RIP Alex Chilton, 1950 – 2010.
I’m going to go listen to “Thirteen” like a hundred billion more times. And then I’ll go listen to the hundred billion different cover versions.
Monthly Archives: March 2010
“That’s kind of like getting fired over the internet.”
So, I watched Up In The Air over the weekend…
The movie, directed by Jason Reitman, starring George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, and Anna Kendrick, is a fine one. Not exceptional, but well done. Good, but nothing Oscar worthy. Smart, but not all that smart, if you know what I mean. And that’s a good meta statement, I believe, to sum up the younger Reitman’s filmography as a whole so far.
But my real question for you, for those of you who have seen the movie, that is…
I can buy pretty much everything else about his character – and not just buy, but understand – but, is it me or doesn’t George Clooney’s character seem more than a little naive about women throughout the whole film?
“Son of a bitch!”
I swear, when I start running a major TV show, I’m going to use a lot of the same gimmicks that Lost uses. People talk a lot of shit about the flashbacks, but honestly, they’re genius. And lazy. But genius. You’re not just telling one story, you’re telling multiple stories, on multiple frames, lost (literally) and found (potentially) in different modes of juxtapositions and dichotomies.
And then, in the third season of such a show, I’m literally going to have a “WE HAVE TO GO BACK, KATE!” moment and before you’ve changed your underwear from watching your main character do all that hillbilly heroin, we’ll be FLASH FORWARDING!
Where I’d change it up from Lost, though, is I’d do the Sideways flashes, the glimpses into the “wouldn’t it be nice” universe earlier. The “happily ever after” alternate existence would come much earlier, and you want to know why?
Because in the last season of my show, instead of flashbacks, flashforwards, or flashsideways, every episode would would flash to a potential spin off featuring my main characters. My Jack spinoff would be just like House, only more misogynistic and feature more pills. Jack would be less British, of course, but the SHOUTING would remain. Awww, cute baby with cancer and shingles on his face. SHOUT AT HIM, JACK! And my Kate episode would be like Run Ronnie Run, only it’d star Kate, which I think works in a lot of ways. And my Locke and Ben Linus episode would be like a sitcom version of Stand And Deliver, just less Edward James Olmos, I guess.
And my Sawyer and Miles episode would be a lot like last night’s episode of Lost, titled “Recon.” Sawyer and Miles as vice cops, going undercover together, and Sawyer would be the weird southern lead whose partner talks to dead people. Their dynamic would be entirely like Kurt Russell and his AZN sidekick in Big Trouble In Little China. And they’d say shit to each other like…
Miles: “Cutting it a little close, aren’t we?”
Sawyer: “Only way to cut it.”
And then David Caruso puts on his shades. YEEEAAAHHHHH!
As for last night’s episode itself, you know, Locke/Flocke/The Man In Black/The Locke-ness monster is evil and all, sure, but deep down, he’s not so bad. If you catch him in a lie, he’ll say he’s sorry and explain himself. He slaps women around when they’re hysterical, which is just so adorably old fashioned. It’s cutesy quaint like how crazy Claire is this season. There’s a certain bit of sex in his violence, unlike Sawyer, whom I feel like has no violence or anything else in his sex.
It’s sad that a character like Sawyer, who only has too emotions, full on redneck angry and goofy, is really just going through the motions this season post-Juliet, it seems. He doesn’t want to search and destroy, he wants to sit around in his underwear and listen to “Search and Destroy.”
He’s doing a so so job of recon on Hydra Island, discovering that Widmore’s got a stealthy interesting operation set up there and an HQ on a submarine (like a Bond villain!), and then trying to play Big Chuck against The Man In Black.
The even sadder thing is I think that Widmore and the Locke-ness Monster have to see through Sawyer’s attempts to get them to go to war with each other. If anyone who’s spent more than five minutes on this mystical, magical Island has learned anything, it’s this: everyone has a past, not everyone has a future, and you may or may not have a sideways. Also, lies are currency and the economy is broken and bleeding.
