10 Things I’ll Miss About Lost

The final season of Lost is rapidly approaching, so I’ve been obsessively feathering my geek nest with reruns of the show and an unending meditation on its themes, characters, and place in the Pop Culture Pantheon.  I even dreamt that I had graded the poorly researched term paper of Dr. Jack Shepherd, and confronted him at a bistro to offer him a chance to revise his work.  “You’ve only got one source,” I cried.  Never being a man who could entertain more than one point of view, Jack turned me down with his typical dismissive arrogance.  So, yeah, I guess it could be said I’ve internalized this show to an almost cellular level.  If there’s a show worth squatter’s rights in my heart and mind, it’s definitely Lost.  And I will miss it when it goes.  What follows below is my list of the things that made it special: Spoiler Alerts ad infinitum.

• Its complete and utter audacity. True, Lost is fantasy, and, as such, is pretty much duty-bound to go where no man has gone before.  Lost transports us and its flawed characters to a land of impossibilities known as  The Island.  Here, the handicapped walk, the dead talk, and time as we know it is, well, subject to change.  The thing is, man has gone to these places before; those places are called spirituality, philosophy, and science.  The true journey of Lost isn’t just the exploration of where our imaginations can take us; it returns us to that timeless question of why we are here.  Are we merely the playthings of  gods and monsters, our inborn frailties foretelling our fates like some predestination expiration date?  Or do we create reality through the choices we make, our lives an ongoing experiment in which the very fabric of existence is refracted through free will into a rainbow of infinite worlds?  To these questions, Lost says an unblinking ”yes.”  Like the character Eloise Hawking, Lost has built its church upon an underground lab of outlaw science, and it’s through this interdigitation of oppositional philosophies that Lost flashes mad cajones. To even presume to bring up the subject in the context of a network television drama is gutsy enough, but Lost takes it a bit further.  Judging by the ongoing failures of characters representing both sides of  the God vs. Science Culture Wars, Lost implies both camps will always be wrong as long as they continue in their mutual hostility.  Damn!

Eloise Hawking: Upstairs/Downstairs

• The Smoke Monster.  An uncanny silence, occasionally pierced by percussive locust echoes, heralds its imminence.  It coils like a serpent.  It roars like a beast.  What the hell is it?  Nobody knows, but make no mistake, it will fuck you up.  The Smoke Monster has been known to pull trees right out of their root bases, toss people like rag dolls, or if it’s in a good mood, it just might treat you to its own special twist on ”This Is Your Life” and torment you with visions of  your past transgressions.  He’s your conscience, motherfucker!

• The Characters.  Sayid the Killer, Kate the Bad Girl, Sawyer the Con Man, Jack the Doctor with Daddy Issues.  Lost introduced us to characters who were each uniquely tormented.  Within the cycle of the 5 seasons, these characters have grown to transcend the psychic pain induced by their life experiences or to become transformed by it.   Make no mistake, the people who crawled from the flaming wreckage of Oceanic flight 815 are not the same as the ones we’ll be watching this final season.  It’s been a fascinating trip watching Sawyer, for one, grow beyond a  vengeance-obsessed, provisions-hoarding confidence artist and bloom into Le Fleur, a man who employs his gifts for prevarication and manipulation to contribute to society instead of taking from it.  But other characters are not so lucky: warped by their shortcomings and blinded by suffering, they succumb to forces beyond their control and become pawns of destiny.  Which brings me to…
• John Locke.  I love John Locke.  This cannot be stressed enough.  John Locke is the Charlie Brown of Lost.  He’s lonely, peculiar, and out of step with the rest of the world; therefore, he is misunderstood and regarded with suspicion and a fair amount of ridicule.  He is, without a doubt, the messiest character who has ever punched a dashboard on network television, and I mean that as a compliment.  His unvarnished neediness, wince-worthy guilelessness and idiosyncratic inscrutability propels John Locke to pursue his purpose within The Island one desperate, dangerous leap of faith at a time.  He is a conduit of both miracle and mayhem, a man who is as liable to walk out of a wheelchair he’d occupied for a number of years as he is to deliberately sabotage the rescue of his friends.  Locke would seem unworthy of anyone’s love, but Terry O’ Quinn’s Emmy-winning portrayal of this tragically wounded man leaves me no choice but to secretly consider myself Locke’s Little Red Haired Girl.  He is a jackass visionary and he sets the Lost story arc in motion with pure Crazy Power.  Let’s have a 21 knife salute to John Locke!
• Son Of  A Bitch!

