Six Years of Lost

It’s a Little Hard to Let Go

6 Years of Lost

To say that Lost was the best show on television for its six-season run is fairly debatable. With the JJ Abrams-produced series sharing nights with such heavy-hitters as The Wire and The Shield, that’s a tough sell even for the most devoted of fans. But what isn’t arguable is that Lost was easily the most ambitious show of its time. Nowhere else would you find this particular brew of cliffhangers, reboots and indulgent character development mixing it up with time travel, weird science and the logistics of island living. As far as ensemble dramas go, Lost was on a level all its own.

Its unique approach to storytelling was ironically the same thing that turned off a lot of potential fans early on. Instead of telling you what you wanted to know, Lost drew out a complex mind maze, leaving tantalizing clues that often led to simply more questions. For the devoted fans, this was the show’s biggest draw. Lost was about never getting what you expected, and constantly being surprised by the direction the show was taking. This was no small feat when you consider that the entire run was over a hundred episodes long. Like a good Radiohead album, the show was a constant rejection of the status quo … sometimes even the status quo that the show itself had propagated.

As someone who has watched Lost since it first debuted in 2004, I’ve gone through the stomach-butterflies pain of waiting for each new episode to break on a weekly basis. These are some of my favorites (obviously, there will be spoilers).

1. 
   

   Walkabout (Season 1, Episode 4)

   
   

   

   
   

   In which we are introduced to John Locke, and the Lost writers show M. Night Shyamalan how to write a twist ending. This was the episode that made me a fan, and is on my list of single best TV episodes of all-time. (Others on this list: Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose, Making a Stand and The Culling.)

   
   


2. 
   

   Orientation (Season 2, Episode 3)

   
   

   In which the hitherto-unknown Eko lays the beatdown on Jin, Sawyer and Michael, and the infamous numbers become central to the show’s mythology as Desmond passes on his button-pressing duties to Locke and Jack.

   
   


3. 
   

   The Long Con (Season 2, Episode 13)

   
   

   There’s a new sheriff in town, boys. This was the episode that triggered the popular quip amongst fans: “Once you go Sawyer, you never go Jack.”

   
   


4. 
   

   The Man Behind the Curtain (Season 3, Episode 20)

   
   

   

   
   

   In which we meet the young Benjamin Linus as he is fostered into the island’s leadership position. Ben is my favorite Lost character and the way this episode tracks his growth into a masterful manipulator/insecure whelp is mesmerizing. It’s widely agreed that Lost … well, lost its way during its third season (hey, Nikki and Paulo)), but they certainly got it together in time for the finale.

   
   


5. 
   

   Through the Looking Glass (Season 3, Episode 23)

   
   

   Meta twist episode! Lost pulls a long con on its viewers by showing us what we believed to be a confusing flashback, but what turned out to be a flash-forward instead. (Years later, ABC would attempt to do a whole show based solely on this concept.) Meanwhile, they kill off a main character while simultaneously laying the groundwork for the final half of the show. Possibly the best season finale of any show ever produced.

   
   


6. 
   

   The Constant (Season 4, Episode 5)

   
   

   

   
   

   The fan-favorite time travel episode, in which the Lost writers pull a Slaughterhouse Five quasi-tribute that would’ve made Vonnegut proud. Mindbendingly paced and emotionally powerful, this episode along with Season 1’s “Walkabout” represented Lost at its absolute best.

   
   


7. 
   

   The Shape of Things to Come (Season 4, Episode 9)

   
   

   In terms of plot advancement, it’s hard to beat this episode. Ben Linus teleports to Tunisia, flash-forward-style. Mercenaries kill Alex. The rivalry between Ben and Charles Widmore is fleshed out wonderfully as a decades-long struggle for control of the Island.

   
   


8. 
   

   Happily Ever After (Season 6, Episode 11)

   
   

   Season 6 was, in many ways, a very long epilogue to a show that was constantly screwing with its fans’ perceptions and expectations. Episode 11 was the turning point that hinted at Desmond Hume’s final contribution to the show and its characters, as being the only person apparently impervious to the effects of … well, even death itself.