I applaud Sawyer for not planning on taking the plane. Of course not. Why would you? It’s not like he knows how to fly that thing. But he does know how to pilot a submarine? Really? I somehow feel that there’s more to it than just pressing a glowing button that says SUBMERGE on it.
If I could use another partial financial metaphor here about Sawyer: The man is just not invested. He’s completely checked out and he’s leaving me checked out too. He’s the exact opposite of Jack in major ways now. Jack is nuts, and entirely invested. There’s not a situation that Jack can’t attempt to kill himself out of us, meanwhile Sawyer’s just going to to sit around and brood and maybe tell Kate things through gritted teeth after she’s had a good sit and cry. Or after she’s seen Claire’s fake baby thing:
Taking a momentary pause here because… Here’s a promotional still from new weeks’ Richard (finally!) Alpert-centric episode:
Also, a question about the Sideways universe that made my ears perk up a bit: Miles’ dad is off the Island in the Sideways universe? Last week people bitched about Roger and Ben Linus being off the Island in the Sideways world, but they could’ve easily gotten onto that submarine on time. But wasn’t Pierre Chang right there front and center when that nuclear weapon went off at the Swan site? Unless this is a stepfather? A stepfather who works at a museum with Charlotte, whom Miles is pimping out to Sawyer.
Also, let’s face it: Charlotte is easy.
But in a great way. In a way everyone should be. Ladies is pimps too. She’s an independent woman who can fuck a guy like a Sawyer if she wants. In another time and place, a guy like Sawyer might threaten to slap her one right after slapping her fragile colleague in science and holder of an unrequited crush on her, but in a Sideways kind of world, she might let a guy like Sawyer try three, maybe four positions with her. And maybe if Sawyer had been cooler, and not left his most important documents in the world in his top drawer, he would’ve seen her whip on the second date. And not being chilling at home watching reruns of Little House On The Prairie. And not being try to win her back in the cheesiest way ever with a huge novelty flower.
But, of course Miles will take him back.
And, thankfully, Charlie is still in jail.
Oh well. Here’s a SPOILER about the rest of the season: In the finale, Sawyer reveals that he’s been at least half gay since the freighter blew up.
Bird on a wire.
I really can’t let it go without being said that I really liked the incredibly vague but enticing commercial for tonight’s episode of Lost, “Recon,” that was played at the end of last week’s episode. That commercial/trailer looks like this:
I love that it uses Leonard Cohen’s “Bird On A Wire” too.
Lovely marriage of images and music. But then again, Lost has always had a formidable track record of the (diegetic) music it chooses to incorporate. Completely unrelated:
Ha ha.
Oh, and I think tonight’s episode is a Sawyer one, right?
The Ides.
Today is the day you were warned about.
Honestly, I just like saying: “Beware!” And telling people to beware various things. Like, “Beware those calories!” Or, “Beware Justin Bieber!”
Recently on Counterforce:
We’ve been comparing things, things like the manic pixie dream girl vs. the amazing girl, Heroes vs. Battlestar Galactica, and Kirsten Dunst vs. Kate Hudson.
We’ve got plenty of our favorite news items and lots of mad linkage to share with you.
And we celebrated the birthday of Dr. Seuss.
We’ve been watching – what else is new? – this brand new and final season of Lost: “Dr. Linus,” “Sundown,” The Lighthouse,” “The Substitute,” and “What Kate Does.”
And, in doing so, we’ve been trying to get inside the minds of characters like Jack and Sayid. But perhaps they’ve been getting into our brains instead?
Speaking of television: Nip/Tuck finally ended, but the singularity still looms on the horizon (and perhaps on cable TV as well).
Oh, and the Oscars came and went again. We talked about afterward and talked about it quite a bit during the ceremony.
I read Tao Lin’s first collection of stories and then talked a little about short stories in general for your amusement.
The lovely Karen Gillan as a soothsayer of sorts in Doctor Who.
People tend to believe that God believes what they believe, we learned, and then we watched a bit of Chris Marker’s documentary about Andrei Tarkovsky.
Conrad talks about two of his favorite things: Prince and Kevin Smith (but more so Prince than Kevin Smith, he assures me).
from here.
