Cars

A friend called the other day to ask if I’d like to see a car collection.  He’s a member of the Alfa Romeo club and someone in the club had met the owner of the collection and asked if he would let the club members see it.  He’d agreed and the viewing had been set for Saturday morning.  My friend took me as a guest.



MGA



The cars were stored in a warehouse.  The first car I saw upon entering was an Austin-Healey 100M, worth about $100,000.  As I walked around with my mouth hanging open, I saw a roomful of sports cars: several more Healeys (including another 100M), a couple Jaguar XK120s, an early Porsche 911 targa with the soft rear window and a 911S, several Porsche 356s, including a Speedster and a Carrera coupe with a glassy silver paint job befitting a car worth about a quarter million dollars.  In one corner there was a Ford Model T Touring with full side curtains and, next to it, a ’36 Ford roadster, but otherwise the cars were all European sports cars of 50s and 60s vintage; just the cars I’ve always admired and desired.  I felt like I was in my garden of earthly delights.  There were several wonderfully restored MGA roadsters, and a coupe as well.  The MGA is a car whose lines I’m particularly partial to.  My first car was an Austin Healey Bugeye Sprite, and, in an ideal world, an MGA would’ve been my second.  The third would have been a big Healey and the fourth, an E-Type Jaguar (there were no E-Types in the collection).  But this ideal progression of mine was derailed by the intrusion of practical considerations.  There were also some Model T based race cars in the room, plus a Morgan, an Alfa Romeo Giulietta Sprint, an MG TD and a TF, and in the corner opposite the Model T, something I'd never seen before: a Turner.  There were maybe 25 classic cars in all, and none of them was even slightly shabby.



Pierce-Arrow



Then someone said, “There’s another room over here!”  I squeezed past a massive Lincoln from the 20s that was parked in a workshop area with a lift and work tables displaying a pair of running boards off the Lincoln that someone not present was inlaying with wood laths.  Doubtless the collector employed someone full time to maintain these cars.  That would be essential with a collection this large.  (Years ago I knew a guy—he painted 2 of my cars, a Lotus Elan +2 and a Jensen-Healey—who for a while worked for Neil Young.  Young at the time employed 3 full time workers on his car collection.)  Beyond I could see a room perhaps twice as large as the first full of ancient brass era cars (pre-1910), and cars of the teens and twenties.  I was told the collector was building on a collection that had been started by his grandfather and added to by his father.  There were a couple of Packards and half a dozen Pierce-Arrows, huge things bigger than an SUV, with tires (the early ones of white rubber) almost up to my armpit, the later Arrows sporting their trademark trumpet-shaped headlight fairings.  There was a Chandler, a Reo runabout from 1906 and a pair of Oldsmobiles with a couple Cadillacs from the same era; a Marmon, a pair of Stutzes, a Pope Hartford, a Maxwell, and more Model Ts.  It seemed a miracle that so many cars this old had been preserved.  After all, it’s not like they could be kept in a steamer trunk in someone’s attic.  They required constant space and attention.  Again, all of them were in excellent condition. 



1906 Reo



I hadn’t the vaguest notion what any of these cars were worth.  I’d never been much interested in cars this old.  Back in the days when I used to attend the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance every year, I would skip over this vintage with barely a cursory glance to head for the 50s and 60s era cars.  But this time I felt fascinated.  These were vehicles my parents would have known when they were children.  I wished I could climb into them.  The brass cars (aka horseless carriages), in particular, awed me.  They harkened to a steampunk aesthetic.  The brass fixtures were exquisite.  There was something on the running boards of a couple of them that looked like a brass thermos.  I asked someone if he knew what it was and he said, “Yes, that’s to make acetylene gas for the lights.  You put calcium carbide in the larger bottom section and water in the top.  The water drips down into the calcium carbide and makes the gas, which is piped to the lights through this tubing.  They’re often referred to as carbide lights.”  So if you wanted lights at night you not only had to load your gas generator and work up some pressure, you also had to light your headlights with a match.  There were strange pedal configurations, all sorts of levers sprouting from everywhere.  Back in these early days there were over a thousand independent manufacturers with no ruling paradigm for how to do anything, so everyone was going off in his own direction.  In some of these cars you had to advance the spark manually as you accelerated, sometimes using a hand throttle.  There was so much for the driver to attend to, in contrast to our era when all cars are pretty much the same and virtually drive themselves.  The oldest were incredibly raw and primitive, but the rapid evolution of the engineering was fascinating, you could see the brains of their designers ticking over, trying to solve problems.  You could smell the history in these cars; they were time machines.  If you could sit in them you would be in another time, and hence a different world.  I imagined driving one of them and finding the external environment transformed as well and myself chugging down a dirt lane through a slow, open, almost 19th century world.  I wished I could spend a few days there and fiddle around with them, get to know them better, but after an hour or so we were rounded up and told there was another building nearby where the “overflow” was stored.   



