He contrasts stoicism with Zen, which causes some problems. I do think there are similarities between the two philosophies. However, he mischaracterizes Zen:
Practicing Zen would require me to suppress my analytical abilities, something I found it quite difficult to do. Another off-putting aspect of Zen was that the moment of enlightenment it dangled before its practitioners was by no means guaranteed. Practice Zen for decades and you might achieve enlightenment — or you might not. It would be tragic, I thought, to spend the remaining decades of my life pursuing a moment of enlightenment that never came.
Enlightenment is not specifically Zen, but Buddhist in general and even pre-Buddhist. Enlightenment presents the possibility of happiness / tranquility / nirvana / whatevs within this lifetime, so I’d say it compares favourably to the competing brands who are selling glorious afterlives and such. But for Irvine, enlightenment is too far off, and may never come. Whereas the stoics are promising results immediately – the spiritual equivalent of the microwave oven.
Except that’s not really the case. Stoics have no miracle cures. They say that reason can cure unhappiness. But blindly following whatever stoics say isn’t reason: you still have ages of reasoning ahead of you, thinking through every aspect of life, undoing all your bad unreasonable habits, getting to work on that shit. You’re not going to get that done in a weekend. Besides, it’s not like your time following the Zen path would be wasted and unfulfilling even if you never attained enlightenment (I have my suspicions about the concept of enlightenment, but that’s too much to get into here).
A Zen Buddhist might advise those wishing to attain tranquillity to spend hours each day trying to empty their mind of all thought. And when they are not doing this, they should spend time trying to solve koans, those paradoxical questions, the most famous of which is “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” … The Stoics, by way of contrast, would recommend neither of these activities. Your time would be much better spent, they would suggest, analyzing what it is in your daily life that disrupts your tranquillity and thinking about what you can do to prevent such disruptions.
It’s true that Zen meditation, zazen, is a big part of Zen-World. The way Irvine describes it, it sounds like a waste of time. Well, the idea is to train your mind. You are practicing concentration, getting rid of mental distractions, getting familiar with your own mind-state and the processes that often run amok therein. Buddhism recognizes that your own mind, not those of others, is often your biggest obstacle.
The koans are meant to show the limits of rational thought. That is indeed a big difference between stoicism and Zen: Zen argues2 enlightenment isn’t something you can book-learn yourself to. It’s beyond reason, since reason is dependent on language but spiritual fulfillment is not.
Zen (and Buddhism in general) do not imagine zazen and koans are enough in the way of spiritual practice. Both say you should follow the eightfold path, which involves a lot more than sitting around doing jack and/or clapping with one hand. Zen does sometimes have an impractical air, since a lot of the literature comes from a monastic tradition and is specifically about the training of monks. But there are indeed Zen temples out there in the wild. Anyway, it’s not all about impractical, time-wasting mind exercises, nor does Zen or Buddhism dismiss rational thought altogether – go ask the Dalai Lama. It has its purposes, but it also has its limits.
One of its limits is a reliance on binary opposition in order to create meaning. We need hot to understand cold, etc. Here, Irvine needs Zen as a foil to first present how Stoicism is similar, then to contrast the differences. But his image of Zen is partial and dependent on the points he wants to make about Stoicism.
I really don’t mean to denigrate Irvine’s choices or the philosophy of the stoics here; I love me some stoicism as much as the next Greco-Roman enthusiast. But I just got to step up when someone smacks my boy Zen is all.
1 I’m super not qualified to judge the merits of Stoicism, but negative visualization as presented by Irvine seems problematic at best. The goal is to better appreciate what you have, which is noble. But surely there are better ways to do so than imagining personal disasters? Can’t you just think about what you have and directly appreciate it without the mental shock treatment? Perhaps some people need to do that sort of thing more, but others most certainly need to do it less.
2 I’d have trouble speaking for any large entity in this manner – “Canada argues, The Sankeys argue” – but especially for Zen. I suppose it’s obvious, but I’m only speaking here of what Zen means to me; I have no authority to declare it always true everywhere. Hey, doesn’t this conveniently tie in to what I was saying about the limits of reason / language etc. etc.
I’ve shot the entire thing myself on a Panasonic GH1. I have the 14-140mm kit lens, the Panasonic 20mm f1.7 pancake lens, plus a 50mm FD lens (that I didn’t use).
The GH1, importantly with the GH13 firmware hack, has acquitted itself admirably. The optics are good in this thing. The sore points are the low bit rate recording and the interlaced wrapper, so the firmware hack has been a godsend.
I honestly way prefer the footage from the GH1 and other video SLRs to that of prosumer-level dedicated video cameras. It’s way more film-like (if I can drop that bomb without unpacking it at all). So I think using this camera was the right choice. It was also, as they say, the camera I had – prosumer vidcams are considerably more expensive.
When I began, I was using the kit lens near-exclusively, thinking that the long zoom would give me some versatility, and its decent autofocus would help me out. Its downside is that it is slow, and thus has a broad, unfilmic depth of field.
As it turned out, I did not find the autofocus good at all. Perhaps it is for some purposes, but my early footage has unusable parts when the lens is hunting for focus, or choosing the wrong plane. So I went manual focus, and as I got used to the focus ring on the 20mm pancake, I started using that a lot more. That lens be pretty yo.
I’m not a pro cinematographer or cameraman by a long shot. Photography has been a hobby for a while, but motion footage in a doc context has its own challenges, mostly that you have to be timely with your shutter, aperture and focus adjustments, and you have to be stable. I love handheld footage. But handheld on a shoulder-mounted TV camera is one thing, handheld in an SLR body another; the tiny body means your wrists’ natural movements can manifest as footage-wrecking jitter. My goal was to stabilize that shit enough to look like regular handheld film or TV camera footage.
To that end, I used simply a Gorillapod. Again, it was the thing I already had, and I wasn’t looking to shell out a stack of hunnys for some steadicam-alike rig. (I also considered a Spider Brace as it looks like a good option.)
