Open, An Autobiography

For a tennis fan, Andre Agassi's autobiography, is simply necessary. A huge slice of contemporary tennis history belongs to him. This is a fascinating peak into the thoughts of a champion.

I've been a fan of Andre's since before he shed the wig and shaved his hair. For a decade, I watched nearly every one of his televised matches. I got up in the middle of the night to watch live coverage of his matches from the other side of the globe.  I took time off of work to watch his matches. I preferred him and rooted for him over every competitor he faced, except Patrick Rafter when I was neutral. I believed he could win every one of the matches I watched, but now I know he did not believe he could win every one of those matches. (For some matches, he didn't even care about winning as much as I cared about him winning.)

It's stunning really to read about the degree of misery he was in and to observe the fragility of his confidence. By ALL measures, he was one of tennis' best players. There'd be some debate about where exactly he should place among the best, but no one would dispute he makes the top 15 of all time.  (He'd make most people's Top 10.) That's top 15 out of the thousands, or tens of thousands, of people who've played pro tennis. He won 8 Major titles. He was the first man to win all four majors on three surfaces (grass, clay and hard) and the only man to win a career golden slam (all four slams plus an Olympic gold).  (Incidentally, Andre's wife, Stefanie Graf, was the only woman to win a golden slam; she won them all within a calendar year.)

Surely, someone who is THAT good at what they do for a living should feel accomplished at their profession. But no, he was constantly addled with frustrations about not being good enough. His struggle to find satisfaction without finding perfection will resonate with people in all kinds of professions. This is one of the universal themes of Andre's story.

The other universal theme is Andre's search for a purpose for his tennis career, in spite of hating tennis. He found purpose and motivation when he found a reason to play that wasn't about him, but instead was about service to others. In the last years of his career, he found satisfaction in playing to be able to deliver financial backing to the charter school in Las Vegas that bears his name.

I was delighted to read about his very fond memories of his match against James Blake at the U.S. Open in the quarterfinals in 2005. (Contemporaneous news stories about it: WaPo, AP.) That match was my all-time favorite tennis-watching memory.  K and I watched at a sports bar downtown.  It was empty except for us;  in the beginning the staff peaked in now and then, mildly curious to see the score, but by the end they were watching and whooping with us.  The match was drama-packed, with Andre coming back from two sets down, and every single point was top quality tennis.

The book is missing some of the details I would have enjoyed, but that may not have been interesting to anyone else. How many hours a day did he work out? How many hours of tennis practice? Who did he practice with? What drills did he do? What did he eat? How many calories a day did he eat? His very close friend and former business manager Perry Rogers sued Stefanie in December 2008 for management fees. What's that story? What kind of deals did he have with sponsors (e.g. there were stories that in his later years, he made them contribute to his school)? He mentions that Nike dropped him along the way; was there any drama with that? Does anyone continue to sponsor him? He says they have no tennis court and that the kids will not play tennis, but what are they doing (because it'd be surprising if they weren't athletes with those genes)? His serve improved markedly after his comeback; how? why? what did he adjust?  Why meth, of all drugs? It'd have to be a multi-volume set to satisfy my curiosity.

There are lots of interesting tidbits, though:

• Pete Sampras was comically stingy with tips;
• Jimmy Connors was particularly douchey to Andre;
  
• Jeff Tarango was a jerk when he was 8 years old (I could have guessed that. We saw Tarango play pro doubles at a tournament in Arizona and that man just oozes bile);
  
• Rafter and Federer actually are the class acts they seem to be;
• Show Andre a picture of your kids, mention that you're worried about how you'll pay for college and he'll write you a check. (Bless him; he's a trusting soul, but cynical readers will observe several people in Andre's life taking advantage of him while he seems oblivious. Still, it was this act of funding college for someone and feeling really happy about being able to do it that gave him the spark of the idea to start the school, so cheers to un-cynical oblivion.)
  
• Andre is a herd creature:  he is miserable being alone and competing alone.  He needs people around him.  Oh, the irony, that his dad channeled him into one of the only sports that you play entirely alone -- with no team and no coaching breaks.  Even the opponent in a tennis match is physically remote.
• He's still claiming that he didn't even notice Pres. Clinton's arrival during his loss to Grosjean in 2001 at the French Open.  And I still don't believe him, although I can't fathom why he'd lie about that when he's come clean about the wig and the meth.  

Photos from NYC trip

I've been meaning to post some photos from our NYC trip. Here are a few:

Lincoln Center plaza, where we saw The Met doing Tosca.

Ravi
 Coltrane performing at The Village Vanguard

Grand Central Station.  One of my all-time favorite buildings.  If I had to take just one building with me to a deserted island, this would be it.

