The iTunes Playlist: Kanye West

There are many people nostalgic for just a few years ago, and all things considered events could have gone a lot worse for Kanye. He is still alive and he is still blogging, which is now ironically the thing he's best at. He can't really sing if he ever could; he's a studio artist who loves AutoTune more than the warm caresses of his collaborators. We have an obituary ready just in case and it includes the 2014 relationship between him and Michelle Williams that I really am crossing my fingers about.

Until then, we can be consoled by his amazing thoughts on Steve McQueen and this photo:

"A Thousand Miles" - Vanessa Carlton (mp3)

See I always liked this song until I saw the movie White Girls. This must be the white song that all black people like, you know every year there's a song that black people like and this is that. I love the string arrangements. Ron Fare is really up on the strings.

"Sleep to Dream" - Fiona Apple (mp3)

with prince harry and william"12:51" - The Strokes (mp3)

Ah man, I love this song so much that I almost fucked up the mix down on my album because you can barely hear their lyrics. I went in the mix on my computer trying to make the guitar louder, trying to make it sound like The Strokes, and Common was like, "Come on man, that don't sound like hip hop. Come on man, turn them drums up."

"The Scientist" - Natasha Bedingfield (mp3)

This is a song where the video really made me go back and look at it. 'The Scientist' is one of the dopest videos, it's one of my top five videos of all time, but I also like the song.

"Torn" - Natalie Imbruglia (mp3)

Once again another black people's favorite white song, because it's a really dope remake, and she had a couple of dope songs on that album.

"Lucifer" - Jay-Z (mp3)

Man, I love this beat right here. I was going to use it on my album but I felt like 'Jesus Walks' and 'Lucifer' needed their own space on different albums.

"Jesus Walks With Me" - Kanye West (mp3)

"Selfish" - Slum Village feat. Kanye West & John Legend (mp3)

This melody is just really infectious and mature, it's like that grown-man music.

"Distant Lover" - Martin Gaye (mp3)

You can't just explain why you like any Marvin Gaye song, but this one inspired the track for Spaceship.

"Am I High" - N.E.R.D. (mp3)

'Am I High' is mine and everybody else I know's favorite song on the N.E.R.D. classic album In Search Of...

"Scar Tissue" - Red Hot Chili Peppers (mp3)

Red Hot Chili Peppers are my favorite group of all times, he says 'broken jaw' on it too so you know I like that.

"The Reason" - Hoobastank (mp3)

Them my home boys I always see them we go to places like England and Canada. We always kicking it backstage you know just having a good time.

"99 Problems (Sam Ronson remix)" - Jay-Z (mp3)

Man, Jay-Z was just snapping on these raps so hard and the way he did the other voices in the middle, man he was killing that.

"Electric Relaxation" - A Tribe Called Quest (mp3)

OK, this is what takes me back to the reason that I wanted to do music or I wanted to bring back the game and I finally got a chance.

"How Many MCs" - Black Moon

Nigga, this is how you know I'm really hip-hop if I picked this. This is a classic.

"The Rain" - Missy Elliott (mp3)

This is actually my favorite. I remember we use to always have arguments about what's Missy's best song, well this is my favorite Missy song.

feist & kanye

Love Locks

by SARAH AMANDOLARE

Some say Goldilocks Syndrome is what got me here, to a tiny village in North Bohemia in the Czech Republic. But even if that three-timing porridge hog explains why I move a lot, she can’t tell me why moving in New York feels like getting pushed from behind and falling face-first into the mud on the side of a three-lane highway. The sense of urgency that accompanies finding or leaving a decent New York apartment goes something like this: get up out of that mud puddle and sprint, or you’ll either be run over or stuck whimpering, forever clutching the guardrail. Not that I’ve been there, but I can imagine.

Two years ago I moved to Greenpoint, a largely Polish and increasingly gentrified part of Brooklyn. My memories are vague – nervously eating bad Thai food while waiting to meet my future roommate – and vivid – the fucked-if-I-know feeling of paying an $800 security deposit for a windowless room in the middle of a railroad apartment. I took the place even though, in addition to the lack of light, the room had no closet. I said yes, in fact, mostly because the girl shared my name and hung her paintings of birds on the walls.

That we’d gotten to the bird paintings was something of a miracle. The last room I’d looked at had been a cluttered little hole, the Brooklyn equivalent of my grandmother’s attic, somewhere near rumbling subway tracks. I remember that something in the kitchen was yellow, and there was a typewriter sitting on a tray table, and that I could not stop complimenting both things. My nerves and the creeping mud and three-lane highway had turned me into a Stepford Wife with a stutter. “I love your kitchen!” I said over and over again to the potential roommate. She was nodding, confused and likely terrified, and I imagine she felt the creep of the highway as well. It had been one of those awful Craigslist open houses where numerous potential roommates converge to display their awesomeness. Other choices were swirling around her, and she seemed to clench tightly around the very next girl she turned to speak to after I’d finally stopped complimenting her kitchen.

Eventually, the Greenpoint girl with bird paintings became my friend. But three months after I’d moved in, she decided to move back to Seattle, and we spent a rabid weekend packing up, scrubbing floors like our lives depended on it, and car-servicing my few belongings to my new place. I’d said yes to living with two North Carolina actresses even though the window in my room had a view of siding. I said yes even though there was a cement plant across the street. I’m fairly certain they said yes to me because we met on March 29 and they needed a roommate for April 1. Meanwhile my Seattle-bound friend was still clutching the guardrail, and when we took a final goodbye walk around the neighborhood, she said things like “someday” and gazed up at bright new lofts on Franklin Street.

Six months later, hunting for a place to share with my boyfriend, I rode my bike in the dark to meet my first New York real estate agent. He seemed like a nice enough man, a Hasidic Jew with horrible breath and an old Toyota. He led me down three dank steps into a filthy basement apartment with incredibly sloped floors. I said yes quickly, mostly because it had a backyard but partly because it was an apartment and I smelled the mud and heard the three lanes of traffic. I told him I’d be right back and ran, like a woman possessed, to the nearest bodega to withdraw my deposit right then and there. I would not lose this apartment even though it smelled like stray cat.

When I got back, a blonde girl with an Australian accent was conversing with the agent. She gave me a passing glance and then turned back to him and gushed about wanting “an outdoor space.” I couldn’t see where this was going yet but her clothes were nicer than mine and sometimes that really does mean something to some people.

“She says she makes $100,000 a year,” the agent said, looking sheepishly in my direction while the girl fiddled with her Blackberry.

I smelled mud again, or maybe I actually had fallen in the mud on my sprint back from the bodega. Either way I was winded, but I was not too exhausted to fight for my piece of shit apartment.

“What does her money have to do with anything?” I demanded. I told him how responsible I was and how my income had nothing to do with my character. It was the first time I’d ever used the word “income” in conversation. It might have been the first time I’d defended my character to a stranger. Mid-rant the agent cut me off and began apologizing profusely. Something I’d said had struck a chord. Or was he actually frightened of me? Both possibilities made me exceedingly proud of myself. The Australian girl turned to leave.

“Call me,” she said to the agent. “I’ll pay $200 above the asking rent.” Yes, she truly said this, because that’s how insane the fear of the mud and the three-lane highway is. You can make one hundred grand a year and still feel the urgency. You can feel it even when you’re looking at a dirty apartment in North Brooklyn, mere blocks from the stinking East River.

You may be wondering why I chose the apartment-with-boyfriend by myself. I said yes to living with a professional cook, that’s why. Even though his schedule allowed no time for apartment hunting, and even though he got home late at night while I was sleeping and collapsed into bed reeking of seafood. I kept saying yes even though we sometimes went two weeks without being able to eat dinner together.

