LOST 6 x 04: The Substitute
I guess what I’m trying to say is, forgive me if sometimes my recaps are thin or spotty, incoherent or inside-jokey, or even (gulp!) woefully disjointed. I just like to write about this stuff. Not because I think anyone reads it (they don’t…except for my amazing sister…looks in camera: “Hi Mims!”). Not because I can tie it all together in neatly wrapped paragraphs like the other pro-bloggers and recappers (note, e.g., the fact that I’ve succumbed to bullet-point only entries). BUT because I think this show is remarkable. And I wanna get my thoughts down for posterity. Like that famous whoever-he-was who said: “I don't know what I think until I see what I say.” Once I’ve pinned it down in pen on paper, or better yet, cursor and monitor, then I’m golden.
So allow me now to introduce to you a lil’ sumpin’ sumpin’ I call The Substitute.
*How did Locke get paralyzed in this iteration? Is there perhaps something to his allegation that his condition is irreversible? If Tony “Soprano” Cooper, a.k.a. The Big Daddy, is a go to be invited to the nuptials of Helen and John, then surely he’s not the homicidal grifter who shoves his son out an 8th floor window. Either that or Locke’s one helluva forgiving dude. (Maybe that’s why he’s seated in the Jesus seat in those Season 6 promo Last Supper shots)…
*Shame on us! We all watched, bracing ourselves, ready to exclaim, “Poor Locke. Poor angry, embittered Locke!” when he tried to vault himself off his malfunctioning ramp, endo’d instead and flopped out of his wheelchair, only to have injury pull a quick piggyback on insult and the damn sprinklers went off soaking Locke to the bone…BUT miracle of miracles, Locke does not pound the marathon sod or throw his fists at the heavens. He simply laughs. Smiles and laughs, almost despite himself. This is definitely a new Locke, a transformed and seemingly quite centered Locke.
*He was not emasculated-feeling in the slightest that Helen has to help. Instead, he looks like a real cool cat, luxuriating and grinning in his tub. He seems to be in his element. I did have to note, of course, that his coffee mug has a very blatant GREY streak right down the middle, helping to shade the playing field for the black and the white. Is this seemingly message-laden mug of joe a clue that the goodness and badness of those brothers on the beach (i.e. Jacob and MIB are not so easily defined? Hmmm. Perhaps…
*The song playing at New Otherton when the Smoke Monster blows through? Iggy and the Stooges’ “Search and Destroy.” The lyrics from the song that matter are: "I am the world's forgotten boy; the one who searches, searching to destroy," And in an episode like The Substitute, I wondered who precisely this forgotten boy could refer to: is it the Smoke Monster*, a.k.a. Esau**, who feels angry at being cheated and deceived, at war with his brother Jacob for centuries? is it Sawyer: forgotten and abandoned under the bed while first one parent is shot and then the other commits suicide, all due to the havoc seeded by John Locke’s asshole of a dad? or could it be that new creepy blonde kid we saw, all Sixth-Sense’d out, who even managed to spook the UnLocke? Or better yet, as with all things LOSTian, does it refer to all three at once? Trivia Fodder: Iggy is from Ann Arbor. Headquarters of a lil’ startup organization we like to call the DHARMA initiative. (One of the Stooges got saucy with Karen deGroot at some point over a glass of Merlot and a parapsychology discussion, or so my sources say). But truthfully, a favorite poetry professor of mine from LMU used to say she’d often see Iggy hanging around spots in Michigan when she was growing up. Iggy himself the man-boy who refuses to grow up. Or, to put a Richard Alpert spin on it, refuses to age. Jumping into the pit, bleeding and crowd-swimming, search and destroy…
*I love the way the Locke-ness Monster tells Sawyer “There’s a fairly good chance you won’t believe me” when asked who/what he is…
*New nickname for Drunk Sawyer (with the soiled shorts)…Drawer! (pronounced Droy-yer)
*Not to be confused with Confident Off-Island Hurley. Man Jorge Garcia rules! The genius choice of a yellow Hummer (of course that’s what the luckiest man alive would tool around town in)…the badass lambchop sideburns…calling Randy Nations “a huge douche!” Honestly, I was so stoked on this version of Hurley: he’s not whimpering or cowering or trying to make peace. He’s just totally in charge and walking tall. (Shows you what an underrated actor Jorge Garcia is; this is no one-trick pony)
*And now featuring Peg Bundy as Helen…really dug the Peace and Karma shirt. What’s so funny ‘bout peace, LOST, and understanding? Groovy!
