Right outside the front door and 238,000 miles away, it stops me in my tracks every time.
by James Brush
Coyote Mercury Posts
Joey watches.
And plans.
[saveagrey]
So there.
Or, rather, here:
- “Bulldog Front” – Fugazi* – 13 Songs
- “Sangria Wine” – Jerry Jeff Walker* – Great Gonzos
- “19th Nervous Breakdown” – Rolling Stones – Hot Rocks
- “Break Charmer” – Cujo – Trip Hop & Jazz Vol. 3
- “…Meets His Maker” – DJ Shadow – The Private Press
- “Countess from Hong Kong (Demo)” – Velvet Underground – Peel Slowly and See
- “I Want to Talk About You” – John Coltrane – Live at Birdland
- “The Messenger” – Ray Wylie Hubbard – KGSR Broadcasts Vol. 6
- “Improv 3” – Earl Harvin Trio* – Unincorporated
- “Oleo (alt take)” – Grant Green – The Complete Quartets with Sonny Clark
- “Elements of Style” – Paul Newman – Frames per Second
The *’s by the ones I’ve seen live reveal my catholic (lower case) tastes in music, particularly the first two.
My first club show was at the Rocket in Providence, RI. A buddy and I had gone up from Newport one Sunday to catch Newport’s own Verbal Assault. Opening for Verbal Assault were G.O.D., Operation Ivy, and Ian MacKaye’s new outfit – Fugazi – playing one of their earliest shows. I still remember the sheer intensity of “Suggestion” and “Waiting Room” and how they just blew whole crowd away.
Later that year, I moved to Texas and began to dig the Texas music. One summer, while shooting video for a summer camp in Marble Falls, Jerry Jeff showed up and played a set in the chow hall. His daughter was a camper there. A year earlier, I had worked as a PA on one of his videos: “Hill Country Rain.” You can’t love the hill country without loving Jerry Jeff’s tunes.
There are other interesting things to accompany the hard core to country opening. Grant Green, for instance. Would that I could play guitar the way he did.
Note: If you haven’t yet seen the Season 3 finale of Lost (“Through the Looking Glass”) you might not want to read this – major spoilers…
Season 3 of Lost ended with last night’s “Through the Looking Glass” and as the producers promised, it changed everything. As predicted, it left viewers wondering how the show can continue for its remaining three seasons considering that the castaways appear to have gotten off the island.
I’ve been saying for about a year (ever since I started studying the Lost books) that we were dealing with some kind of alternate or parallel timestream. Books like A Wrinkle in Time, Alice in Wonderland, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” The Wizard of Oz, and The Third Policeman all point that way. Some of this season’s books – A Brief History of Time, On Writing, and Through the Looking Glass (all links go to my posts on the books) – only reinforced that notion. And that’s just the books; I’m not even going near all the other alternate time references.
After “Through the Looking Glass,” I’m convinced that Lost is a time travel show. I started to see it about half way through last night’s episode when I began to suspect that the flashback wasn’t what it appeared to be. It was neither a flashback nor a flash-forward. In fact, the scenes on the island were the flashbacks and the stuff with Jack as a bearded drug-addled nut were the “present.” Surely Jack will start reading some Philip K Dick in Season 4.
The problem for Jack is that somehow he seems to understand that he didn’t come back to the same world he left. He is in a world where Christian Shepard is still alive (“Go up and get my dad, if I’m more drunk than him you can fire me” or something like that) and Kate is driving a nice car, apparently not a fugitive. It’s the world that Naomi and her rescue ship came from looking for Desmond. The world in which Oceanic 815 was found along with all the dead bodies.
Here’s how. The island exists between timestreams or parallel dimensions/universes (“snow globe, brotha”). The only way on or off the island is to go through the looking glass station (or possibly also along a very precise set of coordinates which would explain the Dharma food drops and Michael and Walt’s escape last season).
We know this because Charlie talked to Penny Widmore in the looking glass station – the link to the original timestream – and Penny had never heard of Naomi. I actually believe Ben is telling the truth when he says that Naomi isn’t who they think she is. Ben knows she didn’t come through the looking glass station and therefore can’t be from the universe/dimension/timestream that the survivors came from before being sucked onto the island when Desmond let the counter run down in the Swan Hatch as revealed at the end of Season 2.
Somehow Future Jack knows this. This is why he so desperately wants to get back to the island. He knows that he didn’t return to the world he left and his life is a shambles – or more of a shambles than it was – as a result. The only survivors whose stories we can glimpse at this point are his and Kate’s, and Kate seems to have it better than when she left Australia in handcuffs bound for the US under the watchful eye of that federal marshal who died in Season 1. Like Marty McFly in Back to the Future, this new timestream must look pretty good to Kate. I wonder if we won’t see Ben washing her fancy new car for her next season.
So who was in that coffin? Whose death would have such a terrible impact on Jack that he would lose all hope and come to the verge of suicide? I say it was Ben.
