To Prequel or Not To Prequel

Sometimes I like to play temporal games in my head. I'll think of something that, in my mind, didn't happen all that long ago, say the release of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (15 years ago), and see what was that old when it happened. I recently realized that when I do this at the premiere of the next promised Star Wars movie (2015), the distance between it, Return of the Jedi (1983) and The Phantom Menace (1999) will all be equidistant. It definitely shows how time gets skewed depending on what age you are. That's kind of how I decided it was time to consider once and for all what I think of the prequel trilogy and clear the decks for the upcoming Disney Era.

Let me state it up front: I'm not a prequel apologist, but for the most part I enjoy them. I know that a lot of people regard them as borderline sacrilegious. My wife, for one, refuses to watch them and finds the original films inviolable -- she doesn't even acknowledge the Episode IV, V, and VI designations. But a few years ago, we went to a concert featuring the music of all six films. It was narrated live by Anthony Daniels himself, and played by a full orchestra under a giant screen that played appropriate montages from the movies. On the way to the concert, just to give her some context, I summarized the story of the prequels for her, and was surprised that the story actually sounded better when summarized than shown in the films themselves. That's when it hit me that Lucas is a fantastic storyteller as far as subtext goes, but when he has to put character action and dialogue on top of it, that's when he falls down.

Ever since then, I keep turning back to the prequels, trying to appreciate them on a deeper level. I find that beyond all the silly side characters, lack of compelling new environments, wonky physics (using sound waves in space to break up asteroids?!?), and clunky dialogue, the underlying story not only holds up, but is shockingly subversive, especially the way the very concept of "good guys" and "bad guys" completely flips around with the execution of Order 66.

I actually feel bad for George Lucas. In his shoes, what would you think? You make movies that not only earn colossal amounts of money, but make incredible impacts on pop culture and society in general. At the same time, you are also barraged by both critics and fans saying that they're immature crap. I think that what Lucas tried to do with the Star Wars prequels was to give everyone everything that they thought they wanted. He simultaneously tried to tell the story he wanted to tell, and also wanted everyone to like it, in an almost openly insecure way. So it comes as no surprise that he didn't entirely succeed.

Let me clear a common misconception out of the way immediately -- Lucas didn't make the prequels for money. In the mid-90s, he didn't need to think about returning to the Star Wars well ever again. That was even more true than in the seventies; he had only been able to make the original film off the goodwill he had garnered from American Graffiti, he financed The Empire Strikes Back himself, and even Return of the Jedi being a blockbuster was hardly a sure thing when he was working through production complications -- it could have been ended up being directed by David Lynch and having Billy Dee Williams fully replacing Harrison Ford. If anything, it was the conversion of the towering Wookiees to the diminutive Ewoks (even the name is a reversal!) that was the most blatant merchandising cash grab. Plus, we're talking about one of the most philanthropic members of the entertainment industry. So saying that the prequels were fueled by any measure of greed just isn't true.

No, the reason Lucas went back, I think, is that he had been living with one of the iconic villains of cinema in his psyche for twenty years, and now thought to himself, "But how did Darth Vader get that way? *Why* is he so evil?" Honestly, it's a question that someone *should* ask themselves at fifty that they didn't think to ask at thirty... And so he tried his best to answer. At their heart, the prequel trilogy is a meditation on the nature of evil -- How does one decide to be evil? Do all villains truly believe they are doing the right thing?

One of the main complaints about the Star Wars prequels is that, in the sixteen years between trilogies, the fans had built the Expanded Universe (the overall canon composed of ancillary books, comics, and video games) that was much more adult and serious in tone than Lucas ever intended it to be. He's maintained since the beginning that the target audience of his movies is ten years old, and I'm sure he felt that he was just staying true to his original vision. Most of us, though, just thought -- somewhat unfairly -- that we were taking his creation more seriously than he was, and could "do" Star Wars better than he could.

Case in point: I recently read a debate about what the best order watch the movies when introduce newcomers to the series -- and fans with young kids think about this more than you'd think. Despite the fact that Lucas has voiced his intention that the films should be watched in "episode order"... first prequels, then the original films, I've often thought that I'd like to expose my daughter to them in the chronological order that I was... original trilogy, then prequels.

But the best solution I've heard is called The Machete Order, created by SW fan Rod Hilton. I assume he took that name from the fact that it omits Episode 1 entirely, a point that I'll talk about in a minute. The Machete Order runs thusly: the original Star Wars (aka A New Hope), The Empire Strikes Back, Attack of the Clones, Revenge of the Sith, Return of the Jedi. Taken this way, you get two films about Luke, two films about Anakin, and the final chapter that concludes both their stories. It's kind of shaping a new super-size trilogy out of the six, plus it preserves the best of the plot twists -- the true identity of Luke's father gets held suspended for over five hours of screen time! Plus, I personally love the revelation of who Yoda is in ESB, even though that ship has probably sailed for most kids. The Machete Order even adds extra drama, because right after seeing Anakin's fall to the dark side, you realize how much Luke looks and acts like he's doing the same thing at the beginning of ROTJ, all dressed in black and apparently willing to sacrifice his friends to further his own plans. The more I think about it, the more brilliant it gets.

It's the exclusion of Episode I that seems most radical, and actually makes the most sense. There's not a lot of plot carryover from that film into the rest of the prequel trilogy, and Lucas course-corrected based on fan reaction to the first movie by barely mentioning either midichlorians or Jar Jar Binks in the subsequent films. Not only that, but Anakin's jarring transition from innocent kid to surly, power-hungry teen is taken away. (And I never cared for the way that both Anakin and Jar Jar independently blunder their way into saving the day at the end.) Without Episode I the prequels are darker, full of ominous premonitions, death, and Anakin's awareness of his own power fueling his mounting fury at a universe that he can't wield control over.

