Lost, again

"Don't make no difference who the guy is, long as he's with you. I tell ya, I tell ya, a guy gets too lonely an he gets sick."

"Of Mice and Men"

So, I have been on a binge again. I will plead extenuating circumstances. My wife and the youngest and still mostly portable kid are back in Detroit for the summer. Suddenly, the house in Tokyo becomes empty and quiet. Not empty and quiet in a nice-to-have-an-undisturbed-moment-to-check-Facebook way. More like house arrest with an electronic tether. More like the gulag.  More like the quiet of Ivan Drago in Rocky IV. When the house finally speaks, this is what it will offer: "I must break you." Yes, a better man and a deeper thinker would plunge with exultation into these cold waters. Me, I need the warm and shallow end of the pool. If in the dark night of the soul, we must fight or flee, I am going to run like the devil is chasing me.  And so I buy the first three seasons of "Lost" on iTunes, roughly 48 hours of viewing distraction, two full days, about a dollar per hour. Cheaper than a cheap motel. And I check in. And I do not leave. And dishes pile up. And laundry mounds. I ignore the phone and leave the mail unchecked. I go feral.

It's amazing in a way that despite my dangerously compulsive instincts I have managed to stay employed. Maybe it's because I have found a way to channel these instincts into work often enough to keep a paycheck coming. What is it they say about heroin addiction? It's not the drug that kills you, it's the poverty. 

At any rate, I watch the first 72 episodes of "Lost" in an alarmingly short period of time. A little more than three days, but not much more than three days. It is not pretty, but it happens. I am not proud.

There is little to write about "Lost" that has not already been written. The pilot aired in September 2004. The last episode of the third season aired in May 2007. As I slipped into my fugue state over a long weekend just ended, I found myself flashing back to my own backstory as it played out in those three years.

I bought and mostly fixed a house in California at huge cost. We had the first summit in Snowmass. We drank Feral Boy's homemade brew. Somehow I agreed to "run" a half marathon -- clamber up the mountain, realize your hands are horribly distended, limp down to the finish, queasy. Then I was in New Orleans helping with Katrina coverage. And then I was out of Los Angeles and back to Detroit, back to Plymouth. I left a house and a neighborhood I loved to go back to a place I had thought I would never return. In the summer of 2007, just after the Season Three finale of "Lost," Stoner and my oldest son took the fateful drive to Memphis and Graceland that became such an anecdote spinner. It all happened so fast. And now I'm gone again. And we lost our brother.

In some small way, "Lost" became something more for me as a sometimes absentee dad in those years. When kids one through three came to visit from Japan for the summers of 2005 through 2007, they got into the show. We bought the DVD box sets, and I just let them burrow in. I enjoyed watching their reactions to the plot twists more than the show itself the first time round. "What? Jack and Claire have the same father? Did not see that coming." I don't know why I thought a show that featured such toxic or distant fathers would be a good bonding choice, but I let it happen anyway.

It's interesting to go back after almost a decade. The show has moments of utter TV nonsense, like the the diamond-stealing couple that poison each other with a previously undiscovered species of spider and are buried alive. Or the pilot-eating monster. It backs away from the darkest "Lord of the Flies" undercurrent pretty quickly. When bad boy, heart-throb Sawyer threatens to veer from antisocial bravado to sociopathic scheming, you can almost hear the producers step in to protect the franchise. Make him apologize to Sun for attempting to kidnap her. Make him kiss a baby. Make him lose at ping pong. Thank you.

Of course, this is also no guide to surviving 80 days on a desert island. The writers get tired pretty quickly of chronicling the whole nasty business of staying alive. In the first season, it's a big deal when Jack finds fresh water. By the third season, food is literally falling from the sky so we can get on to weightier matters like the nature of faith and fate versus free will.

There are many other satisfactions. A truly despicable character named Edmund Burke is hit by a bus. A character named Locke and another named Rousseau square off in the jungle. The show name checks or quotes from Hemingway, "The Brothers Karamazov," "The Third Policeman," "Our Mutual Friend," "Taming of the Shrew," "Turn of the Screw" and "Of Mice and Men." Ben quotes the line above from Steinbeck. An annoying know-it-all blows up in the middle of a speech on the dangers of dynamite.

It's also fun on the second time through this to watch the writers see how many of the characters they can get to say some version of the same set of lines. I imagine a running bet in the writer's room where whoever could shoehorn in a line could take what had accrued in the jar. These cycling phrases include: Don't tell me what I can and can't do. Do you think I'm stupid? What's the difference, I'm dead already. I did not see that coming. Oh, yes, and run like the devil is chasing you.

And then there's Locke, the old guy in a primetime show shot in Hawaii where all the men and some of the women have to take off their shirts. A decade ago, Terry O'Quinn, the actor who played Locke, seemed like somebody's still vigorous Sun Belt grandpa who works as a Wal-Mart greeter. Today, as I'm watching I am closing in on the age at which he was cast, and I am thinking, Terry O'Quinn is jacked. Damn, he looks good in a sweaty camo t-shirt. I am man crushing on the old guy. 

When I leave the house to buy food in the middle of this marathon, it takes me a while for ambient Japanese to come back into focus. I realize that for three days I have been immersed in Korean from Sun and Jin. Without trying, I have learned the phrase they say most often to each other -- gwen chan ah, "it's okay." 

But it takes until the last episode, for my own quest of nostalgia and avoidance to make sense.  Something resonates. By the end of season three, Jack, the tortured protagonist, is washed up and strung out on airline cocktails and Oxycontin. We see him in a flash forward but we don't realize at first this is a glimpse of his flawed future. He does not live happily ever after.

