rossandroll

LOST 6 x 04: The Substitute

2010-03-04T04:56:00Z

The thing with loving LOST and wanting to write about it is this: w/ three kids and a full-time job and some tutoring on the side, well…Everyone beats me to the punch. And that’s cool. I’m cool with that. I pour over LOST scholarship on Entertainment Weekly, Dark UFO, Lostpedia, the ODI, Karen’s Lost Notebook, Fishbiscuitland, et. al. like a hyperintensive, PhD candidate sifting through Tunisian sand, saddled with a dissertation deadline and a deathwish for more intel, more info, more words, more connections, more allusions, more, more, MORE! (Hey are those the bones of Ursus maritimus over yonder? And who’s that bug-eyed dude in the DHARMA parka who just landed in my field space and fouled up my research? Beat it, Benny!)

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

2010-02-27T20:02:00Z

LAX Part 2, Season 6 Premiere
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'...

2010-02-04T01:19:00Z

*

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]!?!?!?!

2010-02-03T04:43:00Z

"theres alot of diffrnt ppl on the row thats doing very crazy shit"...so sez the student.

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...

2009-12-28T16:22:00Z

Why, oh why, do the truckloads of Christmas toys matter NAUGHT to Sawyer, but the stupid "all message playback" on the phone (a cacophony of trifles telling me what I owe, to whom, and why I'm a terrible person) and the bright, shiny silver button that instantaneously shuts off the computer are ALL HE WANTS to play with... (PS It is kinda cute that when we hear Griselda's message for the 76th time imploring me to return her call at the billing department, Soy hands me the phone as if he too wants this and only this!)

An Ongoing, Freewheelin', Off-Roadin', Rootin' Tootin' Good Time List...

2009-12-26T18:08:00Z

Ross Post-Yuletide Household Rule #323:

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!

2009-11-29T00:12:00Z

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

2009-11-05T04:50:00Z

So tonight we've been blessed with a guest post from a dear old friend. Some of you know him as Keithie, Qweep, Andy Devine. Others as Divine Abs. For those of you who slugged down a bullet of Jameson at 6:20 a.m. somewhere over international waters with him in the late summer of 2002, you probably lovingly called him Devine Slabs.

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...

2009-11-05T04:45:00Z

Ask big questions, demand big answers!
--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

2009-09-12T04:23:00Z

A year ago tomorrow I sat at this computer and stared off at the moon and tried to wrap my foggy and furious brain around the fact that David Foster Wallace, the "greatest mind of his generation" and my literary hero, had tied a belt around his neck and stepped off of a chair in Claremont into infinity. I'm sure the night down there was quiet, perhaps with coyotes and the steady shish-shush of traffic slicing its way through the Inland Empire, and surely the weight and sadness inside the nighttime of DFW's personal, internal world was pitch, was tar, was thick and inescapable that evening. But I hope, because I struggle so much, because I wonder daily where the energy and boisterous lifeforce and incomparable wit of my deceased father has wandered off to these past six years...I Hope (with a capital A.A.-inspired "H") that what DFW stepped off into that night was the lovely lake-blue sky with its crowded canvas of cushiony cumulonimbus that we all, all of us who cherish Infinite Jest, know so well from its front cover.

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.

Irritants and Adorations: The Back-to-School Edition, Part 1

2009-09-07T15:05:00Z

Adorations

1. Bumping into long-lost friends the quaint, old-fashioned way (i.e. not on Facebook). Recently I was heading out from Corner Bakery and heard a dear old friend from my Willow Wildcat days shout out: "Ross And Roll?!" How she knew it was me beneath the tennis-ball-fuzzy faux-hawk and Magical Mystery Era life-size walrus suit is beyond me. But maybe it's just that some of those friendships forged on the tetherball courts and solidified over readings about Ishi: Last Surviving Member of the Yahi and during recorder practice are simply rock solid. It was great to see this old friend and to share a brief chat while the children heaved their pennies into the fountain and then darted for the sea turtles.

2. Wailua Wheat. Before I succumbed to this crippling TMJ-ish throbbing pain in my jaw and cheek and teeth, which came about as a friendly byproduct of this nasty head-cold I've now had the pleasure of being acquainted with for just shy of a week, I had embarked on a sunny, season-long sojourn that I'd gleefully dubbed: "The Summer of 1000 Corktails." This pirate-like, swashbuckling drink-a-thon involved trying out all sorts of stuff I normally don't drink. To boot: wine, campari bitter nastiness, gin and juice(wut up Snoop D-O-double-G?!), random concoctions (cf, this FB status update:

Ross And Roll created a new cocktail: 14 parts Malibu rum, liberal dumping of mango infused vodka, 1/2 a banana, fresh pineapple, some sweet cream, ice...I call it "I'm a single daddy for three zany cherubs, it's 8 pm, so let's drink!"), etc, and c., and you get the point. Anyway, it always came back to good old frothy beer for me. And this Wailua Wheat is a doozy. It tastes like a cross between really good golden ale and a glass of fresh-squeezed passion fruit juice. Totally worth your while if you can still snatch some up at Bev Mo. It will make you think of Hana and trade winds and of course waterfalls and the old man and pog juice and the "Island Breakfast of Champions" which is Spam Musubi and a Budweiser tall boy and those potato chips w/ the colorful green/orange/purple bag and Ryan Summons winging over to Maui and not changing out of his board shorts for seven days and pitching plans for a bar with you while you watch the catamarans come and go like the tide and yet Summons somehow, as if like summoned by the FTA, getting all cleaned up: a simulacrum of the Abercrombie model that'd become his bread-and-butter, for the flight home.

