"I come from a world made of love....."
Brace yourselves. This is a long one.

I haven't bought music in a very long time.

Not that I haven't tasted new sounds in a long time. As long as I have Rhapsody and music-loving friends with CD burners, I manage to keep growing my collection.

It's just that, like so many other things in my life (books, comics, movies, etc.), my music tastes have become much more selective and specific than they were in the past. There was a time that I bought anything that made me move. Which explains such unfortunate additions to my rack as NORE's "Superthug". Of course, that was back when I was perpetually planning for some mythic house party in the ill-defined future, when having 6 different versions of Luke's "Work It Out" actually made plausible sense.

Now, I'm older and my living room entertaining has become much more, shall we say, personalized. Isaac Hayes and other 70's artists my father can't stand have slowly but surely replaced any and all club anthems and left them for, well, the club.

Interestingly enough, my mother loves Isaac Hayes. They also disagree over Muhammad Ali. Mom loves him from when he was pretty and talked trash, while Dad, missing the obvious similarities between The Greatest of All Time and his good-looking, trash-talking self, merely respects him. But I digress.

Moreover, as a writer and a resident of Los Angeles, my regular habits play a much bigger place in my musical appetites, and, unfortunately, Nelly rarely makes music I want to drive to and never makes music I want to write to.

I look for music that inspires.

Frank Sinatra for the magic of New York City.

Godsmack for the horror that hides in your bedroom closet.

New Wave Top 40 from my teenage years for unrequited love.

Roy Ayers for the agelessness of the Motherland.

The point, of course, is that I already own or can access most of these at my leisure, some from other discs and others over the web.

So the fact that I heard an album online, then felt strong enough to buy it here in the real world means a number of things to me.

The album in question is the latest from Meshell Ndegeocello, entitled "Comfort Woman".

If memory serves, comfort women were the daughters of Japan who were pressed into service as sex slaves for the army of the Rising Sun during World War II. And my sense of the album is that the title is oddly poetic and totally appropriate. It seems to both acknowledge and still revel in the shackles that love seems to place on us - our willingness to plunge into the deep end of another human soul and let it mingle with our own, sometimes even at the risk of drowning.

Because the world is hot and the water is just so very, very cool.

I'm especially fond of "Love Song #2", where she says:


So happy I'm here
Born on a black star
I've come so far
To give you love
Beautiful, beautiful love
Beyond the stars
Is where I'm from
Come with me
We can live in love

I come from a world made of love
I want to take you there
I come from a world made of love
I want to take you there
We can fly butterflies

Don't leave
Stay
Stay with me
Say you love me
Look in my eyes
I love you
I just want to love you
With beautiful, beautiful love



Which brings me to the real issue at hand, namely love.

A new friend recently told me that she didn't like Male R&B, because she thought most of it was bullshit. "Let's Get It On" she could handle, because she felt like it just cut to the chase. Anything beyond that, to her, was simply a lie that men tell to lasso ass.

Which is interesting to me on two levels. On the first level, in my opinion, most contemporary Male R&B, populated with the likes of Justin Timberlake, Genuwine, R. Kelly, and the rest of their cohorts, seem to be pretty crude and direct about their intentions ("I wanna rock your body", "You owe me", "You remind me of my jeep...I wanna ride it."). On the second level, it sounds like she's presuming that no man is ever actually sincere when he professes to love a woman.

I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm a fan of Male R&B. But, as my good buddy in Harvard Square likes to say, I am a "'sucka for love".

Maybe because I was raised by two people who can't seem to agree on music or old-school fighters or what movies to watch or how much they love church or any number of things they don't have in common, but still manage to stay silly and lovey-dovey after 43 years of marriage.

Maybe because the sight of a 70 year old widow, beaming as she walking down the aisle in a no-frills burgundy dress to marry a 70 year old widower was, without a doubt, the single most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my entire life.

Maybe because I'm an obsessive movie fan and I've internalized the Hollywood notion of the happy ending.

Whatever the reason, the fact of the matter is I believe in love. Love in all its forms.

My aunt once told me that she didn't know what unconditional love was until the day that she became a grandmother. A very good friend of mine said that he really considered the full ramifications of the idea that God loves him, no matter what he's done, and that it nearly brought him to tears.

But if we don't ever think to question the love between a parent and a child, or of a worshipper for their God, or of a patriot for his country, or among old friends, how did romance become so farfetched?

