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Purpose to Chance . . . and Some Brilliant Guitar Playing
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A Short, Sweet Song for Endless Ages
Yesterday was one of those days where I was reminded that, in spite of your best efforts, your time is not your own. This song came to mind, and it turns out that Rich Mullins’ version of the song was recorded at a concert in Holland, which means there are fun subtitles. Oh that this would be “my song through endless ages.”
Spring Break by the Numbers
7 books started
5 books finished
1 book checked out of the state library
0 movies watched
2 new cast members on Community
2 groups calling themselves SHIELD
1 day lived twice on The Flash
7 potentially cancerous spots frozen by the dermatologist
2 visits to the dentist
1 wisdom tooth extracted
3 Kissaten waffles
2 Aloha crepes
1 Nutella and Pretzel milkshake from The Counter
1 pleasantly surprised customer upon finding RC Cola served at JJ Dolan’s
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The Human Condition Since Long Before 1996
Toad the Wet Sprocket sings about it so well.
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Ranking Ten Years of the Doctor
Hard to believe that even MTV has gotten on the “10 Years of New Who” train. Today’s tenth anniversary of the reintroduction of Doctor Who has had people ranking which episodes of the ten-year have been the best. You can read all of MTV’s ordering and commentary here. It’s odd, really, to see all of the episodes together in one place. It’s also a stark reminder of how many episodes I had totally forgotten about. The MTV ranking is interesting, of course, because of the placing of “Blink” at number 2 and “Midnight” in the top position.
The folks at Radio Times did a survey and get about 280,000 responses. You can check out that poll’s results below.
The biggest problem some fans have with “Blink” being in the top slot is the virtual absence of the Doctor in the episode. I like the episode (and truly believe that the Weeping Angels are amazingly creepy villains). A couple of observations: (1) it’s telling to me (and to so many others) that Steven Moffatt has such a presence on the list. The guy has written some brilliant stuff. The show has gotten frustrating over the years, but that’s why observation 2 is important because (2) it’s encouraging to see so many multi-part stories rank so well. For most of the last ten years, we’ve had to deal with “done-in-0ne” episodes with seasonal through-lines. Word is that this coming season of the show will feature mostly multi-part stories, which I think will be a nice change of pace.
My favorites from the last ten years? Hard to say. Lots of episodes have had great moments, but a good moment does not a great episode make. I’m a softy for episodes like “The Shakespeare Code” and “Turn Left.” I think “Vincent and the Doctor” is an amazing done-in-one with the kind of emotional punch you come to expect from Richard Curtis. I love all of Moffatt’s early two-parters and also fond of “The Girl in the Fireplace” (and liked the “shout out” to it this past season). I love the set-up of “The Eleventh Hour,” probably my favorite “first” episode. “Listen” was my favorite of this past season. But my all-time favorite from the last ten years? “The Day of the Doctor.” It was serious and hopeful and honoring of the past while also pointing to the future. Plus, it’s always great seeing the Doctor on the big screen.
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Ten Years Running with The Doctor
On this day ten years ago, the newest iteration of Doctor Who launched. Difficult to believe that much time has passed, but I suppose you feel that way about almost everything after a while. Like so much great television, the adventures of the Doctor have become a great point of connection for me and others, whether its family or friends or students. The folks at aintitcool.com rounded up a few of the celebratory YouTube clips that have been made in honor of the occasion. Two of them are definitely worth sharing. The first, just below, is an amazing fan piece. Wonderful visuals, as in “I wonder how they did that.”
And if the flash and bang of the series is more to your liking, here’s another great compilation of things.
Ten years and still running. Splendid!
Back to the Island: All of This Matters
As I quickly put together the previous post on the origins of LOST, I remembered that I never quite finished my look back at the show while watching it again last year. In fact, I think I got up to season two and and stopped, which is a shame because the show has many amazing moments. So, in honor of today’s earlier post, I thought I’d drop in two last clips from the show. The first, from season two, exemplifies two of the show’s greatest strengths: the power of reunion and the beauty of a Michael Giacchino score. The scene crescendoes with Sun and Jin before turning its attention to something sadder. The score catches all of it perfectly. In my mind, these two things together are also a big part of why the series ending worked so well for me.
The second clip is one that helped sell me on the series finale. Even a cursory glance at the “document” I pointed to earlier today tells you that the show could have gone in a million different directions, almost at once. The more science fiction elements like time travel and sentient smoke monsters and donkey wheels entered the picture, the less certain you were of what ultimately mattered. And so this brief exchange between Jack and Desmond in the final has become the quote I think of almost as much as I go back to “live together or die alone.”
Thanks for indulging one more look at a show that many viewers have moved on from. In light of news concerning reboots and continuations of shows like The X-Files and Heroes, one cannot help but wonder when LOST will be brought back around. As much as I love the show, I hope it’s not for a good, long while.
A Last Word on the First Words of LOST
Front page of the minutes from a LOST storyboarding meeting in February, 2004.
In a bit I’m going to ask you to click a link, get some comfort food to sip or snack on, and then sit back for a wonderfully interesting read on the “secret origins” of LOST.
For many, the origins of LOST have been the stuff of myth and legend. Who was the series full-fledged creator? When did the staff know what the nature of the island? What were we to make of tidbits of knowledge like the fact that Jack, the surgeon and show’s through-line character, was intended to die in the pilot episode? One of the major forces behind the first two seasons of the show, Javier Grillo-Marxuach, just posted his best recollection of those early days, and it is a brilliant thing to read.