   
   

And That Final Episode

Lost’s series finale was quite possibly the most divisive episode ever aired on network television, in that fans were either severely disappointed or tearfully emotional. The explanations for season six have been widely written up at this point so I won’t go into the details here, but I will say that I enjoyed it quite a bit. It wasn’t a perfect episode – it didn’t hit the creative highs of “Walkabout” or “The Constant” – but I felt that it was very much like the show producers were writing a protracted love letter to the characters that they were leaving behind. I particularly loved how the dialogue was so sharp at this point that they managed to explain the entire season in just four lines exchanged between Jack and his estranged father.

Lost has never been an easy show to watch; it alternately tests your patience and confuses the crap out of you. Occasionally, it leaves your jaw on the floor, right before smash-cutting to the end titles. It’s hard to imagine another show ever being quite like it (although people are certainly trying), and maybe there shouldn’t be. It took Jack Shephard a whole season before he was ready to let go; I might take even longer.

That iPad

This is my second attempt at writing a review of the iPad today. I had gotten through a full thousand-word opus earlier this morning and was just about to publish it, when my text editor – the creatively-named Text Editor – decided to replace the entire article with the word “null.” It didn’t help that the essay had been written purely on the iPad either, which in and of itself was already a bit of a feat.

But here we are again, anyway. I’ve resorted to using the built-in Notes app for the rest of this piece, which I had originally rejected because I didn’t especially like the comic-sans-esque font. At this point I’ll be happy with anything that can save my work properly though.

My writing position (and seriously, when was the last time you read anyone describing their posture as they wrote, and it was actually relevant information?) is, in a word, folded. I began this morning sitting on the edge of my bed, the iPad balanced on my lap, and hunched over. My workflow has all the cadence of a funeral march – I poke out three or four sentences, sit up and stretch emphatically, sigh expansively, then fold myself over again, looking for all the world like someone who rings Gothic church bells for a living.

Given these rather torturous working conditions, it may be a surprise that I am experiencing a perverse sense of fun as I do this. There are only a handful of people in the Philippines with iPads right now, and I’m probably the only one who would be willing to go through this seemingly pointless exercise. There is a reason though: I wanted to see if the iPad could work as a decent mobile productivity tool, and the only way to do that is if you actually use it to produce something.

Most of the iPad’s virtues have been espoused at length by other writers, with far better words than mine, so suffice to say that all the good stuff is true. Reading ebooks is a marvelous experience (I’m using the Kindle app), and digital comics via the Marvel app are even more so. (I’ve spent over $50 on digital comics just this week alone.) Touch-centric games like Harbor Master HD took up most of my free time over the weekend, and watching video or viewing websites are, in some ways, superior to their full-sized laptop counterparts. Browsing the web, in particular, has been a really engaging experience. The surprising part is that a lot of common sites look and feel better on the vertically-oriented iPad than in the more traditional landscape orientation. Meanwhile, mainstays such as Tweetdeck and GoodReader look really slick and work very well in their spiffy new iPad guises.

But back to our experiment, and my writing position. At the dinner table, the iPad needs to be at an angle in order to be used properly. I don’t have the official keyboard stand, so I use whatever I can find to prop it up. In this particular instance, “whatever I can find” turns out to be a snoozing 15" Macbook Pro, which I gingerly slip underneath the iPad to give it a small boost. My writing velocity increases slightly.

In many ways, I’ve been waiting for the iPad for the better part of a decade. I’ve been using various small touch devices for most of the 00’s (Palms, PocketPCs, etc) and in early 2005, I was an early adopter of Microsoft’s TabletPC initiative. This was in the form of the HP TC1100, a 1.1Ghz, 4-lb hybrid tablet that used pen and keyboard as its primary input methods. It was slow, buggy, and worst of all, ran a haphazardly modified version of Windows XP. Also, it cost US$2500. Possibly the only thing I liked about the TC1100 was that it included a tiny kickstand. To say that the market response to these half-baked devices was tepid is putting it mildly. Five years later, Apple (and in a few months, HP again) has decided to give the tablet concept another go, and the results are pretty astounding. The iPad soundly trounces the TC1100 in every way, shape and form, and it does so at one-fifth of the cost. If that’s not progress, I don’t know what is.