I'm sure it begins with sex. After all, our bodies are very much like a recording device. And no matter how much you love mama's home cooking, it doesn't quite leave the same mark in your memory as looking into someone else's eyes as you both share a moment of ecstasy. Even the most delicate kiss is looped on our lips and our hearts a thousand times more than any dap you receive from your boys. Someone once told me how she once got it so good that she actually shed tears of joy amidst her screams of passion. We never forget the things that make us cry.

And yet, offering our bodies is far easier than our hearts. In fact, I suspect there are many people who'd sooner have sex with someone to distract them from actually looking at who they really are (or who they THINK they really are) on the inside. As if helping someone achieve an orgasm will make them stop asking all those annoying questions about your interior life.

Romantic love is the only kind of love that operates in two dimensions.

And sometimes, even more than that, because beyond our hearts and bodies, there's also history. How many relationships have had the seeds of their destruction sown years before when a child couldn't escape the unspeakable appetites of a fiendish adult, or the rubberstamping of violence in their parents' relationships, or the hard choices forced upon them through their responsibilities to their own children, or the complication of an STD, and so on, and so on, and so on...

But does the fact that the equations are more complex mean that they're simply unsolvable? No, but they are harder, and I think many simply give up. They just ignore one variable in the equation and stick with the easy one, because it's simply not that hard to sleep with someone (or someones) you don't love.

Of course, I personally don't believe you can ever completely ignore the other half of the equation. Your body is still recording the experiences. They still have more meaning than last night's steak. Those who delude themselves into thinking it's just an endurance sport do so at their peril.

And let's be honest for a moment. For each and every person who talks about how cynical they are, about how much they don't believe love exists, and that all men are dogs, and that they don't love these hoes, and all the other crap we tell ourselves to make it OK that we aren't getting the love we really want, there was probably someone, somewhere, sometime, who made them float on air. Someone who made them want to call every single person they've ever known in their entire lives to tell them just how absolutely grand they've made them feel, body and soul. Every last one of them has had at least a taste of love. They're just mad that they were only given the sampler before they were kicked out of the restaurant.

And this applies to both men and women. Every dog was once just a precocious little boy who had his heart broken and then decided he'd have to teach every other girl a lesson for what the first one did to him. Does it excuse his behavior? Of course not.

But when the Dramatics say they want to go outside in the rain so she can't see them cry, or Teddy Pendegrass says he's been thinkin'-thinkin'-thinkin', and then started drinkin'-drinkin'-drinkin' because he missed her, or Earth Wind and Fire asked if she minded if they touched, if they kissed, if they held her tight 'til the morning light, I know for a fact that they are speaking SOMEONE'S truth, even if it's not their own.

On the other hand, I'm saddened that I have to reach back at least 15 years to find a preponderance of songs by men talking about more than just "I'm really glad I get to bone you on a regular basis." I'm sickened by all these stupid falsetto Romeos who have nothing to offer women on wax but a ride in an overpriced car, a good lay, and maybe some really nice jewelry for their troubles. And that fact forces me to at least acknowledge the reality that spawned my friend's lack of faith in love.

I miss the days when more brothers had the stones to actually love women.

At least I'd have some company. :-)

And I really miss the days when more women knew what to do with love when they actually got it.

I guess we're all out of practice. Maybe we need some lessons from the old folks. Hey, if Mom & Dad can do it for four decades, they might be on to something.

Anyway, I love this album, so here's my first truly shameless Amazon.com plug. Buy it. You won't regret it.



And, while I'm on the subject, I'd also like recommend "Salvation: Black People and Love", by bell hooks. I'm sure you can guess it's relevance to the topic of the day.





Click on this freaky green text to speak your own mind on affairs of the heart

The Final Frontier

The Final Frontier
I don't own a Starfleet uniform, which, in my mind, is an important distinction that allows me to plausibly deny that I'm a Trekkie.

But the mere fact that, one time, I actually considered convincing my girlfriend to dress as Lt. Uhura to match my imagined Capt. Kirk costume for Hollywood probably speaks volumes.

Oh, yeah, and I cried at the end of "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan".

I was nine. Shut up.

The point is, I do love Star Trek. Which is why I'm saddened that next year may mark the first time since 1987 that there will be no new episodes of the venerable old space opera. It's unfortunate, because "Star Trek: Enterprise" was actually beginning to find it's groove this season. But, I have to admit, even after great actors like Patrick Stewart and Avery Brooks, and the advances in special effects, nothing can still compare to the value of Gene Roddenberry's original series. Before we all fell down the rathole of scientific technobabble, Roddenberry's show, much like it's dark cult precursor, The Twilight Zone, was a show about ideas.

Big fat ideas like the price of leadership, like the danger of promulgating pragmatism over passion, like man's eternal struggle with his increasing dependence on machines.