Did it work? Most of the time. If I was standing still, it worked great – you can rest two of the legs of the gorillapod on your person, forming them to the right fit. When I was on the move, however, the shakes got bad. Sometimes they are manageable, but other times, less so. There definitely could be better solutions, I’d say.
One last note: the tiny size of VSLRs is a huge advantage for documentary. People seem to get less self-conscious around a smaller camera, and indeed a lot of people will just think you’re taking stills. And of course you can always have it on you in case something happens. That’s reason enough not to trick it out too hard with steadicam rigs and matte boxes and all that jazz.
Sound
Nothing beats having a sound guy. He’ll roll on in and clip lavs on everyone while holding a boom and making sure the levels are tight. Unfortunately, he costs $500 / day.
So I essentially copied the sound recording techniques of my employer, or at least the old CHUM part. They never had a sound guy; the cameraman would clip a lav onto the interview subject and wire the transmitter into the camera, with auto-gain enabled.
You can do this exact thing with video SLRs, but their audio hardware is less developed and the auto-gain is not as good. So I record from lavs into a separate field recorder (the Zoom H4N), whose auto-gain has yet to let me down. The downside is of course syncing in post, but I didn’t find that to be so bad. I’m using the lavs mostly for interviews, which tend to be long clips. In Final Cut, you can sync up in a sequence and then use that sequence exactly like you would a clip (YMMV in Avid or other NLEs). Anyway, the results are great with minimal headaches. The lavs are expensive, but I considered it a worthwhile expense. Never underestimate the production value that crisp sound supplies.
I also used the Panasonic shotgun mic on the camera, for when I was shooting verité stuff and didn’t have people miked up. It’s decent.
In Summation
I was quite happy with the results. You can certainly get away with shooting a doc on these cameras.1
1 One issue that presents itself is TV broadcasters’ technical requirements, which may specify a bitrate higher than these cameras produce. The tech standards papers are pie-in-the-sky bullshit cooked up by fussy engineers, but they can still cause a problem. I’m not concerned about it for this project – and the GH13 hack can up the bitrate to something pretty crazy – but it’s worth looking into before you start your project, if you’re hoping to get on TV.
As a result, my TIFF experience compared to last year, when I saw 22 films over the same time period, was much less intense. There were no films I thought were “best of the year” category, but also no stinkers. No big hustle to get across town in ten minutes to catch the next flick. It was actually fairly pleasant and relaxed. I also realized if you’re going solo, you can just embrace the fact that you’re going to be wedged in next to other people and avoid the lineup altogether by going 15 minutes early. Usually the lineup crowd has already been seated, and you find what you can. I never had a bad seat. The only lineup I had was for the Winterbottom film, a ‘gala’ (booooo) at Ryerson (boooooo).
Trip – Michael Winterbottom comedy road movie with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. Entertaining, uneven, better than I feared.
Armadillo – Danish doc about Afghanistan – embedded with platoon. Very good, well-shot and visceral, but I hear it’s not as good as Restrepo? (Which I haven’t seen, but would very much like to.)
Microphone – Egyptian film about a recently returned, grieving fella who tries to put together a concert of Alexandria’s underground music scene. Rough, sometimes amateurish, but great music and ultimately cleverer than it initially appears to be.
Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame – a Tsui Hark film billed as the asian Sherlock Holmes. They had me from the moment a magic deer appears and gives orders. Just as much kicking as crime-solving, as one expects from TH.
Sound of Mumbai: A Musical – One of my favourites. Doc about a concert being put together in Mumbai (surprise) featuring slum kids singing The Sound of Music. As fiction this would be contrived and saccharine. As documentary the story is simple and powerful. Scenes of kids roaming around their neighbourhood with Sound of Music score playing feel like real life mashup.
Stake Land – a vampire film that’s really a zombie film at heart. The vampires are brainless bloodthirsty savages, and it’s set a few years after Life As We Know It has ended. But a loose road trip plot goes in more interesting directions than you might expect, focusing on how humans react to the apocalypse rather than the monsters. Although there is that, too. This was people’s choice for best of Midnight Madness.
Outside the Law – epic Algerian / French gangster / revolutionary story in which a trio of brothers becomes involved in the Algerian revolution. Suffers from the usual epic film problems like time compression, condensed dialogue – but actually fairly badass nonetheless.
Sleeping Beauty – Breillat fairy tale about childhood emerging into sexuality. I think. One of my least favourite, but still probably a decent film that I was too tired to get into.
Attenberg – Was attracted to this because of the post-industrial setting. Had I known a major part of this was a father’s illness and death, I probably would have skipped it, which would have been a shame. It’s quite good, although it compares unfavourably to the much more rigorous Dogtooth, another Greek film with which it shares crew members. But I really liked this, and it handled grief in a completely unsentimental and true-to-life way, while also being quite funny and thought-provoking. I have a pet theory that it was a metaphor for Greece’s financial collapse, perhaps.
My father died two weeks ago, the funeral was last week. This week I am back at work and trying to adjust to normal life, which right now, quite honestly, feels like trying to get interested in meaningless busywork. Twitter, facebook, this site, they all seem a bit silly to me. But I know I want to get out of that headspace as it’s all stuff I liked to do before this went down. Right?
So, I’ll ease back into things. I’m away in Windsor for the weekend shooting some stuff and hopefully having fun. Then I have next week off for TIFF, which theoretically should also be fun, and is (in theory) a good excuse for some film reviews up in this bitch.
You know, whenever I post one of these “I won’t be posting a lot” posts, I wind up posting a lot. But be prepared for a lack of such ironies – for a cold, hard, earnest absence of posts. Milady and I have purchased a house, and there are a lot of house-related-type-stuff things to do, and I don’t think they will be particularly fascinating to write about. (Also, the internets aren’t hooked up in the house yet.)
So, a lot has happened. Perhaps I won’t try and record everything here – I have 500 gigs of video that serves that purpose – but start talking about the overall feeling, as there are only a few short days left and then SRSI is over.
