On The Top Twenty-Nine of Everything, 2010 (An Arbitary and Undefinitive List)

SIn no particular order.

1. Michael Raymond-James on "Terriers," as that guy we've all known.
2. The claustrophobic office sets on "Rubicon."
3. The Marc Maron-Louis CK podcast.
4. Bully.
5. Michael Stuhlbarg, Michael Shannon and Michael Pitt on Boardwalk Empire.
6. Abed.
7. The Hunger Games scenes from the first book of the trilogy.
8. This quote, from David Foster Wallace, in David Lipsky's Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: "I don't think writers are any smarter than other people. I think they may be more compelling in their stupidity, or in their confusion."
9. "Swim," by Surfer Blood.
10. John Legend (?!?) on "Blame Game."
11. Spike Jonze, "The Suburbs."
12. 400.
13. My friend Sean Howe's L.A. Burnout mixtape.
14. Jamey Johnson, "Lonely at the Top."
15. Fly.
16. You Are Not a Gadget. 
17. The shock and awe and cultural re-examination engendered by The Decision.
18. Deer Tick, "Twenty Miles."
19. The harmonizing in "Let's Go Surfing," by the Drums.
20. Mr. Peanut, by Adam Ross. 
21. The Suitcase.
22. Vampire Weekend, "White Sky."
23. Michael Vick, rolling to his left.
24. Drive-By Truckers, "The Fourth Night of My Drinking."
25. The last shot.
26. 30 for 30.
27. Roger Greenberg: The thing about you kids is that you're all kind of insensitive. I'm glad I grew up when I did. I'm freaked out by you kids cause your parents were too perfect to parenting. All that baby Mozart and Dan Zanes songs. You're all ADD and carpal tunnel. I hope I die before I end up meeting one of you in a job interview.
28. The shock and awe and cultural re-examination engendered by Cam Newton.
29. The End.

On The End

I watched the first season of Lost on DVD with my girlfriend. She resided in a 400-square foot apartment in the West Village; I essentially lived there with her. This is how we learned to live together; one night, when her couch had been removed and her boxes had been packed and we prepared to move in together, we watched several episodes while sitting on pillows on the floor. That's one of the hard things about the ending of a long-running television show: It marks the passage of your life from one era into the next.

Lost was the first show I remember us watching together, the first show that we both fell into all at once, mainlining five and six episodes in a night, catching up on the entire first season and the first few episodes of the second in a matter of weeks. It sounds kind of stupid and naive to admit it now, but Lost introduced me to a number of concepts I'd never really considered in depth before, including, but not limited to: Buddhism, the book (and film) Lost Horizon, C.S. Lewis*, The Stand**, Philip K. Dick, Watership Down, Mama Cass, Hume, Rousseau, B.F. Skinner, and several dozen others. Many of these were red herrings, and I knew they were red herrings, but I didn't care--the whole point of Lost, at least to me, was to lose yourself in the minutiae, to become obsessed with exploring the questions rather than presuming that the answers would unfold simply and unremarkably.

You might have heard this somewhere, but Lost ended last night. It ended without answering many key questions, and this bothered certain people, but I think it's pretty obvious at this point that those people were watching this show for the wrong reasons. I guess being a Lost apologist is a little bit like being a baseball apologist during the steroid era: You know there are things that just don't add up, and you know the game you're watching is inherently flawed, but you are there because it just feels right, because as much as you enjoy breaking down VOIP and WHIP and OPS, there is something inherently compelling about the players themselves. You do not stop watching merely because it does some silly things on occasion.

So I'm not going to apologize for apologizing for Lost, even when it stumbled (and I don't think it stumbled in the end--I think it embraced its most important elements, and earned its sentimentality, which is a rare thing). If television shows increasingly serve as touchstones for our culture, Lost may be the most important cultural artifact of the 21st century: It never compromised its underlying intelligence, and it embraced the Internet paradigm in the best possible way, and yet it never lost sight of the one lesson that every creative writing teacher since the beginning of time*** has emphasized, which is that character comes first. And if I'm being honest, I can't think of a television show that changed my very character more than this one.