Most of all, it takes care of the corner that Lucas had painted himself into with the prequels, which was that he had married himself to the idea of a trilogy right from the start. He didn't have enough story to stretch across them, so he was forced to throw droid factories and pod races at them until they filled out the needed time.

I think I've already made up my mind about how I'm going to show the movies to my daughter. The Machete Order it is! Episodes IV, V, II, III, then VI. And I think I'm going to go with the "non-Special Edition" of the original movie. Han should shoot first, and you shouldn't see Jabba the Hutt until his reveal in Return of the Jedi. But it will definitely be Special Editions for the others. Cloud City should look super-awesome instead of just regular awesome, and the Sarlacc should have a huge toothy beak. I'll even trade in "Lapti Nek" for "Jedi Rocks" if that means I don't have to sit through that horrible "Yub Nub" song that originally closed out the entire series. Yikes.

It seems that Star Wars is so deeply ingrained in our collective philosophy that we don't even understand what it means to us until it's presented imperfectly. The reason no one liked the idea of midichlorians is that it took away the possibility that *anyone* could become a Jedi with the right training. Heck, as a kid in the seventies, I half-believed that no matter how small or unassuming I seemed, I could lift an X-wing out of a swamp with my mind if I tried hard enough. Saying that Jedi were born special took that away, and Lucas was right to backpedal. He's always used the inherent power of myth to make compelling stories, and I think he's learning along with the rest of us that Star Wars is really a collective story. We know on an instinctive level what we want it to be, even if we don't immediately know how to articulate it. My hope is that he is training the next generation of storytellers what he's learned, and we'll continue to be enchanted for many years to come.

Millennial US

Decades from now, when we look back at the economic collapse of the late 00's, I think we're going to realize that it was a turning point in our history. It's going to come to be looked at, not as a recession to bounce back from, but an essential restructuring that will change a lot about the way America is supposed to work.

In the back of my mind, I had been thinking since the early 90s that capitalism shouldn't work. Back when Borders was in its heyday of IPOs and stock splitting, when everything was blue skies and candy rainbows, I realized that the key to success in terms of American corporations was to grow continually, never slowing (and even increasing if you can manage it), doing more and more to keep the stockholders happy so they'll keep investing. It was apparent to me even then that this was an unsustainable pattern, but many people smarter than me about these sorts of things seemed fine with it. (Seth Meyers once had a joke that rang especially true with me: "When everyone's making money, no one examines the system because they're too busy saying 'WHEEE!'")

So what did Borders do to keep said investors happy? Expand internationally, opened more and more stores, spreading themselves thinner and thinner until an inevitable downturn in the market caused them not to be able to scale back fast enough, and the whole thing came crashing down. I think it really was a larger example of how most people live their lives: exist on credit under the assumption of never-ending income.

In any event, this was one case out of many. The crash has put America in a position of there suddenly being more able-bodied people than there are jobs. That doesn't seem like it's going to change anytime soon. Companies that downsize just learn to make do with less people -- even if Borders had completely bounced back, do you think they would have ballooned their staff back to its former levels? Of course not.

At the same time, there are more and more complaints about the "millennial generation", who are (to hear it told) are lazy, shiftless and spoiled -- which, you may remember, is how EVERY GENERATION SINCE THE BABY BOOMERS has been described, particularly by the generation that came before.

But here's the thing -- and let me talk about this by way of my own experience -- I recently went through a period of almost two years of unemployment. Now, during that time, I suppose I could have taken a minimum-wage job somewhere, but I put in the time and effort and looked for something in my field of expertise. And that wasn't just a matter of pride or vanity, but that to do so would have been a step down from the unemployment benefits that I was getting. Early on I did the math and realized that if I took a job that paid less than $13.50 with healthcare deductions (almost twice the current minimum wage), I would be actually bringing home less money and food for my family to live on.

This is why you'll never hear me complaining about benefits programs -- these "entitlements" you often hear Republicans complaining that the rest of us think we deserve. Thanks to these programs, my family was "entitled" to survive with comparatively minimal change -- we kept our home, ate three meals a day, and maintained our Internet connection so I could keep looking for jobs.

It's really a testament how great our country is that I could afford to take the time to look for the right job, rather than have to take the first thing I could get. And it's exactly this fact that is being brought against the millennials. They're not lazy and shiftless -- at least not any more so than the generations before them -- they're trying to find the best way to navigate in a business system that is actively working against them being able to get a decently-paying job. And they're being ridiculed for it.

The truth is, more members of today's society than ever before are starting at a baseline that was the end goal for most of human history... having a sanitary place to live, enough food to eat, and something to wear. Each generation seems to start off a little better off than the one before. And yet, we expect them to work just as hard, if not harder, to make more money to get more stuff.

Up until now, America has run on the continued accumulation of wealth. But as the cost of living decreases -- and rest assured that it is, a person with a full-time job can afford technology that would seem like a king's black magic to a person with a full-time job twenty years ago -- we should start asking ourselves what wealth gets us, exactly. And whether a person's value to society is equal to the amount of money they can pump back into it.

So can we really blame young folks if they can get by without dedicating themselves to a career that they really don't want -- and less and less really need? It seems as though we're moving toward a civilization where more people, instead of what they *have* to do, can do what they believe they *should* do, That's something I can definitely get behind.

The biggest problem America has had up until now is the power structure that has been in place. We can't change to alternative energy, too many jobs depend on the auto and gasoline industries! It's cheaper for the military to continue to produce tanks and planes than to close the plants! Well, we're closer now than ever before to the perfect time and place to make these kinds of fundamental changes.

