Notes on the Olympics

1. My apartment has been about 82 degrees the past few days (with the windows open) which is making it a bit torturous to watch the Winter Olympics. All that snow! All that cool air!


2. These Alexandre Bilodeau features make me teary. Also, let me just say that having a disabled brother--mine has Down syndrome--never inspired me to any sort of greatness nor instilled within me any particular motivation. Oops.


3. Related: I love it when the entire crowd at an event sings O Canada. I also love O Canada.


4. Things I hate about NBC: Their refusal to show anything live. Their insistence that I love figure skating. The fact that they spoil the results of events they have yet to show right on their homepage so that when you go to look up their stupid broadcast schedule said results are spoiled for you. They're showing ice dancing on the main channel rather than the Canada-USA hockey game which means those of us without cable (see: me) can't watch the hockey game. Their sappy features that take away from time they could spend showing the sports that the Olympics are theoretically about.
   


5. Winter Olympics: Fewer black people than the Republican National Convention?


6. From Amy comes the news that the IOC wants to make Ryan Miller remove certain things from his mask. Things like the tribute to his dead cousin. I don't think that's a PR war the IOC wins.


7. A lot of winter sports look terrifying yet fun. Cross-country skiing just looks like it would make me throw up.


8. Despite all my complaining I love, love, love the Winter Olympics.
   

The Olympics, Beach Volleyball, and The New Yorker

There are a couple pieces on the Olympics in Beijing in the latest issue of The New Yorker. And I think we've established at this point that I'm a bit obsessed when it comes to the Olympics so it shouldn't be surprising that I feel the need to write about them.

Nancy Franklin's piece on the TV coverage of the games is kind of a waste of space. I like critics to provide some sort of insight that I can't come up with on my own while sitting on the couch drinking cocktails in my underwear, thank you. For the most part I even agree with her comments, but the fact that NBC's coverage is obnoxious? I'd kind of figured that out and so have a lot of other people. My annoyance really began though, when I got to this part:

In the four years since I was last forced to watch beach volleyball, I somehow have not found the maturity and wisdom to take it seriously as an Olympic sport, and, frankly, I doubt that NBC takes it seriously, either, except as a ratings grabber. Every time I turned on the TV, there was May-Treanor (the short one) and Walsh (the tall one), in those silly little Victoria’s Ill-Kept Secret outfits.

If I never hear anything else about the beach volleyball bikinis it will be too soon. It's just an easy shot to take. Beyond that though, I have a couple of thoughts on this. First, I think it's sad to not take the sport seriously, particularly when it seems to be because of the outfits. As unexciting as I've found the competition this year I think that the athleticism, skill, and hard work that go into the game are evident and itty-bitty clothing shouldn't distract from that. Second, I really don't have any problem with said bikinis. Do they lead many viewers to objectify the players? I'm sure it does. But let's be honest for just a moment here and acknowledge that desire in various forms and objectification are a big part of sports viewership. And I don't really have a problem with that. Beach volleyball makes those aspects of viewership more explicit than most sports, true, but it's hardly creating something that didn't already exist. (I've also been spending enough time staring at incredibly fit male athletes that it would be completely hypocritical of me to judge someone for watching beach volleyball in order to see women running around in little pieces of fabric.)

There are all kinds of problems in the way some of the commentators, and NBC in general, cover the female athletes. Franklin does point some of those out in the article. I just wish people--not just Franklin--didn't seem to lump the clothing in with those issues. Yes, it's skimpy, yes it attracts viewers, no it's not that different from what most women where on the beach. Whatever. NBC showed a race today in which one of the women was covered from wrist to foot and wearing a head covering, as her religion demands. It's a hell of a lot more troubling then women in bikinis but I bet I read far fewer people complaining about it.

Anthony Lane's commentary on the first week of the Olympics, while not great, was far more interesting. He tells us things that we don't actually see on TV--half-time entertainment at a water polo match for example or the security measures attendees deal with--and sums up the failure of the NBC coverage eloquently.

Most people will stay home and watch the events on TV, having no other option, but be warned: what NBC chooses to broadcast is not the Olympic Games. They offer selected clips of selected American athletes, largely in major sports, sometimes hours after the event, whereas, if the bruised Olympic ideal still means anything, it means loosing yourself, for a couple of weeks, from the bonds of your immediate loyalties and tastes. It means watching live sports you didn’t know you were interested in, played by countries you’ve never been to, at three o’clock in the morning—not just watching them, either, but getting into them, deluding yourself that you grasp the rules, offering the fruits of your instant expertise to anyone who will listen (“I think you’ll find the second waza-ari counts as ippon”), and, most bewildering of all, losing your heart.