*That boy who freaks out ShLOCKE could be any number of characters: the ghost of Jacob as a lad…young Sawyer…Aaron…etc. I just loved it when ShLOCKE’s all like “Don’t tell me what I can’t do!” Maybe there’s something to what Illana says about how his shape-shifting days are through. He’s definitely channeling a little of the old Locke if he’s so readily dropping one of his catch-phrases. Which leads me to a possible theory: (I may have cribbed this from someone else. What if Smokey, now encased in the shell of John Locke, slowly morphs throughout the season into the J.L. we’ve known and loved for 5 seasons? Not bad, writers. Not bad.)
*Weird calendar coincidences that the producers and writers don’t try to claim as INTENTIONAL though they should, they totally should: Season 6 premieres on Groundhog Day. How many times have we seen these characters repeating actions, wondering if they’ve met before, saying the same things, waking up in the same spot, etc. etc.? The Substitute with its undercurrents of faith and fate, destiny and divine intervention, premieres on Fat Tuesday, the last hoorah before Lent officially begins? Coincidence? (cue up Young Frankenstein): “I THINK NOT!!!”
* What fascinating and unforeseen funeral attendees, huh? I bet you 5 fish biscuits that if you had asked John Locke who he thought his pall bearers might be someday, when he died, well…I’m sure he’d’ve come up with any four people on the planet besides Ben Linus, Frank Lapidus, Sun, and Ilana. And while it was touching-slash-horrifying to hear Ben’s impromptu eulogy (better man, full of faith, yadda-yadda, sorry about offing you, yadda-yadda), I’m handing it over to Frank for nailing it: weirdest damn funeral I’ve ever been to, too!
*So let’s talk about that crazy descent into cave country…Of course the blah-ggers and recappers were all over the Jacob’s Ladder connection (assuming of course that this really is Jacob’s cavern and not a shared space within the game, or even FLocke’s own domicile). But my thoughts are thus: didn’t Jacob’s ladder lead upwards towards Heaven? And if I’m not mistaken, this scene found Sawyer and MIB descending a rather steep and perilous ladder southwards. And further, there wasn’t just one ladder kinda stretching and yearning towards the glory of God, but rather dual ladders heading in the exact opposite direction of where Yahweh chills. I.e. Hellwards, The dual ladders link, at least for me, called to mind the mobius strip of a DNA strand. Especially when Sawyer started swinging dangerously and getting himself all twisted up.
*Either way, the question of Jacob’s or Flocke’s digs notwithstanding, it was pretty fresh to see that scale with the white and black rocks, the insouciance as UnLocke chucked the white stone into the sea, and of course the big reveal of the names etched out in orange on the cave’s ceiling. What a cool meta-murderous moment when M.I.B. in Locke’s shell crosses out Locke’s name!
*In this episode, there was that weird, loopy, dreamy moment where the job coordinator (who also happened to be Hurley’s psychic from a prior episode) asked Locke to describe what type of animal he would be if an animal was he. The fish-eye camera angle or something, her purple blouse and made-up face, her exaggerated shove away from her desk…I don’t know but the whole thing seemed very Coen Brothers-esque to me, specifically very Barton Fink-ish. And while I really dug it (Big Lebowski and The Man Who Wasn’t There are two of my all-time favorite films), I wondered if it was a little out of place in a LOST episode. Until…(and here I’m veering a bit into terrain I’ll explore in a rewatch recap blog entry very soon) I remembered that this is not the first time we have witnessed a Coen-ish tone in LOST. In the season 2 episode, Fire + Water, we watch in horror as Driveshaft trades in heroin addiction and one-hit wonderment for a diaper commercial (replete with life-sized crib and tattooed man-babies in pee-pee sponges with serious dependencies on the ol’ white horse). Compare with the Lebowski dream sequence side-by-side below and you catch my drift…
*“There’s no such thing as miracles…”—John Locke. Ouch. That one stings. But maybe the sea-change in this version of Locke is the only thing that keeps him together. Perhaps NOT feeling special, perhaps NOT needing to feel guided by the benevolent hand of fate is what allows him to love Helen, come clean with her, love his father, and accept career advice from Rose.