Here's my proposal: privatize our infrastructure (and from here on out, bear in mind that I'm no student of finance or business, so it's entirely possible that I have no idea what I'm talking about.) As I understand it, private companies like Halliburton made billions of dollars providing ancillary supplies for the military during the wars of the last decade. I don't see a reason why similar companies can't take over supplying what we might need to build a smart power grid, or maintain our highways and replace aging bridges, or construct wind farms/solar panel fields/flood levees/nuclear plants so that we can reduce our carbon emissions and set an example for the rest of the world. Hell, with a healthy, competitive infrastructure-renovation industry, we could even branch out internationally and work toward getting the whole world up to code.

But it takes a change of mindset to put something this big into production. It needs people who aren't beholden to the way America has been run up until now. It takes someone with a new mindset, someone who hasn't already bought into the go-to-school-then-go-to-work-until-you-retire paradigm. Someone who, I don't know, might be seen as lazy and shiftless, but is really being afforded the opportunity to find new ways to work within and outside the current system.

See what I'm getting at here?

The Longhair Chronicles

It started in my senior year of high school. Actually, if you take a look at my yearbook picture, you can start to tell by the way my hair seems to have a little extra anchorman-esque volume... that's because it's being swept back and tucked in, out of view of the camera lens. Earlier that year, I had made a decision to let my hair grow.

At the time, I didn't really think about why I had decided to do this... although I do remember that way back in my sophomore year -- before I found my home with the theater crowd -- I used to hang out with a small, strange group of guys at lunch. They would talk about the kung fu movie that had been on the previous Saturday night, the various exploratory expeditions they took into their neighborhood's storm drains, and seemed obsessed with accurately emulating the drawing style of six-year olds. I didn't really fit in with this crowd, but I didn't seem to fit in anywhere else anyway. The reason I hung out with them is merely that they seemed to accept me as one of their own. I did watch the Saturday night kung fu movie and had a working knowledge of Monty Python, but that was the only touchpoint I had with them. They contributed one lasting thing to my psyche, however, which was the nickname "The Man With the Flowing Hair". They must have dubbed me this because I was getting a little shaggy; then, as now, I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about how long it had been since my last haircut.

Later, at the end of my high school career, I made the conscious decision to stop cutting my hair. Perhaps I wanted to live up to the only nickname I ever had in high school, or (more likely) I knew that I was about to start moving into the next stage of my life, and was looking make some kind of radical change to mark the occasion.

It's not like I was the only guy around with long hair, of course. This was the tail end of the 80s, and long hair had been the hallmark of rock bands for quite a while. A change was starting, though. I seemed to notice it more as Metallica slowly moved from garage band into the mainstream... hair was changing from a moussed-up symbol of glam excess into a legitimate, serious statement, that rare form of rebellion that can actually be achieved with literally no effort.

I let my hair grow throughout that summer, and by the time I started attending U of M in the fall, it had officially reached the "awkward" stage. It wasn't quite long in the traditional sense of the word, but at least long enough to flip up at the ends, especially when it was humid. I had my student ID picture taken on a rainy day, and it looked like I had done the old 60s trick of using orange juice cans as rollers all around the bottom.

I might have stopped then, but if I was having any second thoughts about my hairstyle, it was dispelled by a fellow student in my freshman English class. His hair was uniformly long and awesome-looking, and it looked like it just grew that way, which I mistakenly thought would happen to mine if I just could get it long enough.

My choice of era to start growing my hair turned out to be fortuitous. In 1991 grunge swept in, making long hair stylish again, and I had a substantial headstart on guys who wanted to look more like Chris Cornell or Eddie Vedder. On a blustery winter day almost two years after I had started consciously growing it, I was walking through a passage between two university buildings, and a gust of wind blew my hair so that it got stuck in the corner of my mouth for the first time.

After that, I realized I wanted to give it some sort of shape instead of just letting it grow wild, so I decided to keep the front trimmed just enough to make it look like it was long and swept back. Here I made my second possibly mistaken assumption: that it wouldn't look like a mullet. That hairstyle had already been moved into mainstream consciousness by Mr. Billy Ray Cyrus, but hadn't yet become synonymous with "redneck". I don't think my choice of style went that far, but I was probably walking a dangerously fine line.

Nobody at home seemed to object to my choice, which in retrospect seems strange. I never heard a negative word from my parents, grandparents, or girlfriend. In fact, my younger brother took a stab at growing his out similarly, for a while. Maybe they knew better than I did that I was looking for a kind of handle for my identity. The beginning of college is a bewildering time for everyone, trying to find your bearings in a situation that is so alien (and alienating) than anything you've known before...

But through those college years, and even after, my long hair was my calling card. There were only one or two other guys in the Men's Glee Club (my only social circle) that had similarly long hair. I suppose it gave me a little boost of confidence when, standing along with up to sixty other identically-dressed men, I had something that made me somewhat unique.

I kept the hairstyle for over ten years, all the way up until the summer of 1999. I had been silently thinking about it for a week or two, when I turned to that girlfriend who had been so supportive and in the interim had become my wife, and said, "I think I'm ready to get rid of this." She made an appointment for me with her hairdresser, and I had it done. I didn't get it as short as I currently have it, but back to my high school length. It was another five years (and a little bit more thinning) before I switched to the length I have now.

Looking back at it now, I'm noticing how my hairstyle choice then actually fits into my current personal philosophy, which must have been forming back then even though I wasn't aware of it. In my search for a way to visually define myself, I was stating that I didn't think there was anything else particular noticeable about myself.

