The Lost Book Club Episode 9: Solitary

The episode was Sayid's backstory, but what I think is really interesting is that the Sayid's character was even in the series at all.

Lost debuted in September 2004, twenty months after the war in Iraq began, and eighteen months after President Bush declared the end of combat with "Mission Accomplished" speech.  By the time Lost aired, Iraq had its first interim government in place, news of the Abu Gharib debauchery was one month old, and Saddam Hussein had been captured and would be executed by year's end.  

Overall, I think the mood in the US at that time was that Iraq was an unfortunate and cathartic exercise, but one that was by and large behind us. Like the previous Gulf War, we had routed an inferior opponent, and were ready to make amends and put the whole affair behind us.

Sayid's presence in the show speaks to the optimism of that era.  When he first reveals that he served in the Republican Guard, its a little shocking, but hey--we're all good with Iraq, right?  

The Lost Book Club- Episode 5: White Rabbit

I’ll readily admit that I enjoy a good bit of post-apocalyptic media—literature, movies, comics, coloring books. It’s not so much that I relish thoughts of the impending end-of-the-world or that the earth in flames warms my soul, but I do appreciate that total societal upheaval provides a nice medium for speculating on how people will respond to a radical shift in their environment. Apocalyptica sidesteps the question of whether or not we humans are products of our environment by throwing its characters into a new dystopia: a Wasteland, a Waterworld, a Thunderdome (and that’s just 90s movies).  

At any rate, apocalyptica takes three main stances on the inherent nature of man absent authority:

1)      Lord of the Flies—Left to their own devices, people will smash asthmatic fat children with large rocks. (The Road)

2)      Heroes and Villains — People are either pretty decent or completely wretched, but the good guys will *most likely* triumph over both the baddies and the circumstances.  Most post-apocalyptic stories fall into this category, because it gives you someone to root for. (Alas Babylon, Jericho, Wool) 

3)      Sheeple—Look to your left. Now look to your right. Pretty much everyone around you will go full catatonic until someone tells them what to do.  (1984, Fahrenheit 451, Atlas Shrugged)

At this point of the show, Lost falls into bucket #3, which I found kind of surprising and a little disappointing.  Sure, this episode is about the birth of a leader, but a really more of a Shepherd---or a Shephard---oh my gosh, I just now got the reference to Jack’s name.  Wow.

From the script: 
JACK

How are they? The others.

LOCKE

They’re thirsty. Hungry. Waiting to be rescued. (then; pointed) And they need someone to tell them what to do.

The Lost Book Club: Pilot (Part 1)

Seeing that this is the start to a book club of sorts, it seems only fitting to begin where all great works of fiction begin: with a noteworthy first line. Whether these opening lines are memorable because the remainder of the work makes them so, or whether there is something inherently compelling about a premier sentence--the mythical "hook" that grade-school kids are taught in their 5-paragraph essay lessons--great stories flow from great beginnings.   

And so, an homage to a smattering of civilization's finest literature from civilization's finest television series. (How many can you identify? Any better suggestions?) 

"Who is John [Locke]?"

"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were [killed in a murder-suicide], and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a [Hot Pocket]."

"In a hole in the ground there lived a [Charlie]."

"All children, except one, grow up. [Which is why they had to write Walt out of the show despite being a major plot point before hitting puberty.]"

"[Kate], light of my life, fire of my loins."

"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own [island], or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these [episodes] must show."

"Call me [Jacob]."

"[Everybody] was dead, to begin with."

And perhaps most fittingly: "Happy [characters] are all alike; every unhappy [character] is unhappy in its own way." 

If you'd prefer your opener straight from J.J. Abram's screenplay, you can find it here.

OVER BLACKNESS, MUSIC. OMINOUS AND FOREBODING. THEN, OUT OF THE DARKNESS, A SINGLE WORD. FLOATING IN SPACE, OUT OF FOCUS, TOWARD CAMERA. AS IT APPROACHES IT COMES IN TO FOCUS, BUT IT'S SHARP ONLY FOR A BRIEF MOMENT:  LOST

Thus begins my favorite TV show, and with it the inaugural convening of The Lost Book Club.  I hope you'll enjoy the weekly episodic ramblings, or join us from the comfort of your own couch.

Ratings for "Pilot (Part 1)"
Importance to Story: 5
Importance to Character Development: 5
Overall enjoyability: 4

Unfolded out of the folds

A few weeks back, I came across this opinion piece from Adam Gopnik describing the "asymmetry of parental love."  It seemed fitting for today.

"One of the rules of mathematics and physics, as I - a complete non-mathematician - read often in science books, is that when infinity is introduced into a scientific equation it no longer makes sense. All the numbers go blooey when you have one in the equation that doesn't have a beginning or an end.

Parental love, I think, is infinite. I mean this in the most prosaic possible way. Not infinitely good, or infinitely ennobling, or infinitely beautiful. Just infinite. Often, infinitely boring. Occasionally, infinitely exasperating. To other people, always infinitely dull - unless, of course, it involves their own children, when it becomes infinitely necessary.

