By Rob Brezsny

ARIES (March 21-April 19): Here’s actor Bill Murray’s advice about relationships: “If you have someone that you think is The One, don’t just say, ‘OK, let’s pick a date. Let’s get married.’ Take that person and travel around the world. Buy a plane ticket for the two of you to go to places that are hard to go to and hard to get out of. And if, when you come back, you’re still in love with that person, get married at the airport.” In the coming weeks, Aries, I suggest you make comparable moves to test and deepen your own closest alliances. See what it’s like to get more seriously and deliriously intimate.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Some firefighters use a wetter kind of water than the rest of us. It contains a small amount of biodegradable foam that makes it 10 times more effective in dousing blazes. With this as your cue, I suggest you work on making your emotions “wetter” than usual. By that I mean the following: When your feelings arise, give them your reverent attention. Marvel at how mysterious they are. Be grateful for how much life force they endow you with. Whether they are relatively “negative” or “positive,” regard them as interesting revelations that provide useful information and potential opportunities for growth.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is a BBC TV mini-series set in the early 19th century. It’s the fictional story of a lone wizard, Mr. Norrell, who seeks to revive the art of occult magic so as to accomplish practical works, like helping the English navy in its war against the French navy. Norrell is pleased to find an apprentice, Jonathan Strange, and draws up a course of study for him. Norrell tells Strange that the practice of magic is daunting, “but the study is a continual delight.” If you’re interested in taking on a similar challenge, Gemini, it’s available.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): We humans have put buttons on clothing for seven millennia. But for a long time these small knobs and disks were purely ornamental—meant to add beauty but not serve any other function. That changed in the 13th century, when our ancestors finally got around to inventing buttonholes. Buttons could then serve an additional purpose, providing a convenient way to fasten garments. I foresee the possibility of a comparable evolution in your personal life, Cancerian. You have an opening to dream up further uses for elements that have previously been one-dimensional. Brainstorm about how you might expand the value of familiar things.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): You would be wise to rediscover and revive your primal innocence. If you can figure out how to shed a few shreds of your sophistication and a few slivers of your excess dignity, you will literally boost your intelligence. That’s why I’m inviting you to explore the kingdom of childhood, where you can encounter stimuli that will freshen and sweeten your adulthood. Your upcoming schedule could include jumping in mud puddles, attending parties with imaginary friends, having uncivilized fun with wild toys and drinking boisterously from fountains of youth.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): While still a young man, Virgo author Leo Tolstoy wrote that “I have not met one man who is morally as good as I am.” He lived by a strict creed. “Eat moderately” was one of his “rules of life,” along with “Walk for an hour every day.” Others were equally stern: “Go to bed no later than 10 o’ clock,” “Only do one thing at a time” and “Disallow flights of imagination unless necessary.” He did provide himself with wiggle room, however. One guideline allowed him to sleep two hours during the day. Another specified that he could visit a brothel twice a month. I’d love for you to be inspired by Tolstoy’s approach, Virgo. Now is a favorable time to revisit your own rules of life. As you refine and recommit yourself to these fundamental disciplines, be sure to give yourself enough slack.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Many astronomers believe that our universe began with the Big Bang. An inconceivably condensed speck of matter exploded, eventually expanding into thousands of billions of stars. It must have been a noisy event, right? Actually, no. Astronomers estimate that the roar of the primal eruption was just 120 decibels—less than the volume of a live rock concert. I suspect that you are also on the verge of your own personal Big Bang, Libra. It, too, will be relatively quiet for the amount of energy it unleashes.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): For now, you are excused from further work on the impossible tasks that have been grinding you down. You may take a break from the unsolvable riddles and cease your exhaustive efforts. And if you would also like to distance yourself from the farcical jokes the universe has been playing, go right ahead. To help enforce this transition, I hereby authorize you to enjoy a time of feasting and frolicking, which will serve as an antidote to your baffling trials. And I hereby declare that you have been as successful at weathering these trials as you could possibly be, even if the concrete proof of that is not yet entirely visible.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): One afternoon in September, I was hiking along a familiar path in the woods. As I passed my favorite grandmother oak, I spied a thick, 6-foot-long snake loitering on the trail in front of me. In hundreds of previous visits, I had never before seen a creature bigger than a mouse. The serpent’s tail was hidden in the brush, but its head looked more like a harmless gopher snake’s than a dangerous rattler’s. I took the opportunity to sing it three songs. It stayed for the duration, then slipped away after I finished. What a great omen! The next day, I made a tough but liberating decision to leave behind a good part of my life so as to focus more fully on a great part. With or without a snake sighting, Sagittarius, I foresee a comparable breakthrough for you sometime soon.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Canadian author Margaret Atwood has finished a new manuscript. It’s called Scribbler Moon. But it won’t be published as a book until the year 2114. Until then, it will be kept secret, along with the texts of many other writers who are creating work for a “Future Library.” The project’s director is conceptual artist Katie Paterson, who sees it as a response to George Orwell’s question, “How could you communicate with the future?” With this as your inspiration, Capricorn, try this exercise: Compose five messages that you would you like to deliver to the person you will be in 2025.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Every hour of your life, millions of new cells are born to replace old cells that are dying. That’s why many parts of your body are composed of an entirely different collection of cells than they were years ago. If you are 35, for example, you have replaced your skeleton three times. Congratulations! Your creativity is spectacular, as is your ability to transform yourself. Normally these instinctual talents aren’t nearly as available to you in your efforts to recreate and transform your psyche, but they are now. In the coming months, you will have extraordinary power to revamp and rejuvenate everything about yourself, not just your physical organism.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): The coming weeks will NOT be a favorable time to seek out allies you don’t even like that much or adventures that provide thrills you have felt a thousand times before. But the near future will be an excellent time to go on a quest for your personal version of the Holy Grail, a magic carpet, the key to the kingdom or an answer to the Sphinx’s riddle. In other words, Pisces, I advise you to channel your yearning toward experiences that steep your heart with a sense of wonder. Don’t bother with anything that degrades, disappoints or desensitizes you.

