TVSquad.com has a link to an interview with Damon Lindelof about the upcoming season conclusion of “Lost.” I agree with the TV Squad guy — dude could stand to shut up for a while and lessen the backlash.

The part of the interview that annoyed me the most was at the end:

But I feel for the fans that are desperately waiting for the big answers. The reality is that there is an inherent catch-22 there, which is “Who killed Laura Palmer?” Once you give up who killed Laura Palmer, why watch “Twin Peaks”? Once Dave and Maddy kiss, why watch “Moonlighting”? So I feel like once we give up those big answers, the really compelling reason to watch “Lost” will be over and done with. I would really like to answer those questions because I think that the answers are very cool.

One of the reasons it bugs me is because I used to buy that schtick — hip young guy who loves TV, not just makes TV; can combine high culture and pop culture; and in touch with what fans are saying and what they want. That was before I read about a dozen of these types of interviews (and that’s only a fraction of what’s been published), and they’re all the same — unbelievably cool things are coming up in the series, so just wait; “Twin Peaks” sure fizzled out, huh?; and we want the show to be cool, but it’s all Disney’s fault.

This is going to make me sound like a Disney apologist, but I’m speaking more as a fan of the show teetering on the brink of becoming a former fan. But I’d bet one 30-second block of ad revenue that Disney just wants to make money off the show, they don’t care how it’s done. As long as the series doesn’t full-stop end, I bet anything would be fair game.

And mentioning “Moonlighting” and “Twin Peaks” is just weak sauce. What killed “Twin Peaks” wasn’t revealing who killed Laura Palmer; what killed it was having nothing planned for after the reveal. They’d put all their effort into one mystery, and didn’t start with the larger-scale Black Lodge stuff until it was already too late. “Lost” doesn’t have that problem; if anything, they’ve got the opposite. It’s all Black Lodge stuff, and they keep throwing more into the mix.

They could bring any of the big mysteries to a conclusion and keep the series going. They could bring all of them to a conclusion and — hey, here’s a thought — invent new ones. Hell, they’ve already got enough threads going; if they just devoted two episodes each to resolving every single one of the open stories, that’s at least two seasons’ worth right there.

And what about the stuff that’s been hinted at but never evolved to full-blown mystery? The Black Rock ship that’s over 100 years old — why not do a half-season of that crew and their flashbacks? I’d watch.

As for “Moonlighting,” it was on the decline a long time before they got the two leads together. Because they took a prize-winning formula from the start of the series and killed it by doing the same thing over and over again. They put so much effort into one gimmick (will they ever get together?) and didn’t have anything left over.

Sounds like “Lost” is going to waste its dozen interesting characters and intriguing premises with pointless, never-resolved subplots and more obfuscation. Look forward to the Shakespeare episode, all-musical episode, and black-and-white episode to come soon.

I made out like a bandit this Christmas — even now, the sheriff is standing next to his overturned patrol car at the county line, shaking his fist at me and slapping his good-natured but incompetent deputy over the head with his hat while calling him a “melon-farmer.” (I celebrated Christmas on TBS).

Everyone else, though, got screwed. It was as if I were waging a war on Christmas on a scale that would terrify even Bill O’Reilly. I had the best intentions, sure, but somehow it all fell apart. Everything was the wrong size, wrong format, a duplicate, or just plain not enough. I remember wandering through stores, looking for exactly the perfect gift, and even thinking I had found a couple. But apparently something happened by the time we got to the unwrapping phase.

My brother’s got this weird magic gift-giving gene, though. Where I would plunk down a chunk of cash on something and wrap it, he goes for the bundle, accessories, and an accompanying magazine to commemorate the gift. And where I would give up and just buy a gift card in a panic, he puts the gift card in a box within a box with a specially-printed label and wraps the whole thing up. Not to mention — he got me a Wii, which he had to get up early and stand in line for.

