January 2008 – 10 Zen Monkeys

Six Secret Lost Videos

January 31, 2008November 4, 2010 Destiny 2 Comments

These videos shed new light on the phenomenon that is Lost — or was Lost. A new episode of the mind-boggling mystery hasn't aired in nearly 8 months, and last year saw the show lose nearly 50% of its audience.

But Thursday Lost returns to the airwaves, and last season's finale was even nominated for an Emmy. Whether the series can recapture its glory, it'll at least provide something for TV-loving geeks to talk about.

And these videos will put it all in perspective.

1. The 117th episode?

Lost will end in three years, after 48 more episodes. But hardcore fans know that the final episode already slipped out last January, featuring surprising scenes with Sawyer, Kate, Sayeed, and Ben.

Some argued that actors Evangeline Lilly and Josh Holloway only filmed a three-minute parody to pander to geeks attending the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. (This theory is buttressed by the fact that Kate announces in the video that the first thing she'll do after leaving the island is attend the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas, adding that the men attending the show are all "dead sexy.") Kate also reveals which of the hunky castaways she prefers, Sawyer or Jack, though her answer takes an unexpected twist.

It's nice to see the cast acknowledging their loyal fans, even if they're also teasing them about the show's mysteries. This video ultimately captures a final showdown with treacherous Ben (played by Michael Emerson, who would later be nominated for an Emmy.) In the clip, Ben promises Sayeed "one simple unifying theory" that explains the mysteries of the island. (Sayeed thinks the answer is purgatory — but he's in for an annoying surprise...)

2. Episode 0

Sneak a peek at a bizarro world where there is no plane crash, or even a TV series — just struggling actors desperate for work

The first season DVD holds the rare "audition tapes" that were recorded by the show's actors. As Sawyer, Josh Holloway is good-looking, charming, and even a little bit younger. But even more surprisingly, it's a world of Sawyers, since his part was also coveted by three of the other future Lost actors — Matthew Fox (Jack), Dominic Monaghan (Charlie), and Jorge Garcia (Hurley).

But the most disturbing secret of all lies in Evangeline Lilly's audition tape for the part of Kate. It apparently comes from a parallel reality where Jack, the doctor, was killed in the very first episode.

"And whatever it is that killed Jack is still out there."

3. I'll Be Lost For You

This video suggests another little-known secret about Lost. It was originally a sitcom about wacky good-looking friends living together on an island. They frolic in the water in its original opening, their smiling faces showing what good friends they really are. A montage captures their warm moments of friendship — smiling, dancing, sharing peanut butter, and relaxing by the flaming jets from a recently demolished airline.

This video's title is "The one with the Friends spoof" (even identifying one of the actors as "Matthew Fox Arquette.") But it's letting the cast off easy. Elsewhere on YouTube, someone actually redubbed four full minutes footage of Lost footage with a sitcom laugh track.

4. Sawyer's acting class

The character of Sawyer charmed Kate, who sees tenderness under his gruff exterior. But the other castaways usually just see his volatile temper.

As the frustrations of island life mount, this remarkable video could be seen as a Lost drinking game gone horribly wrong. If you promised to chug every time Sawyer says "Son of a bitch" — prepare for alcohol poisoning.

It's surprisingly zen, a moment in time in which Sawyer's dialogue never changes, though the world flows on around him. Even when he's been captured and gagged, he still manages to snarl out a muffled version of his trademark phrase.

"Son of a bitch"

5. The magic turtle

Lost's writers received a warning message about the unsolved mysteries that are starting to pile up. (There's that smoke monster, the eyepatch guy, what "The Others" want, the ghost of Mr. Eko...)

But maybe they're more interested in discussing what would happen if Kate and Locke switched brains? The rival writers at comedy site "SuperDeluxe" offer a dead-on analysis of what this show's story meetings must look like.

"Everyone wakes up, and the ocean is missing!"
"Everything goes backward, for two and a half years!"

And a comment uploaded with the video suggests what the ABC show's writers are really feeling.

"It begins with the letter 'L' and rhymes with cost."

6. Hurley's Last Laugh

Jorge Garcia was 31 when the writers of Lost created the character of "Hurley" specifically for him. He was the first actor cast, going from stand-up comedian to top-rated TV star, playing the unlucky everyman who regrets ever winning the lottery.

In November of 2006, he even turned up on the David Letterman Show, reading a list of "The Top Ten Signs You're Obsessed With Lost." ("Number four: Your co-workers affectionately refer to you as 'That loser who's obsessed with Lost.") It speaks to the show's popularity that each of the ten jokes triggered some kind of recognition from the audience.

