Zombie, but not zombie

I recently watched Season 1 of The Returned, after reading this New York Times article. Tremendous television, with visuals that range from tourist-y panoramic to occult nightmare.

What is The Returned? It’s a bit of Twin Peaks mixed with a pinch of zombie. Or, as I like to tell people, “It’s zombie, but not zombie.” I say that mainly because I’m so very bored with the mainstreaming and cultural oversaturation of zombies.

It’s not that I was obsessed with zombies before they became popular. It’s just that zombies are not that compelling: they chase you, they eat your brain, and then they look for more. You can squeeze in a bit of consumer critique, or black humour, but I feel that there’s a limited room to innovate in the zombie genre.

Was I pleasantly surprised by the speed of the zombies in 28 Days? Yes, yes I was. A glimmer of something new. Did I find the po-mo romantic comedy Zombieland charming? Yes of course. Was I surprised at the emergent behaviour of the zombies in World War Z? I was indeed. Seeing all those zombies act like ants in order to scale tall walls was great. Too bad the rest of the movie (except for the airplane scene) was so boring.

And don’t get me started on the Walking Dead. I watched some or all of Season 1 (I honestly don’t remember) before getting zzzzzzzombie fatigue.

So when I tell you that The Returned is zombie, but not zombie, that means something. It means it’s a show worth watching, even though it has subtitles. Yes, the show is that good.

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Update! On April 10, 2014 I received an email about this blog post that began "You're doing it wrong." The rest of the email was a defence of The Walking Dead, which didn't change my mind, but was thoughtful nonetheless.

Twin Peaks and Twin Beaks 20 years later

[Note: I wrote this two years ago and forgot to post it. Images sourced from here.]

Back in 2011 I watched Season One and part of Season Two of Twin Peaks for the first time in about 20 years. (I quit watching after the person who murdered Laura Palmer was revealed in S2E7). You may not know this about me, but I obsessed obsessively about Twin Peaks when it was first broadcast.

Let me be more precise, since good writing is all about the details. I bought a T-shirt, and Laura Palmer’s diary, and the tape recordings of Agent Cooper. I watched the film Fire Walk With Me on opening night. And a few years after the show was cancelled, I visited Snoqualmie to see the waterfall and have a slice of cherry pie at the double-r diner.

Oh, and I memorized Agent Cooper’s dream from S1E3. Something which I can still recite to this day. (This fact terrifies me almost as much as it does you I’m sure.)

Watching the show again brought back a flood of memories, not unlike listening to an album from that time period. (A more ambitious cultural journalist might try and write an essay that links Twin Peaks and Nevermind, but I’m doing this for free, in my spare time.)

I can understand how an album or a photograph, or maybe even a movie evokes concentrated bursts of memory and reflection, but it felt odd for a TV show to be capable of the same thing. Especially since the first season, except for a few now-curious haircuts, was not of its time. Twin Peaks the town felt like it was trying to find the courage to leave the 50s behind, right down to bad boy Bobby Briggs doing his best James Dean impression. So unlike watching Beverly Hills 90210, which is filled with music and fashion and slang from that era, Twin Peaks lacks clear visual and audio cues that would evoke my final years of high school.

And yet it flooded back – especially my unrequited crush on Jennifer Young (now married, with children, and basically un-google-able). Jennifer also really liked the show, and I seem to recall discussing it with her quite often. But the vividness of her, and that time of our lives, is high-definition. I can’t immediately think of an equivalent memory trigger.

When I mentioned the memory burst of Twin Peaks to a friend of mine, he noted that high school was a time when you saw the same people all the time, almost every day. And with that came opportunities to discuss and obsess and debate a particular cultural entity in a way that is no longer possible in my current adult life. I’ve talked with friends about The Wire and 30 Rock, but we have neither the time nor the focused passion to discuss these shows endlessly. Back in high school, one had a lot more free time to spend re-watching episodes on VHS in order to try and to solve the mystery. And/or memorize the backwards talking of a dancing midget.

While watching Twin Peaks, I was also surprised at how much of Season One I remembered. After 20 years I could anticipate and recall most of the scenes, key moments and minor asides to degree of vividness that shocked me. I know that I watched Season One more than once back in the day, but that was over two decades ago. In comparison, when I watched The Wire for a second time I was surprised at some of the things I had already forgotten.

Season One of Twin Peaks has aged quite well. It’s well shot, consistent in tone, the writing is strong, the acting solid to brilliant (e.g. Albert the coroner). The soap opera elements are well contained (and even mocked on the show-within-the-show). I also feel vindicated about my crush on Sherilyn Fenn, but that’s the topic of another essay entirely.

The debilitating flaw of Season Two is inconsistency. According to my cursory Internet research, David Lynch and Mark Frost were less involved in the show on a day-to-day basis. Watching the second season reminded me that sometimes it was only a single scene in an episode that would misfire. But later it was entire episodes that went off the rails. Too many unnecessary new characters, slow pacing, dumb u-turns and tangents, blah, blah, blah.