And then he kept doing the Steve Jobs “one more thing” bit, pulling gifts and books and gift cards and animatronic chimpanzees out of nowhere because apparently exactly what I wanted wasn’t enough. I was just embarrassed at the excess of stuff coming my way. But pleasantly embarrassed, which is what I’m used to.

This never really occurred to me before, but Christmas has gotten so far removed from being a celebration of the birth of Christ, that the majority of the most cherished and traditional celebrations of Christmas are about how Christmas has stopped being about a celebration of the birth of Christ.

A Christmas Carol: ghost story about a guy who hates Christmas until he’s guilted into celebrating the season by a crippled child and the threat of his own death.
It’s a Wonderful Life: whiny depressive threatens to kill himself until people boost his ego enough to convince him an entire city hinges on his existence.
A Miracle on 34th Street: jaded little girl forced to believe in the magic of Christmas by an escaped lunatic.
A Charlie Brown Christmas: whiny depressive becomes despondent at commercialism of the season, regains hope via unsolicited sermonizing by his emotionally troubled friend.
The Passion of the Christ: Jews suck.

My point being that complaining about the commercialism is as much an institution as nativity scenes and midnight mass. So I’m not going to try to add anything to that.

Except this: these advertisers really need to stop with the Christmas carol parodies already.

I actually like “Carol of the Bells” a good bit — I think the coming of the Messiah should have music that is big and overwrought and even a little creepy, instead of that weak “Away in a Manger” pablum. Or at least, I used to like it. Thanks to Garmin, this year I was already sick of hearing it by the time it was even December 1st.

So an open letter to marketing types: I’m not going to tell you to stop marketing the hell out of Christmas. That’s what you do, and I know it’s important on some level. But the next time you’re coming up with an ad campaign, and you think that it’ll be cool to write a clever parody of “Carol of the Bells” or “Jingle Bells” or “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” or theme it to A Christmas Carol or include scenes from It’s a Wonderful Life, know this: that shit is played.

And if you still do it, you’re a worthless hack. And as you look around at the ruin of your talentless existence and feel so depressed by the pointlessness of it all, know that when you see the version of the world that doesn’t have you in it, you’ll see a world where everybody is really happy and better off and enjoying the spirit of the season via beloved carols that haven’t been ruined by overuse.

And in that spirit, it’s time once again to hear this rendition of O Holy Night.

Spending time at my parents’ house means seeing hours and hours of CNN, and this week that means every-fifteen-minute updates on Virginia representative Virgil Goode’s discomfort over his fellow congressman’s religion. In particular, how tougher immigration policies are necessary to keep people like Keith Ellison from being born and raised in America and taking advantage of the United States’ establishment clause.

For me, I’m just happy. First, because it’s Christmas. Second, because Ellison’s taking the high road, and a faint ray of light is finally starting to break through and show Goode for what he is: a uniquely stupid individual, and not a representative of the oppressive Conservative Republican Theocracy that controls everything in this country. And third, because for once the idiocy isn’t happening in my home state.

I don’t know if it’s the spirit of Christmas, or if I’d just gotten an unfairly negative impression last time I was here, or if I’m just getting to be less of a tight-ass, but things actually seem to be a little more tolerable in suburban Atlanta these days.

I had to go to the mall to do some Christmas shopping, and the traffic, soullessness, and commercialism were as bad as I’d expected. But it all ended up being pleasant, because people everywhere were friendly. It was a shock to the system — as much as I like San Francisco, I still say that people there keep to a strict mind-your-own-damn-business policy. The clerks here were busy but friendly, and people waiting in line would strike up conversations with me, a complete stranger.

Even better, I ended up feeling like a dope. The mall I went to is targeted primarily towards black people. I don’t know why that’s controversial to say (it’s not just on Wikipedia, where anything can be the grounds for “controversy”); apparently, it’s racist to acknowledge that retailers have target demographics. Whatever the case, Dekalb County is predominantly black, Rockdale is predominantly white, and this bastion of retail paradise straddles the two. As I was shopping, I was keeping an eye out for how people were handling having to fight for the valuable Borders and Best Buy resources that both black and white communities need.