The mobile computing experience is forever a compromise between weight, performance, features and battery life, and whether you think the iPad has struck the right balance depends largely on how open you are to learning new things. There are new micro-paradigms to be learned here, and old ones that need to be un-learned. Some people will find that frustrating, others will find it exciting. As mentioned above, the virtual keyboard has a very real learning curve to it. If you write mostly in plain, formal English, it will catch and correct most of your errors as you make them, but other styles (or God forbid, Tagalog) is a real challenge. I’ve spent a total of three hours writing and rewriting this piece, and although I can feel my typing speed increasing with each new paragraph, I’m still nowhere near my speed with a physical keyboard. On the other hand, battery levels have dropped a mere 30% over that period -- leaving with me with about 5 hours of usable power -- so I’m finding it hard to complain too loudly.

Is it the perfect mobile computer? No, of course not, because there’s no such thing. It’s a damned good piece of machinery though, and if you’re thinking of getting one, my advice couldn’t be simpler. Just get one.

There Will Be Fireworks

The Philippines’ love affair with fireworks reached its summit in late 2005 when the La Mancha group organized the first World Pyro Olympics at the then-unfinished Mall of Asia. Five days of evening performances from each of the eight participating countries, showcasing some of the fanciest fireworks you’ll likely ever see in these parts – how could you go wrong? And indeed the WPO has proven to be a popular diversion in its four iterations since. This year saw the debut of its very own spinoff: the International Pyromusical Competition, which was essentially the same thing, but with loud music accompanying the loud explosions.

(Not my picture.)

And so it was that I found myself facing the sea on a breezy Sunday evening, waiting for a solitary barge floating in the middle of the bay to light up the darkened sky. The event seemed well-organized and quite comfortable, although perhaps this initial impression was colored slightly by the fact that we were in the VIP section, and they were serving us dinner.

We arrived about an hour before the competition was scheduled to start, and sat ourselves down as close to the bayside as possible. The VIP section was a long rectangular strip of pavement along the outermost edge of the baywalk, with about 2 dozen large round dinner tables and a modest dinner buffet. The size of each table was such that you were most likely going to share with someone, unless you happened to bring a whole van full of friends along with you. For awhile, I allowed myself the small fantasy of actually having the table to ourselves – perhaps the VIP section wasn’t running at capacity? – but alas, this was not to be.

Half an hour before the United Kingdom performance began, a young man tapped me on the shoulder and asked me in Tagalog whether there were other people sharing the table with us. I admitted, “No,” and when he turned to wave his companions over, I wished I had lied. Their group consisted of three ladies suffering from varying degrees of obesity and looking like they sold hair elastics in Philcoa, and three squealing 5-year-olds that they were dragging along by the pigtails. They fell into their chairs, making the silverware dance and the wine glasses shudder. They chattered at each other while trying to get their respective bundles-of-joy to sit still for more than two seconds at a stretch. Behind us, a string quartet was playing, and I imagined the sinking Titanic.

One bundle-of-joy in particular was quite memorable. She didn’t like the sound of violins and so decided to play Paramore over her cellphone’s loud speaker. She placed the cellphone, of course, right beside me. Thus energized, she began to explore the subterranean world under our dinner table, crawling over our feet and seriously destroying my calm. Resurfacing from her excursions, she proceeded to smash her head against the underside of the table, and our glasses spilled their contents out on to the tablecloth in fright. I half-stood to see if she was alright, but her mother, mistaking my reaction for concern, waved me back down. “OK lang sya, OK lang sya,” she said. I was hoping she had knocked herself unconscious, and would have to be taken to the hospital.

Thankfully, the performance soon began, and apart from the occasional non-sequitur interjections of “Nasan yung dede nya? Yung dede nya?” from our tablemates, I thoroughly enjoyed myself. The Brits were good, but the Chinese were better, and unfortunately there’s no way to properly describe the experience of either performance to someone who hadn’t been there, at that distance. We watched the spiraling, cascading fireworks cast triumphant reflections on the water, and I have to admit – for all my complaints about the mediocre food, and the presence of other people – I was enthralled.

An Unpopular Opinion about the Ipad

I don't usually write about technology much anymore these days, but the Internet is currently ablaze with opinions on Apple's new iPad announcement several hours ago. A lot of these opinions are just echo-chamber drivel, i.e., but I wanted to share some thoughts on one of the foremost complaints about the iPad, i.e., the "glaring" lack of multitasking.

Wirth's Law states that "Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster," and nowhere is this law more true than in the mobile space. The computing power that you can squeeze out of these smaller machines is severely restricted by physical limits such as size, heat output and power usage. The single most common source of computer frustration is the fact that our machines take too long to do what we ask of them, whether it is opening a Word document or loading up a desktop game. We know from Wirth's Law that the software is the culprit here. In fact, no matter how advanced our hardware gets, our software will continue to overtax it. That's just the way we write code, I suppose.