That's why parents talking about their children can be so tedious - other parents, I mean, not me or you - not because we doubt their love, or the child's charms, but because itemizing infinities is obviously the most boring thing imaginable.

We see this, with heartbreaking clarity, in those people we know, or read about, who continue to love, say, a meth-addicted child. And we think: "Why don't you just give up?" And they look at us blankly and we say: 'Oh, yeah. Right.'

The joke our genes and our years play on us is to leave us, as parents, forever with this weird column of figures scribbled on our souls, ones that make no sense, no matter how long you squint at them or how hard you try to make them work.

The parental emotion is as simple as a learning to count and as strange as discovering that the series of numbers, the counting, never ends. Our children seem, at least, to travel for light years. We think their suitcases contain the cosmos. Though our story is ending, their story, we choose to think - we can't think otherwise - will go on forever.

When we have children, we introduce infinities into all of our emotional equations. Nothing ever adds up quite the same again."

I love you, Mom.

Happy Mother's Day.

Rat City Returns

Just in case there are any other Seattle-ites out there who also had bad dreams after staying up late streaming The Walking Dead on some obscure eastern-European TV-piracy hideout: I bring you...The Seattle Doomsday Map.

In addition to being beautiful and geographically/architecturally accurate, the map “provides valuable information,” Dowler [the artist] writes. “You can find out the location of the radiation leak in Sodo, who sells fresh produce in Belltown, and what’s the worst threat to your safety in Cal Anderson Park.” (Answer: zombies, duh.)  The preparation for Seattle being taken over by the undead really seems to make sense, given that hipster culture is a form on early-onset zombism.

For me personally, I lived in the middle of that flesh-colored ruin to the center-left of the map last summer and currently work next to the bright green square at 11 o'clock on the map-- it looks clear but the Whole Foods across the street has apparently been overrun.  In case of Zombie Apocalypse, you can find me atop the Space Needle, eating $18 chocolate-chip pancakes until the biters learn to use elevators.

**Rat City is a once-and-future nickname for Seattle.  Other nicknames include Emerald City, Queen City, Rain City, and my personal favorite "Gateway to Alaska."

Fitty-fi forms for fibbing:
 

Half-full

Busking at its best.  Although I do like Pike Place's piano man.

Itching

Each year of elementary school, the nurse would come talk about lice. Sometimes the class would have to file up one by one to have a comb run through our hair, just to make certain we weren't infected/infested.  Sometimes we just sat at our hinged desks, itching and hoping that it was just our imaginations.

In first grade, Tabitha got lice.  Tabitha was an intellectually disabled girl in my class, and her limited speech and ignorance to the incontrovertible social cues of 7-year olds made her a schoolyard target.  We saw, but did not understand, the filthy yellow dress and unkept hair, and so the sing-song insult "You like Tabitha" became the standard recess rebuttal.  It was a small cruelty, or rather a full-sized cruelty by small people.

No one was really surprised when the nurse's comb stopped at Tabitha.  She had to stay home from school for two weeks, which may have been a relief for her.    

Thinking about Tabitha makes my soul itch and hope it's just my imagination.

"To this Day" by Shane Koyczan

A Summer

34 States, 2 Provinces, 11,528 miles on the road, another 10,752 in the air.  A swan song for Petey, my  trusty steed over the past decade.

Cities
Savannah, GA
Portsmouth, NH
Bar Harbor, ME

Prettiest Regions
Southeast Tennessee
Northeast Coast
Western Louisiana
Kauai
Hill Country, TX
Prince Edward Island

Experiences
Kayaking the Napali Coast
Thunderstorm in the Chisos
Peter and the Starcatcher
Swamp Tour
Fireflies in Great Smoky Mountain National Park
Fenway Park

Wildlife Encounters
Bayou Otters
Sea Turtle

Food
The Wilkes House
Mahony's Po-Boy Shop- grilled shrim and fried-green tomatoes
Lobster Stew and popovers at Jordan Pond
Sushi in New Haven, CT
Chingones from the now-defunct shop

Books
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The Help
Treasure Island
Anne of Green Gables
Sophie's World
Watership Down
1984

The Incredible Journey

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 “We must not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time.” –T.S. Eliot

Fenway

Road Trip, Week 6: New England and Newer England

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• Driving Tunes: Pretty much NPR and Canada's version of it
• Books: The Golden Apples of the Sun by Ray Bradbury, 1984 by George Orwell, Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Mongomery
• Wildlife: Foxes, turtles, a raccoon, and buffalo (or bison to be more precise)
• Food: Garibaldi's pizza, amazing sushi with an even amazing-er menu, fish and chips, popovers, lobster stew, lobster omelette, lobster roll, chowdah, homemade blueberry ice cream, and a whoopie pie courtesy of the old lady bake sale  
• Sights that didn't quite make the blog: Star-lit Yale with my starlet friend, Portsmouth's pallet of wood-siding houses, Bar Harbor, the red dirt roads of Prince Edward Island, "Free camping in the Shire", massive fields of lupine, the Canadian perspective on the War of 1812, the Lake of Shining Waters
• Friends: Gabriel Jones, Jillian Taylor, Mickey Theis

Worth Several Thousand Words

Well, let's hope the adage rings true this time, because keeping up to date with my writing has suffered a little lately.