But maybe we're all just spending too much time watching TV.

See Also:
Leaving Lost Limbo
Five Freaky Muppet Videos
Pulp Fiction Parodies on YouTube
Six Freakiest Children's TV Rock Bands
Democratic Cartoon Candidates

Records Broken By the Perry Bible Fellowship?

January 5, 2008June 26, 2011 Lou Cabron 16 Comments

Nicholas Gurewitch draws the Perry Bible Fellowship

Is Nicholas Gurewitch fulfilling a childhood dream? Photo by Jeff Marini

"This is the reason paper was invented. Give him your money now."

Marvel comic book writer Mark Millar joined the stampede which placed the first Perry Bible Fellowship collection into the top 500 on Amazon— before the book was even released.

25-year-old cartoonist Nicholas Gurewitch watched as the pre-order sales climbed past $300,000 for The Trial of Colonel Sweeto and Other Stories. Close to 27,000 copies were sold even before the collection of comic strips had its official release in November and crashed into Amazon's top 250. "It bounces off and on Amazon's best-seller lists all the time," Gurewitch told me, jokingly searching for an explanation. "Nifty cover? I'm not sure."

In December the cartoonist's site warned that only 3,000 copies remained, and now copies are "in short supply," Nick says. (The book's first printing had some errors which required a second printing to fully meet the demand, and Gurewitch confirms that "We are indeed gearing up for a third printing.") Publisher's Weekly reports that his publisher, Dark Horse Comics, received their biggest order ever from Britian's Diamond distributor.

"I think people respond to a packaged volume of comics much more than they connect with a computer screen," Gurewitch speculates about the response. "Seeing it on someone's coffee table, or seeing it in someone's hands, or on a high shelf, can affect us in ways far more grand than seeing it bookmarked on someone's computer."

Nick's cover for The Trial of Colonel Sweeto

In our interview, Nick shared even more surprising news. He's been building to this moment for two decades — sort of.

NICHOLAS GUREWITCH: My mom says I was doing cartoonist things at the age of 2, though that's hard to believe. But I was definitely story-oriented. She actually had us making little books around the age of 5 — me and my siblings.

LOU CABRON: Drawings and words?

NG: Early on, it was mostly pictures. And she would bind them with string.

LC: That's adorable.

NG: I think the idea of making a book was a really fun thing that was ever-present in my mind. I undertook a few on my own once I found a stapler.

LC: What was in the books you drew as a kid?

NG: The same stuff I'm doing now, I'm pretty sure. Lots of monsters, lots of robots, lots of dinosaurs...

I don't think I've always wanted to be a cartoonist. I've always just been a cartoonist. I've always just been making little stories.

LC: Colonel Sweeto shows a magical candy land where the reigning monarch practices some vicious realpolitik. When I contacted you, I almost wondered if you lived in a far-away fantasy castle of your own.

NG: I wonder if most people have that impression. I love castles. I plan to live in one some day. It's not wrong that you have that impression.

I wish it were true.

LC: I was picturing lots of monsters, lots of robots, and lots of dinosaurs all scattered throughout the PBF empire.

NG: It's a pretty quaint empire. My buddy Evan handles all the t-shirt stuff, and I had a friend helping me out with the prints. (They take in a lot more money than you expect, though I haven't checked my records in a while.)

Evan was actually my roommate in college when I first started the comic, and he's been writing a lot of the comics lately. He came up with the idea for Commander Crisp, as well as the one with The Masculator.

A panel from "Commander Crisp"
Earlier on Evan would come up with one out of four comics, and he's been doing that lately too. And my buddy Jordan is always really good about knowing how I should amplify an idea and he's come up with ideas on his own. We're all kind of on the same wavelength collaborating, and it's extremely easy.

LC: A writer for The Daily Show, Sam Means, described your comic strip as being almost psychedelic.

"The Perry Bible Fellowship is what Bil Keane, Jim Davis, and the guy who draws Marmaduke would see if they closed their eyes and rubbed them with their fists. It's absurdist, comic fireworks, and I can't get enough of it."

NG: I don't want to make judgments about my artwork, but a lot of people seem to think that it's good, and I chalk this up to the amount of time that I spend concentrating on it and enjoying it myself. If I enjoy it myself a lot, people tend to enjoy it a lot.

LC: Is that the secret reason why you use so many different styles? The strip about Finneas the heroic dog was drawn with acrylic paint, while The Throbblefoot Aquarium switched to the black-and-white style of Edward Gorey.