Now, people can cast aspersions on William Shatner's acting all they want. I'll simply say the man is a Shakespearean trained stage actor who won big critical acclaim for holding his own along side Spencer Tracey in "Judgment At Nuremberg" and is shockingly good as a white supremacist in the nearly forgotten Roger Corman film "The Intruder". He already has an Emmy nomination for "Third Rock From The Sun", and I think he's going to surprise a lot of people after the last six episodes this season on "The Practice".

Having said all that, I recently found myself singing the praises of my favorite old Star Trek episodes in a long email, so I figured I'd capture them for the viewing pleasure of the Macroscope audience. So, in no particular order:


"Arena"
This is Star Trek's version of "Hell In The Pacific", where Kirk is marooned on a desolate planet by one of the many races of non-corporeal beings the encounter during the course of the show to go mano-a-mano with an alien lizard captain called a Gorn, whom he suspects has just led an attack on a Federation outpost. This episode is probably most famous for Kirk building a cannon that shoots diamonds out of raw deposits of sulfur, coal, and big piece of bamboo. Sort of the precursor to MacGyver.

But I just love the Gorn's dialogue:

"Earthlingggg! Thisssssss is your opponent! I grow weary of the chasssssssse. Wait for me. I promisssssse. I will be merciful, and quick. Captain, you've LOST! ADMIT IT TO YOURSELF!!!"


"The Corbomite Manuever"
Kirk tricks the biggest spaceship in the universe that the Enterprise is boobytrapped and that, if they attack them, both ships will be mutually destroyed. And the aliens actually buy it. Turns out this enormous ship is run by one guy who looks like a six year old. Bluff vs. Bluff. Highlight comes when, as the alien ship is moments away from destroying the Enterprise, Dr. McCoy whispers a threat in Kirk's ear on the bridge that he intends to give the captain a reprimand in his medical log for pushing a junior officer into a nervous breakdown. Kirk, in response, shouts down McCoy - "Any time you can bluff ME, Doctor!...."


"The Man Trap"
McCoy's old college girlfriend is actually a shape-shifting, salt-sucking vampire who beats Spock's ass with one hand before Bones is forced to kill her. Coolest, yet creepiest moment is when the vampire takes the form of an anonymous African crewman and tries to seduce Uhura in Swahili. "'Crewman, do I know you?' 'No ma'am. But you were thinking of someone just like me.'". That's some pimp game, folks.


"What Are Little Girls Made Of?"
Tthey find Nurse Chapel's finance on a subterranean planet with ancient machinery to make android copies of humans. The guy is, of course, completely mad by now and wants to inflitrate the rest of humanity with these androids. Kirk figures out that the real fiance is long dead and that this is actually an android copy trying to be him. Kirk, playing on their confused emotions and ruthless adherence to logic, manages to talk all the androids, including a pre-Adams Family Lurch, into killing each other. This theme appears over and over again in Star Trek, in episodes such as "I, Mudd", "The Changeling", "The Ultimate Computer", and so on. While Kirk is constantly characterized is simply an intergalatic gigolo, the character is actually quite devious and clever. Which I suppose are not mutually exclusive things.


"Balance of Terror"
Kirk fights the Vulcans' distant cousins, the Romulans, for the first time. The Romulans have a cloaking device, so the Enterprise can't see them on their view screen, but the Romulans don't have a view screen, so their forced to use their sensors to try to track the Enterprise. Kirk spends much of the episode matching the Romulan ship move for more so that they think it's just a sensor echo. A real submarine battle in space of sorts.


"The Conscience of the King"
It turns out Kirk is one of a handful of survivors of a massacre on an Earth colony who can actually identify the administrator that ordered mass executions to help ration their dwindling food supply. The administrator may or may not be Anton Karidian, the lead actor in a spacefaring Shakespearean company whose tour coincides with the murders of the other witnesses. Kirk books them on the Enterprise. Once the murders start again, Kirk discovers that Karidian really is "Kodos The Executioner", but he comes to have a grudging understanding of the price that man paid when given the responsibility to solve an impossible situation. In the end, Karidian's daughter, whom Kirk had been seducing (of course), turns out to be the real killer, hoping to silence anyone who could finger her father. Karidian screams "Haven't I already enough blood on my hands" before taking the proverbial bullet meant for Kirk and dying at the hands of his mad child. Uncommon as a purely dramatic episode. And quite yummy.


