Half-Remembered, Fully Felt

The beginning of a story I've been writing over winter break, heavily inspired by Dave Eggers's novel A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, as well as events from my own life.

            Through the small window behind the stained wraparound curtain – stained with what looked like either coffee or a case of Montezuma’s revenge, Brook wasn’t sure – the November ground looked frosty and crystalline-looking.  Like the way ice cream gets in the freezer when you don’t touch it for months.  Winter wasn’t even a month away and already the ground was turning to ice cream, with a little grass for garnish.

            Brook’s mother let out a moan, one free of any intonation.  He couldn’t tell whether it was a moan of pain, or of grief, or of something else.  What something else?  People don’t moan under favorable circumstances.  Unless it’s an orgasm.  A really climactic, get-the-camera-rolling-it’s-the-money-shot orgasm.
            “Nurse!” he yelled into the hallway.
            His mother had been cycling in and out of consciousness as if she were running laps.  Brook had alternated day and night shifts with his twin sister Andi (imagine the confusion of their A.M. kindergarten teacher when she had taken a roll call on the first day of school) since their mother had stopped eating five days ago.  Andi had come in for the first day, while he had taken over that night – since Andi had a husband and two kids to look after and what in the hell did Brook at age twenty-five without a college degree have to show for himself?
            He had a plastic cup of cinnamon applesauce he poured into a little styrofoam bowl.  He held the spoon to her mouth.  “Eat up, Mom.”
            Mom made no gesture, no indication that she was even aware of his presence.  Nothing.

            Nurse Rhonda came in, a stout black woman whose purple scrubs made her look like a distant cousin of Barney the dinosaur.  “You called?”
            Brook was surprised she had reported.  He was used to waiting minutes that turned to hours that turned to what seemed like centuries for the women at the nursing home to come by, trotting at the speed of toddlers, with their squeaky food and medicine carts full of mauve-colored trays that were bizarrely shaped like UFOs and probably doubled as bedpans.
            “She’s crying out.  Maybe she needs more morphine.”
            “I already gave her the dosage the doctor told me.  Sure she ain’t just trying to tell you somethin’?”
            Gee, maybe I’m in utter agony and wish your useless ass would put me out of my fucking misery something?
            “Well, I think maybe a few more milligrams will do the trick.  It would make me feel more comfortable.”

            “I don’t think the law or my job bends for what makes you comfortable, Mister Stanton.  ‘Fraid you’ll have to talk to the doctor when he gets here in the morning.”  She stomped merrily back to her cart – “I’ll take her food tray though” – and continued down the hallway – stomp, stomp, stomp – like a good dinosaur.
            Brook took a seat in the wheelchair his mother had used when she was still mobile.  He wished he and his sister could’ve pulled together the funds last year to send their mother to Westhaven, the unequivocally more glorious convalescent home on the other side of town (because whatever’s the better of two options is always on the other side of town; don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise).  But Mom had spent most of the government pensions she had received since their father’s death on vodka and cigarettes and barely had enough left over for a stick of gum, let alone a nursing home that wouldn’t be in every way perpetually execrable.

            Furthermore, Mom’s Medicaid kicked in late, and most of the first three months of nursing-home-rent ended up coming out of Andi’s pocket, to her made-very-known chagrin.
            “So, I’m paying half a thousand a month for a woman who probably didn’t spend half a thousand on me for my entire childhood?” 
            “Well, I’ll pitch in a hundred or so.  Whatever I can scrape up.  Odd jobs here and there.  So you’ll probably end up breaking even.”

            Andi worked as a patient care tech at the community hospital to get herself through nursing school.  Her husband, Steve, was a nurse at the same hospital.  At times Brook wondered why the two didn’t just take Mom in and save everyone the trouble of having to stop by every other day to see if her meals were finally being delivered on time and whether or not she won the week’s round of Bingo and got to add a little something to her forty-five-dollars-a-week allowance, and to drive around town to spend that allowance on a twelve-pack of beer or some other hopeless expenditure like a new pair of socks that could never be allowed to travel to the building’s laundry unit, otherwise known as the Land-of-Say-Hasta-La-Vista-to-Your-Underpants.

            There was an old Sylvania television unit – TV was too modern of a term for it – in the corner of the room beyond the track that the curtain ran on.  A crappy soap opera was playing on mute – probably something the nurses watched when they came in to deliver meals two hours late.  These shows were only fun if women were beating the hell out of each other in their kitchens or swimming pools, which they were not.  Brook switched the channel haphazardly to a tabloid news channel airing a documentary on Courtney Love.  He gave up and turned the television unit off.

            His mother had gone through phases like this in the past, since she had been diagnosed with COPD.  She would give up talking first, so that no one could be sure of the problem at hand to do anything to assuage it.  Then she would give up eating, no matter how many bowls of peaches and cottage cheese and cups of 7-Up were placed on the wheeled table at her bedside.  Then she would zone in and out of reality – either an effect of malnourishment or a futile means of willing herself to die – no one was completely sure.  “They’re trying to kill me, they’re trying to kill me,” she would sometimes say, which in that hellhole was never entirely ruled out as a possibility in Brook’s mind.  This time wasn’t much different than the others.

