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Times of sand
Mar. 12th, 2012 09:45 pm
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 8. High today: 12. Line of thunderstorms heading across Lake Huron--severe thunderstorm watches out for parts of southwestern Ontario, first I've seen in 2012.
Playing the piano often makes me think about figure skating. World-class competitive figure skating is a weird thing, in that all but the very best usually fail spectacularly at something in any given skate. Very few skaters can actually get through their routines reliably. Sometimes there isn't a skater in the world who can get through a routine reliably. Whenever I think about this kind of thing, I think about how amazingly consistent Brian Boitano was in the late '80s. Brian Orser was every bit as good as him, at his best; some people thought Orser was better at his best, but Boitano was more consistent. When Orser "flipped out" of a jump in the long program at the '88 Olympics, you knew it was over, because Boitano would be flawless, and he was. Except: I was going to say that, of course, nobody was doing quads in those days, but Uncle Wikipedia informs me that Boitano was regularly trying and failing to land quads in competition from 1986 to 1988 (including at the World Championships in 1988, where Kurt Browning landed the first verified quad in competition), so, huh. I suppose that was all he couldn't do, though, and at the '88 Olympics he skated last, and knew he didn't have to do one to win. Uncle Wikipedia also informs me that Boitano was the first American to land a triple Axel, in 1982, four years after a Canadian I've never heard of before, Vern Taylor, landed the first one in competition.
Anyway, it's interesting to me that even the very best figure skaters can't do the hardest things you can do in figure skating consistently, but in the context of sports, it's interesting that that's interesting. As people like to say, if you fail to get a hit seven times out of ten for long enough, they'll put you in the baseball hall of fame. When Wayne Gretzky scored 92 goals in a season, he scored on less than a quarter of the shots he took. Of course, the thing about sports like baseball and hockey is that when you fail, someone else succeeds. When the hitter gets out, the pitcher gets him out. When Gretzky doesn't score, it's because the goalie stopped the puck. When figure skaters fail, no one else has succeeded by virtue of their failure. Analogous things do happen in other sports--double-faults in tennis; drivers or skiers going off-course; walks in which none of the pitches are close--but those "unforced errors" are the exception, not the rule, at the top level of competition. But I think more importantly than that, unforced errors in other sports aren't such drastic aesthetic failures. A figure skater falling down is like a pianist, I don't even know what, having some sort of hand spasm in the middle of a performance. When it's finished, that's the main thing you remember; even before it's finished, it doesn't matter how great the rest of it is, that spectacular failure is hanging over the rest of the performance. There is no redemption in art like there is in sports, where you can make up for striking out four times, and looking foolish doing it, by hitting a home run in the bottom of the ninth. (Sports are Christian, art is Greek? Um.) In art, the performance, the work, is the whole, and the wholer the work, the stronger the art. Falling down, or even flipping out (landing out of control) like Orser did, even if it's just one moment, wrecks the whole, like a fingerprint in the middle of a painting.
That isn't what playing the piano mostly makes me think about about figure skating, though, although it does make me think about that a bit: I wonder to what extent it's the case that the very best pianists play the hardest things there are practically flawlessly every time, while the very best figure skaters often fail at the hardest jumps, because there are a hell of a lot more pianists in the world than there are figure skaters. (The answer to this seems to be that the question is poorly thought out. If there were more figure skaters, maybe the best ones would be failing half the time at quints instead of quads. The very best female figure skaters, who at least in Canada are drawn from a much larger pool than the very best male figure skaters, can't do triples consistently; they don't even try quads. If you want to win the competition you have to try to do the hardest thing anyone can do, because someone else might manage to do it. (For a long time there have been those who think that the obsession with jumps ruins figure skating, that it shouldn't be "a jumping competition". But the less figure skating is a jumping competition, the more it suffers from the problem that always looms over ice-dancing: it's not really clear, especially to casual observers, why anyone among the best bunch is better than anyone else.) Another thing about figure skating is that because you're moving very quickly on ice, the slightest error can instantly turn into a spectacular failure. Compare diving: it takes some expertise to appreciate that a slight over-rotation results in too much splash. A naive viewer might think a dive looks better with a bit of splash, and in any event wouldn't likely take the amount of splash a dive makes to be almost the most important thing about it. It's, I guess, impossible for a slight error made by a world-class diver to result in a belly flop, but world-class figure skaters regularly do belly flops.) What playing the piano actually makes me think about about figure skating is how it so often happens that one mistake leads to the whole thing falling apart. Once you've made that one mistake that has cost you the championship no matter what you do in the rest of your skate, can you get it back together to salvage the silver, the bronze, a top-ten finish, your pride? (There are a lot of pitchers for whom this is the big problem, too, the ones who always seem to be done in by "one big inning".) You've got four minutes for your free skate, around the length of many piano pieces. You know that you can do it, you know you can do every particular bit of it, but you also know that you're far from sure of many bits of it; you get off to a good start, you might be flawless for a minute, two, you're growing in confidence, you look sharp, the commentator says it looks like you're really on today, this could be the one--and then you two-foot the landing on a jump, you seize up in the middle of that run that you've practiced over and over and over, and now you're off the rails, running over rough ground, and you might just stay off, oh, this is really disappointing, he'll be hard-pressed to even hang on to the bronze now....
My bird feeder has a tail:
I added an upside-down flower pot to the pole today. Will this finally succeed in baffling the squirrels? Stay tuned! (There were cardinals around today, but I didn't see any at the feeder. Something's going to have to help the chickadees eat all those sunflower seeds if I actually manage to keep the squirrels out of them. The blackbirds are still around, but I don't expect they'll stay.)