I haven’t mentioned The Department of Unusual Certainties in a manner that befits them. They are doing a project called Storefront Success Stories that is fairly fascinating – sort of an attempt to do urban design consultation properly, from the ground up. It’s a tricky project to pin down, in part because there is little visible about it yet (their process looks like regular office work mostly), and in part because the boys like to prevent easy explanations of things. But suffice it to say that I’ve had many fascinating conversations with them.
Lee Rodney has decamped her Border Bookmobile and set up a temporary position in the storefront. The contents of the bookmobile (besides the beautiful Chrysler Crimson seating) are a collection of books about Windsor, Detroit, borders, and more. Among the books was a volume of Shrinking Cities which Chris of The Department had mentioned to me, so I was excited to check it out of Lee’s library and get right into.
That’s the thing, those two words: shrinking cities. Cities that are getting smaller, but also cities plural. You might think at first it’s Detroit that’s this stunning historical phenomenon, then you might realize the problems are shared across the rust belt (Cleveland, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Baltimore), and then you might realize the problem spans the goddamned world. East Germany after reunification was a particular hotbed, but it’s happened many times before and will happen again. Your city could shrink. Perhaps it already is. You can’t help but look at the outsourcing of manufacturing to China and the outsourcing of knowledge work to India as harbingers of a whole lot more shrinkage to come.
So it’s important to look at these cities, not just for the sake of the residents of these cities (good enough reason right there of course), but also for everyone else. It’s important to look at the cities as distinct places each with their own set of intersecting problems, but also to find out about the common issues, and about the solutions that have already been attempted. Some have worked. Some have not.
I’m not going to pretend to have any answers myself, so I want to switch gears and think about Windsor. It’s a strange place. We went on a bike ride last night and Michelle took us to the west side, past the ancient Sandwich Town, through slums, past a quick succession of naturalized field / apartment building / giant heaps of salt / school. It’s not a landscape as desolate as Detroit by a long shot, but it’s unlike anything in my Toronto world. It’s beautiful, lively, friendly, diverse. You get the impression that it is a tough town populated exclusively by grumpy auto workers. But the other day I enjoyed Pho at one of many Vietnamese restaurants as I listened to the enormous family seated near me speak Spanish. The pho was a bit greasy but very flavourful.
Originally my goals for this project were to complete a short documentary, post small segments online, daily blog posts, do workshops etc. etc. Best laid plans and suchlike. There is no way I will get this thing edited by the end of the residency in 10 days. The problem is I am shooting too much. You can’t just go in like a news crew and say, I need an interview and 5 minutes of b-roll and I’m out. A lot of the best stuff comes from hanging around with the camera, sort of like a hunter. You capture the little details, the surprises, you get to know people, and you earn trust. But it takes a ton of time. And there are always a few artists here simultaneously, so I’ve already missed a lot because I was shooting somewhere else.
So, revised goals. Some segments before the end of the project. Some blog posts. No finished film, that will come months later. Luckily Michelle will help with the editing, which is a huge, huge help.
What’s happened since saturday? It’s all a blur.
Sunday I mentioned, here’s Chris and Michelle making pasta.
Here’s Norman monitoring some dweeb filming his camera.
I followed Lea as she gathered plants for her project, the garden party. She goes up to houses with nice gardens and chats with the owners about Windsor, and asks if they’d like to contribute a plant. The plants get set up as a garden in the storefront. She invites the contributors to the garden party. Here’s her with Nadia, who is an amazing woman.
Went to the casino with Robin.
I gambled for the first time, on slots. I lost $9.90. I loved all the bizarre themes to the slot machines – there are Star Trek and Jaws machines, plus off brands like Pirates and Wild Panda. You can’t shoot anywhere near them though.
And you got to love the Walker Power Building, it’s hard not to take pictures of it.
So yeah. Went to Detroit. Let me take a step back. Came back to Windsor on thursday night, was immediately whisked off to karaoke at Billy’s bar in Sandwich Town, which was excellent. Friday was a tour of Windsor’s forgotten suburbs, relics of ambitious overexpansion in the past. We were led by the incredible Lee Rodney in the border bookmobile.
These are houses on Chappas street, a whole neighbourhood that stands vacant because the land has been bought up for the proposed Detroit River International Crossing, a new bridge that the Ontario and federal governments are planning.
Here is an old sidewalk running through a park:
I stopped by the storefronts a little on friday. On Saturday, Thea and I went to Detroit. I had a million places I wanted to see in Detroit but we didn’t want to be gone all day so we kept it to two spots:
Number one was the train station, Michigan Central Station, which was built in the early 20th century but has stood vacant since 1988. Sure, it’s classic tourist ruin porn, but it also has to be seen to be believed.
It’s named after the street it’s on, and – well, let me quote their site:
The Heidelberg Project, bearing the name of the street on which it exists, was started in 1986 by Tyree Guyton. He was assisted by his grandfather, Sam (Grandpa) Mackey (deceased), and his former wife, Karen Guyton. Tyree was raised on Heidelberg Street and, at the age of 12, witnessed the tragic effect of the Detroit riots – from which he claims the City of Detroit never recovered. Though once racially integrated, many neighborhoods have become segregated urban ghettos characterized by poverty, abandonment, and despair.
Armed with a paintbrush, a broom, and neighborhood children, Guyton, Karen, and Grandpa began by cleaning up vacant lots on Heidelberg and Elba Streets. From the refuse they collected, Guyton began to transform the street into a massive art environment. Vacant lots literally became “lots of art” and abandoned houses became “gigantic art sculptures.” Guyton not only transformed vacant houses and lots, he integrated the street, sidewalks, and trees into his mammoth installation and called his work, “The Heidelberg Project”, after its location on Heidelberg Street.
Here are some pics:
Like I said, I was only in Detroit half the day. But even such cursory driving about the city gave me some slightly better understanding of a city that has fascinated me for some time. Just as a few pictures of riots and vandals could give you the impression that G20 protesters in general were a bunch of hooligans, the ruin porn and the breathless tales of desolation could give you the impression that Detroit is a hopeless hellhole. Now, this was a landscape unlike any I’ve seen – not just the ruins and the urban prairies but also the 10-lane arterial roads downtown, the monorail (Monorail!), the trip over the bridge, etc. etc. But there are pockets downtown of much activity, pedestrian and otherwise. And the mere presence of something like Heidelberg (which was a hive of activity when we went, because of the US Social Forum) has got to be reason for hope.