*And speaking of Rose, one final thing in this pitifully spotty (even by Ross and Rollian standards) blog entry. Amid posters that employ phrases like “Dream Job,” Rose gives Locke a good dollop of humility and a lesson about getting real with your bad self. She tells him to ditch the (ultimately self-sabotaging) demand to be placed as Super Tough Construction Guy. As Carlton Cuse confirmed recently in an official LOST podcast, there are indeed all these “interesting crossings” in the LA X timeline: Locke and Jack, Claire and Kate, Ethan and Claire, Ben the uptight pedagogue and John Locke the substitute teacher and new (literal!) man of science. And then it hit me like a ton of bricks or rather like Richard Alpert cut down from a tree and tumbling from a gunny sack, the much debated and often polarizing “X” from the season 6 premiere may actually have represented intersecting lines (and by that I mean intersecting lives). Now it’s all
coming together…
More soon, mis compadres.
Love, Ross and Roll
*Smoke Monster may hereafter, intermittently and without ANY warning of a shift at all, be referred to as the Locke-ness Monster, the Locke-less Monster, Smokey the Hairless, UnLocke, BLocke, or (my new favorite coinage) ShLOCKE (stands for shady Locke)
**There is so much unpacking that can be done with the biblical story of Jacob and Esau, but I’m just too tired these days. Suffice it to say that in many interpretations Jacob isn’t this munificent, perfect son. Rather, through certain lenses and on certain days, he can be viewed as a con artist, a thief of entitlements that don’t rightly belong to him, and a master manipulator. Here have a pen; she won’t steal again; lemme give that vending machine a push so you can gnosh on your Apollo bar…Till next week, chew on that foax!!
LOST Season 6 x 02, Second Half Recap of LA X
The bad news: I wasn't watching the season premiere on Waikiki Beach w/ 15,000 of my closest fanatics, er, friends. The good news: I was able to pause the episode frequently to jot down notes, thoughts, theories, linkages, head-scratching puzzlers, et. al. W/o further ado, here goes:
*You forget how much Sawyer and Kate have evolved these past five seasons until you see them in the elevator together: he’s rocking the raw charm and lascivious Cheshire Cat grin; she’s trying to conceal her handcuffs and figure out how to run, escape, and FAST! Sideways Sawyer still seems to have his sights eternally set on segueway-ing into sweetie’s pants; Back-on-the Island Sawyer wants to get down to another type of business and get Juliet’s grave dug pronto. But first, a face-first-in-the-dirt-and-rubble interruption from our sponsors, i.e. Miles: He tells Sawyer Juliet says “It worked!” Huh? Tie this back into Juliet’s parting, caught-between-two-worlds adieu to Sawyer (“We can meet for coffee and go dutch”), add it to that weird liminal (island-Sideways?) moment from “The Incident” (season 5 finale) in which Bernard paternally implores a sure-seems-to-be-holding-her-tummy Juliet to stay for tea and sit out this latest battle/disastrous plan, and I think you’ve got yourself a nifty new theory. And it goes like this: What if, down the road in Season 6, Elizabeth Mitchell comes back in a cameo and meets Sideways Sawyer for coffee? And she’s pregnant? And the way she breaks the wonderful news to her man is by ordering TEA rather than COFFEE? Foolproof right? (Except for the little fact that if they’re going on an initial date to see if sparks fly, how could she already be preggers with his kid? My response: How the hell should I know? Isn’t this like Days of Our Lives and General Hospital terrain?)
*After wondering for 9, LOST-depleted months, we finally get the reveal that in the guitar case is a…(drumroll, por favor) giant, awkward Ankh?!? Dogen snaps it over his knee, shattering all pretentious, egg-headed theories only to reveal…(you know the drill) another list.
*From ANKH to UGGH…Never thought I’d have to see bogus, Buscemi-knock-off Neil “Frogurt” again. (Remember I’m the guy who leapt outta my chair, bloodlustily screaming: Hell yeah! when he took a flaming arrow to the heart at the beginning of Season 5). But there he was, Buscemi-Lite, in all his sleep mask-wearing and log-sawing glory, dreaming away as Boone and Locke talked airline safety manuals, walkabouts, and sisters who resist saving.
*Now to…a story I forget to tell afterwards/didn't realize its HUGE import when it occurred: So there we are, the Rosses, in line at the shaved ice/hot dog stand in Waikiki, trying to grab some grub for the kids before the Sunset on the Beach LOST activities officially begin. Out of nowhere, a quite polite and pretty pre-teen asks if we are in line. She’s accompanied by a boy who looks to be in junior high maybe. I tell her we’re just perusing the menu and the line is down at the other end. Soon enough, the two kids fall in line behind us. Ever the eavesdropper, I notice their laminates and press an ear to their conversation. The boy asks the girl if she read the whole script. And the girl is like psshaw, pissant—that’s kid’s stuff. I’m a woman now. It’s clear he’s mad crushing on her but can’t be bothered. I jest. The kids actually seemed completely grounded and sweet and totally excited for the event. It wasn’t until I watched the second half of the premiere that I was like oh wow! That was Zack and Emma in line behind us. The Ross fam’s fleeting brush w/ LOSTian fame!