Ben left the island because he couldn’t stay. Everything blew up in his face (or rather the faces of The Others sent to steal the pregnant women) and with Locke still alive, The Others would know that Locke can communicate with Jacob now. They would also probably be pretty annoyed about the fact that Ben’s plans wound up killing so many of The Others. Ben’s only hope would be to leave the island and take his chances in the ‘real’ world. Probably by pretending to be John Locke, who probably doesn’t need that name anymore now that he can be the Wizard of O(ther)z.
Once Jack realizes the he has not returned to the world he left, I think Jack would understand that Ben was right about leaving and he has probably come to regard Ben as his only hope in getting back to the island so that they can escape correctly – back through the looking glass – and into their own timestream.
With Ben’s death – unmourned by the other survivors – Jack is on his own. So where does Lost go from here? Jack’s still lost, but not on an island. He’s a castaway in time and in order to save himself, he needs to get back to the island. But first, he’ll need to figure out a better plan than riding around in planes getting drunk and hoping they’ll crash. Fixing time itself seems the perfect thing for the man who always needs something to fix. There are certainly three seasons worth of stories there. At least.
I suspect that much of Season 4 will take place off the island, and we’ll get to see our survivors trying to decide if they like their new lives or their old ones better. We’ll see Jack trying to find information about Dharma, Widmore and Hanso. We’ll also see who stayed on the island. I’m betting Locke, Rousseau, Carl, Danielle, Rose, and Bernard stayed.
There are still many mysteries to solve. Why hasn’t Alpert aged? What was Libby doing in the mental hospital (perhaps that’s where they put people who claim to have come from another dimension)? What is the smoke monster? What about the four-toed statue? Jacob? The temple?
This show isn’t over by a long shot, but it’s following in the footsteps of Battlestar Galactica’s third season when the whole show took a radical change of course, if only for a while. The rest of Lost will be about some of the survivors getting back to the island. And perhaps, The Others trying to prevent that from happening. Or, maybe the returnees will team up with The Others to keep the outside world off the island.
This was a brilliant episode. In fact the last two months or so of Lost have been the best television I’ve ever seen. It’s depressing to think it won’t be on again until February 2008, but I still have some books to tide me over:
- From Season 1, there’s The Mysterious Island
- From Season 2, I still get to meet Our Mutual Friend and Island
- From Season 3, I’ll be wading into The Moon Pool, The Fountainhead, Evil under the Sun and, of course, rereading Through the Looking Glass.
I’ll read these between now and February, but I’ll probably hold my posts until then and do a kind of lead-up to the season premiere.
Here’s the link to the index of my Lost book posts.
For more good analysis of “Through the Looking Glass”, and predictions about Lost‘s future, please see:
- EYE M SICK where you’ll find another blogger’s take on the alternate reality question
- Mark at Scribes & Scoundrels busts out a Star Trek II reference while commenter CJ at Lost…and Gone Forever comes up with a Jack’s-beard-looks-like-Spock’s-beard = “Mirror, Mirror” alternate reality episode of Star Trek.
- Lost-vivor for the Season 3 champion.
I saved Stephen King’s On Writing, which was referenced in the Lost episode “Every Man for Himself” for the end of the season. When school gets out, I’ll start plugging away more seriously on my next novel, and I figured that perhaps King might offer some inspiration if not a swift kick in the proverbial pants.
King begins with a series of snapshots of his childhood and young adulthood leading up to the publication of Carrie. This is the memoir section of the book wherein King relates the tales of his wonder years interspersed with commentary about how these things led him to becoming the writer he became. From there, he shares advice and wisdom gleaned from a lifetime of writing. Some of it useful, some of it entertaining.
The most vivid portion is the end. This is the project he was working on when he was hit by a van while walking along a Maine highway back in 1999. He was very nearly killed and spent months in and out of surgery and in rehab learning to walk again. The end of the book, fittingly titled “On Living,” describes how getting back into writing helped him through that event. It’s powerfully written and terrifying in the way that reality often is.
On the whole, I can’t say I learned much that I didn’t know about the craft – that section of the book is thin and frequently not much more than an arrow pointing to Strunk & White – but what I got was a wide open sense of anything being possible. That kick in the pants to get me going this summer when I will have the time (starting next week) to finish the next book. Indeed, King himself describes the book as a permission slip:
…you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink.
Drink and be filled up.
King’s unabashed belief in the literal magic of writing is a sentiment that I share, and probably the one thing, that more than anything else keeps me banging out these words despite the fact that so few wind up reading them. It is still worthwhile and as much my work as the things that pay the bills.
The optimism and inspiration are the best parts of On Writing.
This magic is also where On Writing connects to Lost when King explains what writng is.
Telepathy, of course.
He explains that the writer sends his thoughts out across time and space to readers scattered around the world and existing in different times. King points out that he is writing in 1999, but that the book won’t be released until 2000 so all readers are at least a few years down the timestream from him. Here king gets at the permanence of writing and suggests the great dialogs that have gone on in print for thousands of years much like (I think) Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose who described libararies as great silent conversations.
To illustrate his point, King sets up a little thought experiment and this is where King’s telepathic powers manifest themselves on Lost island:
Look, here’s a table covered with a red cloth. On it is a cage the size of a small fish aquarium. In the cage is a white rabbit with a pink nose and pink rimmed eyes. In its front paws is a carrot stub which it is constantly munching. On its back, clearly marked in blue ink, is the numeral 8.
