After the sheer propulsive momentum of last week's episode, I was wondering how Samurai Jack could possibly maintain the same level of energy into another episode (much less the rest of the season). Unsurprisingly, Episode 3 begins by slowing things down a little bit, letting us learn a bit more about its characters and raising the stakes...until a final fight that outdoes even last week's breathtaking action.
Jack starts the episode in a dark place. The opening scenes pick up right where the previous episode left off, following his bloody but still living body as he flows aimlessly down a river, floating in and out of consciousness. The pain from the stab would he received last week is often the only thing keeping him conscious. The whole sequence, wordless, nature-focused, and beautifully animated, reminded me of nothing so much as Leo's most brutally painful moments in The Revenant. Eventually, Jack stumbles into a cave, still in physical and spiritual pain: physical, from the wound, especially after he finally works up the courage to remove the dagger from his side (another Revenant-esque touch). And spiritual, from the persistent torment of his past self, fittingly drawn in even more warped, demonic style than last week*. The hallucination insists that what's bothering him is not this "pathetic little cut," but the fact that Jack has, for the first time, killed a human being ("flesh and blood," past-Jack remarks, the teeth in his mouth sharpening at the thought, perhaps alluding to the danger that present-Jack succumbs to a sort of blood lust, or at least a dark side). "What happens when the others come? You'll have to kill them to. Can you? Maybe they'll kill you. Or is that what you want?" Jack manages a weak "no" to yet another suicidal lure, but that the show would even go there shows how Jack's character has changed over the past fifty years (and how well the show is taking advantage of its new, mature rating).
The hallucination's face when it says "flesh and blood."
But the cave provides nourishment for Jack as well. Physically, he recuperates (with the help of a spirit animal, the wolf who endured a parallel struggle in last week's episode). And spiritually, he reaches back to his past to understand his present situation better. Specifically, he consults a memory of his father brutally dispatching bandits, though not before stoically warning them that he will only kill them if he has to. "Your choices have clearly led you here, as have mine. I will give you a new choice: Leave now and live, or stay and face your destiny." Naturally, their destiny is a bloodbath that young Jack witnesses.**
And you thought your childhood was rough.
From this memory, Jack derives the courage and the moral certitude to move forward. He knows his enemies are human, but so long as they desire his death, he must defeat them. "The decisions you make, and the actions that follow, are a reflection of who you are," Jack recalls his father saying. "You cannot hide from yourself." Once again, the jaded, cynical Jack finds purpose in the quest that had driven him all these years. Thus restored, and, indeed reinvigorated, Jack, in the great symbolic tradition, steps out of the cave, ready to face his destiny.
Jack, ready to face his destiny.
What is his destiny? In the meantime, it is to confront the Daughters of Aku, the relentless foes who spend the first part of the episode tracking him. We haven't learned much about the Daughters as individuals; indeed, I can't even tell them apart, save by their different choice of weapon. But for the time being, they are to be understood as a collective, and this episode deepens our somewhat limited understanding of them as a group. We see them drag the corpse of their fallen sister out of the rubble from last week's episode. Staring at her, one of them then simply says "Death is failure," underlining the brutal ethos on which they were raised, and then they move on.
There is no mourning failure for a Daughter of Aku.
Later in the episode, we hear one of the Daughters describe Jack as a "parasite," a window into the worldview in which Jack is the villain and Aku is the hero. Though Jack is obviously the hero of the show, and the hero to us, we shouldn't forget that, to the world of the show, Aku is basically god.*** The best villains think they are the hero, and the Daughters fit this description, seeing Jack as the ultimate evil, and themselves as its necessary destroyers. The Daughters also encounter a deer for the first tine. Raised from birth in a temple to be killing machines, they do not know what it is. And they expect doom for it when a buck approaches, only to be confounded when the two creatures nuzzle affectionately. These details add a tragic element to the Daughters' destiny: If, as Jack's father says, and as Jack tells the Daughters before he fights them, our choices reflect who we are, then it must sadden us at least somewhat that the Daughters never had the chance to choose anything but the dark life thrust upon them. It is a remarkably humanizing turn for villains to receive, and it is to Samurai Jack's credit that it has imbued its antagonists with even these little bits of humanity.
And so when we come to another clash between Jack and the Daughters, there is an element of sadness to it. Jack gives the daughters the same choice that his father gave the bandits; when they refuse it, he acts just as his father did. Whereas in last week's episode, the Daughters surprised Jack and reduced him to his most vulnerable, this time, Jack understands his foes and is ready to take them on. More important, he is ready to kill, as he does here, brutally and efficiently. That is not to say the Daughters don't put up a fight; they do, perhaps even a better effort than in the previous episode, coming at Jack from every angle and with multiple weapons, forcing him to be at his best at all times (except for a short breather). And the fight looks as beautiful as anything the series has ever done; set in snow, mostly using black colors against a stark white background, with blood the sharpest hue, it's a battle as beautiful as it is brutal.****
Like I said, as beautiful as it is brutal.
Yet the Daughters do not stand a chance against a Jack who has found himself again. Unfortunately for them, it was a process they enabled: In the previous episode, they literally destroyed the armor and gear that Jack had become accustomed to in this future life, and they figuratively destroyed the self he had settled into. Reduced to nearly nothing, Jack had no choice but to build himself back up with a recharged zeal for his mission. And that he did.
Once again, Samurai Jack continues to impress. The character and plot development that occur in this 20-minute episode could have easily stretched over two, if not more. In fact, I expected the Daughters of Aku to serve as the primary antagonists for most of this 10-episode season, but now, after episode three, likely only one (though possibly two) of them are even alive. And Jack himself seems to have achieved that merging of the wisdom of his older self with the energy of his past self that could power him to ultimate victory.
I'm going to keep including this image until some episode references it.
What will happen in the seven episodes that remain? Again, I genuinely don't know. It's possible that Jack may change the mind of one of the surviving Daughters (or the only one); it's possible that the glowing green specter on horseback that has haunted Jack since this season's first episode will become an antagonist (if it's not just a vision of dark Jack himself); it's possible that Aku will realize Jack is swordless, forcing Jack to recover his sword (or an analogue for it) in a hurry. But one of the many great qualities of the final season of Samurai Jack is that I do not know what will come next. All I do know is that it will be great, if this season's first three episodes are any indication.
