The end
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March 26, 2009March 25, 2009"Will anybody ever read what we write here, after today? I am sure our writing will persist in the World Wide Web, but will anybody ever read it again?"Ending up in a kind of soundlessly March 24, 2009The best films of the decadeI'm a bit early, and obviously, towards the end of the year, I'll have opportunity to amend. But I wanted to get this in while the gettin' was still good: 1. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - every generation has "that film," and Sunshine is one of those, a movie which blows open the bounds of what movies can do and what they can mean to the people who see them. An elaborately constructed, fiendishly mischievous, and frequently unnervingly heart-accurate tale of the utter existential chasm of love. No, it never works out. So? 2. There Will Be Blood - whatever else every other movie has been, There Will Be Blood is not. It is something I almost never see: distinct. It is a work of art entirely of itself, of its own meanings and ideals, and powerfully and profoundly so for the people of this decade (and that one). Paul Thomas Anderson didn't exactly suck before this movie; yet he is speaking with an entirely new and ferocious voice here. 3. The Lord of the Rings - cast aside any griping about overexcited fanboys and a legacy of sweaty cosplay; these would be among the most influential films ever made even if they weren't also kickass pieces of cinema. The fruition of digital technology in moviemaking, the apprehension of fantasy as a foundational genre of modern storytelling, the elevation of the pulp to the dramatically mythic, the culture within a culture created by the DVDs' worm's eye view of every second of their creation, even the you-pick-the-flavour alternate versions... All wrote the book on how filmed entertainment would work in the 21st century. Oh, and the movies are kickass. 4. Brokeback Mountain - somewhat dismissed (or at least underestimated) upon its titter-inducing release, the gay cowboy movie still sets the standard for finely observed American drama for a decade that turned out to be surprisingly chock-full of such offerings (especially in the last few years). Is it the 70s again? Now given unexpected colour by Heath Ledger's death, the final five minutes of this film are among the most mournful ever lensed. 5. Lake of Fire - the most important film ever made on any topic of the complexity of abortion, Lake of Fire suffers the ignominy of having been almost completely ignored. You might be able to find it at a video store near you, but otherwise the discussion has been virtually nil. Under the circumstances, I hope I am not being too much of a paranoiac by suggesting willing (or unwitting) conspiracy: America simply isn't ready to have its hateful, patriarchal heart carved out like this. Should be required viewing for every human. Special jury prize: The Prestige, the best fucking movie that is not on this list. The 50 best films of the decade are still TBD, but that'll get ya started. "Guys... where are we?"Lost, as a series, is the answer to the question Charlie asked at the end of the pilot episode. It is the answer both literally and figuratively: literally, because the series will in its 117 episodes serve to answer this dangling question of the nature of the new reality that the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 find themselves in; figuratively because the current - though not eventual - answer for all our characters is, more simply, "lost." And because of this, the true willpower behind the show is slowly becoming clear. Some of the initial mysteries of the series - the monster, the Others, the walking dead people - will likely be answered, and others likely will not, but either way, the slowly-assembling understanding of the series as a whole is also showing it to be astoundingly, and almost frighteningly, prescient science fiction for the America of this decade. Not the stomp-around-the-world-and-be-jerks America, mind; rather, the existential quagmire of the regular people just trying to get back to some sense of "home." "Guys... where are we?" framed what could be called the "aggressive expansion" period of the Lost mythology. For about sixty episodes following the moment Charlie posed that question to his friends (and to the audience), enigmatic clues that both seemed to widen the poser and define its answer piled up on a nearly episode-by-episode basis. Smoke monster, walking Christian, Walt with the birds, whispers in the jungle, Others and Dharma, hatches and numbers, magnetic chambers and time travel, the "magic box" that can create anything, seeing the future and flashing to the past, a man who does not age walking out of the jungle to talk to a man in a wheelchair who can now stand on his own two feet, etc., etc., etc., all circulated into a kind of orgy of creative unburdening that - with The X Files firmly in mind - might well have been going nowhere. Our gaze was forced, instead, upon the characters; endlessly, relentlessly, past the point of annoyance and almost to the point of giving up on the show altogether, while the mythology elements (seemingly) spun their wheels. Three long years of flashback after flashback after flashback - some with enormous twists and reveals at their center (Locke and that wheelchair, the Ballad of Rose and Bernard, and I am still quite fond of finding out the meaning of Jack's tattoos), others barely elevating above movie-of-the-week (anything involving Sawyer and a con; anything involving Hurley and anything). Here, though, was a kind of unseen point - not just, who are these people? What do they mean? But more importantly, are their lives before this (or after, in season 4) actually better than their lives now? Charlie's question - "where are we?" - was tantalizingly extended in the third season, once all concerned were relatively certain that our heroes were not, in