3. Home James, and Don't Spare the Horses. This is this great short film on one of the Wholphin DVD's, put out by the incomparable foax at McSweeney's. Along the same lines as Charlie Kaufman's films or the Pirandello play about the characters seeking their author, HJADSTH (based on Antoine Wilson's same-named short story) seeks to explore and then explode a bunch of cool stuff about artifice, art, originality, falsities, truths, fiction, fabrication, drunken elation, scripted lines we speak over and over for maximum dramatic effect and gusto, & c. I can't do it a whole helluva lot of justice, other than saying please find this thing on the interwebs (or call me and I'll loan you my copy) and watch this brief (31 minutes! You'd easily squander such minutes on a Chelsea Lately episode!) and brilliant film. It'll get you head-scratching and thinking and smirking all day...

Irritants and Adorations: The Back-to-School Edition, Part 2

2009-09-01T21:00:00Z

Irritants

1. Teenagers texting while driving. So I'm pulling up next to this young lady in a Prius, and I know she's maybe seventeen max, and but either way her car is stuffed to the gills with like eight other teens (they're flopping out the windows and the sunroof, and heads are bobbing hither and thither to like T. Pain or Lil' [sic] Wayne or some such other inanity that I'm now too far over-the-speed-bump to appreciate, and I should mention that the flopping and bobbing of heads is of the sort where their bright, big neon mid-80's-reminiscent sunglasses are bouncing dangerously off their ecstatic faces and threatening to sort of fling off and come at one of my kids through their open window, like a throwing star from a Kung Fu movie). And yet this Prius-navigating young lady is TEXTING someone. Or better yet, she's "txtng s/o...lol ;D" And I'm all: Who on God's green could she be texting that isn't already with her in that enviro-friendly Clown Mobile of hers?

2. The Calabasas clientele**. Uniform, men: Too-tight black Affliction shirt (preferably and especially if you're all 'roided out, from the kids' section at Nordstrom's)...True Religion Jeans...Purple, veiny, eggplant-shaded perma-aggresso face...optional accessories: sun-wrinkly, aged-before-her-time bleach blonde spilling her silicone balloons out her very own too-tight halter-top from M. Fredric.

Uniform, women: for starters, see above. For further enhancements, be sure to wear bloodclot-inducingly tight capri pants and accident-waiting-to-happen, seven inch high heels.

Poses to strike: entitlement, ennui, cigarrette-choked obliviousness, good ol' fashioned rudeness, aggression, willingness to like literally rip open your car door and flex a mammoth bicep adorned with a lame barbed wire- or "Japanese character for strength and discipline symbol"-ish tattoo and throw down over a parking space.

Actions to take: Get angry when someone tries to order a drink at the bar on a crowded Friday night cuz you're trying to eat your sushi and how dare they (gasp, moan) try and score a cocktail from a (more gasp, more moan) bar no less; let doors slam on women who're seven months pregnant so you can get your little devil his own truckstop-portion of Cold Stone's latest concoction; run people off Parkway Calabasas in your Lexus/Beamer/Mercedes/Jaguar and flip 'em off out the window for good measure.

3. Smart Cars. Is this a practical joke? Is America being Punk'd (Lord knows Aston Kutcher's career is sort of stalling and sputtering, pun CERTAINLY intended)? So but Smart cars. Honestly? To me, these things are about as smart as a kid who spends the major slice that comprises the pie chart of his day sniffing glue and shoplifting Charleston Chews from 7-11 and capping it all off with a few Nitrus Oxide hits from a cannister of whipped cream. Smart cars are the size of like a mini-Asahi beer can. And I'm not saying in the summer of 2009, my gas-guzzling, lane-hogging GMC Yukon is the Genius of Automobiles. But I will say I'm smarter than driving that lil' paperclip pipsqueak on wheels.

** = Corey Weinberg and the Finch Fam excepted, here, not to mention Ross and Roll's dear old Moms, obviously...

Waiting For Good Dov, PART 1...

2009-07-31T15:32:00Z

Back in 1982, when my former best friend Dov relocated to Woodland Hills after his parents split up, WH seemed to this here narrator (or better yet, his diminutive, non-traveled, sheltered suburbanite younger self) like a faraway land: getting there involved freeways and offramps and strip mall upon strip mall upon traffic congestion; the town had a major thoroughfare (Ventura Blvd) that dwarfed our own quaint Denny's-promoting Kanan Road; and there was much woodland, abundant hills, I don't know--to an 8 year old, Dov mightaswelluv been moving to Minnetonka.

I was bummed. I knew that to get from Agoura to the house off DuMetz that Dov's dad's Pool Service truck got parked each evening entailed a long journey. And in between Agoura and Woodland Hills was a no-man's land, where supposedly (sub-urban lore had it) nomads roamed the land in burlap sacks and those Sheik (and sure, sorta chic) headwraps that got held in place around the skull with a piece of robe whose knotted tails dangled dangerously down the back of said sack-and-Sheik-donning men. Their job, as legend had it, was to shepherd the cows and horses and goats and whatnot that grazed on the hills of The Virgins (I'm utilizing much background in Spanish linguistics--i.e. don't try this at home--to translate from the Latin into the Vulgate. e.g. we Agourians knew the hills as Las Virgenes, but the sack-and-Sheik society, not to mention the wackjobs and drug addicts and misunderstood youth at that hospital off the 101 to your right as you climbed the grade towards Calabasas, all of these enlightened peoples called it The Virgins). Now whether sacrifices involving flames and pure women and intricately carved and painted masks transpired, well that's kinda anyone's guess. There are obscure sources on dusty Conejo Valley library shelves that allude to such shenanigans. But that is not where my diatribe today is headed. Stay put, to see where we're directed.