Are there any solutions? Well, Apple's solution was to not allow third-party apps to multitask at all. This, at least, restricts the number of applications competing for your device's limited resources. People have been whining about the lack of multitasking in the iPhone since its inception, and they continue to do so with the new iPad. But having used all manner of smartphones, pocketPCs, netbooks and tabletPCs over the past 6 years, I can say with much conviction that multitasking did not make these devices better. All it did was make them slower. Generally, you end up turning all of the other apps off anyway, because the foreground application needed as much computing power as your device could muster.

What people tend to misunderstand about these smaller mobile devices is that you cannot look at them the same way you look at a full-blown laptop or workstation. Even the manufacturers misunderstand this, which is primarily why the TabletPC initiative floundered during the mid-00's, and why smartphones have such limited resonance with consumers. They just shoehorn traditional ideas into a form-factor that is fundamentally different, and people just end up getting confused about what it's for. And these machines are always, without fail, abysmally slow. This is ironic, because the primary use-case of a mobile device is that you are using it "when you're on the go," i.e., when time is most critical. Instead you find yourself rooting around the Task Manager killing various processes just so you'll have enough memory to load up OneNote. The sledgehammer "single-tasking" solution that Apple took with the iPhone has largely been vindicated by the fact that it now boasts 17 million users around the world, and I think that doing the same thing with the iPad was a good idea. It keeps thing simple, and here's the really important bit: reliable.

There's this saying that, as a designer, you know your work is finished not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. It's this exclusionist strategy that has served Apple so well with their consumer devices. By stripping their mobile products down to the essentials, and then polishing the heck out of those essentials, they've produced devices that people describe with words like "revolutionary" and "groundbreaking." Me, I'm just glad it doesn't multitask.

Shooting Motion

Capturing flash motion is a favorite photography subgenre of mine, probably because it's notoriously easy to pull off once you've got your camera settings sorted. On my D90, I shoot with an 85mm lens open at f/2.5, ISO 200. I like the 85mm for this because it's very light compared to any of my zooms, and this technique involves a lot of camping (i.e., holding the camera to your face for several minutes doing nothing, then blasting off 5 shots in quick succession).

Shutter speed should be in the non-handholdable* range of 1/5 to 1/8, depending on how much of the background I want to be able to resolve in the image. You have to make sure that your strobe syncs rear-curtain; every camera has a slightly different way of doing this. I believe compact cameras have these too, so theoretically you should be able to pull this off even if you're not using a DSLR.

Right before the gig starts I usually take a few images of the stage area so I can see what kind of flash power I need to illuminate it appropriately. For Route196 last night, this was 1/4 to 1/8 on my smallish SB-600 flash (with an aperture of f/2.2 to f/3.2).

Then it's just a matter of waiting for the right moment. These flash-motion portraits work best when the subject is about to make a quick move. Guitarists are super-easy because there's a lot of repetition in their hand movements, so you'll have a lot of chances to get something nice. Essentially, you open your shutter right as the move's being executed. If you do it right, you'll get a nice motion blur around the subject.

*Why non-handholdable? The rule of thumb when judging whether a particular shutter speed is "handholdable" is 1/focal-length. In other words, on my 85mm, I shouldn't be able to handhold the camera at anything lower than 1/80-1/100. The reason is due to the fact that longer focal lengths magnify vibrations, so you are more likely to end up with blurry images. Conversely, if you had a very wide lens, like Canon's 10-22mm, you could handhold that even at 1/10 or 1/15 and still get a decently sharp image.

Strobes allow us to cheat this law because the light coming from our flashes travels at around 1/1000 or faster. When you are making a flash-enabled exposure, the area illuminated by the strobe will be crystal-clear because it was lit at a speed much, much higher than your handhold minimum. Meanwhile, everything that wasn't lit by the strobe (your background, usually) will still exhibit all the usual camera-shake. This is why you want to have your aperture open pretty wide when capturing flash-motion. Since your background will be pretty shaky, you want to bokeh it out as much as possible.

One of my first really decent flash-motion images from back in May 2009. (In photographer-years, I was 3 months old at the time.) Ironically, this is of Miggy Chavez of Chicosci, but let's not judge. This was pretty textbook stuff: 50mm lens at f/2.5, 1/20 shutter speed. (I didn't own an 85mm back then. And oh, I was still shooting Canon.)