Oh, and my iphone is apparently waiting to me, amidst the sea of pornography, sex pills, and mortgage help that the internet is just dying to offer me.
And our very own Maria Diaz, who’s been rocking it at SXSW this past weekend, got herself wifed up for the purposes of partying and let me DJ the party, and you were cordially invited to the event.
Fun fact about The Ides: It’s the 15th day of the month, but only in March, May, July, and October. In every other month, it’s the 13th of the month. The Roman calendar is really so weird.
All this talk of soothsaying and foretelling has me thinking… Here at Counterforce, when we’re not complaining about shit, we’re typically just slicing up bits of our subconscious, things that we like from all over the place, and sharing them with you. Sometimes it’s planned, and sometimes it happens on a deadly whim, but I wonder… Perhaps we should be planning and sharing what we’re planning more beforehand, teasing you a bit… Hmm. Maybe, right?
Or, more dangerously, just throwing out random things at the start of a month, or any time period, and then talking about them at some point, in some way. Maybe the topics are user generated, or just things the author knows nothing about but have always been abstractly interested in, I don’t know. And then they go off and learn something about that topic, or maybe they don’t. But they find an angle and attack it. Maybe it’s predictive blogging, maybe it’s something else.
OR! And this, this right here, is insane, but let me start earlier… at work, sometimes, when we’re bored, my co-workers and I will play a game, a silly, stupid game that we call “The Wikipedia game.” We generate a large group of topics and subjects, then you pick two randomly. You go to one of those topic/subject’s wikipedia pages, and utilizing only links on that page, you have to, in five clicks or seven clicks (or whatever) or less, you have to arrive at the second topic you picked. Think “Six degrees of Kevin Bacon,” but more infotastic and time wasting. Mind you, I”m just talking out loud here, so maybe this is lame, but what if blogging was like that?
Spending the night in.
by Paul Madonna. See more of his stuff here and here.
All stories great and small.
From Roberto Bolaño, the late author of books such as 2666 and The Savage Detectives, comes advice on writing short stories…
and
And:
12 secrets to becoming a prolific short story writer.
11 times of bad writing advice.
Your favorite writers give you 10 rules for writing fiction, part one.
And part two.
Lorrie Moore’s “How To Become A Writer.” The short version: First, try to be anything else.
Books that only exist in other books.
And here at Counterforce: What we blog about when we blog about love.
Now… get writing!
The elements of film.
I’ve mentioned both Andrei Tarkovsky and Chris Marker and my admiration for the work of both filmmakers before, so I have to say, it was pretty exciting for me to find some clips online from Marker’s documentary about Tarkovsky, One Day In The Life Of Andrei Arsenevich. Here’s one:
Marker filmed the documentary based around the filming of Tarkovsky’s last film, the Ingmar Bergman-approved The Sacrifice, and it actually includes death bed interviews with the Russian director as he was in the final stages of his battle with lung cancer (which he most likely contracted while filming Stalker several years earlier in and around Chernobyl.
Tarkovsky was a director who let the moving images of his stories dictate his filmmaking, and whose plots tended to drift into poetry and the hidden ghosts dancing through the fire and water motifs (which is more natural and not as annoying as, say, John Woo and the fucking doves) of his subconscious tended to wander about the landscapes he so expertly conveyed. I can see a lot of similarities, not just with Bergman, who Tarkovsky greatly admired, but also with filmmakers still operating today, like Béla Tarr. Of Tarkovsky, Bergman said, “Tarkovsky for me is the greatest [director], the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream.”
from Tarkovsky’s first feature, Ivan’s Childhood.
And Tarkovsky’s films have always looked to me as if they were filmed on location inside of dreams. They’re not always pretty, but they’re not exactly ugly either. They don’t conform. Time doesn’t always flow as you think it should. Things happen, whether you understand the reasons or not, and sometimes events can get away from you.
Meanwhile, I’m going to go put his book, Sculpting In Time, on my Christmas list.
The Queen Of All Sciences.
from here.