We returned to Windsor and went out that night to the Loop which was good times, and then I was back to shooting around the SRSI storefronts on sunday and monday, getting lots of insane footage. News of the G20 disaster made me feel distressed and strangely homesick sunday, but reading about that march sunday aft. made me feel better.
I’ll post more about the documentary process by tomorrow.
I got really upset last night looking at images of the G20 ‘riots’ but of course taking stock today it doesn’t seem so bad. Four cop cars torched, smashed windows, some police brutality perhaps… that ridiculous arrest law, and too many arrests. Yet no bombs, deaths, and not too much tear gas (?). I’m out of town in Windsor, but if the vibe of this writeup is to be believed, it sure could have been worse. Pictures of masked people smashing shit, burning cars, and rows of menacing riot cops are always disturbing, but when the backdrop is the city you live in and love – or even the building you work in, in my case – it can be horrifying. And you assume the pictures are representational of widespread similar activity, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
I was happy to hear that street crews were busy cleaning up Queen St. by late last night. Back to business, kids.
So yeah, I’m shooting a doc about the month-long event. My ideas of how best to cover it have been changing. After some great nights of conversation – one with Jefferson and Julie and another with Chris, Thea and later Andrea, I’m settling on a format that I think will work better than the traditional approach of practice viz, artist interviews and talking expert heads. The challenges are to keep the film unified (as we’re dealing with a large number of potential subjects) and to provide a broader context for the events portrayed. The broader context – the collapse of an industrial city – is especially important for this project because it provides the conflict narrative so loves. I’ve also found the artifice of the one-on-one interview doesn’t sit well with some artists (people in general, really. The outgoing sorts are fine but it can force some more introverted types [myself included] into a defensive posture).
The possible solution is to stage conversations between the artists and Broken City Lab members. All of these people are thinking about the broader context and expressing aspects of it in their work. By doing this we get a more natural and lively result. By excluding traditional experts we limit the cast of characters to something possibly comprehensible by an unmodified human.
I say ‘stage’ because I think the initial, informal stage of just plain-ass chattin’ with people is important and pulling the camera out can ruin it. It is perhaps the wrong word, as the filmed conversation isn’t scripted or anything.
We’ve tried it once and the results were good. Picking the people who should talk is interesting. We had Michelle (BCL) talk to Julie (resident artist), but I can see situations where two artists’ work are both about, say, Indian Road, so getting them to talk would probably be fruitful. I’m in the process of mapping out the different paths between people, their work, issues in the city and the broader issues, and it will certainly be an interesting (read: horribly complicated) task to sort everything out in the edit).
I’ll be heading back for like two weeks on the weekend and will try and post a lot more. It has been tricky balancing the work between shoot – log – edit – other things, but I’m getting there.
Day Zero was some shooting, some cleaning. I figured I only needed so many minutes of footage of people cleaning or painting so I jumped in there too to speed things along. The BCL peeps are quite impressive. I mean I knew this before but their organization and willingness to perform unglamorous gruntwork were on full display and are certainly rare traits amongst the creative types I’m familiar with.
The three vacant storefronts were a Canadiana shop, a hairdresser and a tattoo parlour. The first two were in pretty good shape, but the latter suffered from a heinous failed paint scheme, a predeliction towards demon-based decoration, and a surfeit of garbage and broken glass. Naturally, this was the lair I chose to call my temporary home. My room has the best demon face which we have hidden behind a storage unit, as one should with all wall-borne demon faces. I also have a water-damaged copy of this awesome motivational poster
which was left behind by our skin-scorching friends.
So yeah. On Day One the artists started to move in. For the full writeup with pics you should check out BCL’s updates I’ll stick to my narrow point of view. I am from an editing background, and am not an experienced shooter by any means. I’m getting decent with stills, and I’ve shot some doc stuff over the years, but I’m no camera pro. So I had stuck to some pretty lazy auto-exposure settings with the ol’ GH1 on Day Zero. I wasn’t thrilled with the results, so I rolled full manual on Day One. I probably lost a few seconds of gold here and there as I cranked the aperture between the sun-drenched store fronts and the dim, surly store backs, but generally things worked out better. Next step will be going full manual focus, too. Oddly enough I’m much better at this with certain lenses than others, and not that hot with my most versatile lens, but we’ll see what happens.
The artists – Eric, Jolie, Julie & Jefferson – were really excitig to talk to and watch work. I was concentrating on getting some moving-in shots, and I got those. I hope to talk with them more; it seems to me better to get an interview where the artist is showing what she has done rather than talking about what she will do, so I’m aiming to get most of these later.
I had my first documentary moral crisis. Jolie and Mike were unloading a huge couch from their truck, and were having problems. As I said, I was looking for moving in footage, and this was prime gold, but I wanted to drop the camera and go help. But I stood there. It turned out okay; some absolute strangers came by and not only helped carry the couch, but navigated it through a narrow doorway adeptly.
I’m glad I’m not a war photographer.
I started logging by the end of Day One, but Day Two was a real post-production day. Not a great one. Editors know the sort of day you have where you spend way too long sorting niggling technical problems. Well, it was one of those. The GH1 pulls in 24p from the sensor, but wraps it in 30i pulldown, and I tend to process these to get rid of the pulldown because I FUCKINGHATEINTERLACING. But normally, I leave these to run as a batch overnight. Doing them in the middle of the day I realized how long they take. Also, there were errors and I had to do some shots over and over again. So it set me back something fierce.
While it was going on, however, I had the time and motivation to hack my camera’s firmware. As I linked to before, a hacker named tester13 has released a tool that lets you modify the GH1’s firmware. The biggest knocks against the GH1 were that its AVCHD implementation is poor – it records at a low bitrate that can break up into a slurry of pixels when faced with fast pans or high detail scenes, like, say, nature. Tester13’s tool lets you up the bitrate to something that does justice to the camera’s quality optics and sensor. It also lets you record in real 24p and get rid of the pulldown, so that was my major motivation.
