tennis and not

“It’s changed a little bit, hasn’t it, in the last six to seven years?”

— Chris Fowler, Australian Open men's final, ESPN2, 2013

three weeks ago, i read nearly all of David Foster Wallace's Both Flesh and Not: Essays in the span of a day for @24hourbookclub. it was my first DFW experience…all i knew before then were vague murmurings about this author who liked footnotes and had written an absolutely monster novel ostensibly about tennis.

i was coming late to the party, so i skipped the title essay (and two more) and dove right into the fourth chapter, "Democracy and Commerce at the U.S. Open". by the time the first paragraph had concluded, my mind was vividly in two places, or more accurately two times. the entire surrounds of Louis Armstrong Stadium 2010 came into crisp focus, along with its cast of characters — Schiavone, Monfils, Querrey, Söderling — while Armstrong 1995 got painted in big oil-brush strokes, Sampras and Philippoussis the protagonists. i could sense the great, gaping absence of Arthur Ashe Stadium over my shoulder, alternately two years from completion and thirteen years old, and i could feel the sun burning me, the worst of my life, so bad that it got inside my right ear and turned my SPF 50'd knees crispy for a week. DFW then led a tour of the grounds, a bit more behind-the-scenes than my novice day-pass-holder memories, but everything was perfectly congruous, right down to the attire of minor stadium staff. in fifteen years at the U.S. Open, not one damn thing had changed (Ashe notwithstanding). except the tennis.

two weeks ago, i sat down on Sunday afternoon to make good on my book club omissions, starting with "Federer Both Flesh and Not"…especially that essay, in anticipation of the kickoff of the 2013 grand slam season at 7 PM Eastern, 11 AM Monday in Melbourne. the essay plays out in two acts: 1) on what it's like to see tennis performed at the highest level, live, and 2) a history of what DFW calls the "power-baseline" game. these two acts are set against the backdrop of the 2006 Wimbledon Gentleman's Singles Final, a venue for Federer to assert his dominance over Rafa Nadal, who at that point had only won anything of consequence on clay. (In 2006, Nadal came out of nowhere and went 14–0 at Roland Garros to win two French Open titles in his first two tries. In 2013, his lifetime record there is a stonking 52–1 equaling seven titles and, unlike at the other majors, he hasn't missed a single year.)

by all accounts, DFW's beautiful prose included, the 2006 final was a very good tennis match, taken in four sets by Federer. on the other hand, except to provide historical context, it has fallen off the list of top matches of the past decade. like a runaway bidding war at an auction, where both parties have completely forgotten what they're even purchasing but dammit must not lose, the top level of professional tennis has outdone itself year in and year out. to wit:

• Wimbledon 2007: Federer over Nadal in 5
• Wimbledon 2008: Nadal over Federer, at last! 9–7 in the 5th.
• Wimbledon 2009: could you ask for more? yes. Federer's gut-punch win over Andy Roddick, converting just a single break point to win 16–14 in the 5th set.

the question justly posed is: how can spectators even comprehend what's going on down there? and by the time we've reached a grand slam final, it really is "down there." even the in-person spectators are piled up in a giant bowl of a stadium, and would have a better vantage looking through the filter of TV's baseline camera angle. as i watched hours and hours of the 2013 Australian Open on my iPad, propped up on the desk next to me or on my lap, i had the power to hold all of Rod Laver arena comfortably in two hands. (i could just as well have put it in one hand on my iPhone, but then the players are such tiny toys that i have to squint to look for the ball.) as DFW points out, tennis is a strange TV sport. i would argue that it's number two on the "most improved by HD" list (hockey is the clear winner). the increased clarity is perfect for tracking the ever-faster ball, but the wider aspect ratio is wasted, filled with empty swaths of blue, burnt orange, green, and blue (for each major, respectively). for a few fleeting moments this Aussie Open, ESPN2 showed full-speed replays of points from a fixed, isometric view. the frame was filled with action from corner to corner and, compared to the squat trapezoid tennis fans are used to, the court seemed a mile long and the ball took on a blazing life of its own. i would have paid money to get that camera feed for the entire match. i suppose that's why they sell tickets.