• Time after time: not to be confused with that one time that happened 30 years before, which is right about…. Now!   Yeah, I’m not going to pretend that this Subterranean Donkey Wheel That Takes a Licking and Keeps On Kicking The Island Around In Time stuff makes sense.   The thing is, I get the sense that Lost doesn’t expect us to, either.  The show has catapulted its characters back and forth in time, and along the way, proposed that time is not a linear stream made up of a past, present, and future but instead that time is actually the eternal present.  This means that characters who transport from ‘our’ present, do not go into the past, but rather into another present.  This present seems to exist concurrently with our own, a relativity I can only liken to the coexistence of apartments within the same building.  Calling that other present (say 1977), the past, would be incorrect because that character had never occupied that particular present (apartment) until, well, now.  Lost has gone to some admirable lengths to explain this theory, which is very Sci of it, but it does not hesitate to remind us that it is also Fi by admonishing its audience to stop sweating the geek stuff and to have some faith that the story will be told.
• Sayid getting tied up and worked over. I’m pretty sure this happens at least once every season.  It’s beginning to seem as though he’s enjoying it, particularly when he happens to be at the mercy of a woman.    I’ll also miss his soulful brown eyes, his off-putting long fingernails, his jheri curlish locks, his Season One Quiet Storm Love Tent, that low-cut chesty purple blouse he wore on the Ajira flight, and the cute way he says “Torcha!”
  
• The beautiful bad ass women, their dirty tousled manes, their chiseled guns and their tank tops.
  

  Ana Lucia and Kate remind you: Don't drive the tank if you ain't got the guns

• The smarty pants payoffs. Following in the tradition exemplified by time traveling seeker Billy Pilgrim from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, many of Lost’s characters have names that are either character sign posts or clever literary references.  There’s Miles Strom, who harbors within himself a maelström of conflicted emotion.  There’s Jack Shepherd, a leader of men who don’t mind being treated like sheep.  There’s Clementine, who is “lost and gone forever” as far as her absentee dad is concerned. Danielle Rousseau had me revisiting the ideas of her namesake and Jeremy Bentham, the mummified philosopher, even popped by to inspire a hearty chuckle.  At last, my advanced Liberal Arts degree comes to its smug fruition!
  
• The kismet of coincidence. The Island’s inhabitants are only strangers to one another by virtue of their own ignorance.  Their lives are interwoven in ways that they could never guess at and that they all happened to be survivors of the same plane crash is a narrative device that lends itself to all sorts of fascinating plot twists.  But more than that: for the tiny duration of one hour a week, Lost allows us to feel as though our very existence, all its chaos and senseless suffering, somehow means something, that all our lives are interlocking components of the jigsaw enigma of being.  I’ll miss that.

I’m not especially worried if Lost will fail to live up to its ambitions with this Final Season.   That it even dared to have them in the first place is enough to merit my admiration.

Awkward Strikes Again:Update!

This Just In: From this week’s Onion AV Club: “In a challenging dual role, Michael Cera toys with his adorably awkward man-child persona as a hormone-crazed teenager who uses his mastery of language to compensate for his fundamental powerlessness.” 

The correct (sorry, language descriptivists), I mean *classic* use of the word “awkward” pleases me, as does the idea that awkward people can overcome the power imbalance they typically endure by hitting  the squares with some snazzy vocab.  Maybe Youth In Revolt is worth watching?  Even if this movie uses the portrayal of those who demonstrate awkward characteristics in the classic sense as cultural grist in the perpetuation of Awkward as it’s now known?  By this I simply mean: are we in for a Son of Revenge of the Nerds?

Post Script: 01-17-10

My questions answered: Not so much, hardly, and thankfully, no.  Youth In Revolt isn’t some paean to Awkward and its champions.  It’s your typical Teen Fuck Quest Flick and not much more.  The innovative elements that should have allowed Youth In Revolt to engender an evolutionary step forward for the TFQF genre (as established by the Porky’s Precedent of 1982*) are just bells and whistles designed to distract the viewer from the reality that they are, in fact, really watching a Teen Fuck Quest Flick.   The surrealistic digs at the Christian right, the claymation segues, and Nick Twisp’s evil alter ego Francois were the best parts of the movie, but they seemed like an intrusion upon the TFQF agenda as opposed to an enhancement.  I wasn’t at all distracted from the fact that I was watching a Teen Fuck Quest Flick as much as I was wishing I was watching a better one.  Too bad, because that Francois was a bad ass.