fact, stuck in Purgatory or some other godforsaken Miltonian or Manichean construct. Locke's father - whatever the fuck his name was - said to Sawyer, "If this isn't hell, friend, then where are we?" offering, without a moment of knowing it, an even more cogent statement of the series' mission than even Charlie had in season 1. By tacitly dismissing ("if this isn't hell") the inevitable American religious interpretation from the list of what-is-the-Island contenders, Seward/Sawyer/Cooper/Whateverthefuck likewise positioned the true question at the heart of not just the show, but the world: if we are neither in heaven nor heaven's dry run, what are our responsibilities to the now? The positioning of the now - in and around flashbacks and flashforwards and flashpresents - makes it all the more plain that in Lost, Lindelof and Cuse (and to at least an initial extent, Abrams) have created the great pop mythology of this decade of American life. The series arrived in 2004 - at the end of the first term of the Bush administration, three years after 9/11; a cogent point in time where this decade could be said to have formally defined itself through issues of potential environmental catastrophe, brutally dangerous geo-political co-existence, and even the sort of shadow conspiracy mistrust of higher-ups that marked the 1990s great mythos, The X-Files. On Lost, American culture is world culture - the nods towards globalism in the principal cast (at first, two Koreans and, more importantly, an Iraqi) are still so America-centric that one need not even notice that there was, apparently, only a single Australian passenger on a flight from Sydney to Los Angeles. (Even she was just trying to get to the States.) Everyone is America-bound in Lost, but no one is there yet. But this is no Purgatory, and just as surely, the forward action of the first several years of the show - Jack's rational, strong-willed efforts to do exactly what one would expect of a leader in such a situation, getting the castaways off the island - was shown to be a false god. Jack got off the island, all right, and just as quickly (to us, thanks to that now-glorious 3-year ellipse that takes place between the parallel narratives of the final episode of the third season, "Through the Looking Glass") realized he should never have left. It is an understanding that, it seems, will come upon all of the characters over the course of the series. For Rose and Bernard, or more importantly for John Locke, it arrives almost immediately; for Sawyer, it takes a day of capering with the boys in the Winnebago (or perhaps an excursion to 1977) to make him realize that he's exactly where he wants to be. The further the series goes along, the more plainly irrational the rational desire to leave the Island becomes: because even with smoke monsters and Jacob and Others and Dharma sharks, who wouldn't want to be there, on that island, in that palace of perfect Hi-Definition green? Who would want to leave? And certainly not us, either; the pleasure principle of Lost has now abounded our relationship with the show and turned it over into pure cultural synthesis. I once categorized, and dismissed, Lost as little more than visceral, visual pornography in television form, pure pleasure with no soul; and while my view at that time was embarrassingly short-sighted, it also held an element of recategorized truth. The frenzy of the visible, or of visual pleasure, is Lost's onscreen metaphor for the deeper reality of the Island and its relationship to all the castaways. Observe the simple democratic variation between off-island sequences and on-island ones. Off the island, there is less colour, less camera movement, less vegetation, less intrigue. On the island, the entire world is a big bright day-glo Pandora's Box of awesome, exploding in every direction in frenzied, hyper-acute action cinema. I know which one I find more appealing. Remember: are their lives before this, actually better than their lives now? If the castaways are all "lost," then by admissions such as the above, so are we. And so Lost both furnishes the escape - for the characters, the attempt to escape the Island; for us, the escape, Narnia-like, through a wardrobe and into a perfectly actualized otherspace that is as glorious a fantasy as we could ever hope to imagine - and the analysis of the fraudulence of that escape. Why is Jack clawing, scraping, grasping to breach the boundary wall - to break through that audible "woosh" - that separates the Island from the flashbacks/forwards/presents (where everything is so horribly ordinary and plain and concrete) when he could be here, at this moment, in the Paradise of the Now? Who would want to leave this place? There are two moments of pure exaltation on the show, and both are bound in the simple pleasure of being in the place that you are, and enjoying what you have. The first is the "Wash Away" montage at the end of the third episode, and the second is the "Shambala" montage that closes "Tricia Tanaka is Dead." No threat of afterlife here - what peace can be found is found, as the precisely-chosen lyrics point out, on the road to Shambala. If Charlie posed Lost's first question and Seward/Cooper/Locke's Daddy posed the second, I think someone, at some point, will pose some variation of that last line - "who would want to leave?" - as the third and final question; the grand, spiritual epiphany. I've spoken before about Desmond's "you have to lift it up." I think I'm beginning to know what that line means, for the Lostaways, and for the rest of us. March 23, 2009The King of Carrot Flowers, parts 2 and 3Now bearing firmly in mind that this is no longer the case, a few years back, there was a period of six weeks or so where I could not do dishes without starting to cry. I enjoy doing dishes: I find it very therapeutic. Well, the problem with therapy is that sometimes it loosens the internal knots sufficiently to allow a bunch of crap to come pouring