Monthly Archives: March 2010

You’ve got the touch.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

Holy crap, another week, another new episode of Lost. This time it was a Ben episode, entitled “Dr. Linus.” And the often misleading promos promised us that Ben would face his own mortality, and he did, but he survived the encounter, unlike Corey Haim. Or the dude from Sparklehorse.

And it was interesting episode with Ben on the Island being even more broken down, all the shards of his manipulative sad personality being stripped away. He tries to get over his anger and abandonment issues by assuming roles of power. He wants to be a leader and he wants knowledge, but he never understands why he needs to know these things.

And Sideways Ben… well, it was interesting to see a Sideways flash of someone who wasn’t on either Oceanic flight 815, but I like the reminder that this is the same little Ben that was shot by Sayid and taken to the temple. He’s been changed by Others, but what does that mean in the real world?

Apparently that means an unhappy life of teaching in the public school system and only getting motivation to do something when a guy in a wheelchair at the next table suggests it.

And probably means you’ve left less of a body count in your wake.

The thing I think you have to ponder about the Sideways world is… Well, remember last season when we suddenly went back to the Island with the Ajira flight and there was Locke alive again? And we were invigorated by this new Locke, this man in full control of himself and capabilities? For half a season there we had something of the season ending twist just hanging there in our faces but there was no one way we could tell what was happening. You have to wonder if that’s what the Sideways world is. Is this the world that the Man In Black/Smokey has promised his followers? Is this the epilogue? Because, with the exception of Sayid’s sideways flash so far (arguably), these characters are all doing fine, getting second chances and doing what they should’ve done, perhaps.

I mean, there’s Ben, taking care of his asshole dad (oh, the IRONY as he’s trying to keep his Sideways father alive and instead of poisoning him with gas he’s changing his oxygen tank), and finally getting the opportunity to “choose Alex,” the choice he didn’t make before when Keamy had the gun to her head. And it’s not like he’s not getting to do a little scheming, blackmailing his principal and all. Good times for all. Especially Jeff Goldblum:

from here and here.

But back to the Island. And back to Jack and Richard Alpert and perhaps my favorite moment of the season so far…

We always told you Jack was crazy. Who else would do a bro a favor, lighting the fuse on his stick of dynamite so he can kill himself and then deciding to sit down and have a little chat while it burns. This new Jack is still crazy after all these years, but it feels like he’s finally accepted it. Being a slave to destiny is fucking insane. Might as well do some fun, crazy shit while you’re at it.

“When Jacob touches you, it’s not a gift, it’s a curse,” Richard Alpert tells us cryptically, right after he appears from somewhere, and when asked where that somewhere is, he says, “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” I think you’d be amazed what these characters and us would believe/accept after all this time. Though I think I’m getting tired of Hurley as the proxy for the audience’s questions, especially when he makes the audience’s sound so fucking stupid: “Are you a cyborg?”

And Ilana? I respect the seriousness of things, the hopelessness of it all, and how you’ve personally been fucked by destiny – and in that regard, Lost is kind of like the bible: the women get the short end of the stick over and over again, sadly – but having Ben dig his own grave for a few hours? That doesn’t seem like the best use of your time, I would think. But then again, time stops for a little vengeance.

Time will always pause for you to wrap your hands around the big flabby neck of revenge.

And Miles… still annoying, but still a better version of Charlie, right? And now he’s got those Nikki and Paulo diamonds. I neglected to mention in a dorky nitpick last week that Lennon fucked up when he offered Kate two minutes with Claire when it should’ve been three (the Others always offer you three minutes)(but maybe that’s because the situation was a little stressful and two was all they had?), but I’m glad that they didn’t forget Miles and the desired 3.2 million dollars.

And I feel like Miles’ “superpower” is both underused and overused. Sadly, it kind of pales in comparison to Hurley’s being able to talk to ghosts, but I’m fascinated by the fact that Miles’ ability is tactile in nature…

He has to literally touch the dead in some way, which is amazing with the way that this show is now, with everything that these characters have been through, and death just hangs over everything like a cloud. A smoky black cloud, perhaps? As Dr. Arzt said, “You know what gets out formaldehyde? Nothing.”