And it turns out exactly like you’d expect — it’s a big freaking non-issue. After all my years living in the San Francisco Multicultural Biodome, I’ve become just as guilty of being Pompous Left-Coast Liberal as I used to accuse everyone of being when I first moved out there. I guess I was going in to my home county acting like an explorer observing relations between the Afrikaaners and the Zulu, or like the one blonde-haired blue-eyed college boy who reluctantly creeps out onstage at “Showtime at the Apollo.”

Instead, what I saw were a bunch of people shopping. And teenage friends hanging out; the younger they were, the less it seemed to matter what race anybody was. Maybe things will keep getting better as long as us liberal caucasians allow our sphincters to unclench. And that, as my Aryan princess Martha Stewart would say, is a good thing.

Thanks to my recent bout of unemployment, I’ve finally been able to finish one of the projects I always said I’d do when I got free time. This one is to write a complete app for Mac OS X, from start to release.

The app is called Incisor, and it’s a lightweight image editor. I’m always finding pictures I want to use in blog posts on websites, or Flickr, or from my own iPhoto library. But getting them in a usable format means having to crop and resize them in Photoshop or iPhoto, both of which are overkill for doing something as simple as sizing an image.

It’s such a common task I’m surprised it isn’t being done already, but I haven’t found an app that works exactly like I want — in particular, being able to see a real-time preview of the edit, and being able to drag it directly into another program without saving it as an interim file. (Of course, now that I’ve put it on the internets, I’ll probably hear of a dozen programs that already do that. But what the hell; I wanted to learn how to write a Cocoa app anyway).

The thing about programming for Cocoa, at least from my limited experience, is that it’s crazy powerful, but it takes a lot of work to get your foot in the door. There are plenty of excellent tutorials out there, but they either start out too high for the beginner, assuming that you already know the basics; or they are so tailored to a specific task that you’re screwed if you try to do something different. I wrote the “Currency Converter” app about four times, each time ending up with a complete program but never understanding how all the pieces fit together.

I’ve read in more than one tutorial that the mantra of Cocoa programming is, “If it’s hard, you’re doing it the wrong way.” And it’s mostly true; the problem is finding out the right way to do it. Several times I would spend hours writing a bunch of functions to do something, only to have to delete it all once I discovered it was all covered automatically by one call to the system frameworks. For example, everything complicated about image manipulation is handled automatically by the Cocoa libraries — the effort in writing this app was half connecting the UI, and half digging through tutorials and documentation to find out what was covered and what I’d have to write myself.

And I’m just finding out now that at least half the UI code I’ve written could be scrapped if I’d used a different method. I guess I’ll know better next time.

I’m not sure if it’s just my experience, but developing something for OS X at the moment seems like a lot of super-powerful pieces without enough to tie them all together. It’s almost ludicrously easy to get a full-featured app out of the built-in frameworks and tools they give you for free; you can write a functioning web browser with just one line of code, for example.

Still, there’s not really anything guiding you through the process. For a while, after seeing how powerful InterfaceBuilder and Xcode are, and how deeply-integrated AppleScript is into everything, I was starting to think that development had gotten to the point where something like HyperCard wasn’t necessary anymore. But now, after finishing an app (albeit a very simple one) and looking back on where my time was spent, I’m convinced that the system really needs something that casual programmers and even non-programmers can use to get results not built into the stock iLife apps. Bring back HyperCard!

P.S. The app has some of the ugliest icons possible. If anyone wants to volunteer to make new ones, let me know.

Apparently I’m zero for two on my quest to become movie literate. Tonight’s entry: Breathless by Jean-Luc Godard, which leaves a viewer in 2006 feeling as jaded and disillusioned as its main characters.

Cinema studies professors and students like to write about Breathless almost as much as French people like to be smug. For me to try to come up with anything new to say about the movie would be like a high school English student trying to find some untapped vein in The Scarlet Letter. I imagine there’s even a template for writing cinema studies term papers about Breathless: mention the birth of French New Wave, jump cuts, breaking the Hollywood establishment while paying homage to it, the combination of high art and pop art, artifice vs sincerity, emphasis on disillusioned youth culture, post-film noir, etc. As you’re waiting the hour and a half for the movie to end, the points just fly up at you. Hand it in, get a B+.