Calabasas was a way-station for stage coaches, a passing-through place, the kinda blip on the map that people didn't so much settle down in as become unsettled at all the rotten pumpkins and resplendent oak trees that blotted out all sunlight. No one lived here. Unless of course your name was Sherri Samiloff and you were hot and the 5th grade boys of Willow Elementary (including but not limited to Leeb, Finch, West, the Bird, and moi, e.g. Ross and Roll) had maddening Outdoor Ed-generated, fanboy-type crushes on you...

But when this narrator (now a bit surlier, more mullet-laden, intermittently pimply and a whole lotta angsty) moved to The Land Of the Pumpkins (again, translating Latin-to-Vulgate for you, saving you all kinds of scholastic acumen here, since we still are in the dog-days of summer and I wouldn't want you all furrowy-browed and frustrated and like prone to bang on a bag of Cool Ranch chips smashing them into orange-blue garlicky dust, screeching: "And but what does Calabasas meeeeeeean in OUR LANGUAGE, Bubba!"). When I moved to Calabasas in 1988, it was the Gobi Desert: an Oasis of heat mirages and shattered dreams and giant banana-leaf fans concealing squiggly puddles of water that turned out to be hot air...

TO BE CONTINUED

Coffee Bean vs. McDonald's

2009-06-26T06:13:06Z

As a kid, my mom and pops would take to me to the saddle-and-barn-themed McDonald's on the corner of Kanan and Canwood--I believe it's Canwood; you know how as a kid you just know places and turns, curves and landmarks, not like real street names per se. But we'll go with Canwood.

So basically every kid who ever grew up in Agoura and went to McDonald's and did a birthday party or two in that famous barn, which in turn means every child born in Agoura from say 1969-1979, remembers our badass Mickey D's barn. Sure, some other snootier suburbs could boast of McD's with play yards replete with Chuck E. Cheese-caliber ballpits, but dude. Come on. We had a FRICKIN' barn with saddle seats you could chill on while downing a burger-sans-processed-cubed-onions, some fries, and an Orange drink.

But the real meat (har, har) of my post is this: at breakfast time, one could find when surveying the counter where the cash registers rang patriotically and the cash-for-cow-consumption transactions occurred, well one could find this sort of quaint glass cake dish. And under that magical glass cover, one could for the right price purchase an amazingly satisfying and chocolate-chip resplendent pastry. I loved this treat. More than the McCookies or the Apple Pie or a third helping of fries. The chocolate chip danish was it.

And for years I've tried in vain to recapture the taste of said pastry. For as could be concluded, McDonald's ditched these morning pastries many moons ago because they probably weren't big sellers. I mean probably the only takers were like me and the blue-hairs who liked to show up at 5:30 am when the robotically, frighteningly cheerful first shift manager tossed open the doors and the smell of cleaning supplies still hung heavy and the blue hairs simply wanted some quiet solace, a chocolate chip breakfast danish, and cheap hot coffee.

Well, Bubba, guess what. I've found what amounts to the same level of delight. The chocolate chip twists at Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf taste just like those pastries from my youth. Sure, the mark-up might be calculated at roughly 765% (C.B. charges nearly 3 sheckles; Mickey D's of yore charged something in the 'hood of 65 cents). Well worth it, though. If you've craved and sought and drooled Hooch-like over dessert-masked-as-breakfast-yet-coyly-still-called-"danish" as I did for all those years, look no further. Ross and Roll is hooking you up...

Tell Me This Ain't A Toss Up...

2009-05-28T04:01:00Z

June 5th

DJ Z-Trip @ The Natural History Museum, 9 bucks...Mash-up maestro, slicing through vinyl like a sushi chef with a serious Ginsu grudge...

OR

Andrew "Dice" Clay @ The Canyon Club, a.k.a. Ol' Stompin Grounds, a.k.a. Place of Hungover Senior Breakfast, 40 bucks...when I was driving home from the 'rillo the other morn after staying a spell at the Epstang Ranch (not to be confused with the Mustang Ranch, head outta the toilets, Bubba), I had the miraculous luck and good fortune to take note of a billboard off the 101 freeway alerting me to the fact that one Andrew "DICE" Clay would be gracing the stage of the Canyon Club with his foul-mouthed, puerile, and always precious schtick. June 5th. Any one else in? Boys night in the old 'hood?

P.S. I got great memories of listening to Dice on tape in Lynn's (a.k.a. Lucifer Lips') old Bronco, as we sat in the Rite Aid (née Thrifty) parking lot, undoubedtly guzzling Milaukee's Best and trying to psych ourselves up for the purchase of some...some...well, you know, they keep 'em behind the razors and the baby formula. These were not for me, Bubba. Lucifer Lips was becoming a man, I was yet a boy. Yet I'd been strapped with the task of purchasing said prophylactics...