And Charles Widmore is returning to the Island! Kind of like Napoleon perhaps? Will he have Mrs. Hawking/Desmond/Penny with him? And, just out of curiosity, what if Charles Widmore is his own grandfather? What happens if a future version of you touches you? Oh, the questions!

The MPDG vs. the Amazing Girl, Heroes vs. BSG, and Kirsten Dunst vs. Kate Hudson.

Posted by counterforce! on

You just know you want to read this. You just know it.

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Fuck Yeah Sayid!

Posted by Marco Sparks on

Well, Benjamin Light certainly said it best:

But let’s start earlier…

So, I had this friend, okay? A female friend. And she was leaving town. This was a week and a half ago, because she’s gone now, but a week and a half ago, we decided to go hang out one night, do a little drinking, socializing, etc. “Things that young people do,” my fellow young people tell me ad nauseam in chorus.

And, you see, this is at a point right after we had realized, my lady friend and I, that we’d like to hang out like this, maybe as more than just friends, and somewhat exclusively. But then there was the little thing of her leaving town, but that night, that night we decided to hang out, it didn’t matter.

So we went out, did a little drinking, talking, gazing longingly into each other’s eyes and souls and other stuff.

That’s all you need to know about that.

But then I went home, still a little intoxicated, both drunk  on all that alcohol and the night itself. A collection of a thousand or more little moments, all precious and special and dazzling, and they’ll be with me forever. Regardless, there I was. At home. Drunk. Not sleepy drunk, but what was I to do with myself?

About four years ago I remember hanging out with Benjie Light and Peanut St. Cosmo and we did some drinking one night. When it eventually Peanut’s bedtime, we called it a night. And after she went to sleep, Benjie and I were still up and he said something to me like, “We missed Lost.”

Still a little cloudy, I said, “Wha huh hurrh?”

“Tonight was Lost,” he said. “It was a Sayid episode. Don’t worry, I downloaded it. Let’s watch it.”

And so I plopped down in a chair beside him and he clicked play on the keyboard and Lost started. The episode was from season 2, “One Of Them,” the first one with Henry Gale, when Rousseau catches the man we shall come to know as Ben Linus in a net and delivers him to Sayid, informing him that he is one of the Others. But this man, Henry Gale, swears otherwise, and he has a very convincing story about how his balloon, carrying his wife and he, crashed on the Island. His wife eventually grew sick and died.

The story is incredibly convincing, but still, Sayid does not believe it. And though he knows that Jack will not agree, there in the hatch Sayid wants to use his special skill on this mysterious new man with the bug eyes to ascertain the truth. And in the flashbacks within the episode we see Sayid back in the first Gulf War learning how to use that special skill: the art of torture.

You can’t imagine how bizarre it is to watch this episode while your head is slowly clearing, the fog lifting, and your world is sobering up. It just gets darker and more brutal by each passing moment. It just gets all that much more Fuck Yeah Sayid, if you will.

But that was four years ago, and here I was, a week and a half ago, at home, still a little drunk, pondering what to do with myself. I didn’t want to wake anyone else up and what better place for a drunk man with a head full of regrets and way too many thoughts? The internet, of course. But as I get onto the internet, I remembered that night from four years ago and I decided, fuck it, went to Hulu, and clicked on that episode…

And what an episode it is, let me tell you. Still strong, still powerful. Except for the B-storyline about Hurley and Sawyer hunting down the treefrog that keeps Sawyer from getting his beauty sleep. Other than that… it’s all good times: We’re back in the hatch, still pushing the button, Jack is well into his descent into full on craziness, and Locke is still Locke and still looking for a meaning and a purpose in his life, and they’re just inches away from being at each other’s necks. And Shannon hasn’t been dead for too terribly long and though I don’t believe her name is mentioned in the episode, you can almost feel the spectre of her constantly floating over Naveen Andrews’ amazing performance here.

And it’s all wonderfully on display thanks to this strange new arrival, this “Henry Gale” whom they believe to be one of the Others,with Locke and Sayid making plans to go behind Jack’s back and then Sayid excludes even Locke from his plans, locking himself and Ben/”Henry Gale” in the armory and proceeds to question, torture, and then beat him.