Bugeye Sprite



The 3^rd building had just a few, maybe a dozen, cars in it, the least valuable of the collection, it seemed: a Lancia sprint car, a couple of Porsche 912s and a 914, another MGA, a Ferrari 308 and then, over in one corner, I spotted it: a Bugeye Sprite like I had my senior year of high school and first year of college.  It had been a long time since I’d seen one in the round.  Better believe I lingered there a while, looking it over, letting the sweet memories bubble up.    

Indian Wells 2

Milos Raonic

The first match I headed for when the venue opened on Friday was Milos Raonic.  At 11 o’clock it was already 90 degrees and apparently the word was out about him because Stadium 2, which is not small, filled up quickly.  Raonic, up against a Turkish player named Marsel Ilhan, was impressive in the smooth fluidity of his all-court game.  Despite being only 20, he has all the shots and puts them together with grace.  He dismissed Ilhan in 2 quick sets so I popped over to Stadium 3 to watch a bit of Ryan Harrison, an 18-year-old American who’s been talked up, but who is currently ranked 152 and lost in the first round of the Australian Open.  He did a good job of putting away the Frenchman Jeremy Chardy (ranked 49), holding his nerve even after losing the 1^st set tiebreak.  (He went on to beat Garcia-Lopez in the next round and then upset Raonic to earn the chance to face Federer, whom he took to a tiebreak in the 1^st set before losing, so it was something of a breakout tournament for him.) 

Ryan Harrison

Later that afternoon, after a breeze had come up and the temperature had dropped into the low 80s, I went over to Court 7 to see Bernard Tomic.  There were only a few people there so I was able to sprawl out, stretch my legs over the seats in front and lean back against the seat behind, and have plenty of elbow room.  Unfortunately, given how comfortable I was, Tomic looked tired and bored, as if he didn’t really care much whether he won or not.  All the same, he was able to deliver enough points to win in 3 sets.  But his game struck me as more one-dimensional than I’d thought, he was just banging the ball from the backcourt without much finesse or point construction, and I lost some of my interest in him. 

After a trip to the car to grab something to eat, I headed for Court 4 where a women’s doubles match (Benesova/Zahlavova vs. Sanchez/Garrigues) was just finishing up.  I snagged an excellent seat right on the court for the following match with the team of Victoria Azarenka (Belarus) and the foxy Maria Kirilenko (Russia) against another pair of Spaniards (Llagostera Vives and Parra Santonja).  It was cooling off rapidly by this time and even though I pulled a long-sleeved tee over my tee-shirt, and a sweatshirt over that, I was still a little chilly due to a brisk wind that had come up.  But as the match went on the wind slacked off and I slowly got more comfortable, and in the end the contest turned out to be a thriller, going down to 11-9 in a super-tiebreak. 



Maria Kirilenko

 

After the women, Alex Dolgopolov, slighter of build and more slender than he appeared on TV, and Xavier Malisse came on to play doubles against Tomas Berdych and Janko Tipsarevic.   Dolgopolov and Malisse were in high spirits, laughing and joking even when they appeared to be losing.  They seemed to find everything amusing.  Their opponents, on the other hand, were sullen and grumpy.  Tipsarevic got caught reaching over the net and hitting a ball on his opponents’ side, which cost him the point, and this put him in an even darker mood, the more so when he saw how amused Malisse and Dolgopolov were by it.  A little later, Malisse sliced a drop shot so wickedly that, before Tipsarevic could get to it, it bounced back over the net to his own side, something I’d never seen happen before.  He slapped his leg and chuckled with delight.  Like the women’s match before it, this went to a super-tiebreak that was pulled out by Dolgopolov/Malisse, 10-8, their relaxed good humor winning the day against the sourpuss Serb and his cranky Czech partner.  (In subsequent rounds Malisse/Dolgopolov took out both the Bryans and the Murrays, not to mention Bopanna/Quereshi, and, lo and behold, went on to win the doubles championship.)  When I left the venue it was 11 PM.  I’d been watching tennis for 12 hours.  It was the best day of the trip. 



