatsudo
The phrase "Bukatsudou" literally translates to "club activities," but were you to take a more holistic, emotive approach to the translation, you might come up with a much longer term that sounds more like a way of life than a good way to waste a lunch period. There is a character in Japanese, 道, "Dou," that essentially means "path, road, way," and it can express either the most plebian patch of concrete you've ever set foot upon (歩道 (hodou) for example, means sidewalk), or the other kind of life-governing "path," the kind that often, perhaps even necessarily, tend towards the transcendental (武士道 (bushidou) means, roughly and ineptly translated, "the way of the sword," or perhaps "the way of the samurai.") The "dou" in Bukatsudou (部活動) is not that "dou," but I want to suggest that it probably should be. If I were to spell "Bukatsudo" in Japanese, I would spell it 部活道, and I would translate it as "The Way of the Middle School Student."
Clubs in Japanese schools are nothing like clubs in American schools. When you think of clubs in America, you think of eminently marginal, fringey little unions that meet once a week at lunch somewhere and maybe occasionally plan a weekend outing. When you think of clubs in America you think of Debate Club, Environmental Club, Key Club, Anime Club. You think of them generally as a way to boost that extra-curricular section of your college applications, or, alternatively, as a way to goof off with a theme. Critically, you think of them as being fully separate from the much more visible, generally more serious team sports category of after-school-activities. Sure you've got your Swing Club and your Dinosaur Club (I just looked up a list of club activities at my high school because I couldn't come up with any more and they actually have a fucking dinosaur club), but compared to say, the Football Team, or the Basketball Team, who cares? Not only are clubs second tier socially, but they also just lag as a commitment of time and energy.
Enter the Way of the Middle Schooler. Clubs in Japanese Middle Schools take sports teams in American Middle Schools and bludgeon them over the head with a kendo sword; I'm not even going to mention what they do to clubs. Part of it is just a semantic difference, however. Club activities in Japan encompass all after-school activities, as everything from the Brass Band to the Soccer team fall under the umbrella of Bukatsu, whereas in American schools there is a stricter delineation made between the kids who spend their afternoons painting pictures and those who spend theirs kicking balls. Semantics aside, however, clubs in Japan are pretty much across the board a bigger commitment than anything American middle schoolers participate in, be it a club or a team.
I could go on like this forever, cutting cultural differences out of the fabric of my afternoons, but by this point I'm fairly sick of turning my life into an unending comparative anthropology classroom, so as much as is possible, I want to look at the Way of the Middle Schooler without overtly filtering it through an American consciousness. Whoops, I'm writing this so I guess that's an impossible task, but, Bukatsudo is fucking sweet and I don't want to taint it by punctuating it with an incessant, and ultimately misdirecting, chorus of "In America, we do it THIS way, but!"'s. Who cares about American Middle Schools anyway, they suck. However, this post is already horrifically polluted with them. I guess there's no escaping cross-cultural analysis in this post, so I've decided to finish here. Let the next post deal with the natives as they are, not as reflected off of the colonizers. Stupidest line ever.
In summation, clubs in America suck and aren't really a big deal, but clubs in Japan are EVERYTHING and are pretty awesome because of it. Stay tuned if you'd like to learn why.
Clubs in Japanese schools are nothing like clubs in American schools. When you think of clubs in America, you think of eminently marginal, fringey little unions that meet once a week at lunch somewhere and maybe occasionally plan a weekend outing. When you think of clubs in America you think of Debate Club, Environmental Club, Key Club, Anime Club. You think of them generally as a way to boost that extra-curricular section of your college applications, or, alternatively, as a way to goof off with a theme. Critically, you think of them as being fully separate from the much more visible, generally more serious team sports category of after-school-activities. Sure you've got your Swing Club and your Dinosaur Club (I just looked up a list of club activities at my high school because I couldn't come up with any more and they actually have a fucking dinosaur club), but compared to say, the Football Team, or the Basketball Team, who cares? Not only are clubs second tier socially, but they also just lag as a commitment of time and energy.
Enter the Way of the Middle Schooler. Clubs in Japanese Middle Schools take sports teams in American Middle Schools and bludgeon them over the head with a kendo sword; I'm not even going to mention what they do to clubs. Part of it is just a semantic difference, however. Club activities in Japan encompass all after-school activities, as everything from the Brass Band to the Soccer team fall under the umbrella of Bukatsu, whereas in American schools there is a stricter delineation made between the kids who spend their afternoons painting pictures and those who spend theirs kicking balls. Semantics aside, however, clubs in Japan are pretty much across the board a bigger commitment than anything American middle schoolers participate in, be it a club or a team.
I could go on like this forever, cutting cultural differences out of the fabric of my afternoons, but by this point I'm fairly sick of turning my life into an unending comparative anthropology classroom, so as much as is possible, I want to look at the Way of the Middle Schooler without overtly filtering it through an American consciousness. Whoops, I'm writing this so I guess that's an impossible task, but, Bukatsudo is fucking sweet and I don't want to taint it by punctuating it with an incessant, and ultimately misdirecting, chorus of "In America, we do it THIS way, but!"'s. Who cares about American Middle Schools anyway, they suck. However, this post is already horrifically polluted with them. I guess there's no escaping cross-cultural analysis in this post, so I've decided to finish here. Let the next post deal with the natives as they are, not as reflected off of the colonizers. Stupidest line ever.
In summation, clubs in America suck and aren't really a big deal, but clubs in Japan are EVERYTHING and are pretty awesome because of it. Stay tuned if you'd like to learn why.
Monday, May 11, 2009
An Event that Defies Explanation
I mean, it probably doesn't, but I'm not really feeling like words at the moment, so I will insert (moving) pictures instead. This is what I did last weekend. You only really have to watch the first twenty seconds or so unless you want to see an oldish man bite it and get laughed at. I get bumped out of the picture by a drunk dude posing as one of those wind-up cymbal-clashing monkeys and never make it to the fore again. I'm not really sure what happens in the second video.
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