In the morning of Day Three, I actually started cutting footage together and got about 5 minutes of rough cut. Then I went out to follow Andrea and Simon on a little project of theirs. On a bike ride they had discovered an abandoned neighbourhood, and found that the houses had gardens that were still growing, and were growing interesting things like cacti and asparagus. So they went there to dig up some of the plants, with the aim of replanting them in vacant lots downtown, so more people might see them. It was quite a scene – the tall grass, the collapsing roofs, the amplified hum of wild nature. I have some photos that I will post shortly (yeah like you trust me now).
Now I’m back in the T-dot for a few days, and then back to Windsor. It’s a busy-ass month, that’s for sure, but it’s been amazing so far.
I wake to the sound of birds. Behind them, a distant roar.
The house is empty save for me, and strangely, sparsely furnished. There are two mini-fridges, no big fridge or stove. The lot next to me is a small patch of farmland. On the other side, a vacant lot.
Across the street, the University of Windsor. In the background, the great commercial sluice that is Huron Church Road, carrying a continuous torrent of trucks to and from the Ambassador Bridge, the great monument to cross-border commerce that cleaves a community in two. I’m here to film. The event is Storefront Residencies for Social Innovation, in which a group of artists take up residencies in vacant commercial space in downtown Windsor.
The house I’m in is the Ecohouse, a project of the university. It’s used mostly for student group meetings, hence the mini-fridge.
I’ll be here on and off throughout the duration of the event, which ends in mid-july. I’ll try and keep posting as I go, as I think it will be pretty interesting.
I have been mulling this shit over ever since it aired. Thank God I’m not a TV critic. I’ve been writing things about it but not posting them, because my opinions of the episode have been a moving target: first I loved it, then a few days later I hated it, and now a couple weeks later I’m somewhere in between.
Lost has always been a show that crossed several genre barriers. I thought the finale resolved Lost the character drama in an excellent fashion. It tied a neat little bow on Lost the thriller. But Lost the mystery – well, the charitable thing to say would be that Lost remains mysterious.
The mystery was there from the beginning, so you have to view the finale as somewhat of a failure. Mysteries are fabulous – they are questions, openings, possibilities, sheer potential. But you have to answer them, and answers are hard. Answers aren’t necessarily great television, as I’m sure the writers discovered. But if you don’t answer them, you’re sailing along with David Lynch and Luis Bunuel n’ tha gang, and take it from a huge fan of both of the above who has a lifetime of arguing the merits of surrealism under his belt: that shit ain’t mainstream entertainment. 9 out of 10 TV fans are NOT going to endorse your product.
Like a wild, drug-addled, ADD lover, Lost made up its own rules and then broke them. You have to respect it for that.
He succeeds at restarting the engine and the Saab accelerates into Sheppard, who lands on the hood. Bryant hits the brakes when he sees Sheppard. Sheppard falls off the hood. (2.5 seconds elapses between the car starting and stopping. It travels two car lengths before Bryant stops.) Sheppard stands up within two seconds, not seriously injured. Bryant reverses and drives forward, trying to get around the bike.
I’m not saying that Bryant purposefully murdered Sheppard, as I agree that it sounds like sheer panic. Nor am I saying that Sheppard is remotely close to being a good cycling role model. However, it bothers me that this car “lurching” forward two car lengths, striking a human being, is not a bigger deal. It certainly explains why Sheppard grabs onto the car (not that it’s a good idea). I don’t see why the charges don’t involve vehicular manslaughter, careless driving, and leaving the scene of a crime no matter how angry and drunk the victim was.
That said, IANAL and perhaps lesser charges will now be forthcoming. But it would be a shame if Bryant escapes all blame, as it sends the message that it’s okay to kill cyclists if they seem angry or drunk.
Via Ram comes this post from a site I’m sad to only now be discovering, which points out some very juicy tidbits from Gnostic myth just waiting to be plucked and half-baked into a Lost theory pie (how’s that for carrying the metaphor just a touch too long, yet falling short of comparing the Tree Of Knowledge to the magic light cave, thankfully for all involved):
In Gnostic mythos, God is living energy — pure spiritual light — a tiny spark of which burns inside each of us. Occasionally, this divine light produces avatars of human form, one of whom was Jesus. Another was Sophia, an expression of the divine feminine. Sophia became estranged from God and tried to cure her loneliness by creating a son. But something went terribly wrong, and she gave birth to Demiurge, a being of pure evil with many names, including Satan and Samuel.
Dude, where are you going? I haven’t even gone to Wikipedia myself yet. Here it goes:
Gnosticism presents a distinction between a supranatural, unknowable reality and the sensible materiality of which the demiurge is creator … several systems of Gnostic thought present the Demiurge as antagonistic to the Supreme God: his act of creation either in unconscious and fundamentally flawed imitation of the divine model, or else formed with the malevolent intention of entrapping aspects of the divine in materiality.
Boom! I was already thinking about Buddhism in the context of the alternaverse, especially after the last ep where Desmond thought Ana-Lucia “not ready yet,” i.e. not enlightened, not aware of the true reality that lies behind the apparent reality. But move over Siddhartha, time for Sammy McSmoke to drop some Gnosis on that ass.
There’s the idea that some of the pre-crash discrepancies in the Alternaverse could theoretically be attributed to Jacob not having intervened in the lives of the candidates. Also, that when Smokey promises people things “when he gets off the island”, they are things that are true in the sideways world. So then the sideways world is the Smokeyverse, the world that Smokey made by eliminating the island and preventing Jacob from having intervened in said world.
It’s a perfectly serviceable Lost theory. It’ll do until tomorrow.
This was not the episode I was expecting. I hoped the title meant some back-story-rich flashbacks with now-dead characters (Faraday in Ann Arbor, bitches!), not another reiteration of how important it is to stop Smokey blah blah blah. But I didn’t kick it out of bed, as it was pretty straight dope. The body count-o-meter went up a few more notches, the plots advanced on the island and in the sideways world, and the previous episode tied into things, with Jack’s coronation as Jacob 2.0.