*I'd read those books as a kid, but Lost made me go back and look at them again.
**See above.
***Or M.F.A. programs.

On Jumping the Shark

Strange happenings on Tuesday night: I skipped off from Cavs-Celtics to watch Lost for an hour, and when I came back, the Twittersphere was abuzz with schadenfreude: Both for an athlete and a television show, each of which had seemingly set us up for disappointing conclusions. Of course, this is the worst thing about the Internet: Lost is not over, and Cavs-Celtics is not over, but because of the instantaneous ability for everyone to respond to everything, it already feels that way. It feels like LeBron's career is a failure, and it feels* like six years of Lost are a failure. This is ridiculous--I actually have a weird feeling the LeBrons will pull it out tonight and then lose Game 7, just to maximize the Cleveland heartbreak factor. But watching LeBron on Tuesday night--his body language, his demeanor--was one of the strangest things I've ever seen. It was almost as if he suddenly felt the weight of all those decades of Cleveland failure, and absorbed them into his skull. It was almost as if the mythology bled into the reality.

The most powerful scene** I've witnessed in my sportswriting career came in the Cleveland Indians locker room after Game 7 of the 1997 World Series. I stood in front of a veteran pitcher named Charles Nagy, who had just given up the game-winning hit. And Nagy just sat there, wearing a soggy T-shirt and a pair of tights, staring at the carpet. He had struggled throughout the playoffs, but he'd actually pitched well in relief that night. There is nothing athletes hate discussing more than curses, yet it honestly didn't feel like that team had been done in by the futility of the city of it represented; it just felt like their luck had run out.

LeBron on Tuesday night felt different. How can he not feel the weight of all these questions, of all this uncertainty, of the considerable expectations he's built up for himself? And it's not over, and he still has a chance to make it right, but LeBron is not just battling the Celtics anymore. He's fighting against the mythology he's built up for himself. He's fighting against the mythology of an entire city. And he's fighting against those people who expect any great cultural creation to inevitably end in disappointment.

*To some people, though not to me. While I thought this week's episode was relatively weak, the reason it was weak is because Lost has always been a character-driven show, and this was an answer-driven episode. Ambiguity is always better than absolutism.
**Or at least, the most powerful scene that didn't directly involve a human tragedy.

On Inconsequential Things That Matter To Me (Mash-Up Edition)

1. You Are Not a Gadget

"The cumulative result is that online culture is fixated on the world as it was before the web was born."

I'm going to keep on pimping this book, and pulling out-of-context quotations, because I think it's tapped into something essential about technology, and about the development of the Internet, and about how many of the "open-source" developments we think are broadening our culture are, in fact, stifling it. Think about it--how much time have you spent in the past year combing YouTube for mash-ups of Muppets lip-syching Hold Steady songs? Now, don't get me wrong--this is great, and it brought me a great deal of enjoyment the thirty-seven times I watched it, but there is nothing inherently original about it. In essence, modern technology encourages us to repeat ourselves, to embrace was essentially schlock. And you know, maybe this is why I still love basketball and football as much as I ever have--because even in the face of an increasingly recycled culture, both of these games continue to evolve.* Sports are one of the few things that continue to breed originality.

2. Bunning!

I love it when athletes-turned-politicans lose their minds, because it reminds me of one of the inherent absurdities of our political system, which is that we're all really trapped in the seventh grade. I mean, isn't the fact that an athletic career makes one more amenable to a large segment of the voting population proof enough that we never really evolve beyond junior high school? Why was the fact that Bunning retired twenty-seven batters in a row considered an advantage in forming complex social policy?**Sometimes I wonder if the Congressional cafeteria isn't like something out of Freaks and Geeks. In which case, I'll bet Waxman gets wedgied on a daily basis.

3. Lost

Yeah. At this point, I have no f-ing clue what's going on.

UPDATE: I should clarify--this is not a complaint. In fact, I find myself growing increasingly annoyed with the people who seem compelled to complain about Lost, but refuse to stop watching. I've just given up on trying to figure it out, which is actually something of a relief.