And while I’m on the subject on celluloid teen fantasy, I’m positive that 100 viewings of Youth In Revolt would be preferable to 10 minutes of  The Lovely Bones.   From the looks of the trailer (augmented by my reading of the book), it seems that The Lovely Bones makes its foundation the 11-16 year old girl’s Ultimate Rebellion: untimely death.  The Lovely Bones sends dead girls to a dazzling Technicolor after world where they can enjoy the view from above as everyone left behind mourns them to the point of danger and dysfunction.  It posits a world overturned and overwrought by the loss of its vital focal point, (which is, of course, the teenaged girl) and appeals to the You’re Gonna Miss Me When I’m Gone mindset of girls too well-behaved to come of age. 

The Youth In Revolt/The Lovely Bones dichotomy can be parsed in a number of ways (comedy vs. drama, male vs. female, satire vs. “high art”), but the winner of this crappy movie coin toss is the teen rebellion with a pulse. 

*The Porky’s Precedent of 1982 mandates that all TFQF’s depict the desire to lose one’s virginity as the catalyst to Ultimate Rebellion.  As such, the TFQF  must involve outraged parents, mild drug usage, and flummoxed law enforcement in a chaotic symphony heralding the golden dawn of adulthood.  Youth In Revolt is indeed faithful to the PP82.

“It’s a brand new record for 1990!”

"Birdhouse In Your Soul": The Purely Accidental Homage by an unknown Crafty Country Grandma

The opening track is a theme song laden with the sort of hokey harmonies that set the tone for those ’50’s sitcoms they used to show on Nickelodeon.  The buttercream blend of male and female voices evoke the comforting predictability of the nostalgic past.  Yet it is the theme song of a romance so epic, a spirit of goodwill so heroic, that it smacks of utter madness and, ultimately, portends destruction on an apocalyptic scale.   ”Why is the world in love again?  Why are we marching hand in hand?  Why are the ocean levels rising up?” Why, indeed?  Well,  ”It’s a brand new record for 1990!  They Might Be Giants’ brand new album: FLOOD!”                

Of course.                

Flood was, in the vernacular of the music industry, They Might Be Giants’ major label debut, and, as such, their Breakthrough Album.  The modest two-man band comprised solely of Johns (known to me as Guitar John and Accordion John from my acquaintance with their self-titled debut and Lincoln), ponied up to the hype, fortifying their sound with the aforementioned Father Knows Donna Reed Best choir, third-world violins, rasping jazz man trumpets, sly trombones, analogue drums, what sounded like a vacuum cleaner, and the solitary crack of a whip.  Similarly, their songwriting, (termed “weird” by those who did not like it, and “quirky” by those who pretended they did) gobbled up entire genres like a cartoon factory would, as if fed by a conveyor belt.  Folk, country, corporate jingles, jazz, world music–all raw materials consumed in the creation of a product that strained the imaginative limits of modern marketing.  Flood was therefore sold as “quirky” music for “weird” people.  Naturally, it was a college radio smash.                  

I was 20 years old when Flood was ”a brand new record for 1990″ on Electra Records.  Flood was my very first CD and now it is as old as I was when I first put it on the spindle of my first CD player and listened to it via my repurposed Walkman headphones.  The very same CD now spins in my hard drive as I listen to it via my repurposed iPod earbuds.   My glasses are considerably smaller now than they were when I was 20, and my temples have taken on an Earth-2 Superman silver.  The fairy-faint sounds of my daughter ruling her pretend pink kingdom sift into those between-songs-silences once commandeered by my dad’s anti-Bush, anti-Gulf War rants.  (That would be the *first* Bush and the *first* Gulf War.)   Flood thumps, wahs, and whines in my head with a startling freshness, completely unravaged by two decades, two Bushes, and two wars.   It packs the sweet, jawbreaking crunch-punch of a milkproof mouthful of Quisp cereal.              

