THE CANON LOGIC

Good friend and super star violinist Marques Toliver ( playing my Accordion in our apartment on the left) has been making  killer headway with recent success in London and NYC. He was playing with Holly Miranda, former member of the Jealous Girlfriends (who we used to play with in Philly), and her band for a while but is now working on his own solo career and traveling back and forth between London and NYC to record and play various gigs. A recent review of Holly Miranda’s newest album can be seen at NME where there is a video, embedded below, of Holly and Marques playing a take away show with acclaimed filmmaker Vincent Moon . If you have ever seen the video of Arcade Fire playing in an elevator, that was all Vincent Moon and can be seen here . Also, if that is not enough, yours truly was also in one of Vincent Moon’s take away shows, featuring Noah & the Whale and can be seen here. I come in around 1:10. Marques and Holly video below:

Tickets just went on sale for our March 5th show celebrating the release of our debut album, FM Arcade.  Joining us at NYC’s Mercury Lounge will be the inimitable Pants Velour, so you really don’t want to miss it.  Get ‘em here, before they’re gone, and pick up a your free copy of the album at the door.

First review of our second single, “Nights at Armour Mansion” up at Consequence of Sound

Feel free to leave a comment if you get a chance.

Howdy Folks,

Now that you’re all (hopefully) done digesting last night’s shmorgishborg of LOST, we have some information to announce.

Our debut album, FM Arcade, is coming out on March 9th, 2010. Digital copies of the album can be purchased right here on this website, through iTunes, and through other major digital retailers. Physical copies of the album will be available directly through our website. We will also be releasing a special, limited Vinyl edition - available on this website.

The cover art looks a little something like this:

The Canon Logic - FM Arcade

The tracklist, featuring songs you may or may not have heard before, looks a little something like this:

1. Villain in America
2. Avenue of Criminals (download for FREE right now at avenue.thecanonlogic.com)
3. The Fabulist
4. It All Went Away…
5. Nights At Armour Mansion
6. Amy is a Wolverine
7. Dead Man
8. Exile
9. The Dark Maid
10. Delia
11. The System
12. Last Day of Man

We’d also like to take this time to announce that the next single off of the album will be Nights At Armour Mansion, and it will include the song, as well as some other B-Side material. It will not be officially released for another week or so, but for the time being, you can download the song, right here, for free:

Lastly - we’re playing a big show tomorrow night at World Cafe Live in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. You can get more details on the show here. We go on at approximately 8pm. Hope to see you all there!

That is all for now. But stay glued to this site cause we’re going to start pumping out updates fast…super fast… Yea. Ya dig?

-TCL

I have no intention of trying to write a review or a recap of last nights show, for there are plenty of blogs you can check out for that. Instead I’d like to take a minute to further interpret a theory that has been brewing in my head for some time now. Firstly, I want to state that I cannot say whether Jacob and the Man in black, who I will refer to as “New Locke”, are the leaders and rulers of the island, for it is quite possible that there is someone yet unseen who controls them both. I had had this idea for a while but it wasn’t until New Locke said that he wanted to go home that I got the feeling that there was someone above and beyond them who was really in control. But I do not feel that there is enough information to really comment on that so to get to my general theory, for it is only a theory, about the connection between both men, it starts with something that Locke said in the first episode to Walt. Locke is sitting by himself with a backgammon set when Walt says, “what is it like checkers?” to which Locke goes on to explain the history of the game. He says two very interesting points, one that it is the oldest game known to man, dating back 5000 years and “before Jesus Christ” (perhaps stating that this has nothing to with present day Christianity???), and secondly that backgammon has two sides, “one is dark, and one is light”. Try to keep that in the back of your mind as we go on to this next point in regards to the season 6 premier and the season 5 finale.

When the season 5 finale started, the Man in black (now believed to be New Locke) and Jacob are having a conversation, Jacob being in a white shirt, and “New Locke” in a black shirt, possibly showing the duality of man, or that they represent two sides of an opposing war, or perhaps they just are trying to represent two different fashion statements. But either way this, along with the content of their conversation, seems to be a giveaway that they represent two different sides, or opponents in a long lasting game and the island is the main playing field. When “New Locke” asks Jacob about the people coming in from the ship, he already knows how they got there, that Jacob had a hand in it. He then goes on to mention to Jacob how badly he wants to kill him and says, “One-day I will find a loop hole”. This to me immediately strikes the question, why can’t he just kill him now?