Early in the season, we started speculating that the presence of this mysterious alternaverse gave the writers license to destroy one world or another, as they’d always have the other one left over. Seeing as every in-the-know character keeps on telling us that the Man in Black wants to destroy everything (often “everyone you care about”), they may well pull the trigger on the island world right quick, meaning that the locus of action will switch to the sideways world, and Desmond will have to rouse the remaining sleeper characters right quick. To what purpose, of course no one can know – if the sideways world becomes the real world, can they do something to flip back to island reality? What’s so wrong with the sideways world that a character who lives in it would want to go to a world in which they are dead?
As these episodes progress, there’s less fuel for speculation, really, and more a sense of resignation. Not in a bad way, but I’m just eager to watch the series play itself out. That, and I’m thinking a lot about what this series signifies. For me it has been an exceptional ride, quite possibly the most enjoyable show by virtue of the room for speculation and nerd-out sessions that the series’ many mysteries and lacunae have provided. It’s been the most complex narrative I’ve ever been exposed to – Lost needed to be tackled in a group in order to have a remote chance of appreciating it. It’s been the most interactive narrative experience I’ve had outside of a video game, and even if the finale winds up sucking and everything was a dream and none of the various hanging narrative threads are tied together, it won’t change how gol-durned awesome the past six years of Lost viewerhood have been.
Namaste, Darlton.
So with that, I’ll cut short any further speculation, and begin the prep work on the Dharma Mai Tais, Otherton Cave Light Beers, Smokey Soul Tobacco and cans of fucking peaches (oh wait, wrong show) that we’ll need for the finale, which for once may turn out to be the TV Event the promos always promise. See you after that.
What’s the deal with the magic cave? What happens if it’s destroyed? Who were the proto-others? Who built the statue, lighthouse, etc.? What the fuck is dude’s name already? Did Smokey pre-date the Man in Black (and was released by his insertion into magic cave, and then took his form as he did with Locke etc.), or did the Man in Black become Smokey?
After some reflection, though, I am quite happy with the episode. It could stand on its own as an hour-long story, yet it fits in perfectly with the themes and back story of the show. It functions as myth, structurally for the story of Lost, and formally as a piece of myth – it has myth’s openness to a multiplicity of viewpoints. You can argue that Jacob is right, or that Smokey is right, or some other view, and find evidence for your case. Really, that’s one of the strong points of Lost as a whole.
The lack of answers is something we had best get used to. In Lost as in life, there is no all-knowing deity to provide all the answers. There are other people, like Allison Janney here, whose knowledge is always partial, and you can believe them, or not. She is just one in a line of island protectors, and this was not an island origin story. Judging by the Latin, the statue had already been built. So we don’t know why the fuck there is a Magic Cave / Waterfall, but we know it is the source of everything. It can be tapped – can make you immortal, turn you into smoke, travel in time & space, change dimensions. But I wouldn’t expect to learn too much more about it. It’s a MacGuffin, and its definition or lack thereof will not redeem or ruin your Lost experience.
Moving on, then. It was interesting that the MiB is allied with science (certainly with skepticism), what with the use of ingenious “wheels” to tap the power of the island and whatnot. So that puts him firmly in Dharma Camp, making the Dharma vs. hostiles dispute a Smokey vs. Jacob proxy war. Once the ‘others’ took over – the purge, courtesy Ben – theoretically Jacob would be in charge of the island again, but I’m starting to wonder if Smokey hadn’t “gotten free” by then, imitated Jacob, and caused the entire purge. So when Widmore was trying to get to the island, Ben was following Fakob thinking it was Jacob… phew.
A lot of fans and critics (what’s the difference again?) reacted quite negatively to this episode. To generalize, the argument is that not enough questions were answered, and that the show isn’t going to answer everything, therefore they didn’t really know what they’re doing. It’s a species of Lost Finale Angst, and I certainly understand it – I’ve had my doubts about this season, and my initial reaction to this ep was similar. However, I think it’s too hard to judge until the finale ends. But I certainly don’t think info-dump question-answering sessions make for very good television, and I don’t want everything wrapped up in a bow. Again, one of the strengths of this show is the multiplicity of viewpoints it supports and the discussion it engenders, and I hope the end of the show still leaves some room for that.
Next week: well, if you don’t know the episode title, I won’t spoil it for you. And then the two and a half hour finale on the following sunday… It’s gonna be huge. I hope.
The dangerous thing about this season has of course been the sideways flashes replacing the flashbacks or flash forwards of past seasons. The flash sideways at the beginning of the season felt like “hey what would happen if the plane never crashed” speculative time-wasters, which contrasted poorly with the tension and action ol’ smokey was causing in the “real”(?) storyline. The pacing was just too different, and we weren’t told why we should care, as we had no idea about the ontological status of the sideways world. Things felt better with the Desmond injection the sideways received a few eps ago, which projected the alterna-plot forward at a satisfying clip. But this one felt like a touch of a regression. It’s impossible to have a scene like the one with Claire & Jack be satisfying, as it had no apparent purpose or relationship to the main story, and its touchy-feely vibe was an unwelcome break from some machine-gun battlin’, balls-to-the-wall suspense and action on the island.
Do I think the flash sideways are a waste of time, then? Not at all. The writers are doubling down on sideways, and there will be a payoff, which we can at least hope will cover the dramatic debt they have incurred with us by keeping the purpose of this strange universe completely hidden.
So what were the themes, then? A lot of things recurred:
I wish you had believed me
trust me
the mirror
a leader making a decision that cost lives
a sacrifice
‘push the button’
Essentially, Sawyer killed three main characters tonight. His decision to attempt to defuse the bomb was obviously the wrong one. It contrasts with Jack’s decision at the end of season five to detonate the bomb, which cost Juliet her life and earned Sawyer’s rage. Sawyer’s decision was motivated by mistrust, whereas Jack’s was motivated by trust (in Faraday’s theories, and that he could ‘fix’ everything).