The songs seem to explode from the flash point where book-smart collides with smartass.  The Johns, consummate Fermilab pranksters of composers that they are, spared no element of the human condition from surreal experimentation: our capacity for intimacy is calibrated to the teensy dimentions of a ”Birdhouse In Your Soul”, our longing for the solace of simplicity is  boiled down on the bunsen burner to the elemental metaphor ”We Want A Rock”, our abilty to tolerate large-scale torment is crash-tested mightily only to be crushed irredeemably by the merely irksome: “Someone Keeps Moving My Chair”, our eagerness to drink that dangerous cocktail of high self esteem and optimism is case-studied in “Whistling In The Dark”.   Flood’s counter-intuitive images (“Everybody wants prosthetic foreheads on their real heads” , “countless screaming Argonauts”, “Frosty the Supervisor”) are packed within neatly rhyming lyrics.  These strange songs demonstrate perfect respect for the pop song craft convention of verse-chorus-verse and the occasional bridge.  The songs are short.  They are catchy.  They are sneaky little bastards that way.          

         

Above the riotous din of the marching bands, the exotic yodeling, the 88-key tap dancing reigns The Whine.  Summoned up from the recesses of the nasal cavities belonging to Accordion John (and to a lesser extent Guitar John), The Whine is to They Might Be Giants what the Stratocaster was to Jimi Hendrix.  The Whine is, in fact, They Might Be Giants’ signature sound.  It is also the most polarizing sound in the band’s repertoire.  Not everyone can take the The Whine.   The Whine is not for everybody.    The only thing that sounds even remotely like The Whine has to be that mocking ”nyah nyah” sound that little kids make when they safely dodge a snowball or some other projectile intended to humble its would-be target.   The Whine similarly conveys a sense of imperviousness.  It declares a cheery, childish exemption from emotional pain, thus freeing They Might Be Giants to explore all that is painful with complete fearlessness.  (Counterpoint this vocal point of view to that of TMBG’s contemporaries like  U2’s Bono whose  the noble roar  said “everybody hurts” much more eloquently than REM ever could or The Smiths’ Morrissey whose mournful wail declared “nobody hurts as much as I do”).   The more brutal the truth, the more brutal The Whine.  Take for example, the track “Dead” in which The Johns despair a wasted life from behind the protective force field of an unrelenting tandem Whine:  ”Now its over I’m dead and I haven’t / Done anything that I want / Or, I’m still alive / and there’s nothing I want to do.”          

        

Flood will never grow up, despite its age.    It will never hold down a cubicle job or wrong-headedly consider Grecian Formula for its temples or force its children to endure its barely informed viewpoints on world events.  Its bid for immortality succeeds by virtue of its invulnerable immaturity. It bounces on, telling tales of the disappointment and frustration that befalls everyone other than itself.  Those who loved Flood for these 20 years  keep getting older; they look back upon those disappointments and frustrations, taking comfort in the immaturity that caused them in the first place.  Like the unreliable narrator of “Lucky Ball And Chain”, “I was young and foolish then/I feel old and foolish now.”        

Seasonal Affective Disorder Diorama

“‘Tis the season to be jolly!”

 

Winter sweeps off the misty surface of Lake Michigan like a witch hanging ten on a devastating blank white tsunami.  She shrieks the veneer of cheer off all in her path, casting a shadow over all existence from which there is only brief relief.  Today, the sun came up at 7:11 AM and is estimated to flee in terror at 4:22 PM.   As I write this, it’s a “balmy 26 degrees”, to use the buck-up-buddy vernacular of the morning DJ.  I button my cardigan to my chin, crank the volume knob and drown out the dark, arctic dread within me with the Boston classic “More Than A Feeling”.  Didn’t the dude from Boston commit suicide not too long ago?  Freaked out, I kill the live-streaming dinosaur rock and turn on the space heater.       

It’s Seasonal Affective Disorder time!   I’ve resisted formal diagnosis like a gazelle resists the jaws of the lion, but anyone who’s seen that Zoloft commercial could witness my annual transformation from spritely pain-in-the-ass to taciturn bundle of  sweaters and know the score.   Unconvinced that the pharmaceutical industry knows what’s best for my neurotransmitters and too poor to experiment with phototherapy, I’ve resorted to the following home remedies to help me evade the cold, deathly curse of the Winter Witch. 

