Random thoughts on Roger, etc.
The greatest piece on tennis giant Roger Federer has already been written (and obviously this is not it). On August 20, 2006, the New York Times published a piece entitled “Roger Federer as Religious Experience” by the late David Foster Wallace. In fact, it’s the best tennis piece I’ve ever read and (in my opinion) the best piece of sports writing ever published. I say this as an admitted fan of both RF and the late DFW (who took his own life a year ago this Saturday), but I think most tennis enthusiasts and literary/writerly types would agree that the piece is extremely successful.
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Side note: before becoming platonically smitten by Federer, my favourite tennis player was Brazilian Gustavo Kuerten. In some ways “Guga”, as he was called, was similar to Federer – a fairly complete game, fast, and with the one-handed backhand (see below). He’s tall and gangly with a big curly mop that sort of reminds me of Dave Eggers, and among the many power baseline tennis players his more fluid style was beautiful to watch.
Kuerten won three French Open titles between 1997 and 2001 and for a time was the World No. 1. Guga was often the underdog against the power hitters regardless of his ranking, which is sort of anti-Federer in a way. He had this horrible tennis grunt too, which I disliked, whereas Federer is completely silent (at least relative to many others). Oh, and like Federer, Kuerten speaks around four languages. His family story’s pretty moving. But I digress.
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On the surface, there’s a lot to dislike about Federer. He’s very pristine – his monogrammed warm-up jackets are a bit much and he’s definitely one of the more manicured players out there. While others sweat and huff around the court (some picking their underwear out of their butt repeatedly), Roger is the picture of hygiene and etiquette – rarely showing emotion, almost never grunting when he destroys a forehand winner, and hardly ever dripping with sweat like many of his peers. One of his most notable attributes is his “nervous tic” of fiddling with his hair (which I think DFW orginally brought to my attention in his piece – what, you’re still here? You haven’t gone and read it yet?). My impression is that only David Beckham and Tiger Woods really come close to his picture-perfect composure in the sporting world.
With or without his decidedly not-rough-around-the-edges appearance, there’s little dispute that he’sone of the greatest player to ever hit a tennis ball – if not the best. He continues to break records at a relatively middle-aged 28 years, with no signs of injury or letting up otherwise.
First off, the forehand – Federer has his incredible shots down to an art – he can rifle a shot up the short side with just enough spin to curve the ball in near the baseline, or just as easily launch the ball cross-court to the far back corner. You can see a few of these in this surprisingly decent-quality video:
He’s also one of the few players left that employ the one-handed backhand shot, which gives him far more options in terms of ball placement. It’s a beautiful thing to watch:
Anyway, I refuse to get into further detail about his game play, as I really REALLY would rather you read the David Foster Wallace piece (see link above).
He’s also one of the few celebrities I’ve seen that use Facebook fairly effectively to interact with fans. He often posts sorta-cute little videos from behind-the-scenes or what have you, keeping his 2.9+ million Facebook followers (this author among them) endeared and engaged. For what it’s worth.
Note: I’m not quite sure what the point of this piece was – I blasted most of it out immediately after Federer’s four-set win over Robin Soderling Wednesday night, which started off easy (a 6-0 rout in a 25-minute first set) before becoming slightly more complicated. I think I really just wanted to try and write about tennis. At the same time the match was taking place, there was a back-and-forth online conversation I was having with a couple of friends. Among topics discussed: Federer’s fear of Nadal, warmup jackets and cardigans, male capri pants, chatting about the weather, Gavin Rossdale (Federer and wife Mirka’s third wheel?), warriors and injuries.
six minute songs, installment #2: LCD Soundsystem, “Someone Great”
- LCD Soundsystem (photo: Rock Insider)
What to do to follow up “Lay Low” by My Morning Jacket? Installment #2 could have taken many different turns – from early ’90s funk-rock to drone-y solitude kinda stuff – but in randomly flipping through the old iPod I came across the song that maybe should have been #1, only because it’s probably my favourite six minute + song in the past few years.
LCD Soundsystem – “Someone Great”
(The official video is a radio edit, and clocks in at just under four minutes. It’s a beautiful video, but the track is sped up just a hair, which makes it seem a bit more manic but sort of incomplete. This video is just bizarro.)