Was it fear of facing the mud and three-lane highways again or just love that kept me in our apartment for a year and four months? Was it love or his desire to leave The Stephanie, a depressing Brooklyn apartment building where he’d lived on a couch and swatted roaches off his arms at night, that had made him say yes to living with me? I suppose I’m in the Czech Republic figuring that out.

I orchestrated my latest relocation during stolen moments over the past three weeks, in between painful breakup talks and packing up and moving out of our Brooklyn apartment. We did it fast and threw out too much stuff, leaving it on the curb in sad, sagging piles, knowing if we slowed down, we’d be tempted to clutch the guardrail.

Sarah Amandolare is a contributor to This Recording. This is her first appearance in these pages. She is a writer living outside of Prague. She blogs here and twitters here.

Photo by Taea Thale

"I'm Going to Make It Better" - She & Him (mp3)

"Sing" - She & Him (mp3)

"Home" - She & Him (mp3)

Sex With Josh Holloway

by DICK CHENEY

You guys. This is a perilous time in American life for precisely all the reasons you're thinking of. We're missing that lone wolf icon of the counter-culture endemic in the decline of previous generations. Everyone who dies does so too predictably, and with too small a body of poetry left behind.

Left Behind. My favorite series of books about Jesus. Jesus was sort of a lone wolf, wasn't he? The more inappropriately eccentric he became, the more his enthuastic supporters were amused by his tricks. David Blaine would have been huge in Jerusalem during this period.

Implicit in this bargain is that we actually do care if the man (the counter-culture was as sexist as the regular culture) involved dies. At some point, audiences began hoping Steve McQueen would collapse in self-righteous anguish, for he was no longer as cute as a papillon, and his weight gain trumped even my own. To wit:

I really did stick my penis in everything back then. Did you know that Josh Holloway is 40 years old (really), and that he was actually around when Jesus parted the Red Sea and was so jealous of the guy?

Jesus always came when you jangled your keys. In reality he was actually a very appealing golden retriever, the first ever of the breed. He drank the blood of lesser retrievers and urinated, "turning water into wine." JK, Jesus is very important to me; I have a picture of him in my bathroom.

The only thing more pathetic than trying to get someone to care about Jesus is trying to get Carlton Cuse to admit Lost has abandoned us, or trying to get us to care about what happens to Sawyer in the fifth parallel universe storyline that went fucking nowhere. The only person in the world less happy about this episode than me was Daniel Faraday.

james, want to go get pinkberry?

Sex with the man formerly known as LeFleuer is an enervating, staccato experience. It begins with a few fist bumps like every speech from the current president of our country. At some point a counter-clockwise swirl is undertaken; the anus is largely pushed to the sidelines of the interplay except for the occasional tickle. Fellatio is a timely and appreciated rejoinder to the abrasive central act, cunnilingus is frowned upon unless it's Kate and you know she really needs it. After your first or second orgasm, whatever you do, do not ask for a t-shirt. LeFleuer is conditioned for this question; he stores his private keepsakes next to his tee-shirts for a reason, Charlotte. And above all, don't try to long con a con man, and don't name an episode about it "Recon."

Josh Holloway isn't nearly as appealing as Steve McQueen, or for that matter Timothy Olyphant in the triumphant premiere of last night's Justified, which is based on my years as a dickhead Wyoming sheriff nicknamed "Hardbone." I was a handsome guy back then, kind of like Edward James Olmos but less ethnic. I swear that will be my first and last EJO LOL.

The relevant characteristics of myself, Jesus, and Timothy Olyphant are as follows: (1) we take action, (2) after the party is the after party (3) we weren't all that good at tumblr and (4) we had an Asian/Jewish partner who could speak to the dead. We cared not a whit for the machinations of lesser men, definitely not until after dessert, or in Jesus' case, prayer.

Sawyer played the Man in Black and Charles Widmore for fools. Working both sides of the equation when one side is a megalomaniacal billionaire and other is a supernatural being didn't work in Ghostbusters, so why would it start now? Sawyer was such a terrible liar in his backstory that it made sense he largely told the truth back on the island. The truth takes a lot less time to say, or as Orson Welles once phrased this idea, "A long-playing full shot is what always separates the men from the boys."

People learn to lie at about age five, they rarely stop doing it. We accept lies as part of our discourse today. This never happened in real life before two important historical events which occurred in the same month: Watergate, and the switch from black-and-white to color in Pleasantville. When girls were in black and white, it was far more difficult to see them in the dark at parties, and rape was almost impossible unless the victim consumed a particularly savage root beer float.

awesome mural guys: you have color for the first time, and this is what you went with?I guess I'm pretty worried about all the violence against women that's being condoned in our culture, for the most part by Anderson Cooper (he's gay, what's it to him?). Locke slapped Claire full on in the face and she practically thanked him for it. Ben Roethlisberger got a lawsuit filed against him for doing that during sex while reciting the 'Judgment Day' voiceover from Terminator 2 in falsetto. Different strokes for different folks, I suppose.

I generally think that any criticism of television for influencing our children in an untoward way is off the mark except for MTV's True Life, but the artifice of a character lying in a drama and getting away with it is really destructive for people to mimic. It was lying about his attraction to Kate that allowed Sawyer to have cage sex back in Season Three, but really, at what cost?

It would have been hilarious at the time if after sex Kate had wandered over to an armoire located within the cage and been like, "Hey Ford, can I get a tee-shirt?" and he freaked out and ordered her back to her own cage. Incidentally, that is what Guantanamo Bay is actually like.

Lost is so complicated that it's hard to focus in on the subtle details that actually make drama. For example, as Widmore is negotiating with Sawyer in the present, in the alternate universe Sawyer is inside of his son's one true love. That's why after every meeting I take, just in case, I throw in a "Have you banged my son's one true love?" as a parting shot. You never know.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording and the former vice president of the United States. You can find his previous recaps of the final season of Lost here.

"Hope in the Air" - Laura Marling (mp3)

"Devils Spoke" - Laura Marling (mp3)

"Alpha Shallows" - Laura Marling (mp3)

"Rambling Man" - Laura Marling (mp3)

The Secret Life of Richard Ford

by ELENA SCHILDER

In beginning to write this I’ve crossed out three sentence fragments already, because ornery Irish Alec Baldwin, whom I love — lust, even — won’t let go his grip on my head. His book, A Promise to Ourselves: A Journey Through Fatherhood and Divorce, is about his break from Kim Basinger and the ensuing custody battle over their daughter Ireland. On the cover he’s smiling in a way that might be impish and might also be creepy.

There is something quintessentially American about Baldwin — his ruddy cheeks, his temper, the feeling that you’re being evaded a little bit for the sake of charm and a warm handshake. He may be a bit of a Bill Clinton, which — my mother will tell yo u— has its appeal. But Baldwin is not as talented a writer as he is a showman, and a book that ostensibly reveals his deepest feelings — nostalgia, paternal love, grief over a ruined marriage, even thoughts of suicide — has a generic, flat and ultimately self-preserving tone. This comes through especially clearly in some of his two-adjective descriptions of women: “She was a brash, colorful woman who reminded me of Joy Behar from The View.”

A little while ago now, Katie Roiphe bravely took on the specter of male ego in American literature written by men since mid-century. Specifically, she dug at the current generation of white male novelists—many, if not all of whom are based in Brooklyn—for lacking the balls to write about sex as broadly, boldly and bawdily as their forefathers — the John Updike of Rabbit, Run and Couples and the Philip Roth of Portnoy’s Complaint. She bemoans the current tendency toward a male sexuality so inward-looking that it forgets even to objectify women. But what is depressing about Roiphe’s piece is not its spot-on critique of “the Jonathans" and their twee literary voices. What is more than a little depressing is that her argument assumes not only ego but an over-the-top narcissism as the ruling force behind contemporary American literature by men. As Alec Baldwin likes to put it, ego seems to be the “ruler of the day.”