What It Feels Like to Be A Weekend-Only, Single Parent Of Three (Presented in Three Acts)

2009-05-25T04:05:00Z

Act 1 (Exposition and Rising Action)
The night goes ok. You wake up after four hours of sleep, and you are sardined in by your oldest and your middle child and not to be outdone your youngest is wailing away like a Thailand taxicab cutting through traffic and your disorientation is slowly ebbing, you are at your old buddy's house and technically he is now 35 years old like you (he and his wife and darling two kids are upstairs asleep, cocooned in the insulating darkness and warmth of Camarillo at 3 a.m.). You stumble to the kitchen, fix your youngest a bottle, close your eyes and zone out on the sounds of the glug-glug-glug of milk-consumption and bathroom exhaust fan which you've left running as a feeble simulacrum of the air purifying machine back home, a million miles away among the green hills and craggy cliffs and pacific ocean blues. You lay him down (and this time, the 13th time, he turns his face, goes back to sleep--the pint-sized screamer and pugilist in him simply too exhausted to keep sparring with you). Three hours of more restful sleep on your ol' buddy's floor and then your oldest is out the door ready to eat blueberry coffee cake and watch Tom and Jerry. You can do this, you think. You've done it before with two, so what's a third? You can do this, you say. But who the f*$# are you kidding?

Act 2 (In Media Res, Action Is Thick and Hectic and Brutal)
Sure. You'll give everyone that the day went fine but that don't amount to a hill of ants when you've got the present scenario unfolding like so. Your youngest's nose is as frustratingly congested as traffic on the 101 from Westlake Village to Oxnard on any given Memorial Day. What a shit you are, you chastise yourself. This is f*$#in' Memorial Day and you're feeling this way. What gives you the right? But you've got the Washington D.C. concert on and you've said a funny little prayer of thanks and remembrance to good-ol' ram-hatted Dirty Joe Anzack especially and the other folks who've given up their everything for their nation. And but. All you can do is be this like cog in the machinery, the factory of futile attempts at putting kids to bed. Youngest's nose is plugged up, so you gotta rock him to sleep, but each time you have the audacity and stupidity to lay him like fragile glassware in his bassinet he goes apeshit on you. Back up, more crying, more cloggage. And this gets your middle further going, since like 40 minutes ago you promised to read Brainy Baby Animals and God forbid you and he don't get to point out the tree sloth and the boa constrictor and ferret and moose.

So on your way in, holding the youngest [who's none too thrilled at your 14th attempt to lay him down and has decided (I'd swear this is spiteful and malicious) to keep spitting out his binkie so it's taking a trip under the middle's bed with the dust-mites and -bunnies and random marbles and petrified cheese pieces] and so in scooping up the middle and trying to read in the dark and balancing the youngest on your shoulder, the middle wacks his head on the corner edge of his dresser which you know hurts like a bitch and the oldest is now up, way UP, UP like the housebound old man and boy scout in that new movie floating off by virtue of a thousand party balloons. Your wise idea is to give your middle some frozen Edamame to numb the emerging bump but now--after you've put your oldest back and told her that the evil pixellated menace of her dreams is harmless, that the tough-going Sully of Pixar imagination can squash anything her over-stimulated brain can cook up--the youngest is taking on the shade of a perturbed lobster and letting you know he ain't happy about your mismanagement of this whole deal and your middle has torn open the bag of Edamame for a closer look and possible taste and frozen green Sushi restaurant appetizers are scattered across floor and hallway and bedspread like a pharmacy going KA-BLOOEY and then, and then. You just throw in the towel for the evening. I'm talking like literally walk into your bathroom and grab the brown and baby blue wash cloth and hurl it at nothing and throw a few hopeless hay makers at the Gods...

Act 3 (Resolution)
The thrum of the computer. The hard-boiled (egg-ish) glow of the monitor. Thumping bass from some hoodlum out there on the edge of darkness who no doubt put his folks through hell some eons ago. The call of sleep. The wonder of parenting. The patience and the breaking point, the insanity and falling-into-place of it all. Hope you all enjoy a day away from the office, the cubicle, the board room, the cafeteria, the whatever-place-makes-you-feel-trapped-and-not-wholly-buzzing-and-electrified-like-temporary-single-parenting...

Episode 5 x 16 “The Incident,” Hereafter Intermittently Referred to as “The Game Changer”…Presented in Two Parts...PART 2

2009-05-16T15:28:00Z

Ross and Roll channels his inner Radzinsky

Wow. Pound for pound, I'd say that this 2 part episode of LOST, the season finale of Season 5, was the loopiest, thrillingest televisual roller coaster I've ever been on. "Reeling" was the best verb I could come up with. The finale was shocking, heartbreaking, funny, rib-nudging and wink-wink, and most importantly game-changing (more on this in a second). Since I'm a little behind, as well as foggy and cob-webby from the libations flowing freely at the Borne nuptials (man, can you taste the difference between Patron and some shitty, bottom-shelf well tequila), I'll just get right to it. Asterik style. The thought of weaving all the crazy moments of the show into a piece of unifying narrative is too daunting for an amateur recapper such as moi right now. It'd take the patience of Jacob. Speaking of weaving and threads...

*Opening scene in Jacob's cave under the statue--we see his tapestry, his loom, and the firepit around which all good story-telling takes place. I think a few posts back I mentioned the whole weaving and unweaving deal, Penelope's trick to keep the suitors at bay. Perhaps for Jacob the tapestry is like a map of the island's time looping: past, present, and future--repeat...

*Was that a black swan I spotted in the lower right hand corner of the frame when Jacob is sitting on the beach lazily watching the Black Rock approach? I'm just beginning to nose around in the book of the same name but one of the main ingredients of a Black Swan event is that it shatters the norm in its very unpredictability. Hmmm. Sounds a lot like detonating a bomb and destroying a hatch and potentially eradicating/altering history. Sounds a lot like taking something iconic, say a title card that's always been Black with White block letters embossed on it, and inverting that template for the first time. Hard to predict, massive impact, theorized about and explained away wildly afterwards...