And so while last nights season opener only seemed to further my ideas that all of this was indeed just one big game, let me first introduce a new possibility that might explain where all of our beloved characters fit in to all of this. If everything happening on the island is indeed one big game between “New Locke” and Jacob, all of the other people on the island are just pawns, players in one large game of chess, and the only result that matters is the end, nothing else. Death, life, love, good, bad, faith, science, these are all essentially irrelevant pieces to a much larger whole with only one end. As Jacob says in the season 5 finale, “there is only one end, everything else is just progress”, he seems to state this point so clearly. Perhaps as viewers we get too attached to the characters lives, heroism, faults, relationships and so forth and we fail to see that there is something much bigger happening that shadows over the whole show. Now, of course it is just a television show and it is only natural to get attached to characters and place meaning as we see it, but in order to really try and understand the unknown I have to at least attempt to see things from another angle, and in this case, what appears to be the bigger picture of it all, taking myself away from any sort of specific emotional character attachments. Without giving too much away, for anyone that has read “Sirens of Titan” by Kurt Vonnegut, this thought sort of stems from the ending of the book, and a few other ideas throughout it. (Great book that I highly recommend to anyone looking to blow their mind)

So how do our characters fit in to this game as pawns? This is where the imagination has to start being stretched. For one, it seems that Jacob has been bringing people to the island while “New Locke” has been trying to keep them off. If they were simply two inhabitants of the same island with different beliefs then why can’t “New Locke” kill Jacob and vise versa? Perhaps they have different specific rules to follow? If we can all safely say, after last night, that “New Locke” is indeed the smoke monster, it seems to fit that he and Jacob have different abilities, or powers to their advantage in this game that they are playing. I cannot be sure as to what they are yet, but we can at least consider a few possibilities.

For one, Jacob seems to be able to leave the island and somehow bring people to it by touching them. We see this demonstrated in the season 5 finale when he touches Kate, Locke, Sawyer, and a few others. This is also displayed when the man in black states that he knows that Jacob brought the people on the ship (seen from the distant horizon) to the island. Now on the flip side, what sort of powers does “New Locke” have? Well for one, as stated before, it seems that he is able to become and control the smoke monster. He is also able to, not so much as possess, but take the shape of other characters, look into their mind, and fill in as them, hence why I am calling him “New Locke” (as they did in the recap). I also think that he is only able to possess one being at a time. When he turned into the smoke monster last night, “New Locke” disappeared as he did last season when Ben and Locke went to the temple and the smoke monster told Ben to follow Locke. So perhaps he can control the dead, and has been creating the visions of Walt and Christian to help guide Locke for his own doings, or maybe he can do that with any character but knows that it is more efficient and safe to use someone who is already dead so as to not cause any extra confusion amongst the living, but all of this is yet to be seen. We were also relieved of another secret in regards to some underlying rules that they must follow. It appears that the smoke monster cannot harm anyone who has spread, what I believe to be, Jacobs ashes around them (though it may just be any ashes). This was displayed during last night’s episode when some of the guys with guns, referred to as Jacobs’s protectors, went in the temple and all were killed by the smoke monster except for the one guy from the movie “Choke” because he had ashes around him. Of course he falls from his ash circle and then gets a nice vampire death after that, but the same method of protection is used when the, possibly Black Rock, people of the temple find out about Jacob’s death. Panic strikes and they are seen pouring some kind of ash around their temple walls. But what does it all mean, why doesn’t the smoke monster just kill everyone on the island, and even more so, why has this game I speak of not ended even though “New Locke” found a loop hole and had Ben kill Jacob?

The only thing that I can come to think of is that it was not just about killing Jacobs physical being, but that there is much more to this game. Jacob is still able to speak to Hurley because of Hurley’s little talent, so perhaps Jacob can still have some major affect on the island and is still a player in the game. Maybe the scenes they kept flashing to on the airplane represent what is going to happen at the end of the show, perhaps something that Hurley does to revert any of 815 ever coming to the island. Is it possible that what Jack was trying to do with the hydrogen bomb is manifested in another way by another character and that great change still does happen? And when Sayid was saved at the end of the episode by strict orders from Jacob, was Jacob able to sort of reincarnate himself as Sayid to keep his character alive? This raises the question of what happened to young Ben when he too was brought into the temple to be saved by none other than Sayid’s gunshots. Is Sayid going to be part of the whole that makes Jacob and keeps him alive, thus continuing this long standing battle between “light and dark”, and if so, did Ben have the same treatment? The trouble with that is why “New Locke” has kept Ben alive, so perhaps Ben was not revived in the same way, or maybe he was and Ben’s killing of Jacob represents a new factor in all of this. What it might be, I cannot say, but maybe someone else can shed some light on the situation.