*This Jack resembles the "Big Bad Wolf" Jack from the season one episode "Aku's Fairy Tales," in which Aku tells stories to try to convince children that Jack is the villain, not the hero.
**In the last episode of season four, which was previously the show's finale, Jack defends a baby who turns into a baby samurai as a result of watching all the carnage. This must have been that moment for Jack.
***"Aku's Fairy Tales" does a good job of showing the world that Aku was trying to create, and by now has (based on the supplicants in the previous episode), in which he is the hero and Jack is the villain.
****The snowy setting recalls Jack's fight with the bounty hunters and his arrow-dodging; the black-and-white contrast recalls his fight with the Shinobi warrior.
What do Chuck Berry, aliens, the Prime Directive, and Millennials have in common? This blogpost. They've also all been in the news lately. And, as we'll see, they're more connected than you might think at first.
First, Chuck Berry. The legendary musician died last week at age 90. Many consider him the founder of rock 'n' roll. Between his guitar-centric, bluesy output, his theatrical stage persona, and wild personal life, it's hard to object to this title (unless you think Marty McFly deserves credit). The semi-autobiographical* "Johnny B Goode" may not have technically been the first rock 'n' roll song, but it was probably the most influential of rock's early period, earning Berry a legion of fans and imitators:
When the British Invasion began, many of its soldiers professed and demonstrated an admiration for Berry. The Beatles were fans; the first song they played at their first American concert was a cover of his "Roll Over Beethoven":
And here's The Beatles' version:
For further testament of Berry's influence on The Beatles, witness John Lennon's live performance with Berry:
And George Harrison's rendition of "Johnny B. Goode":
As befits the band that John Lennon (rightly) called "Son of Beatles," Electric Light Orchestra also covered Berry's hit, producing a raucous, 8-minute long uptempo rocker with orchestral snippets and backing that I consider the song's best cover:
Even without being inducted to the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame's inaugural class, Chuck Berry has earned a place in rock 'n' roll history. Looking at the state of rock today, a cynic could even say he outlived rock itself.
Though Chuck Berry may have died to this world, he will actually outlive all of us. For in 1977, NASA affixed a golden record to two probes, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, sent into deep space for a journey from which they would not return. Scientist Carl Sagan, among others, chose the contents of that record to maximize the information an intelligent alien race that might find it would glean about Earth and humanity from it. According to Smithsonian Magazine, the record includes "15 analog-encoded photographs, greetings in 55 languages, a 12-minute montage of sounds on Earth and 90 minutes of music." Some specific items include:
-A silhouette of a male and a pregnant female
-DNA structure
-Diagrams of eating, licking (but remember: Licking doorknobs is illegal on other planets!), and drinking
The music selections included were some more classically-oriented works...and Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode." One of the Voyager record's other compilers objected to Berry's inclusion, calling the song "adolescent." To which Sagan replied: "There are a lot of adolescents on the planet." Indeed, some of those adolescents may have watched the 1977 Saturday Night Live sketch in which Steve Martin played a psychic who revealed the first four words uttered by extraterrestrials, words that would appear on the front cover of the next week's Time Magazine: Send More Chuck Berry.
There are far worse ways to establish first contact. In fact, a recent poll revealed that American human beings might not be so accommodating if we find the aliens first. We would, instead, be quite likely to violate what is known in Star Trek lore as the Prime Directive, the principle (routinely ignored in the show) that dictated strict non-interference in the affairs of civilizations that had not yet achieved faster-than-light travel.
The YouGov Poll (full results here), released last week, asked the following:
How I wasn't called about this poll, despite my expertise in this area, is a mystery and a rank injustice of the highest order. Anyway, here were the overall responses:
I would have gone with option four myself.
A plurality of overall respondents favor breaking the Prime Directive to help the alien race advance. And eight percent (!) of the human race would favor revealing ourselves to a discovered alien race, and either enslaving or destroying it. Go humanity.
Millennials, a demographic cohort still being defined (stipulated in this poll as current 18-24 year-olds which seems about right to me), but to which I belong, had the most fascinating responses to these questions:
Yes, you read the correctly: Millennials, supposedly the most tolerant and open-minded generation in American history, are more enthusiastic about enslaving or exterminating an alien race than any other polled demographic. To be fair, we're also more enthusiastic about helping that race advance than any other demographic (though "Generation Z" or whatever it's called wasn't polled). Maybe it's just that we're more sure of ourselves in general. Whatever you think, though, it's an interesting result. The fate of a future alien race may depend on whether it and and the humans who ultimately make first contact know about Chuck Berry**. Be good, Johnny. Be good.
*The lyrics speak of a young person who learns how to play guitar in a bid for immortality:
Deep down in Louisiana close to New Orleans, Way back up in the woods among the evergreens There stood a log cabin made of earth and wood, Where lived a country boy named Johnny B. Goode Who never ever learned to read or write so well, But he could play a guitar just like a ringing a bell...
...His mother told him, "Someday you will be a man, And you will be the leader of a big old band. Many people coming from miles around To hear you play your music when the sun go down. Maybe someday your name will be in lights Saying 'Johnny B. Goode tonight'." **Maybe history will remember Chuck Berry as the "representative" of the rock era. And maybe we will find that the aliens have fashioned their civilization after the Chuck Berry recording; something similar happened in many Star Trek episodes.
Samurai Jack, taking advantage of its new creative freedom, courtesy of Adult Swim.
Sometimes, when you're lucky, a product of pop culture just knocks you right back on your butt. You experience it breathlessly, completely locked into every moment of it as it goes by, and are shocked to find it at an end, to return to reality*. Often, you feel the need to re-experience it immediately after the fact. You simply weren't ready for the full impact of it the first time around, and hope a second time around will actually allow you to appreciate it consciously, rather than simply being in awe of it, as you were at first.