Although my recent flash-motion images have been taken with on-camera flash, I occasionally have the luxury of setting up colored, off-camera strobes. The image above was taken in Magnet High Street with a green-gelled flash clamped to a ladder about 4 feet away from the subject. I guess I must've been feeling cocky that night coz my settings were all over the place: 2 second exposure handheld, f/8 opening and 17mm focal length.

This fire-dancer image pushes the limit of the flash-motion technique. In order to track the flames as they moved around the subject, I had to shoot a 4-second exposure, which is impossible to handhold, no matter what you do. So I tripoded it - the sane solution. The flash hardly did anything in this instance because the light from the fire was already more than enough to expose the dancer in its center. This actually speaks to an important caveat in shooting flash-motion: if the subject is throwing off a lot of its own light, your flash is unnecessary, unless you want to try to overpower the subject's light with your own.

The rest of my flash-motion portraits can be found here.

Shooting Strangers

I'm deathly afraid of approaching strangers. I have been since I was a child, and it's the kind of fear that is magnified even more when approaching strangers with a camera in my hands. This is, as you probably expect, problematic for any one interested in photography, because this fear limits one to shooting just the people one happens to know. Which is fine if you've got a million friends, but I've been shooting for about a year now and I can honestly say that I'm rapidly running out of new subjects.

And so it was that I decided to conquer this fear on this bright Sunday morning. I set 10 strangers as my initial goal, figuring that it'd take _at least_ that many before I would start to get the hang of it. I'd shoot in UP Diliman campus, as the volume of pedestrians there would be sure to provide me with the subjects I needed. I packed my 85mm prime, widely-regarded as the best lens for this sort of street photography. And off I went.

The first 30 minutes were fairly horrible. I stood along the side of the road and pathetically watched joggers and cyclists go by. There were tons of people, way more than I was really expecting. Just focusing on any one individual was turning out to be tricky, as the background was always too busy.

Eventually, I decided that it'd be impossible to shoot the kind of images I wanted with joggers or cyclists. They were just going too fast, and it wasn't like I could run alongside them as I shot. What I needed were slow-walkers, or people sitting around resting. And so I began my own slow-walk around the UP oval, pausing occasionally to eye a potential subject, but never actually bringing the camera up to my eye.

The working distance of an 85mm lens on a cropped-sensor body is about 5 or 6 feet for a very close portrait. This is perfect for street photography because you are neither violating anyone's personal space nor are you too far to actually talk to them. Because, yes, you will have to talk to them. Trying to steal a frame will usually result in a nice picture of the back of someone's head, because people sense when a lens is being pointed at them and tend to become self-conscious.

I finally got up the courage to approach my first stranger after nearly 45 minutes of walking around aimlessly. She was a teenager in a blue jersey, carrying a little dog in her arms. The camera was already set up, so really all I had to do was go up to her and say, "May I take your picture?" and tap the shutter. I mean, seriously, how hard could that be.

As it happened though, I walked right past her first, before turning around and kinda sheepishly mumbling, "Excuse me, can I take a picture of your dog?" And then, hurriedly: "And you?"

She said, "Yeah sure," and like the proverbial overly-excited virgin, I thrust my camera at her and ... fired prematurely. Before I even looked at the LCD, I knew I had screwed up big-time. I had managed to get the top half of the dog's head and most of hers into the frame, but the focus was on the trees behind them. Even more sheepishly now, I asked, "Uh, one more? Sorry."

The second image was still not very good, but at least the foreground was in focus this time. I thanked her, and walked hurriedly away before she could ask to look at what I had taken.



It occurred to me that part of the reason why it was so difficult to approach anyone before was because there is an implicit declaration that you, the photographer, know what you are doing. And 95% of the time behind the lens, I literally have no idea. Finally coming to grips with this notion made me feel a lot better. As long as none of these strangers actually saw how crappy their portraits were turning out, then I was ok.

I spent the next hour botching up most of the 40 images I took, although to my credit, I did shoot more than 10 strangers. The standard line was "Excuse me, may I take your picture?" which I would switch to Tagalog depending on who I was talking to. (When shooting kids, I'd have to ask their moms for permission, and it just seemed more polite to say it in English.) Out of about a dozen approaches, I was rejected only once. And I actually started getting decent images towards the last 15 minutes. These are my two favorites:





The girl in white was hesitant, but I told her that all she had to do was ignore me. The grand-dad, meanwhile, just nodded when I asked, and my focus point just happened to land perfectly on his eyeball. Photo of the day, easily.