On the outside of a fire station mid to upper West side.

Bryant Park.  Spin sponsors this free outdoor table tennis venue (in addition to having a swanky indoor club with a bar that they wouldn't let me take pictures of).  The NY Public Library is in the background.

One of my favorite NYC activities is oggling stone work.  Gorgeous stonework is everywhere.

Another sample of stonework. The Alwyn Court Building.

 

Maybe this is where Scrabble is played in Central Park, but it was closed when we were there so I didn't get to find out.

Tried to see the Daily Show, but it was off for the night following the Emmy Awards. The entrance to the studio is on the left side of this building.

Oh no. UPDATED with AfterElton response

Peggy Noonan goes after Adam for his AMA performance.

Pretty sure she's already on her Christmas vacation and just copy/pasted this from an opinion piece from the 1950's about Elvis.

Update 12/18/09: AfterElton responds to Noonan:

Noonan isn't a stupid woman and I don't really think she believes the tripe she writes here. She's part of the Washington Beltway that she and other conservatives like to pretend they have nothing to do with, and what she's doing here is classic Republican sleight of hand. Is your party mostly responsible for the worst economic collapse in 80 years? Did your party start two failed wars? Did your party run-up massive deficits? Is your party responsible for killing the health care reform the vast majority of Americans want?

Well, then you better find a way to distract the Average Joe from what's going on or they might keep you out of pwer. And what's been better at distracting folks than dragging out the tired old cliche of the gay boogeyman!

Update II 12/18/09: Steve Benen at WashingtonMonthly.com copied me:

It was more than a half-century ago, but I suspect a similar column must have run in 1956, when Elvis swung his hips a little too much on The Ed Sullivan Show.

Happy Birthday, Michael

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MICHAEL

Time's Person of the Year (OR My dreidel spins the other way)

was not Adam.  (No, I wasn't expecting him to be; I'm not quite that delusional.) But he did make their list of People Who Mattered.

He was not the winner of American Idol. He was not even the first Idol runner-up to later make the thoroughly unsurprising announcement that he is gay. (See Aiken, Clay.) But Lambert came first in generating attention: that eyeliner, that voice — ranging from a husky smolder to a granite-splitting glam-rock shriek — and those glittered-out, magnetic performances. And there was the way Lambert treated his sexuality, which reflected the tricky path of gayness toward mainstream acceptance. Lambert never confirmed his being gay until finishing Idol, but, importantly, he never denied it. And unlike Aiken's, his performances had an unmistakable erotic charge — he was a man, not a man-child. After Idol, he infuriated some viewers with a raunchy, grinding show at the American Music Awards on ABC. Rather than apologize, he charged a double standard for gay men while keeping a smile on his face: when Joy Behar told him, on The View, that he was "not exactly a nice Jewish boy," he quipped, "I'm a little different. My dreidel spins the other way." Lambert ended 2009 out, proud — and loud.

— James Poniewozik

(It's a dubious honor, since Jon and Kate Gosselin made the list too.)

He also came in first in the Rolling Stone Reader's Poll for Top Artist of 2009.  He topped Lady Gaga, which is just wrong, and Adam would be the first one to say so.

And, as you may have heard, he was on Barbara Walter's list of the Ten Most Fascinating People of 2009. (Again with Kate Gosselin.  My disinterest in the Gosselins rivals LJ's disinterest in Adam.)

Update:  Adam is also on Forbes list of Music's Biggest Breakout Stars.

Update II: Adam was the third-most trended person on Twitter in 2009, after Michael Jackson and SuBo.

The Tomb of Tutankhamen

Another Half Price Books purchase. I was listening to the sports talk station here in DFW and one of the morning guys was talking about his fascination when he was a teenager with King Tut. He eventually got this book at a library and was captivated by the story and the life of the man who discovered the tomb, Howard Carter. As he was talking about this book and the story, it got me interested. It took me a few months to find this. The original edition of this book was published in 3 volumes (Volume I in 1923, Volume II in 1927 and Volume III in 1933.) Those volumes were condensed into this edition that was published in 1954. The story of the tomb discovery is, of course, captivating. However, that is only a small portion of the work. The book goes into great detail describing each object found and their significance, if any. At times it is too technical and I found myself struggling to get through it. The issue, at least for me, was that this work is written in a textbook/academic type style which is very dry.

Almost as interesting as the story are the pictures - many of which were taken at the time of the discovery. Those pictures are combined with color plates of many of the treasures. If you can fight through the lengthy descriptions of beads, of mummies, of statues and of archaeological techniques, you'll be rewarded with a compelling and fascinating adventure story.