This philosophy has two seemingly contradictory sides: first, that every person is utterly, entirely unique; and second, that no one is particularly special. It's this second part that seems to go against the grain of everything we're taught in Western society, so let me see if I can explain my thoughts on it a little more fully... It's a given that each of us is an almost infinitely complex tapestry of genetics and experience. We're dropped into a particular time, a particular place, and particular circumstances that we have no choice about. And all things being equal, none of us holds a particularly privileged place in any of it.

Think of all the people in your life, spread out around you in a sort of bulls-eye pattern. Everyone's is different, but for example, say that closest to you is your family: kids, spouse, siblings, parents. Moving farther out are your closest friends, then an ever-widening circle of less familiar friends, acquaintances, ranging all the way out to people you might have spoken to once. Now consider that you are also represented somewhere in the patterns of everyone else in your pattern. It's this change from ego-centric to omni-centric thinking that should make you realize how peripheral you are in almost everyone's life but your own.

I'm not saying that as individuals we're unimportant. In fact, I'm saying that we're all equally important. When you stop thinking that other people are inherently better or worse than you, a whole raft of possibilities become open to you. 90% of what you think you can't do is actually within your reach. It's really just a matter of application, what you're willing to put yourself through to get there. The trick is finding your natural talents and following them.

I think this pursuit of something to physically distinguish themselves is really people looking to find their "thing", the hook that makes them easily recognizable. For some it's a particular profession, for others it's a pop cultural obsession, or in my case, a hairstyle. There's a comfort in knowing something definite in a mass of humanity that are all headed in different directions.

I really wasn't aware of an ulterior motive for letting my hair grow at the time, but clearly I had one. I thought I needed something to make me memorable, when really it was my thoughts and actions that I should have been focusing my attention on. It took ten years for me to have the confidence let go of that particular piece of vanity.

So, did it ultimately work for me? Did I really gain anything by growing out my hair? Well, the answer is yes and no. While I think I did garner a certain amount of confidence from it, I don't think there's one positive experience or personal connection that I made with anyone that was at all influenced by it. As we all should eventually learn, you're not defined by your defining characteristic.

Aaron's Top 10 Influential Albums

Lately I've seen folks on Facebook posting lists of their "ten most influential" albums. The idea is that you're supposed to not think about it too much, just scrape off what floats to the top of your mind when you think of your formative musical years. The stuff you loved, the stuff you know backwards and forwards, the stuff that turned you down a different musical path. But when I read my friends' posts, all it did was make me wonder how they came up with their lists... what made that album so special? And how did it affect what they listened to next? I figured I could do what I wanted my friends to do. I tried to figure out exactly *why* and *how* those albums informed my tastes in the years to come. So here we go -- and I put them in chronological order, because that's how it should be:

1. ABBA - Greatest Hits (1977). Current music was kind of lacking in the house I grew up in. My parents had a stack of pop 45s they had accumulated through the 50s and 60s, of course, but they hadn't really jumped onto the rock-LP bandwagon. Most of the full albums on the shelf had to justify their presence by being designed as longer-form works -- namely, classical music and Broadway musicals. Three notable exceptions to this were Neil Diamond, Barry Manilow, and ABBA. And while I make no apologies for my Fanilowism, what's really remained most fresh in my mind is the Swedish quartet that was once offered one *billion* dollars to mount a reunion tour (they declined, for some reason). I think the reason it does, is that it was a logical pop continuation of the full-orchestration trend that classical and musicals had already set me up for. An ABBA single is full of harmonies, wide washes of sound, and seemingly every instrument they happened to have lying around the studio. Few of their songs sound much alike, and it instilled in me a tendency to pay close attention to other style-hopping kitchen-sink-including artists (see: ELO, late-era Beatles, Jellyfish, Arcade Fire, Janelle Monae, and almost every other artist further down this list).

2. The Police - Synchronicity (1982). This was the first cassette that was bought when my brother got a boom box for his tenth birthday, and we conspired to take full control of our listening habits. "Every Breath You Take" was ubiquitous at the time, but I think I was more interested in the thrashier "Synchronicity II" and its accompanying apocalypse-of-garbage video. What we discovered, though, was a varied record of surreal randomness, bouncing from the obvious radio hits to the Middle-Eastern freakout of "Mother" and the the jazz-leaning "O My God". It was a gateway album for all manner of unapologetic weirdness that I loved during the 80s, and still try to seek out today.

3. Asia - Alpha (1983). For the first ten years of my pop musical education, MTV was the beginning and end. Even now, I'm stumbling across unknown (to me, anyway) aspects of what else was going on in music at the time. With this kind of televised tunnel vision, I was frequently exposed to musicians who had already enjoyed long, storied careers, but with no context I accepted them as just as new as everything else I was hearing. I had no idea who prog-rock titans such as Yes, King Crimson, and ELP were yet, much less that it had taken various members of those groups to form "supergroup" Asia. All I knew was that I loved their expansive sound, the way Geoff Downe's stacks of keyboards and Steve Howe's thrashy guitar sensibilities balanced and spun off of Carl Palmer's thundering drums. It all came together to sound gloriously *huge*. By the time I heard the orchestra come in at the end of their massive ballad "The Smile Has Left Your Eyes", I was sold. Talk to folks who knew me in high school, and you'll learn that this one rarely left the little cassette-holding pocket in the door of my Honda Civic. One of the best closing tracks ever, "Daylight", still gives me goosebumps.

4. Judas Priest - Defenders of the Faith (1984). If you're twelve and starting to learn about heavy metal, JP ain't a bad place to start. Following my predetermined M.O., their influence is due to the way they could fill an arena with sound (Two lead guitarists! *Two*!), but for the first time I also was fascinated with the edginess of the lyrics (single entendre "Eat Me Alive" and the chilly vampire-as-metaphor ode "Love Bites" come immediately to mind). This was the first album where I sat down, put the headphones on and actually tried to figure out how they were doing what they were doing, through repetitious study. Seriously, give me a tennis racket, and I can still air-hammer every one of those Downing/Tipton crossfire guitar solos.