in the past year, i put a tennis racket in my own hand for the first time since high school and, stepping out onto the court, the delimiting white-on-blue rectangle feels big. unmanageably big. i can barely cover a third of this space big. yet, in miniature pixels i watched the top players seemingly teleport themselves from sideline to sideline in two and a half steps, or take a third to run around and convert a tricky backhand into a walloping inside-out forehand. they must have mutant blood. this is the power-baseline game, which i've observed as the primary mode of tennis since…circa 2006. so how was Wallace already writing its history at what i perceived to be its beginning? i think his term, "power-baseline", is spot on, and we are reaping its benefits in 2013 by seeing the most exciting tennis ever being played on both the men's and women's sides of the draw.

when i was a kid, being raised on NBC's woefully inadequate (but hey, it's all we had pre-internet) coverage of Wimbledon, tennis had it's boring moments. in 1993, the action game show American Gladiators was in its heyday, and featured an event called "Assault", wherein the "gladiator" shot tennis balls out of a cannon at the contestant at — they noted every episode — 104mph, unhumanly fast. then some of the top male tennis players started cracking serves faster than that, and nobody could return them. boom, 15. boom, 30. boom, 40. boom, game Sampras. it was borderline unwatchable. in the women's game, the points lasted longer…too much longer, as the only strategy seemed to be "pray for an unforced error." the men had power and the women had baseline, and it seemed never the twain should meet.

but then Andre Agassi figured out how to return fast serves. then all the men did. (DFW traces this back to Ivan Lendl, but if anything, Lendl was ahead of his time and not the root of a greater strategic arc. he's applying the strategy quite well now from the sidelines, coaching Andy Murray.) then Venus and Serena started crushing the ball, both on the serve and from the baseline. then all the women did. power got an infusion of baseline, and baseline got an infusion of power. in 2006, this was the brave new world of 21st century tennis, and because it felt so fresh and awe-inspiring, i don't fault DFW for throwing his hands up in the air and calling the future unpredictable. in 2013, though, we've settled into an interesting pattern. the men and women play the same style of game, the distribution of talent is roughly equal, yet the draws feel totally different. for the men, the Big 4 — Djokovic, Nadal, Federer, Murray, now in that order — entertain 124 other contenders…do your best. for the women, the field is wide open; anyone with or without a number in front of their name has a shot at the semifinals, if not the title.

as an amateur observer, i'd like to entertain the hypothesis that these states of order and chaos both owe themselves to the power-baseline game. power creates order over time and chaos in the short term, so what is the crucial difference between men's and women's tennis, at least in the grand slams? best of five versus best of three. the men's game is more forgiving of small lapses, and rewards the players who are most consistent. the number one man in the world, Novak Djokovic, could not be more consistently good right now, just having taken a third consecutive title Down Under to the surprise of no one. he was so good that he was trumping variance when he made his rise to #1 in 2011, winning the first 40 matches of the year (including some best-of-three affairs). while that was happening, the women's game was in utter disarray, crowning three ladies #1 without ever winning a major title. Dinara Safina never will. Jankovic and Wozniacki are, at this point, being lumped in with "the rest of the field" by oddsmakers. they are victims of variance: highly talented players in an environment where dropping a set is danger, and dropping two is a loss.

i've wanted the women to play best of five in the majors for several years now. they are in every bit of physical condition as the men (i'm fairly certain that Serena Williams could crush me with her pinky finger, and Maria Sharapova stands a full head taller than me). they are also being paid the same amount as the men, so the only real concern seems to be scheduling; there's a finite amount of court time, especially at weather-plagued tournaments like Wimbledon and the U.S. Open. nevertheless, working within the format, there have still been some thrilling matches between today's top ladies, e.g. Dementieva – Stosur at the 2010 U.S. Open (high on my list because i was there, all the way until 2 AM), and both of the 2012 Australian semifinals. and at the other end, there is still room for domination…witness Sharapova's insane run in the first five rounds in Melbourne, losing just nine games in ten sets before running into Li Na like she was a brick wall. in the end, Vika Azarenka defended her title, just as Novak did the next night, but there was zero sense of inevitability about it.