What can I say about this song – it’s simple, repetitive, yet so evocative it makes me a little choked every time I hear it. There’s something really evocative about the lyrics, which are sort of simple but really personal, and self-referential in a way I think is brilliant and tragic:
I wish that we could talk about it,
But there, that’s the problem.
With someone new I could have started,
Too late, for beginnings.
The little things that made me harassed,
Are gone, in a moment.
I miss the way we used to argue,
Locked, in your basement.
I wake up and the phone is ringing,
Surprised, as it’s early.
And that should be the perfect warning,
That something’s the problem.
To tell the truth I saw it coming,
The way, you were breathing.
But nothing can prepare you for it,
The voice, on the other, end.
The worst is all the lovely weather,
I’m sad, it’s not raining.
The coffee isn’t even bitter,
Because, what’s the difference?
There’s all the work that needs to be done,
It’s late, for revision.
There’s all the time and all the planning,
And songs, to be finished.
And it keeps coming,
And it keeps coming,
And it keeps coming,
Till the day it stops (x3)
And it keeps coming (x7)
Till the day it stops.
I wish that we could talk about it,
But there, that’s the problem.
With someone new I could have started,
Too late, for beginnings.
You’re smaller than my wife imagined,
Surprised, you were human.
There shouldn’t be this ring of silence,
But what, are the options?
When someone great is gone (x8)
We’re safe, for the moment.
Saved,
For the moment
The music and vocal tracks on the original are pretty constant/don’t change much throughout the song, so when James Murphy switches into the higher-range “When someone great is gone” right near the end it has this elevating feeling that music sometimes has that just takes you to a totally different level.
I don’t remember the first time I heard “Someone Great”, but it was a) within the last 18 months and b) a profound influence on my musical taste. It’s a sort of driving, simple song that relies on the evocative nature of the lyrics and the slow progressions that build through the song to the end.
Does any of this make any sense? Let me know. This song sort of leaves me at a loss for words.
3 mid-life skateboarding wipeouts
Quick post about my skateboarding woes – while some buy an expensive car or something to cope with their mid-life crises, I went the more affordable (and painful) route and picked up a skateboard. Actually, I bought two.
It should be noted that I don’t know how to do any tricks and have no intentions of learning any. The impetus to buy a skateboard was to make traveling to work and back more exciting. Work is about a ten-minute walk from home, and putting on the bike helmet, riding said bikem draggin it inside, etc. seemed sort of pointless when the ride in between is about one minute. Skateboards are quicker to set up, easier to carry around and fulfill some are of my psyche that feels my life is wasting away as I get older.
Anyhow, I digress – I’m trying to get my creative writing mojo back and need to get the associated muscles back in shape. Here are my wipeouts…
1. The first wipeout was the night I got the skateboard(s) – I bought two on Kijiji from a young woman in the south of the city of Winnipeg. I arranged picked them up from her dad – when I arrived he was sitting in his garage eating supper, drinking beer and watching hockey (it was a lovely spring day). He asked me if I wanted to join him. I declined, citing the long drive home.
I headed out almost immediately with one of the two skateboards, walking over to a neaby back alley so as to not be seen/etc. on a main thoroughfare. I carefully started rolling along – my first time skateboarding in about 20 years – and after a couple hundred metres I was feeling pretty good, rolling along at a decent pace.
Then I hit a hole in the pavement and went flying, cutting my left knee and skidding on my hands. I hobbled back home some ten minutes after I had left amd began the bandaging process.
2. About three weeks ago I was blasting down the sidewalk on my street – a route I had taken many times. I guess I wasn’t following my normal path along the sidewalk, ’cause I hit an uneven slab of concrete and went flying.
I cut the same knee as that first night, this time ripping a hole in a new, sort of expensive pair of jeans that I had worn about twice.
3. Around ten days ago I had rolled down to Bruce Park (near both my house and work), as I like to go there and skateboard around or read. The pavement is new and smooth – one long meandering charcoal-coloured strip of icing through the grass.
I was blasting along this one section near the kiddie pool/play structure, and hit something that was neither rock nor branch – it was softer than the latter, as instead of rolling over it it squished down a bit, wedged between the pavement and the wheel, and brought the board to a skidding halt. There was a greenish, two-foot skid mark I noticed as I peeled myself off the pavement.