Nazi Hunter: The Wiesenthal File

I picked this up at Half Price Books many, many months ago when I was on a Nazi kick. This book details the life of Simon Wiesenthal and chronicles some of searches for ex-Nazi's, some of whom were quite famous (Eichmann and Mengele) and some I'd never heard of (Franz Stangl and Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan). I found it intriguing how these persons were tracked down, as well as how they escaped and disappeared in the first place. Who helped them and why were they helped? Wiesenthal has his own theories, some of which I agreed with; some I didn't. It also chronicles his feuds, most famously with Eli Wiesel. Certainly held my interest as I read it (which was abnormally a long time for me) and at the price I paid, a bargain.

"Conservatives have no voice in the media"

While I sometimes find KO's rants a bit over-the-top, the last 3 or 4 minutes of this one had me laughing so hard I was crying...



(He probably shouldn't quit his day job and become an impersonator though)

Deserted island: Music Edition

Question 1: You're going to be dropped alone on a deserted island for the rest of your life with one album/CD, a device that plays albums/CDs and a magical power supply for said player that will last your lifetime. What's the album?

Question 2: Same thing, but you get 5 albums/CDs.

You're invited to edit into the post, so the answers are on the main page instead of being in the comments.

[Update] LJ: - My 1 album/CD would be U2's "U218 Singles". My 5 album/CDs would be:

1) U218 Singles - U2
2) The Allman Brothers at Fillmore East - The Allman Brothers Band
3) The Downward Spiral - Nine Inch Nails
4) The Singles 86>98 - Depeche Mode
5) Evita (1978 Original Broadway Cast)

[Update] Stephanie:  One CD:  Garrick Ohlsson's The Complete Chopin Piano Works, Vol. 3, Ballades

1) The Complete Chopin Piano Works, Vol. 3, Ballades - Garrick Ohlsson
2) Greatest Hits - Journey
3) Ballads - Dexter Gordon (coming in 2nd for the jazz slot:  Standard Time Vol 3, Resolution of Romance, Wynton and Ellis Marsalis)
4) Icky Thump - White Stripes
5) . . . and Serenity - Glenn Gould

I'll change my mind tomorrow.

Favorite Christmas Music?

Nothing says Christmas like the Roches.

Just ordered these three:

Down the Rabbit Hole

The best song on Adam's album isn't on the album proper. It's a bonus track, available on iTunes, here. Hear the whole thing here, while watching someone's attempt at transcribing the lyrics.

The mystery to me is why this isn't the centerpiece of the album, rather than a bonus track. It's funk, it's glam, it's disco. It's catchy. It's just a little bit weird. It's more Adam-y than the songs that made the album. Adam is clearly having a blast singing this. (Aural trivia: can you catch the vocal hat tip to his Ring of Fire?)

I think the lyrics in the above-linked youtube video are almost accurate, but the line at 0:31 "If it's getting high fee" should be "Hippies gettin' hyphy", I believe. Urban Dictionary defines HYPHY thusly:

San Francisco Bay Area, shortened perhaps from English dialect "hyperactive"; other sources cite a combination of "hype" and "fly." Popularized by E-40 and the Federation's song "Hyphy" (2004); first known use on record by Keak Da Sneak in 1998 (on "Cool," from his LP Sneakacidle).
1 : dangerous and irrational: CRAZY;
2 : amusingly eccentric; without inhibition: GOOFY
"They were getting hyphy up in the club Saturday night."

Also, others have opined that the line at 1:52 is "It starts in the bass and ends in the crystal ball", rather than "It starts in the vase and it ends in the crystal bowl".

Adam is a co-writer on this, along with E. Kidd Bogart and Greg Wells.

My new obsession is....

Not much difference between this and fresh ground & brewed (or maybe our coffee maker needs cleaning).

If you were 12, you'd be so excited about this, but we older folks can have fun with it too

There's a new website, vevo.com, devoted to legally streaming professional music videos on demand.  It's having a lot of technical difficulties in its first few days of existence, partly due to bandwidth and partly because it doesn't seem like the programmers are done yet.  But give it a few weeks and I'm sure the kinks will be worked out.

Vevo allows you to search for videos (by artist, genre or time period) and it offers quite a few OLD music videos, so if you want to take a walk down memory lane to the 80's, you can do that.  (The earliest one I could find is performance video of Chuck Berry 1959 but it looks like Vevo has aspirations to go back further.)

Vevo allows embedding. [Update 12/13/09: Videos removed so as not to slow your page-loading time.]

If you find any old favorites of yours, do share!