this is the two-headed beast of modern tennis, and, if i've done it any justice in words, it is tremendously exciting. it is not uniform, but perhaps that is to our advantage. and it no longer is embodied in any one man. as much as anyone, including himself, is loathe to admit it, Roger Federer is slowly on the wane. his whipping backhand and master strategy still outshines all but three humans on this planet, as the cliff drop between #4 and #5 on the ATP rankings documents neatly. his future, and the future of tennis, do not seem unpredictable. we are finally, really, solidly in the midst of a great era in this sport, and Federer (and Williams and Williams) ushered it in. it's hard to say what David Foster Wallace would think of Tennis 2013, seeing as the final major in his lifetime was the 2008 U.S. Open (another Federer triumph, for the record). but his phrase, "…and not", invites many possibilities. "and not" is contrasted with "flesh", but almost certainly does not refer to Roger Federer's racket. or the pixels arrayed to display him on my iPad. or even his topspin. it is much more likely "&c," an unbounded and still-growing list of everything that he has transformed by physically whacking a tennis ball. it will be on display again in June in Paris, and i'll be watching.

made connections

yesterday i did something that used to be impossible.

i shuffled down a line of people waiting to order food, scanning faces. i stopped at someone, head-down, tapping (a message to me, it turned out) on a white iPhone.

"Diana? nice to see you!" we hugged. to the best of my knowledge, Diana and i had never before been in the same room at the same time.

that's how i met an old friend for the first time. describing it that way makes it sound paradoxical, oxymoronic, …impossible. but in the moment it felt natural, comfortable, real. that the first words out of my mouth weren't "nice to meet you" surprised neither of us. we already knew each other. you don't need to stand on ceremony with friends.

how do friendships build to that point? the answer is a little bit of the real world and a lot of the internet. in this case, our lives both orbited around Ann Arbor, MI at roughly the same time. we acquired mutual experiences, mutual friends…spirals and concentric circles, never crossing. but we became aware of each other's existence, and followed our subsequent revolutions around the country and around twitter, the web, soundcloud. because we followed each other, we were able to realize that our paths finally, serendipitously were passing very close to each other. only a minor course correction — negotiated over twitter DM — and we landed in Cambridge, MA, at the same organic cafe, on the same afternoon.

a generation ago, ten years ago, hell, probably even five years ago, we would have just been one long string of missed connections. yeah, that person i heard about a while ago. no, dunno what they're up to now. but in 2013, we connected. frequently it's difficult to explain to people on the outside what you get from twitter. when you tell them that it connects you with people you care about, their faces usually scrunch up with skepticism. but the internet isn't just a TCP/IP connection, a handshake of packets and bits…it's also a satisfying human handshake, the kind where the webbing of your thumb presses tight and for a few seconds, subliminally, you feel the other person's pulse and another flesh and blood creature becomes part of your life experience.

regardless, i'd be lying if i didn't point out the touch of surreality around an otherwise lovely afternoon that led to wonderful conversation. Diana was the third of my twitter friends that i'd met in the course of the weekend (hi Arika and Heather!). when people i knew from words and pictures kept materializing in front of me, i got the unnerving sense that Some Magic was going on. the fabric of reality seemed to have a little pinhole in it, and i was standing on its frayed edge.

in normal circumstances, i'm convinced of the firm reality of the world…to bend and break Decartes, cogito ergo sunt — "i think, therefore they are." i experience the world, and therefore it's either objectively real or i'm inventing the whole thing as i go, and i feel that the latter is a bit beyond my skills. but words are so close to thoughts, and despite the internet's connective power, it tends to reduce to words. if i were uncareful about how i strung those facts together, i could fool myself into thinking that i was conjuring people out of nothing.

but the only magic that really happened this weekend is that the world got smaller. or, perhaps not smaller — since everyone involved had traveled distances more or less great to arrive in Boston — but denser. i've said before: the internet is like living in a big city. it pushes and pulls people together and lets us create and share and laugh and talk and become friends. it's possible.

speaking for the Lorax

a few weeks ago i needed dish soap. i was out, totally out, had balanced the bottle at improbable angles until nothing but funny noises and the occasional bubble would come out. no big deal, i was due to make a grocery run anyway.