Through all the questioning, Ben/”Henry Gale” never breaks character until he starts talking about his supposed wife whom he had to bury on the Island after she fell ill and died. Sayid begins to ask him technical questions about the process of burying a loved one, and that morbid place that’s concerned with and knows death too well, well, that’s a place Sayid’s always had one foot firmly in. But Ben/”Henry Gale” says he doesn’t know how many shovelfuls of earth he dug up to bury the woman he loved and that’s what convinces Sayid that this man is a lair. “You would remember!” Sayid screams as he begins raining a flurry of punches on the spiky haired bug eyed Other.

It’s a powerful moment. Sayid is the man who will always love and will always be doomed to lose that love, usually violently. He will always feel a part of himself is buried in the ground and the part of him that’s still up and walking around is ghoulish and prone to something nasty. If there’s a dark path out there, he feels he deserves to be on it, that he’s fated to be doomed and therefore he wants to start marching towards that oblivion as soon as he possibly can. And in this episode, you feel it. It feels both natural and is terrifying, but you understand it.

We talk a lot about the Jack character on Lost around these parts on Counterforce. A lot, right? He’s a fucked up character, but we praise him. And Kate’s a fucked up character too, but we tend to talk shit about her, which isn’t fair. But the Kate character has a lot of good qualities too. Whereas the other characters, usually the male ones, consider themselves, pardon the pun, lost and accept it, Kate keeps going on, keeps trying for something else, even if that something else is just running away from feeling bad all the time. And despite all the twists and turns, all the sci fi and geek shit about this, what keeps you coming back is the characters, time and again. And those charaters all different points on a spectrum of everyone.

That’s to say that there’s times when I really identify with the Jack character on the show. And sometimes, I see something that feels natural and familiar in the Locke character. Sometimes too much for both of those character. I’m naturally awesome and good looking and always doing well, but I’m still a human being, so sometimes I feel like I can identify with the beta boys on the show, characters like Charlie or Boone (and I’m being there, assigning them as beta boys, because let’s face it, those guys are a lot farther down the ladder). And at times I can identify with Kate too because there’s times when all I have is a bad idea and all I can do is run to it because nothing else will fit. That, or the desire to do copious amounts of tree climbing.

But this point isn’t called “Fuck Yeah Kate” or “Fuck Yeah Nikkie and Paulo.” This is “FUCK YEAH SAYID.” Everyone likes Sayid. He once killed a man with a dishwasher. He once broke a man’s neck with just his legs while tied up. Like we always say here: If he had been in charge on day one of the plane crash, they would’ve probably been rescued on day four. But then again, we also always threaten to do a post on how many times the plot has neccessitated Sayid being knocked out or taken out of the action (well, the plot or the fact that Naveen Andrews knocked up Barbara Hershey). He is all bright spectrum himself, but especially when he goes dark. Then we feel it. Then we understand it. Then we identify with it.

And there I was the other night, in a dark place myself but not really realizing it. And I was watching Sayid lose it, beating a man in a bizarre hatch on a fantastical Island in this magical piece of fiction and still, it resonated. I felt lost or partly lost or that I was about to be lost and the claws wanted to come out. I wanted to scream at someone or grab someone and do something to… to change things. But there was nothing that could be changed. And taking how I felt out on someone else wouldn’t have made me feel any better or accomplished anything useful. It was okay to be angry, but it was better to understand why I was feeling that way and even more importantly, it was better to remember the things that I would be losing, to not let go of that.

And I’ll never forget as the episode ended, as I fully sobered up and there was Sayid sitting on the beach with Charlie. Something else seemed to be gone from Sayid, another very human light turned somewhere in his eyes, and he a man living somewhere in the place after the sundown even then. Sayid told Charlie what had just happened down there in the hatch and Charlie asked him why he was telling him this…

SAYID: “Jack asked me how I knew — knew for sure that this man was lying. How I knew for sure that he was one of them — one of the Others. I know because I feel no guilt for what I did to him. — But there is no way I can ever explain that to Jack, or even Locke, because both of them have forgotten.”

CHARLIE: “Forgotten? What?”

SAYID: “That you were strung up by your neck and left for dead. That Claire was taken and kept for days during which god only know what happened to her. That these people — these Others — are merciless, and can take any one of us whenever they choose. So tell me, Charlie, have you forgotten?”