This is exactly the effect that the second episode of Samurai Jack's fifth season had on me. Though this is not the first time I've experienced this kind of awe before the show's creative powers**, I did not expect to get it again, or to feel it so early in the final season's run. But in life, sometimes we get more than we deserve. And while I didn't deserve to watch an episode of Samurai Jack that simultaneously deepened the show's characters and humor while also putting up some of the best scenes it has ever had, that is what I got, and I'm grateful.
The episode opens with Aku (Greg Baldwin, a great replacement for the late Mako). Dispelling the concern I mentioned in my last review that the new Jack would go all-in on dark, Aku's opening scenes (the first we've seen him this season) are highly comical. The first we see him, he is asleep; when his alarm goes off, he punches it to turn it off, then puts on the flames that sit above his eyes as though they were glasses. He dispassionately attends to some new grovelers and to his scientists, who claim to have created a new robot that can defeat Samurai Jack. And though Aku claims no longer to care about Jack to them, a hilarious scene in which Aku sits on a therapist's couch while talking to another him, also a therapist, suggests otherwise. Though he does not mention Jack in the "safe place" of therapy, we learn that Aku is not ready to accept that Jack will be around forever, a perpetual thorn in his side, as a result of not aging because of temporal displacement. Aku laments that Jack hasn't even changed at all, "except for that stupid beard," and confesses that "I just don't know if I can handle that." Aku is as evil, powerful, and comical as ever, but he is also bored: What else is there to do when there are no more worlds left to conquer?
Meanwhile, Jack confronts his own challenges, without and within. The first of the former variety, he dispatches effortlessly: The Beetle-bot Aku's scientists cooked up for Aku is no match for Jack. Yet his internal struggles are far more complex, as established by what I didn't realize last week is the show's new credits sequence:
In a vulnerable moment, a hallucination of Jack's past self confronts him (both voiced by Phil LeMarr). "How much longer can you keep this up?" past-Jack asks. "It always seems bad at first," now-Jack responds, "but I find a way." Still, past-Jack persists: "I want it to end...there is no more honor" in this present quest. "Come to think of it, the only honorable thing to do is..." But to this implied temptation of suicide, now-Jack simply replies: "Quiet."
Samurai Jack, tormented by his past self.
But these few words reveal ever more of Jack's character, a resolute man, ground down by failure and by the passage of time, and tempted just to end it all. As I wrote last week, it is not the Jack of the past (or, at least, not yet). Still, it is understandable, and fascinating, to see his character having evolved this way. I maintain hope, however, that he can move beyond this despair, and merge the youthful vigor of his past self with the wisdom and maturity of his present self.
Ahem.
He has to survive to do that, though. And in this episode, he endures possibly his closest-ever brush with death, giving us some of the best fights in the whole show in the process. The Daughters of Aku, introduced last week as a 7-strong band trained from birth to hunt and kill Jack, have tracked him down. At first, they overwhelm him, so he retreats to an old temple, with many passageways, caverns, pools of water, trees, and other natural obstacles to frustrate the ruthlessly homicidal intent of the Daughters. This entire fight sequence, which comprises the second half of the episode, is wordless, in the great tradition of Samurai Jack. Who needs words when you have perfectly-paced and edited scenes like a fight in the dark, illuminated every other frame by the light of clashing weapons? Or duels that take place underwater, in the air, or in shadowy recesses? Or moments of tension so taut that one of the only flaws in this otherwise incredible episode was to add music to it? Jack's first real fight with the Daughters is by far one of the best moments of the entire show, made all the more so by the stakes and drama of the encounter: Unlike many fights in the show's history, we genuinely don't know how Jack is going to make it out of this fight alive.
And at times, he probably wasn't sure either.
It's probably not a spoiler to say that he does, in fact, escape, though his survival at the end of the episode is uncertain. Yet this escape comes not only at the cost of a brutal stab wound (he walks off at the end of the episode with a dagger sticking out of his side, almost the only item of any sort he has left on his person after the Daughters destroyed virtually everything else he had). It also demands his first-ever** killing of a human being. Earlier in the episode, we learn that Jack thinks his newest hunters are "just nuts and bolts. Just nuts and bolts." So he is legitimately shocked when he brutally disarms and cuts the throat of one of them, only to hear a sickening crunch and to watch as a visceral flow of blood spurts from the slit neck (thanks, Adult Swim!). When his victim falls to the floor, a mask falls off, and he sees a woman, dead by his own hand. He is shocked, angered even, by this, so much so that he doesn't even notice he's been stabbed until a few moments afterward (a Total Samurai Jack Move if there ever were one). The episode ends before we get to see Jack truly contemplate what he has done, but I have a feeling as honorable a soul as Jack will not easily get over such an act.
Jack's physical and emotional pain transcends the medium of animation.
This episode simply left me in awe, shocking me so much the first time around that I had to rewatch it immediately afterward. There were other great things about it--the explicit parallelism between Jack and a wolf attacked by lion-like creatures was a nice touch--but the humor, character development, and action combined to send this straight to the top of the Samurai Jack canon. We're only two episodes into the final season; if what's left remains at the high level set by this episode, then Samurai Jack will have truly earned a place among the best cartoons of all time. And if it continues to outdo itself, it may transcend animation and earn a place among the best pop culture of all time. Thanks in part to this episode, it's already done that for me.
*The last time I felt anything close to this effect was the first time I watched the Darth Vader scene in Rogue One (reviewed by me here and here; scene available here, for now).
**Before this episode, I think I got it from Jack's graveyard fight, and his being faster than a drop of water. ***Arguably, he killed people in this episode from the show's original run, though we do not know for sure that they died. Here there is absolutely no ambiguity whatsoever.
A nostalgia fever currently infects our popular culture. This isn't exactly an original insight, nor is it the first time I've written about it. It isn't even a critique necessarily specific to our time. But it would be hard to write about our current popular culture landscape without noting the long-gestating sequels to decades-old properties (e.g., The Force Awakens), the revivals of once-and-recently popular shows (e.g., Gilmore Girls), the remakes (e.g., everything), and the ostensibly original properties that draw heavily from past influences (e.g., Stranger Things).
