Lost Season Premier

I'm getting "Lost" is going to go one of two directions - hot and cold and really hot again, not unlike season 3, or the strike is going to leave us all with a gigantic case of build up with no release. Hell, blue balls of light might actually descend from the sky and we'd never figure out what they were about. How's that for a metaphor.

Overall, good season opener though I was disappointed in three things:

1) It didn't begin with a close-up of an eyeball. You're consistent for three seasons and then give me a pile of mangos and papayas? What the hell?

2) Sawyer not just getting soft, which is OK, but almost completely dispensing with his trademark smarm

3) Jack for pulling the trigger. This bears a bit more explanation. I understand that Matthew Fox originally read for Sawyer. I understand he's conflicted and a little bit of an egotist. I understand he doesn't even want to be who he is but you can't set up Jack as a cold-blooded killer when you've spent three seasons establishing his heroic, yet tortured nature. His pulling the trigger was a bad and inconsistent character move in my opinion.

Onto the good stuff.

-A Hurley episode is never bad. His cannonball was great, his explanation of Charlie's absence to Claire, emotional. His future...I'm a little more lukewarm on that, although it was nice to see him kick Jack's trigger-pulling behind in Horse. And leading police on a high speed chase.

-Rose and Bernard had a few cute scenes. When she called him Rambo, I smiled.

-I knew Charlie wasn't gone for good.

-Ben is really growing on me. He's sort of the voice of reason saying unreasonable things - a paradox with eyes like a lizard and the tongue of a serpant. Nice character.

Of course, "Lost" could do about anything and I'd probably invest in the next few seasons, but it's nice to see it getting off to a slightly hotter than lukewarm start.

Happy Wednesday - Anticipation

It's Wednesday, and time to talk about things I like as opposed to the multitude of things that piss me off, depress me or bore me to nearly to death.

So let's start by getting a little abstract. I love anticipation. In fact, anticipation is the function I've adopted for getting through tough days and making time pass with a little bit of joy. Lucky for me, I'm easily impressed so it doesn't take much for me to look forward to something.

Take this weekend, for example. I'll be going over to a friend's house to watch the Superbowl. That, alone, got me through about a week and a half and counting. The idea that you're working toward something, getting closer all the time, it gives me energy.

The fun part is I'm starting to pass this idea along to my oldest daughter, who is prone to counting down to major events in her young life anyway. We make homemade advent calendars and birthday countdowns, we do math to figure out how many days before she can go see Grandma or Sesame Street Live and she's started to take on the counting and anticipation by herself. I'm sort of glad.

Here's the rare thing - I'm rarely let down. I don't know if I pick particularly fun events or if I'm so unimaginative that I can't conjure anything better than what will happen. Either way, the biggest pitfall of this particular like has managed to avoid me.

Football's fine. Movies are good or dissappoint. Trips are great. But waiting for them...ahh, there's beauty in that, no?

I Wanna Get Back

I jog about every day and I've found the best way for me to make it through my 33 minute and 34 second run (3.54 miles) is to completely disappear inside your head. The more you're distracted or daydreaming, the more you forget the pain coursing through your body. An iPod can be an invaluable ally in that fight.

The problem is I'm not necessarily a music guy. I don't seek out new bands, I don't find new music to spark my interest. I'm open to suggestions, but the old standbys can sometimes make it three or four months on my jogging rotation without a break. It can get old quick. To that end, I've been experimenting with old music which haven't passed my eardrums in, literally, years, and I struck on something strange.

Weezer's "Pinkerton" wasn't just great fuel for ignoring pain, especially for me, but the entire album is just a fraction over my 33 minute 34 second time frame.

A quick bit of background - I'm a semi-big Weezer fan and Pinkerton, famously dubbed "great dance music for agoraphobics" came out in 1996 when I was a freshman in college and was sort of floundering around campus pulling bad grades and getting it on with whatever would have me. You read that right.

If the album had a concept, it was basically my life at that time. "This is beginning to hurt...this is beginning to get serious?" Check. "Why bother, it's gonna hurt me, it's gonna kill when you desert me." Big Check. "I'm dumb, she's a lesbian." One of the greatest rhymes ever, and no comment. I wish I had been taking notes as I ran, but I was too busy trying not to fly off the treadmill and onto the wrought iron coffee table immediately behind me. It hurts a lot. Here's an approximation:

:52 seconds - This is a song that never gets old.