"The Return of the Archons"
Investigating the crash of the Federation ship Archon from 100 years ago, they find an abnormally peaceful, rural planet where everybody is incredibly nice & sweet except for "The Red Hour" - the beginning of an annual festival when they all go simultaneously mad for exactly 24 hours, according to the teachings of their cult leader. But, of course, the cult leader died centuries ago and has left the stewartship of the planet in the hands of, you guessed it, a supercomputer than thinks it's the cult leader. Kirk talks it into self-destructing. I'm not quite sure what the point of that episode was, but the "festival" is a sight to behold. Raping, robbing, killing. A dude literally jumps through a plate glass window, just for shits and giggles. And another just runs around, screaming at the top of his lungs "FESTIVAL! FESTIVAL! FESTIVAL!". And then, when the clock strikes noon the next day, they all just stop on a dime and go about their business. Creepy as hell.


"A Taste of Armageddon"
The Enterprise gets logged as a casualty in an interplanetary war that's fought entirely through simulations on a pair supercomputers networked between the two hostile planets. Rather than destroying their cities and eradicating their cultures with real bombs, they just estimate the damages of a theoretical attack, assign people as casualties, and then ask them to willingly walk into a disintegration chamber so their real deaths can be officially recorded. But since they've made war relatively painless, they've had no reason to stop it, so it's gone on in this sociopathic manner for 500 years. Kirk, who, at this point, almost looks like he has a pathological hatred of computers, destroys the computers to protect the Enterprise crew and forces the two factions to actually sit down at the peace table rather than building real weapons. On the one hand, I'm sure there's a really interesting statement about the Vietnam war there, which can very easily be applied to the video game quality of the '91 Gulf War as well. But I also remember this episode because there's a point where Kirk orders Scotty to implement General Order 24 - a Starfleet code for bombarding the surface of a planet with enough phaser blasts to erase all live and make it uninhabitable for years to come. Roddenberry's original vision of the power of a starship was much grander, and scarier, than it was in later years.


"The Doomsday Machine"
One of the worst special effects makes for one of the most intense episodes. Responding to a distress call, the Enterprise finds the burnt out husk of one of their sister ships, the Constellation, amid the debris field of a planet that's been completly obliterated. The only man left alive is the ships commander, Matt Decker, who's gone off the deep end after he encountered a giant robot ship from outside the galaxy that's preprogrammed to blow up planets and consume the remains as fuel before proceeding to the next planet. Decker had ordered his crew to evacuate to the nearest planet, only to watch the planet-killer devour it. They speculate that it's a leftover from a war long since over, and no one was around to shut it off before it started roaming the cosmos, looking for sustinence. The combined fire power of two starships aren't enough, but Decker, overwhelmed by the guilt of losing his crew, goes on a suicide mission to ram a shuttle craft right into the mouth of the beast. Although Decker dies, it gives Kirk the idea to boobytrap the Constellation to blow up once it's inside the jaws of the planet killer.


"The Enemy Within"
A transporter malfunction splits Kirk into two versions of himself: one rational, caring, yet indecisive; the other, violent, craven, and unafraid to take what he wants. My favorite Star Trek scene of all time: the evil Kirk is in his quarters trying to hide the scratches on his face after he tried to rape Yeoman Rand, when the good Kirk gets on the PA and announces that there's an imposter on board. The evil Kirk flips out and ransacks his own room in a hissy fit, screaming at the top of his lungs "I'm Captain Kirk! I'M Captain Kirk! I - AM - CAPTAIN - KIRRRRRRKKKK!!!!!!".

If you love Shatner's over-the-top acting, this episode is priceless. In my second favorite scene from this episode, the good Kirk faces the evil Kirk in engineering. Good Kirk tries to make nice by telling his twin that he needs him, to which, the evil Kirk just sneers "I - DON'T - NEED - YOU!!!


Of course, there are tons of other gems, like "Charlie X", where an adolescent boy with no social skills but the power to alter reality at his whim, simply marches onto the bridge and brags "I can make you ALL go away! Any time I want to." Or the surreal "Spectre of the Gun", where Kirk & Co. are trapped in a dream world where they must play the losing side in a deadly serious reenactment of the Shootout at the O.K. Corral and Spock must use his telepathy to give the others the mental discipline to deny the reality of the Earp Bros. bullets.

Spock's dialogue ("They are falsehoods. Lies. Shadows, without form or substance. They will not pass through your body, for they - do not - exist.") are strikingly remeniscent of "There Is No Spoon" from "The Matrix".

Of course, even if this is the demise of Scott Bakula's Enterprise, I'm sure it won't be too long before Paramount finds a way to resurrect the property. In the meantime, I suppose I'll have to do my part to bring a show about big ideas back to television.

OK. I'm through indulging now.