Alex Dolgopolov

 On Saturday I started off at Stadium 3 watching Marcos Baghdatis play an Indian named Somdev Devvarman.  I’d heard of Devvarman for unexpectedly beating Tipsarevic in Davis Cup.  It was the only match India won against Serbia (which in the last few years has become a tennis power).  Nevertheless I was unprepared for the drubbing he gave Baghdatis.  Baghdatis, who is usually an energetic, happy guy, was dragging glumly around the court looking like he was sick, utterly lacking his usual pep. 

The following match in that stadium was Ivo Karlovic from Croatia, the current holder of the record for the fastest serve at 156 mph (topping Roddick’s 155), against the #6 player in the world and one of the best returners, David Ferrer.  6’10” Karlovic played extraordinarily well, firing off serves in the high 130s routinely and coming to the net to finish off the point when necessary.  He upset Ferrer in straight sets. 



Donald Young

 
From there I moved over to court 5 to see “The Dog,” Dolgopolov, play singles against the Rumanian Victor Hanescu, a journeyman opponent he handled in straight sets.  Dolgopolov has a fast, quirky game that is fun to watch, but he lacks experience and still needs to learn how to beat the big boys.  (He fell in the next round to Del Potro.)  While watching him I could hear the match behind me in Stadium 2 between #5 Andy Murray and Donald Young being called.  Donald Young is an American player who was spoken of as promising years ago.  He was the #1 junior in 2005, but so far hasn’t been able to translate that success to the pro circuit.  He was ranked 143, so my expectation was that Murray would crush him.  Imagine my surprise when he won the first set in a tiebreak.  But that was nothing to the astonishment I felt when he went on to win the second set and the match, and the stadium crowd erupted: then I was really flabbergasted.  Of all the upsets in the tournament (and there were many) this one and Ryan Harrison’s victory over Raonic were the most gratifying, because they offer some (slim, because it now appears Young’s victory probably had more to do with Murray’s post-Australian slump than with Young finally finding his game) hope for the future of American tennis, at least on the men’s side.  The women’s side remains bleak. 

Xavier Malisse

Afterward I went over to Stadium 2 and caught the end of the Querrey/Tipsarevic match, which went to the American Querrey in straight sets.  Following them, in the same stadium, were Malisse (ranked 52) and Tsonga (seeded #15), and I’d long wanted to see Tsonga live.  Nevertheless, I tend to root for the underdog, and that was Malisse in this case (Malisse, who is 30 now, has failed to live up to the early promise of his talent).  To my surprise and delight, Malisse, although he was not the happy-go-lucky guy he had been when playing doubles with The Dog, still played well and came out on top.  (He was beaten by Devvarman in the next round.)

Sunday I started at Stadium 3 to see the Frenchman Richard Gasquet play Pablo Cuevas from Uruguay.  Gasquet has a beautiful all-court game and one of the best one-handed backhands you’ll ever see.  Like Malisse, he’s been an underachiever in his career but he’s still a joy to watch.  He had no trouble with Cuevas.  (Later in the tournament he beat Roddick, but lost to the eventual winner Djokovic in the quarters.)  After him the Serbian former #1 Ana Ivanovic came on.  She started strong, faltered with a string of double faults, but then recovered to take it in 2.  Actually I left when the score was 3-0 in the second to go watch the Bryan twins who were practicing in the next court over.  Then I went to Court 8 to watch Schiavone/Stosur take on Azarenka/Kirilenko.  I’d enjoyed the previous Azarenka/Kirilenko doubles match so much that I wanted more, and, even though the seat I found at the end of the court wasn’t nearly as good as the one I’d had for their previous match, I wasn’t disappointed by the quality as this bout also went to 11-9 in a super-tiebreak.  (Unfortunately Azarenka was injured in singles with the #1 seed Wozniacki, so she couldn’t play their semi-final doubles match.)  When it was over I wandered over to Court 4, where Yen-Hsun Lu from Taipei (who beat Roddick at Wimbledon last year) was taking on Ernests Gulbis from Latvia.  I got a great seat, right on the court, but the match was kind of lifeless.  Gulbis was firing forehands like bullets, as usual, but a lot of them were missing.  After the first set I decided the match lacked excitement (maybe I was just getting tennised-out at that point) and that I would abandon my great seat and get an early start on the drive back to the airport in Ontario. 

