The Postmodern Condition

10 for '10: A Decade in Pop Culture (Television)

erichan22@berkeley.edu (BillyPilgrim) — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 02:14:00 +0000

Acting as our introductory course is television. Why television? Well, honestly, it's cause it's the easiest. But a more analytical reason would be that, out of every pop culture medium we have seen thus far, television has progressed in quality and sophistication the most. Music and film have taken turns for the worst, and while one can find quality in those areas, neither of them are more ubiquitous than television.

So what happened in the last ten years? There's one gleaming turn of events that comes to mind: Reality shows became king (and you'd be hard pressed to find one of those on this list [I still love you Top Chef]). For example, VH1 converted it's "MTV for Adults" status into a get rich quick scheme involving past contestants of a ever-perpetuating cycle of trashy, Jerry Springer-esque dating shows (which, if you think about it, is pretty brilliant). This mentality became quite pervasive in the past decade, influencing the big four networks to rethink their business model (i.e. investing in low-cost, cheaply produced reality programming). Subsequently, quality, hour-long shows got the short end of the stick and we get to suffer with the wrath of The Jay Leno Show. This inconvenient consequence, however, did prove to bear some fruits that were advantageous to cultivate. The cable networks decided to fully embrace the now fringe niche demographics that yearned for quality programming on television, and because of this, they excelled. On a list of ten, you will find only four that belong to a major network (two of which were canceled before their prime). The rest belong to premium cable or foreign entities, all of which pride themselves in quality entertainment.

And quality it was.

This decade redefined comedy. No longer did we have three static camera shots, lazy cutting and editing and a studio audience to dictate when we should laugh. Comedy became sophisticated, postmodern, deeply humanistic and, of course, down right hilarious.

This decade redefined genre. Well, actually, not so much redefined it, but retained genre's original purpose: using its reputation as an un-aristocratic medium to more easily comment on the human condition. Being both retrospective and introspective, genre is now synonymous with drama. For the first time in television's short history, people can watch a series of television and take something away from it; not just cheap thrills and temporary buzz, but an experience that is both long-lasting and influential.

I tried to base the list on a criteria that addresses longevity, influence and how well it represents the recurring themes of our past decade. Because of this, only three of the shows have not yet ended, while the rest have had completed their runs and have gone through the trials and tribulations of cultural idolatry. It goes without saying, there are a ton of shows that just missed the cut. Here's the "barely missed it" list:

30 Rock
Battlestar Galactica
Breaking Bad
Curb Your Enthusiasm
Firefly
Flight of the Conchords
The Office (US)
The Shield
Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!
True Blood

And now, without further ado, here's the list. I hope you have as much fun reading this as I had writing it.

10. Freaks and Geeks

"The dance is tomorrow. She's a cheerleader. You've seen Star Wars 27 times. Do the math."
-Neil Schweiber

It's interesting when a show has the capability to trigger our soft spot for nostalgia, but what makes it down right impressive is when that show takes place in an era you weren't even a part of. Of course, Freaks and Geeks, by plot design, was meant to speak specifically to a lost generation. Instead of focusing on the kitsch pastiche that the 80s is so often known for, the show sublimely focused on the universal themes of coming into adulthood, through the perspective of the freaks who loved being losers and the geeks who had no other choice but to be.

What made the show work turned out to be its unraveling as well. Unlike any other sitcom before it, the show did not resort to one-line zingers, static camera set ups or a studio audience. instead, the show acted as if it was a digital projection of our high school experiences. Missing was the grandiose representations of rites of passages (our first kiss, our first date, fake id's, etc). The show did address those issues, but in a way that avoided the fleeting romantic interpretation and focused on the unpredictability and, often times, pure humiliation and awkwardness that comes with being a teenager.

Freaks and Geeks was canceled after it's first season, probably because of the aforementioned above. Quite simple, there was no market for it. The youth were too busy getting their brains washed by teenage fantasies on the WB (Dawson's Creek and Popular), which left little room for cultural works. All too often, we, the audience, turn to the popular arts as a form of escapism, which, in my opinion, breeds an unhealthy focus on expectations that will most likely never come into fruition (Pacey will never buy a wall for you, Ryan Gosling will never built your own art room for you, and Heath Ledger will never hire a marching band and organize a showtune). The lasting pleasure in a show like Freaks and Geeks is that moment of recognition when we see ourselves reflected on screen; a startling realization for all those who survived the ritual that was high school.

Must See Episodes: The Garage, Tests and Breasts, The Little Things

9. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

"If 'con' is the opposite of 'pro', then isn't 'Congress' the opposite of 'progress'? Or did we just fucking blow your mind?"
-Jon Stewart

Recently, an online poll conducted by Time Magazine announced that Jon Stewart was voted America's most trusted newsman, days after the passing of the journalistic legend Walter Cronkite. While many would argue that having a comedian as a trustworthy journalist is an omen of the coming apocalypse, I would argue that comedians, as well as other purveyors of various social mediums, are themselves a different kind of journalism.

Journalism has taken a turn for the worst since 2000. The consequences of Reagan's decision to abolish the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 has reached the limit's precipice, with media organizations on both sides of the political spectrum using hyperbole, sensationalism and even escapism to reach their chosen means. The most glaring of examples, Fox News: an organization that is run by people too smart (Oh hi, Rupert) to believe in 2/3 of the polemic, unsound and illogical rhetoric of conservative mouthpieces. Both Rupert Murdoch and Sean Hannity have gone on record in the past discussing how television journalism is now a "show", much like professional wrestling. The drama is fake, but the consequential pain is real.

Recently, Sharon Begley of Newsweek wrote an article titled, 'Lies of Mass Destruction', where she discusses how the GOP has successfully started a small, albeit vocal grassroots movement against healthcare reform. Sociologist Stephen Hoffman is cited, in which he talks about 'motivated reasoning'; a phenomenon he describes as, 'Rather than search rationally for information that either confirms or dis-confirms a particular belief, people actually seek out information that confirms what they already believe. For the most part, people completely ignore contrary information and are able to develop elaborate rationalizations based on faulty information". Fox News, and its army of babbling baboons knows this. They prey on the weak, frightened and anxious- with their main intention to reap monetary gain through the use of fear mongering. This is journalism today: a monster that has distanced itself from the original noble intentions of journalism.

Jon Stewart, much like Hannity, Beck and Murdoch, also has a modus operandi that varies from journalism's original purpose; only difference is Stewart fully acknowledges that. He's a fucking comedian. His job is to make people laugh, first and foremost. It is not to inform nor is it to progress the medium of journalism. His motive is to point out the world's obvious truths by exposing the liars who decide to hide them. It just so happens that this job has been significantly easier in the past decade, thus making Stewart a champion for those who wish to read through the lines. The reason why he is America's trusted newsman is because of the very face that he is outside the spectrum of traditional news. Without the motive for profit or the desire to construct the public consciousness, Stewart is in a position more conducive to point out the evident ironies and contradictions of everyday events. Now, while Stewart is by no means a necessary, or even sufficient, source of news information, what he represents is his legacy; his willingness to challenge authority, break from the status quo, and encouragement to better oneself not through one program, but through every option and outlet available. It is not so much the content itself that is important, but the philosophy behind the content that is.

Must See Episodes: The Jim Kramer Episode, The Bill O'Reilly Episode, The Mike Huckabee Episode

8. Mad Men

"Get out of here and move forward. This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened."
-Don Draper

The youngest show on our list, Mad Men exudes a shuddering confidence in itself. It's tight, taut, refined and alluring, as if creator Matthew Weiner intricately placed the pieces of the jigsaw years before the actual conception of the show. An almost perfect show, the acting is superb, the writing should win a Pulitzer and the cinematography is glamorous enough to convince me to invest in a Blu-ray player. But this isn't all that makes Mad Men so promising (I say promising because it is only in its third season). Any show can dress good looking people up in suits, hire a great and experienced cinematographer and call it a day (in fact, many shows are very much like that). It is the thematic elements of Mad Men that make it so versatile and not just another pretty face.

Mad Men is about America--simplistic, almost cheesy to say, but that's it in its most essential and pure form. It captures the last great turning point of American society-- the last breath of the "American Dream". The place: New York City; the true synecdoche of America, a place of opportunity, riches and beauty. The time: 1960; a time where, not just the States, but the world was on the brink of social revolution. The world and its idealism was changing. People didn't want to be told what to do, as the show eloquently says through a hippie mouthpiece, it wants to "feel something". Matthew Weiner takes advantage of this idealism born from the loins of the 60s and instead of reveling in the revolutionaries, he takes a look at the purveyors of tradition: the original American Dream. A race of people stuck in their social and sexual roles, unwilling to change and ignorant of the things that frighten them so. By centering the show around a 1960s ad agency (Sterling Cooper), we see what the relics of a forgotten America believe what consumers want, subsequently revealing the morals and mores that have since been abandoned.

The first season of Mad Men boasted the tagline 'Where The Truth Lies". Other than the obvious cleverness in the meaning's double entendre, the tagline provides the quintessential exegesis of the cultural importance of this very young show: it is a study of the subjectivity of truth and how that truth is defined in a world that is already gone. It is by no mere instance of happenstance that our main characters, the purveyors of consumer culture-- those who try to dictate what we value and don't--are liars, thieves, racists, homophobes, bigots, closeted homosexuals, repressed women and cheaters. Mad Men is about the American dream before it came true.

Must See Episodes: Meditations on an Emergency, The Wheel, Maidenform

7. Deadwood

"Tell your God to ready for blood"
-Al Swearingen

Another show cut tragically cut short due to financial mumbo-jumbo, Deadwood is possibly the best, most mature and laudable postmodern take on the mythical American Wild West. While Westerners of yesteryear dealt with modern narratives dealing with pre-subscribed roles (The Good, The Bad, The Ugly), creator David Milch and his team of fearless writers took the spaghetti out of Western and took a myth as large and symbolic as the American West and Wild Bill Hicock and made it into bloody Shakespeare. The Western is a genre that is the closest thing that we will ever have as pure, good old fashioned, American-born folklore, and because of this, the genre has been dissected, hollowed out and ultimately butchered since the beginning of modern American narrative. In this context, Deadwood is not just a a brilliantly enjoyable show, it is a milestone in American culture; a landscape so rich, detailed and thoroughly original that one forgets about the preconceived notions that come with a myth as large as cowboys and Indians.

Must See Episodes: Suffer The Little Children, A Lie Agreed Upon, Boy the Earth Talks to

6. The Office (UK)

"Life is a series of peaks and troughs. And you don't know whether you're in a trough until you're climbing out, or on a peak until you're coming down. And that's it you know, you never know what's round the corner. But it's all good. 'If you want the rainbow, you've gotta put up with the rain.' Do you know which 'philosopher' said that? Dolly Parton. And people say she's just a big pair of tits."
-David Brent

At the end of the 20th century, static multi-cams, laugh tracks and punchlines masked as dialogue dominated the airwaves of American television, subsequently setting the global precedent of what makes us laugh. Enter Ricky Gervais' incarnation of the boss from hell. Loud, cheeky, boorish and most of all, offensive, David Brent single handily changed the landscape of contemporary comedy.

The Office had a simple premise. Building around the sensibilities of his born English wit, in addition to utilizing the brilliance of his comedy heroes (i.e. Christopher Guest), Ricky Gervais and co-creator Stephen Merchant focused on odd, unusual and cringeworthy situations. The primary one being Ricky Gervais' inexcusably ignorant branch manager David Brent and his inability to be liked, even though he so badly wants to be. At first, the awkwardness is too much to bare. I found myself cringing every time David Brent would inappropriately make an off-colored joke about "colored" people. After the third or fourth episode, however, I not only found myself on the floor in stitches, but realized the brilliance in the satire and it's surprisingly hidden humanity.

Humanity is what makes The Office more than just a run of a mill comedy. It showed that comedy, like drama, could have a lasting, influential effect. It could be thoughtful and well-planned out. It could, ironically, bring the genre to the realm of possibility. While the concept of the mockumentary has been done numerous times, creators and writers Gervais and Merchant utilized what made the mockumentary so intriguing to begin with; they took advantage of the ability to look into the characters' deepest and most inner thoughts. Combined with boisterous laughs brought on upon the tension of awkward silence, The Office is now remembered as a monstrously influential hit, with the ability to make us laugh underneath the shrouded context of middle-class ennui.

Must See Episodes: Training, Motivation, Christmas Special

5. Six Feet Under

"You can't take a picture of this. It's already gone."
-Nathaniel Fisher Jr.

I read a comment once on a thread (possibly Ain't It Cool News; the cross section where inbreeds and their mentally challenged offspring come ot converge to pontificate about David Fincher and his favorite sexual positions) regarding the HBO drama Six Feet Under. My memory is vague, but the comment went something like this:

"Pft. That show is only for cunts and fags".

Or something along the borderlines of where homophobia and sexism come together to create one horrible hate baby. Anyway, I bring this up only to point out the inherent irony in the viewing habits and opinions of the contemporary audience. It seems like these days, people are so afraid to wlak around without their armor, as if succumbing to anything remotely relating to one's deepest emotions would reveal themselves to be weak and consequently ridiculed. Six Feet Under is the apotheosis of that sentiment. Creator Alan Ball, after writing an equally as revealing screen play, American Beauty, wanted t convey everything hysterical, tragic, glorious, ironic and disheartening about what it is to be human. A broad and bold concept, something that most dramas aspire to do, but Ball used the backdrop of a funeral home as the most sensible context to comment about the contrasting polarity of life and death.

The show focuses around the Fisher's, a family that runs their own funeral home business that is brought together by the death of the father. Through five seasons, the show focuses not only on the grief stricken families that come to the Fisher's for their services, bu the Fisher's themselves, who are equally as tragic, funny and fickle as life itself. It would be too easy to say tha ths show's preeminent themes are life and death. As true as that statement would be, it is just too broad and unspecific for a show that is so profound and transcendent. Instead, this show is all about the little things. You know, like relaitonships, parenthood, sex, drugs nad secrets. While Grey's Anatomy and shows akin to it have trained us to believe that the significant moments in our lives would be pictured, framed and frozen in our memory for the rest of our lives; when in reality, the most significant moments in our lives are ones we don't even know are passing by, and the ones that we expect to turn out to be nothing but just another day. Yes, Six Feet Under is a drama, but the reality of these "moments" portrayed on the show make it more authentic than any half baked "reality" show on air today.

Must See Episodes: Everyone's Waiting, Life's Too Short, That's My Dog

4. Arrested Development

"I'm afraid I prematurely shot my wad on what was supposed to be a dry run, if you will. So I'm afraid I have something of a mess on my hands."
-Tobias Funke

While 'The Office' represents eveyrthing that is great about British comedy in the last ten years, Fox's Arrested Development, about a WACKY family and "the one son that has no choice but to keep them together" (yep, stolen directly from the intro), was the shining beacon of hope (much like Obama, circa 2008) for American comedy on broadcast television; that is, of course, before they were canceled (Thanks Rupert!). There's two ways we can go about this. The first way, we can refelct on the groundbreaking satire of corporate greed, political correctness and distinct diversity that makes the American family so enjoyable to dissect. Or we oculd just talk about the laughs per second ratio that was higher than any other show known to man (even Glenn Beck! HEYO!). I'd rather not reflect on both (you see what I did there? By mentioning it, I did reflect on it. It's a trick they teach you in Journalism school. Although I never attended, I hear the lecture halls are just superb). To put it simply (and I want to, because right now, I am flipping tired [compare this review with the Daily Show one. My interest has clearly wained), Arrested is the amalgamaiton of everything we love about comedy. Each episode is so densely packed and layered with so many running jokes and recurring themes the viewer can gain so much from repeated viewings. Half part clever and half part down right asinine, Arested is the cultural touchstone of the new American comedy.

Must See Episodes: Bringing Up Buster, Pier Pressure, Righteous Brothers

3. The Sopranos

"Anybody else would've had their fuckin' intervention right through the back of their head."
-Tony Soprano

It's almost a cliche to have this show on any top ten list. Ask anyone about the best shows of the decade, and they'll most certainly mention The Sopranos. Try it. Ask your 89 year old Chinese grandma. After Devil Beside You, Fated to Love You and Hana Kimi, she is almost guaranteed to add The Sopranos to that stellar list of Hong Kong drama. She'll also mention that (spoiler alert!) Adrianna had it coming (goddamn bloody rat). But cliches are ubiquitous for a reason, mostly because they all started off as true at some point in its conception, and The Sopranos proves to be no exception.

This is the show that started it all. It was 1999. Television was wrought with cliches. Moles penetrating New York Undercover, secret romances in the ER and conclusions that was all in Pamela Ewing's dream (I know Dallas was in the 80s, but come on, seriously. A dream? What the fuck?). Then, like a big yellow bus hitting Rachel McAdams in Mean Girls, came David Chase and his television magnus opus that proved that not all quality cultural works were reserved for the big screen. Wwith its landmark creativity, superb writing, intricate structures and nuance emotions, The Sopranos was the first of its kind, showing other TV showrunners that they can say something of substance without succumbing to network pressure and lazy writing.

On paper, The Sopranos was just another story about the mob; a subject in American culture that continues to captivate audiences. There's something about rooting for organized bad guys that just tickles the subconscious desire to be as unabashedly amoral as Tony Soprano usually is. But The Sopranos was so much more. It's writing (verbose and eloquent), acting (should have won best acting statues at the Oscars despite it being on television), storylines (why the fuck is there a dream sequence in a mob show?) and its direction (Chase used the camera as it should be used: a character of its own) all reinvented the genre of television. The show's best and most exemplary moment was its final scene. Shot along eveyrone's favorite drunk karoake tune (Journey's Don't Stop Believing), creator David Chase orchestrated a montage of images that, if stood alone, would be nothing more than a man entering a room, a young girl parallel parking and a fat Italian man eating an onion ring. But put together, it was one of the most taut, haunting and intense secnes ever put together on film. And the final shot? The controversial final shot? I'm on the boat of believing it to be simply brilliant. Screw the haterz (how's that for eloquence?)

Must See Episodes: Made In America, Pine Barrens, College

2. LOST

"'Men reject their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and honor those whom they have slain'. So what's the difference between a martyr and a prophet?"
-Benjamin Linus

I'm writing this as Sandy (my beloved roommate) is partaking in THE greatest adventure of her relatively young life. Her mission: finish all five seasons of LOST before the sixth and final season begins on February 2nd, 2010. We're currently watching season 2 episode 21 titled "?". As Eko and Locke are skipping through the jungle, I realized that even though this is probably my 15th time watching the episode I love every freaking second of it. Subsequently, I also realized that I could more or less recite much of the dialogue off the top of my head. I know every cut, every pan, every close up and every brillaint musical cue by Michael Giacchino. I also know (this one scared even me) who wrote the episode and who directed it (FUN FACT: Darren Aronofsky [director of Requiem for a Dream and The Wrestler, and self professed LOST fanatic] was supposed to direct "?", but had to drop out while prepping 'The Fountain']). The ultimate sign fo uber-geekage led me to my last revelation; LOST isn't merely a television show; it's an obsession.

This genre-busting, television landscape-shifting, electically metaphysical show about survivors of Oceanic 815 landing on a strange and mysterious island, like The Sopranos, showed that television could be more than just reality and soap. With a massive budget of 11.5 million dollars, LOST's pilot stretched the boundaries of what television is capable of. What the pilot gave us was a ball-busting action adventure, filled with mystery and suspense, filmed in a pristine location one would think could be possible only with a major film studio backing, and a lush soundtrack provided by a symphony orchestra and not from someone's protools on their iMac. The grandiose and epic feel of the show is not the only thing that viewers can take away from the experience. LOST would be nothing wihtout the substance of the writing. The mytholoy, the lessons in history, philosophy, and physics, and the overall appeal to the universal character emotion, LOST has perfected it all.

In addition to the stellar writing, solid actors and a twisty narrative, it is also probably the single biggest gamechanger of the television landscape of this decade. More than any other show in what EW's Jeff Jenson calls the 'Second Golden Age of Television', or what NPR's David Bianculli calls 'The Platinum Age', LOST reinvented the viewing habits and tastes of the American audience. Moreover, it also changed the literary, cultural and monetary value of what a television show could be worth. Taking advantage of its 'event-viewing" status, LOST utilized means of convergence culture with maximum efficiency. The internet, smart phones, alternative reality games, novels, video games and live interactive events were all included in the full realization of gratification.

Subsequently, LOST became not just a television show, but a brand. Probably the most sold show across the glove, LOST has touched a cathartic chord throughout all cultural barriers. An amalgamaiton of different cultures, archtypes, ideologies and beliefs, LOST is a shining illustration of where our beloved medium has ended up in our postmodern/posthuman/posteverything society.

Must See Episodes: The Constant, Through The Looking Glass, Deus Ex Machina

1. The Wire

"If the Gods are fucking you, you find a way to fuck them back. It's Baltimore, gentlemen; the Gods will not save you."
-Burrell

The cultural landscape of American art is much like America itself; an amalgamation of different cultural characterstics and flavors, ultimately culminating in one giant beautiful mixed baby. Most of our classical and modern pop music is borrowed from the likes of foreign legends like Mozart, Beethoven, and, for the latter, The Beatles. Film was perfected long before Orson Wells got his hands on deep focus, with films like Battleship Potemkin and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari accomplishing the techniques and narrative devices that Hollywood now takes for granted. Long story short, in film, music, art, literature , you name it; much of American art is a celebration of Eurocentric cultural works (which isn't necessarily a bad thing). Which leads me to my main point: Television is the true American artform. Although it started off as a means for new communication, television has morphed into the one artform Americans created, popularized and perfected; consequently setting the standard. With that said, The Wire has reached the limits of television's precipice, being the one television program that, more than any other American cultural work to date, so eloquently characterizes the social, political and economic state of our union, all with meticulousness, astuteness and dimension of a Charles Dickens novel. Quite simply, The Wire is the greatest and most authentic American story ever told.

Originally, The Wire looked like just another cop procedural drama With the white-archtype hero, Officer McNulty, leading the pack. But as the episodes unfold, as the characters from the street, the hall and the law intersect and circumvent each other, and as the subtle commentary on eveyrthing that is pardoically ostensibly hidden (the dengradtion of the lower underlcass) are revealed, the viewer can only sit in awe of the ambition of a mere television show; unraveling like a Greek tragedy rather than something we might expect from a medium that covets bad singers and benighted New Jersey stereotypes. Using Baltimore as the representaiton of every fragmented American city, the show illustrated the slow and gradual breakdown of the already broken lower class; concentrating on everything from the drug trade, the working class, our broken public education system to our conventional institutions that are not only symbols, but purveyors of our society (i.e. City Hall, the police, the press).

Exceptionally conscientious with an atypical moral compass, The Wire is pure zeitgeist; a rare and accurate look at the flow of decisions made by powers that be, often abhorrent and obscene, and the aftereffects on sects of society most in need. Ultimately, however, mitigating the disheartening nature of the themes, the show rewards the power of redemption and the slow but influential impact of people who choose to do good.

Must See Episodes: Corner Boys, Middle Ground, Late Editions

Jet Lagged and Nyquil

erichan22@berkeley.edu (BillyPilgrim) — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 08:00:00 +0000

1. Why do people sometimes preface statements with "honestly" or "seriously". Let me just assume that you are always telling the truth. I do not need you to reassure me that you are being honest about how much you love chicken McNuggets.

2. If you are in charge of the BBQ, you are not a chef, you are a control freak.

3. If you are a stewardess on an airplane and you are being served, then who is serving you?

4. When I am telling you a story and you respond to it by saying, "Oh", you might as well say, "That was not interesting. I am going to stop this conversation right now".

5. I do not need a minute-to-minute update on what is going on in your equally uneventful and mundane life.

1:17 am: Brrr. I am cold.

1:17:09 am: Nevermind. I put on my snuggie!