Richard Ford seems to me a particularly interesting American writer because it is far less clear in his novels than in the novels of John Updike or Jonathan Safran Foer when, if ever, his ego comes into the picture. Though Ford started his career as a short story writer in the tradition of Raymond Carver, with a romantic, minimalist tone and a limited but highly recognizable set of symbols — the rifle, the whiskey bottle, the barstool, the woman in a “powder-blue dress” (one of the few physical descriptions of the narrator’s mother in one of Ford’s most famous stories, “Rock Springs”) — he is also the author of a series of novels written in a very different style, all three devoted to the characterization of Frank Bascombe, a divorced man moving through middle age in the suburbs of New Jersey.

The trilogy is comparable to Updike’s Rabbit series in its basics, at least: both follow an American everyman over the course of several decades of American history. In both series, the protagonist’s experience feels charged with the weight of history while at the same time bringing to bear something singular and personal. Both characters are unforgettable and nondescript.

Ford wrote The Sportswriter in 1986, Independence Day in 1995 and The Lay of the Land in 2006. Reading the three books in sequence, all at once, one has the odd sensation of watching Frank Bascombe age alongside his creator; in twenty years’ time, both men take on the markers of deepening middle age — the prose seems more distracted, and more often wanders toward questions of national politics. Ford was born in 1944, meaning he was 42 when he began publishing the series and 62 when he finished. I bring up Ford’s parallel aging only because his presence in these books is, I would imagine, something all readers of the series wonder about from time to time. In Roth and Updike, the degree to which their books are “semi-autobiographical” is almost comically moot, but with Ford there is more to wonder about.

Simply put, the books are built on Bascombe’s musings about life and how to live it. It’s hard to believe, actually, as you trudge deeper into the minutia of the novels, how little else there is to them, and how often he dares to bring you back to life’s “deeper” questions. Before he was a sportswriter, Bascombe was a short-story writer, and his narration never wavers in its writerly search for structure, or Cher Horowitz’s prized “control in a world full of chaos.” The weird thing about Bascombe’s inner peace is that it comes at the expense of all the big rocks the biggest male egos build their mansions on: success, family, the love of a good woman.

Frank Bascombe is divorced, chooses New Jersey over New York, and, after the success of his first book of short stories, becomes increasingly alienated from his career: he writes about sports, until he starts selling real estate. It’s unclear how devoted he really is to his children. The books feel very much like a polemic pitched against these nominal failures — he claims, over and over, until a point in the third book that feels finally like he’s admitting to having fucked up, that his life is beautiful because he has denied himself literary success and a happy home.

To be honest, he makes quite a persuasive argument at the outset. One of my favorite moments in the trilogy comes early on, when Frank reveals that he’s been going to see a palm-reader since the death of his oldest son. “Mrs. Miller, her house, her business, her relatives, her life, posed altogether a small but genuine source of pleasure and wonder. It was as much for that reason I went to see her once a week.” The books are full of treasures like this — counterintuitive pleasures, “mystery” as served up by the banal New Jersey landscape — and one of the great joys of the books is to imagine a man capable of self-consciously thwarting his own ambition and deciding, in fact, he’d much rather smell the proverbial roses. You never know quite whether to believe him.

After he’d read about fifty pages of The Sportswriter, one of my friends said that Frank Bascombe seemed like a man who can only exist in literature. I keep wondering whether that’s true, because I — twenty-five, a woman — spent all summer feeling quite kindred to him. Before reading these books I’d never seen that impulse of mine — crudely put, to subdue ego in the pursuit of some elusive pedestrian glory — not only spelled out but hammered out into dogma. But one has to wonder about a character (or a writer) who spends upwards of a thousand pages “subduing” ego in the first person.

by paula scherFrank Bascombe undercuts the declamatory philosophizing to which he’s prone by insisting, in folksy tones, on his ignorance, simplicity and lack of pretension. It’s easy to identify with the intention to be humble, but by the end of the series you’re left wondering whether humility should feel like quite so much work.

Having read a semi-recent essay by Ford about whether Frank Bascombe is, as readers have asked him, an “everyman,” I worry that the author of these books suffers from some of the same self-deluding principles he’s bestowed on his protagonist. It was oddly disappointing to read Ford’s description of his writing process as “fortuitous” — he makes the case that he owes nothing to “what some people (not I) romantically call talent,” but that his — beautifully written and conceived! — novels were born of a set of happy accidents. To lyrically and verbosely understate one’s gifts is forgivable in a real estate salesman with the soul of a writer, but less so in a career fiction-writer.

I listened to a New Yorker podcast at some point in which Richard Ford read aloud a short John Cheever story that he really liked. He has a strong Mississippi accent, appropriate to a man who likes to make grandiose declarations of purpose and meaning. I think they call voices like that “mellifluous.” I like the figure Ford cuts next to the group of writers whose sexual fantasies so absorb and repel Katie Roiphe, because if nothing else he seems intent on creating something alternative to their models. There’s a sincere hopefulness in Frank Bascombe’s fictive voice, the lack of which I feel heavily when reading John Updike and Alec Baldwin alike. Those American giants are satisfied even in their displeasure. After reading three novels rooted inside Frank Bascombe’s head, you realize (maybe a little sadly) that he’s quite successfully obscured his identity from everyone, himself included. If there is something tragic in his story, it is the feeling that, dreaming all the while of great things, he has shied away from self-acceptance — as, we’re told, dreamers often do.

Elena Schilder is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. This is her first appearance in these pages.

"Goodnight Saigon" - Billy Joel (mp3)

"Uptown Girl" - Weezer (mp3)

"Say Goodbye to Hollywood" - Billy Joel (mp3)

The Bonfire of the Bosom Buddy

by ELLEN COPPERFIELD

I was watching The Polar Express last week and trying to recover the spirit of Christmas for some muffins I was planning when it occurred to me: doesn't that train conductor remind me of something ineffable and someone specific?

My aunt told me it was Tom Hanks, and I was like, "they modeled the conductor after a producer on Big Love?" She explained that Hanks was the owner of a long and storied Hollywood career, while her daschund Leopold stared at me unforgivingly for my ignorance. I spent this past weekend watching all of this old-timey actor's moving pictures, and I have summarized the plots of these films so you can easily find what interests you.

Splash

A man has sex with a mermaid and feels somewhat bad about it. The mermaid's father frowns upon the match because it conflicted with the IPO of his underwater company.

The Money Pit

A home restoration project goes south when a man realizes his wife is Shelley Long.

Bachelor Party

A famous football player insists that protection is for Ravens while attempting sex. The woman mishears "Ravens" as "cravens", freaks out, and ends up majoring in communications. Todd Phillips is passed out nearby and gets the idea for The Hangover.

Dragnet

Two white police officers pay tribute to a long-running television series by visiting Santa Claus at the North Pole. Santa tells them to come back when they're animated.

Big

A man shrinks to the size of a gumdrop to become a boy again and lives inside a huge piano with all his friends. Older women are constantly intuiting he's more advanced sexually than he professes. To return to full size, he is forced to rape a gypsy woman.

Punchline

A comedian is infected with AIDS by Denzel Washington.

Turner and Hooch

A man and an anti-semitic dog fight crime.

The 'Burbs

You may be more familiar with a recent remake of The 'Burbs, Saw IV.