I say this as someone who was ultimately pleased with the way the show ended and who feels like the show holds up better the second time around ( I surprisingly accomplished that feat last year in honor of the tenth anniversary of the show’s debut). So I’m at the place where I can enjoy taking a critical eye to the work and appreciate the creative process.
Let me warn you, the article is a doozy: long and winding, just like the series. Lots of talk about things pre-pilot and post-pilot episode. Lots of things that you might find as frustrating as some of your least favorite moments from the show itself (like was Walt really some kind of psychic?). But it could be the best things you’ll read all week (and there are lots of great things out there to read).
So grad some goodies to eat or drink, settle into a nice seat, and click here for an amazing read.
Tip o’ the hat to Andy Greenwald’s Twitter feed. He pointed this out yesterday. Greenwald writes about television regularly for grantland.com.
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Life as It Buffers
From Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island (upon seeing the dreaded swirling circle on his computer screen):
But on this thought’s outer reaches lay a much less reassuring counter-thought: what if it were just a circle spinning on my screen, and nothing else? What if the supply-chain, its great bounty, had dried up, or been cut off, or never been connected in the first place? Each time that I allowed this possibility to take hold of my mind, the sense of bliss gave over to a kind of dread. If it was a video-file that I was trying to watch, then at the bottom of the screen there’d be that line, that bar that slowly fills itself in– twice: once in bold red and, at the same time, running ahead of that, in fainter grey; the fainter section, of course, has to remain in advance of the bold section, and of the cursor showing which part of the video you’re actually watching at a given moment; if the cursor and red section catch up, then buffering sets in again. Staring at this bar, losing myself in it just as with the circle, I was granted a small revelation: it dawned on me that what I was actually watching was nothing less than the skeleton, laid bare, of time or memory itself. Not our computers’ time and memory, but our own. This was its structure. We require existence to stay ahead, if only by a nose, of our consciousness of experience– if for no other reason than that the latter needs to make sense of the former, to (as Peyman would say) narrate it both to others and ourselves, and, for this purpose, has to be fed with a constant, unsorted supply of fresh sensations and events. But when the narrating cursor catches right up with the rendering one, when occurrences and situations don’t replenish themselves quickly enough for the awareness they sustain, when, no matter how fast they regenerate, they’re instantly devoured by a mouth too voracious to let anything gather or accrue unconsumed before it, then we find ourselves jammed, stuck in limbo: we can enjoy neither experience nor consciousness of it. Everything becomes buffering, and buffering becomes everything.
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The Tribe is Us
When Tom McCarthy’s essay about “fiction in the age of data saturation” posted earlier this month on The Guardian website, a number of writers picked up on the image of James Joyce working for Google:
If there is an individual alive in 2015 with the genius and vision of James Joyce, they’re probably working for Google, and if there isn’t, it doesn’t matter since the operations of that genius and vision are being developed and performed collectively by operators on the payroll of that company, or of one like it.
There’s more going on in the essay, though, than just a thought-provoking image of literary corporate absconsion. Throughout the essay, McCarthy draws connections between the ethnographer/anthropologist (like Claude Levi-Strauss) and the novelist (thus James Joyce). For McCarthy, the anthropologist is “the writer stripped down to the bare structural essentials. You look at the world around and you report on it. That’s it.” And so the conclusive book of the anthropologist equals the novel that might capture the spirit of an age. Now, though, the task of telling the story of a people is falling into corporate hands, as organizations hire their own anthropologists, “deploying ethnographic knowledge to help [them] achieve deeper penetration of their markets, to advise cities how to brand and rebrand themselves, and governments how better to narrate their policy agendas.”
From the paragraph where James Joyce was mentioned:
That last term – narrate – should bring this whole discussion back to the point it never really left. As for the world of anthropology, so for the world of literature. It is not just that people with degrees in English generally go to work for corporations (which of course they do); the point is that the company, in its most cutting-edge incarnation, has become the arena in which narratives and fictions, metaphors and metonymies and symbol networks at their most dynamic and incisive are being generated, worked through and transformed. While “official” fiction has retreated into comforting nostalgia about kings and queens, or supposed tales of the contemporary rendered in an equally nostalgic mode of unexamined realism, it is funky architecture firms, digital media companies and brand consultancies that have assumed the mantle of the cultural avant garde. It is they who, now, seem to be performing writers’ essential task of working through the fragmentations of old orders of experience and representation, and coming up with radical new forms to chart and manage new, emergent ones.
While fiction writers are in a particularly precarious boat (surrounded by way too much data to process), the same is true for the average citizen on 21st century Planet Earth. Everyone’s got a story to tell, and they’re telling it all the time through multiple platforms. And the powers behind those platforms are soaking it up. In turn, we are having our stories tweaked and told back to us as marketing. We are providing the fodder for others to be our anthropologists. As McCarthy says early in his essay, “the tribe is us.”
If you get a chance, read the essay. It’s a good challenge. McCarthy talks a good bit about particular authors and anthropologists. The piece is also a good introduction to what you will find if you read Satin Island. Both remind us that we have turned digital technology into (perhaps) our final story-telling apparatus and that we have made it that way by giving it so much information about us. The story of our lives, indeed.
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Space Enough, and Time 