*Before I got to know Dogen better (as I write this we’re 5 episodes in), he called to mind a certain Karate Kid staple: stern, terse, banzai-tree trimmin’
*Hurley in a red shirt is the biggest, purposely conspicuous red herring the writers have ever wrought! No way in hell they’re offing Hurley. I’m with my man Vozzek69. Hugo is hugely instrumental to the final arc and resolution of this story.
*One of the best scenes in all of LOST was the exchange between Jack and Locke in the lost luggage department. Metaphor alert! It also goes w/o saying (so of course unsubtle me will say it) that on this series, Jack and Locke have always served as two sides of the same circle, yin and yang, even sharing iterations of the same name JOHN. I was reminded of the artwork U2 used during their “All That You Can’t Leave Behind” tour. One sticker showed a simple square-ish bag with a heart in its center. Emotional baggage, lugged from one experience, one encounter, one timeline, to another. All that we can never leave behind. Even when, paradoxically, leaving it behind sets us free. And dig these lyrics:
You've got to leave it behind
All that you fashion
All that you make
All that you build
All that you break
All that you measure
All that you feel
All that you reason
All that you bear
All that you see
All that you wear
All that you sense
All that you scheme
All you dress up
All that you've seen
All you create
And all that you wreck
All that you hate…leave it behind
Instructive huh? 5 seasons’ worth of fighting, dying, crying, hugging, shooting, discovering, dreaming, knifing, defending, philosophizing, theorizing, manipulating…All that our LOSTies and we can’t, but need to, leave behind.
* Back to celebrity life-and-death-match, LOST style…LOCKE (On Island, Man of Faith) VS. JACK SHEPHARD (On Island, Man of Science). In their scene together, they morph into off-island opposites, through-the-looking-glass reversals of themselves: pretty amazing switch-up, right? At LA X, Locke is the one now shackled by the scientific. “My condition’s irreversible.” And he clearly means medically-speaking. Jack is the one this point now trying to offer faith and hope: “Nothing’s irreversible.” But what’s interesting here has to do with the way mirror-images are not exact replicas, but reversed replicas, reflecting back: so Locke retains some of the good stuff, the Locke-esque essence (“How could they know where your father is? They didn’t lose him. They just lost his body”) just as Jack holds onto his core likable trait, namely offering his expert help rather than heaving his hero-complex onto people who don’t want it (“Here’s my card. I’m a spinal surgeon.”)
MORE--OH SO MUCH MORE, MY FRIENDS--TO COME!
LOST 6 x 01 LAX Part 1...Recapping in the lab an'...
*
Let me just say...watching the rest of the LOST season 6 premiere on my glass-cleaner-streaked Vizio from Costco does NOT compare w/ the above (i.e. watching it on Waikiki Beach, tradewinds blowing through my hair, bellyful of Mai-Tai's and beers, surrounded by like-minded geek-tastic superfans, the cast sitting in uber-special plastic chairs mere feet from where I took this shot, 3 nights before it first aired on ABC...
BUT...seeing the second half last night really did add some depth to my initial viewing. To kick us off this time, I'm just gonna work straight from the notes. Asterisks and thoughts, you know the drill. So here goes nothing:
LAX Part 1:
*We all gasped when we saw those first shots of white cloud. We were thinking: afterlife?!?
*After the initial tumult of turbulence, Jack remarks: "Looks like we made it!" (Never mind that that's a kick-ass Barry Manilow song); Rose responds knowingly, blissfully, with a prelapsarian Garden of Eden-watt glow: "Yeah we sure did." Rose seemed almost...angelic? otherworldly? More on this in a sec...
*I thought of the episode "Through the Looking Glass" when Jack is in the airplane lavatory. If you re-watch and freeze it (as I did) you'll truly see two Jacks: on the left (in mirror) the Dharmaville Jack...accepting, weary, diffident, nearly shrugging...on the right of your screen (standing before the mirror) is the quote-unquote real Jack...he looks agitated and angry with a smidgen of fearfulness until he notices that cut..."Hey I didn't do that shaving in Sydney!?!?"