*Cool meta moment...Jacob sez something along the lines of: "This only ends once. Everything else has just been progress." Kinda like a show that keeps building towards some massive conclusion and payoff...

*Are you freakin' kidding me? Kate's NKOTB lunchbox? I told you how my obession with this show is slowly infitrating my life. As a devotee of the "Kids" all theses years Diablo Cody oughta leave the new 90210 in her rearview and take up residency on a lil' isle called LOST...

*Sub driver handing out the magic Kool-Aid, err, sedative. See you on the other side indeed. [Digression: I was thinking back to Professor "He's Our You" Oldham at this moment. Do you guys think his Victrola and teepee near the border of Outland was his attempt to stradle two worlds--Dharma and the others? Is it possible that Sayid's run-in with him was later explained to Ben and that's what planted the seed of having his feet in both camps? Just a thought]

*As with much of the dialogue this season, people were parroting the words of each other again and again this episode. (1) QUADRANGULAR, SYMETRICAL DIALOGUE: Kate tells Sawyer on the sub that she came back to get him, just as Jack told Juliet he'd returned to save her and the others. Both Sawyer and Juliet assert that they didn't need, much less want, saving. (2) I think both Bernard and Juliet threw out a famous Sawyerism: "Sonovabitch!" (3) Ben tells Locke that everyone answers to someone, which is exactly how Richard put it to He-Who-Is-Crazy-And-Bald back in the episdoe "Jughead." (4) Immediately after this Richard grabs Ben's speech bubble from the strip a few weeks back and proclaims: "I've seen lots of things on this island but I've never seen anyone come back to life" [interesting, in light of the final reveal of "what's in the box" because we can now see that maybe Ben, Richard, Carlton and Damon, not to mention a few titular episodes have all been telling the truth: Once you're dead on the show, you're dead!

*Actions were placed on repeat as well in "The Incident." Just like in seasons gone by, a bulk of the episode involved an elaborate game of Follow the Leader. The Others, led by John Locke, trekked across those beautiful slick black rocks towards Jacob's domicile.

Unnecessary Authorial Intrusion #1 I’ve got something you may find interesting. (Maybe not; maybe the computer-related foibles of Ross and Roll are as dull to you as hushed golf tournaments are to me, I couldn’t conclusively say). However, I think it’s interesting and germane to this whole LOST thing. Last summer, the flash-drive that I save all my postings on took a dip with me in my apratment’s pool. The thing was waterlogged and buggy and for all intents and purposes dead. But I took it into the temple (my bathroom) and turned it over to the magic of the island (a hairdryer) and miraculously the thing returned to life…

*The hardcore fanatics and podcasters have been saying all season that the producers of the show have been toying with us by having the voice of one character come out of the mouth of another (e.g. Charlotte’s voice emanating from Teresa’s mouth during the Oxford commencement scene, Jack’s voice (via Roger Linus’s squawk box) reprimanding Kate, etc.) In a show replete with mirrors, Alice in Wonderland references, inversions and doubles (remember the Sawyer look-alike at the Orchid station during the season 5 premiere? the Claire twin in the supermarket?), the “written by” credits this episode were a nice touch. Part 1 was credited to Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, while Part 2 was a Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof venture.

*Cut to Brad Pitt’s whiney voice: “What’s in the box? What’s in the box?” Apparently the film Seven is an influence on the show as well. Both season 4 and season 5’s shocking revelations have hinged on a dead John Locke, in a locked box, whose very deadness has large implications and provides new complications for what is to come…

*Now we know that Jacob came to all of them. And he placed his hands on them. And during one of the most significant of these moments, he played Jesus to Locke’s Lazarus and infused him with life. Important because this is the Locke we know and love; he’s the one who comes to the island and befriends a lonely and isolated Walt and gives us an orange-peel smile and hucks knives at trees till they do that cool wobbly-blade thing. But the Locke from this season, Locke 2.0 as he’s been dubbed by some recappers, is a scary creation. And the question remains: did Jacob or some entity grant him life once more when Ajira slammed into Hydra Island? and if so, what’s with his other dead body in the crate? could it be—again in a show of doublings, doppelgangers, and dupes—that the body in the crate is Jeremy Bentham and the (seemingly) evil new-ish Locke is a spirit and dark manifestation of the island? Perhaps one called "Smokey" (cf Locke and the island's security system = never seen at the same time...Ben saying to Sun that what's about to emerge from that jungle is extremely dangerous and then Locke rustles his way outta the leaves, etc.)

*Sawyer’s uncle strives to dissuade the saddened Southern boy from seeking justice on his parent’s slayer…His words of advice? “What’s done is done.” Cue Danny Faraday’s “What happened happened” soundbite. But are we buying what’s done is done and que sera, sera? Are we forgetting the graphic strangling of Anthony Cooper in the Black Rock’s brig? Those daddy issues sure didn’t look done to me until that moment when we saw that dead is dead. And yet, and yet. Was Anthony Cooper nothing more than a genie-style manifestation of the mysterious (metaphoric? literal?) magic box that Ben Linus described to John Locke.