I do think Jack’s theory, that the MIB cannot kill the candidates, is sound. The mysterious kid who appeared to Locke and Sawyer said as much, and frankly, if he could kill the candidates, he’s had plenty of chances. Also, it fits in perfectly with MIB’s dim view of humanity, as seen in the finale of season 5: “They come, they fight, they destroy, they corrupt.” Humans are so ready to kill each other that he need only gently nudge them in the direction of self-interest, as Jacob does the opposite way. “Live together, die alone.”
And wow, the death count: three, maybe four characters massacred in one go. In an interview that was published quickly after the episode, Darlton state that the point of the slaughter was to establish that Smokey is the villain: “There is no ambiguity… He is evil and he has to be stopped.” While I wish poor Sayid had a few more violins playing him out, it was ultimately as redemptive a death as a character like him can aspire to.
So, the view from here. Next we get “Across the Sea,” reputedly the Jacob/MiB flashback-origin story and certainly the episode I’ve most been anticipating. After that comes the alluringly-titled “What They Died For,” which I hope will contain some more backstory for some deceased characters, especially Daniel Faraday, whose time in Ann Arbor with Dharma in the 70s seems crucial for more than one strand of narrative. And then, we end with two and a half hours of “The End,” which could theoretically pick up right where The Candidate left off. Damn son, not a long way to go.
Halo is Halo, and what works works, so the Bungie crew have been rightly reluctant to mess with their formula. The first Halo was groundbreaking for many reasons. Most importantly it showed that consoles could provide a good shooter experience. It was, despite being a linear game, quite open. Many shooters at the time were about maze-like hallways, and Halo was suddenly out in the open, giving players many possible ways to approach an encounter with the enemy. Vehicles were added to the mix, and have remained there. Finally it was just a hell of a lot of fun, thanks to a finely calibrated shield-weapon-grenade-melee cocktail.
But gameplay evolves. Halo 2 and Halo 3 added very little to the formula (dual-wielding and equipment, respectively), whereas other shooter franchises like Gears of War and Call of Duty were successfully adding new elements to the experience, like cover and various RPG tropes like levelling and character specializations.
Halo Reach has many changes, which may seem radical in the context of Halo, but not so much in the grand scheme of things. Playing matchmaking games earns you credits and rank, but the credits can only buy you cosmetic changes. Quite a number of gametypes allow for different loadouts, which theoretically could mean different starting weapons, but right now only change your ‘armor ability’, briefly deployable features like invisibility, jet packs, sprinting, or brief invincibility.
The armor abilities are a great addition: they’re fun, and well balanced. The cloaking device also scrambles radar, so it’s quite effective. The invincibility doesn’t last long and requires you to remain stationary, but it also gives of a li’l explosion when it ends. Sprinting can be a lifesaver on certain maps, especially if a skilled sniper is beating the shit out of you. And hey, who can argue with jet packs. What’s great is that you choose your loadout every time you spawn, so if you realize you’ve chosen the wrong one you’re not stuck for the whole game.
The traditional Halo weapons mostly remain, but many have been heavily tweaked, and several new ones have been added. The pistol has a scope and seems effective at long range, but it also has crazy recoil. Seems like it would be more challenging to master than the legendary Halo 1 pistol, but just as dangerous once you had your PhD in pistolery. There’s a weird zooming Needler rifle, plus some crazy-ass Covenant missle launcher equivalent.
There are additions to the gametypes, too. Stockpile is a form of Capture the Flag with multiple flags that plays like a cross between CTF and Slayer. In Headhunter, when you are killed you drop a skull, which can then be collected and deposited at drop-off points. It adds some tactical thought to the otherwise run-n-gun Slayer gameplay.
The sound, as per usual, is killer. Now when a grenade detonates near you there is a concussed-silence effect that certainly adds to the sense of danger. It also goes silent when you trigger your cloaking device, reminding you that a) you’re invisible! and b) you’re a magical ninja!
The downsides? There are only two maps. One of them isn’t great. Apparently more will be added over the course of the beta, though. Also, it’s only matchmaking, no custom games – same as with the Halo 3 beta, so not surprising, but something that will certainly limit how much time some of us spend in the thing.
Regardless of the beta’s limitations, the substantial successful departures from the Halo formula indicate the game itself will be top notch. I’m looking forward to it.
So if I see something online I want to watch, it gets saved somewhere so I can load it up on my TV. Or possibly my portable device.
That would be nice.
I use Plex, so a plugin for that would be great. But I’m flexible. The important part is, I’d mostly rather not sit at my computer to watch things – it’s best to watch things in the best place for watching things, my couch & TV. As instapaper is to reading…
This post is brought to you by the alternate reality where the internet is standing by to take my stupid ideas and make them happen.
A commercial for Halo Reach. Not only a great example of games promotion and what you can do with original shoots as opposed to renders or in-game footage, but also a phenomenal excuse for me to talk about my reignited excitement about Halo. The beta starts soon, and my poor 360, after two red rings in the past four months (never buy hardware from a software company, I guess), is theoretically ready to get on that shit. I haven’t played games much lately, and even less time is spent with online multiplayer – none at all, in fact. But I can feel the Halo meter rising. People at work are talking about playing again. And hey, two words: jet packs. Or if you’re busy, just one: jetpacks.
I use a newsreader heavily. I am much more likely to subscribe to sites with fewer posts. I still read sites with mega-heavy numbers of posts (newspapers, pro blogs), but I go to them on the web, and I don’t try and be a completist or anything.
Google reader is what I use now, as it syncs effortlessly between the multiple machines I use. I sort feeds into ‘A’ and ‘B’ lists, where the A list contains only must-reads, and the B list can have “mark all as read” inflicted upon it with the minimum of hesitation. I also have some collections organized by topic (if I’m researching a project) that come and go as needed. My news reader time is usually short, fast and found in between other tasks, and is essentially the activity of gathering. I do my reading elsewhere.