I want to move on and focus on Locke and “New Locke” for a moment because this dynamic raises some interesting questions. “New Locke” said that John Locke’s life was pathetic off of the island and while every other surviving member’s life appeared to be that way, Locke was special in the fact that he recognized how pathetic his life was off the island and this made him want to stay on the island. Perhaps Locke was the perfect pawn in this whole game, the one piece that could really play to “New Locke’s” advantage. So Locke may have been the perfect chess piece, his life off the island was in shambles, he was restricted to a wheel chair, couldn’t go on his adventurous walk about, he was abandoned by everyone he ever loved, and so forth, causing him to be in the perfect position to gain some hope and trust the island. For whatever reason, when that plane crashed and he was given the full mobility of his legs back, all the hope that was lost in Locke was restored and it led him to doing some unbelievable things that no one else believed possible. If you were to ask Locke a few seasons back what the island was he might respond “It is a place where miracles happen”. Being the only one of the survivors of 815 to believe in miracles, he was the perfect character to be used by someone far more powerful and knowledgeable. But why does no one else believe in miracles, and why does someone like Jack try and explain everything through science? Because he lives, lived, in a world that no longer had faith in miracles. Jack believed that everything had a scientific explanation to it, and so he had no faith, even when the unbelievable (big black monster of smoke,etc) stared him in the face, he was not willing to give up his conventional beliefs. But Locke, who was originally told that he would never be able to walk again was able to gain the hope he needed when 815 crashed and his legs were restored. It may seem as though I am trying to conjure up a belief that faith does exist on the island and that it is somehow god related, but to the contrary I believe that that is only a trick used by “New Locke” and possibly Jacob, to control the new comers to the island.

Without getting into too much detail at the moment in relation to what I think the island might be (in fear of this post lasting forever), it is important to mention some of its potential capabilities. It’s not that I think the island represents a dream in which some character will wake up from, leaving every avid lost fan pretty pissed off, but I think it is possible that the properties of the island are similar to that of the dream state. In a lucid dream, a dream where the dreamer realizes he or she is dreaming, you are able to control your dream, breaking the bounds of normal reality and doing as you would like. If you want to fly, you can fly, if you want to go rob a bank, you can rob a bank, if you want to time travel, you can….. Hmm, time travel, an interesting concept, and one that was also, and still seems to be, explored in lost. But what is time travel? Good question, but is it really that much different than what flying is? If I were to take flight in a lucid dream, which sadly to say I have, how would I fly? Would I grow wings and start flapping, or would I do more of a superman fist pump style of flying? In the case of my dream, it was a little more like superman, no wings needed. But why is that? Because that is my perception of flying and I am bound to it, even in the dream state. And I think that it is possible that the island acts in a similar manner. Think about what Ben said to Locke in season 3 when Locke’s dad magically appears on the island. He says something along the lines of, “think of the island as a magic box, think of something and it appears”, not that Ben knows the truth of the island, but I don’t doubt he has some good ideas as to what its mystical powers might be. So in regards to the islands magical properties, perhaps it is all just one big game and Jacob and “New Locke” happen to know more about the island and how to cultivate its properties, while other survivors on the island are able to control some of the properties in the ways that they believe possible (Faraday and time travel). So perhaps like the lucid dreamer, if you become aware of these island secrets, you are able to use them in whatever way your mind can understand what they are, for the off island reality in which we live in is so bound by conditioning and habit that it is almost impossible for us to break free of it. Many of men have tried to tap into the islands magical properties, or exotic matter as some scientists refer to it, and according to the Man in black it always leads to greed and corruption.

With all of that in mind, I feel that there must be some sort of war going on between “New Locke” and Jacob. With Jacob’s physical body being destroyed, it only seems right that “New Locke” is battling everyone that Jacob has brought to the island, his soldiers, since the beginning, and that Jacob himself might not yet be destroyed in the way that he needs to be for “New Locke” to be set free and to get home. Who else would be able to stop “New Locke” without the influence of Jacob?

Now, there is one thing that I wanted to say in regards to all of this theory crap I am spitting out. I am still just as lost as I have ever been. Possibilities may be creeping in, and you can be damn sure that I am going to delve into them, but they continue to remain as theories. The reason I am sharing these ideas with you is in hopes that someone might catch on to what I am saying and shed some light where I only perceive darkness. It is rather clear to me that everyone watches this show from their own perspective, as we all perceive life in our own way, so I don’t doubt that anyone who reads this will see it from a different angle and be able to build on some ideas in ways that I have yet to imagine. So while I am admitting that I have no idea as to what is actually going on in Lost, there are certain signs that are pointing in the direction that I have presented and I hope to find others out there who can open some new doors.

If you have made it this far, thanks for sticking around, feel free to comment below.