Like me, Jack is pining to go back to a place and time he had been in a hurry to leave. He wants to get back to the island. He wants to get lost. The problems he had then seem like nothing compared to what he faces now. He wants nothing more to see his friends together again. He wants a chance to do it over and do it right. Barring that, he will take a state of sedated and suspended animation. And he speaks for me when he says, "We weren't supposed to leave."

Then Kate channels the realistic and healthy people everywhere, the well adjusted people who have not just spent three days holed up somewhere watching this damn show, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. 

Yes, she says, yes we were.

Warning: NSFW*

Today's tip-of-the-hat goes out to metro-sexual Clock contributor rocky dennis, for warning me about the following product. (Click on the image to enlarge.)

See more at: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Veet-Men-Hair-Removal-Creme/dp/B000KKNQBK/ref=cm_rdp_product

 
 *: Not Safe For Willies

French Style

When I was buying this record, I had to explain to the store clerk that these were the parents of Charlotte Gainsbourg. If it's possible to conceive a child just by singing a duet together, this would be the song.

STOP (don't go)

Telephone

It's as if Lady Gaga has been mining my dream journal.

Olympiad

It was impossible to know what went on in the Olympic Villages, in Vancouver and Whistler. The athletes talked about Ping-Pong and TV…By the middle of the second week, there were news reports that the authorities were trucking in an emergency supply of condoms; they had provided a hundred thousand of them, for roughly seven thousand athletes and officials. But apparently that wasn’t enough.


--from “The Ski Gods,” by Nick Paumgarten, in the March 15th New Yorker

 
...

Summit 2008

Wanna join vacationing post-communism Russian mafia for a month-long Sambuca-fueled rave in an abandoned Ukrainian nuclear reactor on the shore of the Black Sea? Check it out.

Paris Summit 2008, Anyone?

French women 'are the sexual predators now'
By Henry Samuel

French women are becoming increasingly assertive in their sexual habits, while one-in-five younger French men "has no interest in sex", according to one of the most comprehensive surveys of the nation's love lives.

Women now have more than twice as many partners as they did in the 1970s, according to the study by the French Aids research agency, which is backed by the government.

One of the biggest changes in recent years, according to the report, was that male and female sexual behaviour had become increasingly similar...

The proportion of French women who claim to have had only one partner has dropped from 68 per cent in 1970, to 43 per cent in 1992 and 34 per cent in 2006. A woman's average number of partners has risen from under two in 1970 to over five today, while a man's has remained the same for four decades, almost 13.

French women's first experience of sex is now almost as early as that of the opposite sex: in 1950 there was a two-year difference, but the gap has narrowed to four months, to around 17 and a half. Meanwhile, more women remain sexually active for longer than previously: nine-out-of-10 women over 50 are sexually active today, compared to just 50 per cent of that age group in 1970...

Female sexual emancipation has been a hot topic in France ever since President Nicolas Sarkozy met Carla Bruni, the Italian model and singer. The couple married last month. Ms Bruni recently declared monogamy "terribly boring" and spoke in relaxed fashion about her numerous past conquests, including Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton. "I am a tamer [of men], a cat, an Italian", she told Le Figaro last year. "I am faithful... to myself. I am monogamous from time to time but I prefer polygamy and polyandry [its female equivalent]." At the same time, she reinforced old stereotypes that link status and virility, by reportedly declaring: "I want a man with nuclear power."

...The two sociologists who compiled the research said that the French had fewer sexual taboos and inhibitions than before, but were more anxious about lovemaking. Never have sex counsellors been so busy in France: according to one estimate, they treat half a million patients per year.

One More Reason We Should All Avoid Minneapolis

Found in the Denver Post:

... the American Land Rights Association, based in Battle Ground, Wash., says that Craig's misadventures were actually just another salvo in the "War on the West."

As the ALRA explained in an e-mail to members: "By ambushing Senator Larry Craig, the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport Police have effectively declared war on the West. They are primarily responsible for greatly weakening private property rights and Federal land use advocates in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and in Congress. We are urging you to make all your flight arrangements avoiding the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport for at least the next year and probably longer. We'll keep you posted as the boycott develops."

Monkey says, "Fuck you Patrick Swayze"

It hurts so so much

only thing to do is laugh

like food in the rain

You have this by now, right?

Sly Old Eli

Jon Holloway is master of Calhoun College at Yale University. A distinguished scholar of history and African American studies and a master of indirection, he is here reduced to pleading with "Hounies" to stop having the "time of their lives" in the college's shower stalls.

Intimate activity is one thing, but "the kind of activity that leaves the showers in a decidedly less hygenic state" is another entirely. Apparently. Although this raises more questions for me than it answers.

I like everything about this very Old School note. Note that he is not embarassed to write "Hounie." But a shudder of revulsion seems to keep the word "sex" out of this matter entirely.



From: Jonathan Holloway
To: All Calhoun Students
Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2007 9:10 AM
Subject: Showers Stalls are for Showering
OK, well THIS is the most awkward college-wide e-mail I've ever had to send....
The college showers are to be used by individuals for hygenic purposes only. They are not to be used by couples engaged in intimate activity--especially that kind of activity that leaves the showers in a decidedly less hygenic state.
Several times since the start of the spring term some Hounies have come across a couple having the time of their lives in a shower stall. Last night the shower flooded and the bathroom could not be used for over 90 minutes. To the as yet unidentified couple, this may be pleasureable and exciting for you but it is a violation of community standards. Please stop.
I really don't want to explore this matter any further as I respect your individual privacy. But such continued brazen public displays of affection will only invite public embarrassment. I beg of you, let's not go there.
JH