1:17:33 am: Oh nos! Now I am too hot.

1:17:49 am: I've thought about it, and a snuggie is essentially a robe you put on backwards.

1:18 am: Goodnight!

1:21 am: I can't sleep! What movie should I put on instead?

1:22 am: No thanks, George! I am NOT watching 28 Days Later to sleep...again! LOLz

1:22:54 am: I'm going to finish writing the song I started yesterday. Can anyone help me rhyme "you broke my heart so bad"

1:23:18 am: Finished!

Thank you, Facebook for letting me get to know that one cute girl who sat in my section last semester. Only now do I know that I did not make a mistake by never talking to her in person.

Music You Should Listen To Just In Case You're Ever Stuck in a Car With Me

erichan22@berkeley.edu (BillyPilgrim) — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 10:38:00 +0000

I haven't posted anything up in a while and I fear that my neglect for this blog will inevitably turn up to be another Xanga (RIP: TimberwolfAtNewJersey), so to combat my fears, here comes this half-ass post. Do not fear, however, a review of Zack Snyder's adaptation of 'Watchmen' is coming, as well as an explaination to what the hell is going on with our economy; but if these do not come into fruition due to a lack of interest or motivation, I will owe you all a Wonka Bar or a Dr. Pepper. Either way, win-win.

I was in the car with a friend the other day, and I found that this person was skipping through every song on my iPod (it's attached to my radio). It was maybe an awkward silence of about a minute, due to the obvious reason that none of those songs were interesting. This bummed me out, and instead of listening to some sweet and tasty tunes, we ended up having a very thoughtful and stimulating conversation about Ayn Rand's Objectivism and how that pertains to the current discourse of right wing ideology (BORING). Anyway, in case you're ever stuck in a car with me (and chances are, you probably will be, because it seems that with any of my friends, I'm the only one who ever volunteers to drive), here are five albums that are "tearing it up" in my car or, as Kevin Wada says, "jams I'm currently jamming to".

Andrew Bird- Noble Beast
Sounds like: You're stuck in an elevator moving side to side sporadically through a wheat field continously blossming Beanie Babies, confetti, dancing panda cubs and cheerleaders.

Tastes like: Deep-fried jellybears

Feels like: A body pillow made for you personally by a good friend (or if you were in a fraternity, your big sis). It's made out of the same material that makes up The Snuggie and Shamwow (It's both comfortable and can pick up stains up to four times what Oxyclean can do)

Most WTF? lyric: "In the salsify mains of what was though but unsaid, all the calcified arythmatists were doing the math"- Oh No

My OMG moment: I was at Starbucks studying for the Hellsat when 'Souverian' came on random. It might have been too many cups of coffee, but when the piano kicks in, I saw everything become illuminated. Now my life is nothing more than chasing that fleeting moment, but I hear that dropping acid is a pretty good bet in replicating said feeling.

Would Philip Johnson like it: Pretty sure he's already an Andrew Bird fan, but I feel there would be a lot of parts that he would find cheesy, but other parts he would think are brilliant. I really can't tell sometimes. There are some things that I think Fil would absolutely love, but then he gives me the thumbs down and raspberries. So I guess I'm not that sure.

Oh No - Andrew Bird

Animal Collective- Merriweather Post Pavillion
Sounds like: If you've ever seen Danny Boyle's 'Sunshine', there's this giant room with just a blank canvas. It can recreate any scenario the subject wants and is used for therapy. This album sounds like a digital Summertime played by digital crickets and raindrops.

Tastes like: Durian. It smells disgusting, looks disgusting, and your intution would most likely tell you to stay away. But it's oddly delicious in its own weird way.

Feels like: When you're walking through the mazes at Knotts Berry Farm's Halloween Haunt and the strobe light makes the giant clown on stilt's movements look way more surreal than it really is.

Most WTF lyric: "Face your money into the dark, but you can't sweat unless swung by the hen"- Also Frightened

My OMG moment: Waiting in an Arby's drive thru while listening to "Guy's Eyes" and being so entranced that I forgotten that I fucking HATE Arbys.

Would Eleana Perez like it: Not unless it's used as a sample for a Chamillionaire song (in his inevitable upcoming record: "Slumdog Chamillionaire") or covered by young filipino boys on YouTube that all wear promises rings and have learned four chords from going to church. The youngest one sings falsetto, of course, which makes it all that much more adorable.

MyGirls -

Bob Dylan- Highway 61 Revisited
Sounds like: A funeral precession run by Barnum and Baily Circus. The eulogizer is 'Pennywise The Clown' from Stephen King's 'It'. This might sound horrifying at first, but then you realize that he's not really a clown, but a giant fucking spider, which is slightly less frightening.

Tastes like: Distilled salt water that you can only taste through bong residue.

Feels like: How Brad Pitt must have felt when he was riding his motorcycle in 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button'. He's eventually going to end up a dying baby, but man, what a badass.

Most WTF? lyric: "And Ezra Pound and TS Eliot fighting in the captain's tower while Calipso singers laugh at them and fisherman hold flowers."- Desolation Row

My OMG moment: The first time I listened to 'Desolation Row', I was goofy off some ilicit substances, sitting in my room alone, and reading old letters from past flames (like Desmond, in the season 2 finale, when he's reading his letter from Penny as he contemplates suicide, and after reading it, he goes crazy and starts screaming 'IT'S ALL GONE!'). Anyway, I almost cried, like a little bitch. I'm not kidding. I listened to that song 12 times that night. It's 11 minutes and 20 seconds. I have no shame.

Would my parents like it: If you live with my parents for a week, you realize that their favorite shows involve young kids with mediocre talent trying to grasp fame and fortune with karoke standards and bad hair. I've noticed that my parents are very hard to please. About 80 percent of the time, they comment about how horrible the performance was. You can usually deduce this by the different noises my mom makes in reaction. "Tssssaaaay" means she thinks its sucks. "Eeeeehehhehe!" means she likes it. When it comes to Bob Dylan, it's probably a big "Tsssssayyy".

Like a Rolling Stone - Bob Dylan

The Decemberists- Hazards of Love
Sounds like: If Marcel Proust, James Joyce and David Foster Wallace started a Spinal Tap cover band.

Tastes like: Mrs. Lovett's savory and sweet meat pies.

Feels like: Any movie that uses an operatic scene, probably from Tosca, to reflect the underlying themes of the narrative the film's audience is following. Oh my god! Postmodernism!

Most WTF? lyric: "No more a rake and no more a bachelor. I was wedded and it whetted my thirst. Until her womb start spilling out babies, only then did I reckon my curse"- Rake's Song

My OMG moment: At Starbucks, listening to 'The Wanting Comes in Waves/Repaid' while a man that was disgruntled for not getting a seat was lecturing everyone in the room. There's a part of a song where the 'Mother character' in the song is screaming 'This is how I am repaid!!' with abhorrent agony. As he leaves, I shake my head, and look down at my work; the 'Son character' begins to sing, 'Mother grant me this proposition right, grant me freedom to enjoy this night' in a quiet poignancy provided by a piano. As the 'Son's' voice escalates and the band begins to join in, I realize that my phone is missing. I search endlessly for it, moving faster as the music's beat grows more tense. Then I realized that I must have left my phone outside, right before I moved to grab a table inside, subsequently cutting off the MAN who was yelling at us for not getting a table...not getting a table because I TOOK IT. Upon this realization, the quiet poignancy turns into an evil metal's riff with heavy and grungy power chords. THE MAN MUST HAVE TAKEN IT OUT OF SPITE. BOOM! Cut to LOST. (Turns out I dropped it in the restroom. The employees returned it to me the next day).

Would Trevor Mast like it: This is a man who raps John Keats' poems over Radiohead-esque guitar riffs. His opening line on women at parties is, 'Hey do you guys like Battlestar Galactica?'. Of course he'd like it.

The Rakes Song - The Decemberists

Grizzly Bear- Veckatimest
Sounds like: If preschool was a music video directed by Salvador Dali. Speaking of which, I'm still waiting for a film adaptation of 'The Persistence of Memory' directed by Zack Snyder. A lot of slow motion and the occasional explosion through a glass window...with MELTING CLOCKS.

Tastes like: Neopolitan ice cream after your dad has ate all the chocolate. So really it's just vanilla and strawberry. Why doesn't he just buy chocolate ice cream? Beats me.

Feels like: That chilling feeling after you pee, an especially long pee. It's such a smooth and lasting ride, and by the end of it, you just want to do it again. It sounds like I'm talking about sex, but I'd rather pee. YEAH, I SAID IT.

Most WTF? lyric: "Oh wildly cohering in a watery deep. We'll drop her down to the bottom. We'll drop her like she's nothing."- Dory

My OMG moment: Listening to 'Two Weeks' with the hallway fight scene in 'Oldboy' playing in the background. They oddly sync up.

Would Kevin Wada like it: That sassy bitch would be like, 'This shit is too slow. I need a beat to dance to', and then he'd immediately change it to Rihanna's 'Please Don't Stop The Music'. I don't know why I have Rihanna on my iPod. I apologize to Kevin in advance for making him a gay caricature.

Two Weeks - Grizzly Bear

Jigsaw Falling Into Place (Part 3): Only Fools Are Enslaved in Time and Space- The Science of Lost

erichan22@berkeley.edu (BillyPilgrim) — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 11:57:00 +0000

Please, pardon my tardiness. I was supposed to write this a year ago, when the season finale of season four just premiered. I was all jazzed up, on the precipice of going mental, and scooping up the melted pieces of brain off the floor just thinking about the implications of what Jeremy Bentham, a moving island, and a dead Locke can possibly mean for our much adored show, Lost. But alas, life got in the way. Graduation, moving out, and gaining lots of weight from eating all of my mommy's yum yums were on top of my list of priorities, and suddenly blogging about Lost was not as vital. But what seemed like a practice in laziness turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because with just three episodes in the newest season, a rather large piece of the puzzle has fallen into our laps. So, without further ado, I bring you the last chapter in this three part study-- Only Fools Are Enslaved In Time and Space: The Science of Lost.

If you know me, then I'm assuming you know that my thought process has been overrun and dictated by a mean and viscous entity known as the LSAT (or what common folk know as the Law School Admission Test). So everything that has to do with me formulating an argument or making decisions is now governed by logical reasoning. It comes to no surprise, then, that this post will follow the three tenets of an LSAT argument: The premise (The answers of Lost can be sufficiently answered deductively with the proper application of theoretical science), the evidence which is presented to prove said premise (the clues that were dropped on us from the beginning of the show's inception), the conclusions (how these pieces of evidence, or clues, have eventually led us to theoretical application) and the subsidiary conclusions (what can these applications of theory tell us about inferences that can answer such mysteries like the whispers, ghosts, or giant pirate ships in the middle of the jungle?).

The Evidence, or The Clues Leading up to our Conclusions
(note: I assure you that references and allusions to scientific theory and physicists will thoroughly be explained later in the post. For now, we're concentrating on the build up that the past seasons have provided)

1. "Day man! Master of the Night man!"
Mac from 'It's Always Sunny' makes the most relevant, albeit obscure, cameo yet. In episode 3.07, the first Juliet-centric episode 'Not in Portland, we see Mac (or Rob McElhenney) play Aldo, a lonesome Other guarding what looks like a jail, reading Stephen Hawking's 'A Brief History of Time', one of the most popular science books of all time and the quintessential source for everything you want to know about the Big bang, wormholes, black holes, super string theory light cones, and most importantly for our show, how time is implemented in these constructs and how it can theoretically be manipulated.

2. "Only fools are enslaved in space and time"

Same episode. After Aldo is knocked out by a butt of a rifle, Kate, Sawyer and Alex free Carl from Room 23, which, seemingly, turned out to be a brainwashing station ala Clockwork Orange. Weird images of babydolls, coins, cockroaches and other arcane and arbitrary things would pop up, all with slogans of equal mystique, such as: "God loves you as he loves Jacob". As with anything on Lost, the message board and blog hounds took that scene and reversed it, suspecting correctly that if the video was played in reverse we would get a hidden message. What we got was a phrase that would set the tone of the further progression of the show: "Only fools are enslaved in space and time". WTF?!

3. "The Universe has a way of...course correcting"
The following episode, the second Desmond-centric episode titled 'Flashes Before Your Eyes', was the first time the audience viewed a break in the spacetime continuum, all without us knowing it. When Desmond turned the fail safe key at the Swan Hatch at the end of season 2, he was exposed to whatever exotic matter or electromagnetic material the Swan was guarding, making Desmond conducive to break the mold (all this may seem confusing now, but I promise, I will try to explain it in the next section). Desmond goes back to his previous self, pre-island, living and in love with Penny, but consciously knowing that he has been on the island, pressing that damn button every 108 minutes. Desmond, now being free from time and space (apparently, he's no fool) can now dictate the course of his future, deciding to propose to Penny. When he tries to buy a ring, he is stopped by the now very prevalent Mrs. Hawking (the white haired lady that appeared at the end of episode 5.02, 'The Lie', and who is, from deductive reasoning, is Daniel Farday's mum). Mrs. Hawking, Eloise is her first name, convinced Desmond not to marry Penny and basically set out the rules that Stephen Hawking set out for time travel. You CAN'T change the past or the future.

4. "I was on a Ferris Wheel"
At the end of the last episode of season 3, 'Through The Looking Glass', Jack calls the freighter that is parked a couple of miles off the coast of the island, believing it to be rescue despite the cries of John Locke that it is not. When the ring goes through, the first thing Jack hears is a man picking up that says, "Minkowski". With this clue, the whole construct of the Lost universe took one step closer to be fully defined. Minkowski was a reference to German mathematician Hermann Minkowski, whose most pertinent revelation in accordance with our show is his development of what is now known as 'Minkowski Spacetime' (which he developed after doing further work on special relativity, something that his greatest student, Albert Einstein, formulated). In short, Minkowski concluded that are spatial construct and surroundings are one time like dimensions. Our Minkowski ultimately showed up in the middle of season four, traveling through time via consciousness exactly like Desmond.

5. This Valentine's Day, will you be my Constant?
The first detailed explanation of Desmond's condition. Rather than the one experience he had after turning the fail safe key, Desmond goes through what is assumed to be the island's protective barrier, stimulating Desmond's consciousness to bounce back and forth between 1998 and 2004. Faraday explains to us how time and space work with a little bit of pseudo science (i.e. the constant), but we forgive this practice in deception due to the incredible cathartic release when Desmond finally calls Penny.

The Conclusion, or What the Clues Have Led Up To
"We really do not have time for me to try to explain. You have no idea how difficult that would be. For me to try to explain this, this phenomenon, to a quantum physicist, that would be difficult".
-Daniel Faraday (Episode 5.01: Because You Left)

I am, by no means, an expert in physics. Truth be told, most of what I learned in high school and college Physics courses failed to make any sense until I started watching Lost (same goes for philosophy, history, and a general sense of conscientiousness in everyday life...I owe this show a lot). But I feel I have a somewhat solid grasp on the complexities of physics that the show utilizes to attempt to explain this to you all, quantum physicist or not. I must warn you, the upcoming section is heavily theoretical and may involve words that do not occur frequently in our daily vernacular. So let us begin this journey into a brief history of time with...A Brief History of Time (Get it? I is the definition of clever. Booya.)

Stephen Hawking: Not Just a Character on The Simpsons
Stephen Hawking, the most well known and celebrated theoretical physicist of his time, in trying to map out his perception of how time and space work and interact, said this:

"Imaginary time is indistinguishable from directions in space. If one can go north, one can turn around and head south; equally, if one can go forward in imaginary time, one ought to be able to turn around and go backward. This means that there can be no important difference between the forward and backward directions of imaginary time. On the other hand, when one looks at "real" time, there's a very big difference between the forward and backward directions, as we all know. Where does this difference between the past and the future come from? Why do we remember the past but not the future?"
- A Brief History of Time

"Imaginary time" is a concept Hawking coined in an attempt to resolve the fundamental question of what existed before the Big Bang. While "imaginary time" remains a relatively simple concept, it is rather difficult to visualize. Hawking distinguished "imaginary time" from what he calls "regular time", or the causal linear construct of how we see our world unfolding (i.e. we forget to turn on the alarm clock and we wake up late the next morning because of that; causality leads to progression in time). In order to more clearly understand this, visualize "regular time" on an X-axis, or a horizontal line, with the left side of the map labeled "past" and the other side labeled "future", all while "imaginary time" would run perpendicular to "regular time", moving at right angles. "Imaginary time" isn't any different from "regular time", it just runs in a contrasting course, dissimilar from the way we usually experience and go through time.

In essence, what Hawking was trying to do was look at time as if it was a dimension of space, meaning that time is not just a human construct defined by cultural semantics, but is actually occupying space, much like how the bed you sleep on, the desk you work on, and the dishes you never clean that lay on top of your book shelf take up space. This construct of time as a spatially occupying space allows you to move back and forth, forward and backward, beside "imaginary time", just like how you can move back and forth in space.

Hawking wasn't the first one to think of time in a spatial construct. In 1907, a Polish mathematician named Hermann Minkowski (the namesake of our beloved freighter communications officer who died because he couldn't find a constant) calculated that Albert Einstein's (the genius for which Minkowski mentored) special theory of relativity can work if we added a fourth dimension to the traditional view of three dimensional Euclidean space. This added addition is, of course, time--meaning that time is spatially occupies dimensions, coining the phrase spacetime.

The Possibility of Paradox: Whatever Happened, Happened
"You cannot change anything. You can't. Even if you tried to, it wouldn't work. Time is like a string, we can move forward on that string, we can move in reverse, but we can never create a new string. If we try to do anything different we will fail everytime. Whatever happened, happened."
-Daniel Farday (Episode 5.01: Because You Left)

What Faraday explains to our Lostaways is paramount--it sets up the rules of time travel and expertly lays down that paradoxes can never exist. While other lesser programs fail at using time travel as a sufficient device (come on, did you really expect me not to take a jab at Heroes. Seriously, cancel it already and just give us two nights of 30 Rock), Lost employs popular theoretical physics as a construct to their narrative, fulfilling the promise of answering most of our questions with at least a semblance of logical and rational thought.

Lost skillfully sought out to establish that, while the show uses time travel, that the possibility of paradoxes can never exist. This means that Marty McFly cannot go meet George McFly and get in the way of Lorraine, his destiny, consequently making him disappear on stage in front of hundreds of dancing students at the Enchantment Under The Sea Dance (I've seen that flick way too many times). The study of paradoxes in time travel has been rigorously investigated by Kip S. Thorne, a close colleague and student of, you guessed it, Stephen Hawking. Using the Novikov self-consistency principle (which basically states that even if an event that brings rise to a paradox can possibly exist, the probability of that event is zero [i.e. The Grandfather Paradox, which is what Back To The Future ignores, can never happen]), Thorne adds more to the idea of the non-existence of paradoxes by calculating that there can never be any initial conditions that lead to paradox once time travel is implemented. Thorne surmised this conjecture by using laws of physics and idenfications of universal physical mechanisms, such as Loterntzian wormholes, closed timelike curves, vacuum polarization of quantum fields, and traversable wormholes. I'm not even going to pretend that I understand any of those things, so instead, I'll use a metaphor to summarize our findings:

Think of a river. In this river, you can go down or forward, and sometimes there might be a whirlpool. When you get sucked into this whirlpool, you can either go forward in the river or back, dislodging yourself from your normal path on the river (in our case, our linear causal view of time). But no matter where you go, you can never change anything that exist already in that river, because it already exists.

The Possibility of Possibility: Whoa Doc, This is Getting Heavy
"This station is being built here because of its proximity to what we believe to be almost limitless energy. And that energy, once we can harness it correctly, it is going to allow us to manipulate time"

-Pierre Chang (Episode 5.01- Because You Left)

One of the most significant clues we received was outside of the 'Mothership', and was seen live by a few lucky thousand people at the 2007 San Diego Comic-Con. After the Lost Panel, a video was shown with who now know as Pierre Chang, formerly known as Marvin Candle, Edgar Haliwax, and Mark Whitman, or better known as the Asian dude who is the spokeman in all them Dharma Orientation videos. In it, we have Chang welcoming the watchers of the video to the Orchid Station, holding a bunny rabbit with the number 15, and dropping a informative H-Bomb on us by uttering the words "The unique properties of the island lead to a kind of Casimir Effect".

A little course refresher, just in case your brain is as cooked as mine is. What we have established is that Lost retains a universe in which space occupies a fourth dimension, in addition to the three previously established Euclidean dimensions (Hawking/Minkowski). In this construct, think of a river, and on this river we can go backwards and forwards, but we can never change the course of this river, because everything that has happened, happened (Kip Thorne). But remember when I said that in this river, there can be some whirlpools, and once sucked through this whirlpool, we can land in any point previous or after the point we were previously established in? Stephen Hawking, Hermann Minkowski, Kip Thorne, and most notably, Hendrik Casimir saw wormholes as a universal kind of whirlpool, making it conducive to hop between points mapped out on our immeasurable spacetime continuum. By the way, I don't think it was unintentional for the powers that be to name Ken Leung's character Miles Starum, which sounds an awful lot like maelstrom, which is a synonym for whirlpool. (oOOoO. You just got chills didn't you?).

In 1948, physicists by the names of Hendrik Casimir and Dirk Polder postulated what came to be known as the Casimir Effect. In their calculations, the two geniuses basically mapped out the possibility of vacuums existing at a quantum level; all in all, this basically means that they physicists found that it is possible to develop a force from virtually nothing. Think about it like this: What would happen if you got two ordinary mirrors and placed them together so they are standing face to face. Intuitively, we would assume that nothing would happen at all, when, in fact, an attraction is developed simply by the presence of a vacuum. If you're still having trouble, think about a tiny man in between these mirrors and saying Bloody Mary in the dark 13 times, and two Bloody Mary's pop out and murder the little man (OK. That doesn't make sense. At all, actually. But I just thought that was a pretty cool image, no?) The Casimir Effect was successfully proven in 1996, when physicist Steven Lamoreaux tested its theory at Los Alamos Labs.

Both Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne (not Minkowski, mofo's dead) were fully aware of the experiments conducted by Casimir and Polder and both suggested that if the application of what they deemed as "exotic matter" (aka: virtual particles, special properties, limitless energy) was employed with the Casimir Effect, then you can theoretically create a wormhole to bounce back and fourth between points on the spacetime continuum. To be more forthright, "exotic matter" is believed to be any material, element or particle that opposes physical and natural laws. For example, if you drop an apple to the floor and it flies straight up to the ceiling, then that apple contains exotic matter.

Right now, as we are at this point, we can only experience time in a limited way. We are only living at this moment right now. Here I am, typing this blog, but at the same time on the spacetime continuum, I am also being born, dying, getting married, losing my hair, money, viriginity, religion, etc. This is the only way we can experience time, just like how we can only be at one place at a time, although we know that the space around us is a spatial dimension. Once a wormhole is generated, then one can use it to experience time at different points at the spacetime continuum. Just like we have vessels that can move us around in our spatial dimensions (cars, boats, bikes, planes, etc.), we can theoertically have a wormhole as a vessel that would be conducive to manipulate our experience with time.

On Lost, we can deductively conclude that everything that we have just discussed has already happened, ostensibly, right before our eyes. We know the island has exotic matter that defies the laws of physics (Rose's cancer and Locke's cancer was cured, 48 people survived from a massive plane crash, people heal fast on the island, Richard Alpert is ageless, babies can't be born, etc.), we know that the show subscribes to Hawking's version of the timespace continuum (as explained meticulously by Daniel Faraday and Pierre Chang), and we know the island has specific spots harnessing electromagnetic energy and ridiculous amounts of unknown energy (as indicative of both the Swan and the Orchid Stations). Put all those together and we have an island filled with people stumbling through wormholes with no end in sight.