That’s not to say that all that isn’t there, or that it wasn’t important at the time. It’s just that watching this movie in 2006 is a little like going to see the Mona Lisa in person; you’re seeing it because it’s an Important Work of Art, not because of what made it an important work of art.

At this point, though, I can’t even conceive of a world in which Breathless would be shocking or groundbreaking. Whether it’s because it was so influential that every movie I’ve seen has picked everything innovative out of its carcass, or because its influence has been overstated by years of film reviewers, I can’t say. Either way, the end result is the same: you feel as if you’ve seen it all before, and done much better.

Back when I was being forced to watch Important Films, the example of French New Wave we were shown was Le Week-end by Jean-Luc Godard. At the time, it really was mind-altering. It was completely unlike anything I’d ever seen before, it showed new things possible in movies that I may never have considered before, and it was entertaining. If you read up on that movie, you see tons of criticism that it was insufferably pretentious and overly political, and that it exists at this point only as a historical document.

The lesson to be learned, as far as I can make out, is this: making a set of Important Films that everyone must see to be culturally (or at least cinematically) literate, is as misguided as, well, making high school students read The Scarlet Letter. Self-obsessed thugs in 60s Paris are as irrelevant to me as dockworkers and communists in the 50s (On the Waterfront), or William Randolph Hearst and the politics of the 30s (Citizen Kane), or social conventions in pre-WWII France (The Rules of the Game). And the filmmaking techniques that each of those movies revolutionized have been adapted and modified into hundreds of movies with more relevance, even if not as much innovation.

I’ve got no doubt that there’s some group who’s coined a simple term to describe everything I’ve written in this post — it’s probably something like “anti-post-structuralist modernism” or some such. It could all be really discouraging, convincing you that you’ve seen everything there is to see. But instead, it’s a sign that movies are evolving. There are still some truly timeless movies — His Girl Friday stands out for me as one that still seems even more contemporary than 99% of the movies Nora Ephron makes, and definitely more relevant than any of its remakes. But more often than not, going back to the well of Important Films means seeing something whose subject matter is lost without the right context, and whose style, the truly relevant part, has already been appropriated 100 times over.

I should point out that as I was writing this, the movie Raptor was playing on TV, and green berets and Corbin Bernsen were being killed by a rubber dinosaur puppet. That made me rethink my theory on the evolution of movies, but not abandon it.

One of my all-time top 5 favorite albums ever recorded is Telecommunication Breakdown by Emergency Broadcast Network. EBN’s schtick was remixing video sources to techno beats, basically popularizing the mash-up a decade before it got popular.

Their video releases were pure capital-G Genius but could get tedious quickly. The best example of that is the original version of “Get Down”, which combined Harrison Ford from Patriot Games, a Mariah Carey screech, and a Dan Rather clip to the beat of “Jungle Boogie,” a brilliant concept which becomes annoying after about 20 seconds. What made Telecommunication Breakdown a highlight is that they had the guy from Meat Beat Manifesto remix a lot of the tracks, to make them work as satire and music.

They got a burst of popularity in the early 90s after their version of “We Will Rock You” was used in one of U2’s concert tours. As is usual for me, I got into them right as they were breaking up, so for years I’ve been stuck with a video, one amazing album, and three QuickTime clips that were included on the CD, hinting at something much greater but that I would never ever see. You can’t really appreciate how clever the music is until you see it with the video sources.

So today it finally dawned on me to check YouTube, and you won’t believe how excited I was to find more videos. This one is the Telecommunication Breakdown track called “You Have Five Seconds To Complete This Section,” and I nearly wet myself when I saw it’d finally been made available online.

It’s just awesome. (And I have to agree with one of the commenters; that does look an awful lot like Jane Lynch.)