*And suddenly Desmond David Hume is there. We can almost hearing him chuckling to Jack: "Remember when I told you I'd see you in another life brutha?" And Jack can't place it, but he knows something is off. David Hume, who once said, "A purpose, an intention, a design, strikes everywhere even the careless, the most stupid thinker..." And Jack may be a lot of things: sometimes hero, frequent wannabe savior, badass macho man with strangely convoluted facial expressions signifying confusion and exasperation, but let's be real: a lot of times he is DENSE! A medical wunderkind, but a stupid thinker...
*So is this it? Is this the alternative timeline we've speculated about? The camera pans downward, gaining speed and momentum, until we plunge through the ocean's surface and scatter some colorful fishies and move down to the water's Davey Jonesy depths and, say hey, look there's the infamous swing set from Dharmaville and there's the statue of Taweret. Are we in Atlantis?
*Right into Season 1-ish standoff's: Sawyer tattooing Jack's forehead with his workboot, punting Jack like an Australian Rules Football football into the pit formerly known as the Swan Hatch...and of course Kate in the middle, the damsel in this stress, between her two former flames
*Confronted by Sawyer, Jack can only stutter: "I thought we were s'pposed to..." and even he can't find the wherewithal to finish the thought.
*I'm at least temporarily calling the flight and LAX scenes not the afterlife but the alterna-timeline. Pretty cool how the jumpcuts are now not really FLASHBACKS or FLASHFORWARDS but kinda FLASH-BETWEENS or FLASH-SIDEWARDS...
*Hurley usually closes his eyes to make his "visitors" (i.e. his hallucinations) disappear. This time the tight closing of his ojo's seems to instead CONJURE Jacob!
*Most of this episode, Ben is timid and shell-shocked. But there are those moments of malevolent nastiness, as when he spears Illana with scorn: "Oh I'm sorry. Who are you?" after she asks after Jacob...
*Classic Hurley-logism upon learning Jacob was offed by Ben's Psycho-shower scene send-up and subsequent kick into the ring of fire: "Sorry Dude. That sucks!"
*Fake Locke rocks a Faux-Hawk: try saying that 8 times with a mouthful of mango. Just joking...whomever's inhabiting Locke's body is still bald as a baby's behind. And anywho, it doesn't take us long to learn that it's the Man In Black, Jacob's tunic-touting nemesis, Smokey the Bearer of all Bad Island Shit who has actually taken over Locke's human shell. When that ass-whupping in the temple went down, you shoulda heard the gasps and cheers from all us crazed LOSTIES on Honolulu shores...
*For a while (until part 2 at least) we are led to wonder about what Juliet needed to tell Sawyer. I was hoping it was a kind of writerly, meta-nod to the audience. There WILL be some mysteries in this show that simply WILL NOT be told. They will die with the finale, a tragic and blood-smeared beautiful blonde death, but gonzo nonetheless...
*Again, I considered the brilliant words of David Hume in lieu of Jack's chronic fuck-up's/attempts at hero-hood: "The corruption of the best things gives rise to the worst..." Take a savior complex, mix in a little desperation and Daddy issue, and even 6 seasons in, we're witnessing this whole giving rise to the worst!
*More reasons to ponder Alterna-Timeline Concerns: Where'd that wascally, lovable lout Desmond David Hume scamper off to? Wa'nt he just here, brutha? And while we're at it, where's Shannon? You mean this time, in this version, THIS TIME, she doesn't leave Sydney with befuddled brother Boone?
* Desmond's disappearing act prompts Jack to ask Rose about was there a dude sitting here which in turn prompts rosy-eyed Rose to kinda blush and say she wasn't paying all that much attention considering she had this hot hunk of Bernard right next to her which prompted me to ask myself the following: What was the pretentious term I learned in Grad Skool [sic]?? Oh yeah, liminal zone.
And so my understanding of a liminal zone is that it's a place that's set apart from while still existing within the dull, pedestrian, workaday world. Think of jury duty. You've got this broad swath of fine upstanding, taxpaying citizens: housepainters, horticulturalists, street punks, professional prophets, pharmacists, publishers, the occasional aspiring prison guard, you name it. And they're all rubbing elbows and either chewing the fat with people they normally wouldn't (the extroverts) or they're going inward, burying themselves in The Financial Times or The Washington Post, their laptops or cellphones or Sudoku puzzles (the introverts). The point is they're still part of the world (i.e. like, they're breathing and taking care of biz and snacking or pacing or whatever) and yet for that time, before "LeRoll-Not-LeRoy++" beckons or dismisses them, they are also not part of the world.