Into this nostalgia-heavy popular culture landscape returns Samurai Jack. Samurai Jack, created by Genndy Tartakovsky (also of Dexter's Lab, Powerpuff Girls, and the hand-drawn Star Wars: The Clone Wars)originally aired on Cartoon Network from 2001-2004. The original series' intro tells you everything you need to know about the show:
But if you're too lazy to watch it, here's the short summary it provides (from the perspective of the show's main villain, no less!):
Long ago, in a distant land, I, Aku, the shape-shifting Master of Darkness, unleashed an unspeakable evil! But a foolish samurai warrior wielding a magic sword stepped forth to oppose me. Before the final blow was struck, I tore open a portal in time, and flung him into the future, where my evil is law. Now, the fool seeks to return to the past, and undo the future that is Aku.
That was the template for the first four seasons of the show: Jack (Phil LeMarr*) roamed across a dystopian future (think Blade Runner crossed with Mad Max), defending the innocent, fighting Aku and his minions, and looking for a way to return to his own time. And from that relatively simple setup emerged what I have argued was the best animated series of the 2000s (if not of all time). I've written about the greatness of Samurai Jack elsewhere, but I would be remiss not at least to mention some of the incredible storytelling that made the show what it was, so stop reading and watch this wordless black-and-white fight:
I've been with Samurai Jack from the beginning, when it premiered on Cartoon Network all the way back in 2001 (8-year-old Jack had great taste, and maybe a built-in bias for the show because of its title). So I was one of the many fans who was sad to see it go, who had hoped vainly for years for its return, and who was overjoyed when news emerged that it would finally come back (so overjoyed I spent the whole day leading up to the premiere re-watching old episodes). My excitement stemmed not merely from nostalgia, however. For, contrary to this review, Samurai Jack did not end its original arc. We may have learned that Jack would one day be worthy to enter a portal from which he was blocked in the show's original run, but we did not learn whether he would enter it, or whether he would defeat Aku when he did. Thus, Samurai Jack's story demanded completion.
I'll be disappointed if the new season doesn't reference this in some way.
And so here we are, 13 years after the show's original run, with almost** all of the main on-and-off-screen talent returning to complete a show with a genuinely unfinished story (the best possible circumstances for any such revival). As an added bonus, the 10-episode final season returns not to Cartoon Network but to Adult Swim, allowing it to show real gore (instead of robot oil blood), engage in more mature themes, grow up with earliest fans, and generally let loose a bit more creatively without having to worry as much about the censors.
So, imagine this, but a pile of actual corpses instead of robots, and blood instead of oil. It could happen!
The Samurai Jack team have made a bold choice with this newfound freedom: to show a Jack who has lost his way. The review I referenced above claimed that Samurai Jack's arc had an implied completion, which is incorrect. It also claimed, concerning the character of Jack himself, that he"...was something of a blank screen. It’s not that he didn’t have a character, more that his resolute commitment to helping others, his insane competence, and above all, his silence, made it hard to latch on to him as something deeper or more complex than a cool, occasionally troubled hero." This is also incorrect. Maybe Jack didn't adhere to the overused and now surely cliché template of "anti-hero," or "flawed hero." But he struggled plenty in the original show, dealing with anger, loss, regret, selfishness, temptation, and, above all, failure. His resolution and persistence despite all of this was what made his character so great.
Yet the Jack we see at the beginning of season five is no longer that Jack, or at least not that Jack currently (one hopes). 50 years have passed since we last saw him, yet he does not age, a consequence of the time travel forced on him by Aku all those years ago. In this time, though he has gained a beard, armor, a motorcycle, an electrified scimitar, and a pistol, he has not only lost his resolve. He has lost his sword, the one weapon that can defeat Aku. Still, the Jack we see is just as bad-ass as ever, and the show's aesthetic remains startlingly consistent with its past: see, e.g., the battle against robot bugs to save a mother and daughter that opens the episode:
Or the fight with Scaramouche (Tom Kenny***), an Aku-favored assassin who powers his weapons with the music of a flute and his own voice****. Both sequences would have fit right into the original series. The difference is in Jack himself. Whereas his past self fought with righteous energy, the new Jack fights with a sort of exasperated ruthlessness (notably, he knew he was being lured into the battle with Scaramouche for some time, but chose not to seek it out immediately). It's a subtle difference, and it is, for the time being, just as effective in battle, but it's definitely not the same Jack.
Samurai Jack, looking a little different.
This Jack has other problems, too. His past is literally haunting him: He now regularly experiences hallucinations of his mother, father, and the countless victims of Aku he has not yet saved. And now, some in the present hunt him. The Daughters of Aku, born in graphic, Rosemary's Baby-esque fashion and trained from birth***** to hunt Samurai Jack, are a combination of the Ringwraiths from Lord of the Rings and Jack himself (also trained from birth, but to kill Aku). There is, moreover, an ominous vision haunting Jack, in addition to his other hallucinations: an eerie, green-glowing warrior on horseback, whose very visage makes the typically fearless Jack scream in fear. And, of course, he still doesn't have his sword. All of this looks pretty bleak for Jack.
This setup is intriguing, but I hope the show doesn't forget that it was the glimpses of light, not the totality of the darkness, that made it so compelling; that Jack's persistence, not his failure, made him the hero who still stands out in today's surfeit of "complicated" protagonists. Nine episodes remain, though it's almost certain to feel like fewer than that, given how quickly this premiere went by for me. At any rate, I look forward to seeing how the long journey of Samurai Jack concludes. Whatever happens, though, the first episode of this last season has proven beyond any doubt that this is one revival our nostalgia-soaked popular culture actually needs.
*Phil LeMarr, aka, Static Shock, Hermes Conrad, Green Lantern (John Stewart), and many other roles. The world of cartoon voice-acting is tiny.
**Sadly, Mako, who has one of the greatest voices of all time, passed away between shows. Aku only has a few lines (spoken on a cell phone!) in this episode, but he has been replaced by Mako pupil Greg Baldwin, who has experience mimicking his teacher.