“The Wizards of Winter” by Trans Siberian Orchestra: This is a Christmas comedy masterpiece.  You can keep your reindeer-trampled-redneck-granny anthem.  For me, it’s all about ”Wizards” because, quite simply, it’s the Christmas song to end all Christmas songs.  It’s a heavy metal hammer of the gods, smashing the musical genre  like so many delicate antique ornaments, fragile icicles, and old-timey windup toys.  The strident power chords and swirling symphonics bring to mind a James Cameron shoot-em up, blow-em-to-hell holiday movie: “Christmas is back…and this time it’s personal!”  The only thing better than laughing at this song is laughing at this song in my car while synchronized LED lights dance a dumbass “Wizards” ballet around a suburban mini mansion. 

The Heavyset Cheeseball: concealed within its toasted almond exoskeleton is a bacon-cream-cheese-mayonnaise-and-dill-weed bliss bomb, ten times more effective than any mood candy cranked out by Pfizer.  And aside from the risk of ass-fattening, there are no sexual side effects.

Sleep: sweet, merciful sleep.  In the winter, there’s much more nighttime than there is daytime.  I gladly take the hint.  When I sleep, I am warm.  As an added bonus: the North Wind can’t burrow under my blankets to  howl its death-scream through the emptiness within like it does during the day,  even when I’m sitting in my motherfucking cubicle.

The Interactive Snow Globe:  It’s old, it’s primitive, and I’m sure there are far more zippy interactive snow globes out there, but by Crom, this baby never lets me down.   The chipper little denizens of this holiday utopia go about their teensy routines with an irksome smugness usually demonstrated by those who make a point of stressing the “Christmas” in “Merry Christmas”.   Clearly, these little bastards need a shakeup and I’m just the disenfranchised dyke to give it to them.  I guess it goes without saying that as of late, I’ve been pretending that these tiny screaming people are gay haters for God.

Quality Time with Sylvia Plath:  Depression can and does actually kill people.  Nobody knows that better than Sylvia Plath, who returns from the great, unknowable beyond in this uber-creepy animated video to deliver a sort of “Cheer up or die” pep talk.    

The space heater sighs its warmth in a dejected sort of way, as if denied its higher calling as a hair dryer for a woman who doesn’t wear ski caps in the house.  I sort of feel sorry for it, as I do for anyone who has to put up with my surly ass these days.  But they’ll survive the experience and so will I.  The winter solstice is only a few days away, bringing with it longer days, fewer sweaters, and a renewal on my lease on life.  In the meantime, all I have to do is hold on and remember that one of the most important things that separates who survive Seasonal Affective Disorder from those who don’t is the conviction that it really isn’t more than a feeling.

Mabel’s Debut

Mabel stands at the crossroads of Ballet and Badassery

The list of things I never thought would come to pass in my life is getting longer with each passing year.  I never thought I’d be a mother, for example.  I never thought I’d ever stomach the sight of pink outside a bottle of Pepto Bismol.  I never thought I’d find myself surrounded by a hundred hip-high, shrieking ballerinas who were not the swarming side-effects of mind-altering drugs or too many slices of jalapeno and bacon pizza before bed.  My daughter Mabel, by her very existence, has shown me the limits of my imagination and made the inconceivable, a dazzling reality.

So when we walked into the Chicago Cultural Center and were confronted with what can best be described as a horrifying pink abyss, it was just another day at the disco.  Mabel has been cultivating a love of the ballet ever since she saw Baryshnikov in The Nutcracker on DVD.  For several weeks now, she’s been compelling me to don a skull-festooned hat and take up arms with a plastic sword and participate in her own choreographed creation “The Princess and the Pirate”.  Naturally, she takes top billing.

When we learned the Chicago Cultural Center was hosting The Dance Along Nutcracker, Kate and I were thrilled.  The event is gay-friendly (it’s sort of like San Francisco’s answer to England’s campy holiday pantomimes and, as an added right-on bonus: the Lakeside Pride Symphonic Band would be performing Tchaikovsky), and it presented the perfect opportunity for our tiny dancer a chance to take the stage.

The ballet is a gentle and delicate art form.  The Dance Along Nutcracker, as it turned out, was no place for the gentle or the delicate.  It was essentially the world’s shortest mosh pit.  In taffeta.   Mabel’s “please and thank you” upbringing put her at a distinct disadvantage, and for a moment there, the scene was becoming a mini reinactment of that nightmarish Jane Fonda danceathon-as-existential-horror movie “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?”.  But with a little help from Kate, Mabel traded pirouettes with a member of the Ballet Chicago troupe. 

I never thought the ballet could be so beautiful.