5. Level 42 - World Machine (1985). I've already talked in a different blog entry about how I first came to hear Level 42, but looking back, I can now see that it also changed the way I listen to music, and by that I mean how I *physically* listen to music. Now, if you don't mind my setting the Wayback Machine a little, you'll recall that cassettes had two sides, and had to be flipped and rewound/fast-forwarded appropriately if you wanted to listen to something on the other side. The lead single, "Something About You" was the first track on side 1, but the tipping point of deciding to shell out the cash to buy the album came when I heard the first song on side 2, "Hot Water". So for a while after buying it, my brother or I would play "something About You", flip it over, rewind to the beginning of side 2, and listen to "Hot Water". Repeat ad nauseum. After a while, we'd get tired or distracted and let the tape roll farther and farther into the respective sides before turning it over, and that was when I found that the second songs on both sides were good, too. And then the thirds. And the fourths. To this day, I still feel that I've listened to the first track on this album about twice as many times as the last. But this process made me more inclined to look beyond what singles were being hyped, beyond the videos and into what I think are still referred to as "deep cuts". There's much more risk and reward, I found, in discovering things for yourself. It was the first little break in the headlock MTV had me in.

6. They Might Be Giants - Lincoln (1988). Ironically, it was MTV that made me fully realize that there was music out there that it wasn't telling me about. Late on Sunday nights, the show 120 Minutes would play "college radio" videos that wouldn't get played at any other time. It's where I saw XTC's "Dear God" for the first time (as outlined in another blog entry) and also where I discovered "Ana Ng", the opening track from TMBG's second album. The next day, I bought the cassette (I think I made a quick detour into a record store while Christmas caroling downtown with my high school choir) and listened. This album broke so many rules... there should be ten songs at most, not eighteen! Songs need to be around four minutes, not two (there's only one song that tops out at well over three)! Songs shouldn't take left turns and play bridges that seemed totally unrelated! In the span of 40 minutes, TMBG handed me sushi-proportioned bites of rock, jazz, samba, military marches, and even a Christmas song, thereby upending everything that seven years of televised pop indoctrination had drilled into me. I still love them for that.

7. XTC - Oranges and Lemons (1989). Everyone has that one album that defines their high school years, and this is mine. Even if it hadn't been the shared soundtrack of my and Amy's early relationship, I would still have been entranced by it. I listened to it so much that I haven't actually played it in years. I know it so thoroughly that I think I'd just end up listening to it on autopilot. Maybe if I put enough time between me and it, I can experience it somewhat anew when I finally return to wander across Andy Partridge's chrome-plated Technicolor soundscape. Until then, I can at least acknowledge how good it felt to find an album so finely tuned to my spirit. It's somewhat contradictory in its style, utterly cohesive in its variance, a surprisingly upbeat collection considering that it contains songs like "Here Comes President Kill Again" and "Cynical Days". Maybe that's because it's bookended by the psychedelic explosion of "The Garden of Earthly Delights" and the introspective, soaring "Chalkhills and Children". Both are songs that marvel at the breadth and depth of the world, but in totally different ways. Splattered everywhere in between is wordplay, immaculate production, and hooky songcraft. It's like all the music I heard in the 80s was leading up to this.

8. Fishbone - The Reality of My Surroundings (1991). It's hard to come up with a better album opening... a multiplied, distorted voice intones what I think is "We will save you now!", followed with a spinning guitar hook that keeps repeating over and over, picking up speed until it smashes into the opening riff of "Fight The Youth". You know you're listening to a great album when there just about every other track would also be an equally epic opener. Honestly, every song here (except the live, silly, and kind of icky "Babyhead") can do no wrong. It's political, it's celebratory, it's punk and gospel and thrash and funk and jazz all rolled into one sparkling package, albeit with sharp edges. Fishbone taught me something that I didn't realize through much of the formal, studio-pristine eighties... music that's fueled by exuberance and enthusiasm is *so* much better.

9. Prince - The Gold Experience (1995). Prince is magic. This we know. But when I take a look back over the advanced-to-expert level of completion I have of his music, this album stands out the tallest. Not bad, considering it was a contractually obligated release (and thus marked not under his given name, but his rebellious 0)+> symbol). With songs strung together by a loose concept of "The Dawn", which is apparently some kind of virtual reality jukebox, he dives headlong into his id-vs.-ego shenanigans with a shot of adrenaline he hadn't had since Diamonds and Pearls. He starts with the 1-2 punch of "P Control" and "Endorphinmachine", and doesn't let up much until the closing number "Gold", in which he takes the spirit of his excellent earlier song "The Cross" and cranks it up to 10. I could just write a list of why every song on this album is awesome, but I'll spare you. I'll just say that it could just as easily be called "The Human Experience", because it ranges from the profane to the sacred, from isolation to connectedness, and the whole time glows under its own power. This is what artists do when they buck the system and become beholden to no one but themselves.

10. Bjork - Homogenic (1999). There's something to be said for an artist who finally cracks the code of what their true voice should be, and you can actually hear that happening to Bjork here. It's appropriate that she opens the album with "Hunter", where the refrain "I'm going hunting" means more than just looking for someone to love... it's looking for inspiration, a new way of existing. Up until this point, Bjork had sort of been comfortably defined by her Iceland-pixie image, with songs that were menacing and silly in equal measure. But on this album, she dives so much deeper... Here's my theory about it. I could be totally wrong, but I think all these love songs are her singing to *herself*. When she says, "You lift me up to a state of emergency" or "This is an alarm call, so wake up, wake up now," when she sings of love unravelling in one song and being woven back together in another, she's being self-reflective, issuing a personal challenge to accept and love herself right before our ears. Don't believe me? Then consider the video that Chris Cunningham made of the final track, the ethereal "All Is Full of Love". It features two china-and-chrome robots kissing each other in slow motion, and both have Bjork's face. Knowing this, these songs ring even more deeply, and show me how the right music can reveal a person's soul.