***Tom Kenny, aka SpongeBob, the Ice-King, the Mayor of Townsville, and countless other roles. At first I thought Scaramouche's voice sounded like Squilliam Fancyson, but that's Dee Bradley Baker, who I'm sure will show up at some point.
****Think Yondu from Guardians of the Galaxy.
*****Trained from birth by an Aku-worshipping priestess voiced by Tara Strong, aka Timmy Turner from The Fairly Oddparents. The world of cartoon voice acting is truly tiny.
For as long as I can remember, I've been a big fan of food. An older cousin claims that, when I was a baby, she could get my attention by waving a piece of chocolate cake in the air from across the room, and would laugh as I scurried over to get it. In those same early years, my parents recall that I would often fall asleep in the meal I was eating. So yeah, I like food, is what I'm saying, but if you've been reading this blog, you knew that already.
At the same time, though, it seems that many of the places where I like to eat are not very popular. Why this is, I don't know. My tastes are not rare or impeccable; quite the opposite, in fact. You could say I'm a picky eater, so long as you mean I am committed to cheap, large quantities of plain food. And yet these are the places that seem to suffer. First, there was Quizno's, a Subway competitor restaurant chain that opened a location within walking distance of my Loveland home. Frequent visits there convinced me it was superior to Subway; few agreed, and it soon closed (presaging larger struggles for the parent brand itself in subsequent years).
Then, there was the poor 20-mile house, an historic building (formerly) located exactly 20 miles north of Cincinnati, where before cars travelers would rest before making the journey into town. The location cycled through dozens of owners, including one who seemed to make it work (and they offered bottomless rolls!). Impressed, my family actually returned for a second meal, only to find that management had changed yet again (I like to think I put the previous owners out of business by eating too many rolls). A few years ago, the building itself was destroyed to make way for...a gas station. And finally (for now), there's Bob Evans, a restaurant franchise born in Ohio that has been struggling to define itself over the past several years. One casualty of this struggle was what I considered their flagship, self-consciously rustic location just outside The Beach Waterpark in Mason, Ohio. It closed recently, ending many years of post-Church or post-Beach meals. (And I'm not going to count the self-consciously modest Decent Deli, a Blue Ash restaurant that closed before I had a chance to see if it was actually decent, as I long intended to do. I guess it wasn't?)
This trend even followed me to college. Oakley! (exclamation in original) was a nice little deli just off of my college's campus. I regularly treated myself to meals there, even though it was often short of basic ingredients (it was surprising how often I ordered something, only to be told "outta chicken" or "outta cheese" by the deli's owner). It closed before I graduated. And this example may be a bit of a stretch, but the dining company that managed my college's food provision also "closed" while I was there; it was replaced by another company that offered more exquisitely-prepared food, but in lesser quantities, and so I was not a fan of the change.
When Saga served Hillsdale's food, this page displayed the weekly menus. It went blank after Saga died.
Even in D.C., the places I like to eat have not been immune to market forces. I am a big fan of Cosi (which I incorrectly pronounce "co-sigh," thanks to this), a sort of Panera competitor I had never encountered before coming to D.C. for the first time, but which now I can barely imagine life without. You can watch them make all of their bread (they do it in an open-fire brick oven), and, best of all, they leave out all the bread they don't use to make their delicious sandwiches in bowls for anyone to grab and eat. When I learned that my company's new workplace would be right next to a Cosi location, I feared for my wallet...until I walked by it one day and discovered that it, too, had closed. Alas.
But the loss of a single Cosi franchise pales in comparison to the sheer injustice of the closure of Armand's Chicago Pizzeria's Capitol Hill location. Since my first internship in D.C. in the summer of 2012 (!), this Armand's has always been about a five-minute walk from where I have lived. I have no idea how many times I've been to the place, how many times I've sampled their decent, if unspectacular, Chicago-style pizza and Italian cuisine. I've been there alone, with D.C. friends, and with visiting family and friends. For sheer convenience and reliability, it was hard to beat Armand's.
And for sheer value, it was hard to beat Armand's Saturday pizza buffet. Every Saturday, from 11:30 am-2:30 pm (and every weekday, but I rarely went on weekdays), $8 would buy you unlimited trips to a constantly restocked pizza and salad bar. I like to think I never failed to make a profit on these days, as I would regularly have at least eight pieces of pizza (if not more; the pesto chicken pizza was the best, but the spinach and onion was a close second). Maybe my visits contributed to Armand's going out of business (my high school cross country team claims to have done the same thing to a Cici's). Although I brought enough costumers with me over the years that they surely couldn't have held it against me.
It could not last, however. Last fall, the signs began to accumulate. Friends of mine (several from Chicago), confused at my love of the place, cast aspersions on its quality, and wondered how it survived. One of them suggested that the busloads of tourist children the place would regularly feed artificially kept it alive, an assessment that is, in hindsight, almost surely correct. Another friend ate with me there on one occasion, enjoyed it, and then, after we left, claimed she had inside intel suggesting the location was doomed. I refused to believe.
In truth, though, I had seen the signs. The Saturday buffets were getting lonelier and lonelier; Armand's even raised the price (not that I cared; it was still a steal). This past January, I returned to D.C. after the holidays to find that Armand's had changed its Saturday hours and done away with the buffet on that day altogether. And then, on at what turned out to be my last meal there (January 15, 2017), I ordered my typical favorite non-pizza meal (pesto chicken pasta) only to be informed that they were "out of chicken." I remembered Oakley! and its twilight failures, and sensed only the same fate was in store for Armand's. And so it was that I, upon walking home from work one day, passed by the place, saw construction workers there, and confirmed with them that it was no more, another victim of the expansion of a certain organization (a Subway and a nice breakfast place also used to eb nearby).
