One Beer #9: Simply Spiked Blueberry Lemonade
It's not great
It’s not great! Cloying, the way all things that are too sweet are. Almost enough so that it doesn’t taste like lemonade, or blueberry lemonade. Just sparkling sugar. Not an ideal drink for a new winter’s night.
And yet, perhaps therein lies the issue. The context of the drink itself. Upon the first sip, I said, “If I was on a beach, and it was ice cold, or maybe even over ice, this would be a decent drink.” Alas. I’m not on a beach. I’m just in North Brooklyn.
The winter did come on all of the sudden in Brooklyn. Felt like many of us commented on the real, true fall we all got to experience. Temperate, if troubling, weather, fallen leaves. Warm evenings asking for one layer. It was such a nice stretch of almost 40 days and it feels like it’s gone so fast once the clocks fall back. I’ve never been someone who is disturbed by the earlier sunsets, but there’s definitely something different going on this year. Maybe it’s the idea that we’re all back outside again, in ways that we weren’t for the last two years, so it’s a bigger deal to stay in and avoid the iron, dark, cold. The promise of the Northeast. Someone stop me…
Perhaps, too, I’ve been thinking of the beach because I’ve been thinking of ABC’s LOST so much, since starting it last month. I, like most people, had some consciousness around it as a teenager and did tune in here and there, and especially for the finale. I liked it, then — even defended it from detractors prior to 2010. As the supposed Golden Age of TV came well after it, the show feels sort of lost in a collective neglect of network television classics. This show has everything: dogs, class, stranded passengers in low rise jeans. Generalized fear. A basically gratuitous attention to beautiful people’s eyes. That thing when an actor stands with their head down just enough that their hair drifts over their face while they look on with some sense of complicated judgment.
It’s sort of a perfect television show? That is, if we can all agree on a sort of outdated mode of what we consider television. Not a tightly wound story by any means, not one with many resolutions, or necessarily anything clean to say. Shows didn’t use to want to offer something prestige — they wanted to offer a smaller version of what you get at the movies. The simplicity in it, especially in a show like LOST, rocks. Let’s put the beautiful people’s faces zoomed into the center of the camera. Let’s have a lot of charged standoffs. Let’s have these people have (what may be inconsequential) secrets. Yes, JJ Abrams and David Lindeloff, let’s!
When we started the rewatch, I remember saying, “It’s silly. They’re not really doing anything metaphorical with it. The island is just crazy.” I’ve maybe never been more wrong, especially at the show’s outset. It’s better, even, than simple metaphor. Anything happening to these characters metaphorically is then physically happening to them. Battles with addictions. Memories of their fathers. Grappling with past misdeeds. What more, really, could we ask for out of television? Answers to questions about smoke monsters? Please…
This, too, all against the kind of fascinating cultural moment to which LOST was born in. It’s 3 years after 2001, and the show is about the small and large scale fallout of a traumatic plane crash… On the island: treacherous known unknowns, abstract monsters, foreign landscapes. The people are strangers you’re forced to trust, under the guise of having undergone the same horrors. It’s clear to me, now, that LOST serves as a kind of rumination on American life after the tragedy of 9/11. What matters, what doesn’t, what we’re meant to do in-between. Does it get away from that idea? Probably, I’m not done with it yet. But I think it’s a more-than-worthy snapshot of what our prestige media was capable of at a very confusing, recently passed time.
A longer post next week, maybe. For now, another list:
A list from my phone
Kafka1
Fathers
“Becoming authentically, spiritual himself”
Music and animal desires, base? Or higher?
The idea that he can understand everyone, they’re aware of him, but they don’t know he can understand them
Wow! Yikes