Events can shape you, because you bring the tools you have to do them and you make choices and act in certain ways or others. You make these choices based on your past experiences and then you keep going, just gaining more memories. And no matter what you do or where you go, all you have are those memories. If your life has been good, bad, full of suffering, or full of joy, or most likely a mix of it all, those memories are you.

Maybe you’re sitting in your room at some point, reflecting on everything that’s lead to now, or maybe you’re out on the street somewhere looking up at the window of someone you care about, watching as their light turns off. Or maybe you’re sitting on the beach, staring out at the ocean, seeing that tiny little window into the past that can only be visible on the horizon…

What’s important is that you always remember. What is it they say about those who forget the past?

The Post-Game Wrap Up for the Oscars…

Posted by Marco Sparks on

from here.

In case you couldn’t tell, we’ve always been on TEAM BIGELOW (As much as we love Point Break, come on, that’s a no brainer, right?.) And, as far as we were concerned, no one else had a shot.

I’d like to tie her winning and becoming the first female best director winner into today’s celebration of International Women’s Day, but I can’t. Is this a momentous thing, her winning and being a woman? Yes, of course it is. But she won for the reasons the same reasons you want anyone to win an Oscar, man or woman, and it’s something that’s been sorely lacking from this dog and pony show for a while: She is a brilliant storyteller and crafted an amazing movie. The Hurt Locker is a taut tale about the men and women who serve in Iraq, but it’s not about politics. It’s about people and it’s bombs walking around and just waiting to go off, both literally and metaphorically.

As for the rest of the night…

Well…

Fuck, it was kind of sad and boring, right?

Everyday is like a Sunday.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

New ad/short film for Oliver Peoples eyewear, featuring the bizarrely odd couple of Shirley Manson and Elijah Wood, and directed by Autumn de Wilde:

It’s entitled “Les enfants sennuient le dimanche,” or, “The children are bored on Sundays.” The children are dancing to Zee Avi. You could call it wildly fabulous, even. I tell ya, I wish my Sunday afternoons were Shirley Manson boring too.

You are cordially invited!

Posted by Marco Sparks on

So, FLASHBACK to last Saturday night… I was online, Maria was online, and we were waxing nostalgic and poetic about bullshit and what have you, talking about music and the internet, and finally Maria suggested that I should be the DJ at her imaginary wedding to her imaginary husband. And I chuckled at that and asked, “Which one?” and then it got me thinking…

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“Existing by momentum only, but pretending always otherwise.”

Posted by Marco Sparks on

This is a picture of Tao Lin:

from here.

This is a picture of Tao Lin’s most recent book:

…which is the novella Shoplifting From American Apparel, which I reviewed here for your extreme pleasure.

But! More importantly, for today anyway, is this book:

…which is Bed, Tao Lin’s first collection of short stories.

After I read/reviewed SFAA, Tao was kind enough to send it to me and this, this bit of bloggery that you’re currently reading, is going to swell and blossom into a review of said collection of short stories. That review will be called: Cull the Steal Heart, Melt the Ice one, Love the Weak Thing; Say Nothing of Consolation, but Irrelevance, Disaster, and Nonextistence; Have No Hope or Hate – Nothing; Ruin Yourself Exclusively, Completely, and Whenever Possible. It’s also the quite charming title of one of the stories in the collection.

Before I really start, I want to share that infamous Miranda July quote with you about Tao Lin: “Tao Lin writes from moods that less radical writers would let pass—from laziness, from vacancy, from boredom. And it turns out that his report from these places is moving and necessary, not to mention frequently hilarious.”

A lazy writer/reviewer/blogger would just post that quote and call it a day. Miranda July is right about a lot of things usually, and in this case, Tao Lin included.

Okay, enough foreplay, a review:

The characters in Bed are people like you and I, most likely, in their early twenties, and primarily from Florida and going to school in New York. Or having moved back to Florida afterward. There’s a different writer on work here than in play in SFAA and Eeeee Eee Eeee, and Tao Lin is doing acrobatic work with casually smart wordplay, showing us characters looking for something or running away from something, or sometimes just upset and confused and not sure which they should be doing. They think a lot and they observe but mostly they feel things. They exist in relationships that are stressed and strange and in different stages of coming to an end.