Do we see the same thing? We’d have to get together and compare notes to make absolutely sure, but I think we do.
He then argues that most readers of that paragraph will fixate on the ‘8’ on the rabbit’s back, and it’s this thought that creates the telepathy. It’s this image that the writer has projected into the reader’s mind. I agree; it’s what jumps out and creates the sense of mystery that will keep me wanting more. Aside from the fact that it’s one of the numbers, I want to know why it’s there.
I’m sure Sawyer did too.
In “Every Man for Himself” – an episode that also references Of Mice and Men (“Tell me about the rabbits, George”) much more explicitly than it does On Writing – Ben has Sawyer strapped to a table. He appears to have just come out of surgery. Ben shows him a rabbit in a cage and proceeds to give the cage the kind of shaking that kills babies. The rabbit dies. Ben tells Sawyer that the rabbit had a pacemaker just like the one he’s had implanted in Sawyer, which will explode if Sawyer’s heart rate goes too high as it might if he were to try to escape or sleep with Kate. It’s a clever scene, but what stands out is the blue ‘8’ stenciled on the rabbit’s back. Later, Ben tells Sawyer about the rabbits, or at least rabbit-8 when he confides that there were no pacemakers; instead, it was an elaborate con designed to break Sawyer’s will.
Referencing King’s thoughts about writing and telepathy appears at first to be a clever and subtle reminder of the apparent, though unexplained, role of telepathy on the show. More interesting, though, is the way it begins to lay the groundwork for seeing Lost as a show about time travel, which I think it is. I’m not sure we’ll see characters time traveling as in Back to the Future, but I think we will see (and have already seen) their consciences and thoughts projected through the timestream, which is really what King was talking about so I’m chalking On Writing up to being yet another literary hint about alternate or parallel or shifted timestreams on Lost.
There’s something else, too, aside from the fact that this bit of On Writing is another rabbitcentric literary reference joining Of Mice and Men, Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass, and Watership Down (all of which makes me wonder when Donnie Darko, a time travel film laden with rabbit symbolism will show up on Lost) and that’s The Stand.
I’ve never read The Stand, and it hasn’t shown up on Lost, but I do know that the show’s creators have said that it is an influence on the show. This is interesting because in On Writing, King devotes some time to describing the problems he had in completing that novel. He said there were too many characters, too many storylines. In the end the solution was to blow a bunch of them up.
Sound familiar? That would resolve many of the storylines and propel the other ones towards conclusion. As season 3 of Lost closes out in tonight’s “Through the Looking Glass” with the survivors hoarding dynamite and making plans to “blow the Others to hell,” I can’t but think that this sounds an awful lot like King’s recollection of how he moved The Stand to conclusion.
I suspect some storylines will end tonight and what remains will be the situation that propels Lost to its ultimate conclusion in 2010. Hell, I’m predicting mass doom.
Be sure to check out:
- Pearls Before Swan for more thoughts about On Writing. (h/t as well since this is how I learned that rabbit-8 was referencing On Writing)
- Mark at Scribes & Scoundrels also has a theory about the season finale: mass doom… or mass rescue?
It’s easy to forget the small things, the little details that make a place whole.
Simon has it pretty good, no?
Before we moved in.
In case you care…
- “Cannonball” – Soulive* – Doin’ Something
- “Drive” – REM* – Automatic for the People
- “La Grange” – ZZ Top – Tres Hombres
- “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” – The Beach Boys – Pet Sounds
- “Concierto de Aranjuez” – Miles Davis – Sketches of Spain
- “Tuff Boyz” – Sonic Youth* – Goo (Deluxe Edition)
- “Camarillo Brillo” – Frank Zappa – Over-nite Sensation
- “Ice Cream Jeep” – Calexico* – Spoke
- “Serenade for the Renegade” – est – Strange Place for Snow
- “Cumberland Blues” – Grateful Dead* – Workingman’s Dead
- “The Whales Are Coming and Boy Are They Pissed” – The Mermen* – Live at the Haunted House
*’s by the ones I’ve seen live
This is amazing. It’s from an interview with writer Shiela Kohler (who?) about the apparently dying institution of print book reviews and the emergence of lit blogs via Critical Mass (h/t to Conversational Reading for the link):
Q. Does your work get reviewed/discussed much on literary blogs? If so, how do those reviews compare with print reviews of your books?
A.Occasionally someone may mention my books in a blog. I believe the dangers of this indiscriminate reporting on books is that people who have no knowledge of literature can air their views as though they were of value and may influence readers. Critics may not always be right, of course, but at least they have read and studied literature, the great books, and have some outside knowledge to refer to when critiquing our work.
Sometimes a writer’s own words and arrogance will turn me off their work faster than any bad review of their work in print or – perish the thought – on some dirty blog rising from the fever swamps (like so much poison gas) to taint the discourse of the learned and influence the unwashed masses with his irrelevant and dangerous opinions. Sheesh.