Come to think of it, the cast and crew, that is the characters and caricatures of a trans-oceanic plane ride, are also kinda functioning in a liminal zone. Or better yet, consider a honeymoon. Bernard and Rose are in the quote-unquote real world, but simultaneously they're in this liminal zone+++ in a flying tube over the Pacific Ocean and to push it even further they're also in a lovey-dovey Honeymoon haze. Thus, liminal zone within liminal zone. Shocking that this show would offer us one more Chinese Box of relationship intricacies to puzzle out! I jest. (I once heard a woman at a comparative literature conference at Cal State Long Beach refer to the unisex restroom on Ali McBeal as a liminal zone. To which I say...I guess. But McBeal ain't no LOST!)
*Oh and so where was I? As the plane descends into LAX (just as our plane would a short spell after watching this premiere) you need to love the trope of the Slow-Mo passenger exodus! Very reminiscent of the pilot episode. The acting is superb during this sequence. Not a dry eye in the Ross roost (tho' that wasn't hard to do, as I was watching it solo)! Kate's darting eyes and expression of fruitless desperation; Sayid's determined beelining it for an EXIT (who wrote NO EXIT? The existential crisis play? I'll need to look back into that? Sartre?); and most heartbreaking of all, of course, the brilliant Terry O' Quinn (who in the span of the two-part premiere will literally seem to pull off playing a Dupe and a Devil): just the tragic resignation on his puss deserves its own special Golden Globe.
++ = Revered and iconic Torrance Municipal Main Courthouse clerk and ringleader for the teeming, potential masses of jurors
+++ = Don't ask me why I insist on italicizing this phrase each time I use it; I s'ppose it makes me feel all academi-geeky once more!
Student's Final Essay on "Cannery Row" is [SIC]!?!?!?!
My rejoinder is of course (and of course, scrawled like the highway blood of an unfortunate squirrel, in a deep, deep red) thus:
"Ummmm. Yeah. So uh, this is your final and not a text message. (LMAO)!"
And as my homeboy G. Crosby the First and fellow groomsmen in my loutish rogue of a cousin's wedding might say: "I ain't lying!"
Kids Do the Damnedest Thangs...
An Ongoing, Freewheelin', Off-Roadin', Rootin' Tootin' Good Time List...
No bowl shall go unbroken; no couch or Ottoman or wall shall go uncrayoned; no stocking shall avoid being dragged through the sooty gray ashes of a long dead winter's fire; no juice shall stay in the cup, but rather it must be thrust in the face of a nagging sibling; no moment shall go by without a three-part harmony of wailing and screaming (infant cry, pre-schooler cry, Kindergartener cry)...And absolutely NO PARENT shall escape w/ their sanity intact!
Reading List, Re-Re-Visited, or How I Learned To Stop Hiding My OCD and Love My Lists!
In May of 2001, the moment I finished graduate school, I sat down at my bubbly, baby-blue iMac and composed meself a reading list. The impetus for doing so was this: with the exception of a class focusing on "The Novel" (Capital N [in which we read heavy-hitters like Moby Dick and Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (whose author's first name my professor insisted on pronouncing "Toe-Mas" [which, ok, to be fair, I know is how it should be pronounced if we were in Switzerland or Austria or one of those coldly clean and snowy places, but in this case the whole thing just made us all wince)])], I'd been drowning in Literary Theory for over two years. And where's the personal freedom and profound fun in that?
And anyway so back to the list.
Of the 80 texts on that original inventory, I plowed through perhaps sixty-five or so with surprising and atypical Ross and Rollian resolution. This process occurred over several years, mind you. People would tell me I simply needed to read something (that book with all the Oprah-generated flap around it, forget its name, springs to mind) and I'd be all like 'Oh hells no! I've got a date with Death in the Afternoon.' People would try to push their books on me, stubbornly and insistently and with a sinister smile, in the manner of those offramp hoboes who just generally want you to feel shitty for not cracking a window and tossing them a five spot. But Ross and Roll was resolute. I would not budge or cave. John Irving's new work was nothing to me.
Some of the books that filled out that 2001 list were of course memorable and great and life-altering, and others...well...not so much. For every Gravity's Rainbow or Goldbug Variations, there was something limp and lifeless like Paul Auster's Timbuktu (and I'm an Auster fan, but the whole canine narrator deal just did me in.)