The Subsidiary Conclusions, or C'mon Eric, Just Tell Us What The Hell It All Means Already
"Sometimes we get frustrated ourselves and decide it's time to download a big chunk of mythology. And then the audience says, 'I find this confusing and alienating and too weird.' So then we pull back, and they say, 'You're not giving us enough'."

-Damon Lindelof (Creator/Writer, on trying to satisfy the audience of Lost)

First thing's first. The picture to the right of your screen has nothing to do with Lost. That's my good friend and former housemate Dan Schneider. We threw a party at our house once, and our other housemate, and siqqest of bros, Filly J. makes a photoshop for the invite (the end result is the aforementioned picture to the right). We recently rediscovered it and couldn't stop laughing. Again, this has nothing to do with the show. I just couldn't find a picture that would be pertinent for this section. On the flipside, Dan also loves Lost. So there we go. A connection! This section is to take what we know currently about where the show is now and how we can make inferrences about questions that still linger and remain unanswerable. These are subsidiary, or secondary, conclusions that are educated guesses. So bare with me.

Billy Pilgrim is Unstuck
In June of last year, in discussing the philosophical implications of Lost, i wrote:

"It seems that the whole template of the Lost universe follows a Kurt Vonnegutt's Slaughterhouse Five lead, with the main character, Billy Pilgrim (sound familiar?) getting "unstuck in time" after minor brain damage from a plane crash (sound familiar?!)... Vonnegutt, like the Lost scribes, based his science on the idea of an "unconstant" plane where time and space are on an equal playing field; that, yes, the universe has a particular course where everything has been played out, BUT, something can happen where an individual may experience something (i.e. a plane crash? maybe being exposed to electromagnetic activity) cause the individual to be conscious of this laid out, universal agenda. How can this clarify Desmond's ability to control his own fate?"

Another course refresher: Desmond's namesake is given to us by Scottish Philosopher David Hume who, among many of his contributions to philosophy and empiricism, developed the idea of compatablism: the idea that free-will and determinism are not separate entities, but, in fact, coexist with each other. Suddenly, the conversation that Faraday and Desmond have in episode 5.01- Because You Left makes all the more sense:

"You're the only person that can help us because, Desmond, the rules..the rules don't apply to you. You're special. You're uniquely and miracalously special".

Philosophical thought, no matter how prolific and influential it may be, has always been viewed as a dimunition of practical application (not my opinion, but according to many pre-med and EECS majors I know, all of us humanities majors are nothing but a bunch of lazy idiots. Anyway, I digress). Compatibalism, therefore, must be explained by the foundation of science, the societal linchpin to all things questionable and answerable. To answer this discrepency between destiny and freedom, we turn again to our MC for the evening, Stephen Hawking, who, as well as discussing a four dimensional plane where "imaginary time" and "regular time" coexist, proposed that wormholes can theoretically be a vessel that can connect an infininte number of parallel universes.

Again, think of a river. The same river that we've been paddling on for this entire bloody diatribe. But say your name is Desmond, your on a sailing boat called the Elizabeth, and all of a sudden, that river suddenly makes a branch to another river, and another one, and so on and so forth. Hawking believes that these rivers that branch off can be parallel universes, where different choices happen and different outcomes are lived with. This "many worlds" theory is the less popular of the two constructs of how space and time work, but remains pertinent in our conversation about Desmond. If Desmond is "unstuck" from our four-dimensional spacetime continuum, then he may have the ability to change the course of spacetime, not by affecting the construct that he was built in, but by paddling on another river. Perhaps Desmond has the ability to create new rivers, or parallel universes; thus, creating a new path and spacetime construct for himself and the world around him.

Birth is Just a Chorus, Death is Just a Verse
“When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is 'So it goes,'”
-Kurt Vonnegutt's Slaughterhouse Five

Desmond shows that the spacetime continuum can be broken into by a human, no matter how simple or modest his or her means. Another example on the show is the case of Miles Straum, our resident ghosthunter and snarky rival of our favorite inbred, Sawyer. While many of us believe that Miles has the uncanny ability to speak to the dead, we have to realize that on our show, "death" is just a societal construct, defined by our limited and mediated perception of space and time. The Tralfamadorians in Kurt Vonnegutt's Slaughterhouse Five see through our mediated perception, and have the foresight and the ability to see the universe as how it is really laid out. The Tralfamadorians do not see death as a indication of sorrow, but rather it is merely a singular moment among a vast myriad of events.

Instead, Miles has the ability to break and see through spacetime. It's not that spirits are nudging him to continue unfinished business like The Sixth Sense, but he can see everything that has happened on a particular spot, in a particular location on a dimensional plane, because, again, everything has already happened. Perhaps this explains the whispers? While Miles can have the ability to hear them willingly (supposedly), perhaps the whispers are leaks in the spacetime continuum? If we listen back to the audio of the whispers, they're mostly arbitrary and undirected statements, such as, "They're coming", "She's here", "Where is he?", etc. What makes these whispers go off is another question. What is the propensity for whispers to suddenly become so ubiquitous?

Another clarification of Miles' uncanny abilities. If Miles were to come into your house and sit on your couch, he can experience everything that has happened or will ever happen on that couch. The first time you made out on it, the second time you made out on it when she puked in your mouth, the third time where you puked in her mouth, and the fourth, where you just gave up and started watching Lost on DVD, all by yourself. Undoubtedly, Miles would call you a loser virgin, but tell you to buck up because you'll get yours someday.

This brings up the notion that the reincarnations of former castmembers that we so often see (mostly through the eyes of Hurley) aren't really "spirits" or "ghosts", but are different versions of themselves at a different point in time before their death. When Boone showed up in Episode 3.03- Further Instructions, his hair was much longer. Fans complained about this discrepency in the show's narrative, claiming that Locke has never seen Boone with his hair long, so this must be an error on the hair and makeup department. However, in episode 3.13- Expose, Boone appears with slightly shorter hair, matching how he looked like on the day the plane crashed. Either way, point is that Boone's hair could have been legitimately long, since he could have been another Boone in a previous point before his hair was short, like say how his hair was in his flashback in episode 2.07, Abandoned? Moreover, when Charlie appears to Hurley in episode 4.01- The Beginning of The End, Charlie has short hair and is dressed like a jetsetter. Hurley has never seen Charlie like this before, so he will have no rational reason for him to imagine him the way he is. Perhaps this is Charlie, hopping through wormholes, from a point where his band was going on its first tour? We've now seen, Boone, Charlie, Ana-Lucia, and a mention of Mr. Eko as resurrected zombies. They are quite possibly now agents of the island, hopping back and forth between wormholes as their previous selves, trying to get the Lostaways to their fixed destinies.

Don't worry. I didn't forget the biggest "ghost" of them all. That'd be Jack's dad, Christian Shepherd. The white-shoe wearing, blue-suit sporting, horrible drunk of a father has been a mystery of the show's lore since episode 1.05, White Rabbit. Christian died in Australia, presumably from a heart attack from drinking too much, and his son, Jack, was sent there to retrieve him and bring him back to the States, only Jack didn't expect to find him dead. When the plane crashed, Jack started seeing his father's body, standing off at vast distances watching his son from afar. Jack eventually followed his "ghost dad" to a stream of water in the caves, where he also found his father's coffin, empty. During the break between season three and season four, we were given "mobilsodes" throughout the summer and fall to keep us busy. These mini episodes, consisting of about 2-3 minutes of additional scenes from seasons past, were, for the most part, not very good. But the last mobilsode before the start of season four was actually chilling to the very bone. We see Vincent, Walt's dog, run around the island. He eventually walks his way up to what we see are white tennis shoes. The point of view tilts up to reveal Christian Shepherd, towering over Vincent, and uttering the words, "Find my son. He has work to do". Vincent runs off and we cut to the very first scene of the show: Jack waking up in the island, surrounded by bamboo, and Vincent patiently watching over Jack. The implications were tremendous and were fully validated toward the end of the season. When Christian appeared, not once, but twice, in Jacob's cabin, speaking as if he was the Tom Hagen of the island. He then appears before Micahel on the freighter and tells him "You can go now, Michael", informing him that the island can now let him die. Christian Shepherd is undoubtedly an agent of the island and has much more to do with the narrative as originally believed.

So here it goes. My first attempt ever at a crazy crackpot theory. Most of the time, I'll remain mum unless I'm absolutely sure that something can be proven, but not this. I am willing to go out and say that, yes, Christian Shepherd is an agent of the island, and, in addition, Christian Shepherd has always wanted to go back, but was not allowed to until he brought a select group of passengers onto an airplane and have it crash in the middle of the South Pacific. Oh yeah, and to get back to the island, Christian had to die. Sound familiar? Locke, in order to save the island, has to get a select few people, bring them back to the island, and in the process, die. But implications of his ressurection are already out in the open. Perhaps, when Locke returns to the island, he will be all-knowing and powerful as Jacob and Christian Shepherd? Christian is, therefore, not a ghost, but free from the construct of spacetime, existing around the special properties that makes the island conducive for phenomenons like wormholes and time travel, which leads me to another corollary to the already numerous corollaries.

Why are "ghosts" or incarnations of characters from previous points popping up? What gives them the ability to do this? If the island is placed in a position that defies the laws of physics (basically, the island is one giant piece of exotic matter), then if you die on the island, your normal stream of consciousness is broken free in the spacetime continuum. Meaning that, once you die, you are virtually unstuck from time, free to do whatever you want at the island's will. Is this getting too crazy? I'll stop this rambling now. I sound like it's 3am and I've been sipping on cough syrup all night.

This Only is Denied to God: The Power to Undo The Past
Hurley: How does something like this happen?
Rousseau: Are you on the same island as I am?

-Episode 1-24: Exodus (when referring to the appearance of the Black Rock for the first time)

The newly adopted model of the spacetime continuum has liberated explanations for some of the narrative landmarks that had a hand in defining the show in the early seasons, most notably The Black Rock and Danielle Rousseau. We can assume now that these basins of unknowning and usually unwilling travelers were forced into crashing on the island due to accidentally falling into a wormhole. This presumption requires the contingency that the world, our planet earth, has a number of places conducive to the Casimir Effect, and thus the opportunity to harness wormholes.

In 1970, a Scottish naturalist and cartographer named Ivan Sanderson started cultivating an interest in how sailors from the ancient world mapped and charted the Eath. Sanderson started studying voyages that came across mysterious complications, Bermuda Triangle-esque accounts stemming from different parts of the world. Sanderson compiled data of these mysterious occurences and found that incidents, similar to the the Bermuda Triangle, most frequently lies in twelve equallty distributed geographic areas. Most notably around the Tropic of Cancer and at both the South and North Poles. Sanderson labeled these areas as "Vile Vortices".

On the map pictured on the right, we can see the green spots that Sanderson labeled to directly correlating with some of the spots where mysterious things happen on our show. There is one on the coast of Australia (where our survivors took off), one at the North Pole (where polar bears live), one at Fiji (where the freighter originally ported and took off), one at Madagascar (where the journal of the Black Rock was found), two spots in Africa (where Ben Linus, after turning the frozen donkey wheel, landed, and where fossilized remains of a polar bear were found in Tunisia; moreover, the plane that Eko's brother, Yemi, was on took off from Africa). Although the idea of Vile Vortices have been virtually ignored by the scientific community, the concrete list of events that Sanderson has taken his time to compile remains fact. Most of the unsolved and puzzling events in recent history have occured in these twelve different spots. Whether it be because of wormholes, parallel universes, or four dimensional spacetime is something that has yet to be explored, but Lost certainly believes this to be true.

The "Future" of Lost (Strictly speaking in a linear narrative term, of course)
"I know who you are, boy. I know everything you have you took from me...that island is mine Benjamin. It always was. It will be again."
-Charles Widmore (Episode 4.09- The Shape of Things to Come)

We've reached a point now where the fans can deductively map out what most of the first few seasons have aspired to answer. Laws of physics and theoretical science can be applied properly to answer how Polar Bears got on the island, why Ben Linus was sent to Tunisia after the turning of the wheel, and why Desmond can go to the past but can't do anything to change it. As we get closer to the end date of the show, we are slowly going backwards to the very beginning of everything. In seven days, God created the Earth, on the eigth, I'd like to think that he created the island. The last season of this innumerable cluster of questions we call Lost will most likely focus on, among other thigns, these three key issues:

1. "Their leader is a sodding old man. You think he can track me? You think he knows this island better than I do?"
We will find out the origins of Charles Widmore. How, like Ben, he was brought to the island almost by mistake. He was chosen by The Mayor of Gotham City (Richard Alpert) as the 'Dahli Lama' or 'The Pope' of the Others (they lead the people, but ultimately answer to God [i.e. Jacob]). When Ben shows up on the island, Richard and the Others see Ben as the "real" chosen one, leaving Widmore bitter, confused and resentful. Eventually, Ben takes over as leader, leaving Widmore an outcast from his own group. How Widmore got off the island is another question. Whether he was cast out by Richard's own hands or had to do what Ben inevitably did as well: turned the frozen donkey wheel for the first time. Perhaps Widmore was also placed in a situation similar to Ben's in the end of season four, and was forced to turn the wheel. Since we know that the person who turns the wheel can never come back to the island, Jacob picked Widmore to turn the wheel, casting him out from the island forever. Widmore, since then, became a billionaire, had a hot daughter, and spent 20 years of his life looking for the island. My guess is that season six will focus on Ben, Locke and Widmore going through a power struggle over the rightful ownership of the island.

2. Smokezilla
Oh yes. Smokey the Monster. Who can ever forget you? I'll say it now, I have nothing productive to say about this enigma of a plot device. I was thoroughly convinced of the "nanobots" theory since season one that has since been rebuked by the show's creators. Smokey is the linchpin to whether the show is remembered as a coherent piece of serious and thoughtful science-fiction cultural text, or just a "good, but not great" piece of television. What we do know is that it can scan your brain, it makes a noise that sounds like metal cranks working together, it can only stay close to the ground, and Ben can summon it in a chamber with a door marked with hieroglyphics. We know it's a "security system", let's just hope there is some realistic and awe-inspiring reason why it's a giant pillar of smoke.

[UPDATED] After publishing this post, a friend sent me a link to Jeff Jensen and his Entertainment Weekly Blog focusing on last week's episode Jughead. He talked about a Physicist named John Archibald Wheeler who coined the phrases "wormhole" and "black hole". Wheeler believed that our spacetime construct was governed by a "participatory universe", meaning that we were in one massive feedback loop. Wheeler's premise relies largely on part of what is known on the "uncertainty principle", which is basically the idea that the mere act of observation may have an affect on what is being observed. All this information on Wheeler ultimately culminates into the most chilling of revelations. Here's what Jeff Jensen had to say:

"But my favorite discovery about John Wheeler — the one that gave me chills — was the colorful, monstrous term he invented for Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Wheeler called it...''The Great Smokey Dragon.'' Wheeler came up with the phrase after the famous Copenhagen debate between Einstein and Bohr, in which the latter scientist argued that the uncertainty principle always allows for a glitch in a system, a fatal flaw in any well-ordered plan. You might say that The Great Smokey Dragon...changes the rules."

You can read the rest of his post here:

http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,1550612_20250233_20255326_3,00.html

3. "Because Richard's always been here"
We'll, without question, find out what the hell the island really is and the historical and cultural context that it comes with. From the easter eggs of blatant Egyptian hieroglyphics, to the giant four toed statue, the island is older than we can imagine. Some speculate that Richard is one of the last descendents of the original inhabitants of the island, believing that Richard is part of the ancient continent of Lemuria (who were rumored to be, you guessed it, ageless). Look for Alpert to be the vehicle in which we find out more about the history of the island's original inhabitants, and why they started to recruit people outside of their living confines (i.e. Widmore, Ben, Locke). And maybe, just maybe, we might find out why Alpert insists on wearing "guyliner". Maybe he has a horribly liking to the detrimental sounds of Fall Out Boy. It's just a hunch, but I'm thinking I might be on to something.

The End is The Beginning Is The End
I have no closing remarks. I am spent, tired, and have reached the limit's precipice. I am convinced that I will never write this comprehensively about Lost again. But who knows? Ther writers can throw another wrench in my thinking and all this can be wrong, which will render it useless and subsequently make me start all over from scratch. Well, here's to eagerly awaiting the inevitable. Cheers.

You're the Best Around! No One's Ever Goin' To Bring Ya Down! (Movie Edition!)

erichan22@berkeley.edu (BillyPilgrim) — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 03:33:00 +0000

Films
Best. Year. Ever. In my mind at least. Not because this year had particular good films (hell, I've been reading articles arguing that this was one year for mediocrity), but because I got to see nearly every movie for FREE, and, for the most part, EARLY. I'm not talking about the kind of free where you have to download a copy taken from a shaky cam on opening night. No! I'm talking about state of the art sound and picture quality, spacious conditions and reserved seating. Working at the Arclight, for all its negatives (incompetent management, prissy customers and caravans of celebrities that just wouldn't leave me alone [assholes, all of them]), not paying for a movie in the past three months has been unequivocal bliss.

There was a variety of trend-setting stories in films this year. The superhero ruled the box-office. Genre-film was making a comeback. Animation was setting the shape of things to come. Personal comebacks were flooding upon the sympathies of movie-goers. Retrospectives of our past mistakes in a now all-together different culture continue to hold up a mirror. And Clint Eastwood is still grunting. But what 2008 did was provide a change of our society's mood, our filmic discourse, or the state of our zeitgeist. While years in film often do that, 2008 was particularly special because, arguably, one film did that this year. So without further ado, I bring you the last of the lists of 2008. Good riddance, you douche bag of a year.

14. The Fall
Illustrious. Marvelous. Glorious. All words that the adventure/fantasy The Fall yearned to hear when released, but was instead met with reviews culminating to a phrase all resembling: "good but not great". While the film lacks that "wow" factor it so sorely intended to have, you have to admire the sheer audacity of director Tarsem and producers David Fincher and Spike Jonez to create a work of cinema with the intent to dazzle and amaze.

Still, we have a film that boasts gorgeous cinematography (the kind where each frame would look good propped up on someone's wall) and solid acting (Lee Pace continuing to be one of Hollywood's most promising young actors). All in all, I haven't seen a film this deliriously incoherent since Terry Gilliam's Brazil, a feat replicated by many but accomplished by few.

13. Religulous
All's fair, leave no stone left unturned. This seemed to be the mantra for Bill Maher, the wise-cracking, no holds barred provocateur, who projected his out-right contempt for the what he sees as the irrationality of all religions in the Larry Charles' directed Religulous. While any criticism of religion still remains taboo in today's American society (remember when people kept saying Obama was a Muslim? This was a problem...why?), Bill Maher had no reservations walking up to a Church, Mosque, Temple (or any other mausoleum built upon as silly of a premise of a zombie God or a space warlord named Xenu) and spewing out polemic diatribes to people who generally refuse to listen. While Maher may be preaching to the choir (and some may argue that his film does nothing but fray the relations between religious and secular America), the end product still churns out a movie that is funny as hell (get it?! Hell?).

12. Frost/Nixon
Admit it, everybody. If Jay Leno walked up to you on Sunset Blvd. and asked to explain the little intricacies of Watergate and the wickedness of Richard "Tricky Dick" Nixon, you would undoubtedly serve as folly for the American viewing public; who, ironically, also probably has no idea what the hell happened in that damned hotel. If you were born after 1968, sure, this is probably the case for you. If there is any reason why Ron Howard's Frost/Nixon, his best film to date (made directly after his worst film to date, The Da Vinci Code), deserves any of the accolades it is currently garnering, it's because it made something as convoluted, complex and, to many people, boring as Watergate and the sins of Richard Nixon into a David V. Goliath story of mythic proportions. Frost/Nixon (unlike another stage adaptation, Doubt) succeeds in effectively transforming the strengths of the original source material to the strengths of an altogether different medium; taking advantage of the visual fluidity that only a camera can possess.

Ron Howard, and screenwriter Peter Morgan, take large royalties when it comes to historical accuracies. Nevertheless, this fictionalized re-creation of history is so dramatized, so Shakespearean like, that one can look past that some things may be taken out of context for the sake of a cathartic reaction. In fact, that's one of the subsidiary points of the film: that the development and usage of the film medium can say so much more with the combination, of color temperature, lens aperture, and the appropriate use of the close-up. Frank Langella, a man over 6 foot-tall, plays the Hobbit-like figure who was Richard Nixon. Dazzling to say the very least, Langella doesn't do a Jamie Foxx in Ray impersonation, but rather captures the essence of Nixon (a poor, broken down man with Napoleonic complex) through the flow and power of both his rhetoric and reaction.

11. Waltz With Bashir
Years from now, when my child is on his 14th week of his/her first film course in college, (s)he is going to call me up and ask if I've ever seen a movie called Waltz With Bashir. I will unquestionably reply, "No shit, Sherlock. What do you take me for? Some sort of philistine? *Scoff*". Then my neglected offspring will tell me how the professor was saying where the public started viewing the tremendous possibilities that animation can bring to the medium of film that live-action narratives cannot--how the almost endless possibilities of animation, once thought to be limited and archaic, can say or express somethings that only the sharpest of storytellers and artist can recite. I will nod my head, and (s)he will, of course, see my expression (cause we're video conferencing through iChat [now in full-body hologram form! Thanks CNN!) and can tell that I am pretending that I know what (s)he is talking about. I'll say, "Well, that's interesting". (S)he will say how the film provided that much needed bridge between animation and reality, subsequently inventing a whole new sub-genre of serious animated films. During the end of the conversation, I'll think to myself, "God. Did I sound like that much a snob when I was at that age? If only I can go back in time".

10. Rachel Getting Married
It seems like anyone remotely interested in films has a quirky, pragmatic and poignant screenplay based directly upon their family and upbringing. By now, with all the Junos, Little Miss Sunshines and other descendants of the Tenenbaum clan, the last thing we want is another wacky movie about your family. Moreover, a wacky family movie shot in a "cinema-verite gone wild" style that has been so repeatedly used that we have grown more or less invulnerable by its implicit nausea. Did I mention that the backdrop of this film is a wedding? A wedding in which the black sheep of the family, who is also a drug dealer, comes back so wackiness can ensue? At first glance, skeptical can moonlight as a delightful little euphemism for being highly fucking suspect. Which is why it is so gratifying to find that, in the midst of all these old and tired filmic conventions, Rachel Getting Married turned out to be something entirely new and fresh; glimmering with the spontaneity and unexpectedness that life repeatedly throws our way.

This is the wedding movie for the newest of generations. Recovering drug addicts, interracial marriage (which the film, wisely, does not touch on one bit), broken families, diverse walks of life, and a groom singing Neil Young's "Unknown Legend' as his wedding vowels. The whole time, despite Anne Hathaway's tirade of lunacy, you can't help but wish you knew these people and you were at that wedding.

9. Man on Wire

Essentially, the making of the greatest artistic crime of all time. The film recreates, follows and retrospects on Philippe Petit, who, in 1974, assembled a band of misfits and merrymakers to help realize his guerrilla dream of crossing the gap between the World Trade Centers. Along with last year's King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters and 2006's Murderball, Man On Wire continues the trend in fascinating and informative documentaries that, on page, have unorthodox, or even mundane, subject matters, yet continue to be surprisingly entertaining. Man On Wire unfolds like we're watching a sequential and coherent retelling of a man's dream. From the interviews of the Petit and the crew involve, to the dramatizations that flow almost seamlessly with the archival footage, to the final act, where Petit (told mostly in pictures) dances across a tight rope between the (at the time) two tallest buildings in the world. The buildings themselves add to the surrealness of the event. Petit's act of guerrilla love ironically acts as the polar opposite to the tragic symbol off hate that was 9/11.