            The door creaked open; Andi had arrived with last week’s laundry.  It had become increasingly difficult to change their mother since she couldn’t (or wouldn’t) move of her own volition, so the nurses had been leaving her in diapers and nightgowns that could easily be taken off and put back on.  Most of her wardrobe she had shrunk out of; while she had weighed about one-hundred-fifty pounds the year before, give or take, she was now a kind ninety.  Skin hung off in her arms and thighs like Grecian drapes.
            “How is she?  Said anything?”
            “No, but I’m sure that when she does,” Brook got up from the wheelchair, “it will be something glorious.”

Country Rain

His grandfather had owned a farm
Far from the city bustle, where
Easter eggs were cleverly hidden
in the nooks of trees.
Some were found, and placed in
wicker baskets filled with plastic grass.
Others were left to rot.
One boy, clad in overalls, didn't eat eggs,
so he threw them at his grandfather's ducks,
one by one, because back then he
didn't know anything about pain.

Sixteen years had passed,
and the boy, now grown,
drove his pickup truck through
that country town,
in search of his late grandfather's farmhouse.
It rained and rained,
and even with his road map in one hand,
and a cup of cheap coffee in the other,
he didn't know the address.
Somewhere in those creeping provinces,
that house surely still stood.
Perhaps he had already passed it.

Hump-Day Hunk: Chris Folz

 Because he's been here, misting over my computer screen:

Source Credit: CoverMenMag

Songs I Love, Vol. 2: The Smashing Pumpkins - "The Boy"

This song was released only as a b-side to the legendary album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.  While "The Boy" was not officially released until the "1979" single was issued months after the album's debut, I think it is easily one of the best songs from its recording sessions.  As a love song, it's about as simple as they come, dappling in the childhood innocence of falling in love for the first time, and capturing that spirit better than the five billion other songs that say the same thing.

MHz

The top is erect
like a Loxodonta tusk or the tip of
a pen.  A bastioned antenna that can broadcast
you into the 50s on Nostalgie or piss out the current
affairs on the Radio publique.  These sine waves whirl above
the smog and traffic like diamond dust sprinkled across a shipwrecked
ice cream float, so discordant yet dulcet in their dos-à-dos, minueting over
the quoins and the shingles that oscillate from vanilla to beige to vanilla.  Even
in the shards of sex shops and cobblestone the tendrils of the city are a chopped-up custard slice of brown and ivory puff pastry cream, dissolved chessman reflecting on an aqueous surface of pulverized sugar.  Who chopped off the heads of these bishops and squashed them into mille-feuilles?  From a prostitute’s parapet we can see the roads split off into twelve different directions,                    
each cleaved from their Neoclassical umbilical cords. 

In each direction past the fearful symmetry of Coca-Colas and Motorolas are boisterous arabesques that scream over the humdrum of sub-people stepping out of submarine-taxis like matryoshka dolls.  A slice of wedding cake they call the Sacre Coeur sits perched on one hill, guarded by blue horsemen who sleep on the job and a lady rained down with a cocktail parasol and an accordion, octaves out of tune. 

Homecoming

Brown the walls, dark the coffee stains
The carpet maroon, dusty museum rope
Smell of age-old food and medication tethered ‘round my nostrils
and the snaky rattle of the drinking fountain
spitting out water, poisoned and polymer.
Nicotine rooms with flyspecked floors as an oxygen tank
that muffles the soft, raspy sweetness of your voice.

It was the eighth of November.
Words whispered through willows of the unconscious,
Taunted by distant gestures of a clock crucified to the wall
With each second, pulled farther from the seconds that were ours,
when sunshine bled into your venetian blinds like grapefruit
and a deck of cards lay scattered on your bed.
Gin and rummy and games I never bothered to remember
between the indifference of your machine and cigarette breaks.
Fresh spring flowers and watered-down insta-coffee
soaked into my nostrils as I wheeled your throne
on wood etched with trails of a thousand others.
The legless man who roamed the hallways and never missed a hello,
Where is he now?

For 22 months you called it “home” but as you jerked your hand
from a compendium of phone numbers—addresses—grocery lists,
and jerked my tears to diamond dust
we knew it was not quite that, a mere mat at the door.
So when I float back to that November frost and the
cerulean clouds clashed against crimson sky,
I think of that mat at the door where you went to die.

Called it a garden on the sign, but what a joke, we knew.
The only thing that grew – your own impatience,
and I guess sometimes my love.
Even if it didn’t always outpace the hasty fleets
of birthday cards—grocery lists—poorly-assembled desserts,
usually shipwrecked upon arrival.

“Tell them I’m not here” I said when the phone intruded,
grabbing the month’s worth of laundry and inhaling a petting zoo
and abruptly vanishing, because sometimes the car radio
was an easier conversationalist.
Your hands were soft as a pincushion
and your body a mere framework
and you shrank into a new wardrobe each week
to break the static, because there had to be some change that didn’t
make its way into the backs of the daily paper.

It was the eighth of November.
Your hand squeezed colors into mine
under a cotton candy sky,
whether an act of conscience or electricity,
of love or of urgency.

"Conduit"

The X-Files - Season One
Aired: October 1, 1993
Starring: David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson
Written by Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon
Directed by Daniel Sackheim

Following on the heels of three impeccably-filmed and engagingly-written episodes is no easy task. Couple that with a formula that starts to mold as any televised series progresses, and the element of surprise begins to wane. Unfortunately this episode falls victim to both obstacles, but in spite of itself proves a valuable character piece, capitalizing primarily on Duchovny's poignant and determined portraiture of Mulder in an episode that provides a vehicle into his character's backstory.

