Samantha Graham wrote to me today because I was down about the death last week and funeral tomorrow of a loved one, and how grateful I am to be alive. Sam texted:
By the way, this is the first posterous post I’ve composed entirely on the Sprint Evo phone. I wrote it sitting on a porch in southwestern Virginia where cell coverage is roamy but 3G coverage is decent! Thank you Sprint Evo. That it is. Beautiful.
“When I started watching??Lost, I found myself more intrigued by the mysteries than the characters. Over time, though, I have become more moved by the themes and the redemption struggles. In the third season, my engagement with??Lost??changed completely. I???ve previously shared how my wife???s cancer affected the way I processed the show and expressed myself about the show.
I began to see??Lost??not as a mystery to be solved, but an allegory for living in a state of profound, unsettling ambiguity that dealt with the central concerns of life. Why are we here? Why do we suffer? Is there hope? Do we accept our fate or fight it? What happens to us when we die? Will we see our loved ones again after death?
I appreciated that??Lost??ruminated on these questions.”
“Jacob seemed to think that the broken people and damaged souls who came to the Island would embrace the opportunity of a fresh start and naturally blossom into the super-Buddha he was looking for. And why not? As Jacob told Richard, the Island is a place where ???the past doesn???t matter.??? But what he realized is that people have a really hard time letting go of the past. I might also argue that people??shouldn???t??let go of the past; at the very least, we can???t let it rule us, but we do need it to learn from it.“
“Mother, Jacob, and Man-in-Black were contemporaries with Guatama (also Siddhartha) Buddha, who lived from 580-480 BC. The core ideas of Buddhism include the idea of letting go of the things of this world that keep us from recognizing and growing our spiritual nature
and reincarnation and evolution of consciousness through a myriad of lifetimes.”
Ultimately, we should reflect, but we shouldn’t overthink it. LOST, after all, was created by the man with??the mystery box.
We were supposed to meet Darron, Miguel, and Ru in Los Angeles on May 20 to see GLEE LIVE. Unfortunately, family matters called us away, but Darron, Miguel, and Ru (and Joyce and Jen!) still got to go and had a fabulous time! Darron then sent me his review, which I post below for all to enjoy…
Since you couldn’t make it down for gLee Live, I thought I’d *try* to bring it to you! We all LOVED it and had such a good time. We met Joyce and her friend Jennifer at Universal City Walk. They were very nice and I sent you a pic of them posing with Ru and Miguel (above). We had fun outside goofing around and took more pics which I???ll send when I get them, but then it was time to head inside.
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Inside the auditorium it was a PACKED house. The curtains were closed on the stage. They were red with one large white McKinnely High School logo on each side. Excitement was crackling in the air. The audience was equal parts little girls, grown women and fashion-forward gay men.??Placed on either side of, and above the stage were large flat screen monitors. At 8:00pm the auditorium went dark and the crowd went WILD and started screaming!!!
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OPENING ACT
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The monitor displays introduced us to a dance troupe called??“LXD” Legion of Extraordinary Dancers. These guys and gals were guest performers on “So You Think You Can Dance”…
…and they’ve performed at the Oscars. Now, they’re the opening act for New Directions! Apparently there are hundreds of members because on the screens here in the auditorium, a short video clip would play with a couple of dancers, displaying their names and LXD member number. There were member numbers as high as #511 and higher! (obviously all members didn’t perform!) etc… After each clip, those dancers would do a short performance skit on stage. The audience was going wild.??
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I was surprised when one of the clips showed Harry Shum Jr, aka, Mike Chang, aka, “Other Asian” from Glee. I’ve learned that he’s not only a member of LXD, but also a choreographer for them. His stage performance was a cool solo number involving possessed silver shoes that, when placed on his feet, force him to dance energetically in a variety of dance styles. All in all, they were all fun to watch, but we were waiting for the main course!
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CHEERIOS IN THE AUDIENCE?
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A short time after LXD left the stage, a group of Cheerios came out and started handing out “Barf Bags” to the audience members. Little girls were running down the aisles to get their pictures taken with the Cheerios as they snagged a bag. What are the barf bags for? I guess we’ll find out. Shortly thereafter the theater went dark again as the happy loopy humming music that plays during the “Previously on Glee” portion of the TV show played loudly throughout the auditorium.??