8. Burn After Reading

Let it be known: this will be the first time, in any place (blog or otherwise), that someone first put forth the idea for a new alcoholic drink called "The Coen Brothers". Check it out. Get some Hennesy, mix it with some dry scotch, ginger ale, with a half pint of lager, half pint of cider and a splash of black currant. The drink, much like the namesake, will undoubtedly be off color, with a combination of ingredients that wouldn't normally fit together; nevertheless, the drink, no matter what your intentions, will get the job done (i.e. get you really, really drunk). However weak this aforementioned drink analogy may be, the point is that the Coens' retain the striking ability to take genre elements that would generally not blend together and make it work. Burn After Reading, while it may look like somewhat of a shift to lighter territory after last year's No Country For Old Men, continues with the same dark and ominous palette; but instead of an amalgamation of neo-Western and horror characteristics, they've opted out for their traditional brand of "comedy". And, like Fargo and The Big Lebowski before it, there's only so much nihilism and uncompromising cynicism before the laughter becomes exceedingly uncomfortable. Burn After Reading is a movie about stupid people propelled into very serious situations, unfolding in a manner so non sensible and puzzling that the viewer can't help but laugh at its farce. JK Simmons' character, playing a high-ranking CIA agent, sums up the intended blatant nihilism the movie portrays:

"What did we learn, Palmer?"
"I don't know, Sir"
"...I don't fucking know either"

7. Wall-E
Wall-E is essentially R2-D2 (Ben Burtt designed both the sounds of R2-D2 and Wall-E) falling in love in a world foretold by An Inconvenient Truth, with themes akin to 2001: A Space Odyssey and sci-fi gleam that would put Blade Runner, Star Wars and Close Encounters to shame. Wall-E, in most reviews (including this one), has the profound honor of being compared to some of the most illustrious staples of film, but none of said comparisons can sufficiently detail the particular qualities that make Wall-E so spectacular, heart-rending, poignant, and all-together, utterly enjoyable.

Lest we forget, Wall-E is a fucking CARTOON. Like the previously mentioned Waltz With Bashir, Wall-E is an animated film that continually progresses its medium into something more by encompassing the qualities that finely tunes and hones the characteristics that make animation exceptional. Wall-E is most likely the riskiest project that Pixar Animation (a studio that has the habit of repeatedly topping itself) has ever embarked on. The film had to take a movie that, for the first 45 minutes, had nothing but bloops and bleeps, with the occasional show tune (provided by the soundtrack of Hello, Dolly!) and sell it to a market targeted toward children. Moreover, the flick incorporated themes of technological determinism, and while not as poignant or profound as Plato's "allegory of the cave", said themes can still be considered a detriment to include in a children's movie. Fortunately, Pixar has found that very small common grey area where children, adults and serious cinephiles can all mutually get along. It's a delicate calculation where the most positive uses of narrative and animation are taken advantage of so easily that one wonders why all studios can't do what Pixar does.

I'm still looking forward to the day where Pixar releases their first bad movie. It would provide a benefit to the film community to see what makes Pixar work by studying the film that didn't. Here's hoping, for our sake, that day never comes.

6. Let the Right One In
When I was working the Twilight premier in Sherman Oaks, I must admit, I was curious. Why were so many people, albeit very young people (90 percent of them being girls), so hyped up about a Vampire movie? The Vampire genre, though it may be one of the longest and most prevalent myths in variety of cultures, has had the life sucked (get it? sucked) out of its limp body for years now. Murdered by the dominant hegemonic subculture (i.e. Hot Topic, Goth, AFI), the power of the Vampire myth has been commercialized, overrun by flash, fashion, shitty music with a deplorable lack of the themes that made said myth so prevalent in the first place: alienation and unrequited love.

It was not a surprise to watch Twilight and see that it was nothing more than an episode of One Tree Hill, set up in an arbitrary backdrop to attract genre fans thirsty to cleanse their dry, blood-thirsty appetite. While the story in Twilight was very much conducive to the themes of the Vampire myth (Bella moves to Washington [alienation] and falls in love with a Vampire who can't F her without eating her [unrequited love]), the flick, and I assume original source material, instead focuses more on lovelorn one-liners and seductive stares.Twilight had me yearning for a Vampire movie that serves its myth and history justice. Essentially, after the clusterfuck of the movie I just saw, I wanted to see the 28 Days Later of Vampire movies. Then, seemingly out of no where, enter Let The Right One In, a Swedish film also based on a novel and directed by Tomas Alfredson, which turned out to be not only the best Vampire film in recent history, but also surpasses the construct that would make Let The Right One In merely a "genre movie".

The film, focusing on 12 year old Oskar (a pale, blonde boy who lives with his divorced mother, isolated from his drunk father, and is castigated by his social surroundings) and his relationship with Eli, who is also a 12 year old ("more or less") sexually androgynous "girl", with long and dark black hair, and is strangely impervious to the cold, wearning nothing but a large T-shirt to act as a dress. In the midst of all the blood, violence, and burning bodies, Oskar and Eli's tender love-affair remains at the heart of the picture, and gives this little genre picture the characteristic to make it palpable enough for the mainstream to digest. This isn't to say that everything we love about the gore and violence of Vampire lore is missing.

Director Alfredson and cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema depict a world stuck in isolation in the blistering cold and snow-covered concrete castle that is Scandanavia. The white-filled atmosphere with tones of grey develops a pallete that is conducive for the deployment of the inevitable blood red. Moreover, there are at least three scenes in the film that leave you gasping for air as your clench your pillow to your face. It would be impetuous of me to divulge those scenes in great detail, but I will say that it involves blood, cats, fire, more blood, and floating body parts under water that makes Jaws look like Mamma Mia!.

5. The Wrestler
While the film's title track is written by Bruce Springstein, Darren Aronofsky's fourth feature, ressurecting the career of the former "Next Marlon Brando" Mickey Rourke, is more like a Bob Dylan song. With a structure that stays in line with the simplcicity of narrative conventions, but boasts strong pride and confidence in its content, The Wrestler is decevingly simple, but has enough layers conducive to multiple viewings and higher meanings. With Aronofsky directing as if it was his first feature, the film neither brags or repents for its lack of cinematic flash or narrative style. The film rests on the shoulders of both the performances and the empathatic qualities of the viewer, not necesarrily mutually exclusive.

Aronofsky and Rourke paint a portrait of a man lonely, broken, and dissolute; self-admittingly selfish and sometimes manipulative with the inability to change even though that's the thing he wants most. The portrait is painted like a labor of love, so delicately and precise that every moment seems purely true and beguiling, subsequently making Rouke's character (Randy "The Ram" Robinson) just as empathatic, and decevingly good-natured and affable. Rourke's likability is implicit in his pain. He accomplishes a monumental feat in making something as esoteric and as specific as the wrestling industry universal enough for its audience to connect to.

Charles Bukowski, in his deep-seated deaftism, once wrote, "If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul left to lose". The Wrestler is about that very experience. About men, set in a world that has already predetermined their failing destiny, consistetly falling short of their boyhood dreams. It's about men who invest themselves in pain--so close to dying that they finally can start to live.

4. Milk
The most fascinating thing about Harvey Milk was just how ordinary he was. He was flawed, idealistic, funny, affable, and, like so many of us, knew the world that surrounded him could be, and should be, better. Somehow, this ordinary man who wanted nothing more to live free became the symbol of a movement, and ultimately an unwilling martyr for a broader cause.

There is nothing facetious when one says that Harvey Milk was an ordinary man. But then again, most people would assume that being something as positive and admirable as say...a community organizer...would never be tarnished by the quick tongues of wicked men (specifically ones with names that rhyme with Judy and Riuliani *nudge nudge/wink wink*). So forgive me for the clarfication. Rather, Harvey Milk's (who was also a community organizer) accomplishments are that more impressive, laudable, and down right inspiring.

Everything about the film pays homage to the collective spirit of Harvey Milk's life. Sean Penn is remarkable in his best role to date and Josh Brolin continues to be one of the fastest rising actors in Hollywood. Director Gus Van Sant selectively uses his usual stylistic tics from arthouse lore to present something more intimate rather than excessive, providing some of the best shots of this year (his use of reflections, especially one shot of a whistle, is one of the most innovative, thought-provoking and poignant shots in the discourse of film history).

The reason why Van Sant and, writer, Dustin Lance Black, achieved in a profound adaptation of the breathtaking life of Harvey Milk is because they understood that the definitive quality of Milk's life was the normalcy of it. While other proposed adaptations of Milk's story focused mostly on Dan White (his destined assassin), subsequently disgusing a life more ordinary into a political-thriller, Van Sant found the fine distinction between intimacy and grandiosity; seamlessly making Milk a story about the celebration of life, the sorrow of death, and the joy of love, all whilst also being the best political docudrama in recent memory.

In the end, we can only lament over the fact that someone like Harvey Milk has not risen in our period of turmoil, hypocrisy and intolerance. Harvey Milk, in the 1970s, a time of great indifference and moral ambiguity, was able to conquer the Christian Right, defeat a proposition that outright discriminated against the homosexual community, and gained an endorsement from both President of the Untied States (Jimmy Carter) and future conservative symbol (Ronald Reagan) to speak out for gay rights. Today, the Christian Right is rampant, proposition 8 passed with self-righteous delight, and Barack Obama remained mum on the issue of gay marriage. Such a shame that Harvey Milk isn't here to recruit them.

3. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
I recently found out that David Fincher was way past his 40s. This, for some peculiar reason, surprised me to the point where I searched for three different clarifications that David Fincher was, in fact, not a 29 year old fresh out of NYU Film. Why did this make sense to me? Maybe it's cause his previous movies, no matter how much I love them, lack a certain quality and authenticity one can only gain from maturity. I knew all this knowing that Fight Club was made a decade ago. I lost track of time I guess. Which makes it apropos that his latest work, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a grand fable about a man who bends and breaks time by living backwards, is the film that made me realize that Fincher is older and wiser beyond his years.

Fincher's main gripe throughout most of his films is that there is something inherently unauthentic about the way he shoots. I guess the easiest way to sum it up is that Fincher always put style over substance (which is something I personally do not subscribe to, by the way). Critics usually point to Fincher's use of CG, claiming that his overall pallete consistently fails to add to the coherency of the final piece (i.e. "Alien 3 is too glossy", or "Fight Club matches its broken and tired rhetoric with the 'too cool for school'-esque attitude beind the camera", or "Zodiac fucking blows! PWNED. LOL!"). With that said, it's revealing, to say the least, that despite all of Fincher's guile and intentional trickery and attempt at artifice through the use of CG, Benjamin Button is his most profound, poignant, and outright beautiful movie he's ever made; to the point where even when you know the gorgeous sunrise settling on the cusp of the New Orleans bay is nothing more but photoshop deception, you really can't help but appreciate the moment and its intention.

Time, obviously, is of the essence, not just with the narrative but with the telling of the narrative as well. Clocking in at 2 hours and 40 minutes (five minutes shy of the neverending Australia), Button never felt like it was tedious, and that owning to the fact that Fincher uses his time wisely. Brad Pitt, in his most significant role of his career, serves as an adequate vessel and auspicious guide for the grand narrative. The film track's Pitt from an incubus of a fetus, to a middle aged 20 year old, a ravishing 45 year old, and finally a freshly baked, out of the oven 90 year old waiting in his death cradle. The film spans a large epoch of time, and yet, every piece is significant, important, and adds, or takes off, a layer to the grand tapestry that is Button's life.

The barrier that the Button must now hurdle to get to the echelon of history's great films is to try to live down all the Forrest Gump comparisons. While there are many, it doesn't take away from the sheer splendor of the film. What seemed like a practice in gimmicktry turned out to be a visionary statement, a distinctive musing on the ephemerality of life and death, and, ultimately, an all-together spiritually fulfilling voyage.

2. The Dark Knight
On July 26th, 2008, in my original review for The Dark Knight, I wrote:

"Almost every rousing review from the cesspool of the bloodthirsty 'intellectuals' we know as critics, mention two things: that Heath Ledger is a shoe in for a posthumous Academy Award nomination, and that The Dark Knight is a worthy addition to the myriad of American crime dramas. Stemming back all the way to the 1930s with Howard Hawks' Scarface, Americans have always had a penchant for the mafia, corrupted cops and anti-heroes. But as much as the Mafia has been part of the American mythos, comic books have had just as much of an impact on the shaping of American myths. While the public's fascination with the mob are slowly starting to wain (i.e. The Sopranos), viewers are looking elsewhere for their grand narratives. The "comic book movie" is now THE largest staple in Hollywood, with options being made on what studios think might be the next big thing, fanboys have been salavating from their mouths ever since X-Men hit big in 2000. However, it's not until eight years later, with Christopher Nolan at the helm of one of the most epic productions ever attempted, that someone finally nailed why comics, much like its mob-affiliated predecessor, have been so pervasive in American society."

Today, knowing that both the film and director Chris Nolan were snubbed by the Academy in this year's Oscar nominations, we can only hold more stock in the idea that the awards, accolades and praise are nothing more than temporary decorations. If anything, in the last few months, The Dark Knight has grown more pertinent, pervasive and important in the technique of filmmaking and the aesthetic discourse of cinema. Much like what The Godfather was to the gangster genre, The Dark Knight is the first to provide the superhero genre with a vision, one that was constantly suspenseful, hypnotic and thoroughly entertaining, all while walking the tightrope that connects magical realism with fabulism. Genre-defining and zeitgeist-setting, The Dark Knight shook us to our very core, making us question our ideological beliefs due to the fact that we want a rabid dog to remain victorious in his desire to light it up and watch it burn.

1. Slumdog Millionaire
The tide is changing. It started with the grim, harsh and often uninviting cultural texts such as The Departed, or even HBO's The Wire, culminated with the musing in moral ambiguity in No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood, and ended, this past summer, with the aforementioned number two pick, The Dark Knight. We get it. This society, or even this country, a place that remains the most affluent and fiscally successful (even in this climate) in the world, still sucks.

With Danny Boyle, a chameleon of an auteur, already tacking a barrage of subjects (Drugs [Trainspotting], Zombies [28 Days Later], Family [Millions], Sci-Fi [Sunshine]), makes his best film to date, and quite possibly one of the most entertaining masterpieces of the past few decades, Slumdog Millionaire. A film that break genre molds, a larger than life story about hardship, retribution, suffering, heartbreak, redemption, love and destiny, that not only provided an epilogue to the grim discourse of our country's path, but single handedly changed the tone to optimism and hope with the proper combination of the right music, joyous dance moves, and a kiss nothing short of spectacular.

I never thought I'd say that a movie centered around a game show originally hosted by Regis Philibin would also be, at it's core, Shakespearean, Dickensian, and whatever other author that is important enough have "ian" added to their names. I almost felt embarrassed anytime a patron at the Arclight would approach me and ask what my favorite film was this year. I would then have to explain what Slumdog was all about. It went something like this:

Patron: Slumdog Millionaire? Never heard of it.
Me: It's from the director of 28 Days Later and Trainspotting, if you've ever seen them?
Patron: Oh yeah! So it's kind of like that?
Me: Well, not exactly. It's kind of more...joyful? More like City of God than anything
Patron: City of God was..joyful?
Me: Well, not exactly. It's like...dammit, how do I explain it...
Patron: Well, just tell me what the damn movie is about, son.
Me: Ok. Well this kid who grows up in the slums is on the last question on India's version of 'Who Wants to Be a Millionaire'-
Patron: Wait. The Regis show?
Me: Yeah..
Patron:...k.
Me: And the host doesn't believe he got so far because he's just a dumb slum kid, so he must be cheating. So the polic kidnap and interrogate him. And through that we see his life through flashbacks.
Patron: So it's a movie about 'Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?'
Me: Not exact-
Patron: Can I get one for Max Payne?
Me:...Yeah.
Patron: Thanks, Kid.
Me: Have a good time Mr. Wahlberg.
Patron: Just call me Mark.

But Slumdog Millionaire is so much more than a movie about a gameshow. Much like what Boyle did in Trainspotting, where he delves right into unknown terrain, a subculture as abstruse as the drug world and makes it transcendent enough to relate to, Slumdog doesn't dive, but cannonballs into another subculture of sorts. The immense, disheveled and often ignored parts of India's deepest slums, and climbs out of it with extensive grace and uniforming humanity.

Every aspect of this film enters the bracket of near perfection, so pristine and confident in its techniqe and storytelling that filmmakers will be studying this for years to come. Boyle, in his years of experience with a variety of genres, knows how to press our buttons, hold us to the edge of our seats, and have us be part of a collective cathartic experience. His eye for what is visually transformational has never been sharper. Boyle shoots in the raw style he used for 28 Days Later and Trainspotting, adding a paradoxical irony to the fairy-tale like imagery. Narratively, he paints an intricate and abstract web of interrelations and interactions of fate disguised as chance, but finishes off the last stroke with a sweeping brush of coherent finality. The music provided by AH Rahman with contributions from M.I.A. drive the narrative forward, adding to a sense of a joyful culmination that the audience craves and longs for. And the actors, while all contributing a considerable risk from its conception (relatively unknowns and child actors for a large portion of the movie), all surpassed expectations and were perfectly casts. Most chiefly in the lead character's case, Jamal, played by Dev Petal with delicate intensity and an uncanny ability to evoke empathy with just the quiver of his voice and the compassion in his eyes.

Slumdog Millionaire isn't your typical fairy tale. While there is a happy ending, people suffer, are affected by irrational decisions and deal with the consequences, sometimes resulting in death. The hero isn't a Knight in shining armor, he's just a boy that lives day by day, paycheck by paycheck, but survives on what is often seen as foolish, immature and futile hope. The idea of hope, never more pervasive in our society than now, makes it more of a powder keg of emotions, rather than a simplistic fairy tale. It made us laugh, cry, cheer, boo, smile and cringe. But at the very end, when Boyle reveals the man behind the curtain, there is nothing but sheer joy and celebration sent down upon by the movie Gods. Slumdog Millionaire breaks our hearts, but, at its resolution, picks up the pieces and puts it back together.

You're the Best Around! No One's Ever Goin' To Bring Ya Down! (Music Edition!)

erichan22@berkeley.edu (BillyPilgrim) — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 05:58:00 +0000

Music
More and more, music is being shoved in to a context of "aesthetic limbo". Meaning that, while other artistic mediums such as films, television, theater and literature still have the proper outlets for quality to be ubiquitous and prevalent, music, for the most part, has a harder time placing steady footing in aesthetic quality. While many ostensible reasons can be considered, the fact of the matter is that in an age where top 40 radio no longer caters to a community where intent of quality counts, we still have, underneath the layers of shit and Jonas Brothers, an array of exciting and progressive music. This year we saw a scene gone increasingly postmodern: musical hybrids, folk revitalization, and mash-ups, all while providing new meanings and context.

13. Islands- Arm's Way

More bleak and sinister with its tone, Canada's Islands has finally matched up with their lyrical and thematic themes of their first record. While the band danced with an obsession over darkness with discussions of metaphysics and death, their sound (on their first record, Return to Sea), always had an upbeat approach; a predecessor to now overly-lauded Vampire Weekend. Taking a cue from their Canadian counterparts (another small, arguably more known, band from Canada called Arcade Fire), Islands matched their internal themes with their exterior, fusing a sound that, while drones on at first, catches us up in a cathartic moment seemingly out of nowhere in a midst of synth, keyboards, and theatrical, grandiose string/choral arrangements. What keeps the record from straying too far from pretentious "epicness" is the simple guitar riff and melody that made this band so damn catchy in the first place.

The Arm - Islands

12. Thao Ngyuen with The Get Down Stay Down- We Brave Bees Stings and All
Infectious, poppy, and youthful. Everything that has been said about Thao Ngyuen's debut record can be said for herself. Maybe because the album, in the midst of her amalgamation of pop and Dixie-folk, feels personal; so personal, in fact, that it emits a feel of universality. I feel like I know Nguyen. That I went to school with her, carried her books, fell in love, and mended a broken heart cause she dumped my ass to go on tour. I don't say this because she's Asian (ok. maybe a little), I say this because she's found that fine line that differentiates the difference between empathy and cheesiness. Ngyuen could totally fit the bill that Taylor Swift plays, but instead of resorting to desperate pleas of youthful ignorance, she sings about geography, swimming pools, and bags of hammers. All things that ostensibly have no relation, but, while listening to the record, it paints an incisive universal narrative.

Bag Of Hammers - Thao Nguyen

11. Beach House- Devotion
Every time I think of Baltimore, I think about the gritty backdrop set by HBO's "The Wire". Crooks dealing drugs at the "Terrace" and the "Towers" while a string of narcotic officers follow their every move. In my mind, Baltimore is the furthest place from the lovelorn, delicate, and energetic ambiance that Beach House has set in Devotion. The record, at times, sounds like a poetic retelling of a love gone sour by a ghost and her widow. The daze of the record matches its dreamy lyrics and the voice of Victoria Legrand sets up an echo-filled, world-weary stage. It's surprising to see that a record made with such pristine pop craftsmanship can be also be eerily evocative, as if it is being haunted by Legrand's ghost; but a friendly ghost, like Casper.

d.a.r.l.i.n.g. - beach house

10. Cut Copy- In Ghost Colors
Every year, there is always a couple of releases that, initially, come off as the greatest thing ever, the second coming even; then after a few weeks, you want nothing more than three bullets to the skull and a nice shallow ditch to sleep in. For example, the MGMT's "Kids" and the many array of Vampire Weekend singles constantly filled whatever real estate I have left in my song-filled head and the mainstream airwaves. Indie-pop, specifically electro-pop, was getting on my nerves. Then April rolls around, and Cut Copy releases "In Ghost Colors". In the midst of my newly found deep disdain for music that made me dance, Cut Copy, with their sweeping synth bravada, sing-along choruses, sonic atmospheres and delicate acoustic guitars when apropos, convinced me otherwise. What makes Cut Copy so marketable is their ability to balance out what they are obviously passionate about (electro, French House) and when said passion can be a bit too self-indulgent. In the end, we have a seamless collective culmination between traditional rock roots and electo-pop.

Hearts On Fire - Cut Copy

9. Hot Chip- Made in The Dark
I distinctly remember the moment where I realized UK-based electro-pop superstars Hot Chip was just not the harbinger of dance they were advertised to be. I was parked on a San Francisco street, on the corner of Market and and Franklin, waiting for a friend. My iPod went to shuffle, and Made in The Dark, the title track, started to play. Right then, it started pouring cats and dogs. The lights started to illuminate, I started seeing in tunnel vision, and everything to change to a 16x9 aspect ratio. All in all, I felt like I was in a Paul Thomas Anderson movie, singing along with Julianne Moore, parked at some sketchy street in the bay area, right after both our respective fathers passed away from a supposed drug overdose (sounds like a plausible plot, yes?). My gaze was broken when the friend I was waiting for knocked on my window. I never experienced that moment again (sober, at least). I've come to the understanding that Made in the Dark sums up so perfectly everything paradoxically frustrating, joyful and peculiar about life. Yes, that we cheesy, but so is Hot Chip, so I'm glad to be in the same boat as them.

Ready For The Floor - Hot Chip

8. Sigur Ros- Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust
If you look at Sigur Ros' collective catalogue, I don't think you can ever pick out one album and say it is one consistent piece of work; rather, you can pick a lot of individual songs and compile it to a "greatest hits"-esque compilation. This is, and probably will always be (judging from this album) their problem. But at the end of the day, in the midst of all the fat Sigur Ros so lovingly produces, there is an overabundance of moments in their songs that speak cathartic volumes, volumes so loud that you can't help but disregard the lesser, more spacious songs on the record. Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust (roughly translating to "With a Buzz in our Ear, We Play Endlessly"), starts off with a hint of a gamechanger in that makes Gobbledigook, a simple pop song with acoustic guitar layers and a driving drum beat. The next song, Inni Mer Syngur Vitleysingur is one of Sigur Ros' best songs, piecing together everything that makes Sigur Ros so distinct and unique (exuberant horns, exquisite strings and an emotional breakdown and release) all in a short, succinct construct that doesn't take more than nine minutes. It seemed that Sigur Ros finally fallen into the timeless mantra of "less is more", but at the halfway mark of the record, the same drab that tore down Takk (their previous record) remained consistent. The biggest promise of this record is the idea that Sigur Ros can evolve into the band we've all been waiting for. We already have enough post-rock bands and incarnations of David Bryant to provide spacious, atmospheric background noise.