There are some variations on this essential theme, but there is also a sense of deja vu that can be felt as you continue through each story as you experience what feels like a different scenario involving the same elements in some places. I don’t think it’s enough to take you completely out of the world set up by each story, and you could make the argument that this is very much a post-9/11 book, even if it only references the events 9/11 in two stories, but there’s that same sense of dread, confusion, and waiting for something to happen in an existence where each day feels exactly the same.

You can find a table of contents of Bed‘s nine stories here, and online you can read three of the stories:

“Love Is A Thing On Sale For More Money Than There Exists.”

The aforementioned “Cull The Steel Heart, Melt The Ice One, Love The Weak Thing; Say Nothing Of Consolation, But Irrelevance, Disaster, And Nonexistence; Have No Hope Or Hate – Nothing; Ruin Yourself Exclusively, Completely, And Whenever Possible,” which is also known as “Leftover Crack In Red Hook.”

And “Sasquatch.”

And if you click here, you can find Tao Lin talking about each of the stories, giving each one mini commentary and talking about the songs he was primarily listening to while writing them, all over at Large Hearted Boy. He also mentions there that a lot of this collection was written and submitted in undergraduate writing workshops at NYU, which makes the story that primarily takes place in a writing workshop all that more interesting and funny to me, and that he studied the styles of Lorrie Moore and Joy Williams while crafting these fine tales.

These are stories that I think the internet can understand, at least the internet elite, those who understand/appreciate/tolerate Gawker. People who know what it’s like to be a “jobless bitch” or have ever felt “shadowy.” People who want to try and understand things by talking, sometimes aimlessly, who walk around thinking things like “Motherfucker” all the time. If you know what the void is like, what it’s like to hover over it, to ponder the big issues over sushi, and to hang out with teenagers for the sake of companionship and to get something out of TPing a house, you can appreciate these stories. These stories are, whoever you are, worth your time. Unless you’re an asshole.

Two of the best stories in the collection are excerpted up above, those being “Three-Day Cruise,” a lovely tale of a family, starting with how everyone in the family meets their eventual demise and then going back through their entire lives leading up to a family vacation they go on. At the end of life, there is no more fear of death, they realize.

In emailing Tao the other day, I gushed about “Three-Day Cruise,” but really, I should’ve been gushing about “Sasquatch,” the final story, which is nothing short of beautiful. The ending is magnificent. Every story here feels like you’re taking a tour through an aspect of Tao Lin’s life, but in a few of the stories, such as “Sasquatch” and “Three-Day Cruise,” something else begins to happen, as if Tao’s journey as the documentarian, sharer of words and thoughts and feelings and experiences, a raconteur and writer all merge in a warm transcendence of transmogrification. In the last story, I feel he loses something that turns off most potential readers, the deadpan voice, the sense that he’s just collecting, absorbing, regurgitating. There’s a whole world between the lines of “Sasquatch,” shared with you in Tao Lin’s usual style, but conveying more than just cleverness. There’s something in that last story that will stay with you a while after you’ve finished the book, set it down, and reviewed it online somewhere, be it on tumblr, Goodreads, or your own personal blog.

Bed was released concurrently with Tao’s first novel, Eeeee Eee Eeee, via small press publisher Melville House, based in New York. For cool visual aids of that first novel, I give you again a picture of Counterforce’s own Peanut St. Cosmo reading the novel:

When he sent me Bed, Tao mentioned that it was in an obviously different style than SFAA, and told me that it was his “least shit-talked book.” You have no idea how much I wish other authors could be so frank.

But, as I said in my previous post on him, Tao Lin is an author who has always embraced the wide world of shit talking that’s out there. In fact, when he announced the release of his short story collection just four short years ago, he was pretty clear that he wanted all possible blurbs, from the good, to the bad, to the ugly. And let’s face it, to embrace “shit talking” is nothing short of embracing the nature of the internet and the new ways that literature interacts, thrives, and penetrates it.

Prof. Leonard Kleinrock doing some crazy internet shit back in the day @ UCLA.

And Tao Lin is very much a writer who, if not created exclusively by the internet or ARPANET scientists based out of Taiwan, then a writer who has been nourished by the internet, who has thrived upon it. Someone who’s experienced it’s ebb and flows, it’s weird writer’s workshop vibe and vitality, from “shit talking” to extreme self promotion to the way that humanity analyzes and experience itself on the internet, always comparing itself to something else and finding the touching, slightly heartfelt emotion hidden there.