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PRESENTLY, ON gLee! 🙂
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The monitors displayed Sue Sylvester talking to us about how she loathes us for coming to a New Directions performance, and about how we’ll be sorry. She told us that we are idiots for paying what was probably a ridiculously exaggerated price for tickets since they sold out in 15 seconds. She tells us that she had her Cheerios hand out barf bags to us because, after watching Will’s group perform, we’ll need them desperately. The camera angle widens to reveal that Will is actually sitting next to her with an exasperated look on his face. I don’t really remember what he says but I think it was something along the lines of reprimanding Sue and telling us to “Enjoy the show!”
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Curtains open on the original “5 1/2” original New Directions members: Rachel, Finn, Kurt, Mercedes, Tina and Artie as the opening “da da da da”s of “Don’t Stop Believing” start playing. After they sing the first verse, newer members of New Directions join them on stage: Britney, Santana, Puck, Mike, Matt (Black guy) and Quinn …
They sing a great version of Journey’s classic (ignore off key audience members in that video!), followed immediately by Kelly Clarkson’s “My Life Would Suck Without You.” after a very quick costume change they do “Push It.” By the way, the whole audience is standing dancing and singing along during all of this! On the monitors, Will appears with “Great Job guys! Okay, now your assignment is to do some solos that represent who you are. Rachel, I assume you want to go first…”??
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To this, Rachel responded with ???Don???t Rain on My Parade??? and did it just like she did on the show, meaning she entered the stage after walking through the audience, and ended it with fellow cast members doing the same. I can???t say that I remember the whole song line up in order, but bare in mind that they were all faithful recreations of the TV show:
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Mercedes did ???Bust the Windows (out your car).??? Speaking of Mercedes, she was the star of the show if you ask me. She hit some serious notes effortlessly and did it all with a smile on her face. She was pretty incredible. It???s hard to believe that she auditioned for Amer
ican Idol and didn???t even make it past the first step!
One highlight was just before the Van Halen ???Jump??? number, Britney and Kurt did a little comedy flirtation which can be seen here …
… but one of my FAVORITE songs from the night was when Kurt and Rachel sang ???Defying Gravity??? …
Again, don???t mistake off key audience girl for Rachel!
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Many more songs were sung and they ended with Tina singing ???True Colors??? which was beautiful, and the final song of the evening was Queen???s ???Somebody to Love.??? The show seemed too short, but that???s because we were loving every minute of it. We mentioned that in order to please everyone they???d have to perform every song from every show which, I guess is impractical.??
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Oh yeah, they managed to throw in ???Bad Romance??? from next Tuesday???s GaGa episode. It was a great evening and we wish you both could have been there, but of course we understand why you couldn???t. Thanks again for making it possible for all of us, and keep your eyes on your mail box! 😉
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A FINAL NOTE FROM ADAM
Thanks Darron for the guest post! Did you know Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” is the most-watched video ever on YouTube ever?
Actually, there are no revealing Taylor Momsen photos here.??That’s just searchbait. People type in things like Taylor Momsen revealing photos into Google or Bing??or Twitter??– or Facebook! — and then get search results that link to Web pages that have, say, titles like “Taylor Momsen Revealing Photos and Ten More Ridiculous Facebook Pages”. It’s an old marketing trick that also serves as the foundation for why Facebook Pages are so valuable to Facebook and should be making people inside Google and Bing nervous about Facebook Pages becoming more authoritative than Wikipedia pages.
P.S. — I stand corrected when I said no one could possibly like vajazzling at the end of the original post about my top 10 ridiculous Facebook Pages. Apparently 1325 people on Facebook like Vajazzling your Vajayjay.??Sure, that’s only 2% of the number of people who like Taylor Momsen, but it still makes you wonder about the youth of today. Oh, the humanity!
If history is stuck in a rut of corruption and catastrophe, can it be unstuck? Can the vicious cycle be broken? Can the hopeless myth of damnation be replaced with a new, better myth? I would like to suggest that these questions represent the Great Work that Jacob has been pursuing over the past couple thousand years. And after much trial and error, and after a few failed approaches, Jacob has found a way to do it ??? though it will be up to the castaways themselves, and perhaps one castaway in particular, to actually finish his Island redemption project.