Sigur 6 (Untitled) - Sigur Ros

7. Deerhunter- Microcastle
I have a problem with psych-pop/shoegaze. Not so much a problem, more like a passionate hate for all of it. For the most part, I hear/see a bunch of "some college" educated hipsters picking up the guitar for the first time, plugging in some ambient noise, strumming a guitar in open D, and pretending that they're Radiohead. But then I heard Deerhunter and their debut Cryptograms and my opinions changed slightly. This year, they released Microcastle and my opinions changed dramatically. What the band has done is reinvention. The type of reinvention that takes an idea and places it in a context where it doesn't belong. The type that creates a sound that captures a society's current anxiety and doctrinal alienation. All this coming from a combination of vast ideas (apathy, nihilism, the importance of art) and shrewd instrumentation (from doo-wop to laconic ambiance).

Cryptograms - Deerhunter

6. Neil Young- Sugar Mountain: Live at Canterbury House 1968
There's always something exciting about a Neil Young live record, especially when it's just Neil, himself, sitting there with a piano and an acoustic guitar pandering to the audience with his trademark witty banter. "Sugar Mountain", like his previous live album (2007's "Live at Massey Hall 1971"), is distinctive by the fact that Young, at this time, was only in his mid-20s. Yet, with a voice that feels both innocent and mature, Young sounds like he's singing with more wisdom and veracity than any experienced veteran; an old man stuck in a younger man's body. Young's raw natural talent, his ability to make the simplest of chords sound fresh and new, his lyrical imagery and his implicit charisma make him one of the greatest American singer/songwriters of all time, creating a capacity for which Young's legacy transcends the detriments of time. I saw Neil Young recently at his annual Bridge School Benefit at Mountain View, CA. I remember watching him rock what felt like a 15 minute solo to "Spirit Road". The only thing that kept repeating in my head was, "Goddamn, 40 years later and motherfucker still has it".

Sugar Mountain [Live - Canterbury House 1968] - NEIL YOUNG

5. Bon Iver- For Emma, Forever Ago
I'm one of many who subscribe to the idea that the best of music has the uncanny capacity to exude the emotions of the author at the time of recording. For most artists, a cushy recording studio with equipment ranging in the multiple thousands is a place of creative inspiration (i.e. the paycheck). So it is no surprise that most mainstream music today is the equivalent to eating cat food for brunch. The saving grace of cathartic music is implicit in artists like Justin Vernon, otherwise known as Bon Iver (translation: Good Winter). Every review of his debut record, For Emma, Forever Ago, recites Vernon's backstory that eventually led up to the release of his first record. Vernon, fresh off a breakup with his long time band DeYarmond Edison decides to go through a, sort of, creative walkabout and locks himself in a faraway cabin in Wisconsin for four months. This story wouldn't be as amazing if we didn't hear it in the record. When listening to his songs, a testament to a lonely man trapped in a corner only with a guitar, the quaint imagery of his surronding nature encircles you and goosebumps form as his voice trembles in response to the harshest of colds. Toward the end, a dreadful angst toward a woman you never met before, named Emma, starts to develop.

Skinny Love - Bon Iver

4. TV on the Radio- Dear Science
Being one of the, if not "THE", most musically eclectic bands in the past half-decade is an immense title to live up to. What usually happens is that "THE" band's first record appears, chalked up with a dense and sonic backdrop, mixed in with a wholly new musical texture none of its predecessors have conducted before. Then, a few years later, the band is condemned by falling into the mainstream. Falling out of taste with the avant garde and being shunned for making a three minute pop song. TV on the Radio can, arguably, be guilty of this. So why isn't this a problem? Because in the midst of power-pop, thrilling and urgent electro beats, and borderline kitsch synth, the themes and tones that TV on the Radio have perservered in within the last few years stays true to form. TV on the Radio, without knowing, has become the zeitgeist band of the new millineum. While other bands may title albums that signal that they are the commentary for the sign of the times, TV on the Radio, with "Dear Science" has perfectly captured the sound of the times. Any band can spew out didactic rhetoric, but it is only TV on the Radio that has captured the essence of what is happening, the only band that is evocative of what we smell in the air. TV on the Radio has given us an album that spells dread, fear, and doubt cross-bred with brash hooks, looping synth guitars and transcendent lyrical verses. An amalgamation that leads to uncertainty, disorder and perplexity; a bastion of confusion that irrevocably leads to the final exit labeled "audacious hope".

Golden Age - TV On The Radio

3. Girl Talk- Feed The Animals
The concept of a mash-up is not new in musical vernacular. Stemming back all the way from Run-DMC and Aerosmith's collaboration, the idea of two things coming together that usually have no business concerning each other has always been an enticing concept. 20 years later and people still eat up the contradictory concept, but with a less credulous acceptance of said concept. It seems that every month, there is a new Jay-Z mash up with The Beatles, Radiohead or Oasis, or a Led Zeppelin mash up with Howlin' Wolf or Muddy Waters. With the ubiquity of aspiring DJs and electronic artists belching out an array of subpar ironic mash-ups, the welcome wagon for a guy like Greg Gillis (otherwise known as Girl Talk) is well received. What makes Girl Talk work, while thousands of other blogers and Digg-hounds consistently fail with their achievements in lameness, is his consciousness of pop culture. Essentially, Gillis is nothing more than a connoisseur of Top 40 moments, stringing along together the little moments in any given song and molding them to coalesce into one long, epic moment. My last final at Berkeley, in a class concerning the intricacies of modern and postmodern movements, I constantly referred to Gillis as the quintessential product of postmodernism, or recontextualization. Constantly self-referential, culturally-conscious, and an ability to pick out the things that make collective individuals tick, Gillis' greatest achievement is taking previously defined artifaces and manipulating them to create a whole new perspective. Feed The Animals addresses the notion that mash-ups are nothing but unoriginal callbacks to nostalgia; with that notion considered, it is that much more impressive to see that Gillis can remain utterly original and unique without resorting to cheap tricks or trend-inspired moves, and only with his uncanny ability to constantly redefine.

Still Here - Girl Talk

2. Conor Oberst- Conor Oberst
I hate to be so disheartening, but am I the only one that thinks that Conor Oberst is about ten steps away from a finger on a trigger? His last three records, including his Merge Records self-titled debut, focuses on escapism as a healing entity; spoken in an almost theological perspective. No one, not even his obvious predecessors like Dylan or Young, has spoken, or sung, with more angst and desire to break away from his given surroundings. Embracing the lonesome echo of a folk guitar and the therapuetic notes of a slide, Oberst sings about loneliness, spirituality, and metaphysical inquiries. The things you would expect a Junior in College to mull over about, but Oberst never went to College. Instead, he went off on the road, writing records in Cassadaga, Florida (the palm reader's capital) and Teopoztlan, Mexico (the birth place, according to Aztec legend, of Quetzalcoatl). Oberst, traditionally using his position as the predestined orator of his generation as a protestor of unrequited lovelorn and a lost childhood, has evolved into a more sophisticated spokesman. Pessimistic in his attitude, Oberst remains hopeful in spiritual discovery, as if finding commune in places of supposed spirituality would cleans him of the cultural and moral catastrophes that lay behind him. In the end, the one thing that keeps Oberst interesting is his way with words. Gushing with a collection of words that seem to be lifted with a Bartlet's quote book, Oberst can touch a nerve with the precise use of syntax and flow. At the close of the record, when you hear him sing: "If I go to heaven, I'd be bored as hell like a crying baby at a bottom of a well", we can't help but think that we know exactly what he's talking about.

Cape Canaveral - Conor Oberst

1. Fleet Foxes- Fleet Foxes
In the ripe period of mental and spiritual maturity most call "the early 20s", some of us go to college, others get jobs, and the very few participate in what the mainstream sees as a giant parade of delusion. Most people go for the former. Being that it is the safe route, we pack away our dreams in replace for new ones: G5 jets, HDTV and a trust fun for the kids. The latter, in which millions of people dream of and about thirteen accomplish, is a hard road to tread on. For Robin Pecknold and Skyler Skjelset of Seattle's Fleet Foxes, it was a road worth treading, and it obviously paid off for them. Fleet Foxes is essentially the personification of the American dream. Two fresh-faced kids move to a big city (Seattle) and just start playing music. People start to notice, bloggers start to blog, Myspace hits rise, and SubPop Records calls and says, "Hey. We want to take advantage of your recent popularity. Want to give it a shot?" Out comes their debut self titled record. A mix of Neil Young, The Beach Boys and My Morning Jacket, with glorious harmonies and rural reverbs galore, Fleet Foxes became the most talked about record of the year. It's not just the hype, as Boobie Miles in Friday Night Lights once said (what an obscure reference, Eric.), hype implies something that isn't real. Fleet Foxes is real, or as Boobie Miles would say, the "illest". Picking up this album well after the supposed hype, I had heavy expectations. Reading reviews that compare this to Neil Young's After The Goldrush, I was highly skeptical. Nevertheless, by the end, I don't remember the last time I fell in love with a record like this. All from a bunch of kids, no older than I am, that, one day, decided to make a record. The record's second track, "White Winter Hymnal", is the best showcase for what makes the band special. Intricate harmonies and T.S. Eliot-esque imagery, the boys sing:

I was following the pack/All swallowed in their coats/With scarves of red tied round their throats/To keep their little heads from falling in the snow/And I turned round and there you go/And Michael you would fall/And turn the white snow red as strawberries in the summertime.

An amalgamation of Eagles-esque classic rock, Nick Drake Folk, AM Country, Beach Boys California Pop, and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young visual harmonies, Fleet Foxes encompasses everything truly great about not only American music, but the American spirit.

White Winter Hymnal - Fleet Foxes

You're the Best Around! No One's Ever Goin' To Bring Ya Down! (TV Edition!)

erichan22@berkeley.edu (BillyPilgrim) — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 03:45:00 +0000

I've always been one for the obligatory best of list. I don't know why I do it. Hell, I don't even know why I publish half of my soap-box standing, college-literate spewing, rolling-eyes inducing rhetoric. I think it might be because no one else really wants to hear what I think is the best of the best in the past year accept myself (i.e. this blog, serving as a technological mirror image of myself). So without further ado, and in the spirit of the holiday season (happy birthday Jesus!), I bring to you:

Cream colored ponies and crisp apple studels

Doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles

Wild geeze that fly with the moon their wings

These are a few of my favorite things.

TELEVISION

2008 was a special year. It marked the end of the Second Golden Age of Television, a period that proved that television can, in fact, say just as much, and arguably more succinctly, than its more culturally accepted big brother: films. With shows like The Sopranos and The Wire ending their respective grand opus', future classics like Pushing Daisies cancelled due to the pervasive ignorance of the American viewing public, and once promising epics like Heroes turning out to be nothing but a massive clusterfuck, we're now in a new age of mediocrity; a new hybrid of "reality" game shows and middle aged-women and/or hyphy-esque Asians dancing for glorified recognition by the dumbest of the American public. Despite this grim outlook, there was some pretty damn good shows this year, all of which I spent countless hours locked in my room eating flaming hot cheetos with a bucket next to my bed, just in case.

10. The Daily Show/The Colbert Report
It's a one-two punch. Stewart comes on and does what any great comedian does, restates an event or news story exactly as it happens with some dry wit that people can easily see through the barriers and fully realize how ridiculous said event/news story is. Colbert comes on, full fledged with his arsenal of satirical weapons, restating the same events but with the intent of defending it. The critique comes full circle. Point out what they see as unjust and ridiculous, then refute the inevitable refutation by offering a pseudo-refutation. All this proves to be points that are both poignant and thought provoking all while hilarity ensues. When the nation's best pundits come from a network that is preceded by Sarah Silverman, there is something horribly wrong with the media.

10. The Office
Still consistently one of the funniest shows on network television. However, this season, with an equal amount of hit and misses, has fallen flat and so inconsistent that when asked about what the show is about, the answer "A bunch of idiots in an office..with one normal couple" is actually more than pertinent now. With that said, it's quite telling to say that this show still makes me laugh.

9. Weeds
Almost forgot about this one until i saw an advertisement with Mary Louise Parker and suddenly remembered that she is my ideal woman. This is Showtime's 'Sopranos', a story about family set in an arbitrary backdrop with the standard prerequisites of violence, conflict, hypocrisy, and crime. While some shows fall into this pit of television cliche, Weeds has consistently highlighted the fine line between drama and comedy. One second, Kevin Nealon is trying to get laid by an illegal immigrant, the next, Mary Louise Parker is making a heart wrenching phone call to her son, who she feels she has failed. Here's where I want to use my obligatory marijuana joke. I have a couple. For example, "Finally, a show about marijuana that doesn't require you to get high to relate to it." That one is pretty good, no?

8. The 2008 Election
I've only been on this dying Earth for 22 years, which is old enough to remember the days of Reagan and welfare queens, Clinton and his blow job, and a stolen election, and already I can't wait to see all of the respective biopics. Despite a plethora of political controversy to look back fondly upon, the 2008 election was the MOST FUN a political junkie can ever have. From McCain's "That One" to Sarah Palin entering the public discourse of American culture, there was nothing but entertainment on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC or any news/media outlet. With more twist and turns than an episode of Gossip Girl, viewers across the states were on the edge of their seats all wondering what ridiculous thing Palin was going to say next (she said a lot of things), or if Joey the Shark was going to school her in the debates (he didn't really), or if McCain was actually as dumb as he lets on to be (he really isn't; Joe the Plumber is, but not Joe the McCain). Furthermore, we had a variety of other shows that benefited from taking fodder at the election: Tina Fey, SNL, The Daily Show, The View, and CNN's magic hologram wall. All the drama culminated on election night, November 4th, 2008, where McCain spoke to what seemed like a private party conceding that his party was out of touch, and Obama, a man that seemingly came out of nowhere with more charisma in his finger than Shirley Fucking Temple, spoke to a crowd of multiple thousands, reiterating the one overarching theme that now serves as our nation's current zeitgeist: hope.

7. Dexter
Not my favorite season, by any means, but every time I see Michael C. Hall in his light green henley with black leather gloves, I get a mental hard-on. There's nothing more exhilarating than to see Dexter performing a coup de gras on one of his finely researched victims, pontificating about the fine balance of life and death, justice and virtue, or whatever other contrived, played-out dichotomies modern entertainment has endlessly endured. What makes Dexter so special is that you can forgive the errors that make it such a normal television show; the qualities that can transform the show into just another CBS buzz-kill for TV-watchers aged 64 and younger. At the end of the show, you still have Dexter towering over his victim wielding a giant knife and all is forgiven.

6. 30 Rock
NBC doesn't do a lot that is considered successful, laudable, or even marketable. Their flagship drama is full of holes so large Arnold can drive his hummers through it. Their summer replacement program consisted a callback to nostalgia that was too soon, too plenty. And they have a knack for making a big deal about shows that no one really cares about anymore (i.e. Shane West is coming back to the ER? I'm so there). With that being said, kudos to NBC for sticking with the only show that still makes them relevant: 30 Rock. Smart, snarky, creative, and paradoxically sophisticated, Tina Fey, along with a terrific supporting cast consisting of Alec Baldwin, has built a live action version of 'The Simpsons', comprised of vital information for our everyday lives, such as: 'Live every week like it's shark week'. Thank you Tina Fey. I sure will.

5. It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
The most offensive and abrasive show on television today; containing no semblance of political correctness and constantly crossing lines. The plots are juvenile, but oddly elaborate and well thought out, subsequently, and accidentally, projecting a statement on a material-based culture that is too concerned with its relative cultural standards, norms and mores. A mix between Arrested Development and Seinfeld, It's Always Sunny banks on that timeless comedy credo: If something makes us uncomfortable, make fun of it.

4. Mad Men
The last great hope for the Second Golden Age of Television. If you need any proof, that at one point in our culture, television was the one great American contribution to the arts, all you need to do is watch the production value, picturesque cinematography, intricately plotted stories, and superb acting caliber of the already mercilessly lauded, Mad Men. Don Draper remains one of the most intriguing and enigmatic characters of his time, Matthew Weiner's obsessive attention to detail sets the tone for authenticity, and the women of Mad Men (although continually ignored by the award season's accolades) are three of the most talented actresses working today, measuring the female archtypes that define our modern epochs of time. Mad Men is simply "The Godfather" of television.

3. Pushing Daisies
I've always wanted to see a major network develop some sort of subsidiary station called "Cancelled TV". Think about it. Some of our most beloved, important, culturally relevant, and "classic" television were ones that were cut off too soon due to the pervasive ignorance of the American viewing public (Damn yous reality TV!). Imagine the programming. It would be cheap to secure the rights and they'll have constant reruns of Arrested Development, Firefly, Veronica Mars, Wonderfalls, Freaks and Geeks, Dead Like Me, My So Called Life, Twin Peaks, etc. This idea proves to be more pertinent more than ever due to the recent, and unjust, cancellation of critic favorite Pushing Daisies, one of the most intelligent, hilarious, and blissfully joyful shows ever created in recent memory. I defy you to find another show that elicits a smile from your face for all of the 42 minutes of showtime. Daisies premiered to about 15 million viewers and had a steady 8-10 million average throughout its first season. ABC, in their infinite wisdom, decided, in lieu of the recent writer's strike, not to bring back the show to finish off its first season. After a whole year of being off air, Daisies returned for its second season, better and funnier than ever, with a lack of advertising, a lack of press, and a huge lack of ratings. The show became the new lost cause for fanboys and geeks across the states, pushing for "Save Daisies" campaigns and sending bouquets of daisies, slices of pies, and (most effectively) hives of bees to ABC execs. Despite the lavish campaign, ABC pulled the plug on the show and the last three episodes are to be aired after the new year. Brainchild Bryan Fuller has returned to Heroes, a show he made relevant, to rescue it from middling reviews and ratings. Left in the dust is 23 episodes of hilarity, warm hearts, hugs and kisses, romantic whimsy, chocolate covered pies, and cleavage baring ladies singing to their hearts content. I'm raising a glass to you pie maker. Thanks for the good pie.

2. The Wire

'nuff said.

1. Lost
Hands down, one of the most important pieces of cultural work in American culture. Along with The Sopranos, Sex and the City, and The Wire, Lost was among one of the first born in the beginning of the Second Golden Age of Television. Television shows that refused to fall into the pitfalls of major network programming cliches. Now was an era with no more laugh tracks, no more cues to elicit a predigested feeling, no more stereotypes and overused archetypes; but, instead, more of a focus on the grey areas of life -- an analytical observation of a world saturated in a postmodern construct. What is the difference between good and evil? What are the intricacies of the post-9/11 definition of humanity? We've always had cultural works to speak to said issues, but never before had television been so influential in the American consciousness. Lost serves to be a unique example, being that it is one of the last sons of the Second Golden Age, and the only show, in the history of television, that has planned an end date (presenting a more mature outlook on television, one that puts quality over ratings and profit). The show continues to be more thrilling than ever. Aesthetically, the show shot in Hawaii provides a natural palate that has stayed consistent since the show's inception. The actors, and their respective characters, are more like players from an elaborate stage play of a masterfully epic film. The involuted weaving of scientific, literary, and historical influence continue to incorporate the kind of esoteric enjoyment that was once only reserved for pretentious snobs or fanboys, but has since relinquished to the mainstream. Moreover, what makes the show hit all strides is the pure excitement it provokes. Surprising, resonant, action-packed and exhilarating. Each episode gives us a piece of a puzzle we've all been yearning to finish, and that same piece changes the picture from what we once thought it was. Lastly, the show is filled with emotionally-charged cathartic moments, the kind that raise the tiniest of hairs and stirs up the heaviest of tears. Like the scene below, where Desmond, after eight years of separation from his long-lost love, Penny, finally makes contact with her via phone. The results are nothing short of breathtaking.

Another Brick in The Wall: How Obama's "New Birth of Freedom" was Overshadowed by "Yes on 8"

erichan22@berkeley.edu (BillyPilgrim) — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 23:15:00 +0000

On the same night this man said this:

“America today is a world away from the cruel and prideful bigotry of that time. There is no better evidence of this than the election of an African American to the presidency of the United States. Let there be no reason now for any American to fail to cherish their citizenship in this, the greatest nation on Earth.”
-John McCain (Concession Speech; November 4th, 2008)

and this other guy, I think you might have heard of him, said this:

Finish him! Flawless Victory

“This is our time, to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth, that, out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope. And where we are met with cynicism and doubts and those who tell us that we can't, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can.”
-Barack Obama (Acceptance Speech; November 4th, 2008)

With that said, it’s hard to believe that I can still be reading this:

“Homosexuality is not a race, its a choice. Unlike with homosexuality, the Bible does not explicitly state that sexual activity between married interacial, hertero-couples is a sin. Trying to justify and protect a sexually deviant behavior is wrong. Period.”
-George (Some guy on a webboard)

also this:

Emily: prop 8 passed! praise the LORD!
Ana: YES!
Helen: separate state and church... what happened to not imposing your ideals on others? 
Ana: There is NO such thing as separation of church and state... It comes from a letter, and it is refering to law not imposing the church..
Andrew: If you also want to legalize abortion, then gay marriage must be prevented because gay marriage legally brings down Roe v Wade.
-Facebook Status comments on November 5th, 2008 (full names are not given to protect identities)

I tried to find some literature or scholarly rhetoric justifying the passing of California Proposition Yes on 8 (“protecting marriage”- the most intellectually insulting euphemism I have ever heard), but in all God-given honesty, I could not find one single piece that can sufficiently summarize a rational and coherent motive to justify said proposition. So George, from a political action committee webboard and two girls on Facebook who have undoubtedly never heard of the words Leviticus, Old Mosaic, or probably even Jesus Christ, will have to suffice. Moreover, George and Facebook have unraveled the one thing the proponents of Yes On 8 tried so unsuccessfully to hide: the one motive behind all of Prop 8 was not our children (“Well someone please think of the children!”- Mrs. Joy, The Simpsons), it was protecting what one fat Roman fuck in the early days of civilization, jealous of Plato and Socrates, said about two dudes sleeping in the same bed with each other. Christianity, my friends (as John McCain would say), is the one thing holding us back from being a complete and rational society.

I didn’t want to write this now. I wanted it to wait it out a week or two, maybe even months. I wanted to soak up the events surrounding it, let people like Bill Maher, Cornel West, Salman Rushdie and other prominent social/political commentators point out the inherent contradiction for me: that on the same night that the first African-American citizen was elected the most powerful man on the face of this plane, three states were added to 27 others that strip away inalienable rights to a sect of people, subsequently establishing a counter intuitive mantra that while we believe “all men are created equal”, that’s not true if you’re different. Because different comes with the shallow and potentially dangerous territory of the desire not to understand. And, like so many of the most “righteous” and “moral” people in this great country of ours have continually shown time and time again, if you can’t understand something then it’s best to be afraid.

One Small Step For Man, One Giant Leap Back for Mankind
All this progress that our local and cable news have been spewing about since last night has got me thinking. Why is that, even though the United States is so progressively behind the rest of the industrialized first world nations (i.e. Europe), we still stand to insist that we are the beacon of hope, equality and prosperity? We’re not like Switzerland, that has universal health care. We’re not like Italy, where gay marriage is legalized (and the fucking POPE lives there). We’re not like the Netherlands, where marijuana is legalized. We’re not like Canada where income inequality is virtually non-existent and there is actually a living wage (as opposed to a 450-1 dollar inequality between CEOs and their employees in the States). We’re not like the rest of the 1st-world, modern countries that all signed the Kyoto Protocol (with the exception of Australia due to their own standards of curbing greenhouse emissions) [EDIT: Apparently, Australia has joined Kyoto. Thank you Bill Wall for my daily Australian current events dosage]. As much as we love to brag that America is the land of equal opportunity, we’re nothing but the equivalent of scared Neanderthals hiding in the back of our caves, afraid of the sun; while the rest of the world is already reinventing the wheel. The one credit to America’s ability to change is given in the context of an aggressive hostility from its people. In other words, we have committed so many colossal fuck ups that it is amazing that we even got out of them. And while human nature is inherently angry, fearful and ultimately retarded, there has never been a case so specific and unique as the United States of America, because, remember, before we were a salad bowl, we were a melting pot, and within this melting pot, if you didn’t melt and become fondue, then you were casts out as goat cheese.