NBC hasn't given us any options. They haven't allowed us to lose our hearts but instead have tried to convince us that we should fall in love with people like Phil Dalhausser and Todd Rogers. Well I'm sorry, but I simply don't love them. They're arrogant overdogs and I refuse to care about them. But NBC doesn't seem to want to show me people I could fall in love with--even if I did enjoy Yang Wei pretending the pommel horse was an actual horse at the gymnastics gala--and that's a shame.

Synchronized Swimming

Synchronized swimming is so bizarre. Crazy hard I'm sure. One of the girls on my high school swim team was also a synchronized swimmer and she could hold her breath for a hell of a long time. Shocking, I know.

I also once had a swim practice where we shared the pool with a synchro team. (Just to make the Olympics all about me here.) It was pretty bizarre to be doing our laps and have music playing under the water. Much nicer than the time we shared the pool with a scuba diving class though. That sucked.

Gentlemen of the Road

So one advantage of NBC's awful weekday Olympic --in their defense they're doing a somewhat better job on weekend sports coverage--that I'm finding more time than I expected to read. There I am, evening set aside for sports overload, and they're replaying the gymnastics they covered badly the night before. In primetime. Instead of, say, showing us some of the many other Olympic sports that they haven't been showing at all. The gymnastics has, at times, been good enough to overcome terrible coverage, but I don't need to see it replayed. The swimming has been compelling thanks in part to Michael Phelps being worth almost all the hype--it's impossible to choose a greatest Olympian ever--and plenty of other swimmers turning in great swims and keeping things close and exciting. Particularly disappointing though has been the beach volleyball, which has been boring me horribly after I loved it in Athens. I especially dislike the top American men's team and find myself hoping they lose. So anyway, I've been spending a lot of time sitting in front of my television with a book.

I went to the library last weekend to pick up Ha Jin's Waiting and impulse borrowed Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road.

It was decent although nothing particularly special and I can't help but wonder if that's partially a reflection of Chabon's attitude toward the book. At the end there's an afterword where Chabon writes, after first telling the reader that his working title was Jews with Swords, "I know it still seem incongruous, first of all, for me or a writer of my literary training, generation, and pretensions to be writing stories featuring anybody with swords." Does it really? This is a writer whose best novel features comic book creators and who, in addition to writing about comic books has also written an actual comic book for Dark Horse Comics. And then there's his detective story as homage to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Is it really so unexpected that such a writer would write an adventure story? I don't really think so and I think that the afterword tells the reader more about Chabon's image of himself as a writer than it does about the apparent incongruity of the book. And I think that this idea that it is incongruous for him to write such a story seems to have affected the book negatively.

The book is almost entirely predictable, resting on its use of language and description, begins its Victorian pastiche with a humorous tone, slyly laughing at its characters and itself.

They sent the Persian and the stripling out into the inn yard then, and as was their inveterate custom and a crossroads of fortune, bickered like a couple of Regensburg fishwives. At first they argued about whether or not they had time to argue, or if arguing would cost them their appointment with the ostler in the clearing, and then about whose fault it had been that they were never paid by the landlord of an inn outside Trebizond, and then Zelikman succeeded at returning the conversation to the elephant boy, and his grandfather's stonghold in Azerbaijan, and the easy money that delivering him thence represented, at which point they resumed an old, old argument over whose definition of "easy money" was the least commensurate with lived experience, and about who was afraid and whose courage had been more openly on display in the recent course of their partnership.

That's good fun, but Chabon isn't really the funniest of writers and when that tone flags the novel becomes significantly less fun. It's as if, rather than just let it be a fun, silly adventure story, Chabon at times seems to want to give it some weight, but he hasn't built a structure that can sustain it. The long bits of description rarely actually describe much and the characters never really move past caricatures. Which would all be fine if it were just a bit more fun as a whole, but it never quite gets there.

As a side note, both his most recent books have been so nicely designed and I think the illustrations in this one are great.