The plot of "Conduit" centers around an alien abduction not drastically unlike those from the pilot, yet follows a structure more akin to the previous episode "Squeeze." Like that episode, this one doesn't do much to further the main story arc. There's no presence of alien implants, government cover-ups, or shadowy figures lurking around the Pentagon. But all the same it is a story about aliens, and thus doesn't qualify as a monster-of-the-week affair.

This episode is perhaps most notable for its focus on the Samantha Mulder storyline briefly addressed in the pilot. In the teaser, a teenager named Ruby Morris vanishes while camping with her mother and brother at Lake Okobogee (there's one for the tongue), a presumed hotspot for UFO sightings. The case obviously has a personal stake for Mulder, who is all-too-reminded of Samantha's abduction that he is driven to some rather slipshod errors in judgment, namely tampering with a crime scene.

One particular point of interest to this episode is the character Kevin, Ruby's younger brother who seems to be perceiving binary code through television static. Later in the episode these numbers are revealed to be part of a satellite transmission, suggesting that Kevin is the titular "conduit" capable of decoding messages from space. While this is initially written as the crux of the episode, it's importance is never quite resolved, as Ruby is returned in the final act with no apparent link to Kevin's psychic ability. "Conduit" was in part written by Howard Gordon, who would go on to achieve greater fame as the eventual showrunner of 24. One unfortunate commonality of his episodes are red herrings that have little fundamental bearing on the main plot. This one is forgivable, as at the heart of "Conduit" is Mulder's personal journey to face the loss of his sister, and the denouement is quite beautiful to say the least, but it detracts from an episode that could have otherwise been far more compelling.

Grade: B

"Tabula Rasa"

Lost - Season One
Aired: October 6, 2004
Starring: Naveen Andrews, Emilie de Ravin, Matthew Fox, Jorge Garcia, Maggie Grace, Josh Holloway, Malcolm David Kelley, Daniel Dae Kim, Yunjin Kim, Evangeline Lilly, Dominic Monhagan, Terry O'Quinn, Harold Perrineau, Ian Somerhalder
Written by Damon Lindelof
Directed by Jack Bender

This is my first review of 2011 (I started this week's other post two days before Christmas and took a break in between - getting four teeth pulled tends to do that to you), so Happy New Year, followers (ok, follower). Hopefully this year will be a time of much inspiration and motivation to write, but we will take things one week at a time.

This is the first episode to air after the two-part pilot, and while the premiere set the stage for a number of different story arcs to come, "Tabula Rasa" is perhaps a better example of the type of storytelling we will be seeing from the remainder of this series. While much of the same action and tumult from the previous two episodes continues to brew here, the script is almost entirely centered on the character of Kate, contrasting flashbacks of pre-island life with her post-crash story. I would have expected this episode to center around Jack with the weight given to his presence in the pilot, but it was a much more astute decision on the writers' part to focus our attention on a far more enigmatic character.

So just what do we learn about Miss Austen? Well, not a whole lot that couldn't have been left to the imagination, but enough to keep us hooked for more details. Grungy and penniless, a pre-island Kate stumbles onto a ranch in Australia and takes refuge for the night. The following morning she is discovered and awakened by a sympathetic farmer named Ray (Nick Tate), who offers to accommodate her in exchange for her accepting a job on the farm. When Kate agrees to a ride to a train station from Ray, it turns out to be a set-up. Ray has contacted the authorities, and the odious Marshal (Fredric Lane; last seen with a bread-basket sized hunk of shrapnel in his gut) is hot on her trail.

Things on the island don't fare much better. The Marshal is in critical condition and his death will surely sever the last link to Kate's criminal past on the island, but the situation becomes further messy when Jack stumbles upon her mugshot in the Marshal's luggage. Though he is unforthcoming of his findings (despite the much less discreet Hurley, a character destined to be a bastion of comic relief, too finding the photograph, and becoming particularly skittish in a subsequent encounter with Kate).

This episode is a bit short on concrete answers. We don't know what Kate did that put her on the run, why she fled to Australia, or just how personal the relationship between her and the Marshal was prior to the island. But faithfully "Tabula Rasa" adheres to the rich canvas of characterization established in the dual-pilot. When Kate crashes Ray's truck in an effort to escape the Marshal, rather than leaving Ray to die, she sticks around to salvage him from the wreckage. There is a powerful compassion to her character that strictly belies her opaque criminal background. Even as the Marshal, barely conscious and bleeding to death, continues to provoke her in his final moments, she makes the magnanimous decision to spare him a slow and painful demise. She doesn't kill him, but rather enlists a trigger-happy Sawyer, who doesn't really kill him either, but...it's better this scene be watched than recounted.

There's a motley of other "oh no, we're fucked!" moments to be found, namely a cryptic radio transmission found by Sayid (Naveen Andrews) and gang that Shannon (Maggie Grace) ruffledly translates from French into a distressing mayday that's presumably been on a loop for sixteen years. Elsewhere, the mysterious Locke (Terry O'Quinn) discloses the occurrence of a miracle on the island. But more on this next week...