I scraped up my other knee pretty badly, and was in the unfortunate situation of being in great pain and about six blocks from work. In retrospect, I should have gone home, tended to the wound and then gone back to work, as home was about four blocks closer. Instead, I hobbled down Portage Ave. (Winnipeg’s biggest street) and back to work, repeatedly changing out the bandages throughout the afternoon.
As it happens, that wound got infected and I’m still dealing with it.
That’s it for now – more six-minute song posts coming, as well as a bunch of otehr stuff as it rattles around in my brain…
Six-minute songs, installment #1 – My Morning Jacket, “Lay Low”.
OK, so here’s my first crack at this theme that I want to get up and running in this blog – six-minute songs. I’m typically a big fan of the epic jams, and I figured six minutes is a decent enough minimum to get some pretty fun stuff collected here.
I figured I’d start off with a song I’ve been listening almost daily (at least once) as of late – My Morning Jacket’s “Lay Low”. It’s a good first installment in this series for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it’s 6:01 in length – a good introduction to this series.
I first heard this song while listening to some random stuff on Last.fm (which hasn’t been working very well for me as of late… it doesn’t want to seem to scrobble my playlists from work) – for some reason this song kept popping up in random playlists I’d listen to once I got bored of the music on my computer.
For the first couple of minutes I wouldn’t really notice much about the song other than it sounded like pretty decent southern tinged American rock. But about two-thirds of the way in, when some of the guitar freakout stuff starts happening, it would always grab my attention and I’d go and make note of the artist (and then of course never follow up on it). After this happened three or four times, I stopped whatever it was I was doing and tracked it down.
Then someone let me know that they had been on Austin City Limits. See below – it’s 27 minutes of hair-swinging rock, so come back whenever you have some time to kill. But do watch it – I did and was totally blown away.
I grabbed Z, the album on which “Lay Low” appears, and I was pretty much smitten.
How do you even describe the sound of My Morning Jacket? It’s like 1970s truck stop rock meets a more rocking Neil Young meets Prince. Jim James has an incredible (and incredibly unique) voice that can growl the bottom-end vocals and trill in the falsettos. He also totally shreds on the guitar. He and longer-haired bandmates are as comfortable playing softer, quiet material as they are busting out some serious rock.
Yuck – OK, in the future maybe I won’t try to describe what a six-minute song’s band sounds like. So forget that – just check out “Lay Low”:
Sorry, this entry is a total mess – I’ll work out the kinks – promise.
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The hesitant introductory post.
So I’m finally getting around to this WordPress blog – trying to figure out just what sort of shape it’s going to take. I’d like to use it as an outlet/repository for all the things that go through my head that just don’t fit anywhere else I write (I do a wine column here, am a contributor here and work at my day job as a copywriter here).
So yeah, I write a lot about wine, but need an outlet whereby I can talk about some or all of the following:
- hockey
- music
- popular culture
- Winnipeg
- etc.
I don’t know how frequently I’ll update or what subject matter(s) will dominate this blog, but so far I have an idea or two about regular features. One that immediately came to mind was a weekly post called Six Minute Songs (or something along those lines). The basic idea: quite often my favourite song on any given record is one of the longer ones. Typically buried in the middle or near the end of a record (song #6 or #8 seems to be a popular spot), the more epic-ish songs (the ones overlooked by most radio stations) often provide far more satisfaction for me than a quick two-minute ditty.
Beyond that, I think a lot of the rest of the content will vary based on my mood, the time of day/year, and so forth.
So here’s a little bit about me: I’m 33, live in Winnipeg, am married and have two kids (2.5 years and two months). I’ve played in a few local bands (and still have aspirations to take it up again), am easily distracted, and have aspirations to once again start producing fiction-type writing.
I figured some sort of outlet to pull together the thoughts that don’t fit neatly into my paid writing gigs was in order. And here we are.
A note on the title of the blog: I wrote a column for a couple of years for the University of Winnipeg’s student paper, The Uniter. It had the same title, and served a similar purpose to what I imagine this blog will – a repository for disconnected ideas. This space, however, will be a bit more useful in that I’ll be able to write about odds and ends in a way that isn’t necessarily print-worthy (like the columns tried to/had to be).
Take this space for what you will, and I’ll use it similarly. And please let me know what you think.
Thanks.