NG: I might be attracted to giving people the kind of response that makes them write in. That's always nice. I'm not terribly lonely, but its wonderful to hear when somebody recognizes that you've done something very subtle.

I like touching people on those levels. So it only makes sense to make references to childhood heroes and artists that I appreciate.

LC: You also told the Boston Phoenix. "There's something wonderful, and soon-to-be mythic, about the printed page... I'll always prefer it."

NG: I just have a feeling comics drawn on a napkin in 100 years will be far more appreciated than comics made on a computer. Don't you get the impression that we're getting bombarded by images that are digital? People often go straight to the digital format, which is unfortunate. I just really appreciate seeing evidence of hard work!

LC: Each of your strips always manages to startle me. For example, Hey Goat starts in the winter, but ends after the spring thaw, implying that there's been a horrible avalanche. You even told one interviewer "there's a lot to be said for chaos where order is making things very, very boring."

NG: I think I just always felt that it might be an aspect of my personality, that I think chaotic situations often reveal something about a scene or a person or an object that a still life wouldn't. It really squeezes out the nature of the characters.

Plus, chaos is just eye-catching. It's a necessary aspect of comedy and drama that there be some conflict.

LC: Does that mean you were a frustrated artist in school? Did you feel high school stifled your creativity?

NG: Or the spirits of the students, or the thinking of students.

I was an editor of an underground newspaper that we distributed in high school. We ruffled a lot of feathers. I think I have an FBI record because of it.

LC: How do you get an FBI record for an underground newspaper? Are you sure?

NG: Someone tells me I do, for certain.

A local pastor had seen the work that we were doing in the paper, and he must've thought we were more than the basic renegade kids because he wrote a letter to the FBI. This is right after Columbine, and he thought our paper displayed many warning signs for troubled youth.

He was probably right about that. We certainly were troubled youth. I just don't think we were the type of troubled youth that would express ourselves with guns.

LC: Well, wait — what was in this newspaper?

NG: We had a section where we presented fictionalized accounts of our teachers fighting each other, and how those fights would go. We'd show a big picture of them, and then a "versus," and then another teacher. It was really entertaining if you had these people as teachers. Lots of blood, lots of violence. Lets hope they never end up online.

We actually published the pastor's letter in the following issue. We also did a word search, and we hid the word "clitoris". It was a point at which we lost a lot of our audience.

LC: So you regret it?

NG: It's the type of thing I look back on and see as funny in retrospect. I think I get paid to make clitoris jokes now.

But I really enjoy having flexed my mind to the full extent at that tender age, because I think it's really helped me maintain a momentum. College was a little bland, but I think that's why I ended up starting the comic strip — because I was so hooked on my experience with the paper.

I noticed that the comics page at the college newspaper would get a heck of a lot of attention. It only took about a semester when I realized that's where I should be putting my attention, and not the articles about the dining hall.

LC: You were "discovered" when you won a comic strip contest in the Baltimore City Paper. When you entered that contest, where did you think it would lead?

NG: The Perry Bible Fellowship debuted in the New York Press the same week that it won, so there were parallel blessings. I had no prediction about where it was going. I just knew I appreciated the extra money while I was at school!

It was running in two papers when I graduated in 2004, so I gave myself a few weeks to see if I could call what I was doing a job. I sent out samples to ten more papers and heard back from about three. I figured that was just as good as trying to get a temporary job in New York City, so I ended up just staying home and doing the comic and operating from a studio space that I rented near my house.

The initial proliferation of the samples was the only time I sent out samples. Since then most papers have just emailed me — because of the web site, I assume.

I think the story ends right about now. Because I've still been doing it...

See Also:
Secrets of the Perry Bible Fellowship
Neil Gaiman has lost his clothes
The Perry Bible Fellowship Enters Semi-Retirement
Steve Wozniak v. Stephen Colbert - and Other Pranks
Jimmy Wales Will Destroy Google
George Bush vs. Spider-Man

Dead Woman Blogging

January 2, 2008September 11, 2011 Lou Cabron 8 Comments

Theresa Duncan committed suicide in July.

But on New Year's Eve, five months after her death, she updated her blog.

January's Vanity Fair had already trumpeted "The New York Art World's Bizarre Double Suicide" in a cover story this month. (One week after Theresa's suicide, Jeremy Blake, her partner of 12 years, removed his clothes and walked into the ocean at New York's Rockaway Beach.) Morbid interest in her blog was only exacerbated when, three months after her death, a new post suddenly appeared on her blog just two days before Halloween. Its title?