Grade: A-

"Squeeze"

The X-Files - Season One

Aired: September 24, 1993
Starring: David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson
Written by Glen Morgan & James Wong
Directed by Harry Longstreet

One interesting feature of this show is its capacity to attempt different types of storytelling.  The first two episodes focused on setting up a standard for the larger alien/government mythology arc that would encompass the entire series.  "Squeeze" is something entirely different.  In-between the UFO chases and close encounters with the third kind, the writers would choose to branch away for a more anthologized version of the show, which would often include one-off characters with little to no impact on the core mythology.  These characters are often termed "monsters-of-the-week," due to their extrasensory and often grotesque capabilities.  Eugene Victor Tooms, who appears in this episode, would be the first in a long line of ephemeral baddies to come.

"Squeeze" is also notable for being the first script penned by Glen Morgan and James Wong, two of the show's most renowned writers who were responsible for many of the seminal, character-centric episodes that would serve as the archetype for a number of inferior replications by a number of inferior writers.  While the still-creepy "Squeeze" is certainly not their best, or even their most frightening script, it can be viewed as a harbinger of many great things to come.

So naturally this episode combines great moments of TV horror while simultaneously building on the characterization of the previous two episodes.  Tom Colton (Donal Logue), an ambitious colleague of Scully's is assigned to a case in which the livers of four victims were extracted with no discernible points of entry or exit.  Colton is happy to welcome Scully to the case, but there's no love lost for Mulder, whose loony reputation has made him a laughingstock in the Bureau.  Of course, Mulder doesn't let this stop him from taking over the case, and his scenes with Colton make for some rather hilarious dry humor.

Doug Hutchison puts in a fine performance as our very first monster, the aforementioned Tooms, a genetic mutant capable of contorting his body to fit into small spaces.  If that's not enough he's found a fountain of youth in human livers, the consumption of which having provided him the subsistence to hibernate for thirty years at a time.  While the alien mythology asks us to accept the existence of paranormal life in the world outside our own, episodes like "Squeeze" go a bit further and ask us that same question applied in the context of the commonplace and the mundane.  What is lurking inside the darkness of a sewer or behind the screws of an air vent?  There's a bit of judgment reservation required here - it's sci-fi after all - but it's interesting how the show juggles the improbable with the impossible and manages to make them both equally compelling and horrific.

Grade: A-

Songs I Love, Vol. 1: My Bloody Valentine - "Sometimes"

Happy New Year, everyone. I haven't felt up to posting anything since I had my wisdom teeth pulled two weeks ago, but like a trooper I was a victor to the pain and have compensated for it by indulging in banquets of fattening foods. As you can tell I didn't come with any good New Year's resolutions...

Until I muster up some good ramblings and reviews, I'll wedge in some musical intermissions here and there. This is a song and band I discovered relatively recently, within the past couple years or so, and have grown a fondness for. You can't really discern the lyrics in this song, but I think there's a message here that shines through in the overall ambiance. Really a beautiful piece of music, perfect for strolling rainlogged alleys while staring at your sneakers. An orgasm of unbridled emotion.

"Deep Throat"

The X-Files - Season One

Aired: September 17, 1993
Starring: David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson
Written by Chris Carter
Directed by Daniel Sackheim

It's a commendable feat when a television series, by default constrained by budgetary and punctual limitations, can produce a successful pilot.  When the second episode proves to be equally as engaging, it can be considered a milestone.  Such is the case with "Deep Throat," the first episode of the series proper and one widely regarded as an X-Files classic.  Taking the man vs. the man construct from the pilot and delving a tad deeper into its mythology, "Deep Throat" touches on a number of different concepts that would serve as a cornerstone for a number of threads to follow.

As with the previous episode, the plot here is relatively simple.  Pilots at an Ellens Air Base in Idaho are being abducted for months at a time and subsequently returned to their homes with faulty memories and altered personalities.  Despite a warning from a mysterious figure (Jerry Hardin, whose daughter Melora may be more renowned for her role as Jan on the American version of The Office), Mulder decides to jump on the case.  Of no certain coincidence, Ellens Air Base is described as a "Mecca" for UFO nuts.

One notable thing about these early episodes is the almost-overwhelming aura of nineties that came to define the seminal first season.  From Scully's haircut (altered in hue and style from the previous episode, indicating some time had passed between the abductions in Oregon and this case), to the homely Oldsmobiles, to the very-dated grunge garb of the two drug-addled teenagers (one played by a hirsute Seth Green), to Mark Snow's electronic soundscapes, revisiting these episodes always gives me a weird nostalgia.

Another nostalgic quality about these first season mythology episodes is how far removed they are from the core plot threads that would carry later seasons.  While those will surely be covered in later reviews (provided I continue this blog), episodes like "Deep Throat" barely graze the surface.  We get the idea that experimental aircraft is being used at the air base but only once do we get a fleeting look at it.  Mulder, in an imbecilic but appropriately consistent move, slips into the base at night to get a front-row view, only to be detained, wheeled into a curtained hangar, then deposited to the front gate the following morning with no recollection of the preceding events.  This effectively ends the episode on the same bleak, unpromising note as the pilot, in that the same secrecy and government cover-ups prevail, once again leaving Mulder and Scully empty-handed.  A cryptic, if frustrating, informant may prove to be a beacon for the two, but it is clear from this episode that the journey to the truth will not be a matter of plain sailing.

MULDER: "They're here, aren't they?"
DEEP THROAT: "Mr. Mulder, they've been here for a long, long time." 