If there???s one word that we keep coming back to, it???s redemption. It is that idea of everybody has something to be redeemed for and the idea that that redemption doesn???t necessarily come from anywhere else other than internally. But in order to redeem yourself, you can only do it through a community. So the redemption theme started to kind of connect into ???live together, die alone,??? which is that these people were all lone wolves who were complete strangers on an aircraft, even the ones who were flying together like Sun and Jin. Then let???s bring them together and through their experiences together allow themselves to be redeemed. When the show is firing on all pistons, that???s the kind of storytelling that we???re doing. I think we???ve always said that the characters of ???Lost??? are deeply flawed, but when you look at their flashback stories, they???re all victims. Kate was a victim before she killed her stepfather. Sawyer???s parents killed themselves as he was hiding under the bed. Jack???s dad was a drunk who berated him as a child. Sayid was manipulated by the American government into torturing somebody else. John Locke had his kidney stolen. This idea of saying this bad thing happened to me and I???m a victim and it created some bad behavior and now I???m going to take responsibility for that and allow myself to be redeemed by community with other people, that seems to be the theme that we keep coming back to.
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So forget looking for the answer to every question, and instead focus on redemption as it applies to the characters.
Clearly Facebook will not be happy until they own a page for every single thing someone might type into a search engine. This would be akin to the Collect Underpants??mantra, otherwise known as Phase 1. Phase 2 is??getting all Facebook page owners to pay??to drive traffic to their Facebook pages. Phase 3: Profit!!!
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Orli Yakuel showed us how to make engagingly awesome Facebook pages. Even if you can’t change the title of a Facebook Page after you create it.
With pages, Facebook was well on its way to world domination…
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And they would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for those pesky Facebook users collectively making oodles of ridiculous Facebook Pages??anyway, thereby diluting the meaning of LIKE on Facebook. For example,??Fucking Shit Up??(amazingly) has 16k likers and Fucking, Austria??has 20k likers. And those are just two examples.
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To make matters worse, Facebook got greedy and created a whole bunch of pages where there were none. What, the user pages weren’t ridiculous enough for them? As Facebook users fall victim to LIKE fatigue, it could destroy the whole system. Collect Underpants??is only liked by two people and??the Holy Carp??is only liked by a single person. When phrases that useful can’t attract the attention of more??likeaholics??without someone having to pay for ads, it makes me wonder if Facebook users already have LIKE fatigue. Or maybe their LIKE fingers are arthritic, and we’ll have to find ourselves a latter-day E.T. to heal us all.
I still have several On the 10s road trip posts to do, so let’s get motivated again with our ten favorite foods on the trip.??
Note that I’m using our Flickr streams because Facebook upload failed for me five hundred times (no thanks to AT&T and the Facebook iPhone app!) and then iPhone lost all my photos before I could upload them conventionally. (Aside: I’m gettin’ an Evo!!!)
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Meanwhile, anger management tip: GET OUTSIDE AND BREATHE…
Note that in future blog posts we’ll actually write about our adventures (and not just the food!) in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida…
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Top 10 Eats On The 10s:
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10. West Indies salad, fried green tomatoes, and gumbo!!! Not to mention the oysters… Winztell’s Oyster House, Mobile, Alabama.
Evo will be the greatest phone in 2010. It’s great for phone calls and Gmail and texting and watching high-definition videos and surfing the Internet, and has a pair of incredible cameras for photos/video, a blazingly fast processor, a freakin’ sweet way to play videos from the Internet on your television, a kickstand,??20k applications, and a mobile wifi hotspot application that will let me connect up to eight laptops and devices to the Internet through wifi. It’s the phone that I have been waiting for.
In an ironic turn of events, Bakadesuyo got me hooked on Posterous, so now I spend most of my blogging time there, and in the meantime, he’s in process of moving his blog from Posterous to WordPress.
So if you’re looking for me, you’ll find me on Posterous. (And occasionally here. But mostly there.)
Here’s a sampling of my top ten favorite Posterous posts:
In 40 days of iPad ownership, I've only wanted to blend it maybe three times. As opposed to my iPhone which I want to blend just about every single day.
Adam Mathes said it best: “Facebook has slowly but surely changed from a tool designed to limit access to yourself and share personal data with a small set of people based on common group affiliations (colleges and companies) to a confusing set of technologies that take data about you and share it publicly. And with companies. Without you knowing.”
ifindkarma. elegance is refusal. 