Joe Versus the Volcano

A pet detective finally marries his true love (Courteney Cox) and decides that Meg Ryan is likelier to have a successful big screen career. He struggles to find a way to break off the engagement before deciding to burn his penis off in an active volcano.

The Bonfire of the Vanities

A journalist with no imagination finds it easier to make things up than interview any more astronauts than he has to. He uses a revolutionary technique to clone himself. He names the clone Malcolm Gladwell.

A League of Their Own

An alcoholic womanizer leads a baseball team of women to greatness and inadvertently creates a popular daytime television program. A text card at the end of the film specifies that they would have achieved nothing without a male manager.

Sleepless in Seattle

A woman facebooks a guy and he ends up taking it way farther than it ever has to go. She falls in love with his eight-year old by accident and they go live on a cute houseboat for the rest of their lives.

Philadelphia

The two main people in a gay man's life are Antonio Banderas and Denzel Washington, and he's still unhappy as a clam for no discernible reason. Andrew Sullivan cameos as "another guy with HIV."

Forrest Gump

The thinly disguised life story of Joe Biden. He has a sexual relationship with Robin Wright Penn and everyone has some misgivings that she took advantage of him. Biden emphasizes the fact that he rides Amtrak in his speeches because he is unable to pilot an automobile.

Apollo 13

A bunch of guys head into space, reassuring their wives with platitudes like, "We won't fuck up in space," and "It's space, what could go wrong?" and "Kevin Bacon's coming with us to space, this will be hilars." These predictions prove largely inaccurate.

That Thing You Do!

The true story of Simon Cowell's rise to public prominence related for the first time.

Saving Private Ryan

Despite the fact that Jews are dying by the millions in camps across Europe, it ends up being a lot more important for everybody's peace of mind that one goy be rescued by a squadron of morons.

You've Got Mail

A man flirts with a woman on the internet; she is somehow not disgusted by the fact it takes 20 minutes for him to type one instant message into AIM. He misunderstands "Shop Around the Corner" for a sexual euphemism, she apologizes for the miscommunication. Not only does he not accept her apology, he puts her out of business and cuts off her airway with the skin folds from his degraded neck. The funeral is a lovely affair, and each of the eulogies emphasize the dangers of misrepresenting yourself on AIM.

The Green Mile

A magical, physically imposing black man heals people with his touch, so the white prison guards murder him, but not before he cures all their urinary tract infections. It turns out that the black man had the spirit of a white guy (Rob Schneider) inside him all along.

Cast Away

High on cocaine, Robert Zemeckis has an idea that later becomes Lost; a plane crashes on an island and only the boring characters survive.

Road to Perdition

Two playwrights debate the existential nature of life over dinner one evening. Hot topic: 'what does the word perdition mean?'

Catch Me If You Can

Christopher Walken has a son, and - shock, surprise! - it doesn't turn out all that well. The son becomes a pilot and figures prominently in the September 11th terrorist attacks on America. He ends up dating Molly McAleer, probably.

The Terminal

A man who jerks off into people's luggage is apprehended and forced to copulate with Catherine Zeta-Jones while Michael Douglas looks on approvingly.

The Ladykillers

A brother-brother writer-director team misfires with their latest film and decides to nab an Oscar by utilizing the foolproof method of having Tommy Lee Jones do the movie's voiceover.

The Polar Express

A shocking expose of how the Japanese kill 500 of Santa's dwarves each year in front of a live studio audience in the Arctic.

The Da Vinci Code

Dr. Robert Langdon is infected with HIV by Denzel Washington.

Charlie Wilson's War

Mike Nichols' 100 minute logic proof that Elaine May had all the talent.

Angels and Demons

Dr. Robert Langdon gives up treasure hunting and retires to a tropical island with Audrey Tautou, Emily Blunt, and Denzel Washington.

Ellen Copperfield is a contributor to This Recording. She tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about how to politely dump someone.

"Down by the River" - Neil Young (mp3)

"Philadelphia" - Neil Young (mp3)

"Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere" - Neil Young (mp3)

"The Losing End (When You're On)" - Neil Young (mp3)

Tolstoy: Kind of a Dick

by PAUL JOHNSON

It has been said that a careful reading of Anna Karenina, if it teaches you nothing else, will teach you how to make strawberry jam.

- Julian Mitchell

Leo Tolstoy's diaries reveal that, as a young man of twenty-five, he was already conscious of special power and a commanding moral destiny: 'Read a work on the literary characterization of genius today, and this awoke in me the conviction that I am a remarkable man both as regards capacity and eagerness to work. I have not yet met a single man who was morally as good as I, and who believed that I do not remember an instance in my life when I was not attracted to what is good and was not ready to sacrifice anything to it.' He felt in his own soul 'immeasurable grandeur'. He was baffled by the failure of other men to recognize his qualities: 'Why does nobody love me? I am not a fool, not deformed, not a bad man, not an ignoramus. It is incomprehensible.'

Tolstoy believed himself to be very highly sexed. Diary entries record: 'Must have a woman. Sensuality gives me not a moment's peace.' 'Terrible lust amounting to a physical illness.' At the end of his life he told his biographer Aylmer Maude that, so strong were his urges, he was unable to dispense with sex until he was eighty-one. In youth he was extremely shy with women and so resorted to brothels, which disgusted him and brought the usual consequences.

One of his earliest diary entries in March 1847 notes he is being treated for 'gonorrhoea, obtained from the customary source'. He records another bout in 1852 in a letter to his brother Nikolai: 'The venereal sickness is cured but the after-effects of the mercury have caused me untold suffering.' But he continued to patronize whores, varied by gypsies, Cossack and native girls, and Russian peasant girls when available. The tone in his diary entries is invariably self-disgust blended with hatred for the temptress : 'something pink... I opened the back door. She came in. Now I can't bear to look at her. Repulsive, vile, hateful, causing me to break my rules.' 'Girls have led me astray.'

The following day he made good resolution but 'the wenches prevent me.' An entry for April 1856 records, after a visit to a brothel: 'Horrible, but absolutely the last time.'

Another 1856 entry: 'Disgusting. Girls. Stupid music, girls, heat, cigarette smoke, girls, girls, girls.' Turgenev, whose house he was then using like a hotel, gives another glimpse of Tolstoy in 1856: 'Drinking bouts, gypsies, cards all night long, and then sleeps like the dead until two in the afternoon.' When Tolstoy was in the country, especially on his own estate, he took his pick of the prettier serf-girls. These occasionally excited more than simple lust on his part. He wrote later of Yasnaya Polyana, I remember the nights I spent there, and Dunyasha's beauty and youth... her strong, womanly body.'

One of Tolstoy's motives in travelling in Europe in 1856 was to escape what he saw as the temptations of an attractive serf-girl. His father, as he knew, had had such an affair, and the girl had given birth to a son, who was simply treated as a male estate serf, being employed in the stables (he became a coachman). But Tolstoy, after his return, could not keep his hands off the women, especially a married one called Aksinya. His diary for May 1858 records: 'Today, in the big old wood. I'm a fool, a brute. Her bronze flesh and her eyes. I'm in love as never before in my life. Have no other thought.' The girl was 'clean and not bad-looking, with bright black eyes, a deep voice, a scent of something fresh and strong and full breasts that lifted the bib of her apron.'

Probably in July 1859, Aksinya gave birth to a son, called Timofei Bazykin. Tolstoy brought her into the house as a domestic and allowed the little boy to play at her heels for a time. But, like Marx and Ibsen, and like his own father, he never acknowledged the child was his, or paid the slightest attention to him. What is even more remarkable is that, at a time when he was publicly preaching the absolute necessity to educate the peasants, and indeed ran schools for their children on his estate, he made no effort to ensure that his own illegitimate son even learned how to read and write. Possibly he feared later claims. He seems to have been pitiless in dismissing the rights of illegitimate offspring.

