Thursday, April 4, 2013

Belated Happy Easter From the Bunny's Best Friends, Meryl and Charlie

Die Fleudermaus placeholder (gif clips to be are on the tarmac).












It was tough to figure the Die Fleudermaus placeholder. The constant, gratuitous two-footing? The constant running and skipping? Or the incredible weirdness that keeps showing up with Meryl in entrances to rotationals - in the Giselle twizzles and here, in the lead up to the spins.

They have the sloppiest feet - EVER. Whether on an edge (both of them, not just one of them) or not. But both on an edge is the exception.

But it's spring, so hopping it is. Although in Die Fleudermaus, it's all about the two footing. That will be for gifs, with some screen cap illustration.

P.S. - elsewhere, I mentioned that this team only skates in segments. They don't link the segments with skating. It's hopping, squatting and other tricks, but mostly two-footing. So much two footing. Re-watching, what's actually taking place is that they re-set before and after elements.

Always. They can't take the momentum into the next thing - not on edges they can't. They can't even stay connected. It's get away from me, and I need to get off any kind of edge.

The smiling, hopping, waving, looking out to the audience and WTF-ing is meant to disguise that they've in fact, stopped skating and are re-setting.

Before I started this project - which I didn't know was going to become a project when it began - my expectation about Meryl/Charlie is that they were indeed, "good element skaters" (as Scott Moir has said) but their basic skating was nowhere near as refined as Virtue and Moir, nor was their speed, blade run or ice coverage what was claimed.

I didn't realize that they do little real skating of any kind in their programs. They're freaking ice dancers, for God's sake.

I didn't expect to see that the elements weren't anything to write home about, and in fact, pretty basic compared to Virtue and Moir's. Of course they can go after the element with a lot of attack, as one would expect after practicing relative basics for five years. It will be interesting to see if other ice dancers give this a shot. A lot of dancers at the moment are really going for levels. Forget that. Find your comfort zone. And then drill the shit out of it over the summer til you can execute in your comfort zone in your sleep, and condition yourself so you can just blow through them. It doesn't matter HOW you blow through them. Just do it. Your pcs will grow and it's just a lot easier this way, and whatever you're doing will get the levels just because you're the ones doing it. You'll become the rulebook.

Davis White's elements - not just their skating - their elements are nothing to write home about divorced from the visual trickery in which they're cloaked.

But the thing is - I understand that if you're watching Meryl Charlie you see a lot of what looks like spinning, flying, sailing, dancing - that's how you take it in.  All this visual noise is set really well to the music - the music is never subtle, so if Meryl is doing something odd like scrambling her feet before a spin, or Charlie has his feet planted for the umpteenth time - you just don't notice.

But all you have to do is load the program up on some type of editing program and go - okay, I'm going to cut after the first ten seconds. So you've got the first ten seconds of the program and you see how little is really there and what a lot of to do the both of them are making out of presenting this nothing. Then you do the next ten seconds, and it's more visual junkyard stuff. Then the next, and already they've skidded to a re-set on two feet. Basically, deconstructed this way - and it was the case with both Giselle and Die Fleudermaus - you're waiting for the actual program to start - and it doesn't. This IS the skating. It's actually not buried that deeply - this little ten second excerise shows it up right away. Yet the judges are watching this in both the short and long program year after year, at practices and in competition, and haven't noticed it? The pcs have gone up for Meryl and Charlie.

11 comments:

  1. Charlie in that last screencap.... There are no words.

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  2. Why was everybody up in arms that they "lost" Worlds last year with this garbage program?

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  3. Your obsession knows no bounds. Didn't you say you didn't hate Meryl and Charlie? I find that hard to believe when reading all of these posts that have such a nasty undertone. Why not post about why you like Tessa and Scott? Oh right, you don't like them because they're lying. Oh wait, you do like them. It's hard to keep your obsessions straight.

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    1. Did you even scroll or just click on the first link possible to share your opinion? Because the recent word count on why the blogger likes Tessa and Scott's skating is throught the roof.

      I'm also confused about - is it the tone in which the blogger writes that you feel is nasty, or just the deconstruction of DW's skating in the first place? Since when did discussing an athlete's performance in a competitive sport become equivalent to hating them?

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    2. like "OMG, you're actually saying in specific ways why you think Crosby is better than Ovechkin, why do you HATE Alex so much, why don't you just write posts about your OWN favourite player, why are you so obsessed with the plays they make and if the referee's call was correct, you're CRAZY."

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    3. Maybe, just maybe, it's not about "liking" but about "skating." Other than the reference to Easter in the title, every word in the post is about figure skating. The SPORT in which Meryl and Cheryl compete. The sport which has exacting and demanding criteria for the placement of the foot, the depth of edge, the bodyline, the holds. This is the event where Meryl and Charlie claimed that they were robbed (sorry, where "many people came up and told" Meryl and Charlie that they were robbed). They should welcome a freeze frame of every move in the program with detailed technical analysis to prove why "so many people thought" they should have won. If a DW fan disagrees with the commentary the blogger has put next to the pics perhaps a DW fan can make a site showing where DW were better. I don't mean quoting articles and parroting the protocols. I mean showing it in the actual figure skating.

      Why is this such a scary thought to DW's supporters?

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    4. OH please it's all in your mind, 10:03pm. It's just scary to see their actual skating deconstructed like an actual sport.

      Figure skating is a real sport or it isn't. If it is, if the judging is on the up and up, then Meryl and Charlie's skating should stand up to scrutiny.

      But it's fascinating that you find close-ups and freeze frames of their skating nasty and obsessive and all things negative. Why is that? I'm not making up what's there - that's exactly what they're doing. I could call it bad all day long and be laughed off the blog if they were as great as their scoresheet tells us they are. We'd all see that I was intent on tearing down a GREAT team and seeing things that weren't there and pretending bad things were.

      Instead, nothing of the sort. Here's their skating.

      And their fans are like - OMG, what an awful person!

      I think fan reaction to this blog's discussion of Meryl and Charlie's skating is pretty fucking damning about Meryl and Charlie's skating, or they wouldn't be so bent out of shape.

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  4. http://www.skatepsa.com/PDF%20Documents/PSA-Rocker-Bracket-Challenge.pdf

    Help us all.

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    1. They're going to try to tell us that D/W are better than Torvill and Dean, aren't they?

      *clutching teddy bear*

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    2. 5:50am -- They'll try. They might even get away with it for a while, but in the long run their skating and programs won't hold up to scrutiny.

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  5. how the hell do these two even win gold

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