Put simply: The internet is the perfect metaphor for the world we live in: Terrorism is the same as heartbreak, isolation is the same as sushi, fighting with your girlfriend is the same as sleeping on your brother’s couch. childhood sleepovers are the same as movies you can buy from Wal-mart that make you feel good, Wendy’s spicy chicken sandwiches, aside from being delicious, are the same as humming the Star Wars theme during sex. Eschatology is the same as the Lochness Monster (or the Locke-ness Monster), Natalie Portman is always interesting, even when she’s in a movie like Garden State, and “it would take three Chopins to beat up Glenn Gould.” That is to say, these things happen, and sometimes they’re far away and sometimes they’re here and they’re now. It’s how you experience them. Sometimes it’s scary and terrifying and you don’t know how to feel or what to do and it feels like non-fiction, and sometimes it’s quaint and clever and a little bit silly and exciting, kind of like a story in a book.

Chopin vs. Gould!

Tao Lin’s website can be found here.

His tumblr presence can be found here.

His twitter presence can be found here.

This is his “tweet” about my previous post about him:

If you click here, you can see a video of his parents ordering at a McDonald’s in a semi-rural/mountainous area of Taipei, Taiwan.

If you click here, you can see Tao Lin’s reading diary.

If you click here, you can read about the iphone app he’s creating, entitled “North American Hamsters.” Previews: The “BSG” Hamster, which thankfully does not stand for Battlestar Galactica. The Morbidly Obese Hamster. And the “Winged Hamster.”

Tao Lin will also be featured in the upcoming Coming & Crying: Real Stories About Sex From the Other Side Of The Bed, edited by Melissa Gira Grant and Meaghan O’Connell. Also featured are incredibly talented people like Tess Lynch, Tyler Coates, Katie West, Stephen Elliott (and, by clicking here, you can read the interview with Tao Lin on Elliott’s website, The Rumpus), and Counterforce’s very own and very amazing, Maria Diaz.

And if you click here, you can find his short story for Nerve.

Write something about Tao Lin online. He will probably google it. Also, his second novel, Richard Yates, is coming out on September 7, 2010. The cover looks like this:

The singularity is near.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

Or is it? I ask you: Is “the future” that we talk about and theorize and plan for and fear and hope and lust after, is it just another piece of art that we’re creating? Or destroying?

Are you afraid of tomorrow? Or looking forward to where the humans go? Or is it just too far off to accurately discuss?

Beyond the pilot, I’ve yet to catch an episode of the Battlestar Galactica spinoff, Caprica, but I’m desperate to before – and let’s face it – they cancel it:

The music video for “In Repair,” a song by a band I used to like quite a bit, Our Lady Peace, from their album, Spiritual Machines, which features the thoughts and ideas and voice of the futurist Ray Kurzweil quite a bit:

And here’s the trailer for The Transcendent Man, a documentary about Kurzweil. Interesting stuff. Especially, and I hate myself or saying this, the celebrity cameos. See:

You can see Kurzweil on Glenn Beck here.

Or, you can see Kurzweil explaining the coming singularity here.

He also made an old resting list of ours, which you can find here.

You can flash back to Maria and I talking about related things (and Megan Fox and the robots who will fuck you) here.

And while I enjoyed the pilot to Caprica, which is on the still ridiculously named “SyFy” channel, part of me is sad that it’s associated with Galactica. I would’ve enjoyed it a bit more if it was it’s own thing. Hopefully it’s still on Hulu, because I need to catch up. Also, I think I’m in love with “the first cylon,” played wonderfully by Alessandra Torresani.

Other craziness:

FLASHBACK! Why the internet will fail (from 1995).

Old people, lifecasting, and the future of the internet.

Other great Our Lady Peace songs include: “Clumsy,” as well as “Superman’s Dead,” I guess, and “Is Anybody Home?” and the epic and immortal “Starseed.” And a song called “Will The Future Blame Us,” which is okay, I guess, but the title is hilarious to me. The answer is yes. Time travel will be created in the future mainly due to posterity’s desire for revenge.