i've used Seventh Generation brand dish soap for some time now. i don't primarily buy it for the "hoorah let's save the earth like the Native Americans would have done" business; i like how it smells, and it gets my dishes clean, and it doesn't destroy my hands even when i need to clean every pot and pan in the kitchen. all of these are good things, including the environmentalism, but i stopped in my tracks when i reached towards the grocery store shelf and saw this:

View fullsize

i picked it up. i put it down. i paced around the aisle. i calculated how many more dishes i could do with what i had at home. (zero.) i contemplated walking all the way to the other end of the store and buying the radioactive blue stuff that kills bacteria, skin cells, and anything else it touches.

in the end, i caved and bought the Lemongrass & Clementine Zest Corporate Shill. i wasn't going to write about this episode as it stood by itself, especially since the internet already has plenty of indignation over corporate tie-ins with the new Lorax film.

fast forward a week or so, and i was in Austin for the North American Summer School on Language, Logic, and Information. on my last morning, i got in a final bit of tourism, including going to the LBJ Presidential Library, which is right on campus at the University of Texas.

i didn't know that the museum was under renovation, and that only a handful of the exhibits were open. they still had a mock-up of LBJ's Oval Office, but 90% of the rest was devoted to an exhibit on the First Lady. the remainder was one little case of miscellany, a hodgepodge of gifts from various heads of states and dignitaries: swords, jewelry, ancient artifacts, cowboy boots, and — at the very end, almost an afterthought — this.

the entire original art of The Lorax is in the library's collection, but just this one spread was on display. the coloring is done in crayon, as if by a child instead of for a child, and the words are held on with masking tape. how humble, i thought, unassuming artwork for an iconic book, donated to a public collection. the antithesis of selling out an idealist character to the highest bidder.

i had the impression that this art had been lovingly and spontaneously donated by Theodor Geisel. i discovered later that the truth was rather different. i suppose "spontaneous" still holds, but apparently the donation was an extreme case of presupposition accommodation:

I was at a dinner for Democrats some years ago, and I sat next to Liz Carpenter, who was LBJ’s press secretary. Since Lady Bird was so interested in beautification, it seemed that environmental protection was a safe topic, so I mentioned that I had written a book on the subject. Liz seemed interested, but soon after left the room. When she reappeared she called me to the phone and said, “The President wants to talk to you.” I said “Hello,” and there was LBJ thanking me for donating the drawings for The Lorax to his library in Austin, Texas.
source: LBJ Library

so the fate of this artwork was made by executive decision. but the Chief Executive acted in the spirit of respect, and preservation. it's not so clear that any preserving force stands watch over the Seuss canon today. what's to be done? near-indefinite copyright terms don't seem to do a lot; as intellectual property, beloved characters can be passed around, traded, sold, and generally mismanaged for decades after the author, long passed away, can no longer say anything. it's hard to say whether limiting that would help, but perhaps there would be a more level playing field; the Once-ler couldn't buy an exclusive product placement in the story where he's the villain.

i don't have a perfect solution, but one thing is clear: The Lorax is an orphan with his creator gone. he's just crayon on paper, and taped-on, typewritten verse. someone needs to speak for him, and his kind, for like the trees, they too have no tongues, and everyone from movie studios to soap makers wants to put words in their mouths.

we've already lost the filesystem

or: How I Haven't Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Cloud.

there's a persistent background of fear in the Apple community. even when rationality ought to prevail (as it most certainly did in John Gruber's written and spoken coverage of the Mountain Lion announcement), paranoia rushes in to fill the void. "it's only a matter of time", the devil perched on your shoulder says, "before they take away the filesystem. for good. everywhere."