4:50 - I can't believe what you've done to me

It's strange, but I swear to God I can smell Randall Hall. It's where I lived my Freshman year and left promptly after a liberal arts major whose name is long gone puked on me right after my finals. I don't think I ever set foot in that building. I remember bad furniture, hard floors, a big, unsturdy loft, and a TV you had to crane your head crawl into the loft to watch properly.

What I did to them, you've done to me

I wasn't a very nice guy, but I found some nice friends.

6:32 - My girl don't see me when she's with my friends/she's all I got and I don't want to be alone

God, I'm remembering now why I'm never really whistful for this time in my life. It was amazing, but there are some things I'd rather forget. It's odd how my head puts the stuff I want to remember in a different order. As I understand it, every time you remember something your brain re-creates it on the spot. I guess this part of my brain is barren. Pot? Drinking? None of the above.

11:31 - More than a mile in. "Across the Sea" is a song I never really connected with and used to fast forward. Now it's my favorite on the album. I still don't connect with it, but the crescendo it builds to is almost unmatched. I'm also remembering why I gravitated away from Weezer over the years. I'm not nearly as big a fan of feeling sorry for myself as I used to be. It's a hobby that can take a lot of time if you let it, and I let it. I used to actually carve out time to wallow about exes. When I studied, I'd go for 90 minutes and allow myself a 10-minute period where dread and fear would wash over and nearly drown me. Then back to memorizing genus and species for that god-awful biology class.

I could never touch you...I think it would be wrong

I never related to this song.

18:04 - "The Good Life" is a great song to run to, but I realize now I've superimposed my own lyrics over it for years.

It's been a year or two since I was out on the floor

I might never go back on the floor. There's a sobering thought.

21:43 - I once got the attention of a young lady by e-mailing her lines of "El Scorcho," one at a time. She wrote me back wondering what I was doing, but I kept sending her the lyrics. I was soooo smoove. It worked, though. Well.

I think we'd make a good team/And you would keep my fingernails clean

Well, not everything can stand up.

26:00 - On the home stretch, and greeted by "Pink Triangle." God, I have a history with this song. Apparently I was drawn to lesbians in college. One, in particular, I fell for really hard because she was worldly, wordy and in control. I'm about 99 percent sure if I ever saw her again, I'd have the same reaction John Cusack had in "High Fidelity" to the Catherine Zeta-Jones character, to wit "my god, she's self-absorbed and obnoxious." At the time, she was the moon and the stars.

I have a confession about the next song, "Falling For You." A girl I knew hadn't heard the album. I was sure of it. So one night, while we lay on her single bed (how did we ever sleep on those), I recited some of the lyrics to that song. I'm not brave enough to say which ones. I'm sure you can figure it out. I'm genuinely embarrassed. I mean, genuinely. Red ears and everything. It's these kind of memories that make me want to poke a hole in my head and use a drill bit to remove the memories. If only I had a powerful grasp on the centers of the brain.

I can't believe how bad I suck, it's true/But I do like you and you like me too

Couldn't have said it better myself.

32:30: Just a few seconds left, but "Butterfly" is not helping. This song is like a great B-movie - awful on it's face but genius in a few, carefully selected spots. My brain is also deprived of oxygen and my side hurts. I'll save it for another day.

And tomorrow, I'm listening to something else.

Smell you on my hand for days/I can't wash away your scent/If I'm a dog then you're a bitch

Damn you, Cuomo.

Movie Review: Walk Hard

It's strange - about a week after seeing "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story" I remember exactly three things: John C. Reilly, the great music and the penis.

A quick explanation on the last part - there's a scene in "Walk Hard," where Dewey Cox is in the middle of an orgy immediately after singing a love song about his wife. While he's on the phone with his beloved an unerect, unspectacular penis suddenly appears in the upper right-hand corner of the screen for no reason other than laughs. I laughed hard, so to speak.

There's no metaphor there. "Walk Hard" is what it is - a really good parody along the lines of "Airplane," with the best music of any motion picture this year. About once every two or three years a movie prompts me to go right out and buy the soundtrack. "Walk Hard" was that movie.

First, a word on John C. Reilly. He's the guy you always want to succeed but know he's going to be relegated to supporting roles from now until the end of time. In 'Walk Hard' he takes center stage and really sweats his performance. You can see the care that went into creating Dewey Cox , even though he's a disposable pleasure. Anyone committed to that level of authenticity for a goof, you've got to really appreciate.