Richard Gasquet

So the highlights for me were the 2 doubles matches on Friday night for which I had a perfect seat and both of which were exciting cliffhangers, and then late on Saturday afternoon the Malisse/Tsonga contest.  The Raonic/Ilhan, Gasquet/Cuevas and Karlovic/Ferrer matches gave me the chance to see some good play on one side of the net, but only the last was somewhat competitive, and it was hard to fully enjoy them because they were all played during the most intense heat of the day and I felt like I was being barbecued.  But around 2:30, 3 o’clock each day a bit of a breeze came up and that made sitting in the hot sun more bearable, so that later matches were more enjoyable. 

Djokovic ended up winning the tournament, beating Federer for the third time in a row in the semis, and Nadal in the final.  That made him 18-0 on the year.  It looks like there’s a new sheriff in town. 

 

Indian Wells 1

I was recently in the desert for 3 days at a tennis tournament.  The official name used to be the Pacific Life Open, now it’s the BNP Paribas Open, but to tennis fans it’s always been known as Indian Wells, after the city in the Coachella valley where it’s located.  Palm Springs, Cathedral City, Rancho Mirage, Palm Desert, Indian Wells: the cities in this valley coalesce and are all knit together with 5-lane boulevards filled with shiny, new, high-end vehicles zipping along at 50 mph through immaculate, manicured lawns, gardens, and water features (for a place in the desert, the profligate water use is astonishing), like one gigantic country club, with shopping centers as clubhouses.  Sometimes referred to as the 5^th major, with $3.6 million in prize money up for grabs and attendance of 350,000, it’s the 2^nd biggest US tournament after the US Open and the biggest on the West Coast.  The beautifully landscaped site, with date palms, flower gardens, and nearby rugged mountains that, in the clear, dry air, look close enough to touch, contains 22 courts with the main stadium seating 16,000.  I’ve been going there every year since 2003, and I have to say that, notwithstanding my comments in the Australian Open post about the declining popularity of tennis in the US, it gets more crowded every year.  Of course, it’s an international event, and you hear plenty of languages other than English as you walk around the grounds. 

I’ve always just gone for the early rounds and hung on the outer courts where I can get close to the players (one year I actually collided with David Ferrer), so I don't bother with a ticket for the main stadium but just get a grounds pass.  That gives me access to everything except the big stadium where the players are too distant anyway.  Of course, I don’t get to see many of the top players then, but I’ve already seen most of them, back before they were top players. That’s because I keep my ear to the ground and when I hear about talented players coming up, I make a point to check them out.  For example, I saw Nadal play here years ago and he was only 30 feet away.  He was 18 at the time and playing Nicolas Massu in an outer court where there were only about 50 people watching, and 48 of them were rooting for Massu.  This year I was eager to see the new up-and-comers I’d discovered while watching the Australian Open on TV (see that previous post): Tomic, Raonic, and Dolgopolov. 

I’ve got a routine down by now.  I pick up a cheap Styrofoam cooler at Ralph’s, stock it with ice at my motel, and put bottles of water and lunch fixings in it.  The first matches start at 11, so I usually get to the venue between 10 and 10:30.  Then, at some point during the day, when it’s convenient and I’m hungry, I foray out to the car and have some late lunch/early dinner and grab a couple fresh bottles of cold water.  This way I avoid standing in line for the lousy yet expensive food sold on site.  I still have to stand in line, on occasion, for a $3.50 bottle of ice cold water, at least when it’s as hot as it was this year, because it’s just too far to go to the car every time you need another bottle of water and when it’s really hot (every day hit 90 degrees this year) the tepid water from the drinking fountains just doesn’t cut it.  I try to time my excursion so that it’s late in the afternoon.  That way I can also grab a jacket, because it can get quite cool in the desert at night.  All the courts are lit, so night matches are common. 

The tournament is a big deal for the town of Indian Wells, and all the motels are very aware of it.  The one where I stay has a lot of officials, referees and lines people staying there.  Every morning when you come down for breakfast there are schedules laid out showing all the matches being played that day, and the courts they’re being played on, so you can roughly plan your day (there’s still no telling how long each match will last, so you can’t plan it exactly).  Even without the big stadium, there are still 7 matches going on at any given time, so it can be difficult deciding on an itinerary.  Factored into the decision lately is how popular I think a given match is likely to be, because as much as possible I try to avoid the crowds.

