The Jungle

Jan 2

“…the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn’t the world, it wasn’t the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, the cancer of never letting go, is ignorance bliss, I don’t know, but it’s so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me?I think and think and think, I’ve thought myself out of happiness one million times but never once into it.” Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer

Dec 20

The Booth at the End

The Booth at the End: The Devil is in the Details

Sometimes the best things in life are those things stumbled upon, enjoyed without hype or expectations. It allows the thing to be enjoyed as it is discovered, without feeling like you have to discover what someone else enjoyed. Nobody told you the wine was smoky with notes of cherries and blackberries, but you enjoyed it because it reminded you of cobbler and it had been a long day.

I’ll ruin that now by ranting about how brilliant this show is. I stumbled across it on Hulu and can’t contain myself enough to allow others to stumble into it so I will trip and push them into it hoping to find some other enthusiasts.

The Booth at the End is reminiscent of a play with a single stage. A benign and common looking Man (played by Xander Berkeley) sits at a booth in a diner as people visit him to make a deal. He is friendly but firm, congenial but cold. He is slightly aloof, and with his pen and thick notebook is strikingly similar to a shrink. The deals he makes with each visitor promises to give them what they want, or at least, what they believe they want. Their desires range from saving the life of their child to becoming more physically attractive, but somehow this man at the booth assures them he has the ability to grant their wish so long as they fulfill their part of the bargain and update him on their progress. The morality and difficulty of the Man’s tasks for each visitor varies as much as their requests, and as any experienced story-listener may anticipate, the paths and desires are quickly begin to intersect.

The beauty, however, of this show lies in the subtle and profound hints at the essence of humanity. What we are capable of when we want something, how far we’ll go, what we believe we deserve, are all displayed in each unique situation.

I could go on about all the gems hidden in the script, and the double meanings of very simple phrases, (the last three words of the title are quite sinister now that I think about it) but really the show is summarized poignantly when one diner asks the Man if he believes in god and the devil.

The response: “I believe in the details.”

The fun for the viewer lies in understanding just who exactly this Man is. Is he lying, or is he powerful enough to grant these wishes? Is he just a sociopath orchestrating a diabolical experiment in human desperation? Is he the devil, or is he god? Is he both? Even more unsettling… which one are we, when we pursue our deepest desires?

The answer is in the details.

The Booth at the End can be seen streaming on Hulu. The first season is comprised of 5 episodes, a little over 20 minutes each. It was created by Christopher Kubasik, and originally ran from August 27, 2010, on the Canadian network CityTV.

Nov 26

Warmth

“Yes, we became very wakeful; so much so that our recumbent position began to grow wearisome, and by little and little we found ourselves sitting up; the clothes well tucked around us, leaning against the head-board with our four knees drawn up close together, and our two noses bending over them, as if our kneepans were warming-pans. We felt very nice and snug, the more so since it was so chilly out of doors; indeed out of bed-clothes too, seeing that there was no fire in the room. The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. But if, like Queequeg and me in the bed, the tip of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.”

- Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Sep 20

I loved this film. Funny, heartbreaking, and sincere. Read the Los Angeles Times review then go watch.

“

Some kind of procession was approaching us, and the light came from the persons who composed it.

First came bright Spirits, not the Spirits of men, who danced and scattered flowers - soundlessly falling, lightly drifting flowers, through by the standards of the ghost-world each petal would have weighed a hundred-weight and their fall would have been like the crashing of boulders. Then, on the left and right, at each side of the forest avenue, came youthful shapes, boys upon one hand, and girls upon the other. If I could remember their singing and write down the notes, no man who read that score would ever grow sick or old. Between them went musicians: and after these a lady in whose honour all this was being done.
‘Is it?…is it?’ I whispered to my guide.
‘Not at all,’ said he. ‘It’s someone ye’ll never have heard of. Her name on Earth was Sarah Smith and she lived at Golders Green.’
‘She seems to be…well, a person of particular importance?’
‘Aye. She is one of the great ones. Ye have heard that fame in this country and fame on Earth are two quite different things.’
‘And who are all these young men and women on each side?’
‘They are her sons and daughters.’
‘She must have had a very large family, Sir.’
‘Every young man or boy that met her became her son— even if it was only the boy that brought the meat to her back door. Ever girl that met her was her daughter.’
‘Isn’t that a bit hard on their own parents?’
‘No. There are those that steal other peoples children. But her motherhood was of a different kind. Those on whom it fell went back to their natural parents loving them more. Few men looked on her without becoming, in a certain fashion, her lovers. But it was the kind of love that made them not less true, but truer, to their own wives.’

” ‘The Great Divorce’ by C.S. Lewis

Sep 5

“

{Billy}….turned on the television. He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody again.

The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn’t in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.

” Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

The Jungle

"When they told him this, Ransom at last understood why mythology was what it was—gleams of celestial strength and beauty falling on a jungle of filth and imbecility." C.S. Lewis 'Perelandra'

The Booth at the End

Warmth

"When they told him this, Ransom at last understood why mythology was what it was—gleams of celestial strength and beauty falling on a jungle of filth and imbecility."
C.S. Lewis
'Perelandra'