Grade:  A-

"Pilot: Part 2"

Lost - Season One
Aired: September 29, 2004
Starring: Naveen Andrews, Emilie de Ravin, Matthew Fox, Jorge Garcia, Maggie Grace, Josh Holloway, Malcolm David Kelley, Daniel Dae Kim, Yunjin Kim, Evangeline Lilly, Dominic Monhagan, Terry O'Quinn, Harold Perrineau, Ian Somerhalder
Written by Jeffrey Lieber, J.J. Abrams, Damon Lindelof
Directed by J.J. Abrams

One consequence of dividing a 2-hour premiere into halves is the inevitable trimming of plot and character introduction.  If the first half can't engage the audience while at the same time providing a baseline for the events to follow, the ramifications can prove to be of a capsizing nature (refer to Joss Whedon's cult favorite Firefly, whose pilot episode wasn't even aired until well after the series had launched, and was one of a number of poor executive decisions that resulted in the series's untimely cancellation).  By dividing the pilot of Lost in two, ABC could have easily heralded the death knell for Abrams's latest project, and while I still maintain that this would have been more effective as a unified whole, the quality of the show's writing up to this point has averted this pitfall.

(To summarize the final couple acts of the previous episode, Jack Shephard, Kate Austen and Charlie Pace set off to find the plane's cockpit, which had landed in the middle of the waterlogged jungle.  There the three find the plane's transceiver and a barely-living pilot (played by Abrams regular Greg Grunberg), who is subsequently vacuumed out of the ruins presumably by whatever entity was responsible for the thunderous noises heard the previous night.  Charlie has some odd preoccupation with the plane's bathroom, a detail worthy of note.  With transceiver in hand, the three dash back to camp.)

Part 1 introduced us to a wide array of characters, most notably Shephard, the stouthearted if slightly nervous spinal surgeon from Los Angeles, and Austen, whose character is a little more fleshed out here.  In flashbacks it is revealed that she was a prisoner handcuffed to a US Marshal (Fredric Lane) for as-yet-unknown circumstances.  The Marshal fared less fortunately in the crash and has wound up on the beach with a sizable chunk of plane shrapnel in his stomach.  How this drama is going to unfold will likely be answered within the next stretch of episodes.  What is quite evident for the time being is how at ease Kate is with handling a gun (after Sawyer shoots and kills a wild polar bear) despite her claim that she's never used one. 

Speaking of which...there's a freaking polar bear!  As a group consisting of Kate, Sawyer, Charlie, Shannon Rutherford, Sayid Jarrah and Boone Carlyle branches off to find higher ground for the transceiver, they are attacked by none other than an Arctic bear who appears to be thirsting for more than just Coca-Cola.  As Shannon so cleverly notes, "Polar bears don't usually live in the jungle."

Of course the show can't maintain viewer interest without internal friction within the camp, and the wide racial palette of the cast allows for conflict.  Sayid, being an Iraqi, is perhaps the most obvious scapegoat, and Sawyer won't stop to grant him quarter.  When the Marshal's handcuffs turn up in the jungle, Sawyer turns the spotlight onto Sayid, and the results aren't so pretty.  While Sawyer's nicknames (especially "Al-Jazeera") strike a humorous tone, there is also something very unsettling in knowing that his chauvinistic inclination isn't too far removed from that of the American public.  By portraying Sayid as a comparatively more sagacious, rational character, he is also one that elicits sympathy, a rare and rather daring depiction of a Middle Eastern man.  Sawyer on the other hand is probably the least likable person on the island up to this point.  In addition, we get a few immediate pre-crash flashbacks of Charlie, who (surprise) had a stash of heroin stored in the lavatory, explaining his desire to accompany Jack and Kate to the missing third of the plane. 

This episode effectively maintains the momentum of Part 1, and gives us a more magnified view of several of the castaways.  One concern I would imagine may have been in the minds of some viewers is the extent of the season's budget that went into this monolith.  As mentioned in the previous review, the cost of building (and subsequently disassembling) and transporting the wreckage set was not cheap.  Had the producers invested too much funding into the pilot, the only logical result would have been resorting to bottleneck episodes for the remainder of the season, episodes that would have been filmed on relatively inexpensive sets and would have likely done little to advance the plot.  Fortunately, as someone who has already seen the entire series, I can put these fears to rest.  There is still a smorgasbord of great things to come, polar bears and all, and I look forward to hitting them all in successive reviews.

Grade: A

"Pilot"

The X-Files - Season One
Aired: September 10, 1993
Starring: David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson
Written by Chris Carter
Directed by Robert Mandel

"The following story is inspired by actual documented accounts," reads a title card as the debut episode of The X-Files begins.  I always find this tidbit interesting because never again to my recollection did the show try to pass itself off as true-to-life.  But that is just one thing that sets the pilot episode ever so slightly apart from the remainder of the nine seasons that would follow it.

The X-Files is a show I treasured and revered in my childhood, and even though (especially in retrospect), the series was never the most consistent, either narratively or qualitatively, the level of detail and depth that went into the characterization of its two protagonists was - and arguably still is - unrivaled.  David Duchovny (Twin Peaks, Kalifornia) played FBI pariah Fox "Spooky" Mulder for the show's first seven seasons, returning as a recurring character in the final two.  His deadpan manner and inclination toward the bizarre rendered him an iconic personality, balanced only by the collected, self-possessed rationale of parter Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson). Throughout the majority of the show Scully's scientific persuasion would complement Mulder's unrestrained pursuits of the unknown.