I’m sure people don’t need another history lesson, but for the sake of George and the Facebook morons, let’s just recap:

Native Americans!!!
- Wars of the East of Mississippi in 1775- Wars of the West in 1917
- Blankets full of small pox and dysentery
- Genocide, massacres, dead baby scalps, imposition of treaties, forced displacement (or the one long giant fuckfest known as the Trail of Tears)
- The Manifest Destiny: Quasi-Religious doctrine claiming God wanted us to expand to the West and "kill all dem damn injuns". Tens of thousands were slaughtered within the first two years. (Sound familiar? West with East and Injuns with Iraqis).

Latin Americans!!!
-Hispanophobia/"The Black Legend": Tracing back all the way from the Spanish Empire, Hispanophobia materialized behind the folklore of "The Black Legends", where Spaniards were viewed, by Anglos, as "unusually cruel, avaricious, treacherous, fanatical, superstitious, hot blooded, corrupt, decadent, indolent, and authoritarian...The Black Legend informed Anglo Americans judgements about political, economic, religious and social forces that shaped Spanish provinces from Florida to California". Subsequently:
- The Texas Revolution
- The Chicano Movement
- The United Farm Workers
- The Brown Berets

Asian Americans!!!
California Gold Rush- Chinese were quickly sent to Central Pacific Railroad to work in large groups with no money. Apparently, slavery as an institution in the states began to waver away, since the popular consensus understood that it was immoral. So let’s just get another sect of minorities and pay them less to nothing instead.
-The Workingman's Party/Supreme Order of Caucasians: Chinese blamed for low wages. Anti-Oriental groups begin to spread with 64 chapters in California alone.
- The Chinese Exclusion Act: Excluded Orientals from setting a foot on the soil of the US, under penalty of imprisonment or deportation. Act was continued in 1892 with the Geary Act and in 1924 with the Immigration Act of 1924.
- Executive Order 9066: Just when you thought it was over, anti-Japanese American bill was signed (not unlike Executive Order 66 in Revenge of The Sith, except Jedis got their revenge three episodes later; we're still waiting for ours).

African Americans!!!
- Black People!!!: The most ever present of all discrimination in the United States, the reason why (if you are black), so many people nod their heads to you as they walk up and down the street. It’s most likely a symbolic gesture saying, “Hey, my bad”.
- Slavery: So there was this little thing called slavery back in the day, where thousands of Africans were shipped over to serve as slaves. In 1860, there were about 385,000 slave owners out of 1.5 million white families.
- Reconstruction: Jim Crow laws, racial segregation, disenfranchisement, exploitation, violence, and murder all were committed for a span of a century; in a time where Americans were fully aware of the American ideals established in our Constitution, but still, African-Americans were nothing but second class citizens. It was not until the beginning of the American Civil Rights movement where things finally began to change, culminating one night ago, where Barack Obama became the first African-American President.

And now, November 5th, 2008, after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1865, woman's suffrage, interracial marriage, the Civil Rights Movement, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Fannie Lou Hamer, Mario Savio, The Brown Berets, Matthew Shepherd, etc., we still can't find it within ourselves to look at our own afflictions and inherent prejudice and say, "No". Instead of steadily walking the righteous path, we stumble blindly forward in a cycle, consequently repeating history.

Ring Them Bells, Freedom Has Come and Gone
Yes on 8 preached the idea of "traditional" marriage. I find it hard to exude scholarship, or even authenticity, when discussing such an obscure, indeterminate, and ambiguous subject that is the institutionalization of love. Love is an emotion; it is not an inanimate object, it is not something you can grab, fix, cut up, study, or have detailed, scientific data and facts to fully understand its skeleton and nature. Love is a concept not created by God or what silly little man with a pen and a robe; it's a feeling, and when we experience it, we know what it is without having to truly define it. Yes on 8, contrarily, believe that, "Yes", we can label what love is. If marriage is the single most symbolic form of true love between any persons, then it should be between a man and a woman. Why? Because it's tradition. If I am the only one that sees the backwards and, let me be frank, fucked up logic here, then I'd like some Oxycontin to calm me down. Tradition, much like the concept of love, is ambiguous; in other words, it is another term that relies solely on the culture or society that inhabits it (i.e. cultural relativism). However, one can argue that when Yes on 8 speak about tradition, they're talking about Christian tradition. Let us, for the sake of argument, pretend that our country and its founding fathers wanted the Bible and its scripture to dictate laws. Even then, what the Bible does say about marriage is very vague. In Genesis 2:23, Adam and Eve are created. Theologians cling onto the fact that Adam was a man and Eve was a woman and that was God's intent, therefore it must be that marriage be between a man and a woman. That equation is like having the transitive property with two variables. It is, essentially, illogical. Moreover, in Ephesians 5:22, theologians point out the rules of a successful marriage. The long short of it is that married couples should love each other to keep their marriage lasting. Yep, not exaggerating. So what's the real Christian tradition of marriage? I think Jon Stewart, in his own rant about the illogical step backwards in the passing of Yes on 8, said it best:

"Yes. Traditional marriage. When your theft Lord decides for the purpose of increasing his work force, that you, a pig farmer on his estate, will marry one of the sloth women who cleans out the castle sess pit. Doesn't matter which one. So he bribes the Archbishop to bind you in marriage and the King, who was passing through the village on his way to a witch burning, takes advantage of the right of premanocta to deflower your bride. Then you have eleven children, three of whom survive before dying of the plague at age twenty-six. Tradddition!"
-Jon Stewart (The Daily Show, November 3rd 2008)

Undoubtedly, the proponents of Prop 8, like any other opposition against the right step to progression, won this with fear; and if I have learned anything about politics based on my short 22 span on this Earth, anyone can win or pass anything with the proper application of fear and children. In a truly Roveian move, Yes on Prop 8 pulled the right levers by attributing marriage equality with the threatening of children; they won this by pandering with that inherent bigotry that makes us believe in the deep, inhabited fears of homosexuals around children. While most logical people will find this repulsive and, arguably, immoral, some have found it to be clever, effective, and most resourceful. What drives a sect of people to practice such hateful rhetoric and implement such disreputable methods? Institutionalized religion. Namely, in this country, Christianity.

Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet
In retrospect, I question myself over how naive I was when believing that California would be the third state with enough foresight to continue on with progressive thinking. It is only clear to me now that the deck was stacked up against No on Prop 8. With two or the largest Christian organizations in America contributing vast sums of money (The Knights of Columbus and the Church of Latter Day Saints [I know what you're thinking. Mormons protecting traditional marriage?]), the signs were never more ubiquitous and hope has never been so truncated.

Let me be clear, in an attempt to not only be seen as a blasphemous, anti-religious, hate monger. I fully understand and accept the positive qualities of religion. Human beings, intrinsically, are built with the capacity to believe, hope, and ultimately have faith. Faith has been a prominent characteristic in the progression of human kind. Moral crusaders like Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. used faith as a catalyst to bring about equality and freedom to those who sought to have it. Yes, faith, when applied properly, can be a very strong resource.

However.

The amount of bloodshed, wars, murders, rapes, hostile take-overs, and discrimination in the name of Jesus, Allah, Muhammad, Vishnu, Buddah, Mick Jagger, etc. have been staggering in human history. In Christianity alone, we have the Crusades, The French Wars of Religion, and the Thirty Years War. In Islam, the term Jihad ("to strive or struggle") is recognized all across the world, and has been applied throughout the history of the world in the battlegrounds of early Persian and Byzantine Empires. More exampels include the Reconquista, or the Recapturing, in which, for 800 years, Christian Kingdoms of Iberian and Muslim States destroyed each other. The modern day war for the State of Israel rages on between zionist Jews and extremist Muslims. The Shinto, a relatively peaceful tradition, promoted the religious concept of hakko ichiu, the idea that an emperor is divinely ordained by the touch of God, which began the Second Sino-Japanese War.

Religion, I put forth, does not hold a causal influence over the beginnings and outcomes of travesties against morality and humanity. While many other factors come into the equation, it is ultimately the indelible characteristic in human beings to equate anything that is outside of our cultural perspective as threatening, consequently enhancing our inability to understand and our ability to fear, dread, and ultimately rebel against. Religion is only the medium for which for this inherent characteristic to come forth, and regrettably, as Marshall McLuhan said, "the medium is the message".

In modern day society, religious scripture is still used to create hostile take overs of land and property, but as time passed by, we have learned to curb our inhibitions when it comes to slaughtering other people (well, most of us at least). So they tried a new tactics: politics. With a bible in one hand and a microphone in the other, the Bible dissimulated itself into being a book of applicable philosophy rather than being what it really is: a book of short stories and fairy tales. Consequently, many of America's colossal blunders was strongly inspired, if not caused by, the teachings of the Holy Bible. For example:

Slavery
"Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. You can will them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites ruthlessly."
-Leviticus 25:44-46

Racism
"Races are God’s will and therefore amalgamating them is against his will."
-Genesis 11:6-9, Deuteronomy 32:8, Acts 17:26

Anti-Zionism
"Come, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, and to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths: for the law shall go forth of Zion, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. And he shall judge among many people, and rebuke strong nations afar off; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid: for the mouth of the Lord of hosts hath spoken it. For all people will walk every one in the name of his god, and we will walk in the name of the Lord our God for ever and ever."
-Micah 4:1-5

Sexism (Salma Hayek said it best)
“The whole book is gender bias. A woman is responsible for original sin. A woman cuts Samson coif of power. A woman asks for the head of John the Baptist. Read the Bible again sometime. Women are painted as bigger antagonists than the Egyptians and Romans combined. It stinks."

–Serendipity (Dogma, 1999)

And while the Bible largely preaches the practice of slavery, the stoning of women, the death of Jews, and the death of anybody who eats fish, shaves a beard, believes the world is round,or believes the galaxy is heliocentric, there is only one line about homosexuals, and it's from the same guy who also wrote about everything said above:

Anti-Homsexuality
"And if a man lie with mankind, as with womankind, both of them have committed abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them."
-Leviticus 20:13

Evidently, the dangers of religious scripture still reign supreme today with no end in sight. The most hazardous of all, however, is a trend that has been exponentially picking up steam in the past few decades: the idea that Christianity, a religion starting in the Middle East and took hundreds of years to get here, is intrinsically and unquestionably American by nature. The Christian Right has not only hijacked the Republican Party, which was once a cogent, prudent and prideful party, but, as a consequence, has also taken over the nation as a whole.

Godless America
One of the Facebook Morons (Ana, I think) referred to Thomas Jefferson’s Wall of Separation Letter to Danbury Baptists, where Jefferson outlined his desire to never mix government with the world of God. While Facebook Moron 2 (as I will refer to her as for now on) states that Jefferson never wanted government to interfere with the practice of religion (give them tax breaks sure! Let them rape children! Sure! But never interfere), and this is true, she purposefully ignores the vice versa. Jefferson, without a doubt, hated dogma. As much as Franklin, Madison, Adams and the majority of founding fathers that wanted nothing more than to protect America from zealots. For example:

"In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own"
-Thomas Jefferson (Letter to H. Spafford, 1814).

"I think vital religion has always suffered when orthodoxy is more regarded than virtue. The scriptures assure me that at the last day we shall not be examined on what we thought but what we did."
-Benjamin Franklin

"The question before the human race is, whether the God of nature shall govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule it by fictitious miracles? "
-John Adams (letter to Thomas Jefferson, June 20, 1815)

"Ecclesiastical establishments tend to great ignorance and corruption, all of which facilitate the execution of mischievous projects."
-James Madison (letter to William Bradford, Jr., Jauary 1774)

Jefferson even wrote his own bible known as The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. While Facebook Moron #2 would have you believe that Jefferson was always a good moral Christian who hated gays, impregnated slaves, and never mixed different crop seeds in his farm , Jefferson was more of a rationalist than the Facebook Morons will ever be. While the Facebook Morons have information and knowledge at the click of a button, Thomas Jefferson developed his own sense of moral through reason, rationality and that American ideal that we so love to brag about called equality. In his own Bible, Jefferson took out the supernatural qualities of the old and new testament, believing that these stories led to misinterpretations and can eventually lead to a whole sect of people taking these stories to be literal (Boy was he wrong. Who could actually believe Jonah sleeping in a giant fish for 200 years, or all languages coming from a tower called babel, or Noah getting every insect on this planet and making them fuck, or how God sent his only son to planet earth on a suicide mission only to come back as a zombie three days later. I mean, who actually believes that shit?). So despite Jefferson’s asinine assumptions about the irrationality of human beings, he wrote a book that focused on the principle qualities that make believing in Jesus so admirable: Love, peace, humility, compassion and understanding. Jefferson practiced in deism, believing that the teachings of religion can come from reason and rationality, as opposed to a blind faith in supernatural events such as prophecy and miracles, ultimately knowing that such interpretations come from humans, usually in an authoritative standpoint. As Thomas Jefferson, Jesus and the ideology of deism preaches, God’s greatest gift to humanity is not religion, but the ability to reason.

Jefferson and the rest of the founding fathers were right from the start. In order to create a harmonious and peaceful democracy, with the inclusion (if need be) of religious institutions, then said institutions can never be dictated by dogma or anecdotes, but by the ideology of deism. In David Zarat's "Religion and Democratic Ideology in 17th Century England", the author points out the backbone in which Jefferson, et. al. used to develop their idea of a society that coexists with the institutionalization of faith. Zarat points out that, especially in Christianity, all sects are highly intolerant and authoritatian, not only with rival sects, but with even their own members. Zarat believes, as Jefferson believes, that the primary struggle for democracy was truncated by the inability for institutionalized religion to separate religion and politics. Instead of democratic societies, we saw "Godly States and Christian Commonwealths". Consequently, according to Zarat, there was no room for the concept of reason. Reason is the central ideal to democracy, and without it, the idea of equality and freedom cannot exist. Instead, Christians (Protestants mostly) would follow "the one true word of God", which ultimately led to nothing but a shattered society and bruised citizens.

Zarat presents an alternative story, or an episodic context, in which he pinpoints the marks of ideolational change, mostly focusing on points in history where authority was challenged. Zarat uses the English Civil War as an example of how religion practiced through the concept of deism led to a successful democracy and a peaceful society. In the 17th century, after the failures of the conflicts between religious sect were apparent, people started to experience "doctrinal anxiety", or a "crisis of authority", in which members of each religious sect would question the benefit and truth of the respective scripture they believe in. The transtion from the 17th-18th century presented a huge shift in deism (again, the idea that we should start looking to nature for God, and subsequently we will find rational and reason). Deism presented a huge shift in political and religious discourse, in which the idea of tolerance and acceptance became widespread throughout Europe. Zarat concludes that, at this point in European history, the consensus of the citizens put down their arms and all yelled that timely mantra: "I don't know". There is no need for bloody wars if we can all accept, with reason, that no one knows what the hell they're talking about. Thus reigned in a new age of democratization. Something that has been spreading for over four centuries and has now reached a sudden halt due to the revival of fundamental religious scripture.

The First Breath After the Coma
Reason, not religion, is the basis of our American institution. With reason comes, not tolerance, but understanding and acceptance. Americans, with our inherent desire to fight, rape and pillage, backed by the pseudo-philosophies of Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Corinthians, and Ezekiel (but never Jesus), have, for all of its existence have never come to sufficiently use reason when it mattered. Of course, when we look back in retrospect, we realize what we did wrong and how to fix it, but we never stare adversity in the eye and challenge it with the ideals that our founding fathers wanted us to use and spread at our conception. Prop 8 is just another example of America's unwillingness to progress. While we put a Black man in the Oval Office yesterday, we have a stark contrast symbolized by the incessantly illogical rhetoric of the Facebook Morons, and judging by the 52 percent who voted yes, they are the tyrants of such misconceptions. While I do believe most people are rational and will barter with reason, Facebook Morons are prime examples of what makes this country continue to delve down the deep pit of idiocracy. Their pseudo-religious beliefs provide the backbone, fear tactics, guilt by association and ad hominem attacks are the bread and butter of their arguments; straying a large mass of sheep (or average people) to vote their way. It's not that all people hate homosexuals, interracial marriage, African Americans, Asian Americans, Women, Latinos, Jews, Muslims, etc., it's just that the proper application of fear and doubt have been so expertly placed that most people will vote YES just to be safe, rather than sorry.

As grim and cynical I am about the current state of this particular issue. I come to remember that Barack Obama is our new President. Although his opposition to Prop 8 was soft, I can see in him that all his rhetoric about equality, hope, change and progress are not just verbal commodities being sold to the eight year idealess American people, but he actually believes it. Reason, hope and equality are characterstics threaded in the very fabric of American culture. It can never be erased, torn, burned, or withered away by the shallow whims of misguided individuals. In the end, it only stands to endure and triumph. In the end, hope is bulletproof.

The Last Crusade: A Liberal Pondering of Conservatism One Night Before Election Day

erichan22@berkeley.edu (BillyPilgrim) — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 11:34:00 +0000

“A state without the means of change is without the means of its conservation. But we insist that further change be organic, rather than revolutionary.”
-Edmund Burke (Political Theorist and Philosopher, 1729-1797)

That was said about 300 years ago, when the core values of what soon came to be known as the conservative movement came into fruition. While it is undoubtedly difficult to distinctly label and establish the defining values of what constitutes a conservative (due to different cultures and societies defining core values due to their own cultural perspective), the strains of modern day conservatism can be laced back to its very beginnings, during the Age of Reason and the temerity of hostile events such as the French Revolution. In other words, most, if not all, modern day forms of conservatism all trace back to what some dead dude said back in the 1700s. Edmund Burke isn’t just the name of LOST’s Juliet Burke’s husband that was inexplicably run over by a bus, thus allowing Juliet to continue her studies in fertility on the island (the trippy thing is that Juliet actually told her island recruiter, Richard Alpert, that she wishes Edmund would get run over by a bus. ISN’T THAT WEIRD?)

Sorry. I miss Lost. I really do. What am I supposed to do? Pushing Daisies is on hiatus. They expect me to watch HEROES to fill my sci-fi fix? Really? Heroes? Fox News is more entertaining. At least they know they’re full of shit.

Edmund Burke was an Anglo-Irish statesman, philosopher, political thinker, activist, and Fox News Political Analyst (jk), who relocated to Great Britain and served at the British House of Commons. Following the coattails of such Reformation thinkers like Richard Hooker, Burke believed in the moderation of government/political influence, in order to obtain social harmony and the common good. In addition, Burke emphasized the idea of inherited institutions, customs, norms and mores as the quintessential answer to a harmonious society. For example, author Robert Putnam emphasizes in his work, Bowling Alone, the importance of what he calls social capital and civil society (i.e. “..the quality of public life and performance of social institutions…are indeed powerfully influenced by norms and networks of civic engagement”).

In layman’s terms: Small government + Civil Society = GOOD TIMES!

Moreover, Burke and other conservative scholars, such as Carl B. Cone’s work in “Burke and the Nature of Politics” put an emphasis on individual rights; especially when it came to the right of property.

So to update our equation: Small Government + Civil Society + Having a lock on our bedroom door = GOOD TIMES! WITH CONSERVATIVE THEMED APPLEBEETINIS!

Conservatives. They don’t sound so bad right? Good neighbors, takes care of their own bills, and lets you beat off to whatever your heart desires in your own room. Sounds pretty good to me. Only thing is that the conservative party that Edmund Burke and other European thinkers envisioned would be virtually unrecognizable today. Instead, we have a party that has been hijacked by money-hungry, money-spending, God-fearing and socially-imposing demagogues that do nothing but stand on a soap box and spew out didactic, false and polarizing sentiments to further maintain what they believe is the core value of conservatism: to conserve. In a nation that was built on progressive thinking, the idea of keeping things the same seems a bit paradoxical.

The most profound, almost convincing, critique of democracy comes from Plato, in which he stated that a society ruled by the hand of democracy would eventually be dictated by unruly passion and pervasive ignorance. To a certain extent, the man was right; the modern day conservative movement (i.e. The Grand Old Party), for the past two decades, have won elections based on facades, convincing (i.e. tricking) the American people into thinking that they are economically, socially and globally voting for a greater good, but only putting more money in the deep pockets who don’t need it, repressing unalienable rights which the founders of the conservative moment would frown upon, and ostracizing a nation from global allies based on a false sense of smug superiority.

The most telling of all signs that the conservative party has been hijacked is the recent conversion of John McCain: The “maverick”, the real Jack Bauer, and the next Dwight D. Eisenhower (the last great Republican President). McCain was supposed to be the catalyst to healing the GOP, a return back to calm, reason and prudence that made people such as Eisenhower an affable candidate. Instead, McCain left his independent roots and decided to pander to the base. He promoted Reagonmics (i.e. staunch proponent of trickle down economics), attacked individual rights (i.e. putting religious practice into political action [gay marriage, abortion]), continued to pretend to be ignorant of middle eastern history, used guilt by association and ad hominem attacks to stir fear into the public, and finally, what has turned out to be the most detrimental move in his Presidential run, pick a Stewardess that thinks the Vice President runs the Senate, doesn’t know what the First Amendment does, and thinks the Bush Doctrine is a murder mystery by Dean Kootz as a Vice Presidential running mate.

Let’s be clear.

From the years 2002-2006, there was an 863 billion dollar growth in the American economy. 626 billion dollars of it went to the top 1 percent of Americans. 90 percent of Americans got less than 10 percent. In the past two terms from which George W. Bush has been in office, 5 trillion dollars has been added to the national debt with an addition 32 trillion dollars to be paid off by us (by us I mean the most recent college graduates). Not exactly small government.

Individual rights and decisions, such as sexual preference and abortion, are constantly being bombarded by people that deem themselves conservatives. When, traditionally, conservatives would be in favor for any citizen to practice individual rights as long as those individual, and unalienable, rights do not present a moral hazard (i.e. imposing on a fellow citizen’s unalienable rights). The idea of moral hazard has been twisted by modern conservatives; while traditional conservatives believe in the idea of improving oneself for the benefit of all others, modern day conservatives believe in the reverse: improving everyone else so that one can personally gain from it. This distorted view in reason has been put into practice in American society since its conception, ranging from slavery, the suppression of racial minorities, and now to the subtle bigotry of anti-gay marriage proponents (i.e. Yes on 8).

The war in Iraq has largely become a modern-day conservative cause, with most of its proponents sitting on the right side of the aisle. While the majority of Americans understand that the middle east is wrought with ideological conflict stemming back from 3rd century AD over whether or not some dudes were actually cousins of Muhammad or not, many members of the GOP refuse to pull out. While implications of a new religious crusade may be overreaching (even though Joe the Plumber said two days ago that Iraq was successful because we saved Iraqis like Jesus saved us), there is no doubt that there is a fundamental difference in the ideologies of the West and the East, and, arguably, those ideals stem from the extremities of each respective religion; and while not causal, there is certainly a correlation.