In the early years there weren’t big crowds.  Most of my fondest memories are from that era.  In those days the tournament started on Monday and I could stay through Thursday of the first week and never have a problem getting a good seat for any match I wanted.  But when BNP Paribas took over as the title sponsor in 2009, the schedule was changed so that the qualifying starts on Monday and the first round matches don’t start until Wednesday (women) or Thursday (men).  As a result you soon run into the weekend and the huge crowds that go with it: both Saturday and Sunday this year were sold out.  That means standing in lines for everything, and sometimes not getting into a match you’d like to see, or getting in but having an undesirable seat with someone’s knees pressed into your back.  In the old days I always used to wish I could stay longer, but this year by Sunday night I was ready to go.  

In my next post I’ll share some specifics about the matches I watched. 

Fate vs. Free Will

In Oedipus Rex, Oedipus life is ruled by fate.  Try as he might to escape the destiny the Fates have spun for him, of killing his father and marrying his mother, it nevertheless comes to pass.  This notion of a master plan, as uncomfortable as it was for Oedipus, was yet comfortable for the ancient Greeks, as it was for all primitive peoples, because it put their lives into the context of a greater meaning (although what higher purpose Oedipus’ fate served remained unclear). 

Many millennia later we know that events are not the products of Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos hunched over their spinning wheel.  The dinosaurs were extinguished not by the Fates, but by the orbit of an asteroid crossing that of our planet, as a matter of random chance, and crashing into it.  Their demise, and the consequent rise of the mammals and us, was an accident.   The notion that our lives are ruled by chance is not as comforting as the idea that they are being scripted by some master planner, but part of the maturation process over the millennia is the triumph of reason over wishful and fanciful thinking.  Perhaps ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny in this, as I too was a fatalist in my youth, and even now an event that seems just too perfect may temporarily resurrect that feeling of destiny, but fatalism is a childish notion, an atavistic remnant of an earlier era, and the wisdom of maturity soon returns me to sanity and the uncomfortable truth. 

In the TV series Fringe, as well as the current film The Adjustment Bureau, based on the Philip K. Dick story Adjustment Team, the writers want to have it both ways: everything is fated yet free will is still possible.  The Observers or Adjusters intervene to correct an action that threatens to derail the master plan.  This, however, is nonsense.  If events are predetermined, then there is no room for free will, and vice versa.  The two are logically incompatible.  Once variation is introduced anywhere into the system, all determination is threatened.  That means you cannot travel to the future for the simple reason that it doesn’t exist yet (except, of course, insofar as we are all already travelling to the future).  Ironically, if fate existed, and everything was predetermined, then life, the actual playing out of these predetermined events, would become redundant and absurd; we, as individuals, would not exist, we would be mere notations of another hand, and original thought would be impossible, since all of our thoughts would have been, as it were, pre-thought.  This way lays madness. 

Unlike what you might infer from this movie, I don’t think Dick was a determinist, either.  Rather, he used fate as a metaphor for chance, to suggest the way randomness impinges on our lives.  But this issue is treated much more effectively in the German film Run Lola Run, in which a sequence of events is replayed repeatedly with slight variations so that we can see how contingency affects the outcome. 

On the Fringe

My favorite current TV show is Fringe.  Like X-Files, Fringe is about a special division of the FBI devoted to dealing with beyond-the-pale phenomena.  I like Fringe more than I ever liked X-Files though.  For one thing, it’s ostensibly set in Boston and I have a soft spot for that city.  Also, I like the characters better.  The head of the team is Philip Broyles (Lance Reddick, who was Lieutenant Daniels in the powerful reality-based series The Wire), but the main character and driving force is Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv).  She’s a one-woman dynamo.  She’s assisted by the eccentric and brilliant Dr. Walter Bishop (John Noble) and his jack-of-all-trades, slacker quasi-son (I’ll get to that) Peter (Joshua Jackson).  Walter (my favorite character) has sudden food cravings and is never truly happy without a body to dissect.  Somewhat pixilated (parts of his brain were removed to protect him and the world from his dangerous knowledge), his volatile emotions are on full display.  The group is aided by Massive Dynamics, a corporation represented by Nina Sharp (Blair Brown).  All of these characters have some heft to them.  But the main reason I like Fringe better than X-Files is the mega-plot that has developed over the course of the series.  In the beginning, like The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits, each episode was a self-contained unit, but along the way they have increasingly become parts of a whole.  X-Files had a mega-plot notion (a government conspiracy to hide the existence of extra-terrestrials), but it wasn’t as riveting or multifaceted.  It was a bit of a cliché, actually.