More quicktime videos are available from Joshua Pearson’s website, under EBN Archives. You can also do a search on YouTube for “Emergency Broadcast Network” to see lower-quality versions. My favorites: Syncopated Ordinance Demonstration, 3:7:8, Psychoactive Drugs, and eMediatainment (a new one!)

EBN’s finest moment, though, and what made me a lifelong fan, is “Electronic Behavior Control System.” The version up on YouTube & Pearson’s site is edited from a live performance, so it’s not quite as cool as the one that was included on the CD. Still, it’s probably the most brilliant music video ever made:

I don’t know if y’all have heard, but the SciFi channel has been running a miniseries called “The Lost Room!”

Non-stop promotions aside, this is actually a damn fine show. (It concludes tonight, which would make this blog post seem useless if not for the fact I’m 100% sure SciFi is going to be rerunning it frequently).

A lot of science fiction and sci-fi/fantasy stories start with a high concept, and then go on to tell a traditional story based on that concept. Every history of “Star Trek” mentions that it was described as “‘Wagon Train’ in space.” Most episodes of TV series like “The Twilight Zone” and all the Star Treks were standard drama plots with a high concept thrown into the mix (what would a love story be like if one of the characters were from a symbiotic race that could change gender?) or used the high concept as allegory for something else (can’t you see that I’m half-black and he’s half-white?)

The thing that impresses me the most about “The Lost Room” is that it’s all about the concept. A preview I read described it as being like a videogame, and that’s apt. It’s true on the obvious level — the story really just boils down to a standard adventure game, with a guy collecting inventory items to solve puzzles.

But the videogame comparison goes deeper, in that this is the most successful non-game art I’ve ever seen that conveys that feeling of engagement that’s unique to videogames. That feeling of being dropped in a world with new rules, and the satisfaction that comes from figuring out how to use the rules to accomplish something.

It helps a lot that the series doesn’t insult your intelligence. Especially when it very easily could have; pretty much every single character in the story knows more about what’s going on than the hero does. That could’ve devolved into a lot of really tedious and clumsy exposition, but it ends up making the hero seem like even more of a bad-ass. Explain something once, and he’s not only figured it out, but figured out how to use that knowledge to get farther than any of these other people have been able to.

He’s not a hero because he’s been dropped into the role of protagonist; he’s a hero because he’s actually accomplishing things. The best example is when he uses the properties of the motel room and the missing objects to figure out how to open a locked safe. It was just ingenious.

I’ve been trained to watch TV from “on high,” sitting on a platform just underneath the writers as we both look down on the characters and wait for them to clue in to what’s going on and catch up with the rest of us. With this, I feel like I’m having to hurry to keep up. A villain will shout, “take all the doors and burn them,” and it takes me a minute to realize what that was all about.

And characters don’t spend a lot of time staring with Spielbergian wide eyes and open mouths at the wondrous properties of these mysterious objects; they jump right in and start playing with them. Testing them with stuffed animals, smashing them with sledgehammers, and using them to break locks, break out of prison, or spy on people. A lot of stories introduce the Ring of Power or the Bag of Holding or Portable Hole and then make you wait for that one crucial plot point to come where the hero remembers the object and uses it to save the day just at the last minute. In “The Lost Room,” people have already exhausted every possible use of an object a dozen times over by the time the audience has figured out exactly what it does.

It’s not perfect; the whole love-interest “don’t break my heart” bit was goofy, and I’ve read previews that suggest that the final pay-off is kind of weak (I’ve only seen four hours out of six). But I’ve been enjoying the hell out of it, and not only am I excited about the conclusion, I already wish it were an ongoing series.

My biggest complaint is that I wish Peter Krause would stop harping on about his daughter and the Prime Object and start trying to find the mysterious missing razor. Any guy over 18 (at least those of us who weren’t raised on estrogen-rich soy products) knows that the perpetual haven’t-shaved-in-a-day look takes a lot of effort, and watching six hours of it makes you feel uncomfortably itchy.