All in all "Walk Hard," is really "Airplane" with better music, but oh what music. I can't remember laughing harder this year than I did at "Royal Jelly" the five-minute Bob Dylan tribute that accompanies Dewey's phase where he visits India and communes with the Dhali Lama. The title track is singularly catchy, and there's not a song with the exception of "You've Got to Love Your Negro Man" that I felt was out of place or unwarranted.

I guess, aside from the penis gag, the aspect of Walk Hard that continues to put a smile on my face is the idea that John C. finally got his moment in the sun and even though it was a monumental goof, he ran with it. Ran hard, as it were.

Good movie.

No One's Home

It's fair to say I consume quite a bit of media. My job often features design work and that work means I can put in my ear buds and listen to podcasts. Today's offerings included the lauded "This American Life" and the oft-fantastic "On The Media." I'm studying to be a really impassioned wonk, apparently.

"OTM" was first and featured a story about a man writing a book about the final moments of executions in Texas. One story he related concerned a condemned man who started singing "Silent Night" upon the administering of the lethal injection. He started to sputter and choke about the time he hit "mother and child," effectively ruining in the song for the author.

Then comes "TAM" where they did a story about a person whose job it is to track down relatives of people who die alone. Two things I learned from the story: 1) bodies with no family and no money for burial are cremated by the state, the ashes held for five years. After that time the ashes are mixed with the ashes of all the other unclaimed bodies in a mass grave and given a funeral, which is attended by only a sparse few social workers. 2)Things like voice mail never disappear. This last point led to a moment in the broadcast where they play a woman's voice mail message, after she died alone and was buried in a mass, state-sponsored grave. Her voice is appropriately haunting.

"This is a message phone.
No name
No number
No message
No answer"

I don't know what it means but it was like hearing a ghost story as a kid. The stomach bottoms out, the tingles go through you. You feel legitimately scared at something. It was almost like a David Lynch scene.

THEN, I saw "Charlie Wilson's War" tonight. I'll write up a review in the next few days, but it's 2/3rds light, frothy political fun reminiscent of the best of the West Wing, and 1/3 depressing-as-hell "American foreign policy destroys women and children and we deserve what we get" kind of message.

Last thing, promise. My girls are away for the next few days, so I'm fending for myself. No big deal, I have a fridge full of food and a Christmas' worth of movies to keep me company.

But here's the thing - after listening and watching some of the most depressing fare in the world back-to-back-to-back, I don't feel depressed. It's a general...funkiness that's more akin to fear than it is to depression. I figure, with depression, you feel bad about something wrong with you. With this, it's something wrong with the world.

I remember once in college getting three or four pieces of bad news in a row about classmates - one had been raped, one was anorexic, one guy had hit his girlfriend, I think - and going on this tear in the middle of the night in an abandoned student lounge about how messed up the world is and how something had to be done. It's awfully naive, but at the time I don't think I believed anything in my life more than I believe something needed to change in my community and people needed to hear what I had heard and feel like I felt.

Of course, that's bullshit but I remember starting in a group that worked against underage drinking, which is funny because now alcohol and I have a very nice, cordial relationship. But the zeal wore off and I didn't change a damn thing. And the world is still messed up. Imagine that.

No message, no answer. Aint that the truth.

Dirty Words For A Good Cause

Comedy, Politics, Naps

Comedy - I'm driving Jordan, my little brother through Big Brothers Big Sisters, home after the BBBS Christmas Party tonight, and we somehow get on the subject of comedy. He brings up Dane Cook. He's a fan.

"I probably wouldn't listen to Dane Cook with you in the room," I say. "He gets a little raunchy."

"It's not bad," Jordan said. "He's funny."

Treading on dangerous ground, I start talking about my favorite stand-ups: Wright, Black, Poundstone and Carlin. He's never heard of George Carlin. I realize I'm a mentor and have to be a forthright, decent influence on this young man's life, but damn it some things need to be rectified.

"Have you ever heard of the 7 words you can't say on TV?"

"The 7 dirty words? Yeah, I know that."

"George Carlin did that."

I then launch into a(n edited) bit about the English language I memorized for my stand-up show in August. Jordan chuckles a bit and promises to look him up.

It's strange, but I feel like I've made more a difference bringing the idea of George Carlin into Jordan's life than I normally do. Then, there's an e-mail I got from a friend of mine last week which talks about a jury she served on that decided the fate of a man accused of murder. Mentoring was brought up at one point - how this man could have taken a different road that didn't end in incarceration if he had a positive male influence in his life.

I ask you, is there a better positive male roll model than George Carlin? Kidding. It just felt kind of good being the guy with the experience and sharing it with the kid who had the enthusiasm. I might get the hand of this mentoring thing yet.