You can check out the rest of my new Strangers set on Flickr here.

Bat-dreams

I have recently been having these wildly vivid dreams where I am a young Dark Knight, at that point where he is still learning his craft. Last night's dream was so deliciously Freudian that I had to write it down. The collection of words below were originally posted on twitter/helloluis (which I will prevail upon you to follow for more oddities).

Last night's #dream: As a young Dark Knight, I had taken to using my skills to "watch over" this girl who had recently dumped me.

Her younger sister had been abducted from their creepy mansion of a house, and as she wept, I knew I had to get involved.

I swooped down from my gargoyle perch, landing lightly in front of her. She was not glad to see me. "I can help," I rasped.

"Stop doing that stupid voice, I know it's you," she said, glumly.

Using various bat-devices, I determined that her sister was all the way across town, in the mountainous Batangas. "We'll take the car."

The interior of the batmobile looked similar to that of a 2008 Honda Civic, but this was beside the point. It sounded big and scary anyway.

We saw ambulances and fire trucks as we approached, and by way of movie-montage, we found ourselves at the Anilao Gen Hospital.

I cast a dark, awe-inspiring shadow in the crowded, well-lit E.R. as we entered. (OH, via bat-hearing: "Uy si Batman o.")

I stood there, the silent brooding guardian, as she spoke to the staff. When she returned, her face was ashen, her expression stoic.

"They told me she didn't make it," she said. Before I could respond with a bat-quote though, her sister came running out from her hiding place.

"OMG why would you joke about something like that!" she said scoldingly, altho she was visibly relieved. They hugged and laughed in the middle of the busy E.R.

When she finally turned to thank me, I was gone. She looked around a bit, and then shook her head slowly, with much understanding.

That's what Batman does, after all. He disappears when you don't need him anymore.

Top 10 Favorite Tracks of 2009

2009 was a great year for music, and I had a hell of a time whittling down a list of over 2 dozen tracks to a tighter top 10. I’ve even managed to rank them this time, by way of iTunes’ play-count column. (In other words, these are sorted by least-played first, just to add a little suspense to things.)

10. The Xx – Islands
These young ‘uns are one of my favorite male/female vocal duos, right up there with Mates of State and the (very) similar-sounding Savoir Adore. Also check out “Basic Shape” from the same EP.

9. Animal Collective – My Girls
When the Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion came out in early January, people were saying that the race for “best album of 2009” had come to an early close, and they weren’t wrong. This album is Noah Lennox’s Ok Computer. “My Girls” is the catchiest track on the disc, although “Bluish” and “Brother Sport” are also sharp as tacks, and indeed, the whole collection is the kind of work that only happens once in an artist’s career, if at all.

8. We Were Promised Jetpacks – Quiet Little Voices
The only rock-out song on my 2009 playlist is from a little-known punk outfit from Edinburgh. This song is hardly “quiet,” though. I have Emusic to thank for this little gem.

7. Grizzly Bear – Two Weeks
Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood refers to these guys as his “favorite band.” Not really much more you can add to that, I think. Also check out their New Moon contribution “Slow Life.”

6. The Swell Season – Feeling the Pull
I’ve been following Glen Hansard’s work since The Frames (and later, Once) and his current partnership with Marketa Irglova is generating some of his most optimistic work to date. The whole album is full of these candid, bittersweet and fervently hopeful hymns. (“Two Tongues” is a very close second as the best track here.)

5. Modest Mouse – The Whale Song (live video clip here)
It’s hard to understate ex-Smith Johnny Marr’s influence on Modest Mouse’s continually evolving sound. “Whale Song” is probably the best example of this, a careening guitar anthem in which you don’t even get any vocals until the three-minute mark. Also check out “Satellite Skin” from the same EP.

4. Thom Yorke – Hearing Damage
Radiohead has been quietly pushing out a handful of tracks via their website for much of 2009, with Yorke himself releasing the sinister Feeling Pulled Apart By Horses EP. “Hearing Damage” is from the New Moon OST, and is possibly his most accessible (and infinitely listenable) solo work since “Harrowdown Hill” in 2006. Perfect for the sparklers.

3. Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Soft Shock
The It’s Blitz! album is a great piece of work, the kind of followup fans wish for but rarely ever get. Other folks will probably pick “Heads Will Roll” or “Zero” as their favorite tracks off this masterpiece, but it’s so close as to be impossible to call.

2. Phoenix – 1901
I’ve listened to “1901” and my number one pick more times this year than the rest of the top 10 songs combined. Phoenix’s pop indietronic sound blows a hole through the ceiling of what this subgenre was thought to be capable of, and there’s a nary a track on this album that doesn’t instantly grab the listener. (Although if you need additional hints, point your headsets at “Lisztomania,” “Lasso” and “Rome.”)

1. Passion Pit – To Kingdom Come
For a band that was formed as a Valentine’s Day gift for the vocalist’s girlfriend, these guys are remarkably accomplished musicians. Their relative inexperience (they formed just two years ago) speaks to the breadth of their potential. The Manners album is a gem, the kind of electronica that turns cellphones into glowsticks, and hipster bars into dance floors. “Sleepyhead” is the most distinct track in this collection (it’s been used in a number of commercials since 2008), but “The Reeling” and “Make Light” are must-listens as well.

Honorable mentions to The Avett Brothers’ jaunty bluegrass “Kick Drum Heart,” Sea Wolf’s balladeer “The Violet Hour,” Bon Iver’s ruminative “Blood Bank,” and Stagecoach’s rocky “Good Luck with Your 45.”

(If you liked this list, please add me as a friend on Last.fm.)

Daejeon, Part Three: Beer, Currency and Sweat Glands

When you are walking around by yourself in a non-English-speaking country, signs with recognizable words tend to jump out at you, like fireworks. Everything else is gibberish, so even simple phrases like “Please here” (sic) and “Don’t worry, price” (wtf) deserve to be looked at and pondered. You don’t know how long it’ll be till you see another sign you can decipher, so you savor these moments.

This is largely how I arrived, today, at The Flying Pan, an Italian ristorante in the middle of downtown Daejeon. I walked past over a dozen more interesting-looking restaurants on the way here, but none of them appeared to have menus with pictures in them. The Flying Pan, meanwhile, had Actual English Words next to the Korean names for all their dishes. As they say in Manila, “San ka pa.”

My favorite travel writer, Bill Bryson, once wrote about how visiting non-English-speaking countries would reduce him to an almost childlike sense of awe. Nothing made sense, everything seemed new and strange, and even the simplest of actions needed to be explained to you. It was like being 5 years old again. I loved how utterly astute this observation was. I can’t remember the last time it seemed appropriate to be proud of having taken public transportation by myself, but here I was. Proud. Now watch me ask for directions from this lady in the convenience store. She motions to go right then down two blocks. See that? A regular Christopher Columbus, that’s me.

In Korea, the custom at restaurants is similar to that of the Japanese. Upon returning with your order, the waiter will leave the bill turned face-down in a corner of your table. Subsequent orders will include subsequent bills, each one turned face-down. When you’re ready to leave, you take the pieces of paper with you to the entrance, where the cash register is, and pay there. I like this system a lot, as it avoids potential disagreements by providing you with status updates. Also, it allows me to indulge myself in that favorite touristy pastime, i.e., computing how much more they are charging you in this country for something you could also get back home. There is also zero tipping here, which is fortunate as I have difficulty gauging the relative value of things. I’ve been in Daejeon for a week now, and I still haven’t gotten used to the 0.04 multiplier. (My Brain Age is like, 75.)

I leave The Flying Pan and resume my exploration of the downtown area. It’s about 6 degrees today, and my gloves are nice and toasty in the cabinet back at home. I duck under the second English sign I see (the first read “DVD”), and find myself in a beautifully modern cafe called Flower: Coffee & Wine. The place is organized into booths with high-backed love-seats, heavy wood tables and dainty glass chandeliers. The Asian art deco is lavender and mauve; the music is 24/7 Korean pop ballads.

Casually ignoring the name of the place, I order a beer. A Cass, this time, one of the two major Korean beer brands. I had tasted the competition, Hite, two nights before and was largely unimpressed. When my order arrives, I notice with some amusement that while Hite’s tagline (“Cool & Fresh”) sounds like it was cribbed from a bottle of mouthwash, Cass’s strap (“Sound of Vitality”) is straight off of an energy drink. Both brand concepts seem to be studiously avoiding the obvious notion that beer is alcohol and alcohol gets you drunk, in their respective branding. (See Red Horse’s “Ito Ang Tama,” as the primary case.)