The hijacking of American conservatism has had a causal effect on all these situations. Modern day conservatism has turned into nothing but an amalgamation of rich men with deep pockets and poor men with God-fearing ideals. It’s a perfect storm of smart and rich people, knowing how to stay in power by using fear and manipulation as a tactic to get the dumb and poor people to continue to vote for big red, despite going against their best interest. The cycle continues. They get to stay in Iraq as long as gay marriage is banned in 11 of the 13 swing states in 2004. They get to carry record amounts of windfall profits as long as abortion remains a prevalent issue in every major election for the next thousand years. They get to own 40 percent of all the world’s wealth as long as God remains the focal point in our American discourse. Traditional conservatism is dead and this dangerous path to modern day conservatism, if kept alive, will further isolate and tear us apart to the extent where today’s great empire will wither into obscurity as tomorrow’s ashes.

Burke and his peers never denounced change. The idea of change was demonized by Hannity, O'Reilly, Coultier, etc., those who have a skewed and twisted view of what makes this country great and will do anything to preserve that false view. Burke believed in "organic change", believing that any attempt to influence the complex intricities of society would be more harrmful than benefitial, subsequently leading to the risk of "the iron law of unintended consequences". With an economy based on interest, debt and income inequality, a violent and overly-obtrusive foreign policy, and social/domestic policies that continue to alieniate the American public, "unintended consequences", such as the denegration of our society, has taken its final toll.

But hey, maybe this Obama character does have enough of an aura to provide the person that Americans so badly need: a strong leader. I think that’s why some people are voting for him,but I think for the most part, they're just voting for him because they like the idea of a black man cleaning up their shit. Why do you think North Carolina is a swing state?

(art by Kevin Wada: www.kevinwadaart.blogspot.com)
(everything written above is a culmination of cheap wine, cheese curls, and insomnia. happy voting)

I'm still alive.

erichan22@berkeley.edu (BillyPilgrim) — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 08:31:00 +0000

I haven't updated in months. So in an attempt to keep this blog active (consequently breaking the fourth wall, because I do feel rather uncomfortable when speaking in a casual voice), I've decided to post a "I'm still alive" entry. I thought about just FINALLY finishing part three of my LOST entry, but that would take too long. I also thought about writing a case against Sarah Palin (as if we need one?) because it's so damn easy to do it, and it's already inherently funny. For example:

Charlie Gibson: "Do you agree with the Bush Doctrine?"

Sarah Palin: "...In what respects?"

2 hours later...

Liberal: Are you fucking kidding me?

1 hour later...

Republican Apologists (i.e. most of our parents [if your asian]): Uh, there are many interpretations of the Bush Doctrine. And plus, the audacity of Charlie Gibson! This isn't a game show. That sneaky little minx.

The next day...

The New York Times (I would imagine):

Excuse us for expecting that a person who is running for the second most powerful position in the United States, and arguably the world, would know an ideology as simple, and as prevalent, as the Bush Doctrine; regardless of numerous interpretations, the candidate should know the different aspects and intricacies of a foreign policy that this country has implemented in the past eight years. This is the Vice Presidency of the United States, not American fucking Idol.

P.S. All she had to do was say, "I disagree/agree with the justification of preemptive strikes". That's all you fucking Moose-hunter.

But then I thought...no, that would take too long and would make me vulnerable to being too didactic and polemic. So I decided to post up pictures. So i scoured my harddrive, and the most recent picture I can find is me winning the olympics:

Anyway. Man, I'm already tired.

kthxbai.

Why So Serious: A Thematic Analysis of The Dark Knight

erichan22@berkeley.edu (BillyPilgrim) — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 10:15:00 +0000

It's a bold question, but someones got to ask it. In fact, I would continue with the current theme of boldness and assert that, in the past few years, "Why so serious?" has been the topic of debate among many pop culture enthusiasts. Virtually, in all sectors of entertainment, we see an overwhelming shadow of ambivalence seeping over in the past few years. In film, 2006's coveted Best Picture Oscar went to Martin "I'll Put Your Fucking Head in a Vice" Scorsese for his take on the modern cop drama, The Departed; in 2007, the same prestige went to the only men sick enough to make putting a dead body into a tree cutter funny (the Coen Brothers) for their neo-western-noir, No Country For Old Men. In literature, any best seller list will surely express dour trends; the most telling of all is in what we read in the nonfiction sections; for example, in the New York Times Best Seller List, What Happened, a tell-all by a former White House press secretary Scott McClellan, consistently takes the top spot. In music, while many examples would be pertinent, Coldplay's most recent work, Viva La Vida is, arguably, the most interesting. A band who has made a living based off loving ballads and sonnets about unrequited love in the late 90s-early 00s, suddenly writes a record that is, as lead singer Chris Martin has openly cited, heavily influenced by the baroque, industrial, and post-punk sounds of Joy Division, My Bloody Valentine, and Arcade Fire, all bands known for their intense vibrato and sullenly unhappy themes. If you want to look at any one epoch's characterization of their times, look at what the makers of popular culture had to say during its time; in other words, popular discourse reflects the current social anxieties of its respective context. In the 20s, we had our Great Gatsby, in the 50s we had our Bridge on the River Kwai, in the 70s we had our Saturday Night Fevers, in the 90s we had our Shakespeare in Love. In the latter half of the first decade of 2000, we have a trend of "seriousness", a hoarse, chilling and inconvenient voice that acts as nothing but a whisper in the face of our petro-capitalistic, war-hungry, terror-inducting times. Suffice it to say, Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight is a product of its environment; a welcomed addition to our most recent cultural works, such as No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood, that act as a cathartic armistice against our indelibly bleak and unsettling times.

The Godfather, The Untouchables, Good Fellas, Heat, The Departed...The Dark Knight?
Almost every rousing review from the cesspool of the bloodthirsty 'intellectuals' we know as critics, mention two things: that Heath Ledger is a shoe in for a posthumous Academy Award nomination, and that The Dark Knight is a worthy addition to the myriad of American crime dramas. Stemming back all the way to the 1930s with Howard Hawks' Scarface, Americans have always had a penchant for the mafia, corrupted cops and anti-heroes. But as much as the Mafia has been part of the American mythos, comic books have had just as much of an impact on the shaping of American myths. While the public's fascination with the mob are slowly starting to wain (i.e. The Sopranos), viewers are looking elsewhere for their grand narratives. The "comic book movie" is now THE largest staple in Hollywood, with options being made on what studios think might be the next big thing, fanboys have been salavating from their mouths ever since X-Men hit big in 2000. However, it's not until eight years later, with Christopher Nolan at the helm of one of the most epic productions ever attempted, that someone finally nailed why comics, much like its mob-affiliated predecessor, have been so pervasive in American society.

The following is an analysis of the three main character in The Dark Knight. This isn't a traditional review, but more a of a delving into the narrative, with the goal to assess the themes that prove to be true to the millions of people who still continue to see it. I love the flick, obviously; I would never dedicate a page to the tropes and themes of something I did not find pop culturally and socially important. I would give a spoiler warning, but let's be honest, my parents have seen this, and they don't even know what spoiler means.

The Triptych: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

The Bad: "Introduce a little anarchy, you upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I am an agent of chaos. And you know the thing about chaos, Harvey? It's fair."
Like Javier Bardem's stoic portrayal of Anton Chigurh, Heath Ledger's penultimate performance as the iconic Joker marks its presence in the list of greatest and most menacing villains in film history. While the Joker acts accordingly, like how a murdering bastard is supposed to (with a penchant for knives and slow deaths), the Joker's iconic legacy is catalyzed not by his actions, but by his socially prevalent ideology, which, ironically in this day and age, is consistently marked by a lack of morality, or just a dedication to one overarching, all-encompassing ideal. The Joker, in other words, is the manifestation of the zeitgeist of our times, an atmosphere that is often grim, feral and morose. Solipsistic, sociopathic, and, most of all, an absolutist, there is no ambiguous complexity or postmodern characteristic within the Joker's persona, no shades of grey, just a tunneled perspective (probably colored purple) of what he believes is a ideologically justified feast of frenzy and chaos. Like the notable villains of historic past, such as Richard III, Hans Beckert, Alex DeLarge, Hannibal Lectur, and most recently, Anton Chigurh and Daniel Plainview, The Joker has no reason to his madness, no method to his maniac, and no end goal in plain sight. The Joker, essentially, just wants to break the rules. Not really an anarchist, nor is he really a nihilist, but like all men who portray characteristics bold enough to be labeled 'evil incarnate', the psycho harlequin wants the power to move his pieces on the board, not necessarily with the goal to take down the King, but to create enough confusion and chaos for his opponent to struggle. A man that, as Alfred so poetically put it, "just wants to watch the world burn". In one scene, The Joker explains his somewhat Marxian view to Harvey Dent, the Joker sees that there is no point for rational in a world filled with so much irrationality, that the rules that Jim Gordon, Rachel Dawes, Batman, and Harvey Dent adhere to are just in place to create standardized and pre-digested expectations, easy to swallow by the general public, and subsequently leading to a world of alienation. This is Joker's main thesis,the only thing that he truly believes in. But, like all who oppose the dominant hegemonic social structure, he even admits that he lacks a constructive answer, his solution is just to set things on fire and watch it crumble. Like he says, "I'm a dog chasing cars. I wouldn't know what to do with one of them if I caught it."

The Ugly: "You thought we could be decent men in an indecent world. But you were wrong; the world is cruel, and the only morality in a cruel world is chance."
The antithesis of the Joker's ideology is personified through Harvey Dent. Portrayed by Aaron Eckhart, who gives a dazzling performance that marks a character downfall that rivals Michael Corleone in The Godfather, Dent is the shining example of the dehumanization of the modern man; a person who easily manipulated and susceptible to despair. Dent, who inevitably transforms into Two Face, is a representation of the constant struggle between rationality and irrationality, order and disorder. The Joker character brings this dichotomy into light: Why be decent in an indecent world? What's the point of being civil when all of the world is inherently chaotic? This is why the Joker is so willing to die by the flip of a coin-- decisions and directives are not determined by rules, but by the fickle hand of fate. Despite all of Dent's noble intentions, he ultimately becomes a more dangerous version of the Joker, a person who commits criminal actions justified by the ambiguity and complexity of morality. Dent, in order to combat what he views as injustice, stoops to the level of his enemies. The ends justify the means for Dent, but like many good people with similar intentions, to reach the end is to compromise integrity. The Joker ultimately wins, while the public may not know it, he ultimately shows that the strongest of good people is as feral and uncivilized as the psycho who wears make up, that if, someone as strong as Gotham's "White Knight" can lose his humanity, what's the point in hope? In a world where noble heroes are hard to find, it's a sad thing to wonder if the Joker is right.

The Good: "Because he's the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now...and so we'll hunt him, because he can take it. Because he's not a hero. He's a silent guardian, a watchful protector...a dark knight."
As much as I hate having to drag Joseph Campbell into this again, his seminal work, Hero of a Thousand Faces, is so pertinent that to not discuss him would be downright negligent. Undoubtedly, the comic book medium has become so prevalent within American pop culture that it has morphed into our postmodern day version of mythology and Campbell is the foremost authority. Campbell believes that each culture's first interaction with concepts such as good and evil are defined by a self-chosen "archetypal hero", an idealized personification of what a culture/society holds to be true, virtuous and selfless, characteristics that create a vision of a "super man", an unattainable model that good men should aspire to inhabit. Campbell goes onto suggest, however, that this "archetypal hero" is only truly defined when juxtaposed with his polar opposite, a mirrored-twin that reflects the antithesis of our hero's ideology, convictions, behavior, and ultimately, his identity. In this abhorrent reflection of what the hero can possibly digress into, we have the construction of the "super villian", the ostentatious echelon of hostile temerity, a soldier of fiendish consternation, and the counterbalance to the hero's benevolence. It can go without saying, Batman and The Joker are on opposite ends of the spectrum, mirrored twins, diametrically antithetical to each other; yet, both men cannot reach the full potential of who they both are (one, an agent of order; the other, of chaos) without each other.

Batman: Why do you want to kill me?
The Joker: Kill you? I don't want to kill you...you complete me.

The Batman and The Joker, albeit having polar opposite ideologies, are essentially the same person. Both outlaws, outcasts, and, most importantly, symbols to their respective causes. As much as The Joker is 'evil incarnate', Batman is 'morality incarnate'. Ostensibly, however, Harvey Dent is known as the hero in the eyes of Gotham City; the people's new hope, their white knight, and, consequently, the most vulnerable. Dent represents the downfall of the common man, what Bruce Wayne foresaw in the first act of Batman Begins:

"People need dramatic examples to shake them out of apathy and I can't do that as Bruce Wayne, as a man I'm flesh and blood I can be ignored I can be destroyed but as a symbol, as a symbol I can be incorruptible, I can be everlasting."

This symbol devolves Bruce Wayne into half a monster, descending himself in the criminal underworld, a kind of downward mobility one does not expect from an aristocratic upbringing. This symbol, since it is incorruptible and everlasting, is allowed to be said monster, it can use terror as a tactic against those who breed it; since there is no accountability, Batman is eternal. The same, conversely, can be said for the Joker, who lacks an identity, ignores accountability and uses terror against those, from his point of view, who breed it. In the end, both Batman and Jim Gordon come to the conclusion that, while Gotham City needs to be restored to a peaceful, civil order, what is most direly needed first is the concept of hope. As a symbol, Batman represents all that is orderly and good, but hope is more important than order. Bruce Wayne, at one point, was even driven to relinquish the cape and the cowl, giving into the demands of the Joker. At that point, Wayne saw that he could never inspire the hope that he set out to accomplish, that the lack of a face, persona, and voice will forever label him as a vigilante, and never a legitimate cause of progress.

Nolan is the first director to tap into what has made Batman such a ubiquitous icon since his conception in 1953. Bruce Wayne has always been a purveyor of the road less traveled--believing that to stoop to the levels of implementation that his enemies use would only serve as a detriment. Realistically, though, Batman's difficulty with handling the myriad of fiendish criminals would cease to exist if Bruce Wayne let go of what Joker believes is a smug, self-righteous, sense of entitlement. As Wayne is burning the evidence that traces his Bat to Lucius and Rachel, he tells Alfred, "I see now what I have to become to stop men like him", he realizes that what he must do is the same as what Alfred did in Burma: "burn the forest down". Batman, in the end, finally succumbs. He uses Lucius Fox's sonar creation to create a virtual projection of every living person with a cell phone in Gotham City, the manifestation of an Orwellian society. Like Dent, the Bat is compromising his integrity, but not to measures extreme enough for him to lose himself; he sees what he can inevitably become, and subscribes Lucius Fox, one of his most trusted companions, to be the reason to his temporary madness. Batman is eventually ostracized from the city he has sworn to protect. He sees now that he will always be a symbol of fear, and while his own philosophical and moral beliefs stay firmly grounded, the public will never see him in any other way. Batman, in order to stay pure, must remain in the shadows.

Afterword
Blasted Comic-Con! In preparation for that damned mecca for the girlfriend-less, I had to publish this a week after TDK came out. While I was there, I was listening to a man dressed up as Heath Ledger's Joker talk to a production crew covering the convention, he was talking about why people are drawn to the character of Batman, and why they continue to do so today. To sum it up, The Joker talked about moral complexity, how ambiguity, or the grey areas in life, are the ones that define us the most. Batman, he said, is essentially about men who has lost something, and how they cope with it. Ultimately, Batman is just like any other hero's journey, it's main purpose is to maintain that good, no matter how dark the night is, will still be the victor. There was a slight pause between the Joker and the the production crew, it was kind of awkward, then the Joker finally broke the tension, "or people just might like shit blowing up?" That's probably the case.

Jigsaw Falling Into Place: Lost- Season 4 in Review (Part 2)

erichan22@berkeley.edu (BillyPilgrim) — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 23:11:00 +0000

From Nowhere To Nothing: Philosophical Implications Updated

Consequentialism: How John Locke Turned into Jeremy Bentham
Without a doubt, the two primary candidates for one of season three's biggest mysteries (i.e. who the hell was in that damned coffin) were Benjamin Linus and John Locke. The mere mention of the name Bentham (as crazy screencap hounds found out from the split second we see Jack holding an obituary) was enough to limit the identity of the dead mystery man to our two favorite island sons. As Kate confirmed in There's No Place Like Home, the namesake of Bentham did, in fact, belong to Jeremy Bentham, a English philosopher with a penchant for, at the time, radical recalcitrance. Bentham was ultimately a social reformer, an advocate for what he deemed utilitarianism. Bentham states utilitarianism as "the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of moral and legislation". In other words, the moral of an action is judged by the utility of an outcome. Ultimately, utilitarianism is "all's well that ends well", or "the ends justify the means". Suffice it to say, Bentham's philosophy was always apparent, albeit being contradictory, to the character of John Locke, which is why it makes perfect sense for him to be in the coffin.

The etymology of Bentham's name evokes a number of implications for the hero's narrative of John Locke. On the surface, it marks a shift in the nature of the great bald hunter, who is no longer a man of, like his former namesake would imply, natural rights and the social contract, but more of a man of, as his new namesake would suggest, legal positivism (or the philosophy that laws are made, whether deliberately or unintentionally by human beings and, consequently, produces no inherent or necessary connection between the validity conditions of law and ethics or morality); in other words, Bentham would state that the mere concept of natural rights, or even the social contract, would hold no grounds in the context of legal states, since they could never hold a verified objectified standard. The quintessential problem with Lockean thinking, as his critics (i.e. Bentham, Hume) would surely point out, is that there is too much of an emphasis on the belief that human beings will naturally be inclined to deal with reason. Our John Locke has been the personification of this very struggle; constantly trying to maintain balance between the assumed ideologies of each respective adopted namesake.

This paradoxical conflict between the battling ideologies of John Locke was a gradual process spreading over all four seasons. Island Locke was first introduced as a stoic and enigmatic figure, using philosophical metaphors such as the contrast between black and white on a backgammon board to further separate the line of ambiguity between good and evil. Essentially, first season Locke was born into tabula rasa, or blank slate, (both a philosophical concept by the real John Locke [believing that we are all born like 'white paper', meaning that not only are we born without concrete ideas, we also lack abstract concepts, such as morality] and the title of Kate's, and the show's, first episode). Being healed from his inability to walk, island Locke was given a new outlook of life with his rebirth. He was no longer in a constant battle against fate, but for the first time, was a companion of it. With this newly acquired mentality, island Locke saw that maintaining the natural rights of each individual on the island was a virtue to be upheld, being that in Locke's pre-island life, his unalienable rights were constantly infringed upon. Locke would consistently give his fellow castaways the ability to pick their own trajectory, having the freedom to pursue any endeavor just as long as it did not impinge on anyone else's natural rights. For example, Locke giving Charlie the choice to decide whether or not he wanted to continue using heroin. Locke saw that, as long as Charlie's drug use was not adversely affecting their newly found community, then it would be rational for Charlie to choose his own fate. The minute that Charlie started to infringe upon his fellow castaway's natural rights, then Locke would exhibit Bentham like qualities (i.e. discipline: apparent in Locke's backhand to Charlie's cheek after kidnapping Aaron in Fire + Water).

While our John Locke certainly practiced the ideals of universalism and, to a certain extent, the trust of the social contract, or the proposition that citizens would give up certain liberties and rights to an authority in return for particular guarantees that would ensure social order (i.e. Locke being the guardian of the hatch, guns, drugs, etc.), the great bald hunter never saw reason exactly the same way as his namesake would imply. The word "special" gets thrown around a lot on our show, even having a episode called "Special" (focusing on Walt's uncanny abilities). Our Locke has always been fixated on being "special", and having that quality, on the island and off, has been one of the most prevalent themes throughout the show. With that being said, it is only reasonable to understand why the rational side of our Locke constantly struggles with his fundamental and, almost esoteric, faith in the island. From what we know of his pre-island live, Locke was nothing more but a squabbling old man, paralyzed from the lost of his legs after being royally screwed (for the third time) by his own father. Locke, however, always portrayed qualities of being outside of the norm; a more than average person stuck in a less than average world. From his most recent episode, Cabin Fever, it is very clear that the reason why Locke was never the man he is on the island is not because of his own detriments, but because he was never in a place "special" enough for his qualities to truly show. When Oceanic 815 crashed, the island, for the first time in John's life, activated him into a man with direction, and the island accomplished this with the held of miracles (i.e. getting his walking legs back), visions (heralds visiting him in dreams to point him to the right direction), and coincidences (Anthony Cooper turning out to be the real Sawyer, Jack and Desmond meeting before, Christian Shepherd being Claire's father, etc.).

Unsurprisingly, the way Locke responded to these mystical apparitions points toward blind faith rather than thoughtful rationality. This is the metaphysical John Locke at its very core; ignoring reason for some sort of transcendent faith in the mystic powers of the island. This quality in the enigmatic John Locke was the starting line toward the complete transition into Jeremy Bentham. With issues of power, knowledge and social order, our John Locke lost all semblance of the man of reason, but instead, saw that the one defining goal in his life is to protect the power of the island and all agents that fall under his umbrella. Locke, in trying to find the ultimate answer and meaning to his post-crash life, put all of his fellow castaways at risk (not pushing the button), killed a defenseless woman behind her back (Naomi), and held many as prisoners, even some of his former "friends" (Sayid); as the real Jeremy Bentham would say, "the ends justify the means".

As of this very moment, we know that Bentham is dead. We know that he went back to the mainland, a place that he never wanted to return to, to get back the 6 (or 7 if you count Walt) that originally left the island. From this, we can assume that something horribly wrong happened on the island. The fact that the creators of the show used the name Bentham is supposed to foreshadow certain things that happened from the time the island moved to the time we see his body in the casket. Perhaps, Locke's stoic and undying faith in the island has withered away for more conventional means? As the real Bentham would suggest, natural rights (or most things that came out of the real Locke's mouth for this matter), can never exist, since rights are ultimately a function of law, and law is controlled by a form of state or government. Is Richard Alpert and his band of Others the head of state? Was Alpert's presentation of "Book of Laws" to a very young John Locke in Cabin Fever a sign of things to come? One can only speculate, and my brain is fried from the mere possibilities. One last thing about the real Jeremy Bentham. After his death in 1832, his will specifically mapped out a plan for his body to be preserved and stored in what is called an "Auto-icon", basically a giant wooden cabinet. The dead Bentham was brought back home after being preserved, as he sat in on meetings at University College London, in which he was "present but not voting". It is interesting to note that our own Jeremy Bentham is in a "wooden cabinet" of sorts as well, also on route to returning to his former home.

Compatibalism: See Ya In Another Life, Ya?
It would be neglectful not to note that the first mention of our favorite button-pushing, conscious-jumping, time-warping Scotman's full name was not revealed until the end of season two (Live Together, Die Alone). From a return address written on a letter, we find that Desmond's full name is Desmond David Hume, a more than apparent reference to 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume. With the introduction of another philosopher, a whole new era of philosophical implications for where the show was heading were brought to light. And in a season which was mostly built on speculation, mythology, and, ultimately, the search for a quintessential truth, it is more than mere coincidence that the namesake of Hume would appear to provide us the answers to a arguably frustrating season.

Hume's introduction to the mosaic of Lost thinkers was not out of the ordinary. Hume's work was significantly influenced by John Locke's work on empiricism, subsequently leading Hume to declare that all human knowledge is defined by perception. Perception is, ostensibly, Lost's first dominant theme, represented by the ubiquity of eyeshots, usually at the beginning of particular episodes (i.e. In The Pilot, the episode begins with Jack's eye opening and diluting). Although Locke placed much faith in the concept of reason, he also believed that the strongest form of human knowledge was intuition. Hume ran with this idea, leading to his theory on causation, believing that cause does not necessarily have to lead to effect, that, instead, perception should be taken into account. It was only fitting for the climax of season two to have both Locke and Hume trapped in the Swan Station, waiting to find out if the button was real, and if it was, what it actually did. Locke, basing his decisions on reason with a hint of his own intuition, concluded that the button was not real. Desmond, despite being told many things from a variety of people (primarily Kelvin Inman and John Locke), concluded that the button was real based on his own perception (the whole episode, Live Together Die Alone, was told from Desmond's perspective), consequently discovering the "truth" about the electromagnetic properties of the island, which unsurprisingly led Desmond David Hume to an entirely new transformation in his own perception. This change in perspective led Desmond to develop prescient qualities, a platform for the show to launch into a discussion concerning determinism, free will, and the combination of both, known as compatibalism.