MULDER: Do you believe in the existence of extraterrestrials?
SCULLY: Logically, I would have to say "no."

Such is the template that the pilot episode follows.  Yeah, we get a bunch of omnium-gatherum about aliens and metallic implants and abductions of teenagers in the woods in Oregon, things that would become revenant staples of the series throughout its run, but these were all MacGuffins - plot devices that strengthened and, at times, disarmed the agents' relationship.  While this episode establishes a baseline for a very convoluted mythology arc that would unwind over the course of several years, at its heart it's a character study.  Looking through the back-catalog, the episodes that rank highest in the minds of fans typically were.

Although Scully is assigned to the Oregon case as a means of debunking Mulder as part of a sinister conspiracy, her steadfast loyalty and probable attraction to him render this effort not only futile, but dangerous (this fact would be reflected in a high-stakes plot line that would unravel in season two).  Taken aback by what she considers pure bullshit, Scully counters his contentions.  She adamantly dismisses the involvement of extraterrestrial presence in the case, yet perhaps in the episode's best scene, frightfully runs to Mulder's motel room after coming across two red pustules on her back, closely resembling the symptoms of the purported alien abductees.  Underneath that hard exterior lies a permeant fear of the unknown:  why admit the possibilities of such ethereal terrors when it is so much easier to deny?  This is a concept the writers would play with at intervals throughout the show's lifespan.

At the episode's end it is revealed all the evidence and paperwork filed for the case has mysteriously vanished.  In the final scene a shadowy cigarette-smoking man is seen stashing the implants away in a warehouse.  Perhaps this is the show's scariest particular - that in spite of the enormity of the stakes of all involved, in the end there is still nothing to show.  That a government can maintain such a citadel of unbridled power and use it against its own people without forbearance.  The details of this episode aren't particularly essential, but the set-up it establishes would be a continuing factor in the years to follow.

Grade:  A-

"Pilot: Part 1"

Lost - Season One
Aired: September 22, 2004
Starring: Naveen Andrews, Emilie de Ravin, Matthew Fox, Jorge Garcia, Maggie Grace, Josh Holloway, Malcolm David Kelley, Daniel Dae Kim, Yunjin Kim, Evangeline Lilly, Dominic Monhagan, Terry O'Quinn, Harold Perrineau, Ian Somerhalder
Written by Jeffrey Lieber, J.J. Abrams, Damon Lindelof
Directed by J.J. Abrams



If we've learned anything about islands in historical fiction, it's that they're a hoarded wealth of intrigue, danger, suspense, spirituality and sensuality.  From the economically-concerned survivalism of Robinson Crusoe to the web of love and retribution in Shakespeare's The Tempest, they are one of the commonest but most captivating plot devices.  They are apart from civilized society.  They are home to exotic fauna and foliage.  Not all of that fauna and foliage is happy to have visitors.  Murder and crime are more easily accomplished without the constraints of civilized society.  I think you can connect the dots.

Lost is the brainchild of J.J. Abrams, who created the espionage thriller Alias and college drama Felicity before that.  Based on his resume we can already predict character development and long-term plot arcs will be the standard.  Add in that this two-part pilot was the most expensive ever produced for ABC (resulting in the truly ironic firing of former chairman Lloyd Braun, who had greenlighted the project in the face of dwindling network ratings), reportedly costing anywhere between $10 and $14 million.  That this show was even given a second thought speaks volumes about the amount of faith the network put into it, as it easily could have been a colossal disaster.

Fortunately that faith was well-invested, because not only is the premiere of Lost viscerally and sensorially astounding, but it's also compelling, chronicling the plane crash and miraculous survival of 48 passengers (with fourteen being regular cast members).  As if in real life, the individuals remain innominate until the situation demands their introduction.

We meet Jack Shephard (Matthew Fox, Party of Five), a spinal surgeon from Los Angeles who gets dropped in the middle of a serious crisis, risking himself to save the lives of others wounded in the crash.  A more enigmatic but equally important character is Kate Austen (Evangeline Lilly), who despite being out of her element is driven by a strong will and versatility.  The scene where an anxious Kate stitches up Jack's wound is one of the most iconic of the series' run.

Few of the other characters are given little more than a fugitive introduction.  There's the washed-up rock star Charlie Pace (Dominic Monhagan, The Lord of the Rings), whose shadowed eyes belie his comic disposition.  There's a very pregnant woman named Claire Littleton (Emilie de Ravin, The Hills Have Eyes), who seems oddly cheery in spite of all the turmoil.  There's an older man played by Terry O'Quinn (Millennium, The X-Files) who seems to be of importance but has little to do in this episode.  More curious is an Asian couple (Daniel Dae Kim and Yunjin Kim) alienated not only by their lack of English but also antiquated gender roles.  A Middle Eastern man named Sayid (Naveen Andrews, The English Patient), a hardened redneck (Josh Holloway), and a larger-than-life guy you can't help but want to hug (Jorge Garcia) both beg stories to be told, while a pair of bickering siblings, the unnerved Boone (Ian Somerhalder, The Vampire Diaries) and the comparatively bitchy Shannon (Maggie Grace, Taken) are decidedly less inspiring.  Rounding out the cast are the overprotective father Michael (Harold Perrineau, The Matrix trilogy) and son Walt (Malcolm David Kelley), and a soundless but sharp woman (L. Scott Caldwell) who Jack brings from the cusp of death.

