Coney Island of the Minds

A few years ago, on a trip to NYC, I took the F train out to Coney Island.  I’d never been and had wanted to go see it for many years.  It was winter, late February, and I thoroughly enjoyed the deserted and desolate tawdry seediness of the place.  I took a bunch of photos and when I got back to California eagerly showed them, but no one seemed to get my affection for it.  So I was amused, gratified, and a trifle vindicated to learn in Just Kids, Patti Smith’s memoir of her friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe, that Coney Island was one of their favorite places and they took many photos of it.  One has a sense there of being on a borderline between tacky vulgarity and the sublimely eternal.  I think this feeling intoxicated them and that Mapplethorpe subsequently sought to replicate it in many of his photographs. 

Patti Smith didn’t start out with the ambition to be a rock star.  She came to New York City from poverty in south Jersey in the summer of ’67 with nothing but a copy of Rimbaud’s Illuminations and the hope to be an artist, but without a clear notion of what that meant or how to get there.  Like thousands of other kids in those days, she wrote poetry and drew.  She did not sing or play an instrument.  

I was in the East Village myself in the summer of ’68, as Patti was, so I may have rubbed shoulders with her in Tomkins Square Park without knowing it, since she was as anonymous as I was back then.  There was some nostalgia for me in hearing about her adventures in the city in those days.  I knew plenty of wanna-be artists then, but none of them made it big like her. 

The propulsion of Just Kids derives from the mystery of how she got from being a wanna-be artist/poet and hanger-on to a rock star, and the disappointment of the book is that, after spending a lot of time describing the first phase (I must admit to some envy about all the interesting people she met while lodging at the Chelsea Hotel), she skims over the second in just a few pages.  Mapplethorpe’s transition from a hippie bead-stringer, part-time art student at Pratt, and collagist to enfant terrible photographer and darling of the haut monde also takes place mostly off stage, although his charisma and social-climbing aspirations come across.  She gives him a lot of credit for building her sense of worth and encouraging her to sing and take her poetry in a musical direction, just as she encourages him to start making photographs.  In fact, she testifies that, without him, she would never have become who she became.  And she met him entirely by chance.  But in addition to him, there were at least a dozen other people she had to meet at just the right moments in order for her career to take the path it did.  The same may be said for Robert.  Had he not met Patti, he might never have come to photography.  Subsequent steps along that path required more ‘helpers.’  But there are many who do not encounter the right helpers at the right times; in fact, to do so is the rare exception. 

Chance, or luck, plays a role in the success or failure of everyone, in every walk of life, but because the odds are so long, it plays an inordinate role in the arts.  You can see people all around Patti falling by the wayside.  And there are many more in the shadows.  It’s like walking through a hail of bullets and watching your cohorts be picked off, one after another.  Jimi Hendrix is picked off, Janice Joplin, Jim Morrison, but these are well-known people who had already, to a substantial extent, realized their potential.  There are many more people we have never heard of who were talented but unlucky.  They may not have literally died, but just been shunted off their proper path by some onerous obstacle or unlucky break, or merely missed some critical connection, so that they never reached their full potential, never found the endeavor that was right for them.  These are the vast majority, actually.  Everyone has some talent.  The question is: are you able to figure out what your greatest talents are and get what you need to maximize them. Patti knows how lucky she was.  It’s hard enough for people who know exactly where they want to go, but for people like her, who are groping, unclear where their paths lie, stumbling around, bumping into things, there is so much that has to go right for them to grasp the prize.  And so much that can go wrong and prevent them from grasping it.  The people who make it through become heroes precisely because they are so incredibly lucky.  There’s an aura of mystery and wonder, even awe, about how it could possibly have happened. 

The Australian Open

The big surprise at the Australian Open this year was that, for the first time in 3 years, the final of a major tournament had neither Roger Federer nor Rafael Nadal in it.  The former fell to Novak Djokovic in the semis and the latter succumbed to a torn thigh muscle and the dogged play of David Ferrer in the quarters.  Astonished observers wondered if this signaled a changing of the guard, a new generation of talent coming to the fore.  Certainly there are questions as to how long the 24-year-old Nadal’s body can hold up to his punishing brand of tennis, questions increased by the fact that he went out with another injury here, but indications are that he’s going to recover quickly.  Federer, on the other hand, who is 29, has been dominated by the 23-year-old Djokovic in the last two majors they’ve played, and this raises a question as to whether, with two rivals consistently beating him, he can still hope to win majors.    

Tennis is a sport of declining popularity in the USA.  This seems odd because it is such an individual sport and the United States is such an individualistic country.  The ideal of self-reliance is deeply ingrained (it fuels the outrage about “socialism”), and tennis is just about the most self-reliant sport there is.  Even a boxer gets to go back to his corner every three minutes, but the tennis player is out there alone for the duration of the match. 

Back in the day the United States had the dominant players, with Sampras and Agassi, not to mention Courier and Chang, and before them, Connors and McEnroe.  On the women’s side we had Billy Jean King, Chris Evert, Tracy Austin, and Martina Navratilova.  I don’t mean to disrespect Roddick and Blake, I admire and root for them, but even though Roddick won the US Open in 2003 and was briefly ranked #1 that year, and Blake got as high as #4 in 2006, their achievements were not at the level of Sampras and Agassi or Connors and McEnroe.  Blake, now 31, is in the twilight of his career, and Roddick, 28, seems not that far behind (he was blown out in the fourth round by the Swiss journeyman player Wawrinka) and there are no new American players waiting in the wings to measure up to them (Isner and Querrey seem, at best, top 20 players).  On the women’s side, the era of the dominance of the Williams sisters is drawing to a close (Serena, 29, didn’t play and Venus, 30, went out in the third round), and there are no American women whatever on the horizon to replace them. 

In short, America is increasingly irrelevant to tennis.  We face a period in which we will have no players good enough to contend for the championship we host.  Tennis is now ruled by the Europeans, with a few exceptions.  On the men’s side, the Argentine Juan Martin Del Potro (who beat Federer to win the 2009 US Open) is a threat.  And on the women’s side, the Chinese players Li Na and Peng Shuai are making inroads and beginning to threaten the Europeans (Li Na made it all the way to the final, a first for an Asian player in any major).  In China, the popularity of tennis is surging.  But Americans seem to be retreating into their parochial national sports with which the rest of the world has little to do. 

One of the interests of the Australian Open as the first major of the year is that you get to see new up-and-coming players.  The new Australian hope is a transplanted European, 18-year-old Bernard Tomic, who in the third round managed to break Rafael Nadal’s serve twice, something few older players have been able to do.  Then there was Milos Raonic, another European transplant, but in this case to Canada, who got to the fourth round where he was taken out by David Ferrer, the subsequent conqueror of Nadal.  And finally there was Alexandr Dolgopolov (try saying that 3 times quickly!) from the Ukraine, whose unconventional game took out the # 4 seed Robin Soderling from Sweden on his way to the quarter-finals where he took a set before falling to # 5 Andy Murray of Great Britain.  But as for Americans, they were nowhere to be seen.  It almost seems as if the United States, which was once at the center of things, has slipped off to the side and is eddying around its own solipsistic internal issues while the rest of the world hurries on by.  America, in its deepening self-involvement and internal fractiousness (born of an exaggerated sense of self-importance), has come to feel that the rest of the world is irrelevant, while in actuality America is becoming increasingly irrelevant to the rest of the world.