After the turn of the century, things get fuzzy. Of course, it's hard to pick an album that you've lived with for less than ten years and analyze how it's influenced you. If it's done its job, if it's burrowed its way into your soul and taken up permanent residence, guiding you along the path of your personal future, it takes more time than that. But while there are always new paths to explore, your past will always inform your present as much as you let it. Choose wisely and forge ahead.

Of Pendulums and Progress

We live in a world of uncertainty. We're never quite sure what's going to happen when we open our doors in the morning. And that's why we cling so tightly to things that seem like known quantities, sure things, done deals. And yet, underlying all this is the knowledge that there really is no certainty about anything. There's nothing we have that can't be swept away on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday.

The world itself can change on a dime as random influences swirl and converge around us. There are two ways of coping with this: you can either build a rigid structure of understanding around you, shoehorning everything you believe into one immutable sense of Truth, or you can accept that you don't know everything and forge an adaptable mindset.

There seems to be more sense in the latter, at least for me. There's a strength that comes from accepting that there are things that you don't know. When you think about it, many of the great institutions we have are based on that principle. Take the United States itself, for instance... it's explicitly worked into the government that anything up through and including the Constitution itself can be amended and changed as the times call for it.

The smartest thing the Founding Fathers did was admit that they weren't smart enough to know everything. They knew they were striking out into new territory, and where they believed monarchy had failed them. They dove back into history, looking to past democracies like the Greece of Plato and Aristotle, wedding it to their secular Masonic beliefs and imagery, and crafting something entirely new -- a self-aware democracy that could adapt to meet whatever undreamt-of situations the future could throw at it.

Recently, I heard someone in an interview talking about the frustrating, never-ending push and pull of our government's process. It seems that every few years we enact some new legislation that is immediately opposed on multiple judicial levels. This new legislation sometimes gets overturned, only to be introduced again, over and over, until it either finally gets through or fades into obscurity. I've been frustrated about this in the past, too. It seems like no-brainer advances are always met by those who don't want change, fear it or fear the often-imaginary "slippery slope" that it will inevitably lead to.

The point that this interviewer brought up was really enlightening... he said that the interminable back and forth was *the* *very* *point* that the Founding Fathers meant to build into their new government. They meant for there to be debate, trial and error, not too much power falling into anyone's hands. The pendulum is designed to swing, but eventually tend toward the will of the people. That actually made me feel better about the state of our current government… until I realized there's a caveat to the whole thing.

This ongoing debate, and eventual settling of things on the right path, works as long as everyone goes into it with good intentions and a spirit of compromise. The sad fact is that there are factions in our government today who are not entering the process in this manner.

Who are these people? They are the ones who are beholden to their own personal Truth. They base their political decisions on the contention that they hold the moral and ethical high ground and are unwilling to budge their position, even if the majority of people think otherwise. Usually, this unwillingness takes the form of holding back progressive legislation, expansion of human rights, dealing with climate change, etc. Some of these paradigm shifts are costly but necessary, such as moving away from reliance on fossil fuels. But the backers of these political figures usually owe their livelihood (and often, multi-generational fortunes) to the old infrastructure.

At its root, this disruption of the intended use of representational democracy stems from the belief that only a small group has the insight into what is true, and what the destiny of the country should be. Often, this consists of rolling back the expansion of rights to people who truly need them, strengthening the bastions of what has propelled us forward in the past, regardless of how the world is changing around us.

Look, I understand the attraction of a belief system that says that everything will be fine. Here's what is true, it says, it's been true since the beginning of time, and it always will be. But that's not how anything in the Universe works. Everything is in a stage of either growth or decay, and that's as true of ethics as it is of planetary systems. The natural state of everything, like it or not, is to be in flux, to be changing from one thing into another. Survival means accepting and incorporating the randomness of life.

For an example of how these two ideologies are butting heads, take a look at climate change. Here are two opposing sides, the scientific community, who has reached a consensus that global temperatures are rising and that human activity is responsible, and political conservatives, who claim that there isn't a consensus and that more studies need to be done.

This is where the scientific method has trouble. Its beauty lies in that it is, by definition, accepting of change. If someone came along with one proven instance where gravity works differently than we always thought it did, we'd have to set aside the old ideas of Newton and Einstein and modify our thinking, with a hearty "thank you" to the mind that corrected our errant path. This is true of any part of objective science.

The trouble comes in because of the very constant of uncertainty that makes it so noble. If someone who doesn't want climate change to be true comes along and says, "Are you 100% sure that we're responsible for it?" a scientist would have to say "no". Which would lead to the naysayer to state, "Well, then let's not change anything we're doing, then! How can we make informed decisions when we don't have *all* the facts?"

But the truth is that we'll *never* have all the facts, not until what is predicted actually happens. And there will *always* be a few people who think they know better than everyone else -- not that it's impossible for some against-the-grain eccentric to be right once in a while, but that just proves my point. It's not physically or ideologically possible for us to have an iron-clad scientific certainty of anything. That is what has led us to all the scientific achievements we've made, from the quantum tunneling in your smart phone to the software in GPS systems that accounts for the warping of spacetime. If we believed that we knew everything there was to know, we could dust off our hands and kick back until the end of time.