It's awfully odd that all of these survivors would be so cushioned in the fall so as not to wind up with more than mere flesh wounds, but odder still are the grotesque noises heard in the jungle at night.  From the get-go it is clear that there is something not quite right with the island, and while ABC's decision to split the pilot into two halves may not do its story total justice, it certainly serves as an engaging doorway into a storyline bound to be riddled with mysteries.  A more comprehensive outline of the plot will follow in my review of Part 2.

Grade: A

My Top 5 Quentin Tarantino Characters

So I'm having my first intermission between finals, which might as well be a one-way trip to the Caribbean, if for no other reason than the fact I was actually able to fit in a nap today.  Behold the magic of slumber.  I actually feel like I can make it through the hour without a cup of caffeine to nurse for the first time this week.  Between finals, work, maintenance issues, et shitera, et shitera, December has been overkill.  (For future and completely unrelated reference, aspirin blocks the synthesis of prostoglandins, and not the release.  I studied this hard and fudged it like Betty Crocker on the final.  As I said on Facebook, I will be kissing the stars for a curve the size of an orca this quarter).

I've been thinking of things I'd like to do over break, and of course making a road trip, getting my short story written and dispatched, enjoying the company of too-seldom-seen friends and indulging in the usual fattening pastimes are all vying for precedence.  Then my attention drifted over to a stack of movies I had been wanting to watch and re-watch for months.  Anyone who knows me knows that I am a huge - as in the loserly sense - fan of Tarantino, with Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill and others being some of my most endearing films of the last millennia.  They're simply untouchable, rife with elephantine personalities, soundtracks that stick like molasses, humor that strays between the darkly comedic and the comically black, and interwoven plot threads more fun than those cradles of string I never learned how to make in the third grade.  They are movies that know they are movies.  Too often I walk out of a movie theater with a sour taste in my mouth because of some ham-handed social commentary or underlying agenda as subtle as a brick through a window.  These often range from the corny, to the maudlin, to the grotesque.  In Kill Bill, you don't have to worry about these issues.  Tarantino doesn't give a fuck.  His films are self-contained monoliths of pop culture, and since I have nothing better else to do, I thought I'd give a try at pinning down a few of my favorite personalities.


5.  Shoshanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent, Inglorious Basterds)
"You either do what the fuck we tell you, or I'll bury this axe in your collaborating skull."

One of the more prominent plot arcs from Basterds is simply a well-paced revenge drama.  Dreyfus's family is killed in a dairy farm raid in France conducted by Christoph Waltz's frighteningly awesome Jew-Hunter in the film's opening scene.  Shoshanna is the sole survivor of the raid, and years later, upon fleeing to Paris, assumes the identity of Emmanuelle Mimieux, the operator of a cinema that by some stroke of serendipity is scheduled to host the premiere of a Nazi propaganda film honoring the German sniper Fredrick Zoller (played by Daniel Brühl, who starred
in the excellent German film Goodbye Lenin!). Zoller, funnily enough, fails to recognize Dreyfus as a Jew, and to her annoyance, romantically pursues her for most of the film. Dreyfus, however, has a diabolical agenda of her own, and I won't give it away to those who haven't yet seen Basterds, but here's a hint:  it involves an exceptionally large amount of flammable nitrate film.

4.  Vincent Vega (John Travolta, Pulp Fiction)
"Boy, I wish I could've caught him doing it. I'd have given anything to catch that asshole doing it.  It'd
been worth him doing it just so I could've caught him doing it."

I can't get over how gross John Travolta looks in this film.  Which means he's perfect as Vincent Vega, an abrasive, sardonic thug-in-a-suit and one of the most trusted henchmen of LA crime boss Marcellus Wallace.  Whether it's the molasses-gelled hair or the fact that he spends virtually every pivotal scene of the movie in the bathroom, I've just always found him unsettling.  Alongside Samuel L. Jackson's Jules Winnfield, Vincent is one of the most memorable characters of Pulp, but unlike Jules he does not undergo any notable character transformations, proving himself a conceited asshole until the very (anti-climactic) end.  For his stagnancy I can't rank him number one, but because he's such an awesome character he still hits the top five.

3.  The Bride a.k.a. Beatrix Kiddo (Uma Thurman, Kill Bill)
"When fortune smiles on something as violent and ugly as revenge, it seems proof like no other, that not only does God exists, but that you're doing His will."

If Inglorious Basterds was only part-revenge drama, Kill Bill is revenge that doesn't stop to tango with drama, but rather slices it with a Hattori Hanzo sword.  Kiddo, whose name is curiously bleeped out of the film's audio for the first two thirds or so, is the sole survivor of a violent massacre conducted by none other than her former mentor and leader of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, the titular Bill (played by the late David Carradine).  Well it turns out she was also pregnant with Bill's child upon her attempted murder (which just happened to coincide with her wedding day), so naturally after waking up from a four-year coma, she sets out to dispense five nice, bloody punishments to the dickheads responsible, in only the most fitting of methods: bloodshed, bloodshed and more bloodshed.  The only thing sharper than the end of a Hanzo sword is the piercing look Thurman maintains throughout both installments, with a third slated to be released within the decade.

2.  Jackie Brown (Pam Grier, Jackie Brown)
"If I lose my job I gotta start all over again, but I got nothing to start over with. I'll be stuck with whatever I can get. And that shit is scarier than Ordell."