Fringe is now in its third season.  When it began, a new creepy and usually gross and yucky menace was on the prowl every week, but then came an attempt to tie them together with the concept of The Pattern, a hidden web of meaning that related to a possible shadowy secret society devoted to the destruction of humanity by means of advanced technology.  In the second season this morphed into a squad of clandestine warriors from a parallel universe.  In the alternate universe the 9/11 terrorists attacked only the Pentagon and the White House, so the twin towers are still standing.  Zeppelins are a popular form of transportation there and sheep are extinct.  The alternate universe has a technological advantage over ours in some areas, while in others it lags behind. This other universe contains mostly the same people as ours, but they have made different choices in their lives and so are somewhat different.  For example, whereas our Olivia is serious, intense, and blonde, the alternate Olivia (Fauxlivia) is auburn-haired and happy-go-lucky, and whereas our Walter is a quirky, quixotic, mad scientist, the alternate Walter (Walternate) is a bitter and ruthless politico, a Secretary of Defense set on a war of annihilation against our universe.  The series thus poses the intriguing question of how different a person might be had s/he made different choices and thus been subject to different influences.  The alternate universe idea also allows for two parallel stories, of the same yet different people in separate worlds, stories that now and then intersect.   

The clandestine war was brought about by Walter, whose son, Peter, got sick and died.  Walter figured out how he could have saved him, and since the alternate Peter had the same illness, he opened a door between the two universes to kidnap and cure him.  His intention had been to return the cured alternate Peter, but opening the door had weakened the fabric of both universes, the alternate one more than ours, and doing it again might be catastrophic.  Once Walternate became aware that his son had been stolen, he determined on retaliation.  The war is carried out beyond the awareness of ordinary people in our world by a squad of quicksilver-veined cyborg soldiers called Shape-shifters, who can assume the form of anyone.  Walternate has figured out how to send them across as beachball-sized embryos that develop into giant, pink, walking amoebae that can grab a person and steal his or her shape (and life).  We, on the other hand, have a group of humans (including Olivia, whose accidental crossing as a child was the vehicle for Walternate discovering what had happened to his son) who have the ability to travel between the two universes because they were treated with an experimental drug when they were children by Walter and his partner at the time, William Bell (Leonard Nimoy), the subsequent founder of Massive Dynamics, who foresaw the future need for inter-dimensional warriors.  On the side watching, in both universes, are a bunch of mysterious bullet-headed guys known as The Observers, who turn up everywhere, but rarely interfere…except when they do. 

Fringe may not be as witty as some TV shows (Californication comes to mind), but it is imaginative and clever, even if some of its ideas don’t hold up to close scrutiny.  For example, if the parallel universe really allows change and has always done so, then over eons the compounding of that variation would have produced a world far more remote from ours than the only slightly divergent one presented.  But I’m inclined to overlook things like that because the notion of distinct versions of me wandering around in other dimensions is so delightfully amusing.   Imagine all the various persons you might be had you made different decisions at critical junctures.  You can really run with that idea, entertain yourself for hours.  What fun it would be to live out all the alternative possibilities!  Perhaps this is why the young Hugh Everett (the inventor of the Many-Worlds Theory back in 1954 in our real, actual universe) just couldn’t resist the concept once it had occurred to him.  He became drunk with the possibilities.  (Despite his enthusiasm his theory was for decades considered rubbish, until String Theory came along and injected new life into it.)

In Fringe Olivia and Fauxlivia, each with her own unique assets, get to compete for the same man (Peter, who doesn’t really deserve either of them) and the fate of both universes hangs on the question of which one he chooses.  I know this sounds crazy, but Peter, you see, is the secret ingredient and power source for Walternate’s Doomsday Machine, designed to destroy our universe (once the two have come into contact and begun to bleed into one another, one must inevitably replace the other, a truth made more poignant by our knowledge of and sympathy for some of the people from each).  Admittedly, the show does occasionally lapse into soap opera, but most of the time surprising plot turns and ingenious craft carry the day.  I can’t say the show is animated by any grand vision.  The choice opportunities a parallel universe offers for political commentary have gone unexploited.  Nevertheless it does have a sort of harmless edginess, which I suppose is the only kind of edginess a network TV show can afford.  It dabbles in ideas at the limits of our understanding.  And though it’s sometimes hokey in its handling of them, at least it’s out there, and still manages to be thought-provoking and fun.

So I hope it gets renewed,  because there are a lot of loose ends dangling and I don’t want to have to tie them all up myself.   SciFi series are particularly prone to cancellation due to the expense of the special effects, and the effects in Fringe are pretty well done. 

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.