*Interestingly, baseball's recent evolution appears to have occurred almost entirely A.) On paper, and B.) In a test tube. Which may explain why some people love it more than they ever have, and some people have turned away from it completely.
**The only supremely influential professional athletes-turned-politicians I can recall in the past generation are A.) Jack Kemp, and B.) Bill Bradley. Though I expect the Sarah Palin-Jay Feely ticket will be a formidable one.

On Inconsequential Things That Matter To Me (Televised Edition)

1. The End

When was the last time you prepared to watch the final season of a long-running television show, and had absolutely no idea either A.) Where the season would begin, or, B.) Where it would end? This is why Lost is one of the top five television dramas ever made: Because, more than any show, it is a living organism, ripe for theorizing and the subtextual ravaging of hypergenius enthusiasts like EW's Doc Jensen, and yet, despite being subject to more analysis than any single television program in history, it still managed to defy our expectations. We had no idea, and we may still have no idea about many things when it is finished, and if this bothers you--if you are so cynical that you cannot accept the notion that certain questions deserve to remain unanswered in a narrative as layered as this one, a program whose greater purpose was to pay homage to its myriad influences--well, then, you don't really understand this show at all.

2. Life on Mars

There should be a term for a television program/film that you stumble upon via Netflix recommendation, which then exceeds your every expectation. (NetGem?) I am not referring to the American version of Life on Mars, which I'm sure is a fine imitation and will land in my mailbox in a scarlet envelope at some later date; I am referring to the BBC version of Life on Mars, starring the ridiculously likeable John Simm (who also appeared in this miniseries, which is like The Wire, with slightly more upscale accents). Life on Mars is one of those shows, like Lost, that shouldn't really work: The premise itself, of a detective getting hit by a car and waking up in 1973, is utterly absurd, but it somehow finds a way to effectively blur the line between realism and surrealism. Also, anything that incorporates Slade, Sweet, Uriah Heep into a single soundtrack should automatically be classified as "great."

3. 96 Teams

Seriously, this has to be the dumbest idea any college basketball mind has hatched since Kelvin Sampson (to quote Mike Tyson, snubbed for an Oscar nomination this morning) faded into Bolivia. There are a million reasons to argue against it, but allow me to offer a practical one: How the hell are we going to fit 96 teams onto a single bracket sheet? Will office workers everywhere be forced to calibrate their copying machines to the 11 x 17 setting? Even on the electronic typing machines of the future, a ninety-six team bracket is daunting, almost Escher-esque. There are too many choices, and the last thing I want to do when I fill out my tournament bracket is, you know, like, think.

On Something That Baffles Me

So I watched a television program the other night called FlashForward. Maybe you saw it; if you didn't, I won't spoil anything for you, except to say that it was such a blatant attempt by ABC to recreate the ethos of Lost (right down to the appearance of a confusing animal) that I kept waiting for a long-haired character named "Huck Finn" to show up shirtless and start making wisecracks and selling prescription medication. But this is not what baffles me. What baffles me is an advertisement I saw the other night, in which ABC claimed that some 35 million people had watched the premiere of FlashForward, and therefore, shouldn't you also be watching FlashForward?*

I know this kind of thing works--I understand that television is both a solitary and a communal experience--but I still can't wrap my head around why it works. For me, this is like the televisual equivalent of the Monty Hall problem. Do people choose to watch a program based entirely on numbers, rather than reviews, or word of mouth? (I also don't understand how the networks' "bridge" programming still works; are there people who watch How I Met Your Mother and are so lazy that they can't even be bothered to change the channel when it's over, thereby resurrecting Jay Mohr's career?)**

Everything about network programming--and, for the matter everything about the modern emphasis on ratings, and box-office gross, and how that can possibly correlate in anyone's mind to the need for viewership--seems utterly anachronistic to me. It's the same thing with sports; today, someone mentioned on Twitter that the Hawaii-Louisiana Tech college football game drew more viewers than the Twins-Tigers baseball game. But what does that mean? What do those numbers have to do with my passion for either sport, or my perception of the game themselves? All they do is water down the experience (see No. 57, here), and coerce the networks to deliver programs that are kind of similar to the programs we love. Except not quite.