Armand's, as it stands currently (original image here)
All of the criticisms of Armand's I heard may have been true (but at least it's not at the center of a conspiracy theory like another D.C. pizza place). But that didn't stop it from being a regular and extremely convenient source of perfectly edible food for me and for the friends and family that I brought there over the past five years. I'll miss it. In fact, I think I miss it already. Earlier this week, I had a dream that it reopened. But when I awoke, I found that it was only a dream, and that Armand's was still permanently closed. And it may be no more in the physical world. But this Armand's will forever live on in my heart...and in my stomach.
2016 has been quite the year. Political drama. Celebrity deaths. General misfortune. Some of this is real. Some of it, though, I think is the gratuitous ascribing of agency to an arbitrary temporal concept. 2016 has not killed anyone. But, in our attempt to make sense of the world, we often assign agency or meaning to things that fundamentally lack it. Poet (and insurance salesman) Wallace Stevens once wrote of this tendency in his poem, "Anecdote of a Bell Jar":
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
The narrator of this poem simply places a jar on a hill somewhere in the arbitrary, unforgiving wilderness; in so doing, he forces uncaring nature to define itself in terms of the jar. It is an arbitrary act, this imposing of meaning, but it is an imposition of meaning nonetheless, however small.
In that spirit, I would like to define 2016 differently from how many seem to be understanding it. For me and for the country, 2016 was the year, not, pace Stevens, of jars, or Tennessee, but of the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes are a fascinating and beautiful geographical feature of North America; the product of glacial movements eons ago, they are individually and collectively among the largest sources of fresh water in the world. In the United States, they more or less define the region known as the Midwest, from which I, as an Ohioan, hail. The Midwest is a strange place. I think its best description comes from the beginning of essayist John Jeremiah Sullivan's biographical exposition of Guns 'n' Roses frontman Axl Rose (who is from Indiana):
...What's the most nowhere part of America? The Midwest, right? But once you get into the Midwest, you find that each of the different nowherenesses has laid claim to its own somewhereness. There are the lonely plains in Iowa. In Michigan there is a Gordon Lightfoot song. And Ohio has its very blandness and averageness, faintly comical, to cling to. All of them have something. And now I invite you to close your eyes, and when I say "Indiana"…blue screen, no?...
The Midwest is an oft-mocked place (Rust Belt, Flyover country, etc.): It is bland, benighted, boring, and other words that don't even start with "b." While I'll always love it here (I type from southwestern Ohio), some of this mockery is deserved. But this year, my first full year as an independent adult, the Midwest and the Great Lakes punched way above their weight, in both my life and in the life of our country.
When did this begin? You could point to a couple of markers. The inordinate importance of Iowa (not Great Lakes, but still definitely Midwestern) in our presidential election system, though a regular feature for the past 30-40 years, assumed a special significance this year when it gave incredibly narrow victories to Republican Ted Cruz and Democrat Hillary Clinton. The result of the Iowa caucuses this year virtually guaranteed the lengthy presidential primaries on both sides that we eventually got.
The Midwest's political influence further lengthened these primaries when Ohio went for John Kasich, its governor and Wisconsin gave a victory to Ted Cruz, delaying Donald Trump's eventual securing of the Republican presidential nomination, and when Michigan gave a surprise victory to Bernie Sanders, delaying Clinton's eventual victory as well. Trump and Clinton would eventually win their parties' respective nominations; for Trump, victories in the Great Lakes states of New York and, finally, thoroughly Midwestern Indiana sealed the (art of ) the deal. But this, too, was a sign of the Great Lakes' influence. Though Hillary rose to political power from Arkansas, she was born in Illinois, and represented Erie-and-Ontario-bordering New York in the Senate, the same state where Trump spent his whole life before, well...we'll see. But this was not the last time the Great Lakes region would influence America's political course this year.
The Great Lakes region flexed its muscles culturally as well. I would say that the Great Lakes' impact began with the shocking death in April of noted musician (and Minnesotan) Prince. Then, in May, an employee at the Cincinnati Zoo shot and killed a male silverback gorilla named Harambe when a child fell into the gorilla's enclosure, causing a momentary flurry of parenting and gorilla experts across the country. In June, in the world of sports, the Cleveland Cavaliers made the Golden State Warriors blow a 3-1 lead, broke Cleveland's 52-year sports championship drought, and challenged strongly-held stereotypes of Cleveland as the "mistake on the lake" by winning the NBA championships. And they did it all without catching the Cuyohoga River on fire.
Because that is a thing that has actually happened multiple times in the past.
For me, the year of the Great Lakes began, in a sense, all the way at the beginning of the year, when I spent the first few days of 2016 at my Midwestern home before returning to Washington. But it really began when I returned to my native Cincinnati soil in mid-July, one week after the one-year anniversary of the beginning of my life in D.C. (a week that includes my first day in the city, my first day of work, and my 22nd birthday). But I was not there to visit. The day after I returned, I made the long drive up I-71 to Cleveland, where my work had drawn me to attend the Republican National Convention, July 18-21. It was by far the craziest political experience I have ever had. And it was also up there for my life overall. That week, when I wasn't at the convention, I was sleeping (though not that much) or running in the vicinity of the residence of a Cleveland-residing college friend of mine.
At the end of the RNC.
The whole convention was the political equivalent of the Mos Eisley Cantina scene from A New Hope. Reporters and media personalities rubbed elbows with state and local party officials and hacks. Cameras were everywhere; protesters were confined to a relatively small portion of the city. The actual delegates, those who voted to give the Republican Party presidential nomination to Donald Trump, were themselves a motley crew; the Texas delegation, for example, had a uniform: blue jeans, a Texas flag shirt, and a ten-gallon hat. (More photos to come.)
On the last night of the convention, I watched as RNC Chair and Great Lakes-bordering Wisconsn native Reince Priebus orchestrated the bestowing upon Donald Trump of the Republican presidential nomination. The convention ended with the gavel-hammering of Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (also a Wisconsin native). For reasons I'll never fully understand, Trump chose "You Can't Always Get What You Want" as the final song of the RNC; it played as I left Quicken Loans arena.