First, a quick lesson in philosophical terminology. Determinism, or a belief that "every event, including human cognition and behavior, decision and action, is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences", was part of Hume's make up of how he saw moral theory and its relation to freedom and the human will. In other words, much of what we decide as human beings is determined by the past and the present; however, according to Hume, his version of determinism (unlike fatalism) emphasizes that humans still maintain an influence on the future and its events. In addition, Hume saw free will, or the extent to how much rational agents have control over their actions and decisions, and determinism as compatible ideas, that it was possible to subscribe to both ideologies and not be paradoxically inconsistent. This is what we call compatibalism. Hume would go onto suggest that, from a compatabilist's view, that in order for a rational agent to fully practice free will, he or she would not have to be forced to make that choice. Desmond is the personification of a compatibalist. With his visions, he sees what will happen in the future, and he enacts his own freewill to change it. In season three, Desmond was given the ability to see vision of Charlie's death. Within these visions, he would see the bits and pieces of the prior occurrences that would ultimately lead to the death of Charlie, and with this foresight, Desmond can practice his free will to change it, if he chooses to.

Some would argue, and it would be right for them to do so, that Desmond's visions of Charlie's death is a more fatalistic ideal, that Hume's version of determinism did not focus much on future events as it did on the past and present. Therefore, Desmond is nothing but a soothsayer, a person given the ability to change the picture in his visions by knowing how that picture got there in the first place. However, fatalism implies that the future is set out or us, that everything we will ever do has been set out carefully for us and we lack the inability to change this. Remember, the theory of determinism puts an emphasis on our "choices and decisions and what gives rise to them are effects". There is no talk of anything being set in stone; determinism is more about cause and effect, what one thing might do to lead to another thing, and what that thing might do to lead to its ultimate effect. Desmond is changing the future, changing the course of what is set out for himself in the future. From Flashes Before Your Eyes, we find out (from Ms. Hawking, the creepy white haired lady in the jewelry store) that Desmond's future is supposed to be away from Penny, in the Swan Hatch, pressing that button to save the world, and that even if he doesn't, the universe will find a way of "course correcting" itself (i.e. finding new ways to kill Charlie). "Course correction" is basically a different way to say "fatalism", that whatever the universe has mapped out for us will eventually be succeeded in the end. So how is Desmond changing his fate? A fatalist would probably argue that Desmond's ability to be "unstuck" in time was always part of the universe's plan, that his ability to see visions of Charlie, his departure from Penny, even his meeting with Libby were all intricately set up so he could reach his end goal, which, if the show ended during season four, was to get back to Penny. So what is there that we have seen that can possibly explain how Desmond, and the whole narrative in general, is working from a compatibalist's point of view? The mere idea that he is "unstuck" provides us with some answers. It seems that the whole template of the Lost universe follows a Kurt Vonnegutt's Slaughterhouse Five lead, with the main character, Billy Pilgrim (sound familiar?) getting "unstuck in time" after minor brain damage from a plane crash (sound familiar?!). In fact, Vonnegutt's book was mentioned in Michael's episode Meet Kevin Johnson and Desmond's friend in The Constant was named Billy. Vonnegutt, like the Lost scribes, based his science on the idea of an "unconstant" plane where time and space are on an equal playing field; that, yes, the universe has a particular course where everything has been played out, BUT, something can happen where an individual may experience something (i.e. a plane crash? maybe being exposed to electromagnetic activity) cause the individual to be conscious of this laid out, universal agenda. How can this clarify Desmond's ability to control his own fate? Enter the science of Lost.

Only Fools are Enslaved in Time and Space: The Science of Lost...coming soon (i hope)

in the mean time...i found out how they ultimately will ALL get off the island: http://maclost.ytmnd.com/

Jigsaw Falling Into Place- Lost: Season 4 in Review (Part 1)

erichan22@berkeley.edu (BillyPilgrim) — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 17:39:00 +0000

*Disclaimer: Part one of a four part (i hope) entry on a theoretical analysis on season four of lost; what happened, what it means, and where we are now. Obviously, this is not spoiler free, so if you haven't caught up with all of season 4, I advise you not to read it. This has been a work in progress for about two weeks. Part two and three have already been partially written, but from well-thought advice from the fanbase (Asenath), I will release it in parts, because, according to the fanbase (Asenath), "No one wants to read long entries. That's why it's a blog. You're stupid Eric. You're so bloody stupid. Just stop writing. You FAIL." Enjoy.

"It's a polar bear on a tropical island! There are so many reasons why that's amazing!"
-The Daily Show

Seemingly, Lost has always been a show about a bunch of survivors from a plane wreck, beached on an island, terrorized by its original inhabitants, and now sullied by the mere mention of rescue. Yes, on the surface, Lost does sound a bit silly doesn't it? Disappearing islands, frozen donkey wheels, buttons that need to be pushed every 108 minutes, etc. etc. But like any good piece of science-fiction text, Lost uses its non-Aristocratic (as Linda Williams puts it) qualities to delve deeper into metaphysics, epistemology, ontology, etc., to create our quintessential postmodern allegory; a cultural text that is not only entertaining, but serves as a commentary and reiteration of the social, political and philosophical aspects of our time.

While the program has always presented civilizational themes of power, reason, faith, discipline, and social order within a sci-fi context, it was the fourth season where the producers presented sci-fi upfront, explicit and bombastic, where most of this season's episodes had at least one science-fiction element to it. In addition to the societal themes that made Lost so prevalent, the concentration on the show's scientific themes carved out a whole new landscape, while, at the same time, providing explanations to the burning questions that have been long eluding us for the past four years. The fourth season's influence, more than any other season, on the future of the narrative is paramount; changing not only the narrative itself, but even how the narrative is told. The show has arguably come full circle. We have spent the past four seasons dissecting the intricacies of what it all possibly means, and now, in its most postmodern move to date, it is moving beyond the circular narrative into new territory, and for the first time, delving into what can possibly happen after the hero's (or heroes') return home isn't all what it is hyped up to be.

The Hero's Path: Shift from Modern to Postmodern
From comic books to epic fantasies, from space operas to the American West, most of what we understand as good and bad, righteous and immoral, and, most importantly, truth and deception come from modernist tales; grand narratives which have a primary utility to discover the essence of humanity by uncovering the one overarching "truth" that can maintain balance, create authenticity, and prevent susceptibility from the detriments and chaos of our external reality. Essentially, the specific purpose of modernism's grand narrative is to develop the canonization of "truth"; in other words, the inhibition of expressions of different viewpoints, narratives and, ultimately, versions of the "truth". Lost, needless to say, is the very antithesis of the grand narrative, while it constantly challenges any solidified "truth" or understanding of how the world works.

The Monomyth

According to author Joseph Campbell (best known for his work in The Hero With A Thousand Faces), the narrative construction of the path of the hero is universal, so much in fact, that Campbell asserts that it crosses all ethnic and racial boundaries and borders, implying that "truth", in whatever shape or form, is succeeded by "enlightenment", which is only achieved when the "hero" goes through departure, initiation, and return. In any narrative tale, it can be argued that there will always be a departure and initiation; in other words, trial and tribulation, being born and reborn, facing challenges and being changed from them. What makes a modern grand narrative and a postmodern cultural text different is within the third characteristic: the return

Lost is, as you have no doubt surmised, an amalgamation of characteristics from both modern and postmodern texts, being that the first three seasons have concentrated, arguably, on Campbell's departure and initiation. In one of its postmodern characteristics, Lost presents multiple characters and narratives that are capable of exuding the qualities of a hero; however, the multiplicity and subsequently conflicting nature of the narrative presents a multi-faceted truth. Ultimately, leading us, the viewer, to choose what version of the "truth" we want to believe in.

The Departure: White Rabbits, Black Smoke, Dead Fathers, and Crashing Planes

With departure, we have Campbell asserting that, in any great hero narrative, it begins with a "call to adventure". WIkipedia (come on, give me a break. This isn't a bloody dissertation) quotes Campbell:

The adventure begins with the hero receiving a call to action, such as a threat to the peace of the community [i.e. giant pillar of smoke tearing down 40 ft. trees], or the hero simply falls into or blunders into it [i.e. Jack literally falling off a cliff only to be saved by the encouraging Locke in White Rabbit or Locke accidentally finding the hatch when dropping a flashlight in All The Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues]. The call is often announced to the hero by another character who acts as a "herald". The herald, often represented as dark or terrifying and judged evil by the world, may call the character to adventure simply by the crisis of his appearance [i.e. smokey, Christian Shepherd in White Rabbit, Matthew Abbadon in The Beginning of the End or Cabin Fever, or Richard Alpert in The Man Behind The Curtain].

Whether it be Jack, Locke, Kate, Ben, Sawyer, or even Hurley, every character in our grand tapestry that is Lost seems to have their own departure, their own "call to adventure". A clear sign of how our beloved narrative is both modern and postmodern characteristics coalesced together is within this departure. Postmodern in the fact that the hero's narrative is split up into a multifaceted platform, giving us 31 flavors of different tastes of heroes. On the contrary, Lost has one unifying "call to adventure", and that lies within the fact that all of our heroes were on the same flight: Oceanic 815. That very fact indicates that the path of our multiple heroes, despite the different interpretations and worldviews, is more or less the same.

The Initiation: "Your Weapons...You Will Not Need Them"
Directly following the hero's departure from his old world and into a new world journey comes his or her initiation, with the first, and most prevalent, theme being "The Road of Trials". Campbell writes:

Once past the threshold, the hero encounters a dream landscape of ambiguous and fluid forms. The hero is challenged to survive a succession of obstacles and, in so doing, amplifies his consciousness. The hero is helped covertly by the supernatural helper or may discover a benign power supporting him in his passage.

Without our given context, Campbell's "road of trials" can read like a plot synopsis for most of the primary threads of narrative we have intertwining in our beloved show. Needless to say, "dream landscapes" are one of the primary plot devices to activate many of our show's "heroes". In Further Instructions, Locke's rebirth from his desertion in the Swan Hatch was encouraged by a radical, vast and sonic dream landscape, in which a knowingly dead Boone (acting as his supernatural helper), led Locke to finding his true calling as a "Hemingway", and not a "Dostoevsky". Other examples would include Locke's encounter with Horace Goodspeed in Cabin Fever, Eko's meeting with both Ana Lucia and his brother Yemi in ?, and Kate's awkward confrontation with Aaron's real mother, Claire, in There's No Place Like Home.

The Return: Into The West
The third, and final, segment in Campbell's monomyth is dubbed "return", and it is within said return where Lost diverges from its grand narrative structure into new territory. While Campbell believes that a hero, after much deliberation and ultimately, reluctance, decides to return back to where he or she departed from. The hero becomes, as Campbell calls it, "master of two worlds", applying his "boon" (the goal that is accomplished, or the lesson learned that has led to enlightenment, truth, and the qualities for the formation of an ideal self) to his fellow people; ultimately achieving a much improved world. The hero is now at a different and, arguably, higher level of consciousness than his fellow man. Normally, in most grand narratives, this "master of two worlds" graciously and willingly upholds the divinity of this new found knowledge of the truth. Let us take the most famous grand narrative for the sake of an easy argument: Jesus Christ. It would seem that much of Campbell's formation of his monomyth was to direct reference to the story of Christ, especially in how the hero is not only supposed to uphold the divinity of truth, but to make the common world better for all men and women involved. On Lost, however, there is no enlightenment for the common man; in fact, the Oceanic 6 lie about their divine experience, with no mention of giant smoke pillars, four toe statues, electromagnetic hatches, or Billy Pilgrim-esque time travel. The 6 are, ostensibly, the same, albeit with a few scratches and bruises; but their memories, attitude, and relationships are seemingly unchanged. But (and there is always a but) the person's perspective on the world is forever altered. The Oceanic 6, with the knowledge of this divinity, or boon, can never express said knowledge, never enact it upon the millions who would want it, and, most importantly, can never express or relive the experience that brought them to that state in the first place. Normally, most narratives would end at this point. (Examples: Frodo leaving to the undying lands in Lord of the Rings, Luke finally achieving Jedi status after defeating his father in Return of the Jedi, Neo quite literally bringing the "word" [the ship he was driving was called the logos] to the machine city in The Matrix, etc). Lost, on the the other hand, took what many of us thought would be the ending and placed it right in the middle. The first episode's title of this sensational season was The Beginning of The End. How interesting is it that we get two whole seasons to find out what happens to our heroes after the proverbial threshold has been crossed.

Part 2- From Nowhere to Nothing: Philosophical Implications Updated...coming soon.

I Drink Your Milkshake: The Discourse of the Dynamism of American Capitalism

erichan22@berkeley.edu (BillyPilgrim) — Wed, 28 May 2008 21:15:00 +0000

In an attempt to categorize what he saw as the forging of the dominant American arch, author Walter Allen put forth that the echelon of the American spirit is intertwined with the principles of capitalistic ideals, stating that, “The great theme of American fiction has been the exploration of what it means to be an American. What seems to be overly apparent in the modern American myth is the capitalistic spirit; in other terms, if need be, the technical and economic conditions which determine the projection of those who are born within such mechanisms”. While Allen deals exclusively within the bounds of literature, author Robert L. Carringer believes that the construction of the American myth that is ubiquitous in the modern novel is just as, if not more, omnipresent in the advent of American cinema. According to Carringer, “enterprise, indomitable idealism, a certain naturalness and openness to experience, and relentless will to succeed” make up what he calls “Americanness”, or the collective, representative traits that compose the mythos of the “American archetype” in cinema.

Carringer, however, fails to make the distinction that “Americanness” serves as a unique, and culturally specific, thematic touchstone. Arguably, the first and most noteworthy instance of the “American archetype” is embedded within Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941). Highly regarded by critics as the greatest American film, Kane illustrates how American cinema views what is regarded to be the representative qualities of the collective “American archetype”. Inherent in both its narrative structure and the use of its cinematic apparatus, Citizen Kane, explored the vicious dynamism of American capitalism; consequently establishing the first US-centric discourse in cinema. While Welles’ influence created a bastion of American films that reflected the discourse of the pitfalls of American capitalism, none of Kane’s progeny matched the grandiosity, potency and relevancy that Wells intended to portray until 67 years later, in Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2008).

The discourse of the ferocious dynamism of capitalism is personified by main characters Charles Foster Kane (Citizen Kane) and Daniel Plainview (There Will Be Blood) and symbolized by the uncontrollable surge of success of each of their respective industries (journalism and oil), which is both the source for their triumph and unmaking. Both films are involved in the twinned aspects of industry and relationships (i.e. family), basked in the landscape of the upwardly mobile system of American progress, consequently delving into a microscopic examination on the tragic American tycoon; a character, whose obsessive and compulsive nature consciously obliterates any ties outside the pursuit of capital. Yet, despite all its similarities, Anderson’s film proves to be a postmodern take on Welles’ cultural work. Suffice it to say, the very notion of discourse, and our quest to fully understand it, requires a systematic understanding of the social surrounding that inhabits it. Through a close observational study of both said films, we will see how the discourse of the “American archetype” in the dynamistic spirit of post-colonial capitalism is developed in accordance with its social surrounding.

At the time of Kane’s release, the narrative became synonymous with newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. In an era that saw the nation’s first financial tragedy (the Great Depression), business tycoons, albeit already having national notoriety, gained overwhelming attention. Citizen Kane was made in a time where business leaders, like Hearst, lacked any semblance of anonymity; a time where business tycoons were more like movie stars, where the public watched and scrutinized every move, and where identity was defined not by the actions, but by the mediated interpretation of said action. The lack of a comprehensive identity in the American tycoon is well represented in the narrative structure of Citizen Kane; where we receive a “mediated interpretation” through a series of subjective flashbacks. While all of the flashbacks recount events that are contradictory to each other, there is one defining commonality: the omnipotent and dominant presence of Charles Foster Kane.

Through the groundbreaking cinematography of Gregg Toland, Kane’s demanding presence was brought to life through innovative techniques. The use of space, or the mise-en-scene, was implemented to give Kane a larger than life presence, using matte paintings, forced perspective , and low angle shots . Moreover, Kane would often be standing in rooms with lower ceilings and smaller door frames, emphasizing the man’s large scale. Welles’ radio-trained voice also played a significant part in his ostentatious character, as his voice would often echo. What is most interesting, however, is that in Kane’s last scene (which marks his unmaking as his second wife leaves him), the techniques once used to emphasize Kane’s superiority are suddenly reversed. The forced perspective is now utilized in a way where Kane looks smaller in a grander context. While Kane pleads with his wife to stay, a thirds perspective shot shows Kane’s last moment of significance before his ensuing downfall. Directly after, Kane destroys the material possessions in a room that suddenly puts him in a neutral context, symbolically obliterating the shallow successes of his life. The final shot of Kane shows a steady, neutral, dolly-shot of a man in defeat, walking alongside with a row of mirrors, projecting numerous Charles Foster Kane’s; symbolically assembling all conflicting views into one motion, showing us the only consistent reflection, and thus, identification of Kane throughout the whole film.

Flash-forward to the 21st century: we are at the dawn of the global market, a sprawling American economy, although suffering a recession, marks the benchmark for any modernized, industrial society. Globalization at a steady incline, where international trade and loan organizations such as the World Trade Organization and the World Bank dictate the direction of the global economy. Subsequently, the American economy converges into a vertically integrated market; coalescing much of what used to be individually owned companies under one giant umbrella. Thus, the arrival of faceless accountability; meaning that, for whatever decisions are made, the responsibility no longer lies on a figure like William Randolph Hearst, but now onto a symbol, logo, slogan, or the cheerful, albeit eerie, corporate mascot. In a world where the representation of our ever-growing petrocapitalistic society is faceless and, conceivably, non-existent, a representative scapegoat is embodied through Daniel Plainview: relentless, merciless, uncompassionate, and ultimately evil.

Anderson, a self-admitted student of classic Hollywood auteurs, implemented the same techniques that made Citizen Kane a considerable piece of cultural work. Much of There Will Be Blood seemingly follows the same narrative structure as Kane, up until the final 30 minutes. Unlike Citizen Kane there is no “rosebud” (symbolizing Kane’s youthful innocence, lost when the pursuit of capital divested him of his humanity). While Kane ultimately laments in the final moments of his life, Plainview is portrayed almost as a nihilist. In his final twilight, instead of repenting for the sins he has committed, he denounces his “bastard” son and kills his last known competitor. While Plainview’s final scene is almost identical to the construction of Kane’s ending (the dissemination of familial bonds, destruction of material things, etc.), what makes Blood so remarkably fascinating is the way the same cinematic techniques used to boast Charles Foster Kane as superior is used to only heighten Plainview’s lack of remorse; marking a contemporary variation to the “American archetype”.

The departure of Daniel from his son marks an evolutionary turn for the discourse of the “American archetype”. Similar to Kane, Plainview is first shown destroying his material possessions; the camera goes from one doorframe to a reverse shot of another door fame where Plainview is wielding a rifle (the use of frames and noir lighting is reminiscent of Welles’ style). Cut to H.W. Plainview, Daniel’s now adult son, striding through large doorframes to meet his father. The shot is nearly identical to when Kane first descends into madness (three door frames creating forced perspective), this time; conversely, H.W. is inching closer to his father, now driving toward madness as opposed to away from. Whereas Welles’ used third perspective to put the focus on Kane, subsequently relegating his off-frame wife as a plot device, Anderson uses his surroundings, or mise-en-scene, to create a distinctive rivalry between father and son. The lighting, shot distance, screen time, cut and edit is equally focused on both Daniel and H.W., signifying Daniel’s neutral stance; no longer boasting an all-powerful supremacy. As H.W. gives details for his plan to start his own oil business, Daniel condemns him, revealing that he is nothing more than a “bastard child”, who he only adopted to attract possible investors to trust in a family business.

The film could have ended with the denigration of H.W., but it makes a conscious turn to further paint Daniel into an uncompassionate character, unwilling to feel anything outside of his own self-righteous material successes. The last act of the film focuses on the murder of Daniel’s last known competitor, Priest Eli Sunday. The scene starts with a shallow focus used to bring emphasis to Eli’s stature over the dilapidated Daniel, now struggling to get up from his bowling alley floor. The scene then digresses into neutral territories, with the use of medium, head-and-shoulder shots, as Eli and Daniel talk business. Interestingly enough, the shallow focus and low angle-shots reemerges, as Daniel demands, in return for a business venture, that Eli proclaim, “I am a false prophet and God is a superstition!” Daniel then begins to ridicule Eli, as he reveals that he has no intentions to help Eli out of his financial debt. Daniel is now standing, with the low-angle shot emphasizing Daniel’s stature as Eli begins to dwindle down to the lower half of the frame. Before Daniel murders Eli, his final words to him include the now pop-culture relevant “I drink your milkshake!” a telling line that can serve as the metaphorical representation of the zeitgeist of our times. The American tycoon is no longer viewed or represented as a figure that yearns for a more intimate discovery of him or herself; we now have a archetype that, at the very end of life, still sucks at the very last drop until there is nothing left to drain.

Both scenes represent the conclusion of the discourse of the “American archetype”. In each respective case, we have a man, shallow, fatuous, consumed and defined by material successes, expelling ties with the last representation of familial life. Both Kane’s wife and Plainview’s son serve as symbols of each respective tycoon’s only failure. However, despite how important it was for both Kane and Plainview to maintain the illusion of the model family, both tycoon’s determinedly made a choice to sacrifice the primordial relationship of family in favor for capitalist-oriented, secondary relationships. The fascinating aspect, however, is how There Will Be Blood spawns an evolutionary change in the discourse of the “American archetype”; instead of the repenting Oedipal-like character we have in Citizen Kane, we have Daniel Plainview, a man, with his last dying breath, would rather put his son “in the ground” than to face another challenge to his already extensive capitalistic aspirations.

"I once played tennis against a wall...it was fucking relentless"

erichan22@berkeley.edu (BillyPilgrim) — Tue, 27 May 2008 07:11:00 +0000

Freewrite.

In order to keep up my productivity, or my lack there of, I've decided to dabble into the slightly familiar world of blogging. I've had some experience before, mostly consisting of exceptionally over-the-top posts, made up of what I like to think is the paradoxical combination of a contrived eloquence with a dull, obtuse, and overly-sardonic "critique" on pop-culture. Yet, for all my worldliness and $40k a year mass-produced commodity that we like to pretend is intelligence, I still lack the capability of engaging an audience without resorting to some sort of distorted projection of my insecurities as a writer; meaning that, yes, the three of you who did read what I wrote in the past probably did recognize a touch of, let's not be too harsh on myself, what many would agree was a amalgamation of self-pity and despair, a testament to the vitality and, ultimately, detriments of the postmodern condition.

I am fully aware that, if I do decide to keep this inevitable train-wreck on its tracks, that I will, arguably, digress into what I used to do; and that is making clear the difference of what I, through my own subjectivity (although some would argue that every subjective truth ultimately relies on objectivity [DMS]), saw as what constituted as absurdity and irrationality. And that will be a-ok. I'm under the impression that, for the most part, most blogs do not need to adhere to an overarching theme or narrative; that whatever truth, moral, or utility that can be derived is made possible by the arbitrary nature of this significantly conducive platform of global mass communication.

I guess I'm starting back at square one. I feel there has to be some record of the progression of my development as an idealized self, despite the fact that I will undoubtedly regret publishing whatever ill-conceived notions I have of the world and the people who inhabit it in the foreseeable future. Perhaps I am too hard on myself, but I can't help but cringe every time I read, listen, or watch something I created prior to who I am at that particular moment. But hey! Everyone's got to have some sort of balance between tragedy and comedy in their lives. At least I'm a first rate diagnostician.