Instapaper
Anything more than a few paragraphs gets sent here. It’s amazing how quickly Instapaper went from “why would I want that” to “I cannot live without this thing”. It has three interfaces I use: the web-based text version, which in a pinch is great to strip out unnecessary distractions from your articles (there’s also readability); the iPhone version, which is beautiful; and the Kindle export feature. You can make a version of your Instapaper cue that will display on the Kindle or other e-readers, and that’s the interface I prefer.
E-reader
I’m now using ephemera to get my Instapaper articles onto the Kindle, where they join newspapers, magazines, and books. So the Kindle becomes the ideal reading tool.
Essentially, it’s ideal because of e-ink, which is almost as nice to read as paper – let’s call it better than a trade paperback, but inferior to a nicely-designed hardcover. The important point, though, is that it’s far superior to reading from a backlit LCD display. Reading from a light source is always going to cause more eye strain, and after spending all day staring at LCDs, I have no desire to read that way for fun.
It’s also awesome because of the size, both in comparison to to most books, and certainly in comparison to a whole shelf of books, which is what you can fit on it. And it’s more portable than any electronic device other than a phone – it’s smaller and lighter than iPads, netbooks, etc.
I’ve really come to love what Amazon calls “whispersync” – you have to pronounce that in a whisper – which is essentially the syncing of last page read that occurs between the Kindle hardware and its software incarnations. For me, the crucial bit is the iPhone app: if I didn’t bring my bag on a given day I can still read my book on my phone.
Finally, it is a dedicated reading device. It doesn’t play movies, post to twitter, or run Doom. This means it is pleasantly distraction-free: the only thing that may pull you away from your book is another book, or – God help you – the newspaper.
(A bit of an aside: While I love the Kindle, I’m certainly not married to it and there are a number of e-readers either out now or soon to be released that all seem similarly compelling – that’s why I titled this section ‘e-reader’, as I don’t imagine it’s Kindle-specific. But I’m not sold on the iPad or any LCD tablet as a Kindle replacement, because of the lack of an e-ink display.)
Audiobooks, podcasts
I hate gyms and don’t play any sports, so I realized I had to do some sort of exercise to avoid a rapid descent to morbid obesity. I settled on walking to work every day (takes about 50 minutes), and soon realized that this was a great opportunity to do some reading – through the earholes. Audible is a great service, and their books are available through iTunes. Free podcasts are a decent way to keep up with news, indulge nerd obsessions, or even learn something (I’m looking at you, Hardcore History).
Calibre
Calibre is an ugly but powerful free app for Mac/PC that functions as iTunes for books (that sounds a lot less snappy now that iBooks are a reality and they are managed by iTunes). Calibre will manage your ebook collection, converting between formats, and copying files to and from your e-reader. One slick trick it can do is convert a bunch of news feeds to ebook form. It can do this on a schedule. So you can use it to subscribe to those newspapers and magazines that offer their content for free on their website.
It can also function as a server for your books, and as I understand it Stanza on the iPhone will function as a client – but I have yet to try this feature myself.
More books, more problems
The biggest beef with this stuff is incompatibility. One of the greatest things I’ve seen the normally regressive big media industry do is the “digital copy” that gets included with some Blu-Ray and DVD hard copies. I know it’s designed to disincentivize the theoretically illegal and certainly DRM-bypassing ripping of said hard copy, but it is an important concession of a point I think all consumers instinctively feel: when you buy the thing, you are entitled to shift formats. So I feel like you should get a digital copy of a book plus the audiobook with purchase of a hard copy. And digital copies should work across all readers, just as the digital music industry has settled, after much tumult, on mp3. Right now every major commercial ebook format is DRM-laden and thus compatibility-challenged and future-averse. Haven’t we learned this lesson already? Can’t we just skip ahead to seamless digital abundance?
All that said, with the appearance of tablets like the iPad, and an explosion of dedicated e-readers coming to market, and the viability of whole print-based industries in question, it’s bound to be a rocky yet thrilling decade for the reading enthusiast.
What’s going on with Sun? Her aphasia is either TV’s lamest plot twist or part of something yet to be explained. Why does she say that Locke caused the problem, and in the alternaverse how does she know he’s Mr Bad Man? One answer is that there is some bleeding of consciousness from one universe to another going on, as with Des (or with the other characters when confronted by death or love). Now, in these split-consciousness cases, what is the chronology? It is looking increasingly possible that they have seen more of one or both timelines than we have right now.
I’m used to watching Lost and making little mental notes of when things may not be how they appear to be – when there could be events missing between time cuts, when a character may know more than they let on, etc. etc. In this episode, there was plenty of that. But of course we’re running out of time for a) the writers to wrap up existing mysteries, and especially b) the writers to create any new mysteries. So I’m not going to read too much into any of the little ellipses in this episode.
Here’s hoping the writers don’t actually wrap up too many little details, as it’s more fun the more open-ended they are. I thought they did a fairly decent job of this in season five; the details of the Man in Black’s manipulations are left for the viewer to review – especially the things he did as Christian Shephard (“you’re going to have to move the island,” “you’re going to have to die, John”), which they’re only getting around to clarifying now.
A stupid little thing: in the ABC promo last week for this episode, there was a muzzle flash in a shot of Sayid with the gun (implying he shot Des). We actually nerded out freeze-frame style on the spot and thought there was something fishy about how it looked. Sure enough, in this episode, Sayid doesn’t fire at all. So we can pretty much assume Des is still alive and it was YAN Lost Character Death Fakeout.
Proposal: Locke wants to go over to Hydra island not because he wants to take the plane and the candidates off-island, but because he wants to use the electro-magnetic shocker shack to zap all of them permanently into the alternaverse. (I’m sure he’d like to kill Widmore and his nerds, too.)
Finally, what happened to Jacob? He’s been absent for what, three episodes now? In his absence, Des seems to have picked up the slack, with heavy duty interventions in the alternaverse and even a possible de-zombifying of Sayid (remember it was Jacob’s order to bring Sayid to the temple in the first place). Not sure what that means. Shit, I might as well wrap up every post with that sentence.