More on the Olympics

Being a hockey fan I'm unfortunately well acquainted with the quality of NBC's sports coverage. So I'm not exactly surprised by the fact that the Olympic coverage has been obnoxious. I kind of just fast forwarded through the non-sports stuff and tried to ignore the fact that most of the announcing is bad, incredibly repetitive, or both. I say mostly because the diving analyst is delightfully nasty. I like her.

Then, a few days ago, I read Claudia LaRocco's post about the Olympics in which she states that the packaging of the games, "does a terrible disservice to athletics and to culture." Now I had just been thinking that the packaging of the games was a disservice to me because it makes me want to bang my head into my coffee table, but I don't really disagree with her. The opportunity to see the best athletes in the world competing against each other in a wide swathe of sports is thrilling and it should be possible to provide compelling and worthwhile coverage of such an event. NBC's coverage is occasionally compelling but only because the competition itself is capable, at times, of overcoming the fatuousness of the network. More often than not, though, enjoying the sports requires ignoring the commentary.

Then, today, the Counter Critic put up a great two part post on China and the Olympics (Part One, Part Two) which looks at the divide between the real China and the illusion that China wants to present. An illusion that NBC is unfortunately helping to promote. And he uses Anne Carson and her explication of erotic desire to do it. Which is really pretty awesome. I don't have much to say, but check it out.

Edit: And the IPB ladies have written a letter to NBC pointing out that we so didn't wait 4 years to see features on Pandas and spend quality time in-studio with Bob Costas. I am seriously missing CBC right now. Chalk that up as an advantage to living in Buffalo. My dad's been all about CBC this year.

On a more sports oriented note, I'm loving watching the swimming and squirming through the women's gymnastics. I loved watching the gymnastics when I was little. I wanted to be able to do all that crazy stuff and my sister and I would pretend to be gymnasts and do tricks and such. So it's sad that when I watch it now I spend so much of my time cringing.

Water Polo, etc.

I watched water polo today and have been thinking about why it's not as exciting to watch as it should be. I think that they need: a) better play-by-play, particularly because most of the viewers won't be accustomed to watching the sport on television and b) more instant replay so that we can see the nuance of the game and learn what to watch for c) not just tell us which players are good but why they're good. The play-by-play seems particularly important to me. The best announcers create a narrative and find a way to verbally express the flow of the game. I realize that NBC probably doesn't employ fabulously talented, knowledgeable water polo play-by-play and color guys, but I still feel like a better job could have been done.

That Tony Acevedo clearly rocks though.

On another Olympic note I was delighted when the Latvian men's beach volleyball team beat the top US team yesterday. It's not that I wouldn't be happy to see the US to win eventually, but I thought it was really enjoyable to watch those two young guys who were so enthusiastic play the best game they were capable of playing and get rewarded for it. It's kind of one of those things that you watch the Olympics to see, no?

In other news, I should never have left my apartment today. I wanted to get up to the Mid-Manhattan library because they had a book I need to read for the book discussion group I attend. So I waited forever and a day for the F only to realize when I got off the subway that I had arrived smack in the middle of the Dominican Pride Parade. The people screaming and blowing whistles on the platforms where everything seems to echo and get magnified were particularly unpleasant. I went up at 40th and 6th only to realize that I couldn't cross the street there, so I went back down and went through the tunnels to 42nd and 5th instead. I got the book I needed and just walked to Grand Central and took the 6 downtown instead, but I found the whole experience far more draining than it should have been. I'm looking forward to spending the rest of the day on the couch with the cat watching they Olympics.

Sports Stuff

Those Opening Ceremonies were something else. Beautiful but also rather frightening in their precision. Definitely the most interesting opening I can remember watching. The Tai Chi demonstration with the thousands of people, many of them running opposite directions in perfect concentric circles was just unreal.

I love the Olympics. My family has always watched them religiously. Having only NBC to watch feels weird though since I'm used to being able to switch over to CBC whenever I feel like it. I can't say I buy into the whole "Olympic spirit" thing. But if you like watching sports--particularly the kind of sports they don't show on tv regularly--it doesn't get much better. I love the swimming and the volleyball (beach and regular) and the diving and a host of other sports. Track and field? That I don't love so much. So the first half of the games is more fun for me as a viewer.

In other news I am absolutely delighted that Teppo Numminen has been re-signed by the Sabres. I don't know how much better the team will be in the upcoming season but I've really been pretty happy with their offseason.