The next day, after a beautiful run in North Chagrin Nature Center, I decided to cross some items off of my Cleveland bucket list while I was in town. Before I did that, however, I had to recover the wallet I had somehow lost (and, miraculously, returned home without). I drove into the city with gas purchased from the massive amounts of change found in my car, then, in a wonderful display of Midwestern hospitality, found my wallet exactly where I had left it. From there, I headed to Cleveland's famous Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
As a rock fan, I had wanted to visit the place for a long time. It didn't disappoint. Again, the pictures I have provided do not do it justice; see here for the rest. It would be hard to describe the collection of rock history and memorabilia with anything close to brevity. So I'll just recommend that you visit yourself (especially now that Electric Light Orchestra, my favorite band, has been inducted into its Hall of Fame, no doubt due to my advocacy). And I'll describe it this way: If Donald Trump actually does usher in the apocalypse, the Mad Max-style civilization that crops up in his wake could create a weird sort of religion from all the 'relics' of rock 'n' roll history contained in Cleveland's Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame. (More photos to come.)
While I was in Cleveland, I wanted to cross one more item off of my life's bucket list. So I drove into Ohio City to explore the summer-vacant campus of Cleveland St. Ignatius High School. St. Ignatius is the brother school of Cincinnati St.Xavier, my alma mater: they are both all-male, Jesuit, have around 1600 students, and are always consistently competitive in sports, both in the state and with each other. In 2009. St. Ignatius bested St. Xavier in the state cross country meet, earning first place to my team's second. Naturally, I had to visit for my revenge.
My revenge.
Yet as I wandered around its campus--the word is appropriate; St. I's resembles a college campus far more than does X, with multiple buildings organized around a central quad, rather than X's single building--I felt not seething bitterness but curiosity and wistfulness. Visiting its classrooms, cafeteria, track, and other parts of its campus pointed me toward some similarities between X and I's. Most notably, I found that I's also uses the "JUG" (Justice Under God) as a disciplinary tool akin to a detention. This and other things I saw gave me a sort of empathy, heightened understanding, and appreciation for the life that my brothers at St.I's lived. I often wonder how my own life would have gone in different circumstances. While I am content with my life's course up to this point, my visit to I's suggested that I could have had a decent one having gone to high school there as well. And my visit to Cleveland as a whole forced me to abandon--or, at least, to qualify--many of the anti-Cleveland stereotypes I had accrued from my Cincinnati upbringing. (I still maintain that Cincinnati has better views because of its hills.)
Cincinnati doesn't have a Great Lake, though.
Had I so desired, I could have continued my exploration of the Great Lakes' intersection with the political world the week after the RNC. That week, Hillary Clinton would accept her party's presidential nomination in Philadelphia, in a state (Pennsylvania) that also borders Great Lakes. Instead, on the same day I visited the Rock Hall and St. Ignatius, I took one of those long evening highway drives through the Midwest, the sort of journey impossible in my current D.C. existence (I don't have a car). Before my drive up for the RNC, I had not taken any such journey since the last time I drove from Hillsdale College (my other alma mater, in southeastern Michigan; it too will have a place in this story) to Cincinnati. It was a stress-free, blissful, relaxed, thoughtful, music-laden drive through mostly rural Ohio along I-71. I stopped once along the way at one of those massive trucker rest-stops of which my experience traveling for track meets in college made me so fond. I enjoyed this trip in ways I still am having difficulty explaining, so I'll simply submit its casual sublimity to the mysteries of this world.
Next came a few relaxed days in my hometown, running and reconnecting with friends old and new, a welcome rest (as was my drive) from the acute dose of politics I had received the week before. But this was a mere prelude to my real vacation: a family trip to South Haven, Michigan, a lovely small town on the West side of the state, right on beautiful Lake Michigan. I didn't do much while I was there other than spend time with my family, run, and relax at the beach--and that's exactly what I wanted. (More pictures to come.)
The influence of the Great Lakes on my life, and on that of the nation as a whole, manifested more sporadically over the next few months. In the Olympics, young underdog Ohioan Clayton Murphy snagged a bronze in the 800 meters. In late summer/early fall, the Internet resurrected Harambe, turning him into one of the biggest memes of all time (though he was probably the anti-Christ). In September, I returned to Hillsdale, my Michigan alma mater, to engage in yet more reflections on my post-collegiate life. In the wider world, several Great Lakes and Midwestern states, most notably Ohio, Iowa, and Pennsylvania (or so it seemed) became this election cycle's most vicious battlegrounds. In October, Minnesotan Bob Dylan received the Nobel Prize in Literature. On November 2nd, just before the election, the Chicago Cubs (Lake Michigan) forced the Cleveland Indians (Lake Erie) to blow a 3-1 lead in the World Series, ending a 108-year championship drought for the former team. And it was only a year after Back to the Future Part II predicted it would happen. The improbability of this outcome suggested that there was no way the longshot candidacy of Donald Trump could succeed; the universe would surely only allow one of these events.
Or not. I deal in politics for a living, and so, on Election Day, after I left work, I went off the grid. It was not until 8:30 am the next morning that I learned the impossible had happened: Donald Trump had won. And, more relevant for this post, he won it from the Great Lakes. Not only did he win the Midwestern states likely to vote for him (mainly Iowa and Ohio); he also secured victories in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan (and nearly Minnesota). In an article I wrote but never published before the election, I predicted that, at some point in our political future, "Ohio, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin may become swing or even red states." I had no idea, however, that it would happen so soon. No one else did either though, so I feel a bit less embarrassed.
In this instance, it is useful to recall John Jeremiah Sullivan's description of Michigan: it "has a Gordon Lightfoot song." That song, of course, is "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," an account of the 1975 sinking of a cargo vessel in Lake Superior. Having spent a lot of time in Michigan in my life so far, I can say that Sullivan's remark holds true. Michiganders have adopted the song as a sort of state anthem. It has also been parodied by the political satirical musical group known as the Capitol Steps, who wrote a little ditty after Minnesota native Walter Fritz Mondale's loss to Ronald Reagan in the 1984 presidential election called "The Wreck of the Walter Fritz Mondale." You can listen to it here. In this spirit, I wrote, sang, and recorded my own musical account of the 2016 election, using the tune of "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald." I call it "The Wreck of the Hillary Clinton." You can listen to it here, or click below for the embed.
