What a great episode. Lost has really hit it’s stride for the final season. The writers have figured out how to answer a lot of the big questions while continuing to introduce new ones. Our Tuesday night Lost parties are a high point in my week. We even had Lost beer and wine this week.
I’ve started seeing more parallels between Myst and the conflict between Jacob and Man In Black. We keep debating which one of them is the good guy and which one is the bad guy. What if it’s not that simple? What if they are like the two brothers in Myst and they are both bad? They are trapped on the Island and bound by a set of rules. Just like in Myst.
I’m sticking with my belief that Jughead never exploded. Someone moved the island while Juliet was hitting the bomb. The white flash was the island moving, perhaps in both time and space, and not an atomic explosion.
I really enjoyed seeing Locke’s life in the no-crash timeline. I’m starting to care about this version of the truth.
Favorite moments this week:
- Ben saying words over Locke’s grave.
- Man In Locke throwing the white rock in the ocean. “It’s an inside joke.”
- The names on the roof of the cave. I can’t wait to see screen caps to see the other names.
As usual, Jeff Jensen does the best analysis of the week at EW.com.
I’m going to participate in the Forty Days of Water challenge at Blood:Water Mission. Basically, you give up drinking everything but water for the next 40 days and give them the money you would have spent on coffee, beer, sodas, etc. They use the money to dig wells in African villages that don’t even have clean water. Seems like a good idea to me. I like these folks and I trust they are doing a good thing.
Wanna Join me?
Joe
Links to the best info I’ve come across so far on this week’s episode:
Jeff Jensen nails it again in his weekly EW column.
A very thorough list of observations and questions.
This guy actually connects Jack and the Biblical Naomi. Fascinating stuff.
The premiere episode of the final season of Lost has gotten better and better as I’ve thought about it the last few days. I think it just took me some time to get my mind back in that weird, puzzling, obsessive place where the mysteries of Lost challenge me to think. 10 months is too long between episodes.
A few random thoughts and links:
Damon and Carlton were on Jimmy Kimmel after the premiere. It is well worth watching. Jimmy asked them to say whether a series of things in the episode were coincidence or significant. It’s pretty darn revealing and some of what is significant is surprising. They are on about halfway into the show. They also announce that May 23rd, which is a Sunday, will be the final episode.
http://abc.go.com/watch/jimmy-kimmel-live/93521/250056/jimmy-kimmel-live-22?cid=fullepisodeaccess
There is something more going on than just two timelines. It seems like much of the “stuff” that crashed on the island is not there on the if-we-didn’t-crash timeline. Jack’s dad, Locke’s knives, the second bottle of vodka the stewardess gave Jack and Kate used to sterilize his wound. This timeline is a close approximation of time without a crash. But something is wrong. It’s almost like someone copied a painting with some colors missing from their palette.
I’m not convinced the white flash was a nuclear bomb going off. A bomb would have blown up everything and everyone. Yet even Juliette, who was laying next to the bomb, was still alive. That’s not how bombs work. I think the Island moved in space and time before the bomb went off. Not sure why or who was behind it. But I think the bomb is a red herring.
Here are links to two columns by EW’s Jeff Jensen. This guy is amazing. His columns last year consistently challenged my thinking. He generally does an amazing recap column every morning after the show airs. Here are this week’s. (How in the world is this guy so well read?)
http://popwatch.ew.com/2010/02/02/lost-premiere-damon-carlton/
http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20313460_20341211,00.html?xid=email-whattowatch-lastnight-%27Lost%27+recap%3A+What%27s+your+worldview%3F
My former partner at Paste, Josh, has a good column on Lost As Religious Allegory. He’s no Jeff Jensen, but his personal theology is probably a little better.
http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2010/02/high-definition-lost-as-religious-allegory.html
I believe there is a moment in one of the Back To The Future movies where there are logically five DeLoreans. We seem to have ended up with three Lockes at the same time. Dead Locke, Smoke Monster Locke (Smock?) and Locke in a wheelchair.
Some people are saying Jacob is in Sayid the same way Smock is in Locke. I don’t think so. But I am willing to predict that by the end of the season, Jacob will be in Jack. I think the Island is a big backgammon game between white and black. Locke is black. Jack is the logical choice to become his new foil. You heard it here first…
The lines I can’t get out of my head, but don’t understand:
“They are coming.” Spoken by Jacob as he died. Who are they?
“It worked.” Miles says this is the important thing Juliette tried to say. Is he telling the truth? What, exactly, worked? The bomb? I don’t think so.
