Latest Parries
April 2012
From Nokia N95 to iPhone 4S
Annoyances and upsets with the iPhone 4S have been more than offset by its screen, the silkiness of its surfaces, the camera, and the third-party market for both software and hardware.
February 2012
2001: A Space Odyssey: Dry, Juicy, Linear, Luminous
After they finished watching the Bond movies, I figured the next series John Gruber and Dan Benjamin would discuss on The Talk Show would be Stanley Kubrick’s oeuvre. But Gruber refused — too personal for podcasting, he said. Disappointed, I rewatched 2001.
January 2012
A Scheme of a Number of Friends
Instead of acknowledging the wisdom of leading from behind, the Right jumped on the Obama administration’s handling of Libya as yet another example of at best incompetence. They lost me there.
October 2011
The Mouse and the Cantilever
Steve Jobs we lost at the age of 56; when Frank Lloyd Wright reached that age it was still only 1923, the time of merely his second comeback with Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel.
March 2010
Friendship is for Weenies
It’s amazing, given the adulation he enjoyed elsewhere, that the Israeli public knew from the start not to trust this US President.
Before the Setup
Nobody from usesthis.com has asked me what my setup us, nor is likely to anytime soon. So I’m just going to mouth off here about it. But first, some background.
February 2010
Walter Russell Mead steps gingerly into the Wieseltier/Sullivan imbroglio
On the Leon Wieseltier/Andrew Sullivan spat, Walter Russell Mead seems to want to have his strudel and eat it too.
October 2009
My Hope: Obama’s Change
Defeat in the Olympics bid may focus the mind in the Oval Office where it should be: Afghanistan.
July 2009
At Modi’in Mall
There’s nothing else around here except empty desolate pretty hills. The Israel Trail passes by a bit to the west. It’s a hot July Wednesday morning. Things are reasonably busy. The shops are mostly franchises, almost all homegrown — Super-Pharm, Aroma, Tzomet Sfarim, Cup O’ Joe’s, LaMetayel, Mega, Fox, Castro, H&O.
Israel, the Bad So Far
I’m surprised at the general appearance of Tel Aviv folks. Yes, it’s hot, but people appear dressed as if they’re in, I don’t know, Be’er Sheva. And the people in Be’er Sheva, last time I was there, looked to me like they’re dressed for Gaza.
O h dear. I disappeared. Much of the blame belongs to season three of Lost. I’d given up on the show partly because it was too fantastic. I mean both that it was too good as well as that it was too full of fantasy. I’d seen up to season two episode 22 or so and had started feeling there was no way the writers could resolve all the amazing issues and conflicts they’d opened up. Already the Others were becoming less threatening and the new survivors being introduced (from the tail section of the plane) seemed less compelling than the old favorites.
So it’s not known why I decided to start watching season 3. Maybe because web work pressure had suddenly eased after what had really been months of pressure (now Extreme Elements no longer seems such a big deal, even something humdrum, but while building it the challenges seemed quite gargantuan) and I felt I could pursue some fun entertainment for a few days. Decompress.
I’d forgotten just how darn juicy Lost is. You feel these writers have read their Nietzsche as well as whole host of other requisite stuff. You feel how excited they themselves must be about what they’ve come up with — deserted island with mystery, and so much verisimilitude about the real contemporary world as well as the recently departed contemporary world of the 70s. And I feel a newly reborn confidence that they do in fact have ideas where this is all going. I read some interviews with J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof with the two of them saying that within the half-hour of their initial excited meeting they found they’d been approaching the show-to-be similarly and that they very quickly came up with the story arc for the first five or so years.
And so the inevitable question: which is better, Lost or 24? To date, 24 has had my vote. I trusted it more, in that I did not believe that the events of the final episode would ever render moot, pointless and silly everything up to that point. I was also more directly influenced by the show: the scenes shot all around Los Angeles got me excited me to go there again, which ended up being a grand trip. But I’ve heard two complaints about season six’s episode 15: that it was outlandish and that it was a repeat of things that have happened in previous seasons. Also, one’s old friend Aaron (not Aaron Pierce) bought the season five DVD and thinks it’s a bit silly, this after previous seasons were his treasured companion while cooped up in his berth on the yacht where he works. His disillusion, he suspects, was from having watched the DVD’s special features, the behind-the-scenes stuff which makes him feel kind of idiotic for getting so involved in what is after all only elaborate make-believe. [Update: he watched to the end and says it really picks up and has begun season 6.]
Sounds like I’ve already made up my mind that Lost is better. Well, I’m not going to choose one over the other (copper-outer) because they are so different yet manage to strike relevant resonant chords. In 24 I could sympathize with Charles Logan. I felt that I too would be unable to handle the powers of the office and be buffeted around by the latest petitioner. In Lost I sympathize with John Locke, this man of extremes who balances between despair that he has been singled out as a weaker and less fortunate man than most, and ecstacy that all, including himself, is blessed with strength and destiny.
Lost seems to strike me more at the dream level. I think it’s easier and more evocative to imagine yourself as one of the characters on that island, either a companion to the leads or offscreen somewhere on the beach. It’s got the feeling of an adventure video game — no accident, I found out from reading the interviews — where you gradually push back the boundaries of your knowledge. You discover the hatch. You try to find a way in. The center of gravity of the setting changes. This is fun, but is it lasting? It’s kind of similar to what E. M. Forster contemptuously refers to as the “And then?” school of literature, serving little purpose beyond holding people’s attention pointlessly. Though I think Forster is protesting too much against his own chosen form, as within that “tapeworm of time”, as he calls it, fictional characters do unavoidably have a chance to act, to exercise themselves, to shimmer and resonate, even if the scenes are not the perfectly wrought humdingers of vividness as in his A Passage to India. Jack is not the only hero in Lost — John Locke is, Charlie is, Hurley is, Kate and Sawyer are.
I like how with Desmond’s tale we’re now in the realm of time travel. In retrospect it seems obvious that it must be involved, as they’re lost and time travel is something that is so central to our imagination these days. It’s amazing though that in this show it’s just one thread among so many others, whereas in a movie it’s usually the central one and no other. There have been some 65 episodes already; that’s at least 25 movies’ worth of time on one big story.
And 24? I like how we’re not quite 2/3s of the way through the season and already half the bad guys have been caught and their operation’s wrecked, but we know that with 8 more episodes there’s plenty more that will happen. But still. Maybe I’ll not cop out after all; suddenly I’m more excited about what will happen next in Lost. Maybe because I’m in catch-up mode, so can watch more episodes in a more condensed time, so I’m more under the spell of the show, whereas we’re watching 24 up-to-date, so only one episode a week, and you kind of forget it and the urgency recedes. No wonder it became a hit from being a DVD set rather than a weekly show.
It’s a new age of addictive, submersive television.
Previously
Tent of Contempt