Changing Seasons
According to the Observer, the Powers That Be are trying to squash a report commissioned at the Pentagon that current trends in climate change could lead to major ecological disasters as soon as the year 2020. I mean, like "submerged cities" scale disasters. Moreover, the Pentagon report predicts that all these nuclear nonproliferation treaties will be rapidly and heedlessly defenistrated as everyone starts worrying and loves the bomb to protect the little they'll have left as the waters rise.

Let me reiterate - this is coming from the Pentagon.

Of course, the President isn't convinced that global warming & climate change are real.

Oy.

Vey.

Bubble Boy
Remember the good old days of the Roaring '90's, where the only reason to buy stock in Amazon or AOL or Pets.com for that matter was because EVERYBODY else was going to do it, so you knew you could make money off of it?

Some of my more nerd-gastic friends may even remember the comic book speculator market from the early '90's, where it was all about variant card-stock covers gilded in silver that you kept in a hermetically sealed vault. As soon as everybody figured out that Action Comics #1 was now worth an obscene amount of money, comic specialty stores were flooded with speculators who bought up 20 copies of the 10 different versions of New X-Men #1 because they just knew EVERYBODY else was going to want it and they'd be richer than chocolate.

Nevermind that those late '90's stocks were ultimately fools gold because nobody bothered to check the fundamentals of those companies until long after they'd paid obscenely inflated prices for shares. Nevermind that none of the genius comic speculators realized that the only reason why Action Comics #1 is valuable is because it is rare, so buying up a ton of them is a waste of your investment money when the publisher has printed more copies than the King James Bible.

Which brings me to the old adage that your mother should have taught you - "If your friends jumped off a cliff, would you do it too just because everybody else is doing it?"

And that, my friends, is exactly what the Democratic primary electorate is about to do by picking John Kerry as their nominee.

Now, this is less about why Kerry's fundamentals are weak, because that argument can be encapulated in the following sentence: George W. Bush, blithering nincompoop that he is, will embarass Kerry on National TV next fall when he reminds Kerry that he voted for virtually every initiative he'll use to attack Bush (the war, the tax cuts, No Child Left Behind, etc.). Let's not even get into the fact that the words "succinct" and "to the point" are personis non gratis to the Kerry speechwriters, thus eliminating the possibility of a pithy soundbite every night to remind people why George W. Bush is responsible for your growling stomach right now.

No, my real problem is that people are voting for Kerry because they think he's electable.

There goes that word again.

And how are they determining Kerry's electability? Why, by looking at the fact that he won the primary in the previous state. ie. Wisconsin voted for him because Washington did because Virginia did because Missouri did because New Hampshire did because Iowa did.

Think about that. We're all about to pick him because the people of Iowa voted for him. Jesus, man, there are more people on the Sunset Strip on a Saturday night than voted for Kerry in Iowa. Can we all just think about this a bit more, for God's sake?

Kerry is untested under national scrutiny. Dean had more passion. Edwards is a better campaigner. Clark had better credentials. Kerry's like the Serpentor of the Democratic Party - he's got a little bit of everybody mixed in, so people figure he's got to be greater than the sum of his parts. But does a smorgasborg really taste better than a meal that was prepared with a purpose in mind?

Apparently, these guys at The New Republic agree with me, for once.

The Taste of Crow
Bill O'Reilly admits that maybe, just maybe, Bush was wrong about that whole "Iraqi WMDs" thing.

Boy, who knew that ice could form this quickly in Hell?

"I'm Out!"
Randall Robinson, founder of the multicultural advocacy group TransAfrica and outspoken activist in support of heavy duty issues of racial justice like slavery reparations and corporate hegemony in the African continent, has, quite frankly, had enough of your shit, America.

And, with that, he is Quitting America, as he describes in his new book (which you can buy for yourself by clicking the nifty red text). "Quitting" as in, leaving for the greener pastures of his wife's native St. Kitts, much like W.E.B. DuBois broke out on the U.S. of A. for Ghana after nearly a 100 years of trying to tell white people about themselves.

Quite honestly, I can't say I blame either of them. There are days when Toronto sounds real appealing.

But, personally, I don't think he should give the Powers-That-Be the satisfaction of running him out of town. Africa may be where our roots are, but America is our country. After all, we built this crap with our bare hands. I'll be damned if I let somebody exploit me and then tell me to get out. How about "kiss my ass"? How does that work for you, Mr. Powers-That-Be?

I'm reminded of Cedric the Entertainer in The Original Kings of Comedy:
"White people think they're just gonna leave us all back here. If y'all go to the moon, damnit, WE ARE GOIN' TO THE MOON."