"The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" may be the anthem of the entire state of Michigan, but it is the state's Upper Peninsula that has truly adopted it. Three years ago, I was lucky enough to be a cross-country runner in the Great Lakes Inter-Athletic Conference when it was Upper Peninsula-residing Michigan Technological University's turn to host the conference meet. When I learned what that meant, I was a bit mad and a bit mystified: Mad, because it would take up my entire fall break, which I usually spent relaxing at home; mystified, because, apart from the few friends I had at Hillsdale who hailed from da UP, and what they and others had told me about it, I knew nothing about the Superior State.
Yet our team Houghton trip became my favorite college running memory. I’ll never forget running at dawn in the shadow of the Mackinac Bridge at the beginning of the second leg of our journey; counting the number of pasty shops we saw between Mackinac City and Houghton (13); and not just surviving but thriving on the toughest, most beautiful cross-country course I’ve ever raced. The only bad thing about the trip was that it had to end. Because I loved Houghton and the UP so much, I spent the past three years plotting to return, though I had no idea how. But when I learned that a good friend was a track coach at Michigan Tech, I, after some hesitation, decided to take full advantage of my flexible young-adult status and booked the flights. My timing ended up fortuitous, for three reasons: 1) It was just after the election, which I had spent the entirety of my job in D.C. up to that point closely following, and from which I desperately needed a break; 2) my first day in the UP happened to be the 41st anniversary of the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, an incredible coincidence I didn’t even plan; 3) the weekend after I left was Houghton’s first snowfall of the season (not that I dislike winter; I just wasn’t ready for it). I knew I was in for a treat when I left the busy airports of D.C. and Detroit, with thousands of people, hundreds of gates, and televisions blasting CNN everywhere, for Marquette's two-gated, sparsely-populated airport with a single television that was playing Blue Bloods (and the remote sitting on a table by the TV for anyone to change the channel).
But those weren’t the only reasons my trip to Houghton was great. I enjoyed every moment of it. It was even more beautiful than I remembered, as was the surrounding area (Mt. Ripley, McClain State Park, Dollar Bay, etc.). I didn’t see nearly as much of Michigan Tech itself the last time I was there as I did this time around; I’m glad I did. And it was a borderline religious experience for me to run not once but twice more on the hallowed ground of the cross-country (ski) course, where the scenic beauty competed with my overwhelming nostalgia and the exhaustion from climbing its hills for emotional predominance. Finally, I closed out the weekend by watching Escanaba in da Moonlight, a tale of life in the Upper Peninsula directed by, written by, and starring Michigan native Jeff Daniels, while also listening only to Lightfoot's anthem for every drive I took in the UP (I went through it at least 50 times). And in my final moments in the UP, just before I returned to the hilariously and refreshingly modest airport that would return me to civilization, my ride and I saw a bald eagle in person, a first for both of us. It was a fitting end to my post-election trip to a remote redoubt of real America. As with my first trip to the UP, the only bad thing about my second was that it had to end. Again, the pictures I include do not convey the majesty of the experience. More to come.
Clockwise, from left: The Michigan Tech cross-country course, the view from Mt. Ripley, the view of Houghton from Hancock, sunset at Lake Superior.
I closed the year where it had began: in my southwestern Ohio roots. First, I came back for Thanksgiving to compete in Cincinnati's Thanksgiving Day race. After a few months of doubt about running's place in my future, it was the promise of this race that gave me purpose once more. I had been training for it since June, and was feeling fit, fresh, and ready to race when, mere days before the race, I fractured my left pinky toe in a freak absurd accident. At first, I could not believe that it had actually happened, and was keeping me from walking, much less running. Confident that I could recover in time for the race on Thanksgiving Day, however, I did everything I could to accelerate the healing while also aggressively cross-training. I ended up placing 2nd, which was about as good as I could have hoped for. And then, over the next few days, I enjoyed the pleasure of reconnecting with family and friends. And, of course, eating a bunch of food.
In the wider world, the Midwest flexed its cultural muscles once more the day after Thanksgiving, when Michigan and Ohio State played the most contested football game of the year, facing each other ranked #3 and #2, respectively (part of a wider pattern of the Big Ten, the football conference of the Great Lakes, putting to rest doubts about it versus the SEC, at least for now). Ohio State secured a victory so narrow that this thrilling, highly-rated game (one of the best football games, NFL or NCAA, of the year) ensured this rivalry is back to its historically contested standards.
For which you can thank this crazy man.
I closed this first holiday journey back to real America by witnessing another bald eagle, this time, in Loveland, at the end of a run with a friend. Before my Upper Peninsula sighting, I had never seen one in person; this made two in the same two-week span. The second sighting was my first-ever sighting in Loveland. Both the friend I was with and I are Pokémon fans, so we instantly analogized it to Ash's Ho-oh sighting at the end of the very first episode.
One journey through the holiday time accelerator (and multiple Christmas parties) later, I found myself back in my hometown, to ring in the holidays with family and to reconnect with friends (mostly runners, it seems) once more. It is here that I composed this recounting of my year. I am near the end of my holiday recuperation in my native soil. While here for this rest, my life has been as stress-free as it has been filled with family, friends, places, and memories dear to me. I know my time here is near an end (for now, anyway), as I no longer live or work here. But my heart will always be here.
My backyard at sunset, an even more beautiful place than I ever remember.
As for the Midwest and 2016 generally, I think the former proved during the latter that it matters a lot more than we often think. 2016 may have been a year of celebrity deaths, though, I'm warning you, as I did at the very beginning of the year, that these deaths will only come at an accelerating rate going forward, so expect 2017 to be even worse in this regard. As Wallace Stevens wrote, we'll all try to impose meaning on this seemingly chaotic year in our own ways. You could say that I am cherry-picking to write this post. Maybe so. But in sports, entertainment, and politics, and in my own life, I submit that 2016 was the year of the Great Lakes.