Like Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs before it, Jackie Brown is a web of crime, intrigue, deception and allure, but unlike those films, Jackie is less concerned with plot than it is with texture.  Which is totally fine given the context:  Brown, portrayed impeccably by 1970s Blaxploitation film star Grier, is a struggling airline stewardess who makes ends meet by smuggling cocaine into the country for gun runner Ordell (Samuel L. Jackson).  When Brown is intercepted and sent to jail, Ordell arranges her bail with the intent of murdering her before she can rat him out to the police.  The bulk of the film finds Jackie playing both Ordell and the cops; she knows she will have to pull off a flawless scam or she will end up dead.  I find that I like this film more with each successive viewing:  Jackie is tired and desperate; not only is the deck stacked against her in terms of racial politics, but it is the fear of growing old, of having to start over, that gives her the desperation to continue.  The film in its entirety is a rich character study, with each figure playing a significant role in Jackie's game, but none of them can keep up with Jackie herself.  She is intelligent, but practical; forcible, but unspoken, and easily makes this oft-overlooked film a contender for Tarantino's best.

1.  Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson, Pulp Fiction)
"And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who would attempt to poison and destroy my brothers!  And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee."
Well, why tell when I can just show?

Jules is the epitome of debonair.  Every line that rolls out of his mouth can be found on any list of greatest Pulp quotes in existence.  This is still my favorite role of Jackson's.  He's pietistic, thunderous, the quintessential hatchet-man and a sharp dresser; the ultimate badass and easily the most memorable character from the film.  If in doubt, look no further than his wallet - inscribed on the front is "Bad Mother Fucker" in bold black lettering.  Suddenly watching someone eat a cheeseburger and quote the Bible before pumping a round of lead into your face has never seemed more intimidating.  Just one look at this man and you'd know he wouldn't hesitate for two seconds before turning your ass into "fried chicken."  Piss him off in his "transitional period" and the results may be a little more interesting.  At the film's end he decides to give up his life of asskickery to roam the Earth in pursuit of adventure.  Suddenly vagabondage has never seemed more cool.

We are the Music Makers, and We are the Dreamers of Dreams

So after two years of trying to locate my old blog, which has seemingly vanished into the unreachable aeons of cyberspace, I've decided to relent and start up a new one.  Not that doing so would be a particularly effective use of my time, but alas, I am a writer:  I create, I fancy, I lie.  I'm in college.  Why wouldn't I have a blog?

I could try to bridge the gap between the point at which my old blog left off (rewind to: December 2008) and to where this new one begins, but building that bridge would require such endeavor I'd have to forgo the rest of the quarter.  I guess that doesn't weaken the temptation.  If the motivation to continue writing this lingers on - which would signify that people are reading what I have to say (hint hint) I'll easel out the juicier details.  As it is I hope you don't mind a dry mouth.

Let's talk about writing - it's what I do after all.  I'm working on four stories consecutively but disproportionately.  Two will likely remain in Microsoftwordland ad infinitum while the other two may or may not see the light of day.  It sounds like I have more control over their fates than I do, when in reality I feel like nothing more than the squished guts of a gnat on the wall of the fictional "room" I've created.  I've always followed a doctrine that in most fiction, character trumps plot.  In a workshop I participated in last year, I read stories with painfully silly premises (shame there was no prerequisite), but what separated the whimsical from the inane was the amount of depth, of penetration the author was patient enough to allow their characters to sink into.  Depth that speaks far more to the acumen of the audience than Jack and Jill and a pail of water.

I say "allow" because I don't believe an author - hereafter, a god - is truly all-powerful in their written kingdoms.  The paradox of writing is that the more 3D a character seems to be, the less malleable they become.  You put up a canvas for this guy, doodle in a house and picket fence and wife (or wives. or husband.) and maybe give them a last name or a job (these are fun to play around with for us less benign gods), but at some point you hit a threshold.  You won't have a man visit his dying spouse in the hospital and then run home and throw a bachelor party, and if you do, well 1) you present a lot questions in need of answers and 2)...shame!  There are always dots to connect in the face of human behavior.

Writing is a bit like lucid dreaming, in which the dreamer is aware that he or she is in a dream (believed to be a result of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activating during sleep, in addition to the pons, which are involved in sensory roles like hearing and taste - see, I learned something from my Psychology courses after all).  You have little control over the transpiring events but recognize them as apart from the tangible world.  You can shape your actions as you see fit, but only within the context of that particular dream.

I've found it's easier for me to write female characters than it is male.  It's not necessarily the different capacities for emotional display - I often write very stoic female characters - but for some reason I can just tap into them better.  Perhaps it's just because I am gay and need an outlet for my feminine qualities, or maybe it's reflective of the bond I share with women in real life.  Most of my friends are women (and all of them are young, I swear!).  I have male friends too, including my best friend of 13 years, but my ability to relate, to bond with women is stronger - don't tell him that.  I prefer female writers to male - I know, entirely inappropriate, right?  But it's true, there's a female-to-female love that, if I ever were to wish myself reincarnated as a woman, would be the one reason to do so.  Male-to-male love does not seem to exist in the same fashion. They say a gay man a lady's best friend maketh, but I have not chanced upon similar luck.

So we will see which of my "kingdoms" will grow and which will remain half-thoughts.  All of this of course depends on the amount of time I will have to invest in writing.  With the holiday season coming up, things don't look too prosperous for Jack and Jill.