*One more thing about all those scenes with Jacob and our LOSTies. It would appear that he showed up at pivotal moments in the characters’ lives. Moments, I would argue, that all shared this in common: they happened before these folks were, really, in a sense, fully formed. (Kate’s initial wading into the cesspool of crime, in this instance the (eh-hem, kinda warranted) theft of an NKOTB lunchbox. Jack’s shaky sense of confidence and subsequent belittling by his father during surgery. Sawyer’s composing the letter that would that would poison his spirit and guide his life into conning and grifting. Locke’s…murder, essentially). What I found troubling, then, and I still can’t come up with a theory that satisfies me, is why then, if Jacob is beneficent and powerful, did these people still go down their respective bad paths? And further, what does it mean that, unlike the others, Sayid was visited when he was whole and happy…and Nadia represented—ok, I’m sorry. Was this some sort of twisted joke? Did anyone else feel it was quite forced and obvious the way she was jazzercising out there on La Brea, like some sort of unclaimed hooker, that she was about to get steamrolled?—a good path for this former cold-blooded torturer? And hell. Hurley’s defining moment would have been getting that lottery ticket. Right? So Jacob should have been, like, at the Snapple and soda cooler with him and shared some words of wisdom with him.

*As in the Season 3 finale, Hugo was once again at the helm of a Dharmobile. Dude, his size and curly hair and laid-back approach to island crisis is perfect. Can’t you just picture him renting out kayaks and snorkeling gear? Man he seems to’ve really found himself cruising the rock in blue VW style, flippin’ crepes and concocting dipping sauces. I absolutely love this character and man. Once more, I urge you to go to dispatchesfromtheisland.blogspot.com if you already haven’t…

*Hurley was the one back in the episode entitled “Tricia Tanaka is Dead” who kinda chastised Sawyer for mocking the deceased. In this case, the deceased turned out to be represented by the skull of one Roger “Workman” Linus. Speaking of skulls and the dead and jesting at their expense, can anyone say Hamlet? Don’t even get me started on the Daddy issues in this play. In a graveyard scene (my fave) Hamlet quips, looking at the skull of a former clown: “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him…[he was] a fellow of infinite jest.” Fast-forward to the snarky Sawyer version of the same thing when he calls the dead dude who’ll turn out to be Ben’s dad “Skeletor.”

*Speaking of skeletons, my sister and I are both wondering whether or not Rose and Bernard will turn out to be Adam and Eve. Their bucolic, Eden-esque retreat into nature seems important. They’ve got Vincent, they’ve got love, Bernard’s rocking a beard and some elderly Dead Head-worthy nappy-dreads. (Seemingly throwaway scenes or ones which seem designed simply to slake the thirst of the fans are never that dispensable.)

Unnecessary Authorial Intrusion #2 Of late, I’ve taken to signing all documents, forms, affidavits, and credit card receipts as Sir Ross and Roll, Duke of Whimsy or alternately D.J. A. Rizzee. I don’t know why I do the things I do. (My students no longer even bat an eye when I belt out in song, like I did today while the teens drank their Monsters and scribbled away on math computations, the De La Soul joint “Hey, hey, how ya doing (doin’)/Sorry I can’t get through/Why don’t you leave your name and your number (numbuh’)/And I’ll get back to you…”) As my old Hillrise hustler David Jorgensen would say: that’s just how Ross rolls…

*Sawyer asks Kate if she’s got a compass. I stifled a chuckle. Ummm…no but good ol’ Richie the Ageless and Johnnie Boy Bald sure as polar bear shit do! On LOST compass is the new bootstrap paradox.

*More lines outta different foax’ mouths. Bram tells Lapidus: “We’re the good guys” à la Ben Linus and dreadish, sun-reddish Bernard mutters a Sawyer-worthy “Sunuvubitch!”

*I actually really dug the way Sawyer/Juliet/Kate kind of bonded over their mixed up feelings of love and loyalty, and chose to help their friends. And Juliet just took that sub worker out! This blonde is brainy, buxom, and badass!

*Everything That Rises Must Converge…Obvious titular implications. The lives of these foax are coming closer and closer together with every ticking moment. I never read this Flannery O’ Connor collection, tho’ her novel Wiseblood had a huge effect on me as a junior in college, Southern Literature class. I’ve appointed my sister to investigate this one. She thinks this Easter egg (Jacob is reading it as Locke plunges out of a window and earthbound) may have to do with the fact that all the characters in the short stories are misfits (a) or (b) that O’ Connor had some interesting opinions on her Catholic faith. (If I was savvier, each of these bits would have some pithy subheading. Take for instance, this one. I might call it Everything That Plunges Must Go Thud. Alright loyal Ross and Rollers, you’ve talked me into it. Catchy subheadings below…

Brief Section Of Easter Egg Yumminess!

*EXTRA, EXTRA! READ ALL ABOUT IT: Ben Linus Channels The Cure And Spends Season 5 Staring At the Sea! (Seriously. I love all these shots this year of Ben just gazing out at the water, chucking handfuls of sand, pondering where it all went to pot.)

*YOU ALL EVERYBODY: Charlie’s Drive Shaft ring in the abandoned, John Locke-crafted crib. Was this as moving to everyone else as it was me?

*FIESTA DE CINCO: An instance of Jack’s whole counting to five bit. It seemed somewhat poetic and inspiring when he explained it to Kate back in the pilot episode, Season 1. Now it seems more laden with Daddy issues when we see it at work in the O.R. of the Shepard-staffed hospital…

Warranted Authorial Intrusion 1: Being that cheeky and not being that deft at it sure is exhausting. Cease catchy subheadings. Turn back, turn back…

*Of course the Apollo candy bar moment was rich, chocolatey rich, come to think of it. And the fact that Jacob said maybe it just needed a little push. Priceless. As aggravating as it is to have to grapple with a stingy vending machine, I’m guessing Jacob meant a lil’ sumpin’ more…

*Ben Linus. “I lied, John. That’s what I do.” Now would this be considered an ontological paradox? Could this be the truth, or a mere lie about his incessant lying? And does a lie about lying constitute the truth?