On my way out of Coffee & Wine, I receive a minor fright when I am informed that I owe the restaurant “two million, four thousand won.” Considering that the currency’s largest denomination is only 50,000 (which they introduced just this February), this was truly a significant amount of money. My feeble Brain-Age math told me that, converted, this was a little under a hundred thousand pesos, which is quite possibly the most anyone has ever paid for a beer and chips in the history of the world. Then I look at the register’s display, and rather curtly inform the cashier that he means “twenty-four thousand.” I thrust the cash into his sweaty palms and walk towards the exit as quickly as I can.

This happens to me two more times over the next 48 hours. Apparently, Koreans have trouble differentiating “tens of thousands” from “millions,” and randomly use the latter when they mean the former. It’s a mildly disconcerting trait, but understandable considering that their number system is significantly less elaborate than ours. (Of course, by “ours” I mean the Western counting system.)

Another interesting Korean trait: they possess near-zero body odor. North-East Asians in general have the lowest level of apocrine sweat glands amongst all races (the glands that produce body odor), and Koreans in particular have the lowest of the low. Nearly half of them don’t possess them at all, which represents, in this writer’s humble opinion, the next stage in human evolution. (The Japanese have, rather predictably, taken this notion to the extreme—it is possible to be exempted from military service purely due to having body odor, in the same way others would be exempt if they were handicapped in some fashion.)

As I stand in line for a cab, I keep my nose alert for bodily scents and fragrances. Happily, I smell only the occasional dash of cologne.

Daejeon, Part Two: Vocabulary

The Chungnam National University Hospital is one of 6 major hospitals in Daejeon City, Korea. I’m sitting in the lobby lounge, mostly in the dark. Less than two hours ago, this place was bustling with chatter; patients streamed to and from the reception desks, doctors bellowed into cellphones and glowered at their clipboards, visitors clustered around blinking elevator doors. Now, it’s empty, and the lights are low. A patient slides by in paper slippers, leaning against his IV stand like an old friend, and his hacking cough reverberates against the high glass ceiling.

Korean healthcare is a thing of wonder to your average third-worlder. My mother had been working in Daejeon with a foreign passport for less than six months when she learned that she needed to check herself into the hospital, and the amount of coverage that insurance here offers is nothing short of astounding. In the Philippines, you’d be lucky to have your initial checkup covered. Here, they’re so busy writing off various fees from your bill that you wonder if they’ll end up paying you. (And mayhap they actually will, we haven’t gotten that far in the process yet.)

Of course, there are tradeoffs for this small fiscal miracle. For us, it is primarily a problem of language. If you took every English word understood by every person on staff in this hospital and strung them all together, you would have the rough word count of The Missing Piece Meets the Big O. I don’t mean that with any disrespect, I’m simply describing the difficulties inherent in our situation. As I listen to them struggle with the peanut-chewing sounds that pass for spoken English in this country, I think about the possibility of my family and I learning Hangol. A halfway meeting, such as it were. I imagine we would sound much, much worse. I cringe at the thought. Instead of peanut-chewing, we would sound like we were stricken with a waking bruxism, like Stephen Hawking without his magic chair.

That said, I have attempted to learn a few words, if only to satisfy my own need to communicate without having to start an impromptu game of Charades. (That, and I had spent $2.99 on a Korean phrasebook iPhone app.) “Yeh” (Yes), “Anyo” (No), “Kamsa Mida” (Thank You), and the quaintly specific “Oosong Kundei Humon” (Behind Woosong College) pretty much round out my Korean vocabulary. You couldn't even write the first sentence of The Missing Piece with that.

And yet there is so much to love about this city. There is no tension in the air, like in Tokyo. No pushiness, like in Shanghai. No aloofness, like in Singapore. No rankness, like in Bangkok. Instead the people here seem laidback, warm, open, and bathed. Importantly: the internet connection in my mother’s low-rent apartment is a blistering 10mbps; one can only imagine what kind of bandwidth the technologists here are enjoying. If they could only speak some English, I wouldn’t mind living here for a few months. As it is, well, I’m already surrounded by Koreans back in Eastwood city, so no big change, really.