Homework: In what part of your life are you doing less than your best? Why? Report to FreeWillAstrology.com.

By Amy Alkon

Q: I’m a 29-year-old woman, and I’ve been dating a guy for two months. I was scrolling (OK, stalking him) on Instagram and saw a pic of him with this pretty girl with her arm draped around his neck. Does monogamy just happen, or should I initiate the “commitment talk?”—Nervous

A: Welcome to the place relationship dreams go to die, also known as social media. One moment, you see your relationship heading toward the town of OnlyYouville, and the next, it’s looking more like a Ten Commandments production still of the Israelites crossing the Red Sea.

Understand why men commit: Because they come to love a particular woman more than they love their freedom—not because they’ve decided that it would be a bore to have sex with the Pilates-teaching twins. Getting to “only you” happens after a guy starts to feel attached to you, which comes out of a combination of sexual attraction, emotional compatibility and the sense that you have a package of qualities that he’s unlikely to get from anyone else. Feeling this way takes time—time spent together, and sometimes, a little time spent comparison shopping. Trying to rush the process is like planting a pea in the morning, yelling, “GROW! GROW! GROW!” and expecting to be climbing a beanstalk by noon.

Also, even for a guy who’s starting to care about you, hearing, “We need to have the commitment talk” can be like hearing the starting gun at the Olympics. There are couples who get serious without ever having this icky conversation. It just happens organically. But to avoid misunderstandings, right from the start, you should be indicating your interest in getting into a relationship. No, not with strategically strewn Brides magazines or messages magic-markered across your breasts: “MARRY ME!!!” You simply drop remarks about what you want and then ask questions to draw out what a guy’s up for. This allows you to get out fast if your goals aren’t a match—as opposed to getting to the four-month mark, holding him down and screaming in his face: “So what’s it gonna be, buddy? You looking to start a family—or a harem?!”