Tolstoy knew he was doing wrong in resorting to prostitutes and seducing peasant women. He blamed himself for these offenses. But he tended to blame the women still more. They were all Eve the Temptress to him. Indeed it is probably not too much to say that despite the fact that he needed women physically all his life and used them - or perhaps because of this - he distrusted, disliked and even hated them.

In some ways he found the manifestation of their sexuality repulsive. He remarked at the end of his life, 'the sight of a woman with her breasts bared was always disgusting to me, even in my youth.' Tolstoy was by nature censorious, even puritanical. If his own sexuality upset him, its manifestations in others brought out his strongest disapproval. In Paris in 1857, at a timewhen his own philandering was surging in full spate, he noted: 'At the furnished lodgings where I stayed, there were thirty-six menages, of which nineteen were irregular. That disgusted me terribly.'

playing tennis with some friendsiesSexual sin was evil, and women were the source of it. On 16 June 1847, when he was nineteen, he wrote: 'Now I shall set myself the following rule. Regard the company of women as an unavoidable social evil and keep away from them as much as possible. Who indeed is the cause of sensuality, indulgence, frivolity and all sorts of other vices in us, if not women? Who is to blame for the loss of our natural qualities of courage, steadfastness, reasonableness, fairness, etc if not women?' The really depressing thing about Tolstoy is that he retained these childish, in some respects Oriental, views of women right to the end of his life.

In contrast to his efforts to portray Anna Karenina, he never seems to have made any serious attempt in real life to penetrate and understand the mind of a woman. Indeed he would not admit that a woman could be a serious, adult, moral human being.

He wrote in 1898, when he was seventy: '[Woman] is generally stupid, but the Devil lends her brains when she works for him. Then she accomplishes miracles of thinking, farsightedness, constancy, in order to do something nasty.' Or again: 'It is impossible to demand of a woman that she evaluate the feelings of her exclusive love on the basis of moral feeling. She cannot do it, because she does not possess real moral feeling, i.e. one that stands higher than everything.'

His choice finally fell, when he was thirty-four, on an eighteen-year-old doctor's daughter, Sonya Behrs. He was no great catch: not rich,a known gambler, in trouble with the authorities for insulting the local magistrate. He had described himself, some years before, as possessing 'the most ordinary coarse and ugly features... small grey eyes, more stupid than intelligent... the face of a peasant, and a peasant's large hands and feet'. Moreover, he hated dentists and would not visit them, and by 1862 he had lost nearly all his teeth. But she was a plain, immature girl, only five feet high and competing with her two sisters; she was glad to get him. He proposed formally by letter, then seems to have had doubts until the last minute.

The actual wedding was a premonition of disaster. On the morning he burst into her apartment, insisting: 'I have come to say that there is still time... all this business can still be put a stop to.' She burst into tears. Tolstoy was an hour late for the ceremony itself, having packed all his shirts. She cried again. Afterwards they had supper and she changed, and they climbed into a traveling carriage called a dormeuse, pulled by six horses. She cried again. Tolstoy, an orphan, could not understand this and shouted: 'If leaving your family means such great sorrow to you, you cannot love me very much.' In the dormeuse he began to paw her and she pushed him away.

They had a suite at a hotel, the Birulevo. Her hands trembled as she poured him tea from the samovar. He tried to paw her again, and was again repulsed. Tolstoy's diary relentlessly recorded: 'She is weepy. In the carriage. She knows everything and it is simple. But she is afraid.' He thought her 'morbid'. Later still, having finally made love to her, and she having (as he thought) responded, he added: 'Incredible happiness. I can't believe this can last as long as life.' Of course it did not. Even the most submissive wife would have found marriage to such a colossal egotist hard to bear.

tolstoy w/ anton chekhovSonya had sufficient brains and spirit to resist his all-crushing will, at least from time to time. So they produced one of the worst (and best recorded) marriages in history. Tolstoy opened it with a disastrous error of judgment. It is one of the characteristics of the intellectual to believe that secrets, especially in sexual matters, are harmful. Everything should be 'open'. The lid must be lifted on every Pandora's box. Husband and wife must tell each other 'everything'. Therein lies much needless misery. Tolstoy began his policy of glasnost by insisting that his wife read his diaries, which he had now been keeping for fifteen years. She was appalled to find - the diaries were then in totally uncensored form- that they contained details of all his sex life, including visits to brothels and copulations with whores, gypsies, native women, his own serfs and, not least, even her mother's friends. Her first response was : 'Take those dreadful books back - why did you give them to me?'

Later she told him: 'Yes, I have forgiven you. But it is dreadful.' These remarks are taken from her own diary, which she had been keeping since the age of eleven. It was part of Tolstoy's 'open' policy that each should keep diaries and each should have access to the other's - a sure formula for mutual suspicion and misery. The physical side of the Tolstoy marriage probably never recovered from Sonya's initial shock at learning her husband was (as she saw it) a sexual monster. Moreover, she read his diaries in ways which Tolstoy had not anticipated, noting faults he had been careful (as he thought) to conceal.

She spotted, for instance, that he had failed to repay debts contracted as a result of his gambling. She observed, too, that he failed to tell women with whom he had sex that he had contracted venereal disease and might still have it. The selfishness and egotism the diaries so plainly convey to the perceptive reader - and who more perceptive than a wife? - were more apparent to her than to the author. Moreover, the Tolstoyan sex life so vividly described in his diaries was now inextricably mingled in her mind with the horrors of submitting to his demands and their ultimate consequence in painful and repeated pregnancies.

She endured a dozen in twenty-two years; in quick succession she lost her child Petya, while pregnant with Nikolai, who in turn died the same year he was born; Vavara was born prematurely and died immediately. Tolstoy himself did not help with the business of childbearing by taking an intimate though insensitive interest in all its details. He insisted on attending the birth of his son, Sergei (later using it for a scene in Anna Karenina), and broke into a frightening rage when Sonya was unable to breast-feed the baby.

As the pregnancies and miscarriages proceeded, and his wife's distaste for his sexual demands became manifest, he wrote to a friend: 'There is no worse situation for a healthy man than to have a sick wife.' Early in the marriage he ceased to love her; her tragedy was that her residual love for him remained. At this time she confided in her diary: 'I have nothing in me but this humiliating love and a bad temper, and these two things have been the cause of all my misfortunes, for my temper has always interfered with my love. I want nothing but his love and sympathy but he won't give it to me, and all my pride is trampled in the mud. I am nothing but a miserable crushed worm, whom no one wants, whom no one loves, a useless creature with morning sickness and a big belly.'

Take the famous sentence from Anna Karenina: 'All happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' The moment one begins to search one's own observed experience, it becomes clear that both parts of this statement are debatable. If anything, the reverse is closer to the truth. There are obvious, recurrent patterns in unhappy families - where, for instance, the husband is a drunk or a gambler, where the wife is incompetent, adulterous, and so forth; the stigmata of family unhappiness are drearily familiar and repetitive. On the other hand, there are happy families of every kind. Tolstoy had not thought about the subject seriously, and above all honestly, because he could not bring himself to think seriously and honestly about women: he turned from the subject in fear, rage and disgust. The moral failure of Tolstoy's marriage, and his intellectual failure to do justice to half the human race, were closely linked.

Paul Johnson is the world's greatest living historian. He is the author of Intellectuals, from which this excerpt is taken. You can purchase that volume here.