"Basil Rathbone's Ghosts."

It's a weird final twist for the A-list blogger and game designer. In the last year of her life, Theresa's apartment was in a New York rectory "allegedly haunted by the ghosts of Edgar Allan Poe and Harry Houdini," according to Vanity Fair, and she'd developed an apparent intrigue in at least one ghost story.

Unfortunately, the entire 423-word post was written by Dick Cavett. On his own blog at the New York Times site, the former 70s talk show host had promised his readers ghost stories. In February he'd told a story about the actor who'd played Sherlock Holmes in the 1940s. (Moments after Rathbone's friend is killed in a car accident along with his beloved hunting dogs, the actor receives a phone call from a psychic who says she's received a ghostly message. "Traveling very fast. No time to say good-bye. There are no dogs here.")

Theresa wrote a post scheduled to appear at the end of October, quoting the entirety of Cavett's last six paragraphs.

The next time I saw Rathbone...more years had gone by, and he was in the act of receiving a summons for letting his dog Ginger off the leash in Central Park. I thought he might have decided, looking back, that it had all been some sort of bizarre coincidence, or maybe a highly original prank. He said, "At the time, of course, I was quite shaken by it." And now? "I am still shaken by it."

A note below the post warned that a second one would appear on New Year's Eve — the final blog post of Theresa Duncan.

And increasing the tension was another dark story lingering after her death — the couple's belief that Scientologists were secretly harassing her. Vanity Fair reports that her boyfriend Blake "wrote a 27-page document encapsulating their claims, which he planned on using as the basis for a lawsuit against the Church of Scientology." (They also report Tom Cruise's denial that he interfered with her negotiations to direct a modern version of Alice in Wonderland, which her agent says was blocked for "budget considerations.")

Theresa's fear of Scientologists had already led to bizarre confrontations with their Hollywood neighbors, according to the article.

"Theresa said to me, 'Jeremy and I have started a club where we've found a bunch of old men and we're letting them fuck us in the ass, and we wanted to know if you wanted to be a part of it.' I asked Theresa if she was joking. She said 'no' and repeated herself..."

In July, when O'Brien came home and picked up her mail, she wrote, Duncan "shrieked 'cult whore' and 'cult hooker' repeatedly. She was very frightening."

Both incidents appeared in a letter supporting the couple's eventual eviction from their bungalow in Venice, California in August of 2006.

But a strange mystery lingers over one detail of Theresa's story — the fact that rock star (and Scientologist) Beck pulled out of Theresa's Alice movie. New York Magazine found a curious inconsistency in Beck's statement to Vanity Fair that he'd "never met to discuss doing her film." Blogger Emmanuelle Richard says she found an Italian interview where in fact, Beck gushes excitedly about preparing for his upcoming movie debut. ("It will be full of energy and full of characters: some kind of Alice in Wonderland set in the 70s... The director is a friend of mine and it will be her directorial debut. We will begin shooting in the Fall.")

Or was their fast lane life simply catching up to them? Vanity Fair reports Blake sometimes took a hip flask of whiskey to his job at Rockstar Games, while Theresa "drank champagne by the bottle."

"It was starting to show in their faces; they were looking haggard."

After the couple's twin suicides, the New York Times ran an article about prowling through Jeremy Blake's computer, assembling his final artwork from the PhotoShop folders he'd left behind.

Other bloggers searched for a logic in the death of the two New York artists. "The same anxieties that underwrite Ms. Duncan's nightmare visions are to be found in the economic and technological circuitry that surrounds all of us," reads one post on the blog Jugadoo, "an erosion of stable modes of identity and selfhood..."

It isn't hard to imagine a future scenario when people will be able to generate AI-controlled virtual selves who will stroll around digital worlds like Second Life, having conversations with grief-stricken friends and family after their living counterparts are dead. That a person on the brink of suicide might leave a new kind of note.

And then Theresa's final blog post appeared.

It spoke of "twenty largely wasted years," saying trying to write is a failure "because one has only learnt to get the better of words for the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which one is no longer disposed to say it."

Theresa is quoting T.S. Eliot, but she'd skipped the first four passages of "East Coker" to focus in on the fifth. "With shabby equipment always deteriorating in the general mess of imprecision of feeling, undisciplined squads of emotion..."

Her final mysterious post was another long quote, arguing wearily that the great truths have already been recorded and "There is only the fight to recover what has been lost and found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions that seem unpropitious."

"But perhaps neither gain nor loss. For us, there is only the trying.

The rest is not our business."