*Our finales always involve a few commonalities: shit blowing up like crazy, trekking across the island [see asterisk numero 7 above], and this one — two leaders hashing it out. Fisticuffs, unbridled rage. A few seasons ago we got Jack jacking Ben up pretty good, after he ordered his minions at the beach to kill some of our LOSTies. This time we got a double dose of said “squaring things up” in the Sawyer v. Jack showdown and ass-whupping, as well as the ‘Ben meet Jacob, Jacob Ben. Now commence to prison-style shanking!”

*Maybe the best line of the finale, delivered in the classic Southern drawl that only Josh Holloway brings: “This don’t look like LAX” after Jughead fails to detonate on impact.

*And finally, the moment everyone’s talking about. Juliet’s ultimate sacrifice. The choice between love and loyalty no longer blurred because in the end they’re exactly the same thing. We watched her clang, clang, clang that stubborn Jughead jackass bomb until it filled our screen with white and we were breathless awaiting the *bong* of LOST and those awful words: See you in 2010…

As I said before, a black swan, a two-hour tour-de-force of television, and nothing less than a game-changer.

See y’all very soon.

Still Reeling From Last Night’s LOST…Episode 5 x 16 “The Incident,” Hereafter Intermittently Referred to as “The Game Changer”…Presented in Two Parts

2009-05-16T02:29:00Z

Loose Ends That Need Tying Up Before We Proceed (And no, I’m not talking about that Ben almost-caps Penny at the marina but doesn’t after seeing cuddly, tousle-haired Charlie. These are other strands of looseness, Bubba)

1. Way back in “Dead is Dead,” we went inside Ben’s study and were granted a fleeting glimpse of his book shelf. Thereon, the discerning viewer could clearly see copies of Alex Haley’s Roots and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Now. We know that the Black Rock was a slave-era sailing vessel; we know that Ben’s study, via a few secret passageways, leads to Smoke Monster Summoning Central. Could it be that the cadre of books on Ben’s shelf provides a clue into the history of this mysterious island? Are leaders like Ben given a summer reading list with which to edify themselves on all they need to know about the island’s history, battles, issues, and former--not to mention future--inhabitants?

2. Doc Jensen (an egg-headed, prolific, inhumanely efficient theorist on all things LOST) pointed his faithful followers (who in our own spin-off, web-only series finale can be seen trekking across various websites—lostpedia, darkufo, odi, docarzt—in search of some drama and climaxing battle) towards Peter Pan for some further research about this zany show. So being a dutiful Jensen junkie, I grabbed a copy of the J.M. Barrie classic—which in its dark, occasionally mirthless look at childhood is miles away from the Disney version I’m more familiar with, having played as a fourth-grader the delicious, hook-handed foil to the more famous pansy-assed Pan—and lo and behold which random passage should my inquiring eyes fall upon but this: “Not perhaps so much owing to the guidance of Peter or Tink as because the island was out looking for them. It is only thus that anyone may sight those magic shores..." Sounds a lot like a little tropical destination we know and love, no? I can hear all the voices of the past five seasons, like those Greek choruses of long ago drama, saying: The island is not through with you…The island won’t let you…The island demands it

3. A confession: Before watching minute 1 of the finale, I’d just about given up on trying to understand the time-paradox issues and bootstrap arguments and stuff about what can and cannot be altered through time travel. Simply put, it’s just all beyond me. It makes me feel ill-equipped and ignorant like that 17 year old who could not pass Algebra 2 for the life of me (damn you quadratics!). And I sure wouldn’t have understood it a lick better if my teacher had been a sketchy pigeon like O’ Danny Boy Faraday, with all his frittering around, pacing back and forth, never finishing much of an explanation. And yet. I did think about this. Does this mean that if things could be changed/eradicated a la Back to the Future that then when Daniel gets aced by his mom in the camp, her little belly bump would magically shrink in some sort of reverse Alien-esque manner? And further, I know to try and sort out the age continuity issues has been taxing this season (I can accept a lot, but I can’t really swallow that a clearly middle-aged Ethan is in his 20’s), but one thing that hasn’t been hit on much in the blogs, forums, etc. is this: if Ellie is in her 40’s when she shoots Daniel and we’re in the Dharma 70’s when birthing technology wasn’t exactly what it is today, I need to know: isn’t it a touch dangerous to be having a child?

4. For over a year and a half now, I’ve been reading William T. Vollman’s behemoth Fathers and Crows, a reimagined piece of history about the Jesuits and the Native Americans. As with anything recently (family matters, job issues, traffic routes), I can relate everything back to LOST. Here are some small linkages that I’ve uncovered:

* A character named Born Underwater who “sees ahead” and is the child of a native and an interloper (this could have resonance with Daniel, Charlotte, Miles, Penny, especially Desmond)

* The priests note that their mission of conversion often makes them feel “trapped in the iron prison of present time”

* “At other times he hooded himself with a piece of blackness that drank up the firelight very thirstily, as sand drinks water, as earth swallows blood…” All I could think of was the black Ajira robe, the bonfire on the beach, and these words My name is John Locke…

* “Then we must be on guard against them, and put them to the torture whenever they trespass on our territories” Relates to: Oldham and the truth serum, trespassing and truces, warring factions [in the novel it’s the Native Americans, the Priests, and the Hollanders while in LOST we’ve got the Others, the Dharma-ites, and the Bram/Illana contingent.