out. I just kept losing it, about half a minute or so into feeling that warm water pour over my hands, the sponge gently stroking the plates. Like clockwork: dishes = tears. At around that time, I also had what could be called an anti-religious experience. Call it a pure visual hallucination brought about by a toxic overdose of bad brain chemicals, but I actually saw something - probably the very kind of something that causes zealots to run to Christ, only in my case, it was divine proof of the absolute absence of anything. A few years on, I've certainly accepted that there was no pragmatic reality to any of the understandings I came to on that particularly hallucinatory day. But fuck, it was scary. In fact I'd say only two products of my mind have frightened me that much in my entire life. They work in a kind of neat parallel: 1. When I was a young teenager I had a dream that I discovered a nuclear weapon in the basement of my parents' house, with a countdown timer in the 20-seconds-to-go range. I crouched behind the washing machine and prayed to God to give me another chance at life, and at that moment, I woke up. In rational terms, I had a nightmare and I woke up from it. In metaphysical terms, God did what I asked. That particular dream remains the single most vividly terrifying experience of my entire life, and the lingering (though foolish) questions about the nature of reality which subsequently haunted me, still sorta haunt me. I try not to think about it. 2. The aforementioned hallucination at the tail end of the summer of 2005, which gets referred to coloquially around here as "the great eye." The thing is, I don't have any particular desire or need to live in a world without God. I don't think anybody does. I think that's why God was invented: we have fragile psyches which are, in a vast number of cases, possibly structurally incapable of fully understanding a universe without a divine creator/protector figure who has some ability to gather us, parent-like, into His arms and protect us from the Big Bad Nothing. (Sure, Gmork, the relentless terror-wolf from The Neverending Story, was scary... one of the scariest. But that raging cloud of dark absence, The Nothing, and the promise of utter existential annihilation it brings? A bit more on the nose than most people might think on first blush.) I have seen things in my life that make me want to believe that I am being pushed in certain directions by a benevolent force of some design, be it almighty or otherwise. I have seen other things in my life which enforce with affirming dispassion the utter meaninglessness of it all. I believe in human beings, and I believe in our ability to create and associate meaning. (Look at all the mythic meaning I've created out of, 1, a bad dream, and 2, a misfiring synapse.) The reason I ultimately have to foreground our internal realities before any expectation of external intelligence is the peculiar pickling effects of the things that live in my own brain. I am, as discussed prior, occasionally prone to rather sensational bouts of chronic depression. In these instances, rationality itself unhinges from the spinal column of my soul. I suddenly become very, very aware of how little is actually tied to anything by indestructible means in the meathook reality of our lives. It's not a comforting awareness, but it returns with unsettling regularity often enough. Inevitably, it's a hard thing to lose any thing that you love, and stay all the way sane. Anyways, it all turned out all right. And that, somewhat abbreviated for time, is the story up to now. March 22, 2009Lo, for the Consumers DistributingWhen I was a kid, there was a store like no other, and it was called Consumers Distributing. Consumers Distributing was Amazon before the internet. It was either so sensationally ahead of its time that one wonders if Jack Stubb was in fact a visitor from the future, or so permanently wedged in the intransigent spaces between true marketing trends that it was essentially the Laserdisc of its day. Consumers Distributing was shop-at-home shopping, where you still had to actually go to a store. But what a store. Once a year the heavy, industrious Consumers Distributing catalogue - like a roided up Ikea catalogue, with extra sass - would THUMP on the door step, and it'd be off to the races. Given my age at the time (well, given my age anytime ever), the races was toys. To the toy section of the catalogue I would flip, and like Eisenhower planning D-day, I would chart out the accumulation of plastic men into my forces. After all, going to a traditional toy shop is such a horribly risky affair for a lad - will they have Dusty? What if they only have one, and my best friend Geoff gets his hands on it first? Who wouldn't want the sensational security of those gloss-bound catalogue pages, and their promise of systematic, gentlemanly shopping assurance? Of course, it was never quite like that, but the ideal was beautiful. Off to the C.D. you'd go, and belly up to one of the geodesic kiosks littering the showroom floor; the catalogue would match the one you had in your house (you would already have memorized the relevant page numbers, to accelerate the process); the golf pencils would scribe the 6-digit code on the tiny slip of paper, and the guy in the wicket would take your slip into the back, and out would come your toy. Sometimes. Well, there was the plot hole, anyway. Perfect idea; unreliable execution. After all, if (with catalogue in hand), you had to call the Consumers Distributing beforehand to find out if your 6-digit code was actually in stock, and tangible reality instead of a dream on paper, what separated C.D. from the animal magnitude of the Hudson's Bay Company, or Toy City? Nothing, that's what, save for the rank anarchy of the toy aisles and the bloodshot look in Geoff's eye when he - and you - realized simultaneously that there was one Dusty left, and it would be a foot race to determine who got it first.