This is the war that's being silently (and sometimes not-so-silently) waged in our country today... between those who understand that we don't know everything and those who can't accept that. Unfortunately, the latter group tends to fall into two factions... the heads of large corporations whose livelihoods and legacies depend on keeping the status quo of pulling energy out of the ground, and religious zealots who believe that either God will intervene before we destroy the world or that we're in the End of Days anyway.

These two groups, the most vocal (and therefore most powerful) in politics today are up against scientists, who in general would rather be left to make their discoveries rather than brave the Beltway to state their case.

So these are the forces at play in this push-and-pull designed by our political forefathers... a softspoken band of liberal thinkers, questioning old ways, exploring the fringes of reality and the consequences of our actions on Nature (and vice versa); and a raucous tribe of why-fix-what's-not-yet-broken conservatives whose monetary and spiritual livelihoods are dependent on certain things being true, even if the evidence is to the contrary.

In a battle like this, who can win? And even if the eternally-swinging political pendulum can continue to usher us toward a more responsible, workable world, will it swing fast enough? No matter what the answers to these questions are, the reality is that we, ironically, have to lose our love of finding ultimate answers. We need to stop determining what we think is true before we see the evidence.

It may seem scary to step back and question what you've always believed is true. But it has to be done, in order to move things forward. One of my favorite people, Neil de Grasse Tyson, recently said something that might help ease the transition. When asked what to do when faced with the inherent ambiguity of the scientific process, when you're faced with questions that you know you're never going to find the ultimate, final answer to, he said "You must learn to love the questions themselves."

I'd go Neil one step further, with my own interpretation of what I think he's saying... you need to love the process of learning more than what the answer is going to get you in the end. It's the only way to stay on the path to the Truth.

The Heroes We Choose

I know it's hardly a new bit of psychological insight, but you can tell a lot about a culture by the stories it tells. Right now, the most interesting part of Western pop culture is the evolution of the superhero, particularly the way it's been moving toward the rise of the antihero (see: Tony Soprano, Walter White, etc.). I could go on about that subject, and probably will at some point, but right now I want to take a look at the heroes themselves.

Our culture is entering a unique position where superheroes are omnipresent, and at the same time we're struggling to find our place in a changing world. Superman has always stood for "Truth, Justice, and the American Way", but the definition of all three of those things has started getting fuzzy around the edges. That's why our superheroes have been getting more internally conflicted. At the same time, there's also a need to amp up the excitement surrounding any one particular hero, and this usually comes in the form of greater and greater superpowers -- it's the easiest way to cut through the noise and grab people's attention.

But when a hero's power makes him more and more invulnerable, the conflict similarly has to be increasingly internalized. This thought came to my head when I recently watched Star Trek: Into Darkness. While the experience was enjoyable at the time, I was surprised at how soon the buzz went away. It got me thinking about how "genre fiction" -- and by that I mean everything from sci-fi to fantasy to superheroes -- doesn't really work unless the struggle has some sort of metaphorical aspect to it along with the cool powers and amazing technology.

The thing that was revolutionary about the original Star Trek show was that Gene Roddenberry created little morality plays in each episode. In a 23rd century where racism, class, poverty, and war had been abolished, the alien cultures that the Enterprise crew encountered all obliquely reflected the struggles that Earth of the 1960s was going through.

But there was nothing like that in Into Darkness. The villain, a genetically manipulated human named Khan, lightly skipped around the whole prospect of eugenics ethics that the original series (and subsequent movie) put front and center, and he became merely a pawn in the real villain's plan. Not only that, but most of the fun of the movie seemed designed to be the "ooh, that's different than the original!" game. That's why I think Into Darkness will eventually be regarded as a "good" Trek movie, not a "great" one.

But like I said, it got me thinking... how does this power-vs.-morality idea find its balance? When does it work, and when does it fail? Here are the first four heroes I could think of with near-God-like powers, and how successfully they've all fared:

1. In the most recent Superman film, Man of Steel, director Zack Snyder flipped the script on us: we were given a hero with no weaknesses meeting with moral challenges that most audiences believed that he failed (which, after all is said and done, was maybe the point). Superman used to represent the American ideal, strong to the point of dominating. I'm sure Snyder thought that, in an era where we're questioning America's place in an increasingly egalitarian world, this unsurety about whether we still are (or should be) perpetually on top should be reflected. Clearly, America wasn't ready for such a drastic reinvention of its most enduring avatar.

2. Wolverine (from X-Men): While not having powers as god-like as the others on this list, Wolverine is pretty close to indestructible (remember that his only real superpower is that his body can heal incredibly fast... the addition of his adamantine skeleton and retractable claws are only a scientific exploitation of that), but he has a lot of angst. He's looking for his place in the world, and in this way is like all the other X-men... he's a man, but just different enough to feel like an outsider. This superpower-as-otherness has been used as a metaphor for civil rights, gay rights, and variously as whatever social group is working its way to acceptance in mainstream society (if that term even means anything anymore). This is why it works so well. And now that there are seven movies featuring the character, it's clear that the public identifies with him in some deep way.

3. Neo (from The Matrix): I think everyone agrees that once Neo mastered his powers inside the Matrix, the movie franchise lost its appeal. And it's true: there's no dramatic tension if a hero has basically no limitation on his powers. As time wore on in the trilogy, the only way to make things interesting was to give him more and more powerful (or numerous) adversaries, and think up new ways to delay him while his slightly-less-powerful friends were in danger. It was actually really interesting to observe how moviegoers saw themselves in him when he had a little power, and were almost completely alienated from him when he got a lot.