As anyone familiar with the show knows, the network put enormous pressure on Lynch and Frost to reveal the killer of Laura Palmer much earlier than they had planned. This ruined the show – the scene where Agent Cooper figures out who murdered Laura was so weak I had forgotten it.

In general I remember far less of Season Two. I scrubbed through the final 15 episodes in an hour or two on my laptop. Of course, I stopped to watch the last 15 or 20 minutes of the final episode, which takes place in the red room where the dwarf (little man from another place) lives. Or whatever – he doesn’t live there, but you get the idea. (Even now I have no desire to be attacked by aging Twin Peaks fanatics.)

There is something absolutely hypnotic to me about the set design and mood and pacing and style of the dream sequence from S1E3 and the final portion of the final episode. On a visceral level, I love watching the dwarf and the giant. It’s mesmerizing and taps into the surrealist pleasure centre buried inside my brain. When David Lynch is successful, it’s a singular type of rewarding.

Watching those final few minutes also reminded me of what it was like to view a television show in real time, knowing that millions of other people were doing the same thing, right down to enduring the excruciating commercial breaks. And watching with the knowledge that the show was going to end at 10pm. (As compared with sitting in a theatre and watching a film that you know will eventually end, but having no clear gauge of when exactly that might be).

Seeing Twin Peaks again also served as a valuable reminder of the cruel disappointment a true fan experiences when their investment and passion is abused through bad writing and crappy creative decisions. When your investment in a show is mismanaged by the creators, you feel an enormous letdown, something I was reminded of repeatedly during S2.

This helped me understand why there are so many aspects about the work of Henry Jenkins that annoy me. I used to be a superfan, and the experience left me jaded. Fool me once, etc. Investing too much of yourself into any form of mass marketed entertainment almost always means ending up in the same sad place. (I’m looking at you, Lost fans.)

In defense of Jenkins, since completing the CFC Media Lab’s Interactive Art and Entertainment program, I was able to appreciate something new about Twin Peaks – the degree to which they successfully implemented the elements of transmedia way before it was a popular notion. I’m not the first person to notice this, but this aspect of the show remains quite impressive 20 years later, when almost everyone still struggles to do transmedia correctly.

This is already tl;dr, but I have two concluding things. The first is that the Twin Peaks parody on Saturday Night Live was actually funny. I’m sure people in 1990 were already saying that SNL had stopped being funny years ago, but that sketch remains pretty airtight. It even features Conan O’Brien as Officer Brennan (Andy). The second is that the Sesame Street parody is almost as funny as the SNL skit. That being Twin Beaks.

I forgot to drink on New Year’s Eve

Well, not quite forgot. I became too distracted to drink on New Year’s Eve. Yesterday evening I finally got around to setting up my Raspberry Pi. Getting the USB wifi adapter thingie to work the way I wanted required more time than I’d like to admit. And as I’ve learned long ago, drinking and creative technology DO NOT MIX.

By the time I had the rpi where it needed to be, it was almost midnight. I decided to celebrate by not having a drink. And not to brag, but boy do I feel amazing today.

Lest you think me a loser, I was able to get most of the way through this Twitter sentiment server project. Another few hours and it should be good to go, although I will need help from geeks more adept than myself to get to the finish line.

Have a great 2014 everyone.

Any year with a 13 is bound to be tricky

To mangle Joan Didion, we tell ourselves year-end summaries in order to live. 2013 was a hell of thing.

In a year of not goodness, here are the events that I will remember as enjoyable:

Gave my first solo presentation at SXSW Interactive.

Went to New York and managed to get into the Rain Room.

Did the Grouse Grind in under an hour.

Gave feedback on a beta version of Jacqueries, an interactive Toronto dance performance inspired by Sleep No More.

Volunteered at the Intergalactic Travel Authority and ended up making a zine in the process.

Saw Alvvays and White Lung at NXNE.

Spent many glorious hours at Game On 2.0 at the Ontario Science Centre.

Took a glitch course at Interaccess Gallery.

Learned the chords to “Touch Me I’m Sick” by Mudhoney. (The solo eludes me still.)

Did jury duty for a week and it wasn’t awful.

Went to a secret screening of a well-known space movie at the Revue cinema.

Successfully completed not one, but two minor car repairs at a total cost of $5 thanks to online tutorials. Estimated cost if a mechanic had done both? At least $300.

SXSW is a notionally offline social network

I said something like this when trying to describe SXSW Interactive 2014, and then gave up and resorted to FOMO. This is much better:

"Austin during SXSW is a bubble. With everyone staring at their phones, it resembles a roving and only notionally offline social network, in which something cooler and more interesting is always happening elsewhere." -- Jacob Silverman, The Baffler #23

The system works (sort of)

Last night I went to see Alvvays at The Drake. Thanks to the miracle of Bandcamp, I gave Programm a quick listen, since they were playing before Alvvays. I liked them, so I got to The Drake early. Turns out they're a great live band.

Today I went back to Bandcamp and bought their 3-song EP. It was pay what you want, and I gave them $3. Won't make them rich, but better than 3 cents.