LT's grave"Fading Youth" - Ekca Liena (mp3)

"Past" - Ekca Liena (mp3)

"Cloud Movements" - Ekca Liena (mp3)

The Urge to Rehab

by ALEX CARNEVALE

In 1929 Congress appropriated the first funds that allowed for federal treatment of addicts. The U.S. Public Health Service Hospitals in Lexington, Kentucky and Fort Worth, Texas began treating addicts in the late thirties, although they were essentially prison hospitals from the first. When we compare the ball-licking treatment Tiger Woods receives for his sex addiction to the treatment the first national addicts faced, the difference is rather jarring. Tiger has a dedicated testicle-moistener who operates twice daily (even on weekends!); addicts of the 1930s had to milk cows, or work at the local cannery to justify the cost of incarceration. Back then, there wasn't really such thing as a free ride.

Addicts were routinely hassled by the government; there was no legitimate way to recover from the problems of drug addiction. By 1939, the Christian movement The Oxford Group had given rise to Alcoholics Anonymous, and the organization published The Big Book, the foundational text of AA. The rise of AA was a huge inspiration for the eventual formation of Narcotics Anonymous.

jimmy kinnon's notebook and other materials

A recovering alcoholic named Houston S received a job transfer to Kentucky in 1947. He had helped a man get sober who found himself unable to kick a concurrent morphine habit, and had seen the face of addiction to narcotics firsthand. Once in Kentucky, Houston suggested the AA model could work for addicts as well. The Narco Group began at the Federal Narcotics Farm in Lexington Kentucky around this time. One of the patients in that program, Danny Carlsen, would spread the first iteration of NA to the New York prison in the late forties.

Writing something down where it can be seen by others and verified (or not) has always been a critical part of recovery lore. The addict can't deny what his habit has wrought once he sees it in print. The initial thirteenth step of NA pleaded, "God help me."

Narcotics Anonymous would evolve beyond being a social service organization for victims of drug addiction once it was born-again in southern California over the next decade. The Brown Booklet was the first real piece of NA literature, and it reads wonderfully well even today, with none of the officiousness or preaching that addicts would come to expect from those attempting to change their lives. The organization struggled through the fifties before entering a real renaissance in the 1960s. Jimmy Kinnon, who arrived at Ellis Island from Scotland in 1923, was responsible for much of both the early NA writing, the NA logo, and the formation of the society as we now know it.

Because it has been extraordinarily successful, the basic outline and information provided by Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous has changed little over the years. Even the pamphlets look largely the same. There was an episode of Seinfeld where George convinced his girlfriend that toilet paper hadn't changed in 500 years; this is roughly true of addiction literature, which exists as a cipher through which the addict himself must find a place.

jimmy k's origination text for what would become NAYet the literature itself remains a weird reshaping of codes of behavior. Each of us, unless we were dropped on our head as a child, has a basic moral code we live by. It is impossible to know, Venn-diagram style, where this intersects with the morality of others, so NA literature explains the basic principles of life for addicts. It is a little shocking to see the world spelled out this way, but this is usually necessary for people prone to abusing themselves and/or others.

drug victims (probably)The presence of God - moreso in Alcoholics Anonymous, which also features deep sociological and psychological underpinnings - never leaves the literature or the people who preach it. There is no way to recover from anything without believing someone is watching you, whether it be some omnipotent being or your family and friends. Otherwise, you are accountable to no one, and the use of drugs retains its otherwordly flair. This is another interesting idea that on its face seems immoral to me, since it is based on a lie.

NA tries to go a bit easier on God than its hard-drinking brother-in-law. For those who have difficulty accepting their savior Jesus Christ, members are allowed to substitute the term "higher power" or read God as an acronym for "Good Orderly Direction." Members are not permitted to roll their eyes or make jokes about this aspect of their recovery.

Unlike AA, there is something unprepossessing about Narcotics Anonymous. It is probably related to the disease being recovered from. For those addicted to alcohol, there is always a happy return to use, and the poison itself is available on every street and every corner. Eternal temptation is eternal viligance. Harder drugs rarely offer a happy return, or a positive ending, beyond the thrill of the initial high. As such, addicts usually need to be very real with themselves in order to confront their disease.

What is most amazing about these programs is that they are effective at all. Tiger Woods' experience, and Steve Philips' experience, indicate there is a future full of things we can be addicted to, and treated for. We now view alcoholism as a disease; there is ample proof that it is, but the most striking reason is that we seem to believe it wholeheartedly, and it is best for us to feel this way.

In the old days, it was not easy to become addicted to sex. The overstimulation of the internet celebrates our best senses, elaborates on our finest indiscretions. People are addicted to the internet and they will probably not require recovery. The internet is the solution more than the problem, but it is still a fairly big problem. I don't really know how rehabilitation works - I usually believe it doesn't work, and that's why these organizations that profess eternal viligance are so popular and effective. How did Michael Vick stop believing that betting on staged dogfights wasn't a fun activity on a Saturday afternoon? About the same time he received the Ed Block Courage Award?

There is also something distinctly American about recovery, and to separate it from a Christian impulse would be to sever the head at the neck. There are worse countries to live in than a Christian one. Whether is it good to become a compassionate country, as George W. Bush basically put it, or whether it is better to tolerate less capriciousness from our fellow man is an open question. The degrading conditions of the first American addicts make a strong argument we are improving as a society. I don't know if it's sad or what that this is as good as we've ever been.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He twitters here and tumbls here.

"See If They Salute" - The Streets (mp3)

"Lovelight of My Life" - The Streets (mp3)

"David Hassles" - The Streets (mp3)

Favorite Rap/R&B Background Ad Libs 2010

by MOLLY LAMBERT

Best Of '09: "L'CHAIM" - Fergie of The Black Eyed Peas, "I Gotta Feeling"

click on the screen caps for links to the youtube videos they originate from

10. "Beckay" - Plies, "Becky"

9. "all day" - California Swag District, "Teach Me How To Dougie" 

8. "Waka. Flocka. Flame." - Waka Flocka Flame, "O Let's Do It"

7. "C.J.!" - Birdman, "4 My Town"

6. "heeeeeeee wah wah" - Robin Thicke, "Sex Therapy"

5. "yurrrrrrrzzzzz" - Ludacris, "My Chick Bad"

4. "Bamaaaaaaaaa" - Yelawolf, "Box Chevy Pt. 2"

3. "big ol'" - Usher, "Little Freak"

2. "YOO! NOO!" - Jay-Z, "Empire State Of Mind" (this part's still in my head)

1. "LEMON!" - Gucci Mane, "Lemonade"

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. She tumbls here and twitters here.

To Lost With Love

by DICK CHENEY

My career has been one of soothsayer and mystic as much as gun-toting maniac and sexual icon. On two separate occasions I have "smashed up a homie" of my wife Lynne, both times the resulting indiscretion helped elect a burgeoning political candidate I nurtured like one of GWB's hangovers. While I kiss the toe of another, my own toe is extended for the lips of others. There is no such thing as a woman behind a man, it is usually another, balder man.

I even taught high school history, although I wasn't anywhere near the pedantic psycho that Ben Linus was. Like me, Linus cultivated talent. We all need a life coach. Linus' mentor was Jacob, who carried a redemptive hope for the guy in his heart. I recruited political proteges; I was also a cagey hand at spotting an up-and-coming blogger. I was the one who told Andrew Sullivan to go with the whole flaming bear thing. That was me. 

you've never read kathryn harrison? really? you'll like her!Ben used information from a student to blackmail the principal, and somehow was the heroic protagonist of last night's Lost. I worry this teaches the wrong lesson to kids, particularly hot kids. The school principal didn't really do anything technically wrong - yes, he did bang the school nurse in front of a student, but (1) it was a hot student and (2) Bill Clinton is still revered in this country and he did roughly the same thing, except in front of the whole world. How we expect to feel sympathetic for a blackmailer with a heart of gold is beyond me, but it is an encouraging precedent for the inevitable prosecution I'll face in the coming years.

we got you some white face paint. hope it helps, sir.Simon Cowell and the new Ben Linus overall have a lot in common. Their favorite movie is To Sir With Love and they both ask to be addressed by their honorifics. "It's Dr. Linus," Ben snivels to Principal Reynolds, who committed that cardinal sin of making him supervise detention instead of allowing Ben to fondle his own daughter in "history club." In this episode, the show's writers simply get Linus wrong. It is no fun to see the weak Linus. The strong Linus was a bad man, a tasty villain on a show that needed the right antagonist.