Blackbeard's real treasure: sunset over Ocracoke Island

  

On Jordan Pond: Lunch time at Acadia National Park

Acadia from Cadillac Mountain, highest point on the Atlantic Coast and therefore the first place in America to catch sunlight

The aptly-named Northeast Harbor

The Margaret Todd, a four-masted schooner that I sailed in (a la "What About Bob?") 

"Dr. Marvin, guess what? Ahoy, I sail, I'm a sailor, I sail!"

Climbing the Beehive...

For this view.

A candle on the water (I actually drove through Passamaquoddy, Maine.)

The Bay of Fundy has the world's largest tides--up to 50 feet at places like the famous Hopewell Flower Pot Rocks.

Farms + Ocean = Prince Edward Island

French River, PEI

Green Gables, restored based off of the book's description

On Broadway

While I was in New York I went to see Peter and the Starcatcher, a prologue to the Peter Pan story with a sort-of steam punk feel to it.  I had picked up a ticket earlier that day at the half-price booth and had misread the seat location, so imagine my surprise when the usher escorted me to the very first row (close enough to see all the spit and sweat of performers giving it their all; "Theatre is juicy," explained my starlet friend Jill).  The play had won 5 Tony Awards the previous night, including Best Featured Actor in a Play going to the actor who plays Black 'Stache, the once-and-future Captain Hook.  On a tiny stage (by Broadway standards) the twelve-member cast created an entire world out of ropes, a few passenger trunks, and a ladder. It was beyond brilliant.  

As I walked away that night, alone in my thoughts despite the Times Square hordes, I felt that sweet and sad  sense that I had experienced something that would never happen again--kind of an in-the-moment nostalgia.

I think that's just about the best feeling in the world.

Damn Yankees

Those two blue blurs with their hands on their heads in the upper left corner: that's Johnny and me gaping as the Bronx Bombers walked-off in the last game of the Subway Series. Tie game. Bottom of the ninth. Full count. It was like a No Fear t-shirt gone bad.  But I have to admit, the place was pretty pretty amazing.

Road Trip, Week 5: Appalachia to Atlantic

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• Driving Tunes: Folk music on the radio, greatest hits of the Napster Age
• Books: The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer
• Wildlife: Sugar gliders, salamanders, wild ponies, shore birds
• Food: Pulled pork and hushpuppies, Spanish mackerel, shrimp and scallops, crab beignet
• Sights that didn't quite make the blog: The equally stunning views from Clingman's Dome and McAfee Knob, meeting through-hikers on the Appalachian trail, the commercial madness at the Smokies' entrances, the swarming-est mosquitoes I've ever seen at Ocracoke, sunset from the Outer Banks, the Kittyhawk monument, swimming in the Atlantic, Teach's Hole (as in Edward Teach AKA Blackbeard); the Blue Ridge Parkway vistas 
• Friends: Bobby Masocol, Ryan Armbrust, Johnny Kirkwood, Becca Fisher

Found scrawled on a virtual tree...

CROATOA

Synchronous Fireflies in the Smokies

Like an old-time movie marquee.  An orchestrated light show--flash, flash, flash, sparkle, pause--and so on.  An airport runway, the light taking off down the path and into the darkness.  Christmas lights, or better yet, what they are trying to replicate: the glisten of icicles at night.  The Electric Light Parade.  Moonlight on rippling water.  The sparkle of thousands of camera flashes, like we will see during the Olympic Opening Ceremonies later this summer.  Yeah, that's how it looked.  And felt.        

Something Wicked This Way Comes

About six months ago, in all seriousness, I turned to my friend Bryant and said: "I really need to start reading more science fiction."  Over the past several weeks (since being in Roswell), I have been trying to track down a copy of Ray Bradbury's I Sing the Body Electric! to no avail.  Well, when I saw the news of Bradbury's passing--on Venus' transit of the sun no doubt--I had to go out and settle for a different collection of his short stories: The Golden Apples of the Sun (pictured above).

From Ray's website:  

Throughout his life, Bradbury liked to recount the story of meeting a carnival magician, Mr. Electrico, in 1932. At the end of his performance Electrico reached out to the twelve-year-old Bradbury, touched the boy with his sword, and commanded, Live forever! Bradbury later said, "I decided that was the greatest idea I had ever heard. I started writing every day. I never stopped."

Also, with this blog I'd like to think that I'm following his advice: "Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row."

Appalachian State

I spent a fair portion of today driving through what was once the Free Republic of Franklin, a portion of present-day East Tennessee ceded to the federal government as a payment for war debt stemming from the American Revolution.  Turns out, the government didn't want it, at least not as a state; the vote to accept Franklin as the 14th state failed by two votes.  Spurned, the people of the Appalachians decided that maybe they didn't want to be part of this new-fangled United States anyway, and so seceded from the one year-old nation and operated independently for about four years (1784-1788).  The most famous Franklonian? None other than Mr. David Crockett, born in 1786 smack dab in the middle of Franklin.