But the memories of reading these books (where I was headed, whom I was going to see, which of my kids had or had not been born) and the satisfaction of crossing titles out was in almost every case more vivid than the action and characters within the novels themselves. For instance, I remember far less about the vitriol, malevolence, and vicious misanthropy of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf than I do about eating lunch with an old friend from my LMU M.A. days, on Larchmont, the day after I stayed up late reading the play. (I.e. I can't recall specifics of the play, but as those nouns attest to, I must've gotten some sort of general feel for the Albee work; at the same time I know that the greens in my salad that day were those maroon-tipped, kinda pokey greens).
And while I absolutely loved all the fun and filth in Ulysses (and I annotated that book like crazy as it fell apart in my hands, first cover then pages then whole sections, eventually ending up as a rubber-banded pile of yellowish sheets of paper), I can't relate specific episodes in the book like some crazed Joyce fans can. What I can do is tell you that Ulysses will always be for me
far more about my 48-hour whirlwind trip to London to visit my friend Keith than a Homeric day in Dublin: for me Ulysses equates to talking to a Welsh woman about the Avian Flu (big news that year) on a Delta flight while sitting in first class and sipping a beer and watching crazy thunderstorms out the plane's windows as we took off from Cincinatti. Ulysses will forever remind me of sweating bullets and getting grilled by the dude at Gatwick Airport's Customs gate and experiencing the ironic, surreal sensation of feeling more and more like a liar the more I told the truth (visiting for 48 hours, don't know where my buddy works, American company, light baggage, yessir I know you are not obligated to let me in the country, etc.)
And but back to the new list.
So I don't know if this is some weird mojo, some numerological tom-foolery, but my latest list is copmposed of, GET THIS: 80 books, as well! Just like the old list. It kinda feels like Groundhog Life: I make new lists, and I read and read and read (not admitting to myself that I've bought shitpiles of books through the years) and I feel I'm making all kinds of crazy headway and LO, there I am, here I am, back with my unchanging, unalterable list of 80 books.
And so I embrace it. Bring it...
U2 Concert Review: Into the Heart and Deep In The Heart of Texas
As far as friends go, few are as long-lasting and loyal as Keith is to me. While we were out monkeying around and making dicks of ourselves as adolescents, Keith was putting in the real, adult time: weeding his garden, making stews and such, bagging groceries, taking care of his little brothers. This isn't to say Keithie was always a saint cuz where's the fun in that? It's just that he got to do his monkeying around later on, as a college student, in the heart of Texas. And then so: how's that for fitting? We return now to our intrepid U2 correspondent and resume our programming in mid-broadcast.
He begins his review with a caveat which is his way*.
One of my Dallas buddies coordinated a mini-bus to take us from Downtown Dallas to the new Cowboy stadium in Arlington. Brilliant move. There's nothing like taking down Heinekens and Jameson's shots while sitting in traffic (legally at least - not that I've attempted this feat otherwise). The new Cowgirl stadium is a monstrous cavern. Luckily, we had floor tickets, as I can't imagine having to take in the show from the nose bleeds. Breathe was an excellent decision to open the show - fitting U2's criteria of something off of their most recent album, coming out with energy to kick off the show. Biggest shock to the system (at least from my perspective) Unforgettable Fire. I've never seen this one performed live and it was an ethereal experience. I would've preferred the normal version of I'll Go Crazy, but I know Bono loves the remixes, so I was able to dismiss this departure. The show was surprisingly void of the usual political grand-standing, with only a brief foray from Bono up onto the pedestal between MLK and Walk On. I was fortunate enough to be in the beer line for my last $8.50 Miller Lite, so missed the gist of his rambling only to return to a moving rendition of One. Encore kicks off with Ultraviolet (as Feet-Doggy well knows, my personal favorite off of Achtung), but Bono stays true to the lyrics rather than free-styling as in concerts passed**. He missed the opportunity to kick it up, but I like the jam so much that I could overlook this. Ears ringing, I make my way back to the mini-bus, proceed to throw back the rest of the Jameson's and a few more Heinekens. Three hours of restless "sleep" before jumping up to catch a flight back to KC and return to my paternal responsibilities.
Bono and the boys outdid themselves in sheer grandiosity (is that even a word? if not, it should be). The set is mammoth. The whole show, truly a spectacle. Alex, you and your fellow Los Angelinos, need to get to the Rose Bowl to take this in.
*I'm sure you'll have to gussy it up as my rambling may not be up to snuff with RossAndRoll standards. [no gussying attempted whatsoever, so there--ed.]
**Here Mr. Devine is referring to Bono's habit, on the Zooropa tour, of substituting in "fucked up" for "messed up" as in: "When I was all fucked up and I had opera in my head/your love was a light bulb/it just went over my bed..."