Above all, Linus is resourceful. We respect a well-thought out plan, and parallel Linus was putty in the weird sexual relationship he had with his alternate universe daughter. I don't know what was creepier, the fact that Alex Rousseau was flirting with her dad, or the disturbing acknowledgement that the 21-year old Tania Raymonde dates old-enough-to-be-her-father Jeff Goldblum in real life. He is the only person to ever get laid from a role on a Law & Order spinoff.

there's nothing like a May 1979 to December 2054 romanceSimon Cowell also has a somewhat unorthodox relationship with the younger women on his show. He's incredibly sparing with praise with the mass of female contestants, but then he picks out his pet favorite and showers her with compliments and gifts that reek of insincerity, like telling her he liked her Tracy Chapman cover and that "dreads look super-great on a white girl."

Simon's pet this season is the innovatively named Crystal Hornblower. Her day job is as a character in a Patrick O'Brian book. Her boyfriend's penis is shaped like a question mark. Her tattoo is of a rooster pleading for his life. She smells of rosemary, menthol cigarettes, and chiante. Her astrological sign is Virgo.

if she doesn't sing Feist next week, I will be the most surprised man in the world

None of the men on American Idol are showing anywhere near this kind of potential (although every single male contestant at least makes my dick harder than Kris Allen ever did). Simon usually latches onto an artist like Crystal Hornblower when he wants the audience to support another candidate with more star potential. If you don't see the metaphorical connection to Lost, you obviously don't read This Recording very often.

the odds that she ends up dating Robert Pattinson are almost insurmountable

Simon's secret crush is on Cape Cod's own Siobhan Magnus. Weirdly, that's what I named my dick in third grade. Siobhan looks like the kind of girl who thinks owning Blood on the Tracks on vinyl isn't a tremendous fucking cliche. Like Alex Rousseau, she was intended for an Ivy League university before a love of singing (history) took over her life (Lost parallel universe). Unlike Alex Rousseau, her grasp of the particulars of the Dutch East India Company is slim at best - she's been singing her whole life. To be fair, her high note at the end of Aretha Franklin's "Think" made me burst out in hives, but like, good hives.

What short memories we have. We forget that Steve Martin's been making the exact same jokes for the past thirty years, and we forget Benjamin Linus actually saved Lost at one point. I mean, the guy showed up to the Losties' camp one day, pretended he got to the island by a weather balloon, and called himself Henry Gale. Sure he could have gone with a lie that could never be verified as such, but lying without regard for consequences is generally Linus' modus operandi. Sidney Poitier would not approve, but then he named his daughter Sydney, so do we give a flying fuck what he thinks?

The old Linus' enterprising tactics and mysterious background turned Lost from The View hosted by Matthew Fox into a badass struggle for survival against a maniacal sociopath whose team of Others could move silently through the jungle and form a book club at a moment's notice.

The new Linus teaches at the only all-white school in America, the only educational institution where it is appropriate for your hot daughter-protege to show up at your house at dinner and request extra study time. It's hard to be a high school teacher, and most in the profession aren't blessed with the considerable stress relief that dude got from punching Snooki in the face.

Then again, it was Ben Linus himself who taught us that violence against women was another, different kind of violence. Linus was an equal opportunity sociopath, the kind of guy who didn't evac the women and children before gassing the Dharma Initiative. It's fun to see him batting around what could have been with dear old dad: "Son, I wonder what you could have become if we stayed on that island." "Dad, I would have gassed them all, and you. Now you know. I also wouldn't be having a weird flirtation with my own daughter. Now eat your cheerios, and let's watch Hoarders so we can feel better about being alive."

Linus represented the triumph of individual industriousness over physical dominance. His second-in-command represented the victory of suave good looks over television sense-making. The immortal Richard's bright plan to kill himself required an hour long walk, two implicated associates, and a dependence on ancient, unstable dynamite. You had 300 years to orchestrate your own death, and this is what you're going with?

That's about as effective an approach as the time Ari Fleischer tried to end it by maiming his arms with a thousand paper cuts from a particularly sharp issue of Commentary. Lost has been promising to reveal why Richard never ages for many seasons, and when they finally do, their answer is "because Jacob touched me." This does explain why Ilana is so devoted to the idea of Jacob - no one makes her come the way he makes her come.

The return of Chaz Widmore comes not a moment too soon. Can we perhaps also intuit that he comes from the Lost parallel universe? We had no indication that the old Widmore could pilot a Prius, let alone a sub. More to the point, he wasn't able to - he spent most of the previous seasons unable to find the island, and now he just strolls up in a sub and doesn't want to kill Ben Linus? This is a different Widmore than we're used to.

Lost has gotten softer than Ellen DeGeneres' gorgeous blue eyes. Sayid going bad last week was a good start, but he commits murders all the time. Killing off some regulars would be a good start; maybe they can bring back Dominic Monaghan and kill him again. His presence on the set would at least inspire Evangeline Lilly to emote a little. Kill off Jin, I can't understand half of what the guy says anyway. Murder Lapidus - the guy spends half his screen time dropping "did you knows" from Lostpedia. Just kill someone before I start watching Parenthood every Tuesday and spending hours on end weeping for what they've done to Lorelai Gilmour.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. You can find his previous recaps of Lost here.

"Found Out" - Caribou (mp3)

"Leave House" - Caribou (mp3)

"Sun" - Caribou (mp3)

Pictures of My Father

by TYLER COATES

The first real memory I have of my father is, like most of my "first memories," actually something that was captured on video when I was about three years old. My father came home on his lunch break, and he walked into the house to find me screaming at my grandmother. Instead of calming me down or telling me to shut up, he instead took the opportunity to capture the moment on home video. So somewhere in my parents' house there's a VHS tape with clips of me stomping around my living room and screaming, "Day-day," which was what I called him until I was about five years old. I think that perfectly introduces the relationship I had with my dad. I always joked that my mother was The Boss. At a very young age I understood that she was the breadwinner; she worked for the Navy as a computer scientist, whereas my father was dispatched around my rural Virginia area from the local Coca-Cola bottling plant fixing drink machines and fountain units.

Northern Neck Bottling Company, Montross, Virginia

There was never a strong conflict between my parents because of their uneven salaries. I didn't know how much they made until they co-signed on my first apartment out of college. When I say that my mother was The Boss, I mean it in the sense that she was the disciplinarian. She had a temper and very little patience for misbehavior, while my father, on the other hand, sometimes encouraged it.

Fleetwood Farm, Acorn, Virginia

My dad was born in Acorn, Virginia, which is a town only in the sense that there is a sign on the side of the road that reads "Acorn." He was born at home, in the house that my grandmother still lives in. He was the second of three children, and he lived at home from his birth in 1950 to the year he married my mother in 1976.

My father, my uncle Andy, my grandfather, and my aunt Lynn on the Minneapolis-Moline.