ENTRY #150...You think I might score an Ace of Cakes deal out of this?

2009-05-13T03:34:00Z

Wow! I made it to big number 1-5-OH. Although I do keep a lot of notebooks, with a lot of strange scribblings in them, I've never been able to really maintain a journal proper. Now I feel like that's all changed. For 150 entries strong (ok, let's be honest...some strong, some nothing more than the electronic versions of said scribblings--didja catch that rap riff on Xanax or whatever recently? what was that all about?), I 've journaled. Diary'd (not diarrhea'd, tho' there be a fair share of garrulous and lengthy loquations up in this piece. Now I've got a veritable beast on my hands here, in the form of this web-log smack dab in front of your eyes (hereafter, the aforementioned web-blog may inconsistently be referred to as a "blah-g").

Traipse down memory lane with me as I note 15 things that I am thankful for (you didn't really think I'd bludgeon you with 150 now didja? in this recession? even I'm not that obtuse. i'm cutting back and dumping a zero so it can find a more meaningful existence among its neighbors "9" and "Dash" on keyboards everywhere):

(1) The fact that Lynn, aka Clumps, aka Louie Lips, aka Louie Laponi (with this many nicknames and sub-monikers the kid should be a member of Wu-Tang or Atlanta's Dungeon Family) finally took the plunge. This way, I can add him to the list of people I guilt-trip with phrases such as "Well now that you're married you'll understand how limited your time becomes..."

(2) My pals the Shoji's for hooking a dude up with a fully functioning dual cassette deck. Can you say NKOTB on TDK MA-R C60 Metal type IV cassette tape? Now that's the way to really rock "I'll Be Loving You (Forever)." As we said back at LCMS in 87 J/K. Tonight, I didn't go for the block-dwellers actually, but my friends in U2. Outside at dusk, squirrels running back and forth along the telephone wires, hummingbirds darting and hovering, Sophia practicing her emerging softball skills, while Joshua Tree blared from the speakers in the man cave.

(3) My wife. It's true. I was at my Aunt Irene's funeral and it was New Year's Eve and all very sad and I felt very certain about only a couple of things, the main one of which was Cameron.

(4) Ben Harper declared in a recent Rolling Stone interview that the two albums he'd worn out through repeated listening were an Eric B. and Rakim joint and a Little Feat one. If only I could be so hip. I think Ben Harper is one of the nicest men I've ever spoken to on the telephone or rang up at the Chariz store's cash register or randomly seen at Disneyland on his kid's birthday. Unfortunately, I gotta go with something more pedestrian like the Xanadu soundtrack and the Annie soundtrack. For every Burn to Shine or The Stage Names or Achtung Baby or Abbey Road I've carried on me like a badge, desperately trying to create a new top two that can reign under this status, there's always a Carpenters' Greatest Hits that just refuses to be de-throned.

(5) TBSEAONTV

(6) My life and day-to-day(7) That there are such spaces, such open platforms from which to spout nonsense

(8) The moments when my father really comes back to life to me

(9) My goofy friends who I've been blessed and cursed with since the Agoura days

(10) New friends who also turn out to be family(11) The good sense of the American constituents

(12) All of you. I can't make it all the way up to 15 tonight. Not because I don't have 15, hell I'm thankful for 15 million major things each day--having a job, staying healthy, the coastline of Palos Verdes, Torrance Bakery, the ODI podcast, the books DFW left behind--it's not that I don't have 15. It's that I've reconsidered and I think a firm dozen is a nice, round number. Here's to 150 more foax, if you can bare 'em...

Economic Downward Spiral, Case Study #32

2009-05-12T04:30:00Z

I've become a bit of an addict when it comes to getting my ice cream fix on recently. Talking 3 out of 5 days may find me parked in front of the Korean Nails place, occasionally sideways "Little Red Corvette" style in my Jeep, cuz when you gotta get your sugary-frozen-milk hit in, you can't be bothered with parallel parking.

So there's this kid in there who's maybe 17. I feel for him. He's got bad skin, seems a little sad at times. He musta gotten hired recently, though, because his duties have included the following over the past week:

Phase 1--Stand around mutely. Get in everyone's way. Offer no help...

Phase 2--Greet people with a hearty yet awkwardly loud: "Welcome to Baskin Robbins! Wouldyouliketotryournew88centsoftserve?!"...

Phase 3--Tonight's initiative. (This was genius). Meticulously practice scooping technique on unsuspecting tub of Cherries Praline. Step 1: Crick neck from side to side to insure maximum looseness. Step 2: Squeeze flexor-ice-cream-scooper-thingie as if mandated to do so by a tough Physical Therapist, such that forearm muscles constrict and relax, constrict and relax. Lay out paper towels for absorption purposes. Bend down, squeeze ice cream extraction tool, watch head so's not to bump on freezer lid, re-squeeze tool, watch Cherries Praline dump out like a duck turd on the Brawny towel, turn said towel into makeshift slide, watch duck-turdish-resembling scoop fall back into big tub and repeat.

I ain't lying foax. I was pretty well mesmerized...

(You guessed it. I wanted to link the LRC reference above to a Youtube video but Prince and his Knights of Pointless Narcissism already took a pin to that hypothetical balloon).