Christmas recipes

I'll start with this delectable desert that I've never made. How does it sound to you? T thought the addition of the chocolate chips sounded bad.

PECAN PIE BARS

Recipe from Kathy Fowler, Spring

1 1⁄ 3 cups flour

1/2 cup butter or margarine, softened

3/4 cup sugar, divided use

3/4 cup light corn syrup

2 eggs

2 tablespoons flour

1/2 teaspoon vanilla

1 cup chopped pecans

1/2 cup semisweet chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

In medium bowl, combine flour, butter and 1/4 cup sugar. Beat at low speed until crumbly. Press into bottom of 9-inch square baking pan. Bake 15-20 minutes or until brown.

In separate bowl, combine corn syrup, 1/2 cup sugar, eggs, flour and vanilla. Beat at medium speed until well-combined. Stir in pecans by hand.

Sprinkle chocolate chips over hot crust. Pour filling over chips and crust. Continue baking 30-35 minutes or until set. Cut into bars.

Into Temptation OR Little girls with holes in their tights always make me cry

I'm looking through our list of posts and I see several that I started to write but didn't finish.  Such is my life.  But here's one I'll finish because now it's timely for the holidays.

We recently (now a couple months ago) saw Into Temptation. (City Page review here.) I knew nothing about it when it started, and then was surprised to see the Minneapolis skyline and lots of other Minneapolis settings, many within a couple miles of our house.

Apparently, it's a relatively low-budget indie movie filmed here. It may not make it to a theater near you. It's the story of a Catholic priest (Jeremy Sisto) trying to find a mystery woman (Kristen Chenowith) who confessed to him that she intends to kill herself. She's a prostitute, so his search for her takes him to places (Sexworld -- yes, an actual place) and into contact with people he doesn't typically come into contact with.

It's a positive, realistic portrayal of a priest, so maybe it's worth seeing for the rarity of that.

I don't want to spoil the ending, but I can say that it reminded me of something I witnessed at a work holiday party a decade ago. I told K the story after the movie and apparently I still can't tell the story without crying.

My workplace then -- we'll call it AATDEA for Ad Agency That Doesn't Exist Anymore -- invited employees' families to attend the holiday party. (This was a response to the drunken debauchery of the previous year's party that was sans families.) One of AATDEA's employees was the maintenance guy who had a 6 year old daughter.  The agency didn't pay him much and he was going through a divorce, struggling to pay a lawyer to help him with custody.  His daughter came to the party in an everyday sort of cotton dress and well-worn shoes, with a plastic barrette in her hair and holes in her tights.

Another employee's 6-year old daughter was also there, dressed to the nines: velvet dress, lacy tights, satin ribbon in her hair, new black patent leather shoes.  She looked expensive.

As part of the activities at the party for the kids, there was a story reader.  Kids gathered around, sitting on the floor in front of the reader so they could see the book's pictures when the reader showed them.  There were already many kids seated when Expensive Girl and Torn Tights Girl joined the group.  Expensive Girl walked to the front of the group and plopped down.  Kids behind her had to adjust their spots so they could see around her.  Torn Tights Girl followed Expensive Girl into the group and sat down next to her in front, but as she sat down she turned around to make sure she wasn't blocking anyone's view.  She melted my heart.

I'm wondering if the person who made Into Temptation was at the same Christmas party.

I hope life is going OK for Torn Tights Girl.  I think, though, that life tends to be harder for girls who had to go to their parents' Christmas parties in torn tights.

Four Bears

It's been awhile since I posted charts from dshort.com.  Here is the Four Bad Bears graph:

And here is the Mega Bear Quartet (mentioned near the bottom of the linked entry; apparently not inflation-adjusted):

And here is the Real Mega Bears (an inflation-adjusted overlay of three secular bear markets):

Testing email alert for new blog post

Stephanie and Michael should receive an email about this new post.

Gratuitous Adam photo -- to test new editor features

Oooooooo.  Love the improved image-adding/moving features in the new editor.  Can change size and move L/R/Center easily, after initial upload (instead of having to make the decision at upload).

Update:  This is a fan photo that I actually have permission to post, except I'm supposed to give attribution and cannot find the name of the person.  So I'm taking it down unless/until I find it.  But the editor is FAB.

Testing new features in the new editor

There's a strikethrough feature: handy for snarky editorial comment.

There's a jump cut.  Follow me below the cut.

Recently read

If you like or even sort of like John Irving, I can recommend Last Night in Twisted River. If you have stayed away from Stephen King because it's "horror" or "supernature" and you don't do either, I can recommend Under the Dome, which is neither. It's "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" meets "The Simpsons Movie" with some great characters.