My grandparents were poor, which is a knowledge I grew up with. My father didn't tell stories about how he walked five miles to school in the snow (he only did it once - he missed the school bus and my grandfather refused to give him a ride). They didn't have indoor plumbing until my father was seven.

My great-grandfather, my father, my uncle Andy

Instead of complaining about his family's poverty, he described it in the way he did about everything: with a self-deprecating joke. "When I grew up the only toys I had were a spoon and a piece of asbestos."

There are very few pictures of my dad as a child because my grandparents could not afford a camera. The majority of the pictures we have of him as a kid are school pictures, or, in the special case below, a photograph of his visit with Santa Claus in Richmond.

My father went to the same high school as my mother (which is the same school both my brother and I attended over twenty five years later), but they were not high school sweethearts. They ran in different circles (if that is possible when your high school has about two hundred students). He was in the FFA, a football player (because, as he told me, "They let everyone who tried out on the team."), and in two bands.

The Rambling Rebels (larger image and full caption here)

It should be noted that my father could be described as a Good Ol' Boy - he was raised in the South and matured during the '60s. While he missed the major action of the Civil Rights Movement (his was the last graduating class of the segregated public high school in 1970), he was certainly affected by it, as were most of his generation. My mother once admitted to me that people her age in the '60s sported Confederate insignia and repeated the line, "The South will rise again," but, in her words, "We didn't really know what that meant." At the same time, my father loved the music of the black artists that recorded with Motown and Atlantic. He saw Aretha Franklin and the Jackson Five in concert, and even when I was a kid, I remember the sounds of Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, and Wilson Pickett playing on the car stereo. So, while he was in a band called The Rambling Rebels and pasted the Confederate flag on his drum set, he sang in another band in 1968 called The Soul Creations.

The Soul Creations - my father is the second from left. I'm sure they sounded a lot like Spoon.

My parents went on their first date just after Christmas in 1972; my mother was a freshman in college and home for break. My father, who was four years older but one year ahead of her in school (he had been kept back two grades, she skipped one), was working his first job out of high school digging septic systems.

My parents always seemed like completely opposite people to me. My father grew up poor, my mother upper-middle-class. My paternal grandparents were uneducated farmers; my mother's father was a lawyer who graduated from the law school at the College of William and Mary (he was a member of a group students who saved the law school from closure - the state originally wanted to have one supported law school at UVA), her mother a retired schoolteacher and housewife. Both of my maternal grandparents could trace their lineage to the First Families of Virginia. My mother, of course, was a debutante.

After four years of dating, my parents married in June 1976 and settled in the area where they - and their parents - grew up.

When speaking of the day he married my mother, my father always said it was the second happiest day of his life, the first being the day his father sold the pigs. His third happiest day was the day my (younger) brother was born in 1989; the fourth being my birthday in 1983.

I have to find some truth in the idea that your life flashes before your eyes before you die. After all, your life flashes before your eyes all of the time: memories come in and out of your head in a fluid motion.

Like dreams, they don't often follow a logical pattern, nor do they always represent what actually happened in the past. When I think of my childhood, things are hazy in the sense that I'm not entirely certain I'm remembering what actually happened to me, or if I've just seen those things in pictures for over twenty years.

I have the same feeling when I remember my father, who died in May of this year from pancreatic cancer. I look at pictures of him and think, "Yes, that is what he looked like." But away from photo albums, I don't see him at 38, when I was five years old. I can look at a picture of him in high school, or in 1978 and think, "That is my father, and that is how I knew him."

But during the day, away from the scanned images of those old photos, the picture in my head is from three months ago: my father is 57, and he is laying in a hospital bed in my parents' room. For the first time in his life he does not look young for his age; he is old, tired, and his wrinkled skin is loose on his face because he hasn't eaten in two weeks. There are, luckily, no pictures of my father from the last two months of his life.

My father and me, Christmas 2006

My father was diagnosed with cancer in February 2007. With most cases of pancreatic cancer, the diagnosis comes months, even weeks, before the patient dies. My father, on the other hand, was extremely lucky; his cancer was still in early stages, and his doctor was very confident that with a combination of chemotherapy and radiation, my father's life could be extended immensely compared to other patients. He did, however, specify to my parents that the number of patients who lived for five years without the cancer returning was very low. My father, forever the optimist, replied, "So, we do have a chance!"

August 2007

My father had an amazing personality. I can't count the number of people who told me that he had never met a stranger, simply because he somehow managed to get along with nearly anyone. I credit his small-town upbringing; at the same time, he grew up with a notoriously unaffectionate father, which made my father completely opposite. My father would demand a hug and a kiss from my brother and me when we were fifteen, in public no less.

November 2007

My father responded well to his chemo and radiation therapy, and by the end of November 2007 he was in remission. At the same time, however, he tried to hide that he knew that his days were numbered. In August, as we crossed the bridge from the Outer Banks of North Carolina (where my parents have vacationed every year since the early years of their marriage) to the mainland, he cried and told my mother that it was the last time he'd be there. After Christmas he unsuccessfully attempted to conceal his illness from my mother, which is difficult when you're trying to hide feelings from a person you've known and spent nearly every day with for thirty-five years.

Dad went through a second round of radiation and chemo, which left him withered and tired. By the time he went into hospice care in May of this year, he had lost about 90 pounds. I flew home from Chicago for what was originally supposed to be a weekend visit, but I spent three weeks at home. I came home in time for his last few days of being aware of his surroundings, floating in and out of a morphine-induced haze. He held on for a week and a half, which my family spent holding a vigil of sorts. There'd be hours were we sat around the rented hospital bed, crying and holding his hand, hoping for a quick release from the pain that my father's illness was causing all of us to experience. Other times, we'd be down the hall in the living room, slamming down multiple glasses of red wine, which, like the casseroles and flowers delivered by the neighbors, were brought into the house in bulk shipments.

We prepared for my father to die, but in a way that surprisingly felt like a party rather than a somber occasion. We told stories about him and shared the memories we had. My mother and my father's sister argued over events that took place in those stories, I listened to the familiar tales that had changed and evolved over the years. It sounds like a cliche, of course, but it's true to my father's sensibility. He was a storyteller, a joker. He always had some elaborate tale to tell, and he never told the same thing twice - which, of course, was unintentional. He was plagued with a bad memory, and he couldn't help but tell the same story over and over, but it changed each time. Fittingly, the preacher who delivered his eulogy somehow managed to mix up the stories that my mother and I provided as research. He placed me and my brother into a story of a trip to Washington, DC in the late '70s, for example.

Growing up, I knew a lot of kids whose parents were divorced - so many, in fact, that I felt left out that mine were still together. I only knew one girl who had a parent die when she was a young age. I felt both normal (in the sense that losing a parent as a child was something that only happened in movies) and out of place (because I only had two parents, not four). Growing up, I realized that my parents had a nearly perfect marriage, despite their opposite upbringings and childhoods. I can't imagine what it is like to be married to someone for almost 32 years (and being with that person for almost 36) and suddenly lose them.

My father left a lot behind when he died. For my brother and me, there is the enormous cache of stories and memories, both from our lifetimes and previous. I have pictures of him - a few from his childhood, even more from my parents' life together before I was born, and a ton since then. My mother, on the other hand, has two sons who look a lot like their father. She has the house they built together when they married. And she has my father's final gift, which is the last metal Coca-Cola sign he built and painted for the owners of Driftwood, which was my parents' favorite restaurant.

My father's name, which he printed on his final sign, is just above the entrance to the restaurant. He told the owner that he did it for my mother, so that whenever she went there for dinner, she'd know he'd always be there with her. 

Tyler Coates is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in Chicago. He tumbls here and twitters here.

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"With the Benefit of Hindsight" - We Were Promised Jetpacks (mp3)