A few times a year when I pass Sunnybrook mall, where the former Consumers is now a drug store (? - and don't get me started on what happened to Boots), I can't help but become nostalgic over the brief window of time where golf-pencil buying was the sport of kings, just like I occasionally miss the feel of a big CAV laserdisc in my hand as I laboriously flipped it over to get to the next 30 minutes of analog-cum-digital content. The times, they were a' changin', and the weirdest and most amazing shit was constantly happening. March 21, 2009The best films of the previous decadeWhile we're on the subject, here's a list that's ten years belated.
Special jury prize: Heat The same river twiceI had my first kiss on this day, a long time ago. Lot of distance between those two points, then and here, can't quite get my head around all of it. Life sometimes knocks you back, with the quantity of change. Countries and space and bodies and time. Been thinking about endings a lot lately - not the bad endings, just the "yup, this is done" factor of tying up a thing, and moving on to the next thing. Everything in constant flow whether you notice it or not, good to sit once in a while and take note of how even if you feel like you're standing in the same place, everything around you is still moving. And then you're back in it, and on you go. I'll try to finish up a few things here on the blog and maybe watch some television, and then we'll see what else can get done around here. March 20, 2009The moral melancholy of Mrs. VentonWhen I was in grade 9, my English class was made up of 27 boys, 3 girls. Our teacher was Mrs. Venton, and as the urban legend goes, she later went insane. In the hindsight of adulthood I can tell that, generally speaking, she withstood the unending onslaught of pubescent testosterone (the strongest, and stinkiest, brand of testosterone) with relative stability over the course of the 10 months in which we hollered, hooted, and kicked desks clean over in her miserable, third-floor afternoon English class. And yet, there is a seductive quality to the notion of Mrs. Venton's eventual, rumoured nervous breakdown. Confronted with the baboon-like yowling and staunch academic dispassion of 27 male bodies fitting and starting to find their way to full adulthood, she lost her cool more than once ("ya stupid fools!") and after we were done with her, she was never heard from again. Except for the legend, which stands thus: Shortly after we were done with her, Mrs. Venton came upon a loonie which had been accidentally sealed into the newly-made hallway floor of North Toronto C.I., and went insane trying to pick it up. I am relatively sure this did not happen. When asking Mr. Waldron about it years later, he said this did not happen. But lordy, lord, what a story. What a clear, precise concept: a grade 9 English teacher, nearly obliterated by we horrible, monstrous boys, confronted with a single immovable object and completely doing her nut trying to move it. It may not be "true," but it'll be true till the day I die. March 19, 2009Further up and further inWell it's a long goddamned story, but here I am fooling around with live Twitter feeds on Tederick.com now. Not sure if I'll keep it - for one thing it's as ugly as fuck, and for another... well honestly, what's the point? (The script I used is here. And the mod I did on the tederick.com landing page is much nicer.) And my thoughts on the entire subject of microblogging are complex and ambivalent. But hey, it's always nice to know you can learn new things, and after a truly strange evening and having now proven that really any blog post at least should have the decency to exceed 140 characters, I'm out. Oh, but click over to my Twitter page. How pretty is that. |
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