Blog is dead humour

Without a bit of prior experience, a great suggestion isn't that great

Before Tom Scocca crapped all over it, I read Adam Mordecai’s Quora post about why they write 25 headlines at Upworthy. I’ve included the entire passage further down, but the most relevant bit is this:

The reason it’s always 25, no less, is that it forces you to think waaaay outside the box when writing. You get desperate around headline 21, and do something so out of left field that it’s not the typical headline.

I found myself immediately agreeing with this, because I have experienced something similar. Maybe not 25 headlines, but there have been a couple of times over the past year where I’ve written at least 10. And even at that point I found myself forced to think beyond the obvious.

The problem is that 85% of people who read Adam’s post will a) think it’s a good idea but b) never bother to try it. A good suggestion requires a modest amount of personal experience for it to be meaningful. And I’m willing to bet that most people reading his post have never had to write more than a handful of headlines.

Adam goes on to note that he can write 25 headlines in 15 minutes, now that he’s practiced enough. That’s the other barrier to adoption – if you’ve never written 10 headlines, then writing 25 is probably going to be a near impossible task. I’m not saying that good advice is impossible to transmit to those without any prior experience in the topic area, but it does make it more difficult. It’s worth keeping in mind the next time you sling around one of those LinkedIn productivity listicles. Inbox Zero zealots are born from people who once had 2,649 unread emails.

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The reason we write 25 headlines is that it’s an old strategy from my boss’s old gig, The Onion. At the Onion, they would “crap out 25 headlines” as fast as possible. Then in the pitch room, they’d assume that 20 were crap, and the remaining 5 had an opportunity to be an article. Then once they had their headline, they’d finish their piece. 
The reason it’s always 25, no less, is that it forces you to think waaaay outside the box when writing. You get desperate around headline 21, and do something so out of left field that it’s not the typical headline. The key is to not overthink your headlines and make every sentence perfect. Remember 20 will be crap. So just get them all out.

Seven random sentences

Yesterday I released some short story ideas into the wild. Today I've got a few sentences to share:

In daylight, under the neon, everything felt different.

Of the seven men I’ve invited back to this apartment, these three I most regret.

She was a good or bad witch, depending on the angle.

A creative class couple in their mid-thirties. No longer pretty, not yet ugly.

The information was on my desk, going stale with each passing minute.

I glance at my watch. It says I’m thirty-two years old.

A cut and paste zine fair full of adorable indie gals. Cute and paste. 

Eight beginnings in search of an ending

I did some digital house cleaning this week. Scoured through digital folders where I keep short story ideas. I found eight potentials that will never go beyond the title and the first few paragraphs. Rather than keep them hidden, I thought I’d share.

Cimco Lewis

Old man Cimco has cold hands and a warm heart.

Little Stories

A small ad in the classifieds:

Mail me a sheet of clean white paper, with any one word typewritten in the centre. Include $5. I will send you a story within a week.

Dozens of people followed these instructions. None were disappointed.

Book Club

The room has plain white walls. No windows. We occupy five chairs, arranged in a circle. Our moderator wears a black tie.

“Today we will orchestrate dialogue in a counter-clockwise direction,” he says.

A murble.

“The rules have been previously explained,” he says. “Now let us begin.”

The Hospital For Minor Complaints

A petty grumble can indicate serious psychological distress. Paper cut?

Broken heart.

Sore knee?

Loss of ambition.

We provide daubs of ointment for abrasions of the soul.

Joy

I eventually learned she had dabbed Sunlight dish liquid behind her ears, just before our first date.

"You smell good," I said, when I was close enough to make an accurate assessment. I kissed her ear lobe. "It's like no perfume I'm familiar with. You smell --"

"Clean?" she suggested.

I stopped for a moment and looked at Joy. "Yeah."

She was anything but her namesake.

Until You Can Turn No Further

The rain became larger.

“The drops are so big,” she said. “They’re like little fish.”

Silvery water fish danced outside her window. She stuck out her hand and caught one. But it turned soft, a puddle in her palm where once was a rainfish.

Destroying Green Towers

The notice slid beneath my apartment door on a Thursday evening. It was straightforward, except for this:

Tenants are the true energy of any building. Yet when a building is sick and in need of replacement, we abandon it. Rather than letting strangers with no emotional attachment to this place destroy our building, I think there is a better way.

“That kook wants us to tear down our own damn apartments,” Kelly said in the hallway, two days later.

The notice promised it would be a celebration. A chance to release old ghosts and terrible arguments trapped behind walls. A final visit with our memories, good and ill.

A meeting was inevitable. The landlord was offering a six-month notice of demolition and a relocation offer for all residents. Still, no one was happy.

A Number of Birds

Five thousand blackbirds, unable to fly, drop toward the ground.

Blackbirds against blacktop. Atop white roofs. Into blue ocean.

The loss of flight, a sudden inability to flap wings, this loss of birdness, worse than death.

The blackbirds bruise the city in every possible location.