*I have no idea how they come up with these numbers, by the way. I presume it is a combination of Nielsen ratings, DVR numbers, and fuzzy math. Speaking of which, when I was a pre-adolescent, we were somehow selected to be a "Nielsen Family" for a short period. This involved marking every single program we watched in a blue book, and...well, that was it. We could have written down anything we wanted, and at times, I think I did, as I was the only one who took our responsibility seriously. Therefore, I may be singlehandedly responsible for keeping My Two Dads on the air.

**I will admit that here are some decent network shows (FlashForward has potential, as does Modern Family, which is kind of like a watered-down, second-tier version of Arrested Development, boosted heavily by the presence of Al Bundy), but for the most part--with the obvious exceptions of Lost and The Office and 30 Rock, and maybe one or two others I've forgotten about--even the good ones are kind of like an HBO program, but not quite as good.

On the Paradox of the Internets

I was reading a recap of a popular television show* on a prominent sports blog this morning, and I noticed that the author linked to a vague and confusing Wikipedia entry for a book of Flannery O'Connor short stories. At first, this made me rather angry, because it was clear that the author of this blog--an influential voice in the blogosophere, and a former journalist--had never actually heard of Flannery O'Connor, let alone read anything she's written**, and I fell into one of my thrice-daily condescending laments about the Internet, about how it is making idiots of us all, and how it has basically turned me into a drooling ADD-addled numbskull who checks his IPhone every six minutes and skips from one site to the next and scans the Huffington Post headlines without ever actually absorbing any information at all.

And then I considered this. And I thought, I have just read a reference to a Flannery O'Connor short story on a website whose primary preoccupations include A.) Whether a one-time backup wide receiver for the Philadelphia Eagles is indeed dating a Playboy model, and B.) Post-apocalyptic survivalism. This, of course, is what is so brilliant about Lost: While absorbing audiences into its story, and into the emotional arcs of its characters, it is also doing something that few, if any, network television shows in history have done: It is surreptitiously attempting to make us all smarter, to make us read things we otherwise would not have read (I almost picked up a copy of Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time at a used bookstore the other day, but I started reading it and became intimidated), to make us contemplate really huge and unanswerable questions that often seem to get--well, lost--in the modern age.***

Again, this doesn't have a lot to do with sports--except I think it has something, however vague the connection, to do with the future of the Internet, and with the future of journalism, and with the future for people like me, who traffic largely in books and long-form narratives that attempt to grasp at some greater truth. I would like to think that these types of stories will still exist in 20 years; in fact, it is kind of interesting how the best television shows have grown increasingly more intelligent, driven largely by HBO, which--not coincidentally--charges a little something extra for its product. Maybe this will happen with the Internet, as well. But it can't happen for free.

So I would like to think that the mythology a show like Lost has engendered--the fact that there are now websites dedicated to deciphering Latin phraseology and analyzing the works of Charles Dickens and Desmond Hume--are further proof that technology can, in fact, contribute to an intelligent dialogue, and that this will happen in new and different and currently unfathomable ways, when (and if) we find a revenue model that works, so that such creativity can be fostered.**** In sports, I hope that means there is still a place for pieces that deliver subtext, that dig deeper, that actually tell real stories, that there will always be a place for something more than 140-character punchlines or links to stories that somehow involve Michael Irvin.

The problem, at the moment, is that stories like these--stories as complexed and layered and nuanced as Lost--require two things to thrive: Patience, and financing. And at the moment, the Internet--or at least, Internet journalism--is in short supply of both.

*Hint: Said show involves mysterious polar bears.
**Which is, of course, typically hypocritical behavior on my part, since I've had a copy of O'Connor's collected stories on my shelf for years, and have probably read 2-3 of the stories in that book.
***My guess is I've come to learn more random facts about history, philosophy, and literature in the reading Doc Jensen's column on EW.com than anything else I've ever read on the Internet.
****And no, I do not believe that serious journalism cries out to be free, any more than Jeff Tweedy is crying out for me to illegally download his new album. And I think the people who are saying things like this are going to very embarrassed about them someday. Either that, or they will be embarrassed when they attempt to read "citizen journalists" who have not read an actual book since Hop on Pop attempt to craft a coherent narrative about a zoning board meeting.