an aside for all those about to go Van Hœt on this: what we're talking about is the filesystem metaphor, i.e. that the stuff on your computer is stored in files which get organized into folders. this is separate from the filesystem qua filesystem, the method by which a computer actually stores, organizes, and finds data on disk. Hypercritical e56 is a nicely comprehensive review of these, and from 1:42:00 to the end deals with the actuality vs. metaphor distinction. to disambiguate, John Siracusa uses the term "file hierarchy", which i think is certainly apt, and points out that one of the major reasons that its demise might be imminent and even welcome is the fact that most people simply cannot grok it. this is certainly true. ten years on, my parents still haven't quite grasped where /Applications is in OS X. they had no trouble with the file hierarchy in Classic Mac OS — just bung stuff wherever you want it, as long as you don't touch the System Folder. so the question is, if the file hierarchy ceases to exist, will they lose anything? i think the answer is yes, but perhaps less than most people think, and for a different reason than most people think: namely, that we've already lost a good bit of the meaningful hierarchy.

the case of the missing calendars

last fall, like many people, i updated to iOS 5. also, i wasn't an early adopter of Lion — i waited until 10.7.2 came out and then did one epic afternoon of software updates. i mostly did this to try to ensure a smooth transition to iCloud. despite having to actually set up iCloud from the bleachers at a hockey game because i didn't believe that the full wipe and restore of my phone would take as long as iTunes warned me it would, everything seemed to go perfectly smoothly. until a couple months later.

one day i was idly playing around with the ⌘4 / heat map / year view in iCal and noticed that 2009 and 2008 looked a little … sparse. (my iCal universe begins on April 6, 2008, due to massive a hard drive catastrophe that happened then. back up, kids!) after digging a little deeper, i noticed that some calendars, despite professing that they were merrily synced to the cloud, had zero events in them. oof. for whatever reason, iCloud had been benevolent and only disappeared the contents of calendars that were no longer in active use; otherwise it would have been a code red disaster. as it was, it was an inconvenience that left a hole in my personal digital history, which i now try to preserve a little better than i did in March 2008. i filed it away as a problem to be dealt with later. perhaps i did that because i knew it would be no simple task to get them back.

backups are only as good as the files they contain

what i was up against was another concern of power users everywhere: (1) the cloud is canon, (2) the cloud is now, (3) the cloud is only now. in this case, iCloud was very sure that those calendars weren't supposed to have any events. that's how things are supposed to be now, because those are the instructions the cloud received, be it in error or good faith. and iCloud has no idea if that's how things used to be, or whether those calendars ever used to have any events in them. the fact that i had a human, fleshy, grey matter memory that i definitely put things there and used to be able to look at them was really of no concern to the cloud. as i learned in the 2008 hard drive crash, wistful memories don't bring data back from the dead, they just make you feel like crap.

but all was not lost. those now-cloudy calendars were once local calendars, back when the canonical version lived inside my apartment, instead of in North Carolina. and i have Time Machine backups, so they must be preserved. it's just a matter of … finding them.

sidebar: i have considered myself a power user for a long, long time — my entire adult life, certainly. restoring a few files from a backup should be trivial, not throw me into a rage. but when there are as many layers of pain as there were between me and those files, there was no other possible reaction. bear in mind that this task would be impossible for an average user, and as i'll point out along the way, near impossible for a third party trying to help an average user. for a power user, it was merely maddeningly difficult.

ok, let's do this! first, where do those calendars live? must be somewhere in ~/Library …which is of course now hidden in Lion. no problem, ⌘⇧G will get me there in no time. from there it'll just be a quick hop into the Time Machine, rescue the appropriate calendars, and— oh, hell. ~/Library/Calendars looks like this:

~/Library/Calendars

we have just exited the universe of the filesystem metaphor. there is next to nothing here that is human-readable. perhaps i was supremely naïve to believe that my Typology calendar would be named something sensible like Typology.ics, or at least be a folder called Typology.calendar. instead i was staring down 32-character hex hashes. (note the Finder's hilariously awful attempt to sort these by name. since it tries to use logical base-10 numerical sorting, clearly a file that starts with 127 should come before one that starts 0259!)

i was not deterred. i went digging and found that each folder had an Events subfolder, which contained each event in its own self-contained .ics file. an empty Events folder indicated that i'd found one of my raptured calendars. there was also an Info.plist file. i started cracking these open, figuring that they had to include important metadata like, you know, the name of the bloody calendar. rinse and repeat for my 33 calendars. some time and scratch paper later, i'd compiled a list of dead calendars matched with the first four digits of their hash. now, certainly, i could step into the Time Machine.