4. Dr. Manhattan: In the Watchman graphic novel and film (ironically, which was also directed by Zack Snyder), this is a hero who used to be human, but was torn apart by a nuclear blast. He somehow managed to reconstruct himself, and reappeared as a bald, blue humanoid with complete control over time and space. He exists in all moments at once, and can be in multiple places at once (much to the frustration of his girlfriend), but has lost his essential humanity in translation. He's entirely disconnected from earthly life, although he tries to approximate it because he dimly remembers who he used to be. When he's not creating amazing new technologies in his lab, he's endlessly (and often randomly) wandering the Universe, contemplating his existence. He wants to engage with us, but it's like one of us trying to live among ants. In terms of character, there's actually an improvement in the film adaptation, where he sacrifices himself for the good of humanity, (although only figuratively because he's immortal).

With all these characters, as the power embodied in an individual ramps up, the importance of their moral decisions has to do the same, or else there's an imbalance. If popularity with the American public can be an accurate barometer, Wolverine and Dr. Manhattan have got it right, where Neo and Superman (at least in his current incarnation) have not.

It's an old story... the fantastical heroes and villains we see on our screens and read in our literature reflect what we respectively see and fear in ourselves. In past generations, Dracula embodied everything we were afraid of about sex, religion, disease, and mortality (all at once, which is why he's still such a potent character after 150 years). Gojira and all the other giant monsters of the 50s were the nuclear threat incarnate. Batman is our belief in philanthropy and personal power. Iron Man is our faith in technology and capitalism. Spiderman is our adolescent awkwardness, albeit inverted into amazing abilities.

I think this is why superheroes loom so large on our collective creative landscape now, and why they don't seem ready to go away any time soon. But they only hit their stride when they take our internal conflicts and turn them into exterior threats to grapple with. In the past, a superhero was someone who demonstrated how to use power. Now, we're going deeper... not only are we trying figuring out what it means to have power in the first place, we are also examining who it turns us into, and the price we pay for it.

Disorientation

Right before MLK's birthday, I found myself thinking about one of my formative experiences with discrimination, and thought it was time that I wrote it down and figured out exactly what I think about it. It wasn't about me being discriminated against, exactly, nor was it me discriminating against someone else. It was more of a sudden awareness I was given about what a tricky and personal issue it is.

In 1989, as I graduated high school, I was waitlisted for the University of Michigan (and if I remember correctly, it was the only school I applied to). I found out rather late in the year that I had actually made it in. I then went through a blur of getting ready, taking their orientation program, and signing up for classes, which involved a lot of leafing through paper catalogs and waiting in lines -- this was the 80s, after all.

It all went by so quickly that I don't remember a lot of the experience, except for one particular part of the orientation program. This is only because it left me with a strange feeling of unease that lasts to this day, almost perfectly balanced by an inability to process exactly why I was so uneasy.

It was a seminar about tolerance, led by a college student who couldn't have been more than a year or two older than the prospective freshmen he was talking to. We discussed our previous issues with discrimination, and I found that I didn't really have anything to relate. I guess this is because I had experienced such extremes in terms of diversity in the places I had lived. I had attended an elementary school in Ohio that had *just* admitted its first black student (due to the homogeneity of the surrounding neighborhood), and by middle school I was living in a college town that people from all over the world brought their families to. I'd never really lived in the middle ground where people of different colors and backgrounds don't really know what to do with each other.

Near the end of the session, we took part in an exercise... our discussion leader had us all stand in a line along one end of the room. Then, he would ask us to step forward if we belonged to a particular minority group. "Now," he said, "step forward if you're homosexual". And with that, he stepped forward. This eventually prompted another two or three people in our group of twenty-five to move forward to join him.

"Now, step forward if you're of Asian descent," he said, and a few more people stepped forward. "Now, step forward if you're African-American." A few more people. He continued through a list of races, colors, and creeds, and the thing that struck me most about the process was that, as he worked his way through the permutations of human heritage, no group name he called out ever applied to me. By the time he was done, only I and one white girl were still standing against the wall.

The seminar leader wrapped up this informal anthropological study by declaring, "You see? The majority of us are part of some kind of minority!" Which was all well and good, but I suddenly felt rather isolated, not having been given any kind of reason to step forward.

I kept waiting for the leader to say something to the two of us who had been left behind, but he never did. He acted as if everyone had stepped forward, and to be honest I'm sure he would have been happier if we all had, driving his point even further home. Of course, later on I would realize that I should have raised my hand and asked exactly what this fact meant for those of us still standing against the wall, but those sorts of things hardly ever come to you in the moment. Instead, I just felt vaguely embarrassed, the seminar wrapped up, and we were sent on to the next stage of orientation.

Two things bothered me about that exercise, and I've been turning it over in my head for more than twenty years now. First of all was the fact that an exercise designed to show how we're all equal left me (and, I assume, that other girl) feeling excluded. Here I was, about to enter the student body of a Big Ten school. I should have been proud and confident, but I had been left feeling unremarkable and without a particular identity. The reality of this had never crossed my mind before. All the people who stepped forward had some sort of defining trait or heritage. I was suddenly lumped into some amorphous "majority" in an exercise that was trying to show that there really was no such thing. Ironically, in trying to eliminate minorities, the exercise had created a new one.

The second thing that bothered me was that I was bothered so much by that feeling. I left wondering if that were part of the point of the exercise... to make me realize how lucky I was, never having had to think of myself as belonging to a particular group or being filed under a particular label. Should I be grateful that society hasn't looked at me and assumed things about me because of something I have no control over? And if that's what I was supposed to take away, why didn't the seminar leader take the time to point that out?

Maybe it was simply a matter of his not going far enough down the list. If the seminar leader had continued, saying things like "Step forward if you're half-Latvian," or "Step forward if you like to write," or "Step forward if you're not even sure that you deserve to go to this school," I could have joined everyone else. That would have made his point that "there is no majority" better. In truth, we're all minorities of one.