Really looking forward to next week. I think my head is getting in the right place.
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We have a group that gathers every week to eat dinner and watch Lost together. Here are some random links to stuff we read or watched before the premiere. Some really thoughtful stuff on Lost and faith and some really funny stuff.
http://blog.christianitytoday.com/ctmovies/2010/01/ct-at-the-lost-premiere-in-haw.html
http://www.newsweek.com/id/231794 http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/tv/s10/lost/tubetalk/a198286/qa-team-darlton-talk-lost-season-six.html
http://entertainment.comedy.com/2010/01/20/italian-family-lost-recap/
http://blog.zap2it.com/frominsidethebox/2010/01/lost-the-final-session—-live-blog-from-press-tour.html
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/final_season_of_lost_promises_to
I haven’t exactly been setting the world on fire with the frequency of my posts to this blog. I guess I’ve gotten enough blogging satisfaction out of Twitter. But there’s a new WordPress iPhone app that looks like it might pull me back into real blogging. We’ll see.
NoiseTrade has been nominated for a Mashable award in the music category. We’re up against companies like Last.fm and Pandora, which is pretty cool for us. I’d really appreciate it if you’d vote for us. You can vote once a day per email address. This would be huge for us if we could beat some of those companies. We put the widget on our blog to make it easy to vote for us. Or you can vote below if you prefer.
In case you haven’t noticed, I haven’t written a blog post in three months. I’d love to say I’ve just been too busy, but I seem to find time to watch The Office and The Fringe, so I must not be that busy. So let’s just mark it up to distraction.
But it’s going to get busy starting next week when I start working three jobs. Yep, three.
My day gig is going to be contracting with the Tennessee Department of Transportation. I’ll be doing project management in the IT department 7.5 hours a day. We’ve been in Nashville almost a year and in that year every dollar we had invested is now worth 65 cents. Tough economic times indeed. So, like almost every artist in Nashville, I’m getting a day gig. This is how I made my living eleven years ago and I can do it in my sleep. So I’ll go in early every day and get out mid afternoon with time to do focus on the stuff I care about. The lady I’ll be working for is great and I’m looking forward to serving her.
I’ve also joined the partners at NoiseTrade, which is a major cool music marketing company. We help artists build their fanbase by targeted campaigns of giving away music. I have great partners and we have a great reputation. There’s lot’s of great music available there for free. Check it out.
I’m also starting to work part time with my church, The Village Chapel. We’re starting a college age group and I’m heading that efort. Betsy and I have commented a lot over the last year that we feel like we are doing an adult version of our first year of marriage when we lived in Gainesville and I worked with IVCF. So here I am working with college students again. I guess the circle is complete.
I’ll try to start blogging more often, but I’m making no promises. But I am starting to blog a lot on the NoiseTrade blog. It’s all geared towards the business of music, but we’re starting to build a great community over there. You might enjoy subscribing to that blog too. And I’ve turned into a Twitter nut so you can follow me there.
Joe
Brilliant.
I went to the the launch of the Ten Out Of Tenn tour launch show at the Cannery Ballroom last night. There had to be 1000 people there to hear a bunch of artists that most people outside of Nashville haven’t even heard of. I moved to Nashville last fall because I wanted to be in a town that nurtures this kind event. This is the second time that Trent and Kristin Dabbs have pulled together ten great Nashville artists for a modern day Rolling Thunder Revue. I’d have gladly paid to see any one of these artists. It was almost overwhelming to see all ten of them playing together.
There’s no headliner. They run it like a big noisy songwriter in the round. The artists all play on each other’s songs so the band keeps shifting. Sometimes there are ten musicians on the stage. It feels like a big family of songwriters that all respect each other and love each other’s songs.
I liked all of it, but a few people’s songs really stood out. Matthew Perryman Jones, K. S. Rhodes, Griffin House and Katie Herzig really brought down the house. And Butterfly Boucher proved that the chicks can rock as hard as the guys.
I sponsored the first tour during my days at Paste and it was plenty cool the first time. But they’ve learned from the first tour and taken it to a new level for the second outing. I’m looking forward to how it will evolve for the third, fourth and fifth tours.
You can hear their music at the Ten Out Of Tenn MySpace and many of the artists have music available for whatever you want to pay on NoiseTrade. But you’ll miss a great night if you only listen to their albums. Don’t miss the opportunity to see them if you are in one of the 16 towns they are visiting in the next few weeks.
God I love this town…
Joe