Sitting by the fire, editing a guest post to the blog, reading Bono's book of interviews, listening (I mean reeeeealy listening) to "Achtung Baby and all I can say tonight is...
--BONO
...and don't let the bastards grind you down!
--U2
"Fame is not the exit from any cage"...David Foster Wallace, One Year Later
David Foster Wallace was the writer most deserving of wearing the crown Writer and yet the least comfortable with such decoration and adulation. I love the story someone (Jonathan Franzen? Mark Costello?) reported about how when Dave had the rattlings of a nervous breakdown, he dropped out of college and moved home and for a while drove a schoolbus for children. Stop and think about that for a second. Don't even get caught up on the fact that these little fresh-scrubbed, rosy pink elementary kids no doubt had no idea that their bus driver was probably the smartest, funniest, and most humane and determined writer of the last hundred years. Forget that. Instead, think of how blank and hardly there all the bus drivers you've ever sat on the yellow buses of are for you. They simply can't be called up. And but how vital. Helping children arrive safely somewhere may, paradoxically, be the most pedestrian and most profound job anyone can perform. If this doesn't speak volumes about David Foster Wallace's humility and heart, I'm not sure what does.
Tonight is Friday September 11, 2009. It is 8 years after 9/11 the tragic event. No one can even touch DFW's authorial grapplings with that impossible subject matter. "The View From Mrs. Thompson's" is hands down, to this day, the greatest piece of non-fiction dedicated to that morning. And it follows suit that "The Suffering Channel" from Oblivion remains the only fiction to do the aftermath of 9/11 and the resultant bloodlust, televisual need to be engaged and spectating and projecting, any justice. If you want to feel 9/11, how it felt that day for the average American who might say they'd been hit with a 9 iron across the back of the head, re-read these two pieces.
On the page, DFW was a dazzler. He was a gourmet chef, a hyperactive librarian, a samurai when it came to spinning similes that'd never been even dreamt of because who besides DFW would think to compare a drug-hangover to a psychic sponge being vigorously wrung out or a bunch of computer cords to a pot of drained pasta noodles. He made metaphor that went on, literally, for a thousand pages: metaphor about waste and want, freedom from and freedom to, the agony and anxiety of technology. DFW could re-animate OED flotsam and bits of knowledge, in ways that'd make your jaw drop (and go slack, to use one of his fave expressions). And he made a character who invented the "phoneless cord." Now that's genius.
DFW was an unparalleled magician when it came to turning the phrase on its ear or replicating dialogue that was erudite and slangy and confused and brilliant. No one, NO ONE, can write about shadows like DFW. If you don't believe me re-read Infinite Jest or embark on your maiden voyage. I'm on my second tour-of-duty and I still laugh out loud every third page. Like stifle my laughter with a knuckle in my mouth, like Ralph Malph used to do on Happy Days. DFW was the smartest kid in the class and the coolest and when he invited people to dinner he called it "supper" and he meant it; he didn't dabble in dickish sniping, he was sincere and honest. He always struck me as the type of guy who'd never do it face to face, but would instead ask a girl to a dance with a note that said something like: "W/r/t Sadie's: I'd be flattered if you'd attend with moi!"
And damn he was funny. He describes one kid's nose-picking as "positively strip-mining his nostril." He describes A.A.'s chairs as "hemorrhoid-hostile folding chairs." He faux-anachronistically refers to an "information turnpike" of the early 90's. He could whip out these adverbs like "nipple-hardeningly" cold and "scalp-cracklingly" brutal Tucson heat. It seems so easy to ape, but it's impossible and that was part of his genius. He lapped any and all, but never made them feel bad about it. He was the king of the high-low blur. No one since Shakespeare. And no quite as good as making it feel accessible. He brought together what I like to think of as the bluntly cerebral and the breakfast cereal. And so many millions of examples besides these.
000
"That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like hurt..." --David Foster Wallace.
We are still hurting a year later, and we miss you Mr. Wallace, many of us who never even knew you though we heard you read funny stuff about fierce infants and shook your hands and got our novels signed and asked questions about the role of the effective creative writing teacher and tried to avoid the little splat of dip spit that kinda splashed up from your styrofoam cup. We get the privilege of missing you too. Just like your students and your friends and your family and colleagues. And the vacuum you left behind is tough. The heft of all your unwritten works and unperformed selfless acts and almost quaint sincerity and caring for other human beings is greater than all the oceans of this wonderful, troubled planet, full of fishies both sage and clueless. This is water. This is water.