brit pop is dead

i've been enjoying a lot of my favorite things lately, but perhaps with added time on my hands (being in one of those 'transitional periods' we tend to find ourselves in these days) i'm seeing the ominous undertones to it all. imagine gaining a little distance from your life and possessions and, from that new perspective, seeing the lie behind the truth. where is your identity defined, at least in passing, if not by what fills your bookshelves?

i can't say it was an unconscious decision to lean heavily towards art and works that emphasizes individualism. being the only child of two self-contradictory loners, it was natural that i would tend towards solitary pursuits and pleasures. it's safe, it's comfortable, it's less scary to be alone than to rely on any unknown variable, even a friend. that, i believed, was the truth guiding how i lived.

and yet, perhaps by taste or by my soul manifesting in the most subtle of ways, i'm seeing now that so many of the tools i've accrued to inform my identity (what is gathering art after all but a way of defining the limits of our likes and, by extension, ourselves) are not just works that underline my aesthetic. they are lifelines and signposts and repositories of directions towards change. i've always been afraid of being boring, of being static. here then, already at my disposal, is enough to usher in my next stage.

that's what i'll be talking about here, even when i'm not. evolution is the name of the game, and it's time to see what's next.

'the prisoner,' patrick mcgoohan's signature work, is a british television program from the late 1960's. it ran for 17 episodes, it can be rather easily summarized, yet it is complex enough to be compared by serious critics to a piece of music. it is an apt metaphor: 'the prisoner' seems to have been less created than orchestrated, and regardless of contributors' later claims the lifeblood of the project is singularly mcgoohan's.

i'll be writing a small article at the cult film/entertainment blog about 'the prisoner,' unless i end up writing a long, scholarly article instead. either way, its importance to the world is as a brazen and timeless work that transcends small budget and productions woes to be an enduring genre-buster focusing on the tensions between the individual and the society to which the individual belongs, willingly or rather unwillingly as in the case of 'the prisoner.'

for me, 'the prisoner' is a wake-up call, a smart bomb that burrowed under my skin with the decoy promises of sci-fi spy adventuring and psychedelic story twists, and dug its hooks into my faltering consciousness with its harrowing of every cool image of edgy unique misfit chic, holding up each glossy pretension and demanding "why?"

i'm anxious to find out each and every 'why.' why wardrobe choices inevitably tend towards all-black, why someone so dependent upon social contact finds it paralyzingly difficult to find the courage to go out, why the ease of going somewhere new alone is forgotten upon arrival as the dread of going unnoticed manifests like storm clouds. why do i feel like i don't care about fitting in, but would be devastated to be permanently on the outside of things? where are the boundaries, anyway?

that's another significance to 'the prisoner:' one strong reading indicates its the spruced up story of how a man learns to move past his dangerous egotism to become a functional member of society. not of giving in to some benign big brother or sacrificing his beliefs to find a reduced status within a group, but of learning to balance how he wants to live with how one is able to live in the world. it's about learning to accept happiness instead of rejecting it along with everything else because protecting the self from harm seems to call for extreme isolation.

of course, one could argue we're all prisoners of something. escaping sometimes calls for help, and sometimes entails a personal effort simply to find the door and the courage to walk through on one's own. hopefully, i'll know my right door when i encounter it.

be seeing you.