since i access my Time Capsule over wifi, this is excruciating in and of itself. two minutes "Connecting to backup volume …". another three minutes remembering that any previous states of this folder exist, during which i can't do anything else with my Mac. (a necessary design choice when Time Machine was first introduced. but please, Apple, make this thing behave like a proper full-screen app in Lion.) all the while i'm not being soothed by my slow drift through some sort of nebula or star cluster, and the all-important navigation bar on the right side of the screen has rendered improperly on my external display. this is well past the point of giving up for most people.

stepping backward through backups proves incredibly slow and massively unhelpful — my calendars are modified between nearly every backup. so i get to play guess and check with when it was that i made the switch to iCloud. i finally find it! here we go, time to bring back those calendars when i realize, son of a bitch all the local calendar hashes are different. 33 new sequences of hex digits, totally unrelated to my notes and the previous work i've done. i am no longer surprised that iCloud lost track of some of my data.

this is also the stage where the endeavor becomes impossible even for a user being assisted by someone else, say a Mac Genius. first, the user would have to take their Mac and Time Capsule to the Apple store. then the Genius would have to get to this point. then, together, they would have to go through every calendar folder through the Time Machine interface, which is about as fast as working with floppy disks, handcuffed by only being able to use quick look to ascertain what's what. i found out that quick look-ing the .ics files was faster than the .plist files, so i did that. i wrote down another set of 4-digit hex prefixes on my scrap sheet, selected those folders and finally, at long last, hit Restore. after clearing the iCal cache and forcing it to rebuild its database, my events were back. not in the cloud, but back, on my hard drive…somewhere.

i don't want to have to be lucky

there's no question, i got lucky in this scenario. the snafu happened in the transition from local to cloud copies of my calendars. i had backups. i had knowledge and a hell of a lot of persistence. but what about the person who buys their first Mac today and always lives in the cloud? when their data goes missing, who's going to be able to save it? it'd be like waking up one morning to find that your car was missing from your garage. you call the police to report it, but once you give them your license plate number and VIN, they tell you that they have no record of the registration and that in fact, the vehicle had never even been produced by the manufacturer. this is nightmare, Kafka-type stuff.

everybody, power-user or not, should want to be able to lay a hand on their data, in both the literal and metaphorical sense: "look here, i hold in my hand a drive that contains my data" and "look here, i'm pointing with my cursor at the representation of that data". if all our data lives inside apps, all our apps have to be able to talk directly to our incremental backups. a couple Apple apps do this — Mail.app, for one — but the vast majority don't.

losing a file hierarchy might be a pain for some power users. but plenty of those power users use a flattened system for the one place they have more data go in and out on a daily basis than any other: their gmail archive. gmail tags are a flat storage system (ironically, to be compatible with IMAP, which uses folder hierarchies, google had to hack a flattening mechanism on top of the hierarchy. actually, the same is true for iCloud — anything saved on an HFS+ drive necessarily lives in a directory, even if it's invisible, unaccessible, and miserably named.) i am all for organizing my stuff in the most efficient way. even though i'm a file hierarchy junkie, i usually cut through most of the layers by using LaunchBar. my files live in a semi-flat representation in my mind already.

fortunately, i don't have to conclude this by predicting only doom and gloom. iCloud is gravely unsatisfactory in terms of keeping my data safe, because it's dumb about backups and previous states. thankfully, we have an alternative: Dropbox. no matter what happens in Cupertino, it's a relatively safe bet that Dropbox is not going anywhere in the foreseeable future. and they provide two very, very important features. first, file hierarchy is their bread and butter. even on a device where the local file hierarchy is totally hidden, like in iOS, any app with Dropbox access lets you browse cloud-based files and folders. but most of all, they preserve previous states of everything, for a full 30 days even on free accounts. if something gets disappeared — through a bug, through human error, whatever — they will not deny that it ever existed.

so is Apple protecting our data? my answer on a file level, and John Siracusa's answer on a filesystem level, is a resounding no. this is sad, but it may change. at least, for now, there are many clouds in the sky.