As for the woman in this photo, she could be someone to your man—or someone standing near him when his friend was taking his picture. (People shooting photos rarely say, “OK, you two, get as far apart as you can.”) You could ask him—and reveal that you’ve been going all Secret Squirrel on social media. But you could also ask yourself, simply by applying context. Look at the photo as one piece of information in the whole of your experiences with him: Is he increasingly sweet and attentive? Increasingly eager to see you? Are you starting to meet his friends? Chances are, you already have the information you need to figure out whether your relationship is going places—without trying to conduct it at a speed that suggests your ancestry is part French, part Italian and part cheetah.

Q: My boyfriend just said, “Your lips get bigger and smaller. What’s going on?” I admitted that I’ve been getting them injected. He hinted that I should stop, saying, “You’re too hot. You don’t need it.” Do I really need to kick the habit?—Smoochy

A: If your boyfriend wanted to kiss something inflated, he’d make out with his tires.

There’s a reason you feel compelled to join the reality-star-led parade of women duckbilling it up—as opposed to going in for a nostril enlargement. Men evolved to prefer women with plump lips. As for why, it turns out that the features that men across cultures find beautiful are those that give them the best shot of passing on their genes. Biopsychologist Victor S. Johnston, who studies the biological basis of human facial attractiveness, finds that full lips on a woman (along with small jaws and a small chin) are associated with low androgens (male hormones) and elevated levels of the female hormone estrogen—a combination that translates to higher fertility. In other words, big pillowy lips are basically a message from nature’s ad agency: “Wanna have descendants? Pick me—not some thin-lipped Lizzie.”

However, there are full lips and lips full of stuff some plastic surgeon injected in them, and any plastic surgery that can be spotted as such is usually a turnoff to men. (You might as well get a tattoo that says, “Hi, I’m insecure!”) So, tempting as it is to keep up with the Kardashians, you’ll be more attractive to your boyfriend if you don’t seem to need to. Best of all, to accomplish this, all you have to do is avoid spending hundreds of dollars to look like you just got out of a heavy make-out session with the vacuum cleaner.

by Richard von Busack

Samuel Fuller had firsthand experience of war, but working as an honest B-filmmaker, he rarely had the scope to reproduce what he saw. Kubrick made war movies with great scope, but without overwhelming humanity; Kurosawa had sweep and humanity, but always found himself dazzled by the bushido code. The former Bay Area director Cary Joji Fukunaga’s epic new film Beasts of No Nation shows that he already deserves placement with those three names. Playing at the Mill Valley Film Festival before opening on October 16 on Netflix at the same time as limited theatrical engagement, this is a towering fictional film about the boy soldiers used as shock troops throughout Africa from the Second Congo War to the Boko Haram attacks in Nigeria.

In the highlands of an unnamed African country, there’s a buffer zone between government forces and armed rebels. When the barrier falls and the soldiers arrive, the family of the boy Agu (Abraham Attah) is split apart. Soon Agu is forced into the army of a charismatic psycho called “The Commandant” (Idris Elba). In the mountains, in a fortress of bamboo huts guarded by heavy guns, Agu is brutalized into becoming a soldier.

Fukunaga does what’s done in the best war movies—he balances the sense of pity with the sensationalism, and unveils a ghastly irony when exposing the character of the top brass. (The head of the rebels is a venal little Goebbels of a man.) The African bush looks as verdant as Henri Rousseau’s forest—Fukunaga amplifies the colors into hallucination, to reflect the horrors Agu sees and perpetrates.  

Attah is a tremendous young actor, and one wonders why Fukunaga thought that relatively heavy narration was needed to explain his easily understood emotions. This is the first great film on a horror subject, these children’s crusades during the ever-continuing Great War of Africa. Yet the movie is quite universal. The brutal training is a form of what all soldiers undergo; in a flooded trench, crimson with mud from the red African soil, we see a mirror of the Western Front.

Attah is startling, but the movie is really held together by Elba’s Commandant, a well-rounded, fascinating observation of a war criminal who is ultimately all too human—whose self-delusion about being the savior of the constitution survives the loss of his cause. Working as producer, director, cinematographer and scriptwriter (adapting the Nigerian-born novelist Uzodinma Iweala’s novel), Fukunaga surpasses even his innovative version of Jane Eyre and of the odyssey Sin Nombre. He’s clearly a master filmmaker, worthy of this vast and tragic subject.