It begins with the throbbing drums of Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life” and a handful of strung-out, wild-eyed lads racing down a city street. Then Ewan McGregor – white-faced, teeth bared – hurls his emaciated frame in front of a cop car and begins a voiceover that sounds like a commercial for Satan himself: “Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fuckin’ big television ….” He keeps going, ire building – “Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you spawned to replace yourselves. Choose your future.” A montage of these boys shooting junk flies before us in a fugue of ecstasy. “Choose life … But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin’ else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you’ve got heroin.”
Those are the first minutes of “Trainspotting,” Danny Boyle’s ear-splitting, cornea-burning 1996 adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s eponymous 1993 Scottish novel and, with all respect to Quentin Tarantino, it was the best film prologue we 1990s kids had ever seen. If Tom Cruise had Renee Zellweger “at hello” in that decade’s “Jerry Maguire,” Ewan McGregor had the rest of us with his deeply ironic “Choose life.” It spoke volumes – zines, really – about the high-octane aimlessness of a generation that was post-punk, post-hippie, post-Nixon, post-Reagan, post-Thatcher, pre-Internet, and very, very pre-AIDS cocktail. The prologue – the whole film – spoke for all of us who’d just graduated school to enter a world where there were no jobs and sex equaled death. That 1980s pop anthem no longer applied: The future was not bright. We did not need shades. Continue Reading →
As of last evening, Donald Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee for U.S. president, which means that all the dystopias are real and that the hatred lurking in our increasingly bifurcated country is blowing up hard. On the other hand, 
As of Thursday, Pluto, Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, and Mercury all will be retrograde, a quintuple whammy that almost never takes place. I don’t hate retrogrades–they amplify the power of a planet until we submit to its lessons, basically–but business as usual is out the window. Expect deep, pattern-changing work in most areas of your life: Saturn is the harsh teacher; Pluto is the god of the unconscious; Mars is the god of war; fleet-footed Mercury governs communication and travel; and Jupiter rules, well, everything. Of course, of course: Back up your electronics, buy insurance, and serve plenty of cream with your coffee in even the simplest of exchanges. But more than that, serious paradigm-shifting is in order. As we’ve already seen (