Time, my very favorite newsweekly, is finally giving some mainstream press to an issue that I've found interesting for a long time: namely, the relative quickness with which my generation has become nostalgic for a childhood with which we are not yet entirely done living in the first place. Time's article is mostly focused on those VH1I Love The.... programs, but the issue extends to beyond which disposable TV shows we like to watch, it also encapsulates nearly everything we consider our culture, from the Internet sites we love to visit to our favourite t-shirts and stores at which we shop. Even our most daring young authors are pontificitating about a not-so long-lost youth. Hell, today I read that a GI Joe live action movie is being made -- something that didn't even happen when GI Joe was popular.

Time pays a little face time to the phenomenon, but I think they get the diagnosis wrong. Instead of attributing the fact that Xers are more quickly nostalgic than Boomers to some murky malarky about having experienced "more media cycles", I think the true answer lies in the fact that Xers are damaged by being marketed to at a very early age. From a very early age, our generation was subjected to constant consumerisim. Ours was the first generation to be marketed to as a consumer demographic, and, as a result, the first generation to have it hardwired into our heads that happiness is a bowl of Crunch Berries, an Optimus Prime action figure, or a New Kids on the Block poster. Is it any wonder than once we realized that the world was shitty and no matter how many products we buy, that Golden Land of Consumer Happiness promised by the "messages" between the Saturday Morning cartoons (and, of course, in cases like GI Joe and Transformers the cartoons themselves) is just a myth, it is no wonder we want to surround ourselves with artifacts of a simpler time, reminders of an age when what you wanted was something you could have.

You are one seriously laid back, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants kind of guy. Even when you've just gambled away $9000 of your boss's money, you still manage to maintain your cool. Always ready with some pseudo-intellectual response, people take pause even when they're about to rip your head off. But beneath the placid exterior and quick-witted, quasi-insightful demeanor, you really have no idea what your doing.

About as self-revealing as my Enneagram type.

So, my beloved Blockbuster Video is being sued by some parents who had rented a tape of Home Alone 3 for their child. Rather than sue for allowing them to rent a derivative, low-quality film like Home Alone 3 *, the parents are suing because, allegedly, at the end of the tape was 10 minutes of porno. While you or I might find this to be a swank bonus, these parents felt that it was inappropriate, and has said that Blockbuster has an obligation to "inspect, monitor and ensure the quality and propriety of all video products purchased by its customers."

Blockbuster corporate's response, as you might imagine, is not exactly in agreement with this idea, dancing around the truth (which would go like "it would be too expensive for us to do that") and instead blaming other customers, who, corporate says, have an obligation to return tapes "in the same condition [they were] given to them."

Of course, given the sheer quantity of videos and DVDs at any one store, QCing them all on any sort of regular basis is impossible. Manufacturing industries have computer-controlled QC mechanisms which inspect every product as it comes off the assembly line, tossing away ones which have even the slightest indictation of defectiveness. Blockbuster products come off the assembly line, but they soon go into the hands of customers and back into the hands of other customers, uncleaned, unsanitized, and unchecked for changes in quality or content.

Customers know this aspect of the rental buisness and don't seem to mind it; alternatives like on-demand digital movies and disintegrating DVDs haven't exactly put traditional rentailers out of buisness. (Although, since more people buy DVDs than bought VHS tapes, there has been an impact there; lots of people buy rather than rent DVDs.) So in many ways, these parents knew the risk. Besides, they could have rented a DVD -- you can't copy over those, despite what an ignorant customer insisted had happened to his rental of "Open Range" earlier tonight.

What is my point in all this? Nothing. Although a similar incident happened once at my store with a copy of Fight Club. To my knowledge, no one got sued, and the mysterious perpertrator was never identified....

* I'm kidding about the low quality of Home Alone 3. I thought it was very amusing and without all the ham-fisted 'emotional reunion' scenes. Maureen O'Hara and Macaroni Culkin had about as much chemistry as my college transcripts.

Lucky Wander Boy is a novel about connections, about the invisible threads that bind together the seemingly unrelated ideas and objects that make up modern life. For the novel's protagonist, Adam Pennyman, classic video games represent the most tangible connection he has between his inner-self and the external world, and, in many ways, the book is simply an account of this facet of Adam's personality. But in just as many ways it is so much more -- the novel itself an important thread connecting the reader back not to just the world around him, but to himself.

At the beginning of the book, Pennyman is an intelligent but largely directionless man adrift in his own life. A chance encounter with MAME, the multiple arcade machine emulator, rekindles his memories of classic games and, more over, the importance of games like Frogger to his youth. As he plays more and more of these emulated games, he casually embarks on the creation of the Catalogue of Obsolete Entertainments, a sort of encyclopedia of classic gaming. Half the novel is Pennyman's first person account of his experiences; interspersed among these chapters are excerpts from the Catalogue itself.

The Catalogue contains more than just mere fact, of course. It also contains Pennyman's philosophical and academic musings on the games and their meaning. One may never have even considered early games to have any meaning at all, but after reading Pennyman's (or is it Weiss's?) deft entry on Donkey Kong as a Christ metaphor, an entire world of possible new perspectives has been opened up for the reader.

The novel takes its title from a classic arcade game of the same name, a largely unsuccessful but entirely unique game that is unemulatable and entirely lost to the ages. It is this game and the riddle of its meaning with which Pennyman slowly becomes obsessed. Because of his job as a copywriter (which he sees as a game called Copywriter!) at an internet company which owns the film rights to Lucky Wander Boy, Pennyman is able to have contact with the game's creator, but she is almost as enigmatic as Lucky Wander Boy itself, and this contact only sends Pennyman deeper into postmodern dissassociation and surrealistic notions about reality.