Politics - Over the past day or so I've read a lot about the two debates for Republican and Democratic presidential candidates and have learned about 4 things from the national media.

1. The Des Moines register format sucked.

2. The "spin room" was small.

3. Alan Keys is from another planet.

4. Nothing of substance happened.

Not terribly thoughtful analysis, but I'm pretty sure without watching either debate that the media didn't have a lot to work with. What I wish, sincerely, is for a way for debates to actually help people make up their mind or an abolition of the process. Right now it seems like a colossal waste of time. Kind of like a few of the campaigns at this point.

Naps - No sleep. Again. It's starting to take it's toll and the caffeine isn't keeping up. The biggest manifestation today: I fell asleep on my couch after sitting down for about 20 seconds. My butt hit the cushion and my body effectively said "OK, we're shutting down now." I woke up five minutes later to my oldest daughter saying "Dad, are you listening to me?" No, sweetheart, I wasn't.

On the upside, the baby and I watched "The Elephant Man" last night while she wasn't sleeping. What a fantastic movie.

Finally, A Format!

OK. I've been floundering out here. You know it, I know it. The reason for the flopping and gill gasping is, obviously, I have no format.

No more. I'm stealing the basic Livejournal format. Why not just Livejournal? Because I don't like being forced into that format. It might be nice to force myself to adhere to the format, but I don't like being forced by someone else.

So the format begins today and I'll try to post as much as possible. Cool? OK.

Today: Life, Politics, Movies

Life - I haven't gone on about this nearly enough but my daughter Tessa doesn't sleep. She'll nod, she'll doze, she'll snooze, she'll get really tired, but she will not sleep. Which means I don't sleep. Which means I get cranky, mean and overly emotional. It sounds strange, but you try sleeping 4 1/2 hours a night in hour-and-a-half intervals and see what happens to you.

The worst part is I get mad at Tessa, who is blameless and helpless. Last night, after an hour of bright eyes in a darkened room, I finally threw her binky as hard as I could across the living room into the kitchen. It hasn't been found. Losing control is not the mark of a responsible man, but rather a manchild undeserving of so many things.

As a result, today has been one of those "what's the point" kind of days. I can't, for the life of me, feel like I mean anything or am anything to anyone. It's a normal ebb of serotonin or noraepenephron in the brain, but it still feels awful. I also had a day where I made a couple mistakes at work and heard about it. It's strange, I'm very busy at work and I don't feel like I'm pulling any weight. Enough bitching. I've had some great moments today, especially with Emaline who has a cold and sounds like Cathleen Turner. It's so cute, and we'll see how sleep goes tonight.

Politics - Morgan Spurlock always struck me as a guy with big ideas who's ability might be a little below his ambition. But mark me, in the next few months you're going to be hearing a ton about good Mr. Spurlock (who I met about two years ago and genuinely liked).

Rumor has it he started a movie called "The Search for Bin Laden" or some such, and took a 15-minute clip to a film festival for bidding. The Weinstein Company paid Spurlock 25 million dollars on the strength of those 15 minutes. The question is - what could possibly elicit such a giant paycheck? Could the guy who made "Supersize Me" actually have an interview with the terrorist who masterminded 9-11?

One of two things will happen in the next little bit. Either Spurlock is lying or has been deceived and his career is OVER (and I can't stress the word OVER enough), or he actually found Bin Laden, doing what the supposed bulk of the US intelligence agencies and military is unable to do. Chances are great this is nothing, but imagine for a second what happens if this is real. The implications are layered and huge, and everyone in the country will have an opinion.

I hope it's real just because it's unprecedented. I also think Spurlock is a well meaning guy. If he's lying, I'll be first in line to spank him with a paddle. If it's real, hoooooooly shhhhhiiiiiiiit!

Movies - Is anyone else totally digging the fact that the words "Tim Burton" and "Oscar" are being mentioned rather frequently in the movie press? I absolutely love it. I've been a big fat Burton fan for years, and while it may have gotten a little "goth" there for a minute or two, largely I've been a fan because of his storytelling ability. A friend of mine pointed out, not incorrectly that Burton might be the "world's prettiest set dresser" but argued he wasn't much of a filmmaker. I say it takes someone with an innate sense of storytelling to see a movie in a mess of a story like "Beetlejuice." I think he's solid with streaks of inspired and it looks like "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street" might net him Oscar gold.

It just makes me smile, is all.