Ray Bradbury on predicting what the future will look like:

“People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it. Better yet, build it. Predicting the future is much too easy, anyway. You look at the people around you, the street you stand on, the visible air you breathe, and predict more of the same. To hell with more. I want better.”

from 1979′s Beyond 1984: The People Machines.

Oh well. The future’s an interesting place that I want to live in someday. And who doesn’t want to be on the team of architects who designs it? But there’s a massive gaping difference between desire and talking and just doing and building. And talking about the future tends to be elegant masturbation.

And a last thought:

“The very people who believe that everything has already been discovered and everything said, will greet your work as something new, and will close the door behind you, repeating once more that nothing remains to be said.”

“Newness is in the mind of the artist who creates, and not in the object he portrays.”

“What moves men of genius, or rather, what inspires their work, is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.”

-Eugène Delacroix, via here and here.

The lovely Liberty Leading The People, 1830, by Eugène Delacroix, which, sadly, you last song on the cover of the last fucking Coldplay album.

The fat lady sings, then gets liposuction.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like we’re on the verge of something in our culture. Or, at least, our pop culture. Things are ending, clearing themselves out, making way for new things. Maybe it has something to do with this being “The Year We Make Contact,” I don’t know, but I’m really starting to feel this faint fin de siècle vapor hanging overhead as the old shocks give up the ghost and fade away. Speaking of which…

Last night was the end of Nip/Tuck.

This amazed me, that it was finally ending, and the ending was an understated one. It coasted I think on the characters’ long journey to here and now, was light on the crazy trashy drama, but ultimately didn’t touch me nearly as much as the ending of The Shield, the FX network’s other big show (since I’ve only seen maybe an episode and a half of Damages) that I used to watch.

Why? Partly because Nip/Tuck probably felt like it ended a year or two ago.

The last real episode I saw before last night’s was the one where Christian and Liz come back from their honeymoon, Christian no longer has breast cancer, and cuts Liz loose. Sean is suddenly dating Rose McGowan out of nowhere. Julia was still fucking around, Kimber was still doing whatever, and Matt… Jesus. Fucking Matt had dropped out of medical school to become a mime and start robbing people. And I thought, “You know what? Fuck this.”

This show used to soar in it’s depths of ethereal trashiness and that lurid hard on of the glamorous nasty just felt forced and medicated. The high was probably the Carver storyline.

But I do have some love for the Sanaa Lathan season (just as I have massive love for Sanaa Lathan). Or any of the other seasons with the countless other over the top dirty sexy fun storylines that we’ve accepted.

And the Famke Janssen season as well.

…who returned last night for the swan song. And maybe it’s a make up thing or just how Janssen has aged, but this time I really felt her character in that she looked quite, uh, tranny-like (?) to me. But she was still fantastic in her role, waxing poetic about not being a monster, but being a victim of society that craves adoration. And then there’s the pathetic Matt whom can only offer adoration to someone and nothing else.

And perhaps it should have. I think trash can always be sustained, but you can’t just keep hooking it up to an IV of dayglo filth and call it a fountain of youth, like this show. You need substance. Or, in the case of the continuing narrative of Nip/Tuck, you desperately need substance and something tangible or more to say about the evils of our society that’s so very much obsessed with looks. And when you shine a light on all of our dark places, there needs to be something there to see.

And Nip/Tuck hasn’t had that for a while. And then… it didn’t.

It’s a show that’s changed so many times, putting itself through facelift after facelift, giving you a dazzling and rapid succession of new status quos to swallow harshly. And what it really needed was some mental surgery. Beauty fades, age gracefully, and know when it’s time to go.

But perhaps there was something in there, not just about the facades we worship, or the exploitation of youth (or a depiction of one of the most continuously fucked up family dynamics on TV ever), but something crueler and more interesting: a study of severely flawed masculinity.

Could you call the ongoing saga of Doctors Christian Troy and Sean McNamara anything else? All the women that have passed through their lives, that they’ve traded like briefly interesting toys and mirrors, it’s all come back to them and how devastatingly uncomfortable they were in their own skin.

Was Nip/Tuck the end result of a truly American journey that was started in Mad Men?

Whatever. This is half a post. I just have nothing to say. It’s like this show turned upon itself, much like Christian did to Sean, and said, “Tell me what you don’t like about yourself.” And the answer?

Everything.