The novel is cleverly structured. Aside from the aforementioned interludes from Pennyman's Catalogue (which are often the most stimulating part of the entire package), the narrative often shifts to screenplay or stage play format for a nice change of pace. The novel is also designed to mimic the three-part structure of the Lucky Wander Boy game, and, as the game's creator stresses in mock Engrish "Remember three acts, and middle being longest, and also being the WANDER stage." Indeed, the second act of the novel is also the longest, with emphasis on WANDER. It is also in this part of the novel when Pennyman's world becomes a lucid series of connections, like a psychotic's awareness of the metaphysical design of everything, that the reader finds the same sort of connections running between the various and oft-repeated elements of the novel, but also between Pennyman and the reader himself.

The journey toward Stage III of the Lucky Wander Boy game is described as running after a floating mirror warping to the infinity of the horizon line, as the sand of the desert rises up like great waves, only merging and forming an endless tunnel of sand, into which you dive deeper and deeper until you are in the mirror. At this point reality becomes disconnected, and you are no longer playing a game, but you are in the world of the game. The face staring back from the mirror is your own.

Indeed, as I read of Pennyman's own journey into stage three, and felt the sands of the novel swirling out from the pages like great waves, I felt as if Pennyman's face was my own. I felt as if the novel was about my experience reading it, as if I expected at any moment to turn the page to find "I can see you reading this, Ray" in the same way that a Lucky Wander Boy machine spoke to Pennyman in his youth.

Act III ventures so far into the surrealistic that I am still trying to grasp its meaning. I will say no more other than to say that, just as Pennyman's own Lucky Wander Boy script diverges entirely from narrative cohesion, so too does Act III. It is more than a mystery to be unraveled, it is a conundrum to be understood. It's a zen riddle on heroin.

It is at this point when I would normally reference Scott McCloud's sublime masterpiece Understanding Comics, but Pennyman beats me to it by referencing McCloud in the Catalogue. Clearly Weiss has been influenced by McCloud's highly philosophical musings on media -- Weiss's tone shits all over McCloud's pyramid of expressiveness, representation, and abstraction. The fact that Pennyman specifically brings up McCloud's observations about mechanisms through which the comics reader can find himself represented by the characters suggests that my own experience with Part II is at least partially intentional on the author's part, though I conceit that there are many elements of Pennyman's character that I found reflected my own. My reaction is certainly influenced by my perceived similarity to the character.

For the most part, the novel is extremely well written, particularly given the difficult task of bending the form of a linear prose fiction novel that Weiss set for himself. At times, the novel is a virtuoso performance; several passages stick out as miniature masterpieces of their own -- particularly the New Mexico scene which finds the threads of classic video games, space aliens, the space program, and nuclear weaponry coming together to lead Pennyman to Stage Three, Pennyman's imaginary battle against his boss over who was more instrumental to the development of golden age gaming, Bushnell or the venture capitalists who backed him, or Pennyman's essay "On Geeks." And, although Pennyman is mostly emotionally empty, referring to intimate contact with women only as a means to "fulfil basic animal needs", there are certain passages that are heartbreaking, plain observations about love and relationships. And, although certain passages reflect a kind of dreamer's naivety about the world (when he writes about a Korean model with "breasts that did not come from the Korean gene pool" it's clear Weiss has never met Maryann Garber) but a great deal of the novel is staggeringly brilliant, a work of genius.

In short, Lucky Wander Boy is exactly the sort of novel I wish I could write. As I read it, I kept thinking it would make a great movie in the vein of Fight Club or Adaptation, but, as the novel grew more surrealistic, more experimental and less linear and less narrative, I found myself echoing the words that Lucky Wander Boy's creator, Araki Itachi, may or may not have said to Pennyman upon the presentation of his experimental, surrealistic, and nonlinear Lucky Wander Boy movie script, "This is not a movie. No one would go see it."

Inspired by a recent conversation:

Never before and never since have the stakes been higher than when the Borg set about invading Earth. The Borg returned as villains and even menaced Earth again, but the scope was never as grand nor was the threat ever as palpable as in this two-part episode, a point which was underscored by the destabilizing of the familiar crew.

The first half of this two-part episode is decent but serves primarily to set up the phenomenal second installment which sees Patrick Stewart deliver what may be the all-time greatest performance ever shot for TV as he is physically and psychologically tortured by his sadistic Cardassian captor.

Another Patrick Stewart showcase, this one finds him living an entire lifetime as a farmer in the span of the one hour episode, while Captain Picard lays unconscious on the bridge floor. Sadly, the promise of deep characterization opened by this episode was never really seized by later writers who seemed either unwilling or unable to explore the ramifications of Picard's experience -- his past experiences as Picard were always treated as more real than his experiences in his alternate life.

The definitive Data episode came early in the show's run, when Roddenberry's touch could still be felt; this episode dealt with the difficult question of defining 'life.' Later portrayals of Data could never think up anything better than the themes raised in this highly philosophical episode and just mimed its themes incessantly until Data wasn't a character as much as a caricature. Still, you can't beat the punch of the original episode even though its theme has been diluted over the years.

This two-part season-straddling episode about the turbulence in the Klingon's high council and Worf's quest to restore the honor to his family name always seemed really cool to me. The Klingon civilization is so much more developed than any other nonhuman Star Trek civilization, it's fascinating the see the political and social machinations of this imaginary machine.

Honorable mentions:
Tapestry, Family, Yesterday's Enterprise, All Good Things, and Shades of Grey. (Just kidding.)