Anyway, what I had mostly meant to throw up here today (or rather last night, before I developed a screaming headache) was an ( illustrated travelogue )
Playing the piano often makes me think about figure skating. World-class competitive figure skating is a weird thing, in that all but the very best usually fail spectacularly at something in any given skate. Very few skaters can actually get through their routines reliably. Sometimes there isn't a skater in the world who can get through a routine reliably. Whenever I think about this kind of thing, I think about how amazingly consistent Brian Boitano was in the late '80s. Brian Orser was every bit as good as him, at his best; some people thought Orser was better at his best, but Boitano was more consistent. When Orser "flipped out" of a jump in the long program at the '88 Olympics, you knew it was over, because Boitano would be flawless, and he was. Except: I was going to say that, of course, nobody was doing quads in those days, but Uncle Wikipedia informs me that Boitano was regularly trying and failing to land quads in competition from 1986 to 1988 (including at the World Championships in 1988, where Kurt Browning landed the first verified quad in competition), so, huh. I suppose that was all he couldn't do, though, and at the '88 Olympics he skated last, and knew he didn't have to do one to win. Uncle Wikipedia also informs me that Boitano was the first American to land a triple Axel, in 1982, four years after a Canadian I've never heard of before, Vern Taylor, landed the first one in competition.
Anyway, it's interesting to me that even the very best figure skaters can't do the hardest things you can do in figure skating consistently, but in the context of sports, it's interesting that that's interesting. As people like to say, if you fail to get a hit seven times out of ten for long enough, they'll put you in the baseball hall of fame. When Wayne Gretzky scored 92 goals in a season, he scored on less than a quarter of the shots he took. Of course, the thing about sports like baseball and hockey is that when you fail, someone else succeeds. When the hitter gets out, the pitcher gets him out. When Gretzky doesn't score, it's because the goalie stopped the puck. When figure skaters fail, no one else has succeeded by virtue of their failure. Analogous things do happen in other sports--double-faults in tennis; drivers or skiers going off-course; walks in which none of the pitches are close--but those "unforced errors" are the exception, not the rule, at the top level of competition. But I think more importantly than that, unforced errors in other sports aren't such drastic aesthetic failures. A figure skater falling down is like a pianist, I don't even know what, having some sort of hand spasm in the middle of a performance. When it's finished, that's the main thing you remember; even before it's finished, it doesn't matter how great the rest of it is, that spectacular failure is hanging over the rest of the performance. There is no redemption in art like there is in sports, where you can make up for striking out four times, and looking foolish doing it, by hitting a home run in the bottom of the ninth. (Sports are Christian, art is Greek? Um.) In art, the performance, the work, is the whole, and the wholer the work, the stronger the art. Falling down, or even flipping out (landing out of control) like Orser did, even if it's just one moment, wrecks the whole, like a fingerprint in the middle of a painting.
That isn't what playing the piano mostly makes me think about about figure skating, though, although it does make me think about that a bit: I wonder to what extent it's the case that the very best pianists play the hardest things there are practically flawlessly every time, while the very best figure skaters often fail at the hardest jumps, because there are a hell of a lot more pianists in the world than there are figure skaters. (The answer to this seems to be that the question is poorly thought out. If there were more figure skaters, maybe the best ones would be failing half the time at quints instead of quads. The very best female figure skaters, who at least in Canada are drawn from a much larger pool than the very best male figure skaters, can't do triples consistently; they don't even try quads. If you want to win the competition you have to try to do the hardest thing anyone can do, because someone else might manage to do it. (For a long time there have been those who think that the obsession with jumps ruins figure skating, that it shouldn't be "a jumping competition". But the less figure skating is a jumping competition, the more it suffers from the problem that always looms over ice-dancing: it's not really clear, especially to casual observers, why anyone among the best bunch is better than anyone else.) Another thing about figure skating is that because you're moving very quickly on ice, the slightest error can instantly turn into a spectacular failure. Compare diving: it takes some expertise to appreciate that a slight over-rotation results in too much splash. A naive viewer might think a dive looks better with a bit of splash, and in any event wouldn't likely take the amount of splash a dive makes to be almost the most important thing about it. It's, I guess, impossible for a slight error made by a world-class diver to result in a belly flop, but world-class figure skaters regularly do belly flops.) What playing the piano actually makes me think about about figure skating is how it so often happens that one mistake leads to the whole thing falling apart. Once you've made that one mistake that has cost you the championship no matter what you do in the rest of your skate, can you get it back together to salvage the silver, the bronze, a top-ten finish, your pride? (There are a lot of pitchers for whom this is the big problem, too, the ones who always seem to be done in by "one big inning".) You've got four minutes for your free skate, around the length of many piano pieces. You know that you can do it, you know you can do every particular bit of it, but you also know that you're far from sure of many bits of it; you get off to a good start, you might be flawless for a minute, two, you're growing in confidence, you look sharp, the commentator says it looks like you're really on today, this could be the one--and then you two-foot the landing on a jump, you seize up in the middle of that run that you've practiced over and over and over, and now you're off the rails, running over rough ground, and you might just stay off, oh, this is really disappointing, he'll be hard-pressed to even hang on to the bronze now....
My bird feeder has a tail:
I added an upside-down flower pot to the pole today. Will this finally succeed in baffling the squirrels? Stay tuned! (There were cardinals around today, but I didn't see any at the feeder. Something's going to have to help the chickadees eat all those sunflower seeds if I actually manage to keep the squirrels out of them. The blackbirds are still around, but I don't expect they'll stay.)
Anyway, what I had mostly meant to throw up here today (or rather last night, before I developed a screaming headache) was an ( illustrated travelogue )