“The Internet” is “in the running” to win a Nobel Peace Prize. There’s a billion jokes there, I’m sure. But when it comes time to accept the award, for the sake of our Republican friends in the audience, I hope that it’s Al Gore who does it.
Norway Doomsday seed vault hits 1/2 million mark.
New Zealand woman sells two souls to the highest bidder.
Speaking of those Swedish bastards, Obama gave away the $1.4 million that came with his Nobel prize.
Blacklisted words from crossword compiler, from Harper’s, and from here.
by Norman Saunders, from here.
Acrobatic thieves hit New Jersey Best Buy avoiding cameras, motion sensors, and alarms in a daring heist.
The world’s richest man: “Shady Mexican dude named Slim.”
Does the Devil need to be excorcised from the Vatican?
An interview with The Exploding Girl‘s Zoe Kazan.
by Jesse Lenz, from here and here.
“Art is the Queen of all sciences communicating knowledge to all the generations of the world.”
-Leonardo Da Vinci
French bread spiked with LSD in CIA experiment. Nice.
Australian archaeologists uncover 40,000 year old site.
First real trailer for David (The Wire) Simon’s upcoming show, Treme.
Christopher Nolan on Inception, Batman 3, and his Superman plans.
And, from the publisher of Pride And Prejudice And Zombies, comes…
No joke.
The undead at a Star Trek convetion.
Zombie Star Trek pictures from here.
Marion Cotillard’s Forehead Tittaes.
Breast milk, but not breast feeding.
Lesbian teen sues to force school to hold prom.
Orange dwarf star set to smash into the solar system.
Two technologies that are about to completely change electricity.
by James Jean, from here.
“All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.”
-Federico Fellini, from The Atlantic, December of 1965.
by Boris Vallejo.
Humans are too fickle for animals to depend on.
In a zoo in the Czech Republic, two lions killed a white tigress; five white tigers in a Chinese zoo had become fearful of the live chickens offered them as food; and in China’s Hubei province, a gang of macaques trained in kung-fu turned on their human master. Male Campbell’s monkeys, in combining and altering their six basic alert calls (boom, hok, krak, krak-oo, kok-oo, and wak-oo), were deemed to exhibit sophisticated proto-syntax. Rhino poaching was on the rise, though Nepal’s greater one-horned rhinos were flourishing because they are protected by guards on elephantback. Wasps were observed to kidnap ladybugs for use as incubators for their eggs, and the ladybugs were observed ultimately to be unharmed by the experience. Male bedbugs were found to emit an anti-predator pheromone to discourage other males from mounting them; males with blocked pheromone glands are mounted for longer than are other males and suffer more grievous abdominal stab wounds from the mounters’ penises. Boys who were exposed in the womb to phthalates—chemicals widely found in cosmetics, vinyl upholstery, and sex toys—are less likely to play rough. Studies of birds and mammals showed that males have more consistent personalities.
by James Roper, from here.
The Permian-Triassic mass extinction, in which 57 percent of all families of living things died due to global warming, was found to have caused many animals to flee to Antarctica. A subspecies of European blackcap birds was noted to have evolved rounder wings and longer, more slender beaks in response to feeding by humans; evolutionary biologists doubted, however, that the birds would ever become a distinct species, because are too fickle for animals to depend on in the longer term. Engineers tested a RoboClam off Cape Cod. Scientists described 158 species of venomous catfish and postulated that as many as 1,600 species of catfish may be venomous. Researched discovered four new species of king crab, concluded that female leatherback turtles are right-flippered, and revealed that the pitch of blue whales’ songs was getting lower. Scientists discovered how to induce molting in blue crabs, thereby rendering them soft-shelled on demand. Behavioral ecologists frightened baby red-eyed tree frogs into hatching early by pretending to be snakes. Pharmacology researchers found that mice who consume hot peppers with their cocaine are more likely to die. Gerbils in Israel are more cautious than those in Jordan. People tend to believe that God believes what they believe. California has too many Chihuahuas.
The